A town that welcomes pirates has a profitable reason to do so.
Whisky Peak greets the Straw Hats with a party tailored to their appetites. The welcome is a business model: Baroque Works agents exhaust visiting pirates before collecting their bounties. Zoro recognizes the organization from an earlier recruitment attempt, and his sleepless response turns the apparent resting point into the first open conflict of the Alabasta journey.
The island also changes the crew’s reason for traveling. Miss Wednesday is revealed as Princess Vivi, who infiltrated Baroque Works with Igaram to discover who is destabilizing her homeland. Once their identities are exposed, returning home becomes a race against the same network that controls the town. Nami initially speaks in terms of payment, but the crew’s involvement quickly moves beyond any plausible contract.
Story
The party has a price Ch. 106–107
The Merry emerges from a fog bank into weather that changes by the minute and arrives at Whisky Peak, an island of cactus-shaped rocks studded with crosses. The whole town lines the river to cheer the pirates in. Its mayor, a curly-haired man called Igarappoi, hosts a feast: Luffy eats, Zoro and Nami drink the town under the table, Sanji is surrounded by admirers, and Usopp tells stories to a crowd that applauds every lie.
Zoro has only pretended to pass out. From a rooftop under a crescent moon he watches the townsfolk gather in the street to divide the crew’s bounties and add their bodies to the cactus rocks, which are gravestones. He recognises the code names and the numbered ranks: Baroque Works, a criminal syndicate that once tried to recruit him. He declines to let its members earn his crew’s reward while they sleep.
One swordsman, a hundred hunters Ch. 107–109
Zoro runs the fight across the whole town, vanishing between rooftops and stairwells so that the hunters shoot at each other, then appearing behind them with a borrowed blade. Igarappoi, who is Mr. 8, fires a saxophone loaded with gun barrels; Mr. 9 fights with steel bats and acrobatics; Miss Wednesday tries a hypnotic dance from the back of her duck, Karoo, who sits down at every command to run.
The commotion wakes Nami, who watches from a window and prices her intervention while the hunters fall. By the time Zoro has pinned Mr. 9 and disarmed Miss Wednesday, the town’s welcome has collapsed into a pile of unconscious agents. Then a man with a coat and sunglasses and a woman in a lemon-yellow dress land on the rooftops, sent by the organisation’s boss with orders that have nothing to do with Zoro.
An undercover mission collapses Ch. 109–111
Mr. 5 and Miss Valentine have not come for the pirates. Their targets are Mr. 8 and Miss Wednesday, whose true identities have been discovered: Igaram, captain of the royal guard of Alabasta, and Nefertari Vivi, its princess. The pair infiltrated Baroque Works to find out who has been pushing their country toward civil war. Vivi lets slip the boss’s name in front of Nami, and Nami realises she has just been marked for death too.
The name is Crocodile, one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea and the man Alabasta’s citizens regard as their protector. Nami offers to escort Vivi home for a billion berries, an amount the kingdom’s treasury does not hold, and then decides to save her anyway. Zoro fends off the two assassins while Igaram and Karoo scatter in the chaos, and Mr. 5 reveals a body that explodes at every touch.
A misunderstanding with swords Ch. 111–113
Luffy wakes in the wreck of the party, sees the townspeople who fed him lying broken in the street, and reaches the wrong conclusion. He charges Zoro. What follows is the crew’s first real fight with itself: rubber punches against three swords, walls and staircases smashed as Zoro tries to explain and Luffy refuses to listen. Mr. 5 and Miss Valentine find themselves standing in the middle of it.
Nami finally stops them both with a fist to each head, and the two agents pay for having waited. Zoro leaves Mr. 5 face down in the dirt with a single strike; Luffy hits Miss Valentine so hard that her control of her own weight does not matter. Vivi, watching from the sidelines with Igaram, understands that she has found people who can fight the organisation she has been hiding inside.
Miss All Sunday visits the ship Ch. 113–114
Igaram dresses in Vivi’s clothes and sails out as a decoy with dummies of the crew, taking the Eternal Pose for Alabasta. His ship explodes on the horizon minutes later. Vivi says goodbye to no one and runs for the Merry, and the crew casts off in silence, until they discover that a tall woman in a cowboy hat has been sitting on their railing the whole time.
Miss All Sunday, Crocodile’s partner and the only agent who knows his face, disarms the crew without moving from her seat and offers an Eternal Pose to a quiet island where they could hide. Luffy crushes it in his hand. He will not have their route chosen by the enemy. She leaves on a giant turtle, amused, and the Merry sails for Little Garden with a princess, a duck, and the attention of a Warlord.