A Deadly Blow! The Astonishing King Punch

A kick from Bartolomeo sends Hack out of the contest, silencing a crowd that had been backing the fish-man and rattling the commentator, who soon recovers to note that roughly two dozen fighters still remain in play. Among the survivors are Bellamy, Dagama, Ricky, the long-legged Blue Gilly, and the fighting king Elizabello II. Sensing his opening, Dagama gives Blue Gilly the cue, and the martial artist drops Ricky with a vicious helmet strike. Sprawled on the ground, the wounded gladiator murmurs that he cannot outrun time and that he despises both the roaring stands and Doflamingo.

The two allies then betray the gladiators Dagama had paid off, felling them from behind, before Dagama tries the same trick on his partner. Blue Gilly, who had never extended him any trust, anticipates the move, counters, and launches the schemer over the ropes, where a fighting fish punishes the landing. The stands applaud the foresight. Bellamy, badly outmatched by Bartolomeo, begins to suspect a Devil Fruit is at work, since every strike against the man seems to rebound onto the attacker.

Cornered by a pack of rivals, Elizabello II winds up the technique his name is built upon, and the spectators bolt for cover the instant they grasp what is coming. As Blue Gilly dives in hoping to snap his opponent's neck, the blow detonates at point-blank range, rupturing the sound barrier and hurling the entire field out of bounds behind a curtain of blinding light.

Once the haze thins, only Elizabello stands, until a watcher in the crowd points out a second figure still upright. A transparent shield is revealed to have spared both the audience and Bartolomeo from the shockwave. Bartolomeo explains that his Devil Fruit, the Bari Bari no Mi, raises a barrier the moment he crosses his fingers. He drives one into the spent king, knocking him toward the rim of the arena and seizing the Block B title, much to the crowd's letdown. Down in a corridor below the stands, Thunder Soldier confides to the cyborg that he too means to demolish the SMILE factory, but he needs help liberating the captive workers first, calling that the key to bringing Dressrosa down, and offers to recount the island's past.

The adaptation inserts a stretch where Ricky slips past several of Blue Gilly's blows before finally being floored, and it stretches out the fight between Bellamy and Bartolomeo. A wholly new beat has Thunder Soldier interrogating Franky over his motives. Blue Gilly gets out only the first word of his Shooting Moon technique before the King Punch silences him. The episode additionally shows Bellamy resting on floating wreckage beyond the ring, a recurring trick used to keep Devil Fruit users from sinking. It draws its content from Chapter 709.