The Legendary Shipwright

As the storm over Water 7 grows violent, Franky stands watch over the room while the agents realize the hideout was the former base of Tom's Workers. Lucci lifts the photograph and offers to depart the instant the Pluton design is surrendered. Franky tells him the plans are not here, and Kalifa wraps him in her thorned lash while Lucci kicks aside one of the workbenches. He then plays his trump: that Cutty Flam, much like Tom before him, broke the law. Stung by the insult to his mentor, Franky demands to know how much CP9 truly grasps about the city, and the narrative falls back across two decades.

Aged just twelve, Cutty Flam fires cannons from the deck of Battle Franky 8 toward a sea beast chasing him, and the creature wrecks the craft and tosses him through the air. A sixteen-year-old Iceburg, bump-headed and cross, chides him for fashioning weapons rather than lending a hand. The Battle Franky craft are the boy's treasured warships, pieced together from Scrap Island salvage, and he is bent on building one able to fell a Sea King. Tom appears, flinging a hull and three masts into the harbor along with his pet Yokozuna.

Home at the main office, the bridge-side warehouse, the group shares a meal cooked by their lovely secretary, Kokoro. She reports that a trade vessel hauling lumber was seized by raiders, whose numbers have multiplied ever since the Pirate King fell, and warns that Water 7 could wither into a drowning island without dependable shipments. Cutty Flam asks to study the plans for the pirate ship Tom constructed, but Tom replies that no pirate vessel carries plans, since it amounts to a craft bearing a skull on its flag. That night the boy looks on as Tom sketches what he names the island's hope. The following morning a Judicial vessel docks and Tom is taken, charged with having built Gol D. Roger's ship and condemned to die at Enies Lobby.

This installment belongs to the Water 7 Arc. The Animal Theater cover follows Zoro on a scuba dive where he meets a giant anglerfish. The chapter discloses that the Oro Jackson, the vessel sailed by Gol D. Roger, was the work of Tom.