Chapter 445

Riding Hildon's carriage with eerie horsemen, the trio heads for Doctor Hogback's home. Hildon plays host with offers of wine while Usopp stays jittery and Chopper gushes about the legendary surgeon who vanished from the world years ago. Nami catches unsettling glimpses of the forest, first a lion with a grotesque human face, then the whole wood seeming to party with trees, beasts, and ghosts, only for everything to freeze still on a second look. Hildon dismisses it all as illusions. When Nami pushes to turn back to the coast and Usopp's cowardice wins Chopper over, they convince Hildon to halt.

Ten minutes later the trio realizes the carriage never moved them at all, leaving them stranded in a graveyard. Hildon flies off and the horsemen desert them as corpses claw up from the soil, surrounding the three with an army of zombies. Tossed from the carriage and dreading being bitten and turned, they fight back and notice the undead behave bizarrely, bouncing and griping comically as Usopp's fire attack scatters them. Outrunning the fast but short-winded zombies, the group finally arrives at the towering mansion of Doctor Hogback.

Hildon abandons the trio in the graveyard, the zombies launch their first assault, and the group reaches Hogback's manor. A grave on one page bears the name Pandaman as a recurring easter egg. The cover advances the space serial as the remaining Space Pirates scheme around an elaborate lunar excavation machine.