Fatal Illness

Now that she has told Luffy her entire history, Hancock offers him passage to Sabaody aboard her Perfume Yuda and invites him to feast with the Kuja that evening. As he joins the celebration, the curious women keep prodding and tugging at his rubber frame until he flees, slipping away alongside Marguerite to the home of Elder Nyon.

It is there that Luffy realizes Hancock ranks among the Sea's Seven Warlords, an admission that catches him off guard. Nyon recounts that the empress took her throne at eighteen, swiftly earned a fearsome name and an 80 million bounty after just one campaign, and unsettled both the Marines and the World Government. To guard her people, Hancock accepted the Warlord title, sealing a treaty that kept the government off the island.

Reading the newspaper, Nyon uncovers the war about to erupt as the Marines move against the Whitebeard Pirates, and the fact that a condemned prisoner, Portgas D. Ace, is bound for the scaffold. Luffy interrupts to reveal Ace is his brother, leaving Nyon stunned. With the execution only days off and a return trip to Sabaody costing a full week, he chooses to save Ace before anything else, undeterred by Nyon's warning that Impel Down, the assembled admirals, and the other Warlords make the attempt suicidal. The single route fast enough is for Hancock to heed the Marines' summons so her warship can deliver him there.

When the pair go to ask her, they discover she has been laid low by a deadly affliction that claimed every empress before her. Wracked with pain, Hancock still forces herself up to meet Luffy, and once he begs her to bring him to Impel Down she consents, cheeks burning. Her enraged sisters charge that he is using her, but Nyon identifies the malady as Love Sickness and declares that Hancock has lost her heart to Luffy.

Her former bounty stands at 80,000,000, and she claimed both her throne and the Warlord seat eleven years before the present. Luffy learns that a battle awaits at Marineford pitting the Marines against Whitebeard's crew, and that Ace is set to die there, while Nyon describes the Tarai Current that ties Impel Down, Enies Lobby, and Marineford together by way of the Gates of Justice. He elects to postpone the hunt for his crew, and Hancock's strange sickness is named as lovesickness. The cover carries on the CP9 serial as the agents meet their arrest with violent defiance.