Chapter 656

The dragon's speech stuns the landing party as it spews waves of fire. Luffy's Jet Pistol barely dents the armored hide, and a tail swing slams him into the rubble. Zoro lands a blow with his Ultra-Hunt, yet marvels at how tough the beast remains. When the creature asks whether they serve a certain Warlord, the group ducks for cover and puzzles over the grudge. Luffy and Zoro cobble together a plan, and after Luffy scrambles onto the scorching body he spots a pair of legs jutting from it.

The dragon bites its own wing by accident and crashes, after which Zoro springs off Usopp's Trampolia and lops its head off in midair, repeating the feat by which Ryuma once became a legend; both slayings ended with an aerial decapitation. Meanwhile, back at the Sunny, Sanji finds the rest of the crew downed by drifting gas and passes out himself while reaching for the snail phone. Hazmat-suited figures stamped with the letters PH cart the sleepers off, leaving only Brook, and speak of bringing their captives to a master. On the island, the group pries the legs free, finds no torso, and recoils as the limbs leap up and run off.

Paulie, Tilestone, and Peepley Lulu return after the timeskip, and a second Sea Train, the Puffing Ice, is finished. Zoro becomes the first known dragon-slayer since Ryuma, each man felling his quarry by cutting the head off in the air. He debuts two moves here: the three-sword Santoryu Ultra Gari, plus a single-blade strike named Ittoryu Iai Shi Shishi Sonson. Brook is oddly spared, perhaps because his skeletal frame led the abductors to assume he was dead. The living legs belong to a man chasing a Warlord, whose voice the group had mistaken for the dragon's.