Chapter 674

Sheltering in the ruined lab, Nami and Usopp struggle as Caesar comes to reclaim the freed children. The drugged youngsters, hallucinating from withdrawal, turn violent, one mistaking Nami for a cockroach and striking her down. Nami stops Usopp from firing on them, insisting the kids are victims, and decides their fury must be aimed at Caesar instead. When Usopp launches a Firebird Star, the flames die out short of the scientist, who reveals his power reaches every gas nearby.

Caesar strips the oxygen from the air around Usopp and Nami, choking both just as he says he downed Luffy's group earlier. Before the children can finish them with a pipe, Brownbeard bursts in, having survived the assassins, and his attack breaks Caesar's grip long enough for the pair to breathe. Brownbeard rages at the betrayal, but Caesar coldly dismisses him as trash, admitting he keeps his subordinates alive only as future guinea pigs. He counters Brownbeard's charge with a Gastanet blast and engulfs the fleeing Nami and Usopp in another explosion.

With the children loaded aboard his Flying Gas Balloon, Caesar opens a video link to illegal brokers across the New World. He pitches his upgraded poison-gas weapon, far deadlier than the one that ravaged the island four years earlier, as something the World Government could never replicate, and offers to deal. Among the silhouetted viewers are Big Mom's men Tamago and Pekoms, and Eustass Kid, who makes his first post-timeskip appearance and admits the weapon does not interest him, though the knowledge is worth having.