A Seemingly Non-Existent Island

On the lowest level of Building R, Brownbeard hammers at a door and swears to lay bare Caesar's deceit to the soldiers who still revere him. Caesar comes down to deal with the outburst, pretending he never learned where Brownbeard's abandoned men ended up. As Brownbeard moves to brand him a fraud who treats followers as lab fodder, the scientist quietly slips a muscle relaxant into him, slurring his speech and dropping him to the floor. With the room under his control, Caesar murmurs that the gas disaster from years past was engineered by his own hand, then has his troops fire on the man who once meant to protect them.

A Haki-charged fist arrests the killing strike. Luffy has shown up, clipping the scientist with an Elephant Gun and planting himself between Caesar and Brownbeard. Caesar waves his subordinates back upstairs to begin readying things, and Momonosuke names him as the one who tortured the children.

Asked what Punk Hazard truly is, Caesar describes it as a sanctuary for the scientific underworld, a place where forbidden research runs and people quietly disappear. After mocking everything Luffy has achieved as pointless, he discloses the purpose of the SAD: Doflamingo draws on it to manufacture man-made Zoan Devil Fruits, the so-called SMILEs. He adds that a member of the Four Emperors leans on that supply to forge a massive crew, and that someone of Luffy's standing cannot hope to stand against such backers.

The boast backfires. With every atrocity Caesar has committed surfacing in his mind, Luffy pours his rage into a savage punch across the scientist's face, telling him that since the day he reached the Grand Line he has been knocking down men exactly like him.

The title leans on the island's hidden, off-the-record existence. On the cover, the Caribou serial drops the runaway onto a strange New World island, evidently the winter land under Kaidou's rule that X Drake once raided. This installment lays out how SAD feeds the SMILE pipeline and ties one Emperor to Doflamingo's network, planting the groundwork for the larger conflict to follow.