SAD

A fist-shaped dent still on his face, Caesar fights on against Luffy. Once more he flaunts Doflamingo's backing to unsettle him, then strikes with Gastille, a move a subordinate recognizes as hot enough to melt steel, yet Luffy ducks under it and answers with a fresh punch. Five minutes remain before the gas overruns Building B, and the rest of the crew with their allies race toward Building R and the way out. Zoro and Tashigi lag behind thanks to his terrible bearings, while Brook and Kin'emon dash the opposite way, Kin'emon certain that the dragon he struck down was his transformed son. Usopp, after seastone cuffs, stumbles into the booby-trapped chamber set above the first floor.

Inside the SAD room, Vergo batters Smoker and snaps his jitte, jeering at him for trusting his smoke form. The taunt misses the point: Smoker was buying the seconds Law needed to recover his heart. With it back in place, Law turns to end matters, and the half-conscious Smoker urges him to be quick, ashamed to owe a pirate.

Law speaks into the Den Den Mushi to Joker, who is monitoring the clash, and warns that once Vergo falls and Caesar is captured, the entire SAD stock vanishes and Doflamingo loses his throne over the underworld. Doflamingo merely laughs, insisting that Vergo's Haki sheathes his whole body so thoroughly that even Law's power cannot slice him. Law disproves that on the spot, severing the Haki-clad Vergo in two and carving open both the SAD tank and the whole mountain housing the lab in the same stroke.

Smoker's jitte breaks for the second time in the series, the first having come at Boa Hancock's hands during Marineford. Vergo demonstrates that he can wrap his entire frame in Armament Haki. Law closes by declaring that Marineford served only as a prelude, that the Marines have quietly been assembling a new fighting force, and that he has now broken the cycle so completely no one can wind it back.

The title points to the SAD substance sitting at the heart of the plot. On the cover, the Caribou serial wakes the runaway to find an old woman has nursed him back to health. The chapter debuts Caesar's Gastille and stages Vergo's decisive fall, tilting the balance of power throughout the New World.