The Ruins of Oden Castle

After handing Tama over to the cowed Speed and pledging to fetch Komachiyo and the Nidai Kitetsu another day, Luffy rides off with Zoro, Law, and Kiku toward the castle's wreckage. Kiku insists she is merely curious about the site, yet her real aim is keeping watch on what the outsiders are after, a deception Zoro immediately picks up on. Within the Flower Capital, a schoolteacher lauds the country's sealed borders, prompting her pupils to jeer at the late Oden and his retainers for once trying to open them, then to applaud Orochi as the hero who eliminated the Kouzuki line. Far off, a tipsy money changer called Kyoshiro chuckles over the bind Orochi is now in, thinking back to a curse Oden's wife spoke twenty years prior. The shogun read it as a forecast that nine warriors would slay him and reopen the nation, and Kyoshiro derides that fear, certain no surviving Kouzuki could ever carry it out.

On reaching the grounds, Kiku tears up and breaks away by herself while Zoro likewise drifts off elsewhere. Law guides Luffy to a row of headstones, and the names carved there leave Luffy stunned, for they belong to Raizo, Kanjuro, Momonosuke, and Kin'emon. Told that Kin'emon is absent yet should turn up after dark, Luffy briefly assumes he is dealing with a ghost, right up until the samurai stumbles out, having been laid low by a violent bout of diarrhea. Kiku flings herself into a hug, chiding him for concealing his homecoming, and works out that the Straw Hats plus Law are the foreign muscle her side enlisted. Momonosuke offers a greeting, and moments later Carrot, Brook, Chopper, Nami, and Sanji turn up, having tracked Luffy through his Vivre Card. Once inside, sharing produce Law had lifted from Paradise Farm, Kin'emon admits the secret that defines his group: they hail from an earlier era and arrived here by jumping twenty years ahead.

With this installment, the long-running Grand Fleet cover serial about the self-proclaimed captains under the Straw Hat banner wraps up for good. Speed escorts Tama back to her village. Shown only as a silhouette, Oden's wife had foretold decades earlier that nine of his retainers would end Orochi and reopen the country. Luffy's reunion draws together Kin'emon, Momonosuke, and the band off the Thousand Sunny, every one of whom pinpointed his location using the Vivre Card. Law confesses to raiding the Beasts Pirates' farm, and Kin'emon spells out that the group of time-jumpers totals five, counting himself.