One Piece, Chapter 1032: Oden's Beloved Blade
A pretty fun chapter, I think, after the Sanji stuff in the previous chapter. This one deals more with the plot threads that have been going around in the background and giving them a bit more prominence. Marco and Izo witness and fly off to investigate the giant fire-demon that Kanjurou made, and... I think that Izou might get something to do? I've been talking about how Denjiro hasn't had anything relevant to do, but so is Izo.
Meanwhile, the Yamato/Apoo/Drake/Numbers group basically clash with the Robin/Brook/CP0 group... because the latter just quite literally fell out of the upper floors into them. It's interesting to note that Fuga has a centaur-like lower body like a horse? And he's friendly with Yamato? There's an almost-hilarious bit where the CP0 agents seems to be caught up in the descending Kazenbou and it would be a hilarious but anticlimactic end if they just got caught up in a different attack and get burned alive.
But of course, they get back up. And I haven't really been paying too much attention to the CP0 members as individuals, but I guess 'hairy mask with octopus mouth' and 'two mismatched eyes mask' dudes are guys that we really have to start paying attention to. In particular, the shorter, mismatched-eyes scar-masked CP0 guy seems to be the one that's most... aggressive, I guess?
Interestingly, because Brook and Robin landed on Fuga and Fuga's just sort of running along, CP0 ends up facing off against Drake and Apoo. Their beef with Drake is simple enough -- they don't actually call the organization by name, but they clearly recognize him as part of SWORD and they want to get rid of him. Apoo, meanwhile, does the rather stupid thing of threatening to sell incriminating pictures of CP0 to Big News Morgans... I'm convinced that Apoo's just basically the Starscream of the One Piece universe. He gets stabbed in the neck for his trouble...
except he actually gets back up because Apoo, as goofy as he looks, still knows Armament Haki. He does a 'boom' to protect Drake from a Shigan, and there we have the team-up. I guess Drake trusts Apoo's revenge-driven motivation now. I do really want to see the story make good use of Apoo beyond just being a Kaidou lackey, so I'm actually happy to see him do something. Doubtful that Drake and Apoo are going to be able to beat CP0, but... I don't know. Maybe? It's kind of something that I wasn't expecting, because I was expecting a Robin/Brook-vs-CP0 moment, but maybe Drake and Apoo get something interesting to do here.
(I initially through Robin and Brook are stuck on Fuga's head, but they apparently jump off and are separated from CP0 by the Kazenbou's flames).
The second half of the chapter deals with Zoro vs. King, and... uh... I guess Queen and Sasaki aren't the only ones who are weird. Because dinosaurs in the One Piece world are just fucking weird, I guess. King is able to, uh... pull the crest of his pteranodon beast mode and launch a force out of it. Like a weird slingshot. Zoro describes it a a 'laser beam', and I absolutely love that this attack, in the original Japanese, is called "Tempura Udon". All of King's attacks end with 'don', because Pteranodon.
And it's different when it's someone like Queen and Sasaki, who are goobers, who claim shit like Triceratops Helicopters or whatever the hell Brachoicoilus is are somethings that dinosaurs do, but King has been so serious. And I absolutely like that King gets actually angry when Zoro things that being 'on fire' is also something that Pteranodons do -- the audience have basically already pieced together that it's part of King's Lunarian race, but Zoro doesn't know that yet. Zoro actually feels like he's having severe problems with fighting King, though the whole "he just got up from fighting two Yonko" thing is probably one of the biggest reasons why. Pretty interesting, it's been a long while since Zoro actually feels like he's exerting effort in his fights. He's throwing out his Black Rope Dragon Twisters and 360 Pound Phoenix and they're barely hitting King, but King's wings are so powerful and tough that Zoro's having trouble knocking him out of the sky.
And then Zoro hears the music of a shamisen, and Enma seems to extract Haki from him. Simultaneously, Orochi hears the same music to see Hiyori, in her Komurasaki getup, play the same instrument. I have been wanting either Hiyori or Denjiro to be the one to end Orochi since they have some of the biggest narrative reasons to, so this is more of a 'oh, finally' moment than a big twist. But the big twist is definitely whatever relation Hiyori has to Enma suddenly behaving like that... I've never been someone who cares a lot about the whole 'cursed sword' or generally the sword stuff in One Piece, but this might actually be something genuinely exciting.
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