 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line review source for everything one piece and today we have a review of chapter 1003 and this week we are continuing our grand action piece on the rooftop of Onigashima, except this time around we are being hit with some very intriguing informations from the lower levels courtesy of a perpetually mysterious group that we haven't seen since Act 1 of Wano. However, since CP0 are essentially a band of top-secret manga spies it makes a lot of sense to have kept their presence hidden from us. What makes very little sense whatsoever though is the idea of you not subscribing to the Grand Line review which would result in a consistent injection of one piece culture straight into your youtube feed. It's a decision so mind-boggling that look you've confused poor Kaido here so for the sake of moving the series forward please do hit the button and unconfuse this manfish. But speaking of this is another chapter that picks up right where the last one left off which sounds like a really obvious and unnecessary thing to say I mean it's a linear story after all but it's actually super rare to have three chapters in a row that pretty much function as back-to-back installments. Usually there's a little time jump or a location jump or something along those lines but these three chapters can essentially be read as just like one long chapter. But here we are being treated to a much needed scene of Luffy I suppose utterly decimating Kaido. This is definitely the most real damage we've seen the Dragon Man take to date especially that wonderful final punch which looks like Luffy's putting his all into resulting in Kaido's face once again being smacked down into the delicious dirt below. I mean really that dirt must have been pretty gourmet tasty considering that Kaido has now gone back down for seconds. Meanwhile there is this very tiny yet noteworthy panel of use to Skid at this point watching Luffy seemingly astonished and to be fair this would be the first time that he's truly seen Luffy in action and I do think it's a bit of a stark realization to Kid that he just does not possess anywhere near that kind of raw power that Luffy is capable of. The look on his face actually seems very humbling because he knows that he's just you know not capable of generating the same sort of results. Of course that's because Kid has a lot less risk involved in using his abilities and during this chapter we have some pretty big alarm bells ringing as Gear 4th inevitably runs out and Luffy is forced to revert to his Hockula state for 10 whole minute things. Oh no. Oh no it's Dressrosa time again. Ah. 10 minutes is an awfully long time. I think we all remember how crucial and painfully long those minutes were during Dressrosa and there there was a threat of significantly less value all we had to deal with was like a birdcage in this wildly flamboyant man that was it. Things are going to be just a little bit more difficult against two of the four emperors but I'm actually quite excited about this development mainly because this is an opportunity to see the other members of the worst generation really step up and shine because let's be real these guys yeah they're all pretty sugoi in their own right but whenever Luffy is with them well he just naturally steals the focus. I mean look at him charming smiling but in the end this scene also quite blatantly emphasizes an important ongoing theme of the series in general which is that Luffy would be nothing absolutely nothing without his allies. Yeah amongst everyone he packs the most punch power but those punches never actually reach their target without the help of usually you know literally everyone not just the straw hats not just their direct allies but even the tertiary island citizens usually jump in. It's like you know the metaphor to stand on the shoulders of giants well Luffy is more like a giant standing on the shoulders of regular people a critical mass of regular people that lift him to victory and I think that will only become more obvious in the coming chapters. He's also completely derp I mean look at him his tongue is always out going it's like my dog this isn't even the first time I've compared Luffy to my dog not even the first time this week actually. With Luffy now temporarily out of the action though the other four worst generation members are well I guess they're doing what they can and I'd like to extend a formal congratulations to Trafalgar lore at the very least for being the first one to land what looks like some sort of convincing hit on big mom. She was struck with a counter shock which is one of those strange lore techniques that works because of reasons interestingly enough though counter shock was first used in chapter 667 the end of which was when lore proposed alliance with Luffy stating that he had a plan to take down one of the four emperors and while that was a disingenuous lie at the time here we are now doing the thing and the use of counter shock is a very nice and incredibly subtle callback to the birth of this alliance although at this point I really do think that we should change lore's title from pirate captain to something more representative and realistic something like you know Luffy's overly grumpy babysitter and speaking of babysitting thank you past me for that kind segue Zorro is another figure of interest here as always and at this point he has begun quite literally carrying this team lifting Luffy out of harm's way like the good green head lad he is but in 1003 Zorro also uses my all-time favorite attack of his being a souped up tatsumaki deciding to go with the intriguing strategy of fighting one tornado with another tornado which to be fair yeah worked out pretty well and Zorro got in quite a decent amount of damage with various individuals and by various I mean too but they noticed that Zorro was able to slice a nice cuttoe in Kaido with that said I'm assuming at this point that enmer is the only sword actually capable of doing that there is only a single slice mark which for three swords is like a 66.6% miss rate bad swordsman bad but until proven otherwise against Kaido Zorro only really has one decent weapon to work with which is pretty bad because if said weapon were to be taken away from him then well oh no however this does conjure at least one intriguing thought being that Kozuki Oden was able to unleash this redonk haki in both of his blades resulting in Kaido's trademark cross scar so what if over the course of this battle Zorro learns to do just that with his other two swords and he is able to one-up the situation by reopening Odin's wound but leaving three scars instead of two admittedly yes that is probably just the wild Zorro fanboy running around there but I do wonder if Zorro will innately learn advanced arm and haki purely through its use with enmer I don't know so we shall see but skipping ahead to the cliffhanger of this week involving so Kaido we have something that I did not expect this is something I did not expect see there's proof of me not expecting it but in a series of two panels we become aware that Kaido has entered his hybrid form and this is huge much much more so than it seems I mean firstly yes we've not seen this part of Kaido so that's great thumbs up there but more so than that this is actually the first time that we've seen the hybrid form of any mythical zohan user which to recap out are the four would be Marco, Sengoku, Katarina Devon and Orachi the latter of which is actually relevant in this chapter but not right now because I am talking about dragons the reason why I bring this up though is because for quite a long time there has been a very popular theory that perhaps mythical zohans don't have hybrid forms at all because they're such super special magical creatures that just exist outside of the standard zohan rules and to be fair to that theory the strange sort of powers that we've seen thus far did make that quite plausible especially with someone like Marco so I'm very happy that we have that confirmation under our belts and wildly excited to see this new and kind of unexpected form of Kaido I think it definitely shows that we're entering a new phase of this fight very boss battle like and it's also very telling that we did not see Kaido use this form against the vassals I mean kind of depressing in retrospect but I suppose he just didn't see them as worthy challengers it actually boggles my mind a bit to think that Kaido is deliberately handicapping himself by using the pure dragon form which is already wildly overpowered but in the grand scheme of things that's just Kaido's charm and demand what we're seeing here in this silhouette is like a fully fledged Charizard except that the Charizard in this case is a fish. Now on a quick note on Kaido's fishness this is kind of crazy but just in case you haven't heard in the SPS segments of volume 98 Oda actually revealed the full name of Kaido's devil fruit it's called the Uruunami model Seriu which I believe is one of Japan's four mythical guardians Seriu guarding the east while Suzaku does the south something I only know because I watched Fushiguyugi when I was a young lad and if you'd like to know more about this then please do check out my video covering that as well as a whole ton of other amazing information revealed in that particular SPS. Onwards with the chapter though and weirdly enough my favorite part of this wasn't the epic battles taking place on the roof but instead the three dude brothers just casually talking inside of Onigashima obviously representing CP0 and what I really loved about this section was using Go as a framing device and this is because there are times when these large arcs can get a bit repetitive and weird in one piece and when it comes to dishing out information it usually consists of straight dialogue with one person sort of yammering out the current state of affairs but I think that Oda is well aware of the fact that there are just so many forces at play on Wano that it is getting confusing and a bit impossible to keep track of so what he's done here is perfectly simplify the status of the raid through a go board oh this is perfect for the first time in this entire raid I actually feel like I kind of perfectly understand what's happening and Go was a fantastic choice because I know that the temptation for a scene like this in the western world would be to use chess but chess can be confusing for non-players as well who don't understand what value the pieces have or even what they're called but on a go board everything is beautifully simplified into black circles and white circles nothing more nothing less and from this we can tell that right now there are more black circles than white circles so we are in a bad situation having infiltrated Onigashima but being surrounded on all sides I love it it is masterfully done the other thing this section does is bring renewed focus onto the lower levels the main CP0 agent puts an exceptional amount of focus onto the tobi ropo that lead performers these figures that we've kind of brushed aside for the last four chapters or so so it's a good transition back into that idea of oh man we have a lot to accomplish here before we can even consider taking down kaito or big mom it's also just nice to have confirmation that CP0 are still on Wano very notably none of these three agents were present at the reverie I mean there is one guy who does look kind of similar but they are different agents and so I'm infinitely intrigued by them because I really don't think that any of these three are former members of CP9 so they're just this mysterious band of completely untapped potential and it does set up a very maybe potential conflict with one deers drake a prominent member of sword aka the anti CP0 squad although right now these guys seem pretty content to just you know chill and watch two pirate factions rip each other apart which yes I can get on board with that but in the past I've also seen so many people doubt that Luffy or anyone will see their bounties raised after Wano because it's a nice little country and in theory no one would know what happened and while I've always maintained that you know the defeat of two of the four emperors probably wasn't going to remain secret it now doesn't matter because CP0 are our key link to the world government they are here and they know pretty much everything just like stuicy on whole cake island but in other news CP0 also seem to kind of confirm Archie's death as well which is I don't know maybe that's pretty big we've seen his head again which has not moved and still looks equally as dead although I'm beginning to think that this particular head might be a bit of a red herring no I refuse to believe that one man with eight heads can lose one of said heads and be considered dead because basic mathematics tells me that seven heads still remain somewhere you're not fooling me Archie the idea being that sure the head we're seeing is dead however the other seven could sprout out of Archie's body which we have not seen since the decapitry incident although I have to say if Archie really is dead then I well and truly stand by placing him so so high on my worst double fruit user's list what a complete Archie of a double fruit that is and just as a general note this chapter does feel a bit short at least to me but that's clearly because of the four double page spreads all of which are heavily focused on action pages like that make it really easy to get swept away by momentum and just blast straight through them still a very solid chapter overall though a great continued escalation of act three and one that makes me wonder really where we're going from here we've already had one round of Luffy throwing the big guns Akaito using his new armament skills and I wonder how deep this well goes outside of you know bigger punches and snake man I suppose does Luffy have more surprises in store for us I'd say almost certainly but if you want to explore that a bit more then please do check out this video where Oda drops some key information regarding a potential gear fifth form and I look forward to seeing you there