'One Piece' Kicks Off its First Luffy v Kaido Battle

One Piece's Wano arc has kicked up another notch at a much faster pace than fans had expected. Now that Kaido has been officially unveiled in a powerful new form, fans were think they'd have to wait a bit before he and Luffy officially traded blows.

But in the latest chapter, Luffy bucked a lot of trends and immediately launched a fierce punch against an incoming dragon Kaido.

After discovering that Kaido can transform into a dragon, things pick up pretty quickly as Kaido is now aware that Luffy and the Straw Hats have made it to Wano. He's got a beef with Luffy as he's been slowly taking apart his enterprise. Luffy runs straight to where Kaido appears as the rest of the Straw Hats remain hiding at the Oden Castle's ruins.

Hawkins then lies to Kaido, assuming the Straw Hats were hiding in the ruins (little does he realize how right he is) thinking destroying the ruins would be worth the lie anyway. When Kaido blasts away the Oden Castle with ease, Luffy is enraged and as he is want to do, Luffy immediately jumps into action against the fearsome Yonko.

Luffy jumps high above Kaido's dragon form and fires off a huge Elephant Gun right onto Kaido's head. The chapter ends as the Kaido is brought down to the ground with this fierce punch. Luffy often fights the main antagonist of each arc after a bit of time, so to see things progressing so quickly is a big deal.

Kaido not only presents a much bigger threat than enemies in the past, as briefly demonstrated by how easily he annihilates the castle ruins, and it seems that the only way to truly fight back against him is to get aggressive quickly. It's going to take a much different strategy against such a fierce foe.

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold.

Oda revealed that he was about 80 percent done with the manga at this point with the Wano arc, fans are worried that the series may be coming to an end sooner than they thought. But it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the ending will most likely still be years away given how much of the world there is to explore and just how well it's selling week to week.