'One Piece' Puts Luffy in a Deadly New Sumo Match

One Piece's Wano arc has not been too kind to Luffy thus far as after taking a beating from Kaido, Luffy's been placed in a pretty tough prison. But, in his usual upbeat manner, Luffy has quickly become quite the thorn in the prison's side. He's become such a threat in fact that the Animal Kingdom Pirates' "lead performer" Queen the Plague is attempting to punish Luffy by putting him in a deadly new kind of sumo match.

In an attempt to execute Luffy in a theatrical fashion, Queen places him in the "Sumo Inferno," a special sumo match that will decapitate Luffy as soon as he's pushed out of the ring.

After defending Hyogoro from a guard's attack, Luffy and Hyogoro have collars placed on them. These collars have claws on the inside that will activate and decapitate the two of them as soon as they are pushed out of the sumo ring. Luffy's sea prism handcuffs are removed, and Queen will allow Luffy to escape his fate should he agree to join their crew. But Hyogoro and Luffy's fate is shared, so they both die if one of them is pushed out.

The match begins as Luffy and Hyogoro are soon threatened by a wave of enemies brandishing weapons run their way, but they can't stand in the face of Luffy's Conqueror's Haki. Even with the odds stacked against him in this deadly new fight, Luffy's instead using this time to practice his Haki. In the next chapter it's revealed that he's been knocking out enemies with ease.

But he's attempting to recreate a lighter type of Haki that Rayleigh used during their training, and he's plenty up to the challenge of trying to figure it out as he fights off Queen's onslaught in the Sumo Inferno.

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. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.

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