‘One Piece’ Highlights Hawkins’ Terrifying Devil Fruit Power

Luffy and Zoro are members of One Piece‘s Worst Generation of pirates, and they rarely face challenges from the other 10 members. In the latest chapter of the manga, they come face to face with fellow Supernova, Basil Hawkins.

Hawkins’ Devil Fruit power has been revealed before, but his latest appearance in Wano debuts a much stronger form of his Straw-Straw Fruit power.

In the latest chapter, Hawkins is revealed to now have a bounty of 320 million, along with his stance as one of Kaidou’s top fighters. After reading Luffy and Zoro’s futures with his tarot cards, he begins his attack with a new sword, the “Straw Helping Hand” sword.

Just as how his power was used in the anime, his sword harnesses his Straw-Straw Fruit ability, and redirects any fatal blows on him to a random member of his crew. He takes no damage in these situations, even when an attack would’ve killed him (such as Zoro’s katana slice). Stating that his sword is an “effigy” of his crew, Hawkins declares that with his powers their lives reside within him. Meaning at this point in the manga, he could take 10 fatal blows.

He has wild offensive abilities as well, as he summons a giant Straw Man with his sword. This is different than his fight with Kuzaru in the anime, where Hawkins himself turned into straw and attacked. His power is the same as it was then, but now it’s his sword that does the transforming.

Hawkins’ tarot cards are interesting as well, as when he pulls the Fool card it causes his crew to attack one another instead of attacking Luffy and Zoro. His Straw Man gets stronger (even using metal nails in its attacks) when Basil draws certain tarot cards, so there’s even more lying under the surface of Hawkins’ power than it seemed. Luffy and Zoro sure have their work cut out for them here.

If you’re interested in the series, One Piece is currently in the middle of the “Whole Cake Island” arc and can be found streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation. 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. Eiichiro Oda revealed some news about One Piece‘s future in a recent interview as well.

Stating 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.