Three Brothers Reunited!

"You are..."

Faced with the figure who had suddenly stepped forward, Luffy looked bewildered.

He felt that the young man before him looked familiar, yet he could not remember where he had seen him.

On the other hand, when Kuma saw the young man, his pupils contracted. In a mechanical, utterly flat voice, he said word by word,

"The plan... was not supposed to go like this..."

"I know."

Sabo looked sorrowfully at Kuma, who lay unable to rise, and slowly lowered his hood. "But I believed the Azure Dragon would not be so easy to deal with, so I kept this from you while preparing all of this."

"I'm sorry, Kuma!"

Sabo's apology was not for concealing his arrival from Kuma, but for exposing himself—the new leader of the Revolutionary Army—to the Marines' eyes, thereby apologizing to the Revolutionary Army as a whole.

"..."

Kuma did not answer. He lay quietly on the ground, as though dead.

"Please get some proper rest now. Leave Luffy's matters to me."

As Sabo said this, he turned around and looked at Luffy, whose nose had suddenly begun to sting as tears and snot streamed down his face. He smiled. "What? Are you surprised to see me?"

"Sabo!!"

Luffy burst into tears with a wail and threw himself at him. "We all thought... thought..."

"You thought I was dead, right?"

Sabo smiled. "Sorry for hiding it from you for so long. Actually, I met Ace several years ago. We kept it from you because we wanted to surprise you."

"Ace knew about this too?!"

Luffy shouted in disbelief, then his face filled with indignation. "Damn it! When I see him, I'm definitely beating him up!"

"Oh? I heard someone here wants to beat me up? My little brother, no less?"

Just then, a