At the end of Chapter 1042, as Kaido and Luffy prepare to attack each other, the lead CP0 agent arrives and holds Luffy back. As a result, Luffy takes Kaido’s attack head-on, while Kaido himself looks on in shock.
Luffy did lose another battle in this war, but that doesn’t mean its necessary bad for him. If the CP0 Boss didn’t interfere in this fight, Luffy most likely would have lost his battle against Kaido. He was short on Gear 4 time, he had already gone beyond his limit, and that big punch of his was the last card up his sleeve.
That attack would have hurt Kaido badly, but no way in hell it would have took him down, we’ve seen that the longer the battle took the more Kaido was unleashing his full-power-potential, and it doesn’t look like he’s using his 100% yet.
Moreover, Oda did mention it once, it was around 2016 or so, how he doesn’t know how Luffy will defeat such a monster, but he was sure that Luffy won’t win just because his punch is too strong, which meant that he needed something “new”.
In a world where the CP0 Boss wasn’t ordered to interfere, Kaido would have took that Luffy new attack heads on, withstand it somehow (like he withstands every other attack ever since the raid begin), and Luffy would have lost his Gear 4 power and would have collapsed on the floor losing the battle. Losing the battle here means losing his life.
Kaido clearly never forgot how his fight against Oden wasn’t fair and maybe he was having regret over it till this day. And now 20 years later, just as he found himself a stronger opponent and started to enjoy his fight, the same thing happened again.
Kaido will re-face his moral dilemma, but on a far greater level since it’s the second time it happens. He may pour all of his anger and anguish on the CP0 Boss, which, as his name indicate, isn’t a small fry that will be killed in a mere second. Either by fighting or running from Kaido, he’ll earn Luffy few precious seconds.
Speaking of Luffy, he has surpassed his limit in this fight multiple times already, on both Haki usage and Devil Fruit usage, and as we’ve seen throughout the 1000 past chapters Luffy learns the most during the deadly battles, just like this.
So now, it won’t be hard to believe that, in the seconds Kaido deal with that CP0 Boss, Luffy will come up with something, either a new attack, a Haki thing, Devil Fruit Awakening or even Gear 5. And the final “battle” in this “war” will begin.
