Brook/Abilities and Powers

Overview
As much as Brook normally goofs around on the ship engaging in acts of silliness with Luffy, he is still a formidable opponent. Due to his previous experiences and skills that he amassed from the days when the Pirate King, Gol D. Roger was still active, Brook, in all respects, is a veteran pirate (though these attributes are somewhat downplayed by his overall demeanor, along with the fact that his isolation in the Florian Triangle seemed to have eroded his knowledge of modern society). Though he often gets scared easily by powerful enemies or the supernatural, he can be very calm and fearless to defend his crew, such as when he willingly sacrificed himself hoping to hold back a Pacifista and Bartholomew Kuma, and when he cleverly realized he could trick Jora to defeat her.

Combat Characteristics
Brook's value to the crew was already evident during the Thriller Bark Arc, where he proved indispensable for the Straw Hats on their encounters with the island-vessel's many undead inhabitants.

Though he has a natural skinny frame, Brook possesses an impressive degree of physical strength, able to carry Luffy up to the crow's nest of Thriller Bark without slowing down and to carry many wounded minks without much help.

When Brook fights, his battles often have a comical element to them, including making a few of the members of his own crew fall asleep while fighting the Flying Fish Riders, playing dead halfway through a battle, or launching himself at an enemy with erroneous results. His childish personality occasionally hampers his effectiveness.

Brook also has immense endurance, as he was able to remain conscious after Bartholomew Kuma used his Ursus Shock on Thriller Bark.

After the timeskip, Brook's overall skills have proven to be a very important asset during battle: defeating the energy steroid powered Zeo with no difficulty, cutting down Jora of the Donquixote Pirates, and matching Zoro and Kin'emon's cutting power in Punk Hazard. Brook also took on Big Mom of the Yonko, and while he was no match for her, he was able to get up several times after receiving powerful attacks from her.

After two years of extensive training, Brook has gain a high increase of physical strength as the force he now applies in his swordsmanship is powerful enough to create flying slashes that can break thick ice from a far range, defend powerful strikes from a steroid enhanced Zeo and Sheephead, an artificial Zoan devil fruit user and leader of the Gifters, cut through a Dragon's scales which is harder than steel. In the treasure room of the Whole Cake Chateau, Brook was able to easily cut down multiple physically large and strong members of the Big Mom Pirates with extremely powerful and precise slashes.

Tactical Ingenuity
Brook has shown to be clever. He could trick Jora into letting her guard down and restoring his sword from her Devil Fruit powers, which allowed him to dispatch Jora quickly and to save Nami, Tony Tony Chopper, and Kozuki Momonosuke from being killed. When acquiring copies of the Poneglyphs in Big Mom's possession in the heavily guarded treasure room of the Whole Cake Chateau, Brook was successfully able to deceive the majority of the Big Mom Pirates in charge of the security of the treasure room, including Sweet Commander Smoothie, into leaving the treasure room by using Pedro as a decoy before sneaking into the treasure room and locking them out, leaving only a minimal number of guards in the treasure room whom Brook can quickly dispatch before stealing. Brook is also an ingenious and quick thinker.

After he finished making the Poneglyph copies, he stored them inside his skull instead of inside his clothes and cylinder, allowing him to effectively hide away the copies even after he was captured by Big Mom.

At the Tea Party, amidst the chaos caused by Monkey D. Luffy and his duplicates, Brook disguised himself as one of the duplicates of his captain and destroyed the picture of Mother Carmel while Big Mom was distracted.

Musical Talent
Brook is a virtuoso musician who is extremely skilled in playing all kinds of instruments, particularly the violin, his favorite instrument. After he was separated from the Straw Hats, Brook began to picked up the guitar and, within two years, he became so highly skilled in the new instrument that he came to be regarded as a world famous rock star. At testament to this fact, his records in Tone Dials sold in the millions, and his fans during his final world tour stop in Sabaody Archipelago were either crying or fainting at his presence. Ultimately, Brook can masterly play enchanting songs that are so melodious they can totally captivate even animals like Laboon, who used to sing along to Brook's music. In addition to singing  and playing music, Brook is also a skilled composer, having composed songs such as "Bone To Be Wild", "New World", and "Let's Go See Master Nekomamushi", which proved to be very fashionable among music fans and lovers.

Brook's devotion to music not only helped him to pass the lonely days during his long isolation, but also learnt to weaponize music for combat. His technique, "Nemuriuta Flanc", loosely translated as "Lullaby Parry", shows this, where he strums his violin with his shikomizue in place of a violin bow, creating a soothing tune that makes anyone who hears it immediately fall asleep.

Due to his musical background, Brook also moves according to the rhythm of his music to assist him in battle.

His music also shows capabilities to change its listener's attitude and emotions such as when he was sent to the Namakura Island by Bartholomew Kuma his music inspires the cult there to fight back against its invaders, the Longarm Tribe.

During the fight with the New Fishman Pirates, Brook revealed that he has refined his musical skills to the point where he could completely change the mood and effectively hypnotize his opponents to believe they were at a festival. His opponents believed the illusion was reality and ended up using their cannons as fireworks. As a musician who mastered music temperaments such as rhythm, beat, and tempo, Brook has extremely sharp hearing able to accurately distinguish sounds, as he was able to detect where Zeo was by sound of his movements, while he was invisible, even though it was shown to be difficult to figure out where he was based on sound.

Devil Fruit


While he was still alive, Brook ate the Yomi Yomi no Mi, a Paramecia-class Devil Fruit. Should the user of this fruit die, it allows them the one-time opportunity to return to life. Though his soul was not able to find his body in time before it decomposed completely to a skeleton, he gained some advantages that would otherwise be impossible to do without being a skeleton supported by Devil Fruit powers. One advantage is that because he is just comprised of light weighted bones, he can use his speed and light weight to run across water, but, like all Devil Fruit users, he can still drown when submerged. With the aid of his powers, he is also able to function like a regular human being, and retains all the strength he had when he still had actual muscle mass. He is able to perform normal acts such as drink, eat, cry, digest, and even "poop" normally. He has also proven that calcium (such as in milk) will rapidly heal any damaged bones.

Due to his light-weight skeleton body, he can leap tremendous distances, jump immensely high and run so fast that he can even run on water without sinking, and can also store things in his skull cavity such as a Tone Dial. His skeletal appearance not only gives him immense amounts of agility on par with Zoro and Sanji, but the fact that he does not have body parts allows him to take less damage in a manner of speaking, as he does not have the physical limitations of a normal human. His extraordinary bone regeneration from milk also allows him to heal immensely faster than the rest of the crew, effectively making him one of the most tenacious opponents in battle. In fact, after an intense fight against Big Mom, one of the most powerful pirates alive, Brook instantly healed all the fractures his skeleton body suffered after drinking some milk. Due to his agility, he has managed to leap close enough to a firing harpoon and destroy it with his sword, while the harpoon was in flight, with relative ease.

Due to being entirely made of bones, he appeared to be resistant against lightning and electricity in general. Furthermore, Brook appeared to be resistant against the deadly poison of Shinokuni, however gases that enter the body through one's respiratory system such as KYP and the unnamed sleeping gas that Caesar's men used still affect Brook normally. Due to all of his flesh having rotted off, he no longer suffer from the effects of aging, and therefore is physically immune from senescence, being nearly a century old without showing the ill-effects of the elderly in fact his physical prowess vastly surpass his physical capabilities that he had when he was alive.

After the timeskip, it is revealed that he can separate his spirit to move individually of his body similar to Perona, but is unable to move his body while in this state. During his battle with Zeo, Brook recalls how in the last two years, he discovered the true power of his devil fruit, and how he is no longer animated by organs or bones, but by his spirit. Brook is also shown to be capable of reattaching his head in the event it is pulled off, and according to the skeleton, as long as his bones are not broken, his core remains unharmed, which will allow him to reconstruct his body. Brook has also shown being able to call upon forces from the other side as seen when he channeled the "Chill of the Underworld" through his sword, in order to freeze his opponent's body with ice.

Fighting Style


At one point being the captain of the guards in his home country and as a captain of the Rumbar Pirates who has fought countless other pirates in the Grand Line, Brook is well trained in swordsmanship. Despite his usual goofy personality in battle, he is an extremely skilled sword master who is able to dispatch numerous enemies at once with swift and precise strikes. His swordmanship is a combination of classical fencing and iaidō.

Brook's main advantage is his tremendous speed, which is possible because of the light weight of his skeleton body to point where he can travel across bodies of water without sinking. This speed allows him to deal extremely accurate blows and quick maneuvers before his opponent can react (once taking down and purifying a whole swarm of Surprise Zombies in a fraction of a second) that are much swifter than he was when he still had flesh and blood back in his mortal days. With these advantages, Brook excels best at fighting and taking down large enemy numbers of average fighters on his own. Despite not retaining any muscle tissue, it seems that Brook can still grow stronger over time, as he said to Ryuma that he has grown stronger over the span of the last five years.

Brook's signature attack as of yet is known as "Hanauta Sancho: Yahazu Giri". The attack is the fastest cutting technique of his kingdom's assault squad. It was originally named "Requiem La Banderole", but was given the other name by his old crew. Due to the attack's blinding speed and Brook's distracting humming, enemies often do not notice they have been hit until after Brook has sheathed his sword.

Although an extremely skilled swordsman, the power he applies in swordsmanship are not of the same caliber as Zoro's, who has a immensely strong physical power in addition to his skills as a master swordsman as Brook's swordsmanship is more focused in speed and precision instead of power. Brook had been unable to defeat Ryuma no matter how hard he fought and while Ryuma only used a fraction of his power, he noticed that Zoro was able to defeat him at full power with only two of his swords, although Ryuma did say that Brook's protectiveness of his afro held him back somewhat.

While at Sabaody Archipelago, two years ago, he struck a Pacifista using a high speed sword attack, yet failed to do much damage to it and had to be rescued afterwards. However, when Zoro attacked the same Pacifista, the results were very different. Although not on par with Zoro, he was able to keep up, visually, with what Zoro was doing while he fought Ryuma, showing his sharp perception for swordsmanship. He works very well with Zoro, as they defeated a Flying Fish Rider together, that was inches away from killing Hatchan.

After the timeskip, Brook has now been shown being able to combine the new freezing ability of his devil fruit with his sword style in order to cover whatever or whomever he cuts with ice. His power and skill in swordmanship has also increased to the degree where a samurai from Wano has commended his skill and he is also now able to use flying slashes as well. Like Zoro, Brook can now cut materials that are harder than steel as he was able to cut down a dragon, whose scales are tougher than steel.

In the treasure room of the Whole Cake Chateau, Brook was able to expertly cut down multiple strong members of the Big Mom Pirates with lightning fast slashes, defeating them within a significantly short period of time as he had sufficient time to finished making copies of the Poneglyphs before Big Mom personally confronted him.

A true testament of Brook's new abilities is when he was able to injure Prometheus, one of Big Mom's most powerful homies, becoming the first person to do so.

Weapon


Brook uses a type of sword called a shikomizue, a sword concealed inside a cane. He uses this sword in conjunction with his fencing skills and has had it for at least fifty years.

After the timeskip, Brook has named his sword "Soul Solid", due to him developing the ability to coat it with the aura of his soul, freezing it in the process, and anyone who comes into contact with it. He also claimed that the Longarm Tribe has helped him sharpen the sword. After he was captured by Big Mom, the sword was confiscated from him.

During the wedding ceremony, Brook used a hammer to destroy the photograph of Carmel.