Characters / Kengan Ashura: Kengan Association Fighters - Left Block

Kengan Ashura Main Character Index
Kengan Association (Yamashita Trading Co.) | Kengan Association Fighters {Left Block | Right Block} | Purgatory | Worm | Other Groups

Adam Dudley - Boss Burger

“FUCK!”

The Emperor

Voiced By: Horii Chado (Japanese), Todd Haberkorn (English)

Age: 28 (Ashura), 30 (Omega)

A former NHL player for the Texas Snowmen who was able to deliver a long streak of knockouts on the rink despite the extremely poor footing, who then became one of the greatest street fighters in America. Originally, his employer planned to hire Punk Abbot, another legendary street fighter who had already fought in the Kengan matches before, but after witnessing Adam knock Punk out decisively he instead brought Adam with him to the Annihilation Tournament. After being defeated in a close match with Cosmo Imai, he decides to stay in Japan and learns MMA from Imai's master.

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• Boisterous Bruiser: He's a very tough and loudmouthed brawler that loves to be the center of attention and enjoys showing off his cocky attitude.
• Born Winner: He's born with an extremely large and powerful set of back muscles, allowing him to deliver full-power Fa Jin blows from any position, no matter how unbalanced, without any technique. Come Omega, he's able to throw out combos while bridging.
• Bowdlerise: In the anime adaptation his "FUCK" on his grill is changed to "DAMN".
• Continuity Cameo: Makes a brief but surprising cameo in How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?, letting the girls hitch a ride when they're in America. Notably, he's one of the few times a character from Kengan appears in the series in-person.
• Defeat Means Friendship: After his loss, he and Imai get along great. Adam worries about - and cheers for - Imai in his subsequent fights, and ends up staying back in Japan and joining the same dojo after the events of Ashura.
• Eagleland: He fits every stereotype of the obnoxious American; His hobby is collecting guns, his favorite food is steak, he has a hot blonde cowgirl girlfriend with a huge rack, his father was a rodeo champion and his fighting experience comes from street-fighting and Hockey Fights and he swears like a sailor, like he was an overgrown high school bully. On the other hand, he's Affably Evil at worst and keeps most of his malice in the ring.
• Everyone Has Standards: Follows an unofficial Hockey Fight creed which ends as soon as one man hits the ice. This means he won't follow an opponent onto the ground if they're out of it, but given that Kengan matches don't end when his opponent goes down, this amounts to bombarding them with Finishing Stomps and soccer kicks until they decide to give up. Nishihonji comments it's arguably ''crueler'' than just knocking Ryuki out as soon as possible, while Mitsuyo just thinks it's a habit he can't train out of Adam and thus let be.
• Everything is Big in Texas: He sure is, and Texas happens to be his home state.
• Flanderization: He's very foul-mouthed in Ashura, sprinkling even casual sentences with cursing. In Omega, he'll occasionally just say "Fuck!" in place of actually articulating himself, with people who know him somehow understanding exactly what he means. He even yells it while sparring with Cosmo.
• Green-Eyed Monster: He wasn't very happy to find out that Cosmo had seen most of the Kengan Association's female members' bare breasts after he had gotten the position of BJJ trainer, something that led to Cosmo losing more blood than in most of his matches.
• Hidden Depths:
  • While he became infamous for the tremendous violence he inflicted during his hockey career, Dudley also ice skates to relax and unwind. Another interesting thing about him is he’s versed in certain aspects of Japanese culture and folklore not commonly known in America to a degree he can make references to it in casual conversation, such as referring to Hiyama as a zashiki warashi, a type of Yokai she bares resemblance to, and in Omega he calls Koga a Daruma Doll in passing when explaining his excess strain issue on the ice rink. ^note though at this point he had been in Japan training for a good two years
  • Despite his brutish attitude, he has a pair of incredibly elaborate tattoo sleeves◊ complete with Flaming Skulls, angel wings, a massive sword-like cross and a The Legend of Zelda Triforce on top of his hands, implying he has more nerdy hobbies than he shows on the surface.
• I Know Madden Kombat: His time in the NHL gave him both fighting experience as well as amazing balance and flexibility on both ice and regular terrain, which he later trains Koga in. This means he can pretty much punch with equal force from any angle or position.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: His language may be colorful and he loves to play the bad guy, but he's quick to jump to the defense of a wounded Cosmo. It's also implied that he wears the FUCK-grill as a tribute to his rodeo-champ father who wore the exact same grill.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He's designed to essentially look the part of an incredibly buff Eminem. In his flashback detailing how he got brought to the tournament, he's also shown knocking out a former Kengan fighter and street fighter named Punk Abbott. His father Stan Dudley is based on Stan Hansen.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Has "FUCK" on his grill for crying out loud. Flashbacks show that his father also had the exact same grill.
• Strong and Skilled: After training with Cosmo for two years he has improved his skill level to where he can throw his already powerful blows at various unpredictable angles.
• Super-Strength: Rei Mikazuchi claims he could knock out Cosmo with a single jab while he's on the bottom in a mount position. Even without it being a clean hit, he's able to send Cosmo flying and bounce him off the concrete floor with one punch.
• Tattooed Crook: He's a very explosive personality and has identical and amazing-looking tattoo sleeves on his arms. See Hidden Depths for details.
• Took a Level in Badass: Come Omega, Adam has made leaps and bounds since the Annihilation Tournament, casually throwing out combos from completely implausible positions with the help of his incredibly powerful trunk. He also learned to anticipate attacks from blind sides with Kureshi to the point he can keep up with Ryuki using Blink.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Adam's little more than a brawler but still good enough to be a competitor as he's strong enough to deliver Fa Jin leveled attacks due to his well developed back muscles as his torque can enhance his striking power, but due to his lack of skill he cannot rely on anything but his raw power and toughness to aid him in a fight. By the time of Omega, he throws off the "Unskilled" part after training in martial arts with Cosmo.

Cosmo Imai - Nishihonji Security Services

"I don't like fighting, I LIKE WINNING!"

The King of Stranglers

Voiced by: Jun'ya Enoki (Japanese), Bryce Papenbrook (English)

Age: 19 (Ashura), 21 (Omega)

A Teen Genius Brazilian Jiu-jitsu fighter who won his first Kengan match at only 14 years old. He used to just be a kid who picked fights, until he ended up nearly getting killed by Yakuza for doing so. A bypassing MMA fighter saved him and offered to teach him, and he hasn't looked back since.

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• The Ace: He's popular, good-looking, intelligent and was a Kengan-tier fighter before he was out of high school. As a fighter, he is a world class grappler and ground-fighter, and even his stand-up game, while weaker than his jiu-jitsu, is good enough for him to stand against elite strikers in a Kengan match.
• Animal Motifs: Cosmo is strongly associated with constrictor snakes, especially pythons.
• Attack Its Weak Point: To compensate for his size and preference for grappling, he's trained to strike at enemies' legs, especially the knees, to bring down larger foes and stronger strikers to his playing field. He later learned to strike trigger points, basically area where the body is more prone to break, to give himself more striking power.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: He learns how to do this during the tournament, able to predict 1 to 2 moves ahead of his opponent. Unfortunately, because he is inexperienced in using it, he becomes over-reliant on it to compensate for his Dented Iron status, leading to his defeat.
• The Baby of the Bunch: The youngest fighter of the Tournament, and the youngest fighter in history to have made his debut in the Kengan matches at the age of 14.
• Berserk Button: He's pretty laid-back outside of his matches, but he absolutely can't abide someone fighting for money, instead of pride or passion as a fighter.
• Big Eater: Most of his early appearances have him layering his plate and stuffing his face with free food.
• Blood Knight: Downplayed if not Subverted. Initially, he thought he liked fighting until his match with Seishu Akoya made him realize that fighting by itself is a terrifying experience with no room for enjoyment, while his true joy comes from winning.
• Butt-Monkey: More often than not, he has the misfortune of ending up in the crossfire of the female characters' fanservice antics (or what looks like it) during the story's comedic segments.
• Child Prodigy: Cosmo has been in the matches since he was fourteen years old. Even then he was capable of taking down men at 200cm in height and had remained undefeated with 21 wins since.
• Choke Holds: His specialty as a grappler. In Omega, he has instead been improving his hand to hand, enough to knock out a professional MMA fighter in two hits.
• Combat Pragmatist: During his fight with Akoya, Cosmo tries to grab his testicles and bit him back after Akoya did the same. He seems to have learned from the experience as he tries moves that would be considered foul on Saw Paing from the get go.
• Counter-Attack: What his "Zone" technique amounts to. The mechanics of this technique is when Cosmo discerns the 0.1 second when the opponent is fully focused on the attack, enabling him to take advantage of that interval and get them in a chokehold.
• David vs. Goliath: Due to his size, every fight he gets into becomes this. Fortunately, he has trained specifically to take on heavyweights in order to make it in the Kengan matches. Even before his martial arts training, he fought adults as a teenager.
• Defeat Means Friendship: He and Adam Dudley form a friendship after their match. He tries to do this with Akoya, but he simply leaves without a response.
• Dented Iron: The short time frame of the tournament turns Imai into this in the later rounds.
• Determinator: His life-or-death battle with Seishu Akoya proves that he's this without a doubt.
• Easily Forgiven: Despite the fact that Akoya nearly tortured him to death and caused him to fear for his life, Cosmo thanks him for helping him realize what he truly likes about fighting.
• Glass Cannon: Cosmo can take on and strangle men bigger and stronger than he is. However, he can't take a hit as well as the rest of the roster can and ends up collapsing from exhaustion after each of his matches in the tournament.
• Graceful Loser: Subverted. In a flashback, he mentions that he just enjoys fighting and doesn't really care about the results. However, after almost losing to Akoya, he realizes that it's not the fight he likes. He enjoys winning.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • During his fight with Akoya he gets severely brutalized and beaten to the point where he goes into shock after having a piece of his flesh torn off by the psychotic vigilante.
  • He gets another less severe one during and after his loss to Ohma. While being choked by Ohma, Cosmo flashes through a montage of what he's been through in the tournament before blacking out. Later, after waking up he starts silently shedding tears over his loss.
• Heroic Second Wind: Against Akoya, Cosmo is beaten down and tortured so thoroughly that he can't even speak aloud to forfeit. Only at death's door does he realize why he loves combat: not for the thrill of the fight, but the thrill of victory. This gives him the strength to edge out a win.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He's eliminated when Ohma correctly predicts his last-ditch Zone counter, managing to overpower and strangle Cosmo with his own arm.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Really with all other characters due to his young age, but especially with Wakatsuki.
• Irony: He's known as "The King of Stranglers", but is defeated in the 3rd round of the Annihilation Tournament via being strangled with his own arm.
• Likes Older Women: His profile states that he prefers older women thanks to Akira frequently taking him to hostess clubs.
• Little Big Brother: Cosmo's little brother Meteor is taller than him, and is the one who takes care of their household needs—generally acting more like a parent rather than a younger sibling. Meteor notes that his older brother would probably not survive without him.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: In Omega.
• Logical Weakness:
  • His Jiu-Jitsu fighting style is capable of knocking out much larger, stronger opponents by choking them out, but otherwise does not give him other options to win a fight. His hand to hand is above what one would expect for someone his size but is not enough to give him an outright win. This means that against a much larger and stronger opponent, he tends to rack up more injuries than they do before winning by chokehold. For normal Kengan matches, this isn't a problem. During the Annihilation tournament though, where he is required to fight back to back over the course of a few days, the damage racks up quickly. In Omega, he has focused on his hand to hand over the past two years, and is now competent enough to defeat a professional lightweight MMA fighter in two hits.]
  • His newly awakened Foresight, because of his inexperience with it, leads to his reactions being slowed down during combat. His over-reliance on his new ability to compensate for his Dented Iron status leads to him being defeated by Ohma.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Downplayed. Like most of the other Kengan fighters, Cosmo's muscles are jacked and toned. But his small frame places him at a disadvantage against bigger fighters who can muscle him down. This doesn't stop him from defeating Adam or Akoya, fighters that double his size. Justified as he's a Brazillian Jujutsu master which doesn't really rely on muscular strength to make it effective.
• Nice Guy: Cosmo holds no negative feelings towards his opponents despite the injuries he sustains and the antagonism they show him, and makes the effort of befriending them afterward.
• Oh, Crap!: When Akoya rips a chunk out of the younger man's leg and chews it as an intimidation tactic, Imai enters a Heroic BSoD at his first real possibility of death.
• Pretty Boy: He stands out among the masculine fighting roster with a more slender frame and somewhat feminine features, as Adam puts it in his usual foul-mouthed way.
• Punched Across the Room: A few times by Adam Dudley. In one instance he gets punched so hard he bounces off the ground.
• Pyrrhic Victory: He seems to excel at this; his fights have a major habit of ending with him in borderline traction. Worse, in the Annihilation tournament, this tends to self-feed, as he ends up fighting worse and worse, getting rustier and rustier, and having to push his body even further to eke out a victory. Ironically, the man who defeated him wasn't in much better condition.
• Slasher Smile: Considering his usual easy-going demeanor, it's rather jarring that he can pull off some unsettling grins when he's sure he's about to win.
• Stronger Than They Look: His raw strength and striking power are both very low by Kengan standards due to his build, but Adam Dudley notes that he still hits far harder than anyone his size has any right to. This is likely thanks to his extreme training and conditioning.
• Took a Level in Badass: In "Omega" he is able to outpunch some strikers focused fighter and doesn't even use any grappling during the Berserkbowl preliminaries.
• Touch of Death: By the time "Omega" rolls around, he's become so strong and skilled that he can dislocate a man's shoulder blade from the front with just one hand.
• Weak, but Skilled: His main thing. Besides Kaneda and maybe Inaba, he's the weakest fighter in the tournament in terms of raw strength. However, his natural combat instincts are so incredibly precise that he can read the exact moment the opponent becomes the most psychologically vulnerable to a counter. Thus, his fights are very back and forth, switching between Cosmo just surviving his opponent's attacks and doing hardly any damage, followed quickly by a brilliant counter that puts the opponent on the verge of getting choked out. If they break out, Cosmo is then back to surviving and looking for his opportunity.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?:
  • "Cosmo" is a bizarre name for a Japanese person. Keep in mind, his younger brother is named "Meteor".
  • Parodied in the second omake of his Chapter in Volume Zero. Akira had a dream where Cosmo's father is named "Bigbang", and that he has an uncle named "Europa" and a cousin named "Callisto". It was apparently because of one of Cosmo's ancestors was an astronomer that named his kids with a space-theme. Cosmo himself denies such a naming convention.

Haruo Kono - Nentendo

"Never... loses. A warrior... NEVER LOSES!"

Click ^here to see Haru before he left the Himalayas.

The Destroyer

Voiced by: Takahiro Mizushima (Japanese), Alejandro Saab (English)

Age: 24 (Ashura), 26 (Omega)

Haru is a Nepalese man from a mountain tribe who was already the strongest in the Himalayas by his mid-teens. With a perfect physique, his enormous stature and great skill in combat, he became feared as the incarnation of Indra by the Gurkhas, while his own tribe looked to him as their invincible protector.

Haru is no longer this man. After being discovered by Akio Kono, the CEO of Nentendo, Haru became Haruo Kono and emigrated to urban Japan under his wing, where the cunning Akio manipulated Haruo's ignorance of technology to addict him to modern vices - video games, fatty foods, and the Internet. Now massively obese and a slave to modern leisures, Haruo participates as a Kengan fighter to avoid being shipped back to his relatively primitive origins. His crushing defeat by Seishu Akoya inspires him to join up with Super Japan Pro Wrestling under Sekibayashi and Kurachi's tutelage.

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• Achilles' Heel: He has a bad knee after Akoya kept hitting it during their fight, even years later he has to forfeit the berserkbowl because Himuro exploited his kneecap even if Haruo won.
• Acrofatic: Despite his tremendous size and the fact he's carrying over 300kg of weight, he's still exceptionally agile.
• Artistic License – Biology: Haruo is so incredibly tall^note 242cm = 7'11" that his stature could only possibly come from some sort of gigantism... which would mean he'd be suffering from crippling joint and spinal problems, but he has neither... and that's before you add the fact that he's massively overweight at a whopping 315kg. Yet, despite his gargantuan size, he's able to participate in underground death matches without issue.
• Big Eater: Is a massive, massive eater. This doesn't change after his redemption.
• Big Fun: Post-redemption, he becomes a very jolly guy, as well as being huge in more than one way.
• Born Winner: Pretty much why he's able to be active in Kengan matches despite being massively out of shape. He's just that naturally strong.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Akoya turns out to be out of Haruo's league as an overall fighter, but Haruo's sheer physical power is still so overwhelming that it rattles Akoya's bones right through his Stone Wall of a guard and causes him enough trouble that he was considering having to kill Haruo.
• Fish out of Water: When he first came to Japan. Unfortunately, it gets deconstructed, as his exposure to Japan's vices corrupted the Gurkha's greatest warrior into the overweight man child he was at the start of the tournament.
• Formerly Fit: He was a 160-kilo wall of Gentle Giant muscle in his youth, but due to his sponsor letting him eat whatever he wants and attending to his every need, he has become massively overweight by the present day (but still a very dangerous fighter).
• Gentle Giant: After his defeat, he transform from a spoiled Manchild into a much friendlier guy. He's still an overweight giant though, as he never manages to keep his appetite in-check even after reforming.
• The Giant: At 242cm, he's the tallest fighter in the tournament by nearly a foot.
• Lightning Bruiser: Despite being both the tallest and heaviest fighter in the story, Haruo is scarily fast, able to leap dozens of feet and charge several meters in under a second.
• Nature Hero: He's the greatest warrior of a Nepalese mountain tribe whose background is borderline mythological in its delivery, with stories of him able to run down a sheer cliff and fighting bears and tigers. Post-redemption, this trait is shown to have returned somewhat, as he's shown in the 4komas to regularly head into the frigid mountain wilderness nearly butt-naked and alone for training, surviving off of whatever he can find.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: His adopted Japanese name Haruo and Central Asian heritage are likely inspired by Terunofuji Haruo, a massive and popular Mongolian rikishi who was the first man to ever climb to the rank of Ozeki, drop all the way down to Jonidan due to knee injuries and diabetes and only not retiring because his coach refused to let him. He then proceeded to climb all the way back to Ozeki from the bottom wrung^note No Rikishi had ever become Ozeki, which demands back-to-back great tournament showings in the top Makuuchi division, gotten demoted and then climbed back to Ozeki from anything lower than Juryo before, which is the division just under Makuuchi; Terunofuji did it from four divisions below that. and as of July 2021 has become the 73rd Yokozuna.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: He's able to deliver standing ground-and-pounds due to his enormous height and reach.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: After taking pro-wrestling, Haruo became one of the nicest characters in the series. That being said, upon hearing that his fellow colleague, Jose Kanzaki, was brutally injured in a Purgatory match, Haruo is shown going berserk and being restrained by his fellow gym mates.
• Psychopathic Manchild: His time spent having his every whim catered to turned Haruo into a violent, overgrown child obsessed with junk food and video games. He says, out loud, during a match that he wishes he was playing games instead. Becomes a regular Manchild in Omega.
• Redemption Quest: After a hard loss to Akoya, Haruo's employer abandons him in disgrace. But the sheer undying grit that Sekibayashi shows in his own match inspires Haruo to reinvent himself, and he joins Super Japan Pro Wrestling as a new beginning.
• Spoiled Brat: Not at first, but his time in Japan turned him into one. His drive to defeat Akoya was specifically so that he wouldn't be sent back to his homeland, i.e. a place with no video games or the Internet. Of course, his loss had quite literally beaten this trait out of him.
• Strong and Skilled: His brief awakening in the endgame of his fight with Akoya shows us what he used to be capable of; a terrifyingly precise series of relentless strikes that are strong enough to rattle Akoya's entire skeletal structure despite the cop's near-perfect defense.
• Super Mode: When he takes a thorough enough trashing from Akoya, his old instincts as the incarnation of Indra reawakens, making him move faster and hit even harder while also delivering far more compact and precise strikes.
• Super-Strength: Even though he's gained over 150kg since he came to Japan, he's still incredibly strong. He splats Akoya against one of the arena walls when he tackles him in the middle of the ring and has a completely ludicrous vertical leap.
  • Even as a teen, Haruo was able to effortlessly carry a live combined weight of 480kg up a sheer cliff face in the a matter of moments.
• Temporary Bulk Change: After awakening into his Indra incarnation form against Akoya, Haruo begins inexplicably losing weight at a ridiculous rate, a feat which is noted by Yohei Bando as being medically impossible. The weight seemingly returns as if it had never left after the fight however.
• Took a Level in Kindness: He starts out in Ashura as a horrendous brat who destroys entire buildings if he doesn't get his way. By Omega he's become a nice, pleasant person after two years training with SJPW.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Didn't used to be this way, but he's fallen out of shape, big time, once he came to Japan.

Seishu Akoya - Wakasa Life Insurance

“What's crazy is this world without justice.”

The Executioner

Voiced By: Rikiya Koyama (Japanese), Joseph Whimms (English)

Age: 31 (Ashura), 33 (Omega)

The Captain of the 44th Riot Squad in the Metropolitan Tokyo police department, Akoya is a stoic and serious man with an unhealthy obsession with the elimination of evil, resulting in him carrying out off-the-job vigilante justice, brutally slaughtering and making a display of criminals. In Omega, he becomes one of the 13 fighters representing the Kengan Association. He is the ninth to fight in the tournament against Nicolas Le Banner.

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• Anti-Role Model: In-Universe. Misasa tells Koga to watch his match closely since he is the perfect example of what Koga should avoid becoming.
• Ax-Crazy: It's not simply the fact that he slaughters criminals, it's that he even directs his brand of justice to the relatives of those criminals as well. He becomes even more crazy without Hiyama giving him instructions; he labeled Haruo and Cosmo as “evil” and nearly killed them both in their matches and Hiyama states that if she or Cosmo had forfeited Akoya would have killed him and then as much of the audience as he could. He's regarded as a liability for this by Team Kengan in Omega.
• The Berserker: Without Hiyama to keep him restrained he dives into a psychotic frenzy.
• Black-and-White Insanity: All Crimes Are Equal in his eyes and worthy of death. Even worse, he considers even being related by blood to a criminal to be a criminal offense.
• Can't Catch Up: Feels that he is losing his edge by Omega as he struggles to enact "justice" on top tier fighters. Akoya is still a strong fighter by all means but even with his improvement he is not gonna be able to handle fighters of top tier caliber with ease.
• Combat Pragmatist: Akoya will use everything he can to get an advantage, like biting or getting outside info for when to attack his opponent. Outside Kengan fights, he is solidly armed and armored and tries his best to gruesomely kill his targets, willing to use any amount of weapons or dirty tactics for the purpose of enforcing his idea of "justice."
  • This is excellently shown when he and Setsuna Kiryu attempt to assassinate "the other" Niko Tokita, where he not only comes decked out in full high-tech armor, but also plans to backstab his target while he is distracted fighting Kiryu. When that plan goes balls-up due to interference from Gilbert Wu and his subordinate Willem Wu, as well as Niko defeating Kiryu in their fight, Akoya drops all reservations and uses a grenade in a last-ditch effort to kill them and save himself and Kiryu.
• The Comically Serious: Akoya's comedic moments, though only in the omakes and fairly few in number compared to the likes of Meguro, boil down to this type of humor.
• Character Catchphrase: "I will execute justice". Or some variation of it.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Even taking into account that Ryuki was dealing with a couple of mental blocks in his fight with Akoya, the fight is utterly one-sided, with Akoya only suffering glancing blows while beating Ryuki to a bloody pulp before he's stopped by Omori, Takayama and Yodoe.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: He struggles with the concept. It's pointed out to him that while he was the superior fighter and had Cosmo dead to rights during their battle, all that matters in the end is that he lost. Inversely, while he wins against Ryuki, he doesn't consider it much of a victory since he recognizes that he left himself open to an attack that could have crippled or even killed him and was only spared from such because his foe didn't want to do that. To Akoya putting the fear of "justice" is more important than winning and think he is losing his edge after hastily killing Lu Tian as the targets he brutalizes are just too strong for him to dominate.
• Determinator: Once he is set to execute "justice" he won't stop until he is unconscious. Most fighter sees him as a bad example of this trope since his determination is not toward winning as much as inflicting the most severe beatdown possible on someone before executing them.
  • One notable instance in his fight with Nicolas in Omega has Akoya unable to move his arms temporarily due to Nicolas' "poison". What does he do? Headbutts his opponent until his forehead cracks open while waiting for his hands to function properly.
  • When faced against Wu fighters that outclasses him even with his armor and weapons Akoya still manage to get the last laugh by withering Willem Wu's attacks long enough to hit im with his taser then toss a grenade at Gilbert and the Other Niko so he can flee with Kiryu.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Innocent people being related to someone who committed a crime is enough for him to enact "justice" on them. There's also him murdering a teenager just because he was a delinquent who stole from Yakuzas, meaning that petty crooks, even if they aren't even an adult, aren't safe from him either.
• Evil Hero: He works as a police officer and his first on-screen action as a vigilante is killing a Yakuza who is in the middle of torturing a teenager. He then establishes himself as an evil Knight Templar by murdering the Yakuza's victim as well, because he's a delinquent who stole from Yakuza and is therefore "evil".
• Expy: Author notes state his character and worldview were modelled after Rorschach and The Punisher.
• Flat Character: He has little characterization outside of his obsession of "executing justice" and the brutal lengths he is willing to go to achieve them. It actually just makes him appear that much more single-minded and unnerving as a human being.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Akoya is not a people person and it shows. No fighter really likes him and he has next to no positive interaction with any of them outside of some of the Omakes. The feeling seems to be mutual as he doesn’t need much of a push to want to kill any of the fighters, something he reserves to those he deems “evil”, and threatens to do so basically at the slightest verbal or physical push they direct at him no matter how strong or weak they might be. The only person who might like him is Cosmo, but only because he was grateful for their fight inadvertently helping him improve as a fighter. In Omega, most of the fighters see him as a liability and negative example of a fighter. As such Wakatsuki asks Yamashita to send him out first in the last five matches so they wouldn't need to rely on him when the chips were really down.
• Genius Bruiser: Ashura showed that Akoya was a powerful fighter with astounding reflexes. In Omega, however, he's shown to also be an intelligent and skilled investigator. He managed to figure out that Ryuki Gaoh was responsible for a string of murders following the death of the fake Mumon Yuzaki. He also figured out that the other people that Ryuki killed were impostors that killed and replaced their targets.
• Hated by All: By Omega both the audience and fighters aware of his reputation are uneasy of him. Not just for his torture of Cosmo in the Annihilation Tournament but also because he got suspended after nearly murdering Murobuchi.
• Hate Sink: There's nothing redeeming or likable about him, aside from the fact that he was apparently once a better person and is cognizant that his own actions make him an evildoer, as his relationship with Hiyama is a heavily abusive one that's going to end with him murdering her due to her cousin being a criminal, as he'll murder people just for being a relative of somebody who committed a crime, even if they're innocent. If that wasn't enough, it's also shown that he murdered a teenager for being a delinquent who stole from Yakuzas and murdered an entire family, which included an innocent young man and his pregnant fiancé just because the man's father was a violent criminal to make it clear to the readers and audience that he's not supposed to be likable in any capacity. Lampshaded in Omega, as the Kengan fans refuse to cheer for him to the surprise of Purgatory fans.
• He Who Fights Monsters: His double life as a vigilante has done a number on his psyche. It's implied he used to be a better, more idealistic man but he's only thirty-one and whoever that Akoya was, he's already long gone.
• Horrifying the Horror: Downplayed as Ryuki only shows his merciless side to members of Worm and is a friendly person in most situations, but even he was disturbed by Akoya's darker side and obsession with justice.
• I Know Madden Kombat: His fighting style is Taiho Jutsu, a martial art developed by a team of experts in armed and unarmed combat during the American occupation of Japan for use by the police force, mixed with a gratuitous amount of ultraviolence.
• Irony: A psychopathic serial murderer who has repeatedly shown to have no regard for the value of human life and has literally killed people for minor infractions such as a delinquent who stole form Yakuzas or being related by blood to criminals... working for a life insurance company.
• Jack of All Stats: One of the things that makes him so dangerous as a fighter is he’s incredibly well rounded. He’s incredibly strong (but not as strong as Wakatsuki or Julius), durable (but not as tough as Sekibayashi or Saw Paing), intelligent (but not as smart as Muteba, Agito or Kuroki), experienced (but not as seasoned as Kuroki or Agito) and fast (but not as quick as Hatsumi or Rei). This paired with his unmatched reflexes (the one area he is the top of) makes him a fighter who lacks a definitive weakness to exploit for a win condition and can’t be outclassed outright (beyond his mental instability).
• Jerkass: Aside from murdering complete innocents for no reason but being related to criminals, he is highly abusive to Hiyama and plans to eventually kill her on principle, no matter how devoted she is to him.
• Killer Cop: But only off the clock. He works as a riot cop, but when doing his vigilante, murder is his first and only ressort.
• Killing Intent: Oozes it and it's played especially darkly when other people with a Lack of Empathy see his aura as a miasma of screaming skeletons swirling around him, representing the many lives he's taken. When his switch first flips in the Annihilation Tournament, Cosmo completely freaks out from being the target of such an intense resolve when he was just there to fight for fun.
  When someone possesses the resolve to die for their convictions, the battle is no longer one about winning and losing, but one of life and death. This was Cosmo's first battle where defeat would lead to death. As he did not expect to get caught up in this, he lacked this resolve.
• Knight Templar: He believes in nothing less than agonizing death to anyone who he deems "evil". In his case, his idea of "evil" doesn't just extend to criminals but also their family members in order to ensure that they do not procreate and "spread the seed of evil".
• Living Emotional Crutch: Hiyama is this trope for him. When it comes to combat though she serves this role to him, as she can rein in his murderous instincts when they work together...but as soon as she starts to fail he starts to go off the handle pretty quickly.
• The Load: Amongst Team Kengan in their fight against Purgatory. He was only signed up because other capable fighters weren't available and Akoya's psychopathic tendencies even after the Kengan Association's new no-killing mandate makes him an issue in Purgatory's stricter match setup. Once they're at the second half of the tournament, Yamashita and Wakatsuki both opt for sending him in early rather than risk depending on him for a tie-breaker later on. And their fears are proven right when he and his opponent Nicolas try to kill each other, forcing their teammates to step in and stop them. The match eventually ends up a no-contest.
• Logical Weakness: See Sanity Has Advantages. His forearm shield stance and overall defense is also vulnerable to attacks that just need to hit him and doesn't outright go for damage like Nicolas' Pressure Point "poison" jabs.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Uses his enormous forearms as a riot shield and baton. So long as he's fighting smartly, he can parry and take punches from someone as superhumanly strong as Haruo with said forearms, with Kaolan likening his toughness to that of steel since he's still taking some damage blocking this way.
• Man Bites Man: Takes a chunk out of Cosmo's leg with his teeth. Then gratuitously chews it just to mess with him.
  • He does the same to Nicolas Le Banner in their match, escalating the round into a deathmatch.
• Nightmare Face: He makes a LOT of horrifying facial expressions.
• Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught:
  • He is cheating by receiving information from Hiyama about when his opponents will breathe before they attack. This, combined with his Super-Reflexes and pre-practiced combos, means he can react and strike his opponent before they can even launch their attack, something he otherwise would never be able to do.
  • In the second round, Hiyama is caught by Nishihonji and threatened to throw the match before the company's reputation is destroyed by revealing the information. It doesn't work, as he simply becomes The Berserker in his match, and can't be stopped by his employer.
• No Place for Me There: Akoya acknowledges that his methods are ultimately wicked and fully intends to cap off his lifelong crusade by killing himself when the work is done - eliminating one more evildoer.
• Not So Stoic: After spending so much of the series almost robotic, he shows downright ecstatic joy when he finds a kindred spirit in Ryuki.
• Personality Powers: His fighting style mirrors his sadistic and heartless personality, as it focuses on subduing and taking control of his opponent's actions as well as rendering them helpless with mounts, holds and grapples.
• Sadist: The way he tortures Cosmo Imai is nothing short of cruel and unusual.
• Sanity Has Advantages: When he goes berserk he forgoes calculated attacks and his reaction time takes a dive. This is shown both in his fight with Cosmo where he wastes time torturing him and get blindsided by a kick he would have normally parried if he was in control of his sadism and against Nicolas where his response to enact with impunity and anger at Nicolas' attacks causes Akoya to walk straight into heavy counter punches or Pressure Point strikes more than once. The fight ultimately has to be called off because both Akoya and Nicolas were ready to tear each other's throats out even if the ref were to call it off, forcing Rolón, Lihito and Carlos to intervene, ending in it being declared No Contest.
• Secret Test of Character: Akoya seems to treat his fight with Ryuki as a way to determine whether the latter is evil by attacking him with intent to kill. His reason ends up being far from noble, wanting to see if Ryuki could end up joining him in his vigilante ways.
• Shield Bash: Akoya develops this tactic by the time Omega rolls around, forcing his opponents to the ground with his forearm-shield and then mounting them for a ground-and-pound. It's a near-flawless move since there's no perfect countermeasure to it and Akoya's inhuman reaction time lets him immediately intercept any of the imperfect countermeasures.
• Slasher Smile: Sports a horrifying one after realizing that Ryuki can be his "ally" in committing to "justice".
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: One of the biggest contributors to this during the Kengan Association vs. Purgatory Tournament by virtue of being a complete lunatic who is only interested in executing "justice", including wanting to kill his own teammates and not caring about the rules.
• The Stoic: It just makes him even creepier. Akoya is so rigid that he could be compared to a machine.
• Stone Wall: Between his extremely polished parrying and utilization of his massive forearms as a shield, his Ripper and a reaction time far quicker than the norm, his defensive abilities are downright ridiculous. Even Ryuki's surprise-attack based style is unable to land more than glancing hits on Akoya before Ryuki ends on the bottom of a ruthless ground-and-pound.
• Super-Reflexes: He has a reaction time of 75 milliseconds, almost three times faster than the human average. Combined with Hiyama's precise internal clock and a radio implant, he can attack the instant his opponents breathe before they attack with pre-practiced combos, making it virtually impossible for his opponents to attack without being interrupted. This strategy is reliant on Hiyama figuring out the opponent's breathing rhythm and it stays consistent throughout the fight, but even without that his reflexes are an extremely valuable tool, allowing him to block Cosmo's triangle choke in the middle of his Zone.
• Token Evil Teammate: In Omega, as one of the 13 representatives in the tournament against Purgatory. No one is thrilled about it.
• Took a Level in Badass: Akoya trained hard after being defeated by Cosmo Imai to the point that, by the time Kengan Omega comes around, Hiyama states that he's stronger than he was during the tournament when they both worked together with pre-programmed combos.
• Use Your Head: It's noted by Sayaka that he’s headbutting Nicolas in the most insane manner by having his face smash the crown of the other fighter repeatedly. In short he’s damaging himself more than he’s dealing damage, and the only reason he's not knocking himself out doing it is because he has a 33kg weight advantage over Nicolas.
• Vigilante Man: What criminals he can't punish as a Police officer, he takes care of on his own time.
• Villain Ball: Picks this up hard in his fight against Cosmo Imai. After biting him, Imai is sent into a panic at the thought of dying, attacking ineffectually and running away in fear. Instead of going for the kill and winning the match, he takes his time torturing him, breaking his ribs one by one. This gives Cosmo enough time to overcome his mental hurdle and fight back to a clutch win.
• Villain with Good Publicity: He's a respectable cop outside of his vigilante work and the public doesn't know of his psychopathic tendencies. In Kengan circles however he has an awful reputation to the point the audience won't cheer for him even when he's fighting for the existence of the organization itself.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: He serves as this to Ryuki Gaoh during Kengan Omega. Up to this point, Ryuki won his Kengan fights easily with the Gaoh Style, but Akoya manages to break his hand when Ryuki attempts his Earth-Crouching Dragon. He then proceeds to dominate Ryuki and win the match with minimal damage.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Taken at face value, his desire to purge the world of all evil is a noble goal...if he wasn't a violent psychopath who believes that All Crimes Are Equal. Depending on how he's feeling, he even edges towards an Omnicidal Maniac.
• Would Hit a Girl: He will slap Hiyama hard enough to draw blood if she displeases him in some way.
• Would Hurt a Child: He's seen murdering a teenage delinquent just because he was stealing from Yakuzas in his intro.
• Younger Than They Look: This giant of a man that looks the age of Murobuchi is barely in his thirties.

Raian Kure - Under Mount, Inc.

"Hey there, dipshit. Ready to get fuckin' slaughtered?"

The Devil

Voiced By: Yoshitsugu Matsuoka (Japanese), Griffin Puatu (English)

Age: 21 (Ashura), 23 (Omega)

The Kure representative for Under Mount, Inc. He's considered a monster even amongst his own clan, both for his strength and his insatiable bloodlust. In Omega, he has disappeared, with Fusui trying to find him. This proved to be a lie, as she knew where he was the entire time. He was hiding in the Kure Village while Ohma was recovering and appeared alongside him to save Kazuo. Later he became the second to last fighter chosen to represent the Kengan Association in the tournament against Purgatory. He is the seventh fighter to fight against Alan Wu.

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• The Ace: Of his clan, Raian is by far the strongest in the Kure Faction due to him being born with a natural percentage rate of the Removal being 100% along with nearly mastering the Kure Clan's style of martial arts. However, while he is definitely the most dangerous amongst them he's still one of the more reckless members, as he is very brutal in his tactics and never listens to directions properly. As of now in Omega it's clear that he's said to be on par with Agito in regard to his strength.
• Animal Motif: He seems to have one that associates with lions. As his name is very similar to the Japanese pronunciation of the word lion "Raion". His favorite Kure technique he is seen mostly using is also named "Lionbite".
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: He won't even use said kung fu against his opponents outside of Lionsbite, simply preferring to brutalize them with sheer might alone once he activates Removal. It is only after his defeat at Ohma's hands and during Toyo's coup that he even bothers using some of them.
• Awesome by Analysis: His preferred savage and reckless fighting style is facilitated by phenomenal analytical abilities sharpened from his career as an assassin. Typically, this allows him to correctly guess his opponent's next move, which would give him a chance to do what he wants after he counters it. It's not nearly as effective against martial arts he's not experienced with though.
• Ax-Crazy: A majority of fighters will have shades of this, but Raian is something else entirely. He is happy enough to be given the chance to ruthlessly slaughter people after being chosen to fight in the tournament, and he looked absolutely joyful when he 'toys' with anyone of his victims he comes across. This is expressed greatly when he fights the Guardians outside the tournament as he gleefully murders every last one of them in his way and even gets pissed off when the Bodyguards interfere with his killing spree.
• The Berserker: As if he wasn't crazy enough when Raian enters a fight he bulldozes his way through an opponent with brute force while ruthlessly beating them to oblivion and he also takes an extreme delight in brutally massacring the victims of his onslaught. Especially when he activates his "Removal" technique where he transforms into a truly frightening and demonic state, as he'll start to take his level of bloodshed up to the extreme by showing absolutely no mercy whatsoever and will rip and tear his way through whomever he's fighting.
• Black Eyes of Crazy: Like all members of the Kure Clan. Even though he seems to be the only crazy one.
• Blood Knight: Though he admits that he likes crushing people more than fighting them, he does actually goes out of his way to spare Ohma from defeat just because he wanted to see how powerful he was and pushes him to use the Advance so the latter could entertain him. Even in the face of defeat he's still enjoying the fight with his opponent, which comes as a surprise to the other Kures.
• Boring, but Practical: Essentially how the Kure Clan style works it consists of deadly strikes and grapples to vital points but thanks to Raian's own enormous physical abilities and skill he can use it to overwhelm his opponents with great efficiency which is shown in Omega.
• Born Winner: He's one of the greatest products of a 1300-year old eugenics project, resulting in his baseline being so ridiculously high that he can overpower Mokichi and Ohma with nothing but brute strength and grit.
• Brutal Honesty: Raian doesn't sugarcoat the truth and loves tearing down others as brutally as possible while mocking them. Even though he's a jerk most of the time but there are times where's he's genuinely right about the majority of topics that he's a part of.
• Character Catchphrase: "It's time to dominate!"
• Character Development: Somewhat in Omega, Raian seems to be more stable than he was back in Ashura. While he still likes killing and fighting he doesn't act like a Jerkass 24/7 and is able to hold a conversation with others.
• The Clan: Part of the Kure Clan, a large family of friendly neighborhood assassins.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: By his own admission, he does not enjoy "fighting", but rather, "one-sided domination".
• Dark Is Evil: Despite the Kure's Black Eyes of Crazy and feared reputation as assassins, they're not evil and most of them are affable when off the job. Raian, on the other hand, lives up to his clan's rather unsettling appearance. He turns it up once he uses Removal, turning his skin into a blood-red shade.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Is now on extremely friendly terms with Ohma, upon their return in Omega. That being said Raian’s definition of “friendly” is much less being kind and understanding and more respecting his abilities and treating him as an equal. He still is incredibly murderous and sadistic even when Ohma explicitly asks him to tone it down on a few occasions such as when Ohma asked him repeatedly not to kill any of the Worm agents yet went ahead and did it anyway.
• The Dreaded: He's been considered to be one of the strongest competitors in the tournament, even in comparison to outright superhumans like Wakatsuki and Julius. Having him on their side against Purgatory guarantees a win in theory.
• Evil Counterpart: To Ohma. They're both rude, fight-happy, and confident yet arrogant, twenty-something-year-old men who have a demonic epithet and a Super Mode that turns them into bloodthirsty berserkers. The main difference is that Ohma likes fighting in general and is fully capable of decency and respect. While Raian likes one-sidedly crushing and killing other fighters and goes out of his way to be a dick towards everyone and everything around him just because.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: He's very antagonistic rather than downright evil and has a very raspy and guttural tone to his voice whenever he's loudly taunting or when he's fighting.
• Fire-Forged Friends: He and Ohma become allies as of right now in Omega and are on much friendlier terms with each other.
• For the Evulz: He doesn't care about his family's dealings in the tournament; he's just there to kill every fighter there.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The man's own clan doesn't even like him that much. The only thing they put him in high regard for is his ridiculous strength.
• Graceful Loser: Like Inaba, his face ends up frozen with a smile even after getting punched out by Ohma. He doesn't even bear a grudge against him either, and cheers for him in later matches in his own way (by shutting up the crowd booing Ohma early in his fight with Cosmo).
• Hate at First Sight: In the most grimly funny way possible. Raian takes the kill-on-sight order for Edward Wu so literally that upon seeing him in the hallway leading to the Purgatory ring, he immediately spouts an inhumanly wide grin, murders Alan Wu brutally just to get his match that hadn't even been called to start by the ref yet over with and sprints off hoping to do the same to Edward.
• Humanoid Abomination: Borders on this when using his Removal, complete with huge Tainted Veins and his skin turning into a dark red shade.
• Hate Sink: There's pretty much nothing likable or pleasant about him at all aside from his strength. The closest thing he gets to a redeeming characteristic is Erioh implying that he'll probably become more polite and responsible when he gets older as Erioh did.
• Hidden Depths: Flippant as he is regarding his clan's traditions and values, he takes great offense when it is "betrayed", and goes so far as to disqualify himself from a match by killing his opponent to go after a traitor faster.
• Jerkass: Even when you put his bloodlust aside, he is not a nice guy. On two separate occasions, he taunts and provokes Lihito and Rei just to show how inferior they are to him for fun. He even threatens his own family with death when they get in his way. During the events of Omega he seems to have lessened up a bit on being this way and is still pretty mean at times but is a lot more calmer.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Kazuo admits that Raian's taunts of him being a bad father to Kenzo were true.
• Kick the Dog:
  • He ruthlessly beats down Mokichi, refuses Elena's (the latter's sister) pleas to stop, snaps Mokichi's neck, slams him into the ground, and mocks the referee for not stopping the match in time.
  • He sadistically mocks Kazuo when his son Kenzo is marked for death by the Kure, labeling him as a deadbeat father who shouldn't be feigning affection for a son he hasn't seen in years and should be glad that Kenzo is about to be killed and out of his hair.
• Lack of Empathy: Mokichi's little sister begs him to stop beating her brother. He refuses. And nearly kills Mokichi.
• Lightning Bruiser: Unreasonably strong, tough, and fast. He hits like a steam locomotive and takes hits from incredibly strong fighters like they're mosquito bites. The Fang considers that Raian outclasses both Julius and Wakatsuki despite him weighing half of what they do.
• Made of Iron: Every Kure is naturally physically superior to normal humans from birth, but Raian displays this in earnest. Ohma's blows don't even get him winded before he starts using Removal.
  • Despite taking countless powerful blows and clean hits from both Mokichi and Ohma over the course of a couple days, he was no worse for wear, appearing completely fine afterwards.
  • During Hayami's attempted coup, one of the high-ranking Guardians was surprised when his kusarigama didn't cut deeper into Raian's shoulder.
• Meaningful Name: His epithet "The Devil" represents Raian's bloodthirsty nature and his ferociousness.
• Mood Whiplash: His intimidating appearance in matches is somewhat waylaid by how he's got the Under Mount, Inc. logo printed on the back of his shorts.
• Neck Snap: He seems to enjoy using this sort of method to kill people. Especially when he uses the Kure technique Lionbite which has him dislocating the enemies' necks to a full 360° turn.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He takes his name from the late Ryan Gracie, a member of the Gracie martial arts family that the Kure clan is based on. Just like Raian, Ryan was known to be the more "loose cannon" of the Gracie family.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Once he removes his restraints, his fight with Mokichi ends up being so brutally one-sided that it becomes this. Hollis remarks that the match stopped being a fight just seconds before Raian activated his Removal.
• No-Sell: He makes a habit of deliberately tanking hits and making it seem as though his opponents have the upper hand, just to beat them down and tell them how weak they are. In the anime, Mokichi's punches can't even make Raian budge while he's using Removal.
• Odd Name Out: Exceptional assassins from his clan have various epithets that incorporate the word "Demon". Raian's linked but distinctive moniker of "The Devil" highlights how he is the most dangerous assassin amongst his family.
• Pet the Dog: Literally the only time he is ever showing an ounce of decency is when he views Ohma as a Worthy Opponent and shows no ill will toward him after his loss. He even supports Ohma silently when the latter goes up against Cosmo and Gensai Kuroki.
• Put on a Bus: He's gone missing since the tournament in Omega and is on the list of people to recruit for the Purgatory face-off as his ridiculous strength would basically guarantee a win.
• Psycho for Hire: The only psychotic one in his family and is an assassin for hire.
• Red Baron: The Devil
• Sadist: Raian flat out admits he doesn't like fighting, he only loves one-sided domination and gets a sadistic vibe from the pure joy of crushing his opponent into a bloody mess. He'll even go as far as to torture anyone in front of a crowd thus further embarrassing his intended victim just to show how weak they are compared to him. Even outside of fighting he still loves tearing people down and trolling them just to show how weak they are compared to him and how he's the alpha in every situation.
• Signature Move: Raian has an odd obsession with snapping other people's necks and has become a very well-known thing with him as whenever he gets the chance to kill someone he chooses this out of any other tactics.
• Sir Swears Alot: Almost every sentence he speaks is peppered with profanities, and he often uses variations of the F-word to call others instead of using their names.
• Slasher Smile: His default expression.
• Strong Family Resemblance: To Erioh Kure in his youth. Both are/were violent Black Sheep who shunned the techniques of the Kure Clan and end up losing in a Kengan Match, leading to them deciding to use other clan techniques.
• Smarter Than You Look: Raian comes across as a sadistic brute, but he isn't stupid. He's able to properly gauge how strong the other fighters are (like Okubo), recognizes the techniques they use and deduces their proper usage, and knew that Ohma and Cosmo's static deadlock was just them catching their breath. It's not that he doesn't get the ins-and-outs of the Association, or that he doesn't have any technical skill; he just can't be bothered with it.
• Smug Super:
  • His fight with Mokichi cements him as this. Not only does Reiichi Kure point out that Raian doesn't even need to use Removal to win, but Hollis and every other fighter who's watching deduce that he's doing this to taunt them all with a display of his strength.
  • This comes back to bite him in the ass during the tournament. His refusal to defend against "weak attacks" or use any Kure techniques other than Removal leads to him eventually being overwhelmed by Ohma's more technical Niko Style techniques once he runs out of the stamina required to keep up Removal.
• Super Mode: The Kure Clans greatest secret, Removal. Out of the family, he's the best at using it at a release rate of 100%.
• Super-Reflexes: He can casually catch a punch from Rei without using Removal or even a stance.
• Super-Strength: Part of the Removal technique is unleashing his latent strength which allows him to overpower his victims through sheer brute force alone and can casually lift grown men who weigh just as much as he does if not even more than him, with ease and toss them around like ragdolls. In Omega he proves able to rip his opponent completely in half from the head to the waist while in Removal.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Is one of the main contributors towards this in the Kengan Association vs. Purgatory Tournament due to him being a Jerkass who decides to start a conflict with the Ax-Crazy Seishu Akoya.
• The Bus Came Back: Raian returns in the nick of time to save Kazuo from Xia Ji along with Ohma Tokita who is revealed to be alive.
• Token Evil Teammate: In Omega, as one of the 13 representatives in the tournament against Purgatory. Being a sadistic troublemaker he tries to derail the tournament twice by starting fights with his team or the other side and costs the Kengan Association a win by gruesomely killing Alan.
• Took a Level in Badass: Not only Raian started using his clan's techniques he spent a whole year sparring daily with Ohma and has more wins than him in Omega. Most notable is that he uses proper defense instead of tanking hits. During the Time Skip following the Purgatory-Kengan Tournament and a lengthy training session with an unwieldly BFS in the mountains has made him essentially learn the Redirection Kata's principle of redirecting force on top of strapping him with a huge weapon.
• Took a Level in Kindness: A very, very minuscule but noticeable one. When he and Ohma are bluntly telling Koga that his Training from Hell is never going to be enough to bring him up to the level of top tier fighters to make it to the fight against the Purgatory, he points out that Ohma told him that it was too much for him to handle "right now", hinting that Koga could eventually reach their level. He then immediately ruins it by stating that he "doesn't give a shit".
• Troll: An especially cruel example; Raian lives and breathes to screw with every living being around him in any way possible.
• The Unfavorite: Despite being chosen to fight for the Kengan Annihilation Tournament he is by far the most hated in his family. He doesn't care either way just as long as he gets to fight.
• Uninhibited Muscle Power: How the Removal works, Raian can use 100% of his muscle power giving him hysterical adrenaline-pumping strength without any drawbacks besides it being fairly exhausting.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Zig-zagged. He knows how to use the Kure's techniques, but his ego won't let him use it when he can just muscle through inferior fighters. When he decides to test it out on the Guardians during Toyo's coup, his moves are rusty, but it still demolishes his opponents. In Omega he dropped his restrictions and is now ready to fight with his techniques. Even though in Omega, he starts to use Kure techniques compared to the other clan heads he falls behind them in skill especially against Edward.
• Villain Respect: After being defeated by Ohma, Raian starts to develop respect and watches him over his matches especially against Cosmo and Gensai even stopping a crowd from unnecessarily booing him.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Has a lighter hair color but nothing is pure about him due to his jackassery and brutality towards everyone.
• Willfully Weak: Not that he's weak in any way, it's just that he'd be Strong and Skilled if he didn't refuse to use the renowned Kure techniques when fighting rather than relying on his natural-born physical strength to destroy inferior opponents. As of now in Omega he doesn't seem to mind using them as he kills multiple students of Xia Ji by using Lionbite.
• The Worf Effect: Amazingly strong as Raian is, he stands no chance against Edward Wu in a straight-up fistfight and gets pummeled half to death by him three times over before Xing Wu managed to burrow a knife handle-deep in Edward's neck, giving the completely adrenaline-fueled Raian a last-ditch chance to take him out by tearing out his entire neck by the Carotid.
• Worthy Opponent: He threatened to kill the referee from announcing Raian's victory when Ohma is seemingly knocked out, letting him get a Heroic Second Wind. Keep in mind Raian has no respect for anyone whatsoever and wants to crush his opponents, not actually fight them.

Mokichi Robinson - Sentory

""I can only defeat you in a dream", huh? In that case, I'll make it a prophetic one."

The Exterminating Vicar

Voiced By: Adin Rudd (English)

Age: 34 (Ashura), 36 (Omega)

An Anglican priest from Britain and the last known practitioner of the eclectic martial art of Baritsu, passed down in his family by one of the Ten Braves of Edo that dominated the Kengan Matches in the mid-1800s. He is the older half-brother of Elena Robinson.

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• Badass Preacher: Cultivates this image.
• Baritone of Strength: Has a very deep voice in the Japanese version, on top of being a powerful martial artist and having one of the highest win rates in the Kengan Association seen thus far.
• Blasphemous Boast: Despite being a Christian vicar, he claims that, for the sake of his sister, he'll "even defeat God."
• Blood Knight: It's revealed that he enjoys a good fight during Kengan Omega, as he sports a grin when he and Lihito are proven to be equally matched.
• But Not Too Foreign: Mostly British at this point given his ancestor moved there in the 1800s, but still has a Japanese first name.
• Confusion Fu: His seamless blend of old jujutsu locks, judo throws and modern striking techniques makes him an enigma to the other fighters, and one of Metsudo's favorites to watch. Raian is left at a complete loss as to what he's up against and eats a ton of hits for it.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: He didn't stand a chance against Raian once he activated his Removal.
• Delinquents: Used to be one. Once he learned about Elena he reined himself in and got better.
• Heel–Faith Turn: After finding purpose in life not only from Elena, but also from God, he ceased being a street thug and reformed himself for the better.
• Heroic Lineage: He descends from one of the Ten Braves of Edo.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Raian pegs Mokichi for a classical jujutsu fighter who relies on joint locks and thinks he has victory in the bag. Then Robinson socks him with a textbook boxing uppercut and throws a high roundhouse at Raian's head, and the assassin realizes he has no clue what he's up against. Sadly for Mokichi, Raian was also holding back and utterly destroys him once Removal is activated.
• Made of Iron: Raian seriously puts him through the wringer with a long and thorough beatdown, all of which he takes pretty well up until the Neck Snap.
• My Sister Is Off-Limits: For Elena. His guise as a kindly preacher shifts into a man ready to kill any man who even looks at his little sister. So far this is largely Played for Laughs as we haven’t seen him actually attempt to kill anyone over it but the intent is still very much there. A recent example found in Omega has Lihito commenting on how good she looks, which causes Mokichi to go from jovial to immediately emitting murderous intent, although he quickly let’s go of it once the latter said he was kidding but his mood is clearly worsened because of it.
• Neck Snap: Raian finishes him off this way at the end fo their fight with the intent to kill. Though thanks to Hanafusa he's able to survive after a lengthy period of being in a coma.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Per Word of God, he's modeled on British pro-wrestler Billy Robinson.
• Reformed Criminal: Due to his father's abusive training methods, he left home at age 14 and used the skills he had picked up to commit a long series of crimes. However, after his half-sister was left in his care, Mokichi changed for the better and became the serene priest we know today. Though the delinquent side still shows up whenever men so much as look at his sister.
• Put on a Bus: The severity of his beatdown by Raian leaves him in a coma for the rest of the story, and he only wakes up just in time to witness the final rounds.
• Shout-Out: His martial arts, Baritsu, is mentioned as being what Sherlock Holmes used. In-series, it was a mix of classic Jiu-Jitsu and British wrestling and bare-knuckle boxing developed by a Japanese Kengan fighter in the Meiji period.
• The Bus Came Back: As of Omega he has not only made a complete recovery from his career-ending injury in Ashura, but he has made a comeback in the Kengan Association. He's done well enough that he is being considered as a possible representative fighter against Purgatory, with him fighting against Lihito to decide who gets the spot, a fight he soundly loses, but thanks to his good performance it’s implies Kazuo is keeping him around as a replacement fighter for any of the main roster in the event it’s necessary to sub him in.
• Took a Level in Badass: Despite just returning to the Kengan matches after his fight with Raian, Lihito inwardly admits that Mokichi's movements have become sharper, implying that Mokichi trained his skills even further while undergoing rehabilitation.
• Training from Hell: Among other things, it involved practicing a two-finger strike until his nails were falling off, with his father beating him senseless and verbally abusing him until he'd get back up and keep going. He ran away and became a self-admitted angry punk taking his frustration out on everything around him over how harsh it was, eventually turning a new leaf when his old man kicked the bucket and he had to step up and take care of his half-sister.
• The Worf Effect: He has a 48-0 record in the Kengan matches with an enormous amount of assets acquired even for the Kengan Association, but ends up getting crushed by Raian, who is downright superhuman.
• Worf Had the Flu: While he loses to Lihito pretty easily, Yamashita notes Mokichi was rusty due to having spent two years rehabilitating from his neck injury, verses Lihito who'd spent the same time training under possibly the greatest martial artist in the entire world. Had Mokichi fully readjusted, it likely have gone very different.

Ohma Tokita - Yamashita Trading Co.

• See Here

Ryo Inaba - Penasonic

"Did you think you could tear it? Don't boo~ther🎵"

The Black Phantom

Voiced by: Megumi Ogata (Japanese), Johnny Yong Bosch (English)

Age: 30 (Ashura), 32 (Omega)

An assassin and current heir to the Inaba Clan. As the Inaba are been subservient to the Urita family, Ryo had been Sukizo's bodyguard for years. In spite of this master/servant arrangement, the two had struck more of a close friendship that lasts to this day.

The Inaba Clan's techniques utilize hair as a weapon, lathering it in a special compound stronger than any hair product that strengthens it enough to be used as a whip or a lasso.

---

• Animal Motif: Ohma envisions him as an enormous spider, and his family's secret technique goes by the name Spider Hair.
• Badass Adorable: He's described as Creepy Cute In-Universe and has a very kindhearted and sociable personality to match, but his prehensile, super-strong hair gives him every bit of an advantage that you'd think it would against the comparatively Badass Normal fighters.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Other characters at first glance consider him to be a creepy quadrupedal weirdo. He's also an assassin capable of giving Ohma a run for his money.
• Blood Knight: He honed his skills specifically for silent killings, but couldn't help himself from feeling joyous in his fight with Ohma. It's implied that Sukizo's commitment to never ordering him to assassinate anybody has actually left him pretty bored most of the time.
• Childhood Friends: With his employer Sukizo Urita and Akira Nishihonji. They have been friends since elementary school through to high school, and their friendship remains strong in spite of Inaba's father assassinating Nishihonji's father, and dying from wounds taken during the assassination. Urita also refuses to treat Inaba as anything less than his best friend, in spite of his clan being historically subservient to the Uritas.
• The Clan: Part of the Inaba family of assassins, one of three such clans participating in the Kengan Annihilation tournament.
• Combat Pragmatist: According to Word of God, Inaba truly excels in fights where anything goes, including weapons such as guns and ambushes. Unfortunately for him, the nature of the Kengan Matches eliminates these options.
• Creepy Cute: In-Universe. When he finally reveals his face, Matsuda, Sayaka and Sawada express shock at how cute he is, since they previously thought he was creepy.
• Creepy Good: He's an assassin and has a very unsettling appearance, but Inaba is a genuinely pleasant and friendly guy.
• Creepy Shadowed Undereyes: He has large bags under his eyes to reinforce his In-Universe Creepy Cute appearance.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Extremely pale skin, long jet-black hair, and creepy to look at all around. It doesn't help that his job is assassination.
• Everyone Has Standards: He finds it insulting that Urita compares him, a professional assassin, to Meguro Masaki, a raving lunatic who kills for fun.
• Flash Step: Using super-strong toes. His version of this technique creates several after-images that make it difficult to guess which direction he's actually going.
• Generation Xerox: His grandfather, Jozaemon Inaba looks like an older version of him with gray hair and a mustache, not to mention he naturally also shares the same fighting style as his grandson.
• Graceful Loser: He's smiling even after losing consciousness, having enjoyed the fight with Ohma even if it ended with his utter defeat.
• Muscles Are Meaningful: Inverted, and not to his benefit. While he's extremely fast on his feet and can pull off some spectacular feats of agility, his small build also means that he can't hit or be hit very hard. When Ohma turns their fight into a slugfest, he simply can't keep up.
• Nice Guy: He's a very pleasant person to just about everybody, on top of caring deeply about his friends and family as well as being a true and loyal friend.
• Older Than They Look: In spite of his short stature, youthful face and long hair, he is 30 years old.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Fully capable of tossing Ohma around with his hair.
• Prehensile Hair: Supposedly it's just special hair products and muscle techniques, but it sure looks like this. The hair he's not using is still floating in the air for starters...
• Running on All Fours: He's more comfortable walking on four limbs than two. Urita even comments that he hasn't seen him walk normally in a long time before he fights Ohma.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Not so much as an adult, but none of his classmates seemed to pay much mind to his hair or walking on all fours during high school.
• Weak, but Skilled:
  • Inaba is often considered to be one of the weaker fighters of the tournament, by Kaolan, Raian and Agito (indirectly, though he considered Ohma, the man who defeated Inaba to be weak). He's a step or two below Ohma in a straight-up fist fight and it's his clan's abnormal techniques that give him an edge. So much so that Ohma had to resort to using the Advance, by which point the fight ended up as a Curb-Stomp Battle.
  • That being said, his techniques are specialized for silent killing, not fighting head-on. He was chosen because he wanted to help his friend and employer and convinced him to use him in the tournament. When it comes to his specialty of sneak attacks, very few can stand up to him.
• Worthy Opponent: Fights hard enough to force Ohma to use his Advance.
  Ohma: You pass!

Gozo Murobuchi - United Clothing

“Great condition? I wouldn't say so. This is what we call peak condition.”

The Immeasurable

Age: 43 (Ashura), 45 (Omega)

A miracle child born to two competitive athletes who was able to stand up straight at only ten days old. Since middle-school, he shattered records for youth divisions in track-and-field left and right and became a Decathlete representing Japan at only 16. For the next 25 years, he dominated the sport and became a national hero who exceeded many specialists in their best Decathlon disciplines. At the age of 41, he retired from public sports and decided to become a Kengan fighter, where his physical dominance allowed him to excel once more.

---

• The Ace: He was more or less completely untouchable in the Decathlon, with his losses in a career spanning two-and-a-half decades able to be counted on one hand. In the Kengan Matches, however, he's in the upper echelon of fighters but nowhere near the top.
• Adaptational Wimp: The very start of his fight in the anime immediately cuts to him getting one-shotted. He never had a chance of winning against Wakatsuki to begin with, but in the manga, he still at least managed to tank a blow from him and get a few hits in (even if they did have no effect.)
• The Cameo: He appears in chapter 39 of How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?. His name also appears on a list of actors that appear in a movie Deire made in chapter 76.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Is utterly destroyed by Wakatsuki in their rematch, being beaten in two minutes whilst Wakatsuki only uses his right hand, and having his "worlds fastest flying knee" to his head do barely any damage.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: By Wakatsuki's own admission after the fight, Murobuchi was legitimately and terrifyingly strong. The strikes he landed would have certainly spelled trouble for anyone else that wasn't Wakatsuki.
• Determinator: He will never give up his goal of beating Wakatsuki. In the epilogue of Ashura, he starts to undergo secret training to beat Wakatsuki, in spite of being so badly beaten in the tournament.
• Easily Forgiven: Akoya brutalized him to the point he is still recovering by the time of the Kengan vs Purgatory tournament. In spite of that, he endorsed Akoya to fight in the Kengan team. The other fighters are shown to still hate Akoya, but learning that Gozo has forgiven him shut their complaints.
  Gozo: Sure, he almost killed me, but I'm still alive. Isn't that good enough?
• Friendly Rivalry: With Wakatsuki, the first man that has ever made Gozo feel like he was the challenger and not the other way around. Wakatsuki shares the sentiment and does think of him as a strong competitor in the tournament, but he considers Agito Kanoh to be far more of a rival because of his prior loss and damaged leg.
• Graceful Loser: It doesn't matter how bad he ends up after a fight, he doesn't hold any grudge. Not only does he enjoy his rivalry with Wakatsuki because the one-sidedness of it make him feel like a challenger, but he also vouches for Akoya as a Kengan representative in Omega even after Akoya nearly beat him to death.
• Javelin Thrower: One of his best events in the decathlon along with the hammer throw. His parents were themselves athletes in these sports, making him somewhat of a thoroughbred.
• Lightning Bruiser: His description as a modern Heracles is no joke. He's one of the fastest men alive and has incredible strength to boot, and is tough enough to take several clean blows from Wakatsuki Takeshi and stay on his feet.
• Loved by All: Gozo is basically a national hero in Japan due to his exploits in athletics, and is a swell dude to pretty much everyone he meets, including endorsing Akoya after the man beat him into a coma. Even the other fighters like him.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Based off of Japanese-Romanian Koji Murofushi, the only hammer thrower to ever bring home medals for Japan at the Olympics, taking gold in 2004 and bronze in 2012, becoming the oldest hammer world champion of all time in the same year, and Sports Director for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
• Perpetual Smiler: Wears a shit-eating grin almost all the time, even after Wakatsuki punches a hole in his chest.
• Satellite Character: While he does have some backstory, virtually all his characterization is tied to his rivalry with Wakatsuki.
• Signature Move: The crouching start, which he has practiced and perfected over thirty years as a runner, into a flying knee. It's so strong and fast that even Wakatsuki can't see it coming and is briefly knocked off his feet by it.
• Super-Speed: Said to be the fastest man alive. While he might not quite live up to that title, his sprint from a crouching start is so murderously fast that Wakatsuki can't even react in time to block or divert the hit that follows. Not that he needed to, but its the thought that counts.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Zig-zagged. He's a genuine amateur with zero martial arts experience, but his extremely diverse skillset from the Decathlon is still useful in a fight. It's more than enough for him to win 19 matches.
• The Worf Effect: Murobuchi is considered to be a modern-day Hercules, and his Kengan record proves that he's capable of demolishing fighters with his physical ability alone. Unfortunately for him, this makes him the perfect guinea pig for showing the audience how much of a physical monster Wakatsuki is.
• Worf Had the Flu:
  • Lost an off-panel match to Kokuro Utsubuki, but Kokuro himself claims Gozo was still recovering from an injury at the time of the match, and he has no idea how the fight would have gone if they were both in peak condition.
  • It is later confirmed that Akoya seriously injured him earlier in the year, and he is now taking an extended leave from fighting because of injuries arising from the fight.

Takeshi Wakatsuki - Furumi Pharmaceuticals

"I was even stronger, that's all there is to it."

The Wild Tiger

Voiced By: Yasuyuki Kase (Japanese), Griffin Puatu (English), Daniel del Roble (Latin American Spanish)

Age: 40 (Ashura), 42 (Omega)

A blonde Japanese boy, with the first words he'd ever hear coming from the doctor who carried him being "He's heavy?!". Takeshi was born to industrialist career parents in 19XX with an extreme case of Superman Syndrome, resulting in him weighting 12 kilos at the time of birth and his muscle fibers to be an earth-shattering fifhy-two times denser than an average grown man's. As a result, Takeshi grew up as part Misfit Lab Rat, part lethal klutz until Heihachi Furumi befriended him via taking a proper straight punch from the little boy who shattered titanium controllers on accident. As a result of sending Heihachi into the hospital for a year, Takeshi finally learned to control his own strength and was shortly after adopted by Heihachi, who nurtured him into the awkward superhuman he is today.

The most successful fighter in the history of the Kengan Association and one of the favorites to win the tournament, Takeshi has an unparalleled match record of 306 wins and 2 losses with assets acquired totaling ¥3,277,395,000,000. In Omega, he is the first to be chosen as one of the 13 fighters representing the Kengan Association. He is the twelfth fighter in the tournament to fight against Fei Wangfang.

---

• Achilles' Heel: In what might be a shoutout to the original legend, Agito handed Wakatsuki his first defeat by horribly breaking his ankle 8 years prior to Ashura. The injury has never healed properly and is treated as a handicap during his fights in the Annihilation Tournament, but unless he specifically puts strain on his ankle via specialized techniques, it doesn't slow him down one bit and an ankle isn't easy to target against an infighter like Wakatsuki.
• All of the Other Reindeer: In Omega he points out how bizarre it feels to have never struggled with a test of might; He beat up an entire gang of highschool delinquents when he was 10, and though he's lost a few times since becoming a fighter, it has never due to a difference in physicality. He's too stoic to actually do a "No More Holding Back" Speech, but it's implied that his condition and growing up as a lab rat are probably the reasons behind his Feet of Clay issues.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Blocking his attacks instead of parrying or dodging them leads to minor bone fractures, internal bleeding and massive swelling if you're an absolute cream-of-the-crop fighter like Ohma or Fei who know how to roll with punches to a superhuman level. If you're not, your entire skeleton is at risk on every punch.
• Batman Gambit: His second greatest asset after his herculean strength is his fighting experience. Having fought for so long Wakatsuki knows no one is getting close to him without a game plan and does his best to lure them into a trap or counter their technique. He tricks Julius by yelling Blast Core when he actually goes for a kick to the head, outwits Muteba by pretending he didn't notice Muteba artificially gained sight and only fails against Ohma's Demonsbane because he thought it had a form like any traditional counter and was thus impossible to fake out with a feint.
• Beware the Nice Ones: He's very friendly and amicable outside of the ring. In it, however, he lives up to his near-monstrous reputation not for his bloodlust, but for his absolutely unbelievable power and speed, along with his absolutely jaw-dropping tenacity and sheer ferocity.
• Boring, but Practical: Due to his overwhelming strength and speed, he can flatten most people in just a few punches or kicks, and his main strategy in the Kengan Tournament (after defeating Julius) is simply making people watch out for his Blast Core so that he can use his strength and skill to put them into a corner instead.
• Born Winner: He was born weighing over 12 kilograms due to Superman Syndrome^note The real life Superman Syndrome is nothing like what is described in the manga. In real life, Wakatsuki would most likely have some form of myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy taken to a logical extreme., resulting in his muscle density being 52 times higher than a normal man's. This means that he weighs 193kg despite only being 193cm tall, but it also means he has actual superhuman strength, to the point where he can punch through concrete walls with ease.
  Fei Wangfang: I was the one on the defensive even through I parried and struck him with my elbow. So he's hard, heavy and impossibly strong. What a pain in the ass...
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: He was already an expert in Full-Contact Karate when he suffered his first defeat against Agito, but has clearly refined his technique even further since, as well as developing a grappling skillset and a punch delivered in the same way as the Sunkei punch from traditional Karate.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: His sheer power and imposing physique hides a guy who worries before every match he's in, even if he's almost guaranteed to win. Once he steps into the ring, however, he's able to calm himself almost instantly.
• Close-Range Combatant: It's noted several times that his particular style of Karate has a slightly shorter reach than most martial arts, somewhat limiting his range. But given his inhuman strength, if he can get in range, it's game over.
• Combat Pragmatist: He has an unorthodox case of Feet of Clay where fighting matches always makes him nervous, even against opponents he's beaten previously. So he gets around that by trying to end fights as quickly as possible.
• Crippling Overspecialization: He almost only uses karate, which has a reach disadvantage compared to other striking martial arts because every attack is delivered with his full body weight behind it. He knows wrestling and Judo, but those don't help with his lack of reach and it's not nearly as refined as Kengan or Purgatory grapplers. While not a great flaw it does give all-rounder fighters and people using soft techniques like Hatsumi a winning chance.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: He spends a majority of his fight with Ohma demolishing the younger fighter even harder than Raian did, with Wakatsuki easily shaking off anything he gets thrown at him despite a busted ankle, heavy injuries and only having one functional eye, but is ultimately unable to figure out Ohma's Counter-Attack technique and has his own herculean power turned on him when Ohma is on his last legs.
• Dark and Troubled Past: He had to basically grow up as a lab rat because he couldn't control his enormous strength, causing him to break anything he touched. After Furumi makes him throw a punch with all of his strength for the first time, he learns how to control it and grows up an otherwise fairly happy child, however.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: Since he's usually outmatched in agility and speed by his opponents, but far tougher than even the biggest of heavyweights, Wakatsuki's strategies after losing the vision in one eye and his depth perception with it often involve him deliberately allowing himself to take hits or combos that would be devastating for a smaller man to endure, in order to secure a decisive One-Hit Kill of his own.
• Determinator: This man will never go down, come hell or higher water, to the point where it scares even Ohma and Fei.
  • He actually manages to get back up after catching a Demonsbane kick directly to the jaw, terrifying everyone for a few moments before it's clear that Wakatsuki's not able to continue fighting.
  • In his fight with Fei he essentially becomes a sandbag for Fei's heavy and lightning-fast strikes due to Divine Demon's tachypsychia allowing Fei to Nonchalant Dodge his punches at the last moment. But he still doggedly attacks and keeps the pressure on Fei, including stomping when he's about to be downed just to stay upright, to the point where Fei has a Villanous RROD from the strain of trying to put Wakatsuki away.
• Dissonant Serenity: While nowhere near as intimidating as some of the more insane fighters, Wakatsuki has an almost eerily casual air about him when he displays what made him so dominant in the Kengan Matches in the first place.
  Wakatsuki, after caving in and painting a concrete wall red with an assassin: Pathetic. He broke after just one punch.
• The Dreaded: In the Kengan Association, this reputation came quite naturally since he's only suffered two losses in a career of almost 20 years, with a long list of incredibly strong opponents that he's one-sidedly crushed. He had this reputation as a kid too from trashing a gang of highschool delinquents alone when he was only ten years old. Even Fei, who can blood-dope himself into a superhuman abominable nightmare with Divine Devil, was regretting picking him as his opponent by the end of the fight despite beating Wakatsuki blue and yellow.
• Eye Scream: Having his face smashed against a wall and then dragged along it by Julius puts out the sight in his right eye.
• Facial Horror: Has the skin and hair on the right side of his head scraped off against a wall by Julius, but it's only a temporary disfigurement due to the doctors involved with the tournament. He still looks a lightly Frankenstein-ish for the rest of the tournament, but by Omega there's no permanent disfigurement.
• Famed In-Story: One of the favorites to win the entire tournament, having already defeated dozens if not hundreds of unfathomably strong fighters before the tournament. The crowds were fully convinced he was gonna blow over Ohma like a storm and get his revenge on the Fang, especially after pulling off an underdog victory against the seemingly invincible Julius.. Not only is he defeated in the semifinals in a match he was otherwise comfortably winning, his revenge against the Fang would have gone up in smoke anyway with Gensai blowing Agito out on the other side of the bracket.
• Feeling Their Age: Forty isn't that old, but in professional fighting circles it's practically ancient and over twenty years of underground fighting has left their marks on Wakatsuki. His bad ankle still gives him trouble, and he declines eating out too often because his stomach is more sensitive than it used to be and requires medication.
• Game-Breaking Injury: Subverted. His ankle was broken in a fight against The Fang of Metsudo. Although it has never quite recovered, he's still considered one of the top fighters in the Kengan Association.
• The Giant: A fairly unusual example because Wakatsuki is, at 193cm, well above the average height but not anything close to unusual by itself, but his Superman Syndrome means that he will never stop developing muscle mass and there's barely any degradation in the fibers with age, resulting in him being quite literally two-to-three times as wide as an average grown man at the age of 40, with the panel showing this off depicting an elderly Wakatsuki, still as musclebound as he is now.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: He's naturally blonde and a pretty nice guy. He distinguishes himself from many other fighters by his lack of overconfident boasting, and rarely trash talks anyone, including his enemies.
• Handicapped Badass: He has to carry around almost two hundred kilos with an ankle that's been horrifically broken in the past, and after the fight with Julius he loses the sight in his right eye, costing him his depth perception. Despite this, he is still one of the most powerful fighters in the series.
• Happily Adopted: His parents are only briefly mentioned and he seems to have otherwise been raised by Furumi and his uncle, but he's very fond of Furumi and basically sees him as a second father.
• Heavier than It Looks :Due to having a rare condition, Wakatsuki has muscle fibers 52 times denser than average. At birth, he weighted 4 times the average despite looking like a normal baby. As an adult, he weights 193 kg, much more than fighters with similar build as him.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He's the unfortunate recipient of Ohma's first use of Demonsbane in a public fight, resulting in his own incredible punching power being turned on him by a kick to the jaw. This takes him all of five seconds to get up from, but it along with the many other horrendous injuries he'd already suffered leaves him barely able to walk on incredibly shaky legs and at Ohma's mercy. His main weakness is fighters trained in redirecting attacks or countering his strength with soft technique.
• Humble Hero: It's in part that he seems to have very low self-esteem, but he gives every opponent their due respect and doesn't overestimate himself or underestimate others. For example, though he utterly crushes Gozo Murobuchi, he makes it clear that he thinks Gozo is incredibly strong to the point where he felt his hairs stand on end the entire fight.
• "Instant Death" Radius: Fighting Wakatsuki is akin to actually fighting a tiger. The difference in strength between him and almost everyone else is so enormous that the moment Wakatsuki gets a clean hit in, he's pretty much already won.
• Intergenerational Friendship: As a child, he develops a close bond with Furumi Heihachi, who is about 20 years his senior. As a 40-year-old, he's also good friends with Cosmo, who is 20 years younger.
• The Klutz: He was a genuinely concerning case of this as a child, shattering specially-made titanium controllers for a home console by pure grip strength as an 8-year old who didn't even know what his strength could do to things and other people. Him accidentally sending Furumi to the hospital for a year for socking him with a real punch made him finally learn to control his strength, with The Narrator comparing it to learning to ride a bicycle or tying his shoelaces as something that he just understood how to do after that.
• Lightning Bruiser: To ridiculous levels. His inborn condition endows him with Herculean strength that's only gonna grow with age rather than degrade, and he's incredibly fast for someone weighing as many kilos as he is centimeters tall. He's also insanely tanky, able to shrug off blows even from people who can almost match his specs.
• Living Legend: While not quite as well-known as Agito, Wakatsuki is a fan-favorite Kengan fighter with decades of experience. He defeated many fighters who were legends in their own right.
• Logical Weakness: Unleashing his ace-in-the-hole, the Blast Core, requires him to use every muscle in his body at once, including his ankle that will probably never recover from the damage the Fang inflicted on it. Naturally, this causes him quite a bit of pain and risks furthering the damage, but the results of said attack speak for themselves and he's still able to tough it out enough to use it four times throughout the tournament and still have a well-off enough ankle to use it in the finals. He also has troubles against more unconventional martial arts like the Niko Style, Hatsumi's custom-made aikido and Kanoh's formless because they can negate or make his strength useless in ways he hasn't seen before and therefore can't plan ahead.
• Made of Iron: His ridiculous musculature works both ways, rendering him incredibly tough on top of his strength and speed. If you're not close to his weightclass, Takeshi makes you go through hell to make him as much as feel the damage. Fei hitting him in the back of the head with a fully wound up roundhouse kick, something that could have killed or crippled a normal person for life, is something he treats as a mild annoyance. Fei outright kills himself wailing on Wakatsuki with the ultimate version of the Advance just to knock out Wakatsuki for a draw, and Wakatsuki still woke up immediately after the match.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Specifically the kanji in his first name Takeshi (健) means "strong and healthy", which highlights his naturally enhanced physicality which qualifies Born Winner status.
  • His epithet the Wild Tiger is also considered this since his fighting style is actually similar to that of a tiger due to his overwhelming strength, speed, and toughness.
• Mutants: Wakatsuki is essentially a genetic freak whose inborn condition gives him muscle fibers far denser than even the Kure Clan, who are bred for battle. While his Superman Syndrome has allowed him to dominate in the Kengan matches for decades, it's also something that isolates him from his surroundings and gives him self-deprecative issues.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: By Word of God, he's partially based on the legendary Japanese middleweight strongman and bodybuilder Takemaru Wakaki (1911-2000), who reinvented weightlifting in Japan to overcome the frailty that got him bullied as a child and ended up being strong enough to bench press a locomotive wheel (more than 200 kilos) despite his slight frame of 162cm and 69 kilos. Takemaru ended up teaching weightlifting◊ to several people who became revolutionaries in Japan's martial arts scene in the 20th century like Kano Jigoro (Kodokan Judo), Mas Oyama (Kyokushin Karate) and Masahiko Kimura.
• No-Sell:
  • Pretty much nothing Ohma does to him even makes him flinch. Ohma is too injured and exhausted for his strikes to even do scratch damage, and his grappling and throw attempts are completely nullified by the sheer difference in strength and weight.
  • Gozo's flying knee to the face barely even makes him stumble, and he ends up walking off Muteba stabbing him in the neck with a spearhand by just clenching his neck muscles really hard.
• Not So Stoic: Pretty much any time he fights during the Annihilation Tournament he is often seen losing his cool in favor of a more emotional attitude.
• Oh, Crap!: Wakatsuki is more than mildly terrified for a moment after seeing Toa Mudo's Maungamanawa, no doubt from giving him flashbacks of Ohma beating him with the similar technique Demonsbane.
• One-Hit KO: Due to his superhuman strength, Wakatsuki is very, VERY good at these. He delivers one to a random assassin (essentially painting the wall with him) and to Murobuchi in the anime. After getting mauled by Julius, he manages to turn the fight around with two roundhouse kicks to the head, turning Julius' head into an abstract painting and knocking him out cold. Notably, he is especially feared for his ability to do this, as Ohma and Fei both acknowledge that even a single clean hit from Wakatsuki would completely demolish them and their chances of winning.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: In theory, his taunting of Fei to use the Advance was a solid idea as both the Redirection and Water kata techniques don't mesh well with the increased physicality of the Advance, and if there's one thing Wakatsuki can handle, it's physicality. In practice, it gets his Wakatsuki Punched Across the Room by Fei, who has activated the far more dangerous Divine Demon.
• Parental Abandonment: Implied. His parents are never seen in any of his childhood/adolescent flashbacks, and he is instead accompanied by Furumi during most of his significant life events (including his high school graduation).
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: A trap his Blast Core technique falls into as identified by Julius. The technique is the most strong single attack in the series to a point it would likely kill anyone if aimed for a vital area. But due to the sheer amount of strain and focus it takes to pull it off, it reduces the range of it to be less than a normal straight punch and can’t exactly be aimed accurately for any range greater than that. This fact is what allowed Julius to manage to tank a few of these during his fight with Wakatsuki and ultimately proved to be what Wakatsuki needed to accommodate for to beat him by getting him close enough so he couldn’t react to it in time.
• Properly Paranoid: Partially due to his low self-esteem, he seems to carefully analyze and worry about any fighter who looks like they could even slightly be a threat to him. Against Murobuchi it just makes him look like a worrywart, but his fear of someone like Julius or Muteba is well-founded and he turns out to be on the money with his prediction that Ohma would be much stronger than he was when Wakatsuki first saw him fight against Sekibayashi before the tournament.
• Punched Across the Room: Frequently the result of trying to block or disperse one of his attacks by going limp.
• Raised in a Lab: Wakatsuki spent most of his childhood in Furumi Pharmaceutical's lab, as his uncontrollable Super-Strength is causing him to break everything he touches. When he eventually manages to control his powers thanks to Heihachi's help, he is allowed to go outside to have a (relatively) normal life.
• Red Baron: The Wild Tiger
• Roundhouse Kick: His Crescent Moon Kick is so powerful that it nearly makes Ohma's liver explode.
• Screaming Warrior: When he really gets riled up, he pulls a Kiai like you'd expect from a Karateka. Only his sounds as loud as a roaring tiger, causing spectators in the already insanely loud crowd to cover their ears.
• Seen It All: Not as much as Kuroki or Rolón overall, but since Wakatsuki is the longest serving fighter and has the highest wins in the Kengan Association he is an example of this trope via sheer experience. Wakatsuki has faced fighters with varying stats or skills throughout his career and crushed them with the exception of Agito and Hatsumi who bested him. Even then, Wakatsuki is highly knowledgeable in the matters of fighters and the underground overall. He also correctly points out that Gensai beating Agito would have unfathomable consequences for the Kengan Association.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: He fights tooth and nail to try and make it to the end of the tournament where he assumes Kanoh Agito will be waiting for him. As Kanoh is knocked out by Kuroki Gensai, Wakatsuki wouldn't have been able to challenge him even if he had managed to beat Ohma.
• Ship Tease: He's frequently seen with Sakura, despite having different employers, and the two often watch baseball together outside work.
• Simple, yet Awesome: His special move, Blast Core, is just a modified traditional Karate no-motion reverse punch, but his inhuman physique lets him use it as if he had battering rams for arms as well as use his explosive core strength to break out of Julius' bear-hug.
• The Stoic: He's fairly reserved and a little awkward man, all things considered. He does have his own insecurities and may tremble from a little before a fight, but he'll immediately calm himself down when he means business.
• Stone Wall: Fei basically compares him to a Dark Souls boss; He's impossibly tough, all his attacks are insanely powerful crits and Fei can't ever drop his guard against him no matter how injured Wakatsuki gets. A single moment of hesitation could mean his defeat or even death, and the sheer strain of trying not to get mauled by Wakatsuki kills Fei in the process anyway.
  Fei: This geezer is human, right?
• Stronger Than You Look: An interesting example. While he is quite tall and incredibly muscled, Wakatsuki isn't of the truly gargantuan proportions of some of the other fighters. However, his inhuman muscle density leads to him being both impossibly heavy and impossibly strong for his size, with only Julius (a near seven-foot-tall bodybuilder whose entire schtick is having trained his muscles to their functional extremes) being mentioned as possibly exceeding him in raw strength. It is pointed out by Agito that Wakatsuki's frame stops him from having the best leverage for such excessive strength.
• Super-Strength:
  • His trademark due to his genetic condition, and boy does superhuman fit the description of Wakatsuki's strength. His first move in the third round consists of jumping well over two meters into the air and reducing the center of the ring for a half a dozen meters around him to rubble in a single punch, and his opponent outright compares him to an African Elephant. Ohma makes a rough estimate that if his Indestructible can nullify anything up to a 10, Wakatsuki's average punch is a 50.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: He is one of the few who seem to care about the outcome of the Kengan Association vs. Purgatory Tournament and clashes with others who are there for other, more basic reasons. In particular he clashes with Seishu Akoya for the injuries he gave Gozo Murobuchi, as well as his in-ring brutality.
• This Is Unforgivable!: While he doesn’t utter the phrase, he holds this feeling against Akoya for brutalizing Murobuchi for no reason during their match, even going so far as to claim that he won’t accept him.
• Trademark Favorite Food: He can't go a single Baseball Saturday without a massive heaping plate of Sekibayashi's curry.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Downplayed. He's a full-contact Karate blackbelt of an unspecified Dan, and used to fight with just that and pure brute force. A defeat against both Agito and Sen pushed him to actually develop his skill beyond that, taking up a decade of grappling training in secret and pushing his superhuman muscles to their limits with specialized techniques that are only possible for him like the Blast Core. By the time the story takes place, Wakatsuki is definitely a case of Strong and Skilled, but he's not one of the tournament's elites in pure quantifiable martial skill and has to make up the difference with his breadth of experience and high fight IQ.
• Victory by Endurance: Played With. Wakatsuki actually loses his fight with Fei Wangfang, getting punched unconscious after his last-ditch effort to hit him with a Blast Core was barely dodged and countered, but because Fei had been abusing his Divine Demon to keep the advantage over him despite Wakatsuki's own natural superhuman abilities, the effort required to beat Wakatsuki unconscious through his iron willpower caught up to him with that final effort, resulting in Fei gushing Blood from Every Orifice and collapsing as well. The match is considered a draw between them, but due to the severity of the damage Fei did to himself, he ends up perishing from the consequences of his Super Mode not long after, whereas Wakatsuki is still breathing and more or less fine, despite needing medical attention and being too beat up to move much.
• Wipe the Floor with You: Gets a part of his face scraped off onto the arena wall by Julius Reinhold.
• World's Strongest Man: Wakatsuki has the potential to become this with his incredible fighting capabilities in terms of his enhanced strength, speed, durability, endurance, and growth. He is also able to practically use any sort of martial arts to his advantage due to his enhanced stature allowing him to overwhelm any opponent, even if he lacks the experience in that particular style he can adapt quickly to their conditions with his immense strength. As well as the nature of his body functioning allows him to grow even stronger than he was before as he ages on with his muscles fibers becoming incredibly denser over time. This in turn means he will eventually overthrow any opponent he comes across as time goes on growing more powerful for years to come if he continues the path of fighting.
• Worthy Opponent: He and Ohma establish a friendship shortly before their fight due to their admiration for the other's fighting skills. Wakatsuki wanted Ohma to resign partly because he was concerned by the latter's injuries and he inwardly begged Ohma to surrender during their fight as he didn't want to injure him out of respect.
  BE PROUD TO BE DEFEATED BY ME!
• Wrestler in All of Us: One of the skills he picked up after he was beaten by Agito was grappling. He started learning it at the age of 30 and secretly trained in it till he is on par with career grapplers. Compared to other grapplers like Cosmo, Okubo and Agito, his technique is below first class at best, but his monstrous strength and weight make it very difficult to escape his holds and makes him able to kill people by squeezing them in a clinch. When he struggles to land a hit on Fei in his Divine Demon form, he instead forces him into a bear hug where even with said Super Mode, Fei has far less brute force than Wakatsuki and would be snapped in half at the spine if he didn't up his output to break out.

Keizaburo Sawada - Murder Music

"Men don't act on reason. You motherfuckers don't get what it means to be a fighter."

The Bird of Darkness

Voiced By: Soichiro Hoshi (Japanese), Bryce Papenbrook (English)

Age: 25 (Ashura)

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• Agent Peacock: He is a Kengan fighter. And strong enough to knock Meguro around no problem for a good minute.
• Anime Hair: You'd be forgiven for thinking it's a hat. Considering his fighting style requires him to spin around at height speeds to perform his stronger kicks, his buzz might be more practical then it initially looks like. As his hair is styled in a way that it never gets in his face when he spins as seen when he fought Julius and he was still able to keep an eye on him the entire time despite his hair flying around with his body at heigh speeds.
• Berserk Button: He absolutely loses his shit when the shady dealings and cowardly methods of cutthroat businessmen interfere with a fight between two men. Also homophobic trash talk or having his appearance insulted, but these are Played for Laughs.
• Camp Gay: Just look at him. Not to mention he frequently comments on or outright swoons over how attractive the other Kengan fighters are, including Hassad, Inaba,^note though at first, he thought he was creepy. and Ren. ^note Sawada called him handsome mid-rant on how it wasn't going to stop him from kicking his ass.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: His gets on the giving and reaching ends of this in a short timespan. Despite not taking any real lasting damage, Meguro was unable to lay a finger on Sawada and got repeatedly knocked around the hallway for his troubles. Then Julius steps in, tanks Sawada's strongest kick, breaks his leg and knocks him out.
• Dance Battler: With Ballet. For reference, a man known as "the god of karate" told his students to "never fight a ballet dancer."
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: While on the hospital bed from his beatdown from Julius, Sawada told a visiting Lihito to spare him his concern for him, comparing another fighter's pity to an act of scorn. Unfortunately, Lihito didn't get the message and swore to win the tournament for him, to Sawada's bewilderment and flattery.
• Gonk: His facial expression when he's pissed off.
• Honor Before Reason: He has immense pride as a fighter. He'd rather take on three high-level fighters at once than allow them to force his employer to forfeit a match.
• Hot-Blooded: He's usually calm and smarmy in a good mood. Get him mad enough however and he'll start dropping whole loads of F-bombs at the top of his lungs.
• I Know Madden Kombat: His fighting style is basically Ballet if you turned it into a kick-centric full contact fighting sport. It has the potential to be very lethal considering his legs are without a doubt very strong and could potentially kill any normal person with a good kick to the neck...unfortunately Kengan Fighters are anything but normal.
• Kick Chick: His feminine appearance and kick based fighting style play with this.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: In his high school days.
• Nonstandard Game Over: He loses his match with Julius because his employer decides to withdraw from the tournament with some heavy-handed advice by Hayami's other fighters. He tries to fight Julius outside the arena, with disastrous results.
• Pride: As a fighter and a man.
• Roundhouse Kick: His go-to move is one of these, delivered after spinning around at high speed to increase the force behind it.
• Sir Swears Alot: When Sawada's in a bad mood he's easily one of the most foul-mouthed fighters in the whole tournament.
• Sore Loser: A more understandable example than most considering the circumstances surrounding his “defeat” (being forced to forfeit). But he positively hates Julius even when the two fight proper and the Monster breaks his leg. The few scenes the two share together after that point are usually him staring daggers at him and Julius barely remembering he exists.
• Spin Attack: His 2G technique. Sawada uses twirls to amplify the force of his kicks to the point where they can bring down men bigger and heavier than he is. Unfortunately, Julius was just too damn strong.
• The Worf Effect: His kicks end up doing little to Meguro and even less to Julius, the latter of which completely crushes him in two moves after blocking Sawada's strongest kick with just his trapezius muscles.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Hayami threatens Togawa with her company's utter ruination to make her forfeit the tournament through Ren and Meguro. Sawada was not at all pleased with Hayami, though he held nothing against Togawa herself.

Julius Reinhold - Toyo Electric Power Co.

"How absurd. You fools are always talking about techniques and secret arts. But that is no more than the ravings of the weak. Those who are truly strong need no techniques!"

The Monster

Voiced By: Hiroshi Shirokuma (Japanese), Michael Sorich (English), Oscar Bonfligio (Latin American Spanish)

Age: 36 (Ashura), 38 (Omega)

A ludicrously enormous German bodybuilder employed as Toyo Electric's fighter with a fantastic fight record of 51-0, Julius has trained his body to its functional extremes through enough steroids to kill a horse, strict dieting and a rigorous education in both medicine and psychology, making him the "Acme of German Medicine". In Omega, he is the last fighter chosen for the Purgatory Faceoff, and the third to fight against Toa Mudo.

---

• The Ace: Julius is the size of a bear and is probably twice as strong and tough as one. He is also much faster than his stature and weight would imply. He's considered on par with Wakatsuki, a genetic freak who's one of the most experienced fighters in the world, who suffers permanent, impeding damage taking Julius down by the skin of his teeth. Because of this, Julius is on the list of people Himuro's searching for in Omega, since he would basically guarantee a win in the Purgatory faceoff, and sure enough, he breaks the Kengan team's initial losing streak by taking down the Goliathesque Toa Mudo who possesses enough power to have easily been a major contender in the Annihilation Tournament.
• Ambiguous Situation: After Hayami carries out his coup behind Julius' back, Julius leaves the psychopathic executive's employ and his current location is unknown. His unparalleled power is highly desirable to the Kengan Association for the Purgatory faceoff, and Himuro was sent on the job to find him to no avail. Muteba Gizenga instead makes contact with him and brings him into the team's folds under Iwami Heavy Industries.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: In the interim between Ashura and Omega, he's learned how to deliver concentrated blows that can circumvent parries or redirection-based counterattacks like Demonsbane and Breathing Mountain.
• Book Ends:
  • The first and last attacks he receives in the Annihilation Tournament are kicks to the sides of his head. The former, he sees coming, and is able to counter it. The latter is used to counter one of his own moves and it winds up knocking him out of the competition.
  • In the Purgatory vs Kengan competition, he is pitted against a foe who possesses both enough raw power to have beaten Julius as he was two years earlier, but also a Counter-Attack technique near-identical to the one that would later beat the man that defeated him, Wakatsuki. By overcoming Toa Mudo, Julius shows that he has clearly stepped into a higher dimension of strength that would have been unattainable to both him and Wakatsuki before.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • He has taken this to a terrifyingly literal degree, eschewing all of the esoteric training regimens for martial arts throughout the series, because why would you need those when you are a 210 kilo Lightning Bruiser boulder of a man who can just punch the dude unfortunate enough to be in the ring with you really, really hard, or snap his bones like they were twigs?
  • When Muteba finds him after the tournament Julius appears to have renounced his more modern exotic training like pulling actively moving racecars with chains and such and instead went back to basic weight lifting.
• The Brute: Initially seems to be this due to his quiet and unempathetic nature, but it is almost immediately subverted big time when Hayami reveals that Julius isn't just really smart, but also really good at figuring out his opponents' techniques and fighting styles through an extremely extensive knowledge of sports physiology and physics. When Hayami later sells him out, Julius starts beating the living shit out of his Guardians using other Guardians as improvised clubs.
• Characterization Marches On: He is initially presented as cold-hearted to an extreme, going along with a convoluted scheme of blackmailing an F1 driver just so he can get in an unorthodox workout before the tournament. In later appearances, he's more mellow (though still grumpy), and gets along just fine with other fighters in the side-chapters.
• Fitness Nut: Julius Reinhold is described as a "martyr of muscles" who had obtained his extreme bulk thanks to special doping and has spent most of his life afterwards honing his strength and developing his muscles further. In Omega, he's reached a point where he can control his individual muscle fibers and flex them to their maximum limit and simultaneously release them to unleash an explosive strike that can deflect any redirection moves and take down someone larger than he is in a single hit.
• Genius Bruiser: He's very well-read on matters such as sports physiology, medicine, psychology and physics, meaning that he has the knowledge to properly utilize his massive strength. He is also able to figure out the effective range of his opponent's attacks and the counter appropriately. His inner thoughts show a calculating and insightful mind.
• Germanic Depressives: He's quiet at the best of times and oppressively annoyed most of the rest of the time.
• The Giant: His 205cm frame is noted to give him an edge over the 193cm and similarly wide Wakatsuki because they have the same strength, but Julius' huge body give him better endurance, reach and leverage to use his power.
• Gonk: Even leaving aside the grotesquely huge muscles, his face is a good deal more ugly and cartoonish than most of the other fighters. Many close-up panels during his fights focus on his odd-looking expressions.
• Hypocrite: For all his talk about how he doesn't bother to use techniques, it's very clear that Julius does rely on more than just raw strength. In his fight with Sawada, for instance, he blocks Sawada's spin kick by flexing his trapezius and leaving it so hard that the kick deals no real damage. This is, essentially, the same logic behind the Niko Style's Adamantine Kata, which is undeniably regarded as a martial arts technique, and Julius performed it almost instantaneously. His Gott-Töter Steinbohrer is even more similar to the techniques used in the series (it even has a name), and uses the same principles as Wakatsuki's Blast Core. In general, Julius's extremely precise muscle control operates a lot like a self-taught martial art, albeit one that only someone with Julius's ridiculous physique could ever hope to manage. Julius repeatedly claims that he isn't actually performing martial arts and the thing he's doing is really just an exotic and well-controlled form of flexing.
• Insistent Terminology: He "evolves" through training, strategy, and refinement. He does not learn techniques.
• Irony:
  • He's cut promos together with Machio for gyms and conventional protein supplements when he only managed to get as big and strong as he is from more exotic means.
  • He avoided a fight with Sawada by Toyo Electric getting the latter's employer to forfeit to preserve Julius' stamina for the later rounds, only to prove soon after that he could've easily beaten him in a fair fight.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Because of his strong belief that strength is always superior to skill, he has pretty much molded himself into one through his insane levels of training.
• Lightning Bruiser: Not only is he unbelievably strong and durable, he can also keep pace with first-class runners in a sprint. He is able to move fast enough to perform a Wipe the Floor with You on Wakatsuki by smashing his head into the wall and running along it, ripping off the skin on one side of the Wild Tiger's face and blinding him in one eye. Taking a punch of his if you're not his size is not as much threat to his opponent's chances of winning as it is a death sentence.
• Locked Out of the Loop: He is locked out of Hayami's plan B to take over the Kengan Association, including his plan to blow up the dome, all Kengan members, fighters and politicians along with it. When he finds out, he goes apeshit and turns on his employer.
• Logical Weakness: While his dismissal of martial arts in favor of immense brute force and pure smarts isn't completely unfounded, it still leaves him open to techniques he has not or cannot account for. He is unable to see Wakatsuki's first Blast Core coming because he assumes it's just another minuscule punch. He seems to have gotten over this by Omega if his bout against Toa is any indication, as he wins by combining his insane body control with his solid combat instincts to parry Toa's defensive posture and strike him down. While this does take a while and he takes a solid beating in the meantime, it does show that Julius is a fighter to be reckoned with.
• Made of Iron: He is able to block a high-speed kick meant to break his neck with his trapezius muscle without much more than a flinch before giving the kicker an annoyed stare. He is able to take punches from Wakatsuki, a man with muscle density 52 times the normal human who can destroy concrete with punches as if they were normal punches. It requires Wakatsuki to use his Blast Core to do any serious damage. His endurance reaches its limit when he is kicked in the head by Wakatsuki.
• Master of Your Domain: He developed complete control over his muscles, to the point he can flex any fiber individually.
• Muscle Angst: He is described as a martyr of muscles, he trains specifically in gaining muscle strength and muscle control over everything making him more a bodybuilder or a strongman than an outright fighter. And he takes pride in using nothing but overwhelming power over technique and feels great shame if it doesn't work.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: His physical appearance is based on the Polish former World's Strongest Man and bodybuilder turned MMA fighter Mariusz Pudzianowski, who in his Strongman days was visibly smaller (though still built like a brick shithouse) than most of his competition but excelled in "mobility" events where his lower bodyweight and emphasis on cardio made him nigh-untouchable; Not unlike how Julius specifically did not neglect speed to become a Lightning Bruiser instead of a Mighty Glacier.
• Out of Focus: Despite being one of the strongest fighters in the tournament and capable of defeating Wakatsuki, he gets very little screentime or focus overall outside of a handful of omakes. He gets more focus in Omega to make up for this.
• Pet the Dog: Julius is still mighty pissed that Wakatsuki beat him, but he still doesn't leave him hanging on an ear-ringing high-five after he takes down Toa Mudo.
• Punch-Clock Villain:
  • Despite what his intimidating personality and stature might have you believe, he's really only an antagonist insofar as he's under Hayami's employ. Outside of that, he's been shown peacefully hanging out with the other fighters outside of his matches and he's notably not one of the people detained following Hayami's attempted coup, which happens to include Hayami himself and pretty much all of his surviving Guardians.. He also always remembers to ask for permission to bring protein shakes into restaurants.
• The Quiet One: Julius isn't really into small talk. He only really talks in the omakes in which he proves far more insightful about bodybuilding, and shows a deep fascination with foreign cultures.
• Sore Loser: He went through a bit of Muscle Angst after his loss to Wakatsuki and tries to give him the cold shoulder. Hell, he even pushed himself to train even harder than before and unlock the ability to flex every single muscle fiber individually just to one day not only get a victory over Wakatsuki, but one day possibly even beat Gensai!
  "I've reached an even higher height. Now no one can put me to shame. Not Wakatsuki Takeshi, not Kanoh Agito...Not even Kuroki Gensai!"
• Super-Strength
  • His physical strength is unfathomable, and easily the greatest in the series, to the point where even if his technique is lacking, even superhumans like Toa Mudo and Wakatsuki can only match him in physical strength when it comes to applying it to martial arts and never elsewhere. Julius is able to pull an F-1 car going at top-speed in the opposite direction while he's wrapped in chains attached to the car's spoilers. Before his fight with Wakatsuki, he easily lifts a barbell bigger than himself racked far past what it should hold, that cracks the concrete floor when combined with his own weight, with one hand before crushing and folding it and the plates like they were was made of cardboard.
  • In a panel of his private gym in Hamburg's industrial quarter, Julius is shown casually doing 520kg one-handed curls, almost 20 kg's heavier than the raw deadlift world record and just over ten the world record one-handed curl. An omake also depicts him passing by to pick up the Four Idiots' run-down car on his shoulder and carrying it to the nearest repair shop.
• This Is a Drill: Gott-Töter Steinbohrer (God-Killer Rock Drills) involves flexing the muscles in his forearms in precise, drill-like sequences that are millimeter thin to enhance the power of his blows and to break through the defenses of his opponents by unwinding the taught muscles in his arms as they go to parry. While so named, honed, and implemented tactically, he does not consider it a technique and Muteba points out that it's only something possible for a man who is purely out to strengthen their muscles, not enhance their martial arts or warmongering skills.
  Muteba Gizenga: (thinking) "...He's insane."
• Unskilled, but Strong: Is a firm believer that brute strength overcomes martial arts. However, not knowing martial arts and relying on his extreme physical abilities does not mean that he is stupid, or unable to strategize. He is able to figure out the weakness and range of Wakatsuki's Blast Core and counter him, almost ending the match. Furthermore, while he has no formal training, he's 51-0 in the Kengan matches before the tournament and thus is a very experienced fighter.
• Villainous Respect: He comes to respect Wakatsuki by "Omega". He silently roots for him during his fight with Fei and praises his raw physical abilities throughout the fight, knowing from experience that nothing Fei can do to Wakatsuki will put him down.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: His muscles grow at a rate where even if he had clothes made for his size, he would grow out of them in no time, so he simply only wears underwear. His civvies consist of massive slacks and a tank top.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: If the omakes are any indication, he's terrified of ghosts and the supernatural, given that he screamed at the top of his lungs in pure fear at the sight of Ryo Inaba dressed up as a ghost spooking him while he visited a haunted house in an Omake depicting him, Nikaido, and Meguro visiting an amusement park.
• World's Strongest Man:
  • In terms of pure physical athletic ability, he is unquestionably the strongest character in the series, arguably beating out the superhuman Wakatsuki in strength, speed, and durability, with Wakatsuki relying on his karate and special techniques to overcome him. He is able to block a spinning kick from Sawada with his trapezius muscle and break his leg by simply clenching his hand, made the stadium shake by throwing Sawada against the wall, and can easily pick up the 193kg Wakatsuki in a back crushing bearhug.
  • While there are many people with The Gift who could qualify as this trope in this series, Julius stands out as being the purest example of this in the entire roster. Julius has no techniques, limited martial arts knowledge, and has instead focused on his musculature and the knowledge of how to properly apply said musculature to defeat his foes. In plain terms, this has made Julius unbeatable in hand to hand combat, with Wakatsuki only managing to eke out a win via a feint with his Blast Core. Even then, it takes two kicks to the head from the superhuman, on top of all the other damage, before he finally crumbled.
  • During his fight with Toa Mudo, someone of same size and build, Julius is shown having much more brute force, being able to lift the 214kg man up while he's in full guard raining hammerfists the size of concrete blocks on Julius' head as if he was simply lifting an Atlas Stone, and using what would be enough weights for a world-record deadlift or squat on his bicep curls, one of the lowest weight exercises possible.
• Wrestler in All of Us: In addition to his extremely powerful punches and kicks, Julius primarily utilizes several basic, but highly effective wrestling techniques such as tackles and bear hugs that can best make use of his full muscle power.

Muteba Gizenga - Iwami Heavy Industries

“You couldn't have toughened up your insides, could you?”

The Genocider

Voiced By: Taiten Kusunoki (Japanese), Christopher Corey Smith (English), Salvador Reyes (Latin American Spanish)

Age: 43 (Ashura), 45 (Omega)

An enormous and heavily tattooed mercenary from the Congo who's been involved with several civil wars in Africa. He works alone and unarmed, but has crushed entire military organizations by himself in the past, and is enough of a menace that even the Kure Clan won't mess with him. He's hired by Iwami Heavy Industries for the Annihilation Tournament after taking out a Somali pirate crew attacking one of Iwami's arms-dealing ships.

---

• Affably Evil: He may be a mercenary whose line of work means he's definitely worked for some less than noble groups in the past, but the worst thing you can say about him is that he's so self-confident that he comes across as being mildly sadistic while fighting, which isn't helped by his fighting style revolving around trying to put his opponent out of commission as quickly as possible, even if it means seriously injuring and even killing them. Even then, he's actually has a sense of mercy and honor given that he gave the Ax-Crazy Meguro a chance to surrender during his fight as he disabled the Judoka, gave his Pro Wrestler opponent a pinfall to go out on and only resorted to lethal attacks against Wakatsuki because he'd have no chance otherwise.
• Awesome by Analysis: Muteba is able to analyze fighting styles just by listening to the sound of the matches from the monitor.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: A fearsome and terrifying mercenary, who loves to dress nice, usually defaulting to his ludicrously expensive favorite white suit when he's not fighting.
• Blank White Eyes: While in some cases of Scary Black Men characters it's used as an indicator of an almost bestial nature, in Muteba's case it's an early indicator that he's completely blind. No one knew besides his employer until he had his eyes gouged out and shrugged it off.
• Blind Weaponmaster: Completely without sight despite having his eyeballs, yet he's a renowned One-Man Army among African mercenaries whether it's with a knife, a gun or his bare hands.
• Blood Knight: Self-admittedly lives for the hunt and finds the tension of fighting irresistible, even against a guy who can brutalize him in a single clean hit he's still having the time of his life. Also somewhat subverted as unlike most examples, he has limits and while he’s willing to go through extreme lengths for the sheer thrill of fighting, at the end of the day he isn’t a fighter but a mercenary who fights to get paid and make it home in as good a condition as possible, not get brutalized. If the pay suddenly isn’t worth the effort and the fight could seriously threaten his future career prospects (like taking crippling injuries he’s unlikely to recover from) he will forfeit without a second thought.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Muteba is a very fun-loving person who wants to live a life filled with vibrant entertainment of fighting and most importantly women.
• Combat Pragmatist: Muteba is not a martial artist, and therefore uses the most brutal and practical techniques to win his fights with minimal damage. When fighting Sekibayashi, he targets his injuries from the first round with hit and run tactics, dodging Sekibiyashi's attacks and running away. It bores the audience, but it works. In Omega, he actually opts to not enter the competition despite Togo calling in her favor because of this. The competition, being under Purgatory rules, is a lot less accepting of his brutally lethal fighting style so he instead calls Julius Reinhold for her to enter in the competition in his place.
  Narrator: Martial artists and mercenaries have one thing in common: They both try to overwhelm their opponents with minimal effort. In other words, they both regard the One-Hit Kill as the ultimate ideal.
• Cool Shades: He usually wears a pair of shades to complement his fancy get-up to enhance his suave appearance.
• The Dandy: He's a cut-from-the-cloth Congenese Sapeur who spends most of his earnings on expensive, fancy suits.
• Difficult, but Awesome: It should be noted that despite the ease Muteba pulls off Eye Scream after Eye Scream that the human eyeball is actually pretty robust^note Yes, it is incredibly sensitive and easily prone to minor damage or annoyances, but the whole thing is not. That's why it'll stay mostly intact even if popped out of the socket by a freak accident, for example., yet he makes them explode like they were fragile balloons. He outright calls Hatsumi, an accomplished Aikido legend, an "amateur" for failing to bust Bando's left eye in one go. Likewise his heart jab and trachea piercing requires both precision and some partial training to be so reliable.
• Disability Superpower: He's able to use echolocation extremely well, mainly by tapping his foot on the ground. He's so good at this that he's able to recognize that his first opponent is a Judoka by his stance and center of gravity alone.
• The Dreaded: An unfortunate group of pirates collectively shat themselves when he came for them. Even Horio, one of the more elite Kure Clan members, who once fought Muteba on the job admits he never wants to face the mercenary again. He even seems to play into this for tactical reasons, using incredibly brutal moves like eye-and-ear gouging to make his opponents worry about said attacks and play into his other equally effective tactics.
• Ear Ache: Does this to Meguro after the eye poke didn't work, ramming his finger into Meguro's ear and crushing his semicircular canal. He is also subjected to this in the second round to "blind" him, though the damage went no further than a busted eardrum so he recovered remarkably quickly by compensating with his sense of smell.
• Electronic Eyes: He is implanted with these by Tomari Togo, and uses them when his hearing is damaged in the third round. They have several modes, including one that senses vibrations and infrared vision. They aren't that useful in a one on one fight and are more suited to battlefield usage. While they allow Muteba to work around some of his injuries from the previous rounds, his reliance on these new eyes end up being his downfall against Wakatsuki.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even a mercenary like him is disgusted by Meguro, and knows that if left unchecked he'd only kill even more people.
  • After failing to deal with The Other Niko Tokita, he makes a very good move on warning Idemitsu to not send any assailants to him noting that there's already casualties and Niko has shown the willingness to gladly create more.
• Eye Scream: His go-to move, also subjected to it himself in the first round, but it barely slowed him down since he's already blind. Done intentionally to condition other fighters to look out for the eye poke, and distract from his other lethal moves.
• The Fashionista: He's a Sapeur, and very particular about his clothes, telling Togo to be careful with his suit while he's taking out the Somali pirates in his introduction. It's telling how much he respects Sekibayashi during Toyo Electric's coup that he's willing to get his suit dirty to help the wrestler out.
• Game-Breaking Injury: A subversion, when his fight against Wakatsuki threatens him with one, he backs out of the tournament.
• Genius Bruiser: He is one of the very first people the other characters go to for information in a pinch, as Muteba is both incredibly well-traveled and connected and knows how to cut a deal as good as any of the Kengan CEO's.
  • He's a great negotiator and generally quite a smart man, a necessity in his line of work. He's also able to come up with some seriously clever tactics on the fly, such as acting like he's completely unable to fight after being temporarily defeaned and then near-murdering the wrestler when he approached Muteba to finish him off.
  • Hanafusa notes that Muteba's probably knowledgeable on the matter of Chinese medicine as well because of his precision with acupuncture point strikes, letting Muteba break out of Wakatsuki's otherwise perfect clinch hold. Once again, this is a completely blind man able to strike Pressure Points with alarming precision on a moving opponent fighting for their life.
• Good All Along: Despite being initially presented as a potential villain, it turns out he's far less villainous than his employer, being a Noble Demon who is strictly professional in his mercenary work and displays a strong sense of honor and respect to the other fighters. Inaba even lampshades as much when he helps out subduing the Guardians.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: He doesn't have proper martial art training but he has made a living fighting unarmed in war zones. If he can't get a good hit at someone's vital he'll just beat them into a pulp, as shown when he keeps wailing on Meguro after dislocating the Judoka's arm with a picture-perfect elbow hold, slamming him in the jaw with a flying knee, and even expertly sweeping Meguro's feet to make the incoming Neck Snap harder to defend against.
• Handicapped Badass: Was blinded in the past, didn't slow him down at all since he's still a 122kg death machine with some serious smarts.
• Hidden Depths:
  • In his free time, the ultra-macho Muteba is a sapeur; someone in the Congo or Nigeria who is extremely into fashion and frequently make extravagant displays of their clothes in public. Sapeurs take fashion so seriously that more than one "Sapeur Duel" has been known to take place, consisting primarily of displaying either the person's talents or their "goodness" by giving away their apparel to nearby beggers (who are often actors paid by the Sapeur) - Complete with an undignified loss sometimes resulting in the loser getting scalped. Yeah, it's Serious Business.
  • Despite being a merciless killer, he differentiates himself from serial killers, refraining from killing unless he needs to. This is why he spares Sekibayashi - he has an immense amount of respect for the wrestler, and as a professional, it would be wrong of him to kill his opponent when the situation doesn't call for it. He even goes as far as to end the match with a pinfall.
• Instant Expert: Muteba is used to battlefield combat, not a fistfight, but is able to adapt to the Kengan matches in no time at all to the point where seasoned pugilists like Wakatsuki and Kaolan are a little freaked out by it. Among other things, he decides to start using footwork against Sekibayashi in the second round for a hit-and-run strategy and instantly masters it. He also copies Sekibayashi's trick of feigning helplessness after he's temporarily deafened, allowing him to set up a combo of lethal attacks in a position where his opponent can't avoid them.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • He quits the tournament when it looks like Wakatsuki might permanently injure him. He still had a decent chance of winning but decides that the injuries he'd sustain in the process would put his mercenary career at risk.
  • In Omega he realizes really fast the other Niko is above his level so he decides to just take his loss after he leaves. He was ready to shoot him with his derringer if he got too close but Niko left instead and he acknowledges that pulling a gun on him might have ended in disaster.
• Limited Wardrobe: Averted with a vengeance, unlike a lot of other characters who have two to three outfits at best. Since Muteba is a proud Sapeur he always dresses for the occasion. His preferred outfit is a white suit but when he's in Hamburg to visit Julius' gym, he's in a full classic hiphop outfit with a hoodie, Cool Shades and a massive gold necklace, and when he goes to fight Niko in the Purgatory monitor room, he brings a skintight black T-shirt and camo pants.
• Logical Weakness: One of his gambit during his fight with Wakatsuki relies on the deceit that he is blind while in reality he has Electronic Eyes, allowing him to deliver a killing blow on Wakatsuki when the latter thinks Muteba can't perceive him after losing his sense of hearing and smell. A solid plan if not for the fact that his eyes following Wakatsuki's movements give away the gambit. It results in him getting Out-Gambitted by Wakatsuki.
• Made of Iron: True, he forfeited his match against Wakatsuki immediately before he could get any more injuries worse than what he got. Still, he took a punch that launched him into a concrete wall, caved the wall in and mangled his arm. And he was still able to calmly stand back up and walk over just to say he forfeited. All he got later was an arm cast. He could still walk after that and was healthy enough to take on armed minions of Toyo during the attempted coup.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: What makes him so effective despite having little formal martial art training is that he won't hesitate to kill or maim his opponent. Of the three fights he only shows mercy to Sekibayashi because the wrestler didn't permanently deafen him when he had the chance, instead leaving Muteba with mildly busted eardrums,and Seki was already out cold standing up when Muteba's chance for a finish came. Meguro was murdered the moment Muteba realized he won't stay down otherwise, and he was planning to murder Wakatsuki not out of sadism but because he is horribly outmatched in a straight-up fistfight and getting in a lethal attack was his only chance to win.
• Noble Demon: He's a perfectly decent guy off the job and doesn't kill when he doesn't need to or isn't being paid for it. He spares Sekibayashi because of this since Sekibayashi had the chance to permanently deafen Muteba but didn't. He also fights the Guardians during Toyo's coup instead of just asking Hayami for a bigger paycheck. He might be a murderer but he's definitely got his head straight.
• The Nose Knows: He's trained his sense of smell as a backup for if he was to lose his hearing too, which comes in handy when Sekibayashi temporarily deafens his both ears.
• Not What I Signed on For: Went into the Annihilation Tournament thinking he'd just be fighting deathmatches with other professional assassins or just really strong martial artists. He's taken aback by how insane and weird the competing brawlers are, and it says something that Sekibayashi is the most normal combatant he fights.
• Older Than They Look: He's 43 and doesn't look it one bit. His libido hasn't slowed down one single bit with age either.
• One-Hit Kill: Specializes in moves such as eye-gouging, heart jabs and other things that can instantly turn a fight in his favor, if not end them. This makes him a dreadfully powerful competitor for his three opponents in the tournament, who are all incredibly durable but still can't deal with lethal moves thrown by someone as good at such attacks.
• One-Man Army: He was once hired to deal with a government coup d'etat in Sierra Leone by a heavily armed rebel army. He was sent alone and unarmed. And he killed them all without being shot once.
• Only in It for the Money: His employer paid a king's ransom to get him to fight for her, but he more than delivers as a monstrously strong fighter, making it to the third round before he forfeits against one of the most terrifying fighters in the tournament, who only barely won out against Muteba. He lampshades this himself, saying that fighting's getting less and less worth the pay because of the lineup of sheer monsters he's up against.
• Private Military Contractors: He even has business cards.
• Properly Paranoid: Despite having prepared for and seen Wakatsuki's Blast Core before, the instinctive fear of a One-Hit Kill blow self-admittedly makes him more passive in their fight. When his strategy works out and he stabs Wakatsuki in the neck, he didn't expect that the Wild Tiger was actually depending on Muteba doing that and in the single moment he lets his guard down, he's struck by the Blast Core he was fearing all match.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Killing people is his job, and just because he's incredibly good at it does not mean it's his hobby. He takes disgust with Meguro for this as the guy is little more than a rabid animal in it for the thrill.
• Put on the Bus: Subverted in Omega. Hayami claims the mercenary's trail went cold in Azerbaijan. Turns out he'd just gone off the radar to go on a tropical vacation, which he's more than willing to end prematurely when Togo calls Muteba to hire him for the competition but, due to the competition's rules not meshing with his fighting style, does her one better and finds her Julius Reinhold to enter in his place.
• Red Baron: The Grim Reaper of Congo, The Massacring Mercenary, The Genocider, The Most Powerful Organism in Africa, The Merciless Mammonist Merc, etc.
• Really Gets Around: He left a trail of naked women on his way to his first match. Up to the entrance. Alongside that most scenes where he’s alone or talking with his employer feature him surrounded by or currently "inside" scores of women.
• Rules Lawyer: When Togo is livid at him throwing his match, he points out that he's not breaking his contract with her by doing so, and that she only owes him his advance payment. He does however throw in a free job for her later as a sign of goodwill.
• Scary Black Man: With his full-body tattoos, Blank White Eyes, size and Slasher Smile, he sure looks like one. Of course, his profession doesn't help. Despite all this, he displays very few stereotypical traits usually associated with this trope besides a talent for violence and being The Pornomancer, the latter of which actually being a Historical In-Joke.
• Smoking Is Cool: Cigarettes will do on the job, such as right after Niko punched him into a wall, but he'll take the time for a cigar if he can, such as when he's watching Ohma and Rolón's fight.
• Super-Senses: Just like Daredevil. He was blinded in battle through unknown means without losing his eyes, so his other senses are powerful beyond belief to the point where he himself claims he can "see" better than the average man. His spacial awareness and behavior in front of others is such that no one even realized he was blind until he shrugs off Meguro destroying his eyeballs without any hindrance to his performance after getting over the initial pain.
• Tattooed Crook: He is covered head-to-toe in a set of incredibly intricate and swirly black tribal tattoos◊, complete with him shaving every strand of hair on his body to highlight them further. The artist designed him to look "like you'd prepare for death if you saw him on the battlefield". They're occasionally highlighted in white to make him look even more horrifying and almost demon-like at his worst. Subverted in that he's a pretty good guy off the clock.
• The Pornomancer: Has a way with the ladies that defies belief, leaving literal trails of satisfied women in his wake. According to his character notes, this trait was something Sandrovich gave him based on widespread rumors about Idi Amin.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • After almost killing Sekibayashi in their match, he lets the wrestler go out to a pinfall to preserve his dignity after it's clear he's unable to continue fighting, despite Sekibayashi's raw fighting spirit having awoken a desire to fight like a warrior in Muteba for the first time since he lost his sight.
  • While he forfeits the tournament, he thanks his employer for both his new eyes as well as him having a good time overall by offering to do a job for free the next time they do business.
• Touch of Death: His Heart Jab technique, an ancient Chinese assassination technique that involves striking below the ribcage and tapping the heart, stopping it.
• Villainous Friendship: He gets along very well with Togo, his employer. Both are...unscrupulous, at best.
• Weak, but Skilled: An interesting example as Muteba, unlike many of the other fighters who got as far into the tournament as he did, isn’t formally trained in any particular martial art (but shows off a handful of assassination techniques) yet is still a very formidable fighter who can actually take on pretty much anyone who he comes across. He mostly lacks the pure brute strength (but, being 199cm and 122kg of rippling muscle himself is still insanely strong by any normal metric) that most of his opponents had, but his mastery over his senses grants him an extreme level of heightened awareness which allows him to adapt in really unorthodox ways to his opponent's moves and tactics before setting up a near-lethal blow of his own.

Meguro Masaki - Umiichi Securities

"This is gonna be fun. Should I break him? Strangle him? Tear him apart? Can I kill him better than father?... Huh? Who was I gonna kill again?"

The Crying Man

Voiced By: Kawamoto Noriyuki (Japanese), Doug Erholtz (English)

Age: 33 (Ashura)

An animalistic judo master, Masaki was the son of Hiroki Meguro, A.K.A "Meguro the Demon" and trained in a dojo with three other adult practitioners. By the age of 7 when he was allowed to practice in his father's dojo, Masaki quickly developed a talent for Judo and became his father's star pupil. He had the image of a modest and talented young boy, but this proved to be a facade. One by one, he secretly used his judo to murder his fellow pupils out of bloodlust, with Hiroki being the last. The police took note of this incident and filed Masaki as "Boy M" (as publishing the name of a criminal minor who hadn't been trialed is a huge legal no-go). Before they could find the culprit, however, Katsumasa Hayami took him under his wing as his pawn, leaving the trail to run cold.

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• Achilles' Heel: Muteba discovers that hitting him in the groin still causes him actual discomfort, but Meguro never gives him another chance to exploit it during their fight - not that there was much left to attack after the first attack.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: Meguro shares his father's belief that judo is the world's most powerful martial art.
• Ax-Crazy: The most insane individual in the series. He is little better than a wild beast. The reason for his madness... there is none! He was just insane from the get-go.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • He seems at first to be a mindless brute and irredeemable monster, but he simply has a twisted perspective and priorities. Pain makes him feel pleasure, and he seems drawn to killing people he loves and values, and treats the prospect of killing his foes like a gift to them. He isn't evil, just insane.
  • Word of God backs this up by mentioning that the only difference between Meguro and Hajime Hanafusa is that, while both were born with "madness", Hanafusa keeps his in check with his logic and rationality.
• Child Prodigy: By the age of 13 he was able to match gold medalist Judokas. That's also the age when he slaughtered everyone in his dojo, including his father. Him demolishing the national junior tournament at age 12 with his glasses still on and a smile on his face was what inspired Jurota Arashiyama to treat him as The Rival he hadn't met yet and remotivated him towards his own Judo training.
• Combat Sadomasochist: He already enjoys killing people, but the way his brain works turns his pain into pleasure, which makes him even harder to repel him in a fight.
• Eye Scream: Will go for the eyes if given the chance. Is subjected to this himself by Muteba Gizenga, and fatally on the second attack by spearing his brain with his index finger through the open eye cavity.
• Fatal Flaw: His insanity has greatly hindered Meguro's ability to fight logically. He never attempts to block any damage which comes his way and ends up he exposes himself to more damage than required. This leads to Muteba deciding he is too dangerous to let live, and ends up brutally killing him.
• Feel No Pain: Meguro was born with a brain that translates pain as pleasure, adding to his madness.
• Go Out with a Smile: He dies seeing the ghosts of those he murdered - his father and fellow students - and thinking that the fight was fun.
• Groin Attack: Holy fuck, Muteba mutilated this man's groin when the Eye Scream and Ear Ache didn't do a thing to stop him. It's somehow even worse in the anime despite being less explicitly detailed because of the enormous flow of blood spreading into Masaki's gi from his groin.
• It Can Think: Despite being basically a giant pile of bloodlust masquerading in a human shape, his Judo skills are well-polished and nothing to shake a stick at - he will floor you instantly and knock the wind out of your lungs faster than you can imagine if he gets a hold of you.
• Killed Off for Real: Is killed in a brutal fashion by Muteba after it becomes clear that he cannot be stopped.
• Made of Iron: In addition to the fact that pain = pleasure to him, Meguro is able to take serious punishment before going down.
• Mask of Sanity: As a child, he is able to act as a nice and humble boy who doesn't take pride in his victories despite his great talent. This is simply a facade to hide his murderous inner desires, and when he finally snaps, his father realized that his son hasn't actually changed—he's simply embracing the monster he's always had been.
• Neck Snap: How he murdered his whole dojo. His victims' bodies' were found with their necks gruesomely contorted from his Judo throws.
• Obviously Evil: Yeah, no way he'd be a hero with that kinda look.
• Offing the Offspring: His own father attempts to kill him after realising that his son is an Ax-Crazy Serial Killer who had murdered the other members of his dojo. Of course, he fails to do so and gets killed instead.
• Only Sane Man: Hilariously plays the Straight Man role in the Omakes, since the comedy revolving his teammates, Nikaido and Julius, tend to focus on their poor choices of costume (or lack thereof, especially in Julius's case). For all his insanity, Masaki at least dresses normally.
• Parents Know Their Children: Masaki's father recognizes that his students have been killed by his own son's Judo techniques just by looking at the corpses.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He tends to call Ren Nikaido a "Chinaman", something that is exaggerated a whole lot in the omakes featuring him, Julius, and Ren, to the point where it's literally the only thing he calls Nikaido, as he calls him disparaging things such as "Creepy Chinaman", "Pervert Chinaman", and "Gross Chinaman".
• Power Stereotype Flip: Judo means "gentle way" for a reason—it's a martial art based on controlling an opponent's strength and neutralizing their attacks with flow and grace, and frequently regarded as a philosophy of calmness and tranquility as much as a fighting style. The common idea of a judoka is anything but Meguro, who is a barely-controlled monster of a man and uses his judo skills to try to shatter the spines of his opponents.
• Psycho for Hire: Isn't an assassin but is willing to kill on other people's orders.
• Rasputinian Death: The sheer amount of damage he takes during the fight is incredible. He has his eye gouged out, his semicircular canal crushed, his testicles destroyed to the point where they bleed heavily. He then has his arm dislocated, fingers broken, head stomped on, his windpipe crushed and is finally killed when Muteba severs his spinal cord at the neck and STABS HIM THROUGH HIS GOUGED OUT EYE SOCKET AND INTO HIS BRAIN! It looks like a fatality that could come out of a Mortal Kombat game.
• Running on All Fours: To show his animal-like nature.
• Sanity Has Advantages: When he first snapped at age 13, his defense was so good that his father, who was a world-renowned judoka and bigger than him at the time, couldn't throw him. Nowadays, after running amok for over twenty years, his sanity has degraded so much that he barely bothers with defense at all (partially because he 'likes' the pain). Once Muteba realizes this, the mercenary turns the fight around immediately and systematically dismantles Meguro's body.It is later revealed that Hayami has been trying to enhance his killing instinct only to make Meguro's condition worse.
• Self-Made Orphan: Killed his father in the most brutal way possible, continuously throwing him until he was a battered and bloody mess.
• Serial Killer: He's essentially an extremely unsubtle assassin on Hayami's payroll.
• Shout-Out: In the writer's note, his commonly-hanging tongue is stated to be a homage to Venom.
• Sleeves Are for Wimps: Although his uniform used to have some back when he was training with Hayami.
• Tears of Blood: Walks into his match like this.
• Tragic Monster: Called this verbatim by the mangaka in an after-special extra. He may be a sadomasochistic killer, but he has no malice or hatred in him. He still loves his father, who he killed with his own hands, and thanks him for his Judo lessons. Also, when he finally reveals his true nature to his father in the flashback detailing his past, he doesn't have a look of malice or sadistic bloodlust on his face at all, and rather has a look of both horror and despair as the Tears of Blood he sheds are seemingly out of genuine sadness as he confesses to his father that he's unable to control himself anymore. It's also revealed that Katsumasa Hayami fiddled with his brain, which drove him EVEN more insane than he already was by the time he joined him, and his clone, Masaki Hayami, reveals that he could've been fully capable of being a normal, functional member of society if he had just gotten help, as Hayami is just as crazy as Meguro Masaki is, but is in complete control of himself and genuinely benevolent and well-meaning too, meaning that Katsumasa took away any chance he had left at having anything close to a normal life by messing with his brain, and is partially responsible for killing Meguro because of this.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Zig-zagged. He is a genuine Judo prodigy who can perform Judo throws with nothing but someone’s collarbone, had flawless defense that even his father couldn’t break when he was only 13 years old and can kill most people on the spot with just one Judo move. That being said, as mentioned above, his lack of sanity and desire to do anything else beyond brutally killing his opponents with his bare hands has seriously degraded his talents. Most of the moves he uses against Muteba are more akin to that of a crazed animal and serial killer than what one would expect from a Judo master, such as attempting to strangle him to death and biting off a chunk of his skin. Despite being unable to use his more effective techniques due to said insanity, however, he is still a ridiculously strong and durable opponent and would likely have killed or seriously maimed his opponent, had he fought anyone else.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Through flashbacks, we discover that Meguro murdered his own father, yet in the present, we find he has nothing but admiration and gratitude for his father. While fighting Muteba, he delusionally starts calling the assassin Father with affection and warmth.

Jun Sekibayashi - Gandai

I never knew my parents, I was living with my grandmother for as long as I can remember. I was a pretty bad kid too. I was a mad dog. I didn't have anything to lose. Until Pro Wrestling changed me. Thank you, Pro Wrestling. I'll always be hooked on you.

Hell's Angel

Voiced By: Tetsu Inada (Anime, Japanese), Toru Inada (CD Drama), Jake Green (Anime, English)

Age: 38 (Ashura), 40 (Omega)

Super Japan Pro Wrestling's pride and joy, Sekibayashi is a gigantic man with an unparalleled love for Pro Wrestling. A delinquent street-fighting kid who grew up in poverty living with his grandmother who was scouted at the age of 15 after picking a fight with the SJPW's chairman and losing horribly to then stick to the organization ever since. As of the start of Ashura, he's one of the powerhouse mainstays of the Association with an incredible record of 57-0, and ends up as Ohma's third opponent.

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• Affectionate Nickname: Sometimes referred to as "Seki" for short by close associates like Wakatsuki.
• Attack Reflector: It's noted that his defense is significantly different from the norm, since he doesn't try to block blows and instead shifts his body so that his opponents' strikes also do damage to themselves. He badly concusses Takeru Kiozan by forcing the impact of his charge down onto his own head.
• Badass Boast: "Pro wrestlers... are good actors!"
• Bland-Name Product: His gym is a blatant allusion to All Japan Pro Wrestling.
• Blood Knight: His reaction to Ohma using the Advance and pummeling Sekibayashi says it all.
  Seikbayashi: "This fuckin' rules!"
• Boisterous Bruiser: Wouldn't be a pro wrestler if he wasn't this.
• Breath Weapon: Uses his own blood to poison mist Muteba to briefly cut off his sense of smell.
• Bruiser with a Soft Centre: He may be a fearsome fighter and a Drill Sergeant Nasty when it comes to Pro Wrestling, but off the clock, Sekibayashi is a pretty sweet guy who likes to treat his friends with their favorite food, and expresses delight when they finish up all the dishes he served. Wakatsuki notes that he's like a grandma in that regard.
• Combat Pragmatist: Downplayed as his Marvellous Seki persona, he still refuses to block blows, but he is more willing to use dirty moves, such as clapping his opponent's ears and bursting their eardrums. He also has ways of taking critical blows like eye gouges "safely", moving slightly so they hit somewhere else.
  "Here's a little lesson for you, mercenary. In Pro Wrestling, anything goes as long as you don't get caught."
• Charlie Brown from Outta Town: His Marvelous Seki persona, which is just Sekibayashi in face-paint.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Completely shat on Ohma until he used the Advance, and even with that Ohma could barely get any ground against Sekibayashi. Despite winning by knocking the wrestler out through hitting his windpipe, Ohma notes that Sekibayashi was barely even hurt despite taking dozens upon dozens of blows.
• Died Standing Up: Downplayed naturally, given he survives, but his defeat against Muteba is signaled by him stopping moving while standing up, having finally reached his limit.
• Determinator: Fracture his bones, punch his face in, try to poke him in the eyes, Sekibayashi will always get back up. He ends up nearly dying on his feet fighting Muteba because he gets back up from being smacked directly on the heart from under the ribs.
• The Dreaded: Show Within a Show example. His Heel persona, "Marvellous Saki", is described by Kaneda as having terrorized the entire SJPW ring during his one year career.
• Dreadlock Warrior: And he's clearly skilled in styling them too, given he can convincingly pull off a reverse gingko-leaf topknot without having to undo his dreads.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite the damage he is willing to take for the show, he draws the line at letting his eyes get gouged. He doesn't fully dodge, but he moves his head enough for the move to hit him in the cheek instead.
• Face–Heel Turn: Invoked. He becomes his old heel persona, Marvellous Seki, for his fight with Muteba. He was already prone to heel-like behavior during matches, but Marvellous Seki is willing to stoop to dirtier moves.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Averted hard. By all accounts, he was a regular guy before he started wrestling, and only his Training from Hell turned him into the juggernaut he is today. Tellingly, he is also remarkably good as passing this on to his students, massively improving Koga's strength and stamina through sheer hard work alone. He may have to send some poor sods home because they can't handle his training, but it's clear that he holds nothing against them and can't afford to keep anyone who's half-assing it.
• Hidden Depths: He's the one in charge of his Wrestling gym's kitchen and he makes a renowned curry perfect for bulking and putting on muscle with. It's so good that it's Wakatsuki's favorite food and he requests it every time they watch baseball together on saturdays.
• Honor Before Reason: This man simply will not dodge. He'll deliberately tank anything thrown at him on the grounds that it's a Pro Wrestler's duty to do so.
• How Much More Can He Take?: Sekibayashi refuses to block blows, but he's so good at tanking them that his opponents are left questioning if they're doing any damage at all.
• Intergenerational Friendship: In Ashura he's very chummy with Cosmo, who is young enough for Seki to be his Cool Uncle, and he also grows fond of Koga's who is around the same age as Cosmo.
• Kayfabe: He takes the role of a wrestler so seriously that he refuses to block any strikes, because "wrestlers cannot block". His Marvellous Seki persona even uses Gandai's right of substitution to substitute "Jun Sekibayashi" for "Marvellous Seki".
• Large Ham: In his own words; Pro wrestlers are entertainers first and fighters second. As befits a pro wrestler, Sekibayashi showboats and taunts his opponent in Kengan matches, as if it was a wrestling ring.
• Loophole Abuse: Sekibayashi makes it an iron-clad rule to never dodge attacks, no matter how serious they are. That said, he will still deliberately move slightly to change where the attack will land to avoid any vital injuries like eye-gouging.
• Loved by All:
  • The audience loves Sekibayashi, and their hype for him is even more pronounced than the other fighters. The crowd nearly starts a stampede cheering for his match with Kiozan, with Kazuo shown roaring in excitement. Even his defeat by Muteba doesn't halt their cheers, and they hope for his recovery as he makes his exit.
  • Even extends to other fighters, with Kaneda and Muteba (one of his opponents) expressing their admiration for him. Even Metsudo Katahara himself is a huge wrestling fan.
• Made of Iron: His main talent is to take as much damage as possible without going on the defensive. He is so tough that his opponents end up hurting themselves attacking him. Even Ohma can barely make a dent in him while firing on all cylinders.
• Magnetic Hero: While he loves to play the heel, Sekibayashi is a great friend outside the ring and constantly tries to recruit his fellow fighters into pro wrestling. By the end of the tournament, he's befriended Haruo and Cosmo, and has earned the respect of Takeru Kiozan and Muteba Gizenga. He becomes an important coach and mentor to Koga in the sequel series Omega.
• Manly Tears: An incredibly tragic and yet inspiring case of it in a flashback about how he promised Rikidozan, his mentor figure, that he'd never skip a day of training even if his parents died, only for Rikidozan to be stabbed in a petty fight a week later and killed. Jun is shown standing in a puddle of his sweat and tears doing his squats while his other mentor figure Kurachi is excusing him at the funeral, knowing exactly why Jun's not coming..
  12889... 12890... 12891... 12892...
  The Pro Wrestler named "Hell's Angel" Sekibayashi Jun was born one year later.
• Master Actor: Can play the Face or the Heel in order to get on his opponent's nerves. This also plays into his ability to sell his opponent's attacks in order to catch them off-guard.
• Mentor Archetype: To Haruo. In Omega, he also becomes One of Koga's most prominent teachers, being principally in charge of his body conditioning to help him build muscle and endurance.
• Mighty Glacier: Speed doesn't seem to be his strong suit. In all three of his fights in Ashura, his opponent had a significant advantage on him in striking speed, mobility or both. That said, his ridiculous toughness, masterful defense, absurd strength, decades of experience and a wide variety of moves render this practically a non-issue.
• Nice Guy:
  • For a guy who relishes being the heel in a fight he is never anything but charismatic and friendly outside of fighting. Nearly every person he’s fought after the fact he treats with nothing but respect and courtesy, is not a fan of killing his opponents despite how brutal he can be, and puts immense time and energy into building up others with the desire to see them better themselves like he once did when he joined the JPW circuit. Like when Haruo tearfully asks to be his disciple to make up for his shame abandoning the Gurkha and becoming what he is now, Seki happily accepts.
  " Yeah, you can change!"
  • 4Koma extras also show him regularly inviting other Kengan fighters and secretaries to come see his circuit's shows.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He's physically very much based on his namesakes, Big Japan Pro Wrestling's Daisuke Sekimoto and Yuki Okabayashi, who are known for being massively strong, muscular and broadly-proportioned even by wrestling standards. His other namesake, Jun Kasai, inspires his history of deathmatches, and he has the Facial Markings of Jaki Numazawa. Collaboration merch was even released depicting Sekibayashi with Sekimoto and Okabayashi.
• Old Master: Downplayed. While he's not that old (hitting 40 in Omega), and he competes in Kengan matches, he has clearly reached a point where he is taking on more mentorship roles to younger fighters.
• Opt Out: He is ordered to not enter the Berserker Bowl tournament as there is an Anihilation Tournament on the horizon.
• Passing the Torch: He Lampshades this when he decides to support Koga with everything he has in the three months leading up to the Kengan-Purgatory Tournament after Jose is put in critical condition following a Purgatory match and he and Haruo can't enter the competition because they need to fill his role in the SJPW while he recovers.
• Pro Wrestling Is Real: Zig-Zagged. Pro wrestling is a fixed show In-Universe but Sekibayashi's strength and training still make him capable of competing in underground fighting rings. His durability and skill in selling attacks, in particular, grant him an edge over his opponents.
• Progressively Prettier: In his first appearance, his eyes and nose were much smaller than the rest of his face, making him look...very odd to say the least. By the time main tournament has started, his eyes & nose are much more proportionate, making him look normal.
• Shout-Out: Quotes Antonio Inoki after he loses to Muteba when someone in the crowd asks him to please not lose his next fight.
  "What kinda idiot thinks about losing before the fight's even even started?!"
  • His match against Okubo in Omega gives him a unique opportunity to perform the famous but situational "Shining Wizard" strike invented by Keiji Mutoh in a chapter that came out the week after Mutoh announced his retirement.
• Super Spit: His last-ditch move against Muteba is a "poison mist" using his own blood. Considering who he's based off of, it had to happen at some point.
• Super-Strength: His dropkick sends Ohma flying like a ragdoll and breaks most of his ribs. On his way to his first match in the tournament he casually helped the massive, 315kg Haruo up with one arm after the latter fell down. During his kengan match against Okubo in Omega, he was able to escape Okubo's chokeholds with nothing but his sheer strength, even turning Okubo's triangle choke against him when he lifted him up with one arm and slammed him to the ground in an improvised powerbomb.
• Theatrics of Pain: Just like any pro-wrestler worth his salt, he knows fully well how to sell his opponents moves, using this tactic to lure them in for some powerful blows and lower their guard when they think they have the upper hand over him.
• Tragic Keepsake: Jun's Red Baron is actually this for him, being a ring name for him Babadozan thought up for him when he took Jun out to drink and eat for the first time since he started training in the Gym, only for Babadozan to be stabbed and bleed out later that week, with Jun skipping his mentor's funeral to train because Babadozan told him he'd slam Jun in the coffin with him if he skipped a day of practice over something like that.
• Training from Hell: His own pro-wrestling bootcamp when he started out was this; 10000 hindu squats, 200 reps of rope-climbing, 1 hour of bridging and 3000 pushups a day, all of which Seki had to do double the amount of due to having no previous formal training, and this was just the pre-sparring warmup. Despite it reducing him to puke and having blended meals shoved down his throat to bulk up and describing it as hell to the leader of their gym, he didn't skip a day of practice ever; Jun missed out on said mentor's funeral to do his squats.
• Troll: A common hat Sekibayashi wears while fighting. He steps into his first match in the tournament with his dreads in a backwards gingko-leaf topknot, a hairstyle that's taboo to wear for any Sumo Wrestlers below the Juryo division. He pulls this specifically to provoke Kiozan, a hardcore sumo wrestler and is very much aware that it pisses him off. Outside of fights though he still very much is a nice guy and seems to only really do this for entertainments sake for the audience of his fights instead of genuine pleasure from pissing people off.
• Underestimating Badassery: Many of his opponents assume that, since Seki's style is professional wrestling, he's no good in a real fight. He has no problem easily proving them wrong.
• Victory by Endurance: His win against Kiozan is this. He lets Kiozan pummel him with all sorts of techniques, tiring and damaging himself until he can hit him with a powerbomb. His match against Okubo in Omega has him winning in a very similar way, despite the versatility of Okubo's MMA style, Jun simply tanked everything Okubo hit him with and knocked him out with a DDT.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: While Lihito was easy to beat, and Kaburagi was a cinch once his trick was exposed, Sekibayashi is the first fighter to actually push Ohma and force him to use the Advance.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…:
  • He had never had any formal training in anything until he started Pro Wrestling, and he sticks to Wrestling even two decades later. This wouldn't be a handicap in itself since Pro Wrestling has moves for more or less any situation, but Jun also insists on acting like a Pro Wrestler when he fights despite fighting in a no-holds-barred underground league, complete with an encyclopedia's worth of Trash Talk, selling his opponent's attacks to put them off guard, and extends to the fact that really strong opponents like Ohma excite him because Jun thinks it's always more exciting to act out a comeback match.
  • His faith in wrestling is so strong that even other martial artists, who probably wouldn't think twice about Pro Wrestling otherwise, are reduced to open-mouthed awe at his devotion and conviction in Pro Wrestling, to the point where Nishihonji in part brought Imai along to show him the level of conviction it takes to stick to your guns in a life-or-death battle, and uses Sekibayashi as an exemplary case. Kaneda, a massive Pro Wrestling fan, and several other fighters are reduced to tears in the stands during Seki's battle with Muteba.
• Worthy Opponent: Even before he starts digging into Kiozan mentally and comes to understand where he's coming from with his Primal Sumo, he acknowledges that the guy is not to be messed with.
  "This kid... can kick some serious ass!!!"
• Wrestler in All of Us: But of course. While Pro Wrestling is still a show In-Universe, training for it has equipped Sekibayashi with a top-notch set of grappling skills. While some of his choices of moves, such as the DDT, Argentine Backbreaker and Powerbomb, aren't optimal for an actual underground deathmatch, they're still more than effective due to Sekibayashi's sheer strength.

Takeru Kiozan - Magatanien

“If you won't go down...I'll just have to kill you.”

The Brawler of the Sumo Ring

The Delinquent Sekiwake

The Ozeki Boss

Age: 20 (Ashura), 22 (Omega)

A Rikishi banned from competitive Sumo due to his penchant for picking fights with martial artists from other sports. He has the talent to carry the future of Sumo on his shoulders according to his two Yokozuna brothers, but is ruled by the arrogance that comes with his belief that he practices Sumo in its most primal form, as in the distant past it resembled Pankration with no strikes or holds barred.

---

• A Lesson in Defeat: After Kiozan's match with Sekibayashi, Magatani's secretary Sakura realizes that Kiozan, despite being incredibly strong, never stood a chance in the Annihilation Tournament with his current mindset. Indeed, it's revealed that Magatani entered him on his brothers' prompting, in the hopes that seeing his "Primal Sumo" soundly defeated would humble him and make him more amenable to proper Sumo. This succeeds; in Omega he fights with proper sumo moves but with the same grit and strength that made him a threat to Sekibayashi.
• Acrofatic: He has the fat, yet muscular build that sumos naturally have, but he's capable of moving at obscene speeds in short bursts, and this speed is the basis behind his Raging Vigour technique.
• Awesome, but Impractical: His "Primal Sumo" is this. It's basic MMA style fighting but he's strong enough to make Sekibayashi blackout for a moment. The problem is that he still has the build of a sumo wrestler, which is built for short, explosive bouts of strength. His body isn't built for carrying out a fight long-term and he'll eventually tire himself out.
• Berserk Button: Sekibayashi walking into the ring wearing a backwards gingko-leaf topknot, a hairstyle that within sumo is solely reserved for Sumo wrestlers at the Juryo division or above, and even then usually only for formal occasions. Kiozan started the match in response by immediately slamming Seki into the ground while his back was turned.
  • What really set him off, however, was Seki accusing him of not truly loving Sumo and mocking his ideology of it.
• Big Brother Instinct: Winds up looking after his employer's secretary Sakura a lot between matches, despite being younger than her.
• Black Sheep: His older brothers are respectable Yokozuna, while he's fighting in underground matches. It turns out when they were younger they were a lot like him - just better at hiding it.
• Boring, but Practical: After honing proper sumo techniques he came up with a simple combo of palm thrusts, then throw and then a Finishing Stomp. Not very flashy compared to his high kicks but it lead to him gathering twelve consecutive victories.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: His Primal Sumo, which consists of illegal moves in sumo such as kicks and punches. He objects to this, hence his Black Sheep status. Unfortunately for him, there's a reason sumo doesn't allow those moves: for a sumo wrestler's body type and fighting style, they're exhausting, while the traditional slaps, grapples, and charges are energy-efficient.
• Death Glare: He has a perpetually pissed off glare throughout his match, but the most notable one was the calm bloodthirsty look he had at the climax of the fight when he's about to charge Sekibayashi.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Due to a Sumo tourney overlapping with the Purgatory faceoff, he unfortunately can't compete on the Kengan side despite his Sumo skillset being made-to-order to cinch an easy Ring Out victory.
• Flash Step: He can move so fast while using his Raging Vigour that normal eyes can't keep up with him and he seemingly vanishes from sight.
• Foil: To Sekibayashi, unsurprisingly. Both of them operate in a wrestling-based sport, but while Seki's sport is seen as a joke and openly dismissed, Kiozan's is seen as highly respected. However, while Seki loves pro wrestling with all his heart and refuses to break from traditional wrestling psychology and Kayfabe even in a fight for his life, Kiozan treats sumo with shame and disregard and wants to reform it, seemingly not realizing or not caring that his planned ideas would take away everything that makes it unique.
• He Who Must Not Be Named: His reputation and taboo use of Sumo makes him this amongst his two brothers, as one newbie reporter found out when he asked about them about Kiozan. The Yokozuna didn't mind as much, but the crowd around the reporter went dead silent and his boss furiously chewed him out for bringing him up.
• Honor Before Reason: When Ohma gets him in a rear naked choke his promoter tells him to just fall on his back and crush Ohma, sumo wrestlers however consider falling on their back a great shame so Kiozan tries to break the hold standing.
• Hot-Blooded: Sekibayashi's antics really get him worked up. And unfortunately for him, Sekibayashi takes a lot of pleasure out in pressing his buttons.
• Lightning Bruiser: A massive young man with a build befitting a career sumo wrestler with palm strikes heavy and strong enough to batter Sekibayashi like a rag doll. At the same time he is very fast in spite of being over 150kg. At his angriest he can pull off a Flash Step type move in his Raging Vigor technique, a feat only replicated by the fastest competitors in the tournament who by and large are far smaller and shorter than him.
• Likes Older Women: He gets hit on by Shion, who's 14 years older than him, in one of the Omakes and actually seems to take her up on it... only she's drunk and wants to shag on the spot while he'd prefer to take her out for dinner first.
• Logical Weakness: He is trained as a sumo wrestler, which means his body is conditioned for a few seconds of explosive strength. He loses because his stamina runs out from the prolonged match.
• Made of Iron: It comes with the body type and backbreaking training routines that Sumo wrestlers do day in and day out. He's absolutely tough as nails to the point where Sekibayashi has to use his own strength against him to bring Takeru down. He took a Demonsbane counter, which return the force of his atatack on him plus the force of his opponent, without problem.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Modelled after former Ozeki Miyabiyama Tetsushi.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivered to him by Sekibayashi, who proceeds to call bullshit on his Primal Sumo when it's unable to bring him down.
  Sekibayashi: You curious? You wanna know why I won't go down?
  Kiozan: Quit you're blabbering. We're in the middle of a fight.
  Sekibayashi: You've got no core. You don't love Sumo, do you?
  Kiozan: .....Huh?
  Sekibayashi: Looks like I hit a nerve. "Real sumo", my ass. Turns out you're just trying to mimic MMA. I mean, gimme a break! You don't have any right to deny sumo when you haven't even made it to the top!
  Kiozan: WHO THE FUCK DO YOU TAKE ME FOR!?
• Simple, yet Awesome: His Primal Sumo is just simple street fighting. That said, it involves him throwing lethally accurate kicks with legs the size of tree trunks, which proves able knock to Sekibayashi out for a few seconds. He even lampshades how simple it is. Even after using proper Sumo he still uses a finishing stomp after his throw to make sure the fighter stays down.
  Kiozan: I've been asking myself this question ever since I was a kid: Why is sumo incomplete? Why do we train ourselves so much to only use a handful of techniques? But then I had a thought. "You know what? I should just throw a kick."
• Super-Speed: His Raging Vigour technique, where he charges even faster than Murobuchi for 4.55 meters, the exact diameter of a Sumo dohyo, for a devastating headbutt.
• Sumo Wrestling: His entire gimmick as a fighter and a incredibly rebellious example at that. He comes from a family of career Rikishi, with both his brothers being famous Yokozuna and him being the rebellious, delinquent younger brother ^note though his older brothers heavily imply they themselves were like this when they were his age if not worse. He wants to bring Sumo back to its more violent roots, actively participates in underground fighting, and practices “Primal Sumo”, which uses moves and techniques (kicks and sucker punches for example) illegal under modern Sumo rules. However, after a humbling defeat in the Annihilation Tournament's first round by Sekibayashi, who he dismissed as a "faker" at first, he started taking modern Sumo seriously once again, and has become a Sekiwake^note The third-highest ranking in the top Makuuchi division of Grand Sumo, only outranked by the Ozeki and Yokozunas. by Omega. After the timeskip in "Omega", he reaches the rank of Ozeki.
• Tranquil Fury: After spending the entire fight with Sekibayashi increasingly fed up with the wrestler to the point of screaming fury, Kiozan seemingly calms himself down... then as he takes a charging stance.
  Sekibayashi: (To himself) ...No. He hasn't calmed down at all. Just the opposite: This brat's gone so far beyond anger, it's turned into bloodlust!
• Took a Level in Badass: Despite abandoning his Primal Sumo in Omega, he has improved greatly as a fighter. In his first fight back he completely destroys Takayuki Chiba with a single throw. He also climbed formal sumo rank to Ozeki, which means he won at least thirty-three sumo matches within the last three tournaments and did so as clean and sportsmanlike as it gets. He's able to provide a decent challenge to Ohma post-timeskip, which even considering the size difference is a considerable feat.
• Use Your Head: Shouldn't be a surprise that he uses a lot of these given that Sumo usually starts with a collision that often ends in a headbutt.
• Worthy Opponent: While dismissing Sekibayashi as a "faker" at first and even attempting to kill him in a rage during their match, Kiozan spectates and silently roots for the wrestler during the latter's match against Muteba.
• Younger Than They Look: Surprisingly, he's only 20 years old, despite being able to pass as being in his late 20's.