Characters / One-Punch Man: S-Class Heroes

One-Punch Man Main Character Index
Saitama | Hero Association (S-Class Heroes) | Neo Heroes | Villains and Monsters (Garou | Monster Association) | Others

---

S-Class Heroes

Beyond the A-Class of the Hero Association is a group of heroes whose power far surpasses that of the ordinary human: S-Class. S-Class Heroes are the highest-ranked and most powerful individuals in the Hero Association and are so strong they typically can deal with Demon or Dragon-level threats by themselves, and are capable of protecting entire cities. There are 17 heroes who have been bestowed with the rank of S-Class.

S-Class heroes are rightfully considered the Hero Association's aces, yet they are also a terribly quirky and unruly bunch. Most of them are aloof to some degree and display a highly varying degree of zealousness to their work, as they possess motivations far removed from the material goals of the lower-ranked heroes.

---

S-Class Heroes (in general)

• Adaptation Expansion: The S-Class heroes receive a lot more focus in the Manga than the webcomic. Special mention goes to Drive Knight's actually showing off his abilities and Blast actually appearing in person.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: What do they do if an unstoppable enemy appears in front of them and their attacks are shown to be useless? Why, hit harder of course!
• Badass Crew: Internal problems aside, they are considered the 17 most powerful heroes on the planet, and have proven it both individually and together on multiple occasions. Only Saitama, whose strength they mistake as King's, ranked 7 in S-Class, surpasses them.
• Break the Haughty: Many S-Class members are considered arrogant about how powerful they are (e.g. Tatsumaki, Atomic Samurai, Flashy Flash, Superalloy Darkshine) and some are considered not very heroic (e.g. Metal Knight, Drive Knight) which Bang himself points out. They receive quite a heavy beating by Monster Association members, especially the Executives and Garou.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Those who aren't superhumans have this type of strength. Some of them, like Bang, Superalloy Blackluster, and Tanktop Master gained their superheroic abilities through intense physical training.
  • They get a bit of spotlight in the Alien Conquerors arc, fighting on A-City ruins against Melzargard.
  • During the Monster Raid arc, most of them get a bit of attention, usually with a fight against a monster.
  • They also receive more focus and development in the Monster Association Arc, mainly while fighting monsters.
• Deus Exit Machina: This happens to several of them in the Neo Heroes Saga with Tatsumaki and Flash being sent on secret missions, Zombieman busy with training, Atomic Samurai being on a training journey with his disciples, and Silver Fang and Darkshine having retired as heroes. Due to this, The Organization makes use of their absence to attack every city in the world with an army of robots.
• Everyone Has Standards: They have no hesitation when killing monsters, but many of them were shocked to see Amai Mask killing the aliens who already surrendered. At least those who appeared on the battlefield. And in general, they don't approve of his narcissistic behavior, making teamwork with him a bit rough.
• Good Is Not Soft: Just like the rest of the Hero Association members, they're not hesitant in terms of killing the monsters to save humans, even if many monsters were once humans too, often giving them a brutal beating.
• Hidden Depths: Don't let all the negatives here fool you - despite their flaws, S-Class Heroes are capable of working together in tough situations and they are good people deep down. Most of them at least...
• Noodle Incident: They were once recruited to try and improve the C-Class heroes through a mentorship program, but it fell through.
• One-Man Army: The main criteria for being considered S-Class is to have sufficient power to defeat a Demon-level Monster on your own (or have firepower comparable to an entire military division). In fact, most of the original S-Class Heroes stood out from their fellow heroes specifically for being able to defeat Demon-level monsters without backup when the Association was just starting out.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Some of them don't exactly behave like superheroes. Silverfang bemoans how so many of the S-Class heroes are Power Level-obsessed and don't act at all heroic after Tatsumaki ends up scrapping Genos over a petty insult. Flash actually notes S-Class Heroes are chosen specifically for their power, not really their heroism. The only one of them who acts as an genuine superhero, according to Tatsumaki, is "King".
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Excluding Genos, the S-Class consists of a prisoner who tears all his clothes off when he flexes, a delinquent with a metallic baseball bat, a guy who wears a tank top, a Ninja who supposedly moves faster than the speed of light, a guy who wears a dog suit but is unexpectedly strong, a guy with muscles Made of Iron, a guy who can eat any monster, a Cyber Cyclops Mysterious Stranger, an Artificial Zombie who can regenerate his body, the World's Strongest Man who's also good at video games, a scientist who controls a ton of robots but hardly helps when needed, a Child Prodigy with a Bag of Holding, a Samurai who can slice atoms, an Old Master who's also a Bare-Fisted Monk, a powerful Esper who looks like a child and acts like a brat, and a guy who is never seen.
• Super Hero Speciation: Averted. They have more than a few redundancies when it comes to combat. In fact, the only really unique S-Class heroes are Pig God, Zombieman, King (By reputation. The closest thing he has to an actual ability would be his ridiculous luck), Tatsumaki^note And the Hero Association actually has two other espers. Even if both are vastly weaker than her, she isn’t exactly one of a kind., and Blast. The rest are either:
  • Tech-based heroes, such as Gadgeteer Geniuses Metal Knight and Child Emperor, and Cyborgs Drive Knight and Genos;
  • Those that focus on skill and speed, like Master Swordsman Flashy Flash and Atomic Samurai, and Fantastic Fighting Style users Watchdog Man and Silver Fang; or
  • Brawlers that rely on their absurd strength and durability like Puri Puri Prisoner, Metal Bat, Tank-Top Master, and Superalloy Darkshine.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: While some of them can get along with each other, they sometimes have these types of moments, especially with Tatsumaki.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Most of them are only really good at cutting/bludgeoning/punching stuff, so even when some of them encounter a regenerating monster, they're stuck futilely doing their thing because the only other option would be to stop fighting it.
• The Worf Effect: Some of them will get this treatment to show how powerful a threat is. When that happens, it's usually Saitama that finishes the threat off.

1. Blast (MANGA SPOILERS)

Blast

"I'm Blast. I work as a Hero."

Blast is the highest ranked S-Class Hero. He is universally respected by everyone in the Hero Association like an idol. Despite this, he is almost always absent, fulfilling his own secretive agenda and leaving the rest of the S-Class to deal with threats. Rumor has it he will only reveal himself to the public again when the world is truly in peril.

---

• Absentee Club Member: Justified. Despite being the highest ranked S-Class Hero occasionally mentioned by staff or other Heroes, he never participates in meetings or group operations, leaving the other S-Class Heroes to handle the regularly occurring threats. This is because he's currently occupied trying to stop "God", as opposed to deliberately blowing them off.
• Adaptational Curves: In the webcomic, Blast's appearance was similar to Saitama, albeit with spiky hair and an added flame design to his costume. In the manga, he has a more traditional Heroic Build.
• Adaptation Expansion: Come the end of the manga's Monster Association arc, the manga has Blast's appearance and motives much more fleshed out despite the webcomic being several arcs ahead.
• Art Evolution: The first glimpse of Blast’s appearance in the manga, the Hero Hunting arc, was actually very similar to how Blast appears in the webcomic, a muscular man with a simple hero outfit. However that first tease was redone in the volume release, with Blast’s back view then being completely obscured; that was likely the first sign of Murata and ONE deciding Blast’s design in the manga should be more complex than his webcomic self, resulting in his full appearance by the middle of the Monster Association arc showing a completely overhauled design.
• Badass Cape: As part of his hero outfit.
• Big Good: He's been leading the war against "God" throughout all of space and time.
• Brought to You by the Letter "S": When seen in the manga's Monster Association arc, he has the word 'BLAST' in a black circle on his chest and on the heels of his shoes.
• Cool Old Guy: When he makes his first appearance in the manga, he has greying hair and a slight beard. He was already an adult 18 years ago when he rescued Tatsumaki, who was still a child.
• Cool Shades: When he makes his present-day appearance in the manga's Monster Association arc, he's wearing a pair of shades that wouldn't look out of place on a '90s Western superhero.
• Depending on the Artist: Blast joins the league of characters who have drastically different appearances between the webcomic and manga versions, unlike those who remain almost the same at their core designs. In the webcomic Blast seems to be wearing a simple suit very similar to Saitama’s, and his body build seems the same as well; while in the manga Blast is wearing a very striking suit, almost armor-like, and his body build is clearly more muscle-bound than Saitama.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Apparently God has a beef with him, as God is angered and practically shouting at him when Blast touches the Mysterious Cube, in contrast to the deal God offers to the group of Saitama, Flash, and Manako. Blast however just interrupts the chat and teleports the cube away.
• Exotic Eye Designs: Has special pattern tech eyes.
• Eye Beams: Implied. According to Fubuki, Blast is rumored to be capable of firing lasers from his eyes.
• Foil: Seems to be deliberately set up as one for Saitama, due to the similarity of their hero costumes as well as the fact that he sees super-heroics as a hobby. Unlike Saitama, however, he has a regular day job (at least, back when Tatsumaki was still young), is well-regarded by the public and Hero Association in contrast to Saitama's Hero with Bad Publicity, and, most importantly, isn't bald.
• The Ghost: Has been mentioned by the characters, but has yet to appear, at least in the webcomic, where he shows up in flashback during the Psychic Sisters arc and the Ninjas arc. In the manga, there's a picture of him in the Hero Hunt arc when the heroes who could defeat Elder Centipede are shown, and he appears in flashback during the Monster Association arc, one of which is an expanded version of the Psychic Sisters flashback in the webcomic, before finally making his first full present-day appearance to rescue Saitama, Flashy Flash and Manako.
• Good Is Not Soft: Another contrast Blast is shown to have with Saitama. Blast is shown during flashbacks regarding the Ninja Village where Sonic and Flash were raised, and he is perfectly willing to kill humans he deems as evil; in his advance against the ninjas, he killed a few of the instructors, before clashing with the top ninja known as "That Man", leaving him in a 15-year coma. Meanwhile, Saitama has not killed a single human yet. This trait of his is also vaguely shown in the manga when he notices that Manako is tagging along with Saitama and Flash, and her not being their "prisoner" while eyeing her with suspicion.
• Gravity Master: Shows some signs of this when he engages Garou.
• Hero of Another Story: Blast has been off fighting against God with several unknown cohorts the whole time.
• Heroic Build: In the manga's Monster Association arc he's shown to have a more traditional heroic physique in contrast to the unremarkably plain-looking Saitama.
• Heroism Won't Pay the Bills: As we see in Tatsumaki's flashback, Blast was a hero 18 years ago, 15 years before the Hero Association was founded. As such, he described his hero work then as more of a hobby, and clarified that he had a proper job too.
• Hot Blooded Sideburns: He has these in the manga flashbacks, and they're still visible as part of his beard in his present-day appearance.
• Lampshade Hanging: The fact that nobody, not even the Hero Association, knows much about him is repeatedly and mercilessly joked about — apparently, he's just shy, really fussy, and has a thing about his privacy. Tatsumaki's thoughts after her flashback now puts doubts about the latter ever being the case, as she is waiting for him to come back.
• Minor Major Character: The highest-ranking S-Class Hero... who doesn't appear in the series until the middle of the manga's Monster Association arc.
• Rugged Scar: In his present-day appearance in the manga's Monster Association arc, he has a prominent scar running from the left side of his forehead to underneath his right eye.
• Shrouded in Myth: The lack of any hard facts about him means that rumors surround him. Some examples are: that he's stronger than all the other S-Class heroes combined, that he can shoot beams out of his eyes, or that he has psychic power and billions of robotic forces.
• Space Master: According to Sitch, he has the ability to manipulate space-time, something no other hero can (currently) do.
• Strong Family Resemblance: His full reveal in the manga, to take Saitama and Flash to the surface in the middle of the MA arc, has Blast showing similar characteristics to his alleged son Blue, who was fully introduced first in the webcomic; Blast has the same special pattern tech eyes and his hair is now lightly shaded, likely being the same color as Blue's.
• Superman Substitute: Like Saitama, Blast, the Hero Association's most powerful hero (since they don’t know about Saitama’s strength) is another clear Superman analogue, especially in the webcomic where Blast has a Superman-like haircut, a cape, and tights, whilst in the manga, he has bulky armor with large shoulder pads and shades (though he does have an insignia on his chest like Superman and the shades make him look like Eradicator). Blast also has a civilian job like Superman and according to Fubuki has Eye Beams. There are several differences though: Blast’s powers are even flashier than Superman as he can perform dimensional travel, besides the usual extreme strength and toughness. He’s also not a Hope Bringer like Superman, bluntly telling Tatsumaki after rescuing her, in a flashback, not to expect anyone to save her, instilling Tatsumaki with the Jerkass behavior that she has today. Also, like Saitama, Blast can be seen as a mild deconstruction of Superman.
• Super Power Lottery: Fubuki speculates that he's stronger than King, along with being able to shoot lasers from his eyes, command trillions of robots, and psychic powers, and hypothesizes that he could beat the rest of the S-Class all at once. According to Blast himself, his abilities revolves around manipulation of cosmic forces. What's known for now is that his powerset includes super-strength, super-speed, super-durability (at least a resistance to Cosmic Fear Garou's radiation), teleportation, portal creation, and Gravity Manipulation.
• Super-Speed: When Flashy Flash attacks Blast to see if he's the real deal, using his maximum speed, Flash suddenly finds that he's standing right behind him. He also was able to defeat the Ninja Village Leader, who is regarded as the most powerful ninja to ever exist. In the manga he was able to fully counteract each of Cosmic Fear Garou's punches by quickly redirecting them into his portals.
• Super-Strength: He can easily hold the Mysterious Cube in his hand and even spins it on his fingertip casually. Manako can't move said cube and Flashy Flash's arm got stuck beneath it, and the cube is so heavy that it cracks and sinks to the ground when Saitama tosses it to the ground.
• Teleportation: Has some kind of teleportation ability, and can take others along with him.
• Walking Spoiler: As seen with all the spoiler tags — rather appropriately, there's a lot of secrecy surrounding him.
• Weaponized Teleportation: Can use his portals in this way against Garou.
• We Used to Be Friends: His close friend and partner in hunting the cubes was Empty Void, who later monsterized himself and simply became known as "That Man", the Ninja Village Leader.
• The Worf Effect: Downplayed example. During a flashback, right before Blast could finish off Elder Centipede, God arrived and battled him. The fight itself isn't shown, but Blast was seen suffering from injuries after driving God away, further establishing God as a very, very serious threat.
• World's Strongest Man: The number 1 hero in the world. How strong he’s supposed to be is unclear, as King is usually described as being "the strongest man" due to people mistaking Saitama's strength for his, albeit in the databook, one of Fubuki's speculations is that he's stronger than King. In the manga's Hero Hunt arc, the Monster Association considers Blast one of only four heroes able to confront Elder Centipede head-on, alongside King, Metal Knight, and Tatsumaki, as he grievously wounded Elder Centipede in an earlier fight two years before but was unable to capture him due to Blast having his first direct encounter with "God". He also was able to put the Ninja Village Leader, regarded as the most powerful Ninja on Earth and stated capable of defeating Flash, Sonic, and the entire Heavenly Ninja Party at once as if he were handling an infant, in a 15-year long coma (he grievously wounded the Leader, but he managed to escape and hibernate in a recovery capsule). Blast's actual strength also remains unclear, but at the very least with his appearance in the manga, he easily reacted to and dodged Flash's fastest kicks, and he's the only hero other than Saitama that can go toe to toe with Cosmic Fear Garou.

2. Tatsumaki (Terrible Tornado)

Tatsumaki

Voiced by: Aoi Yūki (Japanese), Marieve Herington (English, Season 1), Corina Boettger (English, Season 2), Azul Valadez (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), A New Wind Blows (Manga), Episode 6 (Anime)

"Mental strength is secondary. All you really need is overwhelming power."

Tatsumaki, better known as "Terrible Tornado" or "Tornado of Terror", is an insanely powerful Esper who can freely manipulate matter with her mind. As the strongest Hero to regularly fulfill her duties, she is the Hero Association's trump card. She is commonly abrasive and condescending to everyone she meets, particularly lower-ranked heroes like Saitama. Tatsumaki is known to be particularly childish in both appearance and attitude, making other heroes either detest her or ignore her altogether. Tatsumaki also has a younger sister, Fubuki, who is the highest-ranking B-Class hero.

---

• Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: Fitting her petite physique, she’s implied to be extremely flexible; when a rival psychic twists her into a very painful-looking pretzel shape, she eventually just cancels his power out and straightens herself out, completely unharmed.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Big time. She resembled a squat little girl in the webcomic. The manga makes her an absolutely gorgeous young lady.
• Adaptational Badass: In the anime, Tatsumaki pulls a meteor from space to crush the Ancient King. However, she never did this in the manga. ONE apparently told the animation team he wanted her to drop a giant boulder on him, but they mistook this and made her drop a meteor instead.
• Adaptational Curves: Tatsumaki resembled a squat little child in a weird black dress in the original webcomic. Yusuke Murata's work on the manga transformed her into a slender-yet-curvy fairy woman.
• Adaptational Intelligence: She's far keener on getting the job done and dealing with threats with extreme efficiency and prejudice in the manga, and therefore she has many more opportunities to show off her intelligence in battle. Special mention goes to her pretending to be captured by the Tsukuyomi members, only for her to break free effortlessly and reveal that she was able to create a tiny needle out of the drug in Fubuki's body which she uses to nail the scarred member through both his hands and his right eye.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: She has far more Jerk with a Heart of Gold moments in the manga, especially with Saitama, Genos and Fubuki, and overall shows a much kinder side to her personality during the Monster Association arc, such as when she ensures that Tareo is clear of the area before ripping the Monster base out of the ground. Or when she refuses to stop fighting despite her injuries because she wants to set a good example for her sister. Or when she calls out to Genos in concern when Black Sperm smashes him through the ground.
  • She's also much more openly concerned about the Blizzard Group's lack of power or preparedness when it comes to dealing with sudden threats, especially if it places their leader - her sister - in a particularly perilous situation, even stating that she cannot always be there to protect them all, let alone all at once. It's a rather zig-zagged trope however, since she still wants to "kill them enough so they won't die but never work as heroes again".
  • Shown again in the Psychic Sisters Arc. While her webcomic version simply wanted to outright kill Psykos while she's under custody, her manga version instead shows the whole incident as a ruse with Fubuki, so they could use the confusion to take Psykos and move her to a safe location, out of Tsukuyomi's grasp. While planning this with Fubuki, she admits that although she despises Psykos, she doesn't want her to suffer the same fate she suffered when Tsukuyomi experimented on her.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
  • The manga version has focused on and added several events showing the more pure and caring side Tatsumaki has for her little sister Fubuki, that was quite underplayed in the webcomic which culminated in the Psychic Sisters arc showing that Tatsumaki and Fubuki’s relationship was actually unhealthy, with Tatsumaki wanting Fubuki to be as much of a loner as she is, believing that to be true strength, going as far as considering she should just start thinking for Fubuki altogether.
  • The manga also sees her develop a genuine respect for Genos that she doesn’t in the webcomic due to him coming to her aid after being weakened by Psykorochi, with them even forming a tag team attack to take down several monsters and her showing concern for him when he gets crushed into the ground. Ironic, considering she did the same to him in their first interaction.
  • She also develops a burgeoning attachment to Saitama following the manga's Psychic Sisters arc, listening to his opinion (much to Fubuki's shock) and using the excuse of continuing to test him to see if he deserves to be so close to Fubuki as justification to meet him again. Saitama is not thrilled about this. Compare this to the Webcomic ending of their fight where, while still gaining much more respect for Saitama than she had, she seems more annoyed than anything and does not take his advice to heart nor invite herself to “test” him more in the future; instead, she just insults him one last time before leaving and actually insists they DON’T see each other again.
• Always Someone Better:
  • To the Hero Association as a whole. She is one of the strongest heroes, easily surpassing the other S-Class heroes. It was stated that at her best, she could defeat Golden Sperm, with Sweet Mask noting that even if all the other S-Class heroes fought Golden Sperm at once, it would still be a difficult fight, implying she has more power than all the other S-Class heroes combined. All the same, she is still only the second-ranked Hero, despite Blast never being seen or rarely active, and obviously, nothing compared to Saitama.
  • To Fubuki specifically, Tatsumaki is miles ahead of her sister. While Fubuki isn't exactly a pushover, Tatsumaki claims that even as an adult, she isn't even close to the amount of power Tatsumaki had as a small child.
• Art Evolution: As the manga progresses Murata has been adding slightly more curves to Tatsumaki’s body; upon closer inspection it can be noted she was more plain in her very early manga appearances, compared to some apparent changes by later parts of the Monster Association arc.
• Art Shift:
  • Like Saitama, her look in the manga switches between having as much detail as the rest of the cast, and being a doodle more closely resembling her look in ONE's webcomic.
  • She also switches in the anime — which is particularly funny given the contrast between the anime's detailed drawings and ONE's webcomic drawings.
• Attention Whore: She has some elements of this, getting quite vexed over being ignored by Saitama and Genos.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: She may be bad at showing it, thanks to a rather dark past, but she genuinely loves her sister and will do anything to aid her ascent through the ranks of the Hero Association.
• Ax-Crazy: Whoever she talks to, she sounds like an abusive parent, always lashing out at other superheroes out of cold blood.
• Badass Adorable: Looks like a child (in some comedic drawings), and holds the number 2 spot for the entire Hero Association.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. She’s covered in injuries by the time she is found by Blast.
• Berserk Button: People assuming she’s a child based on her looks and demeanor, or referring to her with derogatory terms for young people, like "brat" or "missy." She slammed Genos hard and fast after he called her a brat, causing Bang to scold her. Later on, he automatically corrected himself when he was about to call her a brat again, even though she wasn't anywhere near him.
• Big Ego, Hidden Depths: Extremely rude and arrogant as she is, Tatsumaki has such high placement for good reason.
• Big Sister Instinct: You should NEVER mess with her sister Fubuki. When Garou said he killed Fubuki, let's just say she got incredibly pissed. However, her protecting Fubuki since she was little contributed to and potentially caused her sister's problems.
• Blood Knight: As shown in the bonus chapter "Tatsumaki's Day Off". When she gets a day off from fighting powerful monsters, she quickly gets bored and actually starts looking for monsters to kill. Turns out she enjoys doing it a lot more than she appears, as she almost goes nuts when she keeps finding monsters already slaughtered by Saitama until she finally manages to nail a small-fry monster to sate her boredom.
• Born Winner: This is basically the reason she's S-Class Hero Rank 2 — she was BORN with the level of power she has.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Her personality is straight-up obnoxious.
• Can't Hold Her Liquor: In the sixth OVA, she acknowledges that she's kind of a lightweight and knows when she's had enough, but ends up drinking more than she should after Saitama mistakes her for being underage. This results in her stabbing Zombieman.
• Clothing Damage: Psykorochi's Wave-Motion Gun blows away her left shoe and outright obliterates her right sleeve. She loses her other shoe while getting absolutely pounded by hundreds of Black Sperm clones.
• Commander Contrarian: Her confrontational line of logic can sometimes lead to this. You want her to go on a mission? She'll complain about how it's a waste of her time the entire way. You think a mission is below her rank and thus not worth telling her about? She'll think you're holding back on her and she'll call you an idiot. You want to get her attention? You're beneath her notice and should know your place. You ignore her? How dare you! And so on.
• Control Freak: What she is to Fubuki. When it's clear Fubuki is outmatched by her, Tatsumaki decides she's going to force Fubuki to retire and that she'll make the decisions for the both of them. Luckily, Fubuki gets her to relent...only for Tatsumaki to say she's going to permanently bench her underlings as she believes they make Fubuki weak.
• Cool Big Sis: Averted; Tatsumaki likes to THINK she's this — clearly she HAD to be if Fubuki played with her all the time, right? Wrong, it was because the kids in their neighborhood were so terrified of Tatsumaki that it led to Fubuki being isolated from everyone. In fact, her protective nature over her sister led to Fubuki resenting her. Manga Tatsumaki is steadily getting better at being a Cool Big Sis for real, however, after listening to Saitama's advice.
• Cruel to Be Kind: How she acts towards her sister. At first. She gets better.
• Crush Blush: It's ambiguous whether or not she has a legitimate crush, but when Saitama pulls her in close to his chest so he can take them away to a remote location for their "fight", she's clearly flustered and redder than an apple.
• Curtains Match the Window: Green hair and eyes.
• Cute and Psycho: When she REALLY loses it, anyone who's a target of her wrath has good reason to be afraid. Heck, Saitama was SCARED of her before Bang scolded her for her abuse to him and Genos, and she wasn't even a threat to Saitama - she's simply that terrifying when she's livid!
• Dark and Troubled Past: Revealed to have been taken away from her family as a child by scientists interested in studying and strengthening her powers. She was kept locked up when she wouldn't use them, and would beg for her little sister. It's quite obvious it's a primary reason she believes she only needs herself and why she's so fixated on trying to isolate Fubuki from her subordinates. It's also the reason why she's so immature; she never had a chance to interact with people and grow up in a healthy way.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Gets the spotlight in one of Volume 10's bonus chapters, "Tatsumaki's Day Off".
  • The Monster Association Arc and Psychic Sisters arc also explain how she operates in dealing with monsters and her tragic past.
• Death from Above: How she easily defeats the Ancient Lizard King. When he told her that nothing short of a meteor could hope to kill him, she responds by dragging a meteor from space and slamming it onto him. All that's left of the Ancient Lizard King is a molten skeleton at the bottom of a giant crater.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: She starts learning the value of teamwork in the manga after Genos comes to her assistance during the climactic battle against Psykorochi, causing her to warm up to him very quickly. She goes through it again with Saitama later on.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: Hid her powers from the scientists who experimented on her so they'd think she was useless and let her go. Instead, they abandoned her to be killed by a monster.
• Destructive Saviour: Tatsumaki doesn’t know how to hold back, nor does she want to. Her attacks against Monsters and anything that comes her way are of immense proportions and cause collateral damage that she doesn't care about. She ignores warnings from her colleagues and staff at the Hero Association. It has reached the point in the webcomic where Tatsumaki has simply been doing whatever she wants, like pursuing personal vendettas, and the Hero Association is seriously considering expelling Tatsumaki and labeling her as a threat that needs to be taken out.
• Determinator: She gets put through the wringer and repeatedly falls unconscious from all her injuries, yet keeps coming back to her senses to continue fighting. It culminates in her resisting God’s temptation all while on the verge of passing out again, which she finally does right after he leaves. Blast speaks proudly to her as to how much she’s grown.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: When God approaches her pretending to be Blast, offering his power to strike down all enemies together, she immediately thinks back to the actual Blast’s words that she shouldn’t expect someone to save her when the time comes… and she just asks God, “Who are you?” At that point, God instantly stops bothering with the facade and leaves.
• Disproportionate Retribution: She has a REALLY bad habit of doing this to anyone who pisses her off. Gets doubly bad if it involves Fubuki.
• Doppelgänger Spin: In her fight against Psykorochi, she makes pseudo-clones of herself created using rock to distract Psykorochi while she sneaks inside her to infiltrate her body. She also later uses this when Psykorochi turned into a jet to reveal her location.
• Dub Name Change: In Japan, her name is "Tatsumaki" and her hero name is "Tornado of Terror"; the Viz translation changes her name to "Tornado" and her hero name to "Terrible Tornado''".
• Early-Bird Cameo: In the anime, she gets an early appearance where she gets irritated at the Hero Association admin with the stubble for not sending her to do the Z-City investigation in place of Golden Ball and Spring Moustache. She also gets an "I told you so" moment when she hears that the investigation went wrong due to the seaweed monster.
• Establishing Character Moment: In the anime, immediately after being deployed to deal with what can best be described as a talking Godzilla knockoff, Tatsumaki gets a call from her superiors telling her to come back and gets into an argument with them. When the creature tries to give his Motive Rant, she yells at him to shut up until she gets off the phone. Then when the monster tells her nothing short of a meteor can kill him, she calmly says she'll just have to get one of those, then uses her powers to nonchalantly pull one out of space, literally liquefying the monster with it. That's Tatsumaki in a nutshell: Cool and composed one moment, shouting at someone like a bratty kid half her age the next, and so ludicrously powerful that she can always get away with it.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • She can be very rude to anyone, and little people have her respect, but even Tatsumaki is approving of King after the Alien Conquerors arc. He is the ONLY person that she shows nothing but respect towards and the only one she trusts implicitly, besides Blast that is. Whenever another made-up action is attributed to King, she is impressed and can even crack a genuine smile.
  • She calls out Sweet Mask for slaughtering Narinki's Mercenary Squad after their monster transformations, saying that he should have either restrained them non-lethally or left it to an S-Class hero. Makes sense since Tatsumaki has a strict Never Hurt an Innocent attitude. At least before said action was retconned.
    • In the manga, said the action was changed to something different, but still similar. When Tatsumaki uses a communicator to see if anyone can respond, Sweet Mask is the one to do it, screaming in terror because of him fighting Fuhrer Ugly. This leaves Tatsumaki a bit shocked, making a visibly concerned expression. Although her scolding Mask for being weak against the cadre still stays.
  • She knows full well how horrible Tsukuyomi's experiments on espers can be, having experienced it firsthand when she was a child. When they come to collect Psykos, the woman who tried to brutally kill both Tatsumaki and her beloved sister Fubuki, Tatsumaki admits that, as much as she despises Psykos, even she doesn't deserve to suffer in such an excruciating manner as the one that Tsukuyomi would put her through, and actually bails her enemy out with her sister's help because the alternative is just too awful.
• Family Theme Naming: Fubuki and Tatsumaki are named after windstorms.
• Fanservice Pack: In the original webcomic, Tatsumaki was depicted very cartoonishly. Her "joke mode" form in the manga and anime is what she looks like all the time, and the webcomic in general has almost zero fanservice. Not so in the manga and anime, which dramatically play up her attractiveness. Not only is she conventionally prettier, but the anime gives numerous close-up shots of her butt and legs, and her cloak is borderline Sensual Spandex with how it clings to her body. There are a good number of panels throughout the manga that make it clear she's not wearing a bra underneath her cloak, and the anime seems to imply that she's not wearing any underwear at all. Just compare her in the manga◊ versus the webcomic.◊
• Fatal Flaw: Pride. She is a really firm believer of the class system within the Hero Organization and believes skill should match as such. Her pride also makes her think that she's a really good sister to Fubuki, when in fact a lot of her actions have damaged their relationship.
• Flight: With her psychic aura, she can fly. She seems to prefer hovering over walking as well. Not to mention that she can also launch herself at high speeds that form thick trails in the sky whenever she goes.
• Foil: To Saitama. Both are characters with transitions between goofy webcomic and serious detailed expressions, look non-threatening but have incredible power, and have weaker respective proteges in Genos and Fubuki. On the flipside, where Saitama had a normal life before becoming a hero, has a calm demeanor, is lower ranked and gets no respect, and fights entirely physically, Tatsumaki had a traumatic past, is moody and easily annoyed, is the second-highest ranked hero in the Hero Association, and uses psychic powers.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Tatsumaki, despite being the older one, is the foolish to Fubuki's responsible, acting like a little brat most of the time, while the more mature Fubuki manages to form a group and becomes a motherly figure to them. Ironically, Tatsumaki thinks she's the responsible one due to her overprotectiveness.
• French Jerk: She's a massive Jerkass (much less so in the manga from the Monster Association arc onwards), and according to invokedONE, Tatsumaki and her sister would be French in real life.
• Freudian Excuse: Sold as a child by her adoptive family to a group of scientists who abused and experimented on her for years and never allowed her to see her little sister, no matter how much she begged. When a monster went on a rampage in the facility, nobody stopped to free her from her cage until Blast killed it and saved her life, telling her not to expect others to help her from then on. She went back to get Fubuki, discovered she'd been followed by Tsukuyomi agents, and obliterated them in front of her sister, triggering Fubuki's Traumatic Superpower Awakening as she tried to fend Tatsumaki off. These experiences left her with the mindset that it is unwise to rely on or befriend anyone, and that she should be as overprotective as possible towards Fubuki, not wanting her to make friends or have teammates either out of the fear that they will hold her back.
• The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: With Fubuki, who she thinks is wasting her time and talent in Class B and should ditch those losers and become the hero she was destined to be. It’s presumably meant as a compliment, but this is Tatsumaki we're talking about.
• Going Commando: Many shots in Murata's re-draws and the anime seem to imply she wears nothing BUT her dress. However, in the original webcomic, King claimed to have seen her panties once, she has several panty shots later on, and Murata has stated she does in fact wear underwear. The manga's Psychic Sisters arc plays with this, on one hand featuring a Panty Shot of chibi Tatsumaki with underwear that would be impossible for her to cover in her normal form, and on the other continuing to imply normal Tatsumaki isn't wearing underwear.
• Good Is Not Nice: The only reason she's not more of an Anti-Hero is that, despite the way she acts, she does seem to genuinely want to help people and she does love her sister. She Took a Level in Kindness in the manga’s Monster Association arc.
• Guilt Complex: According to the manga, her behavior towards Fubuki is because she blames herself for triggering Fubuki's Traumatic Superpower Awakening and dragging her into a harsh fate.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: One minute she'll berate a hero for being useless but in the next chew you out for insulting the same hero.
• Height Angst: She HATES to be reminded of her short stature and to be misperceived for a child.
• Hey, You!: She refuses to address anyone except her little sister Fubuki by their proper name, only by their hero names at best and a whole slew of insults at worst. This makes it all the more surprising when she asks Saitama for his name after their fight when she called him by many, many variations of "baldy" beforehand. Even before that, she calls out to Genos using his real name out of worry when he gets put in a crater, showing how far she's come from turning him into modern art.
• Hidden Depths:
  • In spite of her multiple tantrums and abrasive nature, Tatsumaki never raises her hand against her fellow heroes nor uses her powers against them even when she's easily irritated (unless you're a cyborg like Genos). Even with a mouth as big as hers, this shows that she does have a fundamental code that she follows.
  • Despite Tatsumaki not caring for other heroes' safety at first, she creates telekinetic barrier bubbles for all of them during her fight with Psykos, when the Monster Association's base is collapsing, showcasing that deep down she doesn't want innocents to get hurt.
  • Even with the selfish overtones that she raises whenever Fubuki comes into consideration, it's shown that she does want her sister to rise above the stopgap that she put on herself. Belittling as she is, Tatsumaki is more than aware of what Fubuki is capable of, and wants her to pursue it instead of pussyfooting on B-Rank.
  • And during her fight with Psykos, despite the battle turning against her when a regenerating Orochi attacks and fuses with the evil psychic, she notes how much easier it would be to simply destroy everything, but holds back due to an innocent child (who wasn’t even the hostage they were sent to save) being in danger if she did. This displays that despite her temper and usual disregard for other Heroes’ safety during battle, she is conscious of the lives of innocents and committed to their protection.
  • She says to Psykorochi during their fight that a universe in which one is all-powerful but has no one else living in it sounds stupid, probably because it would be awfully lonely.
  • For one little instance, she shows some surprising humility by admitting to herself privately that she can’t always save all of the Blizzard Group for her sister every time they get in trouble.
  • She explains to Fubuki that she's actually willing to put her (completely justified) hatred of Psykos aside to save her from Tsukuyomi, because even Psykos doesn't deserve becoming their helpless tortured guinea pig.
• Hypocrite: She gets mad when people call her a brat, yet her attitude is exactly like that of a spoiled child.
  • Blast told her to protect her sister. He also told her to never expect someone to save her. She always tries to save Fubuki even when Fubuki doesn't want her to and can handle it herself. In fact, she socially, mentally, and even physically isolates Fubuki. Tatsumaki thinks she has to be self-reliant because no one will save her and that Fubuki can't be self-reliant because Tatsumaki has to save her. She refuses to help anyone else who begs for help and even mocks them. (To be scrupulously fair to Tatsumaki, there was a traumatic incident after Blast saved her that left her with a Guilt Complex over Fubuki; she might have had a slightly healthier attitude towards her sister otherwise.)
• I Am Not Left-Handed: When the head Tsukuyomi agent reveals that he’s drugged Fubuki with a poisonous pill, he appears to then get the better of Tatsumaki and starts to use his own psychic power to twist her into a pretzel shape. He starts to brag about the superiority of artificial psychics like himself over the natural ones… and suddenly Tatsumaki just instantly cancels his power and straightens herself out, unhurt; the only reason he was able to twist her at all is because she was too busy finding the pill in Fubuki’s body and twisting it into the shape of a needle, and then she “safely” extracts it (for the most part, since she does fire the needle right out of Fubuki’s sides) and shoots it into the guy’s eye so fast that she completely destroys it.
• I Will Find You: The reason why she joined the Hero Association: she's looking for Blast, who saved her life 18 years ago.
• I Work Alone: She makes it a point that she must be strong enough to never rely on others, thanks to her parents giving her abandonment issues and Blast further compounding it with his advice. She starts walking back this way of thinking after her time fighting alongside other heroes against the Monster Association.
• Jerkass: Her attitude toward the people around her leaves a lot to be desired. Case in point, when she sees Saitama after the alien invasion, she goes and starts verbally abusing him like a mentally unstable person.(although she may have just been annoyed about being ignored). When Genos objects, she uses her powers to slam him into debris, lashes out at him, and she would have turned on Saitama next (not that she would have been a threat to him) if Bang hadn't rebuked her.
  Bang: That's enough, Tornado! Is that how an S-Class hero like you should act like!?
  Tornado: ........FINE!!!!
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Despite being fairly hypocritical herself, her calling out Amai Mask on being a smug hypocrite who thinks that the S-Class heroes take their responsibilities too cavalierly and should strive to be paragons while he spends most of his time being a teen idol and using his popularity amongst the mass media to manipulate the Association is absolutely correct. Of course, Amai Mask completely ignores her.
  • Her attitude toward her sister is rather excessive... But as Fubuki once planned to Take Over the World, Tatsumaki has good reasons to not trust her.
  • Speaking of Fubuki, Tatsumaki (along with even Saitama, for that matter) has been proven correct multiple times that the Fubuki Group is only holding her sister back from getting stronger due to instilling complacency in her, and she’s also correct that Fubuki is needlessly putting them all in more danger due to surrounding herself with weak heroes that constantly have to be saved. Of course, unlike Saitama, Tatsumaki takes it way too far when she resolves to grievously cripple all of them and end their hero careers in order to free Fubuki of them.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite how abrasive and antagonistic she is, she's still a superhero who will protect innocent civilians if they are in danger. Also, like Metal Bat (albeit to a much smaller extent), she does have a soft spot for her little sister. The manga increases her Heart of Gold by giving her far more kind and protective moments with her sister, and she even starts to develop a respect for Genos, even showing concern for him when he gets smashed through the ground. She gets kinder still later on when she reveals that she is willing to save an enemy she hates from A Fate Worse Than Death and actually listens to Saitama, taking his advice and showing that she has come to respect him in her own unique way.
• Killer Rabbit: She may look adorable, but she's one of the most powerful psychics in the world. She isn't ranked as the second-strongest hero in the world for nothing.
• A Lesson Learned Too Well: After Blast saved her, he instilled a lesson to Tatsumaki that "when the time comes, don't go expecting someone else to save you". While this did do some good for Tatsumaki, she also took this lesson to the point where she will never rely on others for help, no matter what. This leads Fubuki to woefully lampshade that while Blast had saved her sister, he had left a curse in her heart.
• Leg Focus: Her legs get a lot of focus despite (or perhaps even because of) her petite frame. This is further emphasized by her dress, which is cut to reveal the most amount of leg possible without exposing her underwear (if she wears any). She is also purposely drawn as more shapely than what a child her size should be, further driving the point that she's Older Than She Looks.
• Little Big Sister: Big sister of Fubuki, and much shorter.
• Logical Weakness: Head injuries can cripple her psychic powers.
• Lonely at the Top: At the end of the day, she doesn't have much in the way of friends, distancing herself from everyone but Blast and her sister Fubuki.
• Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: Psykorochi blows away her left shoe with a beam attack, not that it seems to bother her in the slightest. Her right one goes missing when multiple Black Sperm clones gang up on her and Genos and beat them to within an inch of their lives. She's missing them both when Genos is shown carrying her in the artwork for the volume.
• Love Makes You Crazy: While no one doubts that she genuinely loves Fubuki and wishes the best for her, Tatsumaki's behavior in expressing it is completely out of control and even downright disturbing at times.
• Made of Iron: She doesn’t get hit very often due to being so much stronger than most villains/monsters around her, but when she does, she’s shown a surprising amount of durability for her small frame. Psykos reversing her own energy against her to crush her body barely slows her down, and she later survives getting beaten repeatedly by Fuhrer Ugly and Black Sperm even when already effectively unconscious.
• Magical Barefooter: Psychic, actually, but she certainly has this vibe when battling for her life against the Black Sperm clones, the little blighters having taken away her last remaining shoe. Murata has also added in artwork of her sitting barefoot on top of one of many levitating boulders after the Monster Association battle, and later when she's being carried by Genos.
• Magic Skirt: That dress of hers floats around but always manages to stay just shy of her waist.
• Meaningful Name: In the original Japanese manga, her name is not written out with kanji, implying that Tatsumaki (meaning "Tornado") is actually her real name. She just added "of Terror" to it.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack: She was able to deal with a Godzilla-like monster by dropping a meteor on it.
• Mind over Matter: Tatsumaki is shown to be the most powerful esper in the series. She can manipulate objects many times her size and from great distances. She once called down a meteor from space, and sent an entire volley of huge bullets back up to the alien ship that shot them. She also uses her psychokinesis to float and fly.
• Ms. Fanservice: Lots of shots of her butt and also some shots of her legs. Her navel is also shown in her pajamas. This is only when she's detailed however.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "Tornado of Terror" is the second most powerful hero in the world, sans Saitama, and essentially the Association's trump card.
• The Napoleon: She's one of the shortest superheroes and certainly the one with the worst temper.
• Never Be Hurt Again: The reason she hates the idea of friendship. She was sold by her adopted parents at the age of seven to scientists who experimented on her and shut her off from all social contact, only to abandon her to her death when a monster rampaged despite her pleas for help. Blast saved her, but told her to never expect anyone else to come save her again should she be in trouble. Her childhood has left her with major abandonment issues that she projects onto Fubuki by scaring away anyone that might hurt her little sister.
• Never Hurt an Innocent: Despite her flaws, this is one of her more noble qualities. Although she doesn't care for other heroes' well-being at first, she still does her best to keep them from being hurt. She creates telekinetic barriers for all the heroes in the MA base thanks to their communicators. Later, when Fuhrer Ugly attempts to smash an already injured Naranki's Squad member, Tatsumaki uses her lasts bits of strength to stop him, borrowing enough time for Pig God to rescue him. It is implied in the Psychic Sisters Arc that because she was hurt in the past, she doesn't want anyone else to be hurt, particularly her sister.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: When she's called upon to make sure a monster stays dead, she doesn't mess around (though ironically, in her first appearance in the reboot, she only severely wounded the robot Fubuki and her subordinates were fighting and it got back up as soon as she left. It was finished off by a passing Saitama).
• No-Sell: Just like Saitama, whose toughness allowed him to shrug off Geryuganshoop's telekinesis-induced increase in gravity, Tatsumaki does the same to Gyoro Gyoro's attempt at the same trick with her greater psychic power.
• No Social Skills: She seems incapable of talking to someone else without being abrasive and shoving in as many insults as possible. Justified, as the scientists who experimented on her as a child shut her off from all social contact before abandoning her to die during a monster rampage. Blast advising her not to expect someone to save her if she finds herself in trouble contributed to this, turning her into an abrasive Jerkass who insults and pushes everyone away so she wouldn't rely on them for protection.
• Older Than She Looks: Despite looking like a young teenager at best, she's actually 28. She even looks younger than her younger sister, Fubuki.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Her telekinesis makes her immensely powerful. During the manga's Monster Association arc, she lifts the entire Monster Association HQ out of the ground and later still twists the entirety of City Z like a figurative rag in order to grievously injure Psykorochi.
• Pietà Plagiarism: In the manga, she's carried this way by Genos, Blast, and King after passing out numerous times during the climactic struggle against the Monster Association and the temptation of "God". Bonus points for the volume art showing Genos holding her like this while Bang covers them both.
• Power Nullifier: She can forcibly restrict and suppress the powers of other espers simply by bringing her own greater psychic might to bear on them.
• Psychic Children: She first discovered her powers as a child.
• Psychic Powers: She is an immensely powerful Esper capable of obliterating most threats single-handedly.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: She acts like this occasionally, especially when she wanted to kill a still alive Psykos. It's later revealed that she was experimented on as a child and denied any contact with her family or the outside world. It's clearly left her with a bit of PTSD and emotionally underdeveloped.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: She calls out Psykos after the latter becomes one half of Psykorochi, who boasts about being far superior to Tatsumaki and having been chosen by "God" to carry out its will of assimilating and unifying all life on Earth into one being. Tatsumaki argues that Psykos didn't put any thought into her agreement with the being (as espers have always been sought out by others for personal use) and is now nothing more than its pawn, and therefore should not expect anyone to save her when the time comes, plus she's already being an idiot for having to rely on her "pet" Orochi (who is using her just as much as she's using him), meaning she obtained almost none of the power she has now on her own. This hits Psykos hard and sends her into a rage, meaning that Tatsumaki pushed her Inferiority Superiority Complex button.
• Sexy Slit Dress: She wears a form-fitting black dress with four high-cut leg slits that show off her shapely long legs.
• Shipper on Deck: In the manga, Tatsumaki incorrectly assumes that Saitama has a thing for Fubuki, hence why he's around her so much. She doesn't know that it was Fubuki that was manipulating and bribing Saitama to hang around, deluding herself into thinking that she can make Saitama her subordinate.
• Shoot the Hostage: The hostage being her own beloved sister, no less. When the lead Tsukuyomi agent reveals that he slipped a poisonous pill into Fubuki’s daily supplements, Tatsumaki simply locates the pill in her stomach, twists it into the shape of a needle, and fires it out of Fubuki’s gut straight into the guy’s eye like a bullet. She does acknowledge that it’ll hurt her, but claims that Fubuki should consider it punishment for never listening to her anyway.
• Smug Super: On account of winning the Super Power Lottery. Against major threats she's often the only hero who's any use at all, and she's not shy about reminding everyone of this fact. Even the Monster Association respects her power, listing her as one of the few who can take on their heavy-hitters (who are Dragon-level threats) and come out the winner.
• The Smurfette Principle: The only woman among the S-Class heroes. In fact, there was a point where she and her sister were the only recurring female characters, period, before the likes of D-oS, Captain Mizuki, and Suiko became more prominent.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: Her given name means Tornado, and she fights using telekinesis. Guess what she usually does with it?
• Strong and Skilled: Part of what makes Tatsumaki so dangerous is not only her raw psychic power, but also that she possesses extreme skill in wielding her psychic abilities, whether it be for offense, defense, or miscellaneous uses. Tatsumaki's knowledge about psychic powers is also as vast as her skill in wielding them. Shown during the Monster Association arc where she's able to use her power to pinpoint every single hero with a transmitter given by Child Emperor and wrap them in a protective bubble shield while simultaneously raising the entire Monster Association HQ out of the earth in a furious upheaval, and later, instead of relying purely on brute force, Tatsumaki demonstrates the ability to strategize by creating a dummy of herself to distract Psykos while flying discreetly beneath Psykos to target a weak point. Fubuki has to train her own weaker esper abilities to an even finer point just to compare, and Tatsumaki still outmatches her.
• Super Power Lottery: With her incredible Psychic Powers, she's on a whole different level compared to her fellow S-Class (barring maybe Blast) and even other Espers, as seen during the Monster Association arc, where she easily handles the top monsters of the association which had all quickly defeated other S-Class heroes. She's also considered the Hero Association's trump card.
• Super-Reflexes: She possesses extreme levels of speed and reflexes, being able to react to the missiles of Boros' spaceship, dodge the energy attacks from Psykorochi, and react to the attack of Golden Sperm, a monster whose movement can't be seen by the other S-Classes.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: On the Hero Association’s side in the webcomic. After Tatsumaki tried to act on her own before by trying to kill a confined Psykos for what she did before in the Monster Association arc, the executives were discussing the possibility of expelling Tatsumaki and labeling her a monster. Come the Neo Heroes arc, Tatsumaki still has her job and no punishment was set for the moment. The Hero Association has lost too much support and investment to even think about letting go of someone as powerful as Tatsumaki if she herself has no plans to leave, no matter how disobedient she can be.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: She alone can handle enemies that can overpower the rest of the S-Class heroes.
  • She almost killed Genos by slamming him into debris before Bang stops her.
  • Singlehandedly wrecks an alien spaceship without exerting her powers. Then again Saitama was fighting Boros above the ship and there were numerous times that the ship was hit by their attacks, especially by Saitama landing on it after jumping back from the moon.
  • Calls down a meteor on a Godzilla Expy in the anime.
  • Rips the entire Monster Association HQ out of the underground when she decides to get serious.
• This Is a Drill: Her apparent Finishing Move against a weakened Orochi is conjuring an enormous pillar that she thrusts at him while spinning it.
• Tiny Tyrannical Girl: She's very short, short-tempered, abrasive, and incredibly bossy.
• Token Mini-Moe: The youngest-looking member of the S-Class heroes besides Child Emperor, who actually is 10.
• Took a Level in Kindness: She actually starts treating her fellow heroes with more respect and even praise during the battle against Psykorochi and later the Executives in the manga, and states that she has to keep fighting no matter how injured she gets in order to protect and set a good example for her sister as a hero. Afterward, she listens to Saitama's advice and starts becoming a better sister for Fubuki too.
• Tragic Heroine: Most definitely. Tatsumaki is a tiny young woman with a giant bag of issues, all of which could have been avoided if anyone had taken the time to show her basic human decency during her childhood. For more clarification, read her Freudian Excuse above.
• Troubled Abuser: She is both physically and mentally abusive to Fubuki (knocking someone unconscious without hurting their body is still physical manipulation). Given that her own parents sold her to a lab for experimentation and Blast filled her impressionable head with the "you should protect your sister, but never expect to be protected by others yourself" idea, this is almost understandable. Almost. She learns to stop being an abuser after a talk with Saitama.
• Underestimating Badassery: Assumed Saitama was a small fry just clinging to Fubuki for notoriety. Then Saitama stops her from murdering Psykos and when she blasts him telekinetically at full force, he shows little to no discomfort, forcing Tatsumaki to exclaim "He's not just some small fry". She also tries to mess him up internally and the most she can do is make his muscles shake a little.
• What the Hell, Hero?: She often acts unheroically when she's not fighting monsters, as she always lashes out at other superheroes. Exaggerated when she verbally abuses Saitama. When Genos insults her back, Tatsumaki violently slams him into debris, heckles him and threatens to kill Saitama before Bang stops her and angrily scolds her. And often she herself scolds other heroes for their behavior, especially Sweet Mask.
• When She Smiles: Most of the time, when she's not annoyed, she gives an arrogant smirk, usually while killing a monster. She does however sometimes make a genuine smile, probably the biggest one when she praises Fubuki for her maturity◊.
• Wishful Projection: The manga's narration in Chapter 182 describes her as "[having] excessive expectations of Blast", hoping for his respect after becoming so strong, and expecting him to teach her a better way to live her life. Blast does care about her, but she's been investing far too much into her image of him; in her mind, she still sees herself with Blast as they were when he rescued her so long ago.
• The Worf Barrage: Of course, none of Tatsumaki's attacks work against Saitama. During their fight in the webcomic, she even overexerts herself just to get the chance of damaging Saitama, only to end up reopening her wounds. That's right, Tatsumaki actually deals more damage towards herself than Saitama. In the manga, she's at full power, so she has no wounds to reopen, but she does pass out from the strain.
• Worf Had the Flu:
  • After getting injured by a combined attack from all the top monsters in the Monster Association she doesn't last very long against Garou, and passes out from over-exertion before he can even attack her. She claims that if she were in fighting form, he would have only taken her five seconds. It's hard to know if this is true. On one hand, she did crush most of the top Monster Association members by herself (who were individually easily in the Demon to Dragon class). And in theory, her telekinesis should be a bad match-up for a martial artist like Garou. On the other hand, considering how thoroughly Garou decimated the other S-Class Heroes and how long he lasted against Saitama, she may not have been a match for him even at her peak. Previously due to her injuries, she's also defeated by Golden Sperm, but ONE confirmed that if she was at peak condition, she would have beaten Golden Sperm. Of course, Garou himself effortlessly ripped Golden Sperm in half before even reaching his peak form, so who knows how that match would have gone?
  • During her fight against Saitama during the webcomic Chapters 102 through 105, she avoids using her full power against him because it reopened possibly fatal wounds she suffered from her over-exertion during the raid. All her attacks throughout the arc were a No-Sell on Saitama, but for a brief moment she considered going all out on him despite the risk of death, indicating she had more powerful attacks that weren't utilized. Even after her last attempt to subdue him failed, when all was said and done she still boasted she could take him in five seconds in tip-top shape. However, in the manga, Tastumaki doesn't have this excuse, as she had fully recovered; even when going all out, she couldn't put a scratch on him.
• Workaholic: In Volume 10's bonus chapter, it is shown that the Hero Association usually calls on her to deal with high level threats, and while she may complain about it, she does her job anyway. She gets bored when she gets some time off, having nothing to do, so she goes looking for monsters to fight.
• World's Strongest Woman: She's the single most powerful female character shown in the series (not that there are many) and, while still nowhere near as strong as Saitama, is often the only one among the cast who can actually hope to defeat or at least significantly injure the Arc Villain. Even among her fellow S-Class heroes she's regarded with respect and fear, with several of them and even Monster Association members admitting she's the only one who can be counted on to consistently defeat Dragon-level foes. It says something that Psykos had to perform a Fusion Dance with Orochi and get a power up from "God", making her one of the most powerful beings in the story short of Boros and Awakened Garou, in order to finally make a foe that Tatsumaki actually has to put serious effort into beating, and she still holds her own.
  • While unable to damage him, she even surprises Saitama himself multiple times during their "fight", lifting him up into the air, making his whole body rapidly vibrate, and summoning a gargantuan tornado of green psychic energy with boulders swirling around it. The latter one Saitama actually admits looks like fun. He even briefly seems to be having fun riding the tornado. After their match is over, he even tells her that he was trying to keep the damage she would cause to a bare minimum but she made it practically impossible. He then compliments her on her abilities, speculating that she must have honed her skills for years and that psychic powers must take insane amounts of effort to master.
    Saitama: Very nice!
    Tatsumaki: (eyes actually sparkle with pleasant surprise)
• Worthy Opponent: Very, very, very grudgingly views Saitama as this in the webcomic, while in the manga she actually views him this way in a less grudging manner.
  • When she fights him in the webcomic, she realizes he's no "small fry" and that most of her attacks won't do anything to him. After the fight, she asks him for his name and admits he's "kinda strong." When one considers she calls her fellow S-Class heroes to be useless and Dragon level monsters small fry, it speaks volumes about being called "kinda strong." Of course, she won't admit it to herself and claims she could beat Saitama in five seconds if she was healthy.
  • In the manga, she actually compliments him on how he's not doing too bad at all against her, confident that he can survive her stronger attacks even though she's now fully recovered from the battle agains the Monster Association, and she even takes his advice at the end and is less concerned about allowing him to be around her sister, even wanting to test him again in the future.
• Yandere: For Fubuki; she HATES that Fubuki has amassed so many followers who look up to her and is determined to have Fubuki sever ties with them out of the belief that she cares too much for them and is being held back from joining her sister in S-Class as a result. When she refuses, Tatsumaki decides she's going to make the entire Blizzard Group retire by force. Saitama gets disgusted with Tatsumaki's attitude and directly confronts her, much to Fubuki's shock. The manga downplays this by having her state that even she herself can't possibly protect them all at once.

3. Bang (Silver Fang)

Bang

Voiced by: Kazuhiro Yamaji (Japanese), John DeMita (English, credited as Will Barrett), Pedro D'Aguillón Jr. (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 20 (Webcomic), Chapter 21 (Manga), Episode 7 (Anime)

^{Click here to see Young Bang}

"Silver Fang" Bang is a martial artist, and Master of the Fist of Flowing Water, Crushed Rock. A kind old man but a stern dojo master, Bang is the first S-Class Hero to witness Saitama's power and has become an acquaintance of his. His former disciple, Garou, decimated Bang's dojo and then took to Hero hunting, prompting Bang to chase after Garou to stop him once and for all.

---

• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Bang in the webcomic had a soft spot for Garou only as far as being against his execution, after his defeat at the end of the Monster Association arc, just beating him up with soft punches, like correcting a misbehaving child, and after Garou escaped Bang left him to figure out his new path in life alone; the manga makes Bang a complete and closer parental figure to Garou instead, not leaving Garou’s side after his defeat, vowing to reform the man and shape him to become his successor one day.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: In his younger days, Bang was a brash youth - taking pleasure in thrashing the strong and surrounding himself with beautiful ladies. Eventually, his elder brother Bomb literally beat some sense into him. Bang gave up his original Exploding Heart Release Fist and developed the Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist. He followed the footsteps of his elder brother and founded a dojo to train disciples. This is the main reason why Bang feels responsible for Garou.
• Attack Reflector: His martial arts Fist of Flowing Water, Crushed Rock lets its users repel the attacks of their opponents, nullify them, or redirect them with twice the power.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: When he teams up with his brother, Bomb.
• Badass Normal: His fellow S-Rank heroes include a psychic and cyborgs and the things he fights are monsters, but there's nothing that indicates that he has anything other than his martial arts skill. And also he's the only S-Class Hero, except for Blast and Genos, to survive Cosmic Mode Garou's radiation for some time.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: Uses nothing but his martial arts in fighting.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Despite his kind-hearted attitude, he doesn't hesitate to give his students a hard beat-down if required, such as he did to Garou when he used his martial arts to beat up others.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: He's pretty damn strong thanks to his mastery of the Fist of Flowing Water, Crushed Rock style. In terms of raw physical power, he's behind only Blackluster among the S-Class heroes.
• Clark Kent Outfit: His image here is what he looks like with his shirt on. This is what he looks like without it.
• Cool Old Guy: He's 81-years-old, and he's still in the hero business, still can kick your ass, and is still one of the leading martial arts figures in the world.
• Covered with Scars: Under that shirt of his lies a body that's seen the wear and tear of a martial artist superhero. However, his only complaint about his body is about his hips and back, due to old age.
• Cruel to Be Kind: The reason why he expels Charanko from his dojo is not because he hates or is disappointed with him, but because he doesn't want his student to get in his way with hunting Garou down.
• A Day in the Limelight: The fourth OVA, focusing on his initial attempts to get Saitama to join his dojo.
• Fantastic Fighting Style: The Fist of Flowing Water, Crushed Rock.
• Friendly Rival: With Atomic Samurai.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the manga he attempts to do this against Elder Centipede, after he, Bomb and Genos merely awakened his new form after beating the monster as much as they could. Thankfully, King appears to save the day.
• Hidden Depths: In his OVA he comes up with an Absurdly High-Stakes Game of Janken-Po that breaks through Saitama's normally dispassionate exterior and actually gives him an appreciated challenge.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Bang used to be a muscular youth with a chiseled face and spiky black hair. He was very popular with the ladies. Even his current advanced age doesn't detract from his looks that much.
• Identical Stranger: He highly resembles Garou in his youth, both physically and in personality, having been a Blood Knight with Shonen Hair. It probably isn't a coincidence why he decided to take Garou underneath his wing. He also strangely resembles Suiryu to some extent in his youth, such as his womanizing ways and hedonistic view to use his powers for enjoying himself.
• Intergenerational Friendship: He's 81-years-old, but has good banter with 37-year-old Atomic Samurai. Their relationship has yet to be fully explained, but they're both heroes who made it to the S-Rank with natural ability and traditional combat skills instead of super powers and are both known to take on pupils in their respective styles, so they may respect each other as martial artists.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: He doesn't like getting serious because of his old age, but when he does, watch out. He'll rip through even Dragon level monsters like wet toilet paper.
• Made of Iron:
  • Remember that attack by Melzargard that tore off Iaian's left arm? Bang got hit directly with that and was smashed through rubble and a few buildings for good measure, and all it did was tear off his shirt. Cue Melzalgald's Oh, Crap! moment.
  • In the webcomic he gets paralyzed by Psykos' powers and bombed by the Homeless Emperor's powers. While this does earn an Oh, Crap! moment from him and puts him out of commission for a bit, he still gets back up a bit after still in one piece. Just a reminder, each sphere is capable of turning human meat to shreds, as seen by Zombieman, and he was hit directly by several of them.
• Mentor Archetype:
  • Considered taking Saitama and Genos as his disciples. They both declined. Genos states that he has no need for self-defense techniques and only wants unparalleled destructive power. Saitama declines because he's simply not interested in making his fights any easier.
  • He's also the sometime master of one of the most powerful enemies in the series, "Hero Hunter" Garou.
• Mirror Character: Like Garou, Bang also used to be an Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy who sadistically beat up his opponents. Bang eventually mended his ways and wants to stop Garou from that path.
• Nice Guy: One of the kinder heroes in the series, Bang is one of the only S-Class to show up for the meteorite meeting even with the knowledge that he could do nothing to help. He is almost always polite and treats Saitama with a lot of respect.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: He tries to kill Fuhrer Ugly by feeding him to the monster's fellow executive Gums. Sadly, Fuhrer Ugly was able to free itself by tearing Gums apart from the inside and is transformed into the more dangerous Vomited Fuhrer Ugly. With his new acid powers, he melts Atomic Samurai's swords, kills the other members of the swordsman council and traumatizes Darkshine.
• Oh, Crap!: Played for Laughs when playing a game of hammer rock-paper-scissors with Saitama. Bang's superior dexterity lets him dominate both Saitama and Genos. But once Saitama gets fed up and starts using his real strength, Bang immediately gets the hell out of dodge as the ground where he sat is utterly pulverized.
• Old Master: Bang spends much of his time not fighting monsters or villains, but finding disciples to teach. He has a couple of students in the Hero Association and a former student who became a villain.
• Old Superhero: He's 81-years-old, making him the oldest active hero. It can be said that he's been doing the hero business since before most, if not all, of the other heroes, were born and definitely way before the Hero Association was founded. When he takes what looks like a fatal hit from Melzargard into building rubble, he walks it off with a comment about getting too old to be a superhero.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In the Hero Hunt arc, while training with his master, Charanko feels that Bang is not behaving as usual. Later, Charanko is expelled from the dojo, with the excuse that he had been holding him back for the past half a year and had not been doing anything to improve, but the actual reason is that Bang does not want him to be caught in the crossfire in his hunt for Garou. Later, to avenge his master, Charanko goes to fight Garou and loses badly, with Bang being saddened over Charanko's defeat.
• Parental Substitute: Basically becomes this for Garou after the manga's Monster Association arc, becoming his guardian and making him apologize for what he did during his hero hunt.
• Passing the Torch: When he retires from the Hero Association in the manga, he informs them that Garou will become his successor. The Association are aware of the backlash this will get from other heroes, but they can't really refuse because they need to bolster their forces for the Great Prophecy.
• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: "Hero Hunter" Garou was once Bang's best disciple.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: After he witnesses Saitama's power, he treats him as one of his equals.
• Red Baron: In his youth, he was known as "Wind of Blood".
• Retired Badass: After the events with Garou, Bang decides to retire from being a hero, his reasoning differing slightly between webcomic and manga - in the webcomic, he feels his working as a hero stirred Garou up to do what he did, and decides to step down and train the next generation with Bomb, while in the manga he feels at fault for how Garou turned out because he got involved with the world of heroes at the expense of his relationship with his students and wants to set that right by making Garou his pupil once more.
• Silver Fox: He's absurdly fit and muscular for a man his age. Just look at him.◊
• Strong and Skilled: He's got some insane Charles Atlas Superpower alongside complete mastery over his own martial arts style.
• Supernatural Martial Arts:
  • A master of Fist of Flowing Water, Crushed Rock. Although a fictional style, its philosophy of repelling, parrying or using the force of enemies' attacks against them are pretty standard in the real world of martial arts, specifically paralleling Tai-Chi. What makes this style extraordinary is that it enables a man in his eighties to not only keep up with but even exceed and overpower other S-Rank heroes, Dragon Rank monsters, and aliens with apparently nothing more than training and technique.
  • In his youth, he created a different style called Exploding Heart Release Fist. He sealed it away after his brother defeated him and caused Bang to reflect on how he was living his life to that point.
• Weak, but Skilled: When the two get into a high-stakes match of rock-paper-scissors, Bang's dexterity and coordination ultimately let him win out repeatedly over Saitama and Genos despite the former having vastly greater speed and strength.
• World's Best Warrior: One of the two greatest martial artists in the world, alongside his older brother Bomb.
• What the Hell, Hero?: At the end of the Alien Conquers Arc, Bang calmly but seriously scolds Tornado for slamming Genos into debris for standing up to her and for even threatening trying to MURDER Saitama.
  Bang: That's enough, Tornado! Is that how an S-Class hero like you should act like!?
  Tornado ........FINE!!!!

4. Kamikaze (Atomic Samurai)

Kamikaze

Voiced by: Kenjiro Tsuda (Japanese), Kyle Hebert (English), Antonio Gálvez (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

Real name Kamikaze, "Atomic Samurai" is a practitioner of Iaijitsu with exceptional speed and strength. With a slash of his sword, Atomic Samurai cuts down his opponents at the atomic level and typically shreds them to pieces. He maintains a friendly rivalry with Bang and his three students are among the top A-Class Heroes.

---

• Badass Normal: He doesn't appear to have any superpowers aside from being extremely swift with any blade.
• Cool Old Guy: He's one of the oldest S-Class heroes. He's actually only 37, so he's only comparatively old.
• Crippling Overspecialization: He's a master swordsman, perhaps the best in the world. Problem is, that's all he's good at. Take away his sword and there's not much he can do. Garou calls him out on this, saying that even if he can't fight properly without a sword, it's still no good excuse to just stand there without helping in some way. Downplayed, as he is skilled enough to make even a toothpick a deadly blade in his hands.
• Dramatic Irony: Outwardly tells Saitama that he only acknowledges the strong, and to get to S-Class if he wants to be greeted properly. He says this to a guy who can kill almost anything with a single punch.
• Everything's Better with Samurai: He dresses like a samurai.
• Friendly Rival: To Bang. It's hard to say what they won't compete over. During the S-Class hero meeting, he wonders if Bang will teach Saitama and Genos martial arts, thinking that they will make decent rivals for his own disciples.
• Horrible Judge of Character: He is highly lacking in perception, and often judges people based on reputation alone rather than their actions.
• Hot-Blooded: Normally he’s fairly calm, but once he is fighting...
• Implausible Fencing Powers: Atomic Samurai only needs one visible swing of his katana to cut a horde of monsters into shreds, with hundreds of slashes seen coming from all directions.
• I Work Alone: Played with. He often says this, but he does often work with his disciples, Council of Swordmasters, or fellow S-Class Heroes.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Boisterous but good-natured. His comment to Saitama about him needing to be S-Class in order for Atomic Samurai to shake his hand comes across less as a dismissal of his abilities, and more as a friendly challenge and attempt at motivation. He also cares a lot about his disciples, and is absolutely furious when Garou goes to attack them while they're unconscious.
• Katanas Are Just Better: He carries two katana. His primary one has a black hilt with a cross-guard that resembles the Rutherford atom model.
• Master Swordsman: A formidable swordsman. His sword attacks are so fast and strong that the enemies are slashed into many pieces in an instant without even being able to react. After the fight with Melzargard, he developed an attack that concentrates his cutting power so much he can completely annihilate pieces of Black Sperm without leaving any cells surviving to split and grow into new ones.
• Mentor Archetype: Atomic Samurai has 3 disciples who are the top 3 A-Class heroes, after Amai Mask: Iairon, Itachi and Bushidrill.
• Non-Indicative Name: Atomic Samurai is not a samurai powered by atomic energy nor is he a samurai who uses atomic energy in any way. He may be able to literally slash his targets into atoms, but that's never been explicitly stated.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: He has an I Work Alone policy (except for his disciples), but when S-Class members re-group during MA raid, Atomic Samurai proposes that they should work together to help Tatsumaki fight fused Psykorochi. This surprises every one of the heroes present.
  Child Emperor: The self-centered Atomic wants to work with others...?
  Puri-Puri Prisoner: He's trusting us with his ass...?
  Zombieman: Did you eat something weird?
  Pig God: Shouldn't eat stuff off the floor, bud.
  Atomic Samurai: (very annoyed) Should I just slice you all to bits?
• Oral Fixation: He's always seen chewing on a barbecue stick. It also becomes a Lethal Joke Item in his hands, as he can casually weaponize it to slash through weak monsters.
• Samurai: He's got the look down.
• Smug Smiler: He does it often.
• The Worf Effect: Kamikaze gets beaten up badly by Black Sperm, one of the reasons due to being Black Sperm being the worst match up for him, and Psykos purposely setting up that.
• Wrong Assumption: To test King's strength, he asks him to use his sword to cut an apple. King is unable to even pull the sword out of the sheath and eventually gives up and walks away. Iaian, Okamaitachi, and Bushidrill are understandably bewildered, but Atomic Samurai assumes that King was able to cut the apple at the cellular level in such a way that it didn’t even know it had been cut. He concludes that King is clearly leagues above him in swordsmanship.

5. Isamu (Child Emperor)

Isamu

Voiced by: Minami Takayama (Japanese), Sara Cravens (English), Darhey Fernández (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

A 10-year old genius inventor, Child Emperor is the brains of the Hero Association, and works to create gadgets that will help fight Monsters. He typically carries a number of deadly school-themed weapons in his backpack to battle.

---

• Actor Allusion: In OVA 6, Child Emperor takes up the role of detective and starts acting like Conan Edogawa. He's voiced by Minami Takayama, who is also the voice actress of Conan.
• Actually a Doombot: He controls Dogman, a robot disguised as a hero, to fight monsters in his place and gather information.
• Badass Bookworm: Though his usual method of fighting is to have the machines in his backpack handle everything, if "Okame-chan", the device he built to measure physical strength, is to be believed, he's about as strong as a typical A-Class hero on his own strength. He even mentioned that he once fought and beat Atomic Samurai's three disciples.
• Bag of Holding: His school backpack holds all his gadgetry, as well as his school items. Some of his gadgets are several times bigger than he is.
• Beehive Barrier: His umbrella casts a round one to protect the person holding it.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Child Emperor is rather friendly person, but even he has his limits.
• Broken Pedestal: After the events of the Garou arc with both Blast and Metal Knight refusing to aid in battle, he decides that the "adults are useless" and begins working on surpassing them all himself. However it is subverted in the manga, because at the end S-Class Heroes were able to get along to fight their enemies, which is exactly what Child Emperor wanted. He also bonds with Zombieman the most out of them.
• Break the Cutie: He's a genuinely sweet kid and a true hero, but the events of the Garou arc leave him thoroughly untrusting of others. The manga expands on this by adding in several conversations between him and his former mentor Metal Knight, where the latter constantly advises him that he can only rely on himself and refuses to do the heroic thing when he thinks it's a waste of resources.
  • Happens to him while rescuing the child hostage from the Monster Association. He breaks down in tears when he gets cornered by Phoenix Man Reincarnated, and subsequently needs to pull out his trump card, as he perceives the fact he had to use his ultimate weapon on a monster that was essentially middle management as proof of his weakness.
• Child Prodigy: A ten-year-old inventor hero. He possesses an extreme intellect, far above that of average adult humans. He can create advanced technology, one of which is a four-legged contraption that sprouts from his backpack.
• Combining Mecha: Three of his Underdog robots can combine into the more powerful Mad Dog: Underdog Cerberus.
• Crazy-Prepared: Thanks to his numerous inventions, all of which he keeps in his backpack, he's able to handle a wide range of scenarios and multiple types of enemies. He's got drones and weapons for just about anything he's thought of, be it a small drone for ambushes, flammable liquid against slime monsters, electric stun guns for evil robots, a deployable lollipop wrapping paper for thrusting attacks...
• Defector from Decadence: After the events of the Monster Association, he finally left the Hero Association to join the Neo Heroes due to the former's inability to change and take his suggestions seriously. However, he makes it clear he doesn't trust the Neo Heroes either.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Built a mask-device for the purpose of analyzing power levels. When he uses it on Saitama and it can't give a proper reading, he assumes it's because Saitama is too weak for proper measurements. When he uses it on King and gets the same results, he assumes it's because King is too strong.
• Fake Defector: In the manga redraw, his defection is more to infiltrate the Neo Heroes and see what their game is than legitimately defecting to the organization. This is especially as he knows someone (McCoy) in the Hero Association is acting as a mole for the Neo Heroes for their own ill-gotten gain.
• The Heart: Closest one to the S-Class heroes, as he's the only one who wants them to get along despite their differences and grudges. Makes sense, as Child Emperor is the youngest of them.
• Humongous Mecha: His ultimate weapon, Brave Giant, is a giant robot suit capable of going up against Dragon-level threats, but it can only last a few minutes before the power supply runs out.
• Innocent Innuendo: Apparently, in the original Japanese, his hero name, Doutei, has a similar katakana to the word 'Virgin'. Considering he's ten...
• Just a Kid: Knows exactly how to use this to his advantage. Many a monster has been fooled into coming close to him, thinking him to be a harmless child... Only to get a faceful of hi-tech guns and cutting blades.
• Kamehame Hadoken: Can perform this in his Brave Giant mecha.
• Kid Hero: He's the youngest of all the S-Classes, and of all the heroes in the Hero Association as a whole. He's still young enough to go to school.
• Kid Sidekick: In his C-Class days. He was actually Metal Knight's lab assistant for a while.
• Laser Blade: Has one with the hilt in the shape of a clarinet.
• Loved by All: Second to King, he is one of the most respected S-Class heroes.
• Meaningful Rename: The manga version handles his schism from the Hero Association a little differently, it isn't just about his growing distrust of the Hero Association and the adult heroes like the webcomic, but being made fun of for his hero name (Doutei), which can be read as "virgin", gives Isamu the final push to join the Neo Heroes in the manga version, as he tries to change his image and give himself a new hero name: Immoral Emperor (Hi Doutei) which can also he read as "Not Virgin".
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: His backpack also contains multiple robotic limbs that sport various bladed weaponry that allow him to directly fight monsters.
• Nice Guy: Child Emperor is a sweet and good-natured kid. He doesn't even get mad at Waganma for not telling about the other hostage for rescue during MA raid operation, because he did feel genuinely sorry for Tareo.
• Only Sane Man: Is this amongst the Neo Leaders if not all of the Neo Heroes aside from Metal Bat since he is the only one that tries to figure out where the monster they face actually come from since his research shows that they are surely not normal Mysterious Beings due to the modifications through their bodies and the control chips in their brains.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Don't let his size fool you. He's apparently twice as strong as a bear even without his gadgets, and he's apparently managed to beat Atomic Samurai's disciples in hand-to-hand combat before.
• Properly Paranoid: After joining Neo Heroes, he is given a battle suit like all the other members, but quickly takes it off due to recognizing its design from Metal Knight, which would give his former mentor the complete control of both the Hero Association and Neo Heroes. He is proven right when nearly all wearers of the battle suit undergo a Villain Override turning its users into puppets under the control of someone else.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: Has a rapid-fire kicking technique called Soccer Dribble that he claims is potent enough to give someone a concussion. Sadly, it proves to be ineffective against Awakened Garou in the webcomic.
• Shock and Awe: His Bug Net device consists of several misses that form an electrical net for the purpose of halting robotic enemies.
• Shouldn't We Be in School Right Now?: Complains that he had to skip school to participate in a Hero Association meeting.
• Spider Limbs: His backpack contains large spider-like limbs that Child Emperor can use for transportation and to fight. It is also strong enough to take a Demon-level opponent's attack.
• The Strategist: He has an analytical mind, allowing him to plan ahead to ensure victory on the battlefield. He also searches for possible weaknesses of his enemies.
• Sweet Tooth: He's sometimes seen with a lollipop. He later monologues this as "giving the brain some glucose" which, for his abilities, may actually be true.
• Token Mini-Moe: The actual youngest member of the S-Class heroes.
• Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: He invents and builds them himself of course, and his weapons are a definite notch above Homemade Inventions, being designed to look like an ordinary schoolboy's items but hiding sophisticated technology beneath.

6. Dr. Bofoi (Metal Knight)

Dr. Bofoi

Voiced by: Tesshō Genda (Japanese), Jamieson Price (under Taylor Henry) (English), Guillermo Rojas (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 20 (Webcomic), Chapter 21 (Manga), Episode 7 (Anime)

Dr. Bofoi, or "Metal Knight", is a mysterious scientist who controls a powerful ballistic robot with exceptional firepower. He is an aloof (and considered downright suspicious by Drive Knight) Hero who seldom meets and coordinates with his colleagues and is only interested in collecting pieces of technology. He eventually becomes interested in Saitama.

---

• Ambiguously Evil: While a part of the Hero Association, his morals are very questionable due to his main focus being developing and upgrading his technology and weapons. Not to mention his manipulation of the staff of the Hero Association to experiment on monsters and sell their parts for a profit.
• Arms Dealer: With the rise of the monster threat, Dr. Bofoi sells his technology to many customers, be it weapons or bunkers or prisons to detain monsters. Saitama makes his products look ridiculous when he casually destroys them when he first arrives at A-City (with Black Sperm and Rover in tow), and during a dispute with Tatsumaki, causing Bofoi to antagonize him.
• BFG: His preferred weapon system.
• Destructive Saviour: Metal Knight's usual MO is to use intense firepower to obliterate an opponent, as well as everything in the opponent's vicinity.
• Deconstruction: Of characters like Batman and Iron Man specifically. He's a genius inventor who is only in the hero business to have targets to test his latest weapons on and doesn't bother to use his immense wealth and intellect to improve the status quo, merely maintain it. He is also a Badass Normal who uses Powered Armor and sophisticated drones to fight crime at a street level. Also, like Batman, he insists on being a solo hero and actively rejects offers of collaboration or assistance from other Heroes, only to inexplicably be a member of no less than two Superhero teams. He even managed to be a prediction of the early 2020s jokes about how Batman prefers to spend his time beating up poor people rather than fixing societal issues
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: His "evil" is debatable, but he's certainly at best a Nominal Hero. Despite this, he still seems to care for his former protégé Child Emperor, as he gives the boy some sincere recommendations and advice throughout several conversations between the two. Of course, because this is Metal Knight, such advice usually consists of pragmatic but tough aesops such as "You can only trust yourself when it comes to justice" and "don't assist the other heroes with attacking the Monster Association if it'll get you killed."
• For Science!: To get him to even appear to a fight, you have to promise him that he can take the monster/whatever back to his lab to study it.
• Macross Missile Massacre: His newly developed weapons are a bunch of missiles that he first field tests on the meteor falling to Z-City.
• Mad Scientist: His "heroism" is rather ambiguous, as he only ever shows up to take samples for research or test out his new weapons.
• Man Behind the Man: Seems to be the case with a lot of the handlers within the Hero Association, particularly either the more conniving and/or inept ones.
• More Dakka: His modus operandi.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: His style is usually hitting an opponent with overwhelming destructive power so that he completely obliterates it. He'll probably hold back a bit if the opponent is something he wants to bring back to his lab.
• Nominal Hero: He appears to have no interest in actually saving people or bringing justice, only fighting monsters to test weapons or study them. Private conversations with his former protege Child Emperor reveal that he does believe in a sort of justice and is fighting for it (and encourages Child Emperor to do the same), but it's so cold and pragmatic that it doesn't look heroic at all.
• Offscreen Rebuilding: The reason this keeps happening, thanks to his advanced technology and organizational skills.
• Older Than They Look: A variation. He is actually an old scientist. While he looks about his age, he's not exactly seen in public since he only shows up outside of his lair via remote-controlled robot.
• Playing Both Sides: Implied by Child Emperor, who upon seeing Neo Heroes' battle suits notes that it is similar to the one Metal Knight was developing, which means he has both associations' military in his grasp.
• Pragmatic Hero: In the manga, he figures out the Monster Association is trying to lure the Hero Association into a fight in order to eliminate them, and proposes they avoid this by blowing up the Monster Association's hideout with explosives, giving up on rescuing their hostage. He's turned down.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Averted; he's responsible for the sturdy bunker of the Hero Association, and his robots rebuilt A-City within days.
• Refusal of the Call: Seriously, they literally call him up saying he should do SOMETHING, and he doesn't bother to even answer the phone (personally at least).
• Remote Body: Unlike most heroes who use Powered Armor, such as Iron Man, Metal Knight does not actually wear his, instead sending it out as an unmanned drone. This allows him to accomplish dangerous missions with no real risk to himself.^note  Interestingly this, coupled with his old age, makes him a remarkably similar parallel to [[Kingdom Come a famous depiction of Batman
• Science Hero: He uses unmanned robot suits to battle monsters and builds bunker-like buildings that are pretty damn resistant to being blown up for the Hero Association.
• Token Evil Teammate: While the other heroes have their own foibles and personality flaws, Metal Knight is a Nominal Hero at best and is mainly interested in obtaining more experimental subjects.
• Vast Bureaucracy: What he views the Hero Association's top brass as and hates them for, but has no trouble with it so long as he can manipulate this for his own benefit.
• Weapon of Peace: Bofoi's main doctrine as a hero involves experimenting with incredibly dangerous armaments for the sake of world peace.
• The Worf Barrage: Despite his reputation for overkill and being one of the heroes that are able to beat Elder Centipede, he is yet to win a battle on-screen, albeit he's using nowhere near the full extent of his arsenals. In the Monster Association Arc he is also theorized to have let his drone lose and be captured on purpose.

7. King (HEAVY SPOILERS)

King

Voiced by: Hiroki Yasumoto (Japanese), Rich Brown (English), Jorge Palafox (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

"... Nothing but a weak human."

The Hero named King is considered the world's strongest human whose powers are said to be comparable to Tatsumaki or even Blast. He's one of the most popular heroes, although no one is quite sure what his fighting style is. He and Saitama become friends and play video games together.

---

• Adaptational Badass: The anime adaptation's depiction of the "King Engine" hints that, if nothing else, King has an insanely powerful heart. He is also far braver in the manga and manages insane victories due to the absolute luckiest circumstances anyone could ever ask for. Repeatedly.
• Badass Arm-Fold: Is often seen doing this on the battlefield, standing aloof and alone, although that is because he doesn't know what to do with his arms and he has to stop himself shaking because he can't fight.
• Badass Normal: He’s actually a Cowardly Lion and a regular man that just looks intimidating and has ridiculous luck on his side. However, he still manages to remain calm and survive encounters with incredibly powerful entities. He becomes more confident after he develops a friendship with Saitama.
• Badass on Paper: Parodied. Even though he's powerless, King can still intimidate the enemies just by glaring at them, forcing them to flee in terror, and luck is on his side in such a way that he somehow always gets the better of every villain that comes for him or his team members.
• Becoming the Mask:
  • Upon learning his secret, Saitama recommends that King becomes strong for real and actually earns his feared reputation.
  • As of Chapter 109 (Murata version), he actually does manage to start killing real monsters on his own in a way that fits his exaggerated reputation by merely staring one to death with a single glance. He wasn't even aware of what he was doing, though.
  • Subverted during the Monster Association Arc. When asked to use a special attack to fight Black and Golden Sperm (webcomic) and Platinum Sperm, Vomit Fuhrer Ugly and Evil Natural Water (manga), he bluffs it by shouting some made-up attack name that Child Emperor believed was real, the "Ultimate Hellfire Burst Wave Motion Cannon", but the strength of the courage that was keeping him there instead of running away allowed him to tap into his true power and fire a Kamehame Hadouken said to rival Saitama's power, wiping out all the monsters... before the webcomic revealed that this was all King's imagination and he ran away. In the manga, Garou unintentionally becomes the attack, insta-killing Ugly, ragdolling Platinum Sperm far away and vaporizing Evil Natural Water all in less than a second after King yells out the attack name, moving so fast that he appears to become a giant zigzagging laser beam that obliterates the battlefield, making it look as though King really pulled it off! Perhaps King does have powers that he remains unaware of: rallying and luck manipulation.
  • He sincerely tries to find a way to do this afterward, but sadly can't find a trainer who doesn't pre-emptively dismiss him as too strong to be taught anything.
• Blatant Lies: He claims that he mistook a dating sim for an action game when Saitama catches him playing it, despite the box cover making that impossible.
• Born Lucky: Played for laughs. Although he is rather pathetic, it still doesn't stop him from being S-Class through sheer coincidences and sometimes absolute pure luck, simply because he's always in the right place, at the right time, and usually does something completely mundane that helps the situation.
• Break Them by Talking: King has become so famous that he doesn't need to fight anymore to win, not that he ever was a fighter to begin with, though. King intentionally talks as little as possible and speaks incredibly vaguely when he doesn't know what to say or speak in an overly complicated manner when he wants to confuse someone. He often engages in One Dialogue, Two Conversations, but it's usually by accident. He has even killed a monster by talking. Its shape-shifting powers depended on concentration to work. King freaked it out so much that it couldn't focus anymore and one of its bones pierced what passed for its heart or brain.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Saitama points out he's widdled himself after they're attacked by a monster.
• Can't Stay Normal: This trope is hilariously played straight, subverted, and inverted in the span of a chapter. King knows that sooner or later his reputation won’t be enough to save him or others, so he tries to learn martial arts to become strong and is trying to play this trope straight. However, due to the exaggerated rumors of his superhuman feats, martial artists like Bang and Bomb believe that King is already strong enough as he is and that he’s either being humble or won’t learn anything from them. He is then sent to other martial artists, but they all refuse to teach him since they don’t want to make him even more abnormally strong, which ironically makes him remain just as weak and normal as he really is. As a result, the thought of dying while trying to fight a monster one-on-one becomes increasingly appealing to him until Saitama gives him good advice and he decides to act out on that instead.
• The Cape: Unlike his other superhero tropes, he actually is this; despite having no powers and considering himself a Cowardly Lion, his outlook and behavior is closest to a classical superhero among the S-Class. At one point Tatsumaki even notes that he's the only member of the S-Class who actually behaves like a hero should.
• Cassandra Truth: King tells his colleagues the truth on a fairly regular basis, that he's just a weak normal human, but nobody believes him (thinking of it as King being the Humble Hero), other than Saitama. He even tries telling martial artists like Bang and Bomb about it in hopes he'll genuinely get stronger, but he gets turned down every time since, because of the rumors surrounding him, they mistakenly believe that King is already powerful and his supposed humility means that he won't be able to properly learn anything from them. As a result, he eventually gives up and considers dying in a monster attack until he gets some genuinely good advice from Saitama and follows up on it instead.
• Chewbacca Defense: He talks his way out of a duel with Atomic Samurai with this — a whole lot of nonsense regarding the date, the phase of the moon, and the composition of the atmosphere, all supposedly making it a bad time to duel.
• Clark Kenting: Whenever King needs to go outside on errands in town, he just needs to put on a cap and pull his hood on, and nobody (as in "civilians" that is, other heroes can spot him just fine but keep it to themselves) can recognize him for five cents until the cap and the hood come off, then he gets swarmed by his awestruck fanbase in a moment's notice. It works on monsters as well, to great effect as the moment his "disguise" accidentally comes off, they collapse in self-induced heart-attacks the instance they realize "who" it is that's standing right in front of them.
• Comically Invincible Hero: Parodied. He has such a fearsome reputation as the strongest man in the world that he effortlessly defeats enemies due to them running in fear as soon as he appears. Except it turns out he is a Fake Ultimate Hero with his reputable strength actually being a case of mistaken identity from Saitama as well as having consistently unimaginable luck that would make Domino blush.
• Cowardly Lion: Although he confesses that he's always completely terrified of his opponents and considers himself a coward, he still manages to put up a strong front even against enemies that send other S-Rank heroes fleeing, despite having no powers at all.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: He defeats 30 members of the Blizzard Group, including one who was a former professional gamer, all by himself in a video game contest. Every time he faces off against Saitama in video games, King effortlessly destroys the latter with two fingers. He even stomped Suiryu in a martial arts fighting video game contest.
• Death Glare: Subverted. His face gives off this impression from others' perspectives, but in reality, it's actually how he looks when he's completely terrified. Yet it's so intimidating that one shape-shifting monster actually fell apart and died just from being on the receiving end.
  • If one looks closely at his famous "glare", you can see that his eyebrows are always in a slightly saddened expression. This serves as a subtle early indication that he's always concealing his pants-wetting terror behind his mask of intimidation.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: All of his threats and bluffs are this. Sometimes he insults powerful beings without even realizing it or trying to.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: In his final moments in the "The Omnimous Future" part of the Monster Association arc, he covers both Tatsumaki and Fubuki with his own shirt and body, futilely trying to save the sisters from the radiation produced by Garou's Cosmic Fear Mode even as they both start bleeding.
• Dirty Coward: Very downplayed due to the circumstances. He decided to run away from G4 despite its threat of executing innocent civilians if he wouldn't fight it. Although it's justified that even if King goes to fight G4, it wouldn’t do any good since King is just an ordinary guy and would be instantly killed and G4 would just go execute the civilians anyway. He seems to become braver later on when he temporarily draws the attention of enemies that bested other S-Class heroes, but still either runs away or looks after the wounded when it's apparent that he's not much help beyond that.
• The Dreaded: King's reputation alone is enough to send powerful enemies running in fear. The Monster Association lists him as one of the four major threats to be especially careful of.
• Early-Bird Cameo: First appears reacting to the destruction of Zeniru's home in the manga (before the S-Class were introduced), and is in a crowd before Vaccine Man's attack in the anime.
• Enlightenment Superpower: Similar to Saitama, he shows signs of this but only in videogames. He's also very wise to philosophies and tropes of both videogames and manga/anime. In fact, when he's using his knowledge he's one of the few people who can verbally beat down Saitama, who is usually the Warrior Therapist of the series. It also plays into his luck. As he is well aware of his own strength and how people and monsters can have wildly unpredictable skills, he often talks in such a way that his enemies misunderstand him, usually unintentionally. For example, he is upfront and honest that he can't protect Waganma to his face. However, he says it in a way that the monster pretending to be Waganma dies of fright. Using this knowledge, he accuses Tareo of being a monster that's hiding its true self, prompting the monster who's invisible nearby to reveal himself and run away in fear.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Anything that King does (or doesn't do) is immediately tied to his reputation of being such a badass that characters go out of their way to justify his actions as something only King would or could do. Of course, the audience knows that King is just a normal guy, so the justifications usually sound like Insane Troll Logic. An example being when Atomic Samurai interprets King's inability to draw a sword as having drawn it so fast that not even the apple he was supposed to cut had noticed, nor did the sword even realize it had been unsheathed.
• Face of a Thug: His stern, stoic face with those three long scars across his left eye screams "retired gangster/thug". Even his "terrified" faces can be mistaken for hostility. It's a good thing, too, since he can use it to scare his enemies.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: King has basically the recognition Saitama should rightfully have if everyone grasped how powerful he was. Indeed, King is, in reality, a regular civilian who unwillingly gained the glory associated with Saitama's earlier heroic feats and is consistently insanely lucky whenever a threat comes for him. He just doesn't have the heart to tell the public they're wrong about him because it might upset the civilians, and so the tales of his "deeds" keep piling higher and higher... However, unlike most of other examples of the trope, King is portrayed in a rather sympathetic light, and he still tries to power through his fears and do the right thing despite his rather unfortunate situation.
• Foil: To Saitama, who he is the complete antithesis of. While Saitama is outrageously strong with no recognition, King is a totally ordinary guy who everyone thinks is an invulnerable superhero, in no small part due to the absolutely godlike level of sheer luck he possesses when in a dangerous situation. Bonus points in that Saitama is directly responsible for King's current status and vice versa.
• Godlike Gamer: While King is a complete (and unintentional) fraud, having been confused for being a hero and "the world's strongest human" due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time multiple times, he is a wiz at video games. So far, he’s beaten everyone he’s played against, including Saitama and the best gamer among the Blizzard Group. In an OVA, his fighting game skills outdo Suiryu's martial arts in VR too.
• Hell Is That Noise: In-Universe, they call it the King Engine. Like thundering timpani, it can be heard when the thrill of danger approaches him. Villains and monsters know it is the sound of impending doom, for they believe it is the excitement King feels whenever he has the opportunity to kill something. In reality, it's his heart hammering around in his chest, as he's scared out of his wits.
• Heroic Build: He is tall with broad shoulders in contrast to Saitama's deceptively average build, which is surprising considering he spends most of his time playing video games and collecting otaku memorabilia.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Gives a rather inspiring pep-talk to Saitama in the manga when the latter is feeling especially distressed over the lack of challenge he faces in the world. Granted, it's taken from a manga that King read and King himself is just an ordinary person, but it shows that King, more than anyone else in the series, is able to relate to and offer advice to Saitama.
  • He seems to understand Saitama the most, thus when he sees Genos writing down advice Saitama gave him, King inwardly feels that Genos is wasting his time trying to get life lessons from Saitama of all people.
• Hold the Line: He does this a lot. In fact, it's his whole shtick. He's so charismatic and intimidating that he can hold off 4 Dragon level threats just by staring at them and talking long enough for other heroes to come in to engage them.
• Humble Hero: While he's not as strong, brave, and powerful as people and other heroes like to believe, he's one of the nicest guys in One-Punch Man and very modest. Of course, given his reputation, this bites him in the ass because when he tries telling his colleagues the truth, he's mistaken for being unwilling to take the credit for his supposedly awesome achievements. And unfortunately he's unwilling to tell the entire public the truth since he couldn't bear to see the potential reaction, even though he hates his reputation.
• Ideal Hero: Saitama views King this way, and in a way, he has a point. King will always stand up for what he believes in and will enter situations courageously despite always being afraid and feeling like he is roped in. While it is unlikely that Amai Mask could kill Garou, let alone the other heroes doing the deed, King intimidates them all to stop as Tareo is watching and begging them to not execute "uncle". This despite the fact that even the weakest hero among them could take him down if they just tried. They all back down because they still think King is unbelievably strong, but some of them don't even understand what they are doing is wrong also making it a case of pragmatic heroism can't understand ideal heroism.
• I'm Not Afraid of You: Many monsters have tried this claim against King. He just continues staring at them, very intently. They don't keep their courage for very long after that. And King gets a moment to play this too; although he's scared of the amassed monsters of the Monster Association, he still is able to make them immediately be on-guard through using his reputation alone and is able to scare Homeless Emperor with a small comment about him watching his step. He ultimately bullshits and intimidates them long enough for Fubuki to arrive to face Psykos, Zombieman to grab Homeless Emperor from beneath the rubble, and the rest of the heroes (minus Saitama, unfortunately) to show up to deal with Black Sperm and Evil Natural Water.
• I Owe You My Life: He got his scar from an Octopus-Claw Man that attacked one day, and if it wasn't for Saitama, he might have died then and there. It takes a while for him to recognize Saitama again, due to him not having his hair, but it's what cements the beginning of his friendship with Saitama.
• Inexplicably Awesome: A subversion. King is regarded as the strongest hero by the populace, but no one knows why he's so badass. It seems that the general consensus is that King "did something" to that monster who is now lying dead before his feet, but no one is quite sure what he did and how he did it. Of course, King didn't do anything to the monster and was just the only guy there after Saitama punched the monster and left.
• Loved by All: Thanks to his reputation, pretty much all of citizens adore King, other Hero Association members give him major respect, even Tatsumaki is approving of this guy. The monsters also give him respect, though it's usually out of fear.
• Lucky Seven: Ranked 7th in the S-Hero rankings and is a normal guy possessing borderline divine level of luck that permits him to save himself and others when the situation calls for it.
• Master Swordsman: As far Atomic Samurai sees and knows it, King is an absolute master in terms of swordsmanship, capable of slicing between cells and faster than the sword even can acknowledge, while also trying to play down his skills when asked about them. He isn't, in fact, he could not even pull out the sword from its scabbard and just put it down after a few minutes without having done anything and walk away in complete silence. The misunderstanding being completely on Atomic Samurai's part being from noticing the intense strain in King's arm while holding the sword and assuming that he had just pulled off an amazing display of slashes instead after the man walked away from the scene.
• Meaningful Name: He's certainly a king alright in that he's completely useless. In chess, the King is the weakest piece on the board. While he is more flexible than a pawn, a pawn at least has the potential to become a queen. The King is not only weak, but an active detriment to your team as his capture is an automatic loss condition no matter how many pieces you have left. On the flip-side though, as long as the King is on the chessboard then the heroes haven't lost the game yet either. He's also a king when you consider that he's essentialy a gaming prodigy with enough skills to beat other professional gamers and that he's the only superhero to have nigh-divine luck as a superpower.
• Memetic Badass: This guy is essentially the Chuck Norris/Rajinikanth of the One Punch Man verse, except everyone in-universe believes he is actually this.
  "So... so that one time when you flew into the sky holding the bomb that can destroy the entire solar system and hurling it into a giant black hole... and that one time Mr. King traveled into the past to destroy all those meteors headed towards Earth, so that the history of mankind could exist... and the rumor that there's a hidden message within almost every legend that foretold the coming of Mr. King."
• Mistaken for Badass: He's the one who got the credit for all of Saitama's superhero deeds (from the very first chapter with Vaccine Man and even before that) since he happened to be the only man in the vicinity.
• Mistaken for Superpowered: Everyone calls him "the Strongest Man in the World" under the assumption that he is just that; a man so insanely powerful that he can obliterate any monster that gets in his way. In reality, he is just a regular joe that ended up getting the credit for feats that Saitama — a man who actually does deserve such a title — had done.
• Moe: King likes moe; he's seen purchasing several products with cute girls on the packaging, and tends to play them in fighting games.
• Muggle Best Friend: Played with — Anyone who sees King and Saitama together playing video games would think Saitama is the "normal guy" hero (being a B-Class) to King's "Superhero" (being an S-Class) — that is, if they don't think Saitama is trying to boost himself via this friendship somehow, or if the neighbors don't get cowed into being awestruck because, y'know, KING IS VISITING RIGHT NEXT DOOR (and might even ANSWER THE DOOR POLITELY IF YOU KNOCK) — But it's actually the other way around.
• Not So Stoic: Initially he starts as The Stoic, with a serious look on his face and his roaring "King Engine". Until it's revealed it's just a facade, and he can be very emotional. He still plays his serious role well enough though.
• Numerological Motif: He's the extremely well-respected seventh S-Class Hero whose power is being Born Lucky — despite being a completely normal human otherwise, he's somehow always in the right place at the right time, and resolves situations by doing something completely mundane like terrifying monsters into submission. However, his luck is a double-edged sword as it gives him a famous reputation he doesn't want, but has to keep up because he couldn't bear to break people's hearts if he just told them the truth.
• Odd Friendship: He and Saitama become pretty good friends despite being complete opposites on paper and in reality, both seeing each other for exactly who they are. They also play video games together a lot, the one thing King can actually beat Saitama at with zero effort.
• Oh, Crap!: When Saitama went to his apartment and caught him playing "Doki Doki Sisters." The King Engine is also his heart hammering really loudly as he is trying not to show how utterly terrified he is every time he shows up to help deal with villains; on the flipside, hearing the King Engine does make villains freak out in terror as well.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: A common feature of his luck. When a bunch of assassins try to attack him, one starts to pull out a weapon. King sees this and assumes it's a pen and paper and he's going to ask for a signature. King sternly, but rather politely, asks him to not do something they will both regret. The assassin assumes that King is threatening him, but giving a chance to back down whereas King doesn't want a line forming for his autograph while he's trying to be go under the radar. Compare this to his fight with Homeless Emperor. HE says that he will expose King for who he is. King assumes that HE knows that he is a weak baseline human. King says something like "nothing but a weak human" out loud causing HE to think that King knows that he is as weak as a normal human despite his light based powers. This happens between HE and King several times during the course of the conversation as well as between King and the other Monster Cadres.
• Only Sane Man: Out of all of the heroes in the S-rankings, King is the one with both his feet on earth and the most humane of the bunch. Due to actually being a normal guy with no interest in getting involved with any of the others' antics or the Hero Association in general.
• Otaku: Downplayed. King is a respected member of his community with decent social skills, but his personal life revolves around video games, manga, and old TV shows.
• Outscare the Enemy: How King defeats his opponents, with a little help from "the King Engine", which is the DOOM DOOM DOOM sound he gives off which turns out to be King's own heart as he tries not to freak out.
• Paper Tiger: Even without his reputation, from his looks alone, one could imagine very few people would mess with him anyway.
• Perpetual Frowner: Always wears this expression. Except when he's alone during a dangerous situation, in which event his expression breaks and is replaced by sheer terror.
• Phenotype Stereotype: He has the looks of a stereotypical westerner with blond hair and blue eyes, and invokedMurata states that King looks more western than Genos.
• Poor Communication Kills: Played with — King doesn't get a word in on any sort of discussion most of the time, which leads to odd misunderstandings such as Child Emperor mistakenly thinking King can fire laser beams. This gets the S-Rank heroes into serious trouble (until King draws attention to himself by pretending to do the move), which just makes his reputation reach even greater heights because "he used a special move to save all the S-Class heroes" is all that will get circulated in rumors later.
• Psychotic Smirk: Gives an absolutely nightmarish one to Homeless Emperor once he finds out the latter's secret weakness, terrifying the villain. Of course, he's actually terrified himself, he doesn't know any secret weaknesses, and the smirk is just him hiding his extreme fear.
• Rugged Scar: Has a big claw mark over half of his face, which adds to his already intimidating appearance. The Hero Association believes that the scar was given to King during his fight against a God-threat level monster. He actually got it from a Tiger-level threat that Saitama defeated back when he still had hair.
• Sadly Mythcharacterized: In-verse, King's reputation and acclaimed feats, created and circulated by society, have reached the level of exaggeration bordering of sheer absurdity that not even King can believe people honestly can buy without a second thought.
  • One seemingly common misunderstanding, evident in the action-figures depicting him, is that whenever he gets angry, he hulks out and rips his clothes apart in the process before one-punching monsters into gravy. Fact check: He doesn't.
• Snowball Lie: Played with — the lies are spread by other people, and almost every time that it seems like the bluff might get called, something happens that is both extremely lucky for King, because he no longer has to prove he can fight and usually happens in a manner that somehow gives King all the credit for his incredibly lucky windfall so he gets an even bigger reputation for being the ultimate hero.
• The Stoic: Played for laughs — see that really tough expression as his profile picture? That's the face he makes to stop himself from expressing absolute terror.
• Stolen Credit Backfire: King is actually a powerless Muggle whose victories over monsters were actually Saitama's before he was registered with the Hero Association. He only agreed to join the Hero Association because it seemed to give people such hope (and he has had some Victory Through Intimidation wins), but now he's trapped in the role and sent to every dangerous situation. To his credit, he has actually never taken any of the credit the people have given him and tried to tell people that it wasn't him, only to not be believed and given the credit anyway, much to his dismay.
• Terror Hero: His reputation is such that he can defeat monsters by causing them to faint - or even die - out of fear. It's a good thing, too, since he's as powerful and strong as a normal human.
• That One Player:
  • Later in the story, Saitama gets to know his secret, and becomes his gaming buddy. King is VERY good at games, to the point where the reputation about his battle prowess he's earned actually applies to video games, such as absolutely broken infinite combos and being able to beat really hard games with one hand. To the point that he made Saitama rage and scream "This game is shit!"
  • This comes in handy in an extra chapter when Fubuki challenges Saitama and his "Saitama group" (Genos, Bang, and King) to a competition as an attempt to force them to join the Blizzard Group. When it turned out the challenge was a video game competition, King single-handedly beat all 30 opponents including one member who happened to be a former pro-gamer that defeated Bang, Genos, and Saitama effortlessly (granted, none of them were any good at the game).
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: He's actually a Muggle, and he's actually useless when it comes to fighting monsters. He does save the day with his EVO-level gaming skills one time, though.
• Unluckily Lucky: His backstory has him run into many monsters only to be saved by Saitama constantly. Then people mistook him for a Hero and he got the honor of becoming an S-Class Hero with all the prestige it implies, but also all the pressure from the expectations of the population.
• Victory Through Intimidation: King can turn the tide of a battle simply by showing up — his reputation alone makes monsters and heroes alike freeze in place, and villains that randomly run into him on the street literally have a stroke because he's that big of a surprise. And if you try to attack him? All you hear is DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM, which can make even the most hard-hearted monster falter with doubt and reluctant to hit him, in case of it being fatal to themselves to even touch him. It's a good thing too, considering King has the fighting ability of a completely normal person.
• Virtuous Character Copy: As a Born Lucky, Cowardly Lion Fake Ultimate Hero who, despite being a normal human, is revered by the populace as the World's Strongest Man due to the actions of the real hero, he's like Mr. Satan, but nicer and without Glory Seeker tendencies.
• Walking Spoiler: As can be seen with all the spoiler tags here — it's quite The Reveal as to the source of his abilities and prestige.
• Weirdness Magnet: King has the uncanny ability to seemingly attract monsters to himself like honey attracts fruit-flies, despite not even trying or intending to do so. His ability of surviving these encounters with only dead monsters in his wake is the reason he was promoted to S-Rank in the first place, despite being only a mere bystander at the scene every single time it happened.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Calls out Saitama on his bullshit in the manga! In the webcomic, when confronted with his motivations on being a hero, Saitama comes up with no answer and no one holds him accountable for it. When Saitama tries the same in the manga, King shuts him down, says his self-pitying and self-proclaimed dilemma is arrogant, self-absorbed, and immature, and provides many ways for Saitama to have the feeling of struggle and fulfillment again, one of which is to aim to be a better hero. There's friends who support you no matter what, and there's great friends who push you to be better.
  King: From that perspective, even if you've become the strongest hero, you're not yet the greatest hero yet, Saitama. I'm sure you can agree with me on this.
• Wild Card Excuse: King is mostly busy because he's fighting monsters and/or raiding monster lairs. He's actually just playing an RPG, but his statement saves him from having to actually fight monsters.
• World's Strongest Man: Despite his actual ranking in the Hero Association, King is regarded as the strongest hero, respected by most heroes and feared by even the strongest monsters. Even Tatsumaki respects him, as does Amai Mask. Every single hero in the verse knows that King is simply the strongest and best hero. His feats of killing fierce monsters with ease are renowned by all and are almost of a mythical nature. In actuality, he's just a normal guy, who simply happened to be at the wrong place at the right time.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: In the webcomic, King fakes knowing a special move as a bluff against Black Sperm and Golden Sperm, but his courage allowed him to manifest it into an actual attack, at least in his head.

8. Zombieman

Zombieman

Voiced by: Takahiro Sakurai (Japanese), Vernon Dew (English)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

Zombieman is a nearly completely immortal superhero who can regenerate from almost any injury. Thus, he prefers to relentlessly fight and let Monsters tire themselves out with futile attacks. He wields various weapons, including an axe and different types of guns.

He's a product of the House of Evolution, where his codename was "Subject #66".

---

• Artificial Zombie: He was an experiment from the House of Evolution.
• Badass Longcoat: He wears a typical hard-boiled detective's longcoat, which suits his usual line of work.
• Berserk Button: A mild one, but saying he's not human or calling his humanity into question visibly pisses him off.
• Clothing Damage: His body can regenerate, but his clothes can't. After being blown apart by Homeless Emperor, he spends most of the Monster Association arc completely naked.
• Combat Pragmatist: In the middle of his introduction to Pureblood, he starts shooting at the monster.
• Crazy-Prepared: Keeps an extra gun hidden in his chest. He's also somehow able to fire it from the inside for a surprise attack.
• Cute Monster Guy: What characterizes him as a zombie is his gray skin, incredible regenerative abilities, and seemingless inability to die. But unlike typical zombies who usually involve Body Horror in their designs, he has an attractive face and a well-built figure. At least, once he's finished regenerating. He can momentarily look just like a disfigured zombie after being damaged enough, but only temporarily.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Zombies are traditionally considered an undead monstrosity, not to mention that he comes from the House of Evolution. Despite all of that, Zombieman is actually one of the most heroic characters in the series.
• Determinator: He once fought against mysterious beings in a fierce battle for 140 hours and emerged victorious.
• Establishing Character Moment: Outside of a cameo in the alien invaders arc and a short scene where he follows Marshall Gorilla, his first real scene is when he finally finds the trail of the scientist who created him – Dr. Genus, the head of the House of Evolution. He believes that Dr. Genus is behind the Monster Association and other bad things that have been happening, and seeks to kill him. When Dr. Genus tells him that the House of Evolution has been disbanded, Zombieman threatens him with an axe and demands to know why. The discussion shifts to how Saitama (his name isn't mentioned but the reader knows who he’s talking about) basically crushed his evil ambitions. Zombieman, seeing that Dr. Genus has actually been "defeated" to the point he's dramatically changed and has no plans to rebuild his organization, actually puts away his axe instead of killing him.
• Exploited Immunity: How he defeats Homeless Emperor. The hero pins down Homeless Emperor and makes sure to keep the monster close to him. Zombieman can regenerate from Homeless Emperor's destructive attacks but Homeless Emperor, whose body is that of a normal human's, cannot. So since Homeless Emperor cannot attack Zombieman without hurting himself, Zombieman wins.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: His fighting style involves more or less ignoring every threat to his person and just letting his immortality and regeneration soak it up, so naturally he gets a great deal of this.
• Guns Akimbo: During the Monster Association arc, he uses two large pistols in conjunction for lesser monsters.
• Hand Cannon: He carries around pistols with such firepower and force behind them the recoil alone is capable of breaking his arms with each shot, to say nothing of what happens to nearly any monster on the receiving end.
• Healing Factor: Probably one of the most impressive in the series. It's so fast that one of Pureblood's bats that he sent to try and overwhelm said regeneration couldn't escape in time and was absorbed into Zombieman's body.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: He gets run through with Atomic Samurai's sword in the sixth OVA. He gets better, naturally.
• Implacable Man: Thanks to his healing factor, he essentially doesn't need to ever stop advancing forward. He WILL be back to kick your ass no matter how many times you knock him down. He will NEVER stop or surrender pursuing you if you're a threat.
• Irony: His weapons of choice are a pistol, machete, or an axe. These weapons are stereotypically depicted as popular weapons to use against zombies in zombie movies.
• Law of Inverse Recoil: He wields two large handguns that fire with enough force that both his arms are broken with a single shot.
• Logical Weakness: Zombieman's powers like all subjects from the House of Evolution come from his genetic modifications. In the Bad Future, Cosmic Fear Mode Garou kills Zombieman because he emits lethal doses of radiation which destroys the structure of DNA like removing blocks from a Jenga tower, nullifying Zombieman's regeneration.
• Ludicrous Gibs: When he pulls out a sharp object, someone's gonna get chopped into pieces, and the battle turns into a messy bloodbath. Sure, most of the time all the limbs and blood scattered around are usually Zombieman's, but the difference is Zombieman's wounds heal and his limbs come back, and his opponents' usually don't.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Since he can't be killed, his only serious reaction to any injury is whether or not it's going to slow him down while he heals.
• The Mole: Amai Mask briefly insinuates that he's no more than a Monster who's using the Association to hide from justice. Zombieman, while he doesn't go into a rage about it, is still pretty pissed at the accusation.
• Nice Guy: He seems to be on pretty good terms with most of the other heroes, forgave the former evil scientist who used to experiment on him, and was concerned for Saitama's safety during his fight with Garou. He didn't even get mad at Tatsumaki for stabbing him to death, since it had no lasting effect on him.
• Non-Action Guy: Prior to the assault on the Monster Association HQ, Zombieman apparently focused solely on missions involving infiltration or reconnaissance, and thinks he's ill-suited to the assault because he isn't a particularly skilled fighter. Nevertheless, he manages to single-handedly kill dozens of monsters thanks to his regenerative abilities.
• The Quiet One: Very quiet, hardly speaking unless out of necessity or frustration.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: So reasonable that Child Emperor asks him to take command of the Monster Association mission when his own plans fall through. Zombieman refuses on two grounds. 1. He's not as smart as Child Emperor and doesn't think he can make plans on the fly as fast (implied) or is just too used to working alone and was unprepared to take the lead. 2. He isn't as well respected and Amai Mask out rights says he wouldn't follow Zombieman as he is technically a monster and the last thing they needed was more division amongst them.
• Resurrective Immortality: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. He cannot be killed, as he will just regenerate.^note Word of God, however, states he would die if he were reduced to mincemeat
• Revenge: Subverted as part of his Establishing Character Moment. It's implied that he spent most of his life after escaping from the House of Evolution searching for revenge, but once he actually has the leader at gunpoint, he's willing to listen to them and ultimately lets them live once he's convinced they're genuinely reformed.
• Stone Wall: He doesn't have freakish strength (or much offensive capacity beyond a normal human's), but his main skill is being unable to die. EVER. And when you can regenerate from practically anything, you don't need to be terribly strong when you can simply outlast the strength of your enemy. Every monster that watched him fight Pureblood learned this the hard way once he locked the door.
• Terror Hero: Comes with being a zombie — the concept of a hero that just won't stop until you are either under arrest, defeated, or dead, slowly but surely terrifies his enemies. Because almost nothing can kill this guy, nothing can get in his way, and he can hunt night and day to find and capture you. In fact, it's this sheer determination quality alone that got him into the ranks of the S-Class in the first place, which makes him the only S-Rank Hero that got in due to his pure, absolutely unkillable defense, instead of the absolute offensive strength that usual S-Rank Heroes have.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: According to Pureblood, Zombieman's blood is so nasty that he could barely swallow it after trying to drain him dry.
• Training from Hell: Puts himself through this with help from Dr. Genus and a resurrected or cloned, but probably more mentally stable, Carnage Kabuto in order to break his limiters. This may or may not include some modifications given to him by Dr. Genus.
• Trenchcoat Brigade: Zombieman generally seems to parody this archetype. Specifically, he's the only S-Class regularly shown doing investigative work, with a Private Eye Monologue to boot, while being a snarky chain-smoker with a Dark and Troubled Past. Moreover, his enemies tend to lean toward the fantastical (at one point he fights a Vampire and the Monster Association Executive he ends up fighting is Homeless Emperor, who is basically a Blue-Collar Warlock). Pretty much the only points of divergence are the fact that he's clean-shaven and actually a really Nice Guy.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Zombieman admits that "fighting is not [his] forte", but he manages to kill several powerful monsters simply by outlasting them and striking one powerful blow when they're tired out.
• Victory by Endurance: Both his victory over Pureblood and his follow-up fight against thirty more monsters amount to "Keep taking hits until I kill them".
• Why Won't You Die?: Gets this a lot from his enemies, mostly because no matter what, HE. JUST. DOESN'T. DIE. Blow his arms off? They come back. Blow his entire body to bits? They just regenerate together. Decapitate him? All that does is slow him down. Word of God states that he would die if he's "reduced to mincemeat," but getting him to even that point is no small feat in and of itself, as his body instantly starts regenerating the moment it's damaged, and even if you try to continuously damage him it won't stop him from closing the distance and attacking without remorse.
• Wolverine Wannabe: While he lacks the Wolverine Claws, Zombieman still meets most of the criteria. He is an Artificial Zombie originating from the House of Evolution where experimentation granted him an unbelievable Healing Factor that puts Wolvey's to shame and gives him near Complete Immortality (though not quite to From a Single Cell). In fact he gets subjected to Good Thing You Can Heal more often than the X-Man himself, often defeating his enemies not by overpowering them but by outlasting them. When he becomes fixated on hunting something down, he's essentially an Implacable Man. In place of his Wolverine Claws, he does favor machetes or an axe in combat.
• You Are Number 6: Subject #66 of the House of Evolution.

9. Zero (Drive Knight)

Zero

Voiced by: Yoji Ueda (Japanese), Todd Haberkorn (English), Armando Guerrero (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

A mysterious hero clad in black armor who seems to only have one eye. Drive Knight uses a box containing technology which can transform into any tool suited for his purposes to fight. He's suspicious of Metal Knight and warned Genos about him. In Supreme Hero arc Drive Knight reveals his real name is Zero.

---

• Adaptation Expansion: He fights against the Monster Association in the Manga and more of his abilities and personality are shown.
• Ambiguous Robot: Is he a robot? A cyborg? A guy in a mechanical suit? Who knows? He later explains to Genos that he's just like him; a person who lost his home town to the "Mad Cyborg" and is now, himself, a cyborg like Genos.
• Ambiguous Situation: There's a lot of evidence of him being a traitor, but it could also be that he's completely earnest. ^note When he questions Sekingar about the defenses of the Hero Association HQ, he goes out of his way to ask about every hero that might be a potential threat to him. Sekingar is suspicious because they know they have a traitor, but Drive Knight immediately suggests that Metal Knight is a traitor before Sekingar can get too deep into his thoughts about Drive Knight being the traitor. Furthermore, when G5 attacks and cuts off Sekingar's arm, Drive Knight states that he has no power left to fight and questions Sekingar again about whether or not Blast could show up. G5 then attacks Sekingar, not Drive Knight, and has to be saved by Genos while Drive Knight seems to glare at him. G5 is hinted to be the one who disassembled Bofoi's captured Metal Knight suit, but we never actually see that. Drive Knight is noted to have disappeared for two days during that period and could have been the one to disassemble the suit and G5 could've gotten the data that Drive Knight gives to Genos. This is as equally likely as Drive Knight's claim of him gathering information for 2 days and being worried about his data being intercepted by the traitor if he transmitted it. In addition, he constantly pushes to Genos that Metal Knight is the villain and that Bofoi made the Mad Cyborg. He also claims that his village was destroyed by the Mad Cyborg just like Genos's village. After Genos decides to consult Saitama and Dr. Kuseno about whether they should move on Bofoi, Kuseno's lab is attacked and the doctor is conveniently murdered in such a way that it encourages Genos to attack Bofoi immediately. Everything Drive Knight says could be true, and he's just the ultimate pragmatist, or he could be trying to destroy the Hero Association from within. Given that Bofoi has much the same sketchy personality, it's hard to tell which is the truth. Regardless, it is hinted that the Neo Heroes are using modified and remotely controlled monsters to engineer disasters and raise their popularity and both Metal Knight AND Drive Knight collect monsters to experiment on. It's a certainty that one of them is the traitor.
• Awesome by Analysis: He'll come up with a winning strategy against even powerful monsters, but only after he has all possible information on his enemy, and won't fight any other way. Even if it means hanging back while several other Heroes get mauled by said monster to get that data.
• Badass Biker: His Lance form turns him into a driver stuck to a motorcycle, with which he's very proficient.
• Big Damn Heroes: After mysteriously disappearing during the Monster Association's initial rampage, he shows up out of nowhere to save the surface team from Nyan.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: One of the many forms he can shift his technology into, and it's sharp enough to slice through the heads of multiple monsters with one swing.
• Chess Motifs: Drive Knight's modes are named after shogi pieces, from "lances" to "bishop" and even a "gold" mode referencing the golden generals of a shogi set.
• Cyber Cyclops: He has a single shining red eye on his face.
• Dynamic Entry: How he announces himself to a group of monsters eager to start rampaging: Charging in with his centaur form and ripping the lead one's head clean off as he passes by.
• Fusion Dance: He was able to merge with other mechanical beings like Genos for his Dragon King form.
• Hollywood Acid: Drive Knight can spray a powerful acid around him when in his motorcycle form. It is stated to eat through thin bodies faster, preventing Nyan from fleeing through yet another battle.
• Machine Monotone: In the anime.
• Mysterious Stranger: He's an obvious parody of them, as absolutely nobody knows who he actually is.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: They're mechanical for one thing, and it's just one of many forms he can turn into with his ability to manipulate hardware.
• Playing with Fire: Drive Knight's Gold form gives him the ability to produce enormous amounts of heat, enough to kill Nyan, a Dragon level monster. When Nyan infiltrates the gold armor, Drive Knights triggers his ability and incinerates Nyan.
• Pragmatic Hero: He actually could have saved the surface team from Nyan earlier, but chose to stay back and observe the fight for a while so he could properly analyze Nyan's abilities. He's called out for not helping sooner, but he explains that he needed all the information he could get to defeat Nyan to prevent further casualties.
• Rocket Ride: His Flying Chariot mode attaches him to a rocket that allows flight.
• Sizeshifter: Not Drive Knight himself, but his mechanical prism is seen as being a block of technology smaller than he is, yet capable of turning into equipment of varying sizes from a sword a bit longer than his arm to a bike larger than his whole body. Most notably when he's seen transforming into two armored modes with one a hulking robot several times his size and the other a more compressed form-fitting one. All presumably from the same volume of tech.
• The Stoic: Never changes his tone even when he's brutally slaughtered a group of monsters and threatening the last with torture if he doesn't give him the info he wants.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: Drive Knight uses a big prism of hardware which can seemingly transform into many types of weapon and equipment.
• Technopath: His main power, which he refers to as "Tactical Transformation". By carrying around a giant mechanical prism of hardware, he can manipulate it into all manner of forms, from an electrified Blade Below the Shoulder to even constructing a mechanical centaur half for fast travel.
• Transforming Mecha: Drive Knight's fighting ability revolves around his ability to turn into specialized forms. For instance, his Chariot form turns him into a centaur, or his Bishop form turns him into a hulking robot with particularly powerful punches. They are also extremely fast, enough for him to transform in the middle of a battle and even take a Dragon level monster like Nyan by surprise.

10. Pig God

Pig God

Voiced by: Daisuke Namikawa (Japanese), Marc Diraison (English)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

A morbidly obese man who can swallow and digest anything. He mitigates incoming damage with his thick layers of fat and can store anything in his stomach. Seemingly obsessed with eating, Pig God is nonetheless one of the most humble and dedicated heroes in the S-Class.

---

• Acquired Poison Immunity: Implied. He's able to eat and digest a giant venomous gorgon whole without worrying about getting poisoned, so it's likely he's used to eating such kinds of monsters.
• Acrofatic: Pig God was noted to be able to move quickly, despite his injuries and massive weight.
• Always a Bigger Fish:
  • The first monster he faces in the Monster Association, the Great Food Tub, is one who threatens to swallow all the heroes whole. What happens? Pig God swallows him whole.
  • Turned on him when he faces off against Gums, the Dragon-class Monster who also devours his foes whole. Gums manages to eat him with a surprise attack, and while Pig God manages to fight his way out and engage Gums in a physical contest, he finds himself overwhelmed.
• Big Damn Heroes: Few times in the manga:
  • Saves Child Emperor from Eyesight.
  • Saves Atomic Samurai's disciples from Evil Natural Water... by swallowing them in his stomach.
  • He does the same method again during Garou's battle with Sage Centipede, this time saving all the remaining heroes on the battlefield before a tsunami hits them.
• Big Eater: He's constantly seen eating. In his debut, he was eating during the S-Class meeting. In fact, his only request from the Hero Association upon becoming S-Rank was a constant flow of high calorie meals. His main way of fighting is even Eating the Enemy.
• Big Fun: He may look like a Fat Bastard at first, but the more you know about him, you find how polite he can be.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Pretty much any battle with him is this due to his ability to eat monsters quickly and efficiently. The only exceptions are when the monsters are either big or strong enough to match him, as shown with Gums.
• Eating the Enemy:
  • How he deals with monsters. It's as disgusting as it sounds.
  • Strangely, this is also how he keeps his fellow heroes from harm... by swallowing them and keeping them safe in his cushioned belly until he can safely cough them up.
• Extreme Omnivore: He can pretty much eat any monster regardless of what they're made of and digest them almost instantly.
• Fat Bastard: Subverted. He may look disgusting, but he really is one of the more friendly S-Class members.
• Gonk: But considering he's like 500 pounds overweight, it's to be expected. Yet come the manga's Monster Association arc, his face takes on a more heroic expression, suggesting that there might be a genuinely handsome man under all that fat.
• Healing Factor: Pig God can burn off his large reserves of fat to heal his injuries at a rapid pace.
• Hidden Depths: Although he initially seems to be just an obese man only interested in eating, he is truly amongst the most genuinely dedicated heroes of the series as shown when he drags himself (while severely injured) all the way from the hospital to a recent battlefield in order to make sure none of the monsters he fought can escape, telling the people who come to get him that it's his responsibility along with worrying that his greatest act of heroism would also coincide with his death since if he dies, who would protect the people? And in general, Pig God's facial expressions convey a strong sense of determination, especially when his fellow heroes are in danger. When a few heroes receive information that Drive Knight is missing and is implied to be killed, he's the only one to be concerned about it. Pig God also reacts with visible concern when his peers are injured. He even seems quite non-threatening to speak to, when he's not eating.
• Kevlard: Most of Pig God's defense comes in his fat acting as a protective cushion, to the point not even Gums (who has enough bite force to crush heavy machinery) could pierce all the way through.
• Nice Guy: Contrary to what one might think at a glance, considering how fat characters are usually portrayed in manga, he is actually one of the most sincerely heroic characters in S-Class, as explained by Hidden Depths above.
• Not So Stoic: Usually he has bored, regular expression during eating. Later it's shown he's capable of making other emotions.
• One-Hit Kill: No matter how dangerous or tough the monster is, Pig God's capability to swallow just about anything means that most battles will be over the moment he manages to get the foe into his mouth.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Admittedly, being swallowed and digested would be a horrifying fate that easily qualifies as a Cruel and Unusual Death; however, anyone who meets this fate was a monster who aimed for the death of multiple innocent people.
• Pet the Dog:
  • He pays for Saitama's meal at a restaurant in the bonus chapter in Vol 23 despite barely knowing him, probably also because he felt sorry for him losing a contest eating Udon.
  • When he takes Naranki's Action Squad from the battlefield to the medic centre, he notes one of them is badly injured and needs help fast. Said member, Sosshi, kicks Pig God in the face, asking in anger why he didn't rescue them sooner. Despite being annoyed, he just says that he took Sosshi's ripped off arm too, so the medics could re-attach it back.
• Rubber Orifice: Pig God defeats monsters by stretching his mouth and literally swallowing them, even if they're larger than him.
• Stomach of Holding: His main tactic, he uses it quite a few times during the heroes' fight with Monster Association, keeping even up to a dozen of people in his body.
• Stout Strength: Pig God is strong enough to run through concrete walls.
• Temporary Bulk Change: At the end of their fight with Gums, he shows up to serve as fuel for Fubuki to siphon his extra fat as energy to a dying Tank-Top Master, resulting in a skinny Pig God (and making Tank-Top Master temporarily as fat as he was). Naturally, he's shown to be handsomely built under all that flab. Although to Pig God, a build like that is emaciated to him and he admits he doesn't even have the strength to walk in this state so he immediately starts eating to regain his bulk, starting with Gums' corpse.
• There Was a Door: He simply walked through an entire city block to assist Child Emperor in his fight against Eyesight, as if it wasn't even there. When asked why, he replied it was simply the shortest route.
• Would Hit a Girl: Had no problems eating Eyesight to save Child Emperor's life.

11. Superalloy Darkshine (Superalloy Blackluster)

Superalloy Blackluster

Voiced by: Satoshi Hino (Japanese), Zeno Robinson (English), Carlos Torres (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

Superalloy Blackluster is a bronzed-up bodybuilder with shiny muscles, hence the name. Said to be the strongest hero in terms of raw physical power, Superalloy Blackluster is a truly admirable and kind person - however, he fights monsters mainly to comfort his ego.

---

• Achievements in Ignorance: He managed to inadvertently spook Dark into living a quiet life after showing off his strength by bending a frying pan into a bunny.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: In the webcomic, he only lost to Garo. In the manga, he is also hit by Vomited Fuhrer Ugly's acid attack mentally scarring him. On top of that, he is also one-upped by Golden Sperm, who has bigger and shinier muscles than him.
• Almighty Janitor: Before the formation of S Class, Superalloy Blackluster was actually the lowest-ranked C Class Hero, while still being just as comparatively powerful as the present. This was one of the reasons the Hero Association decided to rework its rankings system.
• Always Someone Better: The manga adaptation has him encounter Golden Sperm, who has even bigger muscles and shines much brighter than Blackluster does. This leads Blackluster to have a breakdown and get punched by Golden Sperm faster than he can react and get knocked out.
• Ambiguously Brown: Blackluster wears a heavy amount of bronzing and spray tan, to the point one may think he's a Token Minority, but a flashback shows that his natural skin color is not brown.
• Bald Head of Toughness: Invoked. He used to have real Samson-like hair to go with his physique, but then he realized his body wouldn't be truly shiny with hair, which is why he trained until he went bald.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Despite his arrogance, he's actually a very kind individual. That said, Blackluster himself mentions he's one of the few heroes you shouldn't make angry.
• Blood Knight: Subverted. He thought he was looking for an opponent that could push him to use 100% of his power, but when he finally fights against Garou and finds himself pushed to that point, he realizes that what he wanted wasn't so much a "good fight", as a fight that could make him feel good about himself. He never considered the possibility that he might actually lose. He was looking for an equal, not a superior. After the Garou arc, he's shown falling victim to his fears of loss no matter how much he trains.
• Break the Haughty: After Tatsumaki and King, Superalloy Darkshine is considered the strongest in the Hero Association and has the skills to match. However, he put much of his pride in his muscular and shiny body, as noted above in his Blood Knight entry. The instant he meets someone buffer and shinier like Golden Sperm, he undergoes Heroic BSoD.
• Broken Ace: He is this after the Monster Association incident, the trauma has left him more fearful and damaged his pride. He quits being a Pro Hero and joins the Neo Heroes, but as a sparring trainer.
• But Not Too Challenging: Similar to Suiryu, Blackluster also reveals this attitude during the fight against Garou in the Monster Association arc. While Blackluster initially thought he was looking for an opponent that could push him to use 100% of his power, once he faced off against Garou and witnessed the latter's indomitable fighting spirit no matter how much damage was inflicted on him, and found himself being pushed, he realized that deep down, he wanted to find an equal for a fight that could make him feel good about himself, not a superior and a fight that he could actually lose. Afterward, he's left traumatized with a near-crippling fear of losing no matter how much he trains and quit the Hero Association.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: His origin story even shows him as previously being a weakling who was bullied, and who worked out to become super muscular.
• Color Character: His name literally means that he's an extremely tanned guy with a shiny muscular body.
• A Day in the Limelight: He gets some spotlight in his fight with Garou, revealing his past and the reason for his pride.
• The Dreaded: He's said to be one of three heroes you must never anger, the other two being Tatsumaki and King.
• Dub Name Change: In Japan, his name is "Superalloy Darkshine", while the Viz translation gives him the synonymous title of "Superalloy Blackluster".
• Everything's Better with Sparkles: His entire body produces sparkling Bishōnen effects when he flexes his muscles and poses (Which he does a lot).
• Foe-Tossing Charge: Blackluster is so strong, he can reduce monsters into mincemeat by running into them. During his battle with Garou, one such tackle plows them through multiple solid stone walls without pause.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Amazingly enough — it turns out he trained hard to make himself feel a lot better about himself so he could try to avoid this, but being beaten by Garou briefly puts him into a funk until he gets snapped out of it, until he met both Vomited Fuhrer Ugly and Golden Sperm. Even after Garou is defeated, his anxiety over losing remains.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: His muscles and posturing hide a little boy who still has no confidence in himself. The moment Blackluster realizes he might lose is the moment he mentally crumbles, making defeating him a lot easier than it seems, as long as his opponents can actually harm him.
• Lightning Bruiser: According to Word of God, if he went all-out he could match and defeat Carnage Kabuto in his Carnage Mode.
• Logical Weakness: As tough as his muscles make him, he's still using his bare naked body for protection. While he's all but immune to blades and blunt-force trauma, his skin is still skin. Fuhrer Ugly can't budge him with brute force, but his acidified body still burns Superalloy Blackluster on direct contact.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: Due to his Heroic Self-Deprecation, when his fist got injured by Vomited Fuhrer Ugly's acid, he rolled all over the ground in terror while crying.
• Muscles Are Meaningful: It's the center point of his heroism — his muscles keep him from being harmed and make him extremely strong.
• Pride: Oh yeah. Though unlike in other cases of characters in the series having this problem, he's still a kind fellow and it's more of a huge confidence he has rather than looking down on weaker than him.
• Retired Badass: As of Chapter 110 in the webcomic, he quits the Hero Association and joins the Neo Heroes not as a hero, but as a trainer and sparring partner.
• Scars Are Forever: The acid wounds he received from Vomited Fuhrer Ugly are the factor on why Darkshine now wears a shirt, he lost his confidence.
• Scary Black Man: Subverted. He might have the appearance of one, but is actually a nice fellow who tries to make the other S-Class heroes get along with each other. Despite Garou reminding him of his trauma of feeling inadequate, he still had enough concern to call out to him when the Hero Hunter collapsed and the Monster Association HQ began to come apart due to Tatsumaki lifting it to the surface.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: He is proud of his muscles and their shine, so when he starts covering them up with a shirt, it truly shows how much his self-esteem suffered after his loss to Garou.
• Sparing the Final Mook: He apparently intended to do this, as he went through the trouble of capturing and tying up the last few survivors from Boros' ship, but Amai Mask was having none of it, and stepped up and slaughtered the pirates before Blackluster or anyone else could respond.
• Super-Strength: Very likely the strongest S-Class Hero in terms of raw physical power. He was capable of lifting two tons with one arm years before he reached his current level of strength. He killed Bug God (a Demon-level threat proud of his Super-Toughness) with one direct blow, and a simulation indicates he could kill the Deep Sea King in his One-Winged Angel form with only a light touch. Noticeably, his strikes were more than capable of harming Garou when he was on the cusp of his final evolution to his "Half-Awakened" state.
• Super-Toughness: That body of his isn't just for show, you know. Most monsters can't even bruise his skin, because apparently the shine protects it. Notably, he treats getting blasted by Evil Natural Water's high-pressure water sprays, strong enough to punch hole through steel, like a good shower. He tanked multiple hits from Garou without any real damage when the Hero Hunter had reached the point he could take down Puri-Puri Prisoner with one blow, and in the webcomic he also stood up after taking two direct hits from Awakened Garou, with the only other S Class Hero able to do something comparable being Flashy Flash (and he only managed one hit).
• Training Montage: He gets one in a flashback that shows how he got his super shiny body — he lifted weights every day, going from a skinny scrawny guy who could barely lift into a super-buff weightlifter. There were two effects: His body became so strong his muscles actually shone, and he became bald.
• Unskilled, but Strong: He's never used anything more advanced than simple punches and tackles, but thanks to his insane natural strength and durability, he doesn't really need techniques most of the time, with few exceptions. He once sparred against Bang and despite taking no damage, lost the fight badly because Bang is a much better fighter than him. After Garou started using Cross Fang Dragon Slayer Fist, Garou's physical stats also matched Darkshine's, thus he had him on his ropes, which Darkshine noted as like being cornered by multiple martial artists at once.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: He's only ever seen wearing a black speedo. Until his pride is wrecked after fighting against the Monster Association, and he starts to wear a shirt and pants.
• The Worf Effect: He's defeated by Golden Sperm in only one hit, as a show that there's Always Someone Better.

12. Watchdog Man

Watchdog Man

Voiced by: Yuji Ueda (Japanese), Arnie Pantoja (English), Alberto Bernal (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 6 (Anime)

Watchdog Man is a Hero wearing a dog suit. His silence and comical appearance belie incredible strength, as Watchdog Man is able to swiftly tear apart Monsters with his bare paws. He sticks to his territory in Q-City and rarely ventures away from it.

---

• Almighty Janitor: Was tearing the heads off Demon-level monsters with no effort since he was C-Class. He is also the only hero in charge of the most dangerous city, takes out more monsters than anyone else, and is the ONLY S-Class hero that has never struggled in a fight on-screen. Oh, and he is the one hero who sent Garou running. Yeah, the man whose trademark is getting back up every time and never giving up faced him and realized he just. Couldn't. Win. Not only that, he only made it out with his life and managed to escape because he moved away from Watchdog Man's territory. On top of all this, he never reports anything to the Hero Association, meaning he moved up the ranks purely from being seen fighting. He could very well be the most powerful S-Class hero, barring Tatsumaki and Blast.
• Animalistic Abilities: He has dog-like senses.
• Animal Motifs: In case you missed something, his motif is of a dog — he took the term "city watchdog" literally, so he wears some sort of dog costume. He could possibly be similar to Phoenix Man, in that he and his costume are perfectly synchronised with each other.
• Animal-Themed Fighting Style: Watchdog Man attacks and defends on all fours while wearing a costume resembling his namesake. He is also the first hero to thoroughly trounce Garou, though circumstances prevent him from finishing the villain off.
• Animal-Themed Superbeing: He's a superhero with a dog motif.
• Atop a Mountain of Corpses: The first time we see him, he's sitting on top of the pile of slain monsters.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He may dress and sometimes act like a dog, but don't dare underestimate him, because he can rip through hundreds of monsters with ease. He's been slaughtering Demon/Dragon-level monsters with his bare hands alone since his C-Class days. His dog-like fighting style also lets him effortlessly fight off Garou in their fight, since Garou's techniques are meant for fighting proper humans, as opposed to one imitating a dog.
• Confusion Fu: Garou pegs him as Unskilled, but Strong, but in reality, he's this. He fights less like a human and more like a wild beast, which causes Garou to severely underestimate his battle skills.
• Creepy Monotone: In the anime, he speaks in a flat monotone, no matter what the situation is.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: During the Monster Raid arc, he fends off Garou with no problem, showing he's far superior in speed and strength. Garou noted that he fights like an animal, and the martial arts he himself uses are meant to be used to fight humans, rendering it ineffective against Watchdog Man.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Implied, but not confirmed. He's based on a very famous Japanese story of a dog that continued to go to the train station that his deceased owner used years after the man died. His bored and laid-back attitude could imply he's more of a Broken Bird than a stoic hero. However, he's the S-ranked hero with the least characterization to date as nothing strong enough has challenged his territory and he refuses to leave it for any reason.
• A Day in the Limelight: Volume 28's bonus story, which shows how he operates.
• Foil: To Saitama. Both are simple-drawn, ridiculously powerful characters who live in a very dangerous city, have a simple fighting style, and report a few of their activities to the Hero Association. However, while Saitama is extremely oblivious to the hive of monsters and only usually ends up finding them by accident (often even missing them), Watchdog Man takes great care in keeping his city safe. As a result, people vouch for him and he is a beloved S-Rank hero, while Saitama lives in obscurity. Watchdog Man's city is also safe despite all the major events happening and the rampage of stronger and stronger monsters, while Z-City has been in ruins for a while now.
• Invincible Hero: It is reported that Watchdog Man has never lost a single fight.
• Killer Rabbit: Look at him and you won't think he's a hero. Cross him, however, and be prepared to be ripped apart.
• Lethal Joke Character: When he says there's "nothing interesting to report", what he actually means is "Now that I'm here, I killed practically every monster in the area, and now there is no longer anything left to report to you."
• Mysterious Stranger: Even more than Drive Knight or Metal Knight. So far, he hasn't been given much characterization or any motives as to why he's so attached to keeping Q-City safe.
• Non-Standard Character Design: His face is drawn even more simplistically than Saitama's "relaxed" state, making him always appear bored or apathetic. Unlike Saitama, he is never drawn any other way and never shows any range of emotions. Seeing as only the very strongest characters in the franchise's setting are drawn this way (including Tatsumaki as well), it's a prime hint that Watchdog Man may have reached a similar level through his constant monster battles.
• The Nose Knows: He can smell monsters several kilometers away.
• Out of Focus: Due to remaining in Q-City, he is the S-Class hero with the least amount of focus.
• The Reliable One: He is so thorough in his protection of Q-City that it is considered the safest place on the planet.
• The Stoic: Appears even more apathetic to his surroundings than Saitama, but is very diligent in his role.
• Stronger Than They Look: Garou ended up getting the boot.
• Super-Speed: The Volume 28 bonus story notes he's able to quickly find and obliterate monsters who are kilometers away from his guard post before the police can get there, and in some cases before the Hero Association can sound the alarm. He's believed to be able to clock 250 km/h.

13. Flashy Flash

Flashy Flash

Voiced by: Kosuke Toriumi (Japanese), Lex Lang (English), Luis Navarro (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

Flashy Flash is a masterful ninja who is the fastest of all the S-Class heroes. He trained with a society of ninjas from a young age, and fights using tremendous speed and swordsmanship to cut down his opponents.

---

• The Ace:
  • Zombieman says that Flash is rumored to be one of the best fighters in the S-Class. Not only is he super-fast, but he's also a talented swordsman who's also proficient in unarmed combat. In the webcomic, he is able to kill the Hot Rod Brothers before either of them could even react. In the manga, he is the first S-Class shown to take down two Dragon-level monsters single-handedly. He only even struggles with them because he was waiting for the opportunity to kill them both at the same time. In the webcomic, he's also the only S-Class hero who was able to dodge any of Awakened Garou's attacks.
  • According to Gale Wind, Flash is the strongest member of the 44th generation of Ninja their village has produced. And as proven during their battle, he's more than capable of taking him and Hellfire Flame (being The Aces of the 37th generation and Demon-level threats aside) on at the same time, even after they turn into their Dragon-level monster forms. It's later shown that he is the single greatest ninja their village has ever produced, taking on a party of many top ninjas from the previous classes and beating them by himself without much trouble.
  • It's implied that Flash's rank isn't higher because most of his exploits aren't public knowledge, such as wiping out entire crime syndicates in a day or taking out dangerous and powerful assassins. He was also fully prepared to face down Tatsumaki after she stole his kill. Overall, Flash's easily one of the most capable fighters in the entire Hero Association.
• Agent Peacock: Downplayed in that he lacks the flamboyant personality that is usually associated with this trope, but he wears high heels and has hair accessories.
• Always Someone Better: Is this to Speed-o'-Sound Sonic, though unknowingly. Flash is much stronger, and much faster than the younger ninja. Sonic couldn't even perceive the speed of Gale Wind and Hellfire Flash once they powered up. Flashy beat them both at the same time and didn't seem to try very hard at all.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: With Sonic. They came from the same graduation class and used to spar with each other. After years of separation, their innate knowledge of each other allows them to easily dispatch a gang of other ninjas that have surrounded them.
• Badass Cape: He wears a dark blue bodysuit with a long white cape over it. It usually gets splattered with blood.
• Combat Stilettos: A rare male example. Flash wears high heels as a part of his outfit and does attacks such as "Flashy Kicks".
• Defector from Decadence: The ninja "village" was more like a single giant facility maintained by an organization that kidnapped children and raised them into killing machines, including Flash and Sonic. The two of them decided it was too evil to be allowed to exist.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: During his training at the ninja village, Flashy Flash was actually so gifted he opted to seemingly slack off so that his teachers would punish him with more challenging training.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Just like "Speed-o'-Sound Sonic", though "Flashy Flash" is a bit more on the nose than "Lightspeed Flash" would be.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?:
  • After Tatsumaki kills Hundred Eyes Octopus before him, he insults and challenges her, claiming to be even stronger. Luckily, the other heroes stop him.
  • He's the only member of the S-Class heroes willing to fight Amai Mask when he tries to muscle in on the planning for the assault on the Monster Association base, despite knowing both of Amai Mask's power and influence in the Association and the public.
• Dub Name Change: The original Japanese name is more like "Lightspeed Flash", though the result does make it more obvious how redundant and ridiculous his name is meant to be, much like Sonic's is, at the expense of losing how both are specific references to their speed.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: As is tradition for ninjas in this series. Many fans thought he was a woman when he first appeared. However, his masculine voice tipped them off.
• Fire-Forged Friends: He forms one with Saitama.
• Foil: He is this towards Superalloy Darkshine since while Darkshine specializes in strength and defense with his muscular body, Flash specializes in speed. Also while Darkshine's spirit was left broken after the Monster Association raid especially since his muscles temporarily lost their luster due to Vomited Fuhrer Ugly along with being one-upped by Golden Sperm in shining muscles, Flash was also one-upped by several beings with greater speed than him including Saitama, Blast, Garou and Platinum Sperm, but unlike Darkshine he recovered from his shock and is more determined to improve himself.
• Genius Bruiser: Flashy Flash isn't just a fast ninja, he's a seasoned fighter who has deep insight in how people fight (allowing him to analyze the fighting style of two monsters with better speed and compensate through skill and prediction).
• Genocide from the Inside: Flash killed all the teachers, staff, and his other students in order to destroy the Ninja Village from within. Of course, it helps that the "Ninja Village" is actually the name of a group that specializes in taking in orphans just to train them brutally to become assassins in the criminal underworld. One of his current goals is to hunt the former graduates of the Village and finish his job. He tried to poison Sonic too, but the poison didn't work.
• Good Counterpart: To Speed-o'-Sound Sonic. Both are prideful, effeminate speedsters who take an interest in Saitama after he No Sells two of their attacks. They even share a technique, the "Wind Blade Kick". The manga version at least confirms that they came from the same ninja village. In fact, he's a good counterpart to the entirety of the village, with Sonic being the least evil of the rest of them, although he fits the spirit of the trope with Sonic more because Sonic's alone and a more major character, who openly disdains heroics.
• Good Is Not Soft: He's a hero but when he hunts his enemies he never leaves them alive unless he wants something from them.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Averted. Flash achieved his level of speed and skill through rigorous training, not some innate ability. As he tells Gale Wind and Hellfire Flame, he got as far as he did because he trained harder than anyone else in the ninja village and when the fallen monsters ask him what they lacked as they die, he only replies "more training".
• Ironic Name: "Flashy" Flash is anything but flashy in reality except for his costume and speed. His fighting style allows him to win before anyone can see he's won, he's neither a braggart nor a flamboyant man, and he's done a lot of work against underground criminals in private, purposefully omitting that in his reports. He is a ninja after all.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Very arrogant, especially towards lower-ranked heroes, with a huge ego to boot, he's still a hero for a reason.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Flash wields a katana with a round guard. He appears to be skilled in using it in combat, as he defeated a Demon-level monster with it and later during the Monster Association assault slaughters dozens of lower-level ones at a time.
• Light Is Good: His speed and color scheme make people associate him with light, and he's on the side of good.
• Lightning Bruiser: So far, in his point of view, only Saitama, Blast, Platinum Sperm, and Monster Garou have outclassed him in speed. He's deceptively durable as well, managed to get back up after a direct hit from Awakened Garou in the webcomic, and is able to take several hits from Platinum Sperm and Monster Garou in the manga, who each can down an S-Class hero with one blow, though Flash is clearly outclassed by both, and after his defeat it's revealed that both of them were holding back.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: Very noticeable since unlike other characters who fall under this category, he doesn't tie it up.
• Ninja: At least in the manga version where it's confirmed that he came from the same ninja village as Speed-o'-Sound Sonic, Gale Wind, and Hellfire Flame.
• Not So Stoic: Doesn't take the fact that there are at least four people that are faster than him well.
• Pet the Dog: Compliments the A-Class Hero Shadow Ring's technique during the Monster Hideout Raid and asks where she learned it, which is quite possibly the nicest he's shown acting towards the lower-ranked heroes that doesn't come off as condescending.
• Pride:
  • Like Sonic, he is so proud of his speed that, when Saitama evaded his first attack, he attacked him again despite knowing that Saitama was not an enemy.
  • He also has a large level of pride in his status as a S-Class hero as well as his abilities, to the point he gets pissed at Tatsumaki killing Hundred-Eyed Octopus before him and at Amai Mask for trying to make himself the commander of the assault on the Monster Association (and by extension the S-Class heroes, despite only officially being A-Class) to the point of being ready to fight them.
  • Deconstructed in his fight with Platinum Sperm. Already outclassed to begin with, Platinum Sperm notes that his single-minded focus to protect his pride made him more vulnerable to attack and left him with more openings.
• Speed Blitz: Being a discreet and to-the-point Hero, Flashy Flash usually finishes off enemies in one decisive attack too fast for them to even see coming before they're cut down.
• The Speedster: Flashy Flash is the resident speedster of the S-Class heroes and quite possibly the fastest in the entire Hero Association with the exceptions of Saitama and Blast.
• Stock Ninja Weaponry: Flash also carries a Kunai with him, serving as an emergency weapon when he has to defend against two comparable ninjas.
• The Stoic: For a character with such Super-Speed and big ego, he's relatively serious and calm.
• Super-Speed: Flashy Flash lives up to his name, being so fast that he can move and attack faster than the ordinary person can see, run up cliffs casually, and instantly reach a giant monster's every weak point. In the webcomic, he killed Gale and Hellfire, two Disaster Level Demon mysterious beings who took great pride in their speed, before they could understand what had happened. In the manga, he easily keeps up with Gale Wind and Hellfire Flame, who both moved way faster than Sonic could handle. He is the only S-Class hero who managed to dodge any of Garou's attacks after his transformation.
• Super-Toughness: It's not really shown given he's fast enough to dodge most things, but Flash is surprisingly durable despite his build. In the webcomic, he actually managed to get back up after a direct hit from Awakened Garou, a feat none of the other S-Class Heroes could manage aside from Superalloy Blackluster (who took two hits).
• Talented, but Trained: Gale Wind and Hellfire Flame appraise Flash's talent to be on par with them, the greatest ninjas from their village, but Flash attributes his strength to his diligent training.
• Underestimating Badassery: While he considers Saitama to be worthy, Flash is ignorant of the true extent of his strength. He presumptuously calls Saitama his disciple and has a sparring match with him. Needless to say, Saitama casually nullifies all of Flash's attacks and outmaneuvers him. Flash also believes Garou was considerably weakened by the S-Class heroes when the truth was they were too fragile for him and that Saitama was the one who crushed him for good.
• We Used to Be Friends: This is how Flash is connected to Sonic. They were both in the same class and deliberately held themselves back so they'd get the most brutal, yet best training possible. They planned together to stop the Ninja Village once and for all from taking in and raising kids to be brutal killers, but Sonic grew distant and cold when he ended up using his abilities to work for criminals.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: His sense of justice made him want to bring down and destroy the Ninja Village, stopping them from taking children and turning them into killers ever again. Unfortunately, his solution meant to kill everyone associated with the facility to make sure no trace of them existed.
• Wilfully Weak: Back in his days in the ninja village. As part of its Training from Hell philosophy, those who failed at classes had to make up for it with additional training. He, like Sonic, failed all classes. Not for lack of ability though; they deliberately looked for punishment to get as much training as possible. The result was a ninja able to best the two most talented ninjas of the most powerful generation together with no effort, and only requires a little more effort after their monsterfication.
• The Worf Barrage: Uses what the manga dubs as his maximum speed Flashy Kicks on Blast, the number 1 ranked hero, but Blast casually dodges it and appears behind him.
• The Worf Effect: Poor, poor Flashy Flash has to live with the fact that he encounters not one, not two, not three, but four characters who are faster than him, in just a single day.
  • During the Monster Association HQ exploration, Saitama easily catches up with him, which surprises Flash.
  • When he encounters Blast, he uses his maximum speed to attack him, only for Blast to easily subdue him.
  • Then there's the triple threat with Awakened Garou and Platinum Sperm. Flash is defeated by Platinum Sperm to show the latter's extreme speed and strength. Granted, Flash doesn't have his sword, but it doesn't change the fact that both Garou and Sperm are still faster than him during the fight. To add insult to injury, after Flash is knocked out of the battle, Garou and Sperm actually become even faster.

14. Genos (Demon Cyborg)

Genos

Voiced by: Kaito Ishikawa (Japanese), Zach Aguilar (English), Jhonny Torres (Latin American Spanish), Enric Puig (European Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 5 (Webcomic & Manga), Episode 1 (Anime)

^{Click here to see Genos in his first appearence}

^{Click here to see Genos after his battle with G 4}

^{Click here to see Genos after his battle with Elder Centipede}

"Incinerate!"

Genos was an ordinary young man until a "mad cyborg" destroyed his hometown and killed everyone he loved. He was mortally wounded, but the kind scientist Dr. Kuseno saved his life and rebuilt his body. Now a cyborg himself, Genos once set out on a journey to find the "mad cyborg" and avenge his family, but after meeting Saitama chooses to settle down with him in hopes of becoming more powerful. Whereas Saitama has raw, undeniable strength, Genos has everything else. That is, looks, intelligence, dedication, money, style, and appeal.

---

• The Ace: Intelligent, cool-looking, and incredibly powerful. He even becomes one of the top 17 heroes right off the bat. It's just that Saitama blows him out of the water in terms of raw strength, speed and invulnerability.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: He has a far closer relationship to Saitama in the manga, to the point that Genos defaults unto his learnings from Saitama before he makes a heroic decision and his teacher would rather not suffer existence when Genos was killed. Compare it to the webcomic, that while they do care for one another, Saitama opts to push Genos away because he makes him uncomfortable and Genos ends up greatly neglected and ignored, as well as stagnant in his pursuit of strength.
• Always Someone Better: No matter how many times he upgrades his body, Saitama will still surpass him in strength. So he asks Saitama to be his teacher in hopes of getting stronger just like him.
• The Apprentice: Officially Saitama's after the two of them became professional heroes.
• An Arm and a Leg: It's not a proper fight if Genos doesn't lose at least one limb.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: He focuses more on offense, and is always the first one to engage an opponent. While he can be successful in subduing lesser enemies this way, his bad habit of letting his guard down and underestimating his opponent means stronger opponents tend to capitalize on his poor defense. It seems he is switching up his fighting style in MA arc.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: How he defeats the G4 robot. He used the steam to disperse the laser, enabling him to get close enough to connect the finishing blow.
• Badass in Distress: As mentioned above, Genos usually loses his body parts, making him helpless until Saitama or any other hero comes to his rescue.
• Black Eyes of Crazy: Zigzagged, he's a good guy and one of the heroes, but he does have some rather unhinged behavior, like being violently protective over those he cares about like Dr. Kuseno and Saitama.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: One of Genos's latest upgrades as of his fight against Garou, a combat knife hidden inside his arm of which he demonstrates the effectiveness against a mob of monsters.
• Born Unlucky: Genos has the misfortune of never being able to catch a break. His home was destroyed by a cyborg, his upgrades are never enough, and despite his immense strength, he can't put away powerful enemies. Furthermore, he ends up suffering a great deal of tragedy in both the webcomic and manga.
  • In the Neo Heroes saga of the webcomic, he loses his Parental Substitute, Dr. Kuseno, from a squad of robots that might've been sent by Bofoi, who's also greatly implied to have been responsible for creating the Mad Cyborg that killed everyone in Genos' hometown. This also leads to another consequence of Genos risking permanent death if he were to get into a fight that would greatly damage him to the point that Dr. Kuseno would've needed to fix him.
  • In the manga version of the Monster Association Arc, he gets murdered by "Awakened Garou: Cosmic Fear Mode" as a means to emotionally hurt Saitama into giving it his all. Since Genos served as Saitama's Morality Chain and Living Emotional Crutch, as well as the latter having doubts about being a capable hero, his death shatters whatever Self-Restraint Saitama had for his incalculable strength and immediately went for a full-powered serious punch (appropriately titled, "Killer Series") against Garou, who also does the same by using "Mode: Saitama". If it wasn't for Blast teleporting them to another planet before their fists collided, it would've destroyed the entire Earth, showcasing Saitama's declining humanity. Thankfully, he gets better.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: Averted. Like Saitama, he turns down a chance to learn martial arts from Bang because he simply doesn't need to.
• Briefcase Blaster: Genos has a briefcase that transforms into a pair of arms for him to use to fire powerful blasts of energy.
• Bullying a Dragon: Hurled insults at Tatsumaki after she began insulting Saitama after the alien invasion. Needless to say, it didn't go well for him, to the point that he corrected himself after he tried calling her a brat even though she wasn't anywhere near him.
• Calling Your Attacks: "INCINERATE!"
• Can't Catch Up: Any time Genos gets a new upgrade, expect him to get disassembled into modern art shortly after to hype up the new Monster of the Week. Extra points if he specifically mentions that this newest upgrade was designed in response to the last Monster of the Week and means he could take it now, such as when he mentions his Monster Association-era Dragon Knight upgrade could destroy the meteorite from the Giant Meteor arc, but it can barely hold a candle to Psykorochi's Wave-Motion Gun now.
• Celibate Hero: After his village was destroyed and everyone he knew killed, he dedicated himself fully to tracking down the killer. After meeting Saitama, he switched that slightly to being the strongest hero he can be. He was so dedicated that he got rid of all his parts anyways. Furthermore, he hasn't shown any romantic interests either, fan shipping with Saitama aside. While he understands how people work like Saitama does, he dismisses most individuals and is as socially dead as Saitama.
• Character Development: He started as a cyborg bent on having revenge on the mad cyborg, to a much calmer person who now genuinely wants to protect people. But his doctor remarks that the hate in his heart is still not extinguished even if he has a master and a goal set. Gets more prevalent from Super Fight Arc and onwards, becoming more vigilant and analytical in battle, as well as being far more cooperative and responsible. And most importantly, has ceased self-destructing when pushed to a corner, finally valuing not only his allies' lives, but also his own.
• The Comically Serious: Most of the humor involving Genos is that he's dark and serious about everything (like paying rent and peeling potatoes) in contrast to Saitama's apathy and lightheartedness.
• Crippling Overspecialization: He really wants to emulate Saitama, so he focuses on pure destructive power and trying to blow up the enemy with as much firepower as he can instead of improving his fighting skills. The result is that he comes across more like a demolition man who's great at destroying the scenery and buildings, but not so great when it comes to fighting mano-a-mano.
• Cyborg: Of the We Can Rebuild Him variety. Only his brain remains as the organic part of his body.
• Department of Redundancy Department: He will sometimes speak in run-on sentences that tend to repeat the same information again and again. Saitama seems to be the only one who notices, or at least refuses to tolerate it.
  Genos: Doctor, he saved me from certain death on two different occasions. You were responsible for restoring my life. Later, that same life was saved by Master Saitama, who has saved it again.
• Detachment Combat: Having probably taken a cue from his previous fights, as of his clash against Garou, Genos' limbs can be detached with ease but still be remotely controlled to take an enemy by surprise and fly back to Genos to reattach themselves.
• Determinator: He definitely qualifies. He will attack monsters without fear until his parts are destroyed. Even losing body parts doesn't stop him from fighting. To the point that he was christened as Demon Cyborg by the Hero Association as a nod to this trait.
• Deuteragonist: If Saitama's not in the spotlight it's usually him being the focus in the earlier chapters. And he's got more screentime in the manga and anime.
• Did You Get a New Haircut?: In addition to an exchange of parts, he also had his hair replaced with heat and shockproof fibers. Resident baldy Saitama notices.
• Distressed Dude: Whenever he loses his limbs. He'll be at the Villain of the week's mercy until someone will come and distract the monster from killing him.
• Doomed Hometown: He explains that when he was a kid, a rogue cyborg destroyed his hometown and everyone he knew, leaving him mortally wounded.
• Dragon Knight: His Monster arc upgrade has sharper and more jagged arms than compared to previous forms with three large protrusions on each shoulder resembling knives. In this upgrade, he takes on an almost draconic appearance, which is lampshaded when he turns the power-up during the fight with Psykorochi and emits a Battle Aura that resembles, in the words of an onlooker, an azure dragon. However, this upgrade only lasts for 10 seconds before his core explodes.
• Eating Optional: His body is mostly mechanical and has its own internal energy source, but he has the ability to taste and can convert any organic food into biofuel so he can still eat if he chooses to.
• Elemental Powers: As the story progresses Genos is given a wide array of cores that give him a bigger variety of elemental offensive capabilities like Ice and Lightning, other than his early heat cannons.
• Endearingly Dorky: He's way too serious about everything, especially when Saitama is involved.
• Expy: Of Casshan, the boy android. Also his backstory is very similar.
• Explosive Overclocking: He got an upgrade in the Monster Association Arc that allows him to fire a Wave-Motion Gun that can barely hold Psykorochi's own, but the upgrade only lasts for 10 seconds before his core will explode and kill him.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Puri-Puri-Prisoner sees the meeting of the S-class heroes as a chance to get closer to Genos.
• Failure Hero: Ironically, despite acing his hero exam and instantly becoming an S-Class, Genos is consistently outclassed by his opponents and gets his ass kicked hard on a regular basis. However, even in the face of failure, he never gives up.
• Fan of Underdog: He's Saitama's first and biggest fan.
• Fatal Flaw: He has the habit of usually letting his guard down. Ultimately, this causes him to be instantly wrecked by whoever he's fighting. Genos acknowledges this himself. He seems to be getting better with this in later chapters.
• Funny Afro:
  • When Asura Kabuto turns one of Genos' attacks back on him, it makes his hair into this. It stays that way for the rest of the arc.
  • During one of his maintenance sessions with the Doctor, his old hair, still an afro, can be seen on a mannequin head in the background.
• Germanic Efficiency: According to invokedONE, Genos would be German in real life; while he does have his moments of overlooking things in battle (i.e. to where he constantly gets his ass kicked), Genos is always willing to improve himself as a fighter with the utmost efficiency.
• Glass Cannon: He is powerful, as shown in some of his fights, can create powerful blasts that can destroy enemies and surroundings, and is fast enough to keep up with Sonic. Unfortunately, his durability leaves something to be desired. Once his arms are destroyed his fighting prowess lowers considerably. Also, he usually fights enemies that are out of his league.
• Good Is Not Nice: While he's a hero that genuinely cares about saving others, and is generally Endearingly Dorky when he's being serious about relatively normal things, Genos is still hostile and cold towards anyone he doesn't particularly care about, even outright criticizing an H.A. official who comes to him for help on a private mission, saying that he's abusing his power before allowing him to talk about it. He doesn't get along with Flashy Flash either, fighting him when he visits Saitama. And throughout the series, Genos is usually seen threatening others over minor inconveniences, such as Charanko not bringing cabbage for the hotpot. His rudeness tends to be usually downplayed however, since he's still far from the big jerk like Tatsumaki and can be nice to people like civilians he saves from monsters.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: He was designed to be easily repairable, which means that he'll be back on his feet in no time.
• Hand Blast: He has blasters on his palms.
• Heart Light: His power source is in his chest and it lights up whenever he uses his arsenal.
• Hero-Worshipper: He idolizes Saitama to the point that he feels the need to pay attention to everything he says in the belief that there is some sort of lesson to it and is willing to be his live-in butler.
• Heroic BSoD: Has a small one when he realized he was no match for the Dragon-level monsters in the Monster Association arc. He also begins to doubt himself after he thinks he's weak because he gave up his human body and relied on artificial enhancements alone.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Didn't realize that he was talking with a mob boss in the second OVA. He also believes Saitama to be much more wise and profound than he actually is.
• Hot-Blooded: Downplayed. He may look like a stoic person but he actually has an aggressive streak. Dr. Kuseno and Amai Mask remark on this trait.
• Hunter of His Own Kind: Hates a mad cyborg that destroyed his hometown, and for revenge became a cyborg himself in order to find and destroy it. He doesn't really resent or deny this fact — he just distinguishes himself as a "cyborg of justice" instead.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Zig-Zagged. Saitama is definitely the more powerful of the two and probably the most powerful being ever. He can destroy with a single punch beings which Genos can't defeat with his full power. Saitama was also shown to easily overpower Genos as well. However, Genos is smarter, works harder, and generally is more reliable than his teacher. The fact that he was admitted into S-class is a testament to his abilities while Saitama failed the written portion of the test. Plus, he even does household chores!
• I Owe You My Life: To Dr. Kuseno, who saved him after he was nearly killed by the cyborg that destroyed his home town and to Saitama, who saved him from Mosquito Girl.
• I Should Have Been Better: Subjected to this when he tries blasting the meteor, and in the fight against Elder Centipede. The latter has this played up to the point where it sends him into a brief Heroic B So D. Another example is when he and Bang are forced to rely on Fubuki to heal their allies despite being already at her limit. Genos laments that he should've been stronger.
• IKEA Weaponry: His ARMS MODE prototype weapon. When inactive, it takes the form of a suitcase and to activate it, Genos pushes a button on the handle and then throws it in front of him. The suitcase splits down the middle and separates, each half then opening to reveal the "arms" inside which clasp over Genos's arms.
• Immune to Bullets: In the 2nd OVA, a mob boss and half a dozen henchmen unload their weapons at him. He doesn't so much as flinch.
• Innocently Insensitive: Usually comments on Saitama's hair problems, much to the latter's frustration. A good example is him telling Saitama that kombu doesn't help in making hair grow, thinking that he bought so many for that purpose.
• Iron Butt-Monkey: Spends an awful lot of his on-screen time in multiple pieces, thanks to any given Monster of the Week.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: When he decided to first spar with Saitama, he tries to put a dent in him as much as he can, but when Saitama casually obliterates a mountain range with a playful punch, Genos decides to call his dream of becoming as strong as Saitama quits for the time being.
• The Lancer: To Saitama. As well as being his self-proclaimed sidekick, Genos is also everything Saitama is not; namely the serious, cool, good-looking kind of guy you'd expect a superhero to be.
• Lightning Bruiser: He's slower than Saitama, but he's fast enough. His main strategy is to use his extreme speed to get in someone's face and burn them in one go with an energy attack. Eventually, he's fast enough to catch up to a high-speed jet on foot.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Serves as one to Saitama. Garou comes to the conclusion Saitama would've lost his mind a long time ago if it weren't for Genos, and when Genos was killed, it was the most unhinged and immoral Saitama has ever been — wreaking immeasurable havoc and not giving a damn on how it affects the lives involved in the process. It's implied Saitama clutching to the core is his last ditch attempt at clinging to his humanity and what little morality he has left; it's likely that if he lost the core as well, he would've lost himself completely.
• Made of Iron: He's survived a major genocide in his hometown, and that was before he became a cyborg.
• Magnetism Manipulation: In the Supreme Hero arc of the Neo Heroes Saga, on the moment of Dr. Kuseno's death in the webcomic, Genos shows one of his new core abilities is magnetism manipulation in order to fend off the Dragon Level robot monsters, although it is stated he has just started using this ability, and he needs to master it to make it more effective and eventually a terrifying asset.
• Meaningful Name: Genos is a play on and short for Genocide; he even wears a shirt with the word stamped on it once, as a shout-out to the sheer scope of his destructive abilities and tragic past.
• Mirror Character: Realized that Amai Mask could have been him if it weren't for Saitama. He and Garou get a lot of parallels in the manga as well.
• Morality Chain: In the Awakened Garou fight, Saitama seeing his eviscerated corpse has the man doubting his own usually unshakable heroism and he's quickly sent into grief-fuelled rage, unleashing a punch that would have shattered the earth and killed everyone had Blast and his team not redirected it. It's even more evident when it's clear the only thing that prevents Saitama from completely losing himself is that he is carefully cradling Genos's core. Garou himself seems to recognise this, connecting the dots that Genos is for Saitama what Tareo is for him, and it's what ultimately motivates him to teach Saitama the secret of time travel.
• Morality Pet: A downplayed one for Saitama. While the latter is far from being a villain he is definitely a Knight in Sour Armor, generally aloof, perpetually bored and even snarky. While Saitama does regularly nice things for the people around him, he does kind acts way more often to Genos, like paying stuff for him, trying to mentor him and being generally protective of him. Not to mention that the cyborg makes his master smile way more often than any other character.
• Motor Mouth: This is how he fits the entire length of his life story in one panel, and in the case of the anime, under four minutes. Eventually, Saitama got used to this penchant of his.
• Mr. Exposition: In contrast to Saitama's cluelessness within the Hero Association. He's usually the one explaining the inner workings of the association.
• Mr. Fanservice: Having a cyborg body doesn't stop him becoming one thanks to his bishonen face. He is already ranked one of the top six in terms of popularity in-universe.
• Mundane Utility: Can blow-dry dishes using his hands, and one of his fingers can transform into a potato peeler.
• No Social Skills: He's not really sociable and tends to not understand human behaviour. In the second OVA, he's shown to be this in best way. He didn't even realize that he was facing criminals, thinking they were following a procedure and would give him the keys of the apartment back after he talked. The Mob boss even lampshades it.
• Not So Stoic: During their fight with Carnage Kabuto, Genos expressed irritation and raised his voice at Saitama when he told him the secret of his strength.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Downplayed in the Latin American Spanish dub, but Genos speaks with a somewhat notable Venezuelan accent, which slips at times, due to his voice actor hailing from there. Since the dub was done in Mexico, this becomes very evident during his debut episode, albeit due to him being The Stoic, this is not very notable at times.
• Out of Continues: Due to Dr. Kuseno's death in the Neo Heroes Saga, Genos does not have anyone who can repair or upgrade him anymore.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • His entire backstory, as rendered to Saitama. It's incredible how he manages to be so repetitive in terminology and motivations. In written form, it's a Wall of Text. In the anime, it's a more proper form of this: The tone is shifted to serious for a very rapid descent into a parody of a montage, as he tells his life story with emotional music in the background and the scene cutting from random background shots showing the passage of time to Saitama becoming increasingly exasperated.
  • Another instance is Genos receiving memories of the deleted timeline and trying to explain it to Saitama in short, 'short' here meaning so many paragraphs that words start to bleed out of Saitama's ears.
  • And another one, when he explains Saitama's battle with Garou to few Hero Association members... for four hours.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Zigzagged as he, Saitama, and a few others know who's stronger between the two, but most people think that he is the stronger one and assume that Saitama is using someone else's (possibly Genos') fame, particularly in the entrance exam when the examiner thinks Saitama is nothing to write home about but sees Genos as being pretty impressive.
• Parody Sue: Compared to Saitama, most other traditional Sue elements get handed to Genos. He's handsome, rich, popular, talented, makes his hero debut as class S at age 19, broods and talks at length about his Dark and Troubled Past, and gets away with causing a lot of damage to his surroundings. What puts him on the parody spectrum is that for everything he has going for him, he's usually the one getting his ass kicked, primarily due to his own recklessness.
• Perpetual Frowner: Played with. Though he does crack a small smile from time to time, it's usually when he's mocking someone. Genos responds to both Sonic and Fubuki with a sneer: one for a ridiculous name, the other for her failed newbie crushing.
• Person of Mass Destruction: It's downplayed since this is a gag comic and he's overshadowed by Saitama, but his arm cannons are ridiculously powerful. Early on, he effortlessly blows up an area several city blocks in radius, and later he destroys the entire House of Evolution (aside from the underground lab) with one hit; during his fight with Saitama, he blows up entire mountains by accident when his attacks miss.
• Playing with Fire: He is capable of creating a huge wall of fire thanks to his arm cannons. He also uses this to roast his enemies to ashes.
• Power Palms: Genos's primary blasters are situated in his palms, leading to numerous open palms stances to blow a monster to smithereens.
• Pyrrhic Victory: In the webcomic, Genos finally defeats a Dragon-level monster, one that acts as a whole group no less, by himself way later during the Neo Heroes arc, but he suffers extreme damage on his body as usual. This leaves Genos completely despondent, wondering how he's ever gonna feel strong if the monsters are seemingly getting stronger at a faster rate than he can catch up, and his obsession with getting stronger just increases after this sad victory.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: His Machine Gun Blow.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Does the household chores for Saitama. Bonus points that he wears a pink apron. Murata really likes to draw him either with an apron or doing chores.
• Red Baron: Demon Cyborg.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Despite being The Stoic, he's red to Saitama's blue due to his aggressiveness and him being more likely to act before thinking.
• Reused Character Design: His manga design seems to be a combination of various characters from Eyeshield 21, Murata's previous work.
• The Rival: To Speed-O'-Sound Sonic, apart from him being Unknown Rival to Saitama. Genos despises him due to his obsession with Saitama, and considers him as a reason to become stronger. Word of God claims that the fight between Sonic and Genos would end in a draw, and they're closely matched when they fight in canon, also they consistently Took a Level in Badass, with constant upgrades and training for Genos and Sonic respectively.
• Rocket Punch: Thrusters on his shoulders and elbows allow him to add more power to his attacks.
• Running Gag: By the end of every arc, Genos invariably ends up losing one or more limbs. He almost breaks this trend during the Alien Mothership attack, where he is one of the few to remain relatively unscathed by the end of the battle. Then he calls Tatsumaki a brat, and she throws him into a wall. The anime made sure to continue the gag by having Saitama accidentally yank his arm off while trying to help him back out. Subverted in the manga's Monster Association arc, where he gets the worst case of this yet, losing all of his limbs to Black Sperm, leaving him and Tatsumaki helpless and on the verge of death.
• Sarcasm-Blind: Taking Saitama angrily asking him "What's your problem?" as a genuine therapeutic question is just one example of his nature as The Comically Serious blinding him to normal conventions.
• Shock and Awe: Genos' fists can release an electrical charge powerful enough to burn out monsters.
• Sleeves Are for Wimps: Always, to show off his robotic arms. Also justified, as sleeves would never survive his bigger attacks, so having them in the first place would be a waste.
• Stalker without a Crush: He stalked Saitama for five days trying to find the secret to his powers. Implied in an extra chapter. How else would he know that Saitama has been staring at a vending machine?
• The Stoic: Nothing fazes this guy, even if his body is wrecked by the monster of the week. Subverted, when this occasionally cracks.
• Super-Speed: He actually manages to keep up with Sonic when the two fight, though Sonic ultimately proves to be faster.
• Super-Toughness: Although he is disarmed often (once an arc, at least), only powerful opponents can do that to him and he can withstand a heavy beatdown and keep fighting.
• Taking the Bullet: He takes a head-on globule of acid that melts through a good portion of his back in order to protect a little girl.
• Taking You with Me: When he's overwhelmed by Mosquito Girl, he attempts to detonate his core so she'll die along with him. He's saved from that when Saitama turns her into a bloody smear on his apartment building wall.
• Targeted to Hurt the Hero: Genos is killed by Awakened Garou in Chapter 166 of the manga in order to make Saitama fight at full strength.
• Technicolor Eyes: Black sclera and gold irises.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • In the manga, while Saitama is tied up with a tournament arc during a massive monster invasion, Genos finally gets to cut loose and takes out monster after monster with little trouble despite most of them being fairly powerful.
  • In the King arc, he is able to defeat G4, a robot that was designed to defeat the World's Strongest Man, King himself! He does this without anyone's help, and even though he still loses an arm in the struggle, this time it makes him look like a badass battle-scarred warrior instead of being played for comedy like it usually is.
• Took a Level in Badass: Already an S-Class hero from the start, but he gets periodically stronger:
  • With G4 Upgrade using G4 parts after beating him; in VGS he was shown to be able to kill Mosquito Girl in only one attack and hydrated Deep Sea King in only two attacks.
  • His post Super-Fight upgrade allows him to purposely detach his limbs and control them, turning his Running Gag tendencies into his strengths, used against Garou. Later he also was able to enter Centichoro's body by kicking his teeth inside and burn him from his insides, albeit Centichoro didn't go down completely.
  • His Monster Association arc upgrade allows him to one shot G5 core with Jet Drive Arrow, a Diving Kick. In comparison, Genos needs to take 15 minutes and 34 seconds to beat G4 according to the databook.
  • His Dragon Knight upgrade enabled him to assist Tatsumaki against Psykorochi by holding off her Wave-Motion Gun. However this upgrade only lasts for 10 seconds.
• Tricked-Out Shoes: To gain the advantage against speedsters who like to suddenly appear behind him, Genos's cybernetic feet can stealthily release a puddle of glue to immobilize inattentive enemies.
• Undying Loyalty: No matter the choices Saitama makes or how he acts, he will always be loyal to him, have his back when he needs it, and won't be afraid to stand up for him. After Saitama defeats the Sea King and puts up a façade to ensure that the other heroes get recognition, he has this inner monologue.
  Genos: Master Saitama. Are you really okay with this? But if this is the path you choose to take, master, I will accept your choice without a word. However, once you've turned the masses against you will you even be able to work as a hero anymore? I can't help but worry about what's to yet to come. If Master Saitama should ever find himself completely cornered, if it should ever come to that, I will...
• Unskilled, but Strong: In combat, Genos mostly relies on as much firepower and mass destruction weapons he can use to destroy his enemies. While somewhat skilled with his cyborg functions and experienced in his own right, Genos rarely bothers to use actual tactics while fighting, and he tends to lower his guard a lot, allowing enemies to land critical damage on him. Lastly, he also refuses to learn martial arts from Bang, since as he puts it, he "searches not for the art of self-defense but destructive power". Saitama shows more skill with his powers than Genos does with his mechanical upgrades.
• Wave-Motion Gun: In episode 7 of the anime, he gets prototype arm attachments that let him fire a powerful incinerating blast, which he makes even stronger by attaching his core to his arm and drawing power directly from it. It fails to stop the meteor he was using it against.
• When He Smiles: Gives sometimes, usually when Saitama finally arrives to save the day or praises him.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Invoked, then subverted. Upon arriving at the base of operations for the House of Evolution, Genos immediately vaporizes it, much to Saitama's surprise. However, it turns out that most of the base is underground.
• The Worf Effect: Despite being considered very powerful by a lot of characters he tends to be defeated quite easily by named villains. While normally this would serve the purpose of demonstrating how strong said villain is, and thus a potential worthy opponent for The Hero, Saitama knows better.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: It looked as though he was actually going to manage to get through the Alien Invasion arc without getting scrapped for once, only for him to call Tatsumaki a brat and get embedded in a wall. In the anime, Saitama completes the running gag by accidentally ripping his arm when trying to pry him free.

15. Tank-Top Master

Tank-Top Master

Voiced by: Katsuyuki Konishi (Japanese), Patrick Seitz (English), Raúl Solo (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

Tanktop Master is the head of the Tanktopper Army and uses the Tank-Top fighting style. He is very strong and is actually a decent person, but gets overshadowed by his fellow S-Class Heroes. Rarely manages to get through a scene without mentioning his tank top or comparing something to wearing one.

---

• Adaptation Expansion: In the manga, he actually participates in the battle against the Monster Association. He and some of his fellow Tanktoppers also join the battle against Forest King.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: He's the highest-ranking practitioner of the "Tank-Top" fighting style and is the master of all the other Tank-Tops.
• Badass Normal: One of the few S-Class heroes who doesn't have a gimmick other than being incredibly strong.
• Butt-Monkey: The only S-class hero never to have a meaningful victory to his name (it says something when Genos has a better track record). In a meta way, he is also unremarkable among S-class heroes. His Charles Atlas Superpower is hardly unique, but the others can boast either technique (Bang, Flash), an utterly ridiculous amount (Superalloy), the use of implements (Flash, Metal Bat) or other abilities (Metal Bat's "fighting spirit", Prisoner's continuous evolution), all he has going for him is... the tank top. Which, despite his claims, doesn't even really come into play during battles.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: In some chapters, it is shown that he gained his strength through doing rigorous workouts, like carrying absurdly heavy weights. He can lift building debris many times his size with one arm.
• Clothes Make the Superman: Parodied. He, along with the other practitioners of the Tank Top fighting style, apparently draws their strength from wearing tank tops, though usually this comes with some other gimmicks and plenty of strength training.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: While he is unable to defeat the Dragon-level threat, Heavy Smoker, he is still able to keep it busy long enough without any major injuries aside from poison until Flashy Flash arrives to kill the monster instantly.
• Determinator: Despite his many setbacks and being shown up by others, Tanktop Master continues to train himself to prove the power the tanktop gives him.
• Fantastic Fighting Style: Parodied with the Tank Top fighting style, which he is a master of. Apparently, wearing a tank top gives you superpowers, and its "versatility" can be used in various ways to kick an opponent's ass.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Downplayed. A lot of his Tanktop Army is pretty chill and highly dedicated to his philosophy. Others, though, like Vegetarian, Blackhole, and Tiger, are prideful to a fault and are essentially big bullies.
• It's All My Fault: After the Garou arc, he notes that many other Tanktop heroes have retired and blames himself for losing, believing that was being a catalyst for the others to lose hope.
• Jobber: He's the only S-Rank Hero that gets humiliated every time he appears. Tatsumaki shows him up using her psychic powers during the alien invasion, he attacks the drones Metal Knight was using to rebuild A-City and feels inadequate once the project is finished in a week when it would have taken him hundreds of days just to clear the rubble, Garou succeeds in beating him, which boosts his confidence and makes him decide to graduate to fighting S-Class heroes, and then Fuhrer Ugly outright breaks every bone in his body and beats him so bad that his heart temporarily stops.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Despite the running gag, there is something unusual about his tank top to the point even Bang comments on it. It restarts his heart when being snapped to his chest (despite the fact that he should be very dead) and he can get one so tight that it essentially holds him together as he pushes himself way past his limits. Again, this is a guy that can throw buildings and he can put on a tank top that gets so tight that he can only fight in it at max power for 5 minutes. Delusional TTM may be, but this series runs on Achievements in Ignorance and he is an S-Class Hero, so maybe he has a point.
• Not Quite Dead: Gets completely brutalized by Fuhrer Ugly, only to heal himself thanks to his tanktop.
• Odd Friendship: He's an S-Class hero, at the tip-top of the hero community and he's become friends with the C-Class hero Mumen Rider. Rider had stopped him from punching a seemingly defeated Garou (even taking the punch Tank Top Master intended to give to the villain) by using good logic and later on attempted to stop a monster from attacking civilians in the hospital they were both recovering at. His conviction impressed TTM. Mumen Rider is also the only person outside of the Tank Top Army to compliment TTM (the tackle that killed the monster in the hospital). In a way, it's a parallel of the friendship between Saitama and King.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: He's strong enough to be an S-Rank hero and one of the physically strongest humans in the series. It's just that Tatsumaki, Metal Knight, Garou and Fuhrer Ugly are far more formidable than he is.
• Real Men Wear Pink: All the tanktops he wears were made by his own hand with the Hero Association even selling some of them as merchandise.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Compared to most of the others who use the Tanktop Fighting Style and the other S-Class heroes, he's actually a decent guy.
• Running Gag: Defeat or humiliation is what always happens to the members of the Tank Top Army.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: While some Tank-Toppers left after the Monster Association arc, the manga adaptation does give him three new members inspired by the strength he showed.
• Unknown Rival:
  • He sees Tatsumaki as his rival, but she likely doesn't return the sentiment.
  • He later sees Metal Knight as a rival as well, who also likely doesn't return the sentiment.
  • He also sees Genos as one, who yet again, likely doesn't return the sentiment.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: He actually participates in the battle against the Monster Association Executives, only to be brutalized by Fuhrer Ugly. Thankfully he gets better due to his magic tanktop.

16. Bad (Metal Bat)

Bad

Voiced by: Wataru Hatano (Japanese), Sam Riegel (English), Eduardo Ramírez (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 32 (Webcomic), Chapter 29 (Manga), Episode 10 (Anime)

Bad, a.k.a. Metal Bat, is a hot-blooded delinquent who wields a metallic baseball bat. Not only is he strong and insightful in battle, but the angrier he gets and the more damage he takes, the more powerful he becomes. Metal Bat can shrug off the gravest wounds to continue fighting. He is fond of his little sister, Zenko.

---

• Adaptation Expansion: In the manga, he actually participates in the battle against the Monster Association and fights Garou later teaming up with him to defeat the monster.
• Affectionate Parody: Of a certain type of Shōnen hero. Specifically those like Yusuke Urameshi and Ichigo Kurosaki who tend to be Japanese Delinquents with a Face of a Thug and matching personality while still being unexpectedly heroic. No matter what fantastic powers they possess, their biggest asset tends to be their unwavering will to win.
• Almighty Janitor: Was taking out Demon-level threats back when he was in C-Class.
• Badass Normal: Possibly. Of the S-Class Heroes, who are either a Flying Brick, technological geniuses, or have some kind of otherworldly superpower, he's... a metal bat-wielding delinquent who gets stronger the longer he fights someone. It's unclear whether his ability to get stronger as he gets angrier and takes more damage is natural or not.
• Batter Up!: He wields a metal bat, which doesn't seem to break or get damaged. Before his promotion to S-Class, he went through a ton of normal metal bats. Upon his promotion to S-Class, the Hero Association decided to give him anything he wanted as a celebratory gift. He requested an unbreakable bat.
• Benched Hero: After leaving the Hero Association to join Neo Heroes, he quickly becomes this due to Neo Heroes labelling him uncontrollable for being skeptical at their policies, which for the record happened after they tried to forcefully turn him into a cyborg with no free will.
• Big Brother Instinct: He possesses a strong, unwavering devotion to his little sister, Zenko. He is often devastated when his responsibilities to the Hero Association conflict with his time with her, and has vowed not to fight in front of her, even when faced with an unwavering opponent like Garou.
• Book Dumb: He doesn't seem to be particularly smart, but he's by far one of the most determined Hero Association members out there.
• Bullying a Dragon: He tried to pick a fight with Tatsumaki, in spite of her rank and Superpower Lottery after she insulted him. Luckily for him, Flash defused the situation before the fight could take place.
• Coat Cape: How he wears his black jacket.
• Critical Status Buff: In his fight with Garou, the latter notices that he becomes stronger the more damage he tanks.
• Defector from Decadence: He left the Hero Association and joins the Neo Heroes as of Chapter 110 in the webcomic. His motives behind this are unknown, though it may have been because of how low the Association has sunk following the whole deal with Garou. However, it is also clear he does not trust Neo Heroes especially after they forcefully tried to turn him into a cyborg. When McCoy tells him about the ongoing robot invasion, he requests McCoy to give him the metal bat he received from the Hero Association rather than the gaudy Swiss-Army Weapon he received from Neo Heroes symbolizing that his opinion towards Neo Heroes has sunk to a far greater low than he ever had with the Hero Association.
• Determinator: Part of his style is that he refuses to go down even after getting beat up. In fact, he becomes stronger and faster the more damage he takes and the longer the battle drags on. When Garou thinks he won, Bad gets right back up and is microseconds away from caving Garou's skull in. Zenko showing up is the only reason Garou’s hero hunt doesn’t end right there.
• Empowered Badass Normal: He's already an S-Class hero, strong enough to quickly take down huge, powerful monsters with nothing more than a metal baseball bat. Upon joining the Neo Heroes, he too starts wearing their special Powered Armor and notes how even light swings seem to generate shockwaves against the air itself.
• Enemy Mine: Ends up performing a Teeth-Clenched Teamwork with Garou in the manga to fight off Sage Centipede, despite bickering with him the entire time. Almost by pure accident and coincidence, they make a near-perfect team together.
• Establishing Character Moment: His first appearance has him attending a hero meeting, sitting with his feet on the table, while feeling angry that he has to miss his little sister's recital. Despite his delinquent looks and personality, he's much softer than he seems.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Even his own sister, Zenko, usually calls him Metal Bat.
• Everyone Has Standards: He's not a fan of beating up someone defenseless and injured, even if it's Garou.
• Expy: In name only — it's a reference to the classic Japanese superhero Golden Bat.
• Good Is Not Nice: He's a delinquent, is not afraid to say what he thinks, and is all too willing to get into fights with other heroes if they rub him the wrong way. However, he is a good guy deep down.
• Heroic Second Wind: Murata's Centipede arc shows this is something he takes active advantage of. When he takes serious damage, he gets stronger and faster, something he describes as his "fightin' spirit". He can take an incredible amount of punishment, to the point of multiple bone fractures, and be ready for another fight.
• Hot-Blooded: YES. By far the loudest and probably most self-confident S-Class member. His first line in the series is shouting on S-Class Heroes meeting how no matter the level, he can take a Demon or Dragon threat.
• The Infiltration: In the manga, much like Isamu, Metal Bat's defection isn't even real: he's sent specifically by Sitch to act as Sekingar's bodyguard as he infiltrates the Neo Heroes to see what they're up to. As he's sent specifically as muscle though, he doesn't quite count as The Mole.
• Japanese Delinquents: During his C-Class days — he still has the pompadour to prove it.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Has a soft spot for his little sister and his cat. He also draws the line at beating up someone defenseless, even if it's a bad guy like Garou.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Has a pet cat named Tama. He was absolutely livid about being called out to fight a Dragon-level Kaiju on the day she was expected to give birth.
• Made of Indestructium: The Volume 11 omake depicting his promotion from C-Class to S-Class shows that his only request upon being promoted was for a metal bat that wouldn't break no matter what. It's seen that when he fought with an ordinary metal bat, it would end up bent out of shape afterward.
• Meaningful Name: His name is "Bad" which can both refer to his attitude and his hero name due to how similar it sounds.
• Perpetual Frowner: His default expression has him either sporting a rather pissed-off Death Glare or looking like he's going to bash some heads in. He does smile, but it's usually around his little sister and pet cat.
• Pet the Dog: When the two C-Class heroes meet Metal Bat again, they apologise for failing the task of rescuing Waganma from Elder Centipede, falling to their knees. Instead of scolding them, Bad says it's no big deal and that encourages them to do better, holding no grudge for it.
• Red Is Violent: He wears a red turtleneck sweater, and he's the most hot-tempered and violent S-Class hero.
• Running Gag: Him trying (and failing) to get Amai Mask's autograph for his little sister.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: After defecting to Neo Heroes, he received a bat with many more functions built within.
• Tsurime Eyes: His eyes are slanted sharply with tiny dots for pupils, which contribute to his perpetually angry, violent expression. His younger sister, Zenko, has similar eyes.
• Unskilled, but Strong: During their fight, Garou remarks that Metal Bat is strong, but lacks the skill needed to fight against someone who uses martial arts like Garou. Justified as other than his ridiculous strength and endurance, he's just a delinquent whose fighting style is simply "smash opponent with metal bat." This alone, however, allowed him to instantly go from C-Class to S-Class.
• Was Too Hard on Him: When he meets Waganma again, Bad is surprised by the "spoiled brat's" concern for Child Emperor's safety and telling him to go rescue him. Until Waganma says that his dad will pay for all medical bills.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Metal Bat solves all his problems by smashing them with his metal bat.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Murata revealed that his real name is "Bad". It's canonized in Chapter 80 of the manga.
• Would Hit a Girl: He was not afraid of challenging Tatsumaki to a fight when she insulted him, showing that he does not discriminate genders at the time of fighting.
• Younger Than They Look: He's seventeen, despite looking a tad older, which also makes him one of the youngest S-Class heroes, and one of the youngest heroes in general.

17. Puri-Puri Prisoner

Puri-Puri Prisoner

Voiced by: Masaya Onosaka (Japanese), Ray Chase (English), Cesar Beltran (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 25 (Webcomic), Chapter 24 (Manga), Episode 8 (Anime)

Puri-Puri Prisoner is a burly man with flamboyant yet super powerful special moves who loves good-looking guys and addresses everyone with the suffix -chan. He is a strong Hero and usually a decent person, but chooses to live in prison lest he harass good-looking boys.

---

• Arrested for Heroism: Played with — apparently he put HIMSELF into prison (with an infinite year sentence) because he didn't want to use his strength just to try and stalk guys. He literally breaks out of prison when given the call (he writes an apology note for the damage and promises to be back soon to make it okay).
• Ass Shove: Guess how he carries his phone even when he's naked.
• Badass Normal: He possesses no obvious super-power, his whole status comes from training and the ability to adapt. He actually calls himself just "an average human male" (although his opponents lampshade how he is far from being average).
• Battle Strip: Flexing his muscles at 100% strength tears all his clothes, leaving him butt naked.
• Beware the Silly Ones: While he is a camp gay man with questionable sanity along with being considered the weakest of his rank, he is still an S-Class Hero capable of soloing Demon-Level threats.
• The Big Guy: Huge and ripped like no one's business.
• Campy Combat: He wears a sweater with a heart on it and loves good-looking guys, stating that they're his reason for being a superhero. His Angel Style has him flex his muscles to the point his clothes rip off, leaving him naked, and unleash flamboyant yet powerful special moves that give him illusory angel wings.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Tied with Superalloy Blackluster for the most ridiculous example in the series. While a far cry from the sheer amount of power and toughness manifested by the former (and not much more than other S-Class heroes), the versatility and absurdity of the ways it manifests make up for it. This includes things like weaponizing his own shaking from pain and sprouting body hair functioning as armor. Tearing through rocks or concrete is not uncommon for S-Class heroes, he is however the only one who swims through them.
• Everyone Has Standards: He may be a Stalker with a Crush to attractive men, but he does not hesitate to stand up to Amai Mask when the latter insults him and the S-Class heroes for the destruction of A-City.
• Expy: Many people also notice his design resembles Hugo/Andore from Street Fighter/Final Fight.
• Fan Disservice: Every time that he fights nude. Even In-Universe the audience is always disgusted, with people choosing to leave rather than look at him naked.
• Full-Frontal Assault: His "Angel Style" is simply him flexing his muscles so hard he tears off his clothes, so he fights in the nude.
• Gentle Giant: As the lowest-ranked hero in the S-Class, he seems to be more down-to-earth, modest, and very polite than some of the more self-absorbed heroes in S-Class. He tells Saitama about Lady Shibabawa and her predictions when the former asks him about her, without caring about him being a B-Class hero in a meeting for S-Class heroes.
• Gratuitous English: Almost all of his attacks have an English name that he yells before he uses them.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: His fight against Sea King — it basically boils down to "You call that an attack? THIS is a real attack!" over and over.
• Heroic Build: Quite built (his muscles have muscles) and he's definitely a hero... Despite his strange "quirks".
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: After both of them lost to Garou, he admitted to Superalloy Blackluster that he only does hero work so he can hook up with guys.
• Humble Hero: When fighting Vacuuma, Puri Puri states that he's just an average human being compared to the other S Class Heroes. While he may not have the devastating skills or abilities as the other S-Class heroes, his battles prove him to be far from average.
• Large Ham: He can be... Really excessive when he wants to be, like a gay version of Alex Louis Armstrong.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Turned himself in for harassing men in public, and now uses these inhibitions in prison to keep criminals in line. Despite his lecherous nature, he is also a gallant hero and has gotten better at controlling his urges over the course of the series.
• Macho Camp: Muscled enough to rip all his clothes when he flexes, and camp enough that his superhero uniform's a cute little sweater with a big red heart in it. Apparently, his boyfriend knitted it for him.
• Made of Iron: Though he still lost to it, the fact that he survived The Sea King's chain attack, and took no apparent long-term damage, speaks volumes for his toughness considering every strike was said to pack the intent to end his life.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: During the invasion of the Monster Association, he gains the ability to vibrate his body and increase his attack power after receiving several elemental attacks. Shortly after when confronting Nyan and the monsterized prison convicts, he spontaneously sprouts body hair that gives him further toughness he calls "Angelic Plumage" (much to the convicts' disgust). While Puri Puri thinks this is all a result of his "deep overflowing love" awakening new abilities, Nyan thinks it's just simple evolution but is nonetheless disturbed by it.
• Oh, Crap!: In the "Encounter" chapter, he finds Garou chained to a wall, thinking he is one of the Monster Association's prisoners. As soon as he gets within range, Garou instantly breaks his chains, lays into him with a psychotic flurry of punches, and lets loose a terrifying roar that actually visibly frightens PPP. This is perhaps the only time he's ever been truly afraid of a handsome young man, to the point of forgetting his desires.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Puri-Puri Prisoner is known as the weakest and lowest rank S-Class hero, but he is still an S-Class capable of soloing Demon-Level threats. Raiden even lampshades this after a fight with him:
  Raiden: What is up with his weak status?
• Play-Along Prisoner: He only stays in prison because he put himself there. He breaks out effortlessly when he's on hero business.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: People who see his Angel Style really want him to do this.
• Prison Rape: Implied to be what he does to other inmates as punishment, though he'll sometimes let them off with just a French kiss. Later revisions of the comic downplay this aspect of his character somewhat.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: His Angel Rush, and later Dark Angel Rush.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Wears a hand knitted sweater with a heart on it made by his boyfriend, until he ripped it to shreds in his fight against the Sea King. He gets a new one before the Monster Association raid.
• Rousing Speech: He gives one to Superalloy Blackluster after said hero experiences just how strong Garou has become and begins to think the battle is hopeless.
• Self-Restraint: He put himself in prison to keep himself from assaulting pretty guys. This way, he only limits himself to the criminals sharing his cell block (including those he apprehended himself to build his own harem).
• Took a Level in Badass: The Sea King really plays his attacks down and laughs at his conviction to protect men. During his fight with Melzargard, he even gets a small flashback of the insults Sea King threw at him... and then he shows off what he learned from that fight.
  • It's pretty much a constant, being the only S-Class hero (beside Genos) to actually get stronger after every fight. First he learns from the Sea King to pack power with every attack, then he learns to "accept the pain" after his fight with the giant porcupine, then after Nyan points out his body is actually feeling the damage he learns to weaponize those vibrations, then develops a retractable coat of body hair functioning as armor. In the webcomic he also devises a strategy to fight other martial artists in the future, covering himself fully in oil so those attacks won't have as much effect.
• Transformation Sequence: Parodied in the anime, where he gets a magical girl-ish transformation scene that he calls "Angel Style" which results in his clothes simply being ripped off, leaving him completely naked.

---