Manga / Versus (2022)

Versus (バーサス, Bāsasu) is a Japanese monthly manga series written by ONE., illustrated by Kyoutarou Azuma and composed by bose. It began publication in Monthly Shōnen Sirius on November 26th, 2022.

For centuries, humanity has endured oppression under the reign and invasion of their Natural Enemy, the Demons. The world has been under the rule of the fearsome Great Demon King and his 47 subordinate Demon Kings.

Living in constant fear, 47 individuals from various corners of the world have been chosen as Heroes and are now preparing to wage war against the formidable army of the Great Demon King.

At this critical juncture, a desperate operation is about to commence, one that will determine the very survival of the human race.

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This manga contain examples of:

• 13 Is Unlucky: Thirteen worlds, thirteen variants of humanity on their last legs, and thirteen Natural Enemies nearly annihilating their species to total extinction.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The robots who only wish to bring eternal joy and happiness. If that involved killing the living to do so, then they are willing to sacrifice the time to accomplish their raison dêtre with virtuous resolve.
• Alien Invasion: What one of the worlds is threatened by.
  • Called the Madarans, the aliens encapsulate the Dark Forest theory in the horror of encountering a superior extraterrestrial civilization from which you cannot hide in the vastness of space.
• The Alliance: The humans form a desperate one in order to keep the entire species alive in this new world where 13 of the most dangerous species that each almost wiped out their world's humanity have arrived.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The robots due to their programming, more so than the plagues which are seemingly indiscriminate and the other monsters merely following their instincts.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The New Humans of Neo Cruelty World have doll-like bodies, view themselves as superior to ‘Old Humans’ and espouse their superiority/the old humans’ inferiority religiously.
• Anyone Can Die: The humans are outmatched and outnumbered at every turn. Every encounter with even one of the Natural Enemies tends to end in the deaths of at least some humans. Tellingly, the very first mission to get Natural Enemies to fight each other ends with all but one of the humans sent dying. And said survivor becomes a prisoner who tells his allies not to rescue him.
• Apocalypse How: Thirteen variants, ranging from the destruction of humanity (species extinction) to devouring the entire world (planetary annihilation) to infecting stars (stellar death).
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Multiple Natural Enemies fit this description, the two best examples of which are the Kaiju-like Calamities of the Misfortune World and the more humanoid Giants of the Giants’ World.
• Beehive Barrier: One of the more advanced robots uses this to protect itself from lightning magic.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The Madarans are made of 'compressed information'.
• Boss Subtitles: The first time they appear in person, each Natural Enemy gets a box introducing them, with their name and the name of their world of origin.
• Charge-into-Combat Cut: What Kiva was last witnessed performing in chapter fifteen after experiencing the violence he enacted to humans, rushing toward his own demise against the Madarans.
• Children Are Innocent: At one point, Hallow sits down and watches a group of kids from most of the various creeds of humanity play a game of soccer with no distinction between each other. It serves as a reminder that, for all their bickering, for how divergent they are, and for as high as the stakes might be, humanity is still in the fight for a reason, and their differences can be overcome.
• Cool Versus Awesome: Robots vs demons? Check. Giants vs giant moles? Check. Demons vs giants? About to be, and it seems the New Humans are joining the fight. This series, in general, is the answer to the idea: What if all these monsters killing humanity fight it out for preeminence?
• Crapsack World: A multiversal variety wherein every humanity is on its last leg before seeking aid from other realities leading to the Patchwork World below.
• Culture Clash: Inevitable when there are humans from 13 different realities mixing together. This causes some initial problems in the beginning since some factions cannot believe that the Natural Enemies of other worlds could possibly stand up to their own and dismiss them as threats as a result.
• Curbstomp Battle:
  • The Demon Army get slaughtered by the Aliens. Granted, mooks have been defeated by Giants before, but even then the demons had at least killed a smaller giant. In the first encounter between demons and aliens, even the demon general Kiva is struck aside. Kiva summoning his QuirkyMinibossSquad only distributed the pain.
• Cute Machines: The robot army puts up a front of being harmless and friendly, with their cute jingles and smiley-face screens, to lure humans out of hiding.
• Darker and Edgier: To ONE's previous works. One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100 were not devoid of suffering or cruelty, but they pale in comparison to the amount of blood and death that occurs in just the first few chapters of Versus. And unlike those two series, there is nobody like Saitama or Mob on humanity's side, meaning they have no hope of defeating their Natural Enemies in a straight on fight, forcing them to rely on pitting the Natural Enemies against each other.
• Death World: Comes in thirteen different flavors, but the vicious wildlife of the Wild Green World is the most traditional example of this trope.
• Deconstruction: Of the Isekai genre where a world in trouble of being annihilated summons heroes from another world to solve the problems for them. Rather than summoning heroes who can defeat their Natural Enemies, humanity only succeeded in merging all their worlds with other worlds where humanity is on the verge of extinction from an evil threat, thus making it so they now have to deal with 13 different evil factions that are all capable of defeating humanity easily instead of just one. This leaves humanity realizing they can't throw all their problems onto somebody else and the only ones who can help them out of this hopeless situation is themselves.
• Dramatic Irony: Hallow wishes he and Alio worked together to take out the group of Giants that were about to find humanity’s base. While he and Alio most likely could have beaten the Giants after a hard fight, Hallow doesn’t know that group of Giants were infected by the Parasites from the Parasite World. So even if they won, they would have had to fight another Natural Enemy faction afterwards and most likely would have been infected by the Parasites.
• Enemy Civil War: The one-sided demon-robot alliance, however brief it was, involved the demon captain Kiva tolerating the robots since they were on the same side killing off human survivors. That lasted until the robot attacked him.
• Enfant Terrible: The young New Humans who took advantage of Alio's humanity to carve him up.
• Eviler than Thou:
  • The New Humans from Neo Cruelty World prove they’re more malicious than the brutish giants, uncaring about their dead and getting joy at the thought of causing Alio pain and suffering, intending on hunting those he cares about just for fun. The giants, while not exactly good or gentle, are far less torturous in their methods.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: The series' premise is for the surviving humanity to pit their Natural Enemies against each other. Time will tell if it's greatly averted or played straight.
  • Hallow pits the robots against the demons and it is a major success, though whether or not it was worth the robots accumulating so much power and information is still unknown.
  • The expedition squad led by Ario to bargain with the giants away from their base way toward that of another Natural Enemy leads to almost all of his entire group getting slaughtered. Still, they succeed in leading the giants into the New Humanity city.
  • The Space Devil World humans deliberately activate one of their satellites, drawing the aliens' attention to its activation and the battle against the demons. The humans were already being outnumbered by the demons, but will now know if summoning a species that ruled the universe would be worth the invoked Villainous Rescue.
• Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: Averted. The surviving group of humans plan on pitting the natural enemies against each other.
  • Even within their own kind, the New Humans are apathetic to their species’ death in the hands of giants, actually detecting outsiders due to showing care.
• Evil Learns of Outside Context: The parasites, originally targeting solely humans, have now acquired a giant.
• Evil vs. Evil: When defeating the Natural Enemy—beings who prey on humanity—proves unsuccessful even with the help from other humans, humanity reluctantly embraces a new idea: pitting each of the 13 Natural Enemies against each other in the hope that they will annihilate one another. For their part, the antagonists were all top dogs destroying humanity in their respective world. It changed when the worlds converged, the various apex predators now finding peer competition for their prey.
  • The demons who want to kill all humans fight the robots who... also want to kill all humans.
  • A giant who chased after Hallow's rescue party unintentionally instigated a fight with giant moles when it stumbled into their territory.
  • The demons kill off a giant, prompting a response from their species and leader Gimbak.
  • A group of giants, after killing most of a party of humans, were misled into rampaging in New Humanity's city, unable to differentiate between the two factions.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Some of the monsters like the giants want to eat and enslave humanity, though for how long till they change their minds is up for debate. That makes them the 'tentatively' lesser evil compared to robots and plagues and other abominable entities that seek only total annihilation.
• Face Death with Dignity: While his death isn’t confirmed, Kiva is still convinced he will die against the Aliens. And rather than cry and flee in terror like the rest of the demon army, Kiva chooses to instead go out fighting.
• Fantastic Racism: The sentient Natural Enemy species so far have all shown utter disdain towards humanity and either see them as pests to exterminate or toys to play with.
• First Contact: Not only among the humans, but also among the Natural Enemies who finally experience the unique sensation of being challenged by peer predators.
• First-Episode Twist: The first chapter makes it seem like an entirely conventional, if extremely grim, Dark Fantasy story. This is then given some hints by news of the summoning, but still nothing too abnormal for the genre. Then the actual summon takes place... and then we learn that the summoning was mutual, at which point it becomes apparent that we're dealing with anything but a conventional fantasy story.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • Right after dealing with some giants advancing on their base, the humans have to deal with the demon army being right outside their door.
  • Taken to a ridiculous extent when the demons invade the humans' base. The humans proceed to summon the aliens by activating satellite lasers which allow the aliens to triangulate their position, the aliens proceeding to decimate the demons. The humans had to heal the demons to fight the aliens whose ships progressively get bigger, while desperately looking for a way out. Then a Calamity, a mega kaiju, gives them that chance by destroying the aliens' giant ship, most likely threatening everyone in the vicinity.
• Go-Go Enslavement: One of two of the giants' proclivities.
• God Is Evil: Seemingly. The Natural Enemy from Mad God World happens to be their god who descended into madness. However, obtaining further information about this god is a delicate matter, as it is fraught with the risk of angering him.
• Godzilla Threshold: The entire comic is essentially a series of Godzilla Thresholds, since humanity constantly needs to play the different Natural Enemy factions off against each other; but this is particularly invoked in chapter 10 and 11, where they deliberately summon the Cosmic Devil World's natural enemy in hopes that they'll fight the demons.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Every world's attempts to summon an alternate version of humanity to solve their problems just multiplies it by 13.
• Hope Spot: At first it seems like the denizen of the Magic Forces World and Machine Rule World are natural counters to the Natural Enemies of the other's world but it quickly becomes clear they're just as outmatched against each other's enemies as they were their own.
• Humans Are Not the Dominant Species: Thirteen worlds over, they are reminded of this by their Natural Enemies, predators to whom they are but prey.
• Inscrutable Aliens: The Aliens that crashlanded into the battlefield after destroying the Cosmic Devil World humanity's satellites, rulers of their universe, just kill every lifeform they encounter seemingly unprompted.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Masayoshi, from the Misfortune World, may be an unemployed loser but he has a point when he says humanity should just hide and wait for the Natural Enemies to fight each other rather than risk their base's location being revealed after they instigate hostilities between Natural Enemies.
• Killer Robot: Hailing from a futuristic Machine Rule World ruined by a genocidal war. They only want to bring eternal peace.
• Kaiju: The Natural Enemy from Misfortune World happens to be titanic monsters known as "calamities" that are rampaging throughout their world.
• Let's You and Him Fight: A heroic variant. The surviving heroes of the thirteen worlds instigate battles between their Natural Enemies, those who prey on humanity, leading to a new ecosystem where the peer predators kill each other off for daring to challenge them.
• Master Race: A common trait among the various enemies of mankind. They either hold beings not of their own kind to be inferior or in the case of the robots and less sapient monsters Always Chaotic Evil.
• Mêlée à Trois: The series.
• The Multiverse: A grim dark one. Humanity from the various worlds are being killed off by their own brand of monster—demons, robots, giants, giant moles, monster plants, a tree sapping the life of the planet, flying saucer aliens, a malevolent god, a plague poisoning the stars and everything in between. It is telling when the new world is a better alternative.
• Merged Reality: The main premise of the story. When Magic Force World humanity faces near extinction and in a desperate attempt to find aid, they create magical runes capable of summoning heroes from other worlds. However, their plans go awry when twelve other worlds had the same idea simultaneously, resulting in the merging of all thirteen worlds into one chaotic planet.
• Nature Is Not Nice: The Untamed Wilderness of Wild Green World with its giant moles, man-eating plants and insects whose shells even giants find inedible.
• Opponent Switch: The second chapter features them trying this out, with the Magic Forces humans and the Machine World humans facing off against their respective foes. Initially, it looks like it's going really well, with the advanced Machine World weapons cutting through the mostly-medieval demons like chaff, while the mages of Magic Forces find out that robots are Weak to Magic due to having no magic power. However, the "it always works" part of this trope then gets horribly subverted when it turns out that the Adaptive Ability of the robots works on magic as much as anything else, and a Demon General is powerful enough to shrug off a squad's full weapons compliment. This serves to establish that while coming from a different world may give you a surprise edge, an edge against a threat that could wipe out humanity is still facing off against a threat that could wipe out humanity.
• Our Demons Are Different: They have an oceanic theme with fins and gills and one—the 19th Demon King Nudou—even resembling a blobfish. Each realm is led by a Demon King forming 47 monarchies that answer to a Great Demon King.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: The New Humans, despite being one of the natural enemies threatening the existence of humanity, look like they might have just walked off a runway with their bizarre clothes and hairstyles.
• Outside-Context Problem: The humans to each other’s Natural Enemies, or the grunts at least, and more importantly the Natural Enemies toward each other.
  • When the worlds merged, many humans perished because they were attacked by threats they had no experience dealing with, like the Giants wiping out the main headquarters of the Machine Rule World.
  • Weaker demons were slain by bullets and robots were beaten by magic, though it didn’t last long.
  • The demons chasing the humans of their world encounter robots whose ‘tribe’ they seek after an altercation, and the robots in turn mistake them for enemies for possessing the same magic as the humans. The ensuing slugfest was the first of many violent battles between peer predators who dominated their respective world.
  • The giants who mistook the new humans for the ‘old’ get to watch one of their own die. The new humans in turn get killed by the hundreds once the giants began taking them seriously. Note these are the weaker—relatively smaller giants and civilian new humans—members of their faction.
• Patchwork World: The merged world was created by the various summoning spells, dimensional gates and other multiverse traveling methods colliding and dragging the worlds, the humans asking for aid, and the various monsters killing them, into one big chaotic warzone.
• People Puppets:
  • The 19th Demon King Nudou treats people like toys, playing a chess game wherein the piece, or people, were forced to fight against each other, making a father be killed by his own son.
  • One of the Natural Enemies is a parasite that does this to human bodies.
• Planetary Parasite: The World Tree devouring the planet's nutrients.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: The Executives Kiva summoned for aid, reminiscent of a cultured demon, a fat eyeless one, and a pterodactyl.
• Robot War: The devastation that wrecked Machine Rule World.
• Sliding Scale Of Natural Enemy Threat: Though they are all hostile to humanity, some like the giants and New Humans are only physical threats and only to those they could reach. The parasites are airborne, the world tree is eating the entire planet, the aliens can bomb it, and the curse and Mad God are more metaphysical in their stellar reaching and theological natures, respectively.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: Taken to horrifying levels with the giants representing the barbaric slobs and the new humans exemplifying the sadistic snobs. The giants are primitive and crude in their savagery whereas the new humans have turned it into fine art and entertainment. Even their weapons, brutal clubs and knives like scalpels reflect this.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To ONE's previous works as there is no exceptional protagonist holding back the enemies of mankind. Humanity is genuinely incapable of fighting any of the major threats directly, and so must conspire to have them take each other out.
• Super Supremacist: Arguably every sapient Natural Enemy, but of those closest to the humans are their Newer counterparts, the New Humans of Neo Cruelty World. The New Humans most resemble the humans, if everyone hailed from a fashion show. They are an entire society of supers who enjoy torturing their weaker, inferior predecessors.
• Summon Bigger Fish:
  • The Space Devil World humans’ Kill Sats when used on maximum output could be detected by the aliens. In desperation to get reprieve from the demons’ siege it was done so and promptly destroyed, the spacefaring aliens locating the humans and dropping into the battle.
• The Right of a Superior Species: All the sapient Natural Enemies.
• To Serve Man: The other of the giants' favorite predisposition.
• Underestimating Badassery: Crops up at times. The various humans from different worlds naturally assume that their world's Natural Enemies are the strongest amongst all the others having never seen the others before. Time will tell if what problem's this will cause but as of time of writing, it seems this may be happening to the Lawless humans in Chapter 13 with everyone deciding that dealing with vicious humans is leagues better than the demons and aliens though that doesn't mean that they don't see them as a threat just not as big of one as the aforementioned demons and aliens.
• Versus Title: In a literal way.
• Villain Respect: Kiva watches the Aliens completely decimate his demon army, unable to fight back in any way. Experiencing how it feels to be at the mercy of a foe which you stand no chance of winning against gives Kiva a newfound respect for Hallow’s ability to remain courageous despite the sheer hopelessness of their situations.
• Villainous Rescue:
  • Hallow intentionally provokes one of the more powerful robots, leading it to send an attack that inadvertantly hits a demon and saves himself.
  • Just when the Aliens are about to defeat the Demons and destroy humanity’s last base with their ship, a Calamity appears and easily destroys the Alien’s ship
• We ARE Struggling Together: Even with 13 different Natural Enemies bearing down on them, all the different factions of humanity don't immediately get along. Luckily, so far, it's not reached a point where they are actively hindering each other and more on the level of bickering with each other over cultural differences.
• World Tree: The Natural Enemy from Huge Tree World where it’s absorbing all the nutrients and life from the planet.
• Zeppelins from Another World: A first look into the new human colony shows us several futuristic looking blimps in the skies.
• Zerg Rush:
  • What the New Humans’ tactic amounts to. Individually smaller and frailer than the giants, the New Humans mitigate this by being swifter, more coordinated and numerous. They tear through the giants’ brutish attacks, climbing their arms and slashing their flesh with ease.
  • The Demons use the same tactic of swarming humanity's base with their much larger numbers. While not as precise or skillful as the New Humans, the Demon army would have succeeded in swarming humanity's base... if not for the Aliens joining the fight.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The Natural Enemy from Parasite World manifests as a virus that infects humanity, causing them to attack and harm one another while also being affected by the virus themselves.
  • They're not limited to humans either, and the spore-like gas fumed by the giant zombie's mutations reveal the parasites' weaponized nature.

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