Gouketsu

During his human life Gouketsu was densely muscled, clad in a ragged black keikogi cinched by a black belt. A hard, chiseled jaw, a scar riding the upper left of his lip, sharp eyes beneath forked brows, and jagged sea-urchin hair defined him back then. Turning monster sealed those first eyes shut and swapped in four vertical, bloodshot orbs tinged mulberry and vivid yellow, while the X-shaped scars and dried blood from his bout with Orochi melded into dark cross-hatched marks. The shift also rendered him gigantic: large spikes erupted across his arms and shoulders, with smaller ones marking the knuckles, wrists, and toes. His ears and teeth sharpened, his hide went brown, and a pair of long lower saber fangs jutted free.

For a monster, Gouketsu was strikingly cool, deliberate, and calculating, almost human in bearing. That poise sat beside a monster's usual cruelty and conceit: he looked down on the Super Fight entrants and craved power, plainly proud of his transformed body. Even so, he could admire genuine strength, granting Suiryu another shot and floating an executive seat after the fighter downed the freshly transformed martial artists, and when Bakuzan drunkenly assaulted him, he neither killed nor maimed the newcomer but calmly parried every blow to teach him humility. A dark streak of humor surfaced when he punted Max and Sneck skyward and idly wondered aloud whether the pair had died. At his core he lived by a Social Darwinist gospel in which the strong are destined to purge the weak through sheer violence and seize control of the world. What he was like as a human stays mostly blank, though he was bold enough to challenge the fearsome Orochi one on one, a bout he lost before being taken captive.

Gouketsu seized the title at the inaugural Super Fight tournament, eleven years ahead of the series' events. Monster King Orochi later challenged and soundly crushed him, then hauled him off alive to the Monster Association's den, where survival was offered in trade for eating a monster cell and enlisting. He complied, became a Mysterious Being, and was written off as dead by the public, while his one-time pupils, the Three Crows, likewise transformed and lost their egos to feeble willpower.

Racing toward C-City's Super Stadium during the Super Fight Arc, he knocked Genos out along the way, then commanded every martial artist present to swallow a monster cell or perish. A single kick dropped Max and Sneck; several fighters caved and turned, and he singled out Choze's result for praise. Suiryu's refusal earned him the transformed fighters as attackers, after which Gouketsu personally toyed with and badly hurt the five-time champion to flaunt the gulf between them. He rated the freshly changed Bakuzan a Dragon-level menace, and when the cocky Bakuzan lunged, he shrugged the assault off one-armed before a deliberately pulled punch blasted a huge crater in the stadium as a caution against taking on the Hero Association alone. Setting off for the Z-City ruins, he was intercepted by Saitama, whom Suiryu had warned of his might; he landed at least two hits to no effect before Saitama's punch tore his head clean off. Even beaten, his power lingered in memory, since Genos had ranked him past any monster yet faced, an opponent that felt like standing before Saitama himself.