King

King stands tall and lean, his skin lightly tanned, his eyes blue, and his blonde hair slicked back at shoulder length to rest against his nape. A long face, hollowed cheeks, and a sharp jawline complete the look. The detail people notice most is the trio of vertical scars raked over his left eye, a souvenir from Octopus Claw Man. He shuns the usual hero costume for plain streetwear, and on occasion pulls on a cap marked with the kanji for 'King.'

Backed into a corner, King turns eerily composed, giving off a menace that rattles whoever faces him. Strip that away, though, and he is a thorough coward, even as the crowd and the top brass of heroes look up to him. There is warmth in him as well: he frets over Saitama, hands out genuinely useful counsel, and drags his friend into video games, once vowing to play with just two fingers so the match stays fair.

Romance titles are a guilty pleasure of his, the likes of Doki Doki Sisters, and he panicked to bury the evidence the moment Saitama noticed. Years of wearing the world's-strongest label have sharpened his bluffing to a fine edge; he can root opponents to the spot or coax a surrender out of them, sometimes with no intention of doing so. A table of assassins once abandoned the profession after a few calm words from him, and even heavyweights like Atomic Samurai, Fuhrer Ugly, and Black Sperm have faltered before him. Underneath the dread, King half-longs to be the fearless champion the stories make him out to be. After the Atomic Samurai affair, shame and the fear of exposure drove him to beg Bang for training, then Bomb, then dojo after dojo, each turning him away until he nearly resigned himself to dying against some monster.

Even without the top rank, King is widely taken to be the mightiest man on the planet, and that belief alone wins him the reverence of other heroes; crooks and monsters routinely throw in the towel rather than square off with him. All of it rests on a mistake, however. Spotted standing over Mysterious Beings that Saitama had already downed, he was assumed to be the one who beat them. In reality he has never thrown a punch in anger, which likely makes him the frailest person in all of S-Class, and even a single staircase leaves him gasping; against machines his glare accomplishes nothing. Crime bosses keep hiring assassins to kill him, yet every one of them is as fooled as the public and tends to back off the moment King speaks calmly.

His true gift is gaming: quite possibly the best player alive, a former tournament champ, he once single-handedly demolished thirty rival competitors to rescue a bet Saitama had blindly signed away to Fubuki, and he later toppled the martial artist Suiryu in a VR match armed with nothing but a controller. He even bested Saitama in a fighting game while running on almost no health and pressing only two fingers to the pad.

The dreaded 'King Engine' feeds the legend too, a heavy rumble others read as bloodlust that is really just his heart slamming from terror. His so-called King Style boils down to bluffing free or bolting outright, padded with grand made-up techniques. His supposed secret killer move is a Wave-Motion Cannon he bombastically titles the 'Ultimate Purgatory Hellfire Burst,' a name he does nothing but bellow; the one time he screamed it in desperation, it was actually Garou showing up that flattened Evil Natural Water and Platinum Sperm alike. Rounding him out is an absurd reserve of luck, both fortunate and cursed, that carries him through calamity after calamity while somehow steering him straight into wherever the monsters happen to strike.