Character · One Punch Man
King
The strongest man on Earth has never won a fight, and only two people know it: a bald hero and himself.
In Otakana the clue reads: Man with three scars called the strongest human
- Type
- Character
- Series
- One Punch Man
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
King is an S-Class hero with three scars down his face and a reputation that empties rooms. Monsters surrender at the sight of him. The Hero Association has credited him with kills that happened nearby while he was frozen with terror, and the record has grown for years because nobody has ever had a reason to check it.
What he actually does is play video games, very well. He is a coward in an ordinary human body, and the loud thumping that other people call the King Engine, taken as the sound of his power gathering, is his heart trying to leave his chest. He and Saitama end up friends, largely because Saitama does not care either way.
The joke is sharper than it first looks. One Punch Man is a comedy about a hero with unbeatable strength and no recognition, and King is his exact inverse: total recognition, no strength at all. ONE wrote the webcomic in 2009, Yusuke Murata redrew it from 2012, and the two characters together make the series' case that the Hero Association measures the wrong thing.
Spelling KING
KING is four letters, an ordinary English word, and there is no trap here at all. Japanese writes it キング, kingu, with a vowel on the end that English drops and nothing else altered. The difficulty is the shortness. Four common letters, no rare consonant to lock a row, and a great many other four-letter words share the shape of KING.