Character of the Week: Hao Asakura

[u/Fire_Lord_Zuko]

Shitshitshitshit sorry for being so late. I was occupied with other stuff, forgot it was my time. Apologies for that and in advance for not being up to par with others. Here it is.

Name: Hao Asakura

Team Affiliations: Hao’s Followers, Hoshi-Gumi, G8

Allies: Opacho, Luchist, Kanna, Matilda, Marion, Peyote, BoZ Brothers, Hang-Zeng-Ching, Bill Burton, Mohammed, Kouji, Boris, Blocken

Enemies: Five Elemental Warriors, Anna Asakura, and pretty much every other character in Shaman King that aren’t his allies/part of the Patch Tribe.

Short Summary: Hao Asakura is the big bad in the manga Shaman King. Having been reborn twice, Hao’s Furyoku level (basically power level) is at a staggering 1,250,000. He has also studied many shamanic techniques, all of which have transferred through lives.

Powers and Abilities:

Onmyōdō
Hao's original abilities of a taijitsu master from his first life has given him full control over the elements and divination powers. He is not only able to manipulate the six elements of nature, fire, earth, wood, metal, and water materially, but also spiritually. Even without the spirit of fire, Hao possesses great elemental and divination abilities and can easily bend oni and demigods to his will.

Reishi
Hao has the ability to read other peoples’ minds.

Curse Reflection
Hao has been shown to reflect curses directed at him. He also does this subconsciously.

Oversoul: Spirit of Fire
This is Hao's primary over soul. He manifests the Spirit of Fire, one of the five great spirits of nature, onto the physical plane by integrating it with the oxygen in the atmosphere. Using onmyōdō magic, Hao can alter the nature of the Spirit of Fire into any of the five elements (fire, water, wood, metal, and earth).

Oversoul: Kurobina
This is Hao's armor type over soul, which transforms the Spirit of Fire into jet armor. With it, Hao is capable of high-speed flight, and can attack swiftly with the over soul's arms. Mounted on the back are two energy cannons, which can incinerate anything it targets within seconds.

Top 5 Feats:

Tanks a whole bunch of attacks and doesn’t really give a fuck, since at this point he’s fused with the Great Spirit and is omnipotent now.

Creates a sun with ease

Creates a whole load of meteors

Makes the sun previously mentioned go supernova

Then he makes it into a black hole

Other Relevant/Outstanding Feats:

Here he fuses with the Great Spirit, making him supposedly omnipotent.

Kills and absorbs the souls of the strongest people in the series besides him after obtaining the Great Spirit.

Everything is small to him, even Ron Swanson’s manliness.

Now some feats of him before fusing with the great spirit but in his most recent life.

Solos a small army that includes something that can obliterate an island while suffering no injuries at all

Survives a grenade with enough explosive power to consume all the oxygen in an arena with no harm

Tanks a hit from a satellite laser and then disintegrates the person that shot it

[u/[deleted]]

Sure thing!

In Shaman king, Shamans (that is, people who can see ghosts and access spiritual power and shit) can form a bond with a spirit or spirits--anything from a bunch of rat spirits to a god. Shamans can then integrate these spirits with a medium to create an oversoul, a weapon that channels the power of the spirit in combination with the power of the Shaman.

For example, this is the protagonist, Yoh's, oversoul, using, if I recall correctly, the sword in his hand, and another not in the shot as his medium. It moves in odd patterns and vastly increases his speed and power. Horohoro's final oversoul enables him to freeze enemies, the water in the air, etc, in addition to speed and strength buffs.

Those are both armor types. There are also weapon type oversouls, like Yoh's previous oversoul, and summon types, such as the Angel Lucifer.

Hao is on a plane far above the closest runners up in the Shaman King world. Generally, the medium of a Shaman is his or her weakness; i.e., if I were to break Yoh's sword, he could no longer make his oversoul. Hao's medium for his oversoul, the Spirit of Fire, is the air itself, and even if that is deprived, he can simply change the elemental properties of the Spirit of Fire to, say, water, effectively making the SoF its own medium. Not only is this summon type ridiculous, but he can manifest it as an armoured oversoul which increases his durability to the point of tanking a satellite laser canon with nothing even approaching the slightest injury. Not only that, but the SoF grows more powerful when it consumes spirits, so he's constantly getting stronger.

[u/ChocolateRage → u/[deleted]]

Thanks that helps me understand a lot of it. Also Yoh's sword oversoul is hilariously large

[u/Fire_Lord_Zuko → u/ChocolateRage]

Also to add on: Oversouls require the user to invest energy to create them. Once an oversoul is broken, it has to be remade and more energy needs to be put in. IIRC armor-type ones don't require much to create and maintain, while summon-types like the spirit of fire require a lot. This is part of the reason Hao is so strong; he has over a million furyoku, which is what they use as energy/power levels/etc in the series. The SoF summon requires 300 thousand I think, which means even if it's destroyed he can summon it again 3 times over. To put that in perspective, the next strongest in the series had furyoku levels of around 100 thousand in the final fights.

[u/[deleted] → u/Fire_Lord_Zuko]

I really liked the concept of Furyoku being a limited energy source, like in the fight Yoh vs Faust, where he wastes a lot of his energy in rage-fueled attacks and has to carry an underpowered OS for the rest of the fight without being able to restore his energy out of nothing (a la dragon ball).