Highlights
- Tatsumaki, or Terrible Tornado, is the number 2 ranked hero in the Hero Association, thanks to her impressive feats of strength and psychic ability.
- Tatsumaki’s troubled past and her encounter with the rogue group Tsukuyomi shaped her personality and motivated her to embrace her powers.
- Tatsumaki has shown herself to be a formidable one-woman army, with mastery over her psychic powers, capable of taking down gigantic monsters and even withstanding Saitama’s strength.
Tatsumaki, or Terrible Tornado, is the most powerful psychic in all of One Punch Man, something that she has proven many times over since her very first appearance. Since the very start of the series, Tatsumaki has proven why she is the number 2 ranked hero in the entire Hero Association and has since then retained her position by showing some of the most spectacular feats of strength and psychic ability that have ever been put to the page.
Her feats of power are highly destructive and second only to what Saitama has been shown to do when it comes to the heroes of the world. One Punch Man makes the tier structure of powers of the world very clear and has also set the standard for what most of the characters are capable of. So, let’s take a look at why Tatsumaki is so strong and why she is the Rank 2 hero in the Hero Association.
Tatsumaki’s Troubled Past
Not much was known about Tatsumaki’s backstory during the initial stages of the One Punch Man story. However, the recent chapters finally revealed her story and motivations, as well as explaining why her personality is the way that it is. When Tatsumaki was 7 years old, she finally started to show some of her latent psychic powers, something that caught the attention of a rogue group of Espers called Tsukuyomi.
Tsukuyomi then gave Tatsumaki’s adoptive family a large sum of money to take both her and Fubuki from them in order to study them and their powers. Though they gave her candies and toys for her cooperation, Tsukuyomi denied all of Tatsumaki’s requests to leave or go outside, instead keeping her confined in a cage-like room whenever she didn’t use her powers.
However, 10 years before the start of the main story, there was a monster outbreak in the facility where she and Fubuki were being kept and, in the midst of the panic and confusion, she was left alone in her cage. However, she was saved by S-Class, Rank 1 hero, Blast, who questioned her about why she didn’t use her powers to protect herself, to which she revealed that she was heartbroken about how her parents sold her off.
She also revealed how she thought that if she never used her powers, Tsukuyomi would find her to be useless and would let her go. After Blast gave her some advice on how she shouldn’t rely on others to save her and how she now bears the responsibility of protecting the only family she has left, Tatsumaki finally embraced her abilities and went on to seemingly eradicate Tsukuyomi and save her sister.
A Small But Deadly Hero
Tatsumaki has proven herself to be more like a one-woman army who is strong enough to fight off gigantic monsters and deal with massive threats all by herself. She holds incredible mastery over everything that her psychic powers encompass, effortlessly using her telekinesis to stop the strongest monsters and dish out attacks that can lay waste to almost everything she sees. She has also shown herself to be powerful enough to destroy entire cities with just a simple movement of her hands but drastically controls her strength at all times.
Tatsumaki’s true strength is also largely a mystery as she has only been shown to use it a couple of times in the manga, and very briefly at that. Most of her incredible feats in One Punch Man are ones that she has been able to show without very much effort, such as her fight against the Ancient King of the Terror Lizard Clan. Though her powers are very straightforward in terms of what she can do, her mastery over them makes her very formidable.
The very first time that she was shown in action was against the very same Ancient King, who was a gigantic dinosaur-like monster who ruled the Terror Lizard Clan and spread destruction upon the Earth along with the Deep Sea Clan and the Subterraneans. The monster was so powerful that he claimed that the only way to stop him was if a giant meteor came and struck him directly. After being dispatched to take care of him, Tatsumaki did exactly that and put an end to the monster by crushing him with a meteor she grabbed with her psychic powers.
After this, she was seen very briefly in the fight against Boros and his army, where she intercepted the mortar bombardment from Boros’ ship and turned it back on the vessel. This showed her reaction time as well as her sheer strength as each round of bombardment from these shells was enough to level an entire city and during the end of the arc, she was seen casually throwing entire destroyed buildings towards the ship as well.
Her next showing was her most impressive. Towards the middle of the Monster Association arc, fans were introduced to the monstrous merger that resulted in PsykOrochi, an amalgamation of the destructive power of Monster King Orochi and the psychic might of Psykos. This was an extremely hard fight for the hero as she was seen to have taken some very serious damage throughout the battle from various Dragon-Level threats. Despite this, she never gave in and turned PsykOrochi into a massive spear that she drove into the Monster Association HQ.
Her next battle was against everyone’s favorite hero; Saitama himself. The fight went underway because Tatsumaki thought of Saitama as being someone who tried to take advantage of Fubuki and was strong enough to resist her strength. While Tatsumaki awakened her maximum potential and strength against the Caped Baldy and used all of her power against him, however, it still wasn’t enough to do even a little damage to him as she eventually tired herself out and fainted.
Even though this ‘fight’ showed the different levels in terms of strength between even the strongest characters and Saitama, Tatsumaki did well enough against him for Saitama to commend her strength. Her showing against Saitama alone is enough to justify her position in the overall rankings of the Hero Association, but her battles and her overall strength make it clear why Tatsumaki is one of the strongest characters in One Punch Man!
One Punch Man can be streamed on Amazon Prime and Netflix.
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