Headliners · Superhuman
Guts vs Roronoa Zoro
A slab of iron against three swords, and a man who has survived hell against a man who is still lost.
Tale of the tape
| Berserk | Universe | One Piece |
|---|---|---|
| Superhuman | Tier | Superhuman |
| The Dragonslayer sword and the Berserker Armor | Strength | Three-sword style backed by haki that can cut steel and stone |
| The armor is slowly destroying his body | Weakness | Hopeless sense of direction |
| 1–1 | Record on Versus | 3–0 |
The Arena
Zoro was lost again. He had been looking for the ship, then for a bar, then for anyone who could point him back to the coast, and instead he found a ruined fortress on a sea cliff, smelling of blood and wet ash. In the courtyard, a man in black armor sat against a wall with a sword the size of a door across his knees.
Guts did not ask who he was. In his world, a stranger with three swords walking into a ruin at night is never good news. He stood up. Zoro grinned and put the third sword in his teeth.
Round One
The Dragonslayer came down like a falling tower. Zoro crossed two swords to catch it, and the impact drove him ankle-deep into the flagstones and cracked the courtyard from wall to wall. He laughed around the third blade. Nobody had hit him that hard since a certain emperor.
Guts swung again and again, each blow heavy enough to cut a horse in half, and Zoro learned the rhythm. He stopped blocking and started cutting between the swings. A slash opened the armor at Guts’s shoulder. Another scored his thigh. Guts answered with a hidden cannon in his false arm that blew Zoro across the courtyard and through a stone wall.
The Turn
Zoro came back through the wall covered in dust and bleeding from the ear, and he was smiling. Guts understood then that this man would not stop. So he did what he always does when nothing else is left. He let the Berserker Armor take him.
The helmet snapped shut into a snarling wolf’s head. Guts’s broken bones were held together by the armor itself, and he moved faster than his body should have allowed, the Dragonslayer swinging like a toy. For a terrible minute, Zoro was only surviving. A cut across his chest. A blow that broke two ribs. The whole tower shook with every swing.
The Finish
Zoro closed his eyes. He stopped trying to follow the sword and listened for the breath of the steel, the way he learned long ago, and wrapped all three blades in a dark sheen of haki. When the Dragonslayer came down again, he did not block it. He cut through the air beside it.
Asura. For an instant there seemed to be three of him, nine swords flashing at once. The strike passed through the gaps in the Berserker Armor and carved a line across it that the armor could not hold together. Guts staggered, the wolf helmet split, and the black swordsman fell to one knee, then onto his back in the rain.
Zoro sheathed two swords and stood over him, swaying. “You’re strong,” he said. “Really strong.” Guts stared up at the sky, breathing hard, and almost smiled. “You’re the first one in a long time who didn’t try to eat me.” Then Zoro asked for directions to the sea, and Guts pointed the wrong way, and that was how they parted.
The verdict
Roronoa Zoro wins
Guts is relentless, and the Berserker Armor nearly turns the fight, but Zoro’s haki-wrapped swords cut what normal steel cannot, and his superhuman speed and stamina outlast the armor.
- HakiZoro’s armament haki lets his blades cut through defences Guts relies on.
- Raw power scaleZoro’s world regularly features cuts that split ships and buildings.
- StaminaThe armor keeps Guts fighting, but it is destroying him while it does.
How the rematch could go differently: Against an earlier Zoro, before he mastered haki, the Berserker Armor and Guts’s experience against monsters would make Guts the favourite.
Who do you think wins?
Who would win in a fight between Guts and Roronoa Zoro?
Roronoa Zoro wins. Guts is relentless, and the Berserker Armor nearly turns the fight, but Zoro’s haki-wrapped swords cut what normal steel cannot, and his superhuman speed and stamina outlast the armor.