Top 12 Strongest Chainsaw Man Characters, Ranked

Chainsaw Man runs on one rule, and it decides every placement here: a devil is exactly as strong as the fear attached to its name. That is why a dog-sized mascot outranks an army, and why the most dangerous thing in Tokyo is a polite woman in a Public Safety suit. We have weighed three things for each entry: the fear the character embodies, the contracts or hybrid biology stacked on top of it, and what they actually did on the page or on screen.

Spoiler warning: this ranking draws on the complete manga, which finished in March 2026. If you are anime-only, the final column of the table tells you which entries you have already met.

All 12 at a glance

#	Character	Source of power	Seen in the anime?
1	Chainsaw Man (Pochita and Denji)	Eats devils and deletes the concept itself	Yes, season 1 and the film
2	The Death Devil	Oldest Primal Fear, the fear nobody escapes	No, manga only
3	Makima	Control Devil, plus a Prime Minister contract	Yes, season 1
4	The Darkness Devil	Primal Fear of the dark, fights on home ground	Not yet, due in the Assassins Arc
5	The Gun Devil	Global firearm panic and absurd speed	Yes, in a season 1 flashback
6	Yoru	War Devil, turns anything she owns into a weapon	No, manga only
7	Reze	Bomb Devil hybrid, detonates like a warhead	Yes, the Reze Arc film
8	Quanxi	Crossbow Devil hybrid, the first devil hunter	Not yet, due in the Assassins Arc
9	Kishibe	Human, holding three devil contracts at once	Yes, season 1
10	Samurai Sword	Katana Devil hybrid with a respawn button	Yes, season 1
11	Power	Blood Fiend, weapons forged from her own blood	Yes, season 1
12	Aki Hayakawa	Fox, Curse and Future Devil contracts	Yes, season 1

Devils, fiends and hybrids: why the categories decide the order

Rankings that ignore these three brackets get the order badly wrong. A devil is the concept itself, and when it dies on Earth it reforms in Hell, which is why almost nothing here stays dead. A fiend is a devil squatting in a human corpse, so its ceiling is whatever that body can take, which is why Power sits this low and Beam misses the cut. A hybrid is a human carrying a devil's heart, and that is the sweet spot: human cunning, a transformation trigger, and a revival every time the trigger is pulled again. Our guide to every major devil and its powers covers the contract system in detail.

1. Chainsaw Man: the only permanent kill in the series

Pochita does not top this list for speed or durability. He tops it because a devil he eats stops having ever existed: the concept vanishes, and so does every human memory of it. The Nazi Devil and the Nuclear Weapons Devil are both on his menu, and the hunters who lived through that history cannot bring either one to mind. The erasure is not quite absolute, though: nuclear weapons came back only because America invented them a second time, and a hard enough beating can force Pochita to bring up what he has swallowed. Note the split, too. Denji in hybrid form borrows a slice of that power, not the whole thing. Being the creature the Four Horsemen went to war with in Hell is why Chainsaw Man also sits on our strongest anime characters of all time list.

2. The Death Devil: the one thing that cannot be killed

Apply the series' own rule and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable. Devils scale with how widely a concept is feared, and nothing is feared by more people than dying. Death is the eldest of the four Primal Fears, the bracket that also holds Darkness, Falling and Aging, and none of them has ever been through the die-and-reform cycle every other devil lives with. That makes her the strongest Horseman by the text's logic rather than by any single flashy scene. Her real credential is the reverse of a kill count: she has cut herself open and taken out her own organs and still could not die, because death cannot die while death exists. Readers spent more than a hundred chapters in her company without knowing it, since she moved through Part 2 under the name Fami and was only unmasked in chapter 198, with the genuine Famine Devil turning up as a separate character.

3. Makima: control, plus a contract nobody can beat

Makima commands anyone she considers beneath her, which is almost everybody: a raised finger, a muttered word, a head that pops. What makes her nearly unkillable is paperwork, not combat power. Her contract with Japan's Prime Minister redirects any fatal injury into an illness or accident suffered by a random Japanese citizen, so she strolls away from wounds that should end her. She is the strongest thing the anime has shown, and she spends twelve episodes running Denji like a pet.

4. The Darkness Devil: the most efficient massacre in the manga

Santa Claus drags a department store full of elite hunters into Hell, and the Darkness Devil greets them by removing everybody's arms at once. What follows is not a fight. It carves Quanxi and her partners into pieces, voids the devil contracts the survivors were relying on, kills Beam moments after he has fed Denji his blood, and never takes a meaningful hit. As a Primal Fear it has never gone through the death-and-rebirth cycle, so its power does not rise and fall with the news the way the Gun Devil's does.

5. The Gun Devil: a five-minute world record

Thirteen years before the story opens, the world armed itself against devils, fear of guns swelled to match, and a mass shooting in America gave that fear a body. Makima puts the toll at 1.2 million people in a little under five minutes, tens of thousands of them in Japan in well under a minute, with victims chosen on criteria as arbitrary as their birth month. It moved so fast that its own flesh shed behind it as bullets, and devils that swallow those fragments grow stronger, which is why its scattered body is now state property: the Soviet Union holds the largest share, America about a fifth, China a slice after that. Season 1 builds its middle stretch on the aftermath, and episode 5 carries the devil's name.

6. Yoru, the War Devil: dangerous, and deliberately handicapped

War is a Horseman, and her mechanic is nastier than it first looks: anything she owns can be turned into a weapon, and that weapon's power scales with how much guilt the transformation costs the person performing it. A school desk is worth very little. A classmate is worth a great deal, which is why Asa Mitaka, the schoolgirl sharing her body and supplying the conscience, forges better weapons than the devil does. The limits are strict, though. Yoru cannot claim what she does not own, so Denji's spine stays a spine, and humanity forgetting certain weapons has thinned her badly. Killing Chainsaw Man is how she plans to get the erased ones back.

7. Reze: the best duel in the franchise

Reze is a Bomb Devil hybrid from a Soviet super-soldier programme, sent to Japan for Denji's heart, and the pin hidden under her choker turns her into something that goes off like a warhead. She fights him to a standstill across a school, a swimming pool and a typhoon, and her hybrid silhouette is modelled on the Fat Man bomb, which tells you exactly how the series wants you to read the romance. Hybrid biology also makes killing her temporary: pull the pin again and she comes back intact, which is a horrible thing to learn mid-battle. MAPPA thought enough of the fight to give it a feature film instead of a television slot.

8. Quanxi: the one the Darkness Devil could not finish

She is introduced as the first devil hunter, which in a world this young means she has outlasted everyone. Quanxi is a Crossbow Devil hybrid who fires bolts from her eye sockets, travels with four fiend partners, and cuts through a building's worth of professional assassins before anyone slows her down. Even Hell failed to close the book: her severed head survived, one of her partners recovered it, and her hybrid biology did the rest. Makima's response was to take the repaired body and aim it back at Denji.

9. Kishibe: the strongest human alive, and he knows it

No devil heart, no hybrid biology, and Makima still calls Kishibe the strongest member of Tokyo Special Division 4. His edge is volume: simultaneous contracts with the Knife, Needle and Claw devils, a load that would hollow out most hunters, all of them feeding the same short-range knife work. Add a veteran's contempt for a fair fight and you get the man who trains Denji and Power by taking both of them on at once, spends most of his screen time drunk, and assembles the conspiracy against Makima in plain sight.

10. Samurai Sword: the first man to properly beat Denji

The grandson of the yakuza boss Denji killed in the opening chapter, fused with the Katana Devil and carrying a grudge with a schedule attached. He transforms by tearing off his own right hand to bare the blade underneath, and because hybrids restart the same way they transform, killing him never quite sticks. His raid on Division 4 is the cruellest stretch in the series: it is where Himeno makes her last trade. Season 1 closes on the rematch in episode 12, "Katana vs. Chainsaw".

11. Power: a coward with a genuinely high ceiling

Power is a fiend, a devil wearing a human corpse, and the Blood Devil handed her a good trick. She hardens her own blood into hammers, spears and blades, so the more she bleeds the more ammunition she has, which makes her lethal in exactly the fights she should lose. She is here for ceiling rather than reliability: she will abandon a teammate over a bad feeling, then walk back in when Denji is about to die.

12. Aki Hayakawa: three contracts, one at a time

Aki is a payment plan wearing a coat. The Fox Devil arrives when he frames his fingers over one eye and shouts "Kon", and it swallows whatever he aims it at, until he spends that favour against Samurai Sword and loses the contract for good. The Curse Devil's nail sword needs three stabs to trigger and bills him in years of his own lifespan. Only once the Fox is gone does he take the Future Devil into his right eye for a few seconds of foresight. That order is the point: Aki never stacks power, he keeps selling off the time he has left, and the series never stops reminding you what that buys him.

How far the anime has got, as of September 2026

Season 1 is twelve episodes, broadcast between 12 October and 28 December 2022 at MAPPA under director Ryu Nakayama, and it stops mid-story with the Katana Man rematch. The Reze fight then went to cinemas rather than television: Chainsaw Man The Movie: Reze Arc opened in Japan on 19 September 2025, reached the United States on 24 October, took more than 190 million dollars worldwide and arrived on Crunchyroll on 30 April 2026. A sequel covering the Assassins Arc was announced at Jump Festa in December 2025, with Tatsuya Yoshihara moving across from the film to direct and a second teaser shown in June 2026. MAPPA has still not said whether it will be a television season or another film, and no release date has been given as of September 2026. Whatever shape it takes, it is where the Darkness Devil, Quanxi and Santa Claus finally arrive. The Chainsaw Man watch order sets out the full sequence, and if you have run dry, our anime like Chainsaw Man picks are the closest matches.

Who just missed the top 12

Santa Claus would make a longer list on utility alone: the Doll Devil contract turns people into dolls through skin contact and lets her hop between those bodies, which is functional immortality, and the old man everyone takes for Santa Claus is only a decoy. The Angel Devil drains lifespan by touch and forges it into weapons, though he refuses to use it properly: a handshake cost Aki two months, and five years of borrowed life buys a sword that kills whatever it cuts. Beam swims through solid ground like water. Kobeni Higashiyama is the most unsettling human in the cast: a panicking office worker who keeps outliving professionals. The full roster is in our Chainsaw Man characters guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the strongest character in Chainsaw Man?

Pochita, the Chainsaw Devil, because devils he eats are erased from existence and from human memory rather than sent back to Hell. Among the Four Horsemen the Death Devil is the strongest, and Makima is the strongest character the anime has shown so far.

Is Makima stronger than Denji?

In their own confrontation, yes. Denji's hybrid form uses a fraction of the Chainsaw Devil's power, while Makima's contract with the Prime Minister converts fatal damage into harm suffered by random citizens. Pochita at full strength outranks her, which is why she wants to own him rather than fight him.

Who is the strongest devil in Chainsaw Man?

By the series' fear-equals-power rule, the Death Devil, since death is the one fear everybody shares. Of the devils actually shown fighting, the Darkness Devil has the most brutal showing: it disarms and dismembers a room of elite hunters in Hell without taking a hit.

Who is the strongest human in Chainsaw Man?

Kishibe. He has no devil heart, only contracts, and Makima names him the strongest member of Tokyo Special Division 4. He runs contracts with the Knife, Needle and Claw devils at the same time, a load that kills most hunters, and he trains both Denji and Power personally.

Is the Chainsaw Man anime finished?

No. Season 1 ran for twelve episodes in late 2022, the Reze Arc film followed in September 2025 and reached Crunchyroll in April 2026, and a sequel covering the Assassins Arc was announced in December 2025. As of September 2026 it has a director and a teaser but no release date, and MAPPA has not confirmed whether it will be a television season or another film.

Has the Chainsaw Man manga ended?

Yes. Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga finished on 25 March 2026 with chapter 232, closing a run that began in December 2018. Part 1 appeared in Weekly Shonen Jump and Part 2 on Shonen Jump+, and no further part has been announced as of September 2026.