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Part 0 - Introduction
The main purpose of this textwall was initially just debunking the Muichiro Killer Fish calc, which is quite fishy (pun intended) and then, well i just kind of found more and more issues and found myself writing a whole wall of text. I've been following Demon slayer intently since before the anime started, so i have a fair amount of knowledge and investment in it. Don't take this as me just dunking on other people's work, i appreciate the calcers whose calcs i talk about, i just feel like i can contribute something by providing honest criticism and improve a lot of the scaling here.
tl;dr
A few speed calcs and some of the scaling is wrong (i provide detailed reasons + sources as to why) and there is a general lack of Massively Hypersonic feats outside of the Killer Fish calc which i will disprove shortly. A few of the remaining calcs also exist seem to me to be very generously interpretations of panels, the anime usually disagrees with the calc's interpretation and some of the arguments within the calcs are based on unproven or false assumptions. In the speed section of DS profiles, there's also a massive amount of Calc stacking which is understandable since there isn't any power level or other quantifiable factor to scale anyone - but it does lead to scaling certain characters such as Upper Moon 6 wrong, which i of course also provide sources for. There is some faulty logic that doesn't hold up even if all calcs and numbers are correct, which i also discuss in great detail.
So here is my extended reasoning for why we need to revisit, and probably downgrade, most of the Demon Slayer verse's speed:
Part 1 - Debunking the Killer Fish Calc
We have seen that Breathing Styles allow for AoE attacks that could easily cut them all at once, shown here with Muichiro himself hitting all 10.000 fish with one slash. He does this about 5 seconds after slicing all the fish, so i am not sure why the assumption is that he had to slash at every single fish. There is absolutely no evidence in the manga that Muichiro used 5000 slashes, in fact it's shown that he hit all of them with one technique. And Breathing Style Techniques never consist of spamming a massive number of slashes but are always a set number of practiced, repeated sword motions. Not to mention, the anime scene clearly shows the fish weren't sliced on a individual basis. And just to absolutely prove that being able to hit that many fish in one slash is not some outlier - here is Mitsuri's Breathing Style covering approximately 100x the necessary volume to completely vaporize that attack. While she uses a different Breathing Style, she scales to Muichiro as a fellow Pillar so his overall abilities shouldn't be too far off from hers.
While the calc is already disproven, since the number of slashes was not anywhere near 5000, there is unfortunately another disagreeable part of the calc i will go over.
I do not disagree with all of the claims. There isn't any other way to know how fast this attack was, so assuming they were a certain speed is not inherently wrong, it's the only way to scale this. And the provided Supersonic feats seem to be valid (i had to use Web archive to view them since the links unfortunately expired), and i also certainly agree that they prove Gyokko can use Supersonic attacks. The issue for me lies in the various other claims this paragraph makes. First, to get an unrelated statement out of the way, Gyokko has created fish monsters so weak that normal, untrained blacksmiths were able to run from them and hold them off for a while, which to me is somewhat of an Anti-feat and weakens the claim that he only threw out Supersonic attacks against a Pillar. But apart from this perhaps subjective observation, there are some incongruities in this paragraph's rationalization that this attack must have been Sonic speed.
Part 2 - Debunking the Six-Fold Thunder Flash calc
I have also noticed Demon Slayer Profiles generally just calc stack speed massively [more on this later], even though there is no power levels or other quantifiable indicator for speed and have a general lack of calcs and sources backing them up. As example I will use Zenitsu's profile who is the speedster of the verse.
Zenitsu's SoS speed is put at Hypersonic+, based on a Speedblitz calc that i will address shortly being faster than Tanjiro (which is a reasonable assumption), but i went to Tanjiros profile to see why he is Hypersonic at the start of the series, and found this calc which, i won't go into as the comment section already thoroughly debunked it. Instead i will focus on a calc of Zenitsu using Six-Fold Thunder Flash to travel a set distance faster than the eye can see. Given the demon blitzed was complete fodder (significantly weaker than the weakest Lower moon), a normal humans reaction speed was used as baseline for how fast Zenitsu must have moved.
The reaction speed used? 0.0082 seconds.
If that sounds absurdly fast to you for human standards, that’s because it is. As the calc's comment section has pointed out, a human’s visual reaction speed is much slower, at a mere 0.04 seconds our eyes' Shutter speed can't keep up anymore, thats how we can watch videos at 30 FPS. Furthermore, the jump has six stages, meaning the demon did not necessarily lose track of Zenitsu during the entire technique, and the anime even shows the demon tracking the first two of Zenitsus six movements, however the manga version can in all fairness reasonably assumed to be a complete speedblitz. If you disregard the anime, that just leaves the reaction speed of 0.0082 being off by magnitudes. Im not a math expert or calcer by any means but this is unfortunately very obviously miscalculated. It would take a calcer to determine the exact numbers, all i know is that it's in need of correction.
Part 3 - Addressing the Calc stacking
Even if the calcs were all correct, and even accounting for the lack of power levels in Demon Slayer, the calc stacking on the profiles is pretty nuts. The speed for Zenitsu's Entertainment District Arc lists him at High Hypersonic reactions again, and higher with God Speed due to blitzing Daki. While i will remark that blitzing Daki is not a High Hypersonic feat because she doesn't scale to Pillars or anyone with High Hypersonic speed due to this calc being wrong, God Speed was stated to increase Zenitsu’s speed by an unknown amount so this is valid.
Continuing with Zenitsu's speed profile, during the Hashira Training Arc he suddenly jumps to Massively Hypersonic. There was never any quantifiable feat or statement Zenitsu had that we can use either to scale how much stronger he's gotten, or any Massively Hypersonic feat he's had since then. Therefore, the only way to scale this speed is by scaling him to other characters.
… so apparently the entire verse's speed is dependant on that one Killer Fish calc being correct, and there is a distinct lack of specific Massively Hypersonic feats.
If you think i am being too harsh for saying that him being a replacement does not make him as strong as Upper Moon 6, i have a lot of evidence for it:
First and most importantly, this statement implies that he was not yet Upper Moon level, which contradicts that assumption. A demon's strength is highly dependent on the amount of blood received from Muzan, and on the amount of humans they consume. While Kaigaku was stated to have received a greater amount of blood then usual, it was impossible for Kaigaku to have eaten even remotely as many people as Daki and Gyutaru combined over 113+ years in the very short time between UM6's death and the Final Battle arc, and before his Demonification Kaigaku had been a failed senior apprentice comparable to SoS Zenitsu ("If i'm trash, then you're garbage"), whereas Pre-Demonification Gyutaro was described as a monster who while heavily injured, blitzed a trained adult Samurai. So there are many reasons to believe he was inferior to Gyutaro in speed.
But i went to Kaigakus page to see what feat was listed in order to say that blitzing him means Zenitsu is higher than Massively Hypersonic. And Kaigakus profile says he is Massively Hypersonic not because he's relative to Upper Moon 6 (Who is only Massively Hypersonic due to that debunked Muichiro calc), but because he kept up with Zenitsu. Who himself has no Massively Hypersonic feats apart from fighting Kaigaku. So like i said, there's a lot of calc stacking and a distinct lack of actual feats supporting the speed tiers the calc stacking pushes the characters into.
This means that, even if we assume Kaigaku is equal to Gyutaro, despite the various issues i listed in Part 3.3, this still does not scale him to Muichiro, which means he still has no evidence for being Hypersonic. And you cannot scale Kaigaku above Gyutaru when there's a statement that implies the opposite. So even assuming the calc is correct, you still cannot use it to get him to Massively Hypersonic. Which also means that Zenitsu blitzing Kaigaku is not a Massively Hypersonic feat. The entire calc stacking chain falls apart at it's root.
Part 4 - Anti-Feats and Outliers
Another false Speed of Lightning feat that is often brought up of is Mitsuri cutting Lightning. Now apart from the fact that real Lightning is immaterial and cannot be cut (and as we established, Demon Slayers aren't magical sorcerers so they don't have any superpowers like Haki to hit Lightning), we cannot assume that conjured Lightning has the traits of real Lightning. The Blood Demon Art in question was a combined attack of Thunder and Sound, and the panel clearly depicts that both the Sound waves and the Lightning strikes had roughly the same attack speed, and moved towards Mitsuri at the same attack speed, and that they were cut at the same time despite Lightning moving more than 300.000x faster than Sound.
This by itself proves to me that the Blood Demon Arts are not necessarily emulating every trait of the real entity they are copying. But let us say they do. Then we run into this problem:
Upper Moon 4 also hit her with a scream that, if we claim that the Blood Demon Arts emulate natural properties, could not have moved slower or faster than the speed of sound. If the Lightning attack is Lightning speed due to emulating the speed of Lightning, the Sound attack must be Sound speed due to emulating the speed of Sound waves. So either we have two massive outliers in a row of Mitsuri cutting Lightning effortlessly, only to immediately get hit by a Sound attack that is more than 300.000x slower than the Lightning attack she just countered, or the attacks are completely disconnected from their real-life traits, since we are talking about magical attacks produced by magical Demon blood. It seems obvious to me which scenario makes more sense.
Part 5 - Conclusion
To summarize, the Speed section of Demon Slayer profiles needs to be revisited. Even if the verse is actually at Massively Hypersonic, the current reasoning on the profiles does not hold up to closer examination and the profiles also partly contradict each other.
Whew. Thanks for reading that wall of text, or whatever part of it you read.
The main purpose of this textwall was initially just debunking the Muichiro Killer Fish calc, which is quite fishy (pun intended) and then, well i just kind of found more and more issues and found myself writing a whole wall of text. I've been following Demon slayer intently since before the anime started, so i have a fair amount of knowledge and investment in it. Don't take this as me just dunking on other people's work, i appreciate the calcers whose calcs i talk about, i just feel like i can contribute something by providing honest criticism and improve a lot of the scaling here.
tl;dr
A few speed calcs and some of the scaling is wrong (i provide detailed reasons + sources as to why) and there is a general lack of Massively Hypersonic feats outside of the Killer Fish calc which i will disprove shortly. A few of the remaining calcs also exist seem to me to be very generously interpretations of panels, the anime usually disagrees with the calc's interpretation and some of the arguments within the calcs are based on unproven or false assumptions. In the speed section of DS profiles, there's also a massive amount of Calc stacking which is understandable since there isn't any power level or other quantifiable factor to scale anyone - but it does lead to scaling certain characters such as Upper Moon 6 wrong, which i of course also provide sources for. There is some faulty logic that doesn't hold up even if all calcs and numbers are correct, which i also discuss in great detail.
So here is my extended reasoning for why we need to revisit, and probably downgrade, most of the Demon Slayer verse's speed:
Part 1 - Debunking the Killer Fish Calc
- Part 1.1 - Debunking that 5000 Slashes were used to counter the attack
We have seen that Breathing Styles allow for AoE attacks that could easily cut them all at once, shown here with Muichiro himself hitting all 10.000 fish with one slash. He does this about 5 seconds after slicing all the fish, so i am not sure why the assumption is that he had to slash at every single fish. There is absolutely no evidence in the manga that Muichiro used 5000 slashes, in fact it's shown that he hit all of them with one technique. And Breathing Style Techniques never consist of spamming a massive number of slashes but are always a set number of practiced, repeated sword motions. Not to mention, the anime scene clearly shows the fish weren't sliced on a individual basis. And just to absolutely prove that being able to hit that many fish in one slash is not some outlier - here is Mitsuri's Breathing Style covering approximately 100x the necessary volume to completely vaporize that attack. While she uses a different Breathing Style, she scales to Muichiro as a fellow Pillar so his overall abilities shouldn't be too far off from hers.
While the calc is already disproven, since the number of slashes was not anywhere near 5000, there is unfortunately another disagreeable part of the calc i will go over.
- Part 1.2 - Debunking that the Fish must have been at least the speed of sound
Spamming attacks stated to be at the speed of sound is done by low-mid tier characters such as Kyogai, but with sound speed it would be impossible for the fish to come close to chasing or overwhelming a Pillar-level opponent as Gyokko is expecting, as shown by these examples: Example 1 - Example 2 - Example 3 - Example 4 - Example 5. Gyokko was even made aware previously that Muichiro is faster than the average Pillar, so Gyokko wasn't under the impression that Muichiro was a fodder. Hence, sonic speed for the fish would be a reasonable low-ball since we know the fish are significantly faster than that by an unknown magnitude.
I do not disagree with all of the claims. There isn't any other way to know how fast this attack was, so assuming they were a certain speed is not inherently wrong, it's the only way to scale this. And the provided Supersonic feats seem to be valid (i had to use Web archive to view them since the links unfortunately expired), and i also certainly agree that they prove Gyokko can use Supersonic attacks. The issue for me lies in the various other claims this paragraph makes. First, to get an unrelated statement out of the way, Gyokko has created fish monsters so weak that normal, untrained blacksmiths were able to run from them and hold them off for a while, which to me is somewhat of an Anti-feat and weakens the claim that he only threw out Supersonic attacks against a Pillar. But apart from this perhaps subjective observation, there are some incongruities in this paragraph's rationalization that this attack must have been Sonic speed.
- Firstly they claim "with sound speed it would be impossible for the fish to come close to chasing or overwhelming a Pillar-level opponent as Gyokko is expecting,", however the attack didn't come close to overwhelming a Pillar, it was dealt with by Muichiro rather easily (both in manga and anime) thus we have no guarantee of its speed by the calc's own logic.
- Secondly, the paragraph speaking of Gyokko taking Muichiro seriously is completely false; Gyokko was immensely underestimating Muichiro throughout the entire fight and refused to use his transformation, which elevates his speed into another level according to Gyokko himself, despite having many openings to do so with his teleportation. Hence he was absolutely not taking Muichiro seriously until after he transformed. And as the "Killer fish" happened before then, it was not even a serious attack from Gyokko.
- Third, the OP asserts "Gyokko was even made aware previously that Muichiro is faster than the average Pillar", however the Pillars Gyokko uses as baselines have not managed to kill a single Upper Moon in 100 years and the current generation of Pillars are completely incomparable to the previous ones. There is an abundance of proof for that, which i linked.
Part 2 - Debunking the Six-Fold Thunder Flash calc
I have also noticed Demon Slayer Profiles generally just calc stack speed massively [more on this later], even though there is no power levels or other quantifiable indicator for speed and have a general lack of calcs and sources backing them up. As example I will use Zenitsu's profile who is the speedster of the verse.
Zenitsu's SoS speed is put at Hypersonic+, based on a Speedblitz calc that i will address shortly being faster than Tanjiro (which is a reasonable assumption), but i went to Tanjiros profile to see why he is Hypersonic at the start of the series, and found this calc which, i won't go into as the comment section already thoroughly debunked it. Instead i will focus on a calc of Zenitsu using Six-Fold Thunder Flash to travel a set distance faster than the eye can see. Given the demon blitzed was complete fodder (significantly weaker than the weakest Lower moon), a normal humans reaction speed was used as baseline for how fast Zenitsu must have moved.
The reaction speed used? 0.0082 seconds.
If that sounds absurdly fast to you for human standards, that’s because it is. As the calc's comment section has pointed out, a human’s visual reaction speed is much slower, at a mere 0.04 seconds our eyes' Shutter speed can't keep up anymore, thats how we can watch videos at 30 FPS. Furthermore, the jump has six stages, meaning the demon did not necessarily lose track of Zenitsu during the entire technique, and the anime even shows the demon tracking the first two of Zenitsus six movements, however the manga version can in all fairness reasonably assumed to be a complete speedblitz. If you disregard the anime, that just leaves the reaction speed of 0.0082 being off by magnitudes. Im not a math expert or calcer by any means but this is unfortunately very obviously miscalculated. It would take a calcer to determine the exact numbers, all i know is that it's in need of correction.
Part 3 - Addressing the Calc stacking
- Part 3.1 - Zenitsu's speed scaling across the series seems arbitrary
Even if the calcs were all correct, and even accounting for the lack of power levels in Demon Slayer, the calc stacking on the profiles is pretty nuts. The speed for Zenitsu's Entertainment District Arc lists him at High Hypersonic reactions again, and higher with God Speed due to blitzing Daki. While i will remark that blitzing Daki is not a High Hypersonic feat because she doesn't scale to Pillars or anyone with High Hypersonic speed due to this calc being wrong, God Speed was stated to increase Zenitsu’s speed by an unknown amount so this is valid.
Continuing with Zenitsu's speed profile, during the Hashira Training Arc he suddenly jumps to Massively Hypersonic. There was never any quantifiable feat or statement Zenitsu had that we can use either to scale how much stronger he's gotten, or any Massively Hypersonic feat he's had since then. Therefore, the only way to scale this speed is by scaling him to other characters.
- Part 3.2 - Massive calc stacking + Many, if not all, speed calcs are based off the Muichiro calc
… so apparently the entire verse's speed is dependant on that one Killer Fish calc being correct, and there is a distinct lack of specific Massively Hypersonic feats.
- Part 3.3 - No evidence for Kaigaku being comparable to previous UM6
If you think i am being too harsh for saying that him being a replacement does not make him as strong as Upper Moon 6, i have a lot of evidence for it:
First and most importantly, this statement implies that he was not yet Upper Moon level, which contradicts that assumption. A demon's strength is highly dependent on the amount of blood received from Muzan, and on the amount of humans they consume. While Kaigaku was stated to have received a greater amount of blood then usual, it was impossible for Kaigaku to have eaten even remotely as many people as Daki and Gyutaru combined over 113+ years in the very short time between UM6's death and the Final Battle arc, and before his Demonification Kaigaku had been a failed senior apprentice comparable to SoS Zenitsu ("If i'm trash, then you're garbage"), whereas Pre-Demonification Gyutaro was described as a monster who while heavily injured, blitzed a trained adult Samurai. So there are many reasons to believe he was inferior to Gyutaro in speed.
But i went to Kaigakus page to see what feat was listed in order to say that blitzing him means Zenitsu is higher than Massively Hypersonic. And Kaigakus profile says he is Massively Hypersonic not because he's relative to Upper Moon 6 (Who is only Massively Hypersonic due to that debunked Muichiro calc), but because he kept up with Zenitsu. Who himself has no Massively Hypersonic feats apart from fighting Kaigaku. So like i said, there's a lot of calc stacking and a distinct lack of actual feats supporting the speed tiers the calc stacking pushes the characters into.
- Part 3.4 - Even if Kaigaku is as strong as previous UM6, he is still not Massively Hypersonic
This means that, even if we assume Kaigaku is equal to Gyutaro, despite the various issues i listed in Part 3.3, this still does not scale him to Muichiro, which means he still has no evidence for being Hypersonic. And you cannot scale Kaigaku above Gyutaru when there's a statement that implies the opposite. So even assuming the calc is correct, you still cannot use it to get him to Massively Hypersonic. Which also means that Zenitsu blitzing Kaigaku is not a Massively Hypersonic feat. The entire calc stacking chain falls apart at it's root.
Part 4 - Anti-Feats and Outliers
- Part 4.1 - Clearing up confusion about "Speed of Lightning"
Another false Speed of Lightning feat that is often brought up of is Mitsuri cutting Lightning. Now apart from the fact that real Lightning is immaterial and cannot be cut (and as we established, Demon Slayers aren't magical sorcerers so they don't have any superpowers like Haki to hit Lightning), we cannot assume that conjured Lightning has the traits of real Lightning. The Blood Demon Art in question was a combined attack of Thunder and Sound, and the panel clearly depicts that both the Sound waves and the Lightning strikes had roughly the same attack speed, and moved towards Mitsuri at the same attack speed, and that they were cut at the same time despite Lightning moving more than 300.000x faster than Sound.
This by itself proves to me that the Blood Demon Arts are not necessarily emulating every trait of the real entity they are copying. But let us say they do. Then we run into this problem:
Upper Moon 4 also hit her with a scream that, if we claim that the Blood Demon Arts emulate natural properties, could not have moved slower or faster than the speed of sound. If the Lightning attack is Lightning speed due to emulating the speed of Lightning, the Sound attack must be Sound speed due to emulating the speed of Sound waves. So either we have two massive outliers in a row of Mitsuri cutting Lightning effortlessly, only to immediately get hit by a Sound attack that is more than 300.000x slower than the Lightning attack she just countered, or the attacks are completely disconnected from their real-life traits, since we are talking about magical attacks produced by magical Demon blood. It seems obvious to me which scenario makes more sense.
- Part 4.2 - Anti-Feats:
- Gyutaro being hit by a Kunai from one of Tengen's wives
- Muzan not being able to dodge a point-blank explosion (this was notably before the
plot devicedrug nerfed him) - Genyu used a conventional shotgun against Upper Moon 4 and successfully landed multiple hits.
Part 5 - Conclusion
To summarize, the Speed section of Demon Slayer profiles needs to be revisited. Even if the verse is actually at Massively Hypersonic, the current reasoning on the profiles does not hold up to closer examination and the profiles also partly contradict each other.
Whew. Thanks for reading that wall of text, or whatever part of it you read.