The Top 10 Strongest Characters in Hunter x Hunter’s Succession Contest Arc, Ranked

In Togashi’s current arc, strength is no longer just punching power. It is Nen, timing, information, vows, and who can survive a room full of people pretending not to be assassins.

Spoilers up to Hunter x Hunter Chapter 411.

Hunter x Hunter used to let us ask simpler power-scaling questions.

Can Gon beat Killua? Is Hisoka stronger than this guy? How terrifying was Netero, really?

Then Yoshihiro Togashi placed princes, mafia families, royal bodyguards, Hunters, assassins, the Phantom Troupe, Hisoka, Beyond Netero, and Kurapika inside one gigantic ship, and suddenly the series became a murder mystery, a constitutional crisis, a mafia war, and a Nen theory class all at once.

Of course, of course, the ranking became harder.

As of this writing, the official English chapter list from VIZ places the manga at Chapter 411, while the Succession Contest remains the current major arc that began after the election arc and moved the story toward the Black Whale voyage [1][2]. That matters because this ranking is not about the strongest characters in Hunter x Hunter history. No Meruem. No Isaac Netero. No Adult Gon. No Youpi. No Chimera Ant royal guard.

This is about the strongest characters currently relevant to the Succession Contest and the wider Black Whale / Dark Continent voyage storyline.

To be clear, this is not an official canon list. Togashi does not write Nen like a Dragon Ball scouter. Strength in Hunter x Hunter is conditional. A weaker fighter with the correct ability, better information, a stronger vow, or a more ruthless plan can defeat someone who looks “stronger” on paper.

Put simply: in this arc, strength is governance. It is systems thinking. It is risk management. It is knowing who holds the knife, who wrote the rule, who can break the rule, and who can make you believe the rule was never there.

Here is my ranking.

How I ranked them

Before the yapping begins, here are the criteria.

First, Nen mastery. Raw aura matters, but control, versatility, and vows matter more.

Second, combat record or combat implication. Some characters have direct feats. Others have strong narrative positioning.

Third, lethality in the Black Whale setting. This ship rewards manipulators, tacticians, assassins, and people who can weaponize confusion.

Fourth, adaptability. In this arc, the best fighter is not always the loudest fighter. Sometimes, it is the one who understands the system fastest.

Fifth, current relevance. I include characters active in the broader Succession Contest / Dark Continent voyage storyline. For readers who interpret the ranking as strictly “inside the succession battlefield only,” I added a note near the end.

Now, let’s begin.

10. Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou

Tserriednich is probably the most uncomfortable entry on this list.

Not because he lacks power. Quite the opposite. He is terrifying because he is learning too quickly.

He is still a beginner in Nen compared with the monsters above him. That matters. Experience in Hunter x Hunter is not decorative. It is survival. Nen is full of invisible clauses, fatal assumptions, and conditions that punish arrogance. A prodigy can still die if he misunderstands one rule.

But Tserriednich is not an ordinary beginner.

His Nen talent is absurd. His Specialist ability, often discussed through his future-sight mechanics, gives him a frightening tactical advantage. His Guardian Spirit Beast adds another layer of protection and psychological threat, even if Guardian Spirit Beasts have their own restrictions [8].

Here’s why he is only №10: he is still being formed.

Right now, Tserriednich is a future disaster wearing the skin of a current prince. He is not yet the strongest fighter in the arc. But if he survives long enough, he could jump several places.

That is the scary part.

He is not merely powerful. He is an emerging institution of violence.

And in Hunter x Hunter, the scariest thing is not always the monster fully grown. Sometimes, it is the monster learning how to read.

9. Kurapika

Kurapika is not the strongest character here in a clean fistfight.

But no serious ranking of the Succession Contest arc can exclude him.

Kurapika is dangerous because he is a specialist of conditions. He is a lawyerly fighter, and I mean that in the best and most terrifying way. He reads the rule, identifies the loophole, builds a chain around it, and makes the enemy pay for failing to understand the fine print.

His toolkit is one of the most strategically complex in the series: Chain Jail, Judgment Chain, Dowsing Chain, Steal Chain, Stealth Dolphin, and Emperor Time. Against the Phantom Troupe, his threat level rises dramatically because of the specific conditions tied to his abilities [8].

But there is a cost.

Emperor Time is not free. It burns his lifespan. In this arc, that cost matters even more because Kurapika is not just fighting. He is protecting Prince Woble, teaching Nen, investigating the succession ritual, negotiating with rival factions, and trying not to collapse under the weight of his own mission [2][8].

That is why I rank him here.

Kurapika is not a blunt instrument. He is a crisis manager with chains.

In a straightforward tournament, many names above him would overpower him. But inside the Black Whale, where information, timing, contracts, secrecy, and political pressure matter, Kurapika becomes one of the most dangerous people alive.

Give him time to think, and he becomes a problem.

Give him a Spider, and he becomes a verdict.

8. Feitan Portor

Feitan is violence compressed into a small body.

Among the Phantom Troupe, he stands out as one of its clearest combat specialists. He is fast, vicious, and frighteningly calm in cruelty. His Pain Packer, especially Rising Sun, gives him one of the most devastating counterattack abilities in the series [7].

What makes Feitan terrifying is not only that he can kill you.

It is that hurting him may make things worse.

That is a very Hunter x Hunter kind of horror. In other series, damaging an enemy is always progress. Against Feitan, damage may be the trigger that turns the battlefield into a furnace.

Still, I place him below Illumi and Biscuit for one reason: predictability of role.

Feitan is an elite combatant, but he is more straightforward than the highest-level tacticians in this arc. He kills. He tortures. He retaliates. He overwhelms. All of that is terrifying, of course. But the Black Whale is not only a battlefield. It is also a maze of surveillance, mafia politics, Nen curses, royal privileges, secret loyalties, and layered assassination attempts.

In pure combat, Feitan may beat some people above him. In the full ecosystem of this arc, I think the next names are harder to deal with.

Still, let us not overcorrect.

If Feitan enters your room smiling, lock the door.

Actually, no. That probably will not help.

7. Illumi Zoldyck

Illumi is one of those characters whose danger is easy to underestimate because he rarely needs to “show off.”

That is exactly the point.

Illumi is an assassin, not a tournament fighter. His Nen is built around manipulation, control, disguise, infiltration, and psychological domination. On a normal battlefield, that is already dangerous. On a crowded ship filled with bodyguards, servants, mafia members, soldiers, Hunters, and civilians, it becomes horrifying [7].

The Black Whale is almost too perfect for him.

A manipulator in a confined population is not just a fighter. He is a public health crisis with needles.

Illumi’s strength is not only that he can fight. It is that he can turn people into weapons, create confusion, control bodies, and move through social spaces with the cold professionalism of someone who has been trained to treat murder as family business.

I rank him above Feitan because his ability has more arc-specific value. Feitan may be more explosive in direct combat, but Illumi is better suited to the ship’s layered chaos.

Also, Hisoka taking Illumi seriously tells us something. Their relationship is strange, funny, unsettling, and deeply unhealthy, parang group project from hell, but it is built on mutual recognition of danger.

Illumi does not need to be loud.

That makes him worse.

6. Biscuit Krueger

Bisky is what happens when the teacher in the room is secretly one of the final bosses.

And as an educator, I respect that. Maybe not the violence part, but the pedagogy? Absolutely.

Biscuit Krueger is a Double-Star Stone Hunter, a master of Shingen-ryu, a Nen teacher, and one of the most technically competent Nen users currently tied to the voyage. She is also physically monstrous in her true form, with tremendous strength beneath the smaller appearance she usually prefers [6].

Bisky’s danger is built on fundamentals.

She understands Nen deeply. She trains others. She reads weaknesses. She has the kind of embodied mastery that only comes from decades of disciplined practice. In a series that rewards technical understanding, that matters immensely.

Some readers might place her above Botobai because we have seen more from her. Fair. I almost did.

But I keep her at №6 because the characters above her either have stronger implied narrative standing, more dangerous matchup volatility, or more destructive arc-level relevance.

Still, do not confuse her placement with weakness.

Bisky is the kind of fighter who may not look like she is winning until you realize she has been teaching you the lesson while breaking your bones.

A queen, tbh.

5. Botobai Gigante

Botobai is difficult to rank because we have not seen enough of him in direct combat.

But narrative implication matters in Hunter x Hunter.

He is a Triple-Star Terrorist Hunter, a Zodiac, a major authority within the Hunter Association, and was previously a sparring partner of Isaac Netero [6]. That last point is not a small thing. Netero did not casually spar with people who had no business standing near him.

Botobai’s Nen ability remains unknown, which makes the ranking speculative. But the level of institutional trust placed in him says a lot. In an arc where the Hunter Association is dealing with Beyond Netero, the Kakin Empire, the Dark Continent voyage, and the security nightmare of the Black Whale, Botobai is not positioned as a background extra.

He is one of the adults in the room.

And in Togashi’s writing, competent adults are terrifying.

I place him above Biscuit with caution. If we rank only confirmed feats, Bisky has the better case. If we rank implied status, Botobai deserves to be here.

This is the kind of debate where both sides can be true at the same time. Gets? Good.

4. Hisoka Morow

Hisoka is what happens when talent, ego, creativity, bloodlust, and clown aesthetics are placed in the same morally disastrous container.

He remains one of the most dangerous fighters in the series because Bungee Gum is deceptively simple. It has the properties of both rubber and gum, yes, we know, he has branded it aggressively at this point. But the genius of Hisoka is that he turns a flexible ability into endless applications.

Movement. Traps. Misdirection. Restraint. Reattachment. Surprise attacks. Psychological warfare.

After his fight with Chrollo, Hisoka’s danger became even more direct. His post-mortem Nen revival and subsequent attacks on Phantom Troupe members changed the entire emotional temperature of the arc [5].

He is no longer just hunting for pleasure. He is waging a personal war.

That matters because Hisoka becomes more dangerous when he stops playing with the food.

I place him below Chrollo because the official result of their fight matters. Chrollo beat him. Yes, there were conditions. Yes, Chrollo had preparation. Yes, Hisoka fans will argue that a rematch could go differently. I hear you from Tier 4.

But rankings must respect evidence.

That said, Hisoka may be the most dangerous single variable in the Black Whale. He is not loyal to an institution. He does not need a kingdom. He does not need ideology. He just needs a target and enough boredom to make murder feel productive.

That is a problem.

3. Chrollo Lucilfer

Chrollo is not only strong. He is structured.

That is what separates him from many other elite fighters. His Skill Hunter ability is already terrifying because it allows him to steal and use Nen abilities under specific conditions. But what makes Chrollo elite is not merely the collection. It is the architecture.

He plans. He layers abilities. He sets conditions. He turns the battlefield into a script where the opponent realizes too late that the ending has already been drafted.

His Heaven’s Arena fight against Hisoka remains one of the clearest demonstrations of high-level Nen strategy in the series. Chrollo used stolen abilities in combination, controlled the pace, weaponized the crowd, and forced Hisoka into a battlefield designed against him [5].

That is exactly why he is so dangerous in the Succession Contest arc.

The Black Whale is not a clean arena. It is crowded, secretive, morally compromised, and politically unstable. In other words, it is a Chrollo-friendly environment.

Give Chrollo people, objects, confusion, and time, and he becomes more than a fighter. He becomes a system.

The only reason he is not higher is that the top two have even larger narrative gravity within the Dark Continent framework.

But among the characters actively moving through the ship’s underworld, Chrollo remains the most complete threat.

2. Beyond Netero

Beyond Netero is a walking warning label.

He is the son of Isaac Netero, a previous survivor of the Dark Continent, and the central figure behind the expedition that disrupted the political and institutional order of the Hunter world. He is currently detained and guarded, but detention does not make him harmless. Sometimes, it simply confirms that everyone understands the scale of the risk [4].

Beyond is difficult to rank because so much about his actual Nen remains unrevealed. But everything around him screams danger.

He survived where almost everyone else would die. He built long-term plans. He attracted powerful followers. He maneuvered around institutions. In recent Succession Contest developments, his possible use of curse-related strategies adds even more menace to his already heavy presence [4].

Beyond may not have the clearest on-page combat feats among the top five. But in Hunter x Hunter, absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence. Sometimes, Togashi hides the blade because the reveal matters later.

Why not №1?

Because we still lack the full picture.

Beyond might eventually prove stronger than everyone here. He might be the most dangerous human currently alive in the story. But until his Nen is fully shown, placing him above Ging feels premature.

Still, imagine being so dangerous that the plot has to physically lock you up and assign elite people to watch you.

That is not a prisoner. That is a contained disaster.

1. Ging Freecss

Ging Freecss is my №1.

Not because he has the flashiest ability. We still do not fully know his Nen. Not because he is the loudest. He is often annoying in a very specific deadbeat-genius way. Not because he has the cleanest combat highlight reel in this arc.

Ging is №1 because Hunter x Hunter has repeatedly framed him as one of the highest-level Nen minds alive.

He is a Double-Star Ruins Hunter, a former Zodiac, a member of Beyond’s expedition team, and, most importantly, Netero reportedly considered him one of the five best Nen users in the world [3].

That endorsement matters.

In a series where Nen is not merely energy but comprehension, Ging’s greatest weapon is not just aura. It is understanding. He reads systems. He adapts. He sees mechanisms behind techniques. He is the type of person who does not only ask, “Can I beat this ability?” He asks, “How was this ability built, what assumptions does it make, and how do I make those assumptions collapse?”

That is elite.

This is also why Ging fits the Succession Contest era of the story so well. The arc is no longer about simple battles. It is about layered systems: monarchy, mafia, expedition politics, Nen inheritance, curses, surveillance, loyalty, and competing futures.

Ging thrives in systems.

That makes him the strongest character currently tied to this phase of the story.

Not necessarily the most moral. Not necessarily the most likeable. Definitely not father of the year.

But the strongest? For now, yes.

The painful omissions

Let’s address the expected objections before the comment section activates its Nen.

Benjamin Hui Guo Rou is the biggest omission. In raw royal power, military authority, physical strength, and Nen inheritance through Benjamin Baton, he has a very strong case for the top 10 [8]. If you want to place him above Tserriednich right now, I will not fight you too hard. I may debate you, but respectfully.

Phinks, Nobunaga, Franklin, and Machi are all dangerous Phantom Troupe members. Any of them could enter a top 10 depending on matchup and available information.

Mizaistom and Saiyu deserve respect as Zodiacs, but we have not seen enough combat detail to place them above the names listed.

Morena Prudo is not a top 10 fighter in the traditional sense, but Contagion makes her one of the most dangerous systemic threats in the arc. She is proof that “strength” and “danger” are not always the same category.

Halkenburg is complicated because his power is tied to collective will, body-switching developments, and current plot conditions. His ability may be among the most frightening in the succession war, but his status makes him difficult to rank cleanly.

A strict Black Whale-only note

If your rule is “only characters confirmed inside the Black Whale’s active succession battlefield,” remove Ging from the list.

In that stricter version, I would move Beyond to №1, Chrollo to №2, Hisoka to №3, and give Benjamin the open slot at №10, possibly higher depending on how much weight you give to military control and Benjamin Baton.

But I included Ging because the Succession Contest arc is braided with the Dark Continent expedition from the beginning. The political contest, Beyond’s plan, the Hunter Association’s response, and the Black Whale voyage are not separate stories. They are one giant knot.

Very Togashi. Very stressful. Very good.

Final ranking

Here is the final list:

1. Ging Freecss
2. Beyond Netero
3. Chrollo Lucilfer
4. Hisoka Morow
5. Botobai Gigante
6. Biscuit Krueger
7. Illumi Zoldyck
8. Feitan Portor
9. Kurapika
10. Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou

Final thoughts

What makes the Succession Contest arc brilliant is that it punishes lazy power-scaling.

This is not an arc where the strongest person simply walks into the room and wins. The room itself may be the trap. The servant may be the assassin. The prince may be protected by a beast he does not understand. The bodyguard may be loyal to another faction. The ability may activate only when the target assumes it has not.

That is why Hunter x Hunter remains special.

It understands that power is not only force. Power is information. Power is patience. Power is preparation. Power is the ability to read people, institutions, and futures before they fully arrive.

In the Black Whale, the strongest character is not always the one with the biggest aura.

Sometimes, it is the one who understands the rules well enough to survive them.

And sometimes, it is the one dangerous enough to write new rules while everyone else is still reading the old ones.

Padayon, and may we all survive Togashi’s next chapter.

References

[1] VIZ Media. Hunter x Hunter official Shonen Jump chapter list and Chapter 411 listing. (Viz)

[2] Hunterpedia. “Succession Contest arc” and “Chapter 411: Announcement.” (Hunterpedia)

[3] Hunterpedia. “Ging Freecss.” (Hunterpedia)

[4] Hunterpedia. “Beyond Netero.” (Hunterpedia)

[5] Hunterpedia. “Chrollo Lucilfer,” “Hisoka Morow,” and Succession Contest story impact notes. (Hunterpedia)

[6] Hunterpedia. “Botobai Gigante” and “Biscuit Krueger.” (Hunterpedia)

[7] Hunterpedia. “Illumi Zoldyck” and “Feitan Portor.” (Hunterpedia)

[8] Hunterpedia. “Kurapika,” “Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou,” and “Benjamin Hui Guo Rou.” (Hunterpedia)