CaV: Noelle Silva (Decaff) vs Akainu (Shirso)

Akainu is a former Admiral and current Fleet Admiral of the Marines in One Piece, one of the strongest characters and poised to likely become one of the end game antagonists in the series. An exceptionally brutal and ruthless fighter, he will stop at nothing, even murdering innocent civilians, in his pursuit of Absolute Justice and stamping out piracy.

Is massive. Many pieces of evidence point to this but I will use the most clear cut one, the horizon from the deck of the Merry stretches over 50 km, as the far bank of the Sandora river (which is stated to be 50 km wide) can be just made out at the horizon from the other bank:

The Going Merry has a stated height of 11m, the deck is at about 50% of that give or take, horizon from that height on our planet is about 9 km:

Akainu's Devil Fruit is stated to be on the highest tier of offense:

Which gives him scaling above Ace (can passively stop snowfall on a large island-small country sized landmass, even as a rookie was dishing out like small island lvl AoE ), Enel (lightning that vaporizes rock on contact), Oven (can instantly boil oceans, 'Netsunetsu''s ability is to instantly transfer heat even in the vast ocean, turning it into sticky water or boiling water').

He is hotter than Ace to the point he can can burn a hole through Ace on contact, Ace who is fire elemental himself:

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Drum Island was also legitimately massive:

You can see there being multiple mountains, and then those towers which dwarf those mountains (these towers were stated on panel to be 5 km high, easily large mountain sized), and several clusters of towns. On top of that, we are looking at the landscape from a massive height (several km easily) and it still stretches beyond the horizon, showing just how massive Drum Island is. Keep in mind the horizon in OP planet >>> irl earth.

So Akainu's passive heat aura (which also has a standalone feat of disintegrating a steel sword in its vicinity, scan below) scales above passive heat that can stop snowfall on an at least 100s of km sized landmass.

It should also scale at least to the passive heat of Kaido's Flaming Susanoo since that's a pure Dragon Zoan DF ability, which is an island sized heat construct:

Just coming in contact is enough to vaporize G5 Luffy if he is not using ACoC for protection, which is impressive, as Kaido's Boro Breath (multi mountain-small island AoE and the usual rock vaporizing potency) cannot vaporize G5 Luffy:

So essentially a Luffy sized volume of the Flaming Dragon carries more heat than a multi mountain-small island sized heat blast with rock vaporizing potency at least. Scale that up to the full size of Flaming Dragon (island) and that's some serious passive heat being generated.

Akainu's attacks don't just carry intense heat though, but also blunt force, and in this regard he scales directly to WB's quake punches:

WB with a casual attack made a sea quake (basically an earthquake on the sea floor) which caused two absolutely massive tsunami waves:

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To get an idea of their size, we can see them dwarfing the Marine Headquarters, which is taller than Sanjuan Wolf who has been stated to have a height of 180 meters.

There's a strict, direct relation between tsunami height and the magnitude of the sea quake that generated it, and the height of WB's tsunamis is far greater than what even Mag 10 sea quakes irl would generate:

Mag 10 quakes require continental energy to generate and since WB did it through shockwaves from kms away the actual potency of his punch I'd put at multi continental:

He also has other feats like this such as tilting the very ocean with ease:

There's also the famous statement from Sengoku of WB having the power to destroy the world:

I am willing to take this as reliable since Sengoku has fought WB many times in the past and he really has no reason to inflate WB's power in this particular war situation. Now "destroy the very world" can be interpreted as anything from life wiping to outright planet busting. I think the most reasonable take based on everything we know so far is he can unleash a planet wide quake intense enough to surface wipe.

Shaking intense enough to at least topple buildings (as otherwise there's no threat to people or infrastructure at all) on a planet wide scale would be moon lvl on irl earth, but as shown OP planet much larger and again this would be done through shockwaves, so the direct potency of his punch would be even higher, so overall WB and by extension Akainu I'd say is operating well into planet lvl ranges with their stronger attacks.

I wanted to give this its separate section as it's Akainu's only serious extended fight we have in the series thus far. His fight with fellow Admiral Aokiji for 10 days straight twisted the very climate of the island Punk Hazard permanently, turning one side into a volcanic wasteland and the other frozen:

There's 2 impressive aspects here, firstly, Akainu is obviously an elemental equal to Aokiji in all regards, Aokiji who can casually and instantly flash freeze an ocean:

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The ability to turn one's own body into ice. You can potentially regenerate even if you were smashed apart. It has the power to instantly freeze anything you touch, even the very ocean itself!

As you can see he didn't just merely freeze the ocean either, but even the very atmosphere on the island they were on turned very cold, instantly.

Temperature wise it's hard to quantify such things without definite statements but to put in perspective Aokiji instantly flash freezes massively superhuman bodies to the bone, turning them completely brittle, while outer space temperatures (like 2.7 K) takes close to a day to have the same effect on a human body. As such realistically he is probably some very small fraction between 0 and 1 K.

The other is the passive environmental warping aspect, the ground and atmosphere on Akainu's side are very hot, enough to keep the ocean in its immediate vicinity boiling and cause the likes of Luffy visible discomfort due to the intense ambient heat:

This when at this stage Luffy can use attacks that intentionally set his limbs on fire (Red Hawk) and even PTS has face tanked Enel's heat that can instantly melt hundreds of tons of gold or Wyper's Burn Bazooka that can vape through rock.

Now one might say this is after 10 days of fighting, however, the chunk of that effect is him generating all those active volcanoes on the island which have been constantly erupting for 2 years straight, something that warrants multi continental levels of energy:

https://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/battles-7/quantifying-punk-hazard-9-years-on-2228295/ (Credits: Naronu)

The net energy required to heat up half of an island and its atmosphere and the ocean in its immediate vicinity is obviously negligible compared to MC, on top this is the state of the island 2 years after the fight ended, and it had so much time to cool down. So I'd say the environmental state we see Punk Hazard is in now, is something he can basically replicate as a passive side effect instantly, the moment he starts fighting seriously (just the environmental warping part, not creating active volcanoes).

Akainu isn't the type who really abuses speed in combat however his reactions should be good enough to not be statued or whatever by Noelle. I will start with this for now, his reactions should scale to Aokiji who has shown he can precisely control his flash freeze at point blank distance, when he flash froze Doffy who was right in front of him while sparing Smoker who was right below Doffy:

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His flash freeze statued Doffy's combat speed to a ridiculous degree, as Doffy was mid movement, with full intention of murdering Smoker there, and Aokiji flash froze not just Doffy himself but also over a 100 meters omnidirectionally as you can see, before Doffy could barely move a few inches.

Doffy is high rel-low FTL in combat speed I'd say, as he scales above stuff like Moriah's shadows instantly crossing the planet, post skip base Luffy casually dodging Pacifista LS lasers from a few dozen meters away, even calling them "slow" and dodging his own Overheat attack that crossed the distance from Green Bit to Dressrosa instantly.

So Aokiji has the reactions to handle point blank an attack that statues high rel-low FTL characters hundreds of times over, casually, and Akainu scales, which should be enough to react to Noelle.

Can spam giant magma fists, each comparable to a large ship:

Can generate volcanic eruptions at any point out of the ground:

Can be a good ability to catch Noelle off guard

Logia regeneration means physical attacks are entirely useless, blowing large chunks off his body does nothing to him and gets instantly regenerated:

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Has the invisible emission Armament Haki, which basically acts like an invisible forcefield that can be used for both offense and defense, he showed it when blocking a massive attack from WB with his fellow Admirals:

Given that attack was intended to destroy that very large platform (to put in perspective how large it is, Akainu himself is over 3 m tall as are the other 2 Admirals, and they are practically dots compared to the platform's height) and Akainu contributed 1/3 of the haki forcefield to block it, I'd say his AoE with this technique should be at least large building lvl.

And he is also a confirmed user of Observation Haki which is quite potent precog, it can easily compensate for speed gaps several blitz tiers above your own, seen in its first introduction in Skypeia by one of Enel's fodder priests. What follows after this section is more elaboration on this, a writeup I composed years back xD !

Haki Bloom

Haki blooms, as in grows more potent in the heat of battle, especially against challenging opponents:

We saw this best in the Katakuri fight, for both CoA as well as CoO:

• At the start of the fight, Luffy hurt his CoA coated G3 fist while clashing with a random unnamed Katakuri punch, towards the end he is matching Katakuri's named attacks in base with his own CoA.
• Towards the middle, Katakuri can casually blitz even G4 Boundman Luffy but once Luffy's CoO blooms and he understands Future Sight, he can essentially sleepwalk through Katakuri's punch barrage in base, never getting tagged.
• All of this happened in like less than 10 hours iirc.

So Akainu's haki will keep getting better as the fight goes on, if Noelle is a challenging opponent that is. His attacks will keep getting stronger (CoA) and he will have an easier time reacting to Noelle (CoO).

However, even if you may argue a raw speed advantage for Judar, it is further compensated for by Observation haki.

CoO is an extremely potent precognitive ability, to the point that it allows you to literally toy with characters who are multiple tiers above you in speed and would lol blitz you otherwise. This is best shown back in Skypiea when the ability is first introduced.

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Enel, in his debut, is able to easily blitz all his priests while playing around.

Yet, Enel, in terms of raw speed, isn't fast enough to dodge Luffy's punches when Luffy found a way to bypass his CoO by randomizing his attacks:

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And Enel fails to react to Luffy's attacks many other times also.

So basically, in terms of raw speed, Luffy > Enel >> his priests. By all rights, Luffy should be able to easily replicate Enel's feat of casually blitzing all his priests at the same time.

But see what happens when Luffy went up against Satori, arguably the weakest of the priests:

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Satori is able to easily dodge both Luffy and Sanji's (who at this early stage shouldn't be much slower than Luffy) physical attacks at close range, tag them back and just keeps on completely embarrassing them.

The reason is of course, due to Observation haki, which is a massive boost to speed in general from how it has been established from day 1.

So even if you argue Judar has a raw speed advantage, CoO is more than enough to compensate and then some.

On the topic of CoO, as is common knowledge, it gives you a brief foresight of the future, as seen the very first time a novice PTS Luffy used it subconsciously.

This is a huge advantage, especially in a random encounter, for obvious reasons. Doffy will always stay one step ahead, knowing Judar's next move before the latter has even thought of it.

The other benefits of CoO are the 360 degree spatial awareness that it provides, along with allowing the user to gauge his opponent's power level, as shown by Rayleigh when he sensed that 500 beasts were stronger than Luffy on the island they were training on:

I anticipate a lot of arguments will be made around heat, cold, temperatures and such, so I want to clear some common misconceptions I see many power scalers have regarding this stuff.

First of all, what does heating and cooling something up even mean? Heating is you transferring some heat energy to the target thus raising its temperature, intensifying the motion of its constituent molecules and atoms, supply sufficient heat, you start breaking their molecular bonds, thus melting them, and so on.

Cooling is obviously the reverse of this, you are draining the target's internal heat energy. Since cooling is essentially an energy drain the correct way to quantify it is obviously the amount of energy it can drain. Which brings me to...

The role of temperature

While temperature is important in such debates, it's only one part of the puzzle. You need 2 other important parameters, the Specific Heat of the target (this is a physical quantity that denotes how much heat it takes to raise the temperature of an unit mass of the target by 1 degree K, it is entirely material dependent) and the mass (this one's obvious, it's going to take a lot more heat to raise the temperature of say an entire lake of water compared to a bucket. Conversely, a lot more energy needs to be drained to freeze a lake compared to a bucket as well).

What this means is freezing an ocean to even the bare minimum 0 degrees C is far more impressive than freezing a bucket of water to even Absolute Zero, as the energy drain required is far larger in the first case.

Having said that, I'd argue temperature is probably the only thing that matters when looking at things from the resistance side. If you are already frozen then breaking out of being frozen at Absolute Zero is > breaking out of being frozen at some higher temperature (say 3 K), even if the latter can freeze the entire universe.

Mana, as described in Chapter 11, serves as a fundamental force permeating both individuals and the world itself. It is also implied that those without mana cannot detect mana.

The quantity of mana one possesses at birth remains fixed, establishing the foundation for the Clover Kingdom's hierarchical caste system. Peasants occupy the lowest rung, followed by the average commoner, then noble-born aristocrats, and finally, the esteemed Royals like Noelle. Typically, ascending the social ladder correlates with an increase in innate mana reserves. However, wizards possess the remarkable ability to augment their mana stores by drawing from nature—an elemental principle that forms the bedrock of Mana Method, a topic we'll delve into more deeply later.

It's crucial to recognize that a person's mana reservoir directly influences the potency of their attacks, a universal principle applicable to all mana-based abilities such as Mana Skin and Mana Zone.

Lastly, Mana is extremely versatile and just having mana makes you more resilient to a wide range of things such Disease, Mind Control, Attacks, Hax, and elemental resistances depending on the character.

The last bit of information is especially critical here because you see a glimpse of Noelle resisting potent heat with no shield, or spells, it's just her raw mana and affinity that makes her resistant to heat, this ability will only grow greatly with Mana Skin which ill talk about later and I don't consider this a Mana Skin feat just yet because as the scan suggests she considers Mana Skin an impossible task for her current self. For reference of the heat she's resisting here, it's stated that normal people are instantly turned to ash by this heat, and characters who use fire capable of turning magic powered beings to ash instantly are bothered by this heat, so it should be a good deal over your standard "It can turn you to ash."

Mana is one of those things that has hundreds of showings and statements so don't be surprised if new information is posted in round two to counter certain things, it's just not viable to mention everything all at once.

Mana skin takes all the inherit properties of mana and increases them creating a protective shell around the user and also boosting their physical abilities. We already touched on Noelle's heat resistance without mana skin above.

But with this ability Noelle's elemental resistances skyrocket as shown when she battles former Wizard King Edward Avalaché.

The impressive aspect of this fight is Edward's spell "World End Church" which reduces the area down to "absolute zero." Every single Black Bull member was able to resist absolute zero to the degree that they're not frozen and they can still speak/think which in itself is a crazy feat far surpassing any "cold resistance" feat in One Piece because you have characters like Kuzan who's flash freezes are considered dangerous in verse and he's not even close to absolute zero, more than that Noelle completely no sells the temperature after using her Mana Skin. Now keep in mind Akainu's heat was matched by freezing far lesser than Absolute Zero, yet Noelle just no sold cold that's at the universal lowest you can go.

Mana Zone as the manga explains it's the ability to control mana across a whole area, this allows the user complete control of the area to the point they can move freely through space (which Noelle can already do), it allows you to spawn attacks on target, all around the target, etc., and it highly boosts the users perception abilities. This ability will be a key factor in this fight because for Undine the elemental spirit of Water that Noelle is using in this battle, her Mana Zone is the size of an entire country. This allows her to manipulate and summon water ANYWHERE within a countries distance of herself, spawning it on target, or even flooding massive amounts of area instantly. These are things that will end the fight the moment it starts, Akainu has no counter to this and he'll instantly lose his DF powers because he's weak to water.

Noelle's first ever spell that she unlocked was a defensive spell called "Sea Dragon's Lair" the spell encases Noelle and her allies in a protective shell of water defending from outside attacks. It should be noted that in this scene Noelle unlocks this spell through an ability that Wizards in Black Clover have where they can unlock new spells mid fight when needed, this X factor could play a huge role in this debate because if Noelle needs something that she doesn't currently have there's nothing stopping her from unlocking it. This is not something Akainu can do.

After learning Sea Dragon's Liar, Noelle further refined the spell in order to reach the Seabed Temple unlocking Sea Dragon's Cradle adding the ability to move around while maintaining the defensive barrier.

Next up on Noelle's spells is her Sea Dragon's Roar, this is Noelle's long range spell of choice and it is very potent, potent enough to nearly one shot Vetto despite the fact that he actively tried to block the attack with his magic, this spell is also controllable and can be adjusted to make up for any misses or dodges, not that Akainu is dodging.

It should be noted that before Noelle learned Mana Skin which is a massive buff regarding the control of her mana and it's capabilities, she was able to match the Salamander and even damage it while tanking it's heat. For reference the Databook states the Salamander can vape oceans.

Faced with an opponent who made it nigh impossible to control mana inside the space they're fighting Noelle was forced to switch from long range attacks to something closer to her self, something that gave her complete control of the mana surrounding her, something that couldn't be suppressed by her opponent, in that moment her magic did what magic does and evolved. Giving her a spell that was filled with an astronomical amount of magic power, this spell not only increases Noelle's AP being shown to outperform her "Sea Dragon's Roar" but it increases her agility, As the name of chapter 177 suggests "Battlefield Dancer", Noelle is able to freely "swim" through space evading all attacks with ease.

So with this new ability Noelle was able to overcome a form of power negation that makes it hard to control your mana, she increased her firepower above what was shown before, and she gained the ability to move around the battlefield freely but, there's one more thing I want to talk about before we move along and it's Noelle's "dancing."

During the seabed temple arc Asta encounters a combatant who uses a form of swordsmanship that incorporates dance, specifically dance that allows him to move like water. I bring this up because I believe it allows us to read between the lines a little, I'm going to bring forth an argument that wasn't stated by the manga but I believe it was shown and we have enough of a comparison between this swordsmen and Noelle that we can safely argue what I'm about to.

During the fight Asta realizes he can't read the swordsmen Ki accurately because it was like his mind was somewhere else due to his dance, Ki and CoO operate pretty similar especially in the way it was countered here. Which we see with Luffy when he turns his mind off (mind gone somewhere else) and Enel can't read his moves.

So if Noelle can perfectly match the dance which she does;

• moving like water via her own dace

Why wont this counter CoO? It's not like you can liken the Ki bypassing aspect of the dance to his Dance Magic and argue that Noelle's dance wouldn't have that property because Asta mimicked the dace with his body.

This spell takes everything about the previous Valkyrie Armor and makes it stronger by using it in conjunction with Undine's Mana Zone which we discussed earlier. So when this spell is in play, Noelle's agility and speed are off the charts, Akainu loses his powers and is a stationary target without his logia to save him, leaving Noelle an easy opening to one shot with a lance through the heart against a slow, powerless, Akainu.

In this form, Noelle also demonstrates the ability to resist Megicula's curse, "Decaying World," which is so powerful that it broke a seal capable of sealing away curse power on the world. Despite being a curse stated to change the very shape of the world and life itself, it was unable to fully remove Noelle's magic. This raises two important points about Megicula's curses. Firstly, they have the ability to alter the very fabric of reality; Megicula's curses impose laws upon the world, such as 'Say this and you die,' and these laws are applied universally, effectively constituting a form of reality warping or law manipulation. Secondly, like all Supreme Devils, Megicula's curses are conceptual, akin to Lilith and Naamah's ability to freeze or burn concepts, Morris's capability to modify concepts, and Lucifero's power to even crush Fate itself. Thus, we are confronted with Noelle's magic surviving a curse whose sole purpose is to destroy magic and spells, originating from someone who can reshape the world and manipulate fundamental concepts, yet even that was not enough to fully eradicate it

This is the strongest form of Noelle that will be included inside this CaV, in this form Noelle is far stronger than she was in her previous form as stated by Vanica. She retains her superior speed and agility, and she gains the ability to kill immortals like Vanica who can recover from any physical attack and even attacks against her soul given how Megicula's curses target the soul itself and one of the curses is what keeps Vanica from dying.