Part 1 — Human Garou
If you're currently reading this, then you're most likely interested in seeing a display of Human Garou's capabilities. After struggling to decide how to format this respect thread, I settled on not presenting it like a portfolio, or résumé if you will. So in essence, this will be a loosely formatted and chronological breakdown of Garou's powers, capabilities, background, and feats.
If you don't have intimate knowledge of Garou, and are only mildly familiar of his character, then the first thing you need to know is that he is a human who made a drastic transformation into a monster, within his story. I'll get into the details of why later, but basically, his monster transformation grants him a monumental stat increase. The power spike is accompanied with a change in appearance that is both grotesque and unsightly. For these reasons, he's generally regarded as a different version of the character altogether, so I'll split the exhibition of his feats in two.
Garou makes his first full appearance in chapter 40 of One Punch Man. He's an abrasive and enigmatic hot-shot, who comes of as predominantly arrogant and antagonistic. His arrogance is not without place however, as he quickly proves himself as a force to be reckoned with by casually dispatching three A-Class heroes who try to intercept him. In verse rankings and titles are generally meaningless in cross-universe battles, but in One Punch Man, heroes are (at the least) usually peak to superhuman. In addition to that, one heroes Garou stomped in his debut was not entirely featless. I am talking about Heavy Tank Loincloth, who shattered concrete with a single punch:
Immediately thereafter, Garou breaks his arm in several places before casually one-shotting him with a vicious uppercut. This doubles as a speed feat as well. You see the masked man who appears to be levitating next to the trail of Heavy Tank's fist? Yeah, Garou was holding him by the collar in the scan prior to this one, so Loincloth's punch tells us he was aiming for Garou. Garou then disappears in the posted scan, and is revealed to have broken Heavy Tank's arm at the same time he attacked, showing FTE speed and superhuman strength. Here is the full sequence of events.
Garou's FTE speed is showed again when Blue Fire, another A-Class hero, confronts him. Blue Fire shoots a stream of flames at him from his arm, but Garou was able to dodge it and immediately discern the fact he was using a contraption to generate the flames, all before closing the distance between them and severing his arm faster than he could see.
After this, Garou slaughters what was an entire room full of A-class criminals and villains, while wearing gleaming grin on his face, and without procuring a single injury.
At this point in time Garou was a simple and intriguing character, not morbidly overpowered or anything. His steady rise in infamy and power was entertaining though, and his feats got better with each and every appearance. His next major showdown was against the S-Class hero Tank Top Master and his followers, and this match placed Garou at the lower spectrum of street tier for me. The biggest takeaway from this encounter was the revelation that Garou's skill (we already knew him to be a prodigious martial artist) enabled him with the ability to memorize his opponents fighting styles, and this allocated him with an adaptation complex.
As far as raw feats go, in the realm of durability, Garou tanked a punch from TTM, followed by a tackle and a couple more punches down the line.
- Scans 1-2: Garou tanks a punch from TTM.
- Scans 3-6: Garou tanks a tackle from TTM with some damage (a nosebleed).
This is impressive because TTM was able to shatter concrete with a punch over a far larger area than Loincloth. Enough to where I would say there were multiple tons of force behind his blow.
In the next chapter, Garou appears to be on the losing end as he struggles to withstand TTM's attacks. He is spewing blood after an off-panel blow, and is bleeding profusely in other areas as well.
This leans more to the area of endurance and pain tolerance than durability, but Garou is actually getting more powerful as the battle continues. After gushing more blood, he feigns surrender as he turns around and is greeted in the face with a punch from TTM's absurdly large fist. But much to everyone's surprise, he counterattacks just as if not more brutally while simultaneously eating the blow.
On the next page, we see Garou accomplished this with Fist of Flowing Water, Bang's signature martial art.
Garou uses it to blitz and pummel TTM with a flurry of quick strikes that collectively have enough power to fracture a brick wall.
Fist of Flowing Water is actually an interesting martial art, and it's mechanics were elaborated perfectly on by TTM.
TTM tells us that Garou repelled, nullified and redirected all of his attacks. He then says that no matter how powerful your attack is, if you can't hit him it's useless, meaning that this technique (Fist of Flowing Water) uses advanced skill to harm his opponents (not him) with their own power and strength. It is even stated that this return deals double the damage, and Garou targets vital spots and joints to incapacitate physical functions and progressively weaken you.
I think this is pretty cool, because it basically dictates that unless you're faster than or more skill than Garou, he'll always dominate you in close quarters combat, specifically hand-to-hand. All of your punches and blows simply won't land on him. He'll be parrying and redirecting your strikes back at you with double their original power through raw skill, and it will be aimed at your vital points like your neck and sternum. If you read the scans you'll know I'm not just reaching or overselling this either. TTM explained it pretty gracefully. So in CQC, I genuinely don't see an actual way to circumvent Garou's technique without having a speed advantage (meaning he won't be able to react to your attacks) or a skill advantage (which means you have superior technique and better fighting prowess than him).
However, Garou is decently fast for his tier, and having more skill than him will prove incredibly difficult as you will later see.