Hibiki Tachibana vs Issei Hyoudou is a What-if? episode of Death Battle featuring Hibiki Tachibana from the Symphogear franchise and Issei Hyoudou from the High School DxD light novel franchise.
Description[]
Not all heroes have public identities who are accepted. And not all heroes become heroes in life. They can be hated, and do not begin their path to being a hero until after they arrive on Death's door. Will Hibiki, the wielder of Gungnir, show the might of the Symphogears, or will Issei, host of the Boosted Gear, prove the strength of one of the thirteen Longinus?
Interlude[]
Wiz: There is always the rare hero whose public identity is despised by those around them. And sometimes, nearly succumbing to death is the beginning of a hero's tale.
Boomstick: And these two pariahs became heroes after a journey that started with them getting stabbed in the heart! Damn, that's hardcore.
Wiz: We have Hibiki Tachibana, the strongest wielder of Gungnir from Symphogear.
Boomstick: And Issei Hyoudou, the host of the Boosted Gear from High School DxD.
Wiz: These two teenagers have a gauntlet as their iconic weapon, but whose hand bears more power?
Boomstick: He's Wiz and I'm Boomstick!
Wiz: And it's our job to analyze their weapons, armor, and skill to see who would win a Death Battle!
Hibiki Tachibana[]
Wiz: In the world of Symphogear, monsters called Noise terrorize the human race. Without warning, without reason, they appear out of nowhere and attack all humans they see, regardless of age or gender.
Boomstick: I'll say! These bright-colored things frickin' turn everything they touch into carbon dust! And the Noise die too when they kill someone, but eh, who cares? There are some Noise that can create more Noise, so their numbers don't really decrease. That, and they come from an infinite parallel universe where they keep making more Noise.
Wiz: Enter Hibiki Tachibana, your typical young girl who loves going out with her best friend and listening to the popular songs on the chart. One day, while waiting for her friend at a concert, Noise attacked, causing chaos everywhere.
Boomstick: Long story short, Hibiki fell off a ledge and got hurt, the two singers were actually secret government agents who fight Noise, the red-haired one named Kanade sacrificed her life to save the kid, yadda yadda yadda. Anyways, Kanade's weapon broke and parts of it ended up in Hibiki's chest, and she got the power of the Symphogear called Gungnir.
Wiz: Symphogears are powerful relics, made from fusing ancient relics with heretical technology, turning mythological and legendary artifacts into mechanized armor powered by... music. Strange, I know, but we've seen weirder. Anyway, with Gungnir, Hibiki was able to fight against the Noise, taking "solving issues with your fists" to a new level.
Boomstick: You know, that Finé lady who created the Symphogears got really nice taste with designing those suits. Hibiki has a pretty nice bod, you know. For a girl who's obsessed with eating, she somehow hasn't gained any weight or fat, and has a strangely fine butt.
Wiz: Boomstick, she's younger than eighteen.
Boomstick: Ugh! I take back what I said. I'll need a drink after this.
Wiz: ... Anyways, armed with the power of music, martial arts, and armor powered by an ancient weapon, Hibiki set out to uphold Kanade's legacy, fighting the Noise to save the citizens of the world. And she would go on to save the world multiple times, all before finishing her education.
Boomstick: And all she has to do to activate Gungnir is to sing a short phrase.
Hibiki: Balwisyal neschell Gungnir tron...
Boomstick: The Symphogear is constantly evolving, adjusting its 301,655,722 locks to change and adapt to its user's fighting style. While her predecessor Kanade used a spear that can spin like a drill, Hibiki punches really, really hard. Seriously, she beats the shit out of the Noise with the martial arts skills she was taught by her commander Genjuro Kazanari, who can obliterate boulders with one punch, flip asphalt with a stomp, pull a "return to sender" on a bunch of missiles fired at him by catching each one and throwing them all back, and more. And he's a regular human! And since Hibiki is a singing mecha magical girl, Gungnir helps her by enhancing her blows with its pistons in her gauntlets and boots!
Wiz: This allows Hibiki to punch with so much force that the generated air pressure acts like a bullet, tearing through anything in its way as it goes in the direction of her punch. In fact, she's even able to throw punches with so much force that they create tornadoes! The minimum amount of force needed for a tornado requires winds going up to 65 miles per hour. However, given the damage caused by Hibiki's tornadoes, they would have to have well over twice that power, meaning that at minimum they hold the power of F3 level tornadoes, which are severe and can cause massive destruction.
Boomstick: And that's just a basic tornado punch! If Gungnir has enough power built up, Hibiki's tornado punch can warp the weather and break through the atmosphere to go deep into space! Now that's what I call a good start to a fighting career!
Wiz: In fact, Hibiki did pretty well for a while, until things didn't. Remember how shards of Gungnir were impaled in her chest? It was the hundreds of fragments that were too close to her heart to be removed that granted her the ability to use Gungnir. The very thing that gave her the ability to fight was also the very thing killing her from within. Just like Iron Man in the MCU.
Boomstick: Apparently having your body switch back and forth between human and machine is really bad for your health. And by bad for your health, I mean as in literally glowing red-hot from heat, water instantly evaporating and leaves instantly disintegrating upon physical contact with your body, and me- OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO HER?! There's metal chuks growing out of her chest and face!
Wiz: The cost of activating Gungnir the way she did caused Hibiki's body to start to merge with the relic, which would eventually kill her. As such, she had no choice but to stop fighting. And then another relic, Rei Shenshoujing, which had the ability to purify anything, showed up and Hibiki's best friend, who happened to be held under hypnosis, was forced to use it and go on a rampage.
Boomstick: And Hibiki's answer to her problem was to throw herself and her friend into the Mr. Clean laser beams that Ray Shoeshine-thing fired around. And it worked! Now an ordinary human, she was no longer in danger of dying from the inside. So she fought Maria, another Symphogear user, who conveniently happened to have a copy of Gungnir and took it for herself.
Wiz: But make no mistake, Hibiki is no slouch in terms of power even without being merged with ancient weapons. Now able to fight safely, Hibiki could access more of Gungnir's abilities.
Boomstick: Hibiki is strong enough to smash through reinforced structures with ease, lift and throw a grounded space shuttle straight up into the air, launch a giant metal monster from deep in the ocean to up above the stratosphere, and destroy part of the moon. There's also the time she turned K2 into the world's third tallest mountain with one punch. Sure, her buddy Chris softened the dirt for that one, but still.
Wiz: Hibiki's fighting style revolves around martial arts. Specifically, she watched Bruce Lee action films and learned the way he fought. This would mean that Hibiki learned Wing Chun, tai chi, boxing, judo, taekwondo, wrestling, eskrima, and even picked up Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee's self-created martial arts philosophy, all from observation and mimicry.
Boomstick: She even got a training montage that would make Rocky Balboa proud! Jogging on snowy mountaintops, punching frozen meat in meat lockers, drinking raw eggs... She even hit a punching bag so hard that not only did the tree branch holding it up break, the punching bag got sent flying several feet away, and that feat was done without her transformation in her first month of fighting!
Wiz: And while Hibiki's martial prowess itself is rather impressive, the Symphogear's arsenal is even more powerful.
Boomstick: Gungnir has a passive energy barrier that protects Hibiki from dangers around her, including the dusting treatment from Noise, the vacuum of space, atmospheric reentry, death lasers, and swimming real deep under the sea in Antarctica. And even then, she has an absurd pain tolerance, as you could tell back when her body was merging with Gungnir. That, and how she's had body parts replaced by her enemy-turned-ally Carol.
Wiz: And after all Hibiki has gone through, Gungnir has unlocked more of its systems, providing her more ways to fight. At first, it had a berserk function, which was later harnessed and controlled to evolve into the Ignite Module, which granted a massive boost to Hibiki's fighting prowess. However, after absorbing the Lapis Philosophorum, it was removed from the system and replaced by Amalgam, an even more powerful transformation that comes in two stages.
Boomstick: The first stage is the Cocoon, an extremely powerful barrier that protects Hibiki from taking damage. It's strong enough that it was able to break through an energy field surrounding the entire Earth. The second stage is Imago, in which her armor turns golden, which you'd think is a terrible move, but actually gives an explosive increase to Hibiki's fighting ability without the weakness of gold being soft. Oh, and she gets two giant mechanical arms too.
Wiz: However, Hibiki's ultimate form is the X-Drive, which is unleashed by using her Superb Song. This technique is dangerous to the user, making it a pyrrhic attack of sorts.
Boomstick: Remember Kanade? She used her Superb Song to save Hibiki, and her body got the Thanos snap treatment after the fight was over! Well, guess what? Hibiki's used it a bunch, and she's never dealt with the nasty side effects of the Superb Song!
Wiz: As a candidate who is naturally compatible rather than taking an artificial booster, Hibiki is able to use her Symphogear with more efficiency than most Symphogear wielders can hope to achieve. The ever-evolving weapon has so many attacks that listing them all would be cumbersome.
Boomstick: I'll say! She can punch the ground to create craters, do rocket punches, throw a flurry of punches that would make Stands proud, and even harness the phonic gain of humanity to unleash METANOIA, a conceptual attack that breaks through any attack and purges all foreign influences from its target.
Wiz: However, the Symphogear does have two notable weaknesses. First, if Hibiki is prevented from singing, she faces a severe drop in power. Without song, shee is reduced to less than half power. And if the Symphogear pendant is targeted, enough damage can destroy it, disabling it and leaving the user defenseless.
Boomstick: Well, that's never stopped her. And let's be honest. After all the shit she's been through, would you even want to stop Hibiki?
Hibiki: You don't need strength to unite the world. We can become one, beyond the limit of words! Even in the future, we can join our hands in unity!
Issei Hyoudou[]
Wiz: Kuoh, a nice quiet town. There's nothing special or attention-grabbing about this place, aside from the local academy that went from an all-girls private school to a public co-ed school.
Boomstick: Except this place is a hotspot for supernatural activity, as well as the home of a bunch of sexy big-boobs devil girls and a boy who wants to be harem king!
Wiz: (sighs) Meet Issei Hyoudou, a teenage boy so perverted he'd be up there with Roshi and Jiraiya. Wait, no. Actually, he'd probably be even higher.
Intermission[]
Wiz: The combatants are set, let's end this debate once and for all.
Boomstick: It's time for a DEATH BATTLE!!!
Death Battle[]
Fight![]
Results[]
Wiz: The winner is...
Trivia[]
- The links between Hibiki and Issei are that they are initially social pariahs, took a fatal injury to the chest, have a gauntlet as their iconic weapon, have armor that changes throughout their respective series, their identities are secret, have high positions, and their equipment has a Celtic origin.
- Hibiki survived the Zwei Wing incident while others did not, and Issei is a shameless pervert
- Hibiki was stabbed by fragments of Gungnir, and Issei was impaled by a light spear
- Hibiki has Gungnir, and Issei has the Boosted Gear
- Gungnir changes its form to adapt to its user's growth and fighting style, and the Boosted Gear has multiple forms
- Hibiki has to keep it a secret that she is a S.O.N.G. agent, and Issei has to keep it secret from ordinary people that he is a Devil
- Because S.O.N.G. is a government organization, Hibiki is by definition a government official, while Issei is a special-class Devil, which is the highest rank in the Devil system
- Gungnir is the spear of the Norse god Odin, and Ddraig, who resides within the Boosted Gear, is called the Welsh Dragon