One Punch Man: Saitama loses his strongest form ever ahead of Chapter 171

The One Punch Man fanbase is extremely happy with how the Monsters Association arc has progressed in the series. There is no doubt that this is the best story arc that the series has covered in the manga so far. One of the highlights of this story arc is the fight that took place between Saitama and Garou.

The Hero Hunter underwent multiple transformations and consistently got stronger as the chapters progressed. The final face-off between the two showed just how strong Saitama is, as Garou has been the only character in the entire One Punch Man manga who drew out the Caped Baldy’s powers to this extent.

That being said, Saitama recently seemed to have lost some of his powers in the manga series. Let’s take a look at chapters 168 and 169 to see how it happened.

Disclaimer: This article contains major spoilers from the manga. Sportskeeda claims no ownership of the media used unless otherwise specified.

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One Punch Man: Understanding how Saitama got weaker in the manga

If we look at chapter 168, the two were duking it out on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. While it felt like Garou was able to push Saitama to his limits, we realized that the Caped Baldy was far stronger than we had anticipated. Two very important points were highlighted aside from the fact that Saitama miraculously kicked away Garou’s portals. The first thing that was highlighted was that Saitama’s potential was limitless. Secondly, he was constantly growing even if no one was strong enough to draw out his true potential.

The reason why Garou was able to observe Saitama’s growth was because he was the only one who was strong enough to draw out Saitama’s power. Garou did a great job in the sense that he was the only opponent who was able to withstand not one, but multiple Serious Series moves from Saitama. However, after giving up against Saitama, he saw what happened to Tareo and realized all his wrongdoings. In an attempt to fix his mistakes, he placed his trust in Saitama and taught him his ultimate technique, which allowed Saitama to travel back in time.

Saitama was not only able to travel back in time, he also reversed the causality rate. The One Punch Man protagonist felt a great deal of guilt when Genos was killed. He believed that he didn’t have the sense of timing that every good hero had in order to save people. When Saitama returned to the original timeline in chapter 169 of One Punch Man, Genos appreciated Saitama for saving the heroes in the nick of time. However, the most important thing in that chapter was that Saitama had no memory of the time travel, or how he managed to do that in the first place.

The Caped Baldy, who was already the strongest character in the series, became far stronger after he learnt how to travel back in time. But, upon reaching the current timeline, Saitama lost his ability to time travel, an ability that only Genos remembers now because of the replacement of his core. Thus, this is how the Caped Baldy became weaker in chapter 169 of One Punch Man.