Johness

Johness is a gigantic, white-looking man whose emotionless face gives off an eerie sense of emptiness.

He is infamous as the worst mass murderer in the criminal history of Zaban City, with at least 146 victims ranging from an 11-year-old boy to elderly people.

He has been sentenced to 968 years in prison, an extreme long-term sentence even among the prisoners used for the Hunter Exam.

Despite this, he shows no interest in reducing his prison term, focusing only on his desire to tear into human flesh again.

In the original anime adaptation, his hair and beard are brown, while in the newer anime they are blond.

His voice actors are Takashi Koyama (older adaptation) and Takashi Matsuyama (newer adaptation).

Johness serves as one of the Third Phase trial officers during the 287th Hunter Exam.

He is introduced as a death row–level criminal brought in specifically to stall examinees with deadly one-on-one matches.

Johness exudes the unsettling aura characteristic of a serial killer, but he is surprisingly straightforward in his desires.

He does not care about strategy, negotiation, or even his own future, as long as he can “grab meat” with his own hands.

Unlike the other prisoner-examiners, he has no interest in earning a reduced sentence by prolonging the matches.

His sole motivation for participating is the instinctive craving to grasp and rip apart the flesh of people from the outside world.

Because of this, Johness intends to kill his opponent from the very beginning rather than play for time or victory conditions.

His attitude is so disturbing that even Leorio Paradinight suggests surrendering their match entirely, saying he would rather fail the exam than fight Johness.

Johness is responsible for the largest recorded mass murder case in Zaban City’s history.

He has killed at least 146 people, with victims spanning from children as young as eleven to senior citizens.

All of his murders are carried out with his bare hands.

He would tear the human body into more than fifty separate pieces using only his fingers and crushing strength.

His killing method involves literally dismantling his victims by hand, earning him the nickname “Dissector.”

Despite this brutality, he reportedly allowed himself to be arrested without resistance when he was finally caught.

However, even his arrest showcased his terrifying nature.

At some point during the arrest, he tore off a piece of a police officer’s arm without the officer noticing at first, demonstrating his speed and precision even outside a formal fight.

For these crimes, Johness was sentenced to 968 years in prison.

He is categorized as an extremely dangerous prisoner, selected specifically for lethal high-risk roles such as acting as a Hunter Exam trial officer.

Johness’s defining feature is his overwhelming grip strength.

He can easily crush stones with one hand, and in the newer anime he is shown scraping his fingers along a brick wall and peeling it away like soft clay.

His fingers are strong enough to rip human flesh directly from the body.

Using only this monstrous hand strength, he dismembers victims into more than fifty pieces without tools or weapons.

He is physically imposing, towering over normal people and radiating raw brute power.

However, this strength is largely unrefined, more akin to a wild beast than to a trained martial artist or assassin.

In terms of technical combat ability, Johness is actually quite limited.

He relies almost entirely on his brute force and intimidation, lacking the fine combat skill or strategic thinking of true professionals in the Hunter × Hunter world.

Johness appears during the Third Phase of the 287th Hunter Exam as one of the prisoner-examiners.

In this phase, prisoners are promised sentence reductions based on how long they can delay and obstruct the examinees.

The deal given to the prisoners is clear: the longer they can stall the examinees, the more their prison term will be reduced.

Most of the other prisoner-examiners therefore choose games or contests that drag out time, such as tricky bets or endurance-based trials.

Johness is the complete opposite.

He has no interest whatsoever in sentence reduction, rewards, or rules; he simply wants to fight and kill.

His approach to the exam is pure predation.

Rather than attempting to outwit or outlast his opponent, he walks into the match intending to end a life as quickly and brutally as possible.

This single-minded bloodlust makes him stand out even among criminal examiners.

He is portrayed as a walking embodiment of destructive impulse, devoid of long-term goals or subtlety.

Johness’s opponent in the Third Phase is Killua Zoldyck, who is secretly a professional assassin.

Johness tries to intimidate him from the outset, making it clear that he does not view this as a fair fight but as a one-sided massacre.

He declares that what is about to happen is not a competition, but a one-sided slaughter.

He fully believes that his overwhelming strength and murderous experience will crush any child who faces him.

Killua, however, remains completely unfazed by Johness’s murderous aura.

He calmly confirms the rules with a casual line along the lines of “If you die, that counts as losing, right?”, treating the match as something trivial.

When the match begins, Johness prepares to use his monstrous grip strength to tear Killua apart.

Before he can enact his plan, Killua moves so fast that Johness does not even realize what has happened.

In an instant, Killua plucks Johness’s heart out of his chest with his bare hand.

Johness continues to stand there, only turning around after feeling a chill, and then sees his own heart held in Killua’s hand.

The speed and precision of Killua’s technique are so great that Johness does not feel the pain or even notice the extraction at first.

It is only when he sees his heart that he begins to panic and moves desperately to get it back.

Killua, however, is almost nonchalant.

He remarks that his own father can perform the same technique even more cleanly, removing a heart without spilling any blood.

From Killua’s professional assassin perspective, Johness is nothing more than an amateur killer.

After the fight, Killua dismissively refers to him as an “amateur,” emphasizing the huge gap between a true assassin and a brute who merely enjoys killing.

Johness dies moments after realizing what has happened.

In the original version, Killua crushes Johness’s heart in his hand as Johness lunges toward him, ending his life in an instant.

The newer anime adaptation softens the visual impact of the scene due to broadcast restrictions.

Killua steals Johness’s heart together with a part of his shirt, keeping the heart wrapped in cloth the whole time and then placing the cloth bundle gently into Johness’s hand after he collapses, though it is already far too late to save him.

Johness is designed as a vivid contrast to true professionals like Killua.

He has the terrifying aura and body count of a serial killer, but lacks discipline, training, or finesse.

His role in the story is to show that raw brutality and a fearsome reputation alone are not enough in the world of Hunter × Hunter.

Faced with a genuine expert assassin, Johness’s so-called “Dissector” skills are exposed as crude and primitive.

Despite his devastating crimes, Johness is defeated quickly and almost casually.

This creates a striking and memorable moment that highlights Killua’s lethality and the dangerous level at which real hunters and assassins operate.