Pillar Men

“

Awaken, my masters! (目覚めたまえッ！ 我が主たちよ！)

Mezame tamae! Waga omotachi yo!

”

—Wamuu, Chapter 64: The Red Stone of Aja

The Pillar Men (柱の男, Hashira no Otoko), also known as the Tribe of the Pillar's Darkness (柱の闇の一族, Hashira no Yami no Ichizoku) or simply the Tribe of Darkness (闇の一族, Yami no Ichizoku), are four powerful humanoids that serve as the primary antagonistic force in the second part of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series, Battle Tendency. Their goal is to obtain the Red Stone of Aja and conquer their weakness to the sun.

Summary

Esidisi revealing his true form

The Pillar Men are from a race of ancient super-human beings. These beings are now nearly extinct, but used to live hundreds of thousand of years ago in underground colonies beneath the American continent. They are highly intelligent and extremely powerful, but vulnerable to the rays of the Sun and to the Ripple.

Their physiology is very different from humans, though outwardly they appear very similar. The only visible feature that can differentiate them from humans is the horns on their forehead. An individual being can possess one or several small horns; for them, displaying their horns is a sign of honor. Moreover, these beings all possess athletic physiques and long lifespans. Their near immortality causes them to produce very few children, as they see little need for them.

The four remaining representatives of this species are Kars, Esidisi, Wamuu, and Santana, in descending order of hierarchy, dubbed "Pillar Men" due to being discovered sleeping inside stone pillars. These four survivors have all used the Stone Mask invented by Kars to gain immortality and a high degree of bodily manipulation, at the cost of a nearly two-millennia sleep cycle and an ever-growing thirst for blood that threatens all life on the planet.

List of Pillar Men

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Pillar Men

Kars

★

Esidisi

Wamuu

Santana

Pillar Men Clan

Abilities

Superhuman Body

The surviving Pillar Men generally have vastly superior physical abilities than humans in all aspects, surpassing by far even the strongest of Vampires.

Super Strength

User(s): All

While a weakened Vampire can exert a pressure of 235 kg/cm² with his fingers, the Pillar Men possess even greater strength. Santana's Rib Blades can exert a pressure of 825 kg/cm² and his finger pressure is estimated by Stroheim to be around 975 kg/cm². Wamuu is also able to casually break a stone pillar, then lift it to crush Joseph Joestar.

Super Toughness

User(s): All

DescriptionExamples

The Pillar Men's bodies are exceptionally tough. For instance, Esidisi is able to swallow a dynamite stick and withstand its explosion in his stomach. Similarly, Kars is not wounded when he falls off a 175 m (574 ft) tall cliff. The Pillar Men have also a high resilience to pain and think little of losing limbs or piercing themselves on spikes. In fact, they can still function even if they are cut in half or even reduced to a head or a brain. However, the Ripple constitutes a weakness for them. While their skin can resist a sufficiently weak Ripple and disperse it, a concentrated Ripple can pierce their skin and melt their bodies.

• 
  Kars tanking a 175 meters fall
• 
  Santana resists the Ripple

Super Speed

User(s): All

DescriptionExamples

Pillar Men are able to move extremely quickly, as Wamuu demonstrates when he moves between the soldiers of a platoon and ties them together before they are able to react. Kars also demonstrates this when he slices through Stroheim's machine gun fire, using his Light Blades Mode to cut the bullets clean in half.

• 
  Wamuu avoids Joseph's attacks

Super Senses

User(s): All

Pillar Men possess extremely enhanced senses. These are demonstrated a number of times, such as when Santana sniffs out his holding area like a dog, or when Kars detects the number of people in a room via their heat signatures. Wamuu reflexively attacks anyone who enters his shadow, and his horn allows him to read the wind and detect other living things via their breathing.

Super Intelligence

User(s): All

The Pillar Men's most dangerous trait is their superior intelligence. They are capable of perfect recall and are able to instantly analyze and understand the mechanics behind anything including complicated things such as languages, machinery, tactics, systems, and people's minds and actions, within a matter of seconds. Santana instantly learns the disassembly procedure for a gun that might have taken a human hours to learn, and Esidisi is able to match Joseph in wits. The Pillar Men are also able to learn the modern language in moments just by listening to others speak.

Advanced Powers

High-Level Body Manipulation

User(s): All

DescriptionExamples

The Pillar Men can freely change and manipulate their bodies to a greater degree and speed than any vampire created by the Stone Masks, being able to dislocate or even break their own bones as well as flatten organs in order to achieve any form they desire. Even if a body part is severed, the Pillar Men can still remotely control them. With their near-immortality and powers of regeneration, they can survive, endure attacks, and restore their bodies even after being reduced to only their brain. They can also slip into another organism's body and control them from the inside. According to their victims, this produces an overwhelming pleasing sensation.

• 
  Possessing a German soldier
• 
  Bloating the soldier's body
• 
  Santana enters Stroheim
• 
  Wamuu twists out of the way of Joseph's attacks
• 
  Santana slips through an air duct
• 
  The severed bits of Santana can still be controlled
• 
  Shooting bullets from the finger
• 
  Santana makes his skin's texture like rubber to avoid being punctured

Absorption

User(s): All

DescriptionExamples

The Pillar Men's main method of sustenance is absorbing living beings (including Vampires) via any form of physical contact. A Pillar Man's body is composed of cells that release a digestive acid, which melt the victim at a cellular level, creating the illusion that the Pillar Man is absorbing a victim into its body. The cells also appear to induce an euphoric enzyme as victims subjected to the process do not feel anything until physical contact is broken. The surviving Pillar Men display this ability in creative ways: Santana forces himself into another's body to control their movement while eating them from the inside; Wamuu grafts the hands of multiple targets and absorbs their innards by simply touching one; and Esidisi grafts a human limb to himself after losing his original forearm. This ability is ineffective against Ripple users, as the Ripple energy within them is able to repel the digestive acid.

• 
  Esidisi makes Loggins's arm his
• 
  Santana eats a Vampire

Elemental Modes

User(s): Wamuu, Esidisi, Kars

The more experienced Pillar Men each have their own special fighting style, characterized by a specific "element" such as fire, wind, or light. Techniques developed around these elements are referred to as Modes (流法(モード), Mōdo, lit. Flow Methods).

Ultimate Thing(究極の生命体(アルティミット・シイング) Arutimitto Shīngu, lit. Ultimate Life Form)

User(s): Kars
Debut: Chapter 108: JoJo: The Final Ripple, Part 2 / JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Episode 25: The Birth of a Superbeing!!

A Pillar Man can become the Ultimate Thing (究極の生命体(アルティミット・シイング), Arutimitto Shīngu, lit. "Ultimate Life Form") by activating a Stone Mask with the Red Stone of Aja inserted, a feat that only Kars has been able to achieve. In this state, a Pillar Man becomes overwhelmingly powerful, gaining massive enhancements to their existing abilities, as well as several new ones:

• Complete immunity to sunlight and Ripple
• Complete immortality
• The ability to reshape their body on a cellular level to that of any kind of human, animal or plant
• The ability to use the Ripple at a level hundreds of times more powerful than humans
• Sight equivalent to a space telescope, hearing able to distinguish a bat scream from a whale chant, and intelligence measured at 400 IQ
• A jump height of 18 m (59 ft)
• A grip of 900 kg/cm²

History

The powerful race later known as the Pillar Men

The Pillar Men come from an ancient race of humanoids that possess extraordinary strength, intelligence and lifespan. This race once ruled the Earth, living at the top of the food chain and consuming humans who regarded them as either gods to be worshiped or demons to be feared. However, because of their great abilities and physique, the race followed the "rule of evolution" regarding the trophic level: the "higher" it "evolved," the fewer its population became. They remained unable to overcome their adversity to sunlight, yet were content with their lives regardless.

Kars using the first Stone Mask

One among this tribe named Kars did not accept his kind's way of life and sought perfection. This led to Kars creating the Stone Mask to bring out his race's full potential through acupuncture. He found that the mask worked effectively on humans by turning them into Vampires, but the thickness of his species's skulls only enabled the mask to partially unlock its full potential. The result for them was immortality and enhanced body manipulation, coupled with an increased hunger. Fearing the threat posed by Kars's genius, the tribe sought to execute him in order to maintain natural order. Kars retaliated by massacring most of his race, including his parents. Kars, his co-conspirator Esidisi, and two infant children (Wamuu and Santana), were the sole survivors of their race.

A mural depicting the 4 Pillar Men; from the top: Kars, Esidisi, Wamuu, Santana

The four remaining Pillar Men first appear in human history 5,000 years prior to the events of Battle Tendency, capturing hundreds of thousands of humans for experimentation with the Stone Mask. Kars found through his research that a flawless Red Stone of Aja called the Super Aja would be essential to perfect the Stone Mask and complete their transition into complete superbeings. To this end, Kars, Esidisi, and Wamuu traveled east, leaving Santana behind in Mexico.

The three reached as far as imperial Rome, where an emperor was rumored to possess a Super Aja, nearly wiping out the entire Ripple Clan in the process. Unable to find the stone, the Pillar Men were forced to hibernate, fusing themselves into the stone wall of a cave beneath the Colosseum around 100 A.D. The wall itself was rigged by the Pillar Men as a trap to enable them to feed on any greedy humans as they sleep, as demonstrated by Mario Zeppeli. The Aztecs correctly predicted that the Pillar Men would reawaken in the year 2852 of their calendar, the equivalent of the year 1938 A.D.

Battle Tendency

Santana resting

In the winter of 1939, the Speedwagon Foundation discovers a Mexican temple filled with stone masks and the body of Santana. Robert E. O. Speedwagon intends for Straizo to destroy Santana, but the Ripple user instead betrays him and becomes a vampire, though he also attempts to prevent the Pillar Man from awakening. The Nazis discover the other Pillar Men around this time, sending a research group headed by Rudol von Stroheim to extract and observe Santana. Once awakened prematurely, Santana kills everyone but Speedwagon and Stroheim before being confronted by Joseph Joestar. It is only through the combined efforts of Joseph and Stroheim that Santana is stopped and stored at the Speedwagon Foundation headquarters in a petrified state.

The Pillar Men awaken after 2000 years

Several days later, Wamuu awakens and kills the team of Nazis watching over him before awakening Kars and Esidisi. Shortly afterward, Speedwagon, Joseph, and Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli, along with a soldier named Mark, enter the cave to meet with the Nazis, only to find them all slaughtered. Wamuu inadvertently passes through Mark, forcing him to undergo an agonizing death and provoking his friend Caesar. After dealing with Caesar, Wamuu also defeats Joseph, who lures him away from Caesar and Speedwagon and convinces him to spare him for a future confrontation. But Wamuu and Esidisi, the latter out of intrigue, place poisoned wedding rings within Joseph's body to force him to rematch them. The three Pillar Men then set up a base in the San Moritz hotel in Switzerland and proceed to search Europe for the Super Aja.

Esidisi battles against Joseph

Nearly a month later, Esidisi learns that the Super Aja is in the possession of the Ripple master Lisa Lisa. Esidisi infiltrates Lisa Lisa's hideout, Air Supplena Island, and kills Loggins in front of Joseph. Though Joseph destroys his body and takes the first antidote, Esidisi survives as a disembodied nervous system, which manages to possess Suzi Q and mail the Super Aja to San Moritz before finally being eliminated for good. Kars, fearing the worst when Esidisi fails to contact him, sets out for the Swiss border. After learning that the Nazis have intercepted a package sent to the hotel, Kars faces and defeats a cybernetically-enhanced Stroheim, intuitively recognizing Joseph as Esidisi's killer. As a result of the battle, the Super Aja nearly falls off a cliff, but Joseph is able to retrieve it while sending Kars off the ledge. Kars, unharmed by the fall, allows him to keep the stone, intending to personally kill him when the time comes.

Wamuu and Caesar near the end of their battle

Events accelerate when Caesar, having learned of the Pillar Men's hideout, attempts to go after Kars during the day alongside Messina. The two are intercepted by Wamuu after he returns from Greece. Wamuu incapacitates Messina and engages Caesar in a fight to the death, which Caesar loses. Following the trail of Wamuu's blood, the two Ripple users find the remaining two Pillar Men surrounded by an army of Vampires. Bluffing that the Super Aja is protected by a time bomb that will destroy it if she and Joseph die, Lisa Lisa proposes two one-on-one deathmatches to settle things. Kars accepts the challenge and lets Joseph go with Messina to get the Super Aja, keeping Lisa Lisa as security and setting the arena as the Skeleton Heel Stone.

Kars revealing his true colors

At Skeleton Heel Stone, Joseph engages Wamuu in a chariot race to the death, and narrowly manages to defeat him. Kars, having no intention of honoring his contract, ambushes Lisa Lisa during their fight using a body double. Kars then seizes the Red Stone of Aja and sics his army on an exhausted Joseph. A timely intervention from the German army and the Speedwagon Foundation, armed with miniature UV lights, allows Joseph to confront Kars and ultimately outwit him. Cornered and almost defeated, Kars uses the UV lights to activate the Stone Mask with the Super Aja inside, finally evolving into the Ultimate Thing.

Kars drifting through space for eternity

Now an invincible immortal, Kars relentlessly pursues Joseph, aiming to avenge his friends and celebrate his rebirth via Joseph's death. Joseph flees by plane, hoping to lure the Ultimate Thing into an active volcano. With Stroheim's help, Joseph manages to force Kars into a pit of lava, but the Pillar Man comes up with a natural defense and emerges unscathed, slicing Joseph's left arm off in the process. As Kars moves to deal the final blow with his own Ripple energy, Joseph uses the Super Aja to transfer the energy into the ground, triggering a volcanic eruption. Distracted when Joseph's severed hand launches into him, Kars is unable to keep the debris from sending him outside the Earth's atmosphere, freezing in the vacuum of space. Unable to live yet unable to die, Kars eventually ceases thinking.

Trivia

• The Pillar Men's appearances are based on a combination of Roman sculptures, the Great Sphinx of Giza, and the Nio Buddhist guardians.