There’s a lot of competition in determining the most powerful student within Maka’s graduating class at the DWMA in Soul Eater. However, even pitted against a tenacious descendent of a long line of assassins and the son of Death himself, Maka Albarn stands out as uniquely impressive. Plenty of her skills come from her tenacious attitude and no-nonsense approach to achieving her goals, but her success is aided by the biological abilities she's either honed since birth or earned throughout the course of her adventures.
Let’s take a closer look at a few unique aspects of our favorite Meister’s body to see what it is that makes her so remarkable.
Maka's Soul Lets Her Fly
Souls play a large role when engaging in battle against demons and witches, and as such come with a wide range of benefits and advantages. Maka possesses a rare winged soul called a Grigori, which grants the bearer the ability to take flight so long as they are given the proper medium.
As a soul that only surfaces in one person out of fifty million, there have been various approaches in how Grigori users channel their flying abilities, with weapons manifesting wings while in their weapon form and meisters having to make do by soul resonating with their partners. Maka uses the latter approach, though it requires her partner Soul to have become powerful enough to channel the needed magical power.
Make Can Utilize Black Blood
First introduced with the character Crona, a Meister who has weaponized their own blood, Black Blood is a powerful tool that comes with intense side effects. Its hardening ability enables the user to survive powerful attacks without sustaining heavy damages, and the blood itself can be manipulated to form needles, swords and anything else needed to help the Meister in question win their fight. After their first fight against Crona, some of the Black Blood made it into Maka’s weapon partner Soul, which they then discovered could be shared with Maka through Soul Resonance.
The Black Blood gives Maka all of the previously mentioned advantages, though comes at the cost of steadily dragging her into madness by removing her sense of fear. This onslaught of madness is slowed by Maka’s Anti-Demon Wavelength, but is not able to stop it outright.
Maka's Soul Wavelength Negates Dark Influences
Though they are mostly used to match with their partners when fighting in battle or attempting to pull off powerful moves, some wavelengths can come with additional benefits. Maka’s Anti-Demon Wavelength builds her a resistance against madness, Black Blood induced or otherwise, which comes in useful both when attempting to channel the Black Blood or when fighting in the madness-steeped worldscape that exists after the Kishin escapes.
Her wavelength additionally grants her immunity to certain variations of Witch magic and allows her to utilize different, increasingly powerful forms of the Death Scythe skill Witch Hunter. These wavelength advantages can be transferred to her partner and to her comrades, either through physical touch or through the amplification of Soul’s piano.
Maka Can See Souls
Soul Perception is a big advantage in a world in which souls can be weaponized and manipulated to gain an edge in battle. It’s a necessity when attempting to fight against witches, whose magics can allow them to manipulate themselves and their surroundings (though their Soul Sealing abilities play as an active check against that).
While at first Maka uses souls only to track opponents and build awareness of her surroundings, she is eventually able to get a read off of a person’s attributes and potential abilities. By resonating with her partner, Maka is able to boost this Soul Perception to a prodigious level, capable of scanning all over the world and causing her to accidentally stumble across the Kishin’s hiding place.
Maka Can Turn into a Weapon
This is a skill demonstrated very briefly, and only in the anime. Maka is capable of manifesting her father’s scythes in her arms when put under great duress. This is likely due to her father’s weapon ancestry, passing down the weapon gene which laid dormant within her until she was knocked unconscious in her fight against the Kishin Asura.
Since she was knocked unconscious but still resonating with her comrades, the boost in power partnered with a body that’s been newly released from fear due to her dormant mind, Maka was able to awaken recessive abilities that helped to keep her fighting in her seemingly hopeless battle against the Kishin. This ability isn’t entirely unprecedented, as Justin Law is shown to be a weapon who commands tremendous power without the use of a Meister. It does open up possibilities for Maka’s future, as she had previously only trained abilities limited to Meisters.
