In a frozen world, the “blessed” are those with strange powers that have come to govern people’s lives. Indeed, while these powers aren’t very common, it was a blessed who turned this normal world into an ice age where fewer and fewer survive every year. The blessed siblings Agni and Luna contribute to their found home in a small village by using their powers of regeneration to chop off their limbs as a way to help feed the village and keep it going (the villagers are completely aware of what they are doing and are thankful for the source of food).
But when a military force from a strange city finds out this village’s secret, one of their own blessed razes the entire village to the ground. For the siblings, this blessed’s eternal firepower is doubly deadly — it will not go out until its source is extinguished and it seems like the siblings will be cursed with perpetual agony as their regenerate and incinerate. Agni spends over eight years learning to control and endure the fire that consumes him and now he’s on the move to destroy the man who cursed him in this way.
Creator Tatsuki Fujimoto seems singularly focused with portraying the bleak and grim tone in Fire Punch to the point where this tone not only affects every part of the story, but almost every aspect in the story suffers for it. Characters are just vehicles to have horrible things happen to them, the plot is an excuse for future terrible things to happen, and even the setting is more of an explanation for why terrible things are happening than groundwork for influences on the characters. I couldn’t even tell if there was any sort of growing season left in this world or not, something that should be very basic world building! One would assume there is still a growing season, otherwise I’m mystified how the village was surviving before Agni started “hand feeding” them. I’m not convinced that Fujimoto thought this all the way through, since they really do seem to have forgotten any detail that wasn’t meant to just cause the characters more pain.
In an ironic way, this lack of character and setting building means that almost no terrible events after the first chapter land with any sort of impact. Oh so a character has acquired two characters as slaves so he can watch them be raped by his dogs for entertainment? Well that certainly is disturbing but gee, I don’t know one of these characters at all and I’m pretty sure the second one is too important to the main story to be deeply traumatized so early so yawn, I know it’s not going to happen. I was also reasonably sure that this event wouldn’t happen because, while the contents of this manga certainly deserve it’s 17+ rating, the art isn’t as graphic as one might fear.
There is some violence but it’s certainly not the worst I’ve seen and having an on-page sex scene (which would be needed for the impact to really pay off) would be far far worse than anything else shown on page so far. Fire Punch doesn’t feel like it’s pushing any boundaries by being so “shocking,” instead it feels like a story that needed another few rounds of revising before ever being published.