Aguri Yukimura

Petite and pale-skinned, Aguri carries herself with the softness of a woman only a few years past her teens. She keeps her black hair cropped short, the fringe brushed toward her left and curling in against her cheeks, above a pair of warm brown eyes.

What people tended to fix on, though, was her wardrobe. The original Reaper, her colleagues, and her own pupils in Class 3-E all struggled to make sense of the outfits she favored, and her offbeat styling became something of a running joke among those who knew her.

Warmth defined her. Aguri came across as gentle, courteous, upbeat, and clear-headed, and she poured genuine devotion into her work in the classroom. Bright enough to handle any subject the curriculum threw at her, she nonetheless leaned toward chemistry, a preference that fit the second job she was pressured into as her fiance's nighttime lab aide.

She also read people with unusual accuracy. When the Reaper puzzled over why his student had turned against him, she offered that the traitor may simply have longed to be truly seen, an insight the story would later bear out in painful fashion. That same tenderness showed when she called on Karma Akabane at his home during his suspension. However eccentric her fashion sense left her in others' eyes, everyone who knew her held her in lasting, fond regard.

Before the series opens, Aguri balanced two demanding roles: daytime homeroom teacher for Kunugigaoka's outcast Class 3-E, and after dark, research aide to her fiance Kotaro Yanagisawa. Regarded as disposable, she was handed the task nobody else would take, minding the captured master killer known as the Reaper. Yanagisawa treated her as a sacrificial pawn, and the scheme counted on her becoming the prisoner's route to escape.

Instead, something human took root. After the Reaper shielded her from Yanagisawa, he began learning compassion from her, and across the year the two grew genuinely close. He confided the truth of his past; she unburdened her own troubles; he sharpened her teaching in return. So when word came that the Reaper was to be put down, Aguri chose to warn him and help him slip away. He refused to run, meaning to blast his way out with his new power, and her appeal to Yanagisawa earned her only a beating.

As the transforming assassin tore the facility apart and cut down the staff around him, Aguri threw her arms around him from behind in a last bid to quiet his rage. A weapon Yanagisawa had rigged caught her in the blast, wounding her past any hope of repair. With her final breath she begged the creature not to become a mere engine of slaughter, but to take up teaching, guard her students, and carry her work forward. Her sister Akari glimpsed the monster departing and wrongly assumed he had killed Aguri, a grief that would later drive her, as Kaede Kayano, to infiltrate the class bent on revenge. The dying wish itself became the seed of everything Korosensei chose to be.