Hirokazu Arai

Arai is a young man whose short hair stands in spikes above round, dark eyes, with a scar marking his left cheek. A black suit is his usual attire, though he turns up in a casual shirt for the division's welcome party.

A stickler for propriety, Arai grows flustered the moment Himeno offers a kiss as a reward, protesting that a young woman ought not give herself away before marriage. He is devoted to his comrades, stepping in to steady Kobeni when fear overwhelms her and scolding Power for mocking her distress. That said, he regards fiends and Denji with suspicion, even proposing they surrender Denji to a devil so the rest of the team might escape with their lives.

He takes quiet pride in caring for the unwell, regularly tending to his mother when she stumbles home drunk and nursing Denji in the bathroom after a sickening kiss. Yet beneath it all gnaws a sense of inadequacy, for he openly envies Denji's gift as a devil hunter and mourns his own lack of talent.

Himeno spent half a year training Arai before his first major outings. In the Bat Devil arc he rode along with Aki Hayakawa to pull Denji from the Leech Devil, then joined the six-hunter team sent to track a devil through the Morino Hotel. Inside, he is the one who notices the floor numbers refusing to change, exposing the Eternity Devil's looping trap, and he does his best to calm a panicking Kobeni even as his own nerve frays and he shuts himself away in a room.

When the Eternity Devil offers freedom in exchange for Denji's life, Arai argues for taking the deal, reasoning that contracts with devils are legal and starvation awaits otherwise. He goes so far as to pin Denji down so Kobeni can stab him, only for Aki to take the blade instead, and he watches in shock as Denji hurls himself into the devil's maw to transform. At the later welcome party he introduces himself and reveals his contract with the Fox Devil, which presumably lets him call on the devil's body in battle at the cost of feeding it his own.

His life ends during the Gun Devil's assassination sweep against Public Safety, when an elderly woman opens fire on him and Kobeni in the open street. Struck in the neck, he uses his final moment to throw himself over Kobeni as a shield, and his sacrifice lets her gun down the attacker and reach Denji in time.