Kobeni Higashiyama

Four small moles mark Kobeni's face. A pair sits below her left eye, while the remaining two rest on her left cheek and just beside the right edge of her mouth. Her brown hair is cropped short and gathered into a ponytail, with bangs and a longer strand falling past her right side, while her brown eyes carry pale pupils. A pair of red clips pins the hair on her left, and she is most often seen in a businesslike suit. For the rookies' welcome gathering she turned up in a dress handed down from one of her older sisters.

Soft-spoken and easily rattled, Kobeni spends most of her time in a state of nerves, and her cowardice runs deep enough that real bravery surfaces only rarely. Facing the Eternity Devil, she freezes and dissolves into babbling, and once the group is sealed inside the hotel with starvation looming she falls apart in tears. Panic can make her dangerously erratic, so when a Devil dangles her freedom on the condition that Denji dies, she rounds on him with a knife, and she even brands Hirokazu Arai a Devil collaborator for shielding Power from her wild accusations, though afterward she feels genuine shame and thanks him for protecting her.

Pushed past a certain point, however, she flips into something cold and ruthless, single-handedly driving off both Katana Man and Akane Sawatari before crumbling back into hysteria once the danger passes. Family weighs on her in complicated ways. Resentful as she is about being forced into hunting, she still wires money to her younger brother for tuition and ferries her relatives around in her car, and she only sticks with the job at first because a bonus is due. Himeno's repeated hugs leave her flustered yet tolerant. She has a fondness for alcohol, especially when someone else is paying, takes simple joy in eating good food, and treasures the taste of ice cream, a flavor she has gotten to enjoy on only three rare occasions.

Himeno judges her genuinely gifted, hampered only by her own fear, an assessment borne out when Kobeni alone overpowers Katana Man in his human shape and chases Akane Sawatari off the field. Her strength is no joke, since she can lop a grown man's arm clean away with a single knife stroke. She is remarkably nimble too, slipping under the Snake Devil's lashing tail and sprinting along its length, a display that earned her the mocking label of monkey, and she nails a flawless run on the Dance Dance Mushroom machine. A blade is her weapon of choice, backed by sharp aim with a firearm, which she uses to wound Katana Man and put two rounds in him before driving Akane back. She also holds a driver's license and keeps her own vehicle, and her dancing skill is genuine, as that perfect arcade score attests. The Devil she has contracted with remains a secret she refuses to share.