Makima

To nearly everyone she meets, Makima passes for an ordinary woman in her twenties, slender and standing a touch above average height. Her pale auburn hair, tinged faintly red, usually hangs in a loose braid, with a fringe falling just past her brows and two longer strands tracing the sides of her face. The single crack in the human disguise sits in her eyes, which glow yellow and hold several concentric red rings. On duty she favors a white long-sleeved shirt with a black tie, black trousers, and brown shoes, and in the early going she layered a long black coat over the outfit so that little beyond the tie showed. A composed, often smiling expression rarely leaves her face.

In public Makima wears the mask of a warm, easygoing professional, forever calm and smiling even when everything is falling apart, and her near-perfect human looks let her hide her devil identity by pretending to be a person merely contracted to one. That gentleness is pure theater. Once Aki Hayakawa dies, she drops the act for Denji and shows what lies underneath: a cold, calculating schemer in the Machiavellian mold who regards everyone around her as obedient dogs to be spent however she pleases. She keeps Denji in line by dangling romance and intimacy with one hand while threatening to destroy him with the other.

Makima freely calls herself something other than a good person, branding herself a necessary evil, a leashed weapon of the Japanese state much as the Gun Devil answers to America. The prospect of her plans collapsing does not rattle her, since she tends to gain something whether they work or not. Above all she idolizes Chainsaw Man, the so-called Hero of Hell, awed by its power to erase a devil's very concept by eating it; her aim is to bring that creature under her thumb and use it to build a world scrubbed of fear, of death, and even of bad movies, while accepting that being devoured by it instead would be its own kind of honor. Beneath every scheme, though, runs a lonelier wish: to stay at Pochita's side forever and finally have something resembling a family, a bond the Control Devil was never able to form on equal terms.

Makima ranks among the most dangerous beings anywhere in the setting, pairing raw devil power with a brilliant, manipulative mind. The dread she inspires across humans, fiends, and devils alike feeds back into her own strength. Her defining gift is domination itself: she can seize command of anyone she judges beneath her, a brainwashing reach that extends over people, animals, devils, fiends, and hybrids without any obvious cap on how many she holds at once. Through chains strung from her body she can also draw on her thralls' abilities, the living and the dead alike, even forming a unit of weapon hybrids out of former foes such as Reze, Quanxi, and the Katana Man. She listens through the ears of rats and birds to eavesdrop from almost any distance, rides swarms of rats to move place to place, and can make even a corpse hear her commands.

On top of control she wields an unseen, crushing force, able to obliterate a named target from afar given a high vantage and a human sacrifice, to blast enemies with a pointed finger and a casual cry of Bang, or to take heads at closer range. Her body is formidable in its own right, with great strength, a hunter's reliance on smell over sight to tell people apart, and a tolerance for alcohol that outlasts anyone around her. A contract with Japan's Prime Minister shields her further, rerouting any lethal blow she suffers into a random citizen's illness or accident; she was confirmed slain twenty-six times before the Gun Devil ever put a bullet through her head. Denji finally undoes her by reframing the kill as a loving gesture instead of an assault, then cooking and eating her in the same spirit, after which she returns through the devils' cycle of rebirth and comes back into the world as the child Nayuta.