Evil Eye

In his yokai form the Evil Eye is a towering, gaunt figure crowned with a blunt bowl cut, his eyes set vertically and his mouth frozen in a leering grin. He goes about clad in nothing more than underwear. This grotesque shape was not his own to begin with: when he failed to rescue a boy the Kito clan condemned to sacrifice, his rage twisted him into a copy of that child. As a wandering spirit he had simply resembled his living self, only restored to fuller health.

While he still drew breath, he was a starved youngster, kept short of food and water by his captors, his hair cropped close and his body wrapped in a filthy, tattered robe. On the day the Kito family offered him up, he was stripped down to a fundoshi.

Once he settles into Jiji's body, the changes are dramatic. Jiji's hair bleaches white, a rippling third eye opens at his brow, his remaining eyes shift to yellow, and dark markings spread down from his face along his shoulders. Even Jiji's earrings stretch out. At first the possession shredded everything the young man wore but his briefs, a problem that ended once the Evil Eye handed those briefs over to Okarun.

In life the boy who became the Evil Eye was full of hope, longing to join the children he glimpsed playing beyond his cage. He carried real kindness too, throwing himself into a doomed bid to save another child marked for sacrifice. That failure shattered him, and what remained was a bitter ghost craving the death of every living person he met.

Wearing Jiji like a suit lets him indulge that craving. He comes across as savage, sadistic, and eager for violence against humans or anything blocking his path. Combat thrills him, especially against foes who can match his pace, and he despises an opponent who tries to flee. As a yokai he also scorns his own kind cozying up to humanity, sneering at Turbo Granny for traveling with Momo and bristling when Okarun shielded her.

After he is bottled up inside Jiji, Okarun reframes him: the creature is essentially a newborn who only wants to play, an echo of that dying wish from the cage. Because that wish fused with the cruelty humans showed him, he confuses killing with playing and has no grasp of right or wrong, leaving him with a child's mind. Sitting in on Jiji's classes with Momo minding him, he was rowdy and impulsive and ate lunch with his hands rather than chopsticks. He is also wildly impatient, badgering Okarun to keep fighting. In time he warmed to Jiji's circle, learning their names and even guarding them, once draping his own sweatshirt over a wounded Seiko, though the childishness never fully left.

Long ago the boy was singled out by the Kito family as an offering to the Tsuchinoko, a sacrifice meant to spare his village from a volcanic eruption. Wasting away in captivity, he once watched children laugh and play outside his cage and held onto a single dream until he died: to play beside them just once.

Generations later he returned as a spirit to that same spot, now rebuilt into a sacrificial house. He revealed himself to the family's son at dinner, frightening the boy, and tried to win him over by dancing. When the Kito clan moved to sacrifice that son after his parents hanged themselves, the spirit fought to free him but had no body to act with. Fury at seeing the same cruelty repeated drove him to vow revenge, and he became the Evil Eye, a curse that pushed people toward suicide. With each new sacrifice his loathing of the Kito family swelled into hatred for all of humanity, and he resolved to wipe every human from the world.

Channeled through Jiji's athletic frame, the Evil Eye hits with bone-breaking force, hurling grudge balls hard enough to pierce the Tsuchinoko and pulverizing an exosuit with one punch. His speed keeps pace with Okarun's roughly 100 km/h Turbo Granny sprint, and his durability lets him shrug off bat blows that crater the ground. A practiced hand-to-hand fighter, he holds his own even when badly outnumbered.