Payase

Payase keeps his hair short and side-parted above strikingly heavy bags under his eyes. He layers a dark, pocketed jacket, its pockets sitting on the upper arms, over a pale hoodie, finishing with light-colored trousers. Like his partner he sports a multi-ringed eye emblem, though his version drops the triangular backing. Years of hoarding curses have stained his aura so dark that anyone able to read auras would see it as nearly black.

Expressive and easily stirred, Payase nurses an intense love for cursed objects. No matter the bad luck they heap on whoever owns them, he is eager to take them in, reasoning that his very devotion shields him from their worst effects, and he affectionately calls them "cute."

After picking up a cursed painting that keeps setting his home ablaze, Payase and Kashimoto are summoned by Seiko Ayase to the Juicy Gyoza Manufactory Dandadan. He happily agrees to safeguard the Fairy-Tale Card's cursed trunk, only for a jiangshi to send him flying mid-conversation. He and Kashimoto rally to drive the Minotaur and the jiangshi horde back from the wounded Seiko and brace for the fight. Told that the Minotaur's iron body grows stronger with every hit, the pair are assigned to hold it off while Seiko retrieves her bag, and Payase uses his shadow power to disintegrate jiangshi, drawing the Minotaur's envious interest. His shadow spike fails to pierce the creature, which yanks him from his own shadow and tosses him aside.

As the brawl wears on, Payase keeps shielding Seiko while worrying over Kashimoto, and once Kashimoto's freezing blows and the surrounding light leave the Minotaur's iron muscles brittle, Payase shatters its arms from within the shadows before Seiko ends it with a talisman and a finishing kick. When a businessman crawls from the wreckage begging for mercy and reveals he was hired by an Orchestrator, Payase grows enraged at the man's wielding of the stolen kozuka knives of the sword Asura, used to siphon yokai powers. His fury over the man's flimsy motive collapses into guilt once the henchman confesses he acted on a slim hope of saving his sick wife. The group then alerts the police and slips away, and after Vega approaches the trio with questions, Payase, Seiko, and Kashimoto vanish onto a nearby rooftop before he can finish.