Severed Head Dribblers

These beings take the form of headless figures kitted out as basketball players, complete with jerseys, shorts, and sneakers, while their absent heads hover in the air as the bodies move. They turn on anyone who slips into their gym after dark, aiming to decapitate victims by slamming a head through a basketball hoop. They hold their assault until one of them blows a whistle, after which they attack with tremendous force, hurling their own heads as projectiles powerful enough to shatter surfaces and badly wound a target. Folklore likely inspired them: the Nukekubi, yokai who pass as normal people by day before their heads detach to hunt at night, and the urban legend of Headless Soccer, in which students play alongside a skilled headless ghost that vanishes by dawn.

Meeting Koki at the Kami High gymnasium and noticing Rin tailing them, Murakami summoned the Dribblers to turn the girls into floating heads, having realized they were trying to identify Koki's blackmailer. The entities then targeted Aira, who arrived with Okarun and Kinta; she dodged their strikes, found Rin's floating head, and after Mai filled her in, used her Acrobatic Silky hair to guide the head back through the hoop and restore Rin, who then repelled the Dribblers with Mai's Onbusuman gravity. While Aira and Rin held them off, Mai and the pygmies slipped Koki's head beneath the attackers and through the hoop to revive her too. As Koki named her blackmailer, the Dribblers swelled in size and the gym walls began closing in.

With time running short, the pygmies built Koki a piano and she played a wrenching melody, leading Mai to realize Koki's true gift was command over small creatures rather than the pygmies alone. A swarm of bugs then poured into Murakami's apartment and engulfed him, letting Adachi pressure him into surrendering. Once he yielded his Severed Head Dribblers power into the black kozuka, the attackers in the gym simply vanished.

The Dribblers act as a collective of identical headless basketball figures rather than named individuals, distinguished only by their roles in the moment, such as the one who blows the whistle to begin an assault. They have no will independent of their summoner; controlled by Takeshi Murakami through the power he carried, they appear when he calls them and disappear the instant that power is stripped away.