Teru Mikami

Black hair falling to his shoulders and a pair of glasses mark Mikami's look, which he completes with a long dark coat worn over a tailored suit. The series counts him among its good-looking cast. For most of the run he is drawn neat and composed, his design echoing Taro Kagami from the franchise's pilot chapter. That polish collapses once he lays eyes on Light in person, when his grooming frays and he takes on the wild look of a true zealot. Certain DS game appearances tint his hair a dark green instead of black.

A ferocious moral drive sits at Mikami's core, hardened since boyhood into an absolute split between the worthy and the wicked. He sorts every person he meets into one camp or the other and burns to see wrongdoers punished, a zeal that mirrors Light's own. His worship of Kira is total: asked on a fan survey what Kira meant to him, he answered with a single word, 'God.' When the job of building and operating a counterfeit notebook unsettles him, he deliberately shuts down his own doubts rather than question his deity. He despises idleness and has Takada broadcast that anyone failing to serve society will fall to Kira, while a softer thread shows in his concern for children, whom he wants groomed into useful citizens.

Mikami pursues his ends with cold utility and will spend innocent lives when he deems it necessary, as when he strikes down a journalist guilty of nothing worse than trespassing near one of Kira's rendezvous. His creed even outpaces Light's: he would execute anyone with a criminal past regardless of present conduct, a stance Light rejects as self-defeating for a project meant to deter future crime. Rigid routine governs him, from identical gym sessions week after week to names entered in perfectly aligned columns that fill exactly one page a day, a clockwork predictability Near and the SPK later turn against him. He never abandons his glasses even once the Shinigami Eyes sharpen his vision, and beneath the discipline runs a fragile mind that chants 'delete' with each killing and finally shatters once his faith in Kira breaks.

Raised by a single mother who was, by his account, his one true confidant, Mikami began sorting the world into good and evil while still very young. Sharp and driven, he rose to class president in elementary school and threw himself into shielding classmates from bullies, often coming to blows. Middle school reversed his fortunes; now a target himself, he started longing for his tormentors to be erased. When his mother begged him to stop putting himself in danger, he turned on her in contempt. She later died in a car crash that also claimed four of the boys he hated, and though he grieved her, he found grim satisfaction in the quiet that followed. From then on he held that every wrongdoer deserved punishment.

Top marks carried him through high school and into the law department at Kyodo University, after which he took up work as a prosecutor. Discovering Kira through the media felt like vindication of everything he believed, and he became a devout follower, joining Kira's Kingdom in hopes of catching the killer's attention. That wish comes true when Light, hunting for a proxy to deflect Near's suspicion, picks him on instinct from the program's footage. Granted Gelus's Death Note and the Shinigami Eyes through a bargain with Ryuk, Mikami immediately purges Demegawa and his unruly followers, then uses Sakura TV and the rise of Takada as a spokeswoman to open a channel back to Light.

The two coordinate an elaborate deception: Mikami keeps the genuine notebook hidden while writing in a forgery, feeding Takada the victims' details so the tailing Gevanni will mistake the fake for the real article. The plan unravels after Mello's interference exposes the true notebook, letting Near substitute a counterfeit. At the Yellow Box Warehouse, Mikami arrives and inscribes the names of everyone present except Light's, only for the swapped pages to betray them and unmask Light as Kira. The manga ends his story in prison, where he loses his mind and dies days later, with Matsuda suspecting Near's own use of the notebook; the anime instead has him drive a pen into his chest, a final distraction that buys his fallen god a chance to run.