Higari Maijima

Almost nothing about Higari reads as a man his age. He stands barely above five feet, slight through the shoulders, with a face youthful enough to pass in a classroom of his own students. Ginger spikes drop to just past shoulder length, his irises are a washed-out blue, and his mouth is startlingly wide. Proportion abandons him at the wrists: the hands are easily the biggest thing on him, and his Quirk finishes each fingertip with an orange claw bent into an L.

Headgear dominates the costume, a yellow rig molded into the outline of a rectangular digging bucket. Its upper plate juts forward across his face while the lower plate hangs down as a long guard over his jaw. He skips a shirt altogether, pairing plain cyan trousers with bulky gray fingerless gloves whose metal plating runs the length of his forearms. Once a fight begins, the helmet docks into a seated steel machine equipped with two oversized mechanical arms.

Two things sit side by side in the way Higari teaches: discipline and a horror of rules. He is exacting with his students yet insists that genuine invention comes from refusing the boxes convention builds, a conviction he passes to Izuku Midoriya in the workshop.

Mei Hatsume tests both halves of that outlook. Her carelessness draws threats of a studio ban on a regular basis, and he never quite denies how prolific or original she is. Away from the gear, the man is a hermit. Machines suit him better than company, the rest of the faculty file him under oddball, and his few friendships have not stopped him from caring about the people he works with and teaches. He is touchy about his height, likes cars, and is described in official material as an eccentric genius who turns out support items without a shred of doubt.

Iron Claws tips his fingers with metal built for tearing through soil and rock, a Quirk suited to digging and mining rather than to brawling. Its named ultimate is Mole Sink. Notably, his construction work needs no specialized machinery at all, as his first-term final exam match demonstrated and as the Coffin in the Sky built for the Final War later confirmed.

His formal role is licensed costume development. Running U.A.'s Development Studio means he knows how hero outfits are designed, upgraded and maintained, which puts him at the center of nearly every piece of student gear. In combat he is often paired with an armored mech modeled on excavating equipment, which appears to deepen and speed up his burrowing. During the first-term final exams he handicapped himself with High Density Weights alongside the other teachers, and he fought students earlier still as one of the staff who answered the U.S.J. Incident.