Charles Bernard

The locals around him immediately read Charles as foreign, and his French heritage shows in his features. He keeps a head of steel-blue hair styled with calculated messiness: the rear is roughly tousled while the bangs on his right are flicked back and up over the scalp. Brows of the same blue, splitting into forks at their ends, sit above eyes tinted to match.

His upper layer pairs a pale blazer over a dark turtleneck. That sweater is detailed with a tan collar and, running down the front, a cut shaped like the letter V. Below, he wears dark slacks and unadorned shoes.

Flamboyant and wrapped up in himself, Charles holds an unshakable belief that he is meant to make manga, endlessly chewing on what it is that defines a true creator. To him his passion is beyond dispute and the dream is simply his due. He cannot stomach critique, answering it with petulant fits; when a publisher gave his submitted work genuine notes, he treated the advice as an insult and struck the agent rather than swallow rejection.

Shibuya's aftermath wrecked his future as a cartoonist, manga production ceased, and he became sure Tokyo would never climb out from under its flood of curses. That despair bled into a crisis over what being a mangaka even meant, since in his view the craft is a flight from a dissatisfying world, and jujutsu had now devoured his own. With no cause worth killing for in the Culling Game, he begged Kinji Hakari to hand him a reason; Hakari complied by jeering at his ambitions, which broke him into tears and drove him to strike.

Throughout the fight he stays an insufferable otaku, salting the brawl with references and erupting in rage when Hakari's domain warped his beloved work. The thing he was actually missing, he understood only in hindsight, was a release valve for his bottled stress, a truth he reached after Hakari downed him and asked if the bout had eased him. He resisted listening at first, convinced manga had already taught him all that counted, yet in the end he took Hakari's words to heart and committed to pursuing his goal again.

Before the Culling Game Charles led a normal life, given the seed of a cursed technique by Kenjaku without his knowledge. Once it bloomed he became a competent sorcerer and a spearman with his G-Warstaff, grasping how cursed energy and domains operate, though it remains unknown whether he downed any other participants. He was skilled enough to make Kinji Hakari, ranked among Jujutsu High's mightiest students, treat him as a real threat, even if he never seized lasting control. Beaten on pure speed and power, he relied on his technique to keep pace and even wounded Hakari right before the latter struck the jackpot inside his domain, whereupon one strike ended things.

The technique manifests as G Warstaff, a cursed tool shaped like a lengthy spear capped by a pen-like point, with the power bound directly to it. Once Charles pulls a foe's blood up into that nib, he meets the requirement for ink, which then lets him stamp the target with a manga panel. The panel peers ahead in time, showing him a sliver of the enemy's coming moments, opening at one second and stretching deeper as the staff soaks up still more blood.