Kokichi Muta

Brown eyes, pale skin, and a slim build marked Kokichi out, his black hair pulled up into a top knot. Bandages and the wrappings tied to his cursed restriction covered nearly all of him, hiding skin gone painfully thin and wrinkled. One forearm, the right, was simply gone; below the knee neither leg could carry him. Robbed of mobility, he passed his life submerged in a tube-fed tub buried within a far-off cavern.

Healing came courtesy of Mahito's Idle Transfiguration, which restored him to a whole and standing figure with nothing left but one cheek scar. From that point his wardrobe matched the school proxy he piloted: the standard uniform topped off by a fluffy white scarf-like wrap circling the collar.

Reserved to the point of reclusiveness, Kokichi seethed at having been handed no future apart from the sorcery world, and he flatly said he would surrender every scrap of cursed energy if it meant an ordinary body. That resentment leaked out toward people he saw as luckier. At the Goodwill Event, when Panda proposed the two get along as fellow cursed corpses, Kokichi sneered that Panda was just a doll, galled that the puppet wandered the sunlight while sickness kept him locked away.

To the other students he presented a clipped, machine-like front by way of Mechamaru, secretly yearning to walk beside them in person no matter how they might judge him. His closest bond was with Kasumi Miwa, for whom he confessed romantic feelings. Determined to win a real body, he struck a binding vow with the enemy, trading intelligence on the condition that no Kyoto student come to harm. Once made whole, he immediately moved against Mahito and Kenjaku, staking everything on careful planning and grit, only for that very desperation to kill him before he could face his classmates or Kasumi.

Ranked semi-grade 1 even as a second-year, Kokichi could operate a number of puppets simultaneously from staggering ranges, every one of them a serious combatant in its own right. Setting up to kill Mahito, he committed the entire store of cursed energy he had ever accumulated; Kenjaku called both his technique and his strategy outstanding and noted he very nearly exorcised the special grade, falling only when Mahito baited him into believing the job was finished. Sharp and calculating, he read Panda's strengths and his own at each phase and came close to grinding Mahito down by shutting off his technique.

The Heavenly Restriction that wrecked his body repaid him with enormous cursed-energy output and a control range spanning the whole of Japan. Behind the controls of Mechamaru Mode: Absolute, he was ready to expend his full hoard, the equivalent of six days past five months past seventeen years of accumulated reserves, flaring up to a special grade's level for an instant. Puppet Manipulation, his innate technique, granted that remote command over cursed corpses, foremost among them Ultimate Mechamaru, a humanoid machine armed with Sword Option, Ultra Spin, Ultra Shield, Boost On, Ultra Cannon, and Ultimate Cannon. Mode: Absolute escalated into heavier cursed-energy artillery: Ultra Cannon, Miracle Cannon, and the tracking Pigeon Viola, each spending years of his reserves. For anti-domain work he loaded New Shadow Style: Simple Domain into custom tubes, and his Mini-Mechamaru relays kept running on leftover cursed energy even after he died.