Masaki Takeda

In his true form Masaki is a small, elderly man, dark-skinned and surprisingly wiry under his age. Baldness, missing teeth, and skin creased most heavily across his face all mark his years, and his eyes are little, with pinprick dark pupils. To blend in he puts on a white polo trimmed with black at the collar and cuffs, black shorts, white athletic shoes, and a white baseball cap.

His childhood disguise transforms him into a young boy whose skin runs paler and smoother and whose head is crowned with light hair set in a right-side part. The illusion completes itself with a mouth of intact teeth and eyes that grow rounder, their pupils noticeably larger.

An old man steeped in cruelty and self-interest, Masaki feels no hesitation about murdering the innocent, children included, whenever it serves him. He once weighed turning his abilities toward helping people, but so many years have blurred the line between rescuing and slaughtering until neither moves him much.

What still grips him, despite that rot, is the craving to feel again the things he treasures, above all the rush of first entering the first grade. He calls that sensation a resonance in the heart that never goes quiet, and his senility leads him to echo his own phrases. That same decline probably fed the reckless, repeated crimes that defined his later life.

Long ago Masaki is presumed to have made his living as a curse user. He crossed paths with Yuji Itadori at one point and took a brutal beating, yet managed to slip away, the sole loss he ever suffered.

Starting in 2084, a longing to be a first-grader again drove him to deadly lengths. He set a rental house as a trap to draw families in, killed one of them, then wore the dead boy's skin and signed up at Shuei Elementary as Masayoshi Takeda. The fake child moved away just before second grade in 2085, reappeared the next year as Masaaki Takeda, and ran the cycle once more in 2086 under the name Masaki Takeda, having buried six victims across two yards by then.

Three straight years stuck in the first grade finally put sorcerers on his trail, and Yuka, Tsurugi, and Maru drew the assignment. Tsurugi caught him heading home from school, and a stumble triggered his shikigami's protective appearance. Masaki spun a tale of a dead mother's curse trapping him as a child and lured the pair to a burial site before Yuka's phone call shattered the lie. He knocked Maru out, revealed himself, and fought Tsurugi; pinned at Shuei by Mino's curtain, he tricked the siblings into striking a skin-cloaked decoy and gravely wounded both before Maru's return forced him off. Maru's disorientation collapsed the shikigami, and in the hand-to-hand exchange that followed Masaki was thrashed, saved from death only by Tsurugi blocking the finishing blow; he then bolted into an alley, where Kou Usami pinned him with Cursed Speech and finished him with a punch and kick.