Naoya Zenin

Tall and slender, Naoya looks out with brown eyes under blond hair dyed over dark green roots, a smug smirk all but fixed to his features. He fancies his face better suited to a clan head than relatives such as Jinichi. On his left ear he wears four pieces: along the helix sit two cuffs, while the lobe carries a pair of studs, and the manga tacks on two further studs at his right lobe. Tradition shapes his clothing like the rest of his kin, a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned beneath a teal kimono, with pale hakama, waraji sandals, and dark tabi completing it. Death returns him as a vengeful cursed spirit, first a worm-like womb keeping human arms and a six-holed star mask his face can poke through, then an evolved chrysalis with a skull-shaped head that spins tendrils into makeshift limbs.

Praised as a prodigy since boyhood and indulged as Naobito's most promising child, Naoya was groomed to believe himself the heir, and his arrogance ballooned in step. He sneers at nearly everyone, dismissing even seasoned clansmen like Jinichi and Ogi as weaklings until they strike back at his insolence. Toji alone earned his respect, the man's hidden strength registering despite his lack of cursed energy, which led Naoya to idolize and chase after him. Sociopathic, narcissistic, and openly misogynistic, he holds no regard for family, mourns nothing at his dying father's bedside, and tells Mai's mother that any woman unwilling to trail three steps behind a man deserves a blade in her back. The naming of Megumi as heir prompts him to plot the boy's death at once, glad to threaten Megumi's friends to lure him out. Maki's slaughter of the clan leaves him unbothered, merely amused, and stubborn in denying her claim to Toji's mantle. That refusal trails him into undeath, where his preserved ego stokes a fixated grudge against Maki and finally blinds him to her cursed-energy-free body, sealing his end.

Heading the Hei as a special grade 1 sorcerer, Naoya counted among the brightest talents of a Big Three family, his might on par with his father's. He handled the inherited Projection Sorcery with elite skill, treasuring its tremendous speed and combining it with shrewd planning and close-range fighting to flatten enemies before they reacted. The technique slices a second into twenty-four frames and traces fixed motions through his field of view, forcing anything his palm contacts to follow suit or sit frozen across a full second within a single animated frame. He flashed past Yuji and Choso at their first meeting, then bested Choso solo by clamping down on Blood Manipulation, only for swollen overconfidence to steer him straight into Supernova. Among the Hei, he alone could trade blows with Maki once she shed her cursed energy. Rebirth as a curse made him deadlier still, flying at supersonic pace in his womb stage and hitting Mach 3 through an Acceleration Mode that sucked air in via inlets and blasted it back out for thrust, curling tight for durability under a binding vow. He even gained a domain, Time Cell Moon Palace, a womb-like realm whose film-line sure-hit imposes the twenty-four frames at the cellular level, yet it could not locate Maki and brought about his death.