Panda

To the eye Panda is a grown giant panda, towering over his classmates on a bulky bear's frame. He dresses up on occasion, favoring armbands, scarves, and the odd jacket. His brawl with Hajime Kashimo wrecked his body along with two of his cores, and the aftermath left him reduced to a far smaller build that reads like a panda cub rather than the imposing original.

Easygoing and good-humored, Panda carries a relaxed warmth and a comedic streak all his own. As a youngster he talked in a stiff, almost machine-like register, but the years let a real personality take shape. He regards humans as a curious sort, feels no urge to become one, yet holds a genuine respect for them as a people.

A reflexive jokester, he tends to lighten even dire moments. During Mechamaru's attempt on his life he kept needling his fellow cursed corpse, and it took the puppet nearly tearing him apart for him to admit to being even slightly angry. Once that clash ended, Panda found common ground with Kokichi Muta and pledged to visit his real body someday.

Ranked a semi-grade 2 sorcerer and standing as the most advanced of the Abrupt-Mutation cursed corpses, Panda takes naturally to jujutsu and can banish curses on physical strength alone. His body presents a rare puzzle for opponents: the only way to bring him down is to destroy the cores of cursed energy that function as his heart, and that frame is enormously tough and grows tougher when laced with cursed energy. His sheer size makes him formidably strong, enough to exorcise curses with plain blows, haul allies on his back, and bull straight through walls; a single right hook rattled the famously durable Aoi Todo, and he hammered the metal-bodied Mechamaru with straight punches. His physiology lets him soak punishment too, shrugging off Mechamaru's Ultra Cannon and surviving the puppet's strongest move.

Behind the brawn sits a keen tactical mind, sharpened from his earliest days under Principal Yaga. He fights several moves ahead, a cleverness that even the formidable strategist Suguru Geto found surprising. Against Mechamaru he weighed every action, calculated the firing angle of the Ultimate Cannon so it would not catch his allies, and repeatedly baited his opponent by feigning damage to his cores, winning because Mechamaru underestimated him. He routinely reinforces himself with cursed energy for added power or defense, a coating strong enough to leave him unmarked by the Ultimate Cannon, and a single reinforced palm strike in Gorilla Mode launched Mechamaru out of the forest and crippled its arm.

His body holds three cores: the balanced Panda, the powerhouse Gorilla, and a third, Triceratops; damaging any one locks him out of that form until it mends, though he can disguise their location to shield his weak points. Shifting to his "brother's" core turns him into a muscular gorilla of the same coloring, faster and stronger at the cost of draining cursed energy quickly, and while in this form his strikes carry the Unblockable Drumming Beat, a resonance that drives damage through a guard so the target feels it even when defending. Switching to his "sister's" core yields a slimmer, bipedal Triceratops form with a wide horned head, whose powers remain unseen. In combat he wears pale blue knuckle bracers stamped with small panda heads to support his fist-heavy style.