Dabi

Purple, gnarled tissue is the first thing anyone registers about him. It wraps the lower half of his face, runs down past his collarbone, and reappears across his torso, arms and legs, fastened to the healthy skin by rows of crude staples and hoop piercings. The damage dates to age thirteen, when his own fire swallowed him. Above it sit heavy-lidded turquoise eyes under a fringe of white hair, spiked and cut short of the neck; he kept that white dyed black until he chose to announce who he really was. Cartilage studs line both ears, which lack lobes entirely, and three rings pierce one side of his nose.

As a boy, Toya was round-faced and crimson-haired, small for his age after a premature birth, though his mother's genes bleached the red away over time. Three years in a coma left him taller and spikier, his burns already visible but not yet stitched into place. His wardrobe tracked his rank: a plain dark jacket at first, then a heavy overcoat with torn hems for the Vanguard Action Squad, then a lieutenant's long blue coat once the Paranormal Liberation Front formed. For the Final War he wore Death Flame, a tattered white set patterned on Japanese burial dress, which his own heat steadily consumed.

The last stretch of his life is a record of erasure. Flesh peeled away from the right half of his face until jaw, teeth and tendon showed through, bone surfaced elsewhere, and he detonated his own right arm mid-attack. Frozen out of his final explosion, he was left skeletal, eye sockets empty, icing over from within. Afterward machines kept what remained alive, everything bandaged and bound, only his restored eyes and a skinless jaw left visible.

Enji drilled into his eldest that surpassing All Might would fall to him, and Toya received that as an assignment. When doctors made clear his body could not survive his own flames and his father quit training him, the boy refused the exit and kept burning himself in private. He described the goal as a fire someone else had lit inside him and then left there. Rei read it more plainly: her son wanted proof he was not a failure. Shoto's birth, and the Quirk that came with it, settled the question of where he stood.

Obsession curdled into cruelty. He waved off warnings from Fuyumi and Rei, told them they lived in a different world, and once turned his fire on Rei and a newborn Shoto because Enji would not look at him. He blamed Rei for the Quirk marriage that produced him, then regretted every word, which is the contradiction that defines him: real love for his family, always losing to his hunger for one man's attention. Waking from the coma, he went home meaning to apologize. Nothing had changed. Toya ended there and Dabi began.

The villain wore a flat, aloof mask, borrowing Stain's contempt for false heroes as convenient cover for a private vendetta, though he never shared the Hero Killer's interest in better heroes. He was condescending to allies and enemies alike, distant from a League he admitted he valued only as a tool, and openly sadistic toward anyone he could hurt. Snatch's dying words stuck anyway, and he wept blood over them. His broadcast dropped the mask entirely, gleeful and unhinged, and afterward he took his birth name back. Suicide never troubled him if it took Endeavor along. Only at the end, iced down and surrounded by relatives who would not leave, did he let himself picture being happy, then apologize to Shoto for pushing him away.

Blueflame produced fire hotter than his father's Hellflame, and rage stoked it further, but he inherited Rei's cold-adapted constitution, so his own weapon cooked him. Prolonged use meant burns and a hard ceiling on his stamina. Trained by Endeavor and then by himself, he racked up more than thirty kills and led the Vanguard Action Squad in practice if not in title, fighting at range with fireballs, sustained jets, and walls of flame that could swallow a group whole. He could hover, and he burned through Best Jeanist's carbon fibers on contact.

Deadened nerves from his childhood immolation left him barely able to register pain, which let him ignore what his Quirk was doing to him. Kyudai Garaki gave that ruined body a month and watched it last into adulthood on hatred alone. Cold barely touched him, an edge against both Geten and Shoto. His eyesight let him copy techniques on sight, so Endeavor's Flashfire Fist arsenal, Hell Spider, Jet Burn and Prominence Burn became his, and he reproduced Phosphor, which had taken Shoto months to invent. Late in the Final War his power surged past a normal Awakening and pulled Frost's ice into the flame itself.

He read people fast: he clocked Tomura Shigaraki's instability at their first meeting, spotted Snatch's Quirk limits mid-fight, suspected Hawks of betrayal long before the reveal, and threw the No. 2 Hero off balance by naming him aloud. His masterstroke was informational rather than physical, a global broadcast of his childhood with DNA proof of his parentage, plus confessions that he had engineered Endeavor's public disasters and that Hawks was a criminal's son who had killed Twice. It did exactly what he wanted to the public's faith. At the last he pushed his body toward a five-kilometer blast, and it took Rei, Fuyumi, Natsuo and Shoto's Great Glacial Aegir together to freeze it out.