Juzo Honenuki

Pale, angular around the eyes, with beige hair spiked to a middling length, a flat nose, and small brows, Juzo would pass unremarked if not for his teeth, which sit outside the skin. No lips are visible, so the face reads as a skull, and nothing about his Quirk explains why. Kohei Horikoshi maintains he is good-looking regardless.

His hero costume is a dark bodysuit under a set of armor, topped by a full face mask. The helmet is rounded and elliptical, black-tinted, white lines crossing the visor, orange framing with black lines at the sides, and tufts of hair still escape at the back and chin. A retractable snorkel lets him breathe while swimming beneath softened surfaces. Three plates make up the chest piece, joined by thick metal shoulder straps with a red jewel-shaped scale set between them. Orange vambraces accented in yellow, plating across thighs, calves and upper arms, raised boots of green and orange built on pipe-like shafts, gloves and kneepads in white: that finishes it off. Eight years on, his features have sharpened, the chest plate has gone mechanical, and the helmet is sleeker.

Losing sits badly with him, though he will let classmates take what they have earned, as he did at the Sports Festival. Around the class he stays calm and reads the room well. He worries about his friends: after his mistake in the Joint Training Battle's third round he wanted to make it right by them. Sen Kaibara keeps praising his soft and flexible thinking.

He has admitted he needs more stubbornness to win from a bad position. When Tenya Ida unveiled Recipro Turbo, Juzo recognized the situation had turned against him and pulled out, which reads as judgment rather than cowardice. He also refuses to sit through Neito Monoma's complaints about Class A, telling him to take it up with them directly, which Monoma proceeds to do.

Recommendation students start from a high bar, and Mashirao Ojiro credited Juzo's reflexes for stopping Heaven-Piercing Ice Wall, Shoto Todoroki's opener, before it could seal his team in. Softening turns anything non-living soft on contact, and a second touch undoes it. Ground becomes quicksand, movement stops, and the shape of a fight becomes his to set. Opponents who depend on their footing, Tenya and Ojiro among them, suffer badly for it. He can dive into softened material and swim through it, crossing a battlefield unseen, escaping something he cannot beat, or surfacing behind someone. Solid attacks turn to harmless goo before they reach him.

The mind is the other half of it. During Joint Training he catalogued his own teammates' flaws and built disadvantages for the other side out of them, then read their strategy off their known Quirks and habits. Knowing Shoto opens with ice, he let the ice arrive and softened it around Shoto's team. He also speaks English well enough to hold a conversation with Pony Tsunotori. That third round ended with Class 1-A's team immobilized until Recipro Turbo changed the arithmetic and he withdrew rather than grind out a fight he could not win.