Kinoko Komori

Her pupils are small black crosses, a match for the cap of a cross-sliced shiitake, though almost nobody gets to see them. A long fringe hangs over her eyes and hides most of her face, leaving a wide mouth as the main feature on show. Underneath the bangs the eyes are large and feline, tilted inward with long lower lashes and warm brown irises. She is short and slight, and her honey-brown hair curls inward into a bob shaped like a mushroom cap that stops below her narrow shoulders.

The costume commits to the theme. A long-sleeved turtleneck dress with furred cuffs carries the red and white speckling of a fly agaric, repeated on her cap-shaped hat and on the frilled pink boots she wears over thick tan soles. A brown belt with a heavy gold buckle holds her Shroom-Shooters. The manga adds a fluffy collar by the time of the Final War. The version she wears eight years later swaps the speckles for stripes on a sleeveless dress, adds striped arm tights and small golden mushroom earrings, and pulls her hat into a point that reads closer to a witch.

At the Sports Festival she reads as painfully shy, tucked behind her fringe and wearing a sour expression. By the Joint Training Battle she turns up beaming, and when Shihai Kuroiro's plan collapses she jumps into her own part of it with obvious delight, whether because her nerve has grown or because the situation finally involves fungus.

Mushrooms are the joy of her life. She knows the scientific name of every species she can produce, attaches affectionate honorifics to them, and cannot resist punning on them mid-fight. There is real warmth in her too. After burying Fumikage Tokoyami in spores she apologized for overdoing it and told him to take something for it. She is a Hawks fan as well, and once asked Fumikage whether he had any candid photos of the No. 2 Hero. Her stated dream is to be an idol hero, which she eventually gets.

Mushroom releases fungal spores from her body that sprout into full specimens the instant they touch a solid surface, whether that surface is the ground, her own skin, or somebody else's. The growths fade after two or three hours. Damp air makes them spread faster, which is what her Shroom-Shooters are for: a pair of gun-shaped spray bottles that raise the local humidity until she can bury an entire training ground within minutes. Allies have to be treated with antifungal spray beforehand or they go under with everyone else.

She is not built for trading blows, and Neito Monoma still called her an opponent worth fearing. The mushrooms do more than swarm. A field of them screens sightlines and hides both her and whoever she is working with, which suits Shihai Kuroiro's talent for sneaking. Her ultimate move, Splitgill Lung Strike, plants schizophyllum commune in a throat and lets suffocation do the rest.

Fumikage Tokoyami learned the limits of pinning her. He restrained her without knocking her out, and from the ground she filled his airway and lungs until he could not breathe. Away from combat she is also a skilled makeup artist, a talent Class 1-B leaned on for their School Festival play.