Neito Monoma

The tilted head and half-lidded eyes do most of the work. Neito habitually looks like he is enjoying a joke at someone else's expense, an impression built from periwinkle irises with white pupils, outer corners angled downward, and a permanent smirk. Blond hair parted to the right grows shorter toward the back of his skull, the bangs long enough to curtain one eye. The light novels concede that he is handsome.

He fights in a double-breasted tuxedo, black, its two tails nearly reaching his ankles, worn over an upturned shirt collar and a blue dotted tie. Two belts ring his waist and three clocks hang from them so he can track how long a borrowed Quirk has left. After graduating he is taller and leaner, the hair reworked into twin slick fringes, and the tuxedo survives with teal accents and a pair of golden clock earrings serving the same purpose as the stopwatches.

Who he is depends entirely on the audience. Aimed at Class 1-A he is loud, sarcastic, and relentlessly mocking; aimed at anyone else he is calm, intelligent, and genuinely kind. The grudge is about attention. The U.S.J. Incident made 1-A the famous first-years, and Neito wants that spotlight for his own class badly enough to vent it as constant abuse of theirs. Katsuki Bakugo's arrogance keeps confirming his worst theory about them. Itsuka Kendo has knocked him unconscious ninety-nine times since he enrolled, which measures how far the tirades run.

Underneath sits an inferiority complex. He praises his classmates freely and doubts himself constantly, relieved when a bracket spares him from facing 1-A directly. He sorts the world into main characters, whose Quirks suit heroism, and side characters, whose Quirks do not. His classmates get to be leads. He does not, because Copy is worthless without someone standing nearby, and adults told him so throughout childhood. Hitoshi Shinso, saddled with a power nobody calls heroic, therefore registers as a kindred case, and it is why Neito fights dirty, blaming Katsuki for All Might's retirement purely to make Izuku Midoriya snap.

The kindness is just as real. He hands Class 1-B a Sports Festival strategy and lets them vote on it, comforts Setsuna Tokage after her loss, and calms Eri despite frightening her at first. His peers respect him and pointedly never say so, likely to starve the ego. Schoolwork is the hole in the resume, bad enough to land him in remedial lessons.

He announces himself at the U.A. Sports Festival by having Class 1-B finish deliberately low in the Obstacle Race, which he correctly reads as a preliminary that cuts nobody, letting his class study everyone else's Quirks while concealing their own. In the Cavalry Battle he lifts Explosion from Katsuki and Hardening from Eijiro Kirishima and blindsides Katsuki twice with them, and from the stands he is one of very few, Pro Heroes included, to read Ochaco Uraraka's true plan against Katsuki while it is still unfolding.

The Joint Training Battle's last round is his showcase and his ceiling. He has Hitoshi fake Ochaco's scream with Persona Chords to catch Izuku scouting, then needles him about All Might until One For All slips its leash. Once Izuku has it under control again, Neito gets a hand on him anyway, only to discover that an Accumulation-type Quirk gives him nothing but the strength Yoichi Shigaraki started with. Ochaco puts him down with Gunhead Martial Arts, and even captured he lands a delayed Twin Impact borrowed from Nirengeki Shoda to slow Izuku's pursuit.

Copy duplicates a Quirk on skin contact and keeps it about five minutes, later ten, unless he stays in contact with the owner. He holds four at once, needs roughly ten seconds to switch, and cannot use anything requiring a stored resource, calling powers like Rewind blanks. What he can do is combine borrowed Quirks into something none of their owners would have thought of, which is what makes the Final War plan work: Kurogiri's Warp Gate to scatter both sides across Japan and contain the fighting, and Shota Aizawa's Erasure, sustained by keeping hold of him, to shut Tomura's Quirks down. He recoils from that assignment at first, certain a bit player cannot carry it, until Vlad King tells him everyone is needed, then seizes the puppet master part with open delight and insists everyone know whose Quirk held Tomura in place. A statue of him goes up outside U.A. for it, he reconciles with Katsuki along the way, and eight years on, as the Pro Hero Phantom Thief, he holds the No. 10 spot on the Hero Billboard Chart JP.