Nine

Shoulder-length white hair, worn swept back off his face, sat over thin rectangular eyes, gray with white pupils. He was tall and fair-skinned, and before the experiments he wore a tattered white jacket with black trousers.

Everything after that was defined by the bodysuit Kyudai Garaki built for him. Black and sealed over all of him but his head and fingertips, it held his failing body together while its onboard technology throttled his behavior. Armored plating covered it in grooves that glowed dark violet, and two canisters at the shoulders carried the same luminous purple fluid he had been incubated in. Over that went dress pants and a lilac blazer, both stolen off a passing businessman during his escape. The critical piece was the mask corset wrapping his chest up to the nose, a cousin to the life-support mask All For One wears, studded with nine gray plugs. Break that section and the limiters stop working.

Class 1-A broke it. By the end his blazer and nearly all the suit were gone, and the restraints on his back were destroyed, which released everything he had. Prolonged Quirk use accelerated the degeneration underneath, winding purple energy veins across his skin. Izuku Midoriya and Katsuki Bakugo left him barely alive; Tomura Shigaraki's Decay turned all of it to dust.

Cold to the point of indifference, Nine was almost impossible to rattle. Collateral damage did not trouble him, but he did not hurt people directly without provocation either, preferring to deflect whatever came at him and continue. When Mr. Shimano's vehicle got in the way, Nine assured the man he had no intention of killing him, and then took his Cell Activation Quirk. He was also, for someone that powerful, genuinely humble, and respected anyone who impressed him on either side of a fight. That respect had a hard ceiling: recognizing that Deku carried multiple Quirks, he decided the boy was too dangerous to leave breathing.

His creed came from two sources. Weather Manipulation handed him the sky, and his past taught him that the weak sat on top while people like him were driven out. A truly superhuman society, in his reading, sorts itself by strength alone, and he would submit to any procedure that moved that future closer. The composure eroded as his Quirk's pain deepened; he threatened to strangle Mahoro Shimano to make her brother Katsuma surrender his Quirk, and once his limiters shattered he told Deku and Bakugo that his new world had no room for them.

What is easy to miss is that none of it was only for him. Slice, Mummy, and Chimera had lived the same oppression, and discussing the plan with Kyudai he pictured them and called the ideal world theirs. Dying, Nine still insisted there could only ever be one true ruler, and it was Tomura, who shared the ambition, who killed him, inherited the dream, and nearly took the world apart with it.

Weather Manipulation, the Quirk he was born with, conjured thunderstorms and tornadoes on command. By his own account it was more than his body could hold, and it destroyed his cellular tissue as he used it. Chasing a cure, he gave himself over to the League of Villains, letting Kyudai transplant a diluted All For One into him once his Quirk Factor tested as compatible. The copy capped him at eight stolen Quirks and only accelerated his decline. He managed to take five, fought with four, and combining them freely with his original power made him nearly impossible to predict.

The stolen set was chosen for damage. Air Wall raised a shield of compressed air in whatever direction he needed, could be fired outward as a repelling burst, and held against One For All at full output. Scanning gave him infrared-style vision that identified Quirks and gauged their power, and Bullet Laser fired purple beams from his fingertips that punched through flesh. Hydra summoned large blue dragon shapes from his back, usually two at once, for range and for pinning people. Cell Activation, the one he actually wanted, would have healed him, except this version only works on Type A blood and his was Type B.

He read situations fast. Finding that Quirk incompatible, he reasoned from Quirk heredity that one of Mr. Shimano's children might carry a usable version, and moved his team to Nabu Island to take it, assigning Slice, Mummy, and Chimera to sever communications, seal off escape, and occupy the Hero students while he hunted Katsuma. His reflexes let him blank attacks he never saw, and his durability carried him through everything two One For All users threw at him. In the end, Deku and Katsuki sharing One For All at one hundred percent put him down, and even that only left him helpless rather than dead.