Soga Kugisaki

Turquoise hair, wild and standing in points, is the first thing anyone registers about him, over a young frame that runs tall and lean. His yellow eyes slant inward beneath eyebrows barely worth the name, and a short goatee sits below. The teeth at the front of his mouth taper to points, while the molars behind them are perfectly ordinary.

Early on his wardrobe ran to jeans, leather shoes, a plaid shirt knotted at the waist, and a sleeveless vest pulled on over a tank top. The later version keeps the vest, jeans, and shoes but adds a hat and trench coat cut close to what Knuckleduster wears, brown where his mentor's are green.

Trigger rewrites all of it. The drug thickens his build, sharpens his hair further, and pushes spikes out across his back and arms. When Kuin Hachisuka later forces an overdose into him, the change goes the whole way and leaves him a monstrous porcupine the size of a man.

The version of Soga who first appears is violent and openly sadistic, running with Moyuru Tochi and Rapt Tokage and enjoying the work of hurting and humiliating strangers. The root of it is straightforward: he was discriminated against for his Quirk and written off as a villain long before he ever acted like one. Convinced that every face around him sees a monster, he took to inflicting on others what had been aimed at him. His grip on reality suffers for it, and he perceives everyone nearby as wearing a smirk and jeering in his direction, whatever they happen to be doing.

Even at his worst he stood by his own. He led that trio, felt real kinship with anyone looked down on for their Quirk, and went to confront Kuin by himself specifically to keep his friends clear of it. He also refuses to be used: told to serve someone else's design, he wrecked an entire selection of Trigger rather than contribute to Kuin's plan.

Being saved from the murderous Stendhal by the Naruhata Vigilantes redirected him for good. He became an ally, then something close to a vigilante himself, talking Koichi Haimawari into rescuing Pop☆Step and helping him do it despite everything illegal about the attempt. He studied under Knuckleduster and repeats a fair amount of his teacher's philosophy without swallowing it whole, and when Knuckleduster tried to take Number 6 down along with himself, Soga stopped him, saying they had put in too much work keeping everyone alive.

What he has now is a settled ideology, and he will lecture anyone he thinks needs it. Vigilantes exist, in his reading, for the people who fall through the gaps in institutions that were never going to catch them. His dealings with the police are accordingly tangled. He knows they want the same outcome and will pitch in at times, but he walks away from methods he objects to, and he has no patience for budget mattering more than results. He criticized Naomasa Tsukauchi for putting thin manpower and a short clock on protecting Pop☆Step, and again for the warrant issued on Koichi, accusing the force of painting decent people as monsters to protect its own image. What the law happens to call a villain carries no weight with him whatsoever. Officers with some give in them, Eizo Tanuma among them, sit far better with him than by-the-book ones like Naomasa.

Spike: Soga can push spikes out of his own body, an ability that started off limited to his hands and feet.

Trigger widens the scope considerably. Under the drug, spikes cover his arms, his head, and the length of his back, and his standard tactic becomes hurling himself at opponents while spinning. The overdose Kuin forces on him when Stendhal has his life in danger triggers a total transformation instead: he grows taller, his face reshapes into something porcupine-like, and the spikes fill in across the same regions Trigger had already covered.