Takaie Kanigumo

A black mask hides his face in public, and what it conceals is not reassuring. Two rows of five spider-like fangs sit arranged over where his mouth actually is, marking him as heteromorphic in the most literal way. Takaie stands at ordinary height, but a pair of spider legs juts back from his shoulders. Six wavy green streaks run from his forehead across the top of his skull, broken on the left side by a scar, and his eyes are red. For clothing he favors a long black shirt topped with a heavy yellow fur collar.

The Front's doctrine is not a job to Takaie, it is a faith. He holds that any future worth having for mutants must be paid for with the blood of the people who spat on them, rejected them, and hurt them, and once Re-Destro is taken into custody he transfers that hope wholesale onto Spinner, treating him as the light the heteromorphs of the organization can march toward.

Because violence is the only remedy he recognizes, he tries to press that conclusion onto other heteromorphs, and he grows sour with anyone who answers prejudice by some other route. Tentacole is a favorite target, mocked for the naive idea that a gentler road exists at all. Even his devotion to Spinner has limits: when Body Bulk begins tearing apart Spinner's mind and the crowd around him falls into confusion, some of Takaie's reverence quietly drains away.

Takaie stood with the rest of the Front's advisers when the Heroes stormed the Gunga Mountain Villa, and he was one of the hundred and thirty-two fighters who slipped free of custody in the chaos that followed Gigantomachia's tear through several cities.

With the war over, he and what remained of Spinner's squadron kept the coals of revolt warm. Re-Destro's capture was a blow he openly mourned, but the movement's hopes had merely changed hands: Spinner became the face on their posters, and Skeptic sent word to keep the fire alive, backing the recruitment drive with manufactured audio logs distributed to sympathizers.

That groundwork paid off when a heteromorph army, swollen by civilians who shared its grievance, followed Spinner in an assault on Central Hospital to break Kurogiri out. Takaie made himself the preacher of the operation, working the crowd with a sermon on everything society had taken from them and ordering them to strike back. Tentacole tried to talk the mob down and drew nothing but ridicule. The answer came instead from Anima, who summoned an enormous swarm of birds and insects at his back, a horn pushing out of his head as his Quirk surged, and told Takaie not to insult his friend.

The mood broke when a pig-faced mutant, one of the people Tentacole had saved, suggested aloud that their anger was pointed the wrong way. Pinned by Anima, Takaie shouted at the crowd to hold the line and remember what the system had done to them. It did not take. As the riot wound down he was arrested with a number of the other villains involved.