Bartholomew Kuma

Kuma is a giant of a man at 689 centimeters, ranking as the second tallest among the former Warlords and often pictured with a Bible in hand. His long, curly hair sometimes sprouts rounded tufts resembling bear ears, and clear lenses hide the cybernetic eyes installed during his conversion. Because his palms bear thick mammalian paw pads from the Nikyu Nikyu no Mi, he keeps gloves on to stop them from flinging objects or people away by accident. A target-like crosshair marks his jacket, paw prints trim its hem, and the brand PX-0 marks the lower side of his neck. After the timeskip his cybernetic frame shows heavy damage and protruding blades from years of duty, and his stint as a slave at Mary Geoise left him in rags, collared and chained, with still more swords stabbed into him; a clash with Sakazuki later burned away part of his face.

Kuma's story is one of accumulated loss. A cheerful child broken by slavery and by losing both of his parents, he clung to his father's tales of the liberation warrior Nika and grew into a man devoted to freeing the oppressed. Raised in a church, he is deeply religious and astonishingly kind, healing even those who tormented him without resentment, and he served Sorbet as a beloved pastor before its people crowned him king. The fearsome 'Tyrant' of his epithet was a fiction; in truth he was a pacifist who fought only to keep the peace. Above all he loved his adopted daughter Bonney, accepting the destruction of his own body and mind to secure her cure. As a Warlord he stayed quietly loyal to the Revolutionary Army rather than the government, aiding the Straw Hats in deniable ways. The completion of his Pacifista programming stripped away his will, memory, and self, yet at Egghead flickers of feeling returned, enough for him to shield Bonney and smile at her.

Born of the near-extinct Buccaneer race, said to carry giant's blood, Kuma inherited immense size, strength, and durability from his full-blooded father Clapp, enduring brutal slavery even as a small child. After becoming the prototype Pacifista he was enhanced into a complete cyborg, guarding the Thousand Sunny for two years and shrugging off countless blades without pain. His Devil Fruit, the Nikyu Nikyu no Mi, grants paw pads that repel anything they touch at what he claims is the speed of light, serving as both an unstoppable strike and an impenetrable guard. He can fling targets vast distances, blast compressed air as a cannon-like shockwave, and crush an entire island by squeezing air into a single exploding bubble. The same power lets him push pain, fatigue, and injury out of a body to heal it instantly, transferring that damage into someone else as a bubble shaped like a paw print. He also possesses uncanny geographic precision, able to teleport a person to any exact spot in the world, and at Egghead he landed an Armament Haki punch that tore off one of Saturn's arms. Like Dracule Mihawk, he sailed as a one-man pirate crew, and he stands as the only character to single-handedly defeat the Straw Hats, doing so twice.