Daimon

Visually the Daimons vary by medium. The Sailor Moon S anime presents them as monstrous humanoid women, whereas the manga and Crystal favor grotesque worm-like bodies capped with skull faces. Regardless of form, every one of them starts as a pod-like egg rather than a finished creature.

In the anime, Professor Tomoe cultures these eggs by pressurizing a pink, pulsing, jelly-like core inside a beaker set over a burner until it ripens into a sentient cell. Early on the process shattered its own glassware and ran slowly. Kaolinite would then steer an egg into a chosen object, where it nested in a gelatinous shell and lay dormant, while later batches were pre-loaded into items through the Heart Snatcher Oven and stayed sealed until a Witches 5 member barked the command to wake. Only once the victim handled the tainted object did the monster rise and pull on a humanoid shape.

What sets the Daimons apart from ordinary minions is a genuine emotional range. They laugh, mope, act silly, and feel dread, and that empathy can override the mission entirely. U-Ndokai comforts Hotaru when the stirring of Sailor Saturn triggers a panic attack, U-Ikasaman and Doorknobder come across as pacifists uninterested in violence, and U-Tomodachi wants nothing but friendship. Whether such warmth is tied to the theme of the object each one animates is left unresolved.

In combat they are far from pushovers. Each seems born already fluent in its own tricks, and they frequently gain the upper hand on the Guardians. The reliable counter is Sailor Saturn, whose presence saps or freezes them just long enough that Sailor Moon and the others can land the finishing blow.

Their entire reason for existing is harvesting Pure Heart Crystals, which is why the English dub renamed them Heart Snatchers. Methods differ by handler. Kaolinite's breed immobilizes a target and siphons the crystal through a beam shot from a black star inked on their body, Mimete's cormorant-themed group kisses victims and swallows the heart drawn out through the mouth, and Eudial, keeping hers stored in a metal box in her van, deploys them only as combat backup while doing the snatching herself with a gun.

Death restores the possessed object and cracks the egg open, venting a dark smoke that wears an evil face, which suggests the creature is exiled rather than destroyed outright. The bulk of them fall to Moon Spiral Heart Attack, and after Eudial's death to Rainbow Moon Heartache, chirping "Lovely!" or "Love-Lovely!" as they die. Exceptions include Mikuuji, felled by Uranus and Neptune, and Daruma, beaten by Jupiter's Sparkling Wide Pressure. In the manga the Witches 5 rank as perfect Daimons because they fused completely with their implants, leaving no remains behind.