Quinque

Known in Japanese as kuinke, a quinque is an anti-ghoul armament built around a harvested kakuhou and carried by the ghoul investigators of the CCG. The design is credited to Adam Gehner and Yoshiu Washuu. It works by feeding electrical pulses into the kakuhou, coaxing the organ to unfurl and obey the wielder. Most take the shape of a melee or ranged weapon while keeping traits of the kagune they came from. Unlike a living kagune, a quinque holds a fixed form and cannot draw in or bank Rc cells beyond whatever it was built with.

Firearms were the CCG's earlier answer to ghouls, but the search for something deadlier drove the research that produced these weapons. Built for a single purpose, extermination, they pushed kill rates sharply upward and were hailed as the next wave of counter-ghoul technology. Investigators haul them in cases and bags that store the kakuhou, and while some treat collecting them as a pastime, others devote themselves to mastering a single blade. Claiming one follows a set path: an investigator first pins down a target's Rc type, kills it, then usually names the finished weapon after the ghoul it was taken from.

Two rarer breeds stand apart. A chimera quinque fuses more than one Rc type into a single tool, either by drawing on a ghoul with mixed kagune or one born with two types, as with Nutcracker and Hinami Fueguchi; Akira Mado's Amatsu, blending koukaku and bikaku, is the best-known case, valuable against varied foes but nearly impossible to build. The kakuja variety comes from ghouls that cannibalized their way into a mutated state, and it usually manifests as armor that shields and strengthens the wearer, though it slowly gnaws at them and drains their vigor to sustain itself. Some kakuja weapons instead take offensive shapes such as blades that keep abilities like projectile fire, detachment, and remote triggering. Most were cut from Arata Kirishima and passed to investigators including Yukinori Shinohara, Koutarou Amon, and Juuzou Suzuya, with Owl, drawn from Yoshimura for Kishou Arima, and Ginkui, taken from Noro for Kuki Urie, as notable exceptions. A curious footnote: at least the armor types can be eaten safely by ghouls, since Ken Kaneki once swallowed Shinohara's Arata with no aftereffects.