#2 Kumako

#tomboytuesday

When she was human, Maetani was taught by a martial artist. Originally meant to be a judoka, she takes note of her mentor's old sword, and a new path sparked inside of her. She tells him she wants to learn how to use a sword for fighting instead, which her martial artist humbly obliged to teach. However, there was a catch. She will be taught of course, but he will continue to spar with her using judo techniques, saying she must learn how to combat his hands-on combat with her weapon. Maetani passionately accepted this challenge. Maetani and her teacher grew closer and closer, developing a daughter-like relationship with him, something Maetani could never gain with her biological father. After finding all the counters to her teacher's movements, he finally humbles her efforts and grants her a sword-to-sword spar, making Maetani light up instantly. Given she had plans to ask her mentor if he would like to attend a festival with her, this day truly could not get any better for her. Unfortunately, while she absentmindedly thought of how she wanted to ask him, she was fatally stabbed. Her mentor takes her to the hospital, mortified at what he had done, wishing he used a practice sword or took note of her wandering mind sooner. He swore to do anything to bring her out of her coma, whether it meant throwing all the money in the world to the doctors. Thankfully, it seemed his calls for help were finally answered, when the hospital subsidiary of the Osaka Lab Committee organization offered him this chance, saying they would use experimental means to lift her right out the coma, even supposedly instantly giving her back her strength in full force.

When taken into the care of the Osaka Lab Committee, she was experimented on in an attempt to manually turn a human into an In-birth to lift her out of the coma, which ultimately failed and just turned her into a Parasite Void. As the Osaka Lab Committee had no idea how to tackle this subspecies of Void unlike other Lab Committees in other Prefectures, she was then transferred to the Kanzakai Lab. There, she would be researched due to their subsidiary having more Parasite Void knowledge in comparison as they had Yomi. Kanzakai's High Chair Man allowed any experimentation on both of them to pick out how their abilities worked. Kumako (and Yomi) thankfully had no substantial pain, but Kumako was unfortunately too emotionally scarred by the pain of her transformation already. Though she doesn't remember being a human, or what happened to lead up to this point, she remembers the pain of having her internal makeup change by the second on a hospital bed, and a few humans looking at her through a glass window. She even still feels some residual pain, commonly occuring as piercing pain across her forehead. She was eventually sealed in a vial when deemed as a "last resort."

Once Nodoka and Hitoki let her remanifest, she was nothing but revenge-thirsty and wanted to find the “one who left her to die.” The scent of Nodoka angered Kumako, and lashed out towards her once she regained her footing, only saying that she was scum, and she must die. Nodoka, knowing she wasn't going to get through her through talking, offered a dual with a deal attached. If Nodoka was defeated, Kumako can kill her as she so pleased. If Kumako was defeated, she had no choice but to let Nodoka show the coexistence method to her. Of course, Nodoka would win, though she was definitely not unscathed. Nodoka explained that she wanted nothing more but to give Kumako a better life, slowly coming to terms that the Lab Committee was not as they posed to be. Kumako was stubborn and stoic in her own thoughts at first, but accepted, seeing Nodoka's sheepish nature. Such a bashful heart was not what Noriko had, after all.

She eventually reforms and becomes a big sister to her young teenage host, Mogu, after being humbled with her humanity and her out of the box antics. While she starts out not understanding a single thing about human activities outside of her desire to spar, she begins to realize its the happiness and close-knit relationships those activities bring that really show the best parts of humankind. The people of Kanzakai have too much humanity to be something as low as scum. Despite this, she still has no idea what she's ever doing when it comes to events outside of fighting, but she pretends to, albeit very clumsily. Kumako, though still possessing her resentment towards the Lab, has began to see the human realm as something worthy to live through.