Characters / Juni Taisen: Zodiac War

The Zodiac Warriors

Tropes for the Twelve

• Animal Motifs:
  • Rat: the piece of metal around the middle part of his face resembles the ears of a rat. And even when he’s not wearing the headset, his hair still retains the shape of rat ears.
  • Ox: Apart from his bull-like horns, his attire resembles the one of a matador, so that the fighting bull looks like a bullfighter as a Visual Pun.
  • Tiger: Her headband has tiger ears and her bikini and tights are striped just like one. Also, the chain who hangs from her choker is an obvious representation of the tail of a tiger (and even ends in one).
  • Rabbit: His attire (or lack of it) looks like a parody of a Playboy Bunny, and the ball of fluff that he carries on his back resembles the tail of a rabbit.
  • Dragon: The stripes of the sleeves and trousers of his suit can be interpreted as the scales of a dragon, and the tube that connects his cylinder full of liquid nitrogen with the hose of the icethrower can be a representation of the tail of a dragon.
  • Snake: Just like his older brother, the stripes of his trousers and the tube that connects his flamethrower with the hose of the weapon can be interpreted as the scales and tail of a snake. Also, his outfit, unlike Dragon's, has no sleeves as a representation of the lack of limbs of snakes.
  • Horse: His helmet possesses the ears of a horse, and he also has horseshoes on the fore of his helmet and on his boots. In the manga, he also has a tail.
  • Sheep: He wears a pair of ram horns on his head and has bushy hair that mimics a sheep's wool. When he was young it made him look like a black sheep, but in his old age it's become the more common white.
  • Monkey: The scarf around her neck can be interpreted as the fur of a monkey, and the fake tail she wears is obviously the representation of the tail of the animal she represents.
  • Chicken: The ornament on her head is an obvious representation of the crest of a rooster, and her cape resembles the feathers of one.
  • Dog: He has the ears and the tail of a dog, and the collar of fur around his neck represents the fur of an actual dog.
  • Boar: More subtle than the other participants, but the way she styles her hair into two small pigtails is like a pig's ears combined with her tusk-like earrings to help form the head of a boar.
• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: Justifed, as members of the twelve families, they wear clothes that echo the animal of their Eastern Zodiac sign.
• Developing Doomed Characters: As this is a battle royale tournament, inevitably characters are going to die off in the middle of their character development. Boar had the first chapter to explain her motivations, and the anime even went as far to show her entire life up to that point, but she winds up dead at the end and becomes one of Rabbit's "allies".
• Dysfunction Junction: While it may not be obvious, each of the characters have clearly been shaped by all the fighting and killing they've experienced in one way or another. The most obvious one is Tiger, whose trauma was explicitly addressed; even though she got her life back together, it's pretty clear that she is just barely functioning and is still very depressed and traumatized.
  • Rat is implied to be mentally damaged due to having to repeatedly live through traumatic experiences multiple times due to his power and coming to the conclusion that all humans suck and that trying to do anything in life is inevitable pointless as a result. If you pay close attention to his behavior in the anime and his thoughts in the novel, it becomes pretty apparent that he is very messed up, and it is just further confirmed by the ending; he ends up needing to wish his memories away to be able to continue functioning.
  • Chicken is very brutal and self-centered yet extremely cheerful due to having no memories or personality to speak of after being horrifically abused and then adopted by the Niwa family so that they could exploit those traits and make her a mercenary.
  • The Tatsumi brothers are explicitly stated by Rat and their novel profiles to be major Stepford Smilers who put on a silly and optimistic front with everyone except each other.
  • Horse has a near crippling fear of losing or being seen as weak and is noted by Rat to likely have an inferiority complex.
  • Rabbit is clearly deranged but, from the way the novel frames the narrative about his mental state, it is implied that he was conditioned to be a soldier focused solely on winning and that he has no personality or moral awareness of his own.
  • Monkey may be optimistic, but it's clear that all the violence and destruction she has witnessed has had an impact on her.
  • Boar is a sadistic psychopath, but it's implied that she became that way as a result of her upbringing in a prestigious family of mercenaries and that her parents were abusive.
  • Sheep and Dog are both total asses who look down on everyone else and place a very low value on human life, yet they both somehow have family members whom they clearly love deeply.
  • Ox is one of the two decent humans in the whole story, yet Rat suspects that his personal philosophy and generally calm outlook are the result of some sort of mental unbalance as he thinks that it is nearly impossible for anyone to think the way Ox does (though this could also just be attributed to Rat's own pessimism).
• Ensemble Cast: Downplayed. Rat is the protagonist of the one-shot manga sequel The One Wish That Must Be Granted, and the Ninety-nine That Can Be Done Without (which is Episode 12 of the anime), but most of the characters have their focus chapter/episode.
• Evil Versus Evil: With the exception of Monkey, they are violent and/or antagonistic characters willing to murder each other for their wish to be granted.
• Underestimating Badassery: The fatal flaw of almost every participant. They're so short-sighted that they can't see that their opponent might have something up their sleeve, which invariably leads to their demise.
  • Snake dismissed Rabbit as a threat due to the his appearance and bizarre behavior. As a result, he was decapitated, while distracted, by Rabbit.
  • Boar was so preoccupied thinking about a way to easily dispatch Rabbit that it opened up a blind spot while she was mentally preoccupied, and she dies unceremoniously when Snake's corpse grabs her from behind, giving Rabbit an opening to plant a knife in her chest.
  • Dog dismissed Chicken as an easily disposable pawn only for her to kill him while powered up by the drugs he gave her.
  • Chicken, once augmented in strength by Dog, believed that she could take on anyone. However, she proves to be no match for Ox, who kills her fairly easily, still being her superior in speed and strength despite the augmentation.
  • Monkey thought she could easily subdue and restrain Rabbit because the latter was not a trained fighter, and attempts to do so from behind. Unfortunately, she did not account for the fact that Rabbit could use Snake's head as a camera to cover his blind spots, and as a result, Rabbit is able to reach behind himself and stab her.
  • Sheep dismissed Tiger as an incoherent drunk and saw her as the weakest of the fighters, not realizing that her fighting style is premised upon being drunk. As a result, he meets his end when she shreds him with her nails.
  • Horse ignored Rat's warning about Snake's corpse possibly pursuing him to the bank Horse was hiding in, reasoning that he would be safer hiding away than fleeing the premises. Horse also believed that Snake's corpse would not be able to use any of the abilities it possessed in life and thus, would not be a threat to him. Unfortunately, Snake's corpse retains both its weaponry and ability, and torches the bank, sucking out all the oxygen in the building and causing Horse to die from suffocation.
  • Dragon assumed that he was untouchable because he can fly to an altitude beyond detection from the other fighters, and thus decided to spend much of the war simply observing Snake's corpse. While his brother was fighting Ox and Tiger, Dragon thought that he could net two easy kills while they were distracted, and descended to attack them. However, he completely forgot about Monkey and Rabbit and did not realize that the former was capable of throwing objects very high. As such, he was distracted when her corpse threw Snake's head at him, leaving him wide open for Rabbit to bisect him when the necromantist was also thrown upwards by Monkey.
  • After Tiger and Ox dispatch Rabbit, they assumed that was the end of him, despite the fact that Ox noticed him committing suicide just before they cut him to pieces. As such, they didn't realize that Rabbit could use his power on his own corpse until his severed hands tried to stab Ox. Tiger wound up Taking the Bullet for Ox and was fatally wounded as a result.
  • After Rabbit's corpse catches up to him, Ox is so distracted by Rabbit's now grotesque appearance that he didn't realize Monkey's corpse was hiding in the necromantist's torso until it bursts out and restrains him, forcing Rat to Mercy Kill him to prevent Rabbit from doing the deed and reanimating him.
  • Rabbit initially seems to play this straight when he confronts Ox and Tiger on his own despite their superior combat prowess and predictably gets hacked to pieces by them. However, he averts this as he committed suicide just before Ox and Tiger manage to touch him, which enables his power to work on his corpse, just as he had planned.
  • Rat also averts this due to his ability giving him foreknowledge of what every other participant is capable of, and as such, knew to stay out of everyone else's way. This ultimately wins him the Zodiac War.

Rat

Tsugiyoshi Sumino/Nezumi, Fighter of the Rat

Kills by Swarm

Voiced by: Shun Horie (JP), Daman Mills (EN)

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• Action Survivor: Rat survives the Juuni Taisen and becomes the last one standing without having to actually fight thanks to his power.
• Alternate Character Reading: His title (寝住) can be read as "bed lodging", reflecting his sleepiness.
• Blessed with Suck: Rat considers his power to be this, as a result of limitations and side effects. Experiencing 100 realities is physically and mentally exhausting, with the burden of recalling dozens of failures or gruesome deaths. In many cases, a positive or desired outcome simply isn't possible no matter what he tries. As such, he's forced to deal with 100 times the suffering as he fails each and every time.
• But Thou Must!: He really did not want to fight in the Zodiac War, and attempted to use his ability to find a reality where he was not chosen to do so. He was unsuccessful in that regard.
• Child Soldier: Probably the youngest of the warriors and still a high school student. In a deleted path, he tells Tiger that he is still a minor when she asks him to drink with her.
• Combat Clairvoyance: Rat can predict enemy attacks through Save Scumming. In the manga climax, he uses it dodge Rabbit's attacks before using Sheep's grenade to finish him off.
• Curtains Match the Window: Silver hair, silver eyes.
• The Cynic: Thinks the lowest of the competition, and believes the War only helps prolong everyone else's "meaningless" lives. After emerging the victor however Rat admits that a lot of this was actually posturing on his end. Right down to stating that he would've preferred that Monkey won over him since she would've done the most good.
• Dark Horse Victory: In the finale, the betters were expecting the winner to be either Ox or Rabbit, but it was Rat who ended up as the winner.
• Exact Words:
  • His killing style, "Killing All", is this. He doesn't have to lift a finger for most of the Zodiac War, only killing one person by hand near the end. He just ends up "killing all" because he chose the reality that leads him to survival— and in this case, since he's in The Zodiac War, everyone else has to go.
  • His Japanese title can also be read as "killing tediously", which also fits. Through his ability, he lived through 100 realities until he settled in the only one where everyone but him ended up dead, thus winning him the war. He still had to die 99 times beforehand, though, and it's implied he has to go through each one, one by one. No wonder he's chronically fatigued.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Because all the paths he has glimpsed through his ability can potentially have the same outcome, this is a possibility when he uses it. For instance, he once tried to confess to a girl using his power. No matter which path he saw, she rejected him in every single one. Also, he attempted to use it to find a path wherein he did not have to fight in the Zodiac War, but failed every time.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: He only wears one pauldron, on his right shoulder. Also, the legs of his pants end at different lengths, only extending to his mid-thigh on the right leg, and completely covering his left leg. He also has a blue piece of cloth tied to his left elbow.
• Guile Hero: He tends to take advantage of opportunities and sneaks around as opposed to directly facing the other fighters, in reference to the original myth. He simply sticks to the shadows while the others take each other out, first hiding with Monkey and then using Horse as a decoy to escape Snake's zombie. Afterwards, he steals an explosive from Sheep's body and uses it to finish off Ox and the zombies of Rabbit and Monkey.
• Have We Met?: Boar and Chicken both mention having heard his voice somewhere, but dismiss it. They have, in an alternate reality. Since Rat can take 100 possible paths and choose the one he likes the most, reality corrects itself to the chosen path, leaving some residue in the form of hazy memories.
• Hidden Depths: After Rat wins the Juni Taisen, he implies that a lot of his cyncism towards Monkey's ideals came less from him actually not believing but more from Rat knowing ahead of time that he was dooming her and all the other fighters to die. He even admits that Monkey would be the fighter he would have wanted to win if he couldn't, because of the good she could have done.
• Image Song: The twelfth and final verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper 言 x THEANSWER rapping in character as Rat.
• Inner Monologue Conversation: This trope is evoked when he encounters Horse in the bank's vault, as he responds to some of Horse's thoughts as if the latter spoke them out loud, perhaps because due to his ability, he already knew what Horse was thinking.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: His ultimate wish was to forget the whole War even happened, out of frustration for what kind of wish he'd like to make.
• Little Sister Heroine: While considering his wishes, #96 is just him getting very excited coming up with the perfect little sister; attractive, endowed, a bit of a ditz, and wants to be spoiled by him.
• The Many Deaths of You: He discovered only a single path that allowed him to survive the Juni Taisen, and a montage features him dying dozens of times before he realizes avoiding his "Interview" is impossible.
• Non-Action Guy: Owing to his ability and fatigue, he never actually fought anyone in the Zodiac War, nor did he have to, simply waiting in the shadows for all the other combatants to take each other out. His only combative act in the battle was to Mercy Kill Ox using Sheep's bomb, thus winning the entire competition.
• Not So Stoic: His stoicism is a side effect of his ability, and in the last episode, he has a mental breakdown.
• Odd Friendship: In one of the rejected realities, he befriended Rabbit of all people. He was surprised at how well they got along, right up until he screwed up and got them both killed. Some of the other rejected paths also depict him striking up rapports with several other warriors, at least enough to get them to open up to him about their wishes.
• Save Scumming: His special ability, "The Hundred Paths of Nezumi", allows him to experience a hundred possible ways a scenario can pan out, and then select one of them that will become realty. Once he makes his choice, reality corrects itself around it, deleting the other ninety-nine options. However, many of the choices can merely be very minor variants of each other and it is possible for all of the choices to have the same outcome regardless. Using this power also leaves him mentally drained, due to experiencing so many options in quick succession.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: While it may not seem like it on the outside, having to experience many different realities at once, several of which result in his own death, clearly takes a deep toll on him mentally. Not wishing to fall victim to this trope is the reason he decides not to expand his power to view a thousand potential realities rather than a hundred and also why he ultimately wishes to forget the events of the Zodiac War.
• Sleepy Head: He is frequently seen either sleeping or behaving lethargically. This is due to his ability, as experiencing a hundred different realities at once is heavily taxing on his mind.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: He does this to Horse, appearing without warning in the sealed bank vault the other man was hiding in. After a vague explanation that rats are simply good at getting into places, he rests for a bit and then simply vanishes when Horse isn't looking at him.
• The Stoic: He's not very emotional, nor talkative. Subverted, when revealed that his stoicism is just actually a result of his ability taking a toll on his body and leaving him in constant fatigue.
• Walking Spoiler: Most listed tropes reveal his fate and special ability.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: Downplayed. Rat can't alter probability or luck, but since his ability gives him foreknowledge about one hundred possible futures, he can pick the one that best suits him (as long as said reality exists).
• You Can't Fight Fate: Most paths are virtually identical or end in failure no matter what choice he makes. In all 100 paths, he had to participate in the Juni Taisen and avoiding his "Interview" was impossible if he wanted to survive.

Ox

Eiji Kashii/Ushii, Fighter of the Ox

Kills Directly

Voiced by: Yuichiro Umehara (JP), Ian Sinclair (EN)

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• Absurdly Sharp Blade: His sword seems able to cut steel easily.
• The Ace: Due to his combat prowess and reputation as a natural-born slayer, Ox is both respected and feared by the other warriors.
• Awesome by Analysis: For a person who admits to not doing much strategizing in battle, he proves to be surprisingly observant and deductive. For instance, he quickly realizes that fire could be used to destroy corpses reanimated by Rabbit after noticing that Horse suffocated to death in a fire started by Snake's corpse and yet did not reanimate under Rabbit's control. He also quickly realizes that Dragon's weapon was an icethrower to compliment Snake's flamethrower, and that it could also be used to destroy reanimated corpses after noticing that Dragon's corpse did not use it while combating him and Tiger, as Dragon was not willing to risk Friendly Fire by unintentionally freezing himself or his brother.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: His attire is that of an Spanish "matador".
• Badass Normal: Unlike the other participants, he doesn't have any supernatural ability, only his skill with the sword and his amazing physical feats. It is suggested in the light novel that the other participants possessing powers is so they stand some sort of chance against him in order to maintain Competitive Balance in the Zodiac War.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: When faced with becoming one of Rabbit's zombies, he attempts to kill himself....only for Monkey to shatter his teeth to prevent it.
• Big Eater: His profile reveals that he actually has an enormous appetite, in spite of his thin build. Because he doesn't know how to cook, he dines out constantly.
• Blood Knight: Fights just because.
• Book Ends: His first and final encounters with Tiger both consist of him saving her from enemies and then giving her a piggyback ride to safety. Tiger even lampshades this.
• Broken Win/Loss Streak: Owing to his ability, Horse was the first person to emerge alive from a confrontation with Ox.
• Cannot Spit It Out: He actually recognized Tiger from their previous encounter, but second-guessed himself and said nothing. As such, he never told her that their meeting had helped him to reexamine his motivations and that he was also grateful to her for helping him.
• Exhausted Eye Bags: Sports bags under his eyes all the time, accentuating his bored expression.
• Face Death with Dignity: Like Tiger before him, he remains calm and content with his final choice when Rat uses Sheep's grenade, knowing it will destroy him and Monkey and Rabbit's corpses.
• Failed a Spot Check: Ox notes to himself after getting pinned down by the Reanimated Monkey that even if he didn't know that Rabbit had brought her back, he should have taken into account that Rabbit's corpse was unusually bulky for a reason.
• The Fettered: He has a strong sense of Justice, making a point to only act in a manner he considers to be righteous. As such, he treats opponents with courtesy and fights to kill in as swift and painless a manner as possible.
• Foil: The novel makes the comparison that he is basically what Monkey would be if she chose to use her immense strength to stop wars instead of negotiating. According to his profile in the novel, he acknowledges the fact that he is usually brought in to stop wars while she is brought in to make sure they don't restart and, for that reason, wanted to meet up with Monkey because he was genuinely interested in having a conversation with her.
• Good Is Not Soft: He is committed to doing the right thing and is often considered to be equal to Monkey in terms of righteousness and morality, but he is also a self-admitted killer with a body count higher than all the other Zodiac Warriors put together.
• Horned Humanoid: He sports a pair of horns like those of a bull. If the ending song can be trusted, he even has them in his daily life, rather than wearing them as a way to show his Animal Motifs in the Juuni Taisen.
• I Call It "Vera": He named his sword "Goboken" (Bayonet).
• Ideal Hero: Downplayed. While he is a mercenary and a killer, Ox is a man defined by his unwavering sense of honor and commitment to doing what is right. He takes on assignments such as rescuing children from war zones, and serves as an inspiration to several other warriors. Among the 12 fighters, he is compared to Monkey in terms of being a person with noble ideals.
• Image Song: The eleventh verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper EINSHTEIN rapping in character as Ox.
• Imagine Spot: Before fighting Dragon and Snake's corpses, he briefly imagines them declaring their titles and method of killing and muses that they would have done so were they still alive. He then states his own as a matter of principle.
• Implausible Fencing Powers: Ox can cut limbs, steel and solid concrete as if they were made of paper.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • Downplayed in his fight with Horse. Ox technically wins the fight, but gives up on pursuing Horse because he could at best inflict only minor wounds on him.
  • Ox begrudgingly admits that he lost the battle to Rabbit the second that he reanimated Monkey.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: Ox is a handsome, impeccably dressed man with incredibly long hair.
• Master Swordsman: A very skilled swordman who can defeat entire armies by himself.
• Mercy Kill:
  • He provides a mercy kill to a mortally-wounded Tiger, so that she won't be reanimated as one of Rabbit's zombies. This favor is returned when Rat uses a grenade to blow him up so that the corpses of Rabbit and Monkey won't add him to their ranks.
  • In the light novel, it's noted that mercy was his motivation in deciding to win by killing all of the other warriors as quickly as possible. He was one of the first to realize that there was a necromancer among the twelve, but didn't initially realize that it was Rabbit, and also came to the conclusion that everyone had abandoned the idea of a group peace agreement in favor of simply killing each other off. Given the state of the battle at that point and the fact that he didn't know who the necromancer was, he believed that the most merciful thing he could do for the other competitors was to kill them all as painlessly as possible to spare them the extra suffering and indignity of being turned into a living corpse.
• Mythology Gag: In the Zodiac myth, the ox was the favorite to win the race, but ended up in second place after the Rat exploited his good nature to get him to give the rodent a ride on its back and crossed the finish line first. Ox is considered to be the strongest warrior in the world and all of the VIPs thought that he was pretty much guaranteed to win; He actually ends up being the final warrior defeated and meets his end when Rat takes the opportunity to blow him up while he is immobilized, along with the undead corpses of Monkey and Rabbit. However, like in the story, Ox doesn't harbor any ill will towards Rat as he believes that more-or-less sacrificing himself so that Rabbit and Monkey would die for good was the right thing to do. He even lampshades this in his final moments
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: While he isn't a terrible person, he doesn't have the title of "the genius of slaughter" ("the natural born killer" in the novel) for no reason. Pretty much every warrior in the world knows who he is and, as such, never want to come anywhere near him, as they know being in the same radius as him means that they are pretty much screwed.
• No Body Left Behind: He meets his end when Rat lobs one of Sheep's bombs at him just as he is about to die at the hands of Rabbit and Monkey's corpses. The resulting explosion vaporizes him, along with his attackers and Tiger's corpse, leaving only the eleven jewels that Rat was seeking to obtain.
• Perpetual Frowner: He always has a serious expression on his face. It never changes, no matter the situation.
• Red Baron: Due to the fact that prior to the Zodiac War, no one has ever faced him in battle and lived to tell the tale, he gained the moniker "The Natural-Born Slayer" in the novel and "The Genius of Slaughter" in the anime.
• Right Makes Might: The essence of his philosophy. He resolves to always act in a righteous manner, and carries out these ideals without hesitation.
• Ship Tease: With Tiger. His focal chapter reveals that he remembered her all along, and his frantic behavior after she saved him left him confused. Never before had he lost his focus in battle, or acted irrationally. Though he abstained from alcohol, he would have liked to have a drink with her. The novel also reveals that his discussion with her after he saved her helped him to strengthen his determination to fight and that he was both very grateful and impressed by how she was brave enough to shamelessly question him. Although, it's worth mentioning that the ship tease is stronger on Tiger's side; for Ox, it's played off as largely admiration, as he's grateful to her helping him in the past, and shock, as he was totally unused to someone being bold enough to question his motivations and surprised that someone would want to save him.
• Shoot the Dog: While he was initially one of those interested in Monkey's alliance, he abandons this after learning of Rabbit's powers. In the manga, he explains to Horse that killing everyone else is simply the only way to protect them from becoming one of the Undead.
• Single-Stroke Battle:This is his trademark, eliminating any opponent in a swift and precise manner. Not only does it make him terrifying to face in battle, but it allows him to kill while minimizing suffering and allowing his foes some dignity.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: He is reluctantly forced to partner up with Tiger in order to take down the threats posed by Snake and Dragon's corpses, as well as Rabbit.
• The Teetotaler: He makes a point to abstain from alcohol, but wishes he could have shared a drink with Tiger.
• The Tooth Hurts: Monkey shatters his teeth, to prevent him from biting his tongue off.
• Tongue Trauma: Subverted. After being restrained by Monkey's corpse and about to be killed by Rabbit, he attempts to commit suicide the same way Rabbit did, by biting his tongue off, but is stopped by Monkey before he can.
• Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: The novel frames him and Horse in this manner, with him being the former. During their clash, he is able to wound, but not kill, Horse, who simply runs away. Knowing that he can't kill the other warrior, Ox chooses not to pursue.
• World's Strongest Man: The narrative frames him as the world's most skilled fighter, with strength to match, and prior to the Zodiac War, he has never lost a battle. He is even the standard by which other warriors are measured. It takes the reanimated corpses of Rabbit and Monkey to finally defeat him, and only because his skills are ineffective against the dead.
• Worthy Opponent: He shows nothing but respect for his opponents, but in particular comes to respect Tiger as a "peerless" warrior.

Tiger

Kanae Aira/Tora, Fighter of the Tiger

Kills Powerfully while Drunk

Voiced by: Hiromi Igarashi (JP), Colleen Clinkenbeard (EN)

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• Absurdly Sharp Claws: Tiger can tear people to pieces with her Femme Fatalons. Subverted in the manga version, where she uses Wolverine Claws.
• Alas, Poor Villain: The narrative certainly goes out of its way to make the audience feel as sorry for her as possible while she is on her deathbed. The anime further plays this up through the way she emotes during her inner monologues and the use of Gray Rain of Depression.
• Badass Normal: Similar to Ox, Tiger doesn't have a special ability or modification done to her body. She relies simply on her martial arts.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Having been fatally wounded by Rabbit's corpse, she asks Ox to kill her so that it wouldn't count as a kill for Rabbit, as she didn't want a fate as one of his reanimated corpses. While she did not commit suicide like most examples of this trope, she still got to dictate the circumstances of her death.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Tiger spends most of her interactions with Sheep drunk off her ass but as soon as a fight is declared, she tears Sheep apart in one hit.
• Blood Knight: She mentions blood intoxicates her in a similar way to booze.
• Book Dumb: She is very good at fighting, but she wouldn't pass a basic academic test. She did not start out this way, however, as she was previously very gifted and intelligent. However, haunted by her consciousness and questioning the morality of all the killing she did, she turned to the bottle to drown out all these thoughts and focus her mind on fighting and nothing else. As a result, her mental capacities eventually shriveled up.
• Book Ends: Her first and final encounters with Ox both consist of him saving her from enemies and then giving her a piggyback ride to safety. She even lampshades this.
• Break the Cutie: She started as a brilliant young woman with a desire to follow an honorable path as a Warrior. Her experiences on the battlefield destroyed her idealism, and left her so filled with doubt that she turned to alcohol to cope. Alcoholism destroyed her mind and her relationships, beginning a downward spiral that left her a barely-functional addict that could only fight.
• Cannot Spit It Out: She never tells Ox about their previous meeting, pretending that she simply picked a fight with him out of annoyance. She dies without realizing that he did recognize her, and that he also felt their meeting was life-changing.
• Chained by Fashion: Wears a chain that ends with what seems a tiger's paw.
• Child Soldier: From a very young age, she was schooled in the art of combat and military strategy. Though she eventually lost her ability in the latter, she refined the former to the point where it's the only thing she's still good at.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: She's easily underestimated by others, as a result of her heavy drinking and her youthful appearance. In the past, people mistook her for a child lost on the battlefield, lowering their guard or attempting to rescue her. Her opponents in the tournament write her off as a non-threat, which proves fatal to Sheep.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: She takes on and effortlessly kills Sheep with her super speed.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: After being fatally wounded by Rabbit's corpse, she dies in Ox's arms by requesting that he Mercy Kill her, not wanting a fate as a reanimated corpse.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Her addiction began as a way of trying to cope with all she had seen and done.
• Drunken Master: She's at her best when she's hopped up on sake. This trope is played with, however, as she doesn't actually need to drink to improve her fighting prowess, but instead drinks in order to clear her mind by warding off doubts about the purpose of her actions or whether said actions are moral or not.
• Face Death with Dignity: As she lays dying, she remains calm and content as Ox gives her a Mercy Kill.
• Functional Addict: Tiger is massive alcoholic. In her backstory, it's revealed that Tiger turned to the bottle in order to cope with the horrors of war. Eventually she customized her fighting style to actually rely on her being drunk. It wasn't until a chance encounter with Ox on the battlefield that Tiger cleaned herself up to a degree that she could actually become functional enough to enter the Juni Taisen.
• Image Song: The tenth verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper Tsubaki rapping in character as Tiger.
• Just Following Orders: According to her backstory, she was a Child Soldier who was raised to simply follow orders and kill whoever her commanders told her to kill. Questions about how moral her actions were haunted her consciousness to the point that she turned to drinking to forget all of it, stunting her mental growth in the process.
• Killing Intent: Subverted. The manga expands upon her Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass tendencies, stating that she gives off an impression of being utterly harmless even when she's preparing to attack. She simply doesn't have a threatening presence, even when on all fours and snarling at her target. By the time Sheep realizes the mistake, it's too late.
• The Lad-ette: Tiger is an aggressive and competitive girl who Can't Hold Her Liquor.
• Mercy Kill: After being stabbed by Rabbit's hands, she requests that Ox kill her in order to prevent her from falling victim to Rabbit's power.
• Older Than She Looks: Despite her appearance, she is old enough to drink. Lampshaded by Ox, who expresses some regret for treating her like a child after he Mercy Kills her.
• Pyrrhic Victory: After a chance encounter with Ox years ago, which steered her onto her current path as a warrior, she wished to meet him again one day. She would get her wish when both were chosen to fight in the Zodiac War. Despite not being able to fight him personally, she died satisfied and in his arms after requesting that he Mercy Kill her. The book notes that she is the first person in the history of the Zodiac War to lose and still have her wish be realized.
• Running on All Fours: She often runs on all fours in combat in conjunction with a Primal Stance, which serves to show how much her mind degraded due to her alcohol consumption and also makes her movements resemble that of a tiger.
• Ship Tease: With Ox. She joined the contest solely to meet him again, and in her final moments she thinks about how if she were more "girly", she'd ask him to kiss her. In a deleted path, she shyly implied that her wish would be for something more to come from her relationship with Ox before cutting herself off when she gets mad at Rat's apparent inattentiveness.
• Stripperiffic: She wears a tiger-striped bikini with a chain collar, thigh-high boots, and a leather jacket. She loses the jacket in a fight against Snake's corpse, playing up this trope.
• Super-Speed: When drunk, Tiger's speed and attacks becomes so fast that her enemies don't even know what hit them.
• Taking the Bullet: Tiger saves Ox from Rabbit's corpse, and gets stabbed in the back for her trouble.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: She is reluctantly forced to partner up with Ox in order to take down the threats posed by Snake and Dragon's corpses, as well as Rabbit.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: In her backstory, upon returning home from war, Tiger gets disowned by her father who is disgusted with her mental degradation. The fact that she was fighting to make him proud in the first place didn't help her.

Rabbit

Usagi, Fighter of the Rabbit

Kills Strangely

Voiced by: Nobuhiko Okamoto (JP), Jerry Jewell (EN)

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• Alternate Character Reading: "Usagi" is written with the kanji for "Anguish" and "Castle" (憂城), reflecting his unhinged nature. The characters can also be read as "Yuu-Jou", punning off of his Defeat Means Friendship attitude towards the corpses he keeps around.
• Attack Its Weak Point: This trope is averted after his death and reanimation, as Ox notes that he no longer has any weak point that can be targeted to take him out.
• Ax-Crazy: The guy doesn't look or act sane in any way.
• Bad Future: According to Rat, any timeline in which Rabbit won would be disastrous, as Rabbit's wish was to be "friends" with everyone on the planet; his wish would literally lead to the end of the world.
• Beat Still, My Heart: After being hacked to pieces by Ox and Tiger, his disembodied heart is briefly seen beating continuously on the ground. Presumably, this is also the case in other corpses he has reanimated.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: He commits suicide mere moments before Ox and Tiger hack him to pieces, in order to ensure that his power will work on his corpse and continue to cause trouble for them postmortem.
• Big Bad: Downplayed. Despite being just another participant, he is the main threat of the Zodiac Games, and easily the most villainous warrior of the entire group.
• Black Comedy: After Monkey's corpse retrieves the dead, burnt Horse from the bank so Rabbit can obtain the deceased fighter's jewel, he complains about it being too well-done.
• Black Eyes of Crazy: His sclera is black, and he is certainly not a stable person.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: After his death and reanimation, his swords completely replace his lower arms, the weapons bound in place where the limbs should be.
• Body Horror: After being chopped to pieces, his corpse attacks while in pieces and later assembles itself into a.....vaguely humanoid shape. It's so horrifying that Ox can barely process what he's seeing, causing him to miss the fact that Monkey's corpse is hiding inside Rabbit's mangled remains.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: In a rejected reality, this was the foundation of his alliance with Rat. When cornered, Rat explained that reanimating him would render Rat's powers useless. As such, the two formed a partnership with Rabbit promising not to kill him until the very end. However, both died at the hands of Horse and the reality was erased.
• Combat Stilettos: Male example. Rabbit can fight normally despite wearing heels.
• Combat Tentacles: [[spoiler:After he is killed and hacked to pieces, he can use his intestines as tentacle-like weapons in a fight.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Rabbit interprets the use of his power as turning his enemies into companions, calling the corpses under his command his "friends".
• Dual Wielding: Wields two knives.
• Fastball Special: He gets Monkey's corpse to hurl him into the air, high enough to reach and kill the airborne Dragon.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: In fitting with traditional myths about the Undead, one of the few ways to stop the corpses he reanimates is to burn them. In the penultimate episode, Rat defeated him using Sheep's explosives.
• Four Is Death: He is associated with the Rabbit, the fourth sign of the Chinese Zodiac, and has an ability that reanimates the corpses of those he kills under his control. He also has the highest body count by far in the Zodiac War.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: We don't learn anything about Rabbit, not even his real name, except that he is an evil and powerful warrior who wants to turn everyone into his zombie minions.
• The Heavy: A combination of both this and The Dreaded once the other combatants learn the nature of his abilities. Rabbit is the driving force of a lot of the conflicts, alliances, and deaths in the tournament; he derails Monkey's pacifist alliance, Chicken explicitly seeks out and kills Dog to get his One-Man Army serum in order to better combat him, and thanks to his abilities Rabbit is largely responsible for the majority of the deaths in the tournament.
• I Call It "Vera": He named his swords "Sangatsu-usagi" (March Rabbit) and "Shiro-usagi" (White Rabbit).
• I Just Want to Have Friends: In the deleted path where he befriends Rat, he reveals when asked by the latter that his wish is simply to have friends. Given his nature, while Rat initially found it disturbing, he later notes that Rabbit seemed genuine in that desire. However, due to his definition of "friends", Rat also realized what kind of nightmare it would be if Rabbit ever had this wish granted.
• I Lied: Parodied. He insists that he wasn't responsible for killing Snake, in spite of it being painfully obvious. After stabbing Boar, he confesses that he lied about it even though she wasn't fooled for a moment.
• Image Song: The ninth verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper Jō rapping in character as Rabbit.
• Implausible Deniability: When Boar sees the decapitated body of Snake, with Rabbit standing right next to it, Rabbit denies having killed him while holding a bloody sword. The manga makes this even more apparent by having him furiously shake off the blood on his sword while he's ranting about people jumping to conclusions. A flashback in Episode 7 shows him quickly shaking his head when Ox enters the room and calls out those present for killing before the battle even began.
• Insistent Terminology: He's not a necromancer, but a necromantist, and he'll thank you to remember it.
• Killing Intent: Out of all the warriors, Rabbit's murderous intent stands out in a class of its own. Best pictured by Boar in the novel, who describes it as a massive dark entity that would roll off the building they stood in and head off on its own if it could. His killing intent reaches such a degree that it reduces any chance of him performing an ambush to nil, as everyone can feel it from a mile away, forcing him to use his "friends" just to get the jump on his targets without giving himself away first.
• Loophole Abuse: He came to the realization that any warrior who gathers all twelve jewels will be declared the winner, regardless of whether or not he or she is alive. Thus, when on the verge of being killed by Ox and Tiger, he commits suicide and programs his corpse with instructions to gather all the jewels to ensure that he still has a way to win, even postmortem.
• My Death Is Only The Beginning: Ox thinks that the reason Rabbit committed suicide was so he could put in place a plan to reanimate his own corpse and attack him and Tiger over and over again.
• Mysterious Past: Nothing is known about him or his past, the light novel simply stating that such details are unknown and the anime episode that supposedly centers around him revealing nothing. Aside from some apparent fondness for rabbits, he's a complete enigma.
• Necromancer: His ability allows him to control the corpses of anyone he kills, and they also retain whatever powers they had in life, giving him complete control over those as well. This power even extends to the corpses of anyone killed by those he is manipulating. And even he is not immune to this power as it will work on his corpse should he commit suicide. Over the course of the battle, he comes to use this power on the corpses of Snake, Boar, Monkey, Dragon, and himself.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: His looks, personality and abilities all scream 'get the hell away from him', and most fighters take too long to realize the danger he poses until it's too late.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Despite his bizarre looks and behavior, Rabbit is - by far - the most dangerous participant of the Juni Taisen.
• Odd Friendship: In one of the possible realities, he made a living friend in the form of Rat. Neither of them survived that version of events, leading Rat to reject that path.
• Omnicidal Maniac: His wish, as genuine and innocent as it sounds, drives him into a quest which would result in The End of the World as We Know It if he had actually won the Juuni Taisen.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Unlike the other participants, his real name isn't listed. Additionally, unlike the other participants, the light novel also gives no information on his backstory.
• Pulling Themselves Together: After his corpse is hacked to pieces by Ox and Tiger, the remains attempt to put themselves back together. They are not entirely successful, however, resulting in a misshapen patchwork monstrosity that only vaguely has a humanoid shape, with parts being reattached in the wrong places and his weapons becoming integrated into the mix.
• Raising the Steaks: His ability to raise the dead also works on animals, as demonstrated in the scuffle between the reanimated Boar and Chicken's summoned birds.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Red eyes are something he shares with real-life rabbits; here, it only heightens the madness lying underneath by combining them with Black Eyes of Crazy.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes: Due to his necromancy, Rabbit can see through the eyes of his zombies. He makes use of this when fighting Monkey, by hiding Snake's severed head in a tree to cover his blind spots.
• Sissy Villain: His choice of clothing makes him come off as rather effeminate.
• Smarter Than You Look: Despite his deranged looks and personality, he's actually an incredibly clever strategist that repeatedly outwits the other competitors.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: In the anime, his voice barely rises above a whisper until battle. And even then, it's just restricted to mad laughter.
• Stalker with a Crush: Rabbit really wanted to be friends with Monkey from the moment he saw her. That's why he hunts her down and kills her.
• The Strategist: He is considered quite inexperienced in combat compared to most warriors. Because of that, his trump cards to outsmart his opponents consisted of the clever ways he used the bodies of the warriors he had killed.
• Stripperiffic: Wears nothing but groin-level shorts, a tiny pair of suspenders and ill-fitting heels.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Once he sets his sights on a target, you can bet he'll go to any length to kill and reanimate said target by any means necessary. This mentality also extends to the corpses he controls, which the light novel notes are only programmed to simply follow his orders and do nothing else. This is further played up after he commits suicide, as not even death will stop him from pursuing Ox in his bid to kill the other fighter.
• Thanatos Gambit: [[spoiler:Ox speculates that the reason Rabbit confronted both him and Tiger alone despite knowing that they would easily defeat and kill him, is specifically so he can reanimate his own corpse and continue to attack them relentlessly.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Despite committing suicide and his corpse being repeatedly cut to pieces by Ox and Tiger, he still keeps reassembling himself to continually menace them, eventually succeeding in fatally wounding Tiger and almost killing Ox. It takes complete obliteration by Rat using one of Sheep's bombs to stop him for good.
• Tongue Trauma: He commits suicide by biting his tongue all the way through.
• Undead Abomination: After his corpse is cut to pieces and then poorly reassembles itself, it becomes an example of this trope.
• Weak, but Skilled: Despite his Heroic Build, he's not a trained fighter and can be easily bested by fighters with more combat experience and training, such as Ox, Tiger, Monkey, and Boar. However, he makes up for it with his keen strategic mind by using the corpses he reanimates in creative ways to throw off and overwhelm the opponent.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Possibly the most kill-happy of all of the participants despite his white hair.
• Zerg Rush: His ability amounts to overwhelming foes with reanimated corpses, as on his own, he isn't a particularly skilled warrior.

Dragon

Nagayuki Tomita/Tatsumi the Elder, Fighter of the Dragon

Robs his victims as he Kills

Voiced by: Takuya Eguchi (JP), Clifford Chapin (EN)

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• Adaptational Badass: Dragon and his brother pull off a better fight against Tiger and Ox in the manga adaptation than in the anime. Ox even admits that it can get troublesome for him if Dragon stops holding back.
• Angsty Surviving Twin: Seemingly averted. He clearly does not rejoice at the death of his brother, but at the same time, Dragon tries to gleefully and quickly appropriate his gem. Later, however, he mocks the fact that his brother was killed so early into the battle and Rabbit using the corpse as a puppet. However, the light novel implies that such behavior is an act on Dragon's part, done to display a strong front towards the other fighters. The manga adaptation expands on this, with him agonizing over how Snake wouldn't want to be revived with his brother's Wish. So Dragon decides that he'll wish for "Nothing", because there isn't anything he would want in a world without his brother.
• An Arm and a Leg: While stealing Dragon's icethrower from his reanimated corpse, Tiger winds up ripping off one of his arms.
• Big Brother Instinct: As the older twin, he sees it as his responsibility to watch over Snake and bail him out of trouble. This continues even after Snake is killed, as he spends much of the Zodiac War observing Snake's corpse. In a deleted path, he was incensed when Ox killed Snake right in front of him.
• Blatant Lies: He states his wish would be for more money, but his brother privately admits that Dragon doesn't actually value money that much.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The light novel reveals that he and Snake are known to use the money they have earned illicitly to fund charitable activities, not because they are good at heart, but out of a perverse ironic joy at seeing blood money be utilized in a manner diametrically opposed to how it was earned. The anime expands on this when Dragon states that all warriors have warped morality due to the nature of their jobs, and as such, the prosecutor's attempt to judge them based on common standards of morality is flawed and misguided.
• Cain and Abel: Downplayed concerning his brother, Snake. With both being selected to take part in the Juuni Taisen, they were resigned to the idea that they would eventually have to come to blows, and Dragon even takes on a cavalier attitude after Snake is anti-climatically killed by Rabbit. But then it's later implied that he is more relieved than anything else knowing that now he would not have to kill his brother.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Played with in regard to him and his younger twin. While they are both awful people who have no regard for human life and are willing to engage in all manner of immoral dealings for either profit or amusement, they do clearly care about each other on some level. It appears stronger on Dragon's end, as he would always watch out for Snake and repeatedly saved his brother from the consequences of his screw ups. Although he seems rather unconcerned about his brother's death, he already knew that one of them would have to die and seems more relieved at the fact that he didn't have to kill his own brother personally than anything else. He actually spends pretty much the whole Zodiac War floating around in the sky following and observing his brother's reanimated corpse, much like he did while Snake was alive, and promises to give his twin a nice funeral when the war is over.///

This is a bit stronger in the light novel, as the fact that Dragon does miss his twin is very much implied, and his relief at not having to kill his own brother is pretty much outright stated. He also has a flashback here of him and Snake fighting together while he is preparing to ambush Ox and Tiger and wistfully thinks that they will never fight side-by-side again.

• Exact Words: The twins were accused by the prosecutor of collusion for accepting contracts from opposing client groups, then wiping out everyone and walking away with both groups' assets. Dragon simply stated that he killed Snake's client, while Snake killed his client, which was exactly what their contracts specified.
• Fastball Special: The top half of his corpse flings Snake's severed head at Ox, who then kicks it away.
• Flat "What": In the anime, upon being chosen as the Fighters of the Dragon and Snake, the twins react in flat disbelief when told they are expected to kill the other fighters, including each other, until only one is left standing.
• Flight: His ability, Heaven's Holding, is a form of flight. With it, he can reach altitudes higher than Chicken's birds, thus ensuring that she can't detect him with her Eye of the Cormorant.
• A Fool for a Client: In an anime flashback, he represented himself, as well as his brother, during a hearing for the brothers' unbecoming conduct as warriors. The light novel states that this is a regular occurrence for him whenever the twins are called to task for their extreme behavior as warriors.
• Freeze Ray: His weapon is an icethrower that uses liquid hydrogen as fuel.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: He is killed by Rabbit bisecting him at the waist.
• Hate Sink: Dragon is the least sympathetic character in the story, along with his brother.
• Hellish Pupils: Both brothers have slitted pupils, playing into their Animal Motifs.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: His icethrower is used by Tiger to eliminate both his and his brother's corpses, as she steals the weapon and smashes it, releasing the liquid hydrogen inside which freezes the twin brothers solid.
• I Call It "Vera": He named his icethrower "Yuki-onna".
• Identical Twin ID Tag: Dresses in cool violet shades to contrast his identical twin brother's warmer brown tones.
• Image Song: The eighth verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper ACE rapping in character as Dragon.
• Imagine Spot: In the light novel, when about to ambush Ox and Tiger while Snake's corpse is fighting them, he declares his title and method of killing before briefly imagining Snake doing the same. As it turns out, he subconsciously did so because Monkey hurled Snake's head in his direction.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Dragon points out the hypocrisy of the prosecutor when the latter attempts to use common standards of law and morality to denounce the twins' conduct, when according to the light novel, the warriors are exempted from such standards explicitly so they can do any work they are contracted to do.
• Just Like Robin Hood: A Deconstructed Trope; it's revealed in his backstory that he and Snake would pull off heists and give the money to the under privileged. Of course, they didn't do it for noble ambitions, but simply because they were bored, and were completely ambivalent to the consequences that might befall those they passed the money off to.
• Kill It with Ice: As his weapon is an icethrower, Dragon naturally kills his foes with ice. His corpse is finally defeated after Tiger takes his icethrower and smashes it, releasing the liquid hydrogen inside, which freezes the twin brothers.
• Literally Shattered Lives: After both halves of his body and his severed arm are frozen by Tiger, they are completely shattered upon impact with the ground.
• Mythology Gag: In their focal episode, the twins are shown performing charitable deeds such as throwing money out of an aircraft while flying over a poverty-stricken village. In the original myth, Dragon explains that he was delayed in the race because he stopped to make it rain over a drought-stricken village.
• Only in It for the Money: As a mercenary, Dragon fights purely for financial gain.
• Playing Both Sides: A flashback in the anime reveals that Dragon was hired by a pharmaceutical company that used poor children in their experiments, while Snake was hired by a criminal gang who kidnapped and supplied those children, allowing them to share information with each other about their respective clients. When both groups came to blows and called in their respective warriors, Dragon simply killed the gang members, while Snake killed the company's employees, allowing the twins to abscond with the money owned by both groups.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: According to the light novel, the twins go above and beyond with their kills when carrying out their illicit activities, even when compared to the other warriors.
• Together in Death: A variant, as though he and his brother were killed separately, their corpses were frozen together by Tiger and then shattered, intermingling the fragments to the point where no one could tell them apart. The novel even lampshades this. In one of the paths deleted by Rat, both twins are killed seconds apart by Ox.

Snake

Takeyasu Tomita/Tatsumi the Younger, Fighter of the Snake

Robs his victims as he Kills

Voiced by: Kosuke Toriumi (JP), Matt Shipman (EN)

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• Adaptational Badass:
  • In the manga, when Snake's severed arm attempts to strangulate Ox and Tiger, the former compares his strengh to Horse's.
  • The Tatsumi Brothers also fare better against Tiger and Ox in the manga adaptation, due to Snake's head being used as an Attack Drone that aims for their blind spots.
• An Arm and a Leg: His arms are hacked off his corpse by Ox and Tiger, but this doesn't inconvenience him in the slightest, as he then uses them to strangle his two adversaries. In one of the paths deleted by Rat, Ox hacks off both his arms before killing him with a stab to the forehead.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: A human example of this trope: his ability, Earth's Guidance, allows him to detect vibrations in the ground made by others, making him a very competent tracker. His corpse retains this ability and is used by Rabbit to track and pursue Rat.
• Blatant Lies: In one of the rejected cycles, Rat asks the brothers about their wish. Each states they would wish for money, but Dragon privately admits he knows his brother just likes the thrill of stealing it.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The light novel reveals that he and Dragon are known to use the money they have earned illicitly to fund charitable activities, not because they are good at heart, but out of a perverse ironic joy at seeing blood money be utilized in a manner diametrically opposed to how it was earned. The anime expands on this when Dragon states that all warriors have warped morality due to the nature of their jobs, and as such, the prosecutor's attempt to judge them based on common standards of morality is flawed and misguided.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • More or less implied with him and his brother. While they don't care about each other in the way that normal people would, they clearly do care about each other on some level, as the fact that they make such a good team shows. He also was clearly less than thrilled when he and Dragon found out that they were expected to kill each other in the Zodiac War, and he actually died because he turned away from Rabbit to warn his brother about Monkey placing explosives under the floor.
  • In the novel, while he doesn't give a crap about anyone other than himself and his brother, he has an extensive amount of pet reptiles and cares deeply for them, despite his lack of concern for other humans.
• Exact Words: The twins were accused by the prosecutor of collusion for accepting contracts from opposing client groups, then wiping out everyone and walking away with both groups' assets. Dragon simply stated that he killed Snake's client, while Snake killed his client, which was exactly what their contracts specified.
• Fastball Special: His severed head is flung at enemies first by Monkey's corpse, and then by Dragon's corpse.
• Fire/Ice Duo: Has this dynamic with his brother, who uses an icethrower.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: His severed arms are neutralized after Ox hits upon the idea to set them on fire.
• Flat "What": In the anime, upon being chosen as the Fighters of the Dragon and Snake, the twins react with flat disbelief when told they are expected to kill the other fighters, including each other, until only one is left standing.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: It's revealed in a posthumous flashback in Episode 7 that Snake had this dynamic with his brother Dragon prior to the Tournament, with Snake being the Foolish Sibling. He would rush into heists and almost get himself killed, requiring Dragon to bail him out.
• Hate Sink: Both he and his brother are incredibly cruel, loathesome and completely without any likable or sympathetic qualities.
• Hellish Pupils: Both brothers have slitted pupils, playing into their Animal Motifs.
• Helping Hands: Having his arms hacked off his corpse by Ox and Tiger does not inconvenience it at all, as the severed limbs retain their autonomy and promptly strangle the two warriors.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The fuel from his flamethrower, which Tiger swallows, is used by Ox to incinerate his severed arms after they try to strangle Ox and Tiger.
• I Call It "Vera": He named his flamethrower "Hitokage".
• Identical Twin ID Tag: Snake dresses in muted brown colors to contrast his identical twin brother.
• Image Song: The seventh verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper Luiz rapping in character as Snake.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Upon detecting Monkey planting explosives under the floor, he attempts to warn Dragon, but has his head unceremoniously lopped off by Rabbit after getting barely two words out.
• Kill It with Ice: His corpse is finally defeated after Tiger takes Dragon's icethrower and smashes it, releasing the liquid hydrogen inside, which freezes the twin brothers.
• Large Ham: In the FUNimation dub:
  Snake (Jap): "Warrior of the Snake, killing for money."
  Snake (FUNimation dub): "Warrior of the Snake, VERY MUCH killing for money. A LOT."
• Literally Shattered Lives: After both his head and body are frozen by Tiger, the former falls and strikes the latter, shattering both.
• Man Bites Man: In the light novel, when his decapitated head is thrown by Monkey's corpse and caught by Dragon, it bites his twin, distracting Dragon enough for Rabbit to bisect him at the waist.
• Off with His Head!: Decapitated by Rabbit before the contest even began.
• Only in It for the Money: As a mercenary, the reason he fights is for financial gain. It's even his wish to obtain more money.
• Playing Both Sides: A flashback in the anime reveals that Dragon was hired by a pharmaceutical company that used poor children in their experiments, while Snake was hired by a criminal gang who kidnapped and supplied those children, allowing them to share information with each other about their respective clients. When the groups came to blows and called in their respective warriors, Dragon simply killed the gang members, while Snake killed the company's employees, allowing the twins to abscond with the money owned by both groups.
• Posthumous Character: Snake was murdered before the tournament started, but he still has a role in the story, as an undead.
• Pyromaniac: According to his profile in the novel, he gleefully admits that he's a mercenary because he can get away with causing extreme destruction with fire and claims that he would have become a serial arsonist if he wasn't born into one of the 12 Zodiac families. In fact, it's also mentioned that everyone he kills is either totally reduced to nothing or so badly burned that they can't be identified.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: Due to his ability, he could find people no matter where they tried to hide. After being killed by Rabbit, his corpse is made to do this in pursuit of Rat.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Snake spends the majority of the story as a headless, reanimated corpse that relentlessly stalks the other fighters. It's incredibly creepy, even before his severed limbs keep attacking people. Heck, Snake was plenty bad on his own even before he got his head lopped off! He's a self-admitted pyromaniac who sadistically gets great pleasure out of causing excessive death and destruction and uses the money that he and his brother steal to do charitable deeds. Not for any noble reason, but simply because they like the irony of using blood money for good and get a kick out of how often their so-called help ends up backfiring and hurting the innocent people that they pass their money off to. In addition, Snake is so prone to making creepy and downright disturbing faces in the anime that his headlessness is actually far less creepy.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: According to the light novel, the twins go above and beyond with their kills when carrying out their illicit activities, even when compared to the other warriors.
• Too Dumb to Live: While turning your back on an enemy is a terrible idea in any situation, doing so when said enemy is a psychopath is especially foolish. Unsurprisingly, Snake turning his back on Rabbit promptly gets him decapitated. In the manga, Snake and Dragon voluntary tell Rabbit that they want to be friends with him, so they can use and betray him latter. Also, in this version, Snake is distracted by Ox arriving, rather than by Monkey moving Sheep's explosives to the floor below.
• Together in Death: A variant, as though he and his brother were killed separately, their corpses were frozen together by Tiger and then shattered, intermingling the fragments to the point where no one could tell them apart. The novel even lampshades this. In one of the paths deleted by Rat, both twins are killed seconds apart by Ox.
• Took a Level in Badass: Ironically, Snake became much more dangerous only after he died and became one of Rabbit's "friends". As Dragon remarks after observing him for some time, the feats Snake performs during the Juuni Taisen would have been utterly impossible for the man to accomplish if he had been left alive instead.

Horse

Yoshimi Sōma/Uuma, Fighter of the Horse

Kills Silently

Voiced by: Hikaru Midorikawa (JP), Randy E. Aguebor (EN)

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• Acquired Poison Immunity: Because the anime portrays his ability as an Adaptive Ability, he would have developed poison immunity if indeed his ability could protect him from the poison he swallowed.
• Adaptive Ability: The anime states that his ability is due to his constantly mutating cells, which give him protection against any force that might injure him, including the poison he ingested at the start of the Zodiac War. According to the anime, this grants Horse a Healing Factor as well.
• Badass Pacifist: Like Monkey, he would rather not fight, even if he's capable of it.
• The Big Guy: Physically the most muscular of the fighters, and the only one (other than undead Rabbit) that fought Ox and forced him to retreat.
• Broken Win/Loss Streak: Ox was the first person to successfully wound him after he gained the ability to use Stirrup.
• Fatal Flaw: Horse's own timidness is ultimately what does him in. After getting injured by Ox, Horse decides to given up on competing for the remainder of the Zodiac War. His attempt to hole up and waiting out the tournament is what leads him to his death. Had Horse actually put more thought into it though, he would have realized that Ox gave up his pursuit of him because he could only inflict shallow wounds on him at best. If Horse had actually gone on the offense, he potentially could have won.
• Fate Worse than Death: In a deleted path, he tells Rat that to him, dying would be better than losing a fight.
• Giver of Lame Names: He originally wanted to name his ability "Armor", but wrote the kanji for it incorrectly and wound up with "Stirrup" instead.
• Healing Factor: In addition to his Super-Toughness, he also possesses a healing ability, which quickly repairs the wounds Ox inflicted on him. It does nothing for the mental trauma Horse suffers from being wounded, however. The anime frames this as part of his Adaptive Ability.
• Heroic BSoD: After his confrontation with Ox leaves him with several sword wounds, he suffers a BSOD as his confidence in being able to emerge from fights unscathed due to Stirrup is shattered. Being injured in such a manner also made him feel vulnerable for the first time since he was a slender teenager, a feeling he explicitly tried to avoid by bulking up and using steroids. It's so bad that he barricades himself in a bank and considers staying there until the Zodiac War is over.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: His plan to hide himself in a bank and wait out the rest of the Zodiac War ends up doing him in when Snake's corpse, having detected that its quarry, Rat, was nearby, uses its flamethrower to burn down the building. The resulting inferno consumes all the oxygen in the building and Horse suffocates to death as a result. Because he barricaded himself inside, he couldn't get out in time.
• Image Song: The sixth verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper Sukun rapping in character as Horse.
• Kill It with Fire: While his ability would normally render him immune to such a fate, he meets his end when Snake's corpse uses his flamethrower to torch the bank where he took shelter, instead causing him to suffocate to death when the flames consume all the available oxygen in the building.
• Logical Weakness: While his ability grants him near-invulnerability to injury, he still needs oxygen to breathe. Snake's corpse kills him in the Zodiac War by torching the bank he took refuge in, sucking the oxygen out of the confined vault he barricaded himself in and suffocating him.
• Mythology Gag: In the original myth, the Horse is beaten over the race's finish line because another competitor frightened him. Snake steals 6th place by spooking Horse, while in the series Horse is killed by Snake's zombie.
• Never Be Hurt Again: In the light novel, he was described as formerly being a tall but slender teenager. Downplayed in the anime, where flashbacks depicted him as having a fairly decent build and already being a capable fighter. Regardless, after a fight that left him brutally defeated, he bulked up, took steroids, and gained his current physique, all so that he would never be put in such a vulnerable position again. Being wounded by Ox reignites this feeling of vulnerability within him and sends him straight into a Heroic BSoD, to the point that he loses the will to fight and decides to hide himself away until the Zodiac War is over. In a deleted path, he confesses to Rat that he fears losing a fight more than dying.
• Super Serum: Apart from exercise, he consumed steroids as a way to gain his muscular physique.
• Super-Toughness: His ability, Stirrup, allows him to substantially increase the durability of his body at will, to the point where Ox's sword strikes couldn't penetrate his flesh. It is also speculated that this ability might grant him enough durability to survive the poison he ingested at the start of the Zodiac War, should he live to the end.
• Unstable Genetic Code: The anime notes that his cells are constantly mutating to protect him against anything that might harm him physically.
• Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: The novel frames him and Ox in this manner, with him being the latter. Horse even initially believed that he could team up with Ox to play off this dynamic. During their clash, he manages to stand his ground against Ox, who is able to wound, but not budge or kill him. After Horse flees from the scene, Ox then runs off to seek other quarry elsewhere.

Sheep

Sumihiko Tsujiie/Hitsuji, Fighter of the Sheep

Kills with Trickery

Voiced by: Chō (JP), Kenny Green (EN)

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• Ambiguously Human: His horns are the real deal, as seen in the ending credits.
• Arms Dealer: He used to be this in his prime, frequenting war zones to sell weapons for personal gain.
• Badass Normal: Doesn't have the borderline Super-Strength of Tiger and Ox, nor any of the other nine's superpowers and yet he won the ninth zodiac war with nothing but his wits.
• Combat Pragmatist: Because of his age, he prefers fighting using trickery and explosives.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Sheep won a previous Juni Taisen, which took place in a space station, by plating explosives and escaping through a space pod before the explosion. Ironically, he also ends up on the receiving end of a curb-stomp this time, due to his misjudgment of Tiger's strength.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He volunteered to fight in this year's Zodiac War to spare his grandchild from having to do so, as that person was selected as a participant.
• Explaining Your Power to the Enemy: A downplayed example, as just prior to the start of the competition, he casually asks Duedecuple about the durability of the jewels, revealing to all the other competitors that he uses powerful explosives that could destroy said jewels. Boar thinks the question was little more than a ruse on his part to intimidate the other competitors by giving them knowledge of his weaponry.
• Explosions in Space: He won the ninth Zodiac War, which was fought in a space station, by escaping in a module and simply blowing up the space station with all the other warriors still inside.
• Horned Humanoid: He sports a pair of horns like those of a ram.
• I Call It "Vera": He named his most prized bomb "Shuukaiokuri" (Old Timer).
• I Regret Nothing: He feels this way about participating in the twelfth Zodiac War, even though it could result in his death, as he had already won the ninth Zodiac War, got his wish from it granted (living long enough to see his grandson be born), lived to a great old age (which was very rare for warriors like the participants), and was doing it to spare his grandson from having to participate.
• Image Song: The fifth verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper Ryofu Karuma rapping in character as Sheep.
• Mad Bomber: His preferred method of fighting is using bombs and other explosives.
• Miniature Senior Citizens: The oldest fighter in the Zodiac War, and among the shortest, if not the shortest.
• More Expendable Than You: Sheep consider himself more expendable than his grandson, and so he decided to take his place in the Juni Taisen.
• Non-Action Guy: Due to his age and size, Sheep doesn't take much direct action. In his prime, however, he was a capable fighter, but that ability eventually shriveled up as he aged. When forced to fight Tiger in the open, he proves to be no match for her, as she easily kills him with a few swipes of her nails. In flashbacks in the anime, he is also rarely seen in direct combat against his enemies, preferring to use explosives to blow them up.
• Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: With the exception of Snake, who was killed before the start of hostilities, he was the only participant of the Zodiac War who did not swallow his jewel, having instantly recognized that it was poison. He acknowledges that such an act was cheating and grounds for disqualification, but also notes that no one caught him in the act.
• Sole Survivor: He was the only one left standing at the end of the ninth Zodiac War, being its victor.
• Space Master: He takes advantage of the fact that he did not swallow his jewel to portray himself as having this ability in order to gain allies, falsely claiming that he can create miniature wormholes in his body and remove the jewel from within, and offering to do it for any potential ally.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: In trying to break pdown and rank the threat-level of his opponents, there's quite a few holes in his plan due to the limited amount of information he actually had. He considered Horse, Boar, and Dog to be a tier below the favorites to win, and the best possible temporary allies. By this point in the story both Boar and Dog had already died early and Horse, who had been demoralized, had effectively given up on fighting. Similarly, he dismisses Tiger as the weakest of the fighters. Tiger is the one who ends up killing him.

Monkey

Misaki Yūki/Sharyu, Fighter of the Monkey

Kills by Talking Peacefully

Voiced by: Saori Hayami (JP), Caitlin Glass (EN)

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• All-Loving Heroine: She offers all her opponents a plan that will keep everyone alive, even the most vicious of the characters.
• Ambadassador: She has apparently worked as an ambassador to solve crises, much to the bemusement of her fellow assassins.
• Badass Pacifist: Although she is certainly a good fighter, the first thing that Monkey suggests to the rest is to agree on a settlement. Additionally, unlike the other warriors, she is more famous for the sheer number of wars that she managed to stop rather than any sort of combat prowess.
• Bare-Handed Blade Block: She is shown to be capable of parrying sword strikes from Rabbit with her bare hands without causing injury to herself.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Downplayed in that Monkey is able to pull off rather absurd feats of strength for someone her size. Doubly so, after she gets killed by Rabbit and comes back as a Zombie. Now that her body has no limiters, her strength goes through the roof.
• Compelling Voice: It's implied that Monkey's ability is essentially having the power of persuasion, being able to enthrall others over to her way of thinking.
• Death by Irony: Just before the start of the Zodiac War, she winds up causing Snake's death by planting explosives underneath the floor of the room where the fighters were to meet for the first time, distracting him and enabling Rabbit to decapitate him. Later, she meets her end when she tries to sneak up on Rabbit, who used Snake's severed head as a camera to detect her in his blind spot and stab her, which would not have happened had she not planted the explosives in the first place and gotten Snake killed.
• Equivalent Exchange: One of two powers she posseses is to transmute substances between physical states, such as bisecting a boulder by turning one plane of it into sand. The light novel notes that due to its potential to cause great harm to opponents, she has never used it in combat against another person.
• Failure Hero: Sees herself as a failure, since she knows that despite her efforts to solve things peacefully, there will always be conflict, sometimes in the same places she tried to appease.
• Fastball Special: She is capable of flinging others to great heights, as her corpse demonstrates when it throws Snake's head at the airborne Dragon to distract him, and then hurls Rabbit into the air at a high enough altitude for the necromantist to bisect Dragon at the waist.
• Fatal Flaw: Her insistence on fighting Rabbit non-lethally left her vulnerable to the trap he set using Snake's head, allowing him to impale her.
• Full-Frontal Assault: In the manga version, when she comes out of Rabbit to subdue Ox, Monkey is nude, with Rabbit's blood on her corpse acting as a form of Censor Shadow.
• The Gloves Come Off: When confronted by Rabbit, she realizes that her ability will do nothing to convince him to not fight, and she is thus forced to actually combat him.
• Gone Horribly Right: Monkey's backstory regarding her attempts to broker peace between two warring nations. Her solution was to convince the soldiers on the front line to desert and form their own independent nation with the land they were fighting over. This does force peace for a time, but then the two original nations ended up joining forces to slaughter deserters for being "traitors."
• Hey, Catch!: Her corpse hurls Snake's decapitated head into the air at Dragon, forcing him to catch it and distracting him long enough for Rabbit to bisect him at the waist.
• I Will Fight No More Forever: Her ability to broker peace is so good that it induces this feeling in the combatants she tries to negotiate with. The other warriors are rather disdainful of her for it, as it saps the will to fight of others to the point where they simply decide that fighting is Somebody Else's Problem instead and thus do not stand up for themselves when war comes around again.
• If We Get Through This…: Her profile in the novel reveals her hope to settle down and start a family after the competition.
• Image Song: The fourth verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper MC MIRI rapping in character as Monkey.
• Irony: In a war where the participants were chosen for their fighting abilities, she stands out as being more famous for how often she didn't need to fight than for the times she actually did.
• Martial Pacifist: Monkey's has built a career out of it. She knows conflict can be inevitable so she's willing to fight to restrain her opponents, and then win them over to her side.
• Mentor Mascot: Three talking monkeys taught her how to transmute matter.
• Mercy Kill: Rat reveals that she asked him to destroy her, should she fall to Rabbit. She even gave him the key to victory, suggesting he use Sheep's explosives against the undead.
• Nice Girl: The only character who is completely positive, at least at first glance.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Rat accuses her of getting Chicken killed. He states that Monkey's motivational speech likely sapped her will to fight and got her killed.
• Pants-Free: She wears standard military gear on top, but only panties, garters, and combat boots below the waist.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: She's incredibly small (150 cm/ 4'9"), but possesses terrifying physical strength.
• Reluctant Warrior: She is a pacifist, and only fights to defend herself.
• Sacrificial Lion: Instead of the typical A Death in the Limelight she dies two episodes after the episode that focused on her backstory.
• Super-Strength: In spite of her small size, she possesses inhuman strength.
• Take a Third Option: Monkey's method of "peace negotiations." She doesn't get the two conflicting sides to come to common ground as much as she strong-arms a third solution they can't refuse. This is illustrated in her backstory where, when trying to broker peace between two warring nations, she instead convinces the soldiers to desert and form an independent nation over the land they were fighting over.
• Talking the Monster to Death: One of two powers she possesses, this stems from her talent at brokering peace, as it saps others of their will to fight and any desire they might have to harm her. Most notably, Chicken found herself inexplicably babbling truthful and valuable information about the current state of the Zodiac War to her and being mentally unable to raise her weapon to stab her from behind.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: She's the most pure hearted character in the series, and sadly, she ends up being killed and turned into a zombie by Rabbit.
• Tragic Hero: Despite her best efforts, she knows that more often than not, the conflicts she tries to solve return eventually.
• Uninhibited Muscle Power: Turning into a zombie allows her to utilize what amounts to a downplayed Charles Atlas Superpower by her body having no limiters on it.
• The Unreveal: Whatever plan she had, it's never revealed. Rat admits he couldn't find a single reality where she told him the details, though Duedecuple insists she wasn't bluffing.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Tiger unintentionally distracting Snake at a critical moment led to his death, providing Rabbit with his first zombie and allowing him to kill Boar. Later on, Ox theorizes that the competition was decided the moment she lost to Rabbit.
• Use Your Head: When her corpse restrains Ox, she headbutts him when he attempts to commit suicide by biting his tongue off, the resulting blow being strong enough to shatter a few of his teeth.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: After her corpse restrains Ox, he notes that she could easily kill him right then and there, yet refrains from doing so. Ox postulates that she is simply waiting for Rabbit's corpse to reassemble himself and do the deed so that he would then be reanimated under the Necromantist's control.
• Willfully Weak: She intentionally holds back in battle, attempting to restrain rather than kill. Once she is killed by Rabbit and reanimated, she proves to be an overwhelming force. Ox estimates that her true strength to be such that Rabbit's victory was assured the moment she died, as no other fighter would be capable of defeating her, and notes that she could easily have killed him when she had him pinned down.

Chicken

Ryōka Niwa/Niwatori, Fighter of the Chicken

Kills by Pecking

Voiced by: Ayane Sakura (JP), Monica Rial (EN)

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• Abusive Parents: Her childhood was so traumatizing even the narrator couldn't put it into words. By the time she was 15, she was so far gone that by the time she came to, she'd already snapped and killed her parents.
• Affably Evil: While crossing with Dissonant Serenity, she's genuinely cheerful and even friendly to her enemies. She even thanks Dog for the drug after killing him and promises to erect a statue in his honor if she wins the Zodiac War. In a deleted path, she cheerfully apologizes to Rat while commanding a flock of birds to devour him alive.
• Animal Eye Spy: Her ability involves controlling and using all sorts of birds to spy.
• Apologetic Attacker: A deleted path depicts her ordering a flock of birds to devour Rat alive while cheerfully apologizing to him.
• Attack Animal: As an application of her ability to control birds, she can actively order them to attack and consume foes. Additionally, a flashback in the anime depicts her using them to drop bombs on enemies in a war zone and a crime boss she betrayed.
• Bait the Dog: Kind of literally. She makes Dog believe she's naive and harmless, when she was actually using him to gain more power with his drugs, and once drugged she kills him.
• The Beastmaster: Apart from being able to see out the eyes of birds, she can also control them to do her bidding.
• Beware the Nice Ones: While she seemed friendly to Dog, when he doped her and intended to use her as bait, she crushed his face with her newfound strength.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Puts on a facade of being a nice girl but in reality Chicken is only looking out for herself. Her internal monologue even reveals that she had no intention of seriously teaming up with Monkey to avoid the conflict, and was planning on stabbing her in the back when the opportunity arrived.
• Cherry Tapping: You know what she means by "Killing by Pecks"? Siccing her birds on you and watching as they slowly peck your flesh away.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Chicken's constant backstabbing of others seems to be a real mental disorder. She even muses she has betrayed so many people she can't differentiate friend from foe anymore.
• Curtains Match the Windows: She also has green eyes.
• Eye Scream: Ox kills her instantly by stabbing his sword through both her eyes.
• Fille Fatale: Niwatori dresses in a Stripperiffic outfit, has Femme Fatalons and act innocently, going as far as to explain her special ability to control birds to Dog in order to gain the other's trust and backstab him later.
• Gutted Like a Fish: After stabbing her eyes out, Ox sweeps his sword upwards through her belly before her corpse falls in order to retrieve her jewel.
• I Call It "Vera": She named her spading fork "Cockscomb".
• Image Song: The third verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper CHARLES rapping in character as Chicken.
• It's All About Me: One narration stated that she knew what other people were probably going through, but as far as she was concerned, they were all just stepping stones. She even outright says that she considers the rest of the world no-name extras compared to her in the manga.
• Just Following Orders: After losing her childhood memories and being adopted by the Niwa family, she had no sense of self-purpose and simply fought and killed whenever they told her to do so.
• Living Lie Detector: In the manga, Chicken can tell when someone is lying or hiding something from her.
• Redemption Equals Death: The first time she ever fought to protect someone of her own will leads to her immediate death.
• Self-Made Orphan: While her memory of the incident is hazy, it's strongly implied that she killed her biological parents after they abused her one too many times and caused her to snap.
• Stripperiffic: She's only wearing a feather bikini and a cape. Dog wonders if she chose it or was forced to wear it. She wears it so that it's easy to remove traces of blood from fighters that she has killed, and indeed, after killing Dog, the first thing she does is wash his blood off her body so she can repeat the same naive act she used on Dog on another fighter.
• Super-Strength: After being drugged with Dog's One-Man Army poison, she becomes strong enough to warp and break a metal railing by squeezing it with her bare hand.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia: She does not remember anything about the first fifteen years of her life, but given that her biological parents were implied to be highly abusive towards her, along with the implication that she snapped and killed them as a result, her memory loss was likely caused by trauma.
• Weak, but Skilled: Physically she's not very imposing, but her ability is pretty useful to find enemies. Until Dog drugs her, making her much stronger.
• What Is This Feeling?: Monkey's kind words make her feel some sort of sympathy, but she denies the feeling and chalks it up to One Man Army heightening her emotions as well as her strength. When she instinctively goes into a defensive stance upon Ox asking her where Monkey is, she thinks that's One Man Army's influence, too.
• You Shall Not Pass!: She battles Ox in this manner, protecting Monkey and Rat's hideout despite her body telling her to turn tail.

Dog

Michio Tsukui/Dotsuku, Fighter of the Dog

Kills by Biting his Enemies

Voiced by: Tomohiro Nishimura (JP), Chuck Huber (EN)

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• Acquired Poison Immunity: He can make his body immune to all sorts of poisons, including the one used in the competition.
• Ambiguously Human: More so than the others participants; for a supposed human, Dotsuku has dog ears and a matching tail.
• Dogs Are Dumb: He fancies himself a sly, cunning strategist. In reality, he's a massively overconfident rube. Best exemplified when he gives a super drug to a near complete stranger, who kills him with it.
• Even Evil Has Standards: While he acts as a recruiter for Child Soldiers, he draws the line at other crimes against children. When he learned one of his clients was a pedophile, he went on a Roaring Rampage of Rescue to get the child back.
• Evil Teacher: He works as a preschool teacher, which doubles as a recruitment pool for his other job. He genuinely cares for his students, but also willingly scouts out promising young Child Soldiers for his clients.
• Friend to All Children: He had a day care teaching job as a cover for scouting Child Soldier candidates, but he was genuine about it and apparently hit it off with the kids and their parents. The fact that Chicken looked so young and innocent contributed to his massive underestimation of her double-crossing nature.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He doped Chicken to use her as bait to find Rabbit, only for her to crush his face in retaliation.
• Horrible Judge of Character: He certainly thinks Chicken is very naive for trusting him. He pays for this dearly, since he ends up being killed by her once he powers her up.
• Image Song: The second verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper Rekko rapping in character as Dog.
• Man Bites Man: His fangs are poisonous, and he kills by biting his enemies.
• Morality Pet: He explains that his daughter gave him a sense of stability that he lacked, giving him a sense of purpose in providing her with a good life.
• One-Hit Kill: If he bites you and chooses to poison you, expect to die quickly but in excruciating pain.
• Out-Gambitted: Attempts to use Chicken as his pawn to take out Rabbit. He assumed that she was clueless and in over her head, so he decided to dope her with the One-Man Army serum in order to take out Rabbit's puppets for him. Unfortunately for Dog, that was exactly what she wanted and she proceeded to kill him after getting it.
• Papa Wolf: When he learned one of his clients was a pedophile, he assaulted the compound and killed everyone in order to rescue a little girl. He then adopted her, and devoted himself to providing her with a good life.
• Poisonous Person: His ability is actually to produce poisons from his body, including an antidote for the poison everyone took.
• Savage Wolves: Despite being the Fighter of the Dog, he looks more like a wolf.
• Smug Snake: Dog fancies himself as a cunning strategist, yet make one of the dumbest decisions in the story, which leads to his death at Chicken hands.
• Super-Senses: He's quite good at hearing and sensing.
• Too Dumb to Live: If you're in the middle of a winner-take-all death tournament, giving someone else superpowers might not be the best idea.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Is killed by Chicken in Episode 2.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Once Chicken has been powered up by his drug One-Man Army, she kills him.
• Your Head A-Splode: Chicken kills him by crushing his skull with her bare hand.

Boar

Toshiko Inō/Inounoshishi, Fighter of the Boar

Kills Abundantly

Voiced by: Yōko Hikasa (JP), Stephanie Young (EN)

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• Abusive Parents: While we don't see that much, it's clear her father had no problem in hitting her, or killing his own men to punish her for showing mercy.
• Asshole Victim: Episode 1 showed how she drove her sister to madness and then suicide to take her place in the competition, so it's hard to feel sorry for her when Rabbit kills her.
• The Bait: After he kills her, Rabbit uses her corpse as bait to lure out the other warriors.
• Big Brother Bully: Drove her own younger sister into insanity and then suicide, all to take her place in the competition.
• Cain and Abel: The Cain to Kiyoko's Abel. Because Kiyoko was chosen over her to be the family representative for the next Juuni Taisen, Toshiko decided to drive her into insanity to steal her spot.
• Decoy Protagonist: She takes up a large amount of the first episode, but it's all to show that Anyone Can Die.
• Didn't See That Coming: She came up with a very intricate plan to take out Rabbit. Unfortunately, she had no idea that Rabbit is a Necromancer and was completely caught off-guard when he used Snake's corpse to grab her from behind, allowing him to land a killing blow.
• First-Person Smartass: Her thoughts are quite snarky. Even as Rabbit is about to kill her, she still snarks in her mind.
• Generation Xerox: Her father was the previous warrior of the Boar who participated in the last Zodiac War. Ironically, while her father won his Zodiac War, she is the first combatant to be killed during the course of hers.
• Guns Akimbo: Wields a pair of machine guns.
• The Hedonist: Implied to be one, being one to happily seek the battlefield and is stated to have multiple lovers.
• I Call It "Vera": She named her two tommyguns "Aishuu" (Lost Love) and "Inochigoi" (No Mercy).
• Image Song: The first verse of the Juni Taisen rap battle, featuring the rapper COMA-CHI rapping in character as Boar.
• It's All About Me: Toshiko claims to love and want to protect her little sister and says she wants to take part in the game to spare Kiyoko from having to participate. Of course, when their father chooses Kiyoko instead, Toshiko resorts to driving Kiyoko to insanity and pushes her into committing suicide.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Boar horribly abusing her sister into murderous insanity and convincing her to commit suicide was solely for self gain. However, Kiyoko’s innocence and kindness combined with her fear during the training montage showed she had problems killing people, moreso than Boar herself, and was ill-equipped to go into battle since she had only killed animals without hesitation, not people. The entire point of the Juuni Taisen is to kill without hesitation or any prompting, and to be prepared for any possible scenario; Kiyoko might not have been a good candidate to begin with.
• Ms. Fanservice: She has a curvy body, big breasts, and a scene where she's just wearing her bra and panties.
• Really Gets Around: The novel reveals that she immerses herself in relationships with many men. And in a flashback in the anime, she is seen casually seducing a boy that her sister had taken an interest in. In a deleted path, she enthusiastically tells Rat that it's her wish to have a harem of 3.2 billion men.
• Smug Snake: Because her father was the winner of the previous tournament, Boar is convinced that she is one of the front runners to win the present game.
• The Sociopath: Few of the characters are distinguished by high moral standards, but the Boar looks immoral and cruel even against their backgrounds.
• Statuesque Stunner: She's 1.76m, easily the tallest of the female participants, and despite her personality, pretty attractive.
• Stripped to the Bone: In order to eliminate the threat posed by her reanimated corpse, Chicken directs her controlled birds to consume her corpse. After the flesh is eaten away, this trope naturally results before the birds take the bones away as well to use as nesting materials.
• Unknown Rival: Towards Monkey. Boar is specifically hostile towards her and despises Monkey for being a peace seeker. In Monkey's flashback it's even shown that Boar happily took part in the slaughter of a small nation that Monkey had previously brokered to be formed. Monkey, for her part, doesn't have any animosity or feelings towards Boar.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Is killed by the Rabbit in Episode 1.

The Zodiac Criminals

Tropes for the Twelve

• Animal Motifs: Most of the western signs are animals.
• Punny Name: Most of their names (or code-names) are puns to their respective sign.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: They are against the Juni Taisen system and wish to destroy it.

Aries

Meland Sherry/Friend Sheep, Criminal of Aries

Counts and Kills

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• Dead Person Impersonation: Impersonates Rat to infiltrate the enemy.
• Improbable Weapon User: She wields what appears to be a giant comb.
• Kill and Replace: She kills Rat, and then disguises herself as him.
• Mind Manipulation: Her power allows her to hypnotize others, or brainwash herself to impersonate others.
• The Mole: She infiltrates the ranks of the Eastern Zodiac by disguising herself as Rat.
• Punny Name: Her codename, "Friend Sheep" is a pun on "friendship" and "sheep".

Taurus

Luke Michael/Look Me, Criminal of Taurus

Vows and Kills

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• Creepy Shadowed Undereyes: Her eyes seems to be shadowed, thing who makes her look deranged.
• Gender-Blender Name: Luke is commonly a masculine name.
• Improbable Hairstyle: Maintenance example. Her gravity-defying hair is shaped like actual bull horns.
• Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: Her crime of choice was kidnapping children, mistaking them for her own lost child.
• Mook Maker: She can create short-lived beings to fight for her.

Gemini

W2222 & M2222/Double Mind, Criminal of Gemini

Kills Having No Other Choice

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• Artificial Human: Created in a laboratory, as part of an experiment to make the ultimate fighter.
• Brother–Sister Team: The twins fight together and count as a single warrior.
• Single-Minded Twins: Unlike the Tatsumi brothers, they are treated as a single Warrior.
• You Are Number 6: They don't have a name to speak of, merely a code number that hints at their artificial origins.

Cancer

Caesar Caesar/Sir Cancer, Criminal of Cancer

Kills as a Gentleman

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• Martial Pacifist: Like Monkey, he is interested in brokering peace treaties.
• Repetitive Name: His name's pronounced "Caesar Kaiser", two different variations of the same source. Mixes with Alliterative Name when spelled out.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: He wears a very stylish suit.

Leo

Dandy Lion, Criminal of Leo

Kills in Command

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• Real Name as an Alias: Believe it or not, "Dandy Lion" is his birth name.

Virgo

Andy Almull/Iron May, Criminal of Virgo

Serves and Kills

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• Battle Butler: A warrior wearing a maid-themed outfit.
• Improbable Weapon User: Wields a mop as a weapon.
• Punny Name: His codename' "Iron May"' is a pun on the band "Iron Maiden".

Libra

Aaron Smith/Baron Sue, Criminal of Libra

Kills with Temperance

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• Punny Name: His codename puns on the word "balance", alluding to the scale motif associated with Libra.

Scorpio

Skull Pyon, Criminal of Scorpio

Kills Reluctantly

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• Beware My Stinger Tail: Scorpio's weapon appears to be a wicked-looking tail with a stinger.
• No Name Given: His true name is unknown, and his wish is stated to be to have one.
• Punny Name: In Japanese, his name sounds like a slurred way to pronounce "scorpion".

Sagittarius

Sashitari Usuki/Unsun Sajari, Criminal of Sagittarius

Takes Aim and Kills

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• Punny Name: Sashitari sounds like his zodiac sign.

Capricorn

Valkyrie Gotou/Go to Heaven, Criminal of Capricorn

Kills Sickly

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• Child Soldiers: One of the children scouted by Dog.
• Cool Chair: Her wheelchair is customized with goat horns, to resemble her Sign.
• Demolitions Expert: She uses landmines to kill her opponents.
• Punny Name: Her codename features a bit of her name in it (Gotou -> Go To).

Aquarius

Thomas B. Tholls/Muppet Bottle, Criminal of Aquarius

Kills Wetly

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• Blood Magic: He controls the blood inside one's body, and also causes it to evaporate.
• Bloody Murder: He can control blood directly.
• Improbable Weapon User: His weapons of choice seems to be... a hose and a water cube.
• Making a Splash: He controls liquids, usually water but also blood.
• Touch of Death: By touching an enemy, he can control their blood.

Pisces

Fuji Nocturne/Doctor Finish, Criminal of Pisces

Cures and Kills

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• Deceptive Disciple: She was originally mentored by Dog.
• Lab Coat Of Science And Medicine: She wears a lab coat, stethoscope, and a syringe as a pendant.
• Mad Scientist: A scientist and doctor of...questionable ethics.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: If we go by that incredibly pointed codename, then definitely.

Other Characters

Duedecuple

Duedecuple

Voiced by: Hiroki Yasumoto (JP), Mark Stoddard (EN)

The manager of the tournament.

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• Affably Evil: He may be the master of ceremonies for this year's Zodiac War, but he still takes time to address the participants' concerns.
• Ambiguously Human: He's able to appear and disappear at will, as well as ingest potentially lethal things into his body for unknown periods of time. When Ox asks about how to get the Beast Gems out of a participant's body in the manga, he slits his own stomach to demonstrate and comes out none the worse for wear. How he appears behind Rat out of the blue in the last episode to grant him his wish makes him look even less human.
• Meaningful Name: "Duedecuple" is the Latin word for twelve.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: He presents the "winner's interview" as optional, but Rat uses his powers to confirm that he will be killed if he doesn't cooperate.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: He wears a very fancy, old-fashioned suit and top hat.

Navi

Navi

A reporter witnessing the war.

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• Audience Surrogate: As the reporter of the Zodiac War, Navi explains the background and skills of the fighters, and shares his thoughts with the audience.
• Canon Foreigner: Only appears in the manga.
• Mr. Exposition: His role in the manga amounts to explaining some information on other participants, and also gaining a couple of their thoughts.
• Nice Guy: He is friendly and even gives the winner a free ride home.
• Self-Duplication: Navi's special ability allows him to create copies of himself, so he can witness every major event in the war.

Kiyoko

Kiyoko Inō

Voiced by: Aya Suzaki (JP), Jad Saxton (EN)

The younger sister of Toshiko Inō. Kiyoko was originally chosen by their father to be their family's representative in the next Zodiac War.

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• Age Lift: The light novel stated that Boar's sister was five years older than she was. This was changed so that in the anime, Kiyoko was a younger sister to Boar instead, possibly so that it would be easier for Boar to manipulate her in the anime's Adaptation Expansion flashback.
• Big Brother Worship: Adored Boar and followed all of her orders without question. Unfortunately for her, Boar didn't have her best interests at heart. This trope only applies to the anime, because her age was changed so that she was younger than Boar.
• Break the Cutie: In her Adaptation Expansion in the anime, Kiyoko is shown to be an overall sweet kid despite coming from a family of mercenaries. But when she is chosen by her father to take part in the next game over her older sister, Toshiko does everything in her power to psychologically break Kiyoko.
• Driven to Madness: Before her suicide, that is. Toshiko's repeated "lessons" in killing human beings drove her to complete insanity, including laughing maniacally after killing a group of what are implied to be her family servants.
• Driven to Suicide: Ultimately ends up hanging herself. She stabs herself in the throat in the anime after some verbal Mind Rape from Toshiko and being given the knife for that purpose.
  Toshiko: Kiyoko. You have done quite enough. Many more. Hundreds more... Thousands more lives... To shoot, stab, slice, cleave, strangle, burn, shred, break, strike, crush.
  Kiyoko: M-more?
  Toshiko: Yes, to kill. As a member of the Ino family, as the chosen one, this is your duty. The taking of lives... That is what Father, Mother, and I... What we all desire. Do you mean to tell me it is not what you desire? [Puts down a knife and slides it under the door to her] Then you may do as your heart guides you.
• Everyone Has Standards: Kiyoko was rather gleeful in her recounting of killing a pair of foxes and their cubs, but Kiyoko is still bothered by taking a human's life.
• Madness Mantra: Develops one of these due to being Driven to Madness in the anime.
  Kiyoko: More... more... I need to kill more... More... More killing... More... More... M-must kill... More...
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In the manga, we see that Boar stuck tons of knives in her.
• Youngest Child Wins: Kiyoko initially seems to be an example of this trope, as she was chosen to participate in the Zodiac War over her older sister, and have a shot at having any wish she wants granted. However, this trope is eventually averted as being chosen caused said sister to plot and scheme a way to remove her from the picture so she can participate in the competition instead, ultimately leading to Kiyoko being Driven to Suicide. This trope only applies to the anime, however, as Boar's sister is five years older than her in the light novel.

Boar's Father

The head of the Inō family, and previous Fighter of the Boar. He was the champion of the previous tournament, and raised his daughters to continue his legacy.

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• Abusive Parents: He was beyond strict with his daughters, readily using violence to discipline Toshiko when she made mistakes in her training.
• Combat Pragmatist: Duedecuple indicates that the rules were changed as a result of how he went about winning, which involved heading to a heavily populated area and using the civilians as human shields to confuse his opponent(s).
• Didn't Think This Through: It’s implied he chose his youngest daughter, Kiyoko, as the family representative for the Juni Taisen because she didn’t hesitate to kill while Toshiko/Boar had issues with it. This caused several problems down the line:
  • Kiyoko’s lack of hesitation came from killing animals, not humans, and it’s implied she had no formal training like Boar when she was picked as the candidate. Once she starts killing, she slips further into insanity and kills herself in madness, proving she wasn’t necessarily the best choice.
  • His neglect of Toshiko after she did everything she could to become the mercenary he wanted, broke her completely. His betrayal caused her to become the cruel and hedonistic woman we see at the tournament and lead her to deceive Kiyoko into the aforementioned suicide in desperation to be the family rep. And her inflated ego and drive to please her father by winning costs her the tournament as the second kill (Snake having technically been killed before the fighting even started), destroying the glory for the Inō Family.
• Hate Sink: He is reponsible for why his daughters, especially Boar, are the way they are. And overall, there is nothing sympathetic or likable about him.
• Offscreen Karma: The deaths of his daughters will mean the Inō name dies with him.

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