Characters / The Promised Neverland

Characters found in The Promised Neverland.

Per wiki policy, trope names are not hidden in spoiler tags. Beware of spoilers.

---

The Children of Grace Field

All the children that live in the orphanage/farm of Grace Field.

---

Tropes that apply to all of them:

• Adaptational Hairstyle Change: In the live-action movie, the main trio's hair colors are the same as in the anime, but the hairstyles are different. Their messy, spiky hair (especially Emma's antenna) is replaced with much neater and straighter hair.
• Age Lift: The 2020 film raises the children's age deadline from 12 to 16. As a result, Emma, Norman, and Ray are portrayed as teenagers rather than 11-year-olds.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: All of the Power Trio, thanks to being Child Prodigies. Played for Laughs in a (non-canon) omake, where Emma and Norman figure out how to swim this way, and the other kids commenting that Ray is the same.
• Big Brother Instinct: Every member of the main five has this to some degree, none more so than Emma.
• Character Focus: The anime skips Goldy Pond and its associated enormous cast in favor of focusing more attention on the non-Power Trio Grace Field children.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After years of struggling to survive in the demon world, all the Grace Field kids get to the human world safely, and take most of the humans from the farms with them. In Dreams Come True, each kid got their wishes from the first chapters granted.
• Family of Choice: They're not related by blood, but the children of Grace Field consider they're part of the same family. Emma, especially, regards the younger children as her younger siblings.
• Foil: All of the main three are this for each other.
  • Emma and Ray are the most direct, being at opposite ends of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism. Even in general temperament, Emma is open and the most beloved of the eldest kids by their siblings, while Ray, though still loved, has a reputation for never playing with them.
  • While generally Emma's best ally in the first arc, Norman shares a degree of Ray's pragmatism and by the time of their reunion, he's the one at an ideological opposite to her, with Ray in the middle this time. Also, Emma is the most physically capable while regarded as not quite as smart, whereas Norman is said to have the "best brains" but lacks Emma's (and Ray's) sheer athletic abilities.
  • Norman essentially has Ray's mindset but without the years of emotional baggage that weigh Ray down. Whereas Norman in some ways is motivated by pride and confidence to make his ideals come true, also allowing him to make for an effective leader, Ray's matter-of-fact (and, in the first arc, ultimately defeatist) approach to things makes him more suited as a follower.
• Gone Horribly Right: The kids were raised to be intelligent. The Power Trio ended up being too smart and escape the farm and bring about the end to the evil aristocracy they were intended as food for, along with the entire system.
• Human Notepad: All of them have numbers tattooed on their necks.
• Nice Mean And In Between: Emma being the kindest and most empathetic is the nice. Ray being the most aloof and callous is the mean. Norman bridges the two being pragmatic and calculating like Ray but also being approachable and caring for the other children like Emma. After their escape Ray Takes A Level In Kindness, and by the time they reunite with a hardened Norman, Ray is the in between.
• Power Trio: Emma, Norman, and Ray initially form one of these. This gets dropped when Norman is shipped off.
• Three Plus Two: Emma, Ray, and Norman are vastly more important than Don and Gilda, who have stretches of time Out of Focus even if they are the two most prominent Grace Field kids behind them. Even Norman being gone for nearly the entire manga, and Don and Gilda travelling with Emma and Ray for a year, doesn't really help the two to close the gap.
• To Serve Man: What their final fate is once they become 12 years old. Defying it is the main theme of the series.
• You Are Number 6: All the children have a five-digit ID code tattooed on their necks. That being said, the ID codes are only ever used by the demon members of the farms, with the humans using their "normal" names.

Emma

Voiced by: Sumire Morohoshi (Japanese), Erica Mendez (English)
Live actor: Creator Minami Hamabe (Film)

Age: 11 (13 as of Chapter 102)
ID: 63194

The protagonist; an energetic and athletic young girl.

---

• Academic Athlete: Of a sort. She doesn't have Norman and Ray's intense intelligence, but she's still pretty smart and is probably the most fit member of the main three. Upgraded to Action Girl when she learns how to fight.
• All-Loving Hero: She'd rather talk things out than fight (much to Ray's exasperation) even when the other party is trying to kill her, and is deeply uncomfortable with Norman's plan of essentially committing genocide against the demons, as Emma realizes that humans and demons are not that different.
• Badass Normal: All Emma has is her wits and luck against a world full of demons twice her size and other hazards.
• Beware the Nice Ones: She is genuinely a kind and sweet girl, but anyone that crosses her or her friends will get a very unsettling glimpse of Tranquil Fury.
• Boyish Short Hair: Her hair is short and messy, fitting with her tomboyish and athletic nature.
• Break the Cutie: To say Norman's (presumed) death did something to her psyche is a major understatement.
• Consummate Liar: Emma is typically a straightforward, honest, and kind person. So when she is lying, almost nobody can see through her. She completely fools Isabella into thinking she had crossed the Despair Event Horizon and given up when she was really working on his escape plan the entire time.
• Cool Big Sis: She thinks of all the kids in the orphanage as her family, and treats them accordingly. Even after she escapes the orphanage in the first arc, she still carries photos of the kids she left behind and gushes about them to Mujika.
• Crazy Enough to Work: In Chapter 27, the kids are in a tight spot because making Norman (pretend to) escape would mean that Ray would be shipped out in his place (since Emma has a broken leg). So what's her idea? That Ray break one of his own limbs or fall sick to avoid shipping. He gleefully agrees.
• Death Glare: Her favorite way of conveying that someone has crossed a line and pissed her off. For bonus points, the angrier she gets, the calmer she looks — compare her indignation, when Krone confronts her and the others in the forest, with the blank, dead stare she gives to Ray when warning him not to sacrifice anyone for the sake of their plan after implying that he's already done just that.
• Determinator: What her character revolves around, she refuses to give up and will do anything to keep her family safe.
• Equivalent Exchange: The One wants to take away "[her] everything", i.e. her memories, because that's her strongest connection to her family. Also, her neck tattoo is erased and Norman disappears for the photo of him with her that Ray took. Emma figures that it's only fair, because she's made so many selfish requests — saving her family, not wanting to kill demons, not wanting to lose anyone, and wanting all of these things simultaneously is a herculean task, if not impossible, so this is her way of settling things.
• The Fettered: Emma will always try to save everyone she can and never abandons her ideals. Even when she's told that genocide against the demons is the most logical course to ensure the safety of all the children, she refuses to go along with the plan.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Emma wants to believe in the best in everyone. She's usually right, unless true evil comes into the picture.
  • She tries to reason with Andrew when he and his commando team come to her and the rest of the escaped kids, pointing out that they plan to forge a new Promise with The One. Andrew as it turns sees the children as subhuman and will stop at nothing to kill them. Eventually it turns out he doesn't even care about upholding the Promise, he just wants to kill the children.
  • She's baffled as to why the monarchy and the Five Regent Families would hunt Mujika and prevent other demons from gaining immunity to going feral. As Ray points out, they wanted to maintain control.
• Good Is Not Dumb: Norman and Ray may outmatch her in logical and linguistic intelligence, but Emma compensates with strong lateral thinking skills and uncanny emotional insights. Some clear examples:
  • It's her idea to train the other children with hide-and-seek.
  • Once Ray explains that he knows how to get rid of the trackers, she immediately figures out that Ray may have pushed up shipping dates for the children he used as guinea pigs to do so, and calls him on it.
  • She picks apart the reasons why Don and Gilda rushed to enter Mama's secret room despite being told not to, and explicitly identifies what aspects of Cannot Spit It Out almost screwed the entire group over.
  • She calls bullshit on Krone's stated reasons for wanting to take down Mama, stating that someone who can maintain a peaceful lifestyle by raising children as food is a damn dirty liar.
• Good Is Not Soft:
  • Emma doesn't play around when it comes to the lives of the other children. After finding out that Ray is the spy, Emma asks him how many of their siblings he sacrificed to figure out how to disable the trackers. He doesn't answer, and Emma says it's fine, they can use what he learns, but makes it clear that she will not tolerate it if he tries something like that again.
  • Despite her kind nature, if Emma has to kill someone to ensure the safety of those she cares about, more often than not she will do it.
  • She wants peace with the demons, but is content with Norman at least removing the Five Regent Families from power to make them accept the new Promise.
• Happily Adopted: At the end of the story, she's taken in by the Old Man who found her and adopts her, once it seems that she has no family due to amnesia.
• The Heart: Emma is the emotional element of the trio, notably demanding that they help all the children escape, not just themselves. Norman and Ray, while not completely insensitive, appear more coldly rational.
• Heroic Sacrifice: She agrees to the One to give up her memories and being separated from the family, so that the humans can escape to the human world. As she puts it, though, it's more of settling things for all of her selfish wants as opposed to a mere sacrifice. Subverted that the other kids spend years looking for her and eventually find her.
• Heroic Spirit: She applies for most of the subtropes, really, including a Heroic Second Wind after being stabbed in the abdomen in Chapter 93. The author actually said that she was not designed as a "heroine" but as a "hero" in the general sense.
• Hope Bringer: Her greatest strength. Emma's determination and belief that things that can work out for the better inspires people to strive to make things better themselves, even if they thought things were hopeless before meeting her.
• Honor Before Reason: Sister Krone notes it is Emma's Fatal Flaw. She is diluting her chances to save herself (or anybody at all, for that matter) by refusing to leave anyone of her family behind.
• Idiot Hair: She sports a rather impressive one. While not an idiot, she's pretty happy-go-lucky most of the time. Also, it's apparently alive and can dodge scissors. ETR3M8 dubs her Antenna Hair soon after their negotiations.
• Idiot Hero: As a perfect test-scorer, she's not an idiot in the slightest. She is, however, noted to be just a notch below her peers Norman and Ray in sheer booksmarts, and she shares many personality traits with classic shounen Idiot Hero's. Additionally, her overt optimism leads her to sometimes make decisions that can be seen as stupid and reckless.
• I'm Crying, but I Don't Know Why: In the penultimate chapter, she breaks down crying because she somehow relates to the Old Man's experiences of having lost his friends and family, and she also wakes up crying when she sees and hears her forgotten friends and family calling out to her in her dreams.
• Large Ham: When Emma justifies her idealism, she almost always makes a grand speech about it.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Her deal with The One for allowing her family to escape to the human world is to lose her memories of them and get separated from them.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Not a limb, but during the escape attempt Emma cuts off almost her entire left ear to get rid of the transmitter in it and leave a false trail, when everyone else had it disabled or carefully removed.
• Living Emotional Crutch: One for Ray, alongside Norman. Those two were the only bright spots for him in an otherwise miserable life, and especially after Norman's supposed death, it becomes clear that Ray's emotional stability is tied to Emma's well-being.
• Master Actor: She's been able to give reactions convincing enough to fool Living Lie Detectors. The best example is when she helps fake Ray's suicide.
• The McCoy: The most emotional and idealistic of the main trio, directly opposing Ray.
• Morality Pet:
  • For Norman and Ray. Norman pragmatically believes that the best plan is to abandon the younger kids and save themselves, but is determined to help them for Emma's sake. When Ray tries to convince Norman to reduce the number of people in on the escape, Norman easily lies to him about doing so, with no intention of betraying Emma's wishes. In Ray's case, despite all his cynicism, he wants to keep both her and Norman safe and alive above anyone else, including himself.
  • After Time Skip, while Norman doesn't delay his genocide plan for Emma's sake, he does hesitate after talking with her, and gives up on it after Emma manages to successfully make the new Promise.
• Nice Girl: The most optimistic member of the three main children, and the most compassionate by far.
• No Name Given: Her new name after she has amnesia isn't given. In the Dreams Come True epilogue she reuses her old name after reuniting with the family.
• Oblivious to Love: She hasn't noticed Norman has feelings for her.
• Plucky Girl: One of her significant character traits. Even when she's horrified by the truth of what it means to leave the orphanage, she refuses to give up.
• Save the Villain: When she learns that Norman is out to exterminate all the demons, she is determined to stop him. This includes saving the demon nobility, though that was more of a pragmatic move on her part, because she wanted to force them to accept the new Promise, something that couldn't be done if they were dead.
• Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: According to a color spread, this is her eye and hair color. Also doubles over with Fiery Redhead a bit, due to her Determinator nature.
• Stepford Smiler: Mildly. She genuinely is a cheerful and optimistic person; however, after the first arc, with her newfound status as The Leader, she's not without her doubts. The only person she'll admit them to is Ray, however.
• Stock Shōnen Hero: As unconventional as Neverland might be for a shonen series, and despite being a Rare Female Example, Emma actually does largely fit the archetype. She's bright and energetic, a little silly and mentioned to be not as book-smart as Norman (though still way smarter than your average kid), is the most physically fit of the kids, a very quick learner including when it comes to fighting, All-Loving Hero and helps anyone, pulls a couple of Defeat Means Friendship, and can will herself back on her feet through sheer determination after being stabbed through the abdomen. It doesn't get more shonen than that.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: The Tomboy to Gilda's Girly Girl, with Emma being the sporty one who focuses on learning to hunt and fight, and dons pants after the escape.
• Wax On, Wax Off: Her training method to prepare the other children for escape without tipping off Isabella is to play games of hide-and-seek.
• The Watson: She plays this role in the early chapters, usually being the one to ask questions and have things explained to her.
• Wistful Amnesia: On top of being physically separated from her family, the price she paid for the new promise was to forget her own identity and her memories of them, externally symbolized by her neck numbers being erased. Her heart still remembers them, though she is tormented by nightmares, until they finally manage to find her.

Norman

Voiced by: Maaya Uchida (Japanese), Jeannie Tirado (English)
Live actor: Rihito Itagaki (Film)

Age: 11 (13 as of Chapter 118)
ID: 22194 / Lambda-7214 Farm Brand

One of Emma's close friends at the orphanage, noted for his superior intellect.

---

• Anti-Villain: After the Time Skip, after witnessing the horrors of the farm system, he becomes one of the final antagonists. His plan to wipe out the entire demon race puts him at odds with Emma and Ray, who want to reform the demon society peacefully by forging a new Promise. However, he would never try to hurt his friends or even another human, even though he doesn't hesitate to lie to Emma and to enact his plan behind her back and against her wishes
• Badass Bookworm: He's one of the few people to give Ray a run for his money.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Or Anti-Villain does the dirty work. While Emma's plan to avoid any bloodshed is commendable, the aristocrats of the demons are shown to be for the most part a bunch of greedy power-hungry corrupt people mostly concerned with keeping their own power over the commoners by controlling the food supply. Therefore, it's hard to argue against the fact that Norman probably did Emma a favour by slaughtering all of them before she could intervene.
• Batman Gambit: The guy could give the Trope Namer a run for his money. He develops a plan based on how he expects Ray and Isabella to act and when for months ahead, and leaves it with Emma. So far, he's batting a thousand.
• Beneath the Mask: After taking up William Minerva's mantle. He shows a different side to whomever he's speaking to (The Stoic, professional leader, or the kindly, gentle friend and brother) — but it's ambiguous at this point which one is the real him, or if both are. In the end the family side wins over.
• Big Bad Ensemble: After the Time Skip Norman becomes one of the final antagonists of the manga, albeit a sympathetic one. While he wants peace for the cattle children, the extremes that he is willing to go to do it put him at odds with Emma, as is the fact that he has no plans to put them on hold, even if it goes against her wishes. Eventually, Emma manages to get him to her side soon before the other villains are taken care of.
• Big Damn Reunion: After being separated for two years and presumed to be dead to his loved ones, he's finally reunited with them in Chapter 119, where Emma leaps into his arms and Ray shows weakness and cries upon seeing his friend again.
• Broken Tears: Norman typically portrays a cool, unaffected disposition, but in reality he's a young kid dealing with horrible circumstances. When he breaks, it's intense.
  • In Chapter 26, Norman breaks down about his oncoming shipping after going alone to fill a glass with water.
  • In Chapter 153, after almost 40 chapters of pretending to be okay, Norman finally breaks down in front of Emma and Ray, confessing that he doesn't want to kill the demons and wants to live.
• The Chessmaster:
  • If Chapter 34 is to be believed, he's successfully planned out every move that the children should make for the next two months after his shipment date. So far, he's been right.
  • Since Norman knows his army can't defeat the royals in a straight-up fight, he allies with the Geelan clan and has both sides wear each other out so that his troops can take down the survivors. He also makes sure that the royals are constantly bombarded with the devolution poison to compromise their abilities even more and make them easier to kill.
• Child Prodigy: He is considered a prodigy even when compared to Emma and Ray. So much so that instead of being shipped for slaughter, he's taken to a special facility where he's given tests that are much harder than the ones at Grace Field − and aces them all effortlessly.
• Dark Messiah: Experiencing the horrors of Lambda 7214 and being separated from his family for two years leads to Norman becoming this, as he takes on the William Minerva alias. He begins to destroy farms and free cattle children, presenting himself as their saviour, as he promises to create a world for them all to live in peace... that is, by committing genocide against the demons. His perceived status as a 'god' by his followers is a big theme in the final arcs. Because he's dying from the aftereffects of the Lambda experiments, Norman rushes his plan and essentially intends to sacrifice himself for his planned utopia.
  Cislo: If the Boss hadn't come, I wouldn't be alive. A 12-year-old kid looked like God to me in that moment.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Sort of, crossing over with being a Legacy Character. He takes up William Minerva's name, and while his closest confidants know that he's not the original, he doesn't go around announcing that he's the second one, so to speak. Before Emma and co. realize it's Norman, they're confused when they hear about William Minerva, having learned previously that he was dead.
• Decoy Protagonist: During the first volumes, he's the driving force of the kid's evasion plan, making the decisions. Then he's shipped out of the orphanage in the fourth volume, and Emma takes on the mantle of The Leader with Ray as The Lancer. Subverted closer to the ending where he becomes a Deuteragonist, if not Villain Protagonist, while Ray gets more Out of Focus.
• Determinator: Not quite to the degree of Emma, but he is going to do everything in his power to ensure their escape and Emma's happiness.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Ayshe being able to talk human language despite spending all her life with demons throws a wrench in Norman's plans when she privately reveals to Don and Gilda she was actually Happily Adopted and was looking for an opportunity to backstab his group for killing her adoptive father.
  • He goes on with his plan and attacks the demon capital, lying to Emma that he trusts she can make the new Promise. She returns safely, so he decides to stop the attack.
  • He made a plan to kill Legravalima by using Geelen to fight each other and finishing off whoever's left. But the Queen proved more powerful than even he could have anticipated.
• Easily Forgiven: Emma doesn't comment about him killing large portions of the capital's population as a collateral damage to getting to the Queen, and lying to her that he would wait for her before enacting his plan, more conerned that everyone from her family is safe.
• The Extremist Was Right: He is proven right about his desire to kill the Five Regent Families and Legravalima. The latter proved she could not be reasoned with and stopping her non-violently wasn't an option.
• Face–Heel Turn: Subverted. Norman initially looks as if he's going down this route after it's revealed he plans to kill all the demons and has a huge disagreement with Emma about his methods — insinuating he'd become a villain they'd have to stop. However, in Chapter 153, when he breaks down, it's revealed he never wanted to enact his plan and, after the trauma he experienced in Lambda 7214, felt like it was the only option to quickly put an end to their horrible world. As Emma and Ray manage to stop him before his plan is properly enacted, he joins their side and stays there for the rest of the story.
• Face Your Fears: Norman's terrified of dying, to the point where 'I want to live' is a character motif, yet on multiple occasions Norman willingly faces his own death in order to protect what he loves.
  • During the Escape arc, Norman chooses to be shipped instead of hiding in order to make sure everyone else can escape.
  • In the final arc, Norman hides that he is also Secretly Dying due to the Lambda experiments, so his plan to kill the demons would run smoothly with nobody panicking.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Chooses to return to the farm to be shipped out rather than running and hiding like Ray and Emma wanted, so that he could give them extra information and make everyone else's escape easier.
• Hesitant Sacrifice: He acts composed in front of everyone else (though he's not fooling Emma and Ray), but when faced with his impending death, he realizes how badly he still wants to live.
• He Who Fights Monsters: After Norman talks with Ray and Emma in Chapter 129. He admits to himself that he'd gladly become both a God and a Devil if it meant he could keep his family safe. This was even demonstrated further when he hears that the Evil Blood Maiden is alive, a demon whose blood can cure the devolution of the demon race, by immediately suggesting killing her rather than to ally with her; showing that he has abandoned all hopes and opportunities of peace.
• I Got Bigger: Puberty hit him much harder than Ray and Emma; he looks more like a young adult despite him being in the middle of the two age-wise. When he's finally reunited with Emma and the rest, he towers over Emma who he was the same height last they saw each other, and is even taller than Ray, who had become the tallest of the group by that point.
• I Lied: Told the other Lambda kids that he wasn't Secretly Dying like they were, but admits he was lying when Emma calls him out on it in front of them.
• The Kirk: He is moved by Emma's idealism, but also acknowledges that Ray makes several logical points.
• Knight Templar:
  • He has become fully convinced that the only way to stop the "demons" is to kill them all and says that Emma's plan for a new promise that involves no bloodshed is foolish and too optimistic. He even goes so far as to call himself both a God and a Devil for the sake of killing all "demons" and saving all humans.
  • It can be presumed that Norman knew about Ayshe's situation and her adoptive Demon father, yet he still followed through in killing Ayshe's father anyway. Effectively; he murdered her only loving parent, intentionally orphaned her, made her join his side, and tricked the other children into believing that he liberated her. All done for the sake of saving another fellow human...
• Living Emotional Crutch: One of two for Ray, the other being Emma.
• Love Confessor: He confesses to Ray that the reason he's going with the plan is because he loves Emma. He even goes as far to say he'll 'utilise himself' to make it happen.
• Loved by All: When he dons his William Minerva alias to lead a resistance, Norman is loved by everyone (or at least his persona is). Followers, such as Hayato and Jin, are shown to be devoted to him completely to the point of following his orders without question, and every other child saved by him adore his presence. His inner circle love him especially, to the point of asking Emma and Ray childhood stories about him to gush over. They respect him so much, they accept Norman cancelling the genocide plan, something they've almost attacked Emma for even suggesting. In an omake, it's shown they have a secret room in the basement where they keep what is effectively a shrine to him.
• Luminescent Blush: In chapter 21.5, he gets this when Emma says she wants to stay together with him when he's sick.
• Named After Someone Famous: Shares a given name with Norman Rockwell. The color pages' warm, yellow-and-tan color scheme and nostalgic appearances are modeled after Rockwell's paintings.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Regardless of necessity, killing the demon nobility had consequences, since it left nobody to negioate with about the Promise and created a void for Peter Ratri to fill.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • When he realizes that there is a gaping cliff past the wall, which makes him give up on escaping by himself.
  • Gets another one when it turns out that Legravalima is Back from the Dead after having her core shattered, she has another one and is stronger than before.
• Pragmatic Hero: He has shades of this going on. He's willing to abandon the other kids to focus on saving himself and Emma, and suspects that one of the other children is likely a spy. He doesn't even put Ray above suspicion in this regard, which turns out to have been the right move.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: He understands that the genocide of the demon race is wrong, but he doesn't see any other option for humans to live in peace until Emma manages to make a new Promise.
• Sacrificial Lion: Played painfully straight and invoked. Norman assumes this role because he sees it as too idealistic for Emma to save everyone and impractical (some kids are so young they can't even run), so he decides to forcefully break Emma's perception that nobody will be lost to sober her up to cold hard reality, which Ray has realized but doesn't have the heart to do to his dear friend. It gives Emma and Ray a fighting chance to get away with some of the younger children by providing a diversion and surrendering to being taken by Isabella and the demons, because it galvanizes their resolve to live and makes them plot their escape much more intelligently. However, it eventually turns out that he is still alive and was transferred to the Lambda facility.
• Secretly Dying: It's revealed that the reason Norman sped up his plans to attack the Tifari is because he is also suffering from the same degenerative condition that the other children from Lambda have. He has kept this secret to not worry his friends, but knows he doesn't have much time left. Getting to the human world allows him to cure his condition with modern medecine.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: When Emma reveals her and Ray's plan to make a new Promise, he says that peace will never happen because humans and "demons" don't want peace. He is partially incorrect, as it's only the Queen and the nobles are like this, while the general populace are more than happy for a peacful option.
• The Smart Guy: Though most of the kids are pretty quick on the uptake, Norman's the one that comes up with the the most thought-out plans among the protagonists. Ray is probably the only person that can match or even exceed him with the proper motivation.
• Uncertain Doom: He seems confused about what he sees at the gatehouse, implying it wasn't just demons taking him like he'd seen with Conny. It turns out that he was instead transferred to the Lambda facility for special testing by Peter Ratri, James "William Minerva" Ratri's brother and the man in charge of the plantations.
• Unwitting Pawn: In his goal to topple demon society, The One is implied to have used him to punish Legravalima, who never planned on handing Norman over to him as part of the Promise. Better yet, Norman has no idea of this as he unleashes karma upon the wicked queen.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: After Emma and Ray reunite with him two years after escaping Grace Field, Norman has concluded that the only way to save the cattle children is to exterminate all the demons, much to Emma and Ray's shock. He knows that they won't approve that and not all demons are evil, but felt it was the best course of action, until Emma talked him out of it.
• What You Are in the Dark: Post-timeskip he maintains the mask of a strong determined leader, but in private he is tormented by his decision to commit genocide knowing that Emma won't approve it. In the end, his friendship with her and Ray is enough to convince him to back away from the plan.

Ray

Voiced by: Mariya Ise (Japanese), Laura Stahl (English)
Live actor: Jyo Kairi (Film)

Age: 11 (13 as of Chapter 102)
ID: 81194

Another orphan, also a close friend of Emma and Norman, and noticeably more aloof than most of the other children.

---

• The Atoner: After the first arc, he vows to make up for everything he's done by devoting himself to his family. The final arc sees him tell Isabella, serving as a Mirror Character, that in contrast to how he started off the series, he's glad to be alive as it means he can continue to atone.
• Badass Bookworm: He can usually be seen with a book in hand, and the knowledge he retains from them has been handy thus far.
• Brutal Honesty: He tends to do this in general, but a particularly notable moment is when, Norman is trying to figure out a way to break it to Emma that Ray was the spy all along, only for Ray to abruptly come out with it before Norman has the chance. In some cases, he considers it a kindness to be blunt, rather than sugarcoat the truth and/or give people false hope, which he calls Norman out on.
• Crazy-Prepared: Since finding out the truth six years ago, Ray has been making plans to survive and escape.
• The Cynic: He is the most direct foil to Emma's optimistic outlook, but unlike Norman's more measured reactions, he tends to be much more dour.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Stands out even among the other children for it. Emma herself expresses horror at realizing Ray has essentially known of and accepted his own death for twelve years by the time of their escape, and has been coping with that knowledge almost entirely on his own. See Despair Event Horizon below.
• Deadpan Snarker: The snarkiest of the main characters, usually at Emma's expense.
• Defiant to the End: When he reveals to Emma how he was going to distract Isabella by pouring gasoline over his body and preparing to light himself on fire he laughs maniacally about how he wasn't going to go down as cattle and he would die as a selfish human.
• Despair Event Horizon: Crossed this years before the start of the series. He never intended to escape with Norman and Emma. Took a Level in Idealism after Emma pulls the escape off.
• Driven to Suicide: Via Self-immolation. Although Emma managed to stop him just in time.
• Easily Forgiven: Conditionally. Neither Norman nor Emma react all that angrily when it's revealed that he's The Mole but they expect him to still explain himself and work with them. Additionally, despite the high level of value Emma places on everyone in the orphanage, she's surprisingly calm and understanding when she realizes that Ray probably sacrificed some of their siblings in trying to create a device that would destroy the trackers on them, but also makes it clear to Ray that he is never to do so ever again.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Managed to build a signal disruptor out of parts he salvaged from Isabella's "rewards" for spying.
• Generation Xerox: He's a lot like his mother, Isabella, from his facial features to his cool attitude to his depressive tendencies. Ray also tried to keep himself alive within the system by keeping his scores up and contributed to other kids being harvested. They have a similar desire to live as long as possible coupled with a tendency to despair and Death Seeker tendencies. He's Locked Out of the Loop when it comes to Emma and Norman's escape plans just as much as Isabella is. Finally, just as Emma forgives Ray for experimenting with other children's trackers and getting them harvested early, she can forgive and love Isabella by the end of the manga. The main differences are that with No Infantile Amnesia, Ray figured out the situation as a small child, and had tight bonds with more children who demanded that he have hope and take chances, allowing him to leave the farms.
• Hiding Behind Your Bangs: His bang covers his right eye, and he is mentioned to be the most mysterious of the protagonists. ETR3M8 dubs him (Sleepy) Cyclops for it.
• Hypocritical Humor: He approves of Gilda scolding Emma for her recklessness... before all the other children point out that Ray's not exactly a bastion of self-preservation himself.
• I Got Bigger: In chapter 102 a slow Time Skip happens as the children search for their leads about the Seven Walls. By the chapter's end, Ray has grown just as tall as Don if not taller.
• Instant Expert: The entire Power Trio is this, thanks to Awesomeness by Analysis, but for Ray in particular, Emma whines that he's always the best at anything he tries.
• Interrupted Suicide: He pours gasoline over himself and then attempts to light himself on fire so that Emma and the other kids could escape, intending to go out as a "selfish human" instead of as a piece of meat for the demons. It's eventually revealed that Emma stopped him just in time.
• Locked Out of the Loop: In the end, Norman and Emma hid a lot of elements of the escape from him: specifically, that they had let all the other kids know about the farm, that Norman knew Ray would attempt suicide, and that he had already come up with a plan around it.
• Loss of Identity: Briefly, in Chapter 134, we see Ray, lost in the The One's world that bends space and time, having forgotten his own name after years of aimless wandering. Emma manages to find the exit before he would die from dehydration and restore him to normal.
• MacGyvering: Managed to build an EMP generator out of the "rewards" he got for spying on the kids.
• Meaningful Name: Ray is often short for Raymond, which is composed of the Ancient Germanic elements ragin, meaning "advice", and mund, meaning "protection". For most of the series, Ray serves as the brains of the operation and after escaping with Emma and the others, devotes himself to protecting them.
• Morality Pet: He is the one thing Isabella genuinely loves more than any other, as he figured out some time ago, he's her biological son.
• The Mole: As Norman's rope trick proves, Ray has been Isabella's spy all along, even as early as when he joined the team. However, he does prove later on that he was using Isabella in order to get the materials he needed for their escape and to break the tracker. But some of his actions, most notably hiding Conny's bunny, have helped out Norman and Emma; this is more fitting of his true Double Agent nature, since he's invested in surviving and making sure that Norman and Emma can if possible.
• No Infantile Amnesia: He can remember events that occurred before he was three, seemingly going right back to when he was in the womb. This allowed him to figure out the truth of the orphanage. He lampshades this phenomenon as being very rare. Proven in Chapter 37, when he can sing the song Isabella sang to him while he was in the womb.
• Oh, Crap!: When he is locked in a room when Isabella pulls a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on him.
• Out of Focus: Downplayed, but after escaping Grace Field and declaring his Character Development, Ray gradually has less to do, compared to Emma and Norman, even with Norman's 'death' and absence for much of the series. He's still more present and important than any kids outside of the Power Trio, but there's much less focus on his worldview and inner life than for the other two. The anime appears to be trying to avert this by skipping the Emma-centric Goldy Pond arc and having him work as a sharpshooter and debate ethics with her in a scene that in the manga comes much, much later.
• Photographic Memory: Implied to be a side effect of No Infantile Amnesia, considering he's known as "The Walking Encyclopedia". When recalling which books in the archives mention temples, he's not only able to remember the books but also, without even looking, their exact location on the shelves.
• Pragmatic Hero: Easily the most ruthless of the main characters, thanks to being The Spock. Even after he Took a Level in Kindness, he's still one of the few kids who has no qualms about killing human threats, and when Gillian wants to go back to save Yugo and Lucas on the off-chance they're still alive, he refuses, knowing that if they did die, then doing so would only make their sacrifice in vain.
• Psycho Supporter: Genuinely wishes to keep Emma and Norman alive, but is willing to throw pretty much all the other kids under the bus in order to do so. After the success of Emma's and Norman's plan to escape, he takes a level in idealism and largely drops this mindset, outside of thinking that he's willing to kill humans who threaten them.
• Shout-Out: Isabella named him after Ray Charles, who she was listening to on the radio when he first arrived at the house.
• Slasher Smile: He sports so, so many of these when Norman confronts him about being the spy, managing to look quite a bit like his mother, but stops after coming clean about it.
• The Spock: Moved solely by cold, hard reason and a desire to survive, directly opposing Emma. At least at first.
• The Strategist: Becomes more and more this trope as the series progresses. While noted from the first chapter as being the best tactician among the main trio (including by Norman, widely acknowledged as the overall smartest), it is actually subverted with regards to their escape, as being The Spock gives Ray several blind spots of his own (likewise see Locked Out of the Loop above for how this works out). Ray only fully comes into this role after the first arc, once Norman is removed from their team and he and Emma become the de facto leaders of the escapees. With his practical outlook and tendency to plan several steps ahead of everybody else, Ray is the one to think through Emma's ideas and turn them into something workable.
• Team Chef: He's seen cooking the most often of the Grace Field kids, with shades of being a Supreme Chef, as the other kids are seen at least once gushing over how good his cooking is.
• Took a Level in Kindness: After the escape succeeds, he admits to Emma that he's glad to see their siblings safe when he had previously thought bringing them would be a burden, and swears to help her protect them.
• Took a Level in Idealism: He starts the story as The Cynic, reasoning that since saving their younger siblings isn't worth it as they would be a burden, and it would have them all killed, it's best to only save Emma and Norman. After Emma's and Norman's plan succeeds, partly because Emma chose to entrust their younger siblings with vital tasks, he admits he was wrong and decides to embrace more Emma's idealistic point of view when it comes to their family, even though he remains more pragmatic and less idealistic than her.
• Undying Loyalty: Develops this for Emma over the course of the series. On a practical level, he admits he agrees with Norman's "kill all demons" plan and doesn't empathize with Emma's doubts, but he still explicitly decides to follow her in whatever path she chooses.
• Wild Card: What he presents himself as, largely because his position as the Double Agent and his six years of planning to escape means that he can easily screw over either Isabella or the kids depending on which side appeals to him more.

Don

Voiced by: Shinei Ueki (Japanese), Cedric L. Williams (English)

Age: 10 (12 as of Chapter 102)
ID: 16194

An energetic boy that is brought into the escape plan.

---

• Adaptation Expansion: In the anime adaption he's given a little more time with Conny, they're seen together with Gilda in their first on-screen appearance. Not only that, but Don appears to be very close and protective of her. Even getting emotional when Conny says goodbye to the other children.
• The Big Guy: Don is physically the largest and tallest of the Five-Man Band, and his major contributions to the team is his physical strength. When Ray tries his best to beat down a door to no avail, Don breaks in with a single shoulder check with a running start. At the end of the first arc Don is the one who chucks a line across the chasm and secures the escape route.
• Fatal Flaw: Impulsiveness. Norman comments on it at the beginning of the series — so he and the others really should've seen it coming when it nearly gets Don and Gilda into trouble.
• Lightning Bruiser: Don is One Head Taller than any of the other children, but as shown when he pickpocketed Isabella's key to her secret room in an instant by bumping into her and making it look like an accident, he's extremely quick.
• Locked Out of the Loop: He doesn't know what actually happens to all the children that leave the orphanage, so he mistakenly thinks that there's a way to find and save them. Averted in that he does eventually learn the truth after visiting mama's secret room, and starts throwing fists and the trio for lying.
• One Head Taller: Don dwarfs the rest of the children. Come the second major Time Skip, Ray has usurped him of this and he and Emma are shown to be about the same height, but he remains one of the tallest members, accoring to Chapter 113's cover.
• Percussive Pickpocket: He uses this trick to take Isabella's master key so that he and Gilda can get into the secret room and see what they can find out about Conny and the other children that left the orphanage.
• The Rival: He... tries to be this to Norman. Once the plot kicks in, though, it's quickly dropped.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Does this to Emma, Norman, and Ray after learning that they lied to him and Gilda about the fate of the kids that left the orphanage.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: During his breakdown after learning the truth of what happened to Conny and the other children, Don ends up slugging Norman and Ray in a fit of anger of them keeping the secret for him. While Don then grabs Emma by her shirt front to also punch her, he stops himself short of doing so, lets her go, and walks outside to calm himself down.

Gilda

Voiced by: Lynn (Japanese), Ryan Bartley (English)

Age: 10 (12 as of Chapter 102)
ID: 65194

A quiet girl that is brought into the escape plan alongside Don.

---

• Adaptational Dye-Job: She has black hair in the manga and anime, but becomes a brunette in the live action film.
• Anger Born of Worry: Gilda assumes a maternal role to the group when they travel. She's very patient, but the risks Emma continues to put herself in annoys Gilda, and she can be quite scary when telling Emma to knock it off.
• Bespectacled Cutie: She wears a big pair of round glasses and be a bit of a dork out of the team.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Like Don, she doesn't know about what really happened to Conny or the other children that have left the orphanage. She learns the truth alongside Don after visiting mama's secret room.
• Red Herring: She's emphasized shortly before the revelation that there's a mole in the kids feeding information to Isabella, and the anime even tries to make it seem blatantly obvious that it's Gilda. She was innocent, however, because it was Ray the whole time.
• Shrinking Violet: She's pretty shy and easily flustered.
• Silk Hiding Steel: While she comes off as more docile and timid compared to Emma, she shows surprising displays of nerve when she and her friend's safety is in jeopardy, such as when she lies to Krone to obscure what she's learned about the orphanage, and when she lets ETR3M8 know that she won't hesitate to hit the shelter self-destruct button if he lets Ray and Emma die.
• Team Mom: Along with Don and Anna, she's usually the one looking after the kids while Emma and co. are out doing their thing. In particular, she takes it upon herself to fuss over Emma, given what Emma's like.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: The Girly Girl to Emma's Tomboy. Her wish for when she leaves the orphanage is to wear more fashionable clothes, and after the escape, she focuses on looking after the other children and prefers skirts.
• Try Not to Die: To ensure that ETR3M8 will actually look out for Ray and Emma, she threatens him that she will blow up the shelter if he returns with neither of them alive from their journey to Goldy Pond.

Other Children

The various other kids at the orphanage who play a role in the story.

Conny

Voiced by: Ari Ozawa (Japanese), Jackie Lastra (credited as Jackie Lynn) (English)

Age: 6
ID: 48294

---

• Adaptation Expansion: Conny is given a little more time in the anime, showing how close she was to the children. She and Don were especially close, as she only began to cry when Don broke down when saying goodbye.
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Has a stuffed rabbit named Bernie that she carries with her everywhere. Ray specifically uses it to lead Emma and Norman to discover the orphanage's secret.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Discovering her corpse is what leads Emma and Norman to discover the orphanage's true nature.
• Sacrificial Lamb: She's sacrificed as early as can be, but it's made clear she's a beloved member of the "family" that everyone will miss, making her death all the more brutal.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The first death of the series is an innocent, kind child who wanted to grow up and be like her "Mom".
• Tragic Dream: Conny's dream was to become a mother and have children of her own, but sadly, her dream never come true after she was killed after being betrayed by Mom she looked up to.

Phil

Voiced by: Hiyori Kouno (Japanese), Amber Connor (English)

Age: 4 (6 as of chapter 100)
ID: 34394

---

• Adorably Precocious Child: Small, cute, and smarter than he seems.
• Ambiguously Brown: Similar to Don, he has a darker skin color than the rest of the kids.
• Ambiguous Situation: After he has a "talk" with Andrew, it is unknown if he's alive or killed by Andrew's hands. Chapter 175 finally reveals that Phil is alive and well, and has continued waiting for Emma and the others at Grace Field.
• Big Brother Instinct: After the initial escape, it's shown he's become this to Carol.
• Break the Cutie: After he's moved to a new farm, he has to watch one of his new siblings get shipped out. He even compares it to how Emma and Ray must've felt when Norman was shipped.
• Child Prodigy: He's four years old and yet he already suspected something was wrong with the orphanage, understands everything Emma tells him and what she expects from him once she and the older kids escape.
• Everyone Knows Morse: He's the one who points out the Morse codes in the books to Emma. In fairness, it was because he was reading a picture book involving Morse code.
• Hero-Worshipper: Clearly worships the ground Emma walks on; when both are living at Grace Field, he constantly wants to know where she is and play with her. When Emma leaves, he apparently starts writing letters to her. Could also be read as a Precocious Crush.
• Hidden Depths: Seems like just a cute (if relatively smart) little kid until he suggests Emma's escape team should plan to leave the younger kids behind for now, as he recognizes they would likely be a hindrance, along with revealing he suspected the orphanage's secret all along. From then on, it becomes clear that Phil has remarkable emotional maturity to go with his intelligence.
• Stepford Smiler: After moving to a new plantation, he's forced into becoming this as he has to watch his new siblings get shipped out.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: When Emma tells him the true nature of the farm, he takes it well, saying that it explains everything he'd seen so far and that he'd figured something was up a while ago. He then agrees to be left behind to take care of everyone four and under to wait for Emma's promised return.

Anna

Voiced by: Ai Kayano (Japanese), Brianna Knickerbocker (English)

Age: 9 (11 as of chapter 102)
IDs: 48194

---

• Dude Magnet: A kid version. After the Time Skip, several boys of the group are briefly shown to have a crush on her. When she suits up to raid a demon farm with Emma, Ray, and Hayato, and ties her hair into a ponytail, Nat, Thoma, Lani, Nigel, and a few other Goldy Pond boys are shown looking at her admiringly.
• Girlish Pigtails: Anna's hair is pulled back into two braids. She donates them to help fake Ray's death.
• MacGyvering: She's able to make a pretty good set of zip lines from things she managed to scrounge up around the house.
• Nice Girl: She's often seen taking care of the other children with a smile on her face.
• The Medic: She's very reliable when it comes to medical treatment for the other kids. So much so she's even more skilled than some of the older children from Goldy Pond.
• Team Mom: Anna is nicknamed "Babysitter" by ETR3M8.

Nat

Voiced by: Shizuka Ishigami (Japanese), Michelle Ruff (English)

Age: 9 (11 as of chapter 102)
IDs: 55294

---

• Nonstandard Character Design: In a Cast of Snowflakes, Nate stands out by his strong nose. So much so that it gets a few remarks at Nate's expense. Undeterred, he's pleased to be nicknamed Nose.
• The Piano Player: Although encountering one is rare, there are some moments where Nat will play on a nearby piano for the other children in times of peace or in imagine spots. Judging by the children's faces he seems to be quite skilled.

Thoma and Lani

Thoma voiced by: Mari Hino (Japanese), Cristina Valenzuela (English) (Thoma), Yuuko Mori (Japanese) Philece Sampler (under the alias Dana Hayes) (Lani) (English)

Age: 7 (9 as of Chapter 102)
IDs: 55294, 54294

---

• Those Two Guys: Never seen apart, even when the going gets tough.

Carol

Age: 2
ID: 53494
The newest arrival at Plantation 3, she proves to be a valuable source of information early on.

The Adults

The adults at the orphanage.

---

Tropes that apply to all of them:

• Being Evil Sucks: They may be in positions of power over the children at the farms, but they are still prisoners themselves, doing whatever they can to survive as long as possible in service to masters who only see them as tools and will have them killed at a moment's notice when they feel they are no longer of use. This allows Isaballa to convince them to rebel.
• Child Prodigy: Both Isabella and Krone fit this pattern, as becoming a "Mama" or a "Mama" candidate requires high intelligence to be considered for selection.
• Dead Man Switch: Krone has one embedded in her heart — if she leaves the boundaries of the orphanage, it'll kill her and let the demons know she's dead, and if she's killed, it will still let the demons know she's dead. Mamas like Isabella also have one, but the Grandmother doesn't.
• The Dog Bites Back: Isabella makes them all realize that no matter how well they do their jobs, they will always be seen as nothing more than tools who can be discarded in a moment's notice. This is enough for them to turn on their masters.
• Genius Bruiser: "Mama" candidates are picked from especially intelligent children, and are also put through extensive physical training.
• It's All About Me: More sympathetic than most as many of the Mama candidates are forced into hellish conditions and Social Darwinism, but a key part of being a Mom is one's own survival at the expense of everyone else. As shown in Krone's flashback, "Mama" candidates live in contant paranoia of being backstabbed due to the tight competition for the position. Until Isabella persuades them to turn against Peter and the demons.
• Living Lie Detector: Part of their training involves learning how to read people's reactions. Krone specifically points it out to Emma and Norman, telling them they need to get better at it.
• What You Are in the Dark: After she's promoted to Grandmother, Isabella convinces the Sisters the day before the rebellion's projected invasion of the farms to help them since they're all victims of the system. Though initially shocked and reluctant, they unanimously join in.

Isabella

Voiced by: Yuko Kaida (Japanese), Laura Post (English)
Live Actor: Keiko Kitagawa (film)

Age: 31
ID: 73584

The children's caretaker. They all call her "Mama".

---

• Affably Evil: Seemingly a kind motherly figure to the children, she's actually a cruel and ruthless matriarch if you try to cross her. It isn't until the end of the first arc do we learn that her kindness to the kids was genuine, just complicated by her thinking process and the circumstances.
• Arc Villain: Of the Orphanage/Escape arc. She does her best to dissuade Emma from planning her escape, including shipping off Norman.
• Bait-and-Switch: The reveal of Grandmother Isabella. At first, it seems that what happened to her was an Ignored Epiphany — she was ready to accept her death after having spent her whole life living in spite, only for Peter to drag her back into her old mindset and promoting her to Grandmother. And then we learn she only did it to persuade the Sisters to turn against Peter so that they could join the rebellion.
• Beneath the Mask: Underneath her kind and smiling facade, Isabella is a ruthless, cold woman who is determined to root out the children that know of Conny's death. However, beneath that she genuinely did love the children of the house, in a horribly twisted way. Only later on her deathbed does the twisting come undone.
• Big Damn Heroes: When it seems the rebellion has been cornered by Peter, she and the Sisters show up armed against him — something that Peter wasn't expecting.
• Broken Ace: Krone states that Isabella is not only the youngest to ever reach the position of Mother, but her farm has the best track record of shipping quality children. But deep down she is a Broken Bird who has lost so many people close to her while doing whatever she can to survive. After becoming a Mother, she found that one of the children she is raising to be killed is her own son.
• Broken Bird: Once a gentle, free-spirited girl and now the callous head of the Orphanage raising her 'children' to become meat for demons. Learning that her beloved childhood friend along with many other children were raised only to be killed, and being forced to give birth to a child, only to give that child to the farm system did a number on her as well... and realizing her son was Ray did a bigger one.
• The Bus Came Back: After disappearing from the series once the children escaped Grace Field, presumably being killed for letting it happen, Isabella returns for the final arc as a Grandmother once the Ratri clan takes the majority of the children hostage again.
• Death Seeker: After the kids escape, Isabella was hoping to be killed for her failure, believing she would finally be free. Peter had other plans.
• Defeat Means Respect: She is straight-up evil, right up until the children escape. A couple of Wham Shot flashbacks later, she quietly wishes them luck and seems hopeful for their future.
• Despair Event Horizon: Like the main trio, she once tried to escape from Grace Field. Once she got to the top of the wall and saw the cliff beyond it, however, she gave up.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Disregarding Krone, she was the first major obstacle the kids had to overcome. After they manage to escape her, and Grace Field, they arrive in the outside world where they will have to confront bigger threats and, ultimately, the people ruling over the farm system and the demon world.
• Dissonant Serenity: She is calm and smiling sweetly almost all the time, whether she leads innocent children to their death, breaks Emma's leg or threatens the main characters, all without breaking her persona.
• Distinguishing Mark: Isabella has a number tattoo just like the children, hidden underneath her collar. It foreshadows that the adults are also slaves of the farm system.
• The Dog Bites Back: After she's made "Grandma" by Peter, she decides she's had enough of being a prisoner with no chance of survival and gets the rest of the Sisters to revolt when the kids break back under the promise that they will no longer be prisoners.
• The Dragon: Is made out to be this to the Grandmother. Isabella doesn't have any official authority over any of the Mothers at the Grace Field House, but she is shown to be the one most trusted by her superiors. It's enough that even if someone like Sister Krone does have dirt on her, Isabella can have them removed with the stroke of a pen.
• Dragon with an Agenda: After the kids escape from Grace Field, she's given the choice between accepting death or becoming a Grandmother. Peter persuades her to take the latter, knowing that she's motivated by living for as long as she can, though he didn't expect her to use her position to turn the Sisters against him over a year later.
• Easily Forgiven: At the end of the manga, her children look on her fondly, Emma in particular. Isabella tries to maintain some distance between them in her Heel–Face Turn, expecting that Emma and the others will hate her. All-Loving Hero that Emma is, she sees Isabella as caught in the same cruel trap and still calls her Mama.
• Evil Matriarch:
  • To the kids, who love(d) her as their foster mother, she's the house's kind and loving mother figure... who is raising the kids to be demon food and tries to squash all rebellion against this.
  • Particularly prominent with Ray, as she tells him she would've liked to keep him by her side to the end — likely genuine in hindsight, given the reveal that both she and Ray know that Ray is her biological son — but doesn't stop her from ruining his and the others' lives.
• Evil Mentor: It has been implied that she is raising Emma to be a 'mama' herself. The implication becomes more overt in Chapter 31, where she makes the offer directly.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • In the past, Isabella had loved a boy named Leslie who lived with her in their farm. His death drives her to live for as long as she can. After Emma and her group escapes, she realizes how much she actually loves them, especially her biological son, Ray.
  • She is hurt when Emma declines the offer to become a "mama". She saw it as a chance for Emma to live a longer, better life and was disappointed to see her turn it away.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Had been raising Emma to become a "mama" in hopes it would allow Emma to live a longer, better life than she would have had otherwise. To her surprise, Emma declines the offer, choosing to die a child, as far as Isabella knew at least.
• Evil Orphanage Lady: She is actually raising her orphans as livestock for demons. She tries to subvert this by trying to be kind and caring so that they can at least live a happy life before they die, but she does have a streak of cruelty if she knows you're aware of what's up.
• Face Death with Dignity: When it seems that she's about to be punished with death for failing to stop the Grace Field kids from escaping, she accepts that after so long, she's going to die. She prepares for it, comforting herself with the idea that the kids will be able to take care of themselves and spite the demons, as well as that she'll be Together in Death with Leslie, until presumably Peter talks her back into her old way of thinking by offering her the position of Grandmother. Ultimately, she embraces this after a Heel–Face Turn and sacrificing herself to ward off a rogue demon.
• Generation Xerox: She is so much like her son Ray, but her spirit was crushed when she couldn't see a way to escape. Physical resemblance aside, both tried to live as long as they could within the farm system and found spiteful purpose in being "something the demons can't eat", both hastened the deaths of family members without showing remorse at the time only to feel the horror of it later, both were Death Seekers, both turned on the same system when they realized there really was another way.
• Genius Bruiser: She is an intellectual match for any of her kids. She's also gone through the physical training to the point it's simple for her to break a person's leg in a way that it would heal relatively quickly.
• Graceful Loser: Upon the children escaping, Isabella gracefully admits her loss and genuinely wishes Emma nothing but the best, even covering for their escape while devoting herself to caring for Phil and the other children in the meantime.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: She genuinely meant her Heel–Face Turn to be taking care of the kids left behind at Grace Field, but once she's promoted to Grandmother, she's not left much choice but to continue the harvest of the other farm kids. That said, the reason why she accepted her promotion as opposed to letting herself get executed is because she wanted to rally the Sisters against the Demons once the escapees return to liberate the farms, and she accepts the possibility that the kids may not forgive her.
• The Heavy: Although merely a servant to the demons, Isabella runs the orphanage the children are housed in and becomes their most personal foe as they try to escape from her. Her manipulative and calculating personality along with her ties to the protagonists make her a much more menacing threat than her higher ups.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: In hindsight, maybe allowing the three Child Prodigies among child prodigies to roam free after you are 100% certain they know about the demons wasn't the best idea, though she was confident they would give up after learning they live in a Closed Circle, like she did in the past. Cue Oh, Crap! when Ray attempts a Spiteful Suicide and another one when Norman and Emma come up with a better escape plan than she had as a child.
• Hope Crusher: Isabella's main strategy about dealing with kids learning the secret, instead of reporting them to the higher-ups, is to let them roam free and then ruining their escape preparations at the most inconvenient time, expecting them to despair and give up. After shipping Norman and breaking Emma's leg, she assumes they passed the Despair Event Horizon. They prove her wrong.
• I Did What I Had to Do:
  • When Ray asks her why would she bring him into a world only to be raised to be killed, Isabella answers that she did it so that she could survive.
  • After she reveals she and the Sisters have revolted against the Demons, she thinks to herself how the kids probably won't forgive her for everything she's done, and she understands that. Emma, realizing that she and the Sisters are not that different, forgives her and takes her back.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: We learn that she only accepted becoming Grandmother in order to persuade the Sisters to turn against the Demons once the time was right, but she does end up harvesting kids along the way to gain Peter's trust, and also helps "fix" Nat's fingers "back into place", right before her and the Sisters' true allegiance is revealed.
• Ignored Epiphany: When it seems she's about to be executed for failing to stop the kids' escape, she finally accepts that she will die and comes to peace that the kids will be okay and that she'll be reunited with Leslie. Then Peter comes along and persuaded her back into her original line of thinking — she doesn't want to die, and becoming Grandmother will achieve that. Subverted in that, it turns out she only did it to bide her time until she and the Sisters could join the rebellion.
• Kicked Upstairs: Two years after Emma and her group escaped the Grace Field House, Isabella was given An Offer You Can't Refuse to become a "Grandmother" of the farm, though she still answers to local demons and Peter Ratri, whom she hates.
• Leitmotif: "Isabella's Lullaby", the song that Leslie, the boy she liked, composed and that she sings to remind herself of him, and Ray learns while still in her womb.
• Let Them Die Happy: How she justifies raising children on the farm. At least compared to dying outside, they do get love and care, food and home, for as long as they stay in the orphanage. And while the farm's official reasoning is that free children develop better, she does genuinely love her children.
• The Lost Lenore: When she was young, she saw the boy she loved get shipped off. Learning about his death fuels her desire to live for as long as she can.
• Luke, You Are My Father: Isabella learns that Ray is her biological son when she hears him hum the lullaby she sang to him while pregnant. For a moment, she was utterly horrified.
• Mama Bear: After her Heel–Face Turn she betrays Peter and supports her children, along with other Sisters.
• Mirror Character: To the protagonists. Isabella once tried to escape as a child, getting as far as getting to the top of the wall. Unlike them, she was caught alone and gave up. Her will to fight back is rekindled when she sees her children escape.
• The Mole: She accepts her promotion to Grandmother, but it turns out she only did it so that she could persuade the Sisters to join her once the rebellion reached them.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Isabella makes a number of gambits based on how the main characters would react. Often times these pay off, but at the end of the first arc, Isabella ponders on some of her decisions. Namely, letting Norman see that there was a cliff and sending Krone away. Both of these actions were done to cement her hold, but they also played into her downfall, Norman planning around the cliff, and Krone not being there to provide backup, but in the end she shrugs it off not wanting to dwell on what-ifs.
• Parental Abandonment: As a Mama, the demons had her give birth to a child and take it to one of the farms. Isabella never thought she'd see her child again... turns out it's Ray, and she was forced to raise him as 'livestock'.
• The Power of Hate: After watching the person she loved get sent off to become food, Isabella decides to live the rest of her life for as long as she can to spite the demons from eating her.
• Prim and Proper Bun: Isabella holds her hair this way with a net, giving her a traditional, slightly strict motherly vibe. In the anime, she undoes it at the very end, letting her long hair fly free as her cold exterior breaks.
• Redemption Equals Death: She switches sides to help defeat Peter Ratri; and a few chapters later, she sacrifices her life to keep a demon from killing a child, dying surrounded by her children forgiving her for everything.
• So Proud of You: After the reunion, she is proud for Emma and other children who have grown up and kept fighting until now.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In the anime, she survives the final arc and makes it to the human world with everyone else.
• Starter Villain: The first major antagonist in the series. While she's arguably the most intelligent villain out of them, later antagonists proved far more dangerous, since Isabella was only trying to keep the children alive until they could be shipped out. Later villains are out to kill them on sight.
• Stepford Smiler: Isabella is certainly very good at pretending she's a kind and loving mother. Once we learn what she's really doing, her smiles becomes quite a lot more scary and sad.
• Taking the Bullet: Dies taking a claw from a stubborn demon aimed at one of the children.
• Thin Chin of Sin: Some low-shot angles make her chin appear unusually long and voluminous, somewhat highlighting that she has the high ground.
• Tragic Villain: All of Isabella's coldness is a natural reaction to the utter cruelty of the life forced on her, to the point she was expected to raise her own biological son to be slaughtered as food. She never had a chance to be anything else if she wanted to survive.
• Uncertain Doom: The color page for Chapter 72 shows that she's been replaced as Plantation 3's Mama, but what has happened to her is not specified. Chapter 162 reveals that she's been promoted to Grandmother, but it doesn't last long.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Before becoming the detached and sinister Mama, flashbacks show that Isabella was a bright, cheerful, and sprightly girl not unlike Emma.
• Villain Has a Point: She tells Norman, Emma, and Ray that the world outside Grace Field was dangerous and escaping would only lead to a life of pain before the kids died. She's never actually seen it, but, as the kids discover once they've escaped, she's absolutely correct.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Ray, Norman, and Emma acknowledge this as one of the biggest problems with the escape plan. It would be difficult to sway the children from the image of Isabella as the loving and caring maternal figure they've known all their lives. Even Norman and Emma struggled to reconcile what she was capable of when they first found out, as to them, Isabella is their only parent. Through Norman's and Emma's secret plan, the other kids turn to their side one by one.
• We Can Rule Together: Offers to Emma the position of a Mom, so she could continue to live and play with other children. Emma doesn't take it.
• Would Hurt a Child: Isabella is rarely stern with the children and creates obedience through her kind treatment of them. That said, as a caretaker, she is quite physically adept and if necessary will use force. To discourage their escape attempts, she shatters Emma's knee.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • Pulls this twice. First to Krone, who dies as a result, and then to Ray, who she merely locks in a room, so he can't interfere.
  • It seems she's about to be subject to this when the kids escape from her farm and she's finally ready to accept her death, until it turns out Grandma is the one who will be subject to this for failing to control her, and Peter Ratri offers to take her position.

Sister Krone

Voiced by: Nao Fujita (Japanese), Rebeka Thomas (English)
Live actor: Naomi Watanabe (film)

Age: 26
ID: 18684

A new caretaker that comes to the house some time after Emma, Norman, and Ray learn the truth.

---

• Alas, Poor Villain: She spends her last moments admiring the beautiful sky, thinking about all the events in her past that pushed and led her to this point, demonstrating that her ruthlessness was a product of trying to survive as best she could.
• Ambition Is Evil: She's not satisfied being just a Sister and plans to sabotage Isabella and her kids to take the former's place.
• The Chessmaster: She wants to manipulate Emma's group into helping her take down Isabella, and uses Don and Gilda as Unwitting Pawns to try confirming just who's in on the conspiracy. Fortunately, they prove to be savvy enough to not say too much.
• Creepy Doll: The anime gave her a tattered rag doll that she hugs, manhandles and even talks to. A flashback reveals that she's had it ever since her childhood at Grace Field; the sorry state it's in now serves to represent her loss of innocence after years of fighting in a merciless system.
• A Day in the Limelight: She is given a mini-arc to herself in the light novels (adapted into the second side-story one-shot), detailing her Mom training and how she became as ruthless as she was when she stepped into Gracefield.
• Distinguishing Mark: A numbered tattoo just like the children's and Isabella's is hidden underneath her collar.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Cecille rats out her escape attempt on the day they're supposed to make a break out of camp. However, this is an exploited trope; this was the push Cecille wanted so Krone can develop the hardened heart she needs to survive and pass her trials. The move successfully has Krone betray her in cold blood.
• Evil Is Hammy: While the anime slightly tones down her exaggerated expressions, it compensates by having Nao Fujita chew every bit of scenery available. In her room, she yells her entire Evil Plan out to a doll and goes through a few mood swings. It helps that some lines that were inner monologues in the manga are voiced in the anime.
• Evil Laugh: She's fond of these whenever she's especially amused, the best example being her call-out of Emma's group when they slip up and reveal that they were only asking her questions that they already knew the answers to.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Right before he death, it's made clear that she never had a chance of overthrowing Isabella. Isabella was already too deep in the good graces of her superiors, and she used that to dispose of Krone. Krone realized it soon before her death.
• Genius Bruiser: Like other adults who went through the training. She's intelligent, and she can shatter a tree into pieces with her bare hands.
• Gonk: Downplayed. While her design itself isn't ugly, she is constantly pulling terrifying facial expressions.
• Go Out with a Smile: Krone accepts her death with a wide smile and thoughts of spite to the other Mama's and Isabella. She may have been taken down, but she knew that the kids still had a chance to still screw with the farmer.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Is insanely jealous of how Isabella managed to become a "Mom" at a relatively young age, and plots to figure out how to take her place.
• Hidden Buxom: An extra comic revealed what she has huge breasts underneath her uniform, in addition to being ridiculously ripped.
• Hyper-Awareness: As befitting a former child prodigy. She can get a pretty good read on what people are thinking by watching their facial micro-expressions. This is how she knows that Emma's group already found out about the trackers — they didn't reach up to touch their ears when she mentioned that that was where the trackers were implanted.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: She wants to replace Isabella as a Mama, so she'll have the kids of the orphanage to herself. Though it's ambiguous if she really loves the kids and only wants to be in a position of authority.
• Meaningful Name: A "crone" is slang for an unsettling, often malicious old woman. While she's younger than most examples, she fits the other traits to a t. The way it's said also makes it sound like "kuro na", which is Japanese for black or "dark one", which is also fitting in a literal sense.
• Properly Paranoid: From when she first arrives at the Orphanage, Isabella tells her that she can receive the Rank Up she wants so badly if she follows orders and keeps the children in line. Krone would rather conspire against her, report the children, destroy Isabella's reputation, and become the Mom herself, instead of simply doing as she's told. As the arc goes on, Krone's paranoid resentment becomes easier to understand, as the Caretakers are always scheming and manipulating each other and what could seem a generous offer of help is just part of a greater plot. At the end of her arc, Krone is even given the promotion she wanted so much, and immediately sees it for the deadly deception it is.
• Psychotic Smirk: She gives out quite a lot of these.
• Race Lift: The film version of Krone is no longer a black woman, and instead is ethnically Japanese like her actor.
• Scars Are Forever: She sports a wicked scar down her chest as a result of the surgery that implanted her Dead Man Switch in her heart.
• Scary Black Man: A Rare Female Example. Krone is a black woman who is bigger and more physically imposing than Isabella, and her face is frequently drawn in a way to make her look scary.
• Secret-Keeper: In a twisted, self-serving example, she acts as this for Emma's group — she's keeping their escape plans secret from Isabella. At least until the children would outlive their usefulness to Krone as pawns to remove Isabella from her place.
• The Starscream: She was brought in to assist Isabella and help her keep an eye on the elder children until they are due to be "delivered". However, she has higher ambitions than just simply obeying and is only looking for a chance to take Isabella's place. Since Isabella has made herself too valuable, Krone had no chances of succeeding in usurping her in the first place, something she realizes before her death.
• Thanatos Gambit: She uses her death to cover up the fact that she's hidden William Minerva's pen for Emma and the others to find.
• Tragic Villain: Like Isabella, she is just another victim of the farm system, trying to do what she can to survive.
• Trapped in Villainy: Sister Krone reveals to the kids that she is as much a cog in the farm's machinations as they are. She can't step foot outside the farm without having her heart shutdown, so her wanting to dispose of Isabela is due to the fact that becoming a "Mother" is the best possible life she can live given her situation.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Her backstory reveals her to have been a spunky but well-meaning girl before Cecille's "betrayal".
• Villain's Dying Grace: When she realizes that Isabella has beaten her and that she will soon be killed, her final act before going to her doom is to hide William Minerva's pen where the children can find it, hoping that the vital clue will help the kids escape and bring an end to the evil farm system.
• Villain with Good Publicity: As soon as Krone arrives at the orphanage, she goes to win the trust of the younger kids by playing with them. She never gets to Isabella's level, but she did manage to install herself into the kids' consciousness as a benevolent figure.

Grandmother

Voiced by: Mami Koyama (Japanese), Philece Sampler (under the alias Dana Hayes) (English)

Age: 52
ID: Unknown

The superior to all of the caretakers, giving positions of "Mama" to humans worthy of the role.

---

• Asshole Victim: She may or may not have had the same Freudian Excuse as Krone and Isabella, but given the fact that she oversaw the farm system and gleefully had Krone killed, it can be tough to sympathize with her when she's shipped out to serve as demon meat as punishment for the mass escape from Grace Field.
• Dissonant Serenity: Has a rather calm smile while Sister Krone is being killed by demons.
• The Faceless: Her face is always obscured.
• Given Name Reveal: Chapter 165 reveals her name as Sarah.
• Karmic Death: For years, she's overseen a system raising children as cattle to be eaten. She ends up shipped out herself to serve as meat.
• Master-Apprentice Chain: As shown with Isabella's flashback, Sarah was her Mom and was the one to recommend her to Mom position after replacing the previous Grandmother. Isabella later tries to offer Emma the position of a Mom and manages to live to become a Grandmother herself.
• Not So Stoic: She drops her almost emotionless Dissonant Serenity after the kids have escaped, chastising Isabella's uncharacteristically poor performance.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: She is nearly visually identical to the previous Grandmother, Anne Marie, who she replaces around the time Isabella became a Mom.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • Does one to Sister Krone before having her killed.
  • Is subjected to this herself due to being held accountable for the escape from Grace Field, instead of Isabella who is still considered useful.

William Minerva (SPOILERS)

Voiced by: Yasuyuki Kase (Japanese), Greg Chun (English)

An author who has wrote several books in the house's library.

He is an associate of both the Mamas and the monsters, and seems to be on an equal footing with the latter. He's been leaving secret messages in his books with Morse Code.

He was once the head of the Ratri clan, which oversees that the Promise is maintained. However, he grew disgusted with the idea of sacrificing children, and decided to organize a way to help them escape before getting killed for the betrayal.

---

• Animal Motifs: Owls, which represent him in silhouette shots, and he uses as his Conspiracy Placement signature. The Ratri Clan are also shown to use owls as pets and later survailence drones, which are also used by his successor Norman.
• The Atoner: He's trying to atone for what his ancestors did by smuggling children into the human world.
• Big Good: Wanting to atone for his ancestors, William Minerva created a sanctuary for those who have escaped from their farms and tried to smuggle as many as he could into the human world. Not only did he leave messages explaining everything people had to do to free themselves, he died fighting for them.
• Cain and Abel: The Abel to Peter's Cain, and worked against him up until his death.
• Crazy-Prepared: His plan to smuggle out children involved planting plenty of clues in many books, building several bunkers with enough resources to be self-sufficient, including some that would only serve as decoys in case the Ratri clan learned about them, and creating a network of spies and agents in both worlds. The plan was so well-put that it continued to work long after his death.
• Dead All Along: The children following his clues thought that William Minerva would regroup with them in the shelter he built for them, but Emma learns in Goldy Pond's recording that he was discovered and most likely killed fifteen years prior to the events of the story. However, even after Emma learned from his recorded message that he was most likely assassinated by his clan, the story still left some hope that he may have survived by making it look like they Never Found the Body. Peter's flashback in Chapter 173 confirms that James didn't survive the purge of the Ratri Clan and truly was dead all along.
• Defector from Decadence: He has been warning children through his books for decades so one day some of them would learn of the farm system and somehow ruin it. Even more so that he's been going against what his family was doing for generations.
• Et Tu, Brute?: James's downfall comes from his brother revealing his plans to the higher-ups.
• Everyone Knows Morse: A factor he exploits to warn the children about their fate by adding specific patterns to the books she shipped in.
• The Faceless: Since the children don't know how he looks like, he gets represented as The Blank and a Sharp-Dressed Man with a cane. The audience finally get to see James' face in the chapter that reveals his connections to the demons.
• Hidden in Plain Sight:
  • The owl drawings in each book have a word in Morse Code written around them in a ring. When put together, they spell out a warning.
  • He also hides information of the outside world and its threats disguised as a storybook.
• Legacy Character: Norman takes his name and resources after the Time Skip.
• Meaningful Name:
  • It seems only natural that the person opposing Peter Ratri shares the same name with Captain James Hook.
  • He's named after Minerva, the goddess of wisdom in Classical Mythology, who also uses the same "The Owl of Minerva" as a symbol.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: He decided to go up against the Promise his own Clan maintained for centuries because he wanted to help the innocent children sacrificed by the farm system.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: The Reveal that Goldy Pond he led the children to in an illegal hunting ground run by demons briefly cast a doubt on his true intentions, and Lucas even feared that he might have intentionally left his clues to lead possible escapees into a trap. However, the recording Lucas and Emma find in the secret room under Goldy Pond confirms that he truly was what he appeared: a man trying to help the children of the farms escape. He simply was betrayed by his younger brother and couldn't do anything about it, and the hunting ground was established after his demise by coincidence.
• Walking Spoiler: His sheer existence implies there are people out there fighting against the monsters.

The "Demons"

The creatures that run the human farms.

---

The "Demons"

Monsters who run the human farms and worship a certain god. As it turns out, they have varying degrees of intelligence and authority − some can talk like humans, while others are mindless beasts.

---

• Ancient Conspiracy: Long ago, humans and "demons" made a Promise to keep both races from warring with each other, for as long as the "demons" are kept a steady supply of human livestock. The Grace Field children's goal is to make a new Promise that allows peace without using humans as food. Too bad that the humans who made the Promise are working with the "demons" and are doing everything they can to make sure that doesn't happen.
• Anti-Regeneration: There are different ways to circumvent their Healing Factor, such as shooting the core between their Extra Eyes with an arrow, continuous damage from More Dakka, leaving them without food, and swords with special Lambda chemical.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Subverted. While the first demons introduced to the readers are the monstrous overseers of Grace Field, and their aristocracy is indeed greedy and power-hungry, most of the demon populace is not shown to be inherently evil. The lower classes do eat humans, but it's due to a combination of needing human meat to remain sentient because their corrupt aristocrats kept for themselves the secret of keeping their intelligence without eating humans and regarding humans as cattle animals, much like how most humans do not see eating animals as a bad thing. In fact, Norman's plan to destroy their entire race is shown from the beginning as a bad thing precisely because they are Not Always Evil.
• Aristocrats Are Evil:
  • The most vicious demons kids encounter are part of the noble class and are shown to toy with humans and lower demons For the Evulz.
  • When the Ratri family, the "demon" royals and Five Regents heard of Mujika's clan's ability to give demons a permanent human form and intelligence, thus eliminating the need to rely on eating humans to keep themselves from devolving, they saw this as a threat to their power over the "demon" world, their money supply, the farm systems and the Promise they made. So, the royals and Five Regents devoured them all until only Mujika was the only one left. And they still kept the best quality human meat for themselves, even though they didn't even need to feed on human meat to stay sentient.
• The Assimilator: The "demons" used to be shapeless beings until they began to eat the plants and animals around them to evolve. When they ate humans, they gained their intelligence and ability to speak. And demons that eat other demons inherit their memories.
• Bishōnen Line: While "feral demons" are dangerous in their own right, the ability to think and strategize is more likely to be found the more humanoid a "demon" appears. For a good reason, since this is why they eat humans in the first place, and losing their humanoid form is seen as a sign their mind might start going away soon. Mujika, Sonju and the nobles look almost entirely human, due to sharing some of the former's special blood.
• Cute Monster Girl: Humanoid female demons, such as Mujika, are surprisingly cute and indistinguishable from human girls, the mask, and long fingers aside.
• Evil Is Bigger: Putting aside that the main characters are children, most demons are much taller than humans.
• Extra Eyes: They keep most of them hidden under masks and can have several of them anywhere on the head.
• Go for the Eye: Their Achilles' Heel is in a point surrounded by a cluster of eyes. Part of the reason why they wear masks.
• Healing Factor: The demons can regenerate from ludicrous injuries unless hit in the eye or any other Anti-Regeneration tactic is used.
• Hungry Menace: As Emma and the rest find out, demons have to eat humans or they'll go through a Face–Monster Turn. This isn't a problem for the royals, who have gained immunity to it long time ago and keep most of the meat to themselves, just for the taste.
• Logical Weakness: Demons gain their intelligence from feeding on humans, and without being fed they devolve back into monsters. Humans raised on mass-production farms with poor quality are increasingly failing to allow the demons to keep their intelligence, as those humans are braindead, the demons cannot gain the same intellectual boast they would from premium farm-raised humans.
• Long-Lived: It's not stated how long demons can live, but the prominently featured ones were alive before the Promise with humans was made, making them about a thousand years old.
• Monstrous Cannibalism:
  • If demons fail to consume enough human meat and revert to their feral state, they will eat almost anything, including their own families.
  • The "demon" royals and Five Regent Heads resorted to cannibalism by eating Mujika's clan to keep the permanent human intelligence trait to themselves.
• "Not So Different" Remark: From the narrative, in comparison to humans. Demons comprise the bulk of the antagonists in the series, but as it goes on, we see that they are still as capable of good as humans and many of them only did what they had to survive, and humans are just as capable of evil as demons.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: "Demons" is what humans call them, but how they call themselves is never revealed.
• Terminally Dependent Society: Without high-qulaity meat the demons would lose their intelligence and humanoid forms, so a famine or the destruction of the farms would spell the end of them as a society. This is exploited by royals, who have secretly gained immortality ages ago and prefer solving the overpopulation problem by letting most of the commoners either die or pay them handsomely for the meat.
• To Serve Man: They love to eat humans, and order human children to be raised as livestock. The farms such as Grace Field House, however, are premium farms meant to produce high-quality goods reserved for the elite. Most of the human meat is mass-produced in "factory farms" where the "cattle" doesn't see the light of day, is pretty much braindead and is kept alive by life support systems. It turns out the demons need to eat smart humans, otherwise they revert to feral creatures. The fastest this can happen is in a matter of six months.
• Starfish Language: They have their own language and writing that looks like a heavily inflated Kanji. Out of the kids, only Norman and Ayshe have learned it.
• Super-Strength: Even putting aside that demons are much larger than humans, they are also much stronger. A Mook from the Grace Field House sliced a massive tree with one swing of his massive blade, and demon nobles are even stronger than the soldiers.
• Tragic Monster: The more animal-like demons encountered throughout the series are demons who lost their intelligence from lack of human meat. Many of them ended up this way as the result of the uncaring nobility ensuring that the commoners would always be dependent on the meat they supplied. Once they turn feral, they will attack anything that looks like food, even their own families.
• You Are Who You Eat: To a lesser degree this is their nature in a nutshell: Their traits barring their Healing Factor all come from things they've eaten, and they can selectively eat animals to gain their traits, which is why so many types of "demons" exist. This is why not eating humans for too long costs them their intelligence and human form, as eating humans with well-developed brains was how they got those traits in the first place. Eating a demon who still has human-like traits can work as a stop-gap if humans aren't available, and they can also go as far as taking on the eaten demon's form and memories for a while.

Sonju and Mujika

Sonju voiced by: Shinichirou Kamio (Japanese), Daman Mills (English)

Mujika voiced by: Atsumi Tanezaki (Japanese), Lizzie Freeman (English)

Left: Sonju, right: Mujika.

A pair of demons who save Emma and co. while they're on the run from the plantation's pursuers. Their religion keeps them from eating humans.

---

• Affably Evil: Despite intending to hunt and eat any next generation the Grace Fields escapees might produce, Sonju is perfectly friendly to them and teaches them all the survival skills he can in the time they spend together. The kids, in turn, all consider him a loyal friend.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Played for Drama. At first, the kids think Mujika is another human, but when they see her six-toed monster foot peeking out from under her cloak, they realize the truth.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Mujika is easily one of the kindest "demons" in the setting and also the most conventionally cute, since she can nearly pass for a human girl around Emma's age.
• Big Good: Mujika handily served as this to many demons in the past and later takes up the role again, a messiah-like figure whose blood can cure them of their Horror Hunger. As it stands, she's one of the genuinely good major faction leader with the potential to bring about a peaceful solution, and is a good friend to Emma, which is why both the Norman's group and the Demon nobility want her and everyone who follows her dead.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Sonju is driven by a desire to destroy the system so that when humans return to being all "natural" creatures, he can devour them to his heart's content. Mujika is as nice as she looks, though.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Sonju has an odd sense of right and wrong. He wants a return to the days when demons hunted humans because it goes against his religion to eat humans raised on farms. Despite wanting a return to the days of violence between humans and demons, he also despises the way the system of farms has given the powerful elite a chokehold on the rest of their kind.
• Chekhov's Gunman: They briefly appear, rescue and treat the kids, and provide some worldly exposition to them soon after they escape Grace Field, then aren't seen again for quite some time. Towards the beginning of the final story arc, it turns out that their blood can be the key to demonkind no longer needing to eat humans.
• Cute Monster Girl: On top of being a Nice Girl, Mujika is the most human-looking demon we've seen so far, and can pass for human with a cloak on.
• Dramatic Irony: Sonju hopes that demons could return to hunting humans, but the kids never learn this and assume he is their friend.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Played With for Sonju. On the one hand he might be worse than the typical demon as there is no necessity for him to consume humans to retain sentience, but on the other he views the farm system as an offence to his religion and the source of all problems in modern demon society, like the Fantastic Caste System. The system gives power to a small group of nobles to gorge themselves and control the lower class demons where before it was a contest of strength rather than Nepotism.
  • In a straight example, Sonju considers his sister Legravalima to be an outright monster after all she's done as a queen.
• Evil Mentor: Sonju genuinely teaches Emma useful hunting skills she makes great usage of, is kind to her, and goes on to teach some of the other kids, but has the ulterior motive of creating a world where he can hunt and eat "natural" humans.
• Heel–Face Turn: Sonju initially only helped the children out because he wanted them to break the Promise, so he could start hunting humans again without violating his religion, which says that demons must hunt their food in the wild. The kids came from the farm, so they're off-limits in Sonju's mind. While he helped out the children during the attack on the capital, it was mostly due to his loyalty towards Mujika and to get revenge against Legravalima. Afterwards, Sonju briefly considers killing the kids to prevent the Promise from coming true. However, after Emma hugs Sonju, and thanks him and Mujika for showing her that not all demons are evil, Sonju lets go of his plans and decides to help stabilise the demon capital.
• Heel–Faith Turn: Their religion forbids them from eating humans, so they have no problem sheltering the kids. Played With Sonju at least, since he lied to the kids to gain their trust. Their religion actually requires them to hunt their prey, which means the farm kids are entirely off-limits. Not because they're human, but because they were born in captivity and raised for food. Turns out, Sonju helped them purely because they might bring "natural" humans back into his world that he could then hunt and eat.
• Hero with Bad Publicity:
  • Due to royals' Propaganda Machine about Mujika having "evil blood that causes diseases", they aren't really welcome in the demon society, on top of them being Vegetarian Vampire heretics.
  • After Queen Legravalima's death, Peter Ratri accuses them of terrorism and Regicide, while keeping the details a secret, making the civilian demons turn on them and the demons they've saved.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Sonju rather tall, though not as much as other demons, while Mujika is about the height of a kid. They are always seen together and Sonju mostly acts as Mujika's bodyguard.
• Irony: When the two first heard about the kids from Grace Fields escaping, Mujika suggested turning them in for a reward while Sonju wanted to rescue them. After spending some time with them, Mujika got far more attached to the kids and wanted to end demons eating humans, while Sonju regains the hopes of returning to the days of demons hunting humans.
• Lightning Bruiser: Sonju can move so fast that even other demons can't see him as he's a member fo the royal family.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Mujika doesn't need to feed on humans to retain her intelligence, and her blood allows demons who consume it to share the gift. Sonju believes the gods the demons formerly worshiped sent her as a savior. It's implied to be a rare mutation, but everyone treats her as a Messianic Archetype and the demon God is indeed unsatisfied with the current queen.
• Messianic Archetype: Mujika is born with a unique condition - she doesn't need to feed on humans to retain her intelligence, and her blood allows demons who consume it to share the gift. In the eyes of her believers, she's hailed as the savior of their kind, though the story never clarifies if Mujika's condition is a divine gift or a natural mutation. Ultimately, whether it was destiny or chance, Mujika chooses to embrace her gift - believing she was born to allow her species to evolve.
• Nominal Hero: Aside from his religion forbidding him from eating humans that were raised in captivity, Sonju only seeks the destruction of the current farming system because it keeps humans as an endangered species... meaning that until the current order is destroyed, the human population will never increase to the point where he can hunt them sustainably.
• Pragmatic Hero: Mujika is genuine in her desire to help humans, but originally planned to give the kids back to the farms for a monetary reward from the farm-related demons, Sonju stopping her for his more villainous scheme is one of the reasons she didn't.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Helping the protagonists doesn't mean Sonju doesn't want to eat humans. He just is faith simply compels him to only eat live-caught prey that he's hunted down himself in the wild, which is impossible and unsustainable under the current system.
• Really Royalty Reveal: Sonju is a younger brother of Queen Legravalima alongside Leuvis.
• Really 700 Years Old: Sonju is older than the Promise made between men and "demons", which is why he remembers the taste of non-cattle humans. This raises a lot of questions, as Norman later reveals that "demons" who don't eat humans in six months revert to a savage state, which clues Emma and Ray in that they can Take a Third Option regarding the demons' hunger. As it turns out, Mujika is just as old and has a unique blood that can preserve demons' intelligence and form, and is inheritable, which was used by the royals who killed her clan to keep the immortal blood for themselves.
• Red Herring: Sonju being a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing gives the hint he might become an antagonist in the future, but he remains an ally when The Bus Came Back. Ultimately, his better side wins out and prevents him from turning on the kids.
• Religious Bruiser: Sonju takes his beliefs very seriously. The reason why he refuses to eat humans? That's because his religion (which he claimed to be the "original faith") forbids its adherents from eating anything that they don't hunt themselves. He's also one of the stronger warrior among the "demons" we saw, probably because he's also a royalty.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: Despite being a demon who finds the Grace Field kids in the wild, Mujika wants to help them. Mujika is genuinely as nice, helpful, and friendly as she appears to be. Sonju is a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing at first, but his loyalty to Mujika and growing affection for the Grace Field humans makes him pull a Heel–Face Turn and also become this.
• Slasher Smile: Sonju can sport a frightening grin with those needle sharp teeth. Especially when he gloats about one day being able to eat humans again.
• Token Heroic Orc: The two are the only demons that the kids have found that don't eat humans, because their religion that the rest of the demons don't follow forbids them from eating "livestock" humans. Subverted with Sonju who wants to hunt humans born in the wild again. Mujika, meanwhile, initially wanted to lead the kids back to Grace Field, but ultimately grows fond of them and plays this straight.
• Undying Loyalty: Sonju is completely loyal to Mujika and has served as her bodyguard ever since their respective exile. Any perceived threat to Mujika's safety causes him to show off just how dangerous he is. He even agrees to help the children get to the demon capital, despite his own sinister plans, purely because it's what Mujika wants to do.
• White Sheep: Sonju is this in regards to the rest of his family when we learn he's the queen's little brother, and by extension related to Archduke Leuvis. He initially comes across as more of a "light gray sheep" but he gets lighter when he berates his own "stupidity" of actively helping Emma while knowing her new Promise goes against his desire to go back to hunting humans for real (which will likely mean he will never get to eat humans again) on top of his loyalty to Mujika.

Archduke Leuvis

— She was going for the eye, which means she knows where to hit and get us killed. Even in a hopeless situation, like that, she dared to jump in with a single ax, with no hesitation, with the eyes of a killer. Magnificent! Perhaps I can finally find some entertainment.

An archduke who hunts children for the thrill of life and death. A guest at Lord Bayon's Goldy Pond hunting ground and one of his friends.

---

• Adapted Out: He doesn't appear in the anime, due to the Goldy Pond arc being skipped over.
• Aerith and Bob: Has the most human name out of all the demons.
• Affably Evil: He's a bloodthirsty demon and unrepentant murderer, but his politeness, friendliness, and goodwill are completely genuine. He's apt to have a friendly chat before he engages you in a duel to the death.
• Anti-Regeneration: Emma and the other kids at Goldy Pond realize that Leuvis, and by extension all the other demons, has a Healing Factor limited by how much energy he has. They defeat him by blinding him to prevent him from defending himself, then shoot so much ammunition at him that his ability to heal is massively weakened.
• Arc Villain: Of the "Goldy Pond" alongside Bayon, and stronger of the two. Seeking nothing but Hunting the Most Dangerous Game, he finds a worthy match in Emma and tells Theo to say he's challenged her after slaughtering his siblings.
  Leuvis: You're my prey now. You will never get away.
• Blood Knight: Leuvis is obsessed with the "dance of carnage" and only truly enjoys engaging prey when he can fight with his life on the line.
• Bullet Catch: When the children open fire on him with machine guns, he's seen holding a lot of bullets in each hand. Not even a single bullet hit him.
• Combat Pragmatist: He doesn't carry any weapons, but he will use any bit of terrain around him to his advantage.
• Cruel Mercy: Seems to be his forte. He appears to have a habit of letting children go after he's had his fill, then lets Theo survive that day's hunt at the cost of his siblings getting killed right in front of him. Lucas's flashback might also indicate he only ripped Lucas's arm off before letting him crawl away and hide.
• Dented Iron: He's still a One-Man Army among one-man-armies, but the centuries haven't been kind to his body regardless, in fact, when he was seen in a flashback he was much more muscular. This is the direct source of his greatest weakness.
• The Dreaded: Out of all the hunters, Leuvis is considered the most dangerous to the residents of Goldy Pond and the final goal they need to cross in order to escape. To the point that the other children feel the need to take out the other hunters first before ganging up on Leuvis, and that he requires two shots from their special bullets when all the other hunters only required one.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • He was genuinely caught off guard by Emma surviving his attack and everyone else at the Goldy Pond defeating his companions.
  • He also performed this on Peter Ratri as no one expected him to be Not Quite Dead and save Sonju and Mujika from execution, nor him reveal that Mujika can save everyone from being dependent on human meat.
• Even Evil Has Standards: He confesses that he didn't support his sister's actions, but he couldn't do anything about them.
• Evil Virtues: Bravery, empathy, and humility; he's not only far braver than the other Goldy Pond hunters, he quickly assumes that he needs to view Emma as someone as skilled as he is, and he's thrilled a human is able to match him, as opposed to the arrogance of other demons.
• Face Death with Dignity: When he's defeated, he reacts to his defeat with complete dignity, praising the humans for their ingenuity in besting him, glad to die as he lived, doing what he loved. Subverted in that he didn't actually die and saves Mujika from the mob in the capital.
• Faux Affably Evil: He acts esteemed and calm when engaging Emma in casual conversation after they finally meet, and is borderline enthusiastic to play a "game" with his new Worthy Opponent. Played With when he is beaten, however, he indicates that his praise was entirely genuine and is glad to have lost to such worthy prey, indicating he may have some Blue-and-Orange Morality going on.
• Flash Step: He is capable of moving behind Emma before she even realizes he's moved.
• Genius Bruiser: Sees through Emma's attempts to stall for time during the hunt. He goes along with it anyway in hopes of making things more amusing, and his combat strength shows he's not overconfident.
• Graceful Loser: Accepts his defeat when he's beaten, in fact states that humans being capable enough to defeat him is the reason he loves them.
• The Heavy: Despite him being played up as the main threat of the arc, and legitimately being the strongest hunter and final threat the characters face before its conclusion, at the end of the day, Leuvis is just another hunter in Goldy Pond; Bayon is the source of the problem itself and the one with a slight connection to the overall plot.
• Heel–Face Turn: Sort of. He was always opposed to the farm system, but initially he expressed that by illicitly hunting humans for sport, making him the main antagonist for an entire arc. After the royal family is slaughtered, he decides to step up and fulfill his responsibilities as a noble by saving Sonju and Mujika, supporting Mujika as queen, and ending the farm system entirely, which is the main reason the series has a happy ending.
• Hope Crusher: It's revealed that back before the Promise, Leuvis massacred an entire battalion of humans by himself, leaving Julius Ratri as the Sole Survivor. This act of slaughter was what convinced Ratri that defeating the "demons" was impossible and led him to forging the Promise.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: He only feels alive hunting humans who are unrestrained and have every intent to kill him and do whatever they can to achieve it.
• Implacable Man: Even with his weakened Healing Factor, it takes a ludicrous amount of pain to finally bring him down. He gets shot repeatedly, and has to be riddled with bullets before he's weakened enough for a shot to his core.
• Lightning Bruiser: He's fast enough to Flash Step and catch bullets, but is also strong enough to collapse a house with his bare hands.
• The Man in Front of the Man: Leuvis and Bayon treat each other as equals, but Bayon comes off as the one who has the authority in the hunts. Later it turns out that Leuvis is actually part of the royal family and is the one with the real power, he just has no interest in using it or politics.
• Mask of Sanity: When his mask breaks, Leuvis' bloodlust turns him into a psychotic maniac, and he starts laughing as he realizes his Worthy Opponent has finally arrived.
• Mysterious Past: Snippets of his memories flash by as he (seemingly) dies, showing him knowing Mujika and Sonju. Turns out he also Really 700 Years Old and is responsible for the Promise being made.
• Never Found the Body: As Goldy Pond is self-detonating, Leuvis' corpse is mysteriously gone; leaving only his hat and a puddle of blood behind. He returns in the final arc and sides with Mujika.
• Not Quite Dead: He comes Back from the Dead and escapes Goldy Pond before its destruction. As the Queen's brother, he has the same mutation that gives him the second core, something even he didn't know of.
• One-Man Army: Leuvis is infamous for being one of the oldest and most powerful "demons" in the world to the point that the entire rebellion together has to team up to take him down after he was already suffering from old age. And in his prime, he massacred an entire battalion of human soldiers by himself, an act which convinced Julius Ratri that defeating the "demons" was impossible.
• Parrot Pet Position: Has a tiny primate demon pet riding upon his shoulder.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: He's the highest ranking demon taking part in Bayon's hunts, and by far the strongest.
• Really Royalty Reveal: Is later revealed to be the queen's younger brother, though he stayed away from politics.
• Slasher Smile: Leuvis lets loose with one once he finds a Worthy Opponent in Emma, and the thought of finding and killing her brings a smile to his face.
• Spell My Name With An S: The Viz translation spells his name as "Leuvis." In other translations, his name is "Lewis".
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: He met Julius Ratri and intimidated him by killing his men. This made Julius seek The One to make the Promise with him, which kickstarted the rest of the series. In a sense, it's also Leuvis's own fault for the establishment of the farm system he dispises.
• Victory Is Boring: Unlike some of the other hunters, such as Luce, who enjoy hunting the defenseless children, Leuvis is bored with the relative ease at which he can kill them, so most of the time he doesn't even bother. It's only when the thrill of meeting someone with the will to kill him, like Emma, arrives that he decides to take the hunting game seriously.
• Villain Respect:
  • What makes him such a threat to Emma is that he genuinely looks at Emma as an intellectual equal and a mortal threat to himself; he doesn't underestimate her in the slightest.
  • It's implied that this respect is exactly why he made the decision to save Sonju and Mujika from execution, take his place as leader of the demons, and use their blood to save all present demons from needing to consume human flesh.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • Is looking for a human that is one, and believes that he's found one in Emma. He also considered ETR3M8 one a long time ago.
  • He considers the entire rebellion force this when he realizes that all of his "comrades" are dead. Needless to say, he is thrilled.
• You Are in Command Now: By the virtue of being the younger brother of the fallen Queen Legravalima, Leuvis' seizes control of the demonic government upon his return, though he passes it on to Mujika as a favor to her and to avoid being involved with politics.

Lord Bayon

The owner and administrator of Goldy Pond A08-63, and manager of the Grand Valley plantation. He buys children from Grand Valley plantation to use them as game for his illegal hunting.

---

• Adapted Out: Since the anime removes the Goldy Pond arc from the story, Bayon (along with Leuvis and the poachers) never appear.
• Arc Villain: Alongside Leuvis for the "Goldy Pond" arc, considering he's the owner of the titular area in the first place.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: An upper-class demon, and apparently even more morally bankrupt than most of them. His secret hunting ground is kept secret for a reason.
• Ax-Crazy: He finds human meat to be tasteless unless there is a hunt where he kills the human first. He initially tried to keep it as a rare treat he would indulge in once a month, but his loss of control eventually led to him doing it every three days.
• Blood Knight: Of a different sort to Leuvis. Bayon originally tried to honor the Promise to not hunt humans, but found the cattle-grown food dry and tasteless. It was only after hunting his first human in a millennium that he found his food tasteful again and decided to start his secret hunting grounds, not caring whether his prey could fight back. It's only in his final moments when he is close to death that he rediscovers the joy in hunting prey that actually fights back and can potentially kill him, and laughs manically.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Like all demons, but his mask incorporates two dark pits side by side which resemble more conventional eyeholes, making close shots where his primary eyes are emphasized that much more striking.
• Fatal Flaw: Gluttony. At first, he just limited private hunts to his own leisure, and only very sparsely. But the children he hunted rather than received tasted so delicious, he indulged himself and made them grand events and made them more and more frequent. Shipping in so many children would lead to the resistance forming, and therefore the source of his downfall.
• Genius Bruiser: His not as clever as Leuvis, but he's nonetheless a crafty hunter. This is on top of his strength from one of the Five Regent Families.
• Hate Sink: While he's not a coward like Luce, he's still a bloodthirsty murderer who can't enjoy life without hunting and killing his food before eating it. He initially tried to limit his hunts to once a month, but he kept increasing the rate because the joy of killing his prey before eating it was too much for him. Going by his indifference to Luce's death, he doesn't actually care about the demons who hunt with him, either.
• Implacable Man: Bayon survives getting shot in the face multiple times by the Goldy Pond residents and keeps on attacking them. Nigel even wonders if Bayon is immortal.
• Knight of Cerebus: The series was dark already, but the demons encountered previously appeared to just be Punch-Clock Villains and the human antagonists were sympathetic characters. Bayon is the first villain who is truly evil, being unable to be content with life unless he's hunting and killing his food. His appearance coincides with The Reveal that William Minerva was Dead All Along and that there are humans who work to uphold the Promise with demons.
• Last Stand: Bayon's last instinct when cornered, shot, and bleeding? Go wild and try to take as many people with him as he can.
• Laughing Mad: Lets loose with insane laughter after his mask is shot off and he has been (non-fatally) wounded in the face, due to rediscovering the joy of fighting prey that fights back.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: To satisfy his desire for a hunt he kept bringing in increasing numbers of humans, and he limited the number killed each hunt to keep his supply from running out. This eventually leads to the death of him and the other demon poachers because the number of children and leftover weapons was enough to form the resistance.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: He is the head of one of the Five Regent Families and is easily one of the most powerful demons in the series.
• Taking You with Me: When he is finally cornered by the members of Goldy Pond inside William Minerva's secret underground tunnels, he attempts to kill as many of them as he can including stabbing Lucas with his arm. While he doesn't kill Lucas, he does manage to get Oliver when he jumps in front of Lucas to save his life.

Nouma and Nous

A duo of hunter twins participating in Goldy Pond.

---

• Creepy Twins: They are relatives of the Rengent Head Noum, and are protective of each other. Aside the size of some body parts, they look exactly identical.
• Death Wail: Nous lets loose with one after Nouma is killed by snipers.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Nous is horrified when Nouma is sniped.
• Genre Savvy: Both of them intentionally set off the tripwires the kids put up with their spears to see what happens. This, of course, was part of the kids' plans.
• Hartman Hips: Nouma. If it wasn't for this and... other assets, she and Nous would look pretty much identical.
• Impossible Hourglass Figure: Nouma looks very feminine for otherwise a pitch-black figure. Her waist looks extremely thin in some spots compared to her hips and chest.
• Ironic Hell: Ironic pre-hell. When Nouma dies, Nous goes crazy from the experience of losing her the same way the children lost all the people he'd killed. One of the older kids even lampshades his sudden ability to feel empathy and grief for a lost loved one.
• Meaningful Name: "Nous" is French for "we". After devouring/absorbing Nouma, he becomes stronger and faster, while having both Nous and Nouma's consciousnesses.
• Moral Myopia: They hunt and kill humans for fun, and Nouma is enraged when Nous is killed. The kids even lampshade the selfishness of it.
• Spanner in the Works: Nous devouring and gaining extra power from Nouma's corpse allows him to wreck basically everyone who was fighting him besides Violet, making the future fight against Leuvis significantly harder than it already was going to be.

Luce

A boisterous hunter participating in Goldy Pond.

---

• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Once he gets captured, Luce tries to stall for time until another Demon comes to save him. When that fails to work, he desperately tries to reason his way out before getting blasted to death.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Of all hunters at Goldy Pond, Luce is considered the weakest of the bunch, to the point that his plan to kill off the Demonic attendants, which every other hunter could see through, completely blindsides him. The children don't even bother to implement their secret weapon against him, and his allies barely seem surprised at all at the indication he might have died.
• Boisterous Weakling: He sure is loud about how the children can't defeat him, but that just hides his pathetic weakness when he doesn't have an army of lackeys to protect him.
• Dirty Coward: Luce enjoys hunting down the defenseless residents of Goldy Pond, but whenever he encounters the least bit of resistance he loses all composure. After his attendants are killed, he runs away from the children in fear, and then tries to bluff his way out of being killed before begging to be spared. Every other demon in his party resolves to go fight with their lives on the line.
• Evil Is Petty: Loses it when Emma throws an ax and nearly kills him, declaring vengeance on kids for trying to harm such an important figure as himself. Other demons don't even take him seriously.
• Hate Sink: For the Goldy Pond arc. Just like all the other demons of Goldy Pond, his favorite hobby is to hunt children. Contrary to them, he's a weak Dirty Coward who enjoys hunting defenseless preys precisely because they can't fight back. All the other demons were thrilled to realize the children of Goldy Pond had mounted a resistance and went down fighting. He, on the other hand, tries to run away and pathetically begs for his life when cornered. Each scene focusing on him ultimately serves one purpose: to make readers cheer when he finally receives his Karmic Death.
• Healing Factor: Well, all demons have this, but out of the Goldy Pond's poachers, the only thing he has a forte with over others is the fastest regeneration due to his relative youth.
• Karmic Death: He dies a very Undignified Death, shot in the head while begging for his life, at the hands of two children he tormented in the past, after they made him run and feel as powerless as he made them.
• Powers Do the Fighting: Luce relies entirely on his attendants, whom are made from his own body, to do the heavy lifting for him. This comes back to bite him in the ass once his attendants are killed, as he has no way left to defend himself, unlike the rest of the hunters.
• Spoiled Brat: Is a member of demon royalty and likes to flash his influence around. Before he is killed, he tries to talk his way out of death by telling the children that his father won't stand for his death before he is promptly shot to death.
• Warm-Up Boss: The first hunter killed at Goldy Pond, and he puts up the least resistance, but he still introduces kids to how tought the sapient demons can be.

Lord Geelen

A former noble and the disgraced former leader of one of the five royal families. Geelen and his clan were ostracised from the royal capital on false charges and left to devolve into mindless beasts. They have since waited for the day they can get their revenge on the royal families.

---

• Alas, Poor Villain: He did cruel things after his Face–Heel Turn and he had planned from the start to betray second William Minerva and the other humans, but his death is still shown into a tragic light. He's about to deal Legravalima the finishing blow, in a panel featuring him surrounded by all his companions and friends who gave their lives for his cause... Only for Legravalima to destroy his body in one blow, then to cruelly taunt him before dealing the finishing blow.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: As part of a joint operation with the second William Minerva's forces, Geelen and his clan massacre and consume the various members of the royal families, including their leaders. While Emma and the others want to save the "demons", considering how most of the families are sociopaths or corrupt power-hungry aristocrats, it's probably a good thing they are being massacred.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Back during his days as a royal head, Geelen was renown for being one of the most beautiful "demons" as well as one of the most kind. It's pretty fitting that, once he got ostracised and mutated into his more bestial appearance, he became much more ruthless.
• Best Served Cold: Geelen and his clan waited seven hundred years before being approached by the second William Minerva to help invade the royal capital and take revenge on the nobles that cast him out.
• Bishōnen Line: Geelen was described as being beautiful and noble when he was still the head of one of the families, but seven hundred years of starvation has mutated him into a more bestial form. After consuming the head of the recently decapitated Lord Pupo, he transforms into an in-between state from his original beautiful and then current monstrous appearances.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Breaks the queen's mask when she's restrained, only for her to break free and slice him to pieces.
• Dead Person Impersonation: For the planned attack on the capital during the Tifari Geelen had his men ambush the royal families and consume their bodies in order to gain their appearances, scents, and masks. During the invasion, its shown that, with the exception of the Five Heads and the Queen, all of the royal families had been consumed by the Geelen clan with nobody noticing.
• Face–Heel Turn: Legravalima comments that he's become a lot less pure than what he used to be, notably with his willingness to kill demon children as part of his Roaring Rampage of Revenge. He's not hiding that he only agreed on Enemy Mine with the second William Minerva, so he could become the King himself.
• Frame-Up: Geelan and his clan were framed by his former bodyguard Dozza for conspiring against the royal capital by teaming up with the "evil blooded" clan. However, as Duke Ivelk reveals to Geelen, the rest of the nobles were well aware that Dozza framed him, they just used the pretence to get rid of someone they found to be inconvenient.
• Freudian Excuse: Geelen was once a noble and honourable "demon" who tried to find peaceful solutions to problems and wished to help the masses. However, being ostracised by his former peers and left to rot in the wastelands as punishment for his noble intentions, watching his loved ones and closest allies degenerate and eat each other, and then having his former subjects come to him to willingly offer themselves to him when he was a mindless "demon", have turned Geelen into a vicious brute who will do whatever it takes to achieve revenge.
• Hypocrite: Played rather tragically during his fight with the Queen. After delivering an utter Curbstomp Battle to Geelen, the Queen decides to twist the knife further by mocking Geelan for abandoning all of his ideals given that he slaughtered the children of the Regent Families.
• Token Good Teammate: Seven hundred years prior, Geelen was the only member of the royal families who advocated for the good of the lower masses and tried to convince his fellow heads to provide the people with high quality meat from their stocks to prevent starvation. This was eventually deconstructed as the rest of the Decadent Court got sick of Geelen's noble attitude and eventually ostracised him the first chance they had, since they considered his morals to be inconvenient.
• Universally Beloved Leader: His clan has the utmost devotion to him, from being willing to fall in the wild with him, to outright offering their own bodies for Geelen to eat to have him maintain his form and sapience.
• Villain Team-Up: In order to get their revenge against the noble families, Geelen and his clan agree to team up with the second William Minerva and his forces in order to invade the royal capital on the day of the Tifari. Notably, neither side trusts the other and both "William" and Geelen plan to betray the other once their goals no longer mutually align.
• The Worf Effect: He and his followers managed to kill the Five Regent Families, but are slaughtered by the Queen to demonstrate her power. The most Geelen can accomplish is breaking her mask.
• Would Hurt a Child: He has the children of the Five Regent Families murdered alongside them.

The Five Regent Families

The five royal "demon" families in charge of the world's politics and economy.

---

• Aristocrats Are Evil: To varying degrees, but, with the exception of Lord Bayon's son (who succeeded his father after his death in Goldy Pond), they mostly care about keeping their powers, not about the common folks. Their entire motivation for setting up the farm system wasn't to stop humans from killing demons, but because it would make the demon populace easier to control by ensuring the nobility would have control of the only source of human meat.
• Broken Pedestal: New Lord Bayon's admiration for the former Lord Geelen goes out the window once Geelen invades during the Tifari and reveals that he and his followers have consumed the royal families in order to ambush the heads. Young Bayon dies by the hands of his former idol.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Duke Ivelk is shown in a meeting with various other "demons" discussing the upcoming Tifari during the introductory arc, long before he is eventually revealed to be a member of the Five Regent Families.
• Corrupt Politician: They care more about their money and for their control over the world, so when they heard of Mujika's clan's ability to spread their permanent human intelligence to lower class "demons", they ate her clan so that they would be the only "demons" to have that ability and could give birth to permanently human-like "demons". In fact, in the past Duke Ivelk mocked the noble Lord Geelen for believing that the court and Queen were anything but this and got rid of him the first chance they had, despite the obvious Frame-Up, because his noble attitude got in the others' way. Only the current Lord Bayon is an exception, being a late addition.
• Cute Monster Girl: Lady Noum is tiny compared to the rest and with a bird-like attire could be mistaken for a human child.
• Dead Guy Junior: The current Lord Bayon is the son of the deceased owner of Goldy Pond.
• Decadent Court: They are the rulers of the demon world who wouldn't mind backstabbing each other if they get more meat share, and with an exception, are shown to be morally corrupt even by the demon standards.
• Despotism Justifies the Means: Julius Ratri came up with the Promise to achieve peace and prevent humans from being hunted and killed by demons. The Regent Families agreed to the deal, not because they cared about their own kind being killed by humans, but because the creation of human farms would give them control of the supply of human meat to the rest of their kind, ensuring that nobody could challenge their rule.
• The Dragon: Duke Ivelk is called the Prime Minister of the demon government and the only one of the royals actively involved in inner politics. The Queen, Norman, and Emma believe him to be such an important asset, the society would effectively be destroyed if he dies. Which he and Queen do, creating a brief Succession Crisis between the Ratri clan and Sonju.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: The Five Regent Families and the rest of the court are slaughtered by the combined assaults of Geelen and Norman's forces, culminating with Norman chopping off panicking Ivelk's head. Though, it turns out the Queen is Not Quite Dead.
• Evil Is Petty: With a few exceptions, they would sooner let multitudes of commoners degenerate into feral, than donate any of their own superior quality meat to help them.
• Hate Sink: Barring the Token Good Teammate in new Lord Bayon, their characterization is meant to make the audience despise them. They knew of a way to prevent demons from needing to rely on human meat to retain their intelligence and put a stop to it to ensure they maintained control, all while refusing to part with their own stocks of meat and let their subjects go feral.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Duke Ivelk is responsible for much of the day-to-day running of the capital compared to his fellow royal heads and the Queen, and as such is a vital cog to the "demons" regime. In fact during the attack on the Tifari, Legravalima makes sure to protect him from Geelen's forces, even through she didn't lift a finger to help the other heads, since his death would be a massive blow to the empire.
• The Starscream: Lord Dozza was not one of the original members of the five royal families but actually a bodyguard for the former head Lord Geelen. After framing Geelen for conspiring with the "evil blooded" race, and because his duplicitous nature suited the royal families interests more, Geelen was banished and Dozza was given his spot.
• Token Good Teammate: The current Lord Bayon is concerned about the common folk and shown to be a family man, and also greatly admired the former Lord Geelen, who was a selfless demon and cared about his subjects.
• The Unfettered: The Regent Families will do anything to hold onto their power, and go out of their way to dispose of anything threatening the rule while keeping all the resources for themselves, even if they don't really need them. For example, framing and exiling Lord Geelen for solving the hunger of his subjects with "evil blood", taking the blood themselves, and letting the commoners starve out, so there would be nobody left to oppose them.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Most of the royal heads, as well as their families, were massacred and consumed by Geelen and his forces during the invasion of the Tifari ceremony shortly after their proper introduction.

Queen Legravalima

The Queen of the "demon" world.

---

• Badass Family: She and both of her brothers Sonju and Leuvis are all devastating combatants, though she is the strongest out of all three of them.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Along with the various heads of the Ratri Clan Queen, Legravalima is one of the main perpetrators of the Promise and one of the main obstacles to freeing the cattle children from the hands of the "demons".
• The Blank: After reconstructing her body after her near death from Norman's forces, Legravalima is shown having a completely featureless face afterwards.
• Cain and Abel: The Cain to Sonju's Abel. Sonju considers her a monster, while she thinks of him as foolish. There is no love loss between the two of them.
• The Caligula: Legravalima is a hedonistic and insatiable glutton who desires to have all the best things in life for herself while not bothering to lift a finger to actually rule the country. When a food shortage is brought to her attention, her response is to do nothing and let the populace dwindle until there will be enough food, while keeping it a secret that she and the Five Regent Families don't even need to eat human meat to retain their intelligence. Yet she still insists on keeping the best meat for herself and the rest of the aristocracy. After regenerating from being killed thanks to her second core she proclaims that all life on the planet is food for her to consume.
• Climax Boss: Legravalima serves this role as the final major threat from the demon hierarchy. As she dies, so to does the threat to the demon world and the final antagonists for the cattle children becomes the Ratri Clan.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: After managing to completely revive herself with a stronger body and revealing she has a second core that can Organ Dodge, everyone present are about to panic. However, her new body didn't remove the effects of Lambda's Poisoned Weapons, and consuming too much at once shortly kills her from inside.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Slaughters Geelen's followers with no difficulty, even when they attempt to blow themselves up to kill her, she comes off without a scratch.
• Death by Gluttony: How she is done in. Eating a lot of meat, from both humans and demons, in a short time span, combined with being affected by poison and having lost one of her cores, causes her to be overwhelmed not only physically as her cells rupture, but also mentally as the consciousness and memories of all those she devoured come back to her.
• Demoted to Extra: She's relegated to a silent cameo in the anime's finale, and while the big battle against her still takes place, it happens entirely off-screen.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: She doesn't take it well when Mujika takes pity on her inability to be satisfied.
• The Dreaded: How she managed to stay in power despite being a despot. As soon as she enters the room on her palanquin, all the heads of the Five Regent Families bow down to her, not out of loyalty, but because she can get rid of them with ease. Leuvis, the most powerful demon the protagonists encountered prior to her, admits he didn't agree with how she ruled, but can't do anything to stop her.
• Fatal Flaw: Greed and Pride. She is even worse than the Five Regent Families, wanting to hoard the best of everything in the world regardless of whether or not she has a use for it. With the latter, she is a complete egomaniac who views herself as the pinnacle of life.
• Finishing Stomp: Kills Geelen by stomping on his head with her heel.
• A God Am I: She is truly powerful, but views herself as the pinnacle of existence and that she may do whatever she pleases without consequence, including denying food to The One, the actual god.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: She is a hedonist who killed her father for the throne because she wants the best of everything in life, power included, and has no interest in governing her realm in any way. She can only be bothered to do anything beyond gorging is if her reign is directly challenged.
• Greed: One of her main traits, the one she proudly points herself and feels justified about. She usurped the throne from her father for power; didn't honor the Promise to give the best meat to The One, so she would have them instead; kept Mujika's anti-degenerating blood for herself and her consort; let her own people starve from famine, so she wouldn't have to share anything; overlooked the mess the James Ratri caused, after Peter promised to give the Lambda children to her in secret; and declared that she sees all other demons as her meal as well. Mujika feels only pity with the irony how the tyrant got consumed by her own desires.
• Hate Sink: Of all the demons, she is the worst. She is a greedy and ambitious murderer who always wants the best of everything for herself. It was under her rule that the demons' world become such a Crapsack World and she gets Drunk On Power viewing everything as her food. She boasts that she will even consume her own family when it suits her. Given that she killed her father to take the throne and didn't hesistate to brand her brother a criminal or kill him herself, she is not bluffing.
• The Hedonist: She wants to enjoy the best things life has to offer, which includes gorging herself on highest quality meat even if part of the Promise expects her to give it up to The One. She only wants more, and can never be satisfied.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: None of her enemies were able to stop her, instead, her absorbing the dead demons in the throne room to revive herself is what did her in.
• Humanoid Abomination: Her and her handmaidens are surprisingly the most human looking "demons", similar to Mujika. But even by humanoid "demon" standards, she is something else entirely. She briefly transforms into a nightmarish Eldritch Abomination after bringing herself Back from the Dead, made up of the bodies of the dead demons in the throne room as well as the faces of all the people she has eaten, including Krone and hundreds of children, before turning back into her humanoid form.
• Hypocrite: Reprimands Geelen for killing innocents to get his revenge on the royals, even though she has far more blood on her hands.
• Implacable Man: She withstands every form of attack thrown against her from Geelen, Norman's men and Sonju. She only dies thanks her own unmoderated gluttony.
• It's All About Me: She is extremely self-centred; she murdered her father because she wanted to become Queen and refused to part with any of the high grade meat to the lower "demon" classes 700 years ago for her own self interests. The fact that she decided to keep Norman for herself, instead of handing him over to The One, further proves it, considering that her Promise with The One required handing over the best meat to him.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: Geelan's defeat at her hands was already heartbreaking enough, but the Queen decides to twist the knife further by giving him a Breaking Speech. After decapitating him, she shows him the slaughtered remains of all of his followers that he "led to their deaths" and mocks him for abandoning his sense of justice by killing children, before finally killing him.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Wears a massively elaborate dress that doesn't slow her in the slightest when fighting.
• Large and in Charge: She is a giant even by demon standards, towering over her subjects while still sitting on her throne.
• Lightning Bruiser: She dodged the blast from Geelen's men blowing themselves up to kill her, though she was still caught in the adhesive the bombs released afterwords. On top of that, she is ludicrously strong. Even without her claws, she knocked Zazie out with a single blow.
• Nerves of Steel: She barely reacts at all to Geelen's surprise attack on the capital, or, as more and more of the noble families get massacred by his army, sneers to "not make her laugh". As it turns out, she had good reason not to be worried.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: It's revealed that Legravalima was the one who ordered Norman to be taken to Lambda, as she couldn't stand the idea of giving him to The One. This action eventually led to Norman gathering the other experimental Lambda children, forming an army, and eventually massacring the nobles, including Legravalima.
• Not Quite Dead: Despite having her head and core destroyed by Zazie, she was able to survive and consumed the bodies of the fallen Demons in order to reconstitute herself. Norman theorises, and is proven correct, that it is because she has another core hidden somewhere on her body.
• Patricide: She killed her father to become queen.
• One-Man Army: Legravalima is shown to be the most powerful "demon" in the setting, able to decapitate dozens of Geelen's forces single-handedly and fast enough to react to sneak attacks and bombs almost instantly. Even after Geelen's suicide bombers were able to pin her with some sticky substance and Geelen was able to bash her mask open with a club, she still managed to turn the tides and kill Geelen and his remaining men by herself. After that she keeps the upper hand fighting Sonju and Zazie, and only dies because of the Assimilation Backfire.
• Orcus on His Throne: As the Queen, she rarely steps out of her throne room, nor she has any interest in doing so. She's only seen in action after Geelen and Norman's men kill everyone else in the room.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: She's not just the ruler. Legravalima is a beast of a fighter who barely needs bodyguards. She's a damn sight, more formidable than any other demon in the series. She is so powerful that none of the demons dared to challenge her rule for seven hundred years prior to the series even if they don't agree with her, simply because she can obliterate any of them. It's allowed her to ensure the demon world is such a horrid place to live.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Averted for the most part, she prefers Duke Ivelk to do the ruling work while she and the other Regent Heads enjoy exotic banquets. When Peter Ratri brings up the threat to the farm system, she tells him off saying it's not her responsibility to watch over her food, but she did agree to give him some troops after being promised that the kids would be delivered to her to her personally. She's happy to kick some ass herself if the situation calls for it, though.
• Villainous Glutton: Legravalima is defined by her constant hunger. Despite being at the top of the demon world's hierarchy, and therefore able to eat more and better meat than anyone else, she is never satisfied. She is called out for this in Chapter 158, where Mujika delivers a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to her, expressing both disdain and pity for her as she is killed from inside by all those she ate. Even dying, she still can't help but think about eating the Grace Field children.
  Mujika: You poor creature. Why are you so desperate to fill your hunger? You have more than anyone. You can obtain anything. [...] You're starving. No matter how much you eat, obtain, or ascend, you're never satisfied. Poor thing. I feel sorry for you.
• We Have Reserves: During a flashback to 700 years prior, when the lower "demon" classes were shown to be starving and on the verge of devolution, the former Lord Geelen advocated giving some of the high grade meat to the people. Legravalima instead decided to allow the lower classes to starve, devolve, and eventually eat themselves, as that would solve their population problem.
• Wolverine Claws: Legravalima uses her claws this way extending her nails like she was Lust. Her claws are so strong and fast that she can spear and decapitate her enemies in seconds.
• You Are Already Dead: Said word by word by Mujika to the overconfident Legravalima, who doesn't realize she has less than a minute to live due to combined effects of poison and Assimilation Backfire.

The One (SPOILERS)

The absolute ruler of the demon world, worshiped as a deity. Top-grade children from the farms are sacrificed to him during a festival called Tifari. His name is always written in demon script in the text, although humans can apparently pronounce it.

---

• Above Good and Evil: Whereas The One is shown to be somewhat of a mischievous character and feasts upon human flesh like the other demons, he is never shown to take any sort of pleasure in the demon's slaughter of humans. While he doesn't approve the corruption in the demon government, he doesn't truly care about general demon population or humanity's plight against the demons. He only has interest in those he finds entertaining his time with.
• Another Dimension: The One lives in a special dimension where the laws of time and physics aren't the same; anyone who tries to contact him must go through a special ritual and a maddening trial that involves going through a maze composed of the visitor's memories and solving a strange metaphysical puzzle.
• Anti-Villain: The One is an amoral creature who grants wishes on a whim, if they can entertain them, disregarding if they hurt others or not, and is the ultimate leader of the demons. Nonetheless, he does appear to have a strong sense of honor, as he always tells the contractors exactly what they get with their deal, and will often times make generous additions to the deal if he happens to like them enough.
• Benevolent Genie: On one hand, The One is a Jackass Genie who asks for rewards that will screw over anybody who makes a deal with him. On the other, he doesn't twist the wording of his deals and explains the details of them.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: He is the God-like ruler of all of the demons, and he takes on a very child-like appearance and personality.
• Deal with the Devil: He is never inclined to assist those who ask for his help without giving them a heavy price to pay.
• Demoted to Extra: The One is only given a few seconds of screen-time in the anime. His encounter with Emma has notably been reduced to a single shot.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Can be considered this for the manga as a whole, being the supposed progenitor of all of the demons, their true leader, and the one that set Ratri's Promise in place, kickstarting the events of the series.
• Have You Seen My God?: To break the Promise and separate humans and demons, Emma decides to find the god who signed the original one. The problem is that the only people who have actually met him in person are Julius Ratri and Queen Legravalima, and that happened centuries ago, so how to find him is lost in mythology.
• I Gave My Word: He's a Jackass Genie, but regardless of what he asks for a reward, he will keep up his end of the deal. When he asks for Emma's family as a price, he states he already promised her family would all be sent to the human world, so he assures that the children wouldn't be harmed in any way and settles on something Metaphorically True. Also, while he took Emma's memory and separated her from her family, he did send her in a place where she would find a new family for herself.
• It Amused Me: All he cares about is making deals where the results can provide him with some entertainment.
• Jackass Genie: He can one hundred percent grant any wish alright, but he'll just demand the exact kind of compensation that will be the most frustrating to the one making the wish.
  • Juilus Ratri betrayed his friends so that he could end the war and finally live in peace? He and his descendants will be in charge of keeping the human side of the deal and collaborate with the demons forever, so that he can never escape his guilt or the monsters he was trying to flee from.
  • Legravalima wants to control the human meat supply, to always be above the people? The One demands that the absolute highest quality meat is given to him to make a point of his superiority over her.
  • Emma wants to give her friends and family a new life in the human world? She loses all of her memories of them and is separated from them when they arrive in the human world.
• Monster Progenitor: The One is suspected in the myths to have been the first demon who ate humans and become intelligent, and has been revered by the demons as their creator.
• The Napoleon: Despite being the absolute ruler of the demons, The One is perhaps the smallest of all of them, even being dwarfed by Emma. He also happens to be very cheeky and somewhat sadistic.
• Pet the Dog: Whatever he asks for as a reward for his wish granting, it won't be something that would screw over the contractor if he takes a liking to them. Emma wanted all the children from the farms to be safely taken to the human world, and The One kept up his end. And while he took Emma's memory as payment, he also dropped her off with a loving new family, something he really didn't have to do.
• Physical God: Being worshipped as a deity by demons, he himself may not even be one himself. Unlike the other demons in the world, The One possesses powers beyond the scope of the world's and reader's understanding, certainly a whole other being entirely, as he is a Reality Warper within his domain and is being able change the events of the world in an instance.
• Placid Plane of Ankle-Deep Water: The dimension he's physically located at is a plane of endless water.
• Reality Warper: The One can change anything and everything in his own dimension in however way he pleases on a seemingly omniscient level. The One can also grant wishes with no known limit.
• The Unpronounceable: Inverted, the children can pronounce his name with no difficulty, but in the manga his name is replaced with unreadable script that is even more mangled than the demon language.

Other Humans

Humans who have no connection to Grace Field House. Spoilers abound.

---

ETR3M8

ETR3M8 / Nameless Geezer / Yugo

Age: 28 (30 as of Chapter 102)
ID: ETR3M8

An escapee from a farm called Glory Bell, who's been hiding out at B06-32 shelter for about thirteen years.

---

• Adapted Out: Despite playing a key role in the manga, he never appears in the anime.
• Big Damn Heroes: Shows up midway through two different fights during the Goldy Pond battle along with Ray.
• Cold Sniper: He's able to completely hide his normally-obvious emotions while shooting, allowing him to snipe one of the Goldy Pond demons who was relying on the ability to feel killing intent to avoid getting shot.
• Defrosting Ice King: Defied by the man himself and attempted to be invoked by Emma. He refuses any and all attempts at changing his apathy or letting himself get attached to the kids, but Emma tries to get through to him by encouraging ETR3M8 to survive alongside the Grace Field escapees. She eventually partially succeeds before she gets poached, and then fully by reuniting him with Lucas. Soon after returning to the shelter, he recoils comically when hugged by a kid, who in a later scene he's carrying on his shoulders.
• Facial Markings: Has a line going down from each of his eyes.
• Groin Attack: On the receiving end of one from Emma when he takes her hostage.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Blows himself up to kill Andrew and what is left of his team. Sadly, Andrew survives.
• Hero of Another Story: He went through the same reveals as Emma's group and led a successful escape from his farm thirteen years before the events of the story. He followed William Minerva's trail up to B06-32, then Goldy Pond where he and his friends managed to resist quite some time against the poachers. Then, Leuvis slaughtered them, and he was the only one who managed to escape, spending the next decade alone in B06-32 dwelling on his guilt.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: While he physically threatens the children and almost left Ray to die, he acts this way exaclty because they remind him of his family who he failed to protect, and in Ray's case he used him as bait without actually planning to sacrifice him.
• Interrupted Suicide: Thirteen years of being alone at the shelter seriously took its toll on him. In the end, the only thing that stopped him was Emma and co. arriving at the shelter.
• Jade-Colored Glasses: He left his farm with at least seventeen other kids. He's the only one left. It's implied he suffers from psychological after-effects, and has lost any kind of hope, optimism or empathy, considering all the Grace Field children dead weights. He no longer has any goal beyond surviving at this point, as William Minerva never showed up, and he has no other way of getting to the human world. He gets better.
• Jerkass: The very first thing the kids note about him is that he has terrible manners. He then goes on to hold Emma hostage at a gunpoint to get the other kids to leave, effectively sending them to a slow death. He reveals his Hidden Heart of Gold only after taking a level in kindness.
• Known Only by Their Nickname: During the Goldy Pond arc, the only name we have for him is his Glory Bell's serial code, ETR3M8. Viz Media's Weekly Shonen Jump refers to him as 'Nameless Geezer' on the recap page. Chapter 96 has him finally reveal his real name: Yugo.
• Last Stand: He stays in the shelter with Lucas when Andrew's strike team attacks to cover the children's escape. They take down all of Andrew's men before sacrificing themselves.
• Lean and Mean: Rather skinny and tall and definitively unpleasant. Ray deduces that his abrasive personality was that of someone living a comfortable life and didn't want to give that up, but his skinny body meant he hasn't been idle those 13 years either. This leads him to conclude ETR3M8 has actually made several incursions outside of the shelter and would be an experienced survival expert, something the kids sorely needed.
• The Mentor: In a sort of way. It's not that he is actively trying to teach anything to the kids, but more that Ray and Emma are trying to pick up anything they can learn from him, since he is so experienced.
• The Nicknamer: As part of his policy to avoid getting attached, he refuses to learn any of the kid's names. As such, Emma is Antenna, Ray is Sleepy (or Cyclops), Don is Bean-Head, and Gilda is Glasses.
• No One Gets Left Behind:
  • One of the conditions Gilda puts on him as a guide after the kids take over the shelter, Ray and Emma must come back, or she'll pull a Taking You with Me with a self-destruct switch.
  • Andrew remarks he could have done a proper Last Stand in the armory, but he chose to carry the badly-wounded Lucas with him, slowing him down. He never forgave himself for abandoning him the first time.
• Not Me This Time: When he returns to the shelter with an injured Emma, the kids initially think that he was responsible and he had to talk Gilda out from blowing up the shelter.
• Sanity Slippage: He has not survived the last 13 years with his sanity entirely intact, which is justified considering that he spent them in what amounts to solitary confinement. It's heavily implied that all the disturbing scribbles on the wall in one of the shelter bedrooms were made by him, and there's a moment where he seems to be arguing with several of his fallen friends in his head before passing out.
• Sacrificial Lion: The first major character to die along with Lucas, to show that the Ratri Family is dead set on killing the escapees.
• Shadow Archetype: He's essentially who Emma could become if she let grief overtake her (an idealist who became embittered after his determination got everyone killed) and an adult version of Ray if he hadn't accepted his Character Development after the escape (a pragmatist focused purely on survival and goals, even if it means throwing everyone else under the bus).
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: He hates Emma and Ray with how optimistic they are, which he repeatedly says so, because it reminds him of himself when he was young and the wrong choices he committed. He's especially affronted by Emma because her energetic optimism is almost exactly like how he was in the past, and her deep connection to and love for her family reminds him of everyone he loved and lost.
• Sink or Swim Mentor: As a consequence of not really wanting to teach them anything, he ends up being this as a mentor. He actively tries to set up situations in which the kids could die, but they keep managing to overcome them and learn in the process.
• Sole Survivor: Out of all the kids from Glory Bell orphanage, only he survived escaping. Or so he thinks, as it turns out his friend Lucas is also still alive.
• Strong and Skilled: Being a former farm kid grown into an adult, he is definitively an experienced survivor and can hold his own in a battle better than any of the kids. He was hiding for 13 years within the demon territory without a food shortage.
• Survivor Guilt: He has a dismissive attitude about his family when he talks about them, but it's pretty clear he's affected quite a bit by their deaths and is afraid to go through the same experience with Grace Field kids.
• Took a Level in Kindness: He stops antagonizing the children of Grace Field after Emma manages to get through to him and discovers Lucas still being alive.
• Would Hurt a Child: Appears so initially, as he pulls a gun on Grace Field kids when they appear and had no qualms with kicking them out of his shelter, leaving them with no way to survive as a result. Additionally, he's ready to orchestrate conditions that would likely get them killed such as provoking wild demons into attacking them.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Becomes apparent as he doesn't hurt the kids, directly anyway, he had no intentions of actually shooting any of the kids dead. Him holding Emma hostage was a bluff, and another kid notes that it would have actually benefited him more if he simply killed the kids, rather than let them go and risk the demons being led to the shelter. Emma deduces that he can't actually bring himself to harm a child directly with his own hands.
• You Shall Not Pass!: During the shelter raid, he and Lucas stay behind to make sure the others can escape without being followed by Andrew's strike team.

Lucas (SPOILERS)

Lucas

Age: 28 (30 as of Chapter 102)
ID: KGX2A7

The only adult of Goldy Pond. Commands Goldy Pond's seniority and was a part of ETR3M8's escape group.

---

• A Child Shall Lead Them: Inverted. Lucas is the only adult and the leader of Goldy Pond's children resistance.
• Adapted Out: Like ETR3M8 and everyone involved with Goldy Pond, Lucas is omitted from the anime adaptation.
• An Arm and a Leg: He lost his right arm while hiding from Leuvis for 13 years. This, and his scar, add to his Action Survivor vibe.
• Chekhov's Gunman: He was seen in the background of a few of ETR3M8's flashbacks, and was mentioned by name during his breakdown. Lo and behold, one of the people from ETR3M8's group is not actually dead, and isn't planning on sitting idly when it comes to fighting back against Bayon's hunt.
• Handicapped Badass: Losing an arm has done nothing to hinder him in a fight.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With ETR3M8, his closest friend, especially the only alive one from Glory Bell.
• Last Stand: Makes one alongside Yugo to get rid of Andrew's team and protect the other children.
• Papa Wolf: To the kids, first to the ones in Goldy Pond and later to Grace Field. Oliver even tells him that to them, he's like the father they never had.
• Parental Substitute: The children of Goldy Pond consider him their father. Especially Oliver, Zack and Paula, the first three kids he took under his wings.
• Sacrificial Lion: The first major character to die along with Yugo, to show that the Ratri Family is dead set on killing the escapees.
• Secretly Selfish: How he feels about his decision in the past to stay with Oliver and co. and help them fight, rather than escape the park. In the Goldy Pond's kids' eyes, he's their saviour; in his, he's just a pathetic man afraid that if he left Goldy Pond he'd realize he has nothing left.
• Taking the Bullet: He shields Yugo from an explosion, leaving him half-dead — though not dead enough to prevent him from trying to take Andrew down still.
• Team Dad: To the Goldy Pond seniority, and later to the kids at the shelter.
• Walking Spoiler: It's hard to talk about him without mentioning anything about Minerva's door, which he guards in the Goldy Pond's underground but couldn't open without Emma's pen. Even then, the fact that one of ETR3M8's group is alive after many chapters of hammering in that they all died is a huge twist in itself.

Goldy Pond's Seniority

The leaders of the group of humans from Grand Valley, another farm, imported to be prey at Goldy Pond. They are the senior members by merit of being the oldest, and intend to destroy Goldy Pond and free the other residents.

Goldy Pond's Seniority in general

Its known members are Sandy, Zack, Nigel, Sonya, Pepe, Gillian, Paula, Violet, Adam, and Oliver.

---

• Adapted Out: They are omitted from the anime adaptation, since it doesn't include the Goldy Pond arc.
• Cassandra Truth: They do their best to convince newcomers to Goldy Pond that their lives are in genuine danger, but realize that most newcomers are shipped there without seeing the demons in person and aren't going to suddenly believe that demons are real and are here to hunt them down, until witnessing it firsthand.
• Demoted to Extra: They play an important role in the Goldy Pond arc, being Emma's major and only allies during most of it. With a few exceptions, most notably Oliver, they fade in the background after the destruction of Goldy Pond.
• Hero of Another Story: They've been fighting and surviving in the park for months, some for years, long before Emma and co. even knew the truth about the farms. The end of the Goldy Pond arc even has some parallels to the Grace Field escape where one of the final shots is their burning home with all of its memories, with the Goldy Pond kids actually getting a bit sad about leaving behind the park they lived together in for so long, despite the atrocities associated with it.
• It's Personal: All of them have beef with one of the hunters due to them killing their friends and family. In fact, it appears that the members sent to fight each specific hunter are based on their past with each demon.
• The Lancer: Oliver is this to Lucas, Sonya is this to Oliver.
• Like a Son to Me: All of them are this to an extent to Lucas, but none more so than Oliver.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Lucas initially lied to them by saying there were human villages they could escape to once everything is over. While Emma was fearful of how they'd react once they knew the truth, they admit that in some way, they say the truth about there being the Human World is actually even better.
• Mauve Shirt: All of them are introduced at once soon after Emma gets to Goldy Pond, and given just enough characterization and backstory to be sympathetic. Surprisingly, while many are gravely wounded, all of them make it through the final hunt alive.
• No One Gets Left Behind: At the end of the arc, the injured Oliver and co. volunteer to be abandoned so that the others can escape safely (and, in particular, get Emma the medical help she needs). Unsurprisingly, everyone says no.
• Scars Are Forever: Adam, Zack, and Lucas all have at least one visible scar. It's especially true of Zack, because he keeps getting them.
• Undying Loyalty: They are unfailingly loyal to Lucas, being the oldest and strongest of the survivors.
• What You Are in the Dark: It's revealed that in the past, Lucas offered to help Oliver, Zack, and Paula escape the park altogether. Even though no one would fault them for it, they couldn't stand the idea of someone else going through what they had and chose to stay behind, so that they could one day bring the hunting ground to an end.
• You Are Number 6: The Grand Valley members of the seniority have their id tag tattooed on their chest just like the other farm kids, but structured differently.

Oliver

Age: 17 (19 as of Chapter 102)
ID: AII866-890

The face of Goldy Pond's resistance, acting as the leader while Lucas remains hidden. He's one of the founding members of Goldy Pond's resistance.

---

• The Face: Lucas is the true leader, but as he has to remain hidden, Oliver is typically the one publicly leading the group and briefs newcomers to Goldy Pond on their situation.
• Good Is Not Soft: After Andrew rants about how none of the kids have what it takes to shoot another human being, Oliver promptly proves him wrong, albeit by shooting in his limbs and not actually killing him.
• The Reliable One: While everyone else ends up oversleeping at new William Minerva/Norman's hideout due to finally having a proper bed and after having been travelling for so long, Oliver is the only one who wakes up early, just in case.
• Secret-Keeper: To an extent, but before Lucas goes off with Yugo to make their Last Stand, he entrusts Oliver with the info he just obtained, making Oliver the one person who knew that Lucas and Yugo were never going to come back.
• Taking the Bullet: Oliver gets stabbed with Bayon's clawed hand while protecting Lucas and nearly dies. However, he survives his wound.

Sonya

Age: 17 (19 as of Chapter 102)
ID: EIV019-270

Oliver's second-in-command.

---

• Number Two: She's Oliver's second-in-command.

Violet

Age: 13 (14 as of Chapter 102)
ID: DIV332-191

The lookout of the group. She's the first to reach out to Emma after her arrival, and leads her to the rest of the seniority.

---

• Action Survivor: Downplayed since she is a fighter, but she's one of two characters in the Goldy Pond Arc who didn't have Plot Armor going for them and still made it out unscathed.
• Bifauxnen: Up until Chapter 69, Emma, and likely most of the audience, thought she was a boy.
• Those Two Guys: With Zack, as the two Goldy Pond group members who accompany Emma and co. on their investigation of the Seven Walls.

Zack

Age: 18 (19 as of Chapter 102)
ID: QII863-552

One of the group's medics and one of its best fighters. He's one of the founding members of Goldy Pond's resistance.

---

• Combat Medic: Zack's simultaneously one of the best fighters and the best medic.
• Major Injury Underreaction: He's been through so many scrapes, his reaction to his wrist being broken is mild annoyance.
• Nerves of Steel: Never flinches in the face of danger, which is part of what makes him one of Goldy Pond's best fighters.
• The Stoic: Downplayed, but he's usually a bit inexpressive.
• Those Two Guys: With Violet, as the two Goldy Pond group members who accompany Emma and co. on their investigation of the Seven Walls.
• The Worf Effect: Zack is referred to as the biggest badass of the group, and is defeated off-screen and left for dead by Bayon, though still alive.

Sandy

Age: 17 (18 as of Chapter 102)
ID: PVI468-992

The other medic of the group.

---

• Eyepatch After Time Skip: He wears one after his recovery. And since Gillian made it, it's got a little bunny on it.
• Nice Guy: Along with Gillian, he's the friendliest member of the Seniority.

Nigel

Age: 16 (17 as of Chapter 102)
ID: RIII522-633

The group's mechanic.

---

• Action Survivor: In the same vein as Violet. He's in the first fight we see, and he makes it to the last without ever getting particularly injured.
• Mr Fix It: One of his roles. He's the team's mechanic.
• Shoot the Hostage: When Bayon tries to threaten Lucas's location out of him, he's about to do this with Gillian as the hostage (doubling as a Mercy Kill). Thankfully, Pepe shows up in time.
• Signature Headgear: Nigel has an aviator's cap. He's worn it for so long that Gillian finds him unrecognizable without it.

Gillian

Age: 15 (16 as of Chapter 102)
ID: QI231-493

She handles the food supplies of Goldy Pond with Pepe and Paula.

---

• More Hero than Thou: Knowing that Nigel means to make an Heroic Sacrifice so that she can get away and inform Lucas of Bayon's intentions... she decides to beat him to it.

Pepe

Age: 16 (17 as of Chapter 102)
ID: PX363-076

He handles the food supplies of Goldy Pond with Gillian and Paula. He's the most recent member of the seniority.

---

• Team Chef: Noted to be a talented chef, if the best out of everyone.

Paula

Age: 17 (18 as of Chapter 102)
ID: AXI640-651

She handles the food supplies of Goldy Pond with Pepe and Gillian. She's one of the founding members of Goldy Pond's resistance.

---

• Cold Sniper: During Goldy Pond's uprising, she's chosen to snipe Nous and Nouma, and is shown to be a good shot — taking out Nouma with one bullet. Personality-wise, she's reserved and doesn't talk much.
• Out of Focus: Even compared to the other members of Goldy Pond's seniority. She's hinted to be one of the founders of Goldy Pond's resistance, alongside with Lucas, Oliver, and Zack. However, contrary to these three, she never gets any focus.

Other Goldy Pond Residents

A group of humans raised in another farm called Grand Valley. They were illegally imported by Lord Bayon in Goldy Pond to be hunted as preys by Bayon and his friends.

Tropes that apply to all of them

• Cast of Snowflakes: Even though they are a large group of Red Shirts, they each have their own individual designs.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Averted, contrary to a lot of typical Red Shirts. They usually appear whenever there is an Imagine Spot of the party's fallen friends, alongside with Sacrificial Lions Yugo and Lucas. A bonus page of the manga even gives their names.
• Redshirt Army: After joining the children of Grace Field. The children of Goldy Pond are a large group, but only some of their members are developed, and the others remain an anonymous crowd (even though they have individual designs). Of course, when things become dangerous and the antagonists start to rack up a body count, the first victims are among the nameless children of Goldy Pond.

Theo

Age: 12
ID: FIII715-412

One of the residents of Goldy Pond.

---

• Cruel Mercy: Leuvis lets him live that day's hunting session... at the cost of his brother and sister getting slaughtered, so he could get away.
• Spare a Messenger: Leuvis leaves him alive so that he can tell Emma that Leuvis is gunning for her.
• Survivor Guilt: He's left traumatized after Leuvis kills his brother and sister right in front of him.

Adam

Age: Unknown
ID: Lambda-7214 Farm Brand

A large boy implied to be from factory farming. He has severe mental impairments, but is intensely focused on a certain number...

---

• The Big Guy: He's almost as tall as Lucas and has muscles for days.
• Lobotomy: His cranial scar and major mental processing issues imply he went through it in the facility he escaped from.
• Made of Iron: Takes a lot of abuse from Leuvis when he steps into the fray at Goldy Pond, and survives all of it in pretty fine condition.
• One-Word Vocabulary: The only thing he says is "22194" — Norman's ID number. After Goldy Pond, he's added Emma's number to his vocabulary.
• Slave Brand: Has one on his collarbone, the symbol of factory farms.
• Super-Strength: He's strong enough to fight demons with his bare hands, managing to do some damage to Leuvis.

Peter Ratri (SPOILERS)

Voiced By: Yoshimasa Hosoya (Japanese), Crispin Freeman (English)

The current overseer of the farm system and the head of the Ratri clan. Also, the brother of James Ratri (AKA William Minerva).

---

• Adaptational Early Appearance: In the 2020 film, he shows up to meet Norman on the night that he leaves Grace Field. This did happen in the manga as well, but we're not shown this scene until much after the first arc (which the film is based on).
• Adaptational Villainy: In the anime, he's unrepentant for his villainy and kills himself as an act of spite, rather than of despair.
• Alas, Poor Villain: In the manga. As horrible as he was throughout the series, seeing Emma's kindness finally makes him realize she had been right the entire time, and he feels that he doesn't deserve to live in the peaceful world she desires and takes his own life.
• Ancient Conspiracy: His family was the one who started the Promise with the "demons" and he is determined that things stay the way they are. He believes that if the children break the Promise, the "demons" will kill all humans.
• Ambition Is Evil: With the Queen dead, he intends to have the escaped children slaughtered in order to get "revenge" for Legravalima and the Five Regent families, as part of a ploy to take the throne and political power of the demon world for himself.
• Archnemesis Dad:
  • Played With. He's "adopted" Norman, although neither of them truly see each other as father or son, especially since Norman sees where he is currently as just another farm.
  • During the rebellion's invasion, he proclaims that he's the farm children's "dad" and the creator, and goes through a Villainous Breakdown about how his kids are disobeying him instead of owing him their lives.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: The Ratri family have been around for thousand years and are technically considered the privileged citizens in the demon world, unlike Moms who are just slaves with a function. The Ratri family are especially close to the Five Regent families and the Queen, as they oversee the farms and were involved in the purge of Mujika's clan. One of the reasons why Peter gets James killed is because he feels honored in upholding the Promise.
• Big Bad Ensemble: As the overseer of the farm system, as well as the head of the Ratri family that upholds the system of selling children as food to the demons, Peter serves as one of the biggest threats in the series. In the manga, he outlasts the demon nobility.
• Cain and Abel: The Cain to James's Abel. After Peter realizes his brother has been secretly enabling kids escape, he reports him to the demons and gets him killed.
• Did Not See That Coming: He was not expecting Isabella to rally the Sisters against him and help the children. He responds accordingly.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: A minor case. He still slits his own throat in the anime, but now it happens before Legravalima's defeat, and he does it just to spit on Emma's kindness. In the manga, the Queen dies first, while Peter dies several chapters later and for more depressing reasons.
• Dragon Ascendant: As the one in charge of the farms, he and his clan are one of Queen Legravalima's closest confidants, even if they don't like each other. Once Peter hears that the Queen and all of the upper hierarchy are dead, he immediately takes the vacant spot in the demon government before Sonju can.
• Driven to Suicide: Rather than killing him, Emma tries to talk him into coming to her side. Overwhelmed by defeat, he takes his own life by stabbing his own neck. In the manga it was because of not wanting to see the human world after what he's done, in the anime it's a Spiteful Suicide.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He genuinely loved his brother and was heartbroken about having to order his death, which he did because he thought it was For the Greater Good of keeping the peace between the worlds.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • While his brother was horrified by the reveal that their ancestor Julius betrayed his friends and sacrificed civilians to negociate the peace with the demons, Peter on the other hand found his actions admirable, reasoning that it proved how heroic Julius was as he was ready to make sacrifices for the greater good.
  • He is stunned by the fact that even though Emma doesn't forgive him, she doesn't want to kill him because she feels there has been too much bloodshed already.
  • He promoted Isabella to the Grandmother of Grace Field, based on her past record and desire to survive as long as possible. He never imagined seeing her children escape give Isabella ideas of rebelling against him.
• Fatal Flaw: Pride. He strongly believes the Ratri Clan's mission was a just cause, to the point where he cannot imagine a world without them.
• Final Boss: In the manga, Peter serves as the final antagonist, once Legravalima and the Five Regent Families are killed. He is the one who send the demon army to the Second William Minerva's hideout, and he is the last person preventing the children from enacting their Promise. In the anime, his defeat also allows the kids to go to the human world, but before leaving, they resolve the remaining plot threads off-screen.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For the Goldy Pond and Cuvitidala arcs in the manga. He was the one who killed William Minerva, told Bayon about Goldy Pond, letting him turn into his personal hunting grounds, and destroyed the elevator to the human world. Right after that arc he sent Andrew and his commando squad to hunt down and kill the escaped children. Him being the overseer of the farm system also means he's responsible for the rest of the story, as far as the childrens are concerned.
• Humans Are Bastards: Before the party crosses over to the human world, Peter leaves them with an ominous warning, claiming that humanity is just as monstrous as the demons. To really hammer his point home, imagery depicting events like The Holocaust is displayed while he makes his final speech.
• Manipulative Bastard: Once he finally takes the spotlight as an antagonist, the audience is shown just how good of a manipulator Peter is. After realizing that Norman and the escaped children from Lambda are the ones breaking out other farm children, he goes to the Queen and uses her gluttony and greed against her, by convincing her to give large portion of the demon army in return for her getting to eat the three best cuts of meat Grace Field has without giving them to The One. Later on, after finding out that the Queen and the Five Regent families are dead, he decides to use their deaths to motivate the army to get revenge, all, so he can take over the demon world in the background.
• Meaningful Name: In a story titled The Promised Neverland, Peter Ratri is the one overseeing the system ensuring that the children never grow old. It makes sense when you consider that the original Peter Pan was a Sociopathic Hero who was more than happy to kill off his friends if it made things "interesting".
• Motive Decay: As a boy, he wanted to uphold the Promise with demons to ensure peace. But by the series' proper it's clear the demons don't pose the same threat to humans as they used to, and he is adamant about ensuring the Promise is upheld at any cost out of sheer pride as a member of the Ratri family, while refusing a more peaceful and pragmatic solution when one is offered.
• Non-Action Big Bad: He is only a human, and he's not a fighter like his commando team. Ironically, the only person he does kill without ordering his minions to do it is himself.
• No Place for Me There: Why he is Driven to Suicide in the manga, even as the farm system is destroyed, he can't take his regrets with Emma to the human world.
• Redemption Rejection: Emma forgives him for all the horrible things the Ranti Clan done and offers him a place in a world where farms are no longer needed. In the anime, he refuses to see any of his actions as wrong and kills himself instead.
• Smug Snake: He's an intelligent manipulator, but his arrogance leaves him blind to the possibility something won't go the way he planned.
• Spiteful Suicide: In the anime, in stark contrast to his genuine remorse in the manga.
• Super Breeding Program: As the one in charge of all farms, he researches scientific and unscientific ways to improve the quality of the meat. The main difference between Lambda and the "premium" People Farms is him manually selecting especially smart kids to use as bases for mass-cloning. The "premium" like Grace Field can also be seen as this compared to "factory" farms, as the only people that can give birth to new kids are "Moms" with exceptional talent.
• Taking You with Me: Even says so literally. With all of his plans completely foiled and with no allies left, he decides to spite teveryone one last time and kill Emma even if he gets shot in the process, to prevent her from fulfilling the new Promise. He fails.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: A flashback reveals that he was one once, with a huge case of Big Brother Worship towards James.
• Villainous Breakdown: Oh, boy. This guy has bouts of them! When things don't go his way, he stops being calm and collected and becomes a screaming maniac. Most prominently, he has one in Chapters 169 onward when Isabella and the Sisters turn against him, leaving him outnumbered.
  Peter Ratri: You... betrayed me, Isabella!
• Walking Spoiler: He is introduced in a Golden Pond's Wham Episode where William Minerva tells in Dead Man Writing about the Ratri clan, the Promise, the Gates, the Royals, and The One, each of which are huge plot changers, and his connections with them. Him being the Big Bad responsible for everything the children had to go through means there's not much that can be safely said about him as well.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: He started as one, genuinely thinking that upholding the Promise made by his ancestor was the good thing to do in order to protect the world. By the time he takes central stage in the story, it's clear that he has become more cynical, as he's more concerned with having the Ratri clan keep their power as keepers of the Promise, even though Emma is proposing a viable alternative. When he does realize there is an alternative, he feels that after all he has done, there is no place for him in it.
• Would Hurt a Child: On top of supervising a system that literally feeds children to monsters, and also having an attack squad in his pocket to kill any escapees, Peter isn't afraid to harm a child personally as a means to an end. His most violent moment happens right in the final arc, when he snaps Nat's finger and then proceeds to step on it.

Andrew

Andrew

A commando who serves under Peter Ratri send out in order to find the escaped children.

---

• Adapted Out: In the anime, he's noticeably absent when Shelter B06-32 is ambused by Peter's men.
• Axe-Crazy: Not at first but after surviving the explosion that destroyed the shelter and destroyed half his face, Andrew seems to have lost all of his sanity.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: He mocks Emma that her uwillingless to kill anyone despite the direct thread would be her undoing. Then a feral demon kills him, sparing Emma from the Sadistic Choice.
• Child Hater: Views children who escaped from the demons' farms as subhuman lifestock.
• Death by Irony: Dismisses the children as livestock on the level of cattle and pigs. And he is the one who ends up getting eaten by "demon". Andrew's final moments was agony and he couldn't believe this is how he was going to end up.
• Determinator: Andrew spend almost a year and a half hunting down the escaped children and killing their supporters. And even after being caught in an explosion wherein half his face was blown off he still hunted the children down with the intent of killing them all himself. Even when he's shot through arms he still tries to kill one of the kids by stomping on them.
• The Dragon: Acts as Peter Ratri's personal assassin in dealing any of Jason's allies before being sent to kill the escaped children.
• Eaten Alive: The bastard finally dies when a feral "demon" sneaks up behind him and chomps him.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: He is a glasses wearing commando who has no problem with hunting down and murdering children, even laughing hysterically when their inability to kill him allows him to kill them.
• Hate Sink: He sees children raised by demons as nothing more than cattle with no rights and when some of the children show him mercy, he responds by killing them and mocks them for showing mercy towards an enemy who was a human.
• Hero Killer: Andrew and his team are responsible for the deaths of several of the escaped children, as well as Yugo and Lucas.
• Knight of Cerebus: While the series was hardly lighthearted, most of the enemies the children faced were demons and the few humans they had to content with were sympathetic. With the introduction of Andrew and his slaughter of several of the escapees the series shows that now humans can be just as evil and dangerous as the demons.
• Lack of Empathy: When Emma tries to negotiate with Andrew and tells him their plan to renegotiate a new Promise Andrew flatly tells her that he doesn't care and that as cattle they have no rights anyway.
• Large Ham: During his Villainous Breakdown he has No Indoor Voice and shouts ever word that comes out of his mouth while ranting about how worthless all the kids are. Given how injured he is, the shouting is likely the result of him being in constant pain.
• Last Stand: Despite losing all of his men to Yugo and Lucas and missing half of his face, Andrew still chases after the remaining escapees and corners them for a final showdown.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: At first he just appears to be to kill the children to uphold the Promise, but it becomes very clear that he's a Sociopathic Soldier who wants to kill than anything else. During his Villainous Breakdown he drops any pretext to upholding the Promise and simply wants to kill all of the children out of spite, even after they show him mercy.
• Sociopathic Soldier: He is a merciless killer who believes children brought on the demons' People Farms are subhuman and don't deserve to live outside of being raised as livestock. When his men start dying, he treats the losses more an inconvenience to the mission, indicating he doesn't care about them.
• Two-Faced: After Yugo and Lucas blow up the shelter, Andrew ends up with half of his face blown off, causing his eye to pop out, exposed cranium, and missing skin on that side of his face. The children are dumbfounded that he could still be alive.
• We Have Reserves: Initially has this attitude when his Yugo and Lucas start killing his men, feeling his still has enough of his squad left to finish the mission. He quickly drops that attitude when more casualties rise up, because his eight-man squad does not have reserves.
• Would Hurt a Child: Children realize it's going to be even more difficult to survive going forward when it becomes clear there are human adults sent to kill them all, regardless of meat quality. Two unnamed children are shot by his men in the shelter, and later he personally kills three in the forest.
• Villainous Breakdown: The guy has lost his squadron and half of his face, and has become so insane in his determination to kill the "cattle children", that his dialogue is reduced to him screaming that they're all nothing but livestock to be eaten. He even calls them pigs at one point.

"Smee" (SPOILERS)

A scientist of the Ratri clan working in Lambda-7214. He is a supporter of William Minerva who managed to survive the first purges of the Ratri clan.

---

• Meaningful Name: He's named after the Captain Hook's boatswain.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Smee is only the alias he gave to Norman, not his real name.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He barely appears in the story, to the point that the reader doesn't even see him closely, but several of his actions greatly impact the story by domino effect.
  • If the Volume 20 bonus page is to be believed, Smee was the one to shoot James Ratri when he tried to run away, unable to oppose Peter.
  • He's the one who voluntarily dropped the William Minerva pen found by Krone, which would later become vital during the children of Grace Field's escape.
  • He helped Norman escape Lambda-7214, albeit at the cost of his life, and disclosed information about his network to him, allowing Norman to learn about the hideout, which he would use to prepare his army.

Minerva's Army (SPOILERS)

The Second William Minerva

Age: 13-14 as of chapter 118
ID: 22194 / Lambda-7214 Farm Brand

A former escapee who managed to connect to the original William Minerva's contact network, and used it to take on his identity. He intends to start a civil war amongst the demons in order to keep them distracted while he takes out their food supply.

For more details concerning his character, see Norman.

---

• Foreshadowing: Norman having A Day in the Limelight in a Lambda facility, and not being dead for starters, should have made it very obvious who's the mysterious blond escapee from the Lambda farms is, especially since Adam, another escapee, knows his number.
• Knight Templar: His time at Lambda and interactions with some of their experiments has led to him growing significantly colder.
• The Stoic: When asked to describe his current character, one of his subordinate's responses was "The Czar".
• Walking Spoiler: Not just his existence, and the fact that he has supporters, but who he is, period.

Jin and Hayato

Age: Unknown
ID: Λ-7214 Farm Brand

The first members of Minerva's Army to (accidentally) find Emma and the others.

---

• Fanboy: They outright gush over how cool the Grace Field kids are. The latter, for their part, find it a little awkward.
• Fragile Speedster: Not that strong in a fight, but Hayato's very fast.

Cislo, Barbara, and Vincent

Ages: 17, 16, 18
ID: Λ-7214 Farm Brand

The main attack force of Minerva's Army.

---

• Adaptational Early Appearance: In the manga, they aren't introduced until after the Goldy Pond arc. In the anime, they appear halfway through Season 2.
• Big Eater: Barbara, who has yet to be seen without a giant leg of meat. Crosses into horror territory when it turns out it's a demon's leg.
• The Dragon: Vincent as the oldest in the group serves as the middle-man between Minerva and the rest of the Lambda children.
• Freudian Excuse: They were experimented on by the demons and greatly suffered because of them, thus explaining their willingness to kill them all.
• Grey-and-Gray Insanity: After all the abuse they've suffered, they are outright refuse to believe that demons are Not Always Evil.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: Unlike Minerva, who thinks the genocide is Necessarily Evil since he doesn't trust Emma's option, his followers genuinely believe demons are Always Chaotic Evil and killing them all is entirely justified.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Due to their torment by the demons, they are shown to have no hesitation in their voices when they causally speak about killing demons.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": They're huge fans of their boss, the second William Minerva, and demand Grace Field kids to tell all kinds of stories about him.
• Non-Action Guy: Vincent is never seen doing any fighting. Instead, his role is mostly as on the sidelines as Mission Control, ensuring everyone is on the same page, and that everything is going as scheduled.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: All of them share the attitude, but Barbara especially, because she eats demons she kills simply out of spite for them eating humans.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: Barbara is obsessed with getting her revenge on the demons by eating them, just as they eat humans.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: They're so full of hate for "demons" that they, Barbara in particular, show signs of irrational anger when Emma suggests making a new Promise without killing the "demons".
• The Stoic: Vincent, to the point of Comically Serious.
• Your Days Are Numbered: The "demons'" experimentations have left them with brain damage that requires them to take drugs increasingly frequently to stop the horrible headaches. It's implied that the drugs will stop working sooner or later. After getting to the human world, they are cured with modern medicine.
• With Us or Against Us: It seems that years of living under "demon" experimentation has led them to develop this mentality. They react very angrily to Emma and Ray when they begin to show signs they don't want to shed blood, both human and "demon". Understandably, Emma becomes afraid of them and what "Minerva" is doing.

Zazie

Age: 5
ID: Unknown

A five year old child who fights for Minerva.

---

• Adaptational Early Appearance: Like his comrades listed above, he appears much earlier in the anime than he does in the manga.
• The Berserker: When he gets into a fight with someone, he lashes out at almost anything he sees and shows no mercy. He would have killed Emma if Hayato hadn't calmed him down. When his face is seen after the bag he wears on his head is sliced off, he has a look of constant rage.
• Broken Ace: He's the single most dangerous fighter Minerva has. He's also ill-tempered and never speaks.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: He managed to stab Legravalima's core after she was softened up after fighting Geelen and his men. Too bad she had a second one.
• Lightning Bruiser: He cut down three demons in one panel before they could react to his presence.
• Manchild: Subverted. He fights while wearing a bag over his head with two eye holes cut out and hangs a small toy tiger on his neck. The subversion comes from the fact that according to the author's notes he is a child.
• Master Swordsman: Uses a pair of swords and is very efficient at them.
• Odd Friendship: Implied to have one with the rest of the Minerva army since he doesn't have the same intellect or opinions as the rest of the group, he just follows whatever Minerva or Vincent tell him to do.
• The Voiceless: He never speaks. It's not stated if that is because he can't or because due to his age and living conditions he doesn't know how to.
• Younger Than They Look: He's five years old, but he's the size of an adult.

Ayshe

Age: 13
A sniper in "William Minerva"'s group, who resides in the Paradise Hideout. Can only speak demon language after living outside the farms from early age.

---

• Improbable Aiming Skills: She is a talented marksman, enough to be compared to Yugo by Don and Gilda.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: Out of Norman's supporters, she actually hates him, becuase to her the demons were her adoptive family who Minerva unwittingly "liberated" her from. Once she learns that Don and Gilda are against Minerva's plan, she reveals that she can talk normally and joins them right away.
• No Social Skills: Due to being raised by "demons" without any human contact, she can't understand human language. The only companions she feels comfortable with are her three dogs. Though it turns out, she can understand and speak human language.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: She understands human language just fine; she just solely speaks the demon's language out of contempt towards those who killed her father. Once she finds out Don and Gilda want to spare the demonkind, she starts communicating with them normally.
• Raised by Wolves: She was raised by "demons" in one of the forbidden forests. It was a case of Happily Adopted too, leading her to hate Minerva and his allies for "rescuing" her when they killed her "demon" dad. This fact also means she this trope applies less than it seems at first; she is at least able to speak the human language, implying her adoptive demon dad taught it to her.
• Red Herring: She is introduced as a scarily competent bodyguard for Don and Gilda during their search of Mujika, which leads them to believe she will attempt to kill Mujika once they found her. It turns out that she has been given no orders and has no intentions to do so. Hayato is the one tasked with guiding Adams look-alikes to do the deed.
• Two-Faced: Her bangs hide a huge blemish on the right side of her face. This caused a similarly disfigured "demon" working on the disposal line to sympathize with her and rescue her.
• Token Good Teammate:One of the few members of Minerva's Army to be against the genocide of the demons.
• You Killed My Father: She actually hates Minerva and his allies for "rescuing" her, since the "demon" they thought was holding her captive was actually the one who saved her from disposal and raised her like a daughter. She pretended not to be able to speak human language because she didn't want to talk to the people who killed her adopted father.
• Walking Spoiler: There's way more to her than being a mute sniper in Second Minerva's group.

Julius Ratri (SPOILERS)

Julius Ratri

The ancestor of James and Peter Ratri. The one responsible for forging the Promise with The One.

---

• Despair Event Horizon: Witnessing Leuvis single-handedly slaughter his entire battalion made him lose hope that the humans could ever win the war, leading to his decision to betray his allies to forge a new peace with the Promise.
• Early-Bird Cameo: He is first mentioned by Sonju as the human who made the promise in Chapter 47. He would not make an appearance until Chapter 141.
• Evil Counterpart: Julius is a rather fitting dark reflection of Norman. Julius betrays his allies' trust and sacrifices the children to the demons, all in the name of the "greater good." Norman, at the point in the story, was similarly planning to betray Emma and Ray's trust to carry through on his genocide plan for the same sense of justice. To drive the point home further, Julius' best friend looked like Spear Counterpart to Emma.
• Face–Heel Turn: He was at first a leader of the army fighting for humanity's survival. Years of war made him lose all hope that they could win, and he ended up betraying his allies to bargain a peace with the demons.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: He's remembered by the Ratri clan as the hero who stopped the war and negotiated the peace with the demons. The clan's official history doesn't mention that he betrayed his friends and allies or that he left behind citizens. James and Peter were disgusted and proud respectively when they dug up ancient documents.
• Posthumous Character: He lived roughly a thousand years ago, and is therefore long dead when the story starts.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: He betrayed his human allies so he and his people could live in peace, safely away from the demons. In return, The One made it so that Julius and all his descendants would uphold the human side of the bargain and collaborate with the demons forever, meaning he would never be rid of his guilt and always be near the very demons he wanted to flee from.
• Secretly Selfish: While he was sincere in his assertions that he thought that bargaining for peace with the demons and offering them a portion of humans as an offering was the best way to put a stop to the killings, his inner-thoughts reveal that he also did it because he himself was tired of fighting and wanted to go home safely with his people.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: He was sick and tired of his family, friends, and comrades being killed and eaten by the demons. But his means to achieve peace between the demons had him betray his allies and had them eaten by demons when they refused to allow a certain portion of humans to remain as an offering to the demons. Though, it's a little downplayed by his inner-thoughts that reveal that he was also Secretly Selfish.

The Old Man (SPOILERS)

Alex Mikhaylov

An elderly man living in the remote wilderness, who comes across an unconscious, amnesiac Emma.

---

• Dark and Troubled Past: He fought in a war that destroyed his home and killed his family and friends, and he immensely regrets fighting in something so pointless.
• Family of Choice: After Emma reunites with her family, he remains part of her family of choice. The Dreams Come True epilogue shows Emma still lives with him, and the rest of her family moved in to them and built extra houses nearby.
• Feet-First Introduction: Only his feet are visible when he approaches the unconscious Emma at the end of Chapter 178.
• Good Parents: From what little we see of him, he's shown to be a good man that decides to adopt Emma once it seems she has nowhere else to go, and she's happy to be with him. Probably helps that he's implied to have had a kid of his own.
• Last Episode, New Character: He's properly introduced in Chapter 180, the penultimate chapter of the manga.
• No Name Given: He's never given a name in the manga proper, but in Offscene 027, it's revealed that his name is Alex Mikhaylov.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Implied. A photo in his home depicts him with a wife and kid, and he states that his family and friends all died.

---