Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
- Nana herself. On the outside she seems like a cheery young girl who befriends Nanao and even helps him gain confidence. But on the inside, Nana is a Knight Templar Serial Killer assigned by the government to assassinate the Talented. The moment she callously allows Nanao to fall to his death off the cliff cements her as an unfettered threat.
- The reason why Nana hates the Talented stems from her childhood: as a child, she discovered the severed heads of her parents after Talented burglars allegedly broke in and murdered them. As pictured above, she's seen running holding a head from her dad, covered in blood and screaming in pain, later exiting the building and trying to find help from any nearby people. That's one tragic past for a rather morally ambiguous character.
- The backstory quickly deconstructs what happens when you've got too much power in the wrong hands. The first generation of Talented were young adults who got Drunk on the Dark Side when they realized their powers let them go unbound by society's rules. The government enlisted their own Talented as a means of controlling them, only for the same Talented forces to abuse their powers too. It's not until after 5 years of warring where the Talented were finally reined in.
- The Talented are all isolated on an island, "training" to fight against "enemies of humanity". While it's easy to deduce that the training academy is a front to keep them contained, the faculty's lack of action to individuals going missing also leaves hints that the island is where the Talented are sent to their deaths. What kind of society willingly sends off teenagers to their deaths under the guise of "training to defend humanity" just to maintain order in the world?
- Nana's profiles of each of the Talented include a "potential kill count" statistic to measure their lethality. These numbers reach into the magnitude of hundreds of thousands. Somehow, Nanao, whose Power Nullifier talent is one of the least threatening to normals, has a potential of over 1 million. How can this happen?
- We learn later on in the story: it works by disrupting to outright stopping bodily systems and even chemical processes like Moguo's flames. He can and does kill somebody just by touching them, not to mention other dangerous applications like removing all their inhibitions and turning even the sweetest, most non-violent individual into a vicious, murderous psycho.
- There are theories that the kill count estimate is a fabrication to help motivate Nana to pick her targets, which puts her mission in an entirely different light if it were true — the Omniscient Council of Vagueness is willing to go to any lengths to keep the Talented under control.
- There's another, more terrible aspect of this, with the reveal as to why the students are all moved to a deserted island with no one around for miles: A person's talent can mutate suddenly during times of stress, and the last time that happened, the Talented in question went from being a relatively inconsequential threat to being able to destroy an entire city. The potential death count doesn't necessarily just account for what they can do now, but what they might be capable of should they experience that kind of sudden exponential increase in power.
- Several of Nana's murders are this, but to name a few:
- When she realizes that Shibusawa had the ability to travel back to the past for 24 hours, she manipulates him into believing that Nanao was eaten by an Enemy of Humanity and causes him to drown in the lake knowing that his inability to swim — and his exhaustion — would result in his demise. Worse, because the lake was not frozen at the time, Shibusawa's corpse would now be frozen in the upcoming days with no one being the wiser. The anime even gives us a shot from his perspective, helplessly reaching up and seeing his oblivious classmates cheerfully going about their training above the surface.
- She ambushes Kirara in the forest, poisons her, then promises to give her the antidote if Kirara gives her her phone's password. Desperate, Kirara complies... then watches helplessly as Nana doesn't move a finger until she dies. Even worse is when she uses Kirara's decomposing corpse to set up Kaori's murder, which involves:
- Lacing her missing color contacts with a highly lethal and painful poison. When Kyouya discovers the body, he notes that it looked like she was trying to claw her eyes out.
- Nana is nearly raped by Tsunekichi. For several panels/minutes, it seems like he's gotten the upper hand when Nana loses the poison needles she was going to use to kill him.
- Yuuka is slowly revealed to be one of the most disturbing Talenteds Nana had faced. Claiming that her Talent was superhuman strength, it becomes apparent that this is a farce and that she was the true necromancer. But what pushes Yuka further is the revelation that she was never in a relationship with Shinji and she was the one who set the fire. She was so fixated on having Shinji to herself that she believed that killing then resurrecting him as a zombie was the only way to do it.
- The zombies themselves are revealed to be the reanimated corpses of past teachers and the Talented. It would seem that before Nana was indoctrinated, The Talented were already being executed through the government's operation. Later chapters reveal that they've already used such methods as bombing the island and inciting violent gang wars so they would tear themselves apart.
- Jin Tachibana reveals what happened to his class 5 years ago: obsessed with becoming the "strongest", the students quickly formed factions and started outright murdering each other in order to prove it. Jin was the winner and the sole survivor, and after sneaking back to the mainland and discovering the government faked his death to his family, he realized the horrible truth that they had all been set-up and unleashed against each other. Keep in mind these were all teenagers and preteens.
- Chapters 94 and 95 show Rin's perspective of these events; once a Yandere ended up admitting that she murdered a boy she liked because he got a girlfriend, the students pulled mob mentality, murdered the girl in return, then the second murderer herself was also publicly killed by a Super-Strength male student to show his dominance, and the next thing anyone knew, the students were drawing lines in the sand and openly killing each other in a local civil war. Let that sink in for a minute: for all the crazy and sociopathic students Nana killed in her tenure, it took a number of deaths and a fair bit of time and drama for things to escalate out of control. Rin's class took one to completely unravel at the seams and have everyone so focused on Might Makes Right that it makes Nana's class look reasonable.
- Even worse, Jin defeated said Yandere with a single attack, and then she marched up to the class roll the following day with a "lifeless face" and confessed to committing the murder. Jin trounced her so thoroughly that she realized she wasn't the strongest in their class after her entire psychotic break about proving herself to be it, and hit a Despair Event Horizon that it was All for Nothing. Jin unknowingly caused the battle royale for survival to kick off solely because he protected Rin from the girl.
- The scene where Tsuoraka finally reveals the truth to Nana: her parents were trying to protect the Talented and the Organization ordered their assassination, then lied to Nana and brainwashed her into being their personal weapon. Nana's ensuing Despair Event Horizon is drawn in horrifying, disturbing detail, made worse by her attempting to commit suicide then and there from the guilt, if it wasn't for Moe.
- We later learn that Nanao survived. The good news is by this point Nana has gotten better. The bad news that Nanao, who is not so forgiving, decides to become much worse.
- After the Time Skip, Japan has gone down the drain. The new government is practically boasting it is the reincarnation of Imperial, Nazi-allied Japan, with concentration camps, manipulation of the press, orchestrated terrorist attacks, and public hangings for merely complaining at the military. The government also turns the Talented against each other by assigning some of them as "watchers" to keep tabs on the others in exchange for privileges. This is a world that was afraid of a Beware the Superman apocalypse yet managed to vote in something even worse.
- And as a final insult, the reason why humanity went completely fascist over the Talented is because they're not done evolving. When one of the talented lives long enough to experience Power Incontinence, they transform into Eldritch Abominations and completely lose their sanity as their brains are mushed around. The governments of the world had to resort to erasing all traces of the last eldritch apocalypse to prevent society from completely collapsing into a Mad Max scenario with suicidal riots against Talented and cults worshipping the soon-to-be eldritch gods. Also, all Talented have some flaw in their frontal cortex, which only makes preventing Sanity Slippage harder.
- When Nanao is finally able to be convinced to turn the side of good again, he falls to the ground, writhing in pain, having his awakening. When he stands up, uncovering his head, a bloody crack appears on his face
◊, with Nanao's ongoing transformation into an Enemy of humanity.Nanao: Behold, the fate of all those born with talents.
