Maru

Maru (マル) is one of the two main characters of the Heavenly Delusion series.

Character Profile
Maru is a boy who is aiming for "Heaven" and to find the other boy who looks like him. He has no memory of his origin and as such has no surname. According to Kiruko, he is "a beautiful boy who is hard to find". He has outstanding physical abilities and a special power to kill man-eaters, which he calls “Hiruko”. He was born only a few months before The Calamity and is 15 at the start of the series.

Appearance
Maru is a boy in his mid-adolescence. He has light gray eyes and light gray spiky hair. He sports a black dungaree with sleeves and a hood; on the back there is the text "We are neither machines nor game pieces", a yellow inside shirt, and black mid-top trainers with red soles. He also carries around a green Army camping bag. He has been described as handsome by Kiruko. A key thing to note as well is that he is often mistaken for a girl.

Personality
Maru is a complex character in Heavenly Delusion, embodying a blend of resilience and vulnerability. His sharp intellect is both a strength and a source of isolation, as he navigates the intricate web of the story's mysteries. Maru's journey unfolds with a balance of determination and moments of self-discovery, making him a compelling and relatable presence in the narrative.

Origin
Maru was born shortly before The Calamity. His true identity currently remains unknown as his mother Tokio had one single child. Sakota cloned this infant and in the midst of the raid on Heaven, mixed the two children. In a panic and with no way to quickly determine who the true child was, Teruhiko marks a circle on the bottom of one of the boys' feet. This child with the mark later became Maru. The child without the circle mark is with Tokio, the other with the mark is with Aoshima during the calamity outside the Takahara Academy.

Maru does not know who his parents are. From very early in his life he had been in constant migration between groups of people. It wasn't until he was found by Mikura that she taught him self defense and the “Maru-Touch”.

Aware of being on the verge of death, Mikura decides to find someone to finish her goal of returning to Heaven with Maru and finds Kiruko, an odd-job handy girl who agrees to be his bodyguard. Before being able to talk about details, Mikura collapses and soon after dies to her core.

Searching for Heaven
Maru and Kiruko travel looking for this vague "heaven", on their way to sleep Maru notices Kiruko holding a picture of Robin and asks if he is her boyfriend. Surprised, she elaborates on their identities and assures him that she'll take him to his destination.

After a few days of walking and starving, the pair find an inn and walk in to stay the night. They're greeted by the inn keeper and are encouraged to take a bath. The keeper mistakes them as brother and sister and attempts to educate them on the consequences of incest. Flustered, Kiruko quickly clarifies that they are not related whatsoever and that they are not in a relationship. The two prepare for bed, and Maru, who mentioned sometime earlier that he has trouble sleeping, is sound unconscious. Kiruko finds herself unnaturally tired and falls asleep. She later awakes in a cold sweat from a nightmare of herself during her surgery and spots a Hiruko in the window. Kiruko wakes Maru and they make their way outside where they then confront the Hiruko. They manage to incapacitate its offensive prowess and upon Kiruko's last shot to remove the final whip, is shoved away by the inn keeper. She believes that it became her son and despite attempting to protect it, she is quickly sliced to bits by the man-eater and ingested. With it heavily wounded by Kiruko, Maru swiftly moves in for the kill; where he then invades its body and finally crushes the core.

Tomato Heaven
Using the information gathered by the bandits they had met days earlier, the pair build a raft and sail through the flooded remains of Tokyo outskirt. They come across a large plantation with a sign that warns the merciless punishments of trespassing. Maru shows Kiruko a cylinder, in it are two syringes with unknown contents. These syringes are to be injected into someone with the same face as Maru, presumably Tokio and Yamato.

They are then greeted by some of the farm's residents and welcomed in. Maru and Kiriko are talking about the scale of the plantation when an ex-viewer of the Asakusa racing league barges in and mistakes Kiruko for Kiriko. He's kicked out by Maru but before leaving, flashes his light on the Takahara logo. Maru notices this and compares it to the Kiru-Beam in Kiruko's holster. The pair agree to board the ship set for Tokyo and enter the cabin. While sitting in a room within the ship, Maru decides to abandon the idea of finding Heaven and instead petitions that he and Kiruko stay at the farm together. Kiruko digresses but he insists. Maru reveals that he had been crushing on her and tries to forcibly kiss her. After a short while of struggling, Kiruko manages to push him off of herself. He profusely apologizes and she brushes the situation off, though it incites her to tell him the truth about who she is.

Maru stares at Kiruko as she sleeps and tries to digest the information he's been fed when a scream can be heard throughout the ship. The pair move to the balcony and are jumped by a Hiruko. It is a large fish with many hands. The creature begins to jet high pressure water and knocks two passengers overboard, where it then swiftly scoops the stranded people and ingests them. The Hiruko quickly makes its way back into the ship and begins chasing Maru and Kiruko. It spits highly pressurized water at Kiruko and nearly splits her in half. She lures the Hiruko into a dark room filled with marijuana, and it suddenly finds itself quickly losing moisture as the cannabis relentlessly absorb all liquids from it away. With no presence of water, the Ningyo is left barely alive; where Maru crushes the core.

Hotel King
Guided by a map they acquired by one of the men from the ship. Maru and Kiruko make their way to a spot labelled, "100% Safe Water." They meet Totori, who specifies the location of this so called pure water. She advertises her hotel services to the pair and Kiruko, feeling guilty about leaving her without customers, agrees to stay for the night. Maru calls her out for it and Kiruko tells him to leave it and trust the girl.

They approach the area and delve into the entrance of a subway. Seeing it as nothing more than a flooded tunnel with very unfavorable terrain, Kiruko quickly suspects that they are being set up, and the two retreat back to the surface. However, there's nobody there to ambush them. She notices a bloodied man on the floor and calls out to him. He responds by asking them to find his friend, and mentions a monster lurking in the area. Kiruko readies the Kiru-Beam and the two begin to hear shuffling around them when suddenly, a large animal begins charging directly towards them. Realizing it's actually a bear, the pair sprint toward the safety of a large cement pillar and find themselves trapped upon it.

After a few hours of pondering their escape, Kiruko drops the Kiru-Beam's battery. Maru screams at her, verifies the location of it, and loses hope. Kiruko asks Maru as to whether he views her as a man or woman, to which Maru responds confused that he sees her as a woman. Upon hearing the promise of being allowed to touch her boobs if he gets the battery, he immediately jumps down and grabs the battery. The bear reappears and attempts to knock him off of the ladder though Maru makes his way back to the pillar. With one shot left, Kiruko aims at the bear and instantly turns its head to mush.

The two return to the hotel later that night exhausted and prepare for bed. However, Maru hadn't forgotten the promise that Kiruko provided him. He urges her to give in to it and as he lifts her shirt she lets out a very loud moan. The two are completely dumbfounded by it when Totori bursts into the room and points to the rules etched on the walls. She drags Maru out of the room and he's left in horrid disappointment. Stuck in a limbo of thought Maru is caught off guard by Totori, now attempting to coerce him with prostitution. He's hesitant until she takes his hand and places it on her breast. In a shock and empty thought Maru accidentally finds himself inside her body; she is a Hiruko. Terrified, he jumps away from her, subdues her, and calls for Kiruko. The following day the vigilante leader is pronounced dead. Kiruko asks Totori if she wants to join them on their search though she declines. Maru tells her to become the king of hotels which she nods to.

The Immortal Order
On their way to find The Immortal Order, Maru and Kiruko decide to camp in an open area and promote a business of hunting Hiruko. Later, they're approached by what they assume to be the Immortal Order. The "immortalites" take them to the headquarters of their main building and interrogate what business they have with the Immortal Order. Confused, the pair question who exactly these people are, to which they respond they have nothing to do with the former. The two storm off in frustration, though the group is able to hook them back. They reveal they are the Liviuman, a community that opposes the Immortal Order. Their leader, Mizuhashi, explains her witness to these "horrible acts" that the Immortal Order partake in. She asks that they eliminate the Hiruko under the building that the order reside so that they take the Liviuman people's demand more seriously.

With the help of a Liviuman spy, Maru and Kiruko make their way into the basement floor of the Immortal Order's headquarters. They're surprised to see that the building supports electricity, though Maru is more concerned about being ambushed. The two become paranoid about the entire man-eater plan being a setup to kidnap them and begin panicking until Kiruko suddenly spots a small dormant Hiruko. Maru quickly kills it but they begin to see the dormant man-eaters all around the garage until Kiruko finally spots a much larger Hiruko in the corner of the floor when its glyph abruptly begins glowing.

Kiruko suddenly fires into a wall and begins flailing on the floor while screaming for Robin. Maru, with no idea as to what he should do, restrains her and kisses her until she suddenly snaps out of the hallucination without breath. Maru puts an end the the large man-eater and tries to kiss Kiruko again while she's lost in a train of thought, though he's quickly shut down with a single slap.

The two are then approached by a tall man with white hair. He looks at the now decaying corpse of Ohma's morph and turns back to the pair, asking if they could do the same to someone else. They ask if he knows someone named Dr. Usami and he tells them that he is the person they are looking for. Usami guides the pair to the upper floors of the building and asks that they use the same method to kill the person in the he is taking them to. Maru and Kiriko move the curtains and are disgusted to see a mangled woman supported by machines. Maru asks Usami why he simply won't just shut down the machines and he reveals that should she die, she will become a man-eater. He further clarifies that man-eaters are humans who have succumb to this spot-like illness. Maru finds Hoshio's core, though he still remains hesitant and asks if the woman is consenting to it. Usami tells him that Hoshio can talk through a tablet on the bed. The two take a look at the pad and read the text, asking them to see the sky before she dies. Maru tells Usami that he won't kill her if they cannot fulfill her request, and so they wheel her to the balcony of the building. Hoshio looks at Usami and closes her eye one final time, where Maru then crushes her core.

The Liviuman group force their way into the building using violence and the other patients with prosthetic limbs have to leave the building. Kiruko asks if they do know the doctor in the photograph but they recognise Robin instead and they say he was with them and Usami until two years ago. Usami suggests to his patients to go to a safe place and asks Maru and Kiruko to accompany him to bury Hoshio. The two sit and wait for him to come back, Maru mentions that he might have just tried to burn the entire building down. Suddenly, Kiruko remembers the firearm he had carried when they first met, in that moment they hear a gunshot and they rush upstairs to see Usami at the top of the building with a self inflicted gunshot to the head.

Kiruko
He fell in love with her. Although knowing her backstory, he still wants to be with her romantically, saying that he never found a girl that he got along with this well. Despite his crush, he most often refers to her as “sis”.

Takezuka
Upon first meeting Takezuka for the first time the two quickly got into a fight. It was the first time that Maru lost a fight. The next day the two exchanged blows in a warehouse to the point they both collapsed in exhaustion. Both claimed that the other had won the fight. Maru took interest in Takezuka because of her use of the word “Hiruko” to describe the “man-eaters”.

Hiruko Child
Maru was born with a Hiruko core.
 * The Maru-Touch: Upon bare-hand contact with a Hiruko, Maru can invade the organism's body in search for its core. This allows him to almost instantly kill any man-eater if he chooses so. However, when entering a Hiruko, Maru's consciousness is transferred into its body; putting him in a state of great vulnerability.
 * Deadly Combatant: Maru displays feats of strength well above any human. He can move faster than the eye can track, effortlessly put one unconscious in a single blow, and jump from heights that would paralyze or kill any normal person without so much as a scratch. He is dexterous in martial arts and even tied with Michika in hand to hand combat.
 * Hiru-Sense: Maru can sense any organism containing a Hiruko core in the nearby.
 * Regenerative Properties: Maru has great proficiency in bodily repair. He recovered from a swollen, bleeding comatose state in three days and can regrow a tooth.

Trivia
*Maru in Japanese means "circle".
 * The novel Maru is reading is Nevil Shute's On the beach.