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| “ | That has nothing to f*cking do with this!! An ear!? An eye!? You can tear off my arms and legs and crush my organs, but you can’t change the difference between our strengths! I'M A LEVEL 5! I'M #4! I'M MELTDOWNER! Don’t get so pleased with yourself, you motherf*cker! I CAN KILL A LEVEL 0 LIKE YOU 100 TIMES WITHOUT LIFTING A FINGEEERRR!! | „ |
| ~ Shizuri Mugino's villainous breakdown towards Shiage Hamazura. |
| “ | You have to dirty your hands to give the dead a clean end. Only the one killed can know how the one killed feels, but only the living can act based on their feelings for the dead. Rejecting that and running away is not being honest or being a pacifist. It is being a coward. | „ |
| ~ Mugino to Accelerator. |
Shizuri Mugino, also known as Meltdowner, is a major character in the A Certain Magical Index franchise.
She is the fourth-ranked Level 5 esper of Academy City and the leader of ITEM, one of the many criminal organizations on the Dark Side, which is at odds with another team, SCHOOL. She is the former archenemy of Shiage Hamazura, due to him leaving ITEM to protect Rikou Takistubo from Mugino's vengeance.
She is voiced by Ami Koshimizu in Japanese and Lydia Mackay in English.
Appearance[]
Mugino is a beautiful young woman with a tall stature and slender figure. She has long soft red hair and matching eyes. Shiage Hamazura states that she has both the style and grace of an ojousama. She has a well-endowed chest, and is considered to be the most attractive of the Item girls because of it.
After her first defeat at the hands of Shiage, the injuries she suffered would scar her face, take away her right eye, and destroy her entire left arm from the shoulder down. After World War III, one-third of her face was artificially treated with cosmetics and her missing eye and arm replaced.
She has a wide variety of stylish clothing. In Railgun, she wears a violet dress with shorts, along with black thigh high socks and white boots. In the main series, She wore a bright short sleeved coat with a belt and checkered pattern ascot. She also has yellow stockings and a sweater underneath. In New Testament, she now wears a jacket over a shirt with a bolo tie, underneath a camisole.
Personality[]
| “ | You're the kind of person who can't stand it when you can't complete a video game without 100% accuracy. If you make the slightest mistake, You fly into a rage and won't accept it even if you complete the game. | „ |
| ~ Shiage Hamazura explaining Mugino's arrogant and wrathful nature. |
At first glance, Shizuri Mugino appears as a calm, mature and sensible individual who acts as an older sister to the other members of ITEM, which goes well with her position as the group's leader. She often shows concern for her comrades and will praise them for their hard work. She also cares about her teammates' utility and won't hesitate to dismiss them when their pushed past their limits and would get in her way. However, beneath this generally warm and friendly exterior lies a far more merciless and sadistic personality - one shaped by her dubious upbringing and role as a mercenary operating within Academy City's dark side.
Mugino is unapologetically brutal and doesn't mind killing people during missions, regardless of whether they're enemy or ally. She is very prideful and arrogant, given her status as a Level 5, and is equally overconfident in her abilities, leading her to underestimate her opponents. She also looks down on lower level espers, especially Level 0s, claiming that she could kill over a Level 0 over a hundred times without lifting so much as a finger. Mugino is also quite bloodthirsty and tends to show signs of excitement whenever she's confronted by an interesting challenge, such as fighting against a fellow Level 5 like Mikoto Misaka. However, her pride and arrogance often clouds her rational judgement and leads her to take risks she doesn't need to.
Despite her mostly calm and casual demeanor, Mugino possesses an extremely vicious temper and becomes incredibly homicidal towards those who angers her, as shown when she violently kicks Mikoto in the stomach after she inflicted a small head injury on her. Whenever her pride is considerably damaged, Mugino will fly into a rage which leaves her vulnerable to being blindsided. In addition to this, Mugino has a low tolerance for incompetence and tends to respond in either mild frustration or anger, as seen when she scolds Shiage Hamazura or Frenda Seivelun. She also reacts harshly to any type of inconvenience, often shouting in a furious manner that devolves into unintelligible speech.
Mugino despises betrayal of any kind and will retaliate in a savage fashion towards anyone who tries to get away with it, best shown when she executes Frenda in cold blood after discovering her betrayal of ITEM. As part of her temperamental nature, Mugino tends to drag out the pronunciation of words, especially the names of those who have angered her. She has a penchant for using crude and vulgar language, as seen when she threatens to burn Rikou Takitsubo's genitalia and taunts Hamazura by telling him to sit and masturbate to the stench of her virginity being burned away, revealing the extent of her sadistic tendencies.
Furthermore, Mugino can be very relentless and unhinged when it comes to achieving victory or getting payback, to the point of inability to let go of her target until they are utterly destroyed, regardless of the damage she does to herself and others. Her pathological need for revenge becomes more prevalent if her quarry has embarrassed or has defeated her in some way. This is best shown by her drive to defeat Teitoku Kakine and SCHOOL which led to the destruction of ITEM and especially her twisted obsession with Shiage Hamazura after being defeated by him twice to the point of pursuing him all the way to Russia in the middle of World War III. She also becomes livid upon learning that STUDY used her and her team as test subjects and destroys several of their powered suits in retaliation.
Shiage surmises Mugino's radical behavior as being unable to accept that she can't complete a video game hundred percent and will fly into a blind rage if she slightly mess up. He also states that if she isn't able to get 100, she instead goes for a high score to compensate. An example of this is after she failed to kill Mikoto Misaka and lets her go after discovering she was trying to stop the Level 6 Shift Project in order to see her suffer against the Dark Side of Academy City more. Mugino believes that she always has to be the best and do things perfectly, but when it's clearly impossible, she instantly changes her goals to something else to hold up her pride.
Despite her flaws, Mugino is not without any humanity, as she genuinely cares about her teammates and truly felt remorse after killing Frenda, even visiting her grave and protecting her younger sister Fremea as a testament to keeping Frenda's legacy alive. When Shiage spares her after defeating her for a third time, Mugino shows confusion at why he would forgive her after everything she's done to him and Takitsubo. She later accepts Shiage as the better fighter even though he doesn't have powers because he beat her. Aside from the members of ITEM, Mugino has few people that she is fond of, such as her classmate Okibi Shiratori or her trusted butler Mujinayama. Mugino felt some regret after killing Shiratori and experienced great rage upon witnessing Mujinayama's apparent death.
By the events of New Testament, Mugino becomes more restrained, showing greater patience, though she remains particularly violent towards her enemies and retains some sociopathic traits, such as cheerfully greeting Fremea by casually introducing herself as the girl who killed her sister. After getting the order to kill Touma Kamijou from Academy City, Mugino chooses to dismiss the order because of the fact that Denmark is too far away and that the city would probably not cover the plane expenses rather than any moral quandaries, showing that she is still ruthless enough to kill someone she barely knows.
However, Mugino's ruthless nature is now used as a way of defending those she cares about. She also doesn't take kindly to those who use Frenda's legacy as a tool against her, as she surprises an assailant dressed up as Frenda who had believed she had gone soft after the war. Mugino states that she is perfectly fine with killing people or destroying things as long as Shiage doesn't know about any of it. It's heavily implied that she has developed some feelings towards Hamazura and avoids doing anything that would make him resent her. She claims that as long as he forgives her, everything she does will sort itself out eventually.
Her softer side also begins to emerge in subtle ways. She displays a newfound patience and playfulness in her interactions with Last Order, when she teases her about her panties. Mugino humors her and simply walks away with a laugh - behavior that starkly contrasts with her former, more violent self. She even begins learning to cook, symbolizing her desire for a more normal life. In a humorous scene, when Cendrillon appears naked in her apartment, Mugino remains surprisingly composed, only showing irritation when teased about her feelings for Hamazura.
Biography[]
While Mugino's full background hasn't been completely revealed yet, she is a daughter of the Mugino Family, which is among the five wealthiest families in the world, making their fortune in wheat on the surface, but also secretly deals in various criminal enterprises, such as money laundering through banks and casinos. Unlike many, she wasn't forced to join the dark side, but was rather born into it.
Powers and Abilities[]
Powers[]
Mugino's meltdowner
- Meltdowner: Mugino's esper ability which allows her to control electrons and rearrange them into an abnormal state that is both particle and wave, turning it into an unstable destructive matter. She utilizes this ability to create a powerful and destructive beam of high-speed electrons known as a "Particle Waveform High-Speed Cannon", that is able to pierce through a target at the same velocity that it was fired. Her ability is so powerful that she unconsciously holds back part of her power due to her survival's instinct so as to not damage herself with her own ability. When her anger over Shiage hurting her despite being a "worthless level 0" reached its peak, she blew up her own left arm from wrist to elbow while trying to kill him with her power. Since her ability is a form of electron manipulation, she can also manipulate enemy electric or electron-based attacks and bend their trajectory away from her.
- Meltdowner Beams: She can fire beams of destructive electrons which are said to be stuck in a state between particles and waves. Mugino initially could shoot four laser-like beams or release one concentrated blast. Normally, her rate of fire is a little slow since Mugino takes her time to perfectly aim and calculate the output of every single shot. She can also fire her Meltdowner like a rocket engine to move at speeds exceeding Mach 20. After World War III, Mugino has trained her ability to the point that she can create up to 20 Meltdowner beams at once. Wounds inflicted are completely cauterized.
- Silicon Burn: Mugino is able to disperse her Meltdowner into several smaller shots that cover the area through her special silicon cards to compensate for her usually slow firing rate.
- Meltdowner Shield: Mugino can generate round-shaped formations of her Meltdowner to block incoming attacks. The shield annihilates everything that comes in contact with it thus protecting her. Mugino can supposedly also erect a full body barrier to protect herself from all directions, solely as a last resort.
- Meltdowner Arm: After her mutilation, Mugino replaced her lost left arm with an energy-like Meltdowner Arm which can move according to her wishes yet carry the Meltdowner's properties. She can freely expand the arm in size.
- Meltdowner Eye: After her mutilation, Mugino replaced her lost right eye with a Meltdowner eye. While is not known if the eye is a functional replacement that allows her to see, she can use it to fire a Meltdowner beam.
- Body Crystal Overload: When Mugino ingested a small amount of Body Crystal she was able to shoot tens of thousands of Meltdowner beams around her, presumably much stronger than her normal powers. Since she's constantly shooting beams the sphere around her looks like a solid energy construct. She can also focus the beams in one spot to construct a single arm almost 20 meters long that easily melted down snow and the earth below it when swung, creating a phreatic explosion; or shoot the tens of thousands of beams into one direction. Since Mugino is not actually one of the rare espers compatible with Body Crystal, the drug greatly tires her out, running out after a few minutes at most and leaving her very weakened afterward.
Abilities[]
- Genius-Level Intellect: As one of the seven Level 5s esper in Academy City, Mugino is extremely intelligent and has a calculation process much faster than most supercomputers of Academy City, which are 20 years ahead of the world. She is constantly calculating possible outcomes and means of best exploiting her beam's destructive power. She is also a capable leader and was able to deduce Mikoto Misaka as the perpetrator behind the attacks on the facilities affiliated with the Level 6 Shift Project.
- Expert Combatant: Outside of her esper ability, Mugino is very capable in hand-to-hand combat, being able to deal out both strong punches and kicks, experienced by Shiage Hamazura and Mikoto Misaka, both of whom had an urge to vomit after being hit in the stomach. In her youth, she was capable of knocking out a white tiger with a single palm strike to its face.
