Character · Hunter x Hunter
Illumi Zoldyck
The Zoldyck family's eldest son adjusts people the way you would adjust a machine, with pins, through the skull.
In Otakana the clue reads: Assassin brother who controls people with pins
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Hunter x Hunter
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Illumi Zoldyck is a professional assassin from a family of them, and the family business is the only thing he treats as real. His Nen ability uses needles: pushed into a target's head, they overwrite behaviour, install instructions, or lock someone into an order that outlives the moment. He has been doing this to his younger brother Killua for years, which is why Killua flinches from certain choices without knowing why.
He also uses the needles on himself, which is where the design comes from. The blank stare and the enormous unmoving eyes are the result of pins holding his own face in place, and when he removes them the features move again. Very little else about him changes. He is polite to his targets, patient with his employers, and completely literal about what he has been paid to do.
His working relationship with Hisoka is one of the odder things in the series: two people with nothing in common except a talent for violence, treating each other as a reliable contractor. Illumi does not appear often, and Togashi uses him to set a ceiling. Whatever Killua has escaped, this is what it looks like when it comes looking for him.
Spelling ILLUMI
ILLUMI doubles its L, and the Japanese gives you no warning. The katakana reads Irumi, one R, three beats. English turns the R into an L and then writes two of them, so the audio and the tiles disagree twice inside six letters. The family name is Zoldyck, but the game wants ILLUMI. Two L's in the middle, and an I at each end.