Yato

Yato is one of the three central figures of Noragami: a minor, self-proclaimed Delivery God who will take on any job — from finding a lost cat to exorcising a phantom — for a flat fee of five yen. Centuries ago he was worshipped very differently, as a god of calamity, and the shadow of that past occasionally resurfaces in how other gods and spirits treat him. His current ambition is modest and grand at once: to be prayed to often enough that he can finally build a shrine of his own.

Yato works alongside his shinki Yukine, a young spirit bound to him as a living weapon and guidepost, and grows close to Hiyori Iki, a schoolgirl whose soul begins slipping out of her body after a near-fatal accident involving him. Beneath his greed for coins, love of gambling, and fondness for lucky charms, Yato carries a genuinely protective streak toward the people he chooses to keep close.

He can be mischievous and childish one moment and unexpectedly severe the next, holding to a strict, sometimes harsh code about what gods owe the humans who rely on them. That contradiction — a trickster who still wants, more than anything, to be needed — defines most of his arc.