Rouka Numachi used to be Suruga Kanbaru's basketball rival—the kind of nemesis you actually remember. While Suruga became known for her offensive dominance, Rouka was a defensive player, equally passionate about the sport. A leg injury cut her career short, though, and the two had a falling out in middle school that never really healed.
These days, Rouka's best known for her fascination with other people's misfortunes. She's basically built her entire life around it. She calls herself a "collector of misfortunes" and runs what amounts to a counseling service under the pseudonym "Lord Devil," where she promises clients she can solve absolutely any problem. The catch is that she's not exactly sincere about it. She'll listen to people's problems and make these grand promises, but she doesn't really intend to follow through.
What makes her tick is schadenfreude—that peculiar joy you get from watching someone else suffer. Unlike Suruga, who's genuinely virtuous, Rouka's malice is baked into everything she does. Though she does genuinely sympathize with her clients' issues, she helps them in this detached, self-serving way. She basically lets time do the work and tells herself that's helpful. She frames her "evil" as harmless since clients eventually solve their own problems anyway, and more importantly, she gets to feed on their misery in the process.
The crutch she carries from her old injury has become part of her whole thing. She's said it actually helps people open up to her more easily—something about the vulnerability it projects makes clients more willing to confide in "Lord Devil."
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
