Zodiac: Capricorn
Iku Sutou is a first-year at Ohananomitsu High School and one of Aijou Rentarou's girlfriends—his ninth, to be exact. She's in Class 1-3 and plays for the school's baseball club, though "plays" might be generous considering she's basically the entire Girls' Baseball Team at this point.
The team used to have nine members, but eight of them decided to pursue baseball in America and left Iku holding down the fort alone. Rather than let the whole thing die, she kept showing up and tried recruiting new members, though nobody ever bit. She stuck with it anyway, refusing to let the club disband on her watch.
What really sets Iku apart, though, is her masochism. She's genuinely into pain—to the point where she'll push herself through grueling training sessions specifically to feel that agony afterward. It's her thing. And somehow, despite loving the suffering, she's also built an absurd pain tolerance. She can do bat swings over 101,000 times without collapsing. She trains for hours until her body is screaming, or even all night straight until school starts the next morning. The pain is practically a feature, not a bug.
Her name is basically a pun: "Iku" sounds like the Japanese word for "stoic," which fits her whole deal with pain tolerance. Her birthday on January 9th is also wordplay—I(1)ku(9)—if you're into that sort of thing.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
