Fiend

A Fiend (魔人), is a devil which has taken over a person's corpse.

Overview
Fiends are human corpses which are taken over by devils as it is their last resort to survive. Devils lose a significant amount of their supernatural power and ability to perform contracts after becoming a fiend. Fiends can be identified by their distinct head shapes, such as Power's horns, Beam's shark head or Pingtsi's hair.

Fiends have the personality of the devils which took over their corpses. However, some fiends retain more of the original corpse's brain than others, leading to their personalities becoming mingled such as Violence Fiend, who should be inclined towards violence, but instead prefers peace. Devils may also deliberately choose to retain half of the original corpse‘s brain to blend into society, as with Asa Mitaka's possession by the War Devil. It should be noted that both of these types of fiends are extremely rare being the exception not the rule.

With fiends of this variety, both personalities exist separately in one body until the devil decides to takes over the remaining brain or relinquishes full control back to the human. The Devil possessing the human in this case can choose when to control the body, but may not always be able to take over in instances where the human host is under high stress. When not in control, the other personality is still visible and audible to the one controlling the body in the form of a hallucination. Also unique to this type of fiend, the fiend's distinctive head feature will only become visible when the Devil's personality is in control of the body.

Should a fiend die, the devil that possessed the body generally reincarnates once they're in hell. However, since the body they possessed is destroyed, they lose all of their memories of their previous life. Once they become reborn as a new devil they will usually have the same exact personality as their current incarnation but if they are the rare type of fiend, then they will develop a new personality should they possess a new corpse.

Abilities
Fiends possess the supernatural abilities of their respective devils but to a lesser degree. Some fiends are able to transform into their original devil forms temporarily. They also can restore their health by consuming blood. However, they are unable to make contracts with devils or humans either.

Power had the ability to revive as a devil from her pact of blood consumption with the Chainsaw Man. However it could be that because she is the Blood Fiend/Devil it could be unique to her that this blood pact with a powerful enough devil/hybrid was enough to fully revive her as a standard devil again. Yoru made the claim that if Asa were to help in her accomplishing her goal that she promises to give her body back. While this could have been just some way of persuading her to follow her orders, it is possible that War Devil has the rare ability of freely leaving out of the state of being a fiend without having to die and then reincarnate. Note that War Devil was in a severely weakened state even as a full Devil so if it is true, then perhaps other devils with an ability to de-fiend themselves can do it even when very weak or it could only apply to weakened Devils of certain types or a specific status. It is unknown if other fiends have a special ability or their own individual way of returning to their original standard devil form, other than a brief transformation, but it could possibly vary to individual on how it works.

Trivia

 * "Majin" is a Japanese word with no direct translation, meaning "one who has a supernatural ability", and it often used to refer to creatures with magical powers such as the Jinn/Djinn (or Genies) in Arabic mythology. The characters in the word individually translate to "demon/demonic, devil, magic/magical" (魔, ma) and "person/people" (人, jin).


 * An unnamed fiend is described as Bird-Eating Fiend (鳥を食べていた魔人 Tori o tabete ita majin) in the second Character Popularity Poll.
 * There are some other fiends that aren't very well known about that work/worked at Public Safety. There was Fushi's unnamed fiend, Seraphim (セラフィム Serafimu) the bug-looking fiend, Dominion (ドミニオン Dominion) the mammal-like looking fiend, and Virtue (ヴァーチェ Vuāche) the headless fiend. Fushi's fiend does not have an known appearance but was said to be "too scary to see" where as the other fiends mention can be seen here.