Bando

"Nice try, but nobody said I had only one gun!""

- Bandou after being disarmed by a diclonius, Nana

Note: Major spoilers for the manga in black. Highlight blank space to read text.

Bandou is an ex-National Police Agency Special Assault Team (Japanese Equivalent of SWAT) officer who plays a major role in the anime and manga Elfen Lied. Bando first appears when is sent to eliminate Kaede "Lucy", an escaped specimen highly dangerous mutated human subspecies known as a diclonius. From his first appearance, Bandou proves himself to be highly unstable, sadistic, and highly skilled in combat. Bandou encounters "Lucy" on a beach in a Kanagawa prefecture, however, Lucy is at this point in her child-like alternate personality, "Nyu". Bandou is disgusted by her lack of resistance, and, figuring she doesn't offer a significant enough challenge, punches her, knocking her to the ground, and then orders his partner, Satou to kill her. When Bandou punched her, however, Lucy reverted to her normal violent, sadistic personality, though he does have a sense of honor and loyalty to to his few allies. Lucy reveals her abilities when she uses her telekinetic "vectors" to kill Satou by cutting him to pieces. Bandou immediately fires his MP5 at Lucy, but she blocks the bullets with her vectors. In spite of this, Bandou managed to fight with her for a while, avoiding both her vectors and objects thrown with the aforementioned vectors. Lucy, however, manages to overpower Bandou when she takes Satou's MP5 and wounds him with a burst of fire. Lucy then proceeds to cut off one of Bandou's arms and gouges out his eyes with her vectors.

Bandou is rescued when a homeless girl named Mayu calls an ambulance to rescue him, and Bandou wakes up with cybernetic eyes and limbs. Bandou is met by an expert named Kurama in government hospital. Kurama states that he has been given the latest in cybernetic prosthetics, however, as he has had contact with Lucy's vectors, his sperm are now contaminated with virus that will transform any children he might have into diclonius. Because of this, Kurama states that he will need to be castrated. Bandou instead punches Kurama with his cybernetic arm and escapes the facility and steals weapons from the SAT arsenal before his membership to the organization is revoked. In the anime, Bandou later meets another diclonius, a nonviolent girl named Nana, who, after he punches her, her personality tranforms into a violent persona. Bandou is almost overpowered by Nana, however, he manages to graze her with a shot from an armor-piercing round from his Desert Eagle, a weapon powerful enough to pierce the shield of the vectors. However, in the process, Bandou's cybernetic arm is damaged by the recoil of the gun.

Nana comes to her senses because of the pain, and convinces (barely) Bandou not to kill her, stating that she has also been sent to find and capture Lucy. Bandou later reappears with new cybernetics after Kurama agreed to repair and upgrade them to be able to withstand .50 AE recoil after Bandou agrees to help him eliminate a diclonius named Mariko, who is actually Kurama's own daughter. Mariko, however, is killed in the end when Kurama detonates the bomb inside her body (a control device) while carrying her, killing Kurama himself as well as Mariko.

Bandou later gets into a final fight with Lucy. In the anime, the two of them fight on even terms, but in the end, Lucy escapes, claiming he will never see her again.

In the manga, Bandou has a number of appearances not seen in the manga, notably, he eventually becomes friendly with Mayu, the homeless girl who saved his life, and rescues her and Nana from a pedophile, beating the man nearly to death. Bandou also later fights Lucy again in the manga, fighting on even terms, managing to evade her vectors, however, when Lucy attempts to kill Mayu, Bandou takes the hit and loses his entire lower body. He appears to die, however, it is revealed that he survived the blow, and now has cybernetic legs. By this point however, Lucy has died    at the hands of her love interest and series protagonist Kouta, who kills her with a handgun in an assisted suicide. and the diclonius problem was dealt with by a vaccine that can control the violent urges on most diclonii and prevent individuals who come in contact with the diclonius' vectors from giving birth to a diclonius.