Characters / Full Metal Daemon Muramasa Main Characters

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa Main Character Index
Main Characters
Civilians, Rokuhara Shogunate, General Headquarters, Unaffiliated People, Tsurugi And Cruxes, Past Characters

Protagonists

Kageaki Minato

Kageaki Minato (Formerly: Jiro Arata)

"Whenever you take a life, no matter who they are, you must be prepared to kill the good as well as the evil. This is the Law."

Voiced by: Ishikawa Yuusuke

A gloomy and mysterious man who presents himself as a deputy officer working for the police. He first appears in Chapter 1, investigating the whereabouts of Ritsu Kazama, a teenage girl living in Kamakura. With the help of Yuhi Nitta and his two friends, he eventually corners the culprit behind her disappearance and subsequent murder.

A war orphan, he was taken in by an old friend of his father and made part of the Minato family, a bloodline tasked with guarding a terrible curse. As he grew up he made his living as a simple salary man together with his new mother Subaru and younger sister Hikaru, trying to make do in this war torn land. This all came crashing down however once his sister was stricken by heavy metal poisoning, making every day she managed to stay alive a miracle. Unbeknownst to anyone, this would start a chain of events that would lead to the death of his new mother, the relationship with his sister forever altered, and Kageaki himself being bound by an oath, the Law of Balance. A law that stipulates that for every time he slays with hatred, he must slay an equal amount in love.

With this oath he sets out to settle things between him and his sister once and for all. Once again taken in by the same man who adopted him all those years ago, he is now wandering the lands of Yamato as a lone musha wielding Muramasa, the cursed Tsurugi.

He's the protagonist of the story from Chapter 2 onwards, replacing Yuhi Nitta.

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• Accidental Pervert: An unusual case happens when he tries to clean Muramasa, he apparently ends touching some private areas causing her to become flustered and call him all kinds of names. Keep in mind that Muramasa is a giant metallic spider.
• Acting Unnatural: When trying to act "normal" in front of some mechanics he just ends up scaring the pants off them.
• And Then What?: He asks Chachamaru what the hell she and the rest of the Green Dragon Society were actually planning to do once the Golden Dawn plan actually succeeded. She admits that they really didn't think that far.
• Anti-Hero: He is a very bleak take on the various heroic archetypes. While he has a kind heart and a strong sense of justice, he is perfectly capable of killing innocents in order to carry out his goals and is heavily weighted down by his sins.
• Anti-Villain: Deeming the life of an innocent person a Necessarily Evil act in exchange for his goal of killing an evil one is no different than the way his foes have been justifying their killing of innocents for their goals. The act of killing, even for a noble cause, can have far-reaching consequences which may harm people innocent of any crime. Coming to terms with these realities and choosing to kill anyway is not a good or heroic action and the Law of Balance he spends so much energy cursing merely enforces this maxim in a manner which cannot be ignored or written off. Once he learns to accept this, Kageaki throws off any notion of being a hero, and declares that he'll bring peace to the world no matter how many people he has to kill.
• Armor-Piercing Response: When he decides to embrace his villainy for the sake of peace at the end of the story. Sorimachi throws one last Armor-Piercing Question about Kageaki's murder of Fuki and Funa and his breakdown of him killing them. Kageaki simply retorts that Sorimachi was wrong and that he was laughing at their deaths. This is enough for Kageaki to gain Sorimachi's respect and reveal that Muramasa was alive.
• The Atoner: Defied. In the Nemesis path, when Akitaka and Prince Haruhiro say they plan to wipe his record clean and leave him a free man due to having acted under Haruhiro's orders, Kageaki is horrified. When Haruhiro explains that it would give him the opportunity to find some way to atone for what he's done if he feels he needs to Kageaki violently rejects the notion, feeling that atonement means nothing to the dead and only way to balance the scales of his wrongdoing is for him to suffer and die as punishment. Luckily for him, that's what Kanae thinks, too.
• A Twinkle in the Sky: In the final battle against Hikaru, she ends up kicking him so hard that he goes flying into the stratosphere with a ping.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: One of Kageaki's greatest assets is his ability to keep cool and analyze any situation he finds himself in, picking up on subtle cues to formulate his own strategy against his foes. This allows for things such as noticing an assassin posing as a waitress simply by the way she carried herself, the state of her hands and how she greeted them.
• Badges and Dog Tags: In a slightly loose sense. Kageaki served in Yamato's military in the Philippines during WWII (which took place in the 1930's in this world), and is now an agent for the police ("unofficial deputy"), if not an actual officer.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: While the armor isn't airtight, Muramasa is able to convert some of his energy into oxygen and pump it into his blood, allowing Kageaki to breathe when knocked into space by Hikaru.
• Battle Couple: In Muramasa's route, she and Kageaki become a proper fighting duo after they finally accept each other.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: In order to save Muramasa from Ginseigo's power he choses to let them tackle it together, leading him to have to wander around his own soul to try and grasp himself and reaffirm what he must truly do. He succeeds and frees both himself and Muramasa from the spell.
• Be All My Sins Remembered: He will not take lightly to his past actions being forgotten. He will remind you that he is a murderer through and through and no hero whatsoever.
• Being Good Sucks: He tries his best but things just never seem to work out for him, either causing more harm to others or emotional duress for himself. Often both.
• Belated Love Epiphany: In the past, when Mizuhi died in his arms, he's shocked at how deeply he grieves for her and realizes that she'd become dear to him in the short time they had together.
• Better the Devil You Know: Part of the reason he shoots down Clive's We Can Rule Together offer was that despite how tyrannical the Rokuhara are, they are still more predicable than the League of Nations and that without them, Yamato would likely become a battleground between Britain and Russia.
• The Big Guy: Kageaki isn't just really tall, he also spent over twenty years training in a martial art which heavily emphasizes physical strength, and being bonded to a shin'uchi has enhanced his physical abilities.
• Big Sleep: His death at the end of Nemesis is a fairly peaceful affair with him expiring as almost falling asleep in Kanae's lap.
• Birds of a Feather: He and Muramasa ultimately end up attracted to one another thanks to just how much they share in common, right down to the Guilt Complex.
• Bolivian Army Ending: At the end of the Hero route it all ends as he makes a final charge against Ichijo and Masamune as they pull out the latters final trick as they refuse to go down after taking what should have been a fatal hit. The epilogue reveals that the results of the duel were that Kageaki and Masamune died while Ichijo and Muramasa survive.
• Boxed Crook: Played with. While Kageaki seems like a guy kept in prison and is hired to work for the police, it's revealed that he's able to walk around and talk fairly freely with the guards and the police chief. In fact, it all seems to be self inflicted by Kageaki himself due to his Guilt Complex.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Downplayed. Chachamaru manages to implant him with one of Ginseigo's eggs but instead of turning him into a mad beast, it simply removed his inhibitions, turning him into a cruel and sadistic man as he acts as her new subordinate in the Rokuhara Shogunate.
• Break His Heart to Save Him: One of the reasons he chose to kowtow to the Yakuza thug threatening Yuhi and his friends was in an effort to get them to stop following him around so he wouldn't end up killing one of them. Ultimately, it doesn't work.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Has this dynamic with his three Love Interests in a different capacity:
  • Hero pairs him with Ichijo, who pities him for being forced to kill innocent people due to the Law of Balance, to the point she would enter the battlefield herself in his place to carry on justice to relieve him of the burden of murder. However, Kageaki finds her ideals of justice to be misgiven and attempts to stop her.
  • Nemesis pairs him with Kanae, a fellow murderer who gets off by killing people in the name of vengeance, born out of a twisted desire for "justice". At first, she was more than happy to kill Kageaki for his murder of Yuhi, only to be plagued with doubts when she discovers he's a Death Seeker with a huge Guilt Complex, and instead showers him with love and tenderness while repressing her desire to kill him.
  • Conqueror pairs him with Muramasa, his first companion who followed him since the beginning. While their relationship doesn't evolve much in the first two routes, they become more intimate in the third as they learn about their respective pasts. Aware of the curse she imposes on Kageaki, Muramasa seeks to relieve him of his guilt with love and self-blame, while questioning herself about the true meaning of the Law of Balance.
• Bring My Brown Pants: When Ginseigo arrives at Enoshima Island he doesn't even try to hide it. He practically soils himself at her arrival.
• Brutal Honesty: He is someone who does not sugarcoat his opinions or statements of facts.
• But Not Too Foreign: He is a quarter foreigner and knows a little bit of English due to having lived in New Holland for a time, an area containing loads of European fugitives and even Americans, all who wanted to escape British rule.
• Byronic Hero: He is pretty much the text box definition of the archetype. He is a somber, emotionally vulnerable man, jaded and cynical from his past experiences and ravaged by a Guilt Complex but who also has a kind heart and sense of justice, determined to put his intertwined story with Ginseigo to rest.
• Cain and Abel: Even before their family fell apart, he was the Abel to Hikaru's Cain, being the more upstanding and humble of the two. This difference only became more pronounced after she embraced the power of Ginseigo.
• Cannot Spit It Out: He doesn't tell people the murders The Rule of Balance requires of him because it would put his sponsors (Akitaka and Haruhiro) at risk as well as endangering his hunt for Ginseigo. But he'd really like to, if only to protect them from himself.
• Character Tics: When he's sitting and thinking, his dark thoughts tend to have him slowly droop toward the floor until his forehead nearly touches.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: In spite of his best efforts to try and appear unapproachable in order to avoid putting people at risk, he still is unable to stop himself from helping those in need.
• Cloudcuckoolander: A rare serious example. His thoughts seem to be pretty... out there. He has a dead serious conversation with Dr. Wolf about the philosophy of not wearing underpants, calls Raicho "elegant and beautiful" without an ounce of sarcasm, blithely admits he's an incorrigible pervert, breezes through a Dating Sim Dream Sequence without batting an eye...
• The Comically Serious: A lot of comedy around the guys comes simply from the fact how stone-faced he is when put in awkward or unusual situations and is able to say the stupidest things without a hint of irony.
• Covert Pervert: Maybe, Kageaki is just so Comically Serious that it is difficult to tell on whether his occasionally perverted comments are meant to be taken at face value.
• Cultured Badass: After being adopted by the Minato family, he was trained to be the modern equivalent of a samurai, and so is highly familiar with literature and other forms of art.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: As he recovered some of the pieces of Muramasa's nodachi, he has gained access to some of Ginseigo's power, dubbed "Gravity Accel", allowing him to gain even more speed. Though it is barely controllable and puts great strain on Kageaki.
• Dark Is Not Evil: He wears black clothes, has dark hair, wields a cursed dark-red Tsurugi and is even described by Nitta and his friends as an "evil-looking evildoer", but he's more moral and good-hearted than most Musha. Then again, he tries to invoke Dark Is Evil by downplaying his own heroic actions due to the Law of Balance and acting as a gloomy and somber individual.
• Dark Messiah: At the end of his long journey he decides that he will not run away and that he will strive for his ideal of peace, even if that ideal means friend and foe alike will die in droves to accomplish it.
• Death Seeker: Played with. He fears death above all and doesn't want to die, but that is also why he views it as a fitting punishment for all of his actions and that he needs to be executed once his quest is over in order to balance things out for all of those he has killed.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: His whole character arc is a giant stab at the Tragic Hero archetype. He is someone who suffers a lot and struggles with what he has to do, yet a lot of the strife he ends up dealing with is self inflicted. While he goes on about how much of a villain he is due to the lives he has to take due to the Law of Balance, at the end of the day he is just trying to run away from the responsibility of his actions as, at the end of the day, the Law is just a response to his other actions.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: In order to escape Chachamaru's full nelson he had Muramasa purge the armor on one of his arms, causing Chachamaru's strength to tear his arm from its socket, freeing him.
• Devil Complex: A tragic example. Due to the stuff he has to do, killing people chief among them, he has come to view himself as a devil. Someone evil to the core only belonging in the pits of hell.
• Dismissing a Compliment: Due to his abysmal self image, whenever someone compliments him he either shoots it down or downplays it to as great an extent as he can.
• Distracted by the Sexy: When Muramasa finally manages to achieve human form he is left unable to think straight, both due to how pretty she looks as well as struggling to make peace with the idea that he had basically been wearing this pretty girl all this time.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: A variant. Thanks to Hikaru's illness requiring him to stay up all night caring for her, he often fell asleep at his office job, but his boss and co-workers went easy on him knowing his family situation. He felt deeply ashamed about this, as hard times had hit all of their familes as well and he didn't want to let them down, but they just told him to relax.
• Dramatic Irony: In the Nemesis route, he swears revenge against the crux pilot who killed his father. The irony however is that said pilot was Kanae, the same person he swore fealty to for her to kill him for revenge of his murder of Yuhi.
• Dreaming the Truth: In the Hero route he ends up dreaming of his past and the time he killed his mother, only to meet Masamune instead of Muramasa. However in doing so and donning Masamune he ends up attracting a strange gaze from Subaru making him remember her teachings, resulting in him putting the pieces together as to the true nature of The Law of Balance and to what he has been doing.
• Drowning My Sorrows: In the epilogue of the Conquerer route he ends up trapped in alcoholism as his guilt finally becomes too much to bear.
• The Dying Walk: Both he and Muramasa try to press on in Nemesis after receiving fatal wounds, walking for some undetermined distance, but end up succumbing in the winter snow with Muramasa crumbling first and Kageaki some time later in Kanae's lap.
• The Eeyore: Has a perpetual gloomy aura around him that makes him very hard to miss for those that spot him and seems to be in a perpetually somber state.
• Empowered Badass Normal: He was already a powerful athlete and skilled fighter. After bonding with Muramasa, he gets all the perks of bonding with a shin'uchi—enhanced physical abilities, a Healing Factor, the ability to use their powers in a more limited form, enhanced senses and so forth.
• The Engineer: Downplayed. Between his obsession with racing cruxes and his intimate knowledge of tsurugi, he has developed some decent assessment and repair abilities.
• Excellent Judge of Character: Played with. In general, his strong observational skills extend to being able to read other people's expressions and tone very well, particularly when it comes to picking out lies. However, there are at least two occasions where he failed and failed big.
• Extreme Doormat: Is a total pushover when it comes to most of the people he interacts with. In fact, aside from his quest to find Ginseigo, he usually follows his orders without much fanfare.
• Evil Feels Good: He notes just how much better everything feels after he ends up inserted with one of Ginseigo's eggs which stripped away his self restraint and doubt, causing him to join the Rokuhara alongside Chachamaru.
• Evil Laugh: Breaks out in one wicked laugh when he manages to cut through the armor of Doji without the use of a tsurugi.
• Face of a Thug: People tend to be set on edge by the aura of darkness he has around him. In addition, he has little in the way of social skills, so he tends to phrase things in a way that confirms their fears. One guy even thought he was the devil! In truth, he's generally a good, well-intentioned person.
• Failure Hero: Not only is every victory he has pyrrhic in the sense that he has to kill one innocent in exchange for saving other innocents, but sometimes his successes are rendered meaningless by the intervention of outside powers like Ginseigo.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: His perhaps deepest secret is in fact that he is not Hikaru's adoptive brother, but in fact her blood father. Forced to conceive her with Subaru due to Akitaka having been rendered infertile.
• Fantastic Fighting Style: Males adopted into the branch of the Minato family in charge of the Muramasa armors receive extensive (if ceremonial) training in Yoshino-onryu Kassen Raiho, a fighting style designed with tsurugi combat in mind (though quite applicable unarmored). One notable difference between this and other fighting styles is that since most combat between musha takes place in the sky, training in footwork is mostly a formality, while raw power is the main focus. One interesting note is that it requires mastery of unarmed combat, swordsmanship and swimming before receiving the final phase of their training, due to the sky being a three-dimensional battlefield.
• Fatal Flaw: Self-righteousness. A lot of his issues stem from a twisted sense of pride and moral superiority. In a really roundabout way, his constant attempts to claim guilt ultimately comes from a place of trying to claim the moral high-ground and to run away from his actual actions. Rather than treating the Law of Balance as the response that it is, he claims guilt to not devalue his attempts at heroism. Additionally, his Guilt Complex also feeds into this, trying to garner pity as well admiration and loathing.
• The Fettered: He is someone who goes to great lengths to restrain his personal desires and emotions in favor of his goals. After he gets Ginseigo's egg implanted however all those restraints go to the wind and he becomes The Unfettered.
• Fingore: In his attempts to kill the real Hikaru he ends up being unable to go through with it, breaking his fingers on a nearby board instead.
• Formal Characters Use Keigo: In stark contrast with his deep voice and gloomy demeanor, his manner of express is polite and humble to the point of being self-deprecating. And he uses it with everyone, including children.
• Ghost Memory: At the start of the Conquerer route he ends up experiencing the memories of Muramasa from her time when she was still human and what lead to the formation of the Law of Balance.
• Giver of Lame Names: When forced to enter Muramasa as a racing crux, replacing the police team's Hot Bolt, the only name he can think of is "Hot Dog". He tries to tell her it's a name with a proud lineage, and she asks if he thinks she's stupid.
• Grenade Hot Potato: Ends up throwing a leaking aerosol can after he turned on a nearby stove. Ends up knocking both Kanae and Sayo out of the air vent. Neither were especially pleased.
• Growling Gut: After having been out cold for three days, his gut ends up revealing just how hungry he is, something Chachamaru makes sure to quickly fix by offering him a lavish breakfast.
• Guilt Complex: Kageaki's defining character trait. He hates himself for what he is doing and any attempts to talk him out of it will just send him further into a maddening spiral of self blame and loathing. He even had his adoptive father promise to execute him, all due to his overwhelming guilt. It reaches a boiling point when he has Hikaru at his mercy and yet is unable to go through with it despite knowing what it will cause, with images of his past victims tormenting him for his cowardice.
• Guilt-Induced Nightmare: He's often haunted by nightmares of his past victims, given that half of them are innocent people.
• Happily Adopted: He was adopted into the Minato family at a very young age after his blood parents died in the war, thanks to them being close friends with his adoptive father. And despite the families cranky elder, he fit into the family just fine. Later the elder would call adopting him the one good thing Akitaka did.
• Hearing Voices: He is haunted by the voices of his past victims born from his guilt with them often goading him on no not hesitate in further kills. After all, he killed them with such ease, why stop now?
• The Hero Dies: In both Hero and Nemesis he ends up dying at the hands of the route heroines. In the first, he dies attempting to stop Ichijo from carrying her ideals, while in the second he dies attempting to protect his loved one from an enemy (without knowing it was her).
• Heroic BSoD:
  • He first seems to kill Funa in cold blood only for it to be revealed that he hesitated and missed her heart, leaving her writhing in agony on the floor pleading for help. Suffice to say, this causes this normally stoic man to completely break down.
  • His reaction to finding out who really was the pilot of Guts Eidar and examining their remains makes his already bad Guilt Complex spiral into a bottomless pit of hatred and loathing towards himself.
  • When he finally finds the remains of Hikaru and Ginseigo in Nemesis he is struck by crippling grief as he sees that she is indeed gone forever as he never learned of her true nature in this route, still believing her to have been a victim of brainwashing.
  • He hits a really big one when faced with the prospect of killing the real Hikaru, breaking down and is unable to go through with it due to thinking that this Hikaru is still the sister he swore to protect.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Suffice to say, he does not have a high standing opinion of himself, viewing himself as nothing but a demon and murderer. Alas, people keep misinterpreting these claims as him being humble or self-effacing when in fact he's being completely honest.
• Heroic Suicide: In the final battle he manages to invoke the Law of Balance by killing himself, the man he hates most of all, in order for the Law to trigger and kill the one he hold most dear, Hikaru.
• Heroic Wannabe: He refuses to admit it, but his actions repeatedly end up speaking louder than his words that despite his claims to the contrary, he is trying to act as the hero of the day and act on his own self righteousness. It is often pointed out by other characters that he knows full well the price the Law of Balance carries, so then if he truly didn't want to kill anybody as a result of it, then the best course of action for him would be to just stand back and not try to act the hero all the time.
• Hero with an F in Good: God knows he tries, but whenever he tries to do the right thing and genuinely help people the universe seems to find a way to screw him over and have things end in the worst way possible.
• Humble Hero: He is humble and polite, almost to a fault. Because he killed several innocent people and villains alike in the hopes of finding his sister, he certainly doesn't see himself as a hero despite his actions.
• Hypocrite: One of his central problems is that he is dead set on trying to be a hero while also seeing himself as an irredeemable villain. What he does and what he says never seem to line up. He's trying to have it both ways, yet as a result end up with neither. If he truly didn't want anyone hurt by his actions, then the only sensible choice would be to metaphorically sheathe his sword down and walk away, and yet he keeps on going. Law of Balance or not, he will have an impact on others peoples lives one way or the other. This is one of the reasons to why Ichizo holds such disdain towards Kageaki.
• Iaijutsu Practitioner: He makes use of Muramasa's magnetic manipulation abilities to power up his Iai strikes.
• I Am a Monster: As a result of his Guilt Complex, he views himself as nothing more than a murderer and a demon.
• I Call It "Vera": Once Muramasa's nodachi has been repaired he decides to dub it Kotetsu.
• Ignore the Fanservice: Inverted and played straight at the same time. When he enters Kanae's hotel room, she is standing around in nothing but a towel. She tries to play The Tease with Sayo trying to further play it up. Kegaki without missing a beat states that he would very much like to see more in his usual monotone, effectively calling her bluff, causing Kanae to completely crumble and backpedal on the whole thing.
• I'm Not a Hero, I'm...: Trying to call him a hero will just lead to him to deny it and refer to himself as a simple murderer, and pushing the issue just makes it worse.
• Indy Ploy: On occasion he has to make things up on the fly when a plan doesn't go as intended. For instance, when approaching an airship he intended to cause some chaos thinking it wasn't heavily guarded only to be surprised by a couple of ST-9 Stealth Dragoons, making him do a mad dash at simply crashing into the ship and then make thing up as he goes along.
• Invocation:
  • For whenever he makes use of Muramasa's Railgun they chant the following phrase togther:
    Muramasa: I'm parting the flows.
    Kageaki: Yoshino-onryu Kassen Reiho, adapted from Jinrai— Railgun: Magatsu!
  • Once they get the nodachi restored it is changed slightly to reflect the gained power:
    Muramasa: The end begins. Death awakens. The void opens wide.
    Kageaki: Yoshino-onryu Kassen Reiho, adapted from Jinrai— Railgun: Ugachi!
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: Downplayed. He's somewhat rough in the sack, something he ascribes to his lack of experience with women and describes as an illness from touching too much female flesh. Considering his first sexual experience was being drugged (possibly with an aphrodisiac, from his description, or a sedative that messed with his head) and tied down while his adoptive mother had sex with him in order conceive an heir to the Minato shrine—oh, and he was barely a teenager—it makes sense that he has a few...problems to work out when it comes to sex. He doesn't actually injure his partners, though he is more...voracious...than they expect.
• I Work Alone: He will constantly try to avoid having any allies, even trying to rebuff anyone who insists sticking around this. This of course makes sense given that he is stuck with the baggage of Muramasa's curse.
• Just a Machine: When it comes to Muramasa he views her as nothing more than a tool and thus should act like it, this despite Yagenta insistence that Tsurugi like her also have a soul.
• Killing Intent: A variant: This guy gives off an almost palpable aura of despair and misery described as powerful enough to make one wonder if the sun will come up tomorrow. This generally pegs him as a fearfully dangerous person in the eyes of most people who first meet him. And they're not wrong.
• Kill the Ones You Love: Kageaki's sad reality is that he is bound by the Law of Balance, as such he has to kill someone with whom he has a a strong positive bond (e.g. love or respect) whenever he strikes someone down with whom he has a strong negative bond (e.g anger or hatred), It doesn't matter whether it's his mother, his sister, or even Muramasa herself.
• Knight in Sour Armor: In spite of how bitter and jaded he has become over the years, he still tries to help people when he can even when it puts them at risk due to the Law of Balance.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: While he is determined to complete his goals, its not the point where keeps fighting when he knows he is outmatched and will withdraw if things are going south. This is also what earns him the respect of Jo'ansai when he realizes that he doesn't need to beat him to win.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: He's got a strong lower jaw and the sense of justice to match. His chin is particularly noticable in his "horrified" expression.
• The Last Dance: In the conclusion of the Hero route he suffers a fatal wound from his duel with Ichijo, only clinging on thanks to his vow. This makes him decide to put everything he has left into his final duel with her, ultimately succumbing against Masamune's final trick.
• Laughing Mad: At the end of Ichizo's "The Reason You Suck" Speech against him, Kageaki actually starts laughing. A mirthless and hollow laugh as he manages to steel his convictions to actually carry out his mission.
• Literalist Snarking: A few of his responses to peoples' statements might be seen as this. That is, unless he's being dead serious. It's hard to tell with him.
• Loophole Abuse: How he eventually beats Hikaru in the finale of the Conquest route. He invokes the Law of Balance by killing the one the hated the most and thus resulting in the Law demanding that he kills the one who he holds the most dear. The twist is that the one he killed was himself, and the one he loved was Hikaru.
• Martial Pacifist: He's a skilled fighter even without Muramasa, but he won't fight if he can possibly avoid it.
• Mask of Sanity: The extremely formal and regimented attitude and behavior and sense of duty he had in his youth have now clearly become coping mechanisms against allowing the horrors he's experienced and participated in from overwhelming him. At times, the mask slips, though.
• Matricide: As a result of Muramasa's curse he was forced to kill his own mother after he killed Kazuma, not knowing the nature of her curse.
• Might as Well Not Be in Prison at All: Spends most of his free-time in prison but given that he keeps his tsurugi and is free to leave at anytime. Nobody except him treats it like an actual prison sentence at all.
• Miles to Go Before I Sleep: He would love nothing more than to end his tormented life, preferably after being made to suffer for his sins. However, as long as Hikaru and Ginseigo are terrorizing Yamato, he won't allow himself to rest.
• Mindlink Mates: He and Muramasa are effectively telepathically linked, to the point where she can send him mental images and he can actually usurp control of her functions to a degree.
• Mundane Made Awesome: In Nemesis, Kanae asks him in a serious Mood Whiplash to stack three coins on top of each other on their sides. He proceeds to do it without missing a beat. He then reveals that he had practiced it in the past and that Hikaru could do ten. Both Kanae and Sayo are left flabbergasted by this display.
• Muscles Are Meaningful: One of the things Chachamaru notices about him right away is that he has a lean build with muscles in all the right places ideal for a swimmer...or a tsurugi pilot. He's shown to be a powerful fighter whether in or out of Muramasa.
• Mutual Kill:
  • Sort of half'n half in Hero. In the end of the route he ends up dying alongside Masamune following their final duel. Ichijo and Muramasa survive.
  • Also happens at the end of Nemesis, though somewhat delayed, both he and Kanae end up perishing from their injuries in their prior duel.
• Near-Rape Experience: In the depths of a serious depression and heavily intoxicated with alcohol he nearly rapes Muramasa only to stop short once he realizes what he is doing, prompting him to run away in disgust and shame.
• The Needs of the Many: Following his Battle in the Center of the Mind he starts to abandon his Chronic Hero Syndrome, shifting to a much more utilitarian mindset and just focusing on the bigger picture, leaving innocents to die even though he could have prevented it for the sake of dealing with something that is gonna claim even more lives.
• Nemesis Magnet: Due to how he constantly seems to get involved into all kinds of stuff he ends up having the number of quite a few individuals out for his blood.
• Nerves of Steel: While he has his Trauma Button's, he is for the most part incredibly adept at keep his cool when under pressure.
• Nightmare Sequence: Is haunted by nightmares of his past actions, one of which sees his victims such as Yuhi, Fuki and Funa praising him even as he kills them, even complementing him on how he killed them.
• "No More Holding Back" Speech: In his final bout with Ichizo, if Kageaki choses not to kill him then he will deliver a speech in how he accepts his status as a villain and will now carry on in search of peace through the Law of Might. Upon hearing this, Ichizo returns Muramasa to him alive and well as well as giving him a sort of verbal friendly clap on the back before leaving.
• Normally, I Would Be Dead Now:
  • After he took some serious blows from Ichizo, including the dreaded Immelmann Turn, he still manages to keep on going in spite of his injuries. Even the man himself isn't sure how he managed in spite of the fact that he should have been dead several times over.
  • After the final battle against Hikaru he is left wondering how he is still alive given that he stabbed himself in the heart to trigger the Law of Balance. By all accounts, no amount of healing from Muramasa should have stopped his death.
• No Sense of Humor: Trying to get the guy to laugh through a joke is a fruitless endeavor, and about as fruitless as the times he himself tries to be funny.
• No Social Skills: Leaving aside the fact that just being in his presence tends to make people feel incredibly depressed, at one point he asks Muramasa, his armor, how to fill an awkward pause She has only slightly better ideas than he does, which only serves to underline his problem.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Tells Ichijo straight to her face in the Hero route that should she keep going on her current path, then she will just be another Ginseigo.
• Not So Similar: As Hikaru tries to tell him that they are the same, he eventually shuts it down as while they are both killers and bound by the Law of Might, Hikaru condones her actions and accepts herself while Kageaki is wracked with guilt and cannot forgive or justify what he has done.
• Not So Stoic: His initial failed murder of Funa caused his usual stoic façade to break, with her pleas for help sending him into a screaming terror.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: In order to duel Mizuhi, he acts like an inexperienced fool as he knows she is far more skilled than him. She falls for the ruse, but unfortunately she is very much a Sore Loser prone of Exact Words.
• Offing the Offspring: It is revealed that what Kageaki has been doing throughout the entire story was to actually kill his own daughter, not his sister, to stop her mad quest for godhood. He succeeds through various means in the Hero and Conqueror routes while something else gets her in Nemesis.
• Oh, Crap!: When the nigh-Eldritch Abomination your insane sister-daughter is piloting moves an entire island several miles with one casual blast, fear is the sensible reaction.
• Papa Wolf: A big part of his emotional turmoil during the final stretch of the story is him struggling with the prospect of either killing his own daughter to save the world or act on his paternal instincts and promise to his mother to protect Hikaru. In the end, he finds himself unable to go through with it and determines himself to be the weak link in the coming battle. As such he has to let Muramasa take over as otherwise he would just hesitate in the critical moment.
• Parental Incest: As mentioned, due to Akitaka taking a bit of shrapnel in a sensitive place, he was unable to conceive an heir for the Minato branch family in charge of the Muramasa shrine. Fortunately, they had a spare (adopted) male on hand who happened to be just barely old enough to potentially be fertile which meant that they could keep it all under their hat, too. Nobody was very happy about this...solution, least of all young Kageaki, though some drugs and a bit of rope soon had him unable to protest. The family worked their subsequent issues out by...pretending it never happened and that Kageaki and Hikaru were siblings. Of course, this was just the start of the pile of repressed issues he's developed by the time of the game.
• Past Experience Nightmare: Nightmares of his past experiences are something that quite plagues Kageaki.
• Peaceful in Death: In spite of how much he went on in wanting an undignified death as punishment for his crimes, at the end of Nemesis he slowly and peacefully dies in Kanae's lap as if he simply went to sleep. Kanae herself even notes that he finally seemed to have loosened up in his final moments, even looking a bit younger without his permanent scowl.
• The Penance: After his first match fighting Aharabaki, whose power reserves he'd been trying to drain, he sees the repairmen trading out the gigantic tsurugi's battery and realizes, no, it's a crate full of human beings being drained to power it, including children. He had been resting and letting his Healing Factor recover the severe damage he'd taken, but seeing this makes him force himself to walk on his severely-burned legs as a way of punishment for all the lives his strategy had taken. This is only one example.
• Perpetual Frowner: The guy hardly ever smiles. His expression is always some form of scowl or frown.
• Plagued by Nightmares:
  • He is constantly haunted by dreams of the innocent people he have slain, those that looked up to him and yet still died by his hands.
  • In the Nemesis route he gets nightmares portrayed in a Stylistic Suck manner where he is in a bizarre court and gets pardoned for his crimes and unable to object while those around him are sentenced to death.
• Poor Communication Kills: He tells a group of helpful potential allies that it's dangerous to be around him and that they should stay away. He does not explicitly tell the teens that he's cursed to kill a good or innocent person for each evil one he slays. Details, man, details!
• Power Fist: As a finishing move against Hikaru in the Hero route, he makes use of both Enchant Plus and Gravity Accel and then transforms Muramasa into some kind of glove, delivering a killing blow to his sister.
• Post-Kiss Catatonia: Downplayed in that the sudden kiss he gets from Kanae in Nemesis only stuns him for a brief moment before he remembers that he is in enemy territory and gets back to business.
• Practically Different Generations: As he was adopted before Hikaru was born there is quite the age gap between the two siblings, though later reveals makes things more complicated.
• Prisons Are Gymnasiums: One of his usual pastimes while in prison is to do lots of exercise. One of his quirks however is that he has a habit of doing sit-ups while hanging from the roof, something his guard is frequently taken aback by.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain:: The whole story is basically about Kageaki's journey from a simple salaryman to that of a dangerous mercenary warlord who is intent on world peace by the Law of Might. The notable thing is that it is less the surrounding world that sees him as the villain and more that he accepts himself as one.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivers a scathing speech to Ryobu in a completely matter-of-fact tone due to his incompetence at even basic Tsurugi combat doctrines.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: During his missions, he keeps a relatively and detached demeanor alongside Muramasa, in order to distance himself from his curse-induced killings. By Conqueror however, once Kageaki starts to build a more meaningful relationship with Muramasa, her human side starts to re-emerge after knowing more details about his past; In this capacity, he becomes the calculating, brooding and detached Blue to Muramasa's hotheaded, caring and warm Red.
• Revenge: In Nemesis he swears revenge against the Blood Crux that took the life of his adoptive father, not knowing that it was Kanae.
• Samaritan Syndrome: He is often left pondering on how he could have done things differently so that less people would have had to die, often to a fault.
• Sarcasm-Blind: Its unclear if he has trouble getting sarcasm or if he is doing it on purpose but whatever the case, sarcasm just goes in one ear and out the other with this guy.
• Secretly Selfish: Hikaru calls him out on his mindset in the Hero route where he is simply using Ichijo as a means to divert guilt. At the end of the day he is still killing, he is just using her as his blade instead to keep his own hands clean.
• Self-Restraint: He could easily break out of prison if he wanted to but refrains from it as he believes that he belongs there.
• Serious Business: Crux Racing. Might be hard to believe but this guy has hobbies too with Crux Racing being something that can easily set the usual stoic Kageaki into full Motor Mouth mode. And once he gets going there is next to nothing that can stop him. It took a hit from Kanae to snap him out of it.
• Slasher Smile: As he accepts himself as a villain, Ichijo who heard his "No More Holding Back" Speech walks up and challenges him, now forever a nemesis. Due to this, Kageaki thinks that his usual expression is unfit for the occasion and decides to flash something more fitting. A wicked and giant toothy grin.
• Snow Means Death: In the end of Nemesis, both he, Muramasa and Kanae are all fatally wounded and slowly succumb as the gentle winter snow slowly starts to embrace them.
• The Stoic: He is the quiet type that hardly ever emotes.
• Stop Worshipping Me: If there is one thing that will set him off, it is worshiping him like some kind of hero of justice. To himself, he is nothing but a murderer who only brings death and can never save anyone.
• Stress Vomit: Whenever his guilt gets too much to bear he is prone of emptying his stomach with some events being especially bad. After seeing who's in the remains of Guts Eider, he actually starts puking blood once everything in his belly and the bile that follows after are emptied.
• Strong and Skilled: In or out of a tsurugi, Kageaki is a powerful fighter, who spent over twenty years training in the martial art behind musha combat, as well as other arts such as jujutsu. Having been bonded to a shin'uchi improves his already impressive physical prowess. He's also had a great deal of experience fighting other musha in his efforts against Ginseigo.
• Take a Third Option: His choice in the True Ending may be seen as this. By founding a mercenary colony and choosing to work for those who take on his services even after learning the innocent will die alongside the guilty, he effectively makes himself and his men weapons for justice (Ichijo), vengeance (Kanae), or simply change (Chachamaru) depending upon the motivations of whomever deems his services worth the price. Rather than try to find a proper justification for shedding blood when there can be no such thing, he abandons the choice entirely.
• Talk About the Weather: Tries to speak about the weather to break the ice when talking to a village mayor. Was more successful than him telling a joke, though that ain't saying much.
• That Man Is Dead: As part of his Battle in the Center of the Mind he finally decides that the man he had used to be must die so that he finally can becomes to hero of the world to salvage the current, dreadful predicament.
• That Thing Is Not My Child!: An interesting variation. On Enoshima Island, one of Ginseigo's eggs manages to hatch, creating a new figure that she dubs her and Kageaki's daughter. One of the possible dialogue options then is to reject it which leads to Ginseigo killing it. In fact, in a subversion, Kageaki actually has to accept it as his own in order to invoke a Loophole Abuse with Muramasa's curse as otherwise he would have to kill Ichijo.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: How he finally resolves his Guilt Complex and inner self-hatred is by accepting his status as villain and becoming a Dark Messiah who promotes peace through destruction. Notably, this isn't society viewing Kageaki as evil, it's him viewing himself as evil and deciding to not be ashamed of it.
• Think Nothing of It: He constantly tries to downplay his actions whenever he ends up saving someone.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: An interesting case where he he has resolved to kill those who have had contact with Ginseigo as well as those as required by Muramasa's curse, he refuses to kill anyone else. This puts him in somewhat sticky situations against some foes where he can't fight using full power lest he risk killing the enemy. This all stems from his mother's teachings who was vehement in the idea of avoiding killing at all costs and only taking a life when it is the absolute last resort.
• Together in Death: He and Kanae dies together at the end of the Nemesis route only minutes apart but seemingly content, even if he didn't get the punishment he was looking for it was still Kanae herself that finished him off even though he never knew.
• Touché:
  • When he brings up that the whole deal around the GHQ inspectors being a sort of figurehead rather than actually doing something, Kanae brings up that the police ain't much different and Kageaki is left with no retort.
  • When he tries to get Chachamaru out of his bed he notes that she dodges questions in a way not unfit a politician. She is quick to point out that dealing with politics is sort of part of her job description, forcing Kageaki to concede the point.
• Trainstopping: He attempts to stop some runaway train cars heading straight off a broken bridge after Ichizo decoupled the cars. Muramasa understandably calls it outright insanity. Unfortunately it didn't work. Fortunately, the occupants at the time aren't that easy to kill.
• Trap Is the Only Option: Everything about Enoshima Island reeked of a trap from a mile away and yet Kageaki still insisted on going just due to the ever slightest possibility that Ginseigo was involved.
• Trauma Button:
  • He has a few, most notably wounded children and looking up to him as some kind of hero. The former especially as it reminds him of the time Hikaru was bedridden.
  • When he has sex, he tends to flash back to his first—unwilling and underage—time and describes his subsequent feelings and behavior as a beast taking him over. He's got severe psychological problems, but if you've read this far and are only figuring that out now...
• Understatement: As he barely dodges a Wave-Motion Gun from Konjin, he tries to gather his thoughts and asks if that beam would have had a slight "negative impact on his health". Muramasa can't help but shout in his ear at such an obvious thing.
• The Unfettered: As a result of Chachamaru implanting one of Ginseigo's eggs within him he loses all his formers semblance of restraint and now starts to act solely for his goals.
• Unholy Matrimony: Should he side with Chachamaru then they will become a villainous couple as they watch the world burn by Hikaru's hand.
• The Un-Smile: In his attempts to get some information out of the maintenance crews, his attempts to smile and appear approachable just produces a result that can best be described as an utter hellspawn.
• Unstoppable Rage:
  • When Hikaru tells him the truth of the events two years prior, of how she knew of Muramasa's curse and set things up so that Kageaki would have to pick up Muramasa and kill the bandit musha, and thus leading to their mother's death, he flies into a blind rage and begins to push the abilities of Muramasa to the utmost extreme in order to even the score with his sister.
  • In Nemesis when he believes that Kanae has been killed due to a derailed train he goes blind with rage against Guts Eidar, fully determined to kill it. Muramasa manages to calm him down eventually though.
  • All of this past eruptions pale in comparison to his explosion of blind, unbridled hate against Ichizo when he believes that Muramasa has been killed. Though sadly, Ichizo was very much counting on this, trying to get Kageaki to strike him down, triggering the Law of Balance and forcing him to kill Muramasa once she appears safe and sound.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: It is revealed that he had taught Hikaru a bit of Greek Mythology in her youth. She especially caught on the bit about how Uranus and Gaia were married despite being mother and child. When she wondered why it was that way, he simply stated that it was the way Gods did things. Unbeknownst to him, this acted as a catalyst for her to form her current beliefs about godhood.
• Vague Age: We don't get an exact number, but he mentions graduating from high school around ten years ago, making him in his late 20's.
• Violation of Common Sense: In order for him to progress during the airship segment he has to turn on a stove while holding an old and leaking aerosol can. Predictably it explodes. And somehow this is required to progress.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: In the end, he choses to embrace the idea of might and intends to carry his hope of peace even if he must climb a mountain of corpses to accomplish it.
• Worshipped for Great Deeds: A twisted and anticipatory case. When Kageaki learns that Kanae Otori plans to kill him for the death of Yuhi Nitta after Ginseigo is dealt with, he falls to his knees in gratitude sobbing into her hand, and there after comes to see her as akin to a savior-goddess who will rescue him from his tormented life. Kanae doesn't really know how to handle the prospect of a person eager to be killed.
• Would Hurt a Child: Kills the young Funa in her sleep, seemingly in cold blood. However, he quickly becomes distraught over the perspective of killing a child.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: At the culmination of his growing disbelief to whatever the hell Muramasa is doing in the kitchen, he can't help but shout once he realizes that she is trying to cook using the railgun.

Yuhi Nitta

Yuhi Nitta

A naïve but optimistic highschooler living in Kamakura. He's the protagonist of Chapter 1, investigating the disappearance of his friend Kazama Ritsu, who went missing for several days. Despite somewhat lacking of ambition and charisma, he nonetheless has his heart in the right place and tries to do his best while hiding his contempt for the Rokuhara Shogunate. Orphaned from a young age, he was adopted by a neighboring family.

Alongside his two childhood friends Tadayasu and Konatsu, they will uncover many clues alongside Deputy Officer Kageaki, all of them pointing to an unsavory truth: The kidnapping and murder of his friend, an event that will put Nitta's ideals to the test.

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• Arranged Marriage: He doesn't know it, but he's been arranged to marry Hanae Otori since birth.
• Broken Pedestal: Yuhi initially assumes Kageaki to be this invincible badass only for him to then present himself as an Extreme Doormat in front of several Yakuza thugs. Ends up being rebuilt, only to cost him his head.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Punching Suzukawa-in-Shinkai with all his force broke all the bones in Yuhi's hand and kicking him aggravated his already-wounded foot, but he managed to knock the tsurugi and its pilot over.
• Character Development: Kageaki's words about his need to fight Ginseigo even knowing that he might lose, then having a taste of true despair afterwards at the hands of Sukuzawa only to furiously defy it lead him to realize the purpose in life he's been looking for and he chooses to live up to the ideals of strength and justice that Muramasa has shown him and to change the world for the bett—Oh, wait, there goes his head. Well, it was a nice thought, anyway.
• Decoy Protagonist: He fits the role of the generic kind of high school VN protagonist only to be killed at the end of the first chapter before Kageaki takes his place.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: He notes ruefully that he has no particular hobbies or interests, and envies Tadayasu for his dream of becoming a racer. He says the greatest ambition he has these days is someday owning a doghouse. Suzukawa's torture of Yuhi and his friends, however, reawakens his desire to fight for justice, especially against Rokuhara.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Downplayed, he managed to get Ryobu who was fully decked out in Shinkai at the time to actually trip backwards with just his bare fists. Not a mean feat given how powerful Tsurugis are.
• Doomed Moral Victor: For a second it seems that way after Yuhi's furious speech about how Suzukawa is a weak loser and his lesson in despair has failed rattles the lunatic musha to the point where the only response he can muster is to kill him. Kageaki and Muramasa intervene to deflect the blow.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • At first he comes to believe that Kageaki is a badass police agent fighting for justice, even when the cause is hopeless. Then after Yuhi and friends offend a Yakuza, Kageaki kowtows and allows the thug and his friends to beat on him, and Yuhi becomes disgusted and loses faith in him. Bonus points for not realizing how brave it was for Kageaki to both resolve the situation peacefully and give up his dignity for their sakes.
  • Then after being saved from his teacher, he becomes convinced once more that Kageaki is a pillar of strength and justice who only fights those he truly needs to fight, standing up against those who would use tsurugi to commit crimes against innocent people. He dies without ever learning just how conflicted and damaged Kageaki really is.
• Genre Refugee: He looks and acts like your usual hot headed high-school protagonist yet is caught in a morally complex war drama.
• Gut Feeling:
  • When Tadayasu is assuring him and Konatsu that their friend Ritsu was probably going to turn up fine the next day after going missing, Nitta notes that he has a feeling something very wrong in spite of Tadayasu's logic, then dismisses it. In fact, something is very wrong.
  • When he finds the head of Ritusu's dolphin pendant, cut off from its body, for a few moments he can't banish the image of it being her head from his mind's eye. Decapitation turns out to be how she died.
• The Hero Dies: Thanks to the Law of Balance, Kageaki is forced to kill him in order to balance out the death of Suzukawa.
• Heroic Sacrifice: After Konata manages to offend a Yakuza, he plans to throw himself at the guy and the three other Yakuza with him in a hopeless fight so she can at least try to run away. Tadayasu stands with him, but fortunately Kageaki intervenes before the two of them can be wrecked.
• Hope Bringer: He swears to become one of these to his friends after Suzukawa's brutal depredations, no matter what it takes. *Sigh* Only in FixFics, buddy.
• Hot-Blooded: Becomes this near the end of the first chapter, upon discovering despair and then gaining the will to fight his enemy.
• Idiot Hero: The introductory lead and not exactly the brightest bulb around.
• Justice Will Prevail: After surviving the incident with his teacher, he goes on to confess his dedication for justice to Kageaki whom he sees as its very embodiment...Who then refutes his claim and beheads him on the spot. Further revelations shows him to be conflicted between his own heroic actions and the Law of Balance imposing him to kill innocent people as a price for killing villains.
• Kid Detective: A deconstruction. He and his friends are explicitly warned on two occasions to stop endangering their lives by continuing to investigate Ritsu's death, being warned to think about the suffering their families would endure if something should happen to them. The one person who supports their efforts turns out to be the one who killed Ritsu, and was only aiding their investigation to set up their own murders. The other two are crippled by the murderer, Nitta ends up dead at the hands of someone he thought was an ally, and the only thing the kids accomplished was helping Kageaki get information he probably would have uncovered on his own anyway.
• Kissing Cousins: What he and Hanae Otori would have been if he'd lived and hooked up with her.
• Living Emotional Crutch: After what she went through with her teacher, Yuhi was basically the sole person who tied Konatsu to her sanity. Once he died she spiraled into madness very quickly.
• Off with His Head!: Ends up decapitated by Kageaki, the man he once again started to look up to.
• Sacrificial Lion: He's established as the story's protagonist, even going through Character Development only to be killed by Kageaki at the very end. Him dying so early also serves as a means to establishes what kind of story the reader is about to witness. No one is safe, and that there's no such thing as Plot Armor or Improbable Infant Survival.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Upon learning that his teacher was a Serial Killer bent on "teaching despair" to his students, he then proceeds to call him out as a profoundly broken and cowardly individual whose only thing he managed to do was to kill innocent people.
• Unknown Relative: As it turns out, Yuhi was not just some random school kid. He was in fact the legitimate heir to the Otori family who was sent away for his own protection. He was also quite beloved by Kanae and her sister, which needless to say, makes his death at Kageaki's hands quite the problem, and not just politically.
• What You Are in the Dark: Suzukawa has abused the power of his tsurugi to defile and mutilate his friends. Yuhi's already been stabbed in the foot and is in agony. Suzukawa is crowing about how he's taught them the feeling of despair, stolen their hopes and dreams, and the feeling overwhelming Yuhi...is not despair. He stands up, ignoring the pain and opening wound on his foot, leaps forward, and give the musha a furious punch (shattering his own fist), following it up with a kick (using his wrecked foot) that knocks the unstoppable fighting machine down on its ass. After that he tears into Suzukawa, utterly rejecting his fucked-up ideals, reawakening his own lost dream to fight Rokuhara, and swearing to do everything he can for his friends. Then he calls Sukuzawa weak and a loser for giving up on beauty just because it fades. When the frustrated killer raises his sword to kill Yuhi, the kid just stares him in the eye and dares him to do it.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: He believes he's in a much more idealistic story than he actually is. One with heroes of justice and righteousness to hold back the darkness of the world. Instead he's in a big mess of moral relativity, and the biggest mercy is that he doesn't get to realize the truth.

Main Characters

Ichijo Ayane

Ichijo Ayane

Click ^here to see her appearance in the epilogue of Hero.

"Even so, I won't stop! I'll keep fighting evil in justice's name! Because I believe that one day it will lead to true justice, to a world where no one has to fight!"

A young girl infamous in Kamakura for mercilessly beating everyone who prey on the weak, especially thugs. She first appears to defend the young team of detectives from the local yakuza, and quickly comes to hate Kageaki due to his cowardice. As circumstances forces them to be together, she began to project her ideals on him, seeing him as the beacon of justice. She's the central character of Hero.

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• Aesop Amnesia: In-Universe. Her father wanted her to remember that in carrying out justice, one would becomes the same kind of wicked creature that they smite. This was something she had forgotten and only remember the whole "fight for justice" bit.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Kageaki comes to see her as a living tool for justice, and is uncertain whether or not to pity her for this. Later events show how she survives things which would kill any other musha and imply that somehow her beliefs in justice allowed her to transcend humanity on some level.
  "A tool fulfilling its purpose. Is that something to pity? I cannot say. But I can say this. No matter where its path leads, a tool will never stop. It will keep going...until it breaks."
• Anti-Hero: Over the course of the game, she's revealed to be an idealist who believes in justice and saving the weak from those who prey on them. However, she's ready to use incredibly violent and dubious means to do so, when given the chance with Masamune.
• Audience? What Audience?: When Kanae decides to break the fourth wall during the battle against Konjin about how they will be victorious and ride off into the sunset happily ever after, at least until the credits roll, Ichijo snaps at her asking what credits she is talking about.
• Awful Truth:
  • Ichizo tells her the truth about what Kageaki had been doing, killing friend and foe alike including children. While the man himself had told her before that he was a murderer, she didn't take it seriously at the time until hearing this.
  • After killing Yusa Doshin she learns that her pursuit of justice can indirectly affect the lives of those connected to her targets in a most unpalatable fashion.
• Badass Adorable: Is first introduced by causing a couple of Yakuza to back off and then in the next chapter beating a giant dog or wolf in a single strike. Suffice to say, she doesn't mess around. And she only becomes more of an ass-kicker once she gets her hands on Masamune.
• Berserk Button: Getting the order of her first and last name mixed up is something that repeatedly irritates her and is sure to set her off.
• The Berserker: When she fights, she does so with zero regard for strategy or her own safety with her strategy mostly boiling down to "Hit it until it dies".
• Black-and-White Insanity: She is obsessed with justice to the point that to her, the only thing that exists is guilty or not guilty. And all that fall into the former category deserve death. In fact, any semblance of moral greyness in the world greatly frustrates and angers her.
• The Cavalry: Just as Kageaki is about to be overrun by the rouge forces under Konjin's control, she and Kanae shows up to save the day and even the odds.
• Dark Messiah: While she has her heart in the right place, her Black-and-White Insanity ends up appealing to peoples' confirmation biases causing her to gain followers convinced that their actions are those of justice.
• Death Glare: She seems to have several menacing stares depending on the required severity, from a casual one where her eyes almost seem to glow, to one where any semblance of restraint goes out the window.
• Determinator: This girl has some serious grit and will endlessly push forward in the pursuit of her beliefs. This is what makes her so frightening in a fight as she just seems to keep on going even when any sane person would have retreated or thrown in the towel.
• Dirty Business: After seeing what her killing of Yusa Doshin has done to Yoshikyo, his sister, and his unborn nephew, she comes to believe that the pursuit of justice at all costs isn't clean or pure, but filthy and rotten. Nevertheless, it's the path she and Masamune chose.
• Distaff Counterpart: She has many similarities with Nitta Yuhi regarding justice, which is why she respected him unlike Kageaki during Chapter 1. However, it becomes downplayed when we learn exactly how she paints the world around her.
• Doublethink: To her, killing is evil, and yet she goes on about how you need to kill evil. This contradiction is something she eventually has to face head on after killing Doshin.
• Dropped a Bridge on Her: If Kageaki shows more affection to her than Kanae, he kills her on her way home, leading to the Nemesis route.
• Establishing Character Moment: When she is first shown, she manages to get some Yakuza thugs to back off while in her more proper introduction she kills a wolf with her bare fists followed by her clearly being lost.
• Fantastic Fighting Style: She's versed in the same fighting style as Kageaki, or rather a near-identical sister style. These teachings allow her to pilot a tsurugi with no difficulty.
• Fearless Fool: He desire to carry out justice makes her blind to fear to a disturbing degree.
• Final Boss: In Hero, Kageaki ultimately deems her ideals too dangerous, and choose to oppose her and Masamune in a last battle.
• Foil: Is established as one with Otori Kanae, unsurprisingly. She's an idealist who believes in changing the world for the better in order to protect the weak, while Kanae consciously reject the very notion of having ideals, presenting herself as a selfish woman who only thinks of her own desires before anything else. While both of them discover the true nature of Kageaki in their respective routes, both of them have a very different reaction: For Ichijo in Hero, she becomes conflicted over the fact that the man she admires considers himself a Serial Killer who deserves to die, in spite of the many people he saved.
• For Great Justice: She is obsessed with the idea of justice, the good prevails and that evil is always punished. It all trails back to her father who was very strict in teaching her its values, and a refusal to see things in shades of grey. It eventually becomes clear in the Hero route that she doesn't even have a firm grasp on what "justice" even is, only acting on the "moral justice" set by society.
• Groin Attack: Delivers a nasty nutshot to Doshin, with a flaming sword even, as it is the only part of his armor that is somewhat thin and causing him to reveal himself allowing her a strike at his neck.
• Gut Feeling: On many occasions, she gets a churning feeling in her stomach just before something horrible happens. This happens often enough to almost seem like a psychic ability.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: She is incredibly easy to set off. The only thing that tends to differ is the severity of her outbursts.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: She gets bisected lengthwise by Kageaki in their final duel of the Hero route. This still isn't enough to keep her down.
• Hated by All: In the Hero epilogue, she and Muramasa become legendary...as figures of loathing, because she's straightforward about the price of their intervention.
• Head Desk: Does a variation where she slams her head into a wall after Kageaki tells her that they are infiltrating a fortress as husband and wife. And then follows up with a kick. And then goes through the whole things and somehow ends up with a rather... eager horse.
• He Who Fights Monsters: As pointed out by Kageaki, what her father tried to teach her and that she herself eventually has to accept is that in acting as Judge, Jury, and Executioner, she will end up embracing the same wickedness that she is supposed to bring down.
• Identical Grandson: Identical Grand-niece in this case, but she is pretty much a dead ringer to her grand aunt Ichihime.
• Idiot Crows: Once her, "disease", rears its ugly head again in Fudaraku Fortress a crow can be heard cawing with even the narration bringing up that it seems like it is mocking her.
• I Owe You My Life: As Kageaki had saved her life, she viewed it as the only right thing to do to stay by his side, helping him best she can. A life for a life.
• Ironic Echo: During her and Kageaki's infiltration of Rakuhara, at one point she sees a bunch of female citizens playing around picking flowers and points out that justice demands that even "innocent" people like them need to pay the price for profiting off of Rokuhara's vile actions. Later, after she kills Yusa Doshin, she encounters his page, who suffered immensely alongside his family due to her killing of the General. Although this does make her eat her words briefly, it ultimately nourishes her beliefs.
• It Gets Easier: After her having been initially shaken following her murder of Doshin she soon becomes incredibly cold and ruthless and starts to kill with increasing ease.
• Knight in Sour Armor: In the end of the Hero route she becomes something in-between this and Jade-Colored Glasses, having had her idea of justice and evil completely eroded over the three years that have passed and is now just struggling with trying to define good and evil. Despite this, she still tries to help people where she can even though she is now saddled with the Law of Balance and thus, have to exact a price for her services.
• Lady Looks Like a Dude: Something about her attitude and appearance tends to have people thinking she's male at first glance in spite of her feminine clothing. This may be due to a certain...lack of assets.
• Laughing Mad: When she finally accepts that Kageaki is indeed a murderer of good and wicked alike, she burst out in a laughter that is both childish and yet laced with hate.
• Meaningful Name: Her first name Ichijo (一条) usually means "straight line" or "single-minded", reflecting her straightforward way of thinking, without considering taking other paths or moral ambiguities.
• Mentor Archetype: Although they start off on the wrong foot, she eventually comes to believe that Kageaki is a highly experienced fighter for justice (in spite of his protests) and that she's the hero with a lot to learn from him. She learns a lot, alright.
• Mentor Ship: Her respect for Kageaki is boosted by her huge crush on him.
• Mundane Made Awesome: At the start of her route she shows up at Kageaki's porch, rain pouring and thunder crashing dramatically, looking at him with an empty gaze. She then invites him to a movie, with the thunder crashing again.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • After killing Doshin, she has difficulty wrapping her head around the notion that she's ended a man's life with her own hands, especially as she had been subconsciously avoiding the reality of what "seeking justice against a villain" meant until confronted with the truth.
  • She learns that after killing Doshin that his favorite concubine had an accident in her shock and grief which killed her and Doshin's unborn son as well as diving her brother, Doshin's page, insane. Though rocked to the core, her sense of duty allows her to overcome the horror of it and accept her deed as part of the Dirty Business of justice.
• Never Mess with Granny: Implied. Ichijo's great-aunt is the one who taught her how to fight hand-to-hand, as well giving her a knowledge of tactics and other fighting styles.
• Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: While all musha have incredible healing abilities, Kageaki is still amazed that Ichijo survived her extremely severe injuries from her duel with Doshin, including missing limbs, 4th degree burns and just huge chunks of flesh missing, even having fused to Masamune due to the intense heat she experience.
• No Sense of Direction: She might be a killer in a fist fight, but her sense of direction is comically abysmal, able to get lost with laughable ease. Becomes a lot less funny when her sense of direction ends up leading her straight into a fight between two armed opponents resulting in one taking a blow meant for her.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: Ends up doing a mutual one with Kanae, but seeing him as something of a hero she ends up setting of Kageaki's Guilt Complex, causing him to completely loose his marbles and even pass out from the emotional turmoil.
• Odd Name Out: Ayane is a common first name for Japanese women, but it turns out to be her last name; Ichijo, usually a last name, ends up being her first name, something pointed out by Kageaki on their first formal meeting.
• One-Man Army: She's a good enough fighter to take out groups of punks and gangsters, and that before she gets Masamune.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: In Muramasa's route she makes it clear that she is the only one that is allowed to defeat Kageaki for what he has done. This of course also acts as yet another reason to why she and Kanae can't get along as she wants to kill him as well and doesn't want to share.
• Overt Operative: She proves to be the worst kind of partner one could have when infiltrating Fudaraku Fortress as her animosity towards the Rokuhara is written all over her, making her stand out something fierce.
• Parents as People: When she was very young, her father taught her that certain deeds (theft, fraud, murder, betrayal) were evil and that they should be hated. When she asked why they should be hated, he simply told her that trying to find a logical reason why such things are evil just invites logical counterarguments trying to justify them. Now she's following a philosophy she doesn't even fully understand, thanks to her loving and well-intentioned father.
• Path of Inspiration: Her belief in justice ends up forming a core not only for herself, but also attracts the attention and following of the Yamato resistance. Kageaki warns her that if she isn't careful then this could turn them all into a violent and ruthless army thoroughly convinced of their own righteousness, to the point that the weight of taking a life is forgotten. Just another Ginseigo.
• Patricide: She killed her own father. Specifically, she acted as his second during his Seppuku after he had betrayed his friend in order to uphold his ideals of justice.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: She's one of the smallest characters of the cast, yet she can easily beat up gangs on her own.
• Power Fist: Very downplayed. When Kageaki sends her off to distract Aharabaki, he has Muramasa use her steel threads to whip up a gauntlet which she can temporarily use to shield herself from the giant tsurugi's gunfire. It's nowhere near as strong as a real tsurugi would be, though.
• Precocious Crush: After a rocky start, she quickly develops feelings for Kageaki Minato. She's still in high school, and he's in his late-20's. With the right choices, this can become an Age-Gap Romance.
• Pyrrhic Victory: She managed to survive Kageaki's final attack during their last battle in Hero, but lost Masamune in the process, forcing her to user Muramasa, which slowly undermines her ideals.
• Satanic Archetype: In the epilogue of the Hero route, she is an In-Universe case of this trope that is played for tragedy. Rather than sneaking up on people and claiming them due to the Law of Balance like Kageaki did, she openly offers people help but while also making clear that it comes with a price. However, in contrast to how people saw Kageaki as a hero despite he himself not seeing it that way simply due to them not knowing, for Ichijo everyone instead sees her as something of a satanic figure worthy of scorn and only to be associated with by the desperate, all cause of her honesty.
• Sex for Solace: Due to having to face the contradictions in her ideals she ends up asking Kageaki for sex in the midst of her emotional turmoil.
• She Is All Grown Up: In the Hero epilogue which takes place three years after the main story, she has visibly matured and grown significantly taller, having turned into a powerful warrior woman.
• Slipping into Stink: Happens somewhat off screen as Kageaki's repeated comments while infiltrating an enemy fortress makes makes her eventually smash herself into a horse paddock and in turn, a pile of horse dung.
• Spanner in the Works: In the Hero route, the plan was for she and Kageaki to infiltrate Fudaraku fortress and slay the young prince Kuniuji in order to put a black mark on the Shogunate's majesty, stymie the ambitions of the Four Generals in regards to putting him on the throne, and thus shift the balance of power in Yamato toward Haruhiro. Ichijo ends up becoming so enraged with General Doshin that she breaks from the plan to pursue and personally kill him. It's fine that their battle destroys the unmanned outer fort—as much as symbol of Rokuharan power as the prince and therefore a viable alternate target—but the death of the General threatens to throw Rokuhara into instability or even collapse, thus making Yamato a target for outside forces like the GHQ to take over. More directly it leads to General Raicho, who had been working with Prince Haruhiro, to become paranoid. This leads to the deaths of another General (Chachamaru) and Haruhiro's aide-de-camp Akitaka, and Haruhiro's implied death as well.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: She will repeatedly reinforce that under no uncertain terms, she is absolutely and most definitely not lost.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Whenever she has to work with Kanae it can be quite unclear who they really are fighting, the enemy or each other. usually both at the same time.
• Took a Level in Badass: While she was already a badass before, when she gets Masamune she goes to whole new levels compared to before, now finally being able to fight on equal footing as her foes.
• Trauma Button: After her first fight using Masamune against Kageaki in Muramasa leads to his defeat, he wearily accepts his execution at her hands as just punishment for his crimes, asking only that she stop Ginseigo in his stead. This beings back memories of her father's seppuku, in which he forced her to decapitate him in the name of justice after carving his own belly open and leads to her breaking down in tears and pleading for her father not to make her do it. Kageaki is naturally confused.
• Tricked-Out Gloves: She is given a gauntlet woven from Muramasa's silk which provides her a modicum of temporary defense against Arahabaki's guns, allowing her to serve as a distraction for a while.
• Upbringing Makes the Hero: She walks the line between this trope and Tyke Bomb with her fathers Black-and-White Insanity shackling her. Sure, he raised her to be a good child and to fight against evil, just to a thoroughly unhealthy extent.
• Uncertain Doom: She clashes with Kageaki in the epilogue of the Conqueror route. We're not shown the result of their confrontation, but given that we know that Kageaki went on to establish a successful mercenary group, it's likely she didn't win. She might have survived, though, given Kageaki's Law of Balance.
• Uneven Hybrid: She's a quarter-Emishi, not enough for pointed ears or dark skin. Apart from this, though, she apparently looks exactly like her full-blooded great-aunt.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Her desire to see justice done at all costs leads to her leaving a great deal of unintentional death and suffering in her wake, which she's eventually forced to come face-to-face with.
• Vague Age: Besides being in high school, it's never stated how old she actually is, but in the Hero Epilogue three years after the game's events, she appears to have fully matured.
• Walking the Earth: He fate in the epilogue where after she had been forced to make a pact with Muramasa and thus be put under the Law of Balance, she wanders Yamato doing what little things she can even though she becomes known as a devil due to always exacting the toll of a life in exchange for her help. The only difference is that unlike Kageaki, she makes clear the cost to anyone who wants her help.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Some of her motivations include just gaining praise from her deceased father, that he approves of her smiting evil.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: She just wants to spread the ideal of justice and to protect the innocent, however her methods are extreme to say the least. She eventually grows to the point that she is determined to carry on to the point that if it could somehow leave such a mark on the world that people would think twice about doing anything evil. As shown in the epilogue however, after three years, her ideals have been eroded severely.
• Well-Trained, but Inexperienced: She is trained in the same school of swordsmanship as Kageaki resulting in a Fearful Symmetry during their duel. However she lacks his experience and as such, also the flexibility that comes with it making her easy to read.
• What Beautiful Eyes!: One of her most striking features is the fierceness of her hawk-like eyes.

Captain Kanae Otori

Kanae Otori

"It makes no difference that you had no choice, or that the people of Yamato owe you their lives. I will avenge the future you stole, insignificant though it may be."

A mysterious lady encountered by Yuhi at the beginning of the game. She later becomes a Captain under the GHQ, and uses her authority as such to intervene in local incident, before her meeting with Kageaki, and quickly falls in love with him, to the point of following him and attempting to seduce him wherever he goes. She's the central character of Nemesis.

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• Accidental Truth: Her statements of Prince Haruhiro being in danger was meant to be Metaphorically True but ended up a lot more on the nose when Kageaki ran into Guts Eidar.
• Ambiguous Innocence: During her childhood, she grew up as a cruel child who didn't understand right from wrong, seemingly enjoying killing predators simply because she wanted to "avenge" their prey. Her father Tokitsugu taught her about the perils of her way of thinking; She perfectly understands that killing is wrong, but cannot help but satisfy her urges, as she feels alive enacting revenge on others.
• Anti-Hero: She's a terrible person with twisted morals, but she nonetheless tries to do the right thing, not hesitating to kill her enemies in battle.
• Badass Boast: After playing a few notes on Burroughs and revealing her Blood Crux she simply tells the opposing guards that "Whenever Burroughs plays a requiem, it is always for my enemies. Never for me."
• Big Damn Heroes: Shows up and stops what seemed to be a bloody duel between Yagenta and Ukyo, saving Kageaki at the same time.
• Blood Knight: Unlike so many others in the story, she relishes in battle and the kill.
• The Cavalry: Just as Kageaki is about to be overrun by the rouge forces under Konjin's control, she and Ichijo shows up to save the day and even the odds.
• Color Failure: When playing sick she meekly asks if Kageaki loves her. He bluntly answers in the negative. Cue this trope after coughing blood.
• Didn't See That Coming: When she told Kageaki Minato that she would execute him for the death of Yuhi Nitta, she expected grief, resignation, even anger. When he fell to his knees sobbing into her palm and expressing his utter gratitude? She was caught completely off-guard.
• Dissonant Serenity: She can be almost frighteningly calm in even the most tense situations or while she is aiming her rifle on someone.
• The Dreaded: The soldiers of the Rokuhara estate knows of her cruelty well, as such when they realize who it is they are dealing with, it is fair to say that quite a few pants get soiled and they all are sent into a blind panic.
• Dropped a Bridge on Her: If Kageaki shows more affection to her than Ichijo, she is killed by Kageaki with little fanfare or buildup, leading to the Hero route.
• Dynamic Entry: Her plan on taking the Otori Estate involved simply taking a jeep, burst through the main gate guns literally blazing with a machinegun while Sayo lobs around grenades. Pretty much everyone notes the insanity of this whole plan.
  Sayo: "This'll teach you to try reasoning with a maniac."
• Enfant Terrible: As a child she frequently killed animals on the basis that they had killed something else, all based on her twisted perception of justice. Even as her father tried to teach her better ways, she just grew up more and more into a monster, culminating in her killing a group of soldiers and their hostages to satisfy her cruel urges.
• Every Proper Lady Should Curtsy: As she is accosted by the guards of the Otori mansion she decides to introduce herself with a curtsy, revealing her armies worth of weapons that she proceeds to make good use of.
• Exact Words: Zig-zagged. On paper, GHQ inspectors are expected to ensure that Yamatoan civilians are being treated properly by the Rokuhara and to correct any misbehavior they see. In practice, most of them are figureheads who see, hear, and say nothing about the cruel behavior of the Rokuharan troops. Kanae, however, takes advantage of the letter of the law to execute those she sees abusing civilians, noting that she hasn't been ordered against taking personal action. However, this only saves her butt until her superiors get word of it and she has to claim a "radio malfunction" in order buy time to act freely until she's replaced.
• Excellent Judge of Character: She is very good to get a read on people and their intentions. It is to the point that she clearly deducted what Kageaki had been up to and clearly knew not to trust him. That said, she did miscalculate on just why Kageaki reacted the way he did, as such she was left completely surprised when she finds out that he wants to be punished.
• Eyes Always Shut: Almost never seen with her eyes open. Beware when she opens either of them.
• The Fake Cutie: She frequently tries to play as some kind of Love Freak to make those around her underestimate her. Kageaki doesn't buy it for a second.
• Fastball Special: She is able to use one Burroughs bolts to have Muramasa launched skywards after the latter attached herself to it with her threads.
• Flash Step: She is able to move quite quickly on her feet. Even when playing sick she is able to quickly glue a leaf to a tree and back into bed again in the time it takes to blink.
• Final Boss: She is Kageaki's final opponent in the Nemesis route even though he himself doesn't know it.
• Foil: She's the opposite of Ayane Ichijo in many ways, with their sole connection being their feelings for Kageaki. Unlike Ichijo, who's an idealist who attempts to change to world for the better in the name of justice, she isn't interested in following any sort of ideals, instead following her own desire of revenge using her own misconception of "justice", painfully aware of her failings as a human being. Upon discovering Kageaki's true character in Nemesis, she becomes conflicted over the fact that the man she wants to kill the most is also seeking to be punished and think of her as his "savior".
• Foreshadowing: Thanks to her Excellent Judge of Character she manages to deduce that Kageaki's Guilt Complex might not be because of all his murders, but something else far deeper. As it turns out, Kageaki does indeed carry a far deeper sin.
• For Great Justice: A dark and twisted example. To her the only justice in the world is revenge, and as reviving the dead is impossible, the only way to balance the scales for those who were killed by someone else is to kill the culprit.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Whenever she really gets into the real killing mood her right eye starts glowing red, signaling death to whoever is facing down with her.
• The Golden Rule: A very dark example. One of the only rules that she abides by is that if someone wrongs someone, then punishment for the guilty party has to follow.
• Gratuitous English: When she gets angry she sometimes lapses into quite the foul tirade in English.
• Gut Feeling: Just before Yuhi Nitta is killed by Kageaki, she sees a red streak through the sky and has a worried feeling she can't shake, try as she might to dismiss it as a regular patrol.
• Height Angst: As she is pretty tall by Yamatoan standards she has a bit of an insecurity about it as shorter women are usually considered more attractive in the setting.
• Hellish Pupils: It's not exactly the pupils which are the problem so much as the fact that she has a whole bunch of them.
• Hidden Weapons: This lady keeps what pretty much amounts to a whole war armory hidden up her dress.
• Idiot Crows: When she tries to joke about how she doesn't recognize Ukyo, things just go silent with the caw of a crow eventually being heard.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: She is sharp eyed and has a killer aim, able to line up a shot with millimeter precision.
• In Love with the Mark: Throughout Nemesis it becomes increasingly clear that despite her desire for revenge against Kageaki, she starts to more and more to love him for real, putting her in quite the troublesome spot.
• Innate Night Vision: Night-time is no obstacle for her amazing eyes.
• Kissing Cousins: She was once betrothed to Shishku Otori, a distant cousin, and truly in love with him. Once.
• Lap Pillow: A fatal example, she allows Kageaki to expire resting in her lap at the end of Nemesis while she herself following soon after.
• Laughing Mad: After she killed Shishiku she breaks out into something that can best be described as a mix between a mad cackle and uncontrollable sobbing.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: While she is cruel and ruthless, she always makes it a point that whenever she takes someone down in vengeance, then it is a trial by combat and thus she always makes sure of it taking place on equal grounds.
• Logic Bomb: Kageaki ends up inadvertently setting one off inside of her. As a result of his lack of self worth he ended up filling her with doubt as his behaviour just went against any semblance of common sense as she knew it, warped as it may be.
• Magical Eye: Her near insectoid eyes gives her superhuman perception and can see movements down to the molecule as well as warping her perception of time.
• Manipulative Bitch: She very quickly manages to figure out Kageaki's Trauma Button and uses it to have him dancing at the palm of her hand.
• Mask of Sanity: While she presents herself as a somewhat dignified goofball, one doesn't have to dig deep before one starts to find a dangerously unstable mind that is barely restrained.
• Master of the Levitating Blades: Gun variant, she is able to use the strings of Burroughs to wield multiple weapons at once even when un-armored. This manifests as them all floating around her.
• The Mole: While she helps both the GHQ and Prince Haruhiro's factions, she is in fact an agent under the employ of Ruby Sarchant, feeding him information about all the goings on both within and outside of GHQ.
• Mood Whiplash: A lot of her dialogue can be silly slapstick humor one moment only to slip to dead serious revelations or statements and then back again.
• Moral Sociopathy: She is a killer to the core, but follows a certain moral code to guide her actions. Most notably, if someone kills another, then the guilty party have to be judged by her. Second, she never shoots someone in the back. Her court is one of combat and as such she won't kill those who refuse to fight back. This last point is why she never revealed her identity as Akitaka's killer as she knew that Kageaki would just take it as another punishment for his actions and then just let her kill him.
• Mutual Kill: While delayed, both she and Kageaki end up dying from their wounds following their final duel at the end of Nemesis.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: While she comes across as an airheaded Ditz most of the time, it hides a clever and devious mind.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: Ends up doing a mutual one with Ichijo, but seeing him as something of a hero she ends up setting of Kageaki's Guilt Complex, causing him to completely loose his marbles and even pass out from the emotional turmoil. However, it is later revealed to be Subverted during Nemesis, as she was perfectly aware of his role as a murderer for some time.
• One-Man Army: Even without her Crux she is able to beat whole squadrons of trained soldiers by her lonesome.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: In Muramasa's route she makes it clear that she is the only one that is allowed to defeat Kageaki for what he has done. This of course also acts as yet another reason to why she and Ichijo can't get along as she wants to kill him as well and doesn't want to share.
• "Open!" Says Me: When a couple of guards blocks her passage and asks for her pass, she guns them down before stating that her pass is of the "all-access variety".
• Perfectly Arranged Marriage: Long ago, a young boy from one of the lowborn branch families was adopted into the family proper so that he might serve as a fiancé for Kanae, daughter of the Otori head. The boy heard about her eccentricities, but dismissed the rumors, for the innocent lad had fallen in love with her at first sight. He swore to become a great warrior worthy of her. Years later, during the war, torn between loyalty to the Otoris and to his country, the man named Shishiku Otori chose to assassinate the head of the Otori family (who was lobbying for peace) for treason and thus earned the eternal enmity of the woman who had once(?) loved him.
• Pet the Dog: She really did care for Yuhi Nitta and tried to get him away from Kamakura City before Rokuhara could find him. He even sees her crying when she leaves after he politely refuses the train ticket. Of course, he ends up dead for entirely different reasons than being the true heir of Otori.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: "BULLETS BEFORE QUESTIONS, DUMBASS!"
• Psychotic Smirk: Whenever her true personality starts to emerge, she becomes prone to these.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Whenever she gets more serious she will reveal her ominous glowing red eyes before getting to work murdering her foes.
• Revenge: Nemesis reveals that her main objective is to kill Kageaki for his murder of Nitta Yuhi. She also wants to avenge her father, whose faction was decimated by Shishiku and his men.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Nobles, rather. She's the daughter of the former head of the Otori house and was raised to see shepherding the just and punishing the wicked as a matter of noblesse oblige, a sacred duty, with those nobles who take the position but not the responsibilities as parasites.
• Silk Hiding Steel: While she can come across as a somewhat gentle person at first glance, this all belies a very dangerous woman who all but the most foolish of people would dare to take on.
• Slasher Smile: She takes great joy in killing her foes. It is written all over her face, with the giant grin perhaps being the biggest giveaway.
• Snow Means Death: In the end of Nemesis, both she, Kageaki and Muramasa are all fatally wounded and slowly succumb as the gentle winter snow slowly starts to embrace them.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: While she is soft-spoken normally, her voice will get noticeably colder whenever she is in her more cruel mood.
• Statuesque Stunner: She stands 170 cm tall (roughly 5'7") which is noted to be quite tall for a Yamatoan woman.
• Stealth Insult: Her way of speaking and constant smile let her get away with a number of good zingers.
• Stepford Smiler: Of the unstable variety. She is frequently shown with a gentle smile on her face, regardless of the severity of her words or actions, and it is clear that the smile hides something incredibly dangerous.
• Super-Senses: Her vision is nothing short of incredible, being able to spot minute details on rapidly moving objects and even being able to slow or stop time from her perspective. She can even see vibrations in the air.
• The Tease: She frequently tries to woo Kageaki using her guiles and beauty, results vary. If it is not Sayo shooting it down, it is Kageaki himself.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Whenever she has to work with Ichijo it can be quite unclear who they really are fighting, the enemy or each other. usually both at the same time.
• Time Stands Still: Time will freeze whenever she opens her eyes.
• Together in Death: She and Kageaki die together at the end of the Nemesis route only minutes apart but seemingly content.
• Tranquil Fury: She sometimes fall into this whenever she starts to get visibly annoyed. The most notable instance is after Kageaki threw an exploding aerosol can at the air-vent she was hiding in, barely containing her fury after the fact.
• Walking Armory: She keeps a whole armory's worth of weaponry hidden up her skirt. Rifles, grenades, guns, spare magazines, you name it.
• Woman Scorned: At one point, she and Shishiku were seemingly headed toward a Perfectly Arranged Marriage—then her father killed his adoptive father in order to take over the Otori family, with Shishiku proceeding to kill her father during WWII using the excuse that his working toward peace was trantamount to treason. In the Nemesis route, she eventually ends up killing him and having a breakdown afterwards from all the mixed emotions.

Muramasa

Uemon-no-Jo Muramasa the Third

Armored Form

^{Original Form}

^{Human Form}

The Tsurugi wielded by Minato Kageaki, who became his partner following a certain incident two years ago. Taking the form of a spider, she's the closest thing Kageaki has for a companion, but he usually dismisses her as a tool due to the heavy toll and huge number of bodies she causes on him. Her true identity is Muramasa the Third, the last of the Muramasa series of Tsurugi rumored to be cursed.

Over the course of the story, she develops a close bond with Kageaki as they defeat more and more enemies along the way, to the point she feels guilty to impose the Law of Balance on him. While their relationship is strictly professional in Hero and Nemesis, her past, motivations, and relationship with Kageaki are explored in greater detail during the later half of the game, becoming one of the central characters of Conqueror.

During her time as a human in the Nanboku-chō period, she was the young daughter of Muramasa the Second, who recently reached adulthood as her last living relatives turned themselves into tsurugi. Unwilling to continue her grandfather's struggle for peace due to the tragedy it caused, she was requested by the Southern Emperor to never bear children and destroy her mother. Through negotiation, she was turned into a tsurugi and sealed away in exchange for sparing her mother from being destroyed, on the condition that she would destroy it herself should someone reactivates her.

That day would finally happen five centuries later, when Minato Hikaru was chosen as her mother's new pilot, creating a chain of events leading to Hikaru's brother Kageaki to activate her in order to save his mother from death. Together, they joined forces to destroy Ginseigo once and for all.

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• All Webbed Up: She can use her steel wires to ensnare foes and the like.
• Animal Motifs: Spiders.
• Battle Couple: In her own route, she and Kageaki become a proper fighting duo after they finally accept each other.
• Berserk Button: Basically anything that wounds her pride will rile her up something fierce, be it to show superiority over her or treating her like she is some common pile of goods.
• BFS: Once her nodachi is restored, she and Kageaki can finally wield this gigantic sword for themselves. And not just enough on its own, she is also able to use some of her new powers to make the blade even bigger.
• Big "WHAT?!": When she and Kageaki ends up getting flung around through time by Konjin, one of the places they end up in is where the moon has been thoroughly shattered. Muramasa's reaction ends up being quite appropriate given the ludicrousness of the situation after which she ends up unable to even form coherent words.
• Birds of a Feather: She and Kageaki ultimately end up attracted to one another thanks to just how much they share in common, right down to the Guilt Complex.
• Bishōnen Line: Averted. She eventually learns how to take human form (technically an advancement of her abilities), but said form is nowhere near as powerful or durable as her tsurugi form—albeit still moreso than a "real" human would be. And thanks to the Law of Balance, she's definitely an Anti-Hero at best.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: She is able to detect the "scent" of her mother (aka Ginseigo) and her eggs. This ability is less accurate than radar, giving only a general location, but she's the only one who can do so.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Implied in Nemesis where Kageaki notes that the transformation into armored form was oddly painful this time right after they both witnessed Kanae kissing him.
• Compelling Voice: She tries to use her powers to make Kageaki obey her when he suggests that they try to understand one another. It ends up failing as she herself is starting to waver.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Muramasa is by all means a decent person, and actually bonds quite well with humans. However, she's also cursed to impose the Law of Balance to anyone who pilots her.
• Deadpan Snarker: Can have quite the sharp tongue at times, even though most of her snark is lost on Kageaki.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: In her own route she finally starts to loosen up and try to be nicer as Kageaki starts to acknowledge her as a sentient being.
• Despair Event Horizon: Should Kageaki reject her attempts to free him from the brainwashing then she will end up completely breaking down and just thoroughly give up on everything.
• Didn't See That Coming: One of her weaknesses is that she is prone of getting flustered in the middle of combat whenever she is faced by something unexpected.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: The nodachi that was part of her was broken up and made into the eggs Ginseigo spreads about. A big part of Muramasa and Kageaki's journey early on is to collect its parts.
• The Dying Walk: Both she and Kageaki try to press on in Nemesis after receiving fatal wounds, walking for some undetermined distance, but end up succumbing in the winter snow with Muramasa crumbling first.
• Emergency Weapon: She has three weapons in her armored form with her wakizashi, the shortest of her blades, often serving as a backup if the other blades have been lost.
• Epic Fail: Her first attempt to try and achieve human form has to be seen to be believed, turning into something best described as a parody of either Gigantor or one of the Super West Invincible Robot, Version 28.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: All of the parts of her nodachi contains some of Ginseigo's power and as she tries to assemble it once more after having gotten the last piece she gets a grim reminder of just how dangerous that power is, almost losing herself to it.
• Fantastic Racism: She generally dislikes mass production models, but racing cruxes especially she seems to have low tolerance of. Its no surprise then that it takes quite a bit of convincing from Kageaki to have her decked out in racing crux parts as a disguise to partake in the race.
• The Future Is Shocking: Due to her age and having mostly been confined to a shrine, a lot of the modern day is quite shocking to her. Things such as airships and nukes just make her feel left behind.
• Giant Spider: In her animal form the takes the shape of a spider the size of a horse.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: When she is given full control in the final battle she reasons that the best way to fight Ginseigo is with her bare hands due to how fast this opponent is.
• Gravity Master: Ginseigo infused her "eggs" with pieces of Muramasa's nodachi, giving their recipients a bit of Muramasa's power. However, this works both ways as when Muramasa reclaims those pieces, she gets the gravity powers that infused within the eggs. Although she has some difficulty controlling it at first.
• Guilt Complex: Like Kageaki she ends up blaming herself both for what happened with her mother and not having her scrapped as well as putting all these burdens upon Kageaki, seeing herself as the cause of all the suffering that is currently happening.
• Hate at First Sight: She and Chachamaru do not get along with them going at each others throats pretty much the moment they meet, going so far as to even have "Blade Arts III", usually an action theme, play in the background.
• Heroic BSoD: She took it quite hard when Kageaki was implanted with one of Ginseigo's eggs causing him to abandon her and spent a long time in an emotional slump.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Just like Kageaki she is a bundle of self loathing who blames herself for a lot of what is going on in the world.
• Honor Before Reason: When the then Emperor of Yamato ordered for her mother to be molten down in the forge, she interjected and asked for anything else other than that as there is no greater shame for a tsurugi than to simply be molten down for scraps. This of course is what lead to her being sealed away instead, causing lots of the problems Kageaki is currently facing.
• Horse of a Different Color: If need be, Kageaki can use her as a mount where her armor form would not be as useful.
• Hot-Blooded: Can be quite temperamental at times and prone to let her emotions control her in the heat of battle.
• How Do I Shot Web?: When she finds out that she can actually assume human form from her mother, her attempts to learn it proves to be a process of trial and error.
• Human Sacrifice: She is cursed that for every wicked soul she slays, she also requires an innocent soul be taken as well.
• Ice Queen: Throughout most of the routes she remains cold and distant with those around her, only chiming in with sharp snipes every so often. All this as a result of her bitterness born from guilt.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: As she faces down the brainwashed Kageaki she makes use of her mind altering powers. However rather than forcing the issue she makes use of it to appeal to his emotions and make him free himself out of his own choice.
• It's All My Fault: Over the course of the story, she blames herself a lot for imposing the Law of Balance on Kageaki, knowing how much it affects him mentally.
• Ironic Echo: After Kageaki killed Funa, Muramasa returns his "just a tool" speech right back at him.
• Knight in Sour Armor: She used to be a naïve and idealistic youth who turned cynical and bitter when she saw what kind of monster her mother had become. She still however wants to believe in humanity and that they'll be able to move past their failings, unlike her mother.
• Lethal Chef: Whatever you do, don't let her into the kitchen. Whatever she does in there it seems to involve loads hatchets and machineguns or maybe jackhammers. Oh, and she also tries to cook using her railgun.
• Magnetism Manipulation: Can manipulate magnetic fields to either protect herself or power up her own abilities.
• Magnetic Weapons: One extension of her magnetic abilities is to use it in a similar way to a railgun to power up Kageaki's Iai strikes.
• Meido: After she mentions how she used to fantasize about being in the royal court, Kageaki manages to rope her into a very fanservicy maid uniform as a sort of Western equivalent.
• Mindlink Mates: She's bonded to Kageaki in a manner which allows him to speak to her mentally at anytime, as well as being able to share mental images. If need be, he can even assume partial control of her functions or use his body as a conduit for her powers.
• Mind Rape:
  • She has the same mind altering powers of her mother, however due to a promise to the emperor of her time she has never used it. She does however end up breaking this promise to try and use it on Kageaki to try and strip him of his will, only to fail as her own heart has started to waver.
  • In the final battle against Hikaru, Kageaki actually demands that Muramsa use this ability on him and take over to try and even the odds in the fight even though it will effectively be a Death of Personality.
• Morality Chain: In a way, she is one of the only people that keeps Kageaki from completely succumbing to rage and hatred whenever it gets too much for him to bear.
• Not So Stoic: Once she finally manages to snap Kageaki back to his senses, she breaks down into tears for the first time in the story, finally breaking down her iron facade.
• Obstructive Code of Conduct: She has access to the same brainwashing powers of her mother Muramasa the Second (aka Ginseigo), but she was asked not to use them by a centuries-old Imperial Decree, and stayed true to her word out of respect for Imperial Family who spared her.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: As Kageaki points out, rare is the day she swallows her pride and admits someone or something else superiority. And if she does, then things are sure to be dire.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: She ends up forced to deck herself out in racing crux parts in order to take part of a race as it has proven difficult to find Ginseigo's egg this time around. Of course, given it is a hack job, it is painfully obvious to onlookers that something isn't right.
• Pride: She can be quite full of herself at times, often looking down on others and cant stand having her own superiority challenged.
• Projectile Webbing: She can sling steel wires at her enemies when in animal form or as a form of traversal.
• Quit Your Whining: In the epilogue of the Conqueror route, as Kageaki is wasting away in alcoholism and self misery she finally has had enough and snaps at him, chewing him out on how he constantly feels sorry for himself, telling him that there are loads of others in the world who have made mistakes and might never atone for them. Do they deserve to die or be punished? He shouldn't think that he is some kind of special exception.
• Rage Helm: When in her armor form her helmet has a permanently scowling face. In addition, the lips can part when using certain moves to give the image of gritting teeth.
• Sealed Evil in a Duel: When her mother was sealed away, she herself had to forge herself into a tsurugi and be sealed alongside her to be ready should her mother ever rise and spread madness again.
• Sealed Good in a Can: she was sealed alongside her mother to take her down in the event that she would be donned by a madman ever again.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Despite being born in a time of civil war, and witnessing the entire Sengoku period with her mother while being sealed, she turns out to be quite idealistic and believes that humanity can learn from its mistakes despite everything.
• Snow Means Death: In the end of Nemesis, both she, Kageaki and Kanae are all fatally wounded and slowly succumb as the gentle winter snow slowly starts to embrace them.
• Stealth Mentor: In a way. Her Law of Balance exists to teach the wielder that there is no such thing as a truly good murder. Whenever you kill someone, regardless on whether you consider them evil, you are also killing someone else's good. The Law of Balance is just the most blunt presentation of this concept, created by her grandfather before her.
• Telepathy: As with all shin'uchi, she can communicate by vibrating her metal in a certain way—the effect is pretty much just straight up telepathic communication under a different name, and allows her to send images and so forth.
• Tsundere: While she can be quite harsh towards those around her with sarcastic snipes always at the ready, it soon becomes clear that she does really care of those she interact with, Kageaki especially.
• Understatement: In the final battle, both she and Kageaki gets knocked around by Hikaru. Once Kageaki comes to and try to asses the situation, Muramasa awkwardly states that the strike and resulting attempts at a defense knocked them a little further than expected. As he looks around he realizes that they are in low Earth orbit. "A little far?" he is left wondering in response.
• Visible Silence: She is prone of these moments of silence, but the most notable one happens as Kageaki tries to clean her followed by whole paragraphs of dots.
• You're Insane!: In a general sense. She has this reaction about crux racers once she finds out that they are going around the course at such insane speeds while having armor so thin that they can crumble from the lightest impact. Kageaki agrees that they've been driven mad by the dream of standing at the top of the racing world.

Chachamaru Ashikaga

Chachamaru Ashikaga

The Governor of Horigoe Province, loosely related to the Ashikaga Clan. She usurped her father in a coup, therefore taking his place as the youngest of the Four Generals. Somewhat of an enigma, she seems to have her own plans for the country and has expressed a certain interest for Kageaki. First appearing as a background character, she takes center stage later on, becoming one of the central characters of Conqueror.

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• Ambiguously Evil: While she's one of the Four Generals, she doesn't actively participates in military campaigns unlike the others, instead doing whatever she deems interesting. During Chapter 3, she acts as a tacit ally to Kageaki and helps him on a whim. It later turns out that she's one of the main villains of the setting, but she doesn't actually want to destroy the world per se; Due her half-Tsurugi heritage, her brain is part machine and constantly receives informations from Konjin, the source of all Tsurugi. As such, she wants to destroy it one way or another and it requires her to join the Green Dragon Society, a sect dedicated to its summoning, even if it involves the end of the world.
• Aside Comment: When Kageaki asks for her name at the racetrack and she jokingly asnwer with "The Emperor of Mankind" and Kageaki treating it like it was a serious answer, she makes a quick comment to the reader that "She knew it was gonna happen".
• Awful Truth: She tells Kageaki of the true nature of Hikaru, how he had been fighting a shadow and that the real one is slowly dying on her own.
• Bastard Bastard: She is a bastard child between Morimasa and an emishi woman and one of the Big Bad's of the story.
• Bastard Understudy: While it seems at first like she is working for Moriuji, she is in fact working for Hikaru and betrays Moriuji once she believes he might become a future obstacle.
• Bedmate Reveal: After Kageaki wakes up from having been unconscious for three days following his battle with Ginseigo he finds Chachamaru sitting on top of him in the bed.
• Bifauxnen: When she is in her civvies she ends up looking incredibly boyish, to the point that Kageaki initially mistakes her for one.
• Big Bad Ensemble: While Hikaru is the main Big Bad, Chachamaru is a sort of secondary main antagonist who works together with Hikaru in a "You stay out of my way, I stay out of yours" kind of way.
• Body Horror: Her transformation into her armored form is anything but pleasant as the parts burst out from underneath her skin, tearing up both flesh and bone as her body practically turns itself inside-out.
• Child by Rape: It is implied that her emishi mother was raped by Morimasa and even though he tried to have her disposed of when he realized that she was pregnant, Chachamaru was still born.
• Cool Big Sis: She's one of the few people who treats Shiro decently outside of his Yes-Man posse.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: As she lays dying she meekly notes that things could perhaps have worked out much better had she just acted a bit differently and just asked Kageaki rather than trying to force him.
• Death Glare: She ends up with a vicious glare in her eyes during the siege of Fudaraku Fortress when informed that Koga had fallen that Kageaki describes as that if looks could kill then it would fell even the gods.
• Devilish Hair Horns: Her distinct bangs gives the look of small downwards bent horns, fitting for the local Satanic Archetype. They also serve the dual purpose of hiding her pointed ears, revealing her emishi lineage.
• Driven to Suicide: In Nemesis she kills herself by burning down the Otori manor and staying behind in the flames after the Golden Dawn plan failed and Ginseigo was reduced to a pile of slag and the blast of the Forged Bomb being far weaker than intended.
• Enigmatic Minion: Although a Rokuhara General, she appears to have a highly capricious nature which makes her actions appear befuddling to both the reader and her comrades.
• Gambit Roulette: She admits that the whole plan of dropping the Forged Bomb on top of Fudaraku Fortress and having Hikaru use the power of Ginseigo at the same time to boost the blast is a gigantic gamble, however they really don't have much of a chance otherwise to see their plans come to fruition.
• Giver of Lame Names: Her ideas when it comes to names leaves much to be desired.
• Half-Human Hybrid: She is in fact a kind of human/tsurugi hybrid. Both yet not quite either. It all came about as a result of her father having his way with an emishi woman and when it became clear that she pregnant, he had her ordered to forge herself into a tsurugi to deal with this. What came of this however was not an armor, but a small child.
• Hate at First Sight: She and Muramasa do not get along with them going at each others throats pretty much the moment they meet, going so far as to even have "Blade Arts III", usually an action theme, play in the background.
• Hearing Voices: She is constantly hearing a voice proclaiming "I AM POWER!" that supposedly comes from God and is quite infuriated by it. As a result of this she likes to be on the racetrack as the noise drowns out the voice.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Her motives are shrouded in mystery, with some hints dropped during Nemesis before being fully revealed in Conqueror.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Non fatal variation, but her implanting Kageaki with Ginseigo's egg and removing his inhibitions also caused him to have no reservations about raping her the moment he got the chance.
• Hypocritical Humor: On the racetrack she becomes increasingly flabbergasted at the various dreadful names of the various racers, something that is quite rich coming from her given that she ain't much better when it comes to naming things.
• Immune to Mind Control: She is unaffected by Ginseigo's Mind Rape abilities, something that ends up earning her Hikaru's interest.
• Kill the God: She is determined to kill the god beneath the earth so that she can finally silence its voice.
• Laughably Evil: Wicked she might be but is also something of a joker that likes to play around with those around her.
• Love at First Sight: She reveals that she actually fell for Kageaki the moment she first laid eyes on him.
• Machine Empathy: She is incredibly good at diagnosing problems with a racing crux, able to just lightly punch it and then figure out what is wrong with it simply from the echo. Makes sense given that she is half one herself.
• The Man in Front of the Man: She is initially acting as a sort of right hand man to the shogun when in reality she is the other half of the Big Bad Ensemble and is just using Moriuji for her own ends.
• Mind Rape: Of a sort. Her shinogi, Castle of Howling, allows her to share her senses with others nearby. And given what kind of nightmarish experience she has to suffer through each day is, with both her tsurugi and human senses getting mixed up and enhanced to a ludicrous degree, it can effectively crush the mind of the weak-willed.
• Motor Mouth: She can cram an awful lot of odd references and side jokes into a simple statement.
• No Campaign for the Wicked: Downplayed, she has a route of her own however it is by far the shortest and gets the least focus in the entire story.
• The Not-Love Interest: She can be considered one of the main (anti)heroines of the story, due to her expanded role in Conqueror and being Kageaki's confident and advisor during his quest to kill Hikaru. Even after she brainwashes Kageaki, she stays with him until her last moments and the player is also given the choice to refuse Muramasa's help to let Kageaki becoming an item with Chachamaru.
• Omnicidal Maniac: She is perfectly content to end all life if it means that she will get the silence she so craves. Later downplayed by the end of the story, when she admits that while she indeed wants to destroy the world, she grew attached to Kageaki enough to cheer him up before his final battle against Hikaru, becoming a part of Muramasa as the final piece of her Nodachi and helping him save the world.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The other generals are quick to note that something must be seriously wrong for Chachamaru to suddenly address them in a serious manner without a hint of her usual playfulness. This was a result of her discovering that Muramasa was cooperating with Prince Haruhiro to infiltrate Fudaraku Fortress.
• Pointy Ears: Hidden behind her hair she has distinctly pointed ears which reveal that she is of emishi decent.
• Rapid-Fire "Shut Up!": Right before the Golden Dawn plan is launched she speaks to someone off screen and repeatedly tells them to shut up, ending with a Big "SHUT UP!". Said someone was actually the God of tsurugi itself, transmitting information directly to her brain, something that she suffers from birth.
• The Reveal: She is in fact not human but rather some kind of tsurugi hybrid with her true name being Kotetsu.
• Sad Clown: Underneath that silly jokester façade she constantly projects is a jaded and bitter individual who has lost herself to a deep nihilism.
• Satanic Archetype: She proves to be quite the deceptive little imp as her trickery and promises of helping him deal with his issues leads Kageaki down quite the dark path, even implanting him with one of Ginseigo's eggs to remove his doubts.
• Stay with Me Until I Die: She asks Kageaki to stay by her side as she slowly expires from the wound she received from Raicho. Kageaki obliges and Muramasa choses to respect it and keeps her distance so that they can be alone.
• Super-Senses: Thanks to her mixed blood, she has both human and tsurugi senses, both amplified to an extreme extent, hearing everything and everyone at all times including a terrible god beneath the earth. Its to the point that if she would ever want silence she would have to purge all life on the planet. Her sight, too is extremely sharp, as demonstrated when she sees the Tamura team cheating in their crux race all the way from the announcers' booth.
• Sweet Tooth: She really likes her sweets, much to the annoyance of the other generals.
• Take a Third Option: When fighting Kageaki, she has the option of either stalling for long enough for the Forged Bomb to be dropped or taking out Kageaki. She chooses to instead run away and try to kill Kuniuji as that would also put a stop to Kageaki's attempts to foil her plans.
• Transformation Horror: Her transformation into her armored form is less of a transformation and more her body almost turning itself inside out as metal bursts forth from her skin and flesh.
• Tranquil Fury: When Misao blinds a rival racer causing a fatal crash, Chachamaru is left pretty much fuming behind a surprisingly calm exterior, angry at them going so far as to taint themselves for a victory.
• Troll: Really likes to get under peoples skin in various ways, all for her own amusement.
• Tsurime Eyes: She has quite the noticeable slant to her eyes, fitting her somewhat cocky personality.
• Underestimating Badassery: She severely underestimated just how powerful of a warrior Raicho was, not only curbstomping her with ease, but also delivering a fatal wound.
• Unholy Matrimony: Should Kageaki side with her then they will become a villainous couple as they watch the world burn by Hikaru's hand.
• Villain's Dying Grace: After her final defeat at the hands of Raicho, Kageaki finds her near a tree as she was breathing her last. After a heartfelt conversation with her, she admits regretting some of her actions and her forceful approach with Kageaki, wondering if he would have accepted to join her without brainwashing him. Not long after her death, she leaves a final message to Kageaki to help him deal with Hikaru.
• Wild Card: What exactly her goal is remains a mystery throughout as she acts in bizarre ways that seem to make little sense to outsiders, helping friend and foe alike. As it turns out, helping both sides allows her to start a war and create an opportunity to unearth Konjin, the very thing that tortured her ever since she was born.
• Wolverine Claws: Her main armament when armored up are pairs of claws mounted on each of her arms.
• World of Silence: She wants nothing more than to silence that incessant voice within her head, even if she has to turn to world into a hollow husk to accomplish this. The silence of the grave.
• You Are Too Late: When beaten by Raicho, she rubs it into his face that she already had something else going on for the young prince and that he is already too late to stop it. Sure enough, he gets killed by a rage filled Sakurako.

Hikaru Minato

Hikaru Minato

"I shall see my conquest to the end! I shall vanquish the entire human race in battle, and with the bones of three billion as my ladder, ascend the throne to heaven!"

Kageaki's foster sister and the next in line for the Minato Family. Touted as a genius ever since childhood, she grew as a teenage girl of many talents with a tremendous potential for martial arts, up until an incident who caused her to be bedridden. During her time in bed, her sanity slowly degrades, garnering a hatred for her mother whom she believes is responsible for her father's disappearance ever since she was born.

A series of unfortunate events would eventually cause Hikaru to make contact with Muramasa the Second, an individual who believes strength to be absolute and the only answer to everything, who convinces her to take arms and synchronize with Muramasa as her pilot, becoming together the dreaded Ginseigo. After getting healed thanks to her newfound status as a musha, she engineers her mother's death and begins her widespread slaughter destruction of cities in order to "destroy every barrier" preventing her to reach her father, kickstarting Kageaki's crusade against her.

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• Above Good and Evil: She basically views her goal as above such petty things as morality as she is on a quest to rid the world of it.
• Abusive Offspring: In the beginning it is Played for Laughs. Kageaki's past showed her as a spoiled individual who wishes to spend most of her time with Kageaki alone, while dismissing her mother Subaru as a "nonexistent third person". This however eventually becomes far more serious as she reveals a deep hatred for her mother and orchestrates events to have Kageaki kill her. And all that is before getting into The Reveal about the true situation about the family.
• The Ace: Before her illness she was quite the prodigy, something that even got more pronounced after she was restored to full functionality thanks to Ginseigo. This boost in capabilities is revealed however to in fact be the result of an idealized version of herself born from her dreams. Her absurd capabilities come simply from the fact that the foe Kageaki had been fighting had never been real to begin with.
  • Broken Ace: Even as a talented genius of a youth, from the day she was born she was aware that she had been denied the love of her true father, and developed a hidden twisted personality as a result.
• A-Cup Angst: Well, for all she had going for her pre-disease, dialogue indicates there were a couple of things missing from her life that she wasn't happy about. And I don't mean her brother-father.
• A God I Am Not: An interesting case in that while she is a Godhood Seeker with near divine powers already, she doesn't see herself as a god. Not until she has completed her conquest can she truly label herself as the god of the world.
• And I Must Scream: While she was quiet to outsiders apart from her seizures during her struggle with heavy metal poisoning, inside she was fully conscious and haunted by a constant dream of craving her father and hating her mother.
• The Anti-Nihilist: When faced with the overwhelming power of the Forged Bomb and is exposed to the pure hatred and nihilism of Little Girl, she admits that while death will always win over life and darkness will always swallow the light, the tiny spark of love makes everything have meaning no matter how brief it is.
• Armor-Piercing Question: In Hero she delivers quite the cutting line:
  "So killing two people is wrong, but killing one is somehow right?"
• Astral Projection: When the true Hikaru is sleeping she creates a body double born from her dreams allowing her to become the being that everyone know as Ginseigo.
• Badass Arm-Fold: When she is first shown, she is portrayed with arms crossed, backlit by the moon with Ginseigo at her side delivering an ominous line to Kageaki.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Thanks to her random appearances and penchant for causing absolute mayhem, she often ends up taking care of whatever is in Kageaki's way, even if by complete accident.
• Beyond the Impossible: The final lesson of the Minato family's school of the sword is to attempt to cleave an old tsurugi helmet. This is, however, impossible and it is meant to be. The lesson is about learning humility, that no matter how powerful a warrior you are, there are some things that just cannot be done. After having failed to cleave the helmet, rather than give up and learn her lesson, she tried again some days later and actually succeeded somehow.
• Big Bad: While Ginseigo is first set up as the main villain of the story, it eventually becomes clear that Hikaru is the true antagonist, acting on her own free will.
• Big Brother Attraction: She's shown to be quite possessive of Kageaki from a young age, but he usually prefers to avoid the subject much to her dismay.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Her single-minded obsession of conquest means that she's immune to the Law of Balance and is able to kill indiscriminately.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Prior to her illness, she was one of these to her mother—although Subaru didn't know the half of it until it was too late.
• Cain and Abel: As a result of her coming into contact with the Ginseigo she was driven mad and has now become a senseless mass murderer, making her the Cain to Kageaki's Abel. Or was she?
• Calling Your Attacks: She is prone of giving her moves various names and then calling them out as she is about to use them, even when there is no need to.
• Career-Ending Injury: She had been wishing of becoming a musha, however her heavy metal poisoning put a stop to those dreams.
• Cast from Lifespan: It is revealed that for each time she becomes Ginseigo, her body deteriorates just that little bit more. It was already in a sorry state before, and when Kageaki is shown the truth, she is expected to only be able to do it two more times.
• Challenge Seeker: In a way, she sees it that her conquest won't mean anything if it is just a one-sided slaughter. For it all to mean anything then the world itself has to be as powerful as she is so that her victory is actually earned.
• Chewing the Scenery: She is already hammy normally, but she also likes to put on that little bit of extra emphasis and enthusiasm as she really gets into the groove.
• Child Prodigy: She was noted to be quite the prodigy in when it came to the sword and a very quick learner, able to get the hang of techniques just by watching her brother perform them. It was to the point that even the families highly conservative and cranky elder eventually relented and allowed her to further her skills due to the skill she displayed. She was also highly intelligent and had a great deal of charisma. Then she got heavy metal poisoning.
• Clark Kenting: Her idea of blending in involves simply letting her hair down and donning a big round hat.
• Cloudcuckoolander: It is hard to tell just what is going on inside her head with it seeming to follow no discernable logic. She often just seems to act on whatever random whim that hits her.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Pretty much any battle she partakes in becomes brutal, one-sided affairs with no one being able to even get close to landing a hit. Not even the veteran Moriuji in his legendary tsurugi lasted more than a few seconds.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: Her real body is still in a horrific shape and is barely kept alive by the best medical professionals that Chachamaru could scrounge together. Despite this, her days among the living are numbered.
• Death Glare: After being restored to full health (seemingly) by Ginseigo, she fixes her joyful mother with a glare of naked hatred that shocks both Subaru and Kageaki.
• Delicate and Sickly: Ended up suffering from heavy metal poisoning, most likely lead, by eating fish tainted by a nearby factory. She had been suffering for a year with frequent seizures, loss of weight and even her bones becoming fragile, being left an empty, emaciated husk slowly wasting away. Unlike most instances of this trope, it is played for maximum family horror as Kageaki has to frequently and carefully restrain her to keep her thrashing from breaking her already fragile body.
• The Determinator: Her main flaw is that she won't give up, and in fact just doesn't know when to quit, constantly striving to live up to her own impossible expectations, even if she has to warp the world around her to accomplish it. This is also on full display in the final battle where she just won't go down. No matter how things go she just keeps on coming back for more.
• Detonation Moon: In the final battle, her powers are shown to be so great that she is able to actually destroy the moon, turning it into nothing but rubble.
• Die Laughing: As Kageaki delivers his final strike at her after having invoked the Law of Balance she bursts out laughing as the Law having picked her as its target means that she is the one he holds most dear, and thus in a way proving beyond a shadow of a doubt what she had wanted the entire time.
• Disappointed by the Motive: She initially asks Moriuji for his opinion on what makes a conqueror only to be disappointed with him simply wanting power for power's sake.
• Disappointed in You: She is left utterly disgusted by Kageaki in the Hero route when it becomes clear to her that he is using Ichijo as a means to avoid culpability in his actions and telling him to get out of her sight.
• Disc-One Final Boss: In Hero, she turns out to be the second-to-last opponent of Kageaki, as Ichijo is forced to confront him due to the Law of Balance after killing Hikaru.
• Dissonant Serenity: She can the extremely calm, even at times where she is about engage in extreme cruelty.
• Diving Kick: Her preferred signature move she has dubbed Ladybug Comet which is a flip kick done from the stratosphere, dropping down on the opponent at blistering speeds.
• Dream Weaver:
  • One of her uses for Ginseigo's gravity powers is to formulate dreams in people, something she makes use of on Kageaki to create a cliché ridden high-school romance dream to find out what kind of woman he likes, featuring cameos from other nitro+ titles.
  • It is revealed shortly afterwards that Hikaru is in fact still ill and confined to bed. The Hikaru everyone knows is in fact a body born from the real ones dreams.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: She gets the short end of the stick in Nemesis being caught in the GHQ nuke by complete accident and gets molten into little more than a pile of slag.
• Empty Shell: Her mind was utterly destroyed as a result of her heavy metal poisoning. However the remaining shards of her identity can still dream, creating the Hikaru that had been active throughout the story.
• Enemies Equals Greatness: She believes that in order for her conquest of the world and claim for godhood to be meaningful she needs to earn it through opponents who are just as strong as she is, thus she spreads her power across the Earth to birth new beings who carry her power, all so she can truly legitimize herself.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Prior to her disease, she was someone with a very boyish attitude and samurai-like speech pattern leading her to be swooned over by other girls.
• Evil Is Hammy: She loves to ham it up and be overly dramatic whenever the urge hits her. You can pretty much hear her Milking the Giant Cow as she goes about in her grandiose proclamations.
• Eye Awaken: As Kageaki comes upon her molten remains underneath the Otori manor in Nemesis, part of the construct cracks and one of her eyes peeks out, glaring right at him.
• Face Framed in Shadow: When she first appears in Conqueror her face is cast in shadows, hiding her eyes.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: She is in fact not Kageaki's adoptive sister, but actually his blood daughter and as a result, the father she had always been looking for.
• Fighting a Shadow: One big reveal is that the Hikaru that Kageaki thought was healthy was in fact not the Hikaru he knew. No, it was not brainwashing after all, but rather the healthy Hikaru was in fact a body born from the real Hikaru's dreams, a dream of her idealized self explaining why she is so unbeatable.
• Final Boss: Fittingly, she is the very final obstacle that Kageaki has to overcome before the story can really be called over.
• Friendly Enemy: Outside of battle she can be as perfectly approachable and polite as anyone else and will happily chat with Kageaki when the time allows.
• Fusion Dance: She ends up fusing with Konjin as she attempts to contain the Forged Bomb, becoming a godlike being in her own right and starting to spread her song world wide.
• Godhood Seeker: She basically wants to use Ginseigo to slaughter the whole world so that she can stand at the apex, all due to her interpreting some words from Ginseigo in an incredibly warped way. That being that someone who had the capability to slaughter the whole world could be nothing but God. All so that she can destroy morality itself, to be able to claim and love her father with nothing in the way.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: She doesn't use any weapons when fighting face to face. She makes do with her bare hands even when up against armed opponents.
• Go Out with a Smile: In both Hero and Conqueror she dies happy after having been slain by Kageaki.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: She was in fact right under everybody's noses the entire time. That girl with the round hat hanging around Chachamaru under the name Yutsuzu? Yep, it was Hikaru.
• Humble Goal: All she really wants is to know her fathers love. The problem is how she is going about accomplishing it as well as the circumstances around it all.
• If I Can't Have You…: She becomes infuriated when Kageaki picks Muramasa over her and decides that if he won't accept her then no one will have him, even if she will have to shatter the whole planet to ensure it.
• I Meant to Do That: She ended up thinking that she had destroyed Enoshima Island after putting a bit too much into her attack during arrival only for Ginseigo to point out that she only turned the island into a peninsula instead. Hikaru basically goes "yea, like I said".
• Insane Troll Logic: About half the stuff that leaves her mouth are the stuff of utter nonsense. This is best exemplified when George confronts her and she somehow justifies by going on about math and the surface area of the Earth compared to Enoshima Island.
• Just Toying with Them: She could have easily reduced the whole of Yamato to rubble within a day had she been serious. The only reason she didn't was cause she wanted Kageaki to grow and to understand the Law of Might and the true purpose of the Law of Balance.
• Kill All Humans: Her goal is to pretty much kill all of humanity so that the concept of morality becomes null and void.
• Lack of Empathy: She doesn't express anything towards the destruction and death she causes. In an interesting twist of the trope, it is also why she can freely kill her opponents; With the exception of her mother, she doesn't consider anyone her friend nor enemy, thus she's unaffected by the Law of Balance.
• Laughably Evil: For all the death and devastation she spreads she can be a surprising goofball, often stumbling with idioms or just making general sense.
• Leitmotif: The Silver Star Rises.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: She can be quite big on honor in the right circumstances and as such, she will often fight cleanly if someone else comes up to her and challenges her in an honest duel.
• Loophole Abuse: Her Tsurugi is revealed to be Muramasa the Second, the mother of Muramasa the Third whom Kageaki wields. As such, she's also subject to the Law of Balance, but her own Lack of Empathy and hate towards anyone makes her able to kill her opponents.
• Misanthrope Supreme: She ends up developing a deep hatred for humanity in general while believing herself to be supreme and intends to kill then all until all that is left is she herself and her father.
• Mouthy Kid: Prior to her illness, she was one of these to Kageaki.
• Never Hurt an Innocent: She twists this trope in a really cruel way. While she refuses to kill someone who runs away or doesn't wear arms, she just gets around it by spreading her Hate Plague making turning people into blind beasts that fight regardless.
• Next Tier Power-Up: Once Kageaki finally manages to kill Konjin they discover to their horror that Hikaru inherited its power. And unlike it, she has a mind to drive all that power, turning an already bad situation way, way worse.
• No Infantile Amnesia: It is revealed that she actually remembers things from the day she was born and that she heard of her mother speaking of how her father was not her father and would not be allowed to love her, acting as the catalyst for Hikaru's hatred towards her mother and desire to be with her father—in every sense of the phrase.
• Not Brainwashed: While Kageaki and even Muramasa are convinced that Hikaru has been brainwashed by Ginseigo's mind altering powers, she is in fact acting under her own volition. They all just severely underestimated the depths of Hikaru's pride and hatred for the world as well as how the time she struggled with her disease affected her mentally.
• "Not So Different" Remark: In the final battle she tries to bring up how she and Kageaki are the same due to both being bound under the Law of Might, how they are weapons that should only kill without either good or evil. Kageaki shoots it down.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Belonging to neither faction of Yamato, she instead acts as a lone warrior who slaughters everything indiscriminately.
• Out-of-Character Alert: In the Conqueror route she at first seems to be in a talkative mood when Muramasa arrives, only to then notice that something is wrong and that Kageaki doesn't seem to be present. She is correct as Muramasa went out on her own.
• Parental Incest: Inverted from how it is normally done. She loves and craves her father, to the point that she is intent on tearing down the very moralities of the world in order to make things such as incest not matter and that he will love her regardless of their relations.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Thanks to the immense powers offered by Ginseigo she can cause destruction on an unimaginable scale, from relocating whole islands to creating black holes.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Even outside of her armor she is not to be taken lightly with her making Kageaki go flying despite being barley half his size. And if Chachamaru's comments about baseball are to be believed, her opponents need to be fully armored up if they are to play against her just to even the odds.
• The Power of Love: How she counters the nihilism of Little Girl. She posits that the tiny spark of love makes all things have meaning no matter how brief, and with this she manages to wrangle the destructive power of the Forged Bomb into what it was intended to do all along.
• Power Perversion Potential: She makes use of Ginseigo's mind altering powers to try and influence Kageaki's dreams in some rather... suggestive ways.
• Practically Different Generations: As Kageaki was adopted into the family before she was even born there is quite the age disparity between the two siblings.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: She ended up quite disappointed with Moriuji's idea of a conqueror, someone who simply craves power for powers sake, and proceeds to smack him down both physically and verbally on how a conqueror needs a craving of love on top of power.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: She represents the Red to both Kageaki and Muramasa the Second, being a passionate, childish and insane individual compared to the more composed attitude of her brother and tsurugi.
• Remote Body: She had in fact never become healthy at all to begin with. The Hikaru that Kageaki had been fighting was in fact a separate version of Hikaru born from her dreams. The real one is bedridden and is still deteriorating.
• Save the Villain: She saved the young Chachamaru purely on a whim when she noticed that the young child was about to be killed by a musha. She then gave Chachamaru some words of encouragement to snap her out of her hopelessness, to give her something to live for, even in her own personal hell.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Her goal is to basically become the sole authority in the world, to the point she is the one who decides the rules according to her own desires.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: She knew that Kageaki was her blood father and that her mother had forbidden him to take a fatherly role in her life because she heard the conversation they had about it literally moments after she was born, no matter how everyone else tried to pretend they were siblings. She just never told anyone she knew.
• The Social Darwinist: Played with. While she intends for the world to become one of might, it is only a step in her path for godhood.
• Shadow Archetype: In many ways she is the complete opposite of her brother Kageaki. He is reserved, quiet, logical, insecure whose impressive talents and intellect come from hard work and experience as well as having to abide by strict morals as well as feeling burdened by the Law of Balance. Hikaru meanwhile is a child prodigy who's blunt, outspoken, often nonsensical, prideful and The Ace as well as throwing morals to the wind and completely disregarding the Law of Balance. Even their relationships with their respective tsurugi are different with Kageaki and Muramasa maintaining a very cold and business like relationship while Hikaru and Ginseigo get along swimmingly.
• Spanner in the Works: She ended up putting quite the dampener on the Golden Dawn plan in the Nemesis route where she just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time as Clive dropped the nuke on top of Fudaraku Fortress. She used Ginseigo's powers to absorb most of the blast causing it to turn out far smaller than what was intended, though she herself ended up a molten clump in the process. Still powerful enough to destroy the fortress and kill most of those inside though.
• Stating the Simple Solution: In light of her mother pointing out that killing people just invites a cycle of vengeance, Hikaru says out that won't be a problem because she'll kill everyone who's weaker than her.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: As it starts to become clear that she is losing and that Kageaki chooses Muramasa over her she decides it would be better off to just shatter the whole Earth rather than allow someone else to have him.
• This Cannot Be!: In the final battle she becomes genuinely shocked when she learns that the reason to why Kageaki all of a sudden seems able to keep up with her yet feeling like she is fighting a puppet is due to him basically undergoing Death of Personality using Muramasa's Mind Rape powers to make them truly one. Finding out about this thoroughly sends her into a blind rage.
• Tomboy: Before her illness, she wanted to get musha training instead of becoming a wife or mother.
• Tranquil Fury: She is not one to let her emotions show most of the time, however she has a habit of turning calmer than usual when she is boiling with anger.
• The Unfettered: After getting her hands on Ginseigo she basically throws any pretense of self restraint out the window.
• Unstoppable Rage: She flies in a blind rage when it becomes clear to her that Kageaki is running from the truth about his situation in Ichijo's route, even swatting Ichijo and Masamune away like annoying flies when they try to attack, in this cause carving a 4 kilometer trench in the landscape.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Before becoming Ginseigo, she was a perfectly normal, if not spoiled, teenage girl who was raised with love from her mother and brother.
• Villain Has a Point: Kageaki eventually has to concede to the point that by the end of the day, he is just using Ichijo to dodge culpability. No matter how much he wans to state the contrary, he finds himself unable to deny what she is saying.
• Villainous Legacy: Even after she is killed, the effects of her actions don't go away. The Hate Plague she spread is the most notable, causing social upheaval and wars all across the globe even with her gone even if the worst effects of it were prevented.
• Villainous Rescue: With Kageaki trapped by George's forces on Enoshima Island all things seem lost until Ginseigo shows up out of the sky and causes the whole island to move that saves him. Of course, given that this is Ginseigo, that is not a good thing.
• What the Hell, Hero?: She gives her brother a thorough tongue lashing in Ichijo's route when it becomes clear to her that Kageaki is running away and lying to himself, calling him out on the fact that in the end, all he is doing is make Ichijo do his dirty work in order to keep his own hands clean.
• Where I Was Born and Razed: Her first act after gaining Ginseigo is to use it's power to make everyone in her home town kill each other until none were left.
• Willfully Weak: The entire time Kageaki had battled her, she had in fact kept a shield up which took power away from her other abilities. Once Kageaki manages to impress her enough she takes off the silk gloves and makes short work of him in ways he struggle to even comprehend.
• Wrecked Weapon: Twice over she destroyed Muramasa's nodachi over the course of the story. First before its start to make her eggs and second during the final battle where her final strike broke the blade beyond repair.
• Your Days Are Numbered: She is in fact still sick and dying, just as she was two years ago. Now however, it is the strain of using Ginseigo's powers that is eating what is left of her vitality. By the time Kageaki sees her body it is estimated that she will only be able to use them two more times.
• You Will Be Spared: She excludes her mother as a victim of her slaughter, but not out of caring for her. Rather her hatred for her runs so deep that she felt like killing her would sully her goal of following the path of might. Instead she planned on setting things up for her to be killed out of love, and have Kageaki do it.

Ginseigo

Uemon-no-Jo Muramasa the Second

Armored Form

^{Original Form}

^{Human Form}

A mysterious tsurugi of otherworldly power who appears two years before the events of the series. Seemingly destroying and laying waste to numerous cities of Yamato at random, its appearance is synonymous with despair and widespread destruction. Due to its silver plating, the tsurugi became infamous as "Ginseigo, the Silver Star" or "Code Silver" by the GHQ.

It first appears in the prologue, turning an entire platoon and village mad before being engaged by a Muramasa-wielding Kageaki, who seems to have an history with its pilot. Over the course of the story, it is eventually revealed to be wielded by his mad sister, Minato Hikaru. Her true identity is Muramasa the Second, mother of Muramasa the Third, the Tsurugi wielded by Minato Kageaki.

During her time as a human in the Nanboku-chō period, she was the daughter of Muramasa the First, and a young smith who intend to follow her father's footsteps without question. She shows a quick interest to the scientific discoveries of Uramu, establishing herself as a quick-thinker with more potential than her father. Following his decision to become a tsurugi for the Northern Court, she follows soon by becoming a tsurugi for the Southern Court in order to bring peace to Yamato. However, tragedy strikes and she was ultimately sealed deep in a remote temple thanks to her daughter's request, deemed too dangerous for humans.

Laying dormant for five centuries, she was reactivated by sheer coincidence after being touched by Minato Hikaru, and quickly acknowledged her as her new pilot, sensing her potential. Both of them would eventually be known as Ginseigo.

(For the sake of simplicity she will be refered to by her title of Ginseigo on the rest of these pages in order to separate her from her daugther.)

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• Abusive Parents: She casually dismisses her own daughter once awakened by Hikaru, not showing any qualms in fighting her during the common route and in Hero. She later gives her a beatdown at the start of Conqueror and verbally abuses her for misunderstanding the teachings of her father.
• Animal Motifs: Ants, specifically, the queen ant.
• Bishōnen Line: Averted. She can actually take on a human form, but it's somewhat weaker and more vulnerable than her tsurugi form. Of course, since she's basically a Physical God, that doesn't mean a whole lot.
• Brown Note: Her "song" is gravity wave which links the minds of people in a large area to that of its Ax-Crazy pilot, driving them insane and causing them to destroy everything around them.
• Diabolus ex Machina: Impressive given that things were already pretty dire, but her out of nowhere arrival on Enoshima Island makes things go From Bad to Worse at terminal velocity.
• The Dreaded: The Rokuhara soldiers in the intro start panicking as soon as they recognize her, and even civilians know and fear her.
• Fragile Speedster: While she is by far the fastest and most powerful Tsurugi of the story, she turns out to have very little armor. However, actually hitting her is easier said than done, as it requires something able to rival the speed of light.
• Game-Breaking Injury: Downplayed in the Hero route where she suffered a small bit of damage to one of her wings, the same wings that act as the main control for her gravity abilities. That said, "slower" for Ginseigo still means wicked fast regardless.
• Glass Cannon: Her tremendous powers and destructive abilities are hampered by her lack of self-repair and light armor, meaning she can be injured by weaker attacks.
• Graceful Loser: At the end of the Conqueror route she takes her defeat in good graces and offers some genuine praise for her daughter.
• Gravity Master: Is able to manipulate gravity and create gravity waves to cause all manner of destructive effects. At her most powerful is an ability Hikaru has dubbed "Black Hole Fairy" which as the name implies warps space to such an extreme that time itself distorts and a black hole is formed. Even her "song" and her "eggs" are special gravity waves.
• Hate Plague: Her song removes peoples morality, though unlike with Hikaru they turn into savage beasts and goes on brutal massacres killing everyone nearby. Friends, family, comrades in arms? Doesn't matter, all will slaughter each other when under Ginseigo's influence. And after having fused with Konjin that song starts to spread globally causing wars to erupt all over the world and will soon devolve into mindless killing. And if things weren't bad enough, after she and Hikaru are freed they now inherited the gods power and are now able to not only spread their song globally, but to also spread their power, making all those affected just as powerful as they are.
• It Is Beyond Saving: In her opinion, humanity is a lost cause as they didn't learn the lesson even after the bloodbath that was the war. To her, the only way to cure their foolishness is if there are no more humans left to be foolish. As such she has no problems with helping Hikaru with her agenda.
• Magic Music: It is almost always accompanied by a song that drives people to madness.
• Light Is Not Good: Her silver plating makes her glowing with white unlike the vast majority of tsurugi harboring dark colors. However, she turns out to be the most murderous and dangerous of the setting.
• Metaphorically True: Ginseigo explains to Hikaru the Law of Might: The strong live, the weak die, the pretense of society will collapse, all life will perish from the earth and the only survivor left anywhere would be a completely theoretical person with godlike power strong enough to bring the whole world to heel by killing all that stand in his way, ultimately ruling over an empty world. Hikaru takes this to mean that she can become a god by becoming mighty enough to destroy mankind and civilization and with it the notions of morality that keep her father from being with her, and together they can rule the throne of heaven and no one can stop her. Ginseigo is baffled for a bit but decides she has the important parts right.
• Mind Rape: Part of her gravity powers allow it to twist the minds of those caught in it, turning them into savage beasts, killing everyone around them.
• Misaimed Fandom: In-universe. Since it's the one thing the Rokuhara Shogunate appears to actually fear, some anti-shogunate factions think of it as a ''hero', ignoring the innocents who are killed along with Shogunate forces.
• Monster Progenitor: Ginseigo will routinely implant eggs into tsurugi that it encounters, and should one be allowed to hatch then it will produce a copy of Ginseigo, just as powerful as the original, turning things even more dire.
• Mum Looks Like a Sister: In the past before she forged herself into a tsurugi, she actually looked like she could be her daughter's younger sister. Another character ends up musing to himself just how fast Emishi grow.
• Mundane Utility: Hikaru finds use of her powers... as to manipulate Kageaki's dreams into a romantic comedy to find out what kind of girl he likes. One can practically hear Ginseigo's self worth shattering at her powers being used like this.
  "I've come a long way, haven't I?"
• No Cure for Evil: One of her few weaknesses is the absence of self-repair unlike other Tsurugi, but she compensates for it thanks to her gravity powers allowing her to move at lightning speed to avoid damage and build a nigh-impenetrable shield.
• Not Quite Flight: Rather than using wings or thrust to fly, Ginseigo makes use of her gravity powers to move herself around as she wishes. Due to not having to subscribe to the laws of flight, she moves far better than any other tsurugi is capable of.
• Oh, Crap!: Ends up panicking when she realizes the power of the nuke the GHQ just dropped above their heads.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Just like Hikaru, she wants humanity wiped out.
• One-Man Army: Capable of striking down over a hundred musha with a single stroke each, and coming out with not one scratch.
• Philosopher's Stone: One reason for her immense power is that she is forged from the very stone that Flamel created.
• Reactionless Drive: Unlike most tsurugi that makes use of so called Heat Conversion engines to produce their thrust, Ginseigo instead makes use of her gravitation and spatial control to fly around, allowing her to accomplish feats of aviation that others can only dream of.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: She verbally thrashes her daughter in the beginning of the Conqueror route she Muramasa had tried to take her on all by herself. This before she proceeds to manhandle Muramasa who is in armored mode while Ginseigo herself is in just a flesh body at the time with laughable ease, keeping up the cutting insults all the while.
• Red Baron: The Angel of Slaughter, The Rain of Death, The Destroyer of Worlds, The Silver Star, Code Silver
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: She's the calm and cold Blue to Hikaru's unhinged and passionate Red.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: At her daughters insistence, she was sealed instead of destroyed. Then of course, Hikaru broke the seal.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Unlike her daughter, she's firmly on the cynical side, as witnessing Yamato fall into a century of civil war again despite the tragedy with Muramasa the First cemented her beliefs that humanity should be wiped out.
• The Social Darwinist: She believes that good and evil are meaningless as they rely on relativity, only might really matters. And this in turn means that only the strong are left standing at the end of the day while the weak are trampled.
• So Proud of You: Her final words to her daughter are those of praise as she merged with Kageaki to beat Hikaru and Ginseigo.
• Story-Breaker Power: Ginseigo is established to be far more powerful than any tsurugi in existence by a large margin and trying to fight it head on is a fruitless endeavor. This is best shown when Ginseigo causes a whole island to move and become a peninsula. Everyone who witnessed the whole thing are left completely stunned.
• Straight Man: Oddly enough as it is, she acts as the straight man to the Cloudcuckoolander behavior of Hikaru. That said, even she sometimes ends up blindsided by Hikaru's behavior at times.
• Super-Speed: She is fast to a frightening degree. In fact, she can drop from the stratosphere straight at an opponent just barely off the ground in the blink of an eye.
• Telepathy: As with all shin'uchi, she can communicate by vibrating her metal in a certain way—the effect is pretty much just straight up telepathic communication under a different name, and allows her to send images and so forth.
• Touché: When Hikaru calls Muramasa a "piece of junk", Ginseigo can only sigh and admit that she can't argue against it.
• Ungrateful Bitch: Despite being spared from scrapping by the Imperial Court thanks to her daughter, she never returned the favor once she was unsealed, even beating her to a pulp for being too naïve about humanity.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Is able to fire beams of pure gravity that Hikaru has dubbed Blazing Stream.
• You're Insane!: She has a small one when she first meet Hikaru, wondering if she has gone mad.