Characters / Rebuild World Akira

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Akira

Voiced by: Daiki Yamashita

^{Click here to see him in his augmented suit}

^{Click here to see him in his second augmented suit}

^{Click here to see him in his third augmented suit}

"I was cheated... robbed... and abandoned by the roadside. I lost everything I ever had. That's why I'll never let myself be stepped on again!"

The protagonist of the story. A teenage Street Urchin scraping out a living in the slum towns of Kusugayama, he tries to change his lot in life by becoming a hunter and finding relics to sell. His life is forever changed when he encounters Alpha while exploring the Kuzusuhara Ruins in search of relics.

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A – M

• 24-Hour Armor: After obtaining an augmented suit, Akira wears it everywhere he goes because of his paranoia and desire to be ready for any situation. It doesn't help that he doesn't have any casual clothing aside from the tank top and jeans he wears every day beneath the suit.
• A Boy and His X: The story focuses largely on Akira's relationship with Alpha, his ultra-sexy-hot A.I. and guide.
• Ace Custom: Subverted. Akira's actions make people think he has expensive equipment and/or cybernetics that he doesn't have. Nonetheless, Alpha hacking the control units of his augmented suits does make them significantly more effective.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Alpha expects him to take six months to be able to consciously affect his own perception of time, but doesn't tell him this to see if he can overturn her expectations. Sure enough, he manages it in a few weeks after a particularly bad nightmare where he's forced to fight without Alpha's support. He's so hopped up on adrenaline after being Eaten Alive that he doesn't even realize he's doing it while rushing to kill the snake before it digests him, defying Alpha's expectation that he was guaranteed to die without her help.
• Actually, I Am Him:
  • After returning from the Kuzushara Ruins for the first time and making his first 200,000 aurum, rumors begin to spread about a boy who went into the ruins alone and came out with unknown relics that earned him a hefty profit. This reignites interest in the ruins and Akira keeps his mouth shut to keep people from realizing that he's the boy from that rumor, lest he get hounded for information or cash.
  • Due to his paranoia and unwillingness to associate with others, Akira keeps the fact that he saved Sara and Elena a secret even after running into them again at Cartridge Freak. After they return the favor and allow him to rest up at their house, he finally admits that the mysterious person who saved them earlier was him.
• Adaptational Badass: In the novel, his battle with the cannon insects leaves him with a broken leg and several bruises that only heal over thanks to the Old World medicine he scavenged from the Kuzusuraha Ruins. In the manga, there's no indication he was injured at all and walks away unscathed, instead giving the medicine to the injured soldiers he was defending.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: His eyes are grey in the light novel, but colored a pale blue on the manga cover art.
• Adaptational Heroism: Akira is a little more straightforwardly heroic in the manga and light novel adaptations. For instance, while responding to his first SOS request in the web novel, he ponders if saving the hunters from the initial onslaught is enough, only later deciding to stay until he's the Sole Survivor after the fact. In the manga, he says there's nothing to be done but help them as much as possible since he accepted the request even though Sara and Elena aren't present, a statement that visibly displeases Alpha. Some of his more questionable actions also get removed via Adaptation Distillation, such as him killing a bunch of other Street Urchins in self-defense when they try to mug him.
• Adaptation Personality Change: Akira is significantly more assertive, aggressive, and headstrong in the manga adaptation of the story. While the novel began with Akira exploring the ruins on his own, the manga begins with a Dramatic Chase Opening of Akira competing with several hunters over guns and things to sell. The novel also emphasizes Akira's lack of confidence at the start of the story, meekly admitting that he's only been a hunter for one day when he meets Alpha. He's also disbelieving of Alpha's services and refuses her offer at first in the manga, even though he readily agrees in the novel, especially after she gives him a trial run.
• Agony of the Feet: He tends to break his legs or his feet while performing intensive Combat Parkour or while trying to use his augmented suit's Super-Strength to imitate older hunters. It's practically a Running Gag how much he has to beg Alpha to take it easy on him.
• Almighty Janitor: Zigzagged. Under his own power, Akira is an inversion, having gotten to his current rank only with Alpha's in-combat support. But his habit of selling relics to Katsuragi rather than the Hunter's Office means that many of his relic finds stay off the record, preventing his Hunter Rank from rising to a level reflective of his combat ability with Alpha's help.
• Amusingly Awful Aim: His aim sucks at the start of the story and he continually misses even at extremely close range unless he's shoving the barrel of his gun right up in someone's face. Alpha continually gives him shooting drills on top of directly assisting his aim to remedy this, but even with his practice he's far from perfect on his own.
  Akira: [shoots a monster] Alright! How was that?
  Alpha: If I hadn't adjusted your aim, you'd have missed the monster by one meter to the left. You need to keep calm as much as possible while fixing your aim.
  Akira: [pouts and mopes] I see...
• An Arm and a Leg: Due to the Cast From Hitpoints nature of many of Akira’s outstanding physical feats, thanks to Alpha both removing the Power Limiter safeties from and boosting his augmented suits, it’s not uncommon at all for Akira to seriously injure his limbs. If not for his nanomachine medicine, he would have been hospitalized a dozen times over each given mission from this it after a certain point. It’s also a good thing the setting has limb regrowth technology…
• Anti-Hero: He'll save the lives of those around him if need be, and he's technically doing the world a huge favor with the monsters he kills. He'll also shoot anyone in cold blood that endangers his life, other kids included, is willing to take any measures he needs to maintain his well-being, silently manipulates an entire gang of people his age without much concern over their well being (albeit mostly as a figure piece rather than on his own qualms), and is intentionally contrasted against Katsuya's attempts to be a hero, albeit a dumb one.
• Armor Is Useless: Akira's first set of protective clothing is outdated military wear that provides no protection against any modern firearms or monster claws. He later replaces it with his augmented suit, which greatly increases his strength and speed but again provides no protection. It's not until he gets his second augmented suit that he gets any protection at all, but even then that protection is minimal unless he activates the suit's energy-intensive battle mode, and he can still get shot to death if he's not careful.
• Badass Biker: Akira has a natural talent for bikes, and especially a difficult Ramp Jump. Reina and Togami are impressed by it. Notably, there’s Akira jumping his bike into the air to catch onto Zelmo’s aircraft while missiles are still tracking him. Which was all without Alpha’s support.
• Badass on Paper:
  • Between taking on an entire squadron of cannon insects and later 60 Yurata Scorpions single-handedly, his combat record makes him sound like a One-Man Army. But he's quick to tell others that he barely escaped with his life on both occasions and that he's not nearly as strong as he sounds, given that much of his success is tied to Alpha. It gets to the point that he agrees to have his combat record scrubbed so people will stop expecting so much of him.
  • Akira later takes out hundreds of Yarata Scorpions in the ruins... but only because they were coming out of narrow tunnels that allowed him to destroy tons of them at once with the extremely expensive CWH rounds he brought with him as part of his ridiculous demand to have the government pay for all his ammo. The narration describes it as more of a fight between the scorpions, Alpha's targeting abilities, and Kugamayama City's economic power than a fight that he had any part in. He also needed Shiori and Reina's help to cover his flanks while he did this. This is also why he has no problems splitting his payment equally between the three of them because he knows he'd be dead without them.
• Bad Liar: Despite his ability to keep a straight face in a high-stakes situation, it's pretty obvious when he's trying to dodge an uncomfortable subject or lying about his intentions to someone. He tries to downplay the danger he's facing as a hunter to Shizuka, whose intuition tells her that he's lying to make her feel better. While on a mission with Sara and Elena, he insists that he's Only in It for the Money, but it's plain to both women that he's coming along to help them.
• Baths Are Fun: Akira becomes addicted to soaking in a hot bath after checking into a hotel with a bathtub for the first time. He always wants to live in a room with a bath no matter what and grumbles when Alpha tells him to sleep in a room without one to save money. He also has to think very hard about choosing between taking a bath and remembering to meet with Sheryl and hand her the negotiation money to get the gangs off his back. Choosing the latter leaves him antsy to return to his hotel room and finally have his bath.
• Beautiful Dreamer: According to Alpha, Akira looks sweet and cute once he gets used to sleeping in a safe bed. Before then, he'd sleep with one eye open while desperately hoping he wouldn't be dead the next morning. The manga adaptation depicts him sleeping curled up in a ball and hugging the blanket with a gentle look on his face, drooling into his pillow before waking up in a daze.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Akira fantasizes about firing an assault rifle in both his hands at once, which Alpha sees from their telepathy. She then scolds him about how damaging that would be to him without an augmented suit. Much, much later, he gets that wish of using two assault rifles without the support of an augmented suit (because it’s deactivated so Alpha can rewrite its software), and fighting like that badly injures Akira’s arms to the point his super medicine isn’t enough to stop the pain.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Akira starts the story as a ruthlessly opportunistic youth trying to get ahead and escape the slums, anyone else be damned. But after one of his acts of self-preservation gets mistaken for an act of heroism, he finds himself being doted on by Shizuka, Sara, and Elena, who look out for him and treat him with kindness when he spent his childhood unable to trust anyone but himself. This gives him the beginnings of a guilty conscience because of how bad he feels about exploiting their good will, and he starts performing reckless acts of heroism for real in an attempt to assuage it (but the handsome pay for answering an emergency request certainly helps).
• Beneath the Mask: Akira is impulsive, emotional, and easily sidetracked by Mundane Luxury. But while assuming the role of Sheryl's muscle, he makes it seem like he's The Stoic and someone who's always one step ahead with the help of a good poker face and Alpha's advice. Sheryl initially has trouble recognizing that Akira roughing up Erio was him acting the part of an emotionless enforcer, only connecting the dots when Akira asks her to rate his performance after the fact.
• Berserk Button: It isn't necessarily hard to get Akira ready to kill someone, but he has some specific recurring triggers, that eventually are used in a bit of Flaw Exploitation to manipulate him.
  • He goes ballistic when Shijima's gang members try to blackmail him by threatening Shizuka, Sara, and Elena at Cartridge Freak, instantly drawing his rifle and shooting the man dead before blasting a hole in another man's head.
  • Being stolen from triggers his trauma from being robbed growing up in the slums, and will put him from a good mood to a psychotic rage at the drop of a hat, even hearing about how he was pickpocketed is enough to set him off.
• Best Served Cold: Often willing to be patient in getting revenge after his Berserk Button is pressed, like not fighting Katsuya without his augmented suit because that'd be suicide. Akira tends towards Tranquil Fury instead of Unstoppable Rage, after all.
• Better than Sex:
  • To Akira, the pleasure of soaking in a hot bath far exceeds anything his already low sex drive could offer him. Alpha's flirtations and Sheryl all but asking him to have sex with her fly over his head while he's enjoying his bath time.
  • Akira makes it almost a Catchphrase that he’s more interested in food than girls, and his guard falls when he eats fine food.
• BFG: After ranking up to Rank 17, Akira is allowed to purchase an anti-materiel rifle and the corresponding CWH ammo for dealing with heavily-armored monsters. The sniper rifle is as large as he is while deployed and using the CWH ammunition blasts a hole through the heads of what is essentially an alligator tank after his normal piercing rounds failed to leave lasting damage. Not only that, but the bullet keeps going and does significant damage to the building behind it. Smaller monsters are reduced to unrecognizable pulp on impact. It's also stated that he'd be Blown Across the Room by the recoil if not for his augmented suit.
• Bifurcated Weapon: The SSB multi-weapon rifles that he eventually makes his go-to weapon. It has the firing rate of a mini-gun, can fire CWH rounds full auto, and can fire guided rocket-propelled grenades as a type of ammo. The biggest problem with it is its tendency to chew through its ammo reserves, resulting in Akira needing to buy an APC to keep from running dry.
• Big Eater:
  • He finds that he's developed a voracious appetite following his hospital stay, finishing an entire full-course meal in one sitting without any discomfort. He only notices this while eating on Carol's tab, which Alpha explains as his body trying to make up for years of malnutrition after the hospital treatments cleaned out the impurities and toxins lodged in his body from eating slum food and overusing nanite medicine.
  • Another reason is that the gradual awakening of his status as a Super-Strength Super-Human has been increasing his metabolism.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • Akira understands right and wrong but operates more on a spectrum of fairness and priorities. He expects to be rewarded for his efforts and prioritizes survival first and foremost. He's completely indifferent to murder, killing with frightening ease and without pleasure or remorse. If a job becomes too dangerous for him to handle, he has no problems leaving the people he's supposed to be rescuing or fighting alongside behind. But at the same time he's not so self-serving that he refuses to share rewards if he feels it's duly owed. He won't scam others either, offering them what he believes is a fair price for goods or services based on what he thinks is the truth even if lying would get him a better deal.
  • Even after developing something of a guilty conscience, he performs good deeds out of his own belief that it will reduce his good luck deficit or benefit him in the long term rather than for the sake of it. He also dislikes the idea of having unpaid debts and thinks it's unfair for him to tag along with more experienced hunters since he believes he'll slow them down unless they tell him otherwise. His sense of morality is so strange that Alpha struggles to wrap her head around it while trying to manipulate him.
• Book Dumb: Akira Never Learned to Read, struggles with math, and can be quite impulsive and foolhardy. But he's also street smart, doggedly determined, and ruthlessly opportunistic in order to survive in the slums.
• Born Unlucky: Alpha tells him that he spent all the luck in his lifetime by meeting her. His troubled past as a slum orphan and track record of running into dangerous situations on routine assignments seem to corroborate this. Even when he specifically chooses missions and roles designed to run into the fewest and least dangerous enemies, he still manages to get hordes of monsters on his tail. He then becomes fixated on "earning [his] luck back" by performing good deeds while earning money after Sara and Elena save him and inadvertently give him a guilty conscience.
  • Akira’s unconscious telepathy from being an Old World connector actually draws monsters to him like a beacon. Because while normal noise, movement, etc is dampened by colorless mist, telepathic transmissions aren’t. These transmissions also why so many people distrust and look down on him.
• Brutal Honesty: Akira will not mince words with others and will tell someone straight to their face if he considers them expendable or if they're The Load. He's surprised when Shiori calls him out on this when she asks him to evaluate Reina's abilities, as his inability to speak with nuance or subtlety does nothing but anger everyone around him. This nearly leads to a shootout between him, Shiori, and Reina. Alpha gently chides him over this, explaining that he could have avoided all of this conflict had he chosen his words more carefully.
• Call It Karma: Akira incorporates the pop concept of Karma into his beliefs, or at least as his go-to excuse for doing the right thing, reasoning that by doing "good deeds" he'll make up for his perpetual bad luck.
• Cast From Hitpoints:
  • Alpha using her People Puppets ability to control his Powered Armor is basically wearing down his body to be more lethal, that is why he so often takes Nanomachine medicine even before getting injured. With a good enough augmented suit, Akira can run with Super-Speed, leap In a Single Bound, or fire weapons with extreme recoil even for an augmented suit… but those things also mangle his limbs. As his skill increases, he is able to minimize the damage better.
  • It turns out that the time compression ability Alpha taught Akira, has caused him some brain damage from using it so much. This gets healed when he takes an especially powerful Old-World medicine.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • As his skills grow and he becomes more confident in himself, he tends to respond to Alpha's challenges and offers of assistance with, "Resolve is my responsibility.", as she can help him with everything but the resolve to go through with it.
  • He also says that he wants to "earn some of my luck back" by performing good deeds after he supposedly spent it all by meeting Alpha and later getting saved by Sara and Elena.
  • That he’s "more interested in food than girls" while trying to brush off others' advances.
• Challenge Seeker:
  • Inverted. Akira would very much prefer an easy, good-paying job over a difficult one if he could help it. But considering that such jobs are far and few in-between, he's often forced to risk his life to make a living. When given the option to take an easier role, he'll volunteer for it automatically, much to the annoyance of other, older hunters. Unfortunately, his tendency to draw monsters to his position means that even the cushy roles tend to turn into desperate fights.
  • However, his combat record and willingness to volunteer for an extremely dangerous mission if it means helping our Sara and Elena gets Kibayashi to mistake Akira for one of these. This is why Kibayashi gives Akira a bike as part of his payment and to help him get to his destination.
• Character Development: Besides how he Took a Level in Kindness and Took a Level in Cheerfulness, there’s also his low self-image receiving a major boost due to surviving the Inner Ruins Assault without Alpha. Soon after that, is the first time that Akira specifically tries to fight in a flashy way, to psych himself up.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: The ability to compress his perception of time is an ability some hunters get either through a drug, or surgical implant in their brain. However, Alpha sets Akira up with a training regimen to teach him the ability without those. This may have to do with the abnormality in his brain that allows him his Brain/Computer Interface with Alpha; it seems to happen naturally in near-death experiences with him before that point. The power also allows him to have whole conversations with Alpha within a few seconds.
• Chaste Hero:
  • Downplayed. While Akira does understand sex appeal, as shown by how embarrassed he gets when he's subject to Marshmallow Hell, he's not particularly interested in the actual act of sex due to his age and having bigger fish to fry as a hunter. While staying over at Sheryl's place, he doesn't question it when Sheryl asks him to strip down to his underwear before climbing into her bed. He's equally confused when he discovers that Sheryl clung to him in his sleep in her underwear. An exasperated Alpha has to spell out to him that Sheryl wants to have sex with him. This also leads to the Running Gag where women try to seduce Akira to get him to spill his secrets, only for Akira to display indifference at best and confusion at worst. Meanwhile, Alpha cheers that her anti-Honey Trap training (read: being a Shameless Fanservice Girl) is working on him.
  • Despite his lack of interest in sex, he seems to at least understand romance. He has a Spit Take when Alpha points out that it looks like he and Sheryl are on a date when they're walking side-by-side. His interactions with Sara and Elena all but say that he has a Precocious Crush on them as well.
  • This proves to be a Subverted Trope as per Carol's investigations of Akira's claims later in the web novels, it's actually Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality from his Dark and Troubled Past.
• Child Soldiers: Akira isn't older than 14-15 years old, but as a hunter, he's essentially a mercenary-for-hire when it comes to patrolling the cities for monsters.
• Cloak of Defense: Akira’s third augmented suit comes with one of these with an independent power source, that protects him from bullets. It has a beehive design.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: He's too young and too busy to be interested in sex even if he understands sex appeal. Despite this, he manages to get a number of beautiful girls like Shizuka, Sheryl, Sara, and Elena around him and sometimes interested in him.
• The Comically Serious: The combination of his deadly seriousness and complete lack of social skills is repeatedly Played for Laughs. When girls like Sheryl and Carol actively try to seduce him, he shrugs them off with such casual indifference that it leaves both girls offended. He also offers a group of fleeing hunters his expensive 2,000,000 aurum medicine with an incredibly blasé tone that has them baffled and unwilling to take it until monsters start rushing after them.
• The Confidant: Besides relying on Sheryl, Shizuka and Nasha to be this for him at times, Akira also serves as one himself sometimes.
  • A negotiation with Reina turns into this after he sees through her starting excuses with Alpha’s Living Lie Detector aid. Reina vents all her stored up conflicted feelings regarding Akira and how he’s irked her in a bout of Brutal Honesty, giving her bodyguards an Oh, Crap! moment expecting a fight to break out, but making Akira laugh and respect her honesty, cementing them as Fire-Forged Friends.
  • Hearing out Carol's Dark and Troubled Past during her Origins Episode.
• Consummate Professional: When he takes a job, he'll fulfill it to the best of his ability even if it would normally go against his survival instincts. That said, he's not so professional that he won't try to negotiate a clause that lets him move independently or run away if completing the objective isn't feasible.
• Coordinated Clothes: Akira gets tailored formal clothing for himself and his Cartridge Freak friends, all based on the dress he gave Sheryl. Without her knowledge.
• Cornered Rattlesnake: Akira is (in his own words) a coward. He can't rest well until everything threatening him has a bullet in its head. Because of this, he's extremely trigger-happy when threatened, taking life with a frightening level of ease. Even when backed into a corner, he's so determined to survive that he'll never give up so long as his chance of winning isn't zero. Even when Alpha estimates that his chances of winning are zero and he's deprived of Alpha's support, Akira's desire to live gets him to shoot his way out of the Overgrown Snake's stomach and continuously manipulate his own perception of time to survive against all odds.
• Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: High-ranking hunters tend to have corporate sponsorship deals, and Akira gets KIRYO as his sponsor after they work with Sheryl’s gang, who specialize in armor and Augmented Reality.
• Covered with Scars: Akira's body is covered in scars as a reflection of how tough his life was up until he met Alpha.
• Crazy-Prepared: Akira gradually starts going to seemingly absurd lengths to keep from being diminished in battle. Ran out of ammo? He buys an APC to store spares (he ends up needing to use all of that at one point). He keeps getting a Wrecked Weapon? He gets guns with force-field armor, and six of them (he loses three of those at one point). Runs out of power for his suit? He gets a Cool Bike with extra energy reserves to recharge it.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Akira's cynical and ruthless attitude arose from being constantly taken in by promises of a better life, only to get exploited and dumped by the roadside when people were done using him. Because of this, the only person he trusts is himself until he meets Alpha.
• Danger Deadpan: Akira has a habit of reporting his amazing feats in a simple matter of fact matter as if they were nothing, leaving those he talks to shocked.
• Dark and Troubled Past: In the web novel, his childhood is largely a mystery aside from it being a constant life-or-death struggle. He grew up sleeping with one eye open in back alleys, hoping he'll wake up the next morning instead of being murdered in his sleep. The manga and light novel specify that Akira desperately looked for someone he could rely on, only to get scammed by con artists who threw him back onto the street when they were done milking him for everything he's worth. The narration says that his childhood helped shape his Blue-and-Orange Morality, but it's unclear how much of it can be attributed to his upbringing and how much of it is just innate to him.
• Deadpan Snarker: He tends to snark at Alpha when she's not being upfront with him, though she tends to be amused more than annoyed at his antics, resulting in some Snark-to-Snark Combat.
  Akira: [regarding Reina and Shiori's fighting style] Is it possible for me to do something similar?
  Alpha: It’s perfectly possible as long as you have my support. You can even just run around freely without a care while carrying piercing ammo loaded AAH rifles on both of your hands with my support.
  Akira: So in short, I can’t do that myself, huh? After all, if I do that, it just means that you’ll be controlling both of my arms, and I’m sure it will leave both of my arms broken too, won’t it?
  Alpha: I’m glad that you’re a smart boy. It’s a good thing that you can accurately evaluate your own ability. You’re mostly correct, although it might break both of your arms, it’ll at least save your life.
• Defrosting Ice King: In part due to their attempted seduction of him pressing his Trauma Button, Akira starts off cold with Sheryl and Carol, warming up to them each over time. With Sheryl, it’s more like bursts of hope shining through that her being a Dogged Nice Girl is paying off, while for Carol, a certain set of experiences sees them developing a close Bash Brothers sort of bond. While the two girls in question get along surprisingly well, considering.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: Part of his determination is making these, like letting bullets hit him in non-fatal areas in Sarenthal Tower, which eventually gets replicated with letting attackers hit him in areas where his armor's Deflector Shields are strongest. Agreeing to let Alpha control him is pretty much this as Cast From Hitpoints. And then there's shooting himself throwing his gun in a Spin Attack.
• Determinator: Akira may be impulsive and short-tempered, but he's also ridiculously determined to survive, continuing to fight so long as he has a non-zero chance of victory even when he's thoroughly outnumbered and outgunned.
• Die or Fly: Alpha tries to teach him to speed up his perception of time to make it seem like things are moving in slow motion, letting him process more and react faster to danger. However, he finds that he struggles to do it consciously outside of a truly life-threatening situation. When he's Eaten Alive by the Overgrown Snake, he gets his trial by fire as he doesn't have Alpha's support either, activating it continuously without even meaning to as he rushes to protect himself from the snake's digestive acid and kill it before he's a pile of bones.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • He tries to explore the famous and highly dangerous Kusuzuraha Ruins with nothing but a handgun against monsters he knows nothing about on his first day of being a hunter. Alpha is quick to point out the folly in Akira's actions, which leaves him embarrassed and ashamed.
  • Sara and Elena point out that despite his propensity for working alone, Akira hired Carol, a complete stranger, to help him search for them in the ruins. He freezes when this is pointed out to him and quickly mutters an embarrassed apology.
  • His aversion to raising his hunter rank. He’s shocked to discover he can buy high-grade ammo cheap once it's high enough. Although his deal with Katsuragi to help Sheryl had him somewhat trapped in that regard.
• Dissonant Serenity: Even when he's in a relatively good mood, he won't hesitate to break someone's wrist for trying to pickpocket him while keeping a smile on his face. It's only after he learns that an information broker had marked him as an easy target that Akira finally loses his cheer and returns to his usual sternness.
• Dodge the Bullet: Alpha tries to train him to be able to control his perception of time to allow him to predict a bullet trajectory before it fires and dodge it. He eventually succeeds after painstaking effort, but his first time doing this in a real crisis is when he's up against Selba, an untrained and overconfident orphan. Otherwise, he relies on Alpha doing it for him even though it's extremely painful to have his body jerked around like that.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Birthday: Akira doesn't know where or when he was born outside of being in the slums, nor had anyone told him the date until he was older. Because of this, he doesn't know his own age or birthday. This is apparently common among slum kids like him.
• Doom Magnet: Akira tends to find himself in life-or-death situations without even trying to. Even actively trying to avoid danger doesn't stop him from meeting murderous cyborgs, hordes of monsters, or getting on the bad sides of other hunters due to his own lack of social skills. He points it out to Carol when she hires him to be her bodyguard for an undetermined length of time. The fact that unconscious emotional transmissions made by Old World connectors attract monsters like a beacon makes this justified.
• The Dreaded: Deliberately tries to build up a reputation like this in part to help Sheryl control her gang and to help keep them safe while he’s away, and in part to prevent people from picking fights with him. Akira particularly likes setting gruesome examples of others to drive the point home. It usually doesn't have much effect on other hunters.
• Endearingly Dorky:
  • The select few people he trusts to let his guard down around get to see him be surprisingly polite, easily flustered, and eager to please. He also gets tongue-tied over small talk and his eyes sparkle like a child's when he's given new gear or is exposed to something new. This only endears him to Sara and Elena, who treat him like a little brother and mentor him. Shizuka is also surprised by how attached she gets to him.
  • He can also be downright goofy when it comes to his priorities. After Taking the Bullet for Carol, he's more upset that all the relics he's gathered up are destroyed than the fact that he'd just been shot, which gets Carol laughing over his strange behavior.
• Famed In-Story: This proves to be part of his bad luck: Other hunters swooping in from tales of his exploits to beat him to the second when he finds uncharted ruins. It gets so predictable that Alpha at one point tells Akira to go training in a low-danger ruin for some days specifically to throw the other hunters off his tracks. As a separate matter, is his reputation in the slums, which gets Akira a mix of awe, fear, and jealousy, at least when he’s not being hounded by rumors making light of him. For both fields, his fame really takes off when he’s caught on camera doing a particularly impressive feat that allows his reputation to be used to great effect by Sheryl, but also puts the Corporate Government on his case to raise his hunter rank.
  • After The Siege, hunters he meets from other cities ask if he's "that Akira?", being known for the 50 billion Aurum bounter formerly on his head and using illegal Antimatter rounds.
• Fatal Flaw: Wrath. Akira's Trigger-Happy nature and easily pushed Berserk Button makes easy for others to manipulate him.
  • Since The Chessmaster Viola is able to figure out both of Akira’s buttons, she tricks a N.G.O. Superpower Ezont Family into both kidnapping Sheryl and taking the pickpocket who stole from Akira, as The Bait for Akira to attack and draw their rival gang to take advantage of the chaos to invade. And thus Viola tricked Akira into causing the destruction of two gangs the city paid her to get rid of, at the cost of a bullet from Akira and being forced to work under Sheryl.
  • It proves to be this again when Chloe taunts him with these buttons after having deployed a communications blackout device severing his connection to Alpha.
• A Father to His Men: Despite his initial coldness, he eventually grows into this for Sheryl’s gang, training the boys and leading them into battle, as well as getting a hero’s welcome at one point.
• Foil: To Sheryl. Both of them are orphans in the slums trying to carve out a life of safety and security for themselves. But while Akira makes his living as a hunter with Alpha's guidance, Sheryl has nothing to rely on but Akira's word that he'll help her and her own bluffing skills. Akira is frequently overlooked due to his age and size, while Sheryl is explicitly noted to be beautiful for a girl her age, using her looks to get her way with men. Akira also demonstrates no interest in leadership and is in fact Alpha's Unwitting Pawn, while Sheryl is thrust into the position of leading her new gang and excels at it despite her lack of confidence.
• Food as Bribe: The single easiest way to distract Akira is to pay for him to indulge in restaurant food. Shiori is surprised by how quickly he lets his guard down and chatters away after she introduces him to a high-class restaurant. Given how he was starving not too long ago, this is hardly surprising.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: From goes from a no-name slum rat who nobody would miss, to someone corporate executives sweat over and try to hire to kill one another.
• Gatling Good: Upon getting his own car, Akira gains access to an M421 Minigun. It chews through ammo quickly but is also able to sweep through weaker monsters with ease while beating down tougher monsters over time. Its recoil is powerful enough for Akira to use it for a Recoil Boost and then Wall Run down a building after detaching it from his vehicle.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: Akira's second augmented suit comes with its own built-in information-gathering device, allowing it to stream in data about his surroundings as well as get data from other hunters.
• Grenade Launcher: After reaching Rank 21, he starts toting an A421 grenade launcher to help him clear out crowds of weaker monsters and for extra firepower when his CWH rounds no longer cut it.
• Grin of Audacity: Akira often sports one of these when in the thick of a fight, especially when Alpha offers him any semblance of good news given his bad luck. People who see him doing this mistake him for a Blood Knight, when Akira is actually terrified.
• Guns Akimbo: Equipping Powered Armor allows Akira to do this, and it’s pretty much his default after he gets his chain gun. But even that often isn’t enough when due to Alpha’s desperate maneuvers, he fires weapons improperly supported (which damages his second augmented suit while breaking his arm when he does it with the anti-tank rifle). Alpha specifically warns him against shooting like this without the aid of his augmented suit due to the risk of injury. He learns this the hard way while fighting for his life while his suit is being reprogrammed; the act injures him badly enough that even his super medicine fails to dull the pain completely.
• Had to Be Sharp: Akira’s instincts but also paranoia were honed and refined by his life in the slums, where the weak don’t survive long. His ability to make a camouflaged sleeping spot, for example, serves as a Chekhov's Skill that helps him take down Sibea, and much later in the Inner Kuzusuhara Ruins Assault.
• Has a Type: Subverted. It seems at first that Akira has a thing for buxom older women given his stronger reaction to Shizuka, Elena, and Sara than the flat Sheryl. But Carol disproves that. The web novels explicitly say that it's more a matter of who he trusts, and he distrusted Carol for being a Femme Fatale despite on paper her fitting that type. For what it's worth, Sheryl asks Akira if he Likes Older Women, he says that he doesn’t have a type and that it’s only a coincidence that his friends are mostly older since there aren’t many kids around hunting (this is Foreshadowing Akira teaming up with a new girl his age on his next mission.)
• Hates Being Alone: Despite his insistence on working alone, he's gotten used to having Alpha at his side to guide him along the way. He's painfully lonely and scared when she isn't around to help him and is relieved whenever she comes back, but he never admits this to her because it'd open him to her teasing.
• He Is All Grown Up: Shizuka and others remark on him becoming taller and more muscular over time; this is possible due to the expensive hospital treatment allowed him to compensate for his malnourishment stunting his growth by eating more.
• Heroic RRoD: Akira passes out for days repeatedly when he uses too much nanomachine medicine. Eventually, he takes measures to counteract this, such as taking small doses of medicine in-between encounters or taking naps.
• Hidden Depths:
  • As comes with the territory of his Jerkass Façade with Sheryl's gang.
  • Akira gets subtly suspicious of Alpha and repeatedly mentally notes that if he asks too many questions, he may lose access to the benefits of her cooperation. He trusts in her self-interest more so than in her, and her self-interest is his survival to complete her task.
  • That Akira has Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality instead of being a Chaste Hero like he pretends.
• Humble Hero: Akira is critical of his skills and is aware of how he'd never have survived this long without Alpha. But the narration says this is an objective evaluation rather than any kind of self-deprecation. This also means explaining to others that he's a Badass on Paper and not the One-Man Army like his combat record would tell you. This insistence on being truthful is further reflected in his lack of interest in his reputation, showing indifference to insults to his skills and never boasting about his accomplishments, especially when others are trying to provoke indignation from him. This trait comes in handy towards Shirakabe who was known to be a Jerkass towards newbie hunters. Shirakabe took a liking for Akira for not being a cocky upstart like Katsuya he gives Akira favors, jobs, and respect that would make Katsuya green with envy.
• Hypocrite:
  • His lambasting of Reina for picking fights with others too easily, which applies more to himself than to her. Alpha calls him out on this immediately.
  • His criticism of the maids for their maid uniforms being conspicuous, while he himself wears 24-Hour Armor in places where it makes him stick out even more, like a high class restaurant.
• I Gave My Word: Despite his Blue-and-Orange Morality, Akira puts a lot of stock into any promises he makes. Early on in the story, he's handily outgunned by a small army of cannon insects whose shells are too hard for his assault rifle to penetrate while responding to an SOS. Despite this, he gave his word to some hunters he rescued that he'd protect them until he's the last one left, putting his life on the line partly out of professionalism and partly because of how awkward he'd feel if he abandoned some people he'd been hired to save.
• I Owe You My Life: Akira is deadly serious about repaying others who've saved his life in the past. It’s for this reason, despite realizing some of the darker things Alpha has done to manipulate him, he refuses to hear out Tsubaki’s requests to betray her. Despite the fact that he makes a deal with Shiori that massively underplayed him for a MacGuffin, since it kept him out of trouble and he got a desperately needed weapon out of it, he refuses to let her take the fall when she gets threatened by Olivia for having done so.
• Ironic Name: Akira's name is written entirely in katakana, but in Japanese it's typically spelled in ways that evoke sunlight, brightness, wisdom, and truth. Akira is none of these things. He's a naturally dour and pessimistic Street Urchin who Never Learned to Read. He's prone to foolhardy outbursts of rage being deceived by Alpha, who manipulates him for her plans.
• Irony: His dynamic with Sheryl is chock full of it.
  • Akira being terrified of Sheryl due to her ability to manipulate the hearts of men… despite himself being manipulated so much by Alpha.
  • Akira being terrified of Sheryl, while she is terrified of him. Both expecting to be thrown out once no longer useful.
  • The fact that Akira is afraid of falling into a Honey Trap from Sheryl, despite the fact that even if he was honey trapped, it wouldn’t change much, given how much time and money he lavishes on her anyway expecting no recompense.
• Karmic Jackpot:
  • Discussed. Akira feels that meeting Alpha was the best thing to ever happen to him and that agrees when Alpha says he expended all of his good luck and karma in running into her. As a result, he tells Alpha that he saved Sara and Elena to regain some of that good luck. But Alpha knows this is a lie and he only killed the gang that went after them because he felt the gang was a threat to himself. He didn't care when they were being attacked by a monster, but the moment other armed men entered the picture he made a 180.
  • Later on, he's rewarded for his (selfishly motivated) good deed when Sara and Elena come to his rescue after taking an emergency request to help the caravan he's fighting alongside. He feels terrible about how thankful they are to him, as he didn't care about saving their lives. Akira then tries to assuage his guilty conscience and pay back what he perceives as a debt, often mentioning how he's going to "earn some of his luck back" by performing good deeds.
• Kids Are Cruel: Akira has no problems shooting other children, especially if they come after him first. In the web novel, he shoots five children who try to mug him over 300 aurum despite him explaining that it'd cost more to kill him than they'd get in cash. He also murders Selba on Sheryl's orders without batting an eye after Selba betrays them. Something Alpha and others note about Akira is his startling apathy toward murder in general, as he feels neither joy nor remorse in killing others.
• Kid Hero: Akira is a young teenager fighting to survive in the slums with no one to guide him until he encounters Alpha. While he's far from "good", he doesn't like having unpaid debts and shows genuine gratitude to those who help him out out of the kindness of their hearts. In addition, the story emphasizes just how naïve and inexperienced he is because of his age. He would be dead dozens of times over if not for Alpha, who leads him by the nose to get what she wants.
• Kindness Button: Spending time with Shizuka almost always puts Akira in a good mood as she is one of the few people to show him unconditional affection, fretting over him like an older sibling and soothing him with motherly hugs. This is best displayed in how his mood shifts when he returns to Kashua's clothing store after meeting Shizuka off-screen.
• Indy Ploy: Comes up with a number of these, with thing like setting his rifles to fire on a preset timer and tossing them into the air, or using his bullets being slowed down by Gravity Screw to make an improvised barrier.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Eventually without Alpha, as displayed when he wins a Sniper Duel at his weapon's maximum range.
• Improvised Platform: Akira’s fifth and onwards augmented suits can create force field footholds in the air that allow him to essentially do this, jumping from tiny platform to tiny platform, or make a larger platform to stabilize himself. During the attack at the Mihazono Hunter’s Office, both Akira and his opponents each do this, resulting in high speed acrobatics mid-air.
• Innocently Insensitive: He doesn't see an issue with bringing Carol, a hunter he hired, before Sara and Elena without an explanation. It takes the two of them sitting down with Akira to get him to realize that it looked like he'd been suckered in by a stranger and were worried that he was being manipulated. Even then it takes a few seconds for it to click for him due to his lack of social skills.
• I Work Alone: He dislikes having to work with others due to all of the logistical problems it creates, like dividing pay, communication between members, and having more people to worry about. Working alone also keeps him from having to deal with his lack of social skills complicating things and allows him to freely communicate with Alpha without drawing unwanted attention. He teams up with squads as long as they’re led by Elena (or Shirakabe), however.
• Lack of Empathy: Zigzagged. Akira is completely indifferent to the moral ramifications of murder and is so trigger-happy when threatened that he gets compared to a landmine. But he's emotionally aware enough to understand just how grateful Sara and Elena are when he saves their lives. He feels the same way after they return the favor and even feels guilt over how he didn't plan to save them the first time. This strange dichotomy if attributed to Akira being born with a "distorted" personality.
• Lady and Knight: Dark Knight to Alpha's Dark Lady. As highlighted in a conversation he has with Tsubaki, Akira takes an almost My Master, Right or Wrong approach in serving Alpha’s requests, figuring I Owe You My Life and that no matter how evil her manipulations or end goal are, I Gave My Word, as well. While Alpha constantly tries to use seduction and manipulation to get him to serve her whims as a classic Dark Lady.
• Laughing Mad:
  • Akira dissolves into broken laughter when he realizes that he's lost contact with Alpha after he's Eaten Alive by the Overgrown Snake. He's terrified that he's truly alone for the first time since he became a hunter, nearly giving up before composing himself and blasting his way out.
  • When Katsuya devalues his accomplishments after protecting the girl that pickpocketed him, turning a nearly resolved situation into a Mexican Standoff.
• Limited Wardrobe:
  • He's never shown wearing anything but a tank top and jeans and his protective gear. He doesn't have any other clothes due to lacking the funds for it and investing all of his money into shelter and hunter equipment.
  • Because of his lack of time and money for spare clothes until recently, Akira's fashion sense is virtually nonexistent. Just about every outfit looks the same to him so long as it's not Stripperific or fanservice-y, and his interactions with Alpha and her Unlimited Wardrobe further dull his sense of what's good-looking and what's not. None of Sheryl's outfits are able to elicit any kind of reaction from him and he has to consult Alpha to buy a gift that would suit a girl. It gets to the point that Sheryl uses getting a response beyond Dull Surprise out of him as a sign that she looks truly wonderful in an outfit.
• Living a Double Life: Somewhat downplayed, he generally keeps his gang life involving Sheryl on one side, and his hunter life involving Shizuka, Elena, Sara, and Shirakabe on the other. The gradual merging of the two spheres serves as part of some Nothing Is the Same Anymore shifts.
• Living Emotional Crutch: For Sheryl, after her heart is broken down enough and she builds back up her psyche centered around him during her second Heroic BSoD. It isn't uncommon for her to demand to hug him for up to an hour in her room as a result, to 'recharge' herself.
• Loner-Turned-Friend: Akira was an absolute loner before the start of the story, and struggles to make friends but ultimately does.
• Magikarp Power: From a virtually helpless Street Urchin to One-Man Army, with plenty of emphasis on the hard work inbetween.
• Meal Ticket: Downplayed. It's stated the women of Sheryl’s gang set their eyes on him, due to him at that point being essentially middle class, while they’ve been surviving on two sandwiches a day in the slums most of their lives. They don’t try anything because they know it’d be declaring war on Sheryl if they did so, and they can’t risk losing their employment under her.
• Messy Hair: Akira's hair is perpetually disheveled and unkempt, underscoring how he's lived his life on the streets fighting tooth and nail to survive.
• Mid-Season Upgrade: Uses most of his money to get these, as per Alpha's advice. He's been through at least eight augmented suits over the course of the web novels, for instance (two of those were variants of the previous with extras).
• Mistaken for Profound: Akira is more than happy to leave Sara and Elena to fend for themselves against monsters. But when they're captured by hunters-turned-bandits, Akira snipes the bandits out of fear for his own life should they come after him next, saving the women as a side effect. After he tosses over some medicine to keep them from coming after them, Sara and Elena come to the conclusion that their savior is a good-natured but shy person.
• Mistaken for Spies: It's a Running Gag that people think he's one, or a cyborg, or both. A highlight is Erde pitying Akira for being a Tyke Bomb, which he of course isn’t.
• Morality Pet:
  • The stated reason for Akira helping Sheryl is to balance the karmic scales to help his luck by doing good deeds for her and her gang, to make up for his bad deeds. But the sheer amount he does and puts up with to grant that help casts some doubts on that reasoning (it certainly confuses Sheryl).
  • Akira makes Nasha into one of these for the same reason, giving her everything she'll need to survive and simply banishing her to a neighboring city for hiding Alna's location, after killing Alna. The two develop an Odd Friendship after he prevents her various methods of attempted suicide.
• Mundane Luxury:
  • Having scraped by on the streets for as long as he can remember, Akira happily soaks in a bathtub once he's able to use his earnings to check into a hotel rather than sleeping in a back alley. Even when Alpha shows up naked to tease him, he's too busy enjoying the bath to be bothered by her and has to be reminded to go to bed lest he drown in the tub. When he wakes up the following morning, he's briefly confused by his surroundings because of how alien the thought of sleeping in a clean, comfortable bed is to him.
  • For the same reason, he's elated when he finally has the funds to rent his own house. Having a bed to sleep in every night, a bathtub he can call his own, and eating clean food he purchased are all dreams he never thought he'd see fulfilled.
  • Akira can’t help but marvel when Hikaru explains to him how the middle district he’s visiting has a normal functioning judicial system, something Akira’s never been exposed to.
• Mutant: Due to being born in the eastern part of the Kugamayama City. Akira can gain mutations and skills more easily than normal humans, which can be achieved through repeated training and combat. Making him nigh-on superhuman. Though due to his age, he is limited on how much he can accel without his augment suit and is nowhere near as stong as enhanced humans and cyborgs.
• My Greatest Failure: Letting Alna get away with pickpocketing him haunts him for a long time. After killing her, being unable to let go and move on from that incident until he did so, is something Akira ends up regretting, confiding in her friend Nasha about it.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Shows shades of this regarding Alpha's instructions, on the basis of I Owe You My Life and I Gave My Word.

N – Z

• Naïve Newcomer: He begins the story by investigating a famous and dangerous ruin on his lonesome with no gear aside from a pistol he picked up off the ground. If not for dumb luck and Alpha's guidance, Akira would have perished in the first chapter. His naivety also lets Alpha lead him any way she pleases, with him growing to trust her unconditionally due to her constant aid.
• Never Be Hurt Again: When Akira was younger, he was suckered into accepting offers to live beyond the wall and eat good food from Con Artists before being abandoned on the roadside when his usefulness ended. This left him a ruthless paranoiac who only looks out for himself until he meets Alpha.
• Never Learned to Read: Akira never knew his parents and grew up without a formal education until Alpha taught him to read and write. Because of this, it's not until he gets his temporary Hunter license turned into a real one that he notices that his name has been misspelled because he couldn't read it at the time.
• No Range Like Point-Blank Range: A common trick employed by Akira to increase his damage output for a Finishing Move. It has the Surprisingly Realistic Outcome of frequently either costing him an arm or a Wrecked Weapon.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy:
  • While he does get embarrassed by Alpha appearing naked before him out of the blue, Akira doesn't seem to be interested in Sheryl's offer of sex. When she offers her body to him, all he can think about is how she wouldn't even make a good decoy or an expendable pawn.
  • Subverted with the older women who playfully flirt with him. Akira is distracted by the sight of their boobs, though he's long since become desensitized to Alpha's advances because he knows she's just toying with him.
  • In the novel, he explains his lack of interest in sex by the fact that he's a little kid struggling to get food on the table. Making out with a girl is the least of his priorities compared to survival. It's only when he's around people he can trust that he starts to display interest.
• Not Helping Your Case: While trying to get the aurum Alna stole from his wallet back, Akira makes things worse for himself as Yumina and Airi interrogate him to prove that the money is his. Alna's quick thinking to remove the money from his wallet and throw it back to him prevents them from simply checking her pockets to prove that she took his wallet, he can't provide conclusive evidence that the money on his person is his, and his aggressive and persistent stalking of Alna makes him seem like the criminal instead of the other way around.
• No Social Skills: He's spent so much time looking out for no one but himself that his social skills are nonexistent. His Brutal Honesty to people he doesn't know does nothing but piss them off and drive away potential allies, while his awkwardness and lack of candor around people he's more comfortable with prevent him from forming deeper relationships. His cynical train of thought also means that he has trouble reading anything other than ill-intent, assuming Reina wanted more of the reward money when she was surprised that he was splitting it equally between them. Basic expressions of affection like hugging and an Affectionate Gesture to the Head are also alien to him until Shizuka shows him kindness for the first time. The narrative itself calls him completely socially inept, both due to the place he grew up in and his personality being naturally distorted.
• Not So Stoic: His all-business attitude and apparent lack of interest in anything that's not food, bath, or hunter-related has others mistaking him for The Stoic. But he's far more emotional than he first appears, desperately asking Reina and Shiori for help when they're ambushed by hundreds of Yarata Scorpions while angrily cursing his bad luck, reacting like a kid in a candy store when presented with new gear, and even cracking sardonic jokes with people he's more comfortable with.
• One-Man Army: Averted for much of the series. While he often appears to be nigh-unstoppable, Alpha's guidance is the primary reason he's able to survive, much less thrive in combat. As his skill grows, it can get hard to tell how much of his performance is due to Alpha's guidance or his own abilities. Akira’s training in mock battles against Sheryl’s gang is specifically preparing him to be a one-man army since it’s him versus groups of them. In the Kuzusuhara Ruins Assault arc, he proves himself fully as one after losing access to Alpha’s support.
• Only in It for the Money:
  • His goal, like many hunters, is to find enough high-quality relics to escape the slums and finally live it up in the safety of the walled cities. Because of this, he's obsessed with earning money and is aghast when Alpha calls his hard-earned cash "spare change". Even when he starts doing good deeds to soothe his growing guilty conscience, he's also drawn by the promise of extensive pay for answering an emergency request. He's also irritated when he has to use a lot of ammo, since that means he has to spend more of his cash to resupply.
  • After expending a truly absurd amount of painfully expensive CWH rounds to exterminate a massive horde of Yatara Scorpions, Akira is petrified by the thought of going bankrupt over a mission he didn't want to join in the first place. The first thing he does when gets back in contact with Hunter HQ is to scream that he's not paying for any of the ammo he used, breathing a huge sigh of relief when the government confirmed that they'll still be footing the bill like they agreed.
  • But when Sara and Elena are involved, he tends to throw this to the wayside because of how indebted he feels to them. He may try to lie that he's in it for the cash reward, but it's plain to both women that he's coming to help them because he wants to.
• Opposing Combat Philosophies: Akira repeatedly gets into arguments over whether guns or melee combat are better, taking the side of guns. He gradually comes to respect swords, but just swords (much to Kanae’s annoyance.)
• Origins Episode: Web Novel chapter 212 serves as an unusual one of these, explaining how and why Akira grew up to be how he is, told in third person via a Sherlock Scan from Kain.
• Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality: Akira isn't interested in the offer of sex, but he doesn't know what to do when women start flirting with him. He's easily teased by older women and he's beet red when Sheryl hugs him out of the blue. And then there are the Trauma Button reactions he occasionally has to Sheryl about falling into a Honey Trap, which fits with his Dark and Troubled Past of being used and thrown out repeatedly.
• The Paranoiac:
  • Akira has severe trust issues due to fighting tooth and nail against everyone he knows in the slums of Kugamayama City and being abandoned by multiple people offering him a better life, making him a Type 4. He's quick to pull a gun on others, won't hesitate to shoot unless it's a waste of ammo, and refuses to make lasting relationships with others unless they also benefit him. He also sleeps with one eye open and never has a gun far away from him. This gradually softens as he becomes accustomed to having more luxuries, but he's still largely cynical unless he speaking to someone who has truly earned his trust.
  • After being pickpocketed once, Akira becomes so wary of thieves that he doesn't even need Alpha's help to see them coming and defend himself, responding to sticky fingers with brutal force.
  • After Kibayashi warns Akira about Tampering with Food and Drink, he panics and demands Inabe meet him at Sheryl's Home Base, grilling him until satisfied via Alpha's Living Lie Detector abilities. All of which goes against the common sense in his country being don't mess with MegaCorp executives.
• Parental Abandonment: Akira has never known his parents and doesn't know how to read or write until Alpha teaches him.
• Perpetual Frowner: Akira's aloof and standoffish personality is matched by his unwillingness to smile to others, which only exacerbates his strained relationships. He's only able to relax and smile around Alpha and the girls from Cartridge Freak. At least at first.
• Phrase Catcher:
  • What the Hell Are You?, sometimes accompanied by being Mistaken for Spies.
  • Others saying that he doesn’t know how to deal with women.
  • The Villain Respect line "You're really loyal, aren't you."
• Pinball Protagonist: Due to agreeing to follow Alpha's instructions to the letter, Akira is often thrown from one situation into another as per her plans for him without much input of his own. Alpha seems intent on keeping things this way, given how frustrated she gets when he goes outside of her parameters, like when he needlessly risks his life by answering an emergency request out of concern for Sara and Elena despite not having the firepower to beat back a horde of armored monsters on his own. Akira ultimately averting this reduces Yanigisawa's suspicions he's Alpha's agent, specifically citing him going on a Roaring Rampage of Rescue (which Alpha protested).
• Precocious Crush: It's all but stated that he has significant feelings for Sara and Elena, who are many years his senior, for both their beauty and for being so kind to him. He reacts differently to them than any other girl, his words and actions more resembling an innocent child's than his usual bluntness, and he immediately rushes over to help when he gets a call from them. He's also eager to please them and is happy when they praise him.
• Powered Armor: After he works to help protect a caravan from a horde of monsters, Akira earns enough cash to purchase himself an augmented suit, a combination of Future Spandex and an exoskeleton that greatly enhances the wearer's strength and agility. Alpha is also able to interface with it directly to control Akira's movements, allowing her to fight with a level of coordination that Akira lacks at the cost of putting severe strain on his body.
• Protectorate: Those who he slowly does come to trust, become this to him (considering his Berserk Button is him or his friends being threatened or forced into things).
• Rags to Riches: Akira goes from barely making enough to eat every day to raking in thousands or even millions of aurum with Alpha's guidance. He's awestruck when he gets his first 200,000 aurum paycheck, but later slaps down 500,000 aurum like it's nothing after earning 12,000,000 aurum from completing an emergency request. Lampshaded by Akira himself, who wonders if his sense of money's value is being skewed by Alpha's insistence that it's all "spare change". He's quick to deplete it on new equipment to get even more money, but he always tries to set aside enough to book a room with a bath. How far he's risen often gets shown with Kashua and Celene acting as Those Two Girls.
• Required Secondary Powers: His augmented suit is this for him. As a slum kid who barely had enough to eat until recently, he's fairly short and scrawny from malnourishment. This means he can't comfortably carry more than one rifle under his own strength, needing the suit to make up for his physical shortcomings and allow him to use heavier armaments without being Blown Across the Room by the recoil.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • This is his reaction when he gets a notice of several highly dangerous bounty monsters being sighted in the wasteland. Knowing his luck, he decides to turn around and go home to study, since he's almost certainly going to run into one of those monsters while trying to do something else.
  • This is also how he ends his Mexican Standoff with Katsuya over Katsuya protecting the girl who pickpocketed him since he didn’t have his armor at the time and was outnumbered.
  • Basically how he treats the hijacking of Atlas D2771, citing Not in My Contract.
• Secret Test:
  • Kibayashi gives one to Akira by having Hikaru meet him at their scheduled appointment, to see how easily Akira might be duped. He passes the test by calling Kibayashi to verify, before playing along and trying to verify her identity himself, embarrassing Hikaru by calling Inabe.
  • While negotiating with Akira, Reina gives him one to see whether Akira is an Old World connector by judging his reaction when she tried to give him the white card MacGuffin, correctly judging that he wanted nothing to do with it because it could lead to his discovery as such.
• Self-Made Lie: To an outside viewer, Akira is a gifted prodigy who clawed his way up from being a slum rat to a hunter making massive amounts of cash. In truth, Akira is extremely reliant on Alpha in most situations and knows he's indebted to her for helping him survive one crisis after the other. While he does try to make it on his own merits, his bad luck frequently lands him situations he can't handle on his own.
• Shared Dream: In his White Void Room dreams, Akira starts seeing others there besides just Alpha. First, it’s a second alpha, then a shadowy figure who it turns out is Katsuya.
• She's Not My Girlfriend: When Alpha points out that he and Sheryl look like a couple on a date while walking together, Akira does a Spit Take and vehemently denies that it's a date. This also creates problems when Akira neglects to keep up the façade outside of work, bluntly telling members of Sheryl's gang that the two of them simply have an agreement to work together rather than corroborating Sheryl's story that they're lovers. This begins to sow doubt in the gang about Sheryl's truthfulness and how much control she actually has. However, his actions afterward make this sound like Implausible Deniability, and the debate and rumors about the two mostly center on which one is calling the shots, rather than if they’re lovers or not. Akira has some of this later on, bordering Everyone Can See It territory, with Carol.
• Shrouded in Myth: Due to being a completely unknown and unusually strong hunter with expensive equipment for his age, people tend to make assumptions about him based on his apparent skills. Sara first imagines him as a rich, dashing hunter after he saves her life before meeting him in person. The Relic Thieves believe he's a child-sized cyborg and an agent of the City Government due to his ability to dodge their Macross Missile Massacre. Shirakabe wonders if Akira has powerful connections to get an Ace Custom augmented suit after watching Akira kick a monster with unusual power. All of these assumptions are wrong, of course, but Akira's refusal to explain himself lets these rumors and assumptions continue.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • After Taking the Bullet for Carol, Akira is less concerned that he's coughing up blood than the fact that his rucksack full of valuable relics was destroyed in the process. He does have expensive medicine to patch up his injured organs, but Carol finds herself giggling over how he's more devastated over losing his relics than getting shot. He doesn't perk up again until Carol offers him 40 million aurum to continue protecting her until they escape the ruin.
  • Due to having to fire 100 million aurum per round Antimatter bullets, Akira nearly breaks into tears. After being informed that these are banned by the government and could turn every city into his enemy for having them, he just brushes that aspect off, prompting Kanae’s laughter.
• Slasher Smile: Both the manga and light novel illustrations feature Akira flashing a wicked grin when he shoves the barrel of his gun into the mouth of a monster trying to eat him before pulling the trigger.
• Slave to PR: Part of his justification for taking a pickpocket getting away from him so deadly seriously is that reputation is extremely important for a hunter. This is also part of why he's so harsh at first with Sheryl's gang.
• Socially Awkward Hero: Akira acts like this around people he likes. In stark contrast to his all-business and Brutally Honest personality with most people, he's astonishingly polite and obedient around Shizuka, Sara, and Elena. Just looking at them gets him all flustered, he's easily teased, and often finds himself tongue-tied because the jumbled emotions he feels while talking to them.
• Spit Take:
  • This is Akira's reaction when Alpha points out that he and Sheryl look like they're on a date while walking around together. He then fervently denies that they're on a date.
  • When Akira hears from Kibayashi that a level 50 hunter only needs to pay 500 aurum per anti-forcefield round, which he thought would always cost 5,000,000.
• Sticky Shoes: Akira’s fourth augmented suit has a function for its boots that let him walk on walls, at the cost of it consuming power rapidly. This leads to some Gravity Screw like scenes, like Akira fighting while standing on the side of his APC, or fighting his way up the side of a skyscraper. At one point, he does a Colossus Climb on a mecha using these.
• Street Urchin: Until he became a hunter and met Alpha, he was living on the streets and scrounging for whatever food or useful goods he could find. It's clear that the experience has not been good for Akira's psyche, as he's The Paranoiac who sleeps with one eye open and treats most people as completely disposable. It's not until long after he acquires the funds to get off the street that he's able to relax a little and show even a modicum of compassion.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality:
  • To most people, Akira is ice-cold, abandoning others as he sees fit and not hesitating to shoot someone if he deems them a threat. But he's able to let his guard down around a select few people: Shizuka, Sara, and Elena, who give him unconditional kindness and support. They're the only people he's excited to see and he's able to act his age around them instead of being a paranoiac. Shizuka also notes how childishly excited he is when getting his first augmented suit or a new gun. Even this is a massive improvement from his days before meeting Alpha where he didn't trust anyone.
  • As he continues to develop more relationships, he becomes emotionally aware enough to apologize to Sheryl in advance in case he vents his anger on her after being put into a sour mood. In the same conversation, he declares his intent to kill the information broker who marked him as an easy pickpocketing target.
  • Despite his virtual disdain for them as disposable at first, he becomes A Father to His Men of Sheryl's gang from his experiences training them, earning cheers when he returns to them at one point.
  • Elena and Sara are aghast after they catch a glimpse of Akira’s cold side after the they side against him in an argument.
• Super-Senses:
  • Eventually, Alpha connects Akira to his suit’s Everything Sensor through the Old World Domain, allowing him to sense things through something akin to subtle vibrations.
  • There is a more advanced version of Akira’s time compression ability that is first tried in the Lida Commercial Zone mission. It allows him to perceive undiluted reality of sorts with the help of Alpha’s processing power, which means removing all lag between the body’s senses and the brain. Akira can do this without Alpha, but he must tune out most of the surrounding world so as not to be killed from overload, and it rapidly mentally fatigues him.
• Survival Mantra: Akira repeatedly states that resolve is his responsibility, to which Alpha usually responds with "Leave the rest to me".
• Sword and Gun: He prefers guns, but due to many instances of a Wrecked Weapon in close combat, running out of ammo due to his SSB rifle’s high fire rate, and being impressed by others he sees using swords, Akira eventually cashes in a favor Shiori owes him for one of her swords. After some virtual reality Training from Hell by Alpha in his garage, he makes good use of it.
• Talking to Themself: Due to others being unable to see Alpha, Akira looks like he's talking to himself like a crazy person early in his career. This later stops once Akira agrees to the part of the contract that grants him Telepathy with her, but people still give him funny looks when he suddenly looks off in another direction as if he's lost in thought. At least once Akira accidentally talks to Alpha in front of someone else when he’s too relaxed.
• Taking the Bullet: When Carol commissions him to protect her, he takes that job seriously enough to throw himself in the line of fire to protect her from a shower of bullets. Luckily for him, his rucksack packed full of relics acts as a Pocket Protector that deflects the worst of it, allowing him to quickly eat some nanite medicine to get back on his feet. Unfortunately for him, this also means those relics are ruined.
• Teen Genius: Subverted. Due to others being unaware of Alpha's existence, Akira's wild success as a hunter is attributed to him being a naturally gifted prodigy defying all common sense. In truth, it's Alpha's guidance, constant training drills, and in-combat support that give Akira the edge he needs to succeed against otherwise impossible odds.
• The Teetotaler: He's sworn to never take a sip of alcohol after watching it destroy people while growing up in the slums. To him, getting drunk would be an unnecessary survival risk that would disrupt his connection to Alpha and his augmented suit.
• Telepathy:
  • Due to taking Alpha's contract, he's able communicate like this with her through the Old World domain Brain/Computer Interface.
  • It’s revealed that Old-World connectors project their feelings into their surroundings non-stop, for example, if you like someone, they’ll like you, if you’re suspicious of someone, they’ll suspect you, and if you hate someone, they’ll hate you. This is why Akira’s childhood was so rough. Even projecting positive feelings to other people there created backlash when they were negative back to him, creating a Vicious Cycle that turned him into The Paranoiac.
  • After teaming up with Shirou, they communicate telepathically more often than verbally due to both being Old World connectors, Shirou even sends him images and computer files (which Alpha has to decode for him).
• Tempting Fate: Akira likes the rare occasions when things go his way. Things tend to go wrong the minute he brings it up.
  • Alpha once reprimands him for raising all kinds of flags right before things went bad.
    Akira: [regarding the lack of monsters] I hope that this situation would continue.
    Alpha: [smiling bitterly] When you say it like that, it sounds like you're raising a death flag, you know.
    Akira: Nothing will happen. This is easy, we just need to wait for the rain to stop before going back home.
    Alpha: That in itself also did not sound good.
    Akira: [pouting] Okay okay, I just need to shut up, right?
  • Akira begging for sensor jamming rain to stop, which is followed by it increasing instead.
  • Akira saying to himself during the Inner Kuzusuhara Ruins Assault, that he has an entire APC full of ammo, so at least he won’t run out. Sure enough, he uses it all.
• They Would Cut You Up: Akira being a rare individual able to interface with the Old World Domain without a device, makes him extremely valuable, and thus he must keep the ability secret else he becomes an unwilling test subject. Worst comes to worst, he may be reduced to a Brain in a Jar.
• This Is Gonna Suck: This is his reaction whenever Alpha has to take full control of his augmented suit to have him perform rapid and complex movements beyond his capabilities. It may save his life, but it also hurts like hell and he begs her not to tear his limbs off in the process.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • CWH ammo is special heavy-duty ammunition designed for use with an anti-materiel rifle. It boasts amazing stopping power, allowing it to punch through the skulls of monsters the size of a small office building with ease and kill them even with their Healing Factor. But this power comes with a hefty price tag, forcing Akira to reserve it as a trump card against colossal and heavily-armored enemies. But as he earns more money, it drops out of this category, as it's oftentimes the only thing in his arsenal that will work, resulting in him becoming much more liberal in his use of these rounds.
  • And then, after he buys 5,000,000 aurum per bullet anti-force field rounds, he’s really sore about Alpha making him use them.
• Took a Level in Badass: His hard work training with Alpha as well as his Virtual Training Simulation bouts with Sheryl's gang eventually pays off substantially, with the latter doing so for both parties.
• Took a Level in Cheerfulness: It's subtle, but Akira goes from being wary of everyone and everything to soaking in the luxuries he's now able to afford, demonstrating a level of childish excitement over new things that he couldn't imagine himself experiencing or having at the start of the story. He also wears a huge, goofy smile when Shiori takes him out to an expensive dinner for the second time and has to be reminded to not make a scene.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Interacting with Shizuka, Sara, and Elena gives Akira the beginnings of a guilty conscience, going from only caring about himself and Alpha to starting to worry about other people. This is most noticeable in his treatment of Sheryl, where he goes from treating her as a disposable pawn to be disposed of at his leisure to actively worrying about how his actions might affect her. His growing kindness and compassion worries Alpha, who knows that he'll become more unpredictable as he starts acting in service of others rather than himself, prompting her to begin sabotaging his relationships.
• Too Much Information:
  • This is his reaction when Alpha tells him that he might get reduced to a Brain in a Jar if the government finds out about this ability to connect to the Old World domain. He isn't sure whether it's better for him to know or not know about this.
    Akira: [panicking]...You shouldn't have told me. Wait, I guess it's better for me to know in case they capture me. No, no no no, as I thought it's better if I don't know...
  • Later on, Shirakabe catches Akira stretching before a big mission. He then asks what kind of augmented suit Akira has before telling him that read-type suits like Akira's run with the risk of tearing all the ligaments of the user when stretching if they still retain the data of the previous owner. Akira immediately wishes he hadn't learned that when Alpha forces him to properly but painfully stretch his muscles out so he doesn't get a sprain in the middle of a fight. He's even more creeped out when Carol tells him a story of a guy who got a suit from a cyborg and subsequently had his limbs and spine all twisted 180 degrees.
• Tranquil Fury: Cold anger accompanied by psychotic-looking eyes is his typical angry reaction (the latter is particularly emphasized in the manga). His default way of dealing with those he dislikes is Silent Treatment.
• Trauma Button:
  • In his own words, being stolen from makes him feel like a helpless kid in the slums all over again. And doubling down on it by being blamed for being stolen from will straight up set him from reasonably upset to murderously wrathful because of how many abusive adults placed all of the blame on him for being exploitable in the first place.
  • He seems to have a minor one about being manipulated by seductresses; it makes him fearful of Sheryl’s mesmerizing smile instead of swept away by it like other boys.
  • When Alpha comes onto Akira too aggressively in Shizuka’s shop, based on his reaction, Shizuka misunderstands that something she said hurt him and overreacts.
• Trauma Conga Line: Akira’s childhood, only vaguely described, was a non-stop procession of being taken advantage of by Con Artist, Honey Trap, and other such schemes. The reason for this is explained in his Origins Episode: That the unconscious telepathy that comes as a side effect of being an Old World connector, means that he transmitted his emotions and self-image into his surroundings non-stop, which drove people to treat him so badly in the dog-eat-dog environment of the slums.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Sara and Elena are both disturbed by the ease with which Akira can commit murder. While all hunters can be expected to fight other hunters in self-defense, Akira is completely impartial and casual about it, which would mark him as a sociopath in a less violent society.
• A True Hero: A constant source of tension in the story is the contrasting philosophies between Akira and Katsuya.
  • Akira is far more pragmatic and would very, very rarely intentionally put himself in harm's way for someone else, unless he's expecting that it will be more helpful to him in the long run, and sometimes even then he'll balk. In this setting, where there are monsters everywhere, the world is legit out to get him, and most other people are rarely trustworthy, it works out well, and he gets better results than Katsuya, actually rescuing quite a few people and getting major accomplishments regardless of his intent to just try and survive. What's more, since Akira is quite suspicious of women trying to Honey Trap him, he's somewhat harder to manipulate, and when women genuinely do prove trustworthy, he dotes on them like crazy, even if he's not romantically interested.
  • Katsuya has more heroic traits going for him and would probably do better in a more idealistic setting. In this setting, he's His Own Worst Enemy as he dives right in to the thick of battle without regard for his own well-being, causing his trusted friends and allies to try and bail him out, which far more often than not gets them killed instead. His intent to "rescue everyone" leads to horrific split-second decisions and overall piss-poor leadership that cause whatever mission he's on to self-destruct, spectacularly. Lastly, his drive for fame, glory, and public recognition causes him to throw himself at monsters and dangerous situations that neither he nor his team are remotely ready for, putting himself and his allies in needlessly risky situations with immense collateral damage. What's worse, said drive for recognition also manifests as a deep-seated need to have every woman in sight throw herself at him as if he's a pop idol, causing him to pursue women who are already spoken for, antagonizing many of his fellow hunters, other gangs, and even city executives, neglect the ones who have already demonstrated their affection, and suicidally diving head-first into extreme danger when a girl he's got his eye on is in peril.
• Tsundere: For Sheryl, he’s cold both to keep his reputation as someone to fear within her gang, as well due to his past trauma from being victim to a Honey Trap, and witnessing her doing that to other hunters. All the while, Akira occasionally shows great respect for her or appreciation for her talents and risks his life for her without a second thought, giving her some Suspiciously Specific Denial statements like this:
  Akira: It’s not like I saved you because I like you or anything.
• Uncle Pennybags: He foots the bill for Sheryl's gang on multiple occasions, such as paying for new clothes for Sheryl to help her with relic negotiations and laying down some cash for Sheryl to feed the younger orphans good food and teach them to read and write. While this is largely selfishly motivated due to his belief that these actions will either make him money or give him better luck, it also shows that he's not as stingy or unreasonable as he appears.
• Underestimating Badassery: Zigzagged. People can hardly believe that Akira is a highly-ranked hunter because of his youth and size. When he's allowed to unwind, he's able to act like a perfectly ordinary boy right up to the point that he's threatened and pulls a gun on someone. In truth, he's not nearly as skilled or talented as his feats suggest, as so much of his success is tied to Alpha's support. So others judging him to be nothing special in person is accurate up to the point that Alpha helps him out.
• Unluckily Lucky:
  • Akira's sheer bad luck is awe-inspiring, given the number of life-or-death situations he finds himself in even while performing supposedly safe work, forcing him to take on threats far above his pay grade. It's not uncommon for him to lose his expensive new gear almost as quickly as he gets it due to his bad luck kicking in. And yet, he manages to drag himself out of those situations with Alpha's help and usually manages to get a workable replacement for his lost gear and often a sizable amount of cash fairly quickly.
  • His conversation with Carol about how reckless he seems makes him briefly evaluate just how unlucky he is. On one hand, his life is a laundry list of misfortune. But if he truly had nothing but bad luck, he'd never have met any of the important people in his life who have helped him thus far. The narration even states that he's not nearly as unfortunate as he thinks he is, but his personality and Alpha's words simply accentuate the negative.
• Unskilled, but Strong: From an outside perspective, Akira is an abnormally talented and strong hunter able to keep up with long-time veterans. But despite his apparent combat ability, he's completely clueless when it comes to information that should be common knowledge to a hunter. This is of course because of his former illiteracy and Alpha being the reason he's able to fight so effectively.
• Unscrupulous Hero: Akira's priority is survival. If you're a threat to that goal, it'll take Alpha convincing him to not blow your head off to avoid a quick and often messy death, and he'll wipe out entire hunter squads and antagonistic gangs as a result. If you're an aid to that goal, he can be cold and standoffish but will save your life, even doing empathetic things towards those around him if they're not an enemy, and even gradually gaining companions along the way thanks to what morality he does hang onto - but that doesn't mean he'll play nice, as Sheryl can attest.
• Unwitting Pawn:
  • Alpha promises to let Akira sell the relic she's after for a huge amount of cash. But it becomes increasingly clear throughout the story that she has big plans for this relic and gets him to thoughtlessly agree to parts of her contract to give herself more sway over him.
    • The conversation he has with Tsubaki about Alpha shows that Akira has caught on to a lot of Alpha's tricks, so it's subverted. He considers I Owe You My Life and I Gave My Word to outweigh it.
  • Played straight with Alice. Alice's plan depended on Akira being easily riled into being a force for Chloe to throw her company's forces at to demonstrate its strength to Olivia and help recruit her.
• Vague Age: Akira's age is never mentioned. He's consistently treated as a child by the other characters in the story and he's mentioned to be malnourished, short, and underweight. But he's not so young that he doesn't understand the value of sex appeal, while also looking old enough that Carol wonders if he's Younger Than He Looks when her attempts at seducing him fail, implying that he's somewhere in his early teens. Akira himself has no idea how old he is or when he was born, as no one ever bothered even tell him the date for most of his life.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: While Akira spends a significant amount of time on getting his revenge for one or more Berserk Button of his getting pressed, after he achieves that revenge, it tends to leave him with negative feelings instead of positive ones, and needing to rely on someone as The Confidant to recover.
• Villain Respect: Akira gets this multiple times for his loyalty and I Gave My Word professionalism.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Those he gets along with best, either repeatedly tease him, or he occasionally assails them with Brutal Honesty and insults. Or there’s some mixture of each.
• Walking Armory: After getting his augmented suit he winds up carrying multiple assault rifles, an anti-tank rifle, a grenade launcher, and sometimes a minigun. It gets so cumbersome that he springs for a Bifurcated Weapon line of guns that contains these functions to avert this, but he winds up buying an APC full of weapons and ammunition anyways.
• The Watson: Due to growing up in the slums and being completely illiterate until Alpha teaches him to read, Akira is prone to asking her and other hunters questions about the workings of the setting. This is baffling to other characters, given that he fights at the level of a veteran hunter despite being a fresh-faced newbie.
• Would Hit a Girl:
  • Akira comes within a hairsbreadth of shooting Sheryl, only stopping because Alpha realizes that she's a non-combatant and that it would be a waste of ammo to shoot Sheryl.
  • And then there's Akira cutting through an Amazon Brigade of hunters like a hot knife through butter (sometimes literally.)
• Wrecked Weapon: His weapons, augmented suits, and vehicles get trashed extremely often. Eventually he becomes Crazy-Prepared in his equipment choices to compensate.
• You Are Number 6: Akira is the 499th person that Alpha has tried to train in order to get to the relic she needs. Many of the ones before him met grisly fates and her lack of interest in them indicates that she no longer cares for them now that they're dead or unwilling to help her achieve her goals.

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