Reign of the Seven Spellblades Character Index
The Sword Roses | Kimberly Students (Upperclassmen) | Kimberly Faculty | Spoiler Characters
The Sword Roses | Kimberly Students (Upperclassmen) | Kimberly Faculty | Spoiler Characters
Please be aware that not all spoilers might be tagged. Proceed with caution!
Chronology Key
This key is based on the main protagonists' grade year progression through Kimberly Magic Academy. Grade years cited in characters' descriptions are based on their grade year at time of introduction.- Year 1 (1532 of the Great Calendar): Light Novel Volumes 1-3 | Manga Chapters 1-46 | Anime Season 1
- Year 2 (1533 GC): LN Volumes 4-6
- Year 3 (1534 GC): LN Volumes 7-10
- Year 4 (1535 GC): LN Volumes 11-13
- Year 5 (1536 GC): LN Volumes 14-TBD
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The Sword Roses
Clockwise from upper right: Oliver Horn, Nanao Hibiya, Katie Aalto, Guy Greenwood, Pete Reston, and Chela McFarlane.
First Appearance: LN Volume 1 | Manga Chapter 1 | Anime 1x1 "Ceremony"
Collectively, the Sword Roses provide examples of the following tropes:
- Cast of Expies: Played With, as the group is clearly referential in many ways to the Harry-Ron-Hermione Power Trio of the Harry Potter series (Bokuto Uno has openly noted the Potterverse as the series' inspiration), but the relevant traits are spread across six characters instead of three. Oliver and Nanao split Harry,note Guy and Chela split Ron,note and Katie and Pete split Hermione.note
- Famed In-Story: After being at the forefront of several noteworthy campus incidents in the first two years, the Sword Roses and Oliver and Nanao especially start to become minor celebrities in the student body. Which isn't always a good thing: in volume 6, they begin to get targeted for harassment by Alvin Godfrey's political opponents in attempts to embarrass him by proxy.
- Gender-Equal Ensemble: Three boys (Pete is a Sex Shifter but still has a masculine gender identity) and three girls.
- Mad Scientist Laboratory: In volume 2 they're given one of their own as a Home Base by an actual Mad Scientist, Vera Miligan, as a partial apology for the events of the previous volume. Located on the first level of the labyrinth, it features laboratory equipment, training space, and living and dining quarters, and is big enough to comfortably accommodate Marco the troll.
- Meaningful Name: Justified. Nanao specifically picked the name "Sword Roses" for this purpose after Chela asked to come up with a name for the group, based on a samurai custom from Yamatsu: standing in a circle and laying their swords across each other causes the tips to create a pattern resembling a flower, representing the bonds of friendship between them causing something wonderful to bloom in that moment, no matter what trials might come their way in the future—which given Kimberly, is all but guaranteed. It's also a Punny Name: in Japanese it's written as 剣花 kenka (inspiring the title of the anime's opening theme), which is a homonym of 喧嘩 kenka, meaning "fight" or "quarrel".
- The Team: Not truly a Five-Man Band since there's six of them from the beginning, although it mostly maps onto that setup. Oliver is The Hero, being the main protagonist and a Jack of All Trades. Nanao is The Lancer, the best fighter among the group with a sometimes-alien perspective, and who sticks to Oliver like glue. Guy is The Big Guy: he's less talented than the others at magical pursuits but makes up for it with brawn and the Hot-Blooded instinctive loyalty of a farm boy. Pete evolves into The Smart Guy: he starts out having to catch up to the others given his Mage Born of Muggles background, but quickly surpasses them, particularly in Awesomeness by Analysis. Katie, The Heart, is less naturally prone to violence than the others and is a Friend to All Living Things. Chela acts as co-leader of the group with Oliver but in a more motherly way: she grew up in the mage aristocracy, and though an accomplished mage, her biggest role in the team is guiding the others through the intricacies of its social constructs.
- True Companions: They become Fire-Forged Friends when Oliver, Nanao, Guy, Pete, and Chela work together to rescue Katie when a troll goes berserk during the entrance ceremonies. Their subsequent travails at Kimberly serve only to deepen the group's friendship.
Oliver Horn
Voiced by: Atsushi Tamaru (Japanese), Drew Breedlove (English)
“I don’t know many fancy spells, but I like to think I’m pretty good at casting and adapting spells.”
The protagonist and leader of the group. A calm and rational boy who rarely shows strong emotions. He comes to Kimberly on a secret mission.- Awesomeness by Analysis: Oliver's general fighting style is to defend and protect himself while observing his opponent's attacks and looking for openings to disrupt them and Counter-Attack. This is a trademark of the Lanoff sword school, but Oliver is so good at it, and at strategizing on the fly more generally, that it leads other analytically minded characters to wonder just how he got that good: Tullio Rossi and Vera Miligan are both perturbed by how someone seemingly so average can keep up with the likes of Nanao and Chela, while Demitrio Aristides realizes in volume 9 that he fights like a Gnostic Hunter, as indeed both his parents were.
- Battle Couple: He and Nanao are practically attached at the hip from the first day of class, on the battlefield and off, though it's complicated by her simultaneous desire for a rematch to the death. Oliver holds back from actively pursuing her for a while for several reasons,note but she eventually becomes frustrated and forces the issue in volume 9, creating a rift between them. They make up in volume 10 after much soul-searching on both sides and become an Official Couple.
- Beware the Nice Ones: He's a Nice Guy and normally very cool-headed under pressure, but bullying his friends to their faces is a serious Berserk Button for him, as a group of students aligned to the conservative faction learn the hard way when they start picking on Katie over her efforts to save the troll from the entrance ceremony incident. And he goes full Pay Evil unto Evil when it comes to the seven mages who murdered his mother. Lampshaded by Tim Linton in volume 9:"The way you act all prim and proper makes you extra nasty. I oughtta pin a note to your back saying, I will lose my shit at the worst possible second."
- Big Brother Instinct: He looks at Teresa Carste like a big brother on a younger sibling, once picking her up and carrying her in his arms on a trip through the labyrinth when he senses she's in need of comforting.
- Blue Blood: He doesn't normally let on, but he's related to the Sherwood clan, one of the older mage families of Yelgland. He is in fact much more closely related than he admits, being the direct great-grandson of the former clan patriarch on his mother's side, rather than the unimportant branch-family by-blow he purports to be.
- Cannot Tell a Joke: By nature he's an imitator and adapter of other people's skills, and is technically proficient at most things he attempts but lacks flair. This extends to comedy: he often attempts to amuse people with parlor tricks and sketch comedy, but lacks the sense of comedic timing needed to make the jokes land. Justified: Before his mother was murdered he was actually a comedy genius, but the Training from Hell he went through to be capable of housing a fragment of her soul caused him to permanently lose that part of his own soul.
- Career Not Taken: Volume 5 reveals he was once very good at telling jokes and wanted to be a comedian when he grew up, but the Training from Hell he went through to be able to house a Soul Fragment of his mother and take revenge on her murderers caused him to permanently lose the part of his soul that housed his sense of comedic timing.
- Cast from Lifespan: Oliver performs an extremely dangerous soul merger with his mother's soul during the Assassination Attempt against Enrico Forghieri. It takes him almost five days to heal from both that and the injuries he sustained, by which time he's grown a full centimeter because of his own soul advancing his body's growth timetable. He has no idea how much of his natural lifespan he lost in that battle but he knows it was probably a lot.
- Casting Gag: Atsushi Tamaru previously voiced another Master Swordsman protagonist of a Wizarding School Light Novel series who walks in on a partially clothed Love Interest in the first episode, namely Ayato Amagiri from The Asterisk War, and just like in his previous series, he and his Love Interest duel shortly after meeting only to have it stopped by a third party (albeit for very different reasons).
- Chick Magnet: Just by the end of the first book, Oliver has become the apex of a Love Triangle between Nanao (mutual) and Katie (unrequited). On top of this, Chela sometimes amuses herself by flirting with him, his cousin Shannon is overtly affectionate with him, and even Vera Miligan briefly makes a pass at him in volume 3 (out of sheer interest in his incongruously strong abilities as a fighter). This is much to the amusement of Pete and especially Guy, who frequently rib him about his ability to attract girls seemingly by complete accident, and his indecisiveness in dealing with it.
- Clothing Combat: "Hidden Tail", an advanced Lanoff Style move Oliver first uses while dueling Joseph Albright in volume 2. He moves with an incoming blow, using his outer robe to conceal his windup for a Roundhouse Kick.
- Clueless Chick-Magnet: Downplayed. Oliver is aware that he attracts an inordinate amount of female attention (if nothing else, Pete and Guy never let him forget it), he's just somewhat baffled about why and has trouble figuring out what, if anything, to do about it for a while. Eventually, his big brother Gwyn counsels him to just take his relationships at their own natural pace and allow himself to feel things without trying to classify them, which Oliver takes to heart.
- Cool Mask: Oliver has a black domino mask that he wears while acting as the leader of his comrades. It has a cognitive disruption spell on it that makes him harder to identify.
- Cowardly Lion: By his own admission, he's scared out of his mind every time he's in a life-or-death situation because only an idiot—or Nanao—wouldn't be. But there's nothing to be gained by being scared, and if he gives in to fear, the people around him will suffer.
- Deadly Upgrade: Merging his soul with his mother's, which lets him use the fighting techniques she developed and mastered. He can only do so for short periods and it puts him into extreme pain and tears his body apart when he does: when he used it against Enrico Forghieri, it would have killed him on the spot had he not had an ally constantly casting healing spells on him.
- Doomed Protagonist: Implied. Oliver is Secretly Dying because his ability to use his mother's Soul Fragment and Ghost Memory is Cast from Lifespan. While the series is only just over the halfway mark, it is likely to end either with him burning out his life altogether, one of his targets pulling Assassin Outclassin', or in a long-delayed final Duel to the Death with Nanao. That said, Bokuto Uno did end up giving his last set of protagonists an Earn Your Happy Ending, so this should not be considered set in stone.
- Even the Guys Want Him: The later volumes start to lightly imply that Pete may have a crush on him in addition to Nanao and Katie: he has bouts of acting a little like a tsundere while Oliver helps him with the side effects of his reversi transformations, and in volume 8 Pete says something about "getting him to notice me" after standing on the sidelines after Lesedi Ingwe irritably tells Oliver to leave his love life on the surface.
- Expy: Downplayed. Oliver is loosely based on Harry Potter: he strongly resembles him physically (down to having his father's looks and his mother's eyes) and is a competent all-round mage with few deficiencies, and his Missing Mom and Disappeared Dad are very important to his storyline. However, Oliver was raised as a mage whereas Harry had Muggle Foster Parents, and Nanao got Harry's Fish out of Water traits and abilities as a Flying Broomstick rider, whereas Oliver is relegated to playing broomsports as her catcher (i.e. his job is literally to catch her with magic if she's knocked off her broom). Also, the deaths of Oliver's parents drive his Series Goal much more directly than Harry: Harry mostly fought Voldemort in self-defense, whereas Oliver is conspiring with other students to kill seven of Kimberly's faculty to avenge Chloe.
- Eye Color Change: Oliver is shown in the novel art to have had brown eyes like his father when he was a child, but in the present day they're golden like his mother's. It's implied this was a side effect of taking a fragment of his mother's soul into himself.
- First Kiss:
- Nanao kisses him for the first time when she wants him to stop crying (from happiness) after their Calvinball game in volume 6 helps him regain his coordination.
- And he finally kisses her back for the first time in volume 10, leading to their Relationship Upgrade.
- Ghost Memory: He has his mother Chloe Halford's soul inside him and can access many of her memories.
- The Grappler: While it isn't his primary fighting style, he demonstrates multiple times that he's perfectly fine with incorporating wrestling moves if the situation calls for it: in volume 2, he puts Tullio Rossi into an armlock when the other man tries to punch him with his off hand, then reduces Joseph Albright's powerful fighting style to a shoving match by grabbing his sword arm, and then just waits for him to get frustrated enough at the impasse to make a mistake.
- I Am Not Left-Handed: Because of Chloe's Ghost Memory, he can draw on her unique fighting techniques, including the Two-Blade Style she invented, and the Fourth Spellblade, Angustavia, which allows him to select an outcome from possible short-term futures. This allows him to defeat instructor Darius Grenville despite being only a first-year student, though the toll on his body is extreme.
- In-Series Nickname: "Noll" (an archaic diminutive of Oliver), although only his close relatives usually call him that.
- Jack of All Trades: He's good and knowledgeable in a wide variety of things but not particularly outstanding. This is intentional on his part, being Weak, but Skilled. He makes up the difference with rigorous training and has enough bases covered that he can still be a top student at Kimberly.
- Lazy Alias: "Oliver Horn" is an assumed identity. Oliver is his original given name, but his birth surname is either Groves or Halford; he uses the name "Horn" to hide his connection to the Sherwood clan.
- Like Brother and Sister: He and Chela are the de facto co-leaders of the Sword Roses and are societal peers who get along very well (according to the author, she's only two weeks older than him), but there's no romantic attraction between them, or at least nothing to the level of what Nanao and Katie feel for Oliver. Amusingly, her father once dated his mother.
- Like Parent, Like Spouse: As the series goes on and Oliver and Nanao's relationship deepens, Nanao starts to draw various comparisons to Chloe Halford. Only Oliver and his close relatives know that he's Chloe's son.
- Living a Double Life: A significant source of the series' drama is the fact that Oliver is simultaneously the upstanding de facto leader of the Sword Roses and rising star in Kimberly's student body, and an Anti-Hero leading a conspiracy to murder six Kimberly teachers and the headmistress. Discussed in his Internal Monologue in volume 10: he comments that he's only able to stay sane by keeping a hard line between the two, which his comrades' just-floated proposal to recruit Katie and Miligan risks upending.
- Love Confession:
- After Oliver and Chela give the other Sword Roses The Talk, Nanao rather abruptly asks him if he wants to have children with her (and then allows how she put her foot in her mouth due to her inexperience with anything but battle). Oliver admits that he is attracted to her, though he isn't remotely ready to even think about children: their ages aside, he doesn't want their relationship "to be reduced to reproduction and inheritance" the way it often is among mages.
- Done more decisively in volume 10. After a Forceful Kiss from her in volume 9, Oliver corners her in the Sword Roses' base and gives her a Forceful Kiss of his own, telling her "You're not the only one restraining yourself!" The next morning, after they've spent the night in bed together (though they didn't have sex) he admits to himself that he's in love with her.
- Love Dodecahedron: Before the end of the first week of classes he's become the apex of one, with Katie crushing on him (due to him being a Nice Guy) and Nanao convinced he's her destined partner (due to the connection they forged when they sparred in class). He doesn't mind too much, although he doesn't return Katie's feelings. Pete has also admitted to being in love with him; ditto the Sword Roses' underclasswoman Teresa Carste, whom he sees as more of a little sister.
- Made of Iron: Oliver may not have much in the way of special talents, but he is incredibly persistent and resistant to hardship and pain because of the Training from Hell his relatives put him through to make him able to withstand the agony of merging with his mother's soul.
- Manly Tears: Oliver is given to a good cry on occasion, usually resulting from happiness: he tears up at the end of the first volume after realizing Katie wasn't hurt physically or mentally by her ordeal with Miligan and the troll, and again in volume 6 after the Calvinball game helps him get his coordination back.
- Master Swordsman: By first-year standards he's an above-average duelist from the beginning, having trained in the Lanoff Style from a very young age and also capable of the unique Two-Blade Style via Chloe's Ghost Memory. He's able to match Nanao, a veteran of multiple real battles, blow for blow.
- Multiple-Choice Future: Exploited by Oliver with the Fourth Spellblade, "Angustavia — the thread that crosses the abyss", which, in theory, selects from possible short-term futures to force the one with the desired outcome. He learned it from his mother's Ghost Memory, but it's revealed in volume 10 that this isn't all there is to it: he couldn't figure it out for years, until the murder of his mother and his mistreatment by the Sherwood elders cracked something in him and he subconsciously concluded that he was destined to suffer forever. Thus, his version of the spellblade in fact picks the possible future where he lives to suffer the most.
- Murder in the Family: Volume 10 reveals that his first kill was his own maternal great-grandparents, to avenge the abuse their descendants, especially himself and Shannon, suffered at their hands. His father committed suicide to help cover it up.
- Parental Abandonment: His mother was Chloe Halford, a famous battlemage of the Gnostic Hunters who had him with her partner Edgar Groves. She's the woman who is murdered by Esmeralda in the prologue of volume 1. His father Edgar Groves is eventually revealed to have committed suicide years later, partly out of guilt over being unable to stop the Sherwood clan's mistreatment of his son, and partly as a Thanatos Gambit to cover up Oliver murdering his maternal great-grandparents for what they did to him and Shannon.
- Overshadowed by Awesome: Zig-Zagged. Oliver is a Jack of All Trades who lacks any significant special skills, but he's a good planner and a quick thinker, and he works his butt off practicing. Alongside Nanao (who is a better swordswoman but worse at spellcasting and strategy), he's consistently one of the top-ranked fighters in his year, but not by enough to be decisive, and especially early on his abilities are often derided for being uninteresting and/or derived from book learning rather than natural talent. Also, the upperclassmen and professors are all far stronger than him man-to-man. And he can only use his mother's abilities at severe physical cost.
- Pay Evil unto Evil:
- Seven Kimberly teachers murdered Oliver's mother. Oliver and his clan plot to avenge her by killing all of them. Darius Grenville is a particular standout: he inflicted 128 kinds of torture on her, so Oliver uses an Agony Beam to inflict the pain of the same tortures on him, telling him he won't stop until he says the magic words. Before he's even a quarter of the way through the list, a near-catatonic Grenville begs him to just make it stop, and Oliver cuts his head off.
- Volume 10 reveals his first kill was his own maternal great-grandparents, partly for drugging him into raping his cousin Shannon.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: The Armor-Piercing Question, "The night of April 8th, 1525, of the Great Calendar. Where were you, and what were you doing?" Directed at each of his mother's killers before his Assassination Attempts.
- Rape as Backstory: It turns out that the Sherwood clan is just as rotten as the rest of them: several years before the series begins, the clan elders drugged him and Shannon and forced him to impregnate her in the interests of producing a pure-blooded heir. This causes a PTSD-related hiccup when he tries to consummate with Nanao in volume 10; they agree to try to gradually work past it.
- Refuge in Audacity: Oliver weaponizes it. He has a public image of a Jack of All Trades, Master of None mage who gets by on the back of rigorous training and study. This serves to divert faculty attention away from him, making him seem too weak to be connected to the string of murdered teachers, at least initially. And no sane mage would expect a fifteen-year-old first-year to have a spellblade, especially not one thought lost with its last wielder's murder.
- Refusal of the Call: Oliver's rise in the student body leads to several student factions trying to court him, but with little success.
- Alvin Godfrey tries to recruit him and Nanao to the Campus Watch in volume 4. Oliver declines, fearing that Watch duties could interfere with his mission of revenge, and Nanao follows suit because she by now considers her place to be at his side.
- In volume 10, Percival Whalley tries to flip his support for Miligan's candidacy for Student Council President by appealing to their shared nature as jacks-of-all-trades, offering to appoint him to the student council and put him into consideration as interim Student Council President.note
- Relationship Upgrade: He and Nanao have a confrontation including a Forceful Kiss from her in volume 9 due to her becoming jealous of his rapprochement with Richard Andrews. After much mutual soul-searching for the next several days, he kisses her back with equal force in volume 10 and admits he feels no less strongly towards her. The two become a couple finally, and even try to have sex, though Their First Time is stymied by Oliver's PTSD.
- Series Goal: Kill the seven mages who tortuously murdered his mother in a methodical and careful Revenge plot, which is slowly carried out over his years at Kimberly.
- Stock Light-Novel Hero: He checks most of the typical boxes: an ordinary-looking teenage boy attending a Wizarding School who is adept with magic and the sword compared to his peers, though rather than gaining new abilities he tends to refine the ones he already has like the Stock Shōnen Hero. He's also a bit of a Chick Magnet, although he only really has eyes for Nanao.
- Strong Family Resemblance: As seen in the novel art, Oliver is the spitting image of his father Edgar, which conveniently helps conceal the identity of his mother from her killers.
- Team Dad: He's experienced with magical society and the other Sword Roses look to him as their de facto leader. Lampshaded by Pete in volume 2, who complains to him that he's not their dad when he's hesitant to put them at risk for a long-shot plan. We eventually learn that this is partly because of a habit of his of taking other people's problems on himself, which is ultimately at the root of his mastering the Fourth Spellblade.
- Technician Versus Performer: He's the Technician to Nanao's Performer. As the caption on his portrait implies, he's a competent technical mage and swordsman; however, he tends to be an imitator and adapter of techniques created by others and chooses to concentrate on ones he's particularly good at like his grave soil spatial magic. This may have been trained into him since his childhood, given the fact he uses his mother's Ghost Memory in life-and-death battles. This also means he Cannot Tell a Joke: he can imitate sketch comedy and humorous parlor tricks extremely well at a technical level (e.g. causing bouquets of flowers to sprout from his collar), but he doesn't have the sense of comedic timing needed to make the jokes land.
- Trauma Conga Line: His full Backstory, once revealed in volume 10, is round after round of suffering for a half-dozen years on end. His happy life with his parents was shattered by her falling-out with her Gnostic Hunter comrades: Chloe was murdered and Ed and Oliver fled to Seek Sanctuary with her powerful, estranged relatives. Turns out, she was the family Black Sheep: when the remnants of Chloe's soul settled with Oliver, his great-grandfather used him to play back her murder from her Ghost Memory, forcing him to relive her Rasputinian Death in first-person. Seeking revenge meant years of repeated Training from Hell to the point of death so that he could perform an unnatural Merger of Souls with his mother, the only hope a Master of None mage like Oliver had of posing a credible threat to a Kimberly Magic Academy professor. Then his great-grandfather had him drugged into a hyperaggressive state and unleashed him on his gentle cousin Shannon, hoping to impregnate her with a child with progenitor ancestry. Shannon forgave him since he was Not Himself, but Oliver's only hope of redeeming his guilt over the rape was scuttled when their daughter was stillborn—leading him to subconsciously conclude that he was destined to suffer forever. All this was capped off when Oliver murdered both his maternal great-grandparents for their actions, and his father committed suicide, both to cover it up and out of guilt for being unable to stop the rape.
- Traumatic Superpower Awakening: As a child he was a strictly ordinary Jack of All Trades mage like his father and not expected to amount to much, which his birth family were perfectly okay with. Reliving the Rasputinian Death of his mother through her Ghost Memory and his mistreatment by the Sherwood elders, up to and including being drugged into raping and impregnating his cousin, then hoping they could make the best of it with their daughter only for the baby to be stillborn, led him to subconsciously believe he was destined to suffer forever—letting him master a variation of the Fourth Spellblade that picks the possible future where he lives to suffer the most.
- Unique Protagonist Asset: Zig-Zagged. In public, Oliver ostensibly doesn't have one, and it baffles many onlookers that he can keep up with the natural talents of his peers despite seemingly being so ordinary, simply from rigorous training and study. He secretly has a Soul Fragment of his mother, Chloe Halford, inside him. This allows him to use the Fourth Spellblade, as well as perform a temporary Merger of Souls to draw on her fighting style and combat experience. However, both abilities are essentially Cast From Hitpoints, not to mention the fact that using them against anybody but the teachers he's targeting to avenge his mother would give the game away. Likewise, he can't mobilize the cadre of mages following him in the cause of his revenge to deal with unrelated problems like Ophelia Salvadori kidnapping Pete, because every time he calls them up, it risks exposure.
- Unscrupulous Hero: Well, it's hard to be straightforwardly heroic when your primary motive for enrolling in a school is to murder seven of its faculty members. But despite his rather grim quest, Oliver is still unfailingly kind and empathetic, which motivates his revenge plot all the more upon seeing how utterly dastardly and amoral his mother's killers are, and he hopes that even if he dies in his quest, it helps clear the way for more compassionate mages to take power afterwards.
- Weak, but Skilled: Downplayed. While Oliver has no significant deficiencies as a mage, he also has no particular special talents of his own to set him apart from his peers other than his ability to exploit his mother's Ghost Memory to use her techniques, including the Fourth Spellblade, which is very much a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that is Cast from Lifespan and could easily kill him if he uses it too often. He makes up for it with rigorous study and training, which lets him keep pace with more naturally gifted mages.
- Withholding Their Name: "Horn" isn't his real surname: his parents are Edgar Groves and Chloe Halford. He conceals this fact from everyone except his coconspirators to obfuscate his purpose for attending Kimberly.
- You Killed My Father: A First-Episode Spoiler: he's secretly the leader of a cabal of mages (mostly composed of his extended family) infiltrating Kimberly to do battle with corrupt faculty. For his part, he seeks to kill the seven Sadist Teachers who murdered his mother, and makes his start by torturing and killing Darius Grenville at the end of volume 1.
Nanao Hibiya
Voiced by: Yuka Nukui (Japanese), Veronica Laux (English)
“Enjoy not the sword of vengeance, but the sword of mutual love.”
Click to see her Innocent Color form
An Azian samurai girl who transfers to Kimberly in the same year as Oliver and the rest.Click to see her Innocent Color form
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Well, normally not: her katana is only sharp to ordinary sword levels. On the other hand, she's the inventor of the Seventh Spellblade, which cuts space and time themselves on its way to cutting the target—though she has yet to figure out how to use it on purpose.
- Achievements in Ignorance: During her and Oliver's battle with Miligan, Nanao manages to invent the eponymous Seventh Spellblade (there were previously six) completely by accident when she "cuts everything between herself and her target"—including the space between her and Miligan—by applying sheer force of will to her katana. Even Nanao herself has no clear idea what she did and is unable to duplicate the feat.
- Adaptation Dye-Job: Nanao naturally has blue-black hair in the novel text, except when her Innocent Color bleaches it white; her eye color is not stated. Miyuki Ruria normally draws her with dark purple hair and eyes, turning them blue when her Innocent Color activates. Sakae Esuno draws her in the manga with black hair and brown eyes, though it's obscured by the red-and-purple Color Wash he sometimes uses on color pages (notably the garuda fight). The anime follows Ruria's example on her hair color, but leaves out her eye color changing.
- Antiquated Linguistics: She speaks in a far more formal manner than the other cast members, which is probably at least partially due to Yelglish not being her first language, though it also gives her a Warrior Poet aspect. In the Japanese version she commonly addresses people with the "-dono" honorific and the verb "de gozaru", both of which are terms of respect and humility strongly associated with the samurai caste and not much used in modern Japan.
- Autopilot Artistry: Nanao's biggest obstacle in learning magic is that a lot of the strange tricks she pulls off, especially while in Innocent Color mode, she does so on pure instinct. She's so used to controlling her body's own energy from her sword trainingnote that she does it without conscious thought, and is thus able to do things like parrying spells with her katana by instinctively synchronizing to the incoming element and disrupting it, and inventing the Seventh Spellblade when she has to close the distance to Miligan before Miligan's Deadly Gaze can hit her, and so wills herself to strike faster than the speed of light. But because it's all instinct, she's often unable to deliberately repeat such feats, and struggles to cast basic spells because they require her to project her magic outside her body.
- Battle Couple: She and Oliver are practically attached at the hip from the first day of class, on the battlefield and off, though it's complicated by her simultaneous desire for a rematch to the death. She respects his wish to avoid complicating their friendship, but she eventually becomes frustrated and forces the issue in volume 9, creating a rift between them. They make up in volume 10 after much soul-searching on both sides and become an Official Couple.
- BFS: Downplayed. Nanao's sword is a standard katana, but by mage standards it's huge: most prefer short one-handed blades for their athames.
- Big Eater: During the entrance dinner, she claims she could eat a dish meant to be split between six people. The amount Nanao can put down and her absentminded disregard for portion size are one of the series' minor Running Gags: Oliver often finds himself having to make plates for her so that she doesn't hog entire meal courses. Justified according to volume 10, which notes that mages as a general rule require more nutrition than nonmagicals of the same age; Nanao's physically active lifestyle as a samurai likely compounded this.
- Blood Knight: She loves swordplay and is always up for any fight that comes her way. Part of her indignance at Andrews's proposed kobold hunt was that she was eager to cross swords with Andrews himself.
- Book Dumb: Nanao is a middling student in terms of academics and takes most of two years to catch up to the other Sword Roses (Pete excepted) in traditional spellcasting. However, she's a genius at Sword Arts and broomsports (to the point where even upperclassmen avoid fighting her by volume 10), and is very insightful when dealing with antagonistic students and their various Freudian Excuses for their behavior.
- Brutal Honesty: Nanao does generally try to be nice to people, but she doesn't spare their feelings when she thinks they need to hear something unpleasant. After Pete is kidnapped by Ophelia and Guy is desperate to mount a rescue, she tells him the odds aren't good with a disturbing amount of calm: in her experience as a samurai, only one in five people who were missing after a battle ever turned up alive.
- Can't Hold Her Liquor: In volume 4, a mug of hard cider (ordered by Guy, who mistook it on the menu for regular cider) is enough to get her drunk in only minutes.
- Child Soldier: She's been swinging a sword probably since she was big enough to pick one up, and is a war veteran Covered with Scars at the tender age of fifteen.
- Covered with Scars: Her body is covered in old war wounds below the neck.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Nanao is a fine swordsman but has no experience at spellcasting whatsoever and takes quite a while to catch up to her friends in that regard.
- Custom Uniform: Starting on the first day of classes, she takes to wearing the top half of her Kimberly school uniform over her red hakama trousers.
- Decapitation Strike: She routinely searches for an opening to try to take an enemy leader's head, often literally.
- During her Last Stand in Yamatsukuni, she led her remaining troops in a suicide charge at the enemy general's camp and very nearly got through to him, killing his son-in-law in passing in the process.
- When the Sword Roses intervene in the "Battle of Hell's Armies" (the test to enter the third layer of the labyrinth), the others foil the enemy cavalry charge, giving her an opportunity to go for the enemy leader. She takes his head off.
- When her and Oliver's broomsport team, the Wild Geese, face off against Diana Ashbury's Blue Swallows, three of her teammates keep Ashbury busy and the others counterattack the Swallows. In the confusion, Nanao slips away and then makes a diving attack on the opposing captain, only foiled at the last second when a student in the stands shines a light in her eyes and throws her aim off.
- Driving Question: One of the many low-level subplots that becomes apparent: what is Nanao's connection to the late Chloe Halford? She's able to ride Chloe's broom when no one else could tame it, and after Chloe's death Theodore McFarlane found Nanao while traveling the world trying to fulfill an oath he swore to Chloe. And like Chloe, she's a spellblade wielder.
- Dude Magnet: She's considered quite beautiful in-universe, and as she gains fame at the school she starts to get frequently propositioned by male mages—some of whom have the ulterior motive of wanting to breed her magical talents into their bloodlines. The propositions prompt Oliver and Chela to host a sex ed seminar for their friends.
- First Kiss:
- She kisses Oliver for the first time (not counting the Smooch of Victory in volume 1) when she wants him to stop crying (from happiness) after their Calvinball game in volume 6 helps him regain his coordination.
- Oliver finally returns her Forceful Kiss in volume 9 with an equally amorous kiss of his own in volume 10.
- Friendly Rivalry: Develops one with Diana Ashbury, the star of one of the senior-level broomsport teams, after making her work for her win during Nanao's debut match. Ashbury initially dismissed her, but was so impressed by her performance that she starts mentoring Nanao during broomsport practice despite being on a different team, seeing her as a Worthy Opponent she wishes to become even more worthy.
- Hair Color Dissonance: Her natural hair color according to the text of the novel is blue-black, but she's always been drawn in color illustrations with purple hair—a little odd considering the series doesn't normally subscribe to Amazing Technicolor Population.
- Iaijutsu Practitioner: Her sword style's repertoire includes the "Tachi-Iai Ring Stance", an iaijutsu designed to rapidly counter an attack from any direction. In volume 10 she mixes this with the spell Gladio to extend the sword stroke from her iai into a Sword Beam.
- Innocent Fanservice Girl: Occasionally. The morning of their first day of classes, Oliver catches her bathing topless in a fountain, in full view of the boys' dormitory. Yamatsukini apparently draws no distinction between the sexes, at least in the samurai caste, so she simply wasn't aware that her "cleansing ritual" could draw that kind of attention in the West. There's also the bit in volume 2 where she wonders aloud if she could unlock more mana from her womb the way Chela just explained to Pete,note and Oliver hurriedly stops her from pulling her skirt up to look.
- Insecure Love Interest: She has a jealous streak, and while she doesn't usually let on, she has a slight body-image issue over being Covered in Scars from her samurai days, and says "I Am Not Pretty" almost verbatim in volume 10 after Oliver comes on to her finally. Oliver reassures her that she's beautiful to him.
- Kimono Is Traditional: Having been raised in a samurai household, she knows her way around kimono. She normally wears a hakama-style skirt with her school uniform, and dresses up in kimono to hold a Japanese-style tea ceremony for Ursule Valois in volume 13.
- Lacerating Love Language: Played for Drama. Nanao Hibiya was raised in a sword style whose core tenet is "Enjoy not the sword of vengeance, but the sword of mutual love"—meaning to seek happiness in a Duel to the Death with one you admire and respect. She's internalized this ideal so much that when she falls in Love at First Punch with Oliver Horn after they spar in Sword Arts class, she admits she can't tell the difference between the man and his sword, and can't kick the desire to fight him without holding back again. This comes to a head at the end of volume 9, where, provoked to irrational jealousy by the end of their championship match in the combat leagues, she throws him against a tree for a Forceful Kiss. Oliver's Internal Monologue describes her looking at him as if "Yearning to carve her way into her beloved, or, barring that, at least pull him down and have her way with him."
- Lady of War: She's poised, fearless, and a Master Swordsman who fought in multiple battles as a samurai for the lord of Tourikueisen. She's also considered quite beautiful In-Universe, and has a feminine side she sporadically indulges: volume 13 shows her hosting a traditional tea ceremony for Ursule Valois in kimono.
- The Lancer: Early on she attaches herself to Oliver due to their attraction, and by volume 4 she's fully committed to remaining by his side. She acts as a thematic foil to him: a foreigner (where he's a Yelgland native), a mage of phenomenal natural talent but little formal schooling (where he's an imitator and adapter of techniques developed by others), and brash and eager to fight (where he's normally cool-headed and measured).
- Last Stand: When Lord McFarlane discovered her, she was leading the rearguard of a defeated army in blocking a mountain pass.
- Legally Dead: Nanao is considered dead in her homeland, officially having fought to the last against General Souma Yoshihisa. Her mother at least was still alive when Theodore McFarlane took her to Yelgland, and Nanao gets occasional updates and sends money back from her stipend.
- Like Parent, Like Spouse: As the series goes on and Oliver and Nanao's relationship deepens, Nanao starts to draw various comparisons to Chloe Halford. Only Oliver and his close relatives know that he's Chloe's son.
- Love at First Punch: One of the ideals of the sword school she was taught was to "enjoy not the sword of vengeance, but the sword of mutual love"—meaning to seek joy in a duel with an opponent one accepts and respects. She finds that when she spars with Oliver. While talking her out of her death wish, Chela suggests she try relating to Oliver in ways besides swordplay to find that joy again. Unfortunately, this doesn't work: as their relationship deepens, so does her desire to fight him.
- Lovable Jock: She's a middling student academically but excels at the athletic sides of Kimberly's curriculum, having been swinging a sword since she was big enough to pick one up, and she loves her friends as passionately as she loves swordplay, and has a lot of empathy for antagonistic students that is prone to inducing Heel Face Turns on their part.
- Love Hurts: She's deeply torn by her feelings for Oliver: she wants to remain by his side and feels an irresistible urge to be close to him and hold him, but at the same time she cannot get rid of the simultaneous wish for a Duel to the Death with him, and fears that someday these warring desires might drive her Ax-Crazy (she asks Katie to kill her if that ever happens)."If you truly love someone, can that emotion coexist with an urge to see them dead?"
- Mage Born of Muggles: Magic in general is mostly a subject of folktales and urban legends in her homeland, and she makes no mention of either of her parents having any supernatural abilities.
- Master Swordsman: As a former samurai, she's been swinging a sword since she was big enough to hold one and is one of the best swordsmen in her grade year. And unlike most new students, Oliver realizes to his horror the first time they spar in class that she has killed men with the blade before—dozens, if not hundreds.
- Meaningful Name: One of the possible meanings of "Nanao", ナナオ in the original Japanese, is "seven", foreshadowing her invention of the Seventh Spellblade. (The actual kanji for her name aren't known: the series only gives characters' names in katakana.)
- Mercy Kill Arrangement: After she reveals to Katie that she still wants a Duel to the Death with Oliver, Nanao says she fears her warring desires could drive her Ax-Crazy and asks her to kill her should that happen, rather than let her harm any of her friends. Katie doesn't reply, but has a mental image of Nanao covered in blood and surrounded by corpses, realizing it's a vision of her having been consumed by the spell.
- Moody Mount: Her Flying Broomstick has a reputation for being both a superior example of its species, and for refusing to allow anyone to ride it since its deceased last master. She is able to befriend it, having experience with horses, and names it Amatsukaze. The aforementioned previous master turns out to have been Chloe Halford, Oliver's mother.
- Name Order Confusion: Discussed. Her birth name is actually Hibiya Nanao, but she goes by Nanao Hibiya at Kimberly to avoid confusion.
- Parrying Bullets: When in Innocent Color, she's instinctively able to block incoming spells by flowing magic through her athame and synchronizing to the spell's element, letting her cut the spell itself to render it harmless. This becomes known in the school as her Signature Move, the "Two-Handed Flow Cut".
- Power Dyes Your Hair: Nanao has a magical trait called "innocent color" that causes her normally blue-black hair to turn white when she draws significant amounts of magic. It only occurs in people with both exceptional magical circulation and a crystalline hair structure that allows magic particles to flow through it.
- Refusal of the Call: Alvin Godfrey tries to recruit her and Oliver to the Campus Watch in volume 4. Oliver declines, fearing that Watch duties could interfere with his mission of revenge, and Nanao follows suit because she by now considers her place to be at his side.
- Relationship Upgrade: She plants a Forceful Kiss on Oliver in volume 9 after becoming jealous of his battlefield rapprochement with Richard Andrews. After much mutual soul-searching for the next several days, he kisses her back with equal force in volume 10 and admits he feels no less strongly towards her. The two become a couple finally, and even try to have sex, though Their First Time is stymied by Oliver's PTSD.
- Samurai: Back home she was a classical samurai in a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to Sengoku Period Japan: a minor noblewoman formally trained in swordplay and expected to serve her lord in battle, which she did without hesitation even when it meant her certain death.
- Samurai Ponytail: As a former samurai, she wears her hair tied back in ponytail down to the small of her back.
- Signature Move: The "Two-Handed Flow Cut", or more precisely her ability to deflect incoming spells by synchronizing her body to their elemental signature and thereby negating them. It's something she invents by pure instinct in volume 1 and others give a name to by the time of the combat leagues in volume 7.
- Significant Birth Date: According to a tweet by the author
, her birthday is the first day of the seventh month. This is another example of the significance of 7 to Nanao (and the series): her name is a version of the number seven, and she created the Seventh Spellblade. - Single-Target Sexuality: Oliver is the only person she's ever felt any kind of romantic or sexual attraction towards. Before being brought to Yelgland, her samurai training didn't leave any room for romance, and after she forms her connection with him, nobody else comes anywhere close to measuring up.
- Super Mode: She's able to use her extraordinarily good magical circulation to charge her whole body with mana in combat, which is signified by her Innocent Color bleaching her hair white.
- Talking Down the Suicidal: Nanao arrives at Kimberly in a state of low-level shock, having been plucked by Lord McFarlane from a battlefield where she was about to die in a Last Stand. After Oliver rejects her partially Culture Clash-induced request for a Duel to the Death following their sparring match in sword arts class, she becomes depressed and starts to wonder if she's having a Dying Dream, and starts looking for a fight where she can die (which she finds when Oliver, Pete, and Guy are accosted in the labyrinth by Ophelia and Cyrus). Oliver stages an impromptu intervention and gets her to agree that from now on she'll only draw her sword with the intent of surviving.
- Technician Versus Performer: She's the Performer to Oliver's Technician. Her magic runs pretty much entirely on Autopilot Artistry, constantly defying the expectations of everyone around her, and she finds joy in challenging herself with magic and the sword. This is also what fits her into the Wild Geese broomsports team: where her Friendly Rival Diana Ashbury's Blue Swallows strive for perfection, following their ace, the Wild Geese aim to have fun in their matches.
- Token Minority: She's from Yamatsu, making her Fantasy-Japanese. The rest of the Sword Roses are Fantasy-Europeans: mostly Yelglish (English) except for Farnish (Finnish) Katie.
- Too Dumb to Fool: Nanao is very much the "brawn" to Oliver's "brains", tending to be instinctual, straightforward, and bloody-minded, and doing her best work when she doesn't have to think about it, in contrast to Oliver's hard-learned skill as a strategist. This applies to her people skills as well: she has a habit of seeing right through other people's obfuscations and calling out their hidden and denied feelings and desires, and generally telling people they should strive to be their own person rather than (usually) bowing to family pressures. This is lampshaded by Diana Ashbury in volume 6 when Nanao penetrates Diana's excuses about her feelings for Clifton Morgan: "That girl was the kind of dumb that saw right through you."
- Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Nanao has a card in Weiss Schwarz's Dengeki Bunko series.
- Underestimating Badassery: She's on the receiving end repeatedly.
- Early on it's because she's a Mage Born of Muggles, and her inexperience with magic leads to multiple characters mistakenly thinking she's easy prey: Richard tries to duel her in class, only for Oliver to step in thinking she needs protecting from their aristocratic classmate. They're both wrong, as Nanao's combat experience and natural mana flow make her a terrifyingly strong swordswoman for her age. Evelynn Odets repeats their mistake at the start of the Tournament Arc in volume 2.
- By volume 10, most of the school has learned this lesson, especially after watching her in the combat leagues, which she actually finds frustrating since nobody will fight her anymore. Fortunately for her, Teresa Carste is too jealous of her relationship to Oliver to think straight, and ambushes her in the labyrinth thinking her lord needs protecting—only to discover that Nanao is far stronger than she anticipated: never mind winning, it's all Teresa can do just to escape.
- Wolverine Publicity: The manga pulls this with her big-time, putting her front-and-center on most of the cover art and relegating Oliver, the primary viewpoint character, to the background (volumes 3 and 5 leave him off entirely).
- Yandere: Reconstructed. She has a possessive streak towards Oliver, made all the more dangerous by the way the urges towards love and violence intersect for her. She's self-aware about it and normally keeps it fairly well under wraps, and she doesn't react violently towards his other suitors. However, in volume 9, Oliver and Richard are able to connect finally in single combat while she's sidelined by injuries. This makes her irrationally jealous, and she finally boils over the next night and throws him against a tree for a Forceful Kiss, followed by a Love Confession."Oliver... Your fate lies with me. ... If this fate comes not to fruition, so be it. If you go out and duel another, I will not mind. But I cannot abide the notion of being forgotten. The soul most drawn to your blade lies here. That fact alone you must keep ever in the recess of your mind. There for all of time, no matter whose blade you face. ... My heart lies with you, Oliver. For every moment, sleeping or awake, from now until evermore."
Katie Aalto
Voiced by: Hitomi Ohwada (Japanese), Jill Harris (English)
“I told you before that I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to fight here at Kimberly. Maybe if I was at Featherston, I’d meet a lot of people who think like me… but that would just make me even weaker.”
A girl with a strong sense of justice in regards to the civil rights of all living things. Rooms with Nanao.- Babies Make Everything Better: Discussed and Played for Drama after Katie communes with the god of Uranischegar in volume 9: off of a remark from Marco on how trolls prioritize parents and childen for survival when their villages are attacked, the Sword Roses contemplate getting Katie pregnant in the hope having a child to worry about might rein in her reckless streak a little—though Pete and Chela are the only ones who really think it's a workable idea.
- Break the Cutie: Subverted in volume 1. She matriculates as a Wide-Eyed Idealist Zombie Advocate and endures a ton of abuse from students and teachers alike, capped off with nearly being vivisected by Miligan... and ends the volume just as idealistic and kind as she was before and even more determined to expand civil rights for demihumans, just more cognizant of how much work it will take. Oliver is so relieved at this that he breaks down crying.
- Category Traitor: Kimberly's rival school, Featherston Sorcery School, is vocal in its support for demihuman rights. Some Featherston students the Sword Roses encounter in volume 4 accuse Katie of betraying the movement by attending Kimberly, which sets off a Bar Brawl despite Oliver and Chela's efforts to defuse the situation. For her part, Katie justifies herself with the argument that she wouldn't experience any personal growth if she was surrounded only by people who already agreed with her: she wants her viewpoints to challenge others and be challenged.
- Custom Uniform: Most Kimberly students wear neckties with their uniform. Katie prefers to wear a ribbon tied at her neck in a bow.
- Feminine Women Can Cook: Played with a little. She's a pretty good cook, but when she and Guy have an impromptu competition the first time the Sword Roses visit their lab, the others agree Guy is the victor because his grilled mutton and veggies kept the spirit of camping out better than her stew.
- Fluffy Tamer: Her childhood love for living creatures evolves into an academic interest in magical ecology and interspecies communication, which turns into her gathering a small menagerie of magical creature allies. She starts by befriending Marco the troll, and then successfully tames a griffin fledgling named Lyla to the point where the prideful creature will let her ride it, something few mages have ever achieved.
- Friend to All Living Things: Katie's family is highly active in the Inhumanable Alien Rights movement, and she grew up surrounded by magical creatures of all kinds. At Kimberly she finds it impossible to think of them as solely experimental resources—to the point of being injured in class by a magical silkworm when she tries to save it after over-feeding it and causing it to metamorphose—and stands up to a Sadist Teacher to save a troll that nearly killed her during the entrance ceremony from being euthanized.
- The Heart: Katie is sweet, friendly, and more classically feminine than Nanao or Chela, and less naturally inclined to violence than Nanao, Oliver, or Guy.
- Jealous Romantic Witness:
- Katie develops a crush on Oliver early on, and tends to get a little irritable when Nanao acts too clingy (despite their otherwise close friendship). It's nonetheless clear pretty early that she's firmly the Third Wheel, which becomes a significant source of angst as Oliver and Nanao's relationship gets more serious over the years: [[spoiler:Guy ends up making her cry into his chest after Oliver and Nanao finally get together in volume 10.
- She's also a little jealous of Oliver's (affectionate but completely platonic) relationship with his cousin Shannon, getting worked up when Shannon greets him with a kiss on the cheek when they run into each other the day after the fight with the garuda.
- Love Confessor: Shortly after Oliver and Chela give the other Sword Roses The Talk in volume 4, Katie asks Nanao if her roommate is in love with Oliver. Nanao admits she's deeply attracted to him, but isn't sure if she can call it love when she simultaneously wishes for a Duel to the Death with him.
- Naïve Animal Lover: Katie's Friend to All Living Things tendencies give her a reckless streak. She sometimes overestimates her very real ability to befriend dangerous critters, which repeatedly lands her in trouble: on the first day of magical biology class, she tries to stop a magical silkworm from metamorphosing into an adult moth and gets badly bitten. She admits in volume 10 that she used to be even worse about it: she once stopped eating entirely as a young girl, preferring to waste away rather than harm another living thing to survive, and then fed her own arms to a litter of egg badger pups rather than witness them cannibalizing their mother to survive during a drought. This comes to a head in volume 9 when she tries to communicate with the god of Uranischegar during a tír migration: the other Sword Roses lock her in their base for the better part of a week while they try to figure out how to address this, leading to the aforementioned Backstory.
- The Power of Friendship: She manages to accidentally complete Miligan's research into "intellectualization" of trolls by supplying the last missing ingredient: kindness. Turns out, even a troll that can speak Yelglish still might not want to talk to someone who hurts him.
- Silk Hiding Steel: Katie may be a Nice Girl and not much of a fighter, but she has a will of iron and is far more resilient under pressure than you'd expect. Every challenge she faces to her ideals at Kimberly only serves to affirm their necessity in her mind.
- Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: She's frequently on the receiving end of this from Kimberly students and faculty, but refuses to budge on improving the lot of demihumans.
- Summon Magic: By year 3, she's learned how to summon Marco and Lyla to her with a ritual that essentially creates a wormhole to bring them from wherever they're located.
- Virtuous Character Copy: Her similarities to Hermione Granger are significant, but there are some differences. Hermione was (controversially) roundly mocked for her activism on behalf of the House-Elves, whereas Spellblades portrays Katie's views as completely correct; she's just a little naive and inexperienced. Katie is also a Nice Girl through and through, lacking the vindictive streak that Hermione displays in the later books.
- Zombie Advocate: She's a vocal advocate for reform in the treatment of demihumans and other magical creatures, having even enrolled at Kimberly instead of another Wizarding School that might have been friendlier to her views in hopes of changing some minds. This proves a repeated flashpoint in the series, particularly in volume 1.
Michela "Chela" McFarlane
Voiced by: Misuzu Yamada (Japanese), Sara Ragsdale (English)
“Once we passed through those gates, we became Kimberly students in both name and reality! And as students of such a historic institution, we should endeavor to be model examples, starting now!”
Click to see her alternate form
A girl from a renowned magical family.Click to see her alternate form
- Berserk Button: Apparently, being told by her father that being a McFarlane means her life will be one of "taking". She physically assaults him when he says this while demanding that she not use her Super Mode to win Stacy's tournament match for her, though she's defeated with a Megaton Bitch Slap that sends her careening out of the arena.
- Blue Blood: She's part of the mage aristocracy. Her father Theodore is a Kimberly guest lecturer (he acts as substitute teacher in the Sword Roses' alchemy class in volume 2 after Oliver murders the original professor Darius Grenville), as well as the mage who rescued Nanao from her Last Stand back in Yamatsukuni.
- Expy: Downplayed: she and Guy are both partly based on Ron Weasley from Harry Potter but split parts of his character. Like Ron, she's the best friend of the main protagonist and is part of the aristocracy of the mage world, and serves as a major source of exposition on mage society. Guy got Ron's looks and impoverished rural upbringing.
- Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't: The Sword Roses are her first real friends outside of her family, and her relationship with her father is strained at best: she's constantly embarrassed by his silly behavior and resents being made to not acknowledge Stacy as her sister by blood (leading to a failed attempt to physically attack her father in volume 9 when he forbids her to use her elf form to help Stacy in a tournament match), and is suspicious of his motives for his treatment of Nanao and is gradually diverging from him on moral grounds. No word so far on what she thinks of her mother (who hasn't even gotten a name in the series yet).
- Half-Human Hybrid: She's a half-elf, and can dramatically increase her magical abilities by transforming into her elven form.
- Half-Sibling Angst: She's estranged from her half-sister Stacy Cornwallis because they grew up having to treat each other as cousins and weren't allowed to acknowledge their real relationship. She keeps a flower garland that Stacy made for her when they were on better terms inside her robe as a lucky charm.
- Hereditary Hairstyle: Her father has similarly curly hair styled in ringlets, which is part of how they all realize that he was the mage who rescued Nanao. It apparently runs in the family: he and her half-sister Stacy both have versions of it.
- In-Series Nickname: She's usually referred to as just "Chela".
- Lady of War: She's a young lady of the aristocracy who was trained in Rizett Style fencing since she was young and is more than capable of keeping up with Oliver and Nanao, even without using her Super Mode.
- Love Confessor: To Pete in volume 10: she wonders aloud why he doesn't seem to mind the idea of Oliver and Nanao getting together, taking it for granted that he's in love with Oliver. He replies that, just like her, he wants to keep the group together, and if seeing the man he loves with someone else is what it takes, then so be it.
- Like Brother and Sister: She and Oliver are roughly social peers (she's only two weeks older than him and both are Blue Bloods, though her family is much more prominent than his) and get along very well, but there's no romantic attraction between them. She sometimes teases him by flirting with him, but the Intimate Healing scene is motivated by her worrying about her friend, and she feels deeply guilty about manipulating him into it afterwards. Amusingly, her father once dated his mother.
- Mark of the Supernatural: She's a little oddly colored: she's a blue-eyed blonde but has bronze skin. It's a clue to the fact she's a half-elf: she got her skin color from her mother.
- Ojou Ringlets: Justified. She has three drill-tails on either side of her head, as a visual cue to her aristocratic background. It runs in the McFarlane family: both of her known blood relatives have similar hair, and she jokes when the Sword Roses introduce themselves to each other that it's considered polite to faint at the beauty of it.
- Royal Rapier: She's an aristocrat by birth, and her athame is in the form of a smallsword (a later, smaller variant of the rapier).
- Sex Magic: She's fairly knowledgeable about this topic: she explains to Pete after he comes out as a reversi that female mages are able to use their uteri as additional magical storage and teaches him how to do it on a "girl day", and assists Oliver with some Intimate Healing in volume 4.
- Shipper on Deck: She pretty openly thinks Oliver and Nanao are a good couple starting from volume 1, suggesting that if Nanao can't tell the difference between falling in love with Oliver's sword or with Oliver himself, that she choose the man. In volume 4 she even suggests he approach Nanao for sex to resolve the aftereffects of Ophelia's Perfume.
- Stereotype Flip: Blonde girls with Ojou Ringlets in Wizarding School anime series are usually written as aristocratic Alpha Bitches. Chela is a Blue Blood, but is instead a precociously mature Team Mom figure.
- Super Mode: Transforming into elf form dramatically increases her mana reserves and spell power and allows her to double-cast, an ability unheard-of in first-year students. As a third-year, she can triple-cast in elf form—though she's still no match for her father.
- Team Mom: She takes on essentially this role in the Sword Roses, especially in comparison to Mage Born of Muggles Nanao and Pete. Having grown up in the mage aristocracy, she's a frequent source of exposition on how things work in magical society and is more experienced with navigating it than the others. However, this starts to become a bit of a burden for her in the later books: she becomes mildly obsessed with keeping the group together and everyone in it happy, because they're the only real friends she's got.
Guy Greenwood
Voiced by: Shinsuke Sugawara (Japanese), Matthew Elkins (English)
“Leave the fighting to me. I ain’t a farmer’s son for nothin’.”
A cheerful and friendly boy who comes from a farming family.- The Big Guy: What he lacks in magical talent compared to the others, he makes up for with the muscles and loyalty of a farm boy. He's also physically the tallest member of the group.
- Breaking the Fellowship: He ends up having to leave the Sword Roses for a time in order to gain proper control of his curse.
- Custom Uniform: Befitting his more down-to-earth image, he tends to skip the necktie that goes with his student uniform and wear it with the collar button undone.
- Expy: He's loosely based on Ron Weasley from Harry Potter, as a Fiery Redhead from a less-than-affluent rural background. However, Chela got more of Ron's role as Mr. Exposition.
- Fiery Redhead: A Hot-Blooded young man with an unruly mop of red hair.
- The Generic Guy: He's by far the most normal of the Sword Roses: he doesn't have any social baggage, deep secrets, or world-shaking special abilities, he's just a farm boy who made good and has an underclassman crushing on him (Rita Appleton). This ends after he becomes Cursed with Awesome in a fourth-year misadventure.
- Green Thumb: He grew up in a farming family and has an affinity to plants. When the team travels into the labyrinth to rescue Pete, he supplies them with seeds of "toolplants" that can be rapidly grown with an application of mana and come in handy a number of times.
- The Heart: He starts to take on more of this role later in the series: being the "normal" one of the group means he can mediate between the other Sword Roses in a way the others really can't, especially as regards Oliver's Love Dodecahedron.
- Hidden Depths: Though a hothead, he can be surprisingly quick-thinking under pressure: when threatened by a swarm of venomous snakes from one of Enrico Forghieri's traps during class, he douses himself with a potion to conduct electricity and then casts a lightning spell on himself, stunning the entire swarm in one go and impressing Forghieri.
- Hot-Blooded: When Katie is being bullied by the conservatives, Guy is the first to suggest some judicious kicking of ass, and is only too glad to join in when Oliver gets angry enough to throw down.
- Hypocritical Heartwarming: Guy clashes with Katie early on over the relative merits of trolls (they were farm pests to him, whereas she was sung to sleep by the family troll as a kid), but when the conservatives take to bullying Katie over her protecting a troll, he's the first to leap to her defense. Lampshaded by Pete:Guy: ...The hell's their problem? They tryin' to piss me off?
Pete: I thought you hated trolls, too.
Guy: That's different! No one insults my friends! - Likes Older Women: Discussed in volume 4. A conversation after their first class with Baldia Muwezicamili mutates into the Sword Roses talking about their "types", and he mentions that "where I grew up, big-sis types rule the roost, so I sorta got it in my head that's what a farmer's bride should be."
- Real Men Cook: With his practical, down-to-earth background, he's the best cook among the Sword Roses: he's a master at grilling over an open fire, and in volume 3 he provisions the rescue party with an incredibly tasty travel bread.
- Romantic Wingman: In volume 10, he gives Oliver the final nudge he needs to start actively pursuing Nanao, while running interference with Katie.
- Trademark Favorite Food: He grew up on a farm and looooooves his vegetables, frequently offering to supply people with them.
Pete Reston
Voiced by: Riho Sugiyama (Japanese), Lexi Nieto (English)
“I have plenty to learn about this place, too. If you consider what lies ahead, there’s nothing wrong with having more familiar faces around.”
A quiet and diligent boy. He comes from a non-magical family. Rooms with Oliver.- Ambiguous Gender Identity: Even after coming out as reversi, Pete still uses he/him pronouns and prefers to present as masculine even while in female form. However, Oliver notes that gender dysphoria is sometimes an early sign of being a reversi, and Pete recalls "not fitting in" among nonmagicals. He also experiments in later books with dressing as a girl when in female form.
- Attractive Bent-Gender: Poor Pete starts to get it from both sides in volume 4 as a consequence of being a reversi, and for much the same reason as Nanao: while it's rare for reversism to be inherited, it is nonetheless possible, and has advantages to mages. The propositions prompt Oliver and Chela to host a sex ed seminar for their friends.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: He excels at magical engineering and is quite good at ferreting out the intricacies of golems and magical traps.
- Badass Bookworm: Turns into one after two years of Character Development. He starts out a complete newbie to magic and far behind fellow Mage Born of Muggles Nanao as a swordsman, but he's a voracious reader and becomes very good at magical engineering, and Oliver and Chela are able to help him make up for his initial deficiency in sword arts. In volume 2 he comes close to landing a hit on Stacy Cornwallis in class with a Rizett Style Hero's Charge, and by volume 7 he's able to lay down the law against uppity first-years without trouble.
- Break the Cutie: Certain events of volume 3spoiler and 5spoiler seem to crack something in him: he starts to become noticeably more cynical and ruthless towards the midpoint of the series, even offering to impregnate Katie in volume 10 on the chance having a child to worry about might rein in her recklessness after she communed with the god of Uranischegar in volume 9.
- Custom Uniform: He adds a vest under his school uniform jacket, essentially turning his uniform into a three-piece suit.
- Expy: Downplayed. Pete shares some traits of Hermione Granger from Harry Potter with Katie, mainly Hermione's Mage Born of Muggles background (Katie was born to a well-known Farnish mage clan) and Defrosting Ice King-to-Badass Bookworm Character Development arc. Katie got mainly Hermione's looks and Zombie Advocate politics.
- Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't: He mentions in volume 10 that he has a poor relationship with his birth family, so the Sword Roses are really the only family he's got anymore.
- Gender Bender Angst: He had no idea shifting sex was even possible until it happened to him, and spends a good chunk of volume 2 freaking out about it and lashing out at his friends due to a combination of general confusion and the painful side effects of his body not being used to it. Fortunately, Oliver is immediately on his side, as is their senior Carlos Whitrow, who invites Pete to join the campus club for Sex Magic-related traits.
- The Knights Who Say "Squee!": He's a huge fan of Theodore McFarlane's travelogues, to the point of having read every printing of every volume, and goes complete fanboy when McFarlane acts as substitute alchemy prof in volume 2.
- The Load: The other Sword Roses, especially Oliver, spend a lot of time having to protect or rescue him in the first three volumes, often at great risk to themselves. Justified on account of him getting a double-whammy of being a Mage Born of Muggles: he didn't even know he could use magic until shortly before the series began, and unlike Nanao he has no real-world combat experience to fall back on, which is then compounded by the early symptoms of his reversi transformations. He grows out of it by volume 4.
- Mage Born of Muggles: Like Nanao, he's playing catch-up with the customs of the mage side of the world, having been born into a non-magical family.
- Man, I Feel Like a Woman: Subverted: his initial reaction to his first time gender-bending in his sleep is horror that he's suddenly grown breasts and had his junk go missing overnight.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: "Pete" is invariably a nickname for "Peter" in English, but he's only ever called "Pete" in the series.
- Painful Transformation: Pete begins suffering painful mana disruptions upon becoming a Sex Shifter. According to main character Oliver, this is a fairly common side effect of changes in the body among mages: in addition to normal puberty and illness sometimes causing it, he recalls helping a woman through mana disruptions caused by a pregnancy. It was his cousin Shannon.
- Polyamory: By volume 10, he's begun to view the Sword Roses as a potential polycule, not just a group of friends: unlike Katie, he doesn't really mind the idea of Nanao and Oliver getting together provided there's also room for himself, and he also suggests having a child with Katie (on the notion it might reign her recklessness in) and proposes a date to Guy as an apology for underestimating him (who takes it as a joke). Part of it is motivated by fear of abandonment, as he explains to Chela:“Kids are great. Why? Because they turn people into family. Put a chain between you that can’t be severed easily. The word friend is pretty and all, but it’s fragile in a way I just can’t trust. If it’s in the cards, I’d like to be more than that with all of you.”
- Sex Shifter: Due to being a reversi who hasn't fully gotten the hang of controlling the ability, he has a tendency to switch sexes in his sleep. It saves his life in volume 3 when he switches to female while unconscious after being kidnapped by Ophelia, causing him to become immune to her Perfume.
- The Smart Guy: He knows next to nothing about magic to begin with and studies hard to make up for it. He develops a particular talent for magical engineering.
- Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: Pete is a reversi, a mage born with the ability to switch his body's biological sex. He still favors male pronouns, but indicates in his internal monologue that he had previously experienced mild dysphoric episodes, suggesting his true gender identity is closer to demiboy.
- Teacher's Pet: He has somewhat of a tendency to try to suck up to and impress the teachers at first (first Luther Garland, then Theodore McFarlane), which draws ridicule from some of the other students. This subsides after he gets more used to Kimberly's culture.
- Took a Level in Badass: His fighting skills normally aren't called attention to, and as a Mage Born of Muggles, he has a lot of ground to cover. In volume 7 he shows the progress he's made in two years when he intervenes in a fight between four newly enrolled first-years after the winner decides to practice pain spells on the losers, and inflicts a Curb-Stomp Battle when the winner challenges him.Pete: You want a rematch, come at me whenever. Duel rules suit me fine. But don't diminish what time here does to someone—to you or to anyone else. I was born nonmagical, and this is what two years here have done to me. That's what you've signed up for at Kimberly.
- Tsundere: He starts to develop spats of Belligerent Sexual Tension with Oliver once his reversi power manifests itself: his confusion about his own sexuality leads to him becoming embarrassed about physical contact with his roommate, and he lashes out at him physically.
Marco
Voiced by: Ryo Sugisaki (Japanese), Conner Allison (English)
- Fluffy the Terrible: He's a literal troll who's about three times the height of the main cast and terrifies first years. Katie named him Marco.
- Gentle Giant: He's a huge troll who can be quite terrifying if people don't know him well. But he wouldn't hurt a fly, at least not unless Katie told him to (she once has him pick Guy up and hang him somewhere high by his jacket after he annoys her).
- Mercy Rewarded: In volume 1, Katie stops Professor Grenville from euthanizing him after the entrance ceremony fiasco, promising to take responsibility for retraining him (and enduring a lot of abuse from the school's conservative faction in the process). He ends up saving her life when he figures out how to speak Yelglish after interacting with her for several weeks.
- Playing with Syringes: He's a product of Miligan's experiments on demihumans to increase their intelligence, which bear fruit when Katie's efforts to befriend him begin to enable him to use human speech.
- Spanner in the Works: His "attack" on Katie was actually a complete fluke: he was just making a break for the exit to get away from Miligan's experiments on him when another student cast a spell that made Katie run into his path as an unrelated prank. Then Katie manages to teach him to speak Yelglish through The Power of Friendship and he proves the key to unraveling Miligan's entire plot.
- Tap on the Head: Nanao knocks him out with a blow to the back of the head during the entrance ceremony incident. His skull is so hard that it numbs her hands.
- Team Pet: Essentially. He's sentient and can talk, but he spends most of his time living in the Sword Roses' hideout in the labyrinth, normally only leaving to join them for dungeon delves.
- Virtuous Character Copy: He resembles the troll from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, both physically and in narrative role (both trolls attack (one of) the girl(s), and defeating him solidifies the main cast's years-long friendship), but Marco eventually forms a bond with Katie, while the troll who attacked Hermoine disappears from the narrative after he's defeated.
- You No Take Candle: Even with Miligan and Katie's work, his grasp of Yelglish is initially marginal and he struggles to phrase even simple sentences, although he understands directions pretty well: in the opening of volume 7, Katie has him guard a nest of pot weasels while she works to move them (because they're a safety hazard), and has to defuse a potential confrontation between him and an overconfident first-year who demands to be let through. However, by volume 10, his Yelglish has improved dramatically and he's even learned to read (though his size makes turning pages difficult).
