HEALTH & LIFESTYLE

DIET: He could run a Mukbang channel with how much he eats on a good day. He tries to eat healthy whenever possible, but funds are hard to come by and supply raids are risky. He'll eat anything as long as its edible, but what he loves the most is junk food. Fatty, savory, oily junk food. The unhealthy shit. He'd kill you for a good burger.

EXERCISE: The one thing that carried over from his past life is his rigorous training regimine. Strength training, cardiovascular workouts, martial arts practice, and sparring with a poor soul will take up hours every day.

SLEEP: Although he goes to bed at a reasonable hour, night terrors consistently disturb him. This combined with missions that require him to be up until or at sunrise mean he cannot stabilize his circadian rhythm.

HYGIENE: One would say he is a bit too obsessed with cleanliness. Of course he takes care of his body to stay in killer (literally) shape, but he also has a thorough skin care routine whenever the supplies are available to him.

ADDICTION: Fortunately, none. He has no interest in remin thanks to his terrible childhood and hates how dull his senses become when he's intoxicated.

HISTORY OF PHYSICAL ILLNESS

No history of disease, genetic or otherwise. However, some old wounds ache when he presses down on them too hard.

SCARS: When the pain of restoration magic as a result of his father's torture became too great, he preferred to let his wounds heal naturally, resulting in scars. They exist all around his limbs and torso, and the ones on his back are particularly gruesome. He used to tell his mother to prioritize healing his face and hands so that he won't receive a constant reminder of his abuse every time he sees himself in the mirror. There is a particularly long scar that stretches from his back to the nape of his neck that he covers with a scarf or high collar shirt.

ALLERGY: None except for a minor dust allergy.

INTOLERANCE: Cannot handle any amount of spice whatsoever. It runs down his patrilineal line.

STRENGTHS

He is good as masking his emotions. When he does get upset, anger does not cloud his judgement and he can continue to carry out his plans thoroughly. He may not have been great at school, but he is a sharp thinker at times.

He is unfazed by low chances of success. As long as he hasn't passed out, he will continue fighting. When he has a goal to attain, a bar to reach, he will stop at nothing to achieve it using whatever means necessary. His allies are often horrified at his efficiency and brutality, but he would never hurt them. Despite how uncaring he seems, he will go out of his way to save them, even if it means putting himself at risk.

WEAKNESSES

For someone who's touch-starved, he shies away from any physical shows of affection. He hates being touched, especially without his permission due to past trauma.

He doesn't show it, but he's tired. He doesn't know how much longer he can fight for, how much longer he can keep killing before he loses the last remnants of his humanity. The motivations may be different, but the outcome of his actions remains the same. He pushes on because his father's triumph over his life is the last thing he wants.

FLAWS

He uses violence and aggression as a solution too often because as a child, it was the only answer he was taught. The concept of a diplomatic solution in small-scale or everyday conflicts doesn't exist to him. Not to mention, witnessing the agony of his enemies is too satisfying to him.

Because he spent much of his time isolated as a child, he never developed proper communication skills. As a result, he is distant and unwilling to communicate. He'll often leave social situations unresolved because he thinks himself incapable of resolving them. It worsens his few relationships unless an effort is made to get him to sort things out.

His lack of understanding in social cues makes it easy for him to upset people, and he is also equally easy to upset due to his poor temper. His opportunity to attend four years of public high school did not help this as other students would go out of their way to avoid him, meaning the only people he talked to were his roommates Harvey and Tyler. These issues carried on into his adulthood, resulting in him preferring to work alone. He has convinced himself he doesn't need other people to live life.

HABITS

He writes in a diary every night and reviews random entries to make sure his memories are in order. It's written in Piaochenese to ensure no one in the base can read it except him. (The only one who can read it other than Will is the base's doctor Tren, but he respects privacy too much to do that.)

PET PEEVES

When people walk into homes with their shoes on. God forbid they wear shoes while lying on their beds.

He will call out people who think they're hot shit, which can include anyone from arrogant personalities to bigots. Depending on how the person reacts, he may punch them in the face (he sees this as a normal reaction).

WISHES

He wishes there is one person out there he'd be willing to open up to.

World peace would be nice too.

PREJUDICE

Magicless folk are inferior humans. He knows this is false after working with them; they are capable fighters and determined as hell, but trying to shake off these notions that were instilled upon him at birth by a very elitist family is a difficult task.

The Areliese are bigots. One of his first interactions with them took place in high school when a trio of bullies tried to pick on him. Outraged, he sent two of them to the hospital and only got a away with a week's worth of detention because of his father's heavy influence, but his actions created a self-fulfilling prophecy that led to greater distrust of him, and the comments from his peers got worse. Witnessing intense xenophobia in the news and sometimes harassment toward him whenever he goes out alone in public doesn't help this.

SECRETS

He secretly craves love and affection. Will himself doesn't understand how much it means to him when he receives so much as a compliment. If someone out there had the guts to say that they loved him and meant it, they'd earn his undying loyalty.

His father is an infamous war criminal, which led him to take on a new name outside of his family. Because his current identity is a lie, he is afraid of losing everyone's trust the moment they find out. Telling them the truth isn't an option either because his father and the army he orders were responsible for ruining so many of their lives. It's why he completes his missions to the best of his ability, to make sure the organization thinks he is worth keeping around no matter what happens.

PHILOSOPHY

The strong survive, and the weak perish. However, strength can come in different forms besides physical or magical: money, political power, and social standing. All of these are strengths that can be wielded to one's advantage.

ETHICS

He has no qualms about hurting others and sees murder as a necessary evil to achieve good things. He claims to prioritize his own life, but if he sees someone in need, he knows he'll regret not helping them.

HISTORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS

The birth of his younger brother and a need to protect him from their father was the only thing that kept him sane. He experiences PTSD as a result of his abuse.

TRIGGERS: He struggles not to flinch when forced to listen to verbal lashings from people with higher authority than him, and the mere mention of restoration magic can give him a panic attack. Very few are aware of the second fact because of how uncommon the magic is.

PHOBIAS: He claims not to be afraid of insects, but there's always some frantic energy to him whenever he's trying to kill one.

DEFENSE MECHANISM: Increased aggression, avoidance

THREAT-BASED MINDSET: 99% of the time he will fight back. The question isn't a matter of if, but how.

BIRTHPLACE: Surrounded by the mountains of the capital Alkae, Caelua.

ENVIRONMENT: He feels safer inside an extremely illegal insurgent base than he does in his childhood home.

OVERALL HISTORY

CHILDHOOD: His family was born from a disaster.

Twenty-two years ago, Isolde Fan took part in a failed assassination attempt by the Belormans to kill Jieming, a rising figure within the Caelian military. As the squad's only healer, she was told to stay in the shadows in case anything went wrong, and so when her squad was massacred by their target whom Belorman intelligence greatly underestimated, she became their only survivor. Isolde was only spared because Jieming offered her a deal: should she agree to marry him, he would spare her life. Otherwise, he would hand her over to the military for interrogation. Her fear of death by torture superseded her loyalty to the country, and she agreed to his terms.

One year later, Will was conceived as a result of the abuse that followed in their loveless relationship. Since the Yan clan had been reduced to just Will and his parents by the time he was born, Jieming began training him personally after he turned three. His lessons started off normal at first, with his father teaching Will the basics of how to strike and defend using his body.

But after a few months of learning the basics, Jieming grew sick of the four-year old's seemingly low pain tolerance and decided it needed to be fixed. The boy's lessons took a dramatic shift when for the first time, Father stopped pulling his punches and beat Will until his body was too swollen to stand up. Isolde was summoned to fix him, and though her restoration magic healed his wounds in a fraction of the time it would have taken for them to heal naturally, he was forced to relive the initial pain of those wounds with no reprieve—pain akin to being struck with a hammer on every part of his body for several minutes straight. Jieming claimed this was all part of his training, but his use of physical violence soon extended outside of it. After the family doctor told him that Will was near-sighted to the point of needing glasses, a disability that could impair him in battle, he punished Will for being born with such a pathetic weakness by beating him senselessly.

The cycle of training, beating, and healing became a near-daily occurrence until Will became quick enough to evade the worst of those blows. By then, the six-year old was starting to grow into the spitting image of his father. Isolde's revelation that her child would look increasingly like her abuser pushed her to revulsion whenever she looked at Will. During a time when Will needed her the most, Isolde chose to neglect him and left Will in the care of his nanny Claire. The nanny, who had also served the family as one of its maids well before Will was born, tried her best to nourish him with the love and care any child deserved, but the boy was already wary of whom he allowed close to him. That didn't stop Claire, who sympathized with him so much after watching him grow up, from trying to assume the role that his mother had tossed aside.

At the same time, Isolde gave birth to her second child Zenguang. Jieming designated Zenguang as his backup should anything go wrong with Will. Upon hearing the news of his birth, Will expected this to be another trick of his father, perhaps to introduce competition in order to make him perform better. But soon after, the family doctor announced that due to complications during labor, Zenguang was born completely blind in both eyes. Were it not for Isolde's fierce protectiveness over her newborn baby, Jieming would have snapped his neck and disposed of him like the defective product he saw him as. Since the family could afford a second child and then some, he relented and allowed Isolde to raise Zenguang normally.

The first time Will met his baby brother properly was months after his birth. He was watching him crawl along the carpet floor of his nursery, tiny hands groping for a toy keyboard several feet away. Pitying him, Will picked up the keyboard and carried it over to Zenguang. The baby's blue, discolored eyes were looking in a completely different direction when his palm landed atop the keyboard, eliciting a broken chord of notes played from a cheap speaker. Almost as if he knew Will was there, his head spun toward him as an elated smile lifted his chubby cheeks. It was that exact moment when Will understood what it meant to love someone so much that he would put himself in harm's way to protect them. He wanted this innocent child to retain his smile, a symbol of childhood's blissful, ignorant joy that he had already forgotten. Originally planning to run away, Will was determined to assume his role as heir if it meant their father would never, ever lay a hand on him because he wanted nothing more than for Zenguang to grow up in peace.

Three years later, Zenguang started receiving his first piano lessons. Though his eyes were useless, his ears gifted him with a remarkable talent for music. As for Will, he was paying the price of protecting him with his own blood. Now that weapons training was involved in his curriculum, Jieming's methods of increasing his pain tolerance had spiked in cruelty. Deep cuts on top of his swelling bruises caused him so much pain that if he was lucky enough to see his father leave while Isolde was in the midst of healing him, he would plead for her to stop. He would rather live with those wounds becoming scars than subject himself to needless torment.

Two years passed. Caelua decided to break its truce with Belorma and summoned Jieming to return to his position in the military (He was a General, but in name only—his true role was to serve as a living weapon of mass destruction). The Yan family manor experienced unprecedented peace for a few weeks, during which they redecorated the house. It let them bond together in a way they never got to before. Will noticed his mother's presence growing warmer around him with each passing day, a rekindling of the love she used to feel for him, and he didn't realize how much he missed it until he was crying in her arms.

But like a fleeting dream, their respite came to an end the moment Jieming returned home. His battle had ended in a triumphant victory for Caelua after, in the span of a single spell, he went from accomplished soldier to mass murderer responsible for taking the lives of millions. And doing so had killed his soul. The first thing he did was pull Will by his hair into their sparring room, bind him to a pillar, and whip his back as punishment for not keeping up with his training while he was gone. Will had been practicing the entire time, but they both knew that was not the point.

Isolde pleaded with him to stop. She tried to intervene—if she could cast restoration magic on a scar across Jieming's chest, she could reopen a mortal wound. But he was faster and broke her arm. He continued, ignoring the screams of pain that rang about until Will was unconscious, held up only by the fetters binding his wrists overhead, the skin on his back peeled into bleeding flesh. Isolde was ordered to heal him, and with much remorse, she did.

The boy never felt the same since.

ADOLESCENCE: Entering his teens, Will's father began gifting him with tools for murder. Building a collection of beautiful steel blades and polished guns, he thought this was his father's way of giving Will the means to enact his revenge on him. And so he tried, he tried many times despite the punishments that ensued afterward. But the closer Will got to killing him, the happier Jieming seemed when he rewarded him with another weapon. Another attempt. Will felt a twisted sense of joy at being able to make his father proud. It reminded him of the times when he was younger, when head blows turned into head pats for his hard work. Despite all his hatred for him, he craved those scraps of affection. With his father's approval in mind, he continued his attempts at patricide whenever he got the chance.

Around the same time, by some miracle, Isolde convinced Jieming to send Will to Amaranth, the nation's most prestigious high school. Her core argument was that he needed learn essential communication skills through talking to peers of his age. Negotiation, persuasion, networking, and similar skills were necessary to navigate the political world if he was to take his father's place. The majority of students in Amaranth were also going to be the children of affluent figures, making it a prime opportunity to build connections. Jieming, being one of the most powerful men in the nation, only needed to pull a few strings to enroll his son into Amaranth, skipping the application and testing process completely. Here was where Will would meet Harvey and Tyler, but that's a story for another time.

That same year, he served as the executioner of a death row inmate sentenced to beheading. Will decapitated his head in one, clean stroke. He convinced himself his first murder—not an attempt, but a true murder—wasn't a big deal. Because if he freaked out, he wasn't going to survive what his father put him through next.

In the next four years, word among the elite spread of a deadly assassin who eliminated political figures acting against the regime. No one knew what the assassin looked like because anyone who saw them also wound up dead, and any security camera footage of them was erased from both cloud and hard drive. If investigators had tried harder, they could have easily figured out the assassin's identity, but they were no fools. They did not want to be the next to disappear overnight. That left the elite and the illegal underworld to continue spreading rumors as to who the assassin could be.

As for those close to Jieming, they knew the man had raised his son to be a killer.

ADULTHOOD: When Jieming turned 18, his own father casted him into the arctic wilderness to test his survival skills. One year later he returned to pick him up, and Will's father, alive but a frozen shell of his former self, murdered him on the spot. Such was the fate of every Yan heir after the age of magic began: to kill his father and assume his place.

Will was intended to undertake the same trial Jieming went through after he graduated, but the young heir had different ideas. Now that he had the majority of four years to get to know the world outside of his family estate, to taste what it is to live a normal life through Amaranth, there was no way he could go back to that hell. He was going to run away from home and use his finely-honed combat skills to do the one thing that would spite his father the most: join the growing insurgency against Caelua's government, the very institution his family was supposed to so dutifully serve.

But running away meant abandoning the person he cared about the most. He wasn't going to be a coward about it; he told Zenguang of his plan to leave. Much to Will's surprise, he volunteered to help distract their father. It was his way of thanks for protecting him all these years, and his brother deserved a reprieve from that duty.

On that thunderous, rainy night, Will jumped out through the window of his room with nothing but a briefcase, an umbrella, and the weapons in his coat. All the way until he reached the estate's borders, he could hear his brother's private recital for their father and mother, a beautiful melody that served as his parting gift.

BEST MEMORY: In their senior year, Will asked Harvey on a whim if they were friends, to which Harvey responded by saying, "Aren't we?"

WORST MEMORY: The day he ran away from home. The guilt he feels in letting his little brother sacrifice his safety in exchange for Will's freedom won't ever leave him. He feels he failed Zenguang as an older brother.

SHORT-TERM GOALS: Killing his father, surviving the war.

LONG-TERM GOALS: To find a career he'll enjoy, to feel at peace with himself, and to learn what it's like to fall in love.

INTERNAL CONFLICT: "I am not a monster," he repeats to himself, yet he finds satisfaction from inflicting physical pain on others. He knows it's wrong and he hates this about him so much, but when his job practically demands violence, he can't stop it. He relishes in being the torturer during interrogations. Combined with his growing kill count, he realizes he's becoming more and more like Jieming every day.

EXTERNAL CONFLICT: All his enemies are out to kill him, and not all his allies are trustworthy. To be captured is a fate worse than death because it will mean he is returned to his father.

CURRENT CONCERN: The revelation that Harvey had been thrust into the military life for three years while Will thought he was safe in college is making him realize he failed to protect someone close to him again. Tyler's pain is also getting worse the longer it takes them to find the Verboten Lab.

VERBAL

ACCENT: He speaks very clearly to ensure he doesn't have to repeat himself.

VERBAL TIC: Goes "tsch" a lot when he's annoyed, which is most of the time.

CATCHPHRASE: ...

SPOKEN LANGUAGE: Areliese, Piaochenese

ARTICULATION: Straight to the point and concise so as to not waste time.

BREATHING PATTERN: Slow and balanced even when he's fighting. The situation must be bad if he's breathing hard.

NONVERBAL

BODY MOVEMENT: He likes to keep his hands close to him in case he needs to draw a weapon, and to avoid being grabbed.

EXPRESSION: People often tell him he has a resting bitch face. He still doesn't know what that means.

EMOTIONAL STATE: He acts composed and doesn't show his emotions often, but he is actually easy to offend.

BODY POSTURE: Straight and proper to indicate that he's paying attention to his environment and the people talking to him. Sloppy posture indicates that he's either tired or he doesn't want to listen to you. If it's casual conversation, then it's usually the latter.

WALKING STYLE: He is a fast walker, gait is like a march.

SITTING STYLE: Keeps to himself, i.e. legs together or crossed.

SLEEPING STYLE: Side-sleeper, wakes easily and is immediately alert. Can fall asleep quickly.

ABILITIES

He is a master ice magician capable of temporarily freezing a room to absolute zero. He can instantly create walls of ice thick enough to stop bullets, then launch them at his enemies. Like all ice mages, his Attribute allows him to survive in naturally cold temperatures that would normally induce hypothermia. Frost and snow are included along with his ice manipulation powers.

The typical combat style for ice mages is getting close to the enemy and freezing them. Getting caught in a freezing spell usually means instant death, but any opponent with a ranged weapon/magic can easily counter the average ice mage. As a result, experienced ice mages who use the instant-freeze strategy often waste time just reaching their opponent. Even then, this strategy only works in one-on-one battles. However, Will's style of combat is the opposite of the slow and steady strategy that most ice mages utilize. Rather than casting ranged spells as a way to exhaust his opponents with the off chance of bringing them down, his spells are relentless attacks with every intention to kill or fatally wound. Using an anti-magic spear as a melee weapon allows him to reach his enemies at a farther distance when engaged in close combat.

TALENTS

Is murder a talent?

SKILLS

He possesses practically unrivaled combat abilities. His complete mastery over ice magic fused with martial arts make him deadly at both long-ranged and melee combat. Moreover, his speed and reaction time makes him virtually untouchable to intermediate fighters. He moves as though a sixth sense allows him to predict exactly how his opponents will move.

Outside of combat, he is embarrassingly inept at many basic activities. Just make him do the laundry or something, at least he knows how to clean blood stains out of fabric.

TRIVIA

He has a whole aresenal of weapons hidden beneath his overcoat. They include two pistols with a shitload of ammo, six throwning knives, two daggers (two more in his boots), the occasional grenade, and a retractable anti-magic spear. The overcoat itself is bullet-proof. It was custom made and gifted to him by his father on Will's sixteenth birthday. His anti-magic spear was another one of his father's gifts to him.

Probability hates him for some reason. Don't take him to a casino, he will lose everything no matter how carefully he bets. He's never won a chance-based game. Tyler even performed an experiment on him with this, and his calculations determined that Will is statistically unlucky.

His glasses have anti-fog coating on the lenses. He also grabbed, like, three spare pairs of them before running away from home (The perks of having money). Rayden is the only person to have ever broken a pair.

Has a good sense of rhythm but a terrible singing voice.

HOBBIES

Hobbies? What hobbies?

TVTROPES

TROPE NAME: Tragic Ice Character

TROPE NAME: Archnemesis Dad

TROPE NAME: Dodge the Bullet

• If he's not dodging them, he's blocking them via magic or weapons. Is it realistic? No, but magic isn't either.

REFSHEET

DESIGN NOTES

He only wears gloves when he needs to use his spear. The cloth serves as a barrier which allows him to cast spells while simultaneously handling an anti-magic weapon.

No belt around his coat (he didn't have enough time to grab it before he ran away from home)

MOODBOARD

PLAYLIST

Chopin - Winter Wind

Imagine Dragons - Enemy

Fate/Grand Order OST - Tonelico ~VS Morgan~

ATTITUDE

TOWARDS STRANGER: Wary of everyone he doesn't know. Always keeps his distance. If they try anything, he won't hesitate to fight back.

TOWARDS ACQUAINTANCE: Starts getting sassy. He's able to relax himself if his intuition deems them trustworthy. However, a part of him will always remain on guard. He continues to play the role of a cruel and heartless soldier most of the time.

TOWARDS FRIEND: His scathing aggression gets toned down to mere quips. Bickering is in good fun. He's more willing to try out new things because he trusts his friend's experience with them, and he eagerly engages in conversation. Overall, he takes on much a softer demeanor, but he has so few he considers friends that only a select few (namely Harvey and Tyler) have seen him this way.

TOWARDS FAMILY: Absolutely detests his father, but until he ran away, he had no choice to obey him. He used to resent his mother until he understood she was in a similar situation as him, now desires to save her from Father. Would give his life to protect his brother, but that wasn't what happened the day Will ran from home.

TOWARDS LOVER: Even if he's terrible at showing affection, know that he's fiercely loyal. He is a protector and will go to great lengths to make sure his relationship with them will remain healthy. He will have placed a lot of trust in his partner because he doesn't want to be taken advantage of when he's changing his behavior to ensure he'll avoid acting like his father.

TOWARDS RIVAL: Constantly spiteful, always arguing and throwing shade at them. Ultimately, rivalries don't mean much to him.

TOWARDS ENEMY: Kill on sight.