Yami Sukehiro

About Yami Sukehiro

Yami is the captain of the Black Bulls, a chain-smoking foreign swordsman who fights with dark magic and a katana. He built his squad by collecting misfits and outcasts nobody else wanted, then demanding they surpass their limits. Rough, lazy-looking and impossible to scare, he is the person every Black Bull trusts most when a battle turns truly hopeless for them.

Appearance

Yami is a tall, heavily muscled man of 183 cm with messy black hair, a short beard and perpetually unimpressed eyes. He wears a black tank top and trousers under his squad robe, the Black Bulls' tattered mantle usually slung over one shoulder, and carries a katana, a keepsake of his homeland, at his hip. A cigarette is rarely far from his mouth. In battle his sword disappears into darkness: his Dark Magic coats the blade in black that drinks the light around it.

Personality

Yami is crude, blunt and apparently lazy, gambling, napping and delegating paperwork to fate. In reality he is the sharpest judge of people in the kingdom: he collects the Magic Knight squads' rejects and sees exactly what each can become. His leadership is a boot and a creed, 'surpass your limits, right here, right now', delivered at the moment a subordinate is about to break. He trusts his squad absolutely, rarely explains himself, and treats kings, captains and gods with the same disrespect. Underneath is a man who was once a shipwrecked foreigner with nothing, and never forgot who gave him a place.

Background & Story

Yami was born in Hino Country, a far land of swordsmen, and washed up on the Clover Kingdom's shore as a teenage castaway, foreign, poor and mocked for both. His Dark Magic, rare and feared, drew the attention of Julius Novachrono, the one man who looked at the outsider and saw a Magic Knight. Yami rose through the Grey Deer squad, earned a captaincy, and founded his own squad on Julius's philosophy: the Black Bulls, a home for the kingdom's misfits, staffed by rejects he hand-picked. As a captain he has fought devils, elves and enemy kingdoms, and his trust in his 'kids' has become the Clover Kingdom's worst-kept secret weapon.

Powers & Abilities

• Dark Magic: Yami's rare magic generates and controls darkness, slow-moving but absolute, able to swallow other spells and cut through dimensions themselves.
• Dark Cloaked Dimension Slash: His signature: a flying slash of darkness from his katana that ignores distance and defence, cutting the space between him and the target.
• Ki sensing: From his homeland's training, Yami reads opponents' ki, life energy, to sense attacks and intentions beyond sight or mana.
• Mana Zone: Black Hole: A sphere of darkness that devours incoming magic, his answer to overwhelming enemy spells.

Key Relationships

• Asta: His most improbable recruit, the magicless boy Yami backed from the entrance exam onward, and the squad member who most embodies his creed.
• Julius Novachrono: The Wizard King who gave a foreign castaway his chance; Yami's loyalty to him is absolute and personal.
• William Vangeance: A fellow captain and old comrade from their Grey Deer days, their friendship is tested by the war's darkest secret.
• Noelle Silva: The royal failure he recruited without blinking, whose growth under his crude coaching vindicates his eye for people.

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