Ducksworth

Metropolis of Superheroes

Hey now, that one Dad is doing his darndest and was a centre-back in High School. He knows his shit.

Edit: Also, I'm British and have no real idea what a centre-back is.

Metropolis of Superheroes

Vector followed in step as Bernard led them down the long carpeted hall. The others’ voices carried in easy rhythm, all of them light, human, and unburdened. The chatter bounced between the walls. The Knight’s armour clinked softly with each stride, and they all kept pace with measured calm. Their excitement filled the air like static, but one of Bernard’s earlier answers lingered in Vector’s mind. No pay. Volunteer work. He hadn’t thought of it until then, of course he hadn’t needed to. He’d never stopped to wonder what it would cost to live whilst being a hero. The thought of money, or the lack of it even, simply didn’t exist in his world. He could afford to risk himself for ideals because comfort, and even luxury, was already a guaranteed.

The question replayed in his memory, that faint hope, a man asking if he’d still be able to eat while saving others. Vector’s jaw tightened. He’d forgotten that some people fought because they had nothing else, that heroism wasn’t a privilege for everyone. It wasn’t guilt. It was logistics, and imbalance needed correction.

He lifted his right hand slightly, thumb brushing upward in a subtle, unnatural motion. The small sensor woven into the glove’s inner seam pulsed once against the web of his hand. Inside his aviators, faint text appeared, projected low across the lens, translucent, and invisible to anyone but him. He signed quickly with his fingers, the coded gestures compact and practiced. Each movement mapped to letters, a silent, efficient language he’d programmed himself to use without obvious movement.

---

HGS-3 Encrypted Channel: Hale... - connected.

Vector
Establish a discrete support fund.
Grants for low-income registered heroes.
Equipment, housing, stipends, etc

Hale
A charitable venture, sir?

Vector
Maintenance. Efficiency requires stability.
Keep it anonymous.

Hale
Initial allocation?

Vector
Two million. Renewable quarterly.
Talk details later. Out.

---

A faint confirmation blinked green on the inside of his lens, gone with a blink, the glass returned to black. To anyone watching, he’d merely adjusted his gloves.

He let the silence settle again as they walked. The others spoke freely, driven by enthusiasm and choice, people doing this because they wanted to. He envied that, in a quiet way he’d never admit; they fought for meaning whereas he fought for control.

The hallway opened into the registration chamber, bright and clean under flat white light. Five booths lined the walls, each humming with its own kind of promise. MAGI shimmered with crystals. DATA flickered with precision. SERAPH buzzed under sterile blue light. GIFT radiated warmth and pride. He watched the others drift, drawn by fascination, or maybe belonging. One bowed politely to the witch at MAGI. Another leaned close to inspect DATA’s robot attendant. The Knight hovered awkwardly, earnest and uncertain. They looked alive, and he envied that, too.

His path, by contrast, had always been narrow. He had no magic, no mutation, no real ability beyond harsh and unending training, and then just structure, a framework, built by himself to keep him from becoming what his father had designed him to be. He crossed the parquet floor in silence. When he reached the booth at the far end, the one with plain wood, gray walls, and a faintly humming terminal, he stopped. He sat his attaché neatly beside his leg and straightened.

“Vector,” he said. “I’m signing on for ELITE.”

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Levi Orienko

---

The morning came with warmth and light, but Levi could still smell the old smoke clinging to the town’s edges, the kind that soaked into walls and the people alike. From the rooftop across the street, a paper bird perched lazily. It wasn’t big, no bigger than a sparrow, but its sight was his sight. The world below spread open through their tether.

’Two soldiers by the gate. One half-asleep. Patrol rotation every twelve minutes. Three civilians sweeping the street. One… no, two? volunteers headed this way.’

His bird drifted down and landed gently onto his shoulder, before becoming a curl of ash. It was a habit now, watching his position, his surroundings, who was coming and going, who might be a threat or a friend. He didn’t like being surprised. Not anymore.

Years ago, the people who took him had made a game of surprise — lights on and off, footsteps in the dark, voices that said horrible things in a language he had yet to master. At nine, he learned that fear sharpens everything. At fifteen, he learned it could also make you vanish. And now, at seventeen, he used both like a second language.

Levi walked the last few meters to the New Town Hall gates, shoulders squared, eyes hidden beneath his fringe. The pack on his back barely shifted. The town itself was strange. Too alive for the wreckage it wore. Mango trees still leaned over the streets, green and arrogant against the gray. Children’s laughter echoed somewhere distant, and for a second, Levi had to remind himself this was post-war. Peace always sounded wrong when you’d lived without it too long. He stopped near the steps, gaze scanning the soldiers before him. Trust wasn’t something anyone here had in abundance.

His name came from behind him, loud and clear enough to cut through the morning heat. He’d known it was coming before the echo reached him — his bird had spotted the man a block away, moving with that confident stride that didn’t belong in a place like this. Bahram Mainyu — hard to mistake. The man carried energy like a fire under his skin, the kind that drew people in without trying. Last time Levi had seen him was in Siberia, both of them knee-deep in the shit that reeked of diesel, gunpowder, and blood.

For a heartbeat, the memory flickered — Bahram’s laughter somewhere between gunfire, a flash of color against the white. Levi’s lip twitched, a slight flush appearing at his cheeks, something close to a smile but not quite. He didn’t call out, didn’t wave. Just watched as Bahram made his way closer, that same reckless ease radiating off him. Levi could almost hear the warmth in it, the familiarity. He wasn’t sure what to do with either.

He shifted slightly, gaze flicking past Bahram for a second — to the second figure further down the street. Black leather jacket, boots that spoke of travel. The man’s movements were calm, deliberate. Likely, another new arrival. Lubao was filling with strangers and ghosts, and Levi wasn’t sure which one he counted as.

He adjusted his pack, “...Guess we’ll be working together, again,” he murmured, voice low, words lost to the heat and the hum of the street.

Whatever awaited inside the Town Hall, orders, alliances, ghosts of old wars: it didn’t matter.

He was here, he was free, and for the first time in a long time, he’d chosen the direction himself.

---

Archer “Griff” Griffin

---

There was no surface. Only deep black and the slow pulse of something deep beneath it. Soundless. Endless. Heavy. Griff couldn’t tell if he was sinking or suspended; only that the black pressed against him from every direction, cold and absolute. It should’ve felt suffocating, but instead there was calm, the kind that came just before drowning. Then came the glint. Two faint embers in the dark. They floated before him, steady, patient. Watching.

Didn’t you want power?

The voice wasn’t a voice at all. It came from inside his ribs, resonating through the cage of his chest, deeper than bone.

You asked for strength, begged for it. You took it with both hands and you burned it all just as quick.

He tried to speak, but the deep filled his lungs. No words, only bubbles that rose and broke against the silence.

Now look at you, the darkness whispered. Small again. Fragile again, Weak! A waste of potential.

The embers flared, shifting to a molten red in the black, and for an instant they took shape — the faint outline of the gauntlets, warped and cracked, fading at the edges.

THUMP.

The light rippled. The black vibrated.

THUMP.

The second came harder, a sound that shattered the dream and tore through his body. The black peeled away, dragging his consciousness upward like a hook through his ribcage. Everything blurred, the heat, the noise, the light, and the surface broke around him. He gasped awake. Air slammed into his lungs. Cold, sterile, sharp. He coughed, a deep, rattling sound, and the motion sent knives of pain through his ribs. Every nerve flared at once. His shoulder burned like open fire; his chest ached with every breath.

White ceiling. Ceiling fan. The low hum of generators. The faint sting of antiseptic. He blinked hard, squeezing away the blurring water filling his vision. forcing his eyes to focus. The room around him was dim but steady, infirmary lights, a bed beneath him, bandages winding tight across his torso and shoulder. Someone had cleaned the blood off him. He could still feel the rough drag of gauze along raw skin. His clothes lay on the chair beside him, folded. He raised his hands. No gauntlets. No weight. Just the plain bracers around his forearms, inert, cold, almost too light now.

For a long while, he just breathed. Each inhale dragged through his teeth, rough but real. The world didn’t sway or explode. The walls didn’t scream. There was no gunfire, no smoke, no roar of Noble Arms tearing through air. Just the low, steady hum of life returning. His eyes wandered toward the small window. Morning light slipped through the blinds, pale and forgiving. It hurt to look at, but he didn’t stop. He remembered the wind. The fall. The moment everything broke.

He could’ve been dead. He should’ve been dead. Instead, he was here when many weren’t, by his hands. There was no doubt this time. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, the movement stiff and halting. His feet touched the cool floor, grounding him. For a second, he stayed there, hunched forward, hands on his knees, his breath rattling slowly through the quiet. No fire. No rage. Just pain. Just weight.

Redshift Blues

Jax - "Progress"

---

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH

The sound of something heavy scraping metal echoed faintly through the Dullahan’s lower deck — another rearrangement. His quarters, a small, jury-rigged space just off the breaching bore, looked less like a cabin and more like the inside of a dismantled ordnance crate. A hammock swayed between two hand-welded hooks, half tangled in a mess of cables. The air smelled faintly of oil, and whatever powdery residue clung to his surface these days.

He was at it — again hauling his desk half a metre to the left, muttering to himself the entire time. “Better line for the light. Yep. Better line for the light.” The light hadn’t changed. It never changed. After ten days aboard, he’d memorized every flicker of it, every half-second blink of the wall strip that threatened to die but never did.

He stepped back, eyed the new layout, frowned, nodded — this time, surely, out of all of them, it was finally in the right spot. The process repeated in bursts: shoving, sighing, standing back to judge, as if the perfect configuration might suddenly make the room bigger, or maybe just different.

He stopped, hands on hips, staring around at the small Kingdom of Jax he’d built. Tools, components, scraps of wire, half-dismantled detonators — each of them had its place, or had once had a place before the last rearrangement, and the one before that. The desk itself was scavenged from discarded cargo parts or plating, with a dent in one corner that he used to crack open whatever needed cracking.

Jax exhaled through his nose and crouched, pulling a narrow box from under the desk. Inside were the makings of something definitely volatile: little jars of powdered compounds, pieces of wire, and one dented detonator housing. His fingers moved automatically, his eyes fixed on the desk that was already starting to irritate him all over again. He checked seals, tightened screws, scraped the residue from a spent charge with a thumbnail.

He wasn’t building anything in particular; he was just doing — Keeping the hands busy so the head wouldn’t start chewing on itself. “Bulkhead Fondue: Mark II,” he muttered, twisting a wire. “The Fondue-...ening?” He mulled for second. “Pfft, Nah.”

A faint spark jumped from a contact and fizzled out against the table’s surface, leaving a black kiss of burn on the metal. He didn’t even flinch. Just stared at it for a long second, then gave a slow, almost appreciative nod — a wide grin slowly forming on his face. The room smelled sharper now, like scorched copper and regret.

“Yes! That’s it!” He spat, dropping the concoction back into the box without a care, shooting up and grasping the desk once more.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH

Outside, The Dullahan’s lacking hum was a low reminder that they were still docked, the engines didn’t vibrate the hull like it should. It was bright and sickly outside — not that Jax could see much of it. He’d considered cutting a viewport into the bulkhead once, just to see the black, but even he had realised it was probably one of his “bad ideas” — the kind that people tended to “frown on.” So no, still stuck.

A whole moon below them, and he hadn’t even set foot on it. Not when there was potential out there: charges to set, things to blow apart properly. Instead, he was trapped in a box, rearranging smaller boxes, which probably had even smaller boxes packed inside.

He leaned back against the wall, running a hand over his face, smearing more than sweat across his brow. His reflection in the steel of one of the newer casings stared back — hair sticking up, eyes bloodshot, a faint smear of graphite across his cheek. He blinked, frowned, then glanced at the narrow box still open beside him. One of the contacts was smoking faintly.

From the corridor outside, there was a muffled pop. The sound was small, but sharp enough to make the lights bounce and flicker once before settling again. A faint haze began to curl out from under the door, carrying with it the acrid tang of burnt chemicals.

Inside, the air had turned grey. Smoke coiled lazily through the cramped space, settling on the cables and the hammock. Jax stood in the middle of it, blinking through the haze, flecks of soot peppering his hair and shoulders. He wiped a streak across his cheek with the back of his hand, leaving it darker than before.

“Huh,” he muttered, voice flat. “Good seal integrity.”

“Progressssss,” he hissed, shoulders dropping, tension leaving him like air from a punctured seal, and reached for his tools once again.

[Ryke - Dungeon] Languishing Large Loner

Heat climbed the bones of his shins; steam shouldered up from the pool and curled hard around his calves, warm enough to sting. It smelled like wet lime and vinegar under old stone, sharp, caustic, clean in a way that didn’t belong here. The fog kinked. It didn’t just thin; it kinked, like fabric snagging on a nail, and pulled back in a rough ring.

He almost laughed the air out of himself. A tight, startled sound punched his teeth. “It worked,” he told the glass grit pricking his palm, told the staff buzzing against his shoulder. “It actually…”

Silver cut the world in half.

A circle of motion where the mist had been, the scythe’s arc precise enough to make geometry jealous, and then the caster came apart as silently as he’d arrived. No speech. No curse. Just a body becoming water, sliding away between the carved faces and their endless tears. It was so clean it felt indecent, like a secret performed in public.

Aramis’ grin held a moment longer than it should have, then softened and tilted. He let it go. His draft had made a hole. Her steel had ended the fight. Those were different truths that lived beside each other without arguing.

The ring of clarity widened another pace on the back of the last bubbles. With it came everything his fog had been keeping from him: the medic half-kneeling, one hand sunk into the ruff of her dog to hold him back as bright ribbons spun off her forearm and hip; the armored rifleman dropping to one knee beside her, visor dead, real eyes bright and human and worried; the dwarf standing like a broken anvil, soaked, armor in tatters, chest heaving, still ready to swing at anything that dared breathe wrong.

He looked down at himself, sleeves damp to the elbow, lenses beaded with condensation, hands uncut. The steam hissed around his boots like a creature pleased with itself. The reaction ran well. The push was right. The secondary destabilization? Partial, at best. He replayed the chain without meaning to: hydration heat was adequate; expansion front reached maybe ten feet; but without a lattice to carry it, the effect broke on the first obstruction and eddied uselessly at the edges. The sorrow carrier still hung in the far air like smoke that refused to be a fire.

“Not enough,” he said softly, no self-reproach in it, just measurement. He could feel the numbers waiting for paper: less acetate next time; swap the primer for something wetter; stitch a mana frame through the vapor so it doesn’t lose cohesion when it meets resistance.

A movement dragged his attention back outward, the scythe-bearer straightening from a brief, private flinch, pale around the mouth as she rinsed the blood from her face. He looked away on purpose, gave her the grace of not seeing it, and wiped his own lenses with the heel of his wrist. When he looked again, the rifleman was already laying out bandage, the medic’s jaw set hard against the edges of pain she didn’t have a spare hand to acknowledge. The dog pressed close, torn between orders and instinct.

Aramis planted the butt of his staff and let it hum until the tremor left his fingers. Pride and relief came in the same breath, and in the next breath the scale of the room put its hand on his shoulder and nudged: you helped; they bled. Both were true.

He stepped once into the cleaner air his concoction had bought and let himself have the smallest smile, crooked, careful. “Good start. Next time, we will do it properly.”

He angled the staff across his body, the old student’s posture settling over him, eyes moving, mind already drafting margins. Phase support, not centerpiece. Keep the path open, keep the people breathing, give the blades and bullets a lane. The new passage yawned ahead, mist tugging from its throat like the breath of a sleeping beast.

Aramis tightened his grip, glanced once toward the scythe’s last glint, once toward the pair at the waterline, and found the center of himself again.

“Stronger.” he said, more about himself than anything else, pitched to no one and to all of them at once.

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Levi Orienko

	_______________________________________________ LEVI ORIENKO LEVI ORIENKO Name: Levi Orienko Faction: Independent Rank: - Nationality: Ukrainian Age: 17 Sex: Male Height: 5'6" Weight: 132lbs (60kg) Eyes: Green-gold Physique: Wiry, scarred, restless Hair: Deep brown Skin: pale Colour: c2b280

N O B L E A R M & A P P E A R A N C E :
N O B L E A R M & A P P E A R A N C E :

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Kami-Kunai (aka as White Fang, Belyy Klyk (russian)) - Levi’s Noble Arm takes the form of a Kunai folded from pale paper. Its surface is matte and smooth, yet the edges taper to impossibly sharp creases. Every line of the blade and handle carries the geometry of a fold, as if it had been shaped by careful, deliberate hands. The material looks fragile, too light to harm, thin like notebook stock, weightless in the air, yet it carries itself with the gravity of steel. In hand, it balances perfectly, never bending, never tearing. When light catches its surface, the seams gleam faintly with a slightly metallic shine.

N O B L E A R M R A N K :
N O B L E A R M R A N K :

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(B)

• Power: D
• Speed: B
• Range: B
• Persistence: A
• Precision: D
• Potential: B

N O B L E A R M T Y P E, E L E M E N T, & R A N G E :
N O B L E A R M T Y P E, E L E M E N T, & R A N G E :

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• Type: Ranged/Utility/Support
• Element: Origami
• Range: Medium/long

N O B L E A R M A B I L I T I E S :
N O B L E A R M A B I L I T I E S :

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• Duplication
  • Kami-Kunai can be duplicated and controlled just like the original, being able to be shaped and modified as willed by Levi.
• Shape and Form
  • Can be folded, bent, and refolded into such shapes as birds, blades, sheets, ropes, masks, keys, etc.
  • Forms behave as expected - Bird flaps/flies, rope can tighten, etc.
  • Shapes can change mid-use - Birds turning to sheet etc.
• Control and Command
  • Has intuitive awareness of everything the forms touch, see, or hear, like extensions of his own senses
  • He does not need to maintain line of sight to manipulate his forms

M I S C A B I L I T I E S :
M I S C A B I L I T I E S :

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• Able to speak Ukrainian natively, Russian due to his time in capture, and English
• Birdwatching
• Observation - He's always watching. Small details like nervous tics, weight shifts, patterns, rarely escape him.

P E R S O N A L I T Y :
P E R S O N A L I T Y :

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Levi is first and foremost an observer. His eyes never stop moving, tracing patterns in behavior, in sounds, in shadows. Years of captivity carved into him the habit of noticing everything, because survival often depended on it. He is guarded to the point of severity, speaking little and offering even less of himself. What words he does share are sharp, deliberate, and efficient, often carrying the clipped cadence of a second language. In English he tends toward simple phrasing, dropping articles here and there but never fumbling. He rarely contracts words, preferring directness over fluency. In his native Ukrainian or in Russian, he is smoother, more fluid, but he seldom has reason to use them.

Despite his silence, Levi is not empty. Beneath the taut surface lives a restless creativity, the echo of the boy who once made birds to perch on his shoulders and paper planes to dance in the air. His mind still bends that way, endlessly inventing, reshaping, improvising. He can see ten ways through a problem where others see only one. Yet this creativity carries a shadow: he is haunted by the memory of when his toys became weapons. Sometimes he indulges in childlike play, a bird resting on his hand, a kite drifting in the wind, but guilt follows swiftly, as if he is not allowed to be a child any longer.

Trauma left him resilient, but it also left him raw. He flinches at the sound of footsteps in hallways, recoils from chains, and dreads confinement above all else. Pain itself does not frighten him, he endured too much of it in captivity to be cowed by it now, but the thought of helplessness, of waking up caged once again, terrifies him more than death. This fear lives under his skin like a quiet vibration, always humming. His body never quite relaxes; his stance is always a little too tense, his shoulders a little too drawn. He rarely sits still. Fingers tap, fold, or twist bits of paper unconsciously. His sleep is shallow, broken at the smallest sound.

Socially, Levi is polite in a detached way, as if manners are armor rather than kindness. He rarely engages warmly, though he is not openly rude unless pushed. Trust comes slow, if at all. Authority especially makes him wary; uniforms and orders are just chains in another form. Still, he is not joyless. Every so often a dry, almost sardonic humor slips through in a wry remark. When it does, it’s darker than expected from a boy of seventeen, but it reveals a quick wit and a tongue that knows how to cut.

To strangers, Levi feels unsettling. There is something too sharp-eyed, too poised in him for someone his age. To allies, he is useful and loyal if that trust is earned, but difficult to draw close. To enemies, he is ghostlike, hard to catch, hard to see, his presence often felt more than it is witnessed. To himself, he is a paradox. He is both the child who longs to play and the survivor who can never afford to. He is both the creator and the weapon. Like his Noble Arm, he folds himself into whatever form is needed, holding the shape as long as survival demands.

L I K E S :
L I K E S :

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• Birds
• Quiet places
• The wind
• Firelight
• Small, harmless tricks
• Music
• Autumn

D I S L I K E S :
D I S L I K E S :

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• Enclosed spaces
• authority figures
• bright lights
• cruelty

F E A R S :
F E A R S :

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• Confinement
• Being forgotten
• Attachment
• Being made to be a weapon

B I O G R A P H Y :
B I O G R A P H Y :

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Levi was born in Ukraine, in a small town where his earliest memories are of wind, fields, and the sound of birds at dawn. His family was ordinary, not rich, not poor, and he was an ordinary boy until the age of nine. That was when he awakened his Noble Arm.

His father had died only weeks before, and the house felt heavy with grief. One afternoon, Levi watched Naruto with his younger cousins while his mother struggled with calls about the estate. When he found her crying at the kitchen table, he felt something shift inside him. He was only a child, but in that moment he decided he had to be the one to hold the family together. The thought clenched like a fist, and when he looked down, there was a kunai in his hand, solid, gleaming, real.

Startled, he ran to his cousins and showed them. They gasped with delight and begged for their own. So he tore sheets of paper and began folding, making clumsy little replicas to hand out. Kunai, shuriken, birds, planes, his cousins laughed, and soon Levi laughed with them. What began as a single weapon became play, and the play shaped the weapon in return. By the end of that year, his Noble Arm no longer appeared as cold steel alone, but as folded shapes that could cut, fly, or cling as his will directed. It was his toy, his secret, his wonder.

But Noble Arms are rare, and their bearers are valuable. It did not take long for word to spread, and where word spreads, so does war. Soldiers came, not from his homeland but from across the border, men with hard eyes and foreign commands. Levi was taken. He was only nine.
The years that followed blurred into one long captivity. A cell became his world, its walls closing in on him. Guards and handlers sought to break him, to twist his plaything into a weapon. They hurt him, starved him, demanded he use the folded blades to kill, to scout, to sabotage. Sometimes he refused, sometimes he obeyed. Each time he resisted, he paid in blood and bruises. Each time he obeyed, he lost a little more of himself. He learned quickly that silence was safer than defiance, that patience was stronger than rage.

Even in hell, he played. Quietly, in corners, he folded birds and kites when no one was looking. They were his secret, his reminder that he was still a boy. But play became survival. The kunai that once awoke in his hand had become many shapes now, shuriken, sheets, nets, birds, tools that fed him, shielded him, or bled others at his captors’ command. The origami was no longer just play; it was the only language he had left.

At fifteen, Levi escaped. It was not a single daring act but a long preparation, a slow burn. For months he tested locks with paper picks, memorized guard routines through the eyes of his birds, and mapped vents and exits. When the moment came, he struck without hesitation. A sheet smothered one guard, a shard slit the throat of another, and another... His folded blades blurred cameras, riled up dogs, and cut open fences. Alarms rang behind him, but the forest ahead was quiet. For the first time in six years, he was free.

Now seventeen, Levi is still carrying the boy he once was and the survivor he became. He does not fully belong to either. To most, he is unnerving, a teenager with eyes too sharp, too still, shaped by suffering. To himself, he is something stranger: a creator whose creations kill, a child who learned to play with death. He walks with it always at hand. His story is still being written, one fold at a time.

C U R R E N T G O A L :
C U R R E N T G O A L :

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• To remain free and never be caged again.
• To free those who are caged where he can.
• Find meaning beyond survival

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Archer “Griff” Griffin

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The blast didn’t just hit him, It consumed him.

Wu Shufen’s eruption went off at point-blank, and Griff was the closest body in its path. For an instant, there was no separation between himself and the detonation, only obliterating force. His world shattered in fire and shockwave, the deck torn out from under him as he was hurled upward like a ragdoll caught in the fist of some furious god. His chest collapsed in on itself, his lungs emptied in a single ragged soundless gasp, his back arched as every nerve lit up at once.

Then there was only air.

The Mirage Space crumbled away, yet Griff’s trajectory continued unbroken, a violent arc into the open sky. Below, the carrier was a splintering carcass in flames; above, there was only void, the wind clawing at him, peeling him apart one frantic second at a time.

His ears rang with shrill static, drowning out the chaos below. His vision fractured into red tunnels and black sparks. His body, whipped by rushing wind, felt suddenly alien, too heavy, too fragile, too human.

And then…

THUMP.

The first heartbeat. Heavy. Absolute. It struck through his ribs like a hammer, reverberating into every corner of his being. With it came the avalanche: pain rushing in all at once, like a floodgate kicked open.

His shoulder. The bullet wound he never realised he received tore wider, hot blood slicking his chest. His ribs groaned like cracked timber, each breath sharp and serrated. His legs seized, muscles knotting into agony. His fists trembled, the gauntlets biting into his skin.

THUMP.

The second heartbeat ripped through him, harder, crueler. And with it, the gauntlets broke.

The steel didn’t simply fade, it convulsed, like metal dragged too far past its limit. Sparks spat from the seams, smoke hissed off glowing edges, plates collapsing inward as though swallowed by the weight of his exhaustion. The armor shrank, folding in on itself until all that remained were the plain bracers, quiet and meager against his skin. The storm was gone.

And in the absence of their weight, Griff felt everything.

Every wound he’d ignored, every muscle he’d pushed beyond breaking, every ounce of rage he’d used as fuel, It all crashed into him at once.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

The sound of battle below dissolved into nothing. Only the hollow roar of wind remained, rushing cold across his sweat and blood, dragging him higher still before gravity claimed him back. His pulse slowed. The fury bled away, leaving only exhaustion, hollow and infinite.

His eyelids flickered. Heavy. Impossible to hold open.

The air embraced him, cool and merciless, brushing against his skin as though the world itself were cradling him in his fall. His body twisted limply, each tumble pulling at wounds that screamed for attention, each spin another reminder of his frailty.

For one fleeting moment, it was calm. No shouting. No gunfire. No orders. No grief. Just the quiet throb of a heart on the verge of silence, and the dizzying pull of gravity calling him home.

…thump.

His eyes slid shut.

The rage was gone. The fight was gone. And Griff fell, unconscious, a broken comet tumbling through the black toward the ruins below.

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

My second character for your consideration!

V.2!

Levi Orienko

	_______________________________________________ LEVI ORIENKO LEVI ORIENKO Name: Levi Orienko Faction: Independent Rank: - Nationality: Ukrainian Age: 17 Sex: Male Height: 5'6" Weight: 132lbs (60kg) Eyes: Green-gold Physique: Wiry, scarred, restless Hair: Deep brown Skin: pale Colour: c2b280

N O B L E A R M & A P P E A R A N C E :
N O B L E A R M & A P P E A R A N C E :

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Kami-Kunai (aka as White Fang, Belyy Klyk (russian)) - Levi’s Noble Arm takes the form of a Kunai folded from pale paper. Its surface is matte and smooth, yet the edges taper to impossibly sharp creases. Every line of the blade and handle carries the geometry of a fold, as if it had been shaped by careful, deliberate hands. The material looks fragile, too light to harm, thin like notebook stock, weightless in the air, yet it carries itself with the gravity of steel. In hand, it balances perfectly, never bending, never tearing. When light catches its surface, the seams gleam faintly with a slightly metallic shine.

N O B L E A R M R A N K :
N O B L E A R M R A N K :

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(B)

• Power: D
• Speed: B
• Range: B
• Persistence: A
• Precision: D
• Potential: B

N O B L E A R M T Y P E, E L E M E N T, & R A N G E :
N O B L E A R M T Y P E, E L E M E N T, & R A N G E :

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• Type: Ranged/Utility/Support
• Element: Origami
• Range: Medium/long

N O B L E A R M A B I L I T I E S :
N O B L E A R M A B I L I T I E S :

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• Duplication
  • Kami-Kunai can be duplicated and controlled just like the original, being able to be shaped and modified as willed by Levi.
• Shape and Form
  • Can be folded, bent, and refolded into such shapes as birds, blades, sheets, ropes, masks, keys, etc.
  • Forms behave as expected - Bird flaps/flies, rope can tighten, etc.
  • Shapes can change mid-use - Birds turning to sheet etc.
• Control and Command
  • Has intuitive awareness of everything the forms touch, see, or hear, like extensions of his own senses
  • He does not need to maintain line of sight to manipulate his forms

M I S C A B I L I T I E S :
M I S C A B I L I T I E S :

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• Able to speak Ukrainian natively, Russian due to his time in capture, and English
• Birdwatching
• Observation - He's always watching. Small details like nervous tics, weight shifts, patterns, rarely escape him.

P E R S O N A L I T Y :
P E R S O N A L I T Y :

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Levi is first and foremost an observer. His eyes never stop moving, tracing patterns in behavior, in sounds, in shadows. Years of captivity carved into him the habit of noticing everything, because survival often depended on it. He is guarded to the point of severity, speaking little and offering even less of himself. What words he does share are sharp, deliberate, and efficient, often carrying the clipped cadence of a second language. In English he tends toward simple phrasing, dropping articles here and there but never fumbling. He rarely contracts words, preferring directness over fluency. In his native Ukrainian or in Russian, he is smoother, more fluid, but he seldom has reason to use them.

Despite his silence, Levi is not empty. Beneath the taut surface lives a restless creativity, the echo of the boy who once made birds to perch on his shoulders and paper planes to dance in the air. His mind still bends that way, endlessly inventing, reshaping, improvising. He can see ten ways through a problem where others see only one. Yet this creativity carries a shadow: he is haunted by the memory of when his toys became weapons. Sometimes he indulges in childlike play, a bird resting on his hand, a kite drifting in the wind, but guilt follows swiftly, as if he is not allowed to be a child any longer.

Trauma left him resilient, but it also left him raw. He flinches at the sound of footsteps in hallways, recoils from chains, and dreads confinement above all else. Pain itself does not frighten him, he endured too much of it in captivity to be cowed by it now, but the thought of helplessness, of waking up caged once again, terrifies him more than death. This fear lives under his skin like a quiet vibration, always humming. His body never quite relaxes; his stance is always a little too tense, his shoulders a little too drawn. He rarely sits still. Fingers tap, fold, or twist bits of paper unconsciously. His sleep is shallow, broken at the smallest sound.

Socially, Levi is polite in a detached way, as if manners are armor rather than kindness. He rarely engages warmly, though he is not openly rude unless pushed. Trust comes slow, if at all. Authority especially makes him wary; uniforms and orders are just chains in another form. Still, he is not joyless. Every so often a dry, almost sardonic humor slips through in a wry remark. When it does, it’s darker than expected from a boy of seventeen, but it reveals a quick wit and a tongue that knows how to cut.

To strangers, Levi feels unsettling. There is something too sharp-eyed, too poised in him for someone his age. To allies, he is useful and loyal if that trust is earned, but difficult to draw close. To enemies, he is ghostlike, hard to catch, hard to see, his presence often felt more than it is witnessed. To himself, he is a paradox. He is both the child who longs to play and the survivor who can never afford to. He is both the creator and the weapon. Like his Noble Arm, he folds himself into whatever form is needed, holding the shape as long as survival demands.

L I K E S :
L I K E S :

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• Birds
• Quiet places
• The wind
• Firelight
• Small, harmless tricks
• Music
• Autumn

D I S L I K E S :
D I S L I K E S :

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• Enclosed spaces
• authority figures
• bright lights
• cruelty

F E A R S :
F E A R S :

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• Confinement
• Being forgotten
• Attachment
• Being made to be a weapon

B I O G R A P H Y :
B I O G R A P H Y :

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Levi was born in Ukraine, in a small town where his earliest memories are of wind, fields, and the sound of birds at dawn. His family was ordinary, not rich, not poor, and he was an ordinary boy until the age of nine. That was when he awakened his Noble Arm.

His father had died only weeks before, and the house felt heavy with grief. One afternoon, Levi watched Naruto with his younger cousins while his mother struggled with calls about the estate. When he found her crying at the kitchen table, he felt something shift inside him. He was only a child, but in that moment he decided he had to be the one to hold the family together. The thought clenched like a fist, and when he looked down, there was a kunai in his hand, solid, gleaming, real.

Startled, he ran to his cousins and showed them. They gasped with delight and begged for their own. So he tore sheets of paper and began folding, making clumsy little replicas to hand out. Kunai, shuriken, birds, planes, his cousins laughed, and soon Levi laughed with them. What began as a single weapon became play, and the play shaped the weapon in return. By the end of that year, his Noble Arm no longer appeared as cold steel alone, but as folded shapes that could cut, fly, or cling as his will directed. It was his toy, his secret, his wonder.

But Noble Arms are rare, and their bearers are valuable. It did not take long for word to spread, and where word spreads, so does war. Soldiers came, not from his homeland but from across the border, men with hard eyes and foreign commands. Levi was taken. He was only nine.
The years that followed blurred into one long captivity. A cell became his world, its walls closing in on him. Guards and handlers sought to break him, to twist his plaything into a weapon. They hurt him, starved him, demanded he use the folded blades to kill, to scout, to sabotage. Sometimes he refused, sometimes he obeyed. Each time he resisted, he paid in blood and bruises. Each time he obeyed, he lost a little more of himself. He learned quickly that silence was safer than defiance, that patience was stronger than rage.

Even in hell, he played. Quietly, in corners, he folded birds and kites when no one was looking. They were his secret, his reminder that he was still a boy. But play became survival. The kunai that once awoke in his hand had become many shapes now, shuriken, sheets, nets, birds, tools that fed him, shielded him, or bled others at his captors’ command. The origami was no longer just play; it was the only language he had left.

At fifteen, Levi escaped. It was not a single daring act but a long preparation, a slow burn. For months he tested locks with paper picks, memorized guard routines through the eyes of his birds, and mapped vents and exits. When the moment came, he struck without hesitation. A sheet smothered one guard, a shard slit the throat of another, and another... His folded blades blurred cameras, riled up dogs, and cut open fences. Alarms rang behind him, but the forest ahead was quiet. For the first time in six years, he was free.

Now seventeen, Levi is still carrying the boy he once was and the survivor he became. He does not fully belong to either. To most, he is unnerving, a teenager with eyes too sharp, too still, shaped by suffering. To himself, he is something stranger: a creator whose creations kill, a child who learned to play with death. He walks with it always at hand. His story is still being written, one fold at a time.

C U R R E N T G O A L :
C U R R E N T G O A L :

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• To remain free and never be caged again.
• To free those who are caged where he can.
• Find meaning beyond survival

[Ryke - Dungeon] Languishing Large Loner

The fog swallowed even the sound of his own breathing. The scythe-wielder had melted out of sight; shapes that had been allies a heartbeat ago were only suggestions in the grey. A shout, distant and warped, cut across the chamber and snagged at his instincts. Barrier. Help. Move.

Aramis locked his hands to his staff until the tremor stopped. A blind ward in this soup was a coin toss at best. The mist was the problem. Solve that and everyone breathes.

He dropped to a knee, guilt and determination gripped into his heart in equal measure, his satchel swinging forward. Glass chimed against glass, small, bright, and surgical. He kept his voice at a whisper, a habit from study halls that had nothing to do with fear.

“Okay. Volatile base to kick… carbonates fizz, but I need heat. Better, quicklime analogue.” He thumbed a squat vial stoppered in wax, grit pale as bone. “Hydration’s exothermic. Good. We make steam.”

A second bottle. “But not a runaway.” He snapped a green-tinted stopper free. “A mild acetate will tamp the spike and stretch the burn window.” Liquid ran like thin syrup into the grit. He swirled once, twice, and shook hard. The glass went cold at his palm from dissolution before the grit started to wake and he felt the bottle exhale against his skin, a tiny pressure that said alive.

“Water’s everywhere,” he breathed, eyes on the shallow pool lapping his boots. “H₂O under sudden phase change, latent heat drives expansion. Denser hot vapor pushes, lighter fog yields.”

He palmed open a third vial, clear, sharp, with a solvent bite that stung his eyes. “Primer for wetting. Drop surface tension so it spreads fast, no dead patches.”

The staff braced across his shoulders; he stood just enough to widen his stance. He could almost see the chain in his head: hydration reaction releases heat → water flashes to steam → pressure spikes → steam front expands. After that, chemistry takes its turn.

“And the second push is pure chemistry,” he murmured, steadying his breath. “If the sorrow carrier’s stable in cool, low-energy air, we hit it hot and saturated. Oversaturate the suspension, disrupt the binder. Either dilutes to useless, or clumps and falls.”

He dragged his sleeve over his lenses, then committed. The solution arced from his hand and splashed in a wide scatter across the pool.

He pictured it as it hit: grit taking water in greedy gulps; the mix hissing like a fuse as wet bloomed heat up through his knees; thin solvent racing the reaction outwards so it didn’t stall. Vapor should leap off the surface in a low ring, then heap into a rolling dome, pressure first, shove, and when that new vapor met the sorrow-mist, it should bite, forcing the fog to retreat on contact and destabilize as it mixed.

He hunched behind the staff, jaw tight, counting half-seconds the way he had over burners in cramped labs. “Two-fold,” he whispered, almost to the formula instead of to himself. “Push now. Dilute after.”

His knuckles glowed white as he waited for the reaction to take, ready to ride whatever he’d just woken.

---

Ability and Action usage

New Ability:
Alchemical Problem-Solving — Intelligence C + Educated: Scholar [Arcana, alchemy, academia] F - Grade F - Cooldown 0 Post(s)
Caster applies their knowledge and kit to engineer quick, improvised concoctions in the field. By mixing available reagents with deliberate intent, they can trigger reactions to address immediate situational problems.

Actions Used:

1. Drop to knee.
2. Alchemical Problem-Solving.
3. Spill/seed the mix in a wide circle into the water to trigger the chain reaction.

Nainoko: Devilslayer

Intrigued o/