Name: Kunichiro "Kuki" Ueda
Age: 17
Gender: Male
Appearance: Just about 5 ft 8.
Personality:
Kuki is really outgoing, but he likes his privacy. A lot. He has a few good friends, some of them out of school, but he goes well with everyone. He is known by being fair and righteous. He hates telling lies, what makes him a terrible liar. He takes school and other stuff pretty serious.

Backstory: Kuki has a secret, no one knows much about his family. His mother died a few years ago and he was raised by his severe father, that no student of friend has ever known personally. Because of him, Kuki has a few scars in his body, that he is ashamed of. He got in school proving to be a good student and the board of directors see in him a good soon-to-be-man.

Inherent Engine Skill: Kuki can take much more pain than others. That gave him advantage in some battles in the past, specially against more powerful enemies.

Active Engine Device: The NAV, an old razor. It was the only gift he had from his grandfather - on Kuki's mother funeral. Granpa was a sailor and got this from some mysterious guys once, a long time ago... It doesn't look very special, but it's blade is indestructible. So Kuki, since then, had it with him all the time.

Skills: He can sharpen pretty much any object. Give him a pencil or a stone, he will make a stunning blade in seconds. That proved to be really useful in outnumbered fights in the past. He is also pretty good with languages and communication.

Rank: 7th
Club: Kuki has no allegiance to any clubs for now.

Name: Hikari Kiyoshi

Age: 17

Gender: Male

Appearance: "You can never defeat another if you know not how to defeat yourself." Kiyoshi is around five foot nine, with a lean and fit build and an appearance that might be described as "unusually pretty", enhanced by an almost elfin grace in his movements.

Personality: Kiyoshi could certainly be considered the strong, silent type. He is stoic and solitary in general to the point of antisociability, yet unfailingly polite when he speaks to others, and quite generous on top of this, dispatching sage-like wisdom to those who require guidance, and assistance to those in need even at his own expense. He is typically patient and calm, maintaining his wits and a rational outlook even in bizarre circumstances, and clever enough to strategise, plan, or improvise around most situations. Despite this, it is not completely impossible to rile or confuse him, flaws in his persona that he seeks to eliminate as soon as he can, and oddly enough, he maintains a poor understanding of many types of advanced technology, whether through reluctance or simple inability to use most of it properly, though he has forced himself to become proficient with the school's ubiquitous tablets, and very few weapons pose any significant challenge to him due to his IES. As far as the school's battle policy goes, he maintains a fairly strict rule of not initiating fights with those lower in rank than himself, and only rarely challenges somebody of greater or equivalent rank, few as they are nowadays.

Backstory: Kiyoshi entered Shirohama High School fairly shortly after the new combat system was implemented, and for the duration of his first year didn't really stand out at all. According to various rumours that occasionally circulated, he was born from some family of nobility and ex-samurais or another, hence his weapon, though he never really got close enough to anybody to confirm or deny the rumours, and indeed rarely made much of an impact even when talking to somebody. At the same time, the size of his sword often deterred others from trying to challenge him, and though the occasional fighter came up against him, they were all handled in a low-key fashion, and his Student Rank remained below 10 for quite some time.

This changed when one of the more insecure and masculine members of the Combat Training Club decided to get sweet on Kiyoshi near the end of his first year. Despite pointing out that he wasn't interested in any relationship at that time, the Rank 38 kept pushing, eventually getting angry at his crush's insistent refusal, and challenging him to a duel in a very public location in the near future. The expected outcome was that the Combat Training Club member would crush his low-rank foe with ease. Instead, Kiyoshi defeated his foe rather easily, apparently insulting some of the other members of the club in the process. He was challenged by multiple people, only to in turn declare a challenge against every single member of the Combat Training Club at once, proposing that he take on a gauntlet of one, two, or three members at a time - and if he won, he would take up leadership of the club in full.

Frankly speaking, the CTC suffered a humiliating defeat. Kiyoshi seemed to be practically untouchable, his sword blocking his foe's strikes even as it sliced them apart, and his movements seemed to be all but unfollowable at times; many a fighter's AED was removed from their grasp and used against them, all ultimately discarded in favour of his own AED's bizarre ability to, amongst other things, strike down an opponent despite having blocked their attack. Once only the Club's captain was left, Kiyoshi explained that Seirei's power was to phase into a realm of spirit, to ignore physical matter and target a living being's Mana Core, their very soul as he put it. This did not help the captain - in spite of holding one of the highest ranks in the school, and bearing one of the most powerful AEDs, he was apparently shredded in a single strike from Kiyoshi's weapon. Leadership of the club transferred to Kiyoshi, and he acquired various monikers ranging from "Spirit Slayer" to "Master of Blades" to go with his final rank of 41.

Not many people have challenged him in his second year, for different reasons to his first, and he in turn has generally refrained from challenging others. Most challengers have been foolhardy students wishing to take Kiyoshi down as a show of their own strength; all of those he has challenged have been of higher rank than himself, and typically offered some grave insult or another to him or his club beforehand. None have lasted very long. Either way, his rank has escalated somewhat since then, leaving him and his club with quite substantial status in the school. Of course, now the newcomer Chinatsu Chiba has drawn his interest, not least because she too is a sword bearer of substantial strength... and wouldn't it be a shame for her to fall into the hands of a club that would waste her potential?

Inherent Engine Skill: Weaponmaster - In Kiyoshi's hands, every sword moves as fluidly as water, every axe strikes true, and every gun seems to aim itself. To put it bluntly, Kiyoshi is instantly able to wield whatever weapon is placed in his hands, or even utilise mundane objects as weapons, as though he'd trained to use it to the exclusion of all other activities for a decade or longer, in particular acquiring the skills of a grandmaster with most types of sword simply because swordsmanship is already his focus. This even extends to Active Engine Devices to some extent - if the AED is a weapon, and Kiyoshi can manage to disarm the wielder and bring the weapon to bear himself, he will have an instinctive awareness of how to use it as a weapon of its type, albeit lesser than a mundane equivalent unless he practices with it; likewise, he gains no insight into its special features without significant training to first handle these effects properly.

Active Engine Device: Seirei - lit. "Holy Ghost" - Kiyoshi's nodachi is around 180cm long, clearly well-forged despite its dark blue colour, appears able to cut through most mundane substances easily enough, and seems to never require sharpening or maintenance. Seirei's power, though, is reflective of its name, and somewhat odd regardless: when wielded, it seems to blur and leave afterimages, signifying what Kiyoshi refers to as "a transition into the realm of spirit", which by his admission allows it to ignore the physical world and strike directly at a person's spirit, in practice passing through other weapons even as Seirei's strikes are blocked, and apparently harming the target's body as a result of damage to their soul and Mana Core. This blurring even extends to Kiyoshi himself in many cases, apparently multiplying his physical abilities like strength, senses, and endurance when necessary, though especially his speed and agility, causing him to move at speeds that seem impossible at times.

Skills: Swordsmanship - Though reasonably well trained in various weapons, Kiyoshi's true calling is that of the sword. Even without his Inherent Engine working for him, he can quite readily hand other fighters their backside, even those who have trained for longer in swordsmanship, from any given stance. He even prefers to "standby" in no particular stance at all, from there being able to adopt whatever stance he desires nearly instantly; as described, the IE Skill proper renders him practically untouchable with sword in hand.

Martial arts - Despite preferring to fight with his weaponry rather than without, this is not to suggest Kiyoshi is anything but skilled with his bare hands and feet; though only specifically a black belt in karate, he combines his general knowledge of various martial arts into a unique style that tends to revolve around disabling and disarming, rather than killing a foe, since if death is a necessity, he already has the tool to inflict it. It helps that Seirei's power remains partially active even when not wielded, boosting his physical capabilities somewhat without providing the corresponding skill boost.

Psychology, and physics - Kiyoshi is rather skilled in the matters of psychology and physics - whilst certainly not an expert in either field, especially compared to his swordsmanship, he knows enough to hold reasonable conversations on the topic with others working in those areas, and shows a keen willingness to learn more about both topics.

Teamaking - Kiyoshi likes tea, and more importantly like tea of varying sorts. It stands to reason that he's therefore good at making tea, even out of wild plants such as nettles.

Rank: 46 - Kiyoshi is a very highly skilled fighter and a strong opponent besides, but the sense that further advancement is more a function of closeness to the Student Council President than actual ability rings strongly within him, and his tendency to avoid challenging others when not necessary has led to minimal rise in rank as of late.

Club: Combat Training Club - Though he did not create it, Kiyoshi presently leads the Combat Training Club as captain, designed to train other students in the use of various weapons and martial arts techniques; under Kiyoshi, it also functions as a way of helping students to master their AEDs, whether or not they are swords or even weapons. Naturally, the most dedicated fighters in Shiroyama High School tend to be drawn to this club, and it contains a rather high density of skill for its fairly small size.