Sei Asaki

Asaki was a man of ordinary height and frame. Sunken black eyes marked his face, and his short, messy white hair carried a dark streak near the forehead. He was most often seen in a formal suit.

Detached yet deeply self-absorbed, Asaki chased his own freedom without limit and would use anyone to reach it, manipulating his family, killing the innocent, and holding children hostage as leverage. He fancied himself a lover of art, hoarding tens of thousands of pieces he could not even recall, hanging a priceless work in his bathroom and pawing at paintings despite every warning. Ambition fueled his rise, and a streak of cruelty ran through him: he grinned while admitting he had tricked Uzuki into killing Rion. For all his poise, genuine danger exposed a coward who lied, pleaded, and tried to guilt his brother into sparing him.

Years before the main story, Asaki was a JAA executive who leaned on the orphans of Al-Kamar to force Uzuki into an attempt on the chairman's wife and daughter, accepting instead his brother's counteroffer to kill the Order's leader, Kindaka. He then engineered the chairman's murder and pinned it on the second-in-command, Satoru Yotsumura, aided by Yotsumura's own wife, Shino, who had married into the family as a plant. The scheme worked, and Asaki claimed the chairmanship for himself. A year later he traced Uzuki and Rion to their hideout and blackmailed his brother again, dangling the orphans' freedom to make him kill a skilled assassin who, unknown to Uzuki, was Rion herself. Once the deed was done, Asaki appeared to mock his brother's dream of a quiet life before slipping away.