Akira Akao

A messy low ponytail defines Akira's look, its turquoise strands fading to lilac at the tips, though the anime shifts that base color to blue. Bangs drop along both cheeks while a single vertical lock falls almost to her nose. Her eyes match her aunt's exactly, yellow irises ringed by white pupils, set into the small frame of a girl her age. Early on she pairs a black leather jacket over a white tee with dark green trousers, and she has also turned up in a green jacket, a yellow top, and loose pink pants.

Warmth and timidity sit side by side in Akira. She startles easily, grows anxious in strange surroundings such as her first days at the JCC, and rarely refuses to look after those near her, a habit that keeps dragging her into situations she never wanted. Underneath the nerves runs real determination, most of it pointed at tracking down her aunt Rion, the assassin she has idolized since childhood. She measures her own choices against what Rion would have done, once turning away bullets that Sakamoto offered because she felt her aunt would have refused them too. A harsher streak surfaces whenever someone hurts her friends, at which point she will wound or kill without flinching, yet once the fury passes she recoils from taking a life.

Akira already fights at a level that lets her scatter rival candidates during the JCC entrance test and even intercept a finishing blow aimed by Sakamoto. Her signature gift, passed down from Rion, lets her perceive faint lines she calls paths, each one tracing an action available to reach and kill a target; she can hold several routes in view at once and choose between them in the middle of a fight. Against a foe far above her strength, the vision instead shows an uncrossable cliff, which tends to lock her in fear. She moves fast enough to close on an opponent before he reacts, and her hands are quicker still. A gifted seamstress, she once stitched a working parachute out of her companions' clothes while plummeting from a sabotaged plane. Early clumsiness with a light machine gun faded after a few pointers, and she happily rates cleaning, laundry, and sewing as her true strengths.