Lu Shaotang

A young Chinese woman with fair skin and dark eyes, Lu Shaotang wears her red hair long and keeps an athletic frame. Her everyday look at the shop pairs a green apron over a black shirt with white shoes, and she normally gathers her hair up out of the way. That changes the moment strong drink enters the picture, since she shakes it loose and her whole bearing turns furious and menacing.

Lu tends to wear an easy, upbeat expression, coming across as cheerful and unbothered most of the time. Her early days at the shop bordered on too laid-back, since she once turned up two hours late with street clothes hiding beneath her apron. That looseness masks real sentiment, though, as she treasures the mementos her parents left behind and quietly loves her family. She has folded the Sakamoto shop into that same circle of affection, treating its people as her own, which is why she flew into a rage, admittedly while drunk on pure alcohol, and smashed Saw as he moved to strike Shin.

Her background stays largely a mystery beyond the fact that she descends from a Triad clan. At the store she trades friendly jabs with Shin, respects Taro as both boss and a source of astonishing strength, looks after his daughter Hana like an older sister, and thinks Wutang is clever yet unsettling given how he trails after her.

Lu is a capable martial artist whose strength and speed both outstrip what her frame suggests. Her most distinctive edge is an extraordinary tolerance for alcohol, since she can down pure ethanol without any harm and heavy drinking never dulls her fighting. That trait runs in the family, as she recalls a grandfather who drank the fuel from an alcohol lamp, the kind of methanol or denatured spirit that would kill an ordinary person.

Drink also unlocks a fighting mode that scales with how much and what she consumes. After emptying a bottle of 200-proof ethanol she tossed Saw about like a doll, moved quicker than his eyes could follow, and caught or knocked aside everything he threw, destroying his signature rope and axe in the process. Shin labeled this state Triad Drunk, setting it apart from the crying, angry, and happy varieties they had already catalogued.