Lim Tae-Gyu

Tae-Gyu reads as a young man, his face framed by unruly black hair and a modest goatee. He turned up first in a black tuxedo, then traded it for brown plate armor and a matching hat when Jeju Island called, drawing a pale golden bow into the fight. The revised timeline barely changes him; the one clear shift is his hair, now grown out long enough to fall to the middle of his back.

For all his rank, Tae-Gyu nurses a streak of self-doubt, once privately wishing the visiting Japanese S-Ranks would take it easy on his team during a four-on-four bout, though he never shirks the work when it falls to him. A wealthy man with a curiously tight grip on money, he had Lee Minsung shielded in the safest slot of the Jeju formation purely because of how valuable the man was. The reset version of him carries more steel, openly clashing with Minsung and moving to keep the Korean Hunter Association from arresting his vice-head, yet he still prizes the friendship enough to spare Minsung any lethal blow he can avoid.

The Fiend Guild he founded once topped every guild in South Korea. That crown slipped when Baek Yoonho and a cluster of senior members walked out to build what became the White Tiger Guild. During the Jeju Island chapter, Tae-Gyu sat in on the summit between Korean and Japanese S-Ranks and drew Minoru Hoshino as his sparring partner; he briefly forced Hoshino onto the defensive with his arrows before being beaten and removed from the match. He could only stare, eyes unable to track them, as Goto Ryuji and Sung Jinwoo traded blows at impossible speed. Before deployment he again insisted Minsung be tucked into the rear of the line, then dropped onto the island with the other Korean S-Ranks to carry out their assignment of slaying the Ant Queen in the fourth raid.

In Ragnarok he begins as Minsung's chauffeur, cleaning up after the man's celebrity life until the Cataclysm awakens him as an S-Rank. He proposes the Reaper's Guild, handling field operations while Minsung bankrolls and administers it. Discovering Minsung's illegal dealings, he demands they stop, severs ties with shadowy criminal contacts during a Southeast Asian raid, and later strong-arms Minsung into shutting down the Paju Field Dungeon as the Association closes in. Summoned to the Association building, he receives Tiel's invitation to join. Standing beside Choi Jong-In, he admits he never grasped how far his former vice master had fallen, rushes to aid hunters caught by brainwashed A-Ranks at full strength, and breaks off to chase the fleeing Minsung. He stumbles onto Sung Suho fighting the transformed Minsung, fires warning shots, grows irritated as they are dodged, and reluctantly resolves to use lethal force, only for one of Suho's shadow soldiers to throw him off and let both targets slip away.