Shade

Shade (シェード *Shēdo*) is a powerful male player of YGGDRASIL whom had only reached to level 90 before the servers shut down. While he was a bit late on joining the game, he has become one of the most renowned members of League of Shadows, a guild that welcomed literally anything into its ranks as long as you followed their two core tenets. First, you had to be a member of one of the heteromorphic (inhuman) Nightshade races. Second, you had to prove that you can become a powerful player quickly.

In the new world as Shade, in the year or 2138 after YGGDRASIL's complete termination, it was revealed by he himself that he is a player known as Matthew Grimm (グリム・マシュー; Gurimu Mashū), a high-end translator that was fluent in several different languages, especially Japanese, to the point that he could have been mistaken as a native speaker of those languages.

While in the New World, Shade, having appeared roughly the same time as the great Ainz Ool Goan would end up appearing, having stories told about him would come to be called The Last Shadow (最後の影 *Saigo no kage*), to some a terrifying monster and demon that is hellbent on murder and chaos (much to the likeness of the Demons of previous legends).

## Personality

The best way to describe Matthew, both as a person from the Real World and as the character known as Shade, is that he is simply just a broken soul simply doing his best to cope with the emotional turmoils that his life in the Real World has already faced.

## Biography

### The Real World

Matthew lived much of his known life in the United States. He was born in a big city and had no real desire to leave it. Sure, there were the occasional crimes here and there, but often the people that committed the crimes, unless they had been tied to some powerful criminal orginization that protected them well, were usually caught and imprisoned.

Matt had your practical and stereotypical boring nerdy life growing up. Of course, he got picked on, but he really didn't care. He was just at school for his studies and couldn't care less about anyone else's attention. Yeah, this made him an outcast and many considered him to be a gloomy nerd (the japanese word is otaku), but why should he care what others thought of him? He thought finely of himself and simply didn't want anyone's attention.

However, this self-satisfied persona would draw the attention of quite a few girls in school, especially when he had gotten into Middle and High school. Doing his best to ignore the girls that tried to flaunt themselves all over him, Matt would get to the point that he would ask teachers and many of the school staff to aid in keeping their constant harrassment to a minimum.

This didn't stop the girls from trying to vie for his attention though. Eventually, Matt would ultimately break from the mindset of keeping himself a social outcast and start socializing. To do this, he even started to take alternative language classes starting with Spanish, then learning many European languages, and even going as far as learning Japanese, which he claimed, like many other translators from his nation before him ,was one of the most difficult languages he had ever learned simply because the language is based not on an alphabet full of phonics and sounds, but rather a syllabary which is based on syllables.

After graduating from high school and eventually college, Matt started working as an interpreter/translator for anyone needing one. He would have a rough start at first, but with continued work and full effort he would show his rather high talent in full. When the DMMORPG YGGDRASIL came out, Matthew was skeptical of trying it out. Of course, he enjoyed being at home and playing games more than he liked talking with people, but he just didn't know if he should play that game. That is why a couple years after the game left it's beta stage and had been released, he would eventually buy the game.

After a while of playing the game as well as continuing his work, Matt would find someone that he would meet up with in real life for the very first time and to his surprise, it was a woman that he had thought to be cute. They would have their date and talk about what they want to accomplish in the game, what they like about the game, and even got into talking about their actual lives. Over time, Matt would continue to date the woman he met on YGGDRASIL and eventually marry her. What he didn't expect though, was just how down hill the both of their lives would tumble.

During the initial years of their marriage, Matt and his wife would try to have kids only to learn about the wife's infertility. Matt would do his best to comfort her emotions and try to help her move on. Eventually, they would end up become powerful enough that they would be able to acquire a NPC character that could help them and they both would jump on the idea of setting the NPC up as the daughter of their Player Characters. As time would go on, Matt and his wife would end up discovering that his wife was terminally ill with cancer. A few months later, Matt's wife would pass away leaving Matt all alone.

Even after expressing his emotions about his wife's passing and their hopes to make the NPC character they had into their virtual daughter to the YGGDRASIL devs, Matt would continue to try and build up the NPC in honor of his wife and would continue to do so even on the last day of the YGGDRASIL's servers being online. He would still be in YGGDRASIL's servers sulking about how he wasn't able to do much of what he had been trying to put his mind to when the servers shut down.

### YGGDRASIL

When Matt made his character in the DMMORPG, YGGDRASIL, he would be in luck as they had installed an expansion pack of content bringing new monster races, as well as a few new class jobs to the game. Matt would select a low tier Nightshade monster, called a Spook, for his initial race. This race wasn't that good in melee combat, but it had an amazing magic stat block that he was wanting to make full use of. When it came to picking a name though, he would find himself stuck a little as he just didn't know what to pick. Looking at the monster category again, he would find the last part of the category really standing out for him and so he decided to name his character, Shade.

For his job class, Shade would start off with the Shadowmancer which was one of the new job classes that came in with the expansion pack. Though it would take some time, Shade would play as much as he could, whenever he could, to get used to the mechanical controls of the game and how they functitioned. In fact, he was probably one of the first to attempt to try using the mechanical controls without trying to access any hidden terminal functions. This had limited his progress greatly as most players used their hidden terminal to do what they needed to do. After a while, Shade would start to get a really good feel for his character, the controls and power functions, and how the evolution of power progression worked.

As Matt continued to get better, his character would end up leveling up so much so that he was ready to start giving his character some evolutions. The first evolution he would give his character would be switching over to the Necromancer class. While the Shadowmancer was really nice, it had it's limitations. After a while, of trying to level as a Necromancer, he would find himself in a situation of how to progress from meager class/race levels which started to stall. This would cause him to roam aimlessly for a bit and eventually, he would meet someone who went by the character name of Bane Yl'Din. Bane would notice just how skilled Shade was and offered him the chance to start getting into serious leveling zones. Shade would take the offer having joined Bane as a party member not knowing that Bane was secretly a Guild Leader and his guild was called "League of Shadows."

As time would progress on in YGGDRASIL, Shade would meet his next evolution of taking on the War Wizard job class which allowed him to slowly delve into more Warrior-oriented job classes. Sometime into his progression of leveling into War Wizard, Shade would evolve from a Spook, to a mid tier Nightshade monster known as a Phantom. However, he didn't exactly like the feel of the Phantom, and opted to race swap after gaining an item for it doing such which came after a few levels. From the Phantom, Matt would swap Shade over to another mid tier Nightshade monster known as a Stalker. This monster had a great physical stat block, but kind of lacked in the magical side. It made for great warriors or even thieves, but it wasn't really built for magic all that much. Nonetheless, Shade would continue to do his best to persevere in evolving his character. By this time, Bane would send him an invite into his guild which naturally took Matt by surprise, but accepted the offer nonetheless. When he first met the entire guild, he would count 49 players in the guild (excluding himself), all of whom had a welcoming mindset of him being in the guild.

Shade would acknowledge his new guild's welcome and thank them promising to uphold their values to the fullest. All of the League of Shadows members would start doing many raids and high engagement grinds to try and earn stuff for their guild as well as themselves. They would do this and attempt to push themselves to the very limits of what they can do. As time went on, some of the 50 members would leave the guild as well as stop playing the game, passing much of their gear and belongings over to Bane who would store much of their belongings in the Guild Vault and make Golems of the leaving guildmembers. Bane would try to find more members for the guild, but wouldn't be able to find very many meeting the conditions that were of the guild's initial values, something he would express to Shade personally during some grinds. Before long, Bane would end up leaving the guild and game as well passing on the title of Guild Leader, as well as all of his character's belongings, to Shade.

At this time, there would only be 12 active members of the guild. Shade would do his best to keep the guild going even through the tough times. They would continue to do the long and needed grinds for their guild, but eventually as time continued to pass the rest of the guild would leave the guild and game, passing along their character's belongings to Shade whom put said things in the Guild Vault on top of making comemorative golems equiped with each member's gear and equipment which would protect the vault. Matt would continue playing and eventually found a female warrioress in the game. She was doing serious grinds on her own and he just couldn't help thinking that it must be difficult to continue playing when you have no one else to play with, and so, Matt would help the warrioress out and would come to find that the player was female as well, and her character name was Phyneria. She would thank him for his help and they would continue their grinds together.

Over the time that it took Matt to continue grinding with the last of the guild until he was the only one left, Shade would level into Fencer and would be working on the Assassin class. As they continued their grinds together, Shade would invite Phyneria into the League of Shadows, have his character evolve into an Enderin, a high tier monster with well balanced physical and magical stat blocks, and they would also end up using the "Call GM Function" to get ahold of one of the DEVs that were still around to see about having a character made that was essentially their Player Characters' daughter after explaining their Real World dilemma. After the NPC character was made, Shade and Phyneria would take their new daughter out on the grinds to try and power her up trying to make her as powerful as they could get her. Eventually, all of YGGDRASIL's world wide servers would merge into one to try and bring players back, but it didn't really work out as well as the DEVs had hoped and due to circumstances in the Real World, Phyneria would no longer get on to do any needed grinding.

Doing his best to push himself harder, Shade would find himself just barely mastering the Assassin job class leaving him barely at level 90 and just starting to acquire his final job class he would have to grind to master while having his NPC daughter, whom he and Phyneria named Aegis, would only be a mere level 45 NPC character.

### New World

Waking up in the new world, Shade would look around confused as to why he was still inside the Temple of Shadows, the Guild Hall for the League of Shadows. He looked about and noticed Aegis attending some inspections of the Temple's walls. For a brief moment he was anxious and potentially even terrified that he was still inside the game. Wait... was he inside the game? Shade would call his daughter by name and have her send out some Spooks to check the surrounding areas. When the Spooks returned, Shade would recognize that they weren't in the realm-scape of YGGDRASIL. Not wanting to put Aegis or any of the Heteromorphic races residing in the Temple of Shadows in harms way, Shade decided he would go out for a bit and see what all was out there to find.

When he got outside the temple, he would find a night sky similar to the one that Momonga would see upon his first arival. However, due to the two different places that the Great Tomb of Nazarick and the Temple of Shadows would appear in, Shade would be given a different set of astral alignment. After seeing the night sky, Shade would move about using the dim light and darkness to move exponentially more quickly than some would think possible. He would move about to find himself within the territories of the Roble Holy Kingdom. This would cause him some distress as he didn't know what to do about the situation that him and the remnants of the League of Shadows were in. Shade would go back to the Temple of Shadows and mention to Aegis what he found and what he planned to do.

A little bit after talking with Aegis, Shade would command the remnant Nightshades of the League of Shadows to guard the Temple and attack only those that planned to clearly loot and ransac the place. Next, he and Aegis went out and discovered that one of the villages in the Roble Holy Kingdom were under attack by domestic conflict. Saving the village, Shade would leave his daughter with a farmer couple to be looked after, albeit he knew full well that it would likely be Aegis that would protect the farmers. She was about half his level, albeit quite skilled in what she could do. What Shade didn't want to see was her get hurt because she was all he had left of Phyneria's legacy and that was what he wanted to protect the most.

It would be some time as he would work to figure out as much information as he could about the surrounding territory he was in and what names and faces to look out for. This would ultimately put him in the service of the Roble Holy Kingdom for a brief time having been a part of the battle at the front lines against the demon Jaldbaoth, whom was actually an entity known as Demiurge. Shade would see his own battle with Jaldabaoth whom would later have his forces march around the the Roble Holy Kingdom's territories and ultimately find Aegis guarding one of the villages and find himself in a spot of having injured Aegis. The battle would go on for a brief time as many of Demiurge's minions would stand and watch the battle take place alongside Aegis. While they both were nearly evenly matched, Shade would see victory in the battle only to have a striking realization that the war would ultimately be in a loss were Jaldbaoth's master get involved, causing him to likely end up losing Aegis in the process as well.

Because of this, Shade would decide to ultimately hand the unwavering fealties of his and the League of Shadows over to Ainz Ool Goan. In response to this decision, Aegis would question her father about his actions and why they would have to support someone else after having given their support to the Roble Holy Kingdom only for her to come to learn of the YGGDRASIL guild Ainz Ool Goan, just how strong of a guild they were renouned to be, and learned about just how many times that guild had other guilds attempt to raid them only for the guild to come out victorious. When imparting this knowledge upon his daughter, Shade would watch Aegis' full reaction to which he knew she was mezmerized. He would have been too had he just learned of the same knowledge for the very first time. Later Shade and Aegis would be brought before Ainz Ool Goan, whom Shade would remember as the YGGDRASIL player character known as Momonga, and as the strongest leaders of the League of Shadows, pledge their fealty and thus, merge the League of Shadows with Nazarick making the Temple of Shadows an outpost/embassy for the Sorceror Kingdom.

1. ↑ For those that don't know, in japanese the family name, or surname/last name, comes before the name of identity, more commonly known as the first name.