Hizashi

## Hizashi Horikoshi

Hizashi is the leader of a large volunteer team of chimeras.

## Appearance

Hizashi is a tall, somewhat muscular woman with red hair tied into a braid and red eyes. She likes wearing cat print t-shirts and sweaters.

## Personality

Hizashi is a confident, extroverted leader who easily makes friends. She is intelligent and witty, often teasing her friends, but nevertheless has a strong bond with the members of her team and freely relying on them for planning and support. Although she is undoubtedly the strongest and most talented fighter in any party that includes her, with the others often relegated to simply supporting her in combat. Unlike Tsukiyo, she is not sexist or elitist, so she has a larger team of fairly mediocre team members of both genders. She can have a strange sense of humour sometimes, but her confidence and good relationships with her friends/teammates lets her pull it off.

She loves cats.

## Background

Hizashi was an unremarkable young woman who just happened to awaken as a chimera a little earlier than others her age. She was a bit of a loner, remaining distant from people by remaining formal and lacking humour. Her parents were distant and focused on their work, although she knew she should consider herself lucky that she still had parents, unlike many others her age. She remained unremarkable when she gained her powers; her magic was weak and didn't have much use outside of combat, and at the time it was thought that magic was far stronger than physical attacks.

All that changed when Tsukiyo extended a hand with her characteristic - at the time - friendly smile, and invited Hizashi to join her. Tsukiyo was an experienced chimera, brilliant at magic and skilled with a sword and polearm, and above all else, her personality was as strong as her combat prowess. Hizashi greatly admired her, so it came as a surprise when Tsukiyo told her she was strong. And under Tsukiyo's tutelage, her words became true: Hizashi found herself growing stronger as she got closer to Tsukiyo, until she could almost consider herself Tsukiyo's equal. She found herself as the de facto second in command of their team.

But everything changed when a god in the form of a serpent attacked. The chimeras were the only ones who could fight the monsters, so Tsukiyo believed that they should, even though it was clear that it would be an impossible battle. So Tsukiyo told everyone that it would be their choice whether or not to follow her. Hizashi, though, believed that sacrificing the lives of their friends to kill a god missed the point; their goal was to save the city, but it would be pointless if they didn't save the people. So she instead thought that they should devote their strength to rescuing people and evacuating them from danger.

She didn't have the courage to bring this up to Tsukiyo on her own, but it wasn't too difficult to convince the rest of the team of her idea - but when the time came for everyone to reveal their opinions, and the vote was unanimously in favour of Hizashi, Tsukiyo just smiled like she always had and simply declared that Hizashi was now the leader of the team. But Tsukiyo still intended to fight alone.

Hizashi brought her team to save the people of the city, and... Tsukiyo died in a heroic sacrifice to destroy the god. To Hizashi, that was the only explanation for why the thing with Tsukiyo's face had an entirely different personality. And yet, the two of them were hailed together as heroes.

## Plot

Hizashi is the leader of the rival team to Tsukiyo.

## Abilities

Hizashi is a strong, tanky physical fighter who wields a swordstaff. She doesn't actually have any particular specialties; she's just really strong and capable of surviving hits that would fell many of her allies, and wields strong attacks against single boss monsters or groups of enemies. Physical attacks are generally considered better than magic because it takes less mana to refresh strained muscles, so it's possible to fight with far greater longevity than pouring mana into magic attacks. She's also good at defending not only herself but occasionally managing to deflect attacks from hitting her friends.

For the most part, she really shines when she has the rest of her team acting as support while she takes on the responsibility of dealing damage; they would be mediocre without her, but she can take many team compositions and make them work.

Although her magic power is weak, she is capable of wielding fire, ice, and lightning magic. She can wrap these around her weapon for elementally-imbued attacks, although the greatest potential of this power is combining it with Tsukiyo's water magic for advanced effects.