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AGE & TIMELINE OVERVIEW.
▸ ND1994: shinya is born
▸ ND2000: shinya is recruited for DEATH SELECTION CAMP by hiiragi family officials. he'll never see his biological family again.
▸ ND2002: hod war breaks out, shinya is 8.
▸ ND2008: shinya begins work on fonic shortcuts.
▸ ND2010: shinya masters fonic shortcuts, and slaughters another member of DEATH SELECTION CAMP, suitably impressing the hiiragi family. shinya is adopted and affianced to mahiru hiiragi. he is 16. he also meets glen ichinose for the first time and is enrolled in a famous baticul military academy.
▸ ND2010: by the end of what is considered to be THE WORST YEAR OF ALL TIME, mahiru hiiragi dies during a fonic experiment. shinya makes an alliance with glen ichinose with the intent of overthrowing the hiiragi family and the imperial kimlascan household.
▸ ND2015: battle of northern chesedonia. shinya learns about colonel jade curtiss. he is 21.
▸ ND2015: battle of kaitzur. shinya blows a hole in the back of a malkuth landship. following being given the moniker of 'the white general', he is promoted to brigadier general. he's permanently assigned the kaitzur naval port. later in the year, after another conflict and the uprooting of a kimlascan official, he is promoted to major general on his birthday through flagrant nepotism.
▸ ND2015: presumably this is when shinya begins making arrangements to meet with jade curtiss.
▸ ND2017/ND2018: shinya is 23, present day
RECORDED HISTORY.
▸ he's kimlascan born, probably in a shit village in the middle of nowhere in the belkend region because i'm assuming there are more cities than just the ones on the abyss map lmao. his ancestry's probably mixed-- he has very fair features, compared to the usually darker kimlascans. his ancestors probably defected from malkuth somewhere between ND1503 and ND1942 (closer to the latter, probably) for whatever the reason, settling in kimlasca in relative peace.
▸ after he gets adopted by the hiiragi house, records of his birth and his original family were wiped out, and everyone from that small village eventually were relocated or were deported back to malkuth. kureto likely knows about the full extent of shinya's ancestry, and is holding onto that information for political reasons. ie. if shinya does something colossally stupid and damaging to the hiiragi name, he can leak the info and brand shinya as a malkuth traitor. shinya has no idea this is a thing because all attempts at finding out his own ancestry had led to dead ends.
▸ ironically, it's probably easier to search for his ancestry from the malkuth side. all anyone needs to do is to look hard at the records of the citizens of old hod to find a few people with familiar-looking faces and features. the malkuth military may hold some info on the matter, so literally it's just a waiting game to see who leaks it first and for what purpose.
▸ he doesn't remember anything about when he was younger. the hiiragi house sent out a nation-wide search for children under the age of ten with aptitude for fonic artes, and shinya was conscripted to a selection camp when he was six. super hush-hush selection camp thing where kids are trained to be super soldiers yadda yadda yadda trying to incorporate his stupid canon is ridic. END RESULT he spends like ten years in camp where forcibly-orphaned kids try to violently distinguish themselves from each other so that the hiiragi house senpais would notice/adopt them. and people wonder why his personality is so shitty.
▸ selection camp was basically cramming as much knowledge and decorum into a bunch of bloodless undeserving brats-- from the hiiragi house's point of view. from shinya's point of view, everyone else around him tried too hard despite being dumb and stupid. there were a lot of talented kids, yes, but to impress the hiiragi family you need to think like a hiiragi, something that shinya realized at a young age. shinya had talent, but more importantly he had discipline and was lazy enough that he'd actually work his ass off to find ways to slack off. because failure at selection camp basically meant death (canon........) he had the incentive to surpass everyone else. he thought that going through all the motions, defeating everyone at swordsmanship and fonic artes or whatever year after year methodically would take too long-- and who knows what those talented enough would come up with to trump him in the process. so shinya spent two years developing fonic shortcuts. he performed the prototype at a mock battle between him and another child at the selection camp. in front of a panel of hiiragis, he lifted his hand, formed it into the shape of a gun, and said 'bang'. the only thing left of his opponent after was a very bloody smear in a small, smoking crater.
▸ he'd been promptly adopted after that. he's not sure where all the other kids at the camp are now. they're probably dead. the only thing shinya regrets is that he hadn't turned around after his demonstration and blown kureto hiiragi's face off.
▸ upon being adopted, he's affianced to mahiru hiiragi for the sake of maintaining a talented line of fonists for the hiiragi family. they're both sixteen and hold no love for each other, with the kind of apathy that only sixteen-year-olds are able to affect. shinya more or less thinks of mahiru as the fiancee he earned after going through hell camp, and mahiru rarely recognizes his existence because she has better things to worry about. he's enrolled in an elite military academy in baticul for the sake of appearances, and meets glen ichinose. glen and mahiru are in love, and have been in love since childhood. however, to surpass the class differences betweeen them so that they can be together, mahiru involved herself in fonic experiments, the last of which killed her. glen and shinya team up with a mutual dislike of the hiiragi family and the royal family as a whole, and begins concocting a plan to overthrow the kimlascan government.
▸ okay, i kid, shinya doesn't give two fucks about the kimlascan government. he's lazy, self-indulgent and is only really concerned about keeping himself alive with the least effort possible. but glen believes in making the world a slightly better place, and shinya needed something to believe in. it's more interesting than sitting around hating kureto's face anyway.
▸ shinya first participates in battle for reals when he's sixteen. during border conflicts with malkuth, he's stationed at the front lines, often under kureto specifically. his main task is to snipe enemy captains, their own deserters, and any of their own troops when they're captured so that malkuth can't interrogate them for information. needless to say he ends up killing a lot of kimlascan troops. after battles, he'd personally attend the funerals of each and every kimlascan that he shot. this only fuels his hatred for the hiiragi family and basically cements his pessimistic and cynical outlook on life.
▸ works with glen throughout his life to rise up in the ranks and gain allies in their struggle against the hiiragis etc. etc. shinya honestly wouldn't have been interested in climbing the ranks if it weren't for the fact that it'd be useful for overthrowing his family and also makes it harder for his own family to kill him. the hiiragis ran out of their primary use for him when mahiru died, so he has to kind of make his own niche in the family. they don't like him, but once his kill count rose alarmingly and he successfully completed military campaigns one after another even they realized that he had a lot more use. the abyss timeline doesn't have a lot of other named battles during this part of the timeline though so they're probably mostly just border conflicts or whatever. there are always border conflicts. kureto has thought of sending shinya on a suicide mission to akzeriuth before, but decides against it because on the slim chance that shinya succeeds, it'd only give shinya leverage against the kimlascan government. it bears noting that kureto trusts shinya about as much as spider trusts the wasp lingering near its web.
▸ he's twenty one when he blows a hole in the back of a malkuth landship at kaitzur. the conflict took place directly after the loss kimlasca suffered at northern chesedonia, when kimlascan morale had fallen drastically. his violent success at the battle essentially turned him into a war hero overnight and paved the way for his upwards promotion to major general.
RELATIONSHIPS.
▸ mahiru hiiragi (deceased). his dead fiancée. this beautiful, cruel girl that he was literally raised, trained and selected to marry and have perfect babies with. in reality, they really didn't care for each other, what with mahiru having already fallen in love with glen ichinose by the time shinya even met her, and with the fact that shinya having been raised and trained to care about nothing but himself. he mockingly called her he and glen's 'common goddess' but was never in love with her, and she was obsessed (from his point of view, but from anyone else's point of view she's likely just in love) with glen and with having enough power to overcome the class difference between herself and the love of her life. she was a fonic genius and had control over every single type of fonon, including the 7th. she also was a fontech genius and was the one who invented shinya's fonic amplifier, glen's sword and the fonic apparatus that shinya uses in his households for amplifying fonic signatures. she died during a fonic experiment that went out of control; she was driven insane by her own fonic arte, and glen ichinose had to be the one to execute her.
admittedly shinya is still bitter about her death for several reasons. one, if he had gone ahead and married her, he would be better treated in the hiiragi family and would have had more political clout to bring them down. two, despite how much they didn't get along, she shared glen's ideologies and would have been an extremely valuable ally. three, her ability to invent crazy fontech made their lives and battles so much easier. four, her death nearly destroyed glen, and shinya had to bear the fallout. five, before she died, she never once saw him as an equal, which still affects him more than he'll ever admit. once in a while, he misses her fontech genius -- and then he remembers that she spent the entire year at the military academy trying to strangle him to death and misses her a little less.
▸ glen ichinose (lt. colonel of the kimlascan military). his best friend. glen was born into an incredibly distant branch of the hiiragi family, the ichinose family, and therefore was considered low-born and unfit to even gaze upon the hiiragi family (canon.....). despite this, he fell in love with mahiru hiiragi as a child, and the feeling was mutual, leading to him being treated extremely poorly by the hiiragi family.
shinya first heard of glen from a score reading, actually, a reading which basically said 'you will meet a grouch at a baticul military academy whom you'll actually care for for once in your sorry life, you self-absorbed asshole' (this is paraphrased). shinya's literal reaction was 'haha ok bring it' (this isn't paraphrased) and first day of enrolment he singled glen ichinose out and that's how this whole mess started, really. he originally approached glen for the sake of creating an alliance, having known (somehow, i don't know how, canon) glen had beef with the hiiragi family, and used his relationship with mahiru hiiragi as leverage against glen. over the course of spending a year with him, however, shinya would grow to genuinely like and respect glen, and while he'd never truly beat his pessimistic outlook in life, glen's resolve and awkward mix of realism and idealism would eventually make shinya think it wouldn't be so bad if glen's ideals came true.
and then, mahiru hiiragi loses control of a fonic arte in search of power that would have allowed her to overcome the class barriers between herself and glen. glen ends up being her executioner, and he most emphatically does not take this well. shinya is left to deal with the fallout alone, including an emotionally compromised glen and the sudden realization that the hiiragi family has run out of their primary use for him. the two of them would form a tight alliance against the hiiragi family and the royal kimlascan family. following mahiru's death, they'd also acquire a good deal of awkward UST that shinya would never really know what to do about. glen believes that the kimlascan government is corrupt and that to make the people's lives a better place, a better government system needs to be in place. shinya believes in the same thing, but ultimately is pessimistic about their prospects-- if the government is overthrown, it'd simply create a power vacuum that may (will certainly) give birth to a worse alternative. still, if there's anyone left on auldrant that shinya even remotely trusts, it's glen, and he's willing to entertain glen's weird sort of realistic idealism and even work towards it out of respect and like for him (though he also reserves the sole right to give glen grief and tease the hell out of him, much to glen's exasperation). glen also acts as shinya's morality chain, but in an unconventional way: glen's methods are under-handed and ruthless enough that shinya ironically doesn't have to resort to them himself, since glen is an idiot and likes to take on the burden of the blame whenever he can. his realism also balances out shinya's pessimism, and ultimately, he gives shinya the hope that maybe the world will be a little less shitty if the hiiragi and the royal family took a hike. if it weren't for glen, shinya may have attempted much more ruthless methods in dispatching his family, that wouldn't have ended well for anyone. he is openly friendly with glen and they make a terrifying team on the battlefield, which is the reason why kureto doesn't usually allow them to serve in the same military unit. despite this, shinya finds way around it and quietly orchestrates military shenanigans that allows glen to rise up in rank.
▸ kureto hiiragi (general of the kimlascan army). shinya's eldest brother. also the brother shinya would like to kill the most. kureto hiiragi is unique amongst the hiiragi in that he is almost terrifyingly blunt about his intentions. it's just that he holds so much political clout that even if you saw his intentions a thousand miles away, you still wouldn't be able to avoid them. his brutal and upfront (but also entirely honest) assessment of shinya's place in the hiiragi family ('he's just an adopted child; it's okay to kill him') is part of the reason why shinya dislikes him so much. the other part of the reason why shinya can't stand even the mentioning of him is because kureto hiiragi is just as good at machinations as shinya is, and unlike shinya, he has both the political clout and the right family lineage to outmaneuver shinya every single time.
shinya is wary of kureto at best, and somewhat scared of him at worst (though this is heavily hidden and the number of times he's ever acknowledged this is precisely zero). kureto has this grand ambition of uniting both malkuth and kimlasca into a super country which the hiiragi family will rule over, and while shinya finds his ridiculous, he also believes that kureto, of all people, would be able to do it. both as a person and a military commander, kureto is efficient, ruthless and shrewd. he is fond of using torture as an interrogation tactic, and will exploit any and all weaknesses, going as far as to kidnap and torture the people you love in order to get the result he wants. shinya's actually extremely pessimistic about the chances of getting out from under kureto's thumb.
▸ seishiro hiiragi (major general of the kimlascan army). shinya's younger brother by adoption. also the brother that shinya interacts with the least. seishiro has strong views about what it means to have hiiragi lineage and therefore looks down upon both shinya and glen. it's just that shinya knows he's a better military commander and better in a fight, and therefore doesn't see seishiro as a threat. seishiro is a part of the council that oversees the chesedonia area.
▸ shinoa hiiragi (sergeant of the kimlascan military). the younger sister of mahiru hiiragi and someone who is even less acknowledged than shinya on the hiiragi family pecking order. because her sister had been incredibly beloved, shinoa was never acknowledged by anyone in the family, and after her sister died because of a fonic arte, shinoa was considered as unstable as mahiru and was permanently scorned by the hiiragi family. shinya doesn't dislike her, but has no intention of marrying her, and therefore keeps his distance so that nobody would even suggest that kind of political union. shinoa serves under glen ichinose.
FONIC ARTES.
▸ shinya has natural aptitude for three types of fonons: wind (3rd), water (4th) and light (6th), with the 6th fonon being his strongest element and 4th being his weakest. he has no aptitude for the 7th fonon, nor is he even remotely sensitive towards any of the other fonons on the spectrum. he's one of the very few people in his military unit that can't even light a match, giving him an almost crippling over-specialization in the 6th. he can't even form a fonic barrier properly. however, he has unparalleled precision in fonslot sensing and in fonon control. he is especially sensitive to people's fonic signatures.
▸ his main shtick is fonic shortcuts, which he developed when he was sixteen in response to wanting to defeat all the other kids at death camp with the least amount of effort possible. essentially, shinya can cast fonic artes without an incantation longer than a singlel word, and can cut arte execution to less than a second. all he needs to activate a fonic arte is a focus and a trigger word, which in his case for the arte he's most well-known for is 'bang'.
▸ how does this work?? it's like self-suggestion or self-hypnosis, and ironically it's achieved after putting in a buttload of work. essentially over the course of two years shinya practised the exact same fonslot configuration, focus movement and trigger word over and over again until his body naturally opens the desired and very specific configuration of fonslots when he lifts his focus. the trigger word replaces the fonic incantation and acts as the catalyst for the execution of the arte. shinya worked on this skill in particular because a) he's lazy and doesn't want to bother with long incantations on the battlefield and b) because his skill at traditional weaponry is admittedly only slightly above average, and having insane casting speeds puts him on a level where he can use fonic artes to outspeed strike artes. in the end, it just boils down to the fact that he's lazy and is willing to work very hard to make his life easier in the long run.
▸ his signature arte, and the arte that got him adopted, is called kongō. it's very simple: shinya takes in a large amount of 6th fonons, and then shoots a linear shot not unlike a fonic cannon. the shot is only suited for long-range combat, and radiates out in an arc the further away it gets from shinya. essentially, at close range, the shot hits like a bullet, but at long range, it hits like a landship cannon. idk physics. basically he shoots giant white pin-point laser beams. just imagine that. now you know why he got adopted. the trigger word for this arte is 'bang'. (there's just something so funny about a grown man killing people on the battlefield by pointing a gun and saying bang) (this is canon i'm not even making this up). the shot causes 6th fonons to scatter violently wherever it lands to prevent the creation of a field of fonons that the enemy can take advantage of.
▸ ADVANTAGES: kongō has an execution time of exactly one second, and hits like a landship. because it has a huge hitbox radius at long-range, it's really difficult to run away, and with shinya's fonic amplifier and a high enough vantage point, he can pinpoint literally anything that he can see. the shot is powerful enough to blow through most fonic barriers that aren't landship-generated, and is extremely effective against tight formations. to make things worse, shinya can modify the hit angle so that it hits behind the target -- this is how he blew a hole at the back of a malkuth landship, by standing in front of its fonic barrier and firing a shot from behind. however, this adds a few seconds to his execution time, needs him to take in a larger quantity of 6th fonons, and really tires him out.
▸ DISADVANTAGES: the shot travels in a strictly linear line, and is not as effective (and a lot easier to dodge) if shinya is on ground level without higher-ground advantage (this is why he prefers to shoot downwards: it works better as a cannon than a lance). shinya can only aim at things he can see. because auldrant is round and not flat, the natural curve of the earth makes shinya unable to hit really far away targets, even if he's given intelligence of their locations. while shinya has done away with the fonic verse needed to activate the shot, the fonic glyph still appears around him and is incredibly flashy. this, coupled with the fact that he needs to be on higher ground to fire, makes it very easy to see when he's about to shoot. also, by design, the destination of the shot is set in stone before shinya says the trigger word. this means he's already aimed before he even casts the arte, and is unable to change his target after he's said the trigger word, so you can, in fact, dodge it if you keep moving. lastly, and perhaps most hilariously, is the fact that because shinya needs to stand on high ground and is flashy to pull his arte off, much to his annoyance he's often targeted directly by landships. shinya's actually fancied for a brief time that if auldrant were flat and it was a clear day in baticul, he'd actually be able to fire a shot all the way to grand chokmah. but this is clearly impossible because a) auldrant is still round the last time he checked, and b) even if he could see his target, the amount of sixth fonons he'll need to take in to have a shot powerful enough to travel that far would kill him.
▸ shinya can also apply fonic shortcuts to other fonic artes that he knows. it's just that he prefers not to for a variety of political reasons -- if he's too versatile in the amount of dangerous artes he can pull off, kureto hiiragi will literally never let him off a leash again. he has two other artes that he uses -- a wind arte whose trigger word is 'whoosh' and a water arte whose trigger word is 'splash' (he prefers using onomatopoeia as trigger words because they're short, easy to remember and because they amuse him. yes he's that guy).
▸ shinya uses a fonic amplifier to perform his artes. his fonic amplifier was designed by mahiru and is called byakkomaru. it is designed in the shape of a fonic rifle with an extremely long bayonet, and comes with a scope that helps shinya aim more reliably. he typically uses byakkomaru as a focus for his casting. the amplifier not only makes his artes more devastating but also comes with its own emergency supply of 6th fonons that shinya can draw on if he depletes his immediate atmosphere of the fonons he needs. if left alone, the weapon recharges 6th fonons passively. he really treasures it.
▸ unknown to everyone but two people in the kimlascan army, however, shinya can cast kongō without the use of his fonic amplifier. this is because shinya wrote off his prototype attempts of using kongō as a fluke in front of the hiiragi family, and has never cast the arte without the amplifier since. it's a well-hidden secret because it loses its effectiveness if anyone knows about it. when not using byakkomaru, his focus for kongō ends up being his hand, which he has to form into the shape of a gun. he can do it with either hand. literally he can point at someone, say bang and leave a smoking crater in the ground where they stood. he doesn't ever want to reveal his hand unless it's absolutely necessary.
▸ shinya's other shtick is masking artes. his masking artes have two functions: to cover up movement, and to cover up light. he developed them out of necessity, because his primary fonic artes are too flashy and do require the element of surprise to work most effectively. shinya specializes in covering up his own fonic glyphs when casting and his movements when he's trying to dodge landship fire.
OTHER COMBAT.
▸ shinya uses his fonic amplifier like an actual bayonet sometimes...! surprise, surprise. it looks clunky but it's actually light enough to be wielded in one hand, and he can use it to parry blows and gain some distance.
▸ he also has training with a rapier. he's not particularly good, tbh-- it took him a lot of effort and practice to make himself even slightly above average, and against true experts in bladed weapons he has no real chance. he learned swordsmanship because kureto would've killed him a long time ago on a whim if he couldn't at least protect himself from the basics.
▸ canon also shows that shinya is ridiculously proficient in hand-to-hand combat, and he retains some of that in the abyss au too... he packs a punch for someone who primarily shoots people from afar. he's better at hand-to-hand combat than he is with his swordsmanship, but in either case he vastly prefers shooting people because laziness. his logical weakness, however, is close-ranged combat and against true masters of the art he falls short.
▸ surprise surprise he can use actual fonic guns...! he's a crack shot and hasn't missed since he was six. he carries around a fonic gun as backup on the battlefield, but he basically never uses it. he's inept when it comes to traditional archery.
HOUSE HIIRAGI.
▸ everyone is an asshole the end.
▸ kureto hiiragi is a general of the kimlascan army. he has an arrogant, overbearing personality and has the ambition to unite both kimlasca and malkuth into this giant super country that house hiiragi will rule over. he's contemptuous of the royal family, and is a rival of duke fabre. he is ruthless, intelligent and, strangely for a hiiragi, is very blunt about his intentions and actions. shinya wants to blow his face off with a fonic arte. he is naturally suspicious of shinya and glen's buddy-buddy act and strives to keep shinya under his thumb and on a tight leash. part of the reason why shinya likes throwing himself into dangerous alliances and secret rendezvouses is to spite kureto in his own way.
▸ he has as younger brother named seishirou hiiragi. he also has a sister... kind of... named shinoa hiiragi. all of them answer to some form of 'general hiiragi', which is why shinya doesn't like being called by his last name (the only exception to that is shinoa hiiragi, because his relationship with her is a little complicated. to put it bluntly, nobody expected anything of shinoa because everyone was enamoured with mahiru, and it wasn't until mahiru died that shinoa's name ever came up in conversation. shinya doesn't have a reason to even think about shinoa as a member of the hiiragi family because shinoa remains to this day politically useless. but there's a high chance that house hiiragi might marry him off to shinoa, which would actually piss him off. he doesn't actually dislike her-- but he doesn't have any intention of being saddled in a politically useless position. it's Complicated).
▸ STUFF ABOUT HIIRAGI POLITICS GO HERE i need less politics in my life help
MILITARY STUFF.
▸ he was promoted to major general at the age of twenty-one, and has been a major general for two years.
▸ his moniker for the general public is 'the white general', which he finds really funny for some reason and can't take seriously. call him that if you want him to laugh in your face.
▸ shinya does have a private aide! whom he ditches on a regular basis. part of the reason is shinya doesn't like his aide and the other part of the reason is that shinya knows the aide is a spy for kureto. he tends to find excuses to fire his aides whenever possible and kureto always hand-picks the replacements. it's a vicious cycle and his entire unit knows about it. money is exchanged hands every month as they bet on how long the current aide will last. the longest an aide has lasted is three months and the shortest, a single day. shinya is very whimsical and fickle.
▸ despite shinya's everything, his subordinates listen to him and his immediate soldiers are actually quite loyal to him. this is because shinya genuinely cares about the outcome of battles, and while he's a pessimist at heart and always prepares for huge losses, he never fails to attend the funerals of each and every one of his fallen men, and takes his role as a commander very seriously on the battlefield. he has a good head on his shoulders, and people know when he's being genuine. while he may not care about their private affairs, he takes their lives seriously and soldiers can appreciate that. however, he'd never cry for another person's death. he's not sentimental and hardly compassionate.
▸ shinya's preferred battle strategy is to stand in a very tall watch tower with his army below him. under conventional circumstances, he'd start off battle by bombarding the approaching enemy army with his fonic artes, which generally can take out opposing squads easily if the opposing commander doesn't tell their troops to scatter. he favours creative fonic warfare and will try very weird but creative and strangely effective strategies, like mounting fonists on horses or using landships to bottleneck enemy advances. his role in battle is to act as a command centre, keep track of battle flow, snipe enemy generals, snipe allies who've been captured, and incapacitate landships. he typically has at least another two other commanders down on the ground level handling some of the ground tactics because he typically doesn't leave his tower-- his artes are useless at ground level. he is known to come down to ground level during larger battles to boost troop morale, because nothing boosts morale more than having your commander stand next to you and take a landship head-on, but this is rare.
▸ his main responsibility is the kaitzur naval port, because the flat and rolling padan plains of southern rugnica are literally perfect for landship regiments from malkuth, and shinya is a living landship counter and actually gives kimlasca an edge in ship-to-ship combat. it's a joke around that shinya is the primary reason why malkuth's r&d budget is constantly being under review. that being said, the latest malkuth landship -- the tartarus -- is said to have fonic barriers powerful enough to withstand his attack. he almost wants to see how it'll go (and it's not because jade curtiss is the captain, certainly not).
▸ that being said, anyone in kimlasca who can't plainly see that malkuth has better fonists AND landships is a fool and deserves to be deported to the hole in the middle of the ocean, and mass bombardment from malkuth forces is one of shinya's greatest headaches. he himself can get around it by firing back far faster (and he does, but he can honestly only do so much and in one-second intervals with cooldown while there are like a gazillion malkkuth fonists firing back at seven times a second), but for the rest of his army, he maneuvers landship positions and uses their fonic barriers as coverage.
▸ typically he has a 7th fonist healer up in his command tower with him in case he sustains an injury. he also has a team of fonists around the base of his tower who are ready to activate a large-scale fonic barrier around said tower in case landship bombardments land and knock his tower to the ground. his primary concern is keeping up his higher-ground advantage for as long as the battle allows.
▸ he's actually not in charge of the kaitzur border area. on paper, seishirou hiiragi is in charge. the only reason why shinya hasn't been given control of the full kaitzur area, and therefore all of the kimlascan land on the rugnican peninsula, is because kureto had the foresight to realize that if shinya is in control of the full kaitzu area, he'd have the political clout he needs to begin negotiations with malkuth and/or to start pressuring kimlasca using all the land on the rugnican peninsula as a bargaining chip. therefore, someone else needed to be in control of the kaitzur border that shinya can't easily influence. that being said, it'd make more sense for kureto to have assigned shinya the kaitzur border, on account of it being on the frontlines and politically useless in terms of land. it's just that a) shinya is competent enough that he'd actually be able to hold the kaitzur port against invasions, and b) and even kureto acknowledges that having shinya stationed where he's hemmed in by a river is not making the best use of his talents. therefore, shinya gets the kaitzur port, while seishirou hems him in from the north at the border. it's an arrangement that works perfectly-- and frustrates the hell out of shinya, which is certainly kureto's purpose.
▸ shinya does basically perform all the administrative duties for the kaitzur border area, however. this is because seishirou is military-incompetent. seishirou essentailly pulled rank and bullied shinya into gettingn saddled with the most inane duties at kaitzur, and shinya hasn't forgiven him since. he's working towards undermining seishirou's authority at kaitzur, which would normally be a simple thing if not for the fact that guarding the katizur border is traditionally a ceremonial position and soldiers are rotated from the mainland once every two months. he just wants control of kaitzur. why is life so hard.
▸ in the upcoming battle, shinya is most likely serving under seishirou at the frontlines in kaitzur, and then retreating to the naval port the moment the battle is over to prepare for the next one (not just because he's a pessimist-- any dolt looking at the kaitzur border knows it's going to fall).
▸ HE WANTS AKZERIUTH come on let him launch a campaign to retake it, there is so much potential for economic leverage he is so thirsty. glen's probably working on some scheme or another in relation to it, though, so he's keeping himself in check for now.
#JUST SHINYA THINGS.
▸ likes carrying around horrible bodice-ripper paperbacks and pretends to read them to scandalize people around him. in truth he carries them around to bolster his reputation for being eccentric, and to give his hands something to do when he's sitting around doing nothing. the best part about awful bodice-ripper paperbacks is that he can literally flip six pages mulling over his latest plan to punch kureto's face in and still not miss a thing in the narrative, which means if people spontaneously quiz him on it he can bluff his way through. shinya puts an incredible amount of effort into being seemingly effortless.
▸ his actual preferred literature is, in no particular order: books on strategy, foreign intelligence reports, internal intelligence reports, newspapers from around the world, and books on other cultures and history books no matter how biased. he doesn't like fiction-- he doesn't think there's any point in reading stories about alternate worlds because no matter what you read you still can't escape from the reality of how shitty this world is. he devours a lot of books on military strategy because he's young and knows he has a lot to prove. if he doesn't keep up, he'll lose all the precious ground he's gained. once in a while he picks up books on philosophical thinking but inevitably he'd just laugh his way out of the pages because he can't take fanciful thinking seriously. he's an ass.
▸ re: the score, shinya is not particularly religious and thinks the order of lorelei is a tax machine leech that's attached itself to kimlascan society. that being said, his approach to the score is very pragmatic because no half-competent person will blatantly disregard a tool that literally tells you the future. he knows the existence of the closed score just like everyone else in the hiiragi family, but doesn't have the clearance to go about inquiring about it let alone get a reading from it. the fact that it's being kept from him annoys him.
▸ shinya doesn't get drunk easily and he has a very high pain tolerance. both of these are born out of necessity from living in the hiiragi household-- if you can't hold your drink, assholes will interrogate you while you are drunk. if you don't have strong pain tolerance, assholes will torture you. the hiiragi family is a great place to be. consequently, shinya's trained himself to be able to handle his alcohol and to withstand a lot of pain, and in both cases he's good at pretending otherwise.
▸ his preferred food of all time is sliced bread.......... basically he's lazy and if left alone without any societal expectations or otherwise he will literally just subsist on sliced bread all day. it's the easiest thing to eat and requires no effort to acquire. on paper, his favourite food is something like oysters or something. he changes it up just to play up his eccentricity.
▸ he pins back the hair on the left side of his head whenever he goes out into battle! the act of pining up his hair acts like a physical barrier between his frivolous persona and the deadly calm he needs in battle. strangely enough he pins up the hair on his left-hand side when he really aims with his right eye... don't ask me why i'm looking at canon and ??? on the flipside this means he gets a very mixed reaction if pull his hair which is sometimes very fun to see.
▸ really likes riding horses. anything that prevents him from needing to walk anywhere himself lmao.
▸ if there's a chance for him to sit down somewhere, he will. he's too lazy to stand. he can literally perch his ass anywhere.
▸ if he likes you enough he will sometimes steal your food and drink. no regrets.
▸ despite his frivolous persona he doesn't sleep around a lot. shinya requires a lot of intellectual stimulation to get him going, but also a lot of trust-- something he can't really afford in his profession, unless something is set up beforehand with a lot of drawn lines. he's very interested in power and insubordination, and has a thing for people who won't take his shit.
▸ things that are a sure-fire way to get shinya annoyed 2k20 in order of least annoyed to most annoyed: idealistic talk, mentioning of the hiiragi family in a positive light, mentioning of his lack of freedom and the fact that shinya's basically just a pawn in a huge political game, mentioning of kureto hiiragi in any light (as long as he's not the one initiating/making light of the topic), mentioning his unhealthy hatred towards kureto hiiragi in any light, telling him to defect from his country.
▸ things that are a sure-fire way to make shinya visibly angry 2k20: pushing the issue of mahiru hiiragi, mentioning that he may be married off again, mentioning or threatening glen ichinose in any capacity because there are only two people in the world that shinya has ever cared about-- himself and glen. in this verse, glen functions as a morality chain for him. if shinya hadn't taken an interest in glen, gotten to know him, pushed to be his ally and then slowly learned to actually care about the guy, he honestly wouldn't have a single positive thing in his life, and he actually would not have had the motivation to even get this far. his feelings towards glen are nebulous at worst and possessive at best, though he hides it well. there's a lot of unacknowledged and awkward UST between them since their academy days that shinya honestly doesn't know what to do with and emphatically does not think about, but has been a motivating factor for getting shinya to form unhealthy dalliances with other people. like jade.
▸ he has an infuriating 'if i won't be the best at it then i just won't bother' attitude towards life in general. he doesn't want to bother wasting time on something he knows he won't be the best at if he can spend that exact time making himself better at something he's already good at. it's equal parts pragmatic and lazy.
▸ sometimes shinya wishes he could cross the border and just go sight-seeing in malkuth. see some aqueducts. see snow enough to actually build something with in keterburg. he finds kimlasca horribly dull, with it's hot to temperate climates and completely uninspired architecture. however, he probably has a shot-on-sight designation in malkuth and like hell kureto is going to let him cross the border, official business or not. it's just so boring.
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