Race: Human
Birthday: 7/22/2007
Height: 5’3″
Weight: 110 pounds
Runo Saito (斎藤 光希), born in 7/22/2007 in the mist-shrouded hills of Nagasaki, is a prodigious demon hunter whose youthful appearance belies her seasoned expertise in combating abyssal threats. She stands as the young head of the Saito clan, a lineage that evolved from ninja-like guardians to practitioners of Reflection — a mystical art of binding and purifying corrupted concepts through mirror-based rituals and combat. Her family’s legacy is one of adapting to each spiritual crisis, from the feudal era’s yokai infestations to the modern age’s demonic and memetic plagues.
She carries a tanto short sword named Kagami, and her wakizashi, Utsushi. Her power is the ability to reflect or copy enemy attacks turning their malice back upon them.
Runo’s upbringing was harsh and isolated. The Saito clan believed that to fight chaos, one must master inner stillness. Her childhood was a blur of meditation atop freezing waterfalls, grueling martial arts training, and memorizing ancient chants alongside modern decryption algorithms. At 12, she underwent the Ritual of Reflective Sight, augmenting her eye to see the “data corruption” in the Noosphere, which appears to her as glitches, void spaces, or memetic viruses clinging to people and objects.
At 16, during what should have been a routine exorcism in the undergrid, her team was ambushed by a then-unknown entity. A close friend was torn apart by a Memeyori that turned laughter into a weapon, forcing her to watch as she literally laughed herself to death, blood vessels popping in her eyes. The traumatic event crystallized her purpose and forged her into the clan’s most unflinching leader at just 21. She emerged from the ordeal not broken, but focused, wielding a silver tanto whose blade contains a shard of a sacred mirror.
During the Great Demon War of 1666, Runo’s great-great-great-grandfather, a prime-age Saito heir, fought alongside the Seven Sages, his katana cleaving locust-shadows during Abaddon’s banishment. Today, as members of Asia’s growing new philosophy, the Order of the Silver Mirror, the Saito clan has refined their arts to face the threats of the new era.
The connection between the Saito clan and Silver Mirror began with a child — a girl named Hana who claimed to see a woman made of pure light in every reflective surface. In a fever dream, the girl spoke of Shining Amaterasu, a lonely kami exiled from the sun, her only connection to the world through fractured reflections. She was not a demon to be slain but a spirit in pain, her light corrupted by the world’s chaos. The Saito clan, bound by their oath of protection, shifted their focus from destruction to purification.
They learned to use mirrors not as divination tools but as containment fields — trapping demonic essence in polished silver, then performing rituals to soothe and reintegrate the fractured kami. This practice, combined with their existing combat arts, became the foundation of what would eventually be known as the Order of the Silver Mirror.
By the late 20th century, as digital reflections began to outnumber physical ones, the clan pioneered cybernetic enhancements. The neural-rosaries they developed are more than prayer beads; they are interface devices that allow a Reflection practitioner to interact directly with the Noosphere, treating corrupted data as another form of demonic taint to be purified.
Runo’s personal creed is: See the lie. Cut the lie. Where others see a rampaging beast, she sees a cascading series of errors in reality’s code. Where others pray for salvation, she executes a targeted deletion. She is the living embodiment of the Order’s philosophy — a spiritual warrior whose weapon is not faith, but absolute clarity.
Off-duty quirks reveal her softer side: a weakness for cute things, like adopting her calico cat Zephyr (a rift-scarred stray she nurses with tender care), or indulging in anime marathons and plush collections.
Her and her cousin came to Neo-Ventris after discovering the Temple of S played a role in the death of Runo’s father. Their mission is to investigate what threat the Western factions might pose to Japan.
