Hoss

Hoss is a dwarf, twenty-three years old, and a Rank IV explorer, first introduced when the protagonist Wof is recruited as a porter for the party "Thunder Fang" (Raigeki no Kiba). Short and stocky with a squarish face, a button (dango) nose, and eyes usually hidden behind his hair, he wears light fur clothing and speaks in a heavy rural dialect (referring to himself as "ora" and ending sentences with "-dabe"). Because he was raised in an all-male dwarf village, he is chronically shy and easily flustered around women. Within Thunder Fang he fills the mid-range combat slot alongside Akus (close range) and Rel (long range), but off the battlefield he is the party's indispensable porter, forager, and cook.

In combat Hoss wields a halberd (halberd/halberd-axe) that is an ancestral heirloom and secretly an Oreparts. He once possessed a single unremarkable Relic, Strong Strike (Kyougeki), which raised his attack power and which his Oreparts halberd amplified further; on this modest foundation he steadily built a reputation in the trade city of Haizen. During a great hunt against the monster known as the Kizumono, his Strong Strike relic was permanently erased by the beast's Relic Eraser, and his combat partner (the lover of a woman named Ruma) died shielding him. Now relic-less, Hoss fights instead with Byakuya ("White Night"), the soul-powered white light described as "the fang of those without relics," which the Thunder Fang members learned from Exs, Hoss being the first to master it.

Hoss is warm, dependable, and self-effacing, quick to shrink in embarrassment but fierce when it matters. He is best known and most affectionately teased for his cooking, especially his signature junk-meat soup (zatsuniku soup), which Wof loves and repeatedly tries to imitate; when Wof sets out on his travels, Hoss is lured along partly by that shared love of food and his own quiet loneliness. Carrying survivor's guilt, he had fled Haizen without saying goodbye to Ruma, and much of his personal arc turns on that unfinished past.

His revenge storyline sees him confront the Kizumono once more, this time able to fight it alone because the creature he faces is only a dungeon-monster remnant of the original; he lays the beast to rest and joins a violent raid on the Jinryu house (fighting alongside Giza and Garad). The arc culminates when he reunites with Ruma: he confesses his feelings, refuses to abandon his comrades in Thunder Fang, and the two finally reconcile, with Ruma choosing to watch over him as he continues his journey.