Rel

Rel (full name Rel Tasan) is a tall silver-haired elf who serves as the long-range archer of the veteran explorer party "Thunder Fang" (Raigeki no Kiba). First met by the protagonist Wof at the Cidre Inn, he is described as a handsome elven man with silver hair flowing to his waist, sharp gray eyes, and silver-rimmed glasses which he habitually pushes up when speaking. He dresses in black with a single silver belt and carries himself with an aristocratic bearing. Reserved, dry, and quick with a deadpan retort, he uses the masculine pronoun "ore" and is roughly twenty years old.

Within Thunder Fang the roles are cleanly divided: leader Akusu handles close combat with a sword, the dwarf Hoss fights at mid-range with a halberd, and Rel provides ranged fire with a bow. Though skilled with archery, Rel notably possesses no Relic of his own — an ongoing point of note in a family where nearly everyone carries one. His weapon is described as “just an ordinary bow,” discovered in a hidden compartment beneath the floor of his family storehouse; his seventh sister tried to shoot the sixth sister with it before the first sister intervened and it was left in Rel's keeping. He is a steady, reliable combatant, seen holding lookout, laying down covering fire, and improvising with fire, lightning, and explosive arrows against powerful foes such as the great demon-blade Rhino.

Rel's defining trait is his strained relationship with women, rooted in his enormous family. He is the only son — the heir/eldest male — of the Tasan house, the kingdom's sole marquis (later styled a ducal house) and the third-ranking noble power in the realm, famed as a hunting family whose members all excel with the bow. He has an overwhelming number of half-sisters (sixteen-plus, born to six wives of the Tasan lord), and being surrounded by their strong, aggressive, and eccentric personalities has left him wary of women in general; he even refers to his sisters by number rather than name. Running gags include his sister Zekatoria once feeding him an undead rotten-meat pudding.

His noble identity is initially unknown to his companions and is revealed gradually, largely through the appearance of his younger sisters. He is the elder brother of Juicy (the 14th sister, a Fenrir pseudo-deification user), Samaniya (the 8th sister, who idolizes and secretly compiles data on him), and Dova (the 2nd sister, the Tasan domain's acting deputy administrator, whom Rel closely resembles). As the story progresses the Tasan house becomes a major backer of Wof and his allies, and Rel and Akusu end up residing for a time in Haizen.