Damien Valle

Damien Valle is a young genius professor at the academic city of Aramsas and one of its "Seven Worthies," renowned across the continent as "Damien the Puppeteer" (also called the Marionettist). Short in stature and perpetually adjusting his glasses with a fingertip, he is utterly indifferent to the people around him, openly admitting he cannot be bothered to remember names because he finds it a nuisance and simply does not care. His signature magic is Golem, the art of animating puppets and armored dolls, which he has honed to Skill level; he habitually travels escorted by four armored puppets and three automaton maids, and later builds massive cargo golems ("Porters"), war-golems, and female-form combat golems he names Valkyries. Lyle learns Golem magic directly from him.

He first enters the story through a Guild commission tied to his name: escorting him deep into a dungeon to defeat the boss on the fortieth floor, a request so brutal that dozens of veteran adventurers had barely survived it. Reckless, cheerful, and thrilled by any chance to descend into a dungeon, Damien treats the expedition as a research holiday, ignoring priceless materials that awe ordinary adventurers because they simply do not interest him. During this arc he restores the ancient automaton Monica whom Lyle recovers, an achievement he prizes chiefly as leverage to expand his research funding, and his Aramsas laboratory becomes a recurring hub for Lyle throughout the story.

Damien is a self-described "man among men" whose life's ambition is to create the perfect woman with his own hands. This single-minded, faintly perverse obsession makes him a chronic eccentric with, as others put it, a few screws loose in his head, yet it is precisely why he ranks among the Seven Worthies, whose members are all brilliant but invariably troublesome. His compatibility with the blunt Aria is poor and the two bicker constantly, while Miranda helps rope him into cooperating with Lyle. When Lyle warns him that the monster Celes is hunting people connected to him, Damien coolly flees Aramsas rather than resist and relocates to Lyle's domain in Baim.

In the later war arcs he becomes a fixture of Lyle's camp and a driving force behind its technological edge. Partnering with the old craftsman Latarta, he mass-produces Porters and Valkyries, upgrades their capabilities, fortifies the mobile fortress, and fights on the front lines from atop a wooden crate or leaning on his metal staff, deploying golems and automatons rather than exposing himself. His stated reward for all of it is simple: the freedom and funding to pursue his dream of the ideal woman, an arrangement that makes Lyle's cause and his own fantasy perfectly aligned.