Real Name: Unknown
Race: Human?
Age: Unknown
Height: 168 cm
Weight: Probably between 54-68 kg?
Occupation: Martial Artist for Hire
Affiliation: Professional Freelancers, Fighters Guild
Attack Potency: 5.45 x 10^10 J

“Ahoy, you’ve reached The Metal. If you have a problem, I have an answer.”

The Metal is the main character of the story Ex Dynamis Chaos and the leader of the Professional Freelancers. He is a jack-of-all-trades that goes out of his way to take bizarre gigs that interest him so that he can make money while also living an adventurous life. You would be stressed to call The Metal either a hero or a villain. He does help people, but mostly cause he is just doing his thing.

Personality

The Metal is a hard one to read. He comes off as very playful and aloof, not taking anything seriously at all. He turns everything into a game and appears to have fun in otherwise horrific circumstances. But then there are spurts of extreme seriousness that pop up, like when Laney Lin mentions that she will surpass him or when his brother Joe the Short appears on the intercom. His tone and mood drop instantly as if flipping a light switch. Given this sudden switch and his own friends and family referring to him as a psychopath, it’s not certain The Metal is ever projecting his actual state of mind. Otherwise, it doesn’t appear that much at all phases him emotionally. Even being transformed into a woman was shrugged off with his desire to turn back being more about ego than anything else.

History

Early Life

Very little is currently known about The Metal’s childhood currently. He has two younger brothers that go by The Kidd and Joe the Short. He’s known Sentri Sable since the 3rd grade when they and his siblings would hang out at their public park. Sometime in Junior High School, he met both Kavikaru and Buck separately. Sometime after schooling, he met Pitaya and Duggernaut. Apparently, he has had supernatural encounters of various sorts since he was young. He also claims that he and his college roommate Enobria once killed a troll while in the woods in Waco, Texas.

Adult Life pre-Ex Dynamis Chaos

The span of time between The Metal leaving college and the events of Ex Dynamis Chaos Act 1 is currently unknown. Sometime after returning to the Dallas-Fort Worth area he began freelancing as his main source of income. He also eventually roped Sentri and Kidd into the mix as well. During that time he also progressed his martial arts journey, meeting back up with his old friend Shadow and winning the first World Tournament that he entered. He also created the Fighters Guild and the annual King Kong of Combat.

After he had already formed his somewhat improperly named group, the Professional Freelancers, he rescued a down-on-her-luck young woman who goes by Laney Lin. Feeling bad for her situation and seeing a lot of potential, The Metal adopts her as his apprentice and begins teaching her both martial arts and the way of the freelancer. After many missions together, she developed feelings for him, he rejected her, and she left the crew. He did date other girls during this time including, but not limited to, Purrcy and Regi.

The Metal also took to a life of invention to make his jobs more efficient. Though much of his tech comes from his partnership with Pitaya Laboratories, he and his brother Joe also built a massive airship by themselves. They used it to rescue many abducted children turned into catgirls from the Neko Meet’yo Need Delivery Service before Joe stole the ship for himself and left with all the catgirls as his crew. These escapades with the airship also led to The Metal’s rivalry with the mercenary soldier Jerome Gallagher. He also keeps these strange canisters of his own making on him, though it can’t be told if they are science or magic.

Other things that occurred during this era include The Metal finding a ring at a curio shop that turned him into a woman (and since recovered), the crew defeating a mad scientist creating super-intelligent gorillas at their local zoo, Pitaya and him encountering a pandimensional being and collapsing a football stadium on it, getting evidence of bigfoot while accidentally burning down a national park, and a few other scattered events that lack enough information to properly describe.

Ex Dynamis Chaos

Starting with a trip down to Corpus Christi, Texas to hunt a succubus, The Metal ramped up both his training and the jobs themselves. He kills the succubus, rampages through downtown Dallas while protecting a package from Kavi, and finds proof of alien visitor while also protecting them from Gallagher’s soldiers. Meanwhile, he also participated in the annual King Kong of Combat, of which he was the reigning champ. In the earlier round, he defeated both his apprentice Laney Lin and form World Tournament champion Mitsuo Samo while inside the Parks Mall in Arlington, Texas. Later in the semi-finals, The Metal faces off against his friend Pitaya. The match ended in a draw with the lab destroyed and The Metal getting dragged off screaming.

Although he could have moved on in the bracket having entered the round with more points, The Metal’s ego wouldn’t allow it, so he went on a training trip to China to prepare for a rematch. On the way, the plane he, Sentri, and Buck were on was hijacked by Joe the Short, who was being targeted by the Hexxhunter and needed his older brother’s help. During their fight with Johnathan Graves in Hong Kong, The Metal was shot through the head with a powerful shotgun, and everyone rightfully thought him to be dead. Shortly after, he popped back up with far more energy than before and killed Graves effortlessly. Instead of going to the hospital, he took Buck to mainland China and met up with Shadow at the Proving Grounds. After three days of tribulations and a giant serpent dragon, they cleared the Proving Grounds and headed back home so The Metal could rematch Pitaya.

Pitaya had also been training and found other ways to increase his strength while they were gone. After finding out about Pitaya’s enhancement chamber, The Metal physical threw him out of his own lab and then hopped into the machine while in the middle of the fight. The machine was unable to properly work with The Metal’s physiology and exploded. After the dust cleared, it was revealed that sometime between entering the machine and the explosion The Metal had physically become a woman. No one was able to explain it scientifically and Pitaya was so done with all this that he forfeit the King Kong of Combat.

Looking for a way to become a man once again, The Metal and crew take the airship to Crete, Greece where they meet up with Laney. She sends them on a trip down into the infamous Labyrinth to retrieve an artifact for her while she prepares for a concert. Inside they encounter Herakles and The Metal nearly dies again before the Greek god realizes that he isn’t his archrival Hera. Upon returning the artifact to Laney, they are interrupted by sirens and Gallagher searching for them. The Metal convinces Laney to fight Gallagher in his stead as part of training and because The Metal doesn’t want to give Jerome the satisfaction of knowing he is stuck as a woman. While Laney fights, the crew sneaks away and heads toward another old friend of The Metal’s.

Attributes

Stats

Might: In terms of strength, The Metal is easily considered beyond human. At one point in time, he was fairly normal, if not considered decently weak aside from striking power. But, over the years he just keeps getting stronger even when a normal person should have plateaued. He wears increasingly heavier weights on his body at nearly all times, which has drastically increased the effect of his training. He doesn’t often do much lifting, but he has ripped open security doors that can withstand dynamite and easily move with a literal imperial ton strapped to him. He was also stated to be able to kick with a force equal to a freight train moving at full speed, though that was not using good form while being pinned to the ground.

Vigor: The Metal is just as, if not more, durable as he is strong. In fact, the main reason he is able to get so strong might be due to his insane ability to recover. Since his body never seems to break for too long, it is likely his constantly repairing bones and muscle fibers are able to adjust to the extreme conditions he places them under. He’s even begun developing resistance to extreme heat.

Alacrity: Despite the weight he places on himself, The Metal is still very fast and agile. Obviously even more so with the weights off. Even early on he was hitting 90 km/h on foot without his weights on. While his running speed hasn’t been properly measured in a while, The Metal has dodged projectiles comparable to bullets and can fight at those speeds.

Intuition: The Metal acts goofy and does stupid things for fun, but he is pretty intelligent and thinks at the same speeds he fights at. It may even be assumed that he is getting more intelligent as he gets faster since his reaction time seems to be keeping up even though it shouldn’t. He is also very well-read. He always seems to know something about any given situation and probably finds it necessary to know a lot of random stuff since he takes gigs related to the most bizarre circumstances imaginable. He claims to have good instincts as well, but that may only apply to how he views the world and may actually be counterintuitive to what most people would consider a desirable outcome. His friends often regret anything his gut tells him to do.

Morale: The Metal is incredibly ego-centric, but not in the normal way. He seems to only care about his own view of himself. This means he isn’t influenced very easily by others and it is hard to break his spirit. The downside is that in these times when he actually is down, it is incredibly difficult for anyone except himself to bring him back up. Often, he is his own worst enemy. Otherwise, he has more than enough willpower to spare.

Luck: This is an odd case of extremely bipolar luck. Some people are unlucky or have no luck and some are a bit more lucky than average. The Metal has extremely good luck when it comes to the small things and specific circumstances. He always tends to be in the right place at the right and if he really needs something it just comes to him. The other side of the coin comes with really bad broad luck. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong. Something in the universe just seems to have it out for him and he’s always making his plans “him proof” knowing how his luck will backfire. Though sometimes it’s also just his own ego causing the issue and he just lumps that in with the luck as well.

Abilities

Martial Arts Fanatic: Martial arts is almost a religion to The Metal. He lives and breathes it and made the Fighters Guild to be like his church. He’s been picking up different skills and behaviors from different styles ever since he was a kid. He even knows styles knows he really shouldn’t be able to, like real Bak Fu Pai. He even made his own style after navigating the Proving Grounds.

Hammerspace: The Metal has figured out a method of storing objects within a fourth-dimensional space hidden somewhere on his being. The space seems nearly bottomless considering how much he has pulled out at different points in time. The only limit appears to be that whatever he stores has to be able to fit through the openings in his clothes. Likely another reason he wears a gi all the time so he has that large opening in the front to reach into.

Entropic Sight: He’s always shown some signs of being able to see layers of the universe not normally visible to the naked eye, especially being able to detect the fourth-dimensional entrances to subspaces or navigate smokescreens without special eyewear. But the sight came in stronger after the shot in the head from Hexxhunter. The Metal claims to be able to see the unstable entropy around Pitaya’s gloves and that the whole world has been like that for him since then. He could even tell how hot the metal beam Pitaya was holding was just by looking at it. It’s likely he can even now estimate the impact of a strike before it lands.

Equipment

Cell Phone: A normal cell phone that he uses to keep up with clients and the crew. Comes in handy for anything a cell phone can be used for these days.

Trackers: The Metal and crew keep little tracking nodes on them so that they can find each other using their phones. The signal becomes active again the second they leave hammerspace.

Training Weights: The Metal is almost always wearing his weights. These days they weigh a genuine ton. He chooses to remove them when he wants a boost of speed and capability and sometimes uses them as heavy projectiles in the process.

Pocket Knife: A common yet sturdy pocket knife usable for many situations, such as cutting open the windows of a city bus.

Orange Canister: A soda-can-looking device The Metal invented. No one but him knows how, but it contains a nuclear blast that can be unleashed in an emergency. Everyone but him hates that it exists.

Cyan Canister: Another can-like device he invented. This one somehow contains an extreme endothermic reaction that can quickly freeze everything within a hundred feet. Everyone also hates this one.

Silver Canister: This one isn’t so bad. This can-like device contains a silver smokescreen that can be used for cover. The others don’t hate this because they have equipment that lets them see in it. The Metal for some reason can see in it just fine without anything.

Electromagnetic Psionic Pistols: [Formerly] Something Pitaya and The Metal worked on together. Pistols that use the living energy of its user to fire condense, concussive, electromagnetic blasts based on the user’s own mental fortitude. They have no ammunition concerns, but do take a toll on the user with each shot. Though The Metal and his brothers don’t seem as bothered by excessive use as others do. Both guns, Azrael and Uriel, are in Sentri’s possession as of now.

Bathing Suit: The Metal always wears a swimsuit of some sort instead of underwear. He finds it more reliable since he never knows when he might fall into a body of water in his line of work. He swapped from men’s trunks to a two-piece bikini after the transformation.

Snacks: The Metal always keeps wrapped food and canned beverages in his hammerspace. Know knows how old any of it is or if anything can actually go bad in there.

Official Character Art

Terzich’s Codex Pages