Victor Boldakov

[Victor Boldakov]

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CASE FILE: Demon Hunter

”The world has tried to kill me so many times and failed. I will try to kill you once, and I won’t need to try again.”
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       FULL NAME:
       → Victor Boldakov

       AGE:
       → 40

      SEX:
       → Male

       BIRTH PLACE:
       → Kursk, Russia

       RACE:
       → Russian

      TYPE:
       → Magi

       DATE OF BIRTH:
       → December 6th, 1874

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       HEIGHT:
       → 6’ 6”

       WEIGHT:
       → 241 lbs

       PICTURE:
       →

Spoiler:

      DESCRIPTION:
       → Victor is the kind of man one notices.

For one, he’s huge. He towers over most people at a whopping six foot six inches, and he’s not particularly lanky either. Well built and stocky, he’s less man and more moving house. Secondly, he’s quite a scary looking man, with his shaved head and cold ink-dot eyes making him look even more like a thug. He walks with a stomp, his foot hammering into the ground as he walks. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Victor is loud. Very loud. He knows how to be quiet when on a job, but the moment he doesn’t need to be silent, he starts laughing and roaring with a huge booming voice that seems to shudder the walls of every room he’s in. He’s also not particularly quick of a man when it comes to movement; he can swing a punch fast enough, but he’s not very interested in the whole ‘running’ business, and he tends to move in a very careful and considered way, even when drunk, which he quite often is.

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       PERSONALITY:
       → Victor Boldakov fears no man, beast or demon. Few men or demons fear Boldakov, because all of those with reason to fear him end up dead.
Victor is a boisterous and jolly fellow with only a few simple loves in his life; his criminal daughter Alina, gambling, drink and women. He’s never met Alina in person, having been distant from her for most of her life, but he continually sends her letters and, to her mother’s dismay, guns and advice about guns. In the meantime, he can often entertain himself with his other loves and rarely feels alone. He’s instantly friendly to just about everyone he meets on the first occasion (especially ladies, with whom he’s had mixed success), and rarely holds animosity towards any one person. He doesn’t even have much of an agenda; he has little interest in politics and is completely atheistic, and has little cause to fight. In the end, there’s not much TO Victor Boldakov.

Indeed, this is part of the reason that he is an extremely deadly assassin; because no one sees him coming.

It’d be easier to name the people Victor Boldakov hasn’t worked for. He’s fought both for and against the British, the French, Spaniards, Germans, Austrians, Turks, Africans, and even other Russians. He’s taken on assassination contracts targeting individuals, he’s worked as a sniper on military operations, and he’s worked with insurgent rebellions and law enforcement alike. Victor is loyal only to the highest bidder, and he has been fighting for a very long time. Even with people he would consider brothers or sisters in arms, he would not hesitate for a second if he was given a contract on one of his allies; he can turn on people very quickly and suddenly. This mass of experience has made Victor Boldakov a dangerous foe or friend, and indeed the Ayakashi have a lot of reason to fear him as well. He knows how much people will pay for a dead one, though he’ll generally only attack if he knows for certain that he’ll be paid for the trouble.

However, while this wealth of experience has made him extremely dangerous and powerful, it’s not made him invincible, contrary to his own belief. As tough and wily as he is, he’s getting sloppy and tired; the almost non-stop fighting since he was 15 has taken a massive toll on his body and his mind, even at the comparatively young age of 40. He’s remarkably slow in combat and while he isn’t stupid, he doesn’t have a particular amount of complexity in his plans, simply relying on pure brute force to overpower any opponent. He doesn’t even know martial arts, just using his considerable bulk like a battering ram. However, this has yet to backfire for him. After all, what use are brains against brawn when brawn can just remove someone’s brains?

       LOVE:
       → Himself, Alina, money, vodka, guns, gambling

       HATE:
       → Physical exertion, speaking publicly, complex planning, starvation, the bourgeois, French people.

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       HISTORY:
       → Victor was the fourth child in a family that already had difficulty providing for one.

They were poor family in Kursk, their father was crippled and bed-ridden for most of his life, and their mother was rarely present, working like a dog to get money. As such, the children of the group were somewhat left to fend for themselves, and the best way to do that was through hunting in the countryside with a stolen army rifle; after all, it put food on the plate and it gave the children something to do that got themselves out of their mother’s way. At first, Victor wasn’t particularly skilled a shot as his siblings, but he learned fast, becoming especially good at tracking and taking out an animal in the wild and difficult to traverse Russian winter. However, it didn’t take long for the family to drift apart; Victor’s father died when he was 8, his older brothers joined the army and his sister ventured to Moscow to find her fortune, and so when his mother died as well when he was just 15, Victor saw no excuse to stay in Kursk. To that end, he went north and looked for work in Siberia.
He found an interesting line of work after all.

Victor’s hunting skills were not uncalled for the snowy wastes; a tracker with a good eye was highly valuable, so Victor Boldakov joined a small gang of illegal bounty hunters; they would hunt for known criminals who were hiding in the wastes of Siberia and pick up any rewards they found. Despite being essentially a kid, Victor felt right in his element in the snow-blasted tundra. He slowly grew in skill, his trusty rifle serving him well for three long years, but he was a nervous and uninspired kid with little aspirations beyond survival. It seemed like his life would continue on this path until a chance encounter that set off a domino chain of events that sent him all over the world.

It was when he was 18, on the Russian east coast, evading the local law enforcement. He had found a good hiding spot on a shingle beach amongst the rocks and planned to lie low. However, little did he know that he was being stalked by another figure. He didn’t know because he couldn’t see it, and he was only made aware of it by the footprints made in the stones. Victor was baffled, but it had taken long enough for whatever it was to reach him for him to realise that it was no illusion; something invisible was about to attack him. The creature attacked, but Victor guessed the attack correctly and avoided a fatal blow. Then the creature kept attacking, while Victor simply swung wildly at the air. The moment he struck the beast though, it was revealed to him. The young man at the time assumed it was a troll or some demon, but later he would know the creature as an Oni. An Ayakashi that evidently had washed ashore from Japan by freak accident, and attacked Victor out of blind rage. Despite the huge disadvantages, Victor managed to fight it off, before the creature faded into nothing as suddenly as it had appeared. However, for a while Victor was convinced that it was simply waiting for him, and he became even more shaken up than he already was.

Injured by the attack, Victor was caught by the law enforcement. They were going to throw him into a jail, but his brothers evidently were able to pull some strings, and get him a full pardon on condition that he worked on an assignment. Seeing little choice and dazed by his life changing encounter, he agreed.

He was sent to West Africa to fight for the nation of Dahomey against the French. The Russians had little investment in allowing Dahomey to win the war, but wanted to injure their rivals the French Empire. So Victor’s task was to observe the progress of the war and any highly successful French generals in particular, before murdering them. The African jungle was unlike any task Victor had taken on, and he was still mentally reeling from the Oni encounter. However, he served with distinction thanks to training from the Dahomey Amazons. From the women warriors of Dahomey he learnt how to fight cheek-by-jowl with an opponent. He could fight at long range with a sniper rifle, and now they taught him how to fight in a closed environment with a short carbine and a knife. It was unlike the Siberian sniping; it was a dirty gutter brawl in the muck and grime of the jungle, and he learnt how to get his hands dirty. The young Russian began to rack up a substantial amount of kills thanks to these tactics; while the French numerical losses were drops in the bucket, their captaincy suffered heavily thanks to the Russian assassin. To that end, they sent in a team of famed counter-assassins; one Lord Mathieu Gaston Rochesais and his Eleven Companions.

Lord Mathieu Gaston Rochesais was amongst the most famous and deadly hired guns in Europe for much of the same reason as Victor had become feared in Dahomey; he was a master of ambush and close-quarters combat, and had eleven subordinate elite guards who had cut through Europe like a razorblade, carving out their status as the deadliest mercenaries and assassins in Europe. This group armed themselves for jungle combat, and began to pursue Victor. Even the Dahomey Amazons respected the Rochesais’ Companions, and soon the Companions pushed him further and further north of Dahomey where he could cause trouble. But Rochesais did not want to force Victor away; he wanted his blood. This upstart Russian kid had butchered the French aristocracy and by all rights should have been an easy kill, so he pursued Victor further at the request of his paymasters. For days they chased the Russian, even beyond the border, until the jungle began to thin and the savannah came into full. And soon, the pursuit left the jungle entirely, and entered the wide, flat grasslands.

As Victor planned.

Despite his considerable success, Victor knew that he couldn’t defeat Rochesais in the close quarter jungle fighting; the Companions were better equipped and better trained for the cheek-by-jowl brawling, so Victor pulled them away from their home turf to his own; the wide open, where his sniping practise in the Siberian tundra could tip the balance. Lord Mathieu Gaston Rochesais didn’t see the mistake until after he saw four of his Companions simply drop down after a series of loud bangs, and then he fell with them. After five days of chasing him, Victor killed all Eleven Companions and their leader in under a minute. While Dahomey lost the war soon after, the Russian army considered Victor’s operations a success and pardoned him of all crimes.

So Victor decided to commit more crimes.

In the circle of assassins and mercenaries in Europe, the death of Rochesais’ Companions left a massive power vacuum. Victor had a distinct advantage in knowing that Rochesais was dead before anyone else, and he very quickly established himself as a multi-talented mercenary who could fight in groups and alone, for and against the law. But there was a reason he didn’t return to Russia instead. Most of the people who knew him before Dahomey and met him again after all insisted that he was someone else entirely; he wasn’t the nervous son of a peasant with a good eye and a lack of ambition. He had become a hardened, fearless lover of life and dealer of death. The change came from Victor’s own reflections on his life after the year in the jungle; the world had thrown at him armies, the greatest gunman in the world and even a monster, and he had beaten it. Before he couldn’t sleep knowing the monster might come back; now he slept just to taunt it. It and anyone else could come for him at the dead of night and he would have them.

Over the next seven years, Victor marched back and forth across Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa taking every job he could. He had the taste of blood and a newfound sense of invincibility fuelling him on, and from the amount of jobs he took he made a lot of money and killed a lot of men and women. However, he was never wealthy, because every penny he made was spent almost immediately on drink, gambling and women. However, this caused something of a hiccup in his carefree life; he had slept with a Russian singer, left the country to fight in Spain, and then found out that she was pregnant. Victor had the choice to return to Russia and risk his enemies chasing after the girl or stay his course and essentially abandon her.

But Victor was good at finding third options.

From then on in, a huge portion of Victor’s income went straight to his daughter, Alina, and he often sent letters. However, there was only one subject he knew well; guns. Luckily, all these letters made Alina a girl he could be proud of but her mother found very troublesome. Even from the young age of five she was constructing her own homemade weaponry, with some exotic parts sent by her father through the mail, and she formed a small all-female crime ring at the age of eleven.

Right now, Alina is seventeen. Her little crime ring has spent six long years as a thorn in the side of the Russian government, but it has ended up in somewhat of a crisis state, with a lack of money coming in. Desperate, Alina sends an appeal for financial aid from her father, Victor, now older and slower than his heyday but still every bit as deadly as before. What he has lost in the vitality of youth he has gained in brute force and equipment. However, he doesn’t know where he can get the money for Alina’s ring.

And then he hears of Japan.

The previously very unknown technological haven of Japan has opened up to the rest of the world, with foreigners pouring in. However, one of the big problems for foreigners are very strange beasts, sometimes seen and sometimes not. Some violent, some peaceful. All of them monsters. Victor gets two incentives to go to Japan; firstly, he knows that if these ‘monsters’ causing problems for people, then they will pay huge amounts for every single dead one. However, the second is an assertion of power, to show whichever monster that attacked him exactly what that beast had wrought upon its own kind. It wasn’t personal, but Victor couldn’t pretend that gunning down some of those monsters wouldn’t be amazingly good fun.
Stowing away on a ship with equipment in hand, the Russian assassin prepares to show Japan’s monsters that it was their turn to worry.

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      TRIVIA:
     → Surprisingly for such an open and welcoming (and loud) Russian, Victor Boldakov has glossophobia, the irrational fear of speaking publically.
     → Victor’s travels have made him at least competent at speaking many languages; he can speak Russian, (#ffffff) English, (#d99588) Dutch, (#8ebeff) Bambara (#fff66d) and Arabic (#cf469a) fluently, and he can also speak some French, (#ff0000) German, (#13c449) Spanish (#00f0ff) and Turkish (#0000ff)

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       ALIAS:
       → Sponge

       OTHER CHARACTERS:
       → None as of yet

      CREATOR'S COMMENTS:
       → Fucking wasps, dude.

      CUSTOM RANK:
       → The Hydra

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