“I’ve been broken so many times that the original shape is lost."
"...I’m not a person; I’m a collection of survival, stitched together by the grace of my King. Do not mourn my face; it is just another sparepart long since replaced.”
「 Please take a moment to peer into the ‘Mountain of Corpses’ below. It’s a deeper look into Emmerich’s profile as the Sternritter M… 」 🧩
Emmerich Leichenberg [Von Clausewitz]
Emmerich Leichenberg is a chilling relic of the Lichtreich, having been recruited into Yhwach’s service over a thousand years ago; approximately five years before even Jugram Haschwalth was brought into the army. At seventeen, he was a victim of his own community; fearing his ability to turn living things into wooden mannequins, his fellow villagers brutally beat him and burned his hair down to the scalp to humiliate him before death. Yhwach later discovered the dying boy among the ruins, and after being "saved," a traumatized Emmerich used his power to transmute his entire village, stacking their wooden bodies into a literal hill. Because the head trauma left him with amnesia (remembering only his first name) Yhwach branded him with the surname Leichenberg, or "Mountain of Corpses," a name that has defined his existence for a millennium.
Now standing as Sternritter M — The Mannequin, Emmerich is a 188cm lean (192cm on his 4cm boots), athletic powerhouse with a personality that is famously dry af and brutally blunt at times. He moves with a clinical detachment that is deeply unsettling to those around him, as he no longer views enemies as living beings, but as a collection of "spare parts" for his own detachable, modular body. He is emotionally numb, often staring vacantly with his one milky-white eye (a permanent scar from the fire) carrying the heavy, silent weight of "old guard" trauma. He doesn't engage in the flashy theatrics of the younger Sternritters, preferring to exist as a quiet, efficient instrument of His Majesty’s will, whom he follows with a fanatical, machine-like devotion.
Despite his cold exterior, Emmerich is actually a remarkably solid mentor, though he carries a very specific, old-school "traditionalist" streak that borders on misogynistic. He will flat-out refuse to train Sternritters he deems "pretty" or "cute" at first, not because he thinks they are weak, but because he sees them as far too vulnerable for the "ugly work" of war. In his mind, "pure" things shouldn't be wasted in a meat grinder; he views them like fragile porcelain that has no business being on a battlefield of mannequins and corpses. This protective, stubborn bias is a direct reflection of his ancient roots… he’d rather lose another limb of his own than see a "beautiful" Sternritters get turned into the same kind of patchwork monster he has become.
✨BTS of yours truly assembling the Schutzstaffel’s favorite mannequin✨
