Gauro

Gauro is a veteran gatekeeper (monban) and city guard stationed at the entrance of the city dungeon in Hydrangea, where the young protagonist Wof scrounges for a living in the adjacent junkyard. A member of the Common Human race and 33 years old at the story's outset, he is a brown-haired man with a prominent scar across his face that gives him an intimidating, bandit-like appearance. He was once a dungeon explorer himself, but after taking the facial wound — and “various things” that followed — he gave up that life and became a gatekeeper. He is unmarried and, unlike some other characters, possesses no Oreparts.

Despite his frightening looks, Gauro is fundamentally serious, earnest, and gentle, and he is especially soft toward children. He lets small children and first-timers into the junkyard for free out of his own pocket, treats the working orphans to meals, and spends his days off doing volunteer work — helping at the orphanage, cleaning the town's drains and gutters, and assisting at the free food kitchen. Having learned firsthand how dangerous the explorer's path is, he quietly hopes the children who work the junkyard will never end up scarred and broken as he did, wishing instead that they find safety and a different kind of happiness. He takes a particular liking to Wof, whom he considers an oddly composed, unusually un-hardened child among the desperate kids who come to dig through the trash.

Gauro plays a quiet but pivotal role early in the story. When Wof casually gives him a ring pulled from the dungeon — telling him to sell it for the orphans' meal money — Gauro scolds the boy but accepts it and takes it to the appraiser Arifa. The ring proves so significant that it drags Gauro, an ordinary guard, into the orbit of high nobility: he is summoned by carriage to a noble estate and comes face to face with Marquis Tasan, effectively the third-most powerful figure in the realm, in an episode narrated partly from Gauro's own point of view. Even under that pressure he stands protectively over Wof, wary that the nobles might mean the boy harm.

Across the long run of the story Gauro remains a steady, recurring presence and one of the few people Wof genuinely talks to during his early years. He wields a Wind-attribute Relic that lets him manipulate the wind, and he participates in guild operations — including a rescue mission tied to an ancient ruin that ended in a city-leveling disaster attributed to a mistake on his part. He rises within the guard ranks over time, later reappearing as a seasoned guard whose superior is the captain of the guard corps, and he continues to greet a now far more powerful Wof with the same gruff warmth he always showed the junkyard kids.