Outwardly, Asch is all business - impatient, rough business. He perpetually gives off an aura of having no time for anything other than whatever mission he's focused in on at the time, and has a hot temper that despises teasing or wasting time. Act responsibly and professionally, and he'll give you the same in return; anything less isn't worthy of his time or respect.

His trust, on the other hand, is much harder to earn; in large part due to Van's manipulations, Asch doesn't trust anyone. Not even just on the level of not letting anyone get close to him - Asch doesn't trust other people to be competent, so he feels the need to do everything himself. The only people in-game that he trusts at all are Luke's party (who he can spy on over his connection to Luke at any time) and the Dark Wings, who he trusts to do their jobs because he's paying them. The same deep-set paranoia is what sends him to the Radiation Gate just in case when the party goes to take down Van at the Absorption Gate.

That isn't to say that he lacks emotional bonds; if anything, Asch is the sort to get attached to a frightening degree. The trouble is that he has no idea how to form new bonds, or how to deal with the ones he still has from the part of his life as Luke. Natalia, Guy, and his mother in particular are extremely precious to him; he just expresses it poorly, mostly with vaguely supportive emotional gestures towards Natalia. And when new people try to form bonds with him, he's prone to rejecting it, with anger, almost by reflex.

Anger is, in fact, Asch's primary response to stress. Upset by something? Get angry at it. Confused? Get angry and call it stupid. Grieving? Lash out at anything that steps wrong. It isn't so much that Asch is short-tempered as that he doesn't know how to process his own emotions correctly, and so he manifests them in the only way he does know how to express himself. The constant stress that colored his last year of life on Auldrant - the potential death of everyone on the planet, his own impending death, dealing with Luke, dealing with Van - only made that worse.

Because ultimately, Asch is a kid who has been hurt and is afraid of getting hurt again. He just won't ever admit it, even to himself, because it's a weakness he can't stand in himself. If he doesn't let anyone close, he doesn't have to fear losing them, or being betrayed by them. If he assumes the worst of people, then he doesn't have to fear disappointment. If he doesn't entrust the job to anyone else, he won't have to deal with them failing.

And yet, bizarrely, impossibly, buried beneath all of this is a spark of the idealistic child he once was that won't be snuffed out. Ultimately, for all that it's hurt him, personally, Asch loves the world, wants to help people, wants to see no one else have to suffer. It is this love of the world that is Van's ultimate failure, because nothing the man did to Asch, no evil he exposed the boy to, could put it out. Unlike Van, Asch did not despair, and still believes the world can be made better.

And perhaps more to the point, that he can make it better. Even without the kind of pressure he's used to working under, Asch is intensely driven; in fact, you could easily say he doesn't know what to do with himself without a goal in mind. A childhood of being told he would be king, and training for that, followed by his adolescence in the Oracle Knights, left Asch with a pathological need to be doing something at all times. And it only got worse when he found out that his time remaining in the world was rapidly approaching an end.

It is also worth noting, that for all his buried idealism, Asch is not exactly kind, or even a good person. While he will help out where he can, he is very aware of exactly where the lines of his morality are - and where they aren't. He has no compunction against killing, and if the person is someone he classes as an enemy, he won't feel any guilt or remorse. (Even if the person is close to him - in that case, he'll use the fact that they were an enemy to actively talk himself <i>out</i> of feeling anything about it.) He does feel some measure of guilt for killing innocents, but would likely never show it. He can't afford to hesitate.

It's a mantra that's practically built into him at this point; no hesitation, no diverting from the path he's set his mind to, no distractions, always forward. In some ways, Asch has survived everything he's been through on willpower alone, and that is the thing that makes him most frightening. He devotes his entire being to achieving his ends, be they good or ill, and as a result he strangles success out of situations where most could not. The unfortunate other side of this, however, is that when he fails - when the rope onto which he's invested his all gives out - he collapses utterly.

He can put himself back together, given time. After all, it's not the worst thing that's ever happened to him. But that rebuilding is shaky and destined to collapse again, some other failure, some future day, until he stops and takes the time to examine himself from the ground up. Self-reflection is the furthest thing from Asch's mind and as a result he can seem extremely hypocritical to someone who doesn't follow his thought processes, which can range from bizarrely convoluted to almost childishly simple. His patterns of thought just aren't quite <i>right</i> with the rest of the world, and he avoids thinking about either himself or the world enough to realize it.

Finally, Asch is fiercely, almost violently independent, as you might well expect from a teenager who has been betrayed on some level by everyone who has ever claimed some measure of authority over him. He fights orders and parental affection both as though they were chains and considers making his own judgements to be practically a moral imperative. He likes things to be clear-cut, and detests lies and deceptions. Considering the high standard of both he holds himself to, this can make him difficult to deal with, especially in any situation where tact is called for. It's probably for the better that he has the reputation of being angry and anti-social; it makes people less likely to take it personally.