Grace Howard

Overview

Grace Howard is a playable character in Zenless Zone Zero, where she serves as an S-Rank Electric Anomaly Agent. She acts as the primary mechanical engineering consultant for Belobog Heavy Industries, a major construction firm in New Eridu. As the adopted daughter of former company president Honus Belobog and the adopted elder sister of current president Koleda Belobog, she plays a vital core role in the organization. A brilliant graduate of the prestigious Ruth Institute of Technology, she possesses top-tier technical expertise, though her fanatic devotion to machinery often makes her stand out among her peers.

Appearance

Grace Howard stands 170 cm tall with orange eyes and shoulder-length black hair tied into a small rear ponytail, featuring prominent stray strands and an ahoge. She wears orange-lensed welding goggles on her forehead and a black choker around her neck. Her upper attire consists of a black zippered sports bra that exposes her shoulders, collarbone, midriff, and navel, revealing subtle abdominal muscles, alongside a frayed gray thread detail on its inner left trim. Her right shoulder features a gray gear tattoo. She wears arm covers with tool pouches, a left fingerless glove, skinny pants wrapped with cloth at the waist, a support pad on her right knee, a grey waist belt holding electric grenades, and black sneakers, though she is frequently shown barefoot. She also appears in a white formal suit in billboard advertisements.

Personality

Grace is an uninhibited mechanics fanatic who views automated heavy machinery and artificial intelligence as her beloved children. While she exhibits extreme precision and rationality in her engineering work—refusing vague measurements in favor of exact metrics—her social demeanor is wonderfully eccentric. She often installs quirky personalities into her AI units, such as hot-headed youth or romantic maidens, and unabashedly tries to embrace or disassemble intelligent mechs, Ethereals, and Bangboos on sight. Her detachment from typical human social dynamics earned her the moniker Iron Witch. Beneath her obsessive tinkering lies a deep sense of responsibility; she harbors profound guilt over deploying her mechanical creations into dangerous Hollow environments and shows intense passion and discipline regarding technological integrity.

Abilities

Grace fights as an Electric Anomaly Agent using a high-pressure nail gun and electric grenades. Her normal attack, High-Pressure Nail Gun, inflicts Physical and Electric damage while building up to eight stacks of Electric Power. Her Special Skill, Obstacle Removal, and Enhanced Special Skill, Extraordinary Obstacle Removal, involve throwing grenades with directional control and invincibility frames; consuming eight Electric Power stacks increases the Electric anomaly accumulation rate by up to 130%. Her Ultimate Skill, Blasting Zone Keep Out, launches a specialized grenade that splits into four smaller explosives for massive damage. With potential upgrades, she accesses Obstacle Removal - Loop to rapidly toss multiple grenades and activates Wild Bloom, inflicting heavy bonus damage matching the target's current anomaly status.

Background

Raised as the adopted daughter of Honus Belobog, former president of Belobog Heavy Industries, Grace attended the prestigious Ruth Institute of Technology before becoming the company's chief mechanical engineering advisor. After Honus mysteriously disappeared, she completed his unfinished designs for autonomous heavy construction machinery, turning them into the company's flagship asset. During the events at Black Goose Construction Site, she teamed up with Koleda Belobog, Anton Ivanov, Ben Bigger, and the proxies Phaethon to retrieve stray intelligent mechs. In doing so, she helped uncover the truth that Honus had died attempting to reinforce an Ethereal seal and pay prototype fees rather than fleeing with company funds. She later confronted her former academy classmate Betty Brenda, who illegally copied Grace's AI core data, resolving a major mech malfunction while upholding engineering ethics.

Relationships

Grace shares a close bond with Koleda Belobog, who is both her adopted younger sister and her current superior; Grace affectionately addresses her as Little One, while Koleda calls her Sis. She holds deep reverent loyalty to her late adopted father and former president, Honus Belobog. Within Belobog Heavy Industries, she works alongside Anton Ivanov and Ben Bigger. She maintains a strong partnership with the proxy siblings Wise and Belle (Phaethon), often attempting to enthusiastically hug their Bangboo, Eous. Her former academy roommate and classmate, Betty Brenda, briefly became a technological rival before Grace resolved her runaway mech crisis. Grace also routinely unnerves intelligent androids such as Billy Kid, Qingyi, and Banyue by eagerly expressing her desire to inspect and disassemble their internal components.

Trivia

Grace's right shoulder displays a prominent gray gear tattoo, symbolizing her lifelong dedication to mechanical engineering. In lore fluff, inanimate maintenance tools such as wrenches, screws, and lubricants are humorously depicted as praising her exact measurement standards and soft touch. It took her 1001 days of intense development and trials to successfully build intelligent heavy machinery like Gretel the tunneling machine. Additionally, official promotional art, cutscenes, and agent stories frequently depict her working while barefoot.