[CHAR] REACH HEAVEN THROUGH VIOLENCE

[Kassarock]

Hashinau-I, Mistress of Blades

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Hashinau-I, Mistress of Blades

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<sub>Art by Juliette

Theme</sub>

Name:

Hashinau-I

Titles:

The Mistress of Blades, Sword Sage, Thousand Army Killer, Mountain-Cutter, Swordsman’s Doom.

Age:

120 Great Years of the Old Tri-Lunar Cycle.

World:

Rakunen, a feudalistic world of towering mountain ranges, verdant river valleys, and dense bamboo forests. For as long as anyone can remember Rakunen has been a world divided by many warring Empires and Kingdoms.

Race:

Hanin, a race of slight tanned humanoids with dark hair and almond shaped eyes.

Form:

Hashinau-I is a withered old crone of diminutive stature. Her famous blood stained hair has faded to almost complete white, only streaked by crimson here and there. She wears ragged roughspun robes and goes unadorned save for a pair of copper disks that stretch out her earlobes. Her lips and teeth are stained blue for her near continuous smoking of Oolachi leaves.

There’s a hard edge to the old woman and her mind and tongue are still extremely sharp despite her age. Her scarred arms are still coiled with lean ropey muscle and she stands straight and unbent.

Legend:

No one truly knows where she came from, or who trained her in the deadly Sword Arts that she evidently possessed. But the Legend of Hashinau-I was born on the battlefield, the travelling mercenary who could not be defeated, who slew every man put before her, who could singlehandedly fight off a hundred men.

She held the esteem and terror of every Sovereign, controlled the fate of empires and nations with her whims, became richer than any lord or merchant prince. And she gave it all up to live as a hermit on a mountain.

After she split the mountain, Hashinau-I returned to the world below, but never again did she take up her blade in the service of another. She sought out all the great Sword Masters of the world, to find one that could do but a fraction as she had done. She found only disappointment.

Finally, after many years, she gave up her travels and lived in a barrel in the market of the Great Yellow City. Never taking a single pupil, never raising her sword again. She lived in absolute debasement and squalor, lower even than the stray dogs. Occasionally great men, emperors and sages, would seek her out for her wisdom and try to rouse her to action, to take part in their affairs once more. They all left with the same answer:

“Be gone, worms. I am trying to think like nothing.”

Will:

Hashinau-I comes from a violent world, constantly at war with itself. She has seen thousands upon thousands die by her hand for nothing more than the petty squabbles of children. Hashinau-I is the ultimate practitioner of violence that her universe has ever produced. And she has learnt to abhor it.

She seeks to face the Gods and ask them why the cycle of violence must be so. And if their answer does not satisfy her? Then she will cut them down.

Mastery:

The greatest swordsman to have ever lived on Rakunen cowers before the might of Hashinau-I, there is no equal when it comes to her ability to turn men into corpses. In particular, she is highly skilled in the Art of the Cut, the act of cutting something, anything, everything.

Even without a sword, it is said that Hashinau-I is still more deadly than any other Sword Sage. To quote the Mistress of Blades herself: ‘A Sword is just a tool to cut with, the actual cutting is done by your Will, given sufficient Will, anything can be a Sword.”

Ascent:

It is said that on the last day of Hashinau-I’s earthly existence, she had been sat in her barrel, smoking from her nikishi pipe as she did most days. By this time she was an old woman, ancient by the standards of most of the Hanin. Men who were old enough to remember when Hashinau-I had split the mountain were all grandfathers or great-grandfathers themselves by this time. Many only knew her as the crazy old woman who lived in a barrel.

None-the-less, it is said that all gathered stopped what they were doing when the ancient crone’s pipe suddenly dropped from her mouth and she began to laugh hysterically. From beneath her tattered robes she had pulled out a tiny stump of blade, barely extending past the sword hilt, that few in the market had ever even seen.

“Everything is nothing. And nothing is everything.” Hashinau-I had exclaimed as she had climbed atop her barrel. “I do not exist, you do not exist. This sword does not exist… This world does not exist.”

As she spoke, a halo of divine fire spread its way around around her head, until it crowned her in the light of the stars themselves. It dripped down her arm and onto her sword hand, until the blade glowed as bright as her did. Those who witnessed it said that they suddenly realised that the stumpy broken sword blade was not small at all, in fact it stretched longer than any there could see, it stretched wider than the universe itself, it stretched to infinity.

Hashinau-I made her final cut – and disappeared in a flash of light.

Ephemera:

It is said that you will know Hashinau-I by her two Icons. First, the Infinite Blade, the broken stump of a straight bladed Jian that is actually longer than the universe. Second, a bronze and rosewood nikishi pipe, said by Hashinau-I to be far more valuable than any ugly hunk of metal.

Hashinau-I and the Mountain

_{H A S H I N A U - I A N D T H E M O U N T A I N}

There is an old tale told in Koshi'ni Highlands, peculiar to the local people there, who have inhabited those lands for countless aeons, of how the Great Mountain, Kuraka-Ko, came to be known as the Split Peak. Today, the Great Mountain is cut down the middle by the Gorge of Tenshai, through which the famous river of the same name now flows. But according to the Koshi'nin this was not always the case.

Long ago, before the arrival of our Great and Bountiful Empire (long may it prosper), when a hundred squabbling pretty kings ruled and warred in these lands, the mountain of Kuraka-Ko was whole. There was no gorge cut through this highest of peaks, and the river Tenshai instead snaked its way through the wide valleys around its base.

In those long ago chaotic days, a stranger came to the lands of the Koshi'nin. A warrior woman from the lowlands below, a mercenary who had fought under the banner of every king and who had bathed so long in the blood of a hundred armies that it had stained her hair the brightest red. Her lips were stained blue from the smoking of Oolachi leaves, and she carried a fine nikishi pipe of bronze and rosewood.

This stranger was Hashinau-I, the Mistress of Blades, the greatest wielder of the Sword Arts to have ever lived, who you no doubt know from countless other stories.

Hashinau-I had grown tired of fighting the wars of men, for men were too easy to slay and she desired a stronger opponent. The villagers, fearful of invoking the terrible wrath of the Sword Sage, delicately told her that there were no worthy opponents to be found amongst them. Hashinau-I only smiled, and told them she had not come to fight any of them.

She had come to slay a mountain.

At first the villagers thought that Hashinau-I was joking, but as her face darkened at their laughter, they quickly realised that she was perfectly serious. Privately they decided that the great swords woman must have lost her mind. But they could ill afford to make an enemy of Hashinau-I, who had once slew the Titan or Yrre with nothing more than sharpened finger nail, so they humoured her, and gave the great warrior their hospitality.

Hashinau-I took up residence on the great peak of Kuraka-Ko, living as a hermit in a little cave below the summit. The people of Koshi'ni would make offerings to her, but seldom did the Sword Sage come down from her mountain. When emissaries from the petty kings below sought her out so that she would take up her blade once more in their service, she sent them away in disappointment, occasionally missing a few of their limbs if she thought they had been particularly disrespectful.

For the first three years, she wandered the surface of the mountain. Getting to know every feature of its sloping sides, its forests and streams, every rock and every crag, how the wind blew against it in the winter, how the sun warmed its flanks in spring. When she knew every blade of grass and every pebble on the mountain, Hashinau-I went back into her cave and started to dig.

She used the sword that she had cut down countless men with to dig a tunnel deep into the back of the cave. Scarce did she emerge from the tunnel, and few of the villagers were brave enough to enter to see it from themselves. Those that did said that she had dug her way deep into the heart of the mountain. Scraping away at the dirt and rocks for years and years until her sword was ground down to just the stump of a blade, its edge incomparably fine.

Finally, when Hashinau-I had reached the very centre of the mountain, she carved a small chamber there and sat and meditated. For thirty days and thirty nights she sat in complete darkness, unblinking, heart beat and breathing slowed to the point of near death.

On the thirty first day she emerged from her cave, walked down from the mountain, turned her broken blade to it, and cut.

And the mountain split in two.

Before she left one of the villagers asked Hashinau-I how she had done it. How could one woman cut a mountain in half with the stump of a broken blade? Hashinau-I had only smiled enigmatically as she had puffed blue smoke from her nikiseri pipe and said:

"To cut a thing, one must understand it. It took me three years to understand the surface of the mountain, and many more to understand what lay beneath it. But the most difficult part is learning to think like a mountain."

Hashinau-I never visited Koshi'ni again, but she would go on to have many other adventures, and cut many more things. To this day, however, there is still a shrine dedicated in Hashinau-I's honour that can be found at the mouth of the Tenshai Gorge, where the entrance of to her cave could once be found.

[DracoLunaris]

Rita, the Goblin Knight

Rita, the Goblin Knight

warpath theme

Titles (in order gained)

Runt, cherry top, humilover, knightstabba, horserida, the greenest knight, the strangely honorable, rusta o chains, rebel of green, god mounta, the demon lord, the goblin queen, the goblin formerly known as queen, champion of the small folk, devil slayer, she who would break the heavens, first among mortals, the eternal liberator.

Age

Rita is 36, which is impressive for a goblin as while they can live to about 70 at most, they basically never get anywhere close.

Race

Rita is a goblin, one of the most pathetic species ever to have been made, or at least that is how the prejudice goes. They have green skin, very large ears, eye and hair color trending from yellow to red, and generally stand three feet tall, with none of the brawn species like the dwarves have to compensate. Their only real positive traits are an excellent set of senses (having decent night vision, an enhanced sense of smell and exceptional hearing) used to detect danger, coupled with rapid breeding and maturation rates. Oh and in the eyes of anyone looking for minions, the art of enslaving goblins being older than recorded history is quite the boon.

Form

Rita has long red hair that she styles into a set of braids and equally red eyes. She stands at about 2.6 feet and has the functionally muscled build of a lifelong warrior. She has several scars, the most notable being one on her left temple along with several more scattered across her body.

The goblin is most often seen wearing a practical set of relatively plain plate armor adorned with a flowing golden cape.

World

Algerntia

Rita comes from a pretty bog standard fantasy world all things considered. A variety of species, from humans to dwarves dragons and, of course, goblins, dwell in a magically infused medieval stasis. Slightly more of note is the unusual way in which faith and belief impact the world.

In Rita’s world, if enough people believe a thing is true, then it becomes so. If enough people believe a being exists, be it a god, devil or monster, and that can do certain things, then it’s existence and capabilities become fact. Similarly, if enough people are confined another person can do a thing, then they are able to do that thing. More specifically, the act of telling a story about that truth is what engraves it into reality, be it telling it within a person's head or spoken and shared among the people.

This also extends to things like magic and basically any supernatural phenomenon, where functionally you trick large amounts of people and in doing get them to fool reality for you, but in terms of Rita’s story, only gods, devils and heroes are relevant to go over.

Gods are supernatural beings spawned by faith who live in their own higher domains known as heavens, but make no mistake, they are gods, not Gods. They are powerful, but they are not masters of creation, nor sharpers of it. There are many gods, and once formed they do not die, nor do they base their power or vitality on continued belief. Instead, without belief, without their stories being told over an over and mutating and modernizing as the world changes, a god becomes immutable, stagnant, even senile in the worst of cases and, in the games of gods, ultimately easily out maneuvered. A god can still do things of their own accord but, if no one talks about it, if no one believes that it happened, then the very impact of that action will fade, being forgotten or even undone.

Inorder to maintain any kind of fluidity and relevance then, a forgotten god must attach themselves as a bit player in another god's story, generally, though not always, as servant. This means that the equivalent of angels in the world’s heavens are simply gods who are no longer worshiped on their own, and simply play a role in another god’s court.

The dark reflections of the gods are known as devils, beings born of tales of fear, as the pure evil antagonists of gods, as explanations to why bad things happen to good people, etc. Of course, no one wants to worship a being of pure malice, and the other gods don't wish to associate with them either (that would be antithetical to their tales and/or bad pr) and so they are generally confined to their own subset of realms know as hells, where they plot, scheme, bicker and fight amongst each other, all while coveting the power of the gods are freely given, and the source of that power, the mortal realm. The best devils can hope for to remain relevant is to be feared, bought off or bargained with. People believing you are a horrible monster that will bring about the end of days is still belief in the end.

These devils’s most noticeable form of influence on the mortal world is via proxies known as demon lords, mortals made nameless by their pacts with and/or enslavement by various devils, and who’s ultimate purpose is to gather enough power in the mortal realm, spread fear of their master’s name, and to eventually to summon their dark patron into it to wreak havoc. All that stands against them is the might of mortals and their heroes.

Heroes are mortals who, similar to gods and devils, draw power from stories of their exploits and deeds being spoken or sung over and over. A legend about a powerful feat they once performed circulating will make performing that feat again more straightforward with each retelling till it comes with ease. If the story gets exaggerated, or even has details added out of whole cloth, as so often happens when stories are traded around orally, then so much the better, as the hero will eventually be able to do something they never could have done before. As with gods, a hero whose tales fall out of circulation will also not be weakened, they simply don't get any stronger. However, as mortals are people, operating in a purely physical world and using their own hands to do things, they do not suffer the stagnation or fading influence of gods, which is quite the advantage.

Generally however, heroes don’t gain anywhere near the prestige of gods, especially highly worshiped ones, and so the fact that mortals can be empowered by belief is mostly unknown, and the gods, who need and crave belief, aren't exactly interested in sharing the details on this little facet of their universe. The gods are more than happy to insert themselves into the tales of heroes, and to claim credit for their remarkable abilities, as a way of feeding off of their tales and becoming stronger however. Of course, tales of gods granting boons mean that gods can gain the ability to actually grant boons, meaning that their relationships with their heroes isn't purely parasitical.

Mortal lifespans also prevent them from benefiting from generations upon generations of retellings and mutations of their stories as gods do, and instead after their death these tales will generally be co-opted either by an existing god if one has not done so already, or cause the birth of an entirely new god made in the image of the hero.

Legend

book report backstory

Rita was once a faceless minion of a demon lord, until she was forcibly adopted by an adventuring party when she was just a teen (after said party hacked their way through the rest of the various minions in the patrol she had been a part of). From them she became more worldly than any goblin before her in living memory, and was effectively trained and treated as the squire/daughter of the knightly adventurer who had adopted her.

After several years in their company, the adventures aimed to strike down the demon lord themselves, but were hopelessly outmatched. To save her own skin Rika backstabbed them, (specifically her adopted father with one of his spare blades) when it became clear to her that they were doomed, and in so doing reentered the demon lord’s service and gained a minor position of leadership, along with ownership of her dead father’s armor and his horse. She took these, and a burning resentment for both her forced betrayal and the general abysmal treatment of her people, and used them fuel a climb up the ranks through a combination of conquests in her lord's name and the assassination of her superiors.

As she climbed, she effectively dragged goblin kind up with her, empowering them, organizing them and protecting them from poor treatment. In doing so she became their dark folk hero and, as in her world, people believing something makes that belief closer to reality, their belief in her heroism allowed her to perform greater heroic feats.

Eventually her power and influence grew so large that the demon lord began to fear she would attempt to usurp him as well, and moved to strike her down before she could do the same to him.

Rita was beaten but not killed in the resulting clash, yet her near death at the demon lord’s hands sparked the revolution against him she had been kindling.

While recovering from her wounds, the goblin was lured into the realm of the goblin king, a fading god who coveted the faith her kind had in her, and attempted to force her into marrying him to take if for his own. After a dance of words about how she would ‘mount him’ and ‘take his sword’ the Rita exited the goblin king’s domain riding atop a new divine mount and carrying an equally devine blade.

Armed with this new power she rode out and struck down the demon lord, freeing her kin from his bondage at last. She founded a nation out of the remains of the demon lord’s empire, and then quickly resigned her position as its leader when it turned out she was only really good at war. She couldn't find it in herself to retire either, and so instead struck out, racing across the world on a campaign of liberation. First fell other demon lords and corrupt kings. Then as fatih in her built to absurd levels, she launched a crusade directly into the hells and, finally, took to the heavens and made even the gods, who had grown fearful of her power, kneel to her might.

full backstory

Rita began her life in a goblin clan who were, like many if not most of their kind, enthralled to the service of a demon lord. Though goblins are weak by nature, they breed quickly and the art of their enslavement is older than history, making them perfect cannon fodder for any being higher up the food chain than them (which is basically everyone). Most often they are employed alongside other slave races by demon lords, servants of devils whose names are expunged from existence upon entering a dark pact with their vile masters.

Rita was the runt of her litter, smaller than even the average goblin, but that didn't really matter much other than getting ribbed for it on occasion. During her early years Rita’s life was unremarkable for a goblin. As soon as she could walk she was put to work, toiling away in the small mine she was born in, a slave to the schemes of her dark master.

All that changed one day when she was barely a teen. She was randomly hauled away from work, got a spear shoved in her hands and told to match out along with a patrol of other dark minions, mostly orks whom she and her kin were explicitly acting as cannon fodder for. This wasn't exactly unusual, but what was unusual was that the patrol actually ran into something. She’d fought before of course, but rather than monsters or unfortunate hunters the patrol hit an adventuring party.

For most of the minions, things ended as you might expect, the adventurers slaughtering their way through the patrol with ease. For Rita however, who was hurt but not killed in the opening moments, things ended strangely. Perhaps it was because so small, maybe it was because she made made an effort to make her hair nice today in order to impress a now corpse, maybe it was how she just coward among the dead once the fighting was over, maybe it was pure whim, but for whatever reason, the knight (a man called sir Reginald) among the adventurers took pity on her and decided to, for all intents and purposes, adopt her.

Thus began Rita’s crash course in the human world, a bewildering barrage of sights, sounds and experiences during which she acted as something between pet, daughter, squire and mascot for the party who she traveled with for many a moon as they slowly got stronger and better equipped. To protect her own skin, she played the role they wanted her to play perfectly, but inside she hated them. They had, after all, killed her friends and family without mercy. So she plotted revenge in secret but as her worldliness grew, and her very presence among the party resulted in them and others questioning the validity of their ruthless actions against her kind in their war against the demon lord, the need to scheme fell from burning necessity to reluctant burdening commitment.

Maybe if time had been on her side she would have eventually dropped her plans entirely, but in the end her hand was forced. The party, partially out of overconfidence and partially out of a growing sense of guilt about killing more and more of Rita’s kin, went to directly challenge the demon lord. They were not the first to do so and, tragically, they would not be the last.

As the battle began to go poorly Rita saw the writing on the wall and so she executed upon her schemes and stabbed her team in the back. Quite literally in the knight’s case, sliding one of his own spare swords through a weakness in his armor she knew about from helping him put it on before battles. The revenge did not feel good, but it did save her skin, the goblin being able to honestly say to her old master that she had simply been buying her time while traveling with the heroes, waiting to strike at the perfect moment such as the one presented to her now.

For her cunning she was rewarded with a lowly position of command, barely one step up from common underling. She also, however, got to keep the possessions of the knight, including his horse, Sandy. Cobbling together a suit of armor for herself out of the fallen knight’s own, she became the first goblin knight, and swore a silent oath she would take down the demon lord herself, and end his cycle of death that had taken her first and second family from her. To do that, she would have to become stronger.

She rose her way up the ranks of the demon lord’s forces through force of arms, first by slaying her superiors in one on one combat to get a true command (an entirely permissible and even encouraged act), and then by forming an order of green knights, wolf riders armored with hydra scale leather who hunted both the demon lord's enemies (focusing especially on rival demon lords) and various neutral monsters that stood in the way of him expanding his realm. In doing so, and in focusing her efforts on empowering and actually caring about the survival of her goblin kin, she became something of a dark hero, one who protected the weak minions both from the forces of light and from the cruelty of their dark masters.

As she build up her influence among her people, she also built up something of a repertoire with the forces opposing her lord, changing the name of the game and forcibly ‘civilizing’ their conflict, making herself into someone who was seen as a reasonable, even honorable opponent who could be expected to show mercy and, importantly, expected that to be shown in turn. She built a significant worthy foe relationship with the knights of her deceased adoptive father, one that would eventually prove vital. Casualty rates massively dropped among those who fought in her name even as they remained an effective fighting force, and soon enough she had risen to the top of the demon lord’s ranks. Despite being near indispensable at this point, the lord did not trust her. As he was right to do.

Things came to a head when three of the other right hand minions of the lord attempted to dispose of her, an act that cost them their lives at her hands. The resulting power she would gain was too much, and so the demon lord himself aimed to strike her down. He only succeeded in wounding her, and preemptively sparking the revolution she had been fostering beneath his nose. As civil war erupted among the demon lord’s forces, and it raged the wounded Rita made contact with the forces of light, and convinced them to actively side with her force rather than simply let the war burn to its end and then swoop in to take down the battered victor.

Gazing down upon this war was the goblin king, a lesser deity who was worshiped by the peoples who now saw Rita as their savior. He took notice of their adoration of her and hatched a scheme to take it for his own. As the war raged across the continent, he lured the goblin, exhausted from the stress of brokering her alliance while also being wounded, into his domain. There, in a twisting labyrinthine forest, he challenged her to a series of trials that, should she fail them, she would submit to him and become his bride, tying her influence to his. The game was rigged from the start, of course, and so it ended in a game of words where Rita put on the airs of a flustered maiden who refused to talk of consummating a marriage in straight terms out of embarrassment. Thus, after a dance of words about how she would ‘mount him’ and ‘take his sword’ the Goblin exited the goblin king’s domain riding atop Sandy the 17th and carrying the blade known simply as Fang.

Upon her return to the land of mortals, she learned that the humans had sent a daring force driving into the heart of the war to try and strike down the demon lord, but their fate, it seemed, looked as if it would be going the same way as the adventurers who had adopted Rita. Hearing of this the goblin, still not yet fully recovered, rode to their aid upon her new divine steed. She stormed the demon lord’s fortress with her own knights, linking up with and fighting alongside heroes who were led by a knight who proved to be her adoptive father’s sister. Working together they brought down the demon lord, with Rita striking the final blow that ended his reign once and for all.

The end of the right of the demon lord lasted for all of a minute, as soon as the news got out Rita was immediately hailed as the new demon lord by both sides of the war. As this supposed betrayal threatened to tear apart the alliance of man and goblin, the devils of the many hells that had empowered the old lord to attempt to slip their malignant tendrils into her in his place. In the end, the knight who Rita had only just discovered was her aunt who sacrificed her life to prevent Rita’s corruption, allowing her to beat it back and seal this one piece of access the devils had to the mortal world once and for all.

Rather than a demon lord then, Rita was instead hailed as the first goblin queen, though she swiftly also became the last, as it turns out having the most powerful warrior in the nation be your leader does not result in good stateswomanship. She, fortunately, recognized this before it was too late, and, after transforming her new kingdom into a democracy, resigned her position as queen.

For a time she stayed and helped ensure the peace between the new nation and the human ones it now lived among, but before too long she grew tired of peace, unable to sit still knowing that there were other demon lords out there and other peoples enslaved to their will. Soon enough the goblin set out on a journey of liberation, traveling across the continent and then across the world, freeing her people, and all who were like them, from the bondage of tyrants of all shapes and forms.

As she fought more and more for the people’s freedom, their faith in her grew and grew and, thanks to her godly steed she learned how to harness this power as a god did (a moment that carved their begrudgingly built friendship in stone, for the god did not attempt to steal this power all for himself as Rita feared he might do) and in doing so she became a near unstoppable force on the mortal realm, which only fueled the people’s adoration of her even further.

Armed with the will of the people the goblin looked beyond the demon lords themselves, and instead took aim at the source of their powers, the many hells from which all evil seeped. At the head of a mighty crusade made from all races, and with the backing of their gods, she plunged into those fiery pits and against all expectation succeeded in rooting out the darkness within. The gods, both fearing her powers and empowered themselves by the deaths of their dark kin, attempted to force the liberator of all to kneel to their will. A mistake they soon came to regret.

Rather than kill them however, for they were the embodiment of good things, just lost in their power, she taught them a lesson in humility as she had the wolf god, forcing them to respect a mortal as an equal, and in doing so getting them to respect all mortals in a way they had never done before.

Her story might have ended there, or perhaps in some calamity caused by her being unable to simply sit down and retire after a life of war, if the overwhelming faith and belief in her from all the peoples of the world, combined with the submission of all the gods to her will, had not breached some threshold of power, and ascended her (and her trusty steed) to the wheel.

There, new tyrants stand tall, waiting to fall to the hand of the meekest of creatures.

Will

Rita is driven by the need to end the mistreatment of the weak. She is mostly focused on what she calls ‘the small folk’ (your goblins, imps, kobolds etc) but ultimately she wishes to see all tyrants fall, and all peoples to be free.

Mastery

Rita is the hero to end all heroes, a goblin of a thousand tales, the ultimate underdog. On paper she does not seem particularly impressive, being a goblin in armor with a glowing sword and an unusual steed. In practice Rita has far surpassed any mortal limits long, long ago.

Defensively, her natural senses have been sharpened to such a fine point that she functionally has a 6th sense for danger. The goblin also has an intense resilience in a way that, while she can most certainly be hurt, actually putting her down is frightfully difficult. The stubborn little creature will take her licks and just keep going and going, and if it looks like you've got her pinned down she’ll escape to train and scheme, and then come back for a rematch at the most appropriately dramatic moment.

Offensively Rita’s primary strategy is to stab people with a sword using blows with hundreds of times the strength her body should be able to produce behind them. Failing that she has a small pile of tricks up her sleeves gained from various exaggerated tales made true. She can form lances of light, breath fire (thanks the kobold's for that one), tame any beast, leap across battlefields like a grasshopper and create improvised explosives from basically anything (imps for this one), along with a few other party tricks kept up her sleeve from her more obscure stories.

The ability that is perhaps her greatest and yet also her most often dismissed is the ability to inspire and empower others, particularly those considered meek. This is both a psychological thing, seeing a tiny goblin stick it to those far more imposing than her can't help but inspire, as well as an actual faith fueled power. Those who join Rita’s order of Green Knights, for example, can tap into her legend and the previous exploits of their organization, gaining the speed and power to keep up with Rita’s wild charges. Even more generally, those fighting alongside Rita or in her name can tap into the legacy of the army that broke all the hells and heavens of her world, gaining increased strength, bravery and resilience.

Finally, Rita has been taught the secret power of stories and faith, a frightful power in her home world, one less useful beyond its confines. Functionally the barrier between her soul and the souls of others is soft, resulting in external perception lightly warping her flame. By influencing how others see her, she can use them to mold herself into a stronger and better being.

Ascent

Rita took on her world’s gods, the final tyrants and made them bow their heads to a mortal, and one that she forced them to broadcast to all their followers, predominantly to prove both that she wasn’t going to kill them all like she had all her other foes, and to end their dominance over mortal kind. The unprecedented event made even those ignorant of her invasions of the hells aware of her and in awe of her. Yet what was a heroic liberator with no more tyrants to face in battle? That was the question asked, the universe answered, and ascended the rebel knight to the wheel, where her quest of liberation can continue.

Ephemera

Inherited Platemail
Originally cobbled together from her adoptive father’s armor, Rita’s platemail is a simple and unadorned affair that over the years has been ship of theseused into actually fitting her like a glove. It is technically very mundane, but belief in its resilience has given the armor supreme stopping power, withstanding blow after blow without a care. If part of it does break it will shatter rather than buckle, the struck section acting as ablative armor in its last moment and entirely sparing Rita from the blow that breaks that part of her armored shell. Any replacement metal also gains this ability, as long as it does not clash with the rest of the metal aesthetically.

Fang
A fine blade the color of dawn. Not remarkably sharp or possessing of any exotic enchantments, but the goblin king’s sword is the only blade that has proved again and again that it can handle being swung around by the pint sized powerhouse, and for that she has kept hold of it for all these years.

Sandy the 17th (aka sandy the last, formally known as the goblin king)
Sandy is, or was, a god, born of legends of a long dead king of goblinkind. He now acts as Rita’s mighty steed, uninstalling his innate shapeshifting ability to provide her the perfect mount for any occasion, be it the traditional war wolf, a dashing stallion, a mighty elk or more exotic rides like sharks, giant spiders, lions, rocs, wyverns and so on. All of these forms are absurdly fast, strong and unerringly beautiful perfect specimens of their kinds

As a being of pure belief he is difficult to permanently kill. Which is a good thing, because Rita managed to go through 16 other steeds in the few years before he met her. The fact that she named all of her replacement steeds Sandy, in tribute to the first, means that even if the latest of their name falls, he can tap into the story that Rita always rides a mount with the same name, and can use that to simply return to life near her whenever it is narrative convenient.

POV: you upset the goblin

[Lewascan2]

Jen - Overclock

Name:
Jen Shiragami

Titles:
Overclock, Fastest Woman Alive, Bane of the Heaven Seeker, The Deathlight, Vanquisher of the Unspoken, The Hero Who Never Was

Age:
21 physically... and a fair bit older mentally if one considers her living extended periods with an accelerated mind.

World:
Earth Q is an Earth variant world once reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland by decades-long war with a Wuxia-style Invader, were it not for Jen's final heroic act during her ascension restoring it to a golden age of relative peace. Magic and supernatural abilities are a fairly new phenomenon on this world, barely 30 years old, and are thus poorly understood and with shaky foundations for training.

Race:
A black-souled/Perceiver human(?), Jen developed from her youth a natural and intuitive connection to the forces of Speed. By all accounts she is otherwise a bog-standard human woman of Japanese descent... at least on the surface.

Form:
Jen appears as a young human woman of what could be described as be Japanese heritage. As a result of her ascension, this appearance is more a thin veneer than anything. Having been forced to cast aside her mortal form in truth, the illusion falters when she uses her powers to any real degree, revealing a semi-ethereal blue humanoid being that appears to be more a living, moving galaxy than anything else.

Nexus Form

Legend:
Jen's world was woefully unprepared for an invader with the bullshit of a Wuxia protagonist behind them. A war of decimation with the goal of godhood was waged against her world, and Jen from the age of 11 found herself participating. The war went on for a full decade from her joining, and Jen's power over Speed was cultivated and mastered in that time, her personally confronting the Invader many a time and often being the only thing between her world and annihilation. She in many ways became the face of the resistance, and her very presence tended to at least guarantee that the enemy could not win outright.

Widely hailed as humanity's savior, she was a one-woman army, known to slay and save thousands in the blink of an eye, entire armies liberated or laid to waste at her leisure. Rumor said that should one have a way by which she may hear them and so much as call her name, she could cross the ocean to aid the besieged before the words ceased to flow. Her final battle with the Invader would see her finally initiating a last desperate stage of her personal cultivation, resulting in her victory, along with her ascension and removal from the entirety of her world's memory and history.

Will:
Jen dedicated herself to heroism and war from a young age. Time and again she has fought for the sole purpose of saving lives and opposing an unparalleled tyrant of a madman. Despite having finally defeated said tyrant once and for all, she cannot lay such instincts completely to rest. That said, facing a new world with new people and evils, Jen can only feel a looming sense of... exhaustion. Having sacrificed everything for her world and spent half her life at war, Jen now desires to try living for herself for a change, to seek personal peace instead of peace for the sake of others. To that end, she intends to explore the new limits of her existence/body and shatter them all over again, to cast down any threat to her peace, and to finally have what she always reserved for others... hopefully without compromising her moral compass... much. It's time for the selfless hero to be a bit selfish for once.

Mastery:
Jen has long cultivated a natural intuition for manipulating the primal forces of Speed, to a degree that steps even into the realm of space-time. Her mastery has seen her surpass even the speed of light and the flow of time itself, and her ascension has seen the obtainment of near-immortality through the stark transformation of her body to one more akin to an elemental of Speed than anything else.
Broadly speaking, if one can so much as conceptualize a usage of speed, it's fair to assume she can make it happen -or figure it out if not; she is basically a living embodiment of Speed.
However, her mastery is very much White Arts focused. Red Arts are comparatively unexplored territory for her.

Ascent:
When faced with the genocidal ascension to godhood of the Invader that had long terrorized her world, Jen was forced to finally attempt time travel. In order to prevent a worldwide paradox and ensure success, she exploited her time-space manipulation through her mastery of Speed to sacrifice her own past/history. As a result, her body began to unravel from the self-contained paradox, and she was forced to craft a new shell of a body from the fundament of Speed around her while she reversed time.

In short, she successfully reversed time by more than a decade and assassinated the Invader in the moment they entered her world. However, her not yet completely stable form interacted with the forces laid bare by the Invader's dimensional technique, causing Jen to lose her grip on her world's timeline. Fumbling to stabilize her form, she began to Ascend, as she managed to work a solution together using her accelerated reaction time. Her form solidified, and a force like a sun being birthed within her propelled her uncontrollably forth into the next adventure.

More Detailed Version

During the Wuxia Invader's ascension ritual, a genocidal sacrifice was initiated, wiping out a large portion of the planet's population and ensuring the Invader's ultimate victory. Instead of allowing such an atrocity to pass, Jen was forced to use time travel. She was wary of causing a paradox, but it was the only thing she had left, and she had a theory about how she could make it work.

Speed of light remains constant irrespective of the observer. It is observed that as the speed of an object increases, time slows down. At the speed of light, time stops. And on further increment of speed greater than light, time reverses. Thus, to travel back in time we have to move faster than Light. And Jen's personal step: sacrifice her own timeline to ensure that her appearance in the past would not cause a paradox.

She didn't just erase the battle, the defeat. She reversed time all the way back to the exact moment the Wuxia Invader had arrived in her world years ago. As she did so, the disappearance of her very past caused her body to begin to come apart at the seams. In order to retain cohesion, she infused herself with the very concept of speed that flowed more freely around her now than ever before, crafting a new body from the fundament of the universe, a part of her mortality inextricably cast away to achieve a stable existence outside her own timeline.

She found the moment of the Invader's entry and attacked him with every bit of her fully cultivated power against his less experienced past self, a merciless barrage of high-speed vibrating attacks that reduced him forever to mere atoms. However, the Invader had still been resolving the effects of his dimensional technique when she struck. The combination of such a technique imploding and Jen's own state of still-resolving ascension and weakened grasp on her world's timeline caused her to be nicked by the collapsing technique and thrust from her world entirely, as her ascension solidified and completed in truth.

Arriving in a place unknown, she found that her very being had been fundamentally changed by the experience. In order to maintain her existence, she had not merely joined herself to the concept of Speed. No, for to join herself with her own universe's rules of reality would have resulted in her unraveling the moment she left. Instead, she had managed to transform herself into a sort of moving "universe of Speed" in the shape of a human. Her very being was a self-sustaining battery of an existence that molded and adapted itself to instead be fueled merely by Jen's own belief and perception of Speed.

Ephemera:
The Speed Nexus:
A self-sustaining existence within Jen's body of her own semi-unintentional creation. More accurately, her body is the nexus itself, a relatively tiny but growing and hyper-compressed "Universe of Speed" that acts as a protective shell/shield for her memories and soul to guard against the paradox that destroyed her original body. Through this and her own perception of her power, her body has become essentially a walking physical expression of the fundamental force of Speed. This body is a magical nuclear power plant, constantly utilizing the forces of its own existence to generate and store further power, which is partially put towards generation, escalating the speed at which it generates more ad infinitum.

This body doesn't possess an organic growth cycle and as a result is no longer is capable of aging. Nor does it require food, drink or air. However, the body is barely any more durable than a standard human's. This will likely change in time, as it grows in power and "density".

Loyal Fol-... Frien-... Honestly, it's a cult:
As a result of erasing her own history/past, very few from her home-world recall her existence, and she has been relegated more to myth than anything. That said, she is not the only being that can step beyond the reach of time, and several that remember cultivate her (presently false) image as a Goddess and search for ways to contact her or bring her home.

Theme:

Main Theme

Final Battle With the Wuxia Invader

To Pierce the Barrier of Time (Jen's Ascension)