Name: Katsumi Chiyoko
Gender: Female, mostly
Sex: Female
Age: About 10 years old as far as how long she's been who she is, has the body of an 18 year old or thereabouts but stopped aging.
Appearance: Has fives forms, each on a sliding scale of speed vs. power save for the last.
Spectre/"Stage 0": A mostly intangible, ill-defined form, darting from shadow to shadow in the vaguest shape of a humanoid. Appears to be a sort of just "darkness" with eyes and a mouth, with the limbs sometimes simply not existing. Her equipment is still there, in a vague sense, as one gets sort of "impressions" of weapons and clothing. If you look really hard, you can see sinister violet lines criscrossing her "body..."
Normal/"Human:" A lanky individual with light blonde hair, longer than average but spiky, which makes its true length somewhat difficult to discern. (It also might actually be changing from encounter to encounter; she likes to mess with people.) She tends to wear a longish coat of a dark violet color, with a plain white shirt beneath and black pants. Her face is quite expressive, and is somewhat angular without being harsh; she could definitely be characterized as attractive. Her eyes are a bright green, and always lively looking. Her voice is slightly toward the deep side, but her speech is quite expressive as well, so it tends to vary quite a lot. A bit of a bifauxnen. She has eyes that start a vibrant green and fade to an equally energetic blue as one moves away from the pupil.
My attempt.Stage 2: Much as her human form, but much heavier, with bulging muscles and a noticeably deeper voice. Her coat doesn't actually fit around her in this mode, forcing it to stay open as she gains bulk. She actually gains height, so it seems like her clothing shouldn't fit her, but it does nonetheless. Tends to show up if there's news coverage of her, as it's a lot more intimidating than just some random lanky teen.
Stage 3/"Beast Out"/"Black Beast": A massive creature, living up to its name with shadowy black skin that seems to shift and crawl as one looks at it and a vague impression of the clothes in the previous forms. Easily breaking twelve feet tall, glowing lines of violet replace where bulging veins might be on a more mundane creature. The oversized blade that Chiyoko normally wields looks like a butcher's cleaver in the grasp of this malevolent-looking transformations whose eyes burn a reddish-purple. Her voice also changes to one decidedly inhuman, guttural and deep, with an unnatural echo. Her head looks a lot like a bull's in this mode, complete with curved horns - it's best not to mention to her that bulls are all male.
Stage 4/"Border Break"/"Crusader Chiyoko": The only form that represents a significant increase in overall actual power (though the previous ones do actually scale up slightly), Chiyoko reverts to humanoid form. Her hair is long and unbound, the spikiness becoming a few stray hairs that poke upward and the rest descending well past her waist, though it never seems to get in the way of her fighting. She gains two metallic, white faulds protecting either hip, with two violet ribbons that fall to just above the ground in a standing position attached at either corner of said faulds. Alternating black and white plates, with a purple glow shining from the gaps between them, ascend up her sides before wrapping around her shoulders and becoming white, rectangular and flat "pauldrons" above them. Her eyes similarly become violet and glow faintly. She wears black leggings and her white shirt reappears to cover the gaps in her armor. Inferno Divider's physical blade is replaced, save the back, with a pinkish-red blade of energy. Additionally, four thinner, lighter versions of the weapon hover behind her.
Weapon: A large, oversized sword dubbed Inferno Divider, that almost seems to be more suitable for bludgeoning than actual cutting (though it does a great job of that, mind you.) It has a black backing piece where the rest of the pieces connect, running about 3/4 the length of the blade, which is made of a white metal and quite thick and heavy. A thinner violet piece connects the back to the blade. It can be charged with energy to heat it up, potentially lighting victims on fire. The handle is much longer than one would expect, to accommodate Chiyoko's physically larger forms, and rather simply made of a similar material to the backing, with a small pommel.
Powers: Chiyoko was "born" with two unique abilities. The first is straightforward: Chiyoko gains power from, and indeed is sustained by, the fear and hatred that others have toward her. Were this to cease entirely, she would have to quickly adapt to a new energy source or quite literally fade out of existence; but on the bright side, she doesn't actually have to eat or drink, since her body stopped being anything resembling human beyond appearance years ago.
The second is a bit more complex. Chiyoko can manipulate the borders and boundaries of things. This is not a physical effect, though it can easily be used to achieve such; rather, it is a conceptual change, that warps, tears, and patches over reality, twisting it about to better align with Chiyoko's desires. However, a large or complex result requires a similarly large amount of expenditure and effort due to the precision needed to achieve the shifts one wants with reality itself fighting to remain unmodified. Her most common use of this is creating pathways and portals through space, either for transportation or as a method of attack.
Fighting style: If this was a fighting game, Chiyoko would be a zoner first and foremost, with different modes representing different strategies to mix up that tactic with. She harasses opponents at range from every angle possible and impossible, relying on her ability to literally slash through space and strike an opponent with an attack regardless of where they may be. She tends to play the long game against a single opponent, deliberately frustrating them and implying that she's holding back her power (regardless of whether she is or not) in order to create the maximal amount of fear and loathing. Her signature attack is the ability to strike at a distance with cuts from her blade without the thing itself being visible, only tracing lines of light across opponents that leave them bleeding.
When pressed into direct melee, each of her forms has a different tactic:
Spectre: None. It's quite difficult to exert any force at all in this mode; she'll do her best to flee confrontation as this is mostly for stealth and conserving energy.
Stage 1: Relies on overwhelming speed, emphasizing quantity over quality with hits and aiming to startle and knock off balance those expecting a slow, lumbering assault from her massive weapon. Lots of jumping and aerial assault, with a dancelike style to it. Tends to not get too close; she lacks the bulk to deal and take blows that are inside her effective striking distance. Plus it could screw up her hair or tear a hole in her coat; she LIKES her coat.
Stage 2: Much more balanced, striking a well-rounded midpoint between speed and power, though losing quite a bit of the grace that characterizes Stage 1. She's bulky and strong enough to fight in extremely close distances, and will mix up her weapon strikes with fisticuffs, kicks, and the occasional grab. - though she's not so brutish as to resort to something like a headbutt. Strong enough to swing the blade one-handed without undue exertion.
Stage 3: The concept of trying to outrun people is pretty much abandoned here; Chiyoko relies on raw brute strength, smashing and pummeling people to death. She might be physically slower, but despite her monstrous appearance her border manipulation is unaffected; unwary foes will find themselves snatched from behind and crushed, or tossed over the horizon by a hand lurching out of thin air. This also happens to be Chiyoko's go-to tactic if she has to engage a group; instead of direct engagement, she emulates a monster in a horror movie, snatching people to a grisly end before their comrades' very eyes.
Stage 4: Largely reverts to the tactics used in stage 1, though with added force. The Crusader form is strong enough to stand up to direct physical assault without being tossed about like a ragdoll. She also integrates her four extra blades into her strikes, parrying and riposting with them in tandem with the larger as well as using them as additional harassment tools at range.
Story: There was once a fairly ordinary teenaged girl, who had pretty simple goals; get decent grades, get into a good school for her medical degree, and maybe meet a nice boy and have some kids - after she got her job, of course, there was no way in hell she felt ready to raise children just yet, and they were pretty tough to take care of while studying pre-med and half-dying of the resulting stress. Despite the orders of holy knights sowing chaos in the world, she lived a fairly quiet life in the suburbs, with a loving family and no real fears of anything besides spiders.
This story is not about that girl.
Due to a stroke of misfortune of a cosmic scale, she managed to trip and fall headlong into a long-lost puddle of ancient demon blood. The result of this sudden expose resulted in her soul being nigh-instantly crushed into the afterlife, and the tiny fraction of the demon's power moving into the freshly vacated body out of something like instinct. For two days, the body laid there, inert but not decaying as any living being felt the pain radiating from the soul's power - which is probably what caused the slick of mud on an otherwise grassy surface that resulted in the girl's fall.
After those two days, the body rose. No, not as a zombie; that's a different anime. She looked about, confused; where was she? Who was she? There was some sort of vague impression of the world left in her head, the physical remains of the memories the girl's soul had left behind in its frightful flight. She had limbs, eyes, a mouth. . . She stood up, wandering in a haze, until she stood in front of something. A house, the house that her body had lived in for twelve years. The people inside called her something: Chiyoko. That must be her name. Well, they screamed a bit too; she was spattered with blood and dirt, and had been missing for two days. When they saw her, shied away from the red substance on her, she felt a small surge of strength. Fear? It was fear that sustained her. At their confusion and sadness, the one who had been their daughter simply turned about and wandered away, lost in thought and feeling no connection to the people before her. . .
She found she could touch reality. Not with her physical limbs, but reaching out mentally, tugging and pulling at it, making one part touch another that it wouldn't normally. This last was quite convenient; her limbs lacked vitality, making it difficult to cross terrain to new places while she searched for more sources of fear. Chiyoko - she may as well keep using the name, as she had no other - found that she didn't like the collection of that loathing; the people she frightened, their screams grated at her ears and her mind. Still, she did what she had to do to survive; if she stopped trying to cause fear, she could feel her grasp on reality waning, her senses dulling.
Over time, as her soul grew more from its seed and "filled out," her thoughts became more coherent, and so did her actions. She adopted a surname for herself. She traveled, running across an old sword that showed no signs of its age other than a thick layer of dust, abandoned in some ruined shrine at the base of a volcano, based in a cleft in its surface. She learned that, as she existed within reality like anything else, she could pull at her own physical form, adapting it to the needs at hand. She used this, abused this. Chiyoko became a monster in the night, horrifying people with a demonic form. She met and fought the holy knights, suppressing them where she could. To build up a steady source of "food," she established herself as a world-class criminal, stealing untold valuables from secured vaults, and even stepping to performing assassinations - though despite these acts, she always at least tried to ensure she harmed people who she truly felt deserved it; irredeemably corrupt politicians and corporate magnates who cared for nothing but their own pockets, rulers that savaged their people, or occasionally evildoers on a smaller scale, like the serial killers she was accused of being.
Chiyoko continues to wander now, chasing fragments of the demon's soul like the one that had created her to end the threefold suffering; that of the rule of the knights, that which she inflicted on others to survive, and that which the previous inflicted on herself. Perhaps, maybe, she could find solace in a few choice individuals that she could share her innermost thoughts with, or even find a new source of energy to sustain herself with. . .
Stats:
Strength: D~A+
Endurance: C~B+
Agility: D~A++
Mana: A
Luck: E~C
Ability to Manipulate Borders: EX
Self-Modification: B
Ability to Piss People Off: B+
Magic Resistance: C
Edginess: A+++