Embers like Rain/// Rai Advancement story

Item/Character Advancement Name: Tenacity
Item/Character Advancement Description:
As a Reaver, Rai is supposed to accept death. If she dies, the citadel necromancers will create ten more of her kind in her stead. However, coming to this world has given Rai a reason to want to live. So when Rai encounters the real possibility of death and refuses to accept it, rather than regenerating as she would normally have to, she can have a 'last stand'. She gets a twenty second window to deal as much damage as she can before succumbing to her injuries and taking a much longer time to heal than normal.

Basically a sugar rush, with a sugar crash.
Item Power(s):
*Rai's normal ability to dash instead turns into a blink. Technically while she's traveling she has no mass, therefore grabbing her mid blink is impossible. Her scythes will float behind her and make attacks at her command.
*Rai's strikes will do loads more damage, on top of her being faster in general.
*Rai can ignore pain and injury during this time as if she doesn't feel it.

Item/Character Advancement Weakness(es):
*She only gets 20 seconds, make it count
*Rai can only use tenacity when she is either about to be forced to regenerate or if she knows a killing blow is about to be landed
*When tenacity is over, Rai immediately loses consciousness. She could be unconscious from anywhere from a day to a week and her healing factor gets slowed to almost a halt. When she wakes up her body will be healed the bare minimum that it needs to heal to be functional and will slowly heal itself over the next 24 hours leaving her very vulnerable. Her body markings will be grey and grow darker and be black again when her healing factor is returned.


FLUFF:
*When Rai uses Tenacity, she has a red glow rather than a pale green one when she's about to dash.
*for some reason it will occasionally rain white feathers for no reason at all
*Rai's normal markings are black, however the edges of them will turn bright red when tenacity is happening and will fade to a very pale grey when over
*when unconscious from using Tenacity... somebody talks to her.

Item/Character Advancement Price: 5

Another day, another demon to kill.

Grimmorah shifts his weight beneath his rider with an irritated snort as Rai urges him onward. Her silvery eyes locked onto the mud following a pair of horse hooves, however they appeared to be running backwards. The demon hunter recognizes these were kelpie tracks, insidious horse-like creatures known for dragging people into unsafe terrain such as lake bottoms and volcanos. The presence of a kelpie-however, was not the part that had Rai’s interest piqued. The intriguing part was reports of a horrible monster riding a glass horse, crashing into rural towns and leaving them asunder before disappearing into the mist. The idea of a kelpie being ridden at all was incredibly strange, however once again Rai was faced with a killer demon to hunt. She’d been tracking for days, however as of late the trail of destruction and grown fresher, bodies still bleeding and fires still smoldering.

‘Uuughhh’

Rai’s ears twitch to the dying gasp of a broken man along the path. Dismounting, she kneels to his side, taking his hand. The silver shine that was human blood in her eyes covered his body, she was certain he was going to die no matter what she did.

“It’s alright. You’re not alone. Can you speak?” Rai’s voice rang clear like a bell, speaking slowly and working to suppress her thick Dis accent.

“It’s- to town.” His breath was failing him. His hands trembling in Rai’s cold fingers.

“Where is town?”

With the last bit of strength the bleeding man had, his left hand lifted, indicating off the path, to the north east. And with that, the unlucky stranger was no more. His hand falling into the grass and the last gurgle passing his lips.

“Thankyou.” She nods, taking notice of a gold band around his left ring finger. This one had a family. She slips the band off the man’s finger, placing the precious object into her pocket for now and spurs Grimmorah onward into the thicket. The stranger had given her a gift of knowledge with his last breath and she wouldn’t waste it. It was only a few minutes worth of a B-line through the thicket until she was joined with the path again, Grimmorah huffing air the entire time beneath her as she impelled him on to a brutal pace.

The back of Rai’s mind heightens into a frenzy of fury, one that could not be described as simply rage, but rather a compulsion to kill. It was as if the inside of her head itched and her skin was on fire with rancor. It had to be close. She reaches the crest of a hill and the path turns to a wooden bridge across a small canyon and a river flowing steadily beneath it and she notices the tell-tale glimmering of glass and steel.

“Enough.” Rai shouts, tugging her mount into a skidded halt. “This ends here.” She growls, accent beginning to show through her speech.

“So three is the magic number?” A voice booms in an aloof tone from under the helmet as the man on the glass kelpie turns. He was enormous and in full plate armor, stained a crimson red not by blood but with shellac. His shape was relatively normal, until one noticed he had two sets of arms, one set crossed at his chest and the other set wielding large lances. Rai immediately recognizes this as a Narszugon, a type of hell knight  infamous for being hell’s own cavalry chargers. Although hell was packed with them, they were rare in Dis. On top of the rarity of this demon for Rai, she’d also never seen one not on a nightmare. Nightmares were unholy creatures of hell that resembled flaming horses, so why was this one on a kelpie?

“Excuse me?”

“It takes three raids to get your attention.” The armored demon speaks up. “I thought the only reaver smart enough to leave Dis would be a bit quicker on the draw.” The Narszugon’s eyes shone through the visor of his helmet with a sickening glee.

“You did all this to get to me?” Rai couldn’t help but snarl, feeling her cold blood boil.

“I must say, I am disappointed. I expected you to come after me in the middle of the first town.” His plate mail rattles as he shifts his shoulders in a half-uncaring shrug. “Either way, You’re here now. I’m Ralvon. And I’m here to add you to my collection.” He pulls a chain up from  his saddle, holding a line of horns sawed from the heads of at least ten reavers.

Being honest with herself, Rai had to admit that seeing her own kind hunted for sport did mildly irk her. But what truly infuriated her was that the Narzugon felt the need to bait her by slaughtering at least a hundred people and beckoning her to chase him down. If he really wanted her to find him, all he had to do was stay in one place for too long.

“We’ll see. But I’m not about to let you kill anyone else.” Rai produces both scythes as Grimmorah stamps the ground beneath her, eyeing the smaller kelpie viciously. The beast shimmered like shining glass and simply stared back into the murderous stallion as if staring blankly into the abyss. While Grimmorah bellowed taunts, insults and vitriol at the creature, it seemed to almost be dead in the face. How odd. Kelpies were supposed to be wild, quick to anger and were typically far too intelligent to be delegated as a mount. Although they weren’t demons, they could often be mistaken for them due to their propensity to cause chaos. Something was wrong with this one, as if it's been lulled out of the fury that made it itself. “I’m not letting you off this bridge.”

A narrowing of the glowing slits behind the visor was all Rai had as a warning before he cruelly dug his heels into the kelpie’s sides and it exploded toward her. She had minimal time to think, but all she knew was if she faced dual charging lances with her scythes, they’d come up short. She’d be hit by his lances before her scythes could touch him. Moving to match his charge Rai ducks behind Grimmorah’s neck, allowing him to eat the strike for her as she leans to the side as he passes. She hooks a scythe under the kelpie’s gaskin as Grimmorah fell.

While Grimmorah collapses into a pile of screaming sulfurous ash, the kelpie shattered into a wave of water and glass without so much as a whine. Liquid dripping off the side of the bridge and into the river below and tack remaining in the road. Rai manages to land on her feet, cringing as her ankles give at the impact. Ralvon did well to land on his boots as well, however due to the heavier armor and weaponry he was carrying he was a bit slower on the recovery.

Rai seizes the opportunity, outline flashing a ghostly green as she closes the distance quickly. She is upon him just as he gets standing, the left scythe finding its way to shear across his left pauldron, leaving deep divots in its wake. She follows up with the right scythe, only finding it to leave more scores rather than to peel the metal from flesh. The Narzugon reaches out with the lower set of arms, grasping her around the waist and his upper arms crashing down on the back of her head, dropping their lances and sending armored fists clattering into her skull. The massive impact leaves the reaver coughing, her vision blurring harshly as she warps back from his grasp and to her scythe before dashing back from the demon.

She shakes her head, ears ringing and clattering like television static. Black blood dripping from her nose, quickly she gets her scythes up just in time to take the impact of two short swords crashing into her guardian scythe. As she rears back to swing with the other poised to strike, Ralvon’s free left hand grips the blade, blocking it from colliding with his helmet and decks Rai with a nasty haymaker.

The reaver is sent flying into the concrete barrier, letting out a pained yelp at impact. This wasn’t working. With four arms he could block incoming attacks and counter attack at the same time in close combat and his melee strikes were brutal. Getting back up only earned her enough time to dash away from another heavy advance, a swing from the sword leaving the barrier splintered and the bridge sending parts into the river. The bridge wasn’t going to survive their fight, not only was she fighting a demon, she was fighting time.

Her only viable idea was to attempt to out maneuver him. She baits him forward, tossing a scythe to the left and jamming it into a support column up high and choosing to dash past Ralvon as he charges, before he gets to turn, she blinks to the scythe and kicks off the support. Rai slices through the pauldron she’d hit earlier, cutting deep into the flesh of his shoulder before tossing another scythe back and dashing under his left side, capitalizing on his lower mobility of one of his arms.

As she repeated this pattern of blinking and dashing in, shredding off a piece at a time, Rai’s heart fluttered with rage. Each cut through flesh or steel only spurring her on to the smell of more foul blood. Off came another pauldon, she’d split his breast plate and even  managed to work a sizable hole in Ralvon’s visor. She’d drawn blood from the other shoulder and cut into the right side of his ribs. However, Ralvon was tracing her movements and eventually she moved to abuse the cut side, only for him to catch her by her throat and slam her down, hard into the bridge.

She gags as the gauntleted hand squeezes into her throat. Even if she did need to breathe, no way her ribs would allow it. She winced, body wracked with pain. She’d broken at least four ribs and her head felt like a hot wire had been fed under her skull. He pulls her up by the throat and slams her into the ground with great hatred once more before tossing the reaver to the other end of the bridge.

All Rai could do was take a second to grit her teeth and work her way back up to her feet, trying to clear her head that was cluttered with noise inaudible to her ears. Just when she didn’t think it could get any worse a jolt of the single most painful thing a reaver could experience shot up her spine as the silver wire of a bola wrapped itself around her, forcing her back to the ground.

Rai couldn’t let it end this way.

The reaver grits her teeth as her skin smoldered beneath the silver wire, flesh beneath beginning to corrode into dust and her strength to remove the bola waned due to the copper weights that had snared her. She gives a hard tug, as her legs give out and her horns scrape against the pavement. Her outline resonated a bright green as she attempted to blink away to a nearby scythe, but being ensnared by both copper and silver made escape impossible.

She breathed heavily against the crimson stained pavement, she couldn’t help but shed a bloody tear. The realization she was likely dying here dawning on her, it was a moment she shouldn’t fear. Reavers were made to die. With her death, ten more would take her place. It was meaningless to mourn one’s self. However, one resonating thought passed through her mind.

No.

Ralvon closes in, both swords clutched in his hands. “I have to admit. You did put up a decent fight. I kind of hoped the other reaver that made it here  would have been with you. Would have been a bit more fair.” The demon sneers in pity. Poising his swords to strike.

I am not dying here. I refuse.

Inky black markings along Rai’s body suddenly flourish like crimson blooms on black lace as a booming growl, far too large to belong to the reaver. Her outline shimmering a matching shade of red as she disappeared from the bolas just as Relvon’s swing hits the pavement. The demon didn’t have time to so much as question why he’d missed before he felt blades biting along his spine. He swings behind himself, only hitting air as another red flash and another deep gouge is opened up in his breast plate.

Rai stops short, bridge crumbling while red energy radiates off the infuriated reaver, both scythes floating behind her as she seethes.  “You’ll collect no more horns.” He roars, voice taking on a harsh echo it’d never had before with a high pitched trill as white feathers begin to fall from the sky like rain.

“Wh-AH!” Rai didn’t even let the demon finish his thought before dissipating in a crimson burst in his general direction while the floating scythes follow up, cutting through flesh and bone on two of Ralvon’s arms.

Swinging with Ralvon’s remaining two arms earns him another slash into the back, cleaving through his ribs and separating them from his spine. The devil falls forward, attempting to even see where she’d come from, only for Rai’s boot to land heavily on the back of his helmet, shoving it into the ground until it warped under the pressure.

“And fuck you.” She adds just before her scythes crash down into the back of his neck like a pair of ghostly guillotines.

The reaver pants, markings beginning to fade from their coal black with brilliant edges to a dull grey as she suddenly feels as though her body was fading into dust. Perhaps it really was ending here then? Had she been exposed to silver too long?

The world faded, the bridge crumbles and Rai drifts away.

XXXX

‘This humans here have heroes to protect them yet you still choose to die for them? Aren’t you a dedicated little slave?’

Rai gasps suddenly, jolting up at the vaguely familiar voice and presence beckoning her, only to realize she was in a bed. The plush pillows around her gently soothed her aching body as Rai soon came to realize blood had welled under the skin of her more severe injuries. She couldn’t help but squint in confusion, if she’d lost consciousness, she should have regenerated. However, she was still pretty injured, even if it wasn’t as bad as it should be.

“Oh! You’re awake!” A sweet voice called from the hallway, causing Rai to damn near jump out of her skin.

“How did I end up here?” Rai asks a young blonde lady in a light green dress.

“We pulled you out of the river after you killed that big monster. Thank you so much for that. How did you know he was coming here next?” She asks, sitting at the foot of Rai’s bed as she pulls herself up into a sitting position.

“Uh…” She moves to try to find her pocket, realizing these people had dressed her in a nightgown, her clothes and armor were sitting clean on the nightstand so she went to that instead, retrieving the wedding ring she’d gotten from the man on the path. “A man from your town helped me. I couldn’t save him, but he let me help you. Someone here is going to want that.” Rai hums, handing the girl the ring.