Faith

Faith, a former top 5 awakened is an offensive type Awakened Being close to Grace and the one who opened the eyes of Grace that not all awakened beings were mindless monsters. Her namesake is indicative of her faith to follow Grace, and put her trust in a claymore (as an awakened). Ironically Grace tried to behead her when she was unconscious but got stopped by Medea. They ended both in the Valley of Death and decided to band together to increase their chances to get out. Thus, both experienced that it is possible to talk to each other without killing the other. Faith had no intentions to tag along with Grace but after meeting Eliah she feared for her life and decided to not anger her and claimed to be Grace's friend, which later came true after she began to appreciate Grace's company. She now even considers Grace as indispensable and a true friend since she is incredibly grateful that Grace sees her as a person and comrade. She also partially realized the true purpose of yoki and the existence of the observer and observed under the names of quality and quantity with a few hints given to her by her black-list claymore (see below). Faith herself awakened about 300 years ago and has numerous connections/parallels to Viola, almost certainly being the same person.  Her symbol was most likely a diagonal cross with two arrowheads (c27). Faith's true Y.I.D. is a praying mantis. 
==Appearance==
Faith resembles a Mantis in her awakened form, possessing a mantis lower body and a human upper body with sharp and barbed sword like limbs. With these arms, she can slice at incredible speeds at an opponent to cut them up or grab them.  She trained with Grace multiple times and both improved from these training sessions. After pushing her limits trying to save Grace, her arms rapidly seasoned, becoming double-edged barbed chains held together by sinew and muscle. She can use these for medium-distance combat and flail them at praying-sword speed instead of having to cut off and throw her arms for ranged attacks. She is extremely well versed in semi-transformation and is quite experienced and certainly considered a seasoned awakened (over 100 years old). Faith appears capable of freely transforming her human parts of her awakened form into their corresponding mantis parts, such as transforming her mouth into a mantis mouth to bite precisely through bone while eating, as well as transforming her entire head into a mantid head. It appears that the parts of the body that are transformed are determined by what ability-set Faith is using. 
==Personality==
Faith is rational while Grace is impulsive, making the pair foils. She is quite intelligent and protective of Grace, and is described by Cassandra as being Grace's "sword". Faith has a habit of calling those close to her abbreviated nicknames although she has begun to call Grace by her real name recently. This indicates that Faith has truly believed that Grace is her comrade, something very difficult for her to do as she naturally is very suspicious and has great psychological trauma with friendship after her betrayal by her closest friend. Faith is one of the Awakened Beings who differentiates food. She only preyed on bandits and rapists, but now only eats animal guts, something difficult for most awakened because it requires great willpower. Until recently, she argued with Grace about if every human was worth saving.  Faith is very closed to anything regarding her past and only speaks of it in the rarest of occasions.  She herself admitted that she followed Grace because she didn't want to live alone in pain after her betrayal and found solace in Grace's company.  For this, Grace is an indispensable comrade to Faith who Faith would protect with her life.  
Faith is perceptive, determined, and curious.  She is quick to figure out solutions and plans which allowed her to figure out the true nature of yoki to a greater degree than most awakened.  She sometimes uses trickery and underhand methods to achieve what she wants or to gain information but isn't an immoral person.  Her temperament is balanced between fear and confidence, skillfully and confidently dealing with people from lesser or equal positions and cautiously fighting and talking with people of greater power and/or position. Like her Y.I.D., she carefully observes her opponents and waits to strike when they are most vulnerable. Faith enjoys watching the stars and only has started to do this again recently, as it reminded her of her betrayal by her closest comrade. Faith has a great fear of not having her feet on the ground. For this reason, she hates riding on horses and flying, which is why she almost never uses her wings.
==Powers/Abilities==
Faith's fighting style during her Claymore days, created from the idea that an enemy can't simultaneously attack and defend,  was unofficially nicknamed "the Praying Sword". She used it after awakening from muscle memory (c91). It involves standing perfectly still and swinging the sword extremely quickly and precisely (1/20 of a second per swing), mincing anything within a certain range. Her range and destructive capability with this technique was improved with the addition of barbed, extendable arms.
Faith has wings but hates to use them, using them only once to fly Grace down to safety after fighting Omen. She hates not having her feet on the ground and is afraid of heights, hating even sitting atop a horse since she is moving.
Faith can clean herself and recover from severe injury by "molting", a process where a shell forms around her body and her body, contained within, is rejuvenated. Unlike other creatures that recover using this method, she does not dissolve her bones, and will not die if the shell is shattered mid-recovery, although it will stop the recovery.
Faith appears to have a secondary fighting style, "Stargazer", which can be switched with her primary "praying sword" style. She appears to be capable of switching styles when she molts and remakes her body, although it may be possible for her to do this without molting. Faith's second secondary fighting style gives her viridian green eyes, involves transformation of the head and arms, and seems to possess an Eye class Ability, which enables her to see, remember, and to a limited extent, mimic the Techniques of anything she has seen 
==History==
=== Black List ===
Faith maintains a black list of Claymores and beings alike to kill who did her wrong. The first as an awakened being which killed her family on a mountainside and one she failed to kill as a claymore (possibly Angel). She remembers its shape clearly. The second is likely Icolde, a fellow top 10 claymore she was close friends with who betrayed her for Blanc, leaving her to die. Faith carved her symbol (a diamond with a line through it) onto her hand to never forget it. Lastly, she wishes to kill Blanc for "getting her into this mess".  
She managed to confront Icolde, but retreated since she became an Abyssal One without getting satisfying answers for the reasons of her betrayal and defection (Icolde claimed not to remember who Faith was, although considering her part in Faith's resurrection and she did eventually remember (so her memory wasn't wiped), this is a near impossibility and likely only her way of trying to get Faith to abandon her vengeance for the events that transpired). Since then, Faith had immense hatred against Abyssal Ones. She only overcame this when talking with Cassandra during a desperate situation and decided to aim this hatred solely against number two on her list(c81). 
Faith's family was killed by a mysterious awakened (possibly Angel) when she was a child and she became a claymore after that. As a claymore, Faith worked her way up from a low position in the organization (she started hunting at number 24) by leading over 20 awakened hunts successfully, ending up in the top 5. Many of her missions went to Alphonse where she fought against the strong awakened, gaining experience to combat their ranged weaponry.  Faith's last awakened hunt ended in failure as the being she tried to kill, which had killed her family prior, escaped. Following this, she went on a mission to kill Blanc, probably because of the organization's intolerance to failure in purge missions, and was betrayed by her close friend and left for dead. Her yoki saved her but she awakened in the process and lost 3 months of her memory, finding out only later when she tried to talk with a warrior, thinking she was still a claymore, and was attacked by the horrified claymore.  Following this incident, she gained a deep hate for abyssals and made her black list and resolved to kill herself by running into Staff after she had killed the people on her black list, making it her only reason for living. She ate the guts of rapists and slavers, believing that even if she had awakened, she still was doing humanity a service. She lived a lonely life, eating by pretending to be a prostitute without ever dirtying herself and targeting morally corrupt individuals.
=== Life Before Grace ===
Faith's identity and place in history is a mystery.  All evidence seems to strongly point to the conclusion that Faith is Viola (or more specifically, Viola's Shade) except for Faith's name.  However, is has been hinted that Faith's name might not be her real one in her confrontations with Vega and it is very likely that she is in denial and thus is suffering from a psychological disorder in which she has intentionally shut off her painful memories and replaced them with more acceptable ones, changing her name.  Most of her life before meeting Grace is unknown although she has been involved with many strong and notorious awakened in the past. She traveled over Tolaine and saw many extraordinary things like an outsider and the ocean. Sometime later, she tracked down Blanc's path of destruction and came across her old friend. Her friend was extremely peaceful and content with defecting and didn't even remember Faith, making her extremely angry. Faith demanded answers yet was scared off and ran away when her friend revealed that she no longer had a stigmata and was an abyssal, leaving her to train and curse her incompetence.  She was once a prisoner of Alice but managed to escape 250–300 years ago, possibly the only one to ever escape Alice's tea party. This escape was done with the help of her comrades and she was remembered by Alice as "the one that got away". She hates Alphonse the cold weather and beings there. Partly because of experiences from her Claymore days when she hardly managed to escape the vicious beings of Alphonse. Her particular memory of the place is from her claymore days, when she killed awakened from Noble's Kingdom, and was attacked by Noble himself, only being saved by an avalanche that buried her for many days until she dug herself out.  She appears to have met Medusa when Medusa was 1 years old, freeing the young awakened and teaching it how to hunt. Medusa repaid the favor by rescuing Faith.  
== Story ==
===Meeting Grace===
Grace met Faith in Medea's valley of death. Faith had escaped a single time before but had been caught and returned to the valley. Faith fought briefly with Grace and came close to killing her, stopping temporarily after seeing her medallion. Faith later cooperated with Grace to escape the valley by poisoning Medea's Yoki Suppressants with Gilas' poison, leaving her paralyzed. She later helped Grace fight the awakened Medea to increase her survival rate but stayed with Grace afterwards. Grace was afraid Faith would eat people and thought she was doing humanity a service, yet didn't want to kill her after realizing Faith had her humanity intact. Faith stayed because Eliah terrified her and she had to pretend to be Grace's friend to avoid Eliah's wrath. After a month of rehabilitation, Faith became able to resist the addiction of eating guts with a side effect of increased aggression. She later bought a perfect-fitting open-back dress for herself with Grace's money, cherishing it as her first gift from Grace. Faith helped Grace rescue Renee and Kahlan from Nina and Armand by scaring off the Apex, reclaiming the Claymores, and fighting (somewhat ineffectively) against Armand. After Kahlan tried to kill her, she tricked Kahlan into being bait for Armand and at the cost of the claymore's life, opened up a hole to the outside so that Grace and Renee could enter. She later asked Nina who lead the Vanguards after Armand was defeated.
=== Mission to Purge ===
Faith met with Gloria after the latter had been assigned to watch Grace and her "pet" Faith under orders. Faith and Gloria got into arguments about awakeneds and Gloria tried not to talk with Faith, considering her "evil" for her very nature. Faith and Gloria later got to know each other better while Grace went on her mission to Purge. 
=== Mission to Alvenheim ===
Faith helped Grace out when she went on a rescue mission to Alvenheim, meeting Cassandra. She was terrified of Cassandra at first but once she realized that Cassandra was mentally unstable and wanted to be close to Grace, she tried to dissuade Grace from taking her in. She claimed Cassandra was a liability with logical arguments in her paranoia of abyssal ones and jealousy of having to "share" Grace, although Grace ended up accepting Cassandra regardless. Using Faith as a living scapegoat was proposed as an idea for halting the approaching hunting squad but was rejected. Faith later helped gather food for Victoria to create a Corrupted gut worm. When facing the Vanguards who had come to recruit the claymore hunting party, Faith killed 100 feeders and numerous corrupt vultures. Vega fought against her with a rapier and came up with the conclusion that Grace was an extremely dangerous claymore who could manipulate awakened.
===In Alphonse===
Faith later journeyed with Grace to Alphonse to find Eliah. She protected Grace from Bonnie, Artemis, and Arwen and later fought personally with Bonnie, sustaining heavy damage and was almost killed when her body couldn't regenerate from the massive damage inflicted by Bonnie's bullets. Grace rescued her and Faith witnessed Grace, using borderline-awakening amounts of yoki, disintegrate Bonnie's arm to protect her and cleave through an avalanche started by Miata with her voice alone. She grabbed onto Grace so as to not loose track of her but she lost her grip on Grace and was buried in the avalanche. She was dug out and exiled to Nexus so the princess' secrets of creating corrupt beings wouldn't be revealed. In nexus, she met up with Cassandra who had also been exiled and helped her recover incompletely (in fear of her aura) by pulling out Artemis' bone spikes. Together they escaped from numerous corrupt beings and two pesky ones, Picasso and Rodin while slowly warming up to each other after hearing each other's histories and learning about each other more deeply. Faith tried to teach Cassandra how to semi-transform while hiding from the territorial corrupt beings. She stumbled across the account of Eon, found a claymore and also was attacked/met by Omen who was secretly following and watching them expecting them to accept his help. They escaped from him and fell into a water pool where they were attacked by an Outsider. Laila rescued them and Clover gave her a fruit of labor to rejuvenate her (she was starving from not eating anything unlike Cassandra). Faith entered blood mist as a side effect and saw everyone as Blanc, but was calmed down by Cassandra who semi awakened and reminded her of Grace. Clover, realizing that they were unfairly judged exiles, decided to bring them back to the surface. Sustaining casualties from Omen along the way, Faith and Cassandra escaped after 1 month in nexus via an elevator shaft to Noble's castle. She hid when Omen attacked and followed Gloria to save her from Bonnie. She used her praying sword technique to hold off Bonnie, Caleb, Poe, and Rubric while Gloria healed herself. Later she fought against Omen with Grace and saved Grace from being executed by Noble by rapidly seasoning and extending her newly chained arms out to instantly grab Grace without harming her. When Omen reverted to his outsider form and trapped Grace inside him, Faith climbed up his leg, entered his body, fought against corrupted beings within his body, was drenched in pheromones, cut open his heart to find Grace, and rescued Grace when Grace destroyed Omen's mind. Faith temporarily overcame her fear of heights and having her feet off the ground for Grace's sake, flying off Omen's collapsing body to safely carry Grace away from danger. Following Omen's attack, Faith had to be decontaminated in a hotspring by burning off her skin 5 times to remove the pheromones from her skin pores. She was then judged by Clarice for her actions and was found not guilty of assault on the royal family. Upon hearing about Deborah's reputation and finding out Deborah was with Grace, Faith came to monitor her, running across Deborah and Amelia and finding out that Grace was in danger and that Victoria had been eaten. When Grace woke up after fighting Desiree, Faith accompanied her, telling her that she had been banished and that Victoria and Gloria were dead.
===Black Card Mission===
After returning from the Deep mountains, Faith tried to vet Cassandra and Deborah's interactions with Grace, deeming them both as being potentially dangerous to Grace. She came up with a plan to help Grace recover from her slump, and handle her newfound bloodlust, including giving Grace animal blood soup and killing off Corrupted Beings around their encampment so Grace wouldn't have to fight in her weakened state. Grace wanted to take the shortest rout to Maiden's Cove to reduce the time spent while Faith suggested that the group take a longer way to Maiden's Cove to avoid dangerous Awakened Beings that lived in the area, particularly because she was unable to enter awakened form from malnutrition. Faith later cut Grace's hair after it excessively grew out from Deborah's testing of Grace's Damage Rejection.
Faith, in protest to having to travel to Maiden's Cove through the forest rather than the longer way around, withheld information and forced the rest of the party to follow her in a single file line. Upset, Grace demanded that they run through the forest rather than just walk, and Faith revealed the forest was littered with spring-traps. Grace, thinking herself clever, started destroying traps, against Faith's protests. As a result, they attracted Medusa's attention, who dangled human offal to try to trap the awakened beings in the party. Faith, suffering from extreme malnutrition, briefly entered Blood Mist, and nearly attacked Grace. Grace, horrified, headbutted her, knocking them both out, and was captured by Medusa. Faith was woken up by Deborah, realized that Grace was missing, and decided to get rid of Vega's crows which had plagued the group. She attracted the crows to herself, sacrificing herself, while Cassandra blasted the crows away. Heavily injured, Faith covered herself in a shell and began to molt to recover. Cassandra and Deborah watched her as molted to protect her. Waking up, Faith strategized a method to rescue Grace and defeat Medusa. She tried to train Cassandra briefly to hit aerial targets, knowing Cassandra would need to hit Medusa in midair. Together, they effectively blinded and weakened Medusa, nearly defeating her. Faith finally landed a critical blow on Medusa, saving Grace. After Grace woke up, Faith made it clear to Grace that she was leaving the group, because she was worried she might harm Grace, and also was desperately in need of food. Grace, shocked, tried to tell Faith they could compromise, and refused to let her go. Faith, seeing that this would happen, had prepared earlier with Deborah and covered herself and her nails in Yoki Suppressants, knocking out Grace, warning her not to use her ability to "eat" Awakened Beings, and to keep Deborah close by and be careful around Cassandra. She had Deborah send her away.
== Datasheet: ==
As a claymore:
Datasheet:
Name: (-)
Number: 5
Type: Offensive
YID: (Theopropus Rubrobrunneus)
Ability: ("Praying Sword")
Strength: C
Agility: C
Defense: C
Mental: A
Yoki: A
Leadership: B+
Rank: B+Category:Awakened Being
Category:Grace's Comrades
Category:Faith's Generation