Riley Furystrike

## Early Life:

Riley was the fifth born child to a pair of destitute farmers, who lived in a small village of other poor farmers. Of the eight children that her mother gave birth to, only herself and two brothers survived to adulthood, and though that type of tragedy was typical for peasant workers, that grief and unfairness colored Riley’s childhood, and shaped the way she looked at the world for the rest of her days.

A strong, brawny lass, Riley helped out around the farm just as much, if not more, than her two older brothers. She was known around the village for her temper, and by the time she was eleven, nobody would commit acts of cruelty or selfishness in her presence, lest they risk taking a prodigious punch from the strong girl.

When she was fifteen, she had developed both a reputation for standing up for those that couldn’t, and for being the strongest person in the village, much to the chagrin of the young men in the area. She was attractive, but didn’t care too much about keeping up her appearances, and ultimately her adolescent love life was none too interesting.

It was during this time that a large warband of goblins had begun to ransack the countryside where she and her family lived. Farmers began to notice livestock going missing, fires being set to fields, and all other sorts of mischief occurring.

The village had a town hall, which Riley attended, as she was considered a grown woman at the age of sixteen. She was disgusted when all the village did was argue about whether they should cave in to the tribute demands of the goblin army, or sneak someone to the nearest city to plead for help.

That night, armed with a pitchfork and nothing else, Riley made her way towards the goblin chief’s camp; she had never slain a creature in combat in her life, but she was fed up with the abuse her village suffered, and realized that *someone* had to do something, before the village was razed entirely.

In later years, Riley would find that she had very little memory of her first battle; she remembered challenging the chieftain to single combat, and then the memories ran blank. When she came to, the goblin camp was in ruins, tents burning, and goblin corpses lay strewn about the ground. The goblin chief’s severed head was impaled on her pitchfork.

When she returned to her village, dazed but triumphant, she expected to see gratitude from the people of her town. Instead, the people she had grown up with, terrified at her blood soaked, wrathful visage, shunned her, afraid of her bloodlust. It didn’t take very long after that before she made the decision to leave her old life behind and explore the world of warriors.

## **The Mercenary Years**

After several months of wandering, exploring, and seeing the world, Riley settled in the town of Leviathan, where she became a warrior for hire. It didn’t take long, however, before she caught the wrong kind of attention.

Riley had been working as a freelance mercenary, and was quite good at her job, which rubbed the established guilds the wrong way. One night, as she was heading home, more than twenty fighters encircled her, forcing her into the alleyways where no-one would notice them.

Forced to her knees by the several leveled spearpoints and drawn bows, Riley was given an ultimatum: either join their guild, at half the guildmember’s cut, or be slain where she knelt. Fuming, she chose to live.

To her surprise, she found she enjoyed her work; while her cut was far smaller than when she had been working as a freelance merc, she enjoyed having guildmates, colleagues that she could drink with, boast with, and go into battle with.

She soon became renowned, both around Leviathan, and within the politics of her guild. Clients began to request her by her trade name: The Spearmaiden. Following her initial battle with her family pitchfork, Riley had specialized in the use of the short spear, and wielded it with brutal efficiency. As she entered adulthood, the awkward, emergent attractiveness she had as a teenager deepened into full, confident beauty, though she remained just as apathetic about her looks.

In spite of her lack of regard towards romance, however, she eventually found herself madly in love with one of her guildmates, a young man named Jonas, who was a legend with a staff. The two became inseparable, and after two years of courtship, they married.

One of the leaders of the guild, however, had noted her ascension of popularity with fear and jealousy; the very leader that ordered the attack on her five years prior. Though decent with the longblade, his talent lay in brokering contracts, and as such, he was never very popular with most of the guild, instead viewed as a necessary evil.

Fearing that Riley would soon rise to knock him off his position of leadership in the guild, he and five other assassins struck at Riley and her family on one dark night.

Though she and Jonas tried to fight back, the cutthroats used poison, in the dead of night, and the last thing Riley saw before the poison rendered her senseless was the leader of her guild smirking at his victory while he lit her home on fire. Jonas lay dead at his feet.

When Riley finally awoke, she found herself in the care of an old homeless man, living beneath the docks. With icy fear gripping her, she probed her stomach and confirmed the one thing she dreaded most of all; she had lost the child she was carrying.

While all she wanted to do was die, the old man, a former warrior named Tolandruth, forced her to look ahead of her. Little did she know that Tolandruth would change the course of her life forever.

## **The Ten Year Fist**

Though Tolandruth had started out his life as a standard knight, he eventually met his master, who taught the secretive Ten Year Fist style of martial arts. Tolandruth had held onto the ancient techniques, searching for someone to pass on the tradition. Riley’s reputation as a stalwart defender of justice, in addition to being a fearsome warrior, removed all doubts from his mind, and so her training began.

The training was brutal, but it filled the whole ripped in Riley’s heart. Each day, for a whole year, Riley struck the support beam of the dock they lived in with a single finger, one thousand times. Once that was finished, Tolandruth would teach her fighting techniques, until the sun finally set, at which point they would go to bars, where Riley would fight for money to keep them fed.

For ten years, one year per finger, she struck the post, building her strength, endurance, and pain threshold. Each day, Tolandruth would pass on his wisdom, often by brutally trashing her on the beach, and each night she would force herself to shake off the exhaustion and fight brawny, drunken strangers.

Finally, after a decade of training, Riley had become transformed: each finger was more deadly than the spear she once wielded, and the years of striking the post, with all parts of her body, had practically turned her arms, legs, and feet to stone. Riley told her master, who had become quite old, that she was ready to seek revenge. Tolandruth warned her that killing the man that destroyed her old life wouldn’t bring it back, wouldn’t make the pain go away.

Riley discovered he was right.

Though the revenge was called for, it did nothing to dull the pain of her loss. If anything, it made the pain worse, for the training she had dedicated the last decade to had done far more to heal her than slaying her foe. Still, she saw justice done to a murderer, and though it left her raw and hallow, she never felt regret.

She remained with Tolandruth for the next several months as his health began to deteriorate. She tried to remain strong, but watching her master fade away devastated her heart. Tolandruth reminded her to stop feeling sorry for herself; all things must die, and he was no exception. To live life with honor, he intoned, was more important than to live everlasting.

When at last she scattered the ashes of her master, the man who was like her father, into the sea surrounding Leviathan, Riley vowed to take his message to heart; she would spend her life using her strength to right the wrongs of the world, no matter who committed them. She vowed on the great ocean that nothing would be safe from her justice; be it a sniveling goblin, king, or even a god.

Soon after, she left Leviathan, never to return, beginning a lifelong mission to bring honor to the world, one punch at a time.