[SPOILER!] - Concept Artwork: Slayer Unmasked (Patreon)
Content
A childhood spent amidst unspeakable suffering, followed by a lifetime at war...
Once upon a time, the Slayer was simply a girl named "Hera", who lived in a rural country estate, out on the frontier of Rathpike. In those times, Rathpike was in a state of constant civil war, as various bickering mercenary factions fought among one another. As one faction lost, they'd lose ground, and retreat towards the countryside, inevitably displacing weaker factions there who were forced to go further out into the frontier.
Hera was descended from the soldiers who had gambled and lost, and been forced into seclusion on the frontier. They etched out a meager living for themselves, but far away from the city and the bloodshed, they at least had peace.
Or so they thought.
In such distant lands, the rule of monsters reigned supreme. And the monsters that these frontiersmen most feared were Goblins - individually no stronger than a child, but when grouped together and put under the leadership of a Shaman or a Champion, they became a terrifying force to be reckoned with.
One day, Hera's family estate came under attack. Though her elderly father fought bravely, he was soon put down and butchered. Her young brothers followed suit, and their vain struggle simply left them alive a few seconds longer, bleeding out as they watched Hera, her sisters, and her mother, stripped and raped over and over again by the foul creatures.
Violating them was not enough. The goblins maimed her mother and sisters for sport, and forced them to drink foul waste that did not sustain them so much as poison them to the point of slow, excruciating deaths. To protect Hera, her mother and sisters put themselves at the front of this abuse, eventually being broken down and reduced into gibbering fleshbags who were summarily executed and eaten by the Goblins.
Hera sat through all this horror; she suffered through all this abuse; and she waited. When the lair she was held in was mostly empty as most of the goblins left to hunt, and when the time came for her to meet the butcher's knife... she leaped upon her tormentors with a fury.
With her bare hands, she wrestled her would-be executioners to the ground. She ignored the bites, the scratches, the blades and the arrows as she was hammered again and again. She killed them all, tore them limb from limb, one by one, and then staggered out of the foul lair.
Hera would collapse from septic shock minutes into her escape. She would've died, then and there, if not for Zeon himself passing through with his men. By then, she was nearly feral, but Zeon saw in her a fire, and he had the patience to temper it.
Years later, Hera now goes by a new name entirely: Slayer.
She is cursed with an almost-fanatical obsession with goblinkind. She roots them out, learns their tricks, adapts to their ambushes, and kills, and kills, and kills...!
Though most think Slayer to be a mindless fanatic, barely loyal to the cause, in truth she is one of Zeon's most devoted followers. She knows firsthand the horrors of the frontier. She cherishes the stability that Zeon brought to the region by unifying it under one banner more than anyone else, knowing of its immense value.
To protect their newfound stability, and to ensure nobody has to go through what she did, Slayer will stop at nothing.
And if she can drive goblinkind into utter extinction in her mad campaign of bloodshed... Then that will be reward enough...!
Trivia: Appearance-wise, Hera is meant to be an almost-exact replica of Juno Townsend from the Overgrown: Genesis game, as a sort of canon cameo between our games. This is also evident in their names, with "Juno" being the Roman Goddess of the State, and "Hera" being the original Greek counterpart.