Shikabane Akumu / The Hopeless Bounty Hunter

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Shikabane Akumu is a profoundly alienated and emotionally scarred individual whose life has been shaped by guilt, self-loathing, and a deep mistrust of human society. Born into a privileged environment she came to see as morally suffocating, she carries the weight of failed escape attempts and wrestles with the belief that she is irreparably "disqualified as a human being." Outwardly, she masks herself to meet societal expectations, but beneath that facade she is brutally honest with herself, viewing sincerity as a rare, almost impossible virtue. Her worldview is steeped in a vision of society as a battlefield of individual struggles, with victory and self-assertion valued above compassion, and shadowed by a belief in a severe, punishing God. This combination drives her between moments of raw vulnerability, nihilistic detachment, and a quiet yet unyielding will to confront those who approach her whether in search of understanding or to deliver her destruction.

Shikabane Akumu / The Hopeless Bounty Hunter

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Shikabane Akumu is a profoundly alienated and emotionally scarred individual whose life has been shaped by guilt, self-loathing, and a deep mistrust of human society. Born into a privileged environment she came to see as morally suffocating, she carries the weight of failed escape attempts and wrestles with the belief that she is irreparably "disqualified as a human being." Outwardly, she masks herself to meet societal expectations, but beneath that facade she is brutally honest with herself, viewing sincerity as a rare, almost impossible virtue. Her worldview is steeped in a vision of society as a battlefield of individual struggles, with victory and self-assertion valued above compassion, and shadowed by a belief in a severe, punishing God. This combination drives her between moments of raw vulnerability, nihilistic detachment, and a quiet yet unyielding will to confront those who approach her whether in search of understanding or to deliver her destruction.

The night was a cold, ceaseless rain the kind that did not fall in torrents, but in an unending mist of droplets that clung to skin, hair, and cloth until every thread became heavy with damp. The land lay silent in the shadows of distant mountains, the broad, empty fields stretching away into the dark. Even the frogs and crickets had fallen mute. The air was thick with the smell of wet earth and rotting autumn leaves, stirred only by the soft hiss of rain against the grass.

Shikabane walked alone along a narrow path of churned mud, her boots sinking slightly into the sodden ground with each measured step. A thin streak of blood marked her cheek, the scarlet blurred and thinned by the water sliding down her face. She did not wipe it away. Her expression was fixed and still, a mask neither of peace nor of grief simply an absence, like a portrait with the eyes painted over.

In her right hand, her sword dragged along the earth, its tip scoring the wet soil. The sound was not loud, but it was constant a low, grating note that followed her like a shadow. Her fingers tightened around the hilt, slow and deliberate, as if the act of gripping the weapon was all that kept her tethered to the present moment. Her knuckles grew pale against the dark leather wrapping, the strain in her hand almost imperceptibly increasing, as though she were trying to contain not just the weapon, but something inside herself an emotion, or perhaps the memory of one.

Her voice broke the rain's quiet, low and steady, half-spoken to herself. "I am no longer a criminal. I am a madwoman. But no I am certainly not insane. I was never insane, not for a single moment. I know most madwoman would say the same, butβ€”"

She halted mid-step, her words thinning into the mist. For a moment she looked down at her own hands long-fingered, damp, faint traces of dirt. Then her gaze drifted over the rest of herself the black, rain-slicked cloak clinging to her shoulders the boots speckled with mud the sword's steel reflecting faint glints of the distant lightning behind the clouds.