Knuckle Buster

Knuckle Buster is a tall, full-figured woman with fair skin, long blonde hair falling to her lower back, heavy eyebrows, and full lips. In her extremist guise she wore a dark blue leotard cut high to bare her legs, with elbow-length sleeves and white fur trimming the deep neckline down to her waist. A red mask hooded her scalp with a gap for her hair, matched by fingerless red gloves and red sneakers, while black knee pads, a black strap at her right hip, and a red sash buckled with the Order of the Freeing Fist's winged-skull emblem completed the outfit. When posing as a shop clerk she dressed down in an orange dress over dark red trousers, a red cloth draped from one shoulder to the opposite hip, a red head wrap, and pale sneakers.

She was a zealot who despised industrialized modern life and glorified raw human strength and spirit over tools like firearms. Alongside Force Fist she held the delusion that spreading murder and chaos would shock humanity into throwing off modern society for some better way of living, which drove the couple to loose a flesh-dissolving bioweapon on a city as a grim example for others to follow. As the gas ate at their own skin, the pair showed no fear or regret, only acceptance, a mark of how far their conviction ran. After the GDA later rebuilt her with artificial skin and folded her into its ranks, Radcliffe judged the couple reformed and willing to help, though their sincerity was never truly tested, since they were killed before they could prove it.

More than twenty years before Invincible rose to fame, Knuckle Buster and Force Fist operated as the Order of the Freeing Fist, convinced that industrialized society had left humanity soft and stagnant. To spread their message and inspire copycat uprisings, they planned to release a gas that rotted human flesh on contact into a crowded city. GDA agent Cecil Stedman tracked them to their hideout, a hippie-style clothing store, and located the gas, but the couple's superhuman strength and martial skill let them beat him with ease. Stedman had quietly called for backup first, which only pushed the pair to trigger their plan early. Both let the gas take them without flinching, and hazmat-suited agents arrived just in time to contain it; the toll came to seventeen civilians and Stedman himself, whose skin was nearly stripped away save for a patch on his lower cheek.

The GDA later saved the couple with artificial skin, and Radcliffe rehabilitated them as counter-terrorism backup and a path to redemption. When the Lizard League strongman Komodo Dragon tore through a government base, Knuckle Buster and her husband rescued Radcliffe and Stedman, beating the giant into unconsciousness. Radcliffe insisted the two were atoning, but Stedman could not forgive their past and gunned them both down in cold blood. His arrest and imprisonment for killing fellow agents followed, yet in only three years he curbed the deaths among the villain inmates, which led Radcliffe to install him as the GDA's new head. That whole encounter with the Order of the Freeing Fist forged Stedman into the ruthlessly pragmatic leader who would later weigh Earth's safety above all else.