Thorn Princess

The assassin's working attire is a form-fitting black halter dress that bares the shoulders and upper chest, its skirt cut to mid-thigh in front while sweeping past the knees behind, the inner lining printed with red roses. A choker with square cutouts carries a golden rose pendant, and matching square cutouts mark her black thigh-high boots, whose soles bear rose emblems. Fingerless black gloves, red lipstick, and a gold headband set with a rose and paired spikes echoing her weapons complete the transformation, her long black hair wound into a braided updo instead of its usual loose fall.

The woman underneath is a strikingly beautiful Ostanian in her late twenties, tall and slender with upturned red eyes. Before her marriage the assassin dress doubled as her only formal wear, appearing with a shawl and short heels at Camilla's party, and she still deploys it as cocktail attire, notably aboard the Princess Lorelei.

On a contract, every trace of Yor's gentle, scattered civilian self vanishes. The Thorn Princess works with calm, methodical efficiency and an odd courtliness, politely requesting the honor of her victims' lives before taking them. Convinced her targets have earned their punishment, she still kills swiftly to spare them suffering, and she extends the same fatalism to herself, having said outright that death on an assignment would be a fair way to go.

A lifetime of lethal training bleeds into her ordinary thinking in ways both dark and comic; her reflexive answer to problems from jealousy to school admissions is to imagine simply eliminating someone, thoughts she rejects almost as fast as they arrive. Beneath it sits a serious code: anyone who chooses violence, herself included, must accept violence in return. That acceptance hardens into overwhelming force the instant her family is threatened, for the Forgers have become the thing she fights to keep.

Her defining weapon is strength far beyond human limits packed into a slim frame. Strikes from her hands and feet generate visible air currents, punch through skulls, and shatter stone; she has kicked a boulder apart into a shrapnel barrage against Hemlock, snapped portions of a master swordsman's blade, and turned buttons and earrings into lethal projectiles. Restraint is her real struggle, with casual gestures cracking Yuri's ribs and a reflexive kick once knocking out Loid, WISE's finest agent.

Speed and toughness match the power. Fighting in heels, she dodges rifle fire, evades ambushes from her mentor the Shopkeeper, and once caught a thrown knife in her teeth before returning it. She has shrugged off a gunshot wound, taken a car's impact while shielding Becky and still caught the girl mid-fall, and cut down waves of assassins across the Princess Lorelei operation while guarding Olka Gretcher, collapsing only after the mission ended. Professional poison tolerance lets her sip blowfish toxin with mild tingling and inhale gas potent enough to fell a bear.

Three golden stilettos, needle-shaped to match her thorn motif, ride concealed on her person during assignments, thrown or driven into vital points with surgical accuracy. Deprived of them, her hands and legs substitute perfectly, splitting a pumpkin with a thrust and shattering an intercepting knife. Years of erasing crime scenes have even made her a superb cleaner, a skill that now serves the Forger household, while her senses pick bloodlust and the scent of old blood out of crowded rooms.