Bio
Inquisitor Rhys was born on Vigam 24 years before the Battle of Olynthaseia. He was born a Wasp in the Lunar Cliffs, where, after a cataclysmic plague, Rhys was the only drone left alive. All the other males were killed off. This led to Rhys being officially titled as "The Alpha Male" by the females and the queen. He went on to forge a sword out of blue steel and began his training as a warrior. By the time he was 20 years old, he was the strongest warrior on Vigam, and soon came under the watchful eye of Tate. Tate inducted him into The Cabal, his secret society dedicated to using Shadow Magic to redesign the Galaxy. After 4 years of training under Tate, Rhys was sent on his first mission: go to Aurea and steal the Key to the Jungle. He gathered together his private army from Vigam and launched a surprise attack on the planet, looking for someone from Planet Squid who would know something about that artifact. After a long chain of events mostly consisting of being chased around the planet by Weasel and his friends, Rhys was eventually cornered by them near Olynthaseia and killed.
Abilities
Inquisitor Rhys was a master of Form II of melee combat, also known as the Way of the Eel. As such, Rhys would not often attack his opponents head-on but would instead weave his way around their defenses, using footwork, fluidity, and precision to disable opponents from angles they would never see coming. In addition to this, Form II was such an outdated and thus rare approach to fighting that not many people were used to encountering it, thus many of Rhys's opponents had no way of countering his highly fluid style. However, Form II's weakness to projectile weapons was sometimes exploited by his enemies, as Ryan was able to escape a duel with Rhys by way of distracting him with a musket shot he could not block in time.
Rhys, due to his parents' proximity to an Ishga-built nuclear waste dump in the Blue Desert while his mother was pregnant with him, was born with a mutation that made his exoskeleton nigh-indestructible. While most wasp exoskeletons would only survive a good sword hit or two, Rhys's exoskeleton allowed him to survive multiple injuries with barely a scratch that would have killed any other wasp. For example, Rhys's exoskeleton absorbed a direct hit to the chest from Ryan's musket, causing the bullet to barely make it a quarter of an inch into the soft flesh beneath. The only parts of his body not covered by this exoskeleton were his eyes, mouth, stinger, and privates. As such, Rhys was able take a blast of Aurean Fire at point-blank range without a scratch simply by closing his eyes and mouth. Rhys's mutation also enhanced his sting, which in normal wasps is only enough to cause pain and swelling. Rhys's sting, however, contained a unique chemical mix that literally turned those he stung to stone until the effects wore off after about 5 days.
Due to his training under Tate after he left Vigam, Rhys was able to use Astral Magic. However, he was one of the least talented Astral Magicians in the entire Cabal, and as a result, he was often ridiculed for his averageness in this regard. However, Rhys was able to use Astral Magic to supplement his fighting style at times, such as when he used Astral Lightning on a metal railing Weasel was holding onto, knocking Weasel unconscious. Rhys also demonstrated some proficiency with Astral Life as well when he healed one of his generals after the general was mauled by a Deinonychus. Rhys hardly ever used Astral Rock, since he was always hovering over the ground and that power required the user to be both physically and mentally rooted to the ground. The very few times he used this power were in conjunction with his swordfighting, such as when he used it to make a rudimentary rock wall to distract Weasel while he went around him and sliced off his tail from behind.
In addition to his swordfighting and magical attributes, Rhys was highly skilled in hand-to-hand combat as a result of being a professional wrestler before he left Vigam. As such, he was able to beat Ryan, a highly skilled martial artist, to within an inch of his life even after losing his sword.
Personality
As a child, Rhys did not show many of the violent tendencies that would define his later years, apart from an interest in professional wrestling. He was always an extrovert, forming a group of friends as a child that would engage in attempts to imitate the VWE Wrestling that Vigamians were inundated with. However, the wrestling was all in good fun and Rhys was a good-natured child who would never go out of his way to hurt people. He developed a wrestling pseudonym, calling himself "Inquisitor Rhys" after being inspired by tales he heard of Inquisitors from Rinascita.
Rhys's adolescence was defined by the plague that hit his planet. Within the span of two weeks, all of his family and childhood friends were dead, and he was the last male in his entire village. As a result, he became very protective of the people in the village where he lived, and entered the VWE as a pro wrestler to bring money home to what was left of his village. His success in wrestling, partially due to the mutation he was born with, caused him to drastically overestimate his abilities and underestimate his opponents, which would lead to his eventual downfall at the hands of Weasel.
A few years into his wrestling career, Rhys was approached with an offer by a mysterious man named Tate, who was in charge of a nebulous organization called The Cabal, which was aimed at destroying the old, flawed galaxy and creating a utopia in its place. Tate's promise of a galaxy without problems such as poverty and the plague that nearly wiped out Rhys's people proved alluring, and Rhys became a member of The Cabal. Rhys's Cabal pay was far greater than what he could have ever dreamed of getting from the VWE, and until the day he died, Rhys would send a portion of his pay back home to help rebuild his village. Although Rhys still had that sense of duty to his people and generosity that defined his earlier years, Rhys was forced by Tate to commit progressively more violent acts in the name of a better galaxy, such as funneling drugs through UniSyn and the Black Market, and assassinating people on Tate's orders.
Rhys became highly conflicted by these illegal and immoral activities he was being ordered to commit, and often thought about leaving The Cabal altogether and going back to wrestling. However, that would never happen, as Rhys was soon given his first big mission: Tate would give Rhys a hefty sum of money, which Rhys would use to return to his home planet and hire a huge mercenary force that he would then use to invade the nearby planet of Aurea and seize an object important to Tate's plans known as the Key to the Jungle. As a reward for his mission, Tate promised Rhys an amount of money that would more than pay for the complete restoration of his village, as well as an entire UniSyn planet all to himself.
Upon landing on Aurea, one of Rhys's generals foolishly stood out in the open and was ambushed by Aurean scouts, alerting the entire planet to his army's presence. Although almost all of Rhys's advisors practically begged him to execute the general for his incompetence, Rhys merely fired him instead as a show of compassion. Upon meeting Weasel and Ryan, Rhys greatly underestimated his opponents, causing them to escape the first time they fought and kill him the second time, despite the fact that Rhys was stronger than both of them and could have easily killed them if he fully applied himself.