“He’s a fairy tale for terrorists. The perfect bogeyman in red armor. Do you really think House Helicon is going to bankrupt itself hunting a fairy tale? Especially one who only kills the kind of people who make our jobs harder? Let the Monster play—if he does exist, then he saves us man-hours.”

— Komissar Veth Lirián, House Helicon Investigations

The Battlesuit of Terror

The Monster’s armor is a work of both function and theater. Constructed of advanced composites and powered systems, it is deliberately decorated to exaggerate her bulk, twisting her silhouette just far enough past human identifiers to set primal instincts on edge. The faceplate is the most infamous feature: a leering, spiral-twisted visage modeled after Yupik masks, its maw lined with shark-tooth shapes in perpetual grin. From the outside, the mouth and eyes emit an eerie red glow, or—more terrifyingly—flicker with an IR beam matrix that tracks motion even in perfect darkness. Within, the holographic display overlays combat telemetry, predictive targeting arcs, and the layered vision of microwave through X-ray bands, turning the world into a shifting lattice of ghostly detail.

The armor houses Haineux, a Sentient Redspace Adversarial Intelligence (RAI) bound into service as her partner and onboard system controller. Haineux serves as predictive combat AI, comms monitor, Cyberjack, and sadistic tactician, sometimes selecting targets and ammunition loads with chilling theatricality rather than efficiency. The Monster appears to tolerate—if not delight in—its cruel sense of “humor.”

Weapons of the Hunt

The Monster’s personal arsenal complements the armor’s spectacle. In her hands is a molecular-ceramic halberd, a weapon chosen as much for psychological impact as for battlefield utility. In combat she wields it with a fluidity that investigators note requires years of training, not improvisation. Alongside it she carries a long gut-hook hunting knife, a grotesquely personal weapon in contrast to the halberd’s sweeping arcs.

The battlesuit itself bristles with built-in armament. A Personal Point Defense grid and hardlight shield provide layered Protection, while the shoulder mount conceals a 15mm gyroc cannon firing smart rounds. These munitions are often employed with performative sadism, detonating in patterns designed to maim, terrify, or humiliate more than to kill cleanly. The contragrav pack on her back permits her to leap great distances or soften falls in standard gravity, and in lower-gravity theaters, it allows full controlled flight—granting her the aerial presence of a mythic predator.

The Three Mysteries

For all the visibility of her Equipment, investigators face three insurmountable frustrations:

1. Not Concealable.
   The Monster’s arsenal is conspicuous, impossible to disguise as anything but high-grade military materiel. Moving it through ports, checkpoints, and city customs without detection implies either deep smuggling networks or access to diplomatic privilege—a clue pointing to her noble origins.
2. Not Cheap.
   Every component of the suit and its weaponry is staggeringly expensive. Only the extremely wealthy or those backed by a resource-rich patron could sustain its maintenance and deployment across Human Space.
3. Not Amateur.
   The halberd is not a weapon one “picks up.” The skill required to wield it effectively in powered armor speaks of years of training in both melee and battlesuit operation. House Helicon has noted that all known elites with such Skills and resources have been cleared—leaving the Monster’s true identity concealed.

The Indulgence of the Consortium

Though the Monster’s rampage has stretched on for years, the truth is that no one is in a rush to stop her. Her targets are terrorists, cartels, and insurgents—the very foes that bleed the Solar Consortium’s resources and manpower. For House Helicon, the Monster is less a rogue factor than an unofficial adjunct to their algorithmic justice: a fairy tale assassin who frightens the very people they most want gone. Terrorists whisper her name. Cartels dread her crimson silhouette. Civilian casualties are rare enough, and the spectacle serves as memetic terror directed toward humanity’s enemies rather than its citizens.

The Monster thrives because she fills a niche. She is the equal and opposite reflection of the forces she hunts: a Terrorist for terrorists, an assassin of assassins, a sadist unleashed upon sadists. And until she turns her halberd against the “wrong” targets, few in power have any reason to call the hunt.