Nimue

"Killers aren't born, they're made. The quality of the killer in question depends on the time and effort their forger invests in them."

- David Kahn

Nimue was a genetically modified human girl created by the Humanity Liberation Front for the Knight Project. Unlike her fellow subjects, Nimue was not instructed in a regular facility constructed for the project and was instead given over for the mercenary David Kahn to raise and train himself. Under his guidance, she became an extremely proficient assassin, well-versed in virtually every method of killing imaginable. She eventually chose to reject the Insurrection entirely and instead decided to follow in her foster "father"'s footsteps as a freelance assassin.

Conception and Early Life
"Gentlemen, these operatives could very well be what saves our war for freedom from petering out and dying in the face of our enemy's overwhelming strength. Since we can't fight their fire with our own fire, we'll fight them with needles. And let me tell you, needles can be very painful if you jab them in the right spot."

- Redmond Venter explaining his plans for Project Knight to a gathering of Humanity Liberation Front officers

Along with her brothers and sisters, Nimue was a part of the aftermath of the renegade SPARTAN-III Simon-G294's defection to the Insurrectionist group known as the Humanity Liberation Front. After discovering that his newest disciple was none other than one of the UNSC's fabled Spartan operatives, an ambitous officer within the HLF, Redmond Venter, hoped to use Simon to gain more influence with the HLF's leadership. Unfortunately, Simon and Venter's prized A.I. were lost and presumed dead during a large-scale UNSC assault on the asteroid base where they were headquarters. But even with his two greatest weapons lost, Venter refused to be deterred and began using DNA samples he had acquired from the genetically enhanced Simon in order to develop chemical augmentations of his own. After years of recruiting scientists, gathering funds, and performing experiments to build his &quot;Knight Project&quot;, Venter's branch of the HLF finally produced a batch of test-tube babies who had been imbued with the home-grown augmentations during their fetuses' development. Out of fifty total fetuses, only twelve survived incubation and the resulting infants were immediately spirited away to a hidden HLF facility where they would spend the first years of their lives.

"Come on, little freak, let's see how you do!"

- Peter Collins instigating a "sparring match" with Nimue

Nimue spent the first three years of her life under heavy guard at the HLF facility. Although their combat training had not yet begun, Nimue and the other Knight children were subjected to a educational regimen that aimed to hone their physical and mental capabilities from as early a stage as possible. Given daily doses of drugs meant to further enhance their developing bodies, the young children were all capable of communicating fluently through spoken or written word by the time they were three years old. Although they were constantly kept together, very few bonds or friendships were formed amongst the Knight children during this time period, as their rigorous education and testing forced them to focus only on their training. One person Nimue would remember from her time at the HLF facility was an older boy named Peter Collins. Peter was actually a clone derived from Simon-G294's genetic tissue and was being raised by Venter to be his personal lieutenant in order to fill the gap left by his progenitor's apparent death. He had been "born" slightly earlier than the other Knight trainees and enjoyed using his larger size to hurt the younger children. Nimue learned to hate and fear Peter and developed a loathing for him that would resurface later in her life when she met his genetic "father."

Once the Knight children reached the age of four, Venter and his lieutenants decided that they were ready to begin their extensive combat training. However, he had also decided on an even greater ambition for one of his developing assassins. While he was confident that his hand-picked cadre of Insurrectionist and mercenary instructors would be able to forge his Knights into highly capable operatives, he knew that he lacked both the funds and the facilities to produce soldiers that could match the caliber of the UNSC's Spartans. In order to make up for this deficiency, Venter wanted a "trump card": an agent who could stand amongst the best killers the galaxy had to offer. The HLF officer envisioned a perfect assassin who could locate and kill anyone he wanted dead, be they politicians, soldiers, or even his rivals within the Insurrectionist cause. But the training of such an operative would take skills far greater than the ones Venter currently had at his disposal. Fortunately, he knew of just the person who could make his dream a reality: David Kahn.

Known as one of the deadliest mercenaries and assassins to have emerged within the galactic underworld since the end of the Great War, David Kahn already stood within the ranks of the most lethal individuals in the galaxy and as such was the perfect candidate for training Venter's ultimate assassin. However, Venter knew from personal experience that Kahn was a fiercely independent agent who would be reluctant to take on such a long term task and would charge extremely highly for his services. Unwilling to let his dream die, Venter gambled everything by having one of his agents arrange for a large amount of funds from the main branch of the HLF to be transferred to his own private accounts. Such an action, if discovered, would undoubtedly have resulted in Venter's immediate execution, but he managed to deflect the guilt and privately contact Kahn for the job.

At first, the infamous mercenary was skeptical about the job, particularly since it would sidetrack him from pursuing his always-lucrative contracts and because it involved training a young girl in the art of the kill. However, Venter's illicit money transfers had given him a hefty amount of monetary bargaining power. He offered Venter a contract of ten million credits up front, a well-stocked and secluded location for him to conduct the training, and twenty million more credits once the job was completed. With one of the highest-paying freelance jobs in mercenary history staring him in the face, Kahn could hardly refuse.

While these negotiations were going on, Venter was testing his Knight children to see which one showed the most promise as an agent. While all of the candidates had been honed by their assigned drugs and their education, he knew that only the best of them would be able to withstand the training a man like Kahn would put them through. Ultimately, Nimue's fate was decided on the practice mats of the HLF facility--the only home she had ever known. She scored the highest in a series of agility and reflex tests that Venter's scientists put the candidates through and proved through simple psychological evaluations and exercises that her I.Q. was among the best in the candidate pool. Selected for the "honor" of becoming Venter's perfect assassin, Nimue was removed from the group of children she had lived with from the first moment she had opened her eyes and was shipped to a remote colony planet on the UNSC's frontier where the HLF had constructed a hidden bunker to house here and Kahn. Nimue's real training was about to begin.

Training With David Kahn
"It's great that this job is paying me so much. Really, it is. And the equipment my new terrorist friends are forking out, that's wonderful as well. Living accommodations couldn't be better; nothing's homier than a battle plate coated bunker, especially with these ten-foot thick walls. The only things they didn't get me were a cargo bay full of books and holo-guides to tell me how the hell I'm supposed to turn a toddler into a galaxy-class killer like me. I'm really running low on ideas on where to begin... I guess I'll just start by beating the shit out of her until she learns how to do the same to me..."

- Excerpt from the private diary of David Kahn

While he had some experience in instructing others from times spent teaching at mercenary camps, David Kahn was as poorly prepared to train a four year old girl as she was to begin living with him as his pupil. Although Nimue's life spent living around armed men prevented her from being terrified of her new teacher, she was still intimidated by him and did her best to avoid him during her first weeks alone with him. For his part, Kahn was extremely worried about how he would carry out the first years of her training. He knew that in order for his methods be effective he needed to submit his new charge to a harsh training regimen from the very beginning, but he also feared that putting too much pressure on the girl at such an early age would break her entirely and render her useless as the assassin he'd been hired to create.

In the end, Kahn took a middle road. He began the training by drilling Nimue in various forms of martial arts, working to develop her unarmed fighting skills before he instructed her with weapons. Successful completion of their drills together was rewarded by extra rations and praise from Kahn. However, any failures would result in Kahn beating his charge to a bloody pulp before denying her rations and forcing her to do more exercises in her weakened state. In regards to these punishments, Kahn more than lived up to his merciless reputation. While the mercenary was internally conflicted by his actions, he never allowed his misgivings to affect the administrating of his harsh discipline. But he always allowed one thing to stay his hand from punishing Nimue's failures: if at any time during his savage beatings she managed to fight back and hit him, he would immediately cease attacking her and provide her with the rations he would otherwise have denied.

"I don't know what kinds of twisted cocktails you and your goons pumped into her, Venter, but you've given me one hell of a little monster to build up here. Sometimes she scares even me the way she just absorbs everything I tell her and then throws it back at me, and sometimes she even throws in some improvements of her own. But of course, the real tests are still a ways down the road."

- David Kahn in one of his weekly reports to Redmond Venter

Nimue's pre-birth augmentations and the enhancement drugs that were still being provided by Humanity Liberation Front agents gave her the physical abilities to handle Kahn's brutal training: she was many times faster than ordinary human children many years her senior, was already nearing the reaction timing of a UNSC Spartan, and her bones were gradually being hardened to allow her body to withstand harder impacts that might otherwise kill her. Nevertheless, Kahn was skeptical of the HLF's over-reliance on their drugs and ran Nimue ragged every day in order to further develop her endurance and physical capabilities. After nearly half a year of constant drilling, he also began sparring with her in order to test her comprehension of the skills he'd been teaching her. While she was nowhere near ready to have a chance against such a mismatched opponent, Kahn held back in order to evaluate her skills while teaching her valuable lessons about fighting a much larger and stronger opponent. Although he never let her win--these failures were the only ones that did not bring punishment with them--Kahn was amazed at how quickly Nimue was grasping his instructions. By the time she had turned six, Nimue hardly ever failed at her drills and Kahn, while continuing with the unarmed combat training, also began instructing her with various ways to implement knives as well, thus beginning her first real training with lethal weapons.

Live Opponents
Four years after beginning her time under Kahn's unforgiving tutelage, Nimue was already well on her way to becoming the assassin Venter had hoped for when he set her apart from his other Knight subjects. Although her mentor continued to punish every failure with physical beatings, Nimue remained remarkably unfazed by the brutality through a combination of precautions Kahn himself took to avoid mentally scarring his pupil and through an iron resilience that she herself possessed. Her unceasing drilling, day in and day out, continued, but Kahn also began to instruct her in combat tactics and a variety of battlefield skills, such as explosives proficiency and electronics skills. Nimue was less of a natural at these than she had been with her unarmed and knife combat training and would spend the next many years struggling to grasp many of the advanced concepts he taught her.

Although his observations of Nimue had taught Kahn much about how to exercise moderation in how he punished her, he continued to answer failure with beatings and ration denial. One of her harshest punishments occurred at the start of her training with firearms. Beginning a buildup that would eventually see Nimue targeting sentient individuals for assassination practice, Kahn ordered her to kill a stray dog he had procured from a nearby town and brought to their bunker. When Nimue refused, her mentor beat her into a bloody pulp while lecturing her on the need to be utterly merciless when it came to killing. Denied food for several days, Nimue found herself fearing Kahn for the first time since her early days with him. Although she did her best to hate him and even began planning an escape attempt, she stopped when she realized that all she really wanted out of life was her teacher's praise. The next time she was ordered to kill the dog, Nimue complied and resolved to strive harder to please Kahn.

"You'll have to become an expert at everything I teach you, not because you're afraid of me or what I can do to you but because you know that without that expertise, you'll be dead in minutes once you hit the field for real."

- David Kahn to Nimue

The training continued as Kahn continued to pound combat principle after combat principle into Nimue on a daily basis. Although harsher exercises like the dog-shooting one were rare, this did nothing to soften the ever-hardening training regimen that Kahn put Nimue through. Daily activities for Nimue now included physical and endurance tests, martial arts drills, and firearm usage and maintenance all alongside whatever other subjects Kahn was teaching her at the moment. After Nimue turned ten, Kahn began recruiting local thugs from nearby towns to spar with her. Her smaller size, speed, and agility gave her a natural edge over the untrained toughs she was pitted against and she regularly sent her sparring partners to nearby hospitals with broken bones and internal trauma.

Trivia

 * All of the Knight children were named after characters from the Arthurian legends. Nimue's designated name refers to one of the | Ladies of the Lake who was an apprentice to the wizard | Merlin.

Behind the Scenes

 * Nimue's childhood of training with David Kahn was inspired by the childhood of Cassandra Cain, one of the Batgirls from DC comics. Almost all of the images of Nimue are derived from cropped scans of Batgirl comic pages, though her post-training life is radically different and entirely of the author's creation.