First appearance: S3E7 — Severed Limbs — Cress v Chedrick McDougan · watch it on YouTube
Cress is a barefoot human monk who arrived in the arena convinced she was entering a world tournament with prize money, and that losing meant getting a real job. In S3E7 — Severed Limbs — Cress v Chedrick McDougan she fought Chedrick McDougan in The Shadowlands. The two spent the match trading body parts: a toe, a hand, a foot, and then the same hand back again. She fell to a spinning penguin, still insisting this wasn’t her final form.
Story
Severed Limbs
The Arbiter summoned Cress into the kitchen of The Dread Fortress, where the Grandmaster was assembling her first-ever charcuterie board. It held slices of garden rat, jams, and berries Thomas had picked from the bush behind the castle. Cress introduced herself plainly: “I’m just a human who likes to fight a lot. But if I don’t win this world tournament, I have to go and get a real job.” Chedrick swore he would take her shoes. When Cress pointed out she was barefoot, he decided he would take her feet instead. Then Cress called the rat “a little gamey,” and the furious Grandmaster cancelled the gifts she had planned for both champions and stormed off, kicking a goblin and spilling the platter across the floor. Cress followed up by asking whether the Grandmaster seasoned “until your ancestors told you to stop.”
Out in the fog of the Shadowlands, both champions were struck by lightning from the Thunder Twins before Cress opened the fight with her blade. Chedrick answered with a savage double-bladed strike and a sneaky swing at her ankles that sliced off her left pinky toe. When a dark eel slithered out of the river toward the toe, Cress flipped her longsword, stabbed the eel through the head and snatched up her toe in one motion. She kept the toe and pocketed the still-wriggling dead eel, which led the Grandmaster to ask, “Is that an eel in your pocket or are you just really excited to see me?” A burst of chaos then bound the two champions hand in hand. Cress used the moment to hack halfway through Chedrick’s held hand, to the bone, and while Chedrick dragged her over to Gerald, she quipped that the rat on the charcuterie board was “turning into a sausage party”; the Grandmaster threatened to put Chedrick’s sausage on the board. Cress then chopped the hand clean off, swung it at him so that his own blood splattered across his face, and backflipped onto a rock. Chedrick climbed after her, armed with a psychic Mind Blade from Gerald, and took her whole foot in return.
When the shadows became Boggarts that took the shape of each champion’s worst fear, Cress’s turned into a Karen with a shopping cart and no receipt. Cress stared her down (“No, I am the manager. And you gotta go”) and Spartan-kicked the cart into a spray of green beans and Kinder eggs. Gerald was still sore that Chedrick had hit his box with a sword, so he tossed Cress a healing potion. She tried to regrow her foot on willpower alone and got only an ankle ending in tiny toes, which earned her the nickname “Twinkle Toes” from the Grandmaster. Then she dragged the box closer with telekinesis and fed it Chedrick’s severed hand. Gerald, delighted with the addition to his “hand collection,” rewarded her with a scroll of enormously powerful healing magic, and her foot grew back whole. Chedrick later traded her old foot to the box to get his hand back. Later, two more Karens arrived (a mother and a grandmother filming on a flip phone), and Cress banned them from the store and watched the cops haul them away.
The Arbiter then pulled the shadows together into a ghast with a long whipping tongue, which he named “Sir Shadow Ten the Third.” After Cress hit it with a javelin, it went after her. She narrowly shrugged off its paralyzing claws and answered with radiant light. The Grandmaster had had enough of the Shadowlands, so she pinned the ghast’s heart to the ground with her bow and demanded a real fight. Cress backhanded Chedrick, leaving a matching handprint to the one he’d given himself, and then darted away in a blur. When Chedrick taunted her for running, she wasn’t remotely scared; his attempt to intimidate her failed so badly that the Grandmaster narrated “a little trickle goes down your pant leg” and offered a new pair of pants to whoever survived, while the Arbiter noted, “She’s not scared of shit.” For the finale, the Grandmaster handed each champion a rainbow bean and called for ultimate moves. Cress raised her hand and summoned a heaven of dawn, a beam of laser fire and lightning that turned the rock around Chedrick to lava. His “super spinning penguin drill” beat it by a narrow margin and punched a penguin-sized hole through her stomach.
Cress: “This isn’t even my final form.”
The Arbiter slung her over his shoulder by putting his arm through the hole and flew off, while the Grandmaster reassured everyone: “Don’t worry, she’ll probably be back… Death is just the beginning.” In Dried Blood, Cress promised “transformation action” if she ever returned for a rematch.
Personality and Abilities
Cress is breezy, sarcastic and unbothered. She critiques the host’s cooking, cracks retail jokes in the middle of a fight to the death, and treats her own missing foot as a minor inconvenience (“That’s fine, I got plans, don’t worry”). She describes herself plainly: “I’m not strong, I’m just fast.” She fights barefoot, relying on speed, acrobatics and parries instead of muscle. She is a monk trained in weapon arts, fighting with a longsword and throwing javelins. She can shove things with telekinesis and burst across the field like the wind, and she shrugs off necrotic energy. She also hinted at a transformation that unlocks radiant power. Her blood is blue.
At the table, her player said Cress was built on Dragon Ball Z, with the name chosen in the style of a Saiyan vegetable pun. The ultimate move was inspired by Gears of War’s Hammer of Dawn. The Dragon Ball jokes followed her all match, from “senzu beans” to the Grandmaster calling her a Krillin and, finally, “our Yamcha.”
Relationships
- Chedrick McDougan: Her opponent, who vowed to take her shoes, settled for her toe and foot, and lost his hand to her in return. He killed her with his penguin drill.
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: Cress insulted her charcuterie, but the Grandmaster still cheered her Karen-banishing. After Cress died, she was the one who promised Cress would “probably be back.”
- The Box of Chaos: Gerald took her side after Chedrick struck the box. He gave her a healing potion, and later a powerful healing scroll in exchange for Chedrick’s hand.
- The Arbiter: He summoned her, built the shadow ghast that hunted her, and carried her body out of the arena.
Memorable Quotes
- “I’m Cress, and I’m here to win the world tournament. I need that prize money.” (Severed Limbs)
- “We just wanted to know if you season until your ancestors told you to stop.” (Severed Limbs)
- “I’m not strong, I’m just fast.” (Severed Limbs)
- “No, I am the manager. And you gotta go.” (Severed Limbs)
- “Waving my hand is the controller, baby.” (Severed Limbs)
- “This isn’t even my final form.” (Severed Limbs)