First appearance: S1E7 — Wild Magic — Strako v Zayliss · watch it on YouTube
Zayliss was a monk champion with a staff and a set of glowing green spectral arms. The Arbiter found her outside the Witchlight Carnival and brought her to fight Strako, the Wild Shadow. She treated a fight to the death the way some people treat a pickup game, with parkour, rude gestures and repeated assurances that she thought her opponent was “really cool.” She lost to two brutal axe swings on a shattered asteroid. Her story did not quite end there, because the Arbiter quietly brought her back for purposes of his own.
Story
Wild Magic
Zayliss arrived in the Void unbothered. Weird things like this happened to her all the time, she said, and she was “accustomed to it.” Her arena was a tower adrift in the cosmos with a portal in each corner: one into mirrored space, one into a molten forge, a green one that smelled of springtime, and a pool of blood with squirming bodies in it. Before the first blow, a chaos event turned her staff into a balloon animal. She was still baffled by that when Strako sent a tiny glowing fairy to hover in front of her face and then explode. Zayliss shrugged off the blast, held her balloon staff behind her back to keep it safe, and politely called the fairy “a little doll.”
She then showed what kind of fighter she was. She retreated behind a wall, shouted “Parkour! Parkour!”, ran straight up fifteen feet of stone and perched above Strako, “looking right down at his dome.” She dropped onto him with her astral arms bursting out as she fell (“They’re green and they start to glow. Thank Zenyatta.”) and landed a punch, though her stunning blows never took hold on the giant barbarian all match. When Strako complained that she had no respect for him, she whispered, “Dude, I respect you. Just be cool… I mean, it’s a show, right?” She dove backwards into the green portal, flipping him off and yelling “I respect you! Respect!” The Grandmaster called it “very Deadpool energy.” Strako, unable to tell whether he was being mocked, missed her entirely. She later tackled him back into the portals, whispering “dude, you’re actually really cool. Like, we should hang out after this” as she shoved him. He came out of the lava portal burned while she came out of the green one healed. “The messages are so mixed,” Strako said.
When the Arbiter pulled the big green lever, both champions were sucked through a portal into an asteroid field, where anyone floating too far out began to freeze. Zayliss drifted across the gap asking whether this was “death death” and whether Strako had a family. Then one of her own wild, missed swings sent her spinning helplessly through space (“Just hit me, man”). Strako’s burst of chaotic light blinded her, so she flailed in the dark in a round of space Marco Polo. Strako’s shield shove launched her to the freezing edge of the atmosphere. Then the Arbiter, enraged at losing a dice-rolling contest to Doug the Pug, dragged a meteor swarm down on both of them, and Zayliss took the worst of it. She fought back hard. She dug a sparking, electrified rock out of the asteroid and found inner strength to kick Strako out into space.
The end came fast. Zayliss found a second, bigger charged rock and threw both. The big one struck Strako. The small one flew wide and killed Tabitha, a little worm who had just crawled out of the wreckage of Timothy, the worm mayor Strako had blown up the round before. “You were supposed to catch it!” she yelled. Strako charged with two reckless swings. The first cut a huge slash across her chest, and the second nearly cleaved her in half, the blade embedding in her hip. “Nice hit, bro,” she said. They parted as friends, with Strako promising a beer in Valhalla and Zayliss answering, “I’ll save you a seat.” The Grandmaster brought Doug down to snuggle beside her body, a “final snuggle to carry you well into the afterlife.” The Arbiter bent over the blood spewing everywhere and declared it “like three and a half pints. I nailed my bet.”
Afterlife, of a Sort
Zayliss did not stay dead. Out of sight, the Arbiter revived her, just barely alive, “for my army.” She told him she was “a cat person” and joined his grudge against Doug the Pug. She became one of the fallen champions he secretly gathered for his own ends.
Personality and Abilities
Zayliss stood 5’6”, small next to her 7’5” opponent. She was edgy and chaotic, but at heart a good-natured “bro.” She genuinely respected Strako and flipped him off constantly, and saw no contradiction in either. She was always up for a fight (“I always want to fight things, so yeah”) and chatted cheerfully in the middle of trying to kill someone. Afterwards her player summed up her outlook: “You can respect people who cut you in half.”
In combat she relied on speed and mobility. She ran up walls, attacked from above, flipped through portals, and darted out of reach. Her signature weapon was a pair of glowing green Arms of the Astral Self that struck with a long reach while her real arms stayed crossed, or busy making rude gestures. She could snatch a thrown missile out of the air and send it back, as she did with Strako’s exploding fairy. She slipped through blasts with acrobatic grace and could focus her inner energy to make herself hard to hit. She also carried a staff, briefly a balloon.
Relationships
- Strako: Her opponent and her killer. She respected him sincerely, confused him endlessly, and parted with him like an old friend.
- The Arbiter: Brought her to the arena, then secretly revived her to serve in his army.
- Doug the Pug: Gave her body a farewell snuggle. After her revival she joined the Arbiter’s grudge against him anyway, as “a cat person.”
- The Grandmaster: Hosted her Deathmatch and thanked her for leaving blood on her asteroids.
- Tabitha: A tiny worm Zayliss killed by accident with a stray electrified rock.
Memorable Quotes
- “Dude, I respect you. Just be cool… I mean, it’s a show, right?” (S1E7 — Wild Magic — Strako v Zayliss)
- “I respect you! Respect!” (S1E7 — Wild Magic — Strako v Zayliss)
- “dude, you’re actually really cool. Like, we should hang out after this.” (S1E7 — Wild Magic — Strako v Zayliss)
- “You were supposed to catch it!” (S1E7 — Wild Magic — Strako v Zayliss)
- “Nice hit, bro.” (S1E7 — Wild Magic — Strako v Zayliss)
- “I’ll save you a seat.” (S1E7 — Wild Magic — Strako v Zayliss)