Foes of the Superwomen of EVA #15: KGBeast
"Before she took on the life of a professional killer, Russian-born Natasha Radinov served in her home country's armed forces under the command of former KGB operative Anatoli Knyazev, where as his protégé, she became particularly proficient in almost every deadly hand weapon in the world; she also was brought on to aid him in a number of criminal trades on the side, with her put in charge of a heroin-running operation. During the wars that followed in the wake of Second Impact, Knyazev became a casualty, and following the end of the fighting, Radinov left the Russian army to go into business for herself as a gun-for-hire, adopting her mentor's former handle from his days as a Soviet assassin: KGBeast. In addition to her skills as a weapons master, she also underwent a few cybernetic enhancements to bolster her abilities. Her jobs would take her around the world, all with the common thread of her usual pay being in heroin, which she then resold in her home country as part of the continued underworld operations Knyazev's other major follower, Gregor Dosynski (known in most circles by the alias NKVDemon), currently ran.
One job at a certain point took her to Chicago, Illinois in the United States, where she was hired to take out a pair of bounty hunters named Irene "Rally" Vincent and "Minnie May" Hopkins on behalf of a corrupt assemblyman named Edward Haints, who was trying to cover up his secret arms dealing. The two beat Radinov back with the aid of a fellow gun-for-hire named Christopher Chance, the bodyguard and master of disguise known as the Human Target; when Radinov personally went after Rally, a chase throughout a building undergoing numerous renovations resulted in the young gunwoman seemingly killing Radinov with several gunshots to the chest. Radinov, thought dead, wound up surviving thanks to some of her cybernetics, though she lost her left hand in a fall from the building. After secretly fleeing the country to evade U.S. authorities, while lying low she had her left hand replaced with a detachable cybernetic version capable of deploying twin blades, among other features.
KGBeast would later resurface in Tokyo-3, Japan, the location of the main branch of the U.N. special agency NERV, tasked with defending humankind from the otherworldly menaces codenamed 'Angels'. Its supreme commander, Gendo Ikari, hired her to eliminate some of the 'superwomen' that had begun to appear in the city; specifically, the masked vigilantes known as Batgirl (secretly heiress Mayumi Yamagishi) and Green Arrow (secretly NERV Evangelion pilot Maria Vincennes), both of whom were covertly investigating the dark secrets behind NERV, which would threaten Gendo's own ambitions. To lure both crimefighters out, KGBeast began targeting certain high-ranking officials in the Japanese government, whose assassinations had to be thwarted not just by Batgirl and Green Arrow, but by some of the other superwomen of Tokyo-3, with whom they managed to coordinate the efforts. After a pitched battle that led into a chase beneath the Tokyo-3 sewers, both Batgirl and Green Arrow managed to corner KGBeast in an empty storage room. When Radinov tried taunting the two into a fight to the death, to her own surprise, Batgirl instead locked Radinov in the room with a knockout gas capsule from one of Green Arrow's shafts; the two then contacted the Tokyo-3 police to pick up the assassin.
One year after the defeat of both the Angels and the secret organization SEELE, KGBeast would escape imprisonment, and at one point would face the two vigilantes again when they found her working as the muscle for the crimelord Roulette when her pop-up underground fight club and gambling den, the House, set up shop in Tokyo-3."
*Author's Note(s)*
Kicking off the new year on the foes side of things, the theme is 'street-level', and for the DC half of the 'wave', our subject is a twist on a classic B-bordering-on-C-list Batman villain in KGBeast. For Mike313's Batgirl-centric story "Dark Lady of Tokyo-3", considering he's already featured hired guns like the ninja Kyodai Ken and Bane, why not keep going with someone like KGBeast and/or my previous entry in Deadshot? Maria/Green Arrow's inclusion was a minor nod to the recurring presence of Knyazev in the Arrow TV series.
As for the anime character donning the KGBeast mantle, I turned to one of my all-time favorite anime OVAs in the three-episode adaptation of Kenichi Sonoda's Gunsmith Cats; specifically, the major villain of the story in Natasha "Bloody Pierce" Radinov. Given her nationality and occupation, she would definitely fit as KGBeast in the setting of the Superwomen of EVA 2 stories. In terms of visuals (seen in the Deviation), I mainly altered her hair color and the highlights on her trench coat; I imagine that underneath that coat she'd probably wear an outfit akin to Knyazev's 90's garb, with the addition of the Beast's signature mask. I also thought including an alternate take on the events of the Gunsmith Cats OVA (with a guest appearance from the cult-favorite Human Target) would be a neat way to incorporate her further into the setup that's been semi-established with my tribute series.