Ganishka

Black-haired and roughly 180 centimeters tall at around 92 kilograms, the emperor cuts an imposing figure in his human shape, marked by a single scar set between his brows where Guts once thrust the Dragon Slayer through his astral body. Yet he seldom relies on that mortal form. His released state is a churning fog sculpted into the shape of his own face, and once he descends into rebirth a second time he balloons into a mountainous, many-mouthed monstrosity vast enough to crush cities beneath its tread.

A childhood spent outmaneuvering the murderous intrigues of Kushan royalty left Ganishka cold, methodical, and merciless; he orchestrated the deaths of his brother, his mother, and his father to hold his ground. Certain that only terror could carry him forward, he gave himself over to the craft of war while nursing private fears he could never shake, and his craving to rule all the world was really an effort to drown those fears. He prized strength wherever he found it, deeming Guts' ferocity and will to endure well suited to a bloodstained age and inviting the swordsman to serve under him. Where other apostles knelt to the God Hand, Ganishka would not; he held himself the lone being fit to sit above the world and came to despise Griffith for blocking his path. Being beaten and shamed by Griffith stung so deeply that he threw himself into rebirth again, and in that twice-born shape his reason dissolved, everyone around him dwindling to the stature of insects while he reveled in the slaughter below, likening the gore to blossoming red flowers. Even so, buried within his roiling mind, he grieved an existence he could see as nothing more than unbroken dark.

Ganishka came into the world as the firstborn to a Kushan king, and watched his mother favor a younger brother and try to poison him at six years old; surviving, the boy retaliated by killing that brother, and the grief drove his mother to suicide. He endured what he called a den of vipers, engineered his own father's death upon reaching manhood, and claimed the throne. Ceaseless conquest left him no room for the wife and child he came to dread, and when his grown son orchestrated a coup and a near-fatal ambush, Ganishka triggered a beherit he had kept for years and gave up that son to be reborn as an apostle.

With plague and famine gutting Midland, he stormed in and took the royal seat of Wyndham, locking Princess Charlotte inside the Tower of Rebirth so she might bear him an heir and cement his claim, only for the newly reborn Band of the Falcon to carry her off. At Vritannis he declared war on the Holy See Alliance, fighting through an astral projection cloaked in a fog that could smother whole cities and rain down lightning. Taken with Guts after their clash, he offered the branded swordsman a post and was turned down. His projection hid a fatal weakness: when Guts, lifted by Zodd, drove the Dragon Slayer into the fog between its eyes, the entire manifestation burst apart and left him racked with pain.

Griffith reversed the Vritannis campaign entirely. Meeting the White Falcon in person, Ganishka raised his released fog only for Griffith to summon the coastal winds and nearly scatter it, driving him back into his mortal frame and onto his knees. Shamed past endurance, he cast his body down into the Man-Made Beherit and reincarnated a second time, rising as a titanic, sanity-eating horror that leveled Wyndham and its own soldiers underfoot, spewing fire and hatching pseudo-apostles from the dead it trampled. Griffith, now Femto, seized the Skull Knight's space-splitting sword-stroke and steered it into the emperor's body. The gash split open a rift, releasing the surge of the Astral World that fused the physical and astral planes into Fantasia and raised the World Spiral Tree in the spot where Ganishka had towered.