Grunbeld

In his human guise, Grunbeld is a massive red-haired figure, the guidebooks placing him near 270 centimeters and roughly 303 kilograms. His eyes carry the same crimson tone as his hair. When he sheds that shape and takes his released apostle form, he swells to gigantic proportions and his hide hardens into corundum, a crystalline mineral tougher than steel that shrugs off most blows and mends without leaving scars.

His weapon of choice is a great hammer, flat on one face for crushing armor and tipped with a heavy spike on the other for hooking shields or punching through barricades. He pairs it with an oversized shield molded into a monstrous visage, sturdy enough to bounce back cannon shot while firing rounds of its own and hiding a pair of retractable blades. As a dragon, he can also exhale gouts of flame.

Grunbeld carries himself with pride and gravity, a humorless warrior who has little patience for banter or clowning. He clings to a soldier's sense of honor: sent against the elderly Flora, he balks at the notion of overwhelming an old woman with a whole company, voicing his distaste for the orders. Guts throws the sentiment right back at him, scoffing that a monster has no business claiming a warrior's code.

Once he grasps how dangerous the swordsman truly is, Grunbeld drops any restraint, resorting to craftier tactics and finally unleashing his apostle body. After losing that clash, he acknowledges Guts as a splendid opponent, then vows to hunt him down thereafter as an apostle sworn to the Hawk of Light.

Long before his rebirth, Grunbeld lived as a man during the Hundred-Year War, born into a faded noble line in the far-northern Grand Duchy of Grant. Raised by his widowed mother after his father fell in battle, the oversized boy was bullied relentlessly until a nearly fatal beating left him crippled with pain. A blind girl named Benedikte, who perceived the world through her heart, guided him to a healing spring and told him he would one day grow into a mighty dragon able to scorch foes and snap blades on his scales. Soon after, Tudor forces overran his village, killed his mother, and hauled the children of Grant off to the fortress of Chester for brutal indoctrination under a cruel officer called Abecassis. There he forged bonds with Edvard, the archduke's illegitimate son, and a noble girl named Sigur.

Over the following years Grunbeld rose to become a knight and the commander of a three-thousand-strong corps of Flame Dragon Knights, Grant's most renowned leader, with Edvard as his second. His fame bred envy in the corrupt archduke Haakon, who conspired with Abecassis to sell out the duchy and destroy him, exploiting Edvard's simmering jealousy and unrequited love for Sigur. Lured into a trap and surrounded, betrayed by Edvard and cut off while trying to shield a mortally wounded Benedikte, Grunbeld was battered by relentless cannon fire until he could barely stand. As death closed in, his blood woke the beherit he carried, and the God Hand appeared to offer him an endless dragon's war in exchange for those he held dearest.

Declaring himself a true dragon, Grunbeld gave up Edvard, Sigur, and Benedikte to the Brand of Sacrifice and rose as an apostle, devouring Edvard and consuming the two women in his flames so no enemy could defile them. He then wiped out the Tudor army, burned Abecassis alive, slew Haakon, and drove the empire from Grant, becoming a legend whose true story no one ever knew. Following Benedikte's dying words, he wandered Midland in search of the Falcon of Light and eventually pledged himself to the resurrected Griffith. Fighting now within the ranks of the reborn band, he helps retake the city of Shet from Kushan invaders, then joins Zodd in the assault on Flora's Mansion of the Spirit Tree, where his duel with Guts drives him to assume his dragon form before Flora's wall of fire cuts off his pursuit.