Mayor of Koka

The Mayor of Koka is a human man who governs the town of Koka; the 1997 anime instead styles him the Minister. He comes across as a nervous official, wholly cowed whenever the Snake Lord is near.

Fearful and utterly submissive before the Snake Lord, the mayor bristled the moment anyone questioned his morals. He dressed up his surrender of townsfolk as a means of shielding Koka, but in truth he cared only for saving his own skin and prolonging his own life.

After the Black Swordsman cut down the Snake Lord's thugs, word reached the mayor, who ordered the stranger seized. He came to watch the man tortured in the town dungeon, halted the torturer at the sight of the confiscated arsenal, and, realizing he faced a mercenary, lectured him on the ruin his killings might bring down on Koka. When Guts threw the offering of women and children back in his face, the shaken mayor suffered what looked like a stroke, then resolved to hand the prisoner over to the Snake Lord in exchange for his own safety.

At the castle the Snake Lord greeted him in a way that only deepened his terror, prompting pleas for forgiveness and an offer to double the tribute of gold and captives. The monster flicked a scrap of the human flesh he was eating at the mayor, revealed his intent to burn Koka and slaughter its people, and had the trembling man dismissed. In the 1997 anime the mayor is shown killed, impaled on the Snake Lord's spear and cast down before his own aide.