The Count

In his human guise the Count is a bald, ordinary-looking nobleman, but the apostle beneath wears a vastly different shape. When released he swells into a colossal, slug-like mass, an image that led Kentarou Miura to nickname him the "Slug Baron." That monstrous bulk lets him burrow through solid stone and shatter pillars with ease, and unusually for an apostle he can melt individual parts of himself into the gastropod form at will rather than transforming all at once.

As an apostle the Count is a figure of pure cruelty, slaughtering accused heretics and their kin over trivial slights and hoarding those he spares for vivisection and consumption. His hunger is bottomless; on the eve of the fifth Eclipse he joined other apostles in devouring wounded Falcon mercenaries. He relishes tormenting Guts during their duel, only to collapse into panic once the swordsman gains the upper hand. His human years tell a gentler story. Those who knew him, from the physician Vargas to his daughter Theresia, recalled a harsh but sincere ruler who genuinely cared for his land and was not gratuitously sadistic. His undoing was a capacity for blind fury: discovering his wife amid a pagan orgy shattered him, and in the end not even eternal damnation could make him surrender Theresia to the God Hand.

Roughly seven years before the fifth Eclipse, the man who would become the Count governed a hold overrun by pagans. Returning from a long campaign to hunt them, he found his beloved wife willingly joined to a heretical rite. Blind rage drove him to butcher everyone present save her, and unable to strike her down or endure her mocking smile, he stood on the verge of suicide when his beherit answered his despair. Brought before the God Hand, he offered his branded wife as sacrifice, was reborn a monster, and devoured her. He then spread a lie that heretics had murdered her, locked his daughter away, and used relentless inquisitions as cover to gather bodies for his experiments. When Vargas uncovered the truth and fled, the Count mutilated him and forced him to watch his family eaten alive, though the physician escaped with the beherit.

Years later, after taking part in the Eclipse banquet and helping bring down Pippin, the Count resumed his executions until Guts arrived in his land, maiming his guard captain Zondark, whom the Count then possessed by seeding him with a fragment of his own being. In the climactic clash inside his castle, Guts seized the freed Theresia as a shield and mortally wounded the apostle. Begging for life, the Count activated his beherit and summoned the God Hand, only to learn that his already-sacrificed foe could not be offered a second time and that saving himself meant giving up his daughter. Unable to do it, he let his existence be forfeit, and his spirit was hauled into the Abyss by a chain of vengeful souls, Vargas among them, his lifeless human body left broken atop the rubble.