Mozgus' Disciples

Mozgus' Disciples are the devoted torturers and bodyguards of the inquisitor Mozgus, six people once driven from towns and villages because of their deformities, some sold to circuses or left to survive in the forests. Mozgus gathered them by insisting that scripture condemned neither their looks nor their dark feelings, that God in fact needed them, instilling in each a fierce pride and faith. Skilled at turning their torture instruments into weapons, they are later remade into pseudo-apostles by the Egg of the Perfect World, granting them the strength they craved.

The group first shows its brutality by butchering the vigilante villagers who ambush Mozgus' carriage, then works the torture chambers of Albion. When the Incarnation Ceremony erupts and awakened blood-spirits batter the chapel doors, the Egg stings the disciples and transforms them into winged pseudo-apostles with heightened strength, speed, and stamina. Confronting Guts, they coordinate their attacks and briefly overpower him, pinning him for a killing blow, but Guts turns their own momentum against them. He downs the Bubblehead with his arm cannon, ruptures the Imp with mini-bombs and the Dragon Slayer, and opens the Crow's throat, while the fleeing Twins are cut down by the combined effort of Puck, Isidro, and Jerome.

The Crow, most human-looking of the group, hides sun-sickened skin beneath a plague-mask and black silk and fights with a man-catcher. The Imp, smallest of them, bears a cleft face and horn-like nubs and wields pliers meant for gouging eyes. The silent, hulking Angel Face carries a child's features and swings a breaking wheel, while the towering Bubblehead uses a jawed chain and shrugs off grievous wounds. The Twins, gentle mirror-image brothers who dote on birds, join oversized saws into a scissoring blade. After death, the four fallen disciples reappear as the shadow vessels from which Void, Slan, Ubik, and Conrad manifest their avatars.