Zodd

In his human-seeming form, Zodd towers as a black-haired giant with orange-red eyes and a long scar along the left of his brow, standing around seven feet and weighing well over three hundred pounds. His released shape swells to more than eleven feet and roughly a ton, a horned, fur-covered beast bearing a single overgrown right horn where its left one was severed away. From this monstrous body he can call forth wings at will, drawing them out to fly and to rend flesh or folding them back into his spine, while his hide runs thick enough to swallow entire arrow volleys.

Zodd has surrendered his whole existence to the pursuit of combat, and countless warriors have died in his path as he hunts ever-stronger foes. Above all he yearns for what he calls the ultimate strong one, and he fights without mercy even against those hopelessly beneath him. In other respects he stands apart from his fellow apostles: he neither devours human flesh nor delights in torment, and he takes no pleasure in slaying the weak. His overwhelming might is in truth a burden to him, leaving him few opponents worthy of the name and steeping him in melancholy. Those rare warriors who survive him, chiefly Guts and the Skull Knight, earn his genuine respect, and his long feud with the latter is the one thing that truly quenches his craving for battle.

Across roughly three centuries Zodd earns his epithet of Nosferatu, a deathless battlefield god who vanishes for long stretches only to return to the killing. Fighting for the Tudor Empire against Midland, he first crosses Guts while defending a stronghold's inner keep, having cut down some fifty Falcon raiders. In their duel Guts shears off the upper half of Zodd's blade and bites into his shoulder, the first wound the apostle has taken in three hundred years, prompting him to assume his true form. He soon overwhelms the young mercenary, but reinforcements under Griffith drive him back, and a pincer strike from the two men wounds him further. Poised to slay Griffith, Zodd instead freezes at the sight of his crimson beherit, the Egg of the King, and departs with a cryptic warning that an inescapable death awaits Guts once Griffith's dream collapses. He aids Guts obliquely at Doldrey by lending him a sword, and a year later kills the apostle Wyald for holding a crippled Griffith hostage against the God Hand's law. During the fifth Eclipse he remains outside the ritual, is overpowered by the Skull Knight, and watches his rival carry the branded Guts and Casca to safety.

Two years on, sick of feeble opponents, Zodd is felled in a vision by the Falcon of Light, waking to find his left horn severed and a summons to Albion, where the desired one awaits. There he and the Skull Knight witness Griffith reborn, and Zodd kneels to his new master. He carries Griffith to the Hill of Swords, battles Guts anew, and afterward serves as a lead warrior of the reborn Band of the Falcon, slaughtering Kushan invaders and warring against the emperor Ganishka. Unable to harm Ganishka's mist form alone, he strikes an uneasy alliance with Guts, whose Dragon Slayer can wound the ethereal proxy, and together they scatter it. When the Great Wave of the Astral World breaks, Zodd bears Griffith to its very center. In the age of Fantasia he fights beside the Band against the jotnar, throttling a hydra's heads, and later intercepts Guts' strike at Griffith in Elfhelm before flying his master and the captive Casca back to Falconia.