Baruka

Every mark of his ice-elf kind showed on Baruka: snow-white hair, skin tinted blue, blank white eyes, and black-tipped fingernails. A cruel grin sat on his face, and a purple leaf design traced across his forehead. For warmth in his frozen domain he wrapped himself in a fur-lined parka of white and blue.

Like the elves who followed him, Baruka was vain and savage, forever crowing about his strength mid-battle and relishing the slaughter of humans. What set him apart was his mind. Unusually clever for a magic beast, he sized up Jinwoo within minutes and correctly judged that the man was not entirely human.

An S-Rank magic beast occupying a Red Gate Dungeon, Baruka was potent enough that Jinwoo conceded he could never win a one-on-one and only triumphed by piling Igris and Iron, his best shadows of the time, onto the elf at once. He fought skillfully with paired daggers, matching the swordwork of both Jinwoo and Igris, shrugged off shadow-mage fire while resisting the poison of Kasaka's Venom Fang, and could twist away from a near-lethal strike even while outnumbered. His Stealth let him melt into his surroundings, erasing every trace of himself, and he ranked among the few beasts able to speak directly, though only in a monster tongue that no human but Jinwoo, drawing on the System, could follow.

When Kim Chul's expedition entered the Red Gate Dungeon and found themselves sealed inside, Chul split the group, leading the higher ranks off to hunt the boss. Baruka and his warriors tore through that small party, sparing only Chul, who fled in panic. Tracking the terrified human through the forest, Baruka was led straight to Jinwoo's group. Though he arrived cloaked, Jinwoo gave away his presence, and the elf revealed his intelligence by speaking his own language, which Jinwoo answered in kind. A scout had warned Baruka that Jinwoo could put up a real fight, and noting the man was not wholly human, the elf offered to spare him in exchange for sacrificing his squad. Jinwoo refused and called up his shadow army, including a freshly added pack of Ice Bears.

Baruka held the early advantage, brushing off hit-and-run strikes and the fireballs of the shadow mages, but the tide shifted once Jinwoo lured Kim Chul to his death at Igris's hand and extracted Chul's shadow to gain Iron. The boss weathered the combined threat and dodged a nearly fatal blow, yet his own elves were being wiped out around him, and fury set in. Jinwoo faked a thrown dagger, yanked it back with telekinesis at high speed, and forced Baruka to block with his own blade, which shattered. Iron moved to restrain him while the mages poured fire onto him. Surviving even that, Baruka was struck cleanly when Jinwoo used Stealth, and as the elf roared his refusal to yield, Iron rose behind him and crushed him under a warhammer. Jinwoo tried three times to extract the corpse's shadow but failed against the boss's superior strength. Baruka resurfaced in conversation later, when Jinwoo crossed paths with Sillad, the Frost Monarch, soon after Go Gunhee's assassination.