Xavier

For most of his battle Xavier hides behind his illusions, so his real shape stays unseen until the very end. Once those illusions finally crumbled during his fight with Suho, his genuine form was laid bare: a hideous skeleton whose ribcage leaked a menacing glow.

To Xavier, humanity was nothing but a frail, lesser race. He spoke in an eerie, mournful tone and never once questioned that he would win, brimming with total faith in his own power. Watching souls writhe in hopeless despair brought him pleasure, and in his role researching for the Demonic Spirit Tribe he treated captured human souls as nothing but raw stock for magical experiments.

At Haeundae Beach, Xavier harvested the souls of the people he gathered and used them in his research, concluding plainly that humans were weak; to his tribe, souls were simply fuel for devastating spells, no matter the suffering involved. He set Mirage and Memory Manifestation on Lim Tae-Gyu and Suho, forcing Tae-Gyu to relive killing his Mist Burn wife and conjuring against Suho a terrifying copy of his father, Jinwoo, drawn from the boy's Tutorial Dungeon trauma. Even aware it was false, Suho buckled under the copy's oppressive aura. Xavier savored the fear and schemed to harvest it and enslave the Shadow Monarch as his own illusion, but the conjured Jinwoo unexpectedly gained self-awareness; familiar with demonic spectre magic from Jinwoo's shadow army, the freed illusion started to move and talk by itself, even though it held barely any mana.

Rather than turn against its maker, the Jinwoo illusion refined Xavier's magic circles toward perfection, leveling up the Mirage skill to thicken the sandstorm and strengthen the skeletons, all to help Suho grow faster. When Suho summoned Harmakan, whose magic circle far outclassed his own, Xavier grew alarmed, and the realization that this boy was the Shadow Monarch's son deepened his dread. Desperate, he cast Mirage on himself and became a monstrous Kraken modeled on one of Itarim's Apostles he had met across dimensions; his on-screen label, once reading 'the Demonic Illusionist: Javier', shifted to simply 'Kraken', and Beru rated his strength at the high reaches of A-Rank, perhaps even S-Rank. Trading raw blows with Suho in that final shape, he held on until Suho's shadow soldier Kira tore apart the memory illusions feeding him mana, which drained him while the bound hunters broke loose. Suho then saw his true skeletal form and dealt the killing strike. Because his mana was tainted, Xavier could not be raised as a shadow; instead Jinwoo's avatar spent the soul on a final spell, forging a Soulstone bearing Xavier's name to give Suho.