Ba'al (UQ Holder)

Ba'al is an unfathomably powerful, child-like Vampire Lord, who serves as a major villain in the manga UQ Holder, sequel to ''Negima! Magister Negi Magi''. He is one of the Vampire Nobles, the first and mightiest vampires in existence, and the archenemy of Evangeline McDowell, herself an incredibly powerful vampire mage and the leader of the titular organization gathering the heroes of the story. Ba'al plagued Evangeline in the past, and now supports the Mage of the Beginning's goal, to erase the Solar System and relocate everyone to a paradise dimension.

Appearance
Ba'al looks like a little boy of around ten years old, rather tall, slender and androgynous, with long hair reaching his hips and masking roughly half his face. He has light coloured hair and eyes, likely yellow like another Vampire Noble.

He was first seen bare-footed in a tattered robe, disguised as a normal boy, but he normally wears elaborate black robes with trimming and belts, black slacks and shoes, and a black cape fitting for a Vampire Lord. He sometimes wears a dark, tattered cloak covering his body, floating around him as it does with other powerful beings.

Like all vampires, he has slit pupils, fangs and pointed nails. When he unveils his vampiric nature, he becomes downright unsettling. His eye sclerae turns black; small bat-like wings grow on his head; his face and even his hair get covered with eyes; and his nails become long, black claws.

He can also change his clothing, by elongating his robes and splitting his cape, turn his cape into black feathered wings, or sprout them from it, usually an uneven number, or sprout many long, black tendrils.

Ba'al's shadow is an integral part of his being, which reveals its true form when he unleashes his full might. It contains a mass of demonic beings which are part of him, either spawned from his spirit or assimilated into himself, probably when he became a vampire. The more power he unleashes, the more manifest.

Ba'al can grow giant arms, tentacles, spikes and scythe-like appendages, long claws, even fanged mouths and monstrous snake-like wyrms from his shadow, all covered in demonic-looking eyes and oozing a creepy white fluid. At full might, his shadow unleashes a frightening conglomerate of monsters, giant limbs, spikes and tentacles all around him.

Much worse, Ba'al can fuse all of his shadows into an even mightier form all around him, turning them into a tower-sized, eldritch construct of welded tentacles. It has a writhing mass of bulbous eyes and fanged tentacles for a head, huge fanged tentacles sprouting from its back, a fanged mouth on its belly where Ba'al stands, and a cluster of tentacles instead of legs.

Personality
Ba'al is the most outright malevolent villain in a series running on grey morality. He is a vicious, ruthless and unhinged sadist, craving for battles and violence. He enjoys crushing foes as much as he enjoys emotionally breaking them. He revels in foes able to match him, so long as he retains the upper hand that is. Worse, he delights in wreaking havoc, is utterly indifferent to the pain he inflicts, and hates losing control of the situation.

Fitting the vampire archetype, Ba'al is cold, aloof, collected, serious and driven. He directly involves himself in his schemes and crushes any obstacle, without bothering for theatrics. Before becoming a vampire, he already had enormous knowledge, which increased in his millennia of experience.

Despite this, he has a strong playful, mischievous and frankly immature streak, fitting the child he looks like. He constantly craves stimulation and breaks his stoic behaviour when enjoying himself or when livid. He is haughty and boastful, scorning weaker people and gleefully lording over them. His sadism is no different from a misbehaved kid crushing ants, breaking toys, and bullying people just because he can. He considers that his power enables him to do basically whatever he wants.

In spite of such thoroughly unflattering traits, Ba'al is more nuanced than it first appears, though this does not make him any less disturbing. Having seen pretty much everything, he delights in anything surprizing and greatly enjoys promising people, yet he only expresses it through violence. His stalking of Evangeline and her disciple Karin stems as much from the challenge they present as a fascination for their nature. Likewise, he appreciates UQ Holder's pluck and greatly admires the Mage of the Beginning, whom he calls "humanity's greatest genius".

Surprisingly, Ba'al sincerely loves humanity and wants the best for them, albeit in a twisted way. He claims to have backed the invasion of Earth by mages from the Magical World (a dimension full of magic beings), because their guidance, and his own of course, would have spared them overpopulation, war and chaos. In the same way, he supports the Mage of the Beginning's goal to destroy the Solar System and warp its population into the "Cosmo Entelecheia" (Perfect Word), an alternate reality where everyone lives the happiest life possible. As such, he deems immortals a threat to their vision, to be terminated without qualm.

Like his fellow Vampire Nobles, Ba’al follows the "Noblesse Oblige" mindset, meaning that the powerful are duty-bound to take care of the powerless, but his vision is horribly warped. Instead of training humans to better their lives, he imposes his vision, believing to know what is good for them better than they do, in a creepy Messiah Complex. He regards them as children unable to care for themselves, who need supervision whether they like it or not. While he has a point in mentioning the two World Wars and the climate crisis, he fails to consider the racism of the mages invaders he backed, who viewed earthlings as slaves and energy sources. Besides, reasoning that dead souls will be sent to the "Cosmo Entelecheia" as well, he does not care about casualties. All in all, Ba'al's bloodlust and self-righteousness make him an outright menace despite his good intentions.

Powers and Abilities
As a Vampire Noble, Ba'al is far and away one of the most powerful beings in a series full of monstrously overpowered characters. His presence alone radiates an intense aura of dread. Even Evangeline McDowell and Fate Averruncus themselves dread the prospect of confronting him. Moreover, he is immortal and virtually indestructible, regenerating all wounds in microseconds, be it having his head destroyed or his body blasted to bits.

Ba'al has supreme strength, speed, spryness, agility, reflexes, stamina and skill with weapons, who can effortlessly break stone and steel, shatter the ground just by applying pressure, and tear down huge buildings in a single blow. He mostly fights with a thin longsword, which he can wield in either hand, but he is also adept with cross-shaped spears or martial arts, being able to dash as if he did teleport.

His powers and mastery of magic are equally formidable. He can levitate; teleport; conjure all sorts of things; shape-shift; change his clothing's size, width and shape; travel through dimensions; instantly spawn clones of himself at different places; bewitch World Trees seeds to grow instantly to full size, summon demons; negate powers; and hurl magic spheres that banish targets into the normally inescapable Void Between Words.

He is highly skilled in creating things, especially sentient beings bound to serve him. For instance, monstrous parasites made of eye-tipped tentacles who fuse with their host’s soul and take control of them. They can telepathically speak to their host, influencing their mind to remove emotions or morality and increase their worst impulses.

They can also completely remove the victim’s personality, or take over their bodies, sprouting tentacles and a huge tail to fight, while keeping access to their host’s powers and skills.

He also created an extremely powerful light spirit, with a defined personality, whom he made his second-in-command, and granted vast powers and fighting skills, as well as immortality and agelessness.

Of course, Ba'al masters deadly magic attacks. He can fire invisible force blasts that vaporize people; conjure huge stone blocks to crush his targets; conjure long black tendrils to bind or squeeze his targets; conjure black, cross-shaped spears that pierce his targets regardless of their defences and immunities; fire a gigantic explosive fireball that can level a giant palace; or fire countless cutting beams of light from all sides at once to cut anyone to pieces in a split-second.

When he unleashes his demonic shadows, he can send his tentacles, claws, fangs and blades to attack from several sides, if not send all of them over a wide range. The giant arms and wyrms attack as if they were alive and track down foes.

When he fuses his shadows into a demonic titan, Ba'al can attacks with its fanged tentacles and fists with ludicrous strength and deceptive speed and spryness. He change its shape and size at will, growing titanic fists as large as it is from itself, or elongate its tentacles for miles.

Worse, he can spawn countless, titanic, horned, draconic fanged tentacles, spreading them over the sky for hundreds of miles, and make them fire enormous energy blasts from their mouths.

Background
Over twelve thousand years before the start of the series, there was a human civilisation on Venus, enormously advanced in both science and magic. They ultimately doomed themselves in apocalyptic wars in search of immortality. Most became demons and were banished to Inverse Venus, a dimension anchored on the planet, like Inverse Mars, the Magical Word, is anchored on the planet Mars. Inverse Venus became the Demon World, a chaotic wasteland where might is the only rule. (Though demons are neutrals in this setting.)

Meanwhile, a few scholars gained true immortality and god-like power, becoming the Vampire Nobles. No-one knows what Ba'al did after they parted ways. He seems to have based himself on Inverse Mars after its creation by the Mage of the Beginning.

Around six centuries before the start of the series, Ba'al created his main servant, Sept Shichijuro Nanao. At the same time, he began backing the ambitions of power-hungry mages from Inverse Mars to colonize Earth. They took advantage of their superiority over the Earth mages to dictate their law. But they were all crushed by Evangeline McDowell: an incredibly powerful vampire mage created by the Mage of the Beginning from the Nobles' model, and her disciple Ist Karin Haute: in fact Judas Iscariot (female in this setting), cursed into invulnerability after betraying Jesus Christ but granted enormous holy powers, whose only relief from her crushing guilt was to defend people under Evangeline.

Evangeline attacked one of these mages, who kidnapped many children to use their life-force as fuel, but he set a trap draining the magic of anyone but him in his castle, ensnaring the powerless vampire in vines. Karin barged in and destroyed him with her holy power.

As everything seemed won, a strange child appeared, mistaken by Karin as a surviving captive. He suddenly cut Evangeline to pieces by surprise and subdued Karin under a stone block, revealing himself as a Vampire Noble. Karin and Evangeline only owed their lives to the intervention of another immortal attracted by their amount of power, the swordsman Jinbei Shishido.

Evangeline, Karin and Jinbei went to Inverse Mars and spend a year investigating, discovering that the invaders are led by the smarmy and xenophobic Senator Gorgonzola, from the superpower nation of Megalomesembria. Upon learning that his plans are widely unpopular, Evangeline sneaks in his palace to kill him, but Ba'al appears to save him. As Evangeline holds her own in a physical brawl, he unleashes his shadows, forcing her to use puppet soldiers.

Karin bombards Ba'al's shadows with spears of holy energy, and Jinbei engages a swordfight with Sept Shichijuro Nanao. Ba’al prepares to banish Karin to the Void Between Worlds, but Evangeline deflects his spell, banishing him instead.

Gorgonzola launched the entire Megalomesembrian army after them, but Evangeline crushed them all by herself, forcing him into peace negotiations, in fact a trap, which she saw coming and avoided using dolls in her and her friends’ likeness. Evangeline reminded the capital of the Covenant of non-aggression of the Old World decreed by the Mage of the Beginning, destroying all who went against it. This spurned the anti-aggression majority into decisive action, ruining Ba'al's and Gorgonzola's plans.

Furious, the wretched senator put a bounty on her head and slandered her as an evil witch, until she became one of the most dreaded mages around. After a hundred and twenty years, Ba'al returned and sealed Karin in a World Tree, condemning Evangeline to solitude and breaking her spirit.

Sometime later, Evangeline teamed-up with the Vampire Noble Nikitis Laps to seal Ba'al away and recruited Sept, in circumstances yet undescribed. She would later be separated from all and succumb to despair, constantly running from bounty-hunters, eventually settling in Japan. She could only free Karin ten years before the start of the story.

She later met the legendary archmage Nagi Springfield, who had saved Inverse Mars from the Mage of the Beginning. He sealed her in the immense magic campus of Mahora Academy, where she later met his son Negi Springfield, the hero of Negima! Who would become her student and form the Ala Alba team to defeat Cosmo Entelecheia.