Rainer Layer

"Illusia, I don't need you anymore, either! I already have your Three Elements in hand! You can sleep alonside your brother!"

- Rainer before stabbing Illusia to death

Rainer is a major antagonist in Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor appearing as the main antagonist in Volume 3 of the light novel. He's a scientist of magic from Researchers of Divine Wisdom and the henchmen of Busks. For the sake of investigating magic, Rainer and others of his allies believe any sacrifice would be forgiven as his experiments would lead mankind one step above the Realm of Gods by bringing dead people back from the Other World and manipulating their spirits and memories as they wanted. In order to bring their outlandish beliefs to fruition, Rainer and his allies waged many conflicts against the imperial government, in which bloodshed was washed away with more bloodshed.

Appearance
Rainer is shown to be one of the youngest  member of Researchs of Divine Wisdom (RDV). He is a young man between 19 years old and has spyke blonde long hair and blue eyes.

In an attempt to make Re=L fight alongside him, he disguises himself as Sion, her brother that he murdered years ago to make her swear her life to him to protect him from Alzano Imperial Court Magicians and has blue hair with the sama facial expression.

Personality
Rainer is calm, collected and polite, he speaks very formally and courteously. However, like many villains with these characteristic, this is only the visible part of the iceberg.

In fact, Rainer shares many traits with other mad scientists from Researchs of Divine Wisdom; namely conducting experiments without the slightest regard for moral and human life, (being able to stab a child to death without second thoughts) the near complete devotion to science and the desire to know and to understand how life works. In Rainer's case, this desire to know is driven by sheer psychosis. He only regards human beings as guinea-pigs including his own experiments that he calls as "puppets". He shares Burks' desire to revive the deceased, and even if he doesn't seems interested by immortality for himself, he wants to achieve it as a scientific breakthrough.

Rainer is a higly intelligent, knowledgeable and calculating man, who observes the situation before making his move. Rainer also appears to be greedy and cowardly, as he never fights by himself and cowardly ask for mercy before Gleen can knock him down. Furthermore, Rainer is a remorseless sadist who likes to manipulate people and to play foul mind games, such as forcing people to fight their comrades or their loved ones.

History
Years ago, Rainer was a biological-scientist that worked to the RDV and helped the ruthless Burks in his experiments by gathering the Three Elements of Illusia, Sion's 9-years old sister. Sion was also his partner and apparently helped him in his research. But along the way, Rainer proved to be cruel enough to happily receive orders from the superiors to sacrifice hundreds of people for the sake of his research to revive dead people.

When Sion reported their crimes for the Imperials Court of Magician, he asked Rainer to leave the organization with him to escape and redeem themselves for their crimes but Rainer's only answer was a stab in his stomach while his sister was watching him killing her brother in cold-blood. In an attempt to destroy all witnesses from his presence in that HQ, he went to Illusia and proceeded to stab her numerous times in her belly while Sion was watching in despair. Possibly, Rainer finished Illusia and continued to kill Sion to kill him once for all.

Later, it turned out that Illusia was alive and Rainer proceeded to throw her out of the laboratory in a hellish winter, where she died from the cold. Before Rainer could escape, he altered the memories of his "puppet", Re=L, to suit his needs before he could escape the laboratory. His alteration included throwing her emotions away and turning her into a machine.

Waiting for the moment to retrieve Re=L 3 years later while working with Burcks to complete their beloved dream to revive people using their genetic codes and turning their memories into data to use as their please using the body of another person as its host. When Re=L join Gleen, Sistine and Rumia in a school-trip, Rainer disguised himself as Sion and went to Re=L to make her believe that he was her brother that died 3 years ago and said he was a slave from RDV despite he was working with them by his own free will. Furthermore, corrupted her saying that he could be saved if she decided betray her friends and kidnap Rumia to serve his needs and the organization and forced her to protect him. As a result Re=L, backstabbed Gleen, who tried to protect her from Rainer's manipulation and captured Rumia to extract her mana to give life to three of Re=L's clones that he and Bucks created in the past years.

Soon after his sucess, Rainer, Bucks and their assassin, Eleanor, started to extract all her mana while Re=L was forced to watch her friend in suffering. When Gleen and Albert invaded their laboratory, Rainer asked for Re=L to protect him from her friends and forced her to fight the man who saved her 3 years ago. When Gleen punches Rainer, he says everything about his past with Sion to Re=L and Gleen and blows everything that he hated in Re=L as his puppet for not being the perfect guinea-pig that he always desired, such as for being a "puppet with human emotions", calling her as junk and he did not and said that he no longer needed "it" and that he intended to discard "it". Before Gleen could finish him, his experiment finished before he could be knocked out and had three mindless clones of Re=L combined with genes of the deceased child Illusia, to protect him while being in a state of eternal suffering.

Forcing them to kill Re=L and Gleen, he watches the fight while taunting them saying that they were his perfect experiments and indirectly taunted the original Re=L saying that he wiped out all their troublesome human emotions and memories from them. When Re=L and Gleen released the clones from their suffering by finishing them off, Gleen proceeded to point a gun to Rainer while he cowardly begged for mercy only to be punched in his face, falling on the floor unconscious.

Later, he was arrested by the Imperial Court of Magicians and was possible sentenced to life imprisonment.

Trivia

 * Rainer, from a far point, is the youngest villain and the first scientist tfrom Divine Wisdom to appear in the series.