The Life-Maker's Apostles

The Life-Maker's Apostles are a group of warriors under the control of the ominous Mage of the Beginning, who serve as major villains in the manga UQ Holder, the sequel to the manga ''Negima! Magister Negi Magi''. They are the evil archmage's main agents, in a continuation of sort to the secret society Cosmo Entelecheia. In a gloomy twist of fate, they mostly consist in major protagonist of the previous series.

The Mage of the Beginning/The Life-Maker
The leader of Cosmo Entelecheia and creator of the Mundus Magicus: Her real name is Ialda Baoth, but her origins and nature remain unknown. The Mage of the Beginning seems to be of divine origin, which could explain her unfathomable level of power. She is not only eternal but she can resurrect whenever she is destroyed by using her victor as a vessel. Besides, she is the progenitor of the royal family of Vespertatia, making her the hero's distant ancestor.

Story Settings
The story unfolds 75 years after the end of Negima!. It is set in the previous series' second timeline, in which the primary female protagonist Asuna Kagurazaka was sealed for over a century to power the process to save the Mundus Magicus (an alternate world set on the planer Mars created by the Mage of the Beginning, that is about to collapse due to mana depletion). However, the original manga truly ended after Asuna travelled back to her era after awakening. This created a third and final timeline that saw the battle mentioned at the end of the previous series, during which the Mage of the Beginning was defeated for good and Nagi was saved.

Negi's project to terraform Mars and sustain the Mundus Magicus was accomplished, and giant towers leading into space are now serving as bridges between the three worlds. Magic was revealed to the world ten years before the start of the story and has begun to spread, with expensive applications enabling non-magic people who can afford it to spell-cast. Evangeline Mc Dowell has become the founding leader of UQ Holder (Eternity Holder): a group of immortals tasked to protect the population from supernatural threats, and took under her wing the primary protagonist, Tōta Konoe, a clone of Negi whom she turned into a vampire to save his life.

The Mage of the Beginning resurfaced twenty years before the start of the story, and was destroyed by Negi Springfield and his Ala Alba team, before she could unleash a spell that would have destroyed the entire solar system. Fate Averruncus later had a fallout with UQ Holder, which sets out to kill Negi before he becomes the Life-Maker's new vessel, according to his wishes, while Fate wants to save him. Fate now leads the Ala Alba in Negi's place, and he is determined to recruit Tōta, who having been created from a descendant of the Life-Maker wields both her power of creation known as the "White of Mars" and the power of destruction known as the "Black of Venus/Magia Erebea", as his abilities could save Negi and the world.

Cutlass
A mysterious girl created from Negi Springfield, who calls Tōta "brother": Although she is first introduced as acting on her own, it is revealed that she is in fact the Mage of the Beginning's new main agent.

She is an extremely powerful warrior with incredible speed, strength, magical might, and skill with both weapons and spells. She can conjure weapons, including a long, black short-sword and a gigantic black sword, with which she can effortlessly shatter stone and steel, and proves able to send powerful shockwaves of ki from her pommel. Even worse, she has access to a copy of Asuna’s artifact: a great sword that banishes demons, spirits and constructs, and can wield all with exceptional proficiency.

She can also cast spells that manifest through arrays of pentagrams. Contrary to the other servants of the Life-Maker, who specialize in one type of magic, she can use different types, having seen attack with powerful fire deflagration of variable scale, ranging to destructive to devastating, a barrage of shadow spears, a continuous and incredibly destructive onslaught of lightning, and a violent telekinetic wave able to send people flying far away.

Much worse, she owns Koyomi's time-controlling hourglass artifact, which she masters with much more proficiency, being able to fully stop the flow of time for up to 30 seconds and likely more. She remains unaffected when someone else stops time, but fortunately it works both ways and people who can also stop time are unaffected as well when she does.

She is ruthless, hateful, contemptuous and scathing. She display strong disgust and loathing towards Tōta, whom she dismisses as a "flawed and worthless copy", and the UQ Holder as a whole, calling them "monsters"; though such scorn might hide some jealousy. She seems to revel in violence, gleefully slaughtering hundreds of innocents, but hints that she saw so many horrors that she can no longer empathise with people.

The Fallen Heroes
Negi having fallen under the Mage of the Beginning's control is bad enough, but it appears that some of his and his father's former comrades are controlled as well. Asuna calls her The Mage of the Beginning's Apostles. They all retain their original caring and quirky personalities, though they are now condescending and scathingly sarcastic, and above all distant and somehow emotionless, not unlike the Life-Maker herself. This looks like the archmage's personality is mixing with their own, implying that they are possessed as well. Worse, she seems able to use her powers through them.

Negi Springfield/Negi Ialda
Negi (called "Negi Ialda" by Asuna to differentiate the hero he was from the vessel he has become) can go from his normal cheerful, gentle and friendly self, to the Life-Maker's cold and indifferent persona, broken by the strain of the Life-Maker's limitless empathic powers that plague him with the suffering of everyone in existence. (Negi explains that there are windows of time during which he can be his normal self.)

He is as incredibly powerful as he was at the end of Negima! and probably even more, with extreme speed, strength, fighting skills, healing factor, and mastery of devastating Wind and Lighting Magic, a basic neutralizing spell being from him being enough to disrobe thousands of people. Worse, he can turn into lighting to become intangible and gain an incredible boost in speed and power, and he can absorb, reflect or assimilate spells.

Jack Rakan
Jack Rakan is as boisterous, easy-going, fun-loving and battle-loving as ever, but he has gained a strong scornful streak. He is an incredibly powerful warrior with ludicrous levels of physical strength, skill with weapons or hand-to-hand fighting, and resilience, who can fire devastating energy blasts, can cause tremendous explosions with a single attack, and masters devastating spells. His artifact enables him to conjure as many weapons of all sorts and sizes as he wishes, with a preference for downpour of blades or skyscraper-sized swords.

Albireo Imma
Albireo Imma, who still goes by the name of "Ku'Nell Sanders", is polite, reserved, sarcastic, teasing and witty, but has become completely emotionless and ruthless. He is an extremely powerful master of Gravity Magic, who can hurl many devastating spheres of pure pressure and can crush anyone to the ground, even creating black holes of variable size and conjuring atmospheres of other planets or even the sun.

Yue Ayase
Yue, now known as "Yue the All-Knowing", Negi's former student and magic apprentice, appears completely detached and indifferent to everything, speaking her mind bluntly, while she used to be kind and helpful. She is an immensely powerful mage who masters highly dangerous Lightning Spells, and is able to conjure hundreds of arms out of nowhere or fuse them into a giant one that deals crippling blows. Her artifact is a grimoire that grant her access to any kind of information. She teams up with Nodoka and specializes in offence.

Nodoka Miyazaki
Nodoka, now known as "Nodoka the All-Perceiving", Yue's best friend and a famed treasure hunter was once sweet, gentle, caring and self-effacing, but she now harbours a cold, stern and bored attitude, disparaging her foes' predictability. She is now has a set of (seemingly artificial) angel-like wings she uses to fly at great speed and to swat away foes like flies, and displays immense grappling skills. Her artefact is a mind-reading book of which she displays a frightening mastery, being able to read several people's most secret thoughts in a nanosecond, learn about their powers and anticipate their every move even in fast-paced battle, taking out even absurdly powerful foes with martial arts holds. She teams up with Yue and specializes in defence. Fortunately, she can still be taken by surprise by unpredictable moves.

Preparing the tournament
Cutlass appears shortly after Tōta runs away from UQ Holder and registers to a tournament set in Amano-Mihashira Academy City, the former Mahora Academy. She soundly trounces him, using her magic sword to bypass his immortality and very nearly kills him. She then reveals the truth about his origins to crush his spirits before finishing him off. However, Tōta's comrades appear to save him, and though they are still no match for her, she departs, stating that this was but a way to introduce herself.

The following days, as Tōta is being nursed back to health, a projection of Cutlass appears before him and orders him to partake in the tournament in one year and fight her there, otherwise, she would obliterate the entire city. To prove her point, she destroys a crowded mall, but fortunately, Tōta's friends were able to save everyone.

Negi Resurfaces
Eight months later, after Tōta and his friends spent months training very hard under Evangeline's own master, the Vampire Queen Dana Ananga Jaganatha, they learn about Cutlass from Negi's former student, the Demon Princess Zazie Rainyday. Zazie reveals her name, power and loyalties, after Tōta mentioned his plan to use his comrade's own power to stop time in order to defeat the Mage of the Beginning and save Negi.

Cutlass reappears shortly after and attacks Tōta again. Though he fares much better against her, he was divided into three clones of reduced power, and still gets driven into a corner. To make matter worse, Negi and all the Life-Maker's Apostles barge in, prompting Evangeline, Fate and all of UQ Holder to take the matter in hand. Eventually, Albireo drags Tōta into a memory of Negi's time in Mahora to explain him the situation. But this was a trap, and the memory is revealed to be a Phantasmagoria, a spiritual world under the Mage of the Beginning's complete control, in which she can fully manifest and engage a battle against Tōta and Evangeline. In spite of their best efforts, they are no match again the archmage who easily overwhelms them. They are only saved by the miraculous intervention of Asuna, manifesting through a projection of herself to break the Phantasmagoria and provide intel on how to defeat the Apostles.