Bernhardt Rhodes

Bernhardt Rhodes (a.k.a. Vesalius) is the main villain in Kaze no Stigma. He is the new boss of Armagest.

Info
During the years Kazuma was away from Tokyo, Bernhardt had some kind of contact with him that lead to Tsui Ling´s kidnap. He used her as a sacrifice to feed with her soul and body a powerful demon, awakening him from hell. Kazuma tried to stop him but at that moment he hadn´t done his contract with the Wind God so he couldn´t prevent Tsui Ling´s death. But after Tsui Ling´s sacrifice he obtained his great wind powers and was able to destroy that demon, who was in fact Bernhardt´s master. Four years later Bernhardt came back to revenge his master and destroy Kazuma. He elaborated a devious plan and created a web site game called "Pandemonium", in this game anybody who entered the web site was confronted with a simple single question: Do you want power? if you answered yes a virtual Yomi (evil spirit) was downloaded providing you with supernatural powers, but at the final cost of your own soul, only that you would never know that or the fact that you were possessed by a demon. Then you would have to fight other users and killed them in order to achieve higher levels with the promise of the ultimate power that the Pandemonium would give you. Ren, Kazuma and Ayano discovered this plan and entered the Pandemonium to confront Bernhardt and Lapis, a cloned version of Tsui Ling made after the final thoughts she had when she was dying, but they were defeated, although they could scape unharmed. After these events Kazuma went berserk chasing Pandemonium players, some time later, and only thanks to Ayano, he could return to his true self. A new Pandemonium appeared and again the three of them attacked the building only to find that the true objective behind the Pandemonium game was to gather enough soul to release, for a short time in Tokyo, Beliel, the demon king himself, but thanks to the effort of Kazuma, Ren and Ayano the demon was sealed again and Bernhardt´s plans were ruined. At the end Bernhardt and Lapis escape.