Chaos Dragon Garv (Demon Dragon King in the original Japanese) is a major villain in the third story arc of the Slayers novels its anime adaptation. He is a Demon Lord created by Ruby Eye Shabranigdo, but betrayed his kind after being fused to a human, seeking to rule the world they try to destroy. In fact he was a pawn of the true villain Hellmaster Fibrizo, who casually kills him.
He is voiced by Joji Nakata in Japanese and Dan Green in English.
Appearance[]
Chaos Dragon Garv's aspect depends on his reincarnation. In the story, he looks like a massive and strongly-built, middle-aged man, easily twice as tall as a human if not more.
He sports long, crimson red hair tied near the end of it and a brutish face. He wears a long, white trench-coat (orange in the anime), and wields a long broad sword.
His true demonic form is that of an absolutely gigantic, demonic dragon with red, spiky scales, a black underbelly, a body covered with white spikes, and three heads with long necks, red eyes and three pairs of horns each.
Personality[]
Chaos Dragon Garv is cruel, relentless, hateful, abrasive and boastful. He loves lording over his victims and despises defiance, but greatly respects bravery. He is also headstrong, never hesitating to take matters in hands unlike the other Demon Lords who prefer acting from behind the scenes.
Like Dynast Grausherra, Garv is horribly blood-thirsty and violent, revelling in the thrill of battles and crushing his foes. He loves to fight no matter the risk, regarding it as a challenge to overcome. In his last moments, even when terrified, he remained defiant to the end.
However, Garv is much more cautious, clever and tactical than his brutish aspect lets appear. He carefully hides from the Demon Lords, keeping tabs on them to undermine them and spread his influence in secret. While he once shared their goal to destroy the world and return it to the Sea of Chaos, the source of everything, being fused with a human gave him a survival instinct. Knowing that he now risks to disappear with the world, he does all he can to thwart them. Not out of benevolence but because he now wants to rule the world they threaten.
To do so, he has his vassals strike deals with rulers and nobles all over the world, to use them as puppet-kings and rule from behind the scenes. Not only to amass political power, but to raise an army of monsters and mortals, even bidding a temporary truce with dragons. All this to destroy all of Shabranigdo's fragments, starting with Lei Magnus, and the Demon Lords, leaving himself as the sole ruler of the demons, before taking over the mortal races.
Powers and Abilities[]
In Slayers, demons are evil spirits dwelling in the Astral Plane, who can project themselves into the Earthly Plane. However, being merged with a human, Chaos Dragon Garv is now restricted to the Earthly Plane and his human aspect is his true physical form, instead of a projection like the others.
He can no longer access everywhere from the Astral Plane, turn intangible and invisible. Nevertheless, as with other demons, he remains only vulnerable to attacks able to harm both his Physical and Astral selves, and remains able to regenerate.
Yet, he retains access to the Astral Plane and his true, form, and the power to shape-shift to mimic any life-form and create objects of all sorts and size. He can still teleport and levitate, but whether he can still include landscape in his physical form to control them like the other is unknown, yet possible. His ability to sense auras is somewhat hampered by his human side however, as he failed to identify Fibrizo even after he stopped concealing his nature.
Garv is immensely powerful. He can spawn (and reabsorb) demons from his essence; brainwash or empower anyone; corrupt, twist, transform, teleport and levitate things and people; alter the weather and the landscape; open pocket dimensions; and use the dark powers basis of Black Magic to perform all manners of spell-like feats. The Black Magic spell drawing from his power is the Garv Flare: a gigantic beam of purple fire with homing properties.
He controls the Fire element, being able to hurl fiery blasts or spheres, and heat waves heat. He can send people flying with just a glance, hurl high pressure winds from his hands, fire up to huge, red, explosive energy balls, and cause tremendous energy explosions. When unleashing his full might, he fire a gigantic blue sphere of destruction.
Finally, he is enormously strong, fast, spry and durable, He can blitz highly fast foes to pummel them with fists and hand chops, and fire devastating waves of pressure in a sword swipe. Being his creation, his sword bypasses immunities to normal weapons and cuts through spells like nothing. Even badly wounded, he was still more than able to wreck the heroes. Still, despite his huge fighting skills, he relies mostly on raw might to overwhelm his foes.
History[]
Creation[]
Chaos Dragon Garv was created with the others around five thousand years before the story, sometime before his liege, the Demon God Ruby Eye Shabranigdo and the Dragon God, Flare Dragon Ceifeed defeated one another: Ceifeed's spirit being scattered and Shabranigdo being divided in seven fragments.
The War of the Dark Lord's Resurrection[]
Over a thousand years before the story, Hellmaster Fibrizo staged a war he spread throughout the word before swarming the lands with demons. His goal was to make the great archmage Lei Magnus fall into despair, to awake the fragment of his liege he discovered sealed in his soul. The newly titled Demon King of the North took command of the demons to start the War of the Dark Lord's Resurrection against the dragons, the worst conflict in history.
At some point, but only in the anime continuity, he witnessed the genocide of Ancient Dragon by Golden Dragons, who feared their power. Seeing his potential, he saved Val, the last survivor, infusing him with his might and turning him to a half-demon. Now remained Valgarv, the young hybrid became his most powerful and devoted vassal.
The war killed countless humans, dwarves, elves, dragons, demons and monsters. The Demon Lords destroyed most of Ceifeed's temples to erase knowledge of Holy Magic (the best weapon against them), before raising the Demon Barrier: a force-field cutting the world in two and negating Holy Magic to weaken dragons.
The war ended without real winner after Lei magnus-Shabranigdo and Garv fought and killed Ragradia, the Dragon Lady of Water. Before expiring, she sealed forever Lei Magnus in the everlasting glaciers of the Kataart Mountains, and permanently fused Garv with a human soul to be reincarnated over and over, hoping to weaken him.
Alas, Garv retained his full power. He betrayed the Demon Lords, and spent the following centuries in hiding, retaining the loyalty of many renegade demons and waging a cold war of sorts. In the anime, Valgarv was kept on the other side of the Demon Barrier, so Garv could only contact him telepathically and had him build his own power base.
Role in the Story[]
Garv enters the fray after being told by his spies that Hellmaster Fibrizo needs the main heroine, the powerful teenage sorceress Lina Inverse, for his plans. As such, Garv orders his servants to kill her before Fibrizo can get a hold of her.
Little did he know that Fibrizo was feeding false intel to his spies, expecting this very reaction. In fact, he wants Garv to threaten her, forcing her to learn the Giga Slave: a spell of sheer devastation drawing power from the Lord of Nightmares, the creator of the universe, using it to destroy the world. Fibrizo borrowed Xellos, Zelas Metallium's enforcer, to secretly protect Lina and guide her to the Claire Bible: the source of all knowledge, so she could fully master the spell.
Seigram the Formless
As Lina and her friends, the master swordsman Gourry Gabriev, the powerful mage warrior Zelgadis Graywords and the mage princess Amelia of Saillune are travelling, they unveil several plots by demons, who start harassing them.
In Atlas City, the demon Seigram the Formless, made a pact to make Halcyform the White, leader of the local Sorcerer's Guild, immortal, to rule the city through him, but the heroes defeat him.
They later go to Amelia's kingdom of Saillune, for her father Prince Regent Philionel is believed dead. (Actually, he foiled a murder attempt and is hiding to unmask the conspirators.) The heroes first suspect Phil's younger brother Christopher, but it was in fact his son Alfred, allied with (or rather manipulated by) two demons named Kanzel and Mazenda. They kill their now useless puppet, but get killed in turn, after revealing that Garv wants Lina dead.
Garv's Priest Raltark
In the novels, Kanzel hires the master assassin Zuma (who appears later in the anime), who is foiled and fuses with Seigram as a vengeance. In Vezendi City, the hero unmask the wealthy merchant Radok Lanzard as Zuuma, and his butler as Garv's Priest Raltark. They kill all their foes, but Raltark escapes.
The heroes get to Gyria City, capital of Dils Kingdom, where the royal marshal Ralshart hires Lina to teach magic to his soldiers. However, he is in fact Garv's General, raising a huge, international army of humans, elves and dragons to kill Lei Magnus-Shabranigdo in the Kataart Mountains. (The previous King having tried, only to fail miserably and get turned into an immortal ever-suffering chunk of flesh.)
Garv's General Ralshart
The heroes foil his plans, but most of the city is destroyed in the battle.
In the anime, Seigram replaces Raltark and Ralshart, gaining a power-boost from Garv. Xellos leads the heroes to the Temple of Sand, where the Claire Bible is recorded on countless lithographs. Lina learns the Giga Slave, including that the slightest miscast will end the world, but Garv barges in.
Hidden from the Demon Lords in this dimension, he asks Xellos about Fibrizo's plan and almost kills Lina. Luckily, the keeper of the temple, a remnant of Ragradia herself, helps them flee.
In both the novels and the anime, the heroes search for the True Claire Bible in the Dragons' Peak. In the novels, Xellos fends off Ralshart and Raltark, until the latter is killed. In the anime, Seigram ambushes them but is killed. Just after Lina gains the Claire Bible's knowledge, Garv returns, ready to end it, badly wounding Xellos who must retreat. He is too powerful for the heroes, but Lina, who refuses to cast the Giga Slave, wounds him with the Ragna Blade spell she just learnt.
As Garv emerges alive, he is struck from behind by Hellmaster Fibrizo himself. Noting that Garv cannot turn back to a pure demon, he remorselessly dusts him, replacing Garv's threat with a much worse one. Still, in the novels, Ralshart joins Fibrizo for revenge. And the next season of the anime has Valgarv as the villain.
Trivia[]
Like his fellow Demon Lords, Chaos Dragon Garv is based on an Arch Demon described in the Ars Goetia, the first chapter of the grimoire The Lesser Key of Salomon, describing seventy-two demons who according to Biblical Lore, were trapped and enslaved by King Salomon. Garv is based on Bune, the twenty-sixth demon and a Grand Duke of Hell, who like him takes the aspect of a three-headed dragon, sometimes with a human head mirroring Garv's fusion with a human. Bune can grant riches and wisdom, while Garv entices greedy people to usurp power in their nations.
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| Slayers Villains | ||
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Deities Shabranigdo's Generals Greater Demons and Major Villains Demon-worshiping cult | ||