Agares

**Among the seventy-two Demon Lords, Agares stands second only to Bael in rank — and to no one at all in raw martial power.** The narrative is blunt about it: the greatest Demon Lord is the 1st-rank Bael, the wisest is the 3rd-rank Vassago, but the *strongest* is the 2nd-rank Agares. She is a battle-god (武神, «бог войны») who scorns magic entirely and fights on pure aura: a single warrior who can hold a battlefield alone, which is precisely why the leaders of the three great factions are always reckoned only 'second' to her. In the translation she is rendered female — light-blue-haired, perpetually wearing a faint smile, with cold red pupils glinting behind her laughing eyes, and a mocking, lazy manner that hides a maniac's ferocity.

**Crescent Alliance and the cynic's creed (ch 158-159).** Agares marches in the 8th Crescent Alliance under the banner of conquering the human continent, but she does not believe in the cause for a moment. Her creed is pure nihilism: *all the demons who truly wanted to conquer the continent died a thousand years ago; we are fine as long as we can feed the ones who follow us.* She fights lazily, hoarding her legion, and openly mocks the idealist Barbatos for still believing in the old dream of conquest. When the Habsburg Empire abandons its own capital under a scorched-earth policy, Agares — who once chased an empty Kiev across the snow in the 5th Alliance — is the first to refuse the bait and demand her duchy's worth of land instead.

**The rebellion (ch 222-233).** With the conquest won and the old empire carved up, a three-way power struggle erupts in Habsburg between Barbatos (Plains Faction), Agares, and Gamigin. Agares plays it brilliantly for a creature reputed to be all muscle and no brains: she pretends to delegate her authority to Gamigin, then launches a sudden invasion of the undefended territories while the Plains Faction is away in the demon realm, taking Vindobona and more. She wins the first battle outright — but her army is held together by nothing except her own overwhelming presence, and Dantalion grasps the flaw at once: *Agares cannot afford even a single defeat.*

**The fall (ch 232-235).** Dantalion spends his last favors and debts to pull the Mountain and Neutral Factions onto Barbatos's side — the first time in two thousand years that all three factions move as one. In the climactic duel Agares blocks Barbatos's reaper's scythe with bare aura two centimetres from her throat and shatters six of her Death Knights' black swords; but caught between the combined factions and a surprise rear-assault by Sitri's army, her host is annihilated and she cannot be taken alive. Agares and Gamigin are made the sacrificial lambs of a new 'age of harmony' — though Agares fixes Dantalion with her narrow eyes and names him exactly: a parasite who never steps forward himself, but drags in other powers to solve his problems.

**Exile and the human alliance (ch 273-300).** Branded the criminal who struck down his own kind, Agares flees to the human world and entrenches in the west of the Frank Empire, then forges a secret pact with Queen Henrietta of Bretagne — *the strongest monarch of the human world and the strongest monarch of the demon world, allied.* As Henrietta's guest-general he becomes the named objective of Dantalion's entire Bretagne campaign: Laura de Farnese's army harries the Bretons into a month-long fighting retreat with no pitched battle, until Henrietta's host is cornered at the port of Le Havre.

**Death (ch 300-302).** When Henrietta tries to buy an honourable surrender by ambushing and beheading Agares to hand over his head, Agares survives both the ambush and the knights' onslaught — a wounded tiger covered in grievous wounds. In the final hunt every great fighter of the army converges; Daisy, bearing the Sword of Bael, slips behind the distracted Agares and severs his halberd together with his arm — the decisive blow. Captured at last and then executed, Agares is remembered as a grand sinner who, like Bael, sacrificed his own people out of sheer obsession. The army of Demon Lords had lost both Bael and Agares; the humans had lost Henrietta; only Dantalion truly won.

Agares hides a maniac's ferocity behind a lazy, perpetual smile — cold red pupils glint behind her laughing eyes, and her tongue is as mocking as her halberd is heavy. She is a thoroughgoing cynic and nihilist: she believes the demons' old dream of continental conquest died out a thousand years ago, and she fights only to feed those who follow her, hoarding her legion and refusing to bleed for anyone's cause. That same self-interest curdles into obsession — she will sacrifice her own kind to take what she wants, which is exactly why the survivors brand her a grand sinner. Sharp enough to read a scorched-earth trap before Barbatos can, she nonetheless leads by sheer presence rather than statecraft, so her host is only ever as stable as her own unbroken aura.

Agares is, simply, the strongest Demon Lord — a battle-god who fights on pure aura and disdains magic entirely. Her aura is so dense it stops a reaper's scythe two centimetres from her throat by sheer pressure, shatters black Death-Knight swords, and cracks the very ground she stands on into drought-fissures. Wielding a halberd from the back of a giant wolf, she can hold a whole battlefield single-handed, which is why she is counted, with Bael, as a power beyond the three factions. Her one weakness is structural, not personal: an army bound together by her presence alone cannot survive her first defeat — and in the end it takes the combined Plains, Mountain and Neutral factions, a rear-assault by Sitri, and finally Daisy with the Sword of Bael to bring her down.

Agares is the great martial obstacle of the middle arcs — the one enemy whose strength cannot simply be out-schemed and must instead be ground down. Her rebellion forces Dantalion to spend his hardest-won capital (his last favor from Sitri, Marbas's debt) to unite all three factions for the first time in two thousand years, and her defeat cements his place as the broker between them. Her exile then sets the stakes of the Bretagne campaign, where the human-demon alliance of Henrietta and Agares becomes the named target of an entire war. Above all she is the mirror Dantalion cannot fully deny: when she calls him a parasite, and when she is condemned as a sinner who sacrificed her own kind for obsession, the story quietly invites the reader to weigh how little, in truth, he differs from her victims.