Babolat

"Babolat"

- expressing his fear of Kayblis.

About
Babolat is a Dark Lord affiliated with the Kayblis Faction and a major antagonist in Rance X.

A former Oni, Babolat was transformed into a Dark Lord at an unknown point in the GI Era. Upon becoming a Dark Lord, his already large body began to continuously grow in size, causing him to steadily become gigantic. For whatever reason, his brain was exempt from this expansion, leading to it taking up progressively less space inside of his ever-swelling skull cavity and his intelligence plummeting in turn. Over time, Babolat's brain became too small for him to effectively control his body, to the point where even the simple act of moving began to be a mentally-straining task for him.

In the year GI0420, the Demon King Gi, at the pressuring of his subordinates, declared war on the Holy Magic Sect, the most powerful and prominent Human civilization in existence at the time. Harnessing powerful magic, the Holy Magic Sect constructed Toushin, mechanical warriors of unbelievable power, to fight against the forces of the Monster Realm. During the conflict, known as the Dark Lord War, Babolat fought against one such warrior, Toushin Zeta, in a long and arduous battle. While Zeta was incapable of damaging Babolat due to the protection of the Invincibility Field, he was able to utilize his own towering size to effectively counter the Dark Lord's attacks.

Babolat's battle with Zeta continued for seven years until, in a last ditch effort to win, Zeta overloaded the mana battery of his Toushin Toshi, producing a massive explosion. While the attack failed to directly damage Babolat, it succeeded in burying him beneath the large amounts of rubble it produced, trapping him underground and incapacitating him for the remainder of the war. Though Zeta was deactivated as a result of destroying his mana battery, the battle was nonetheless viewed as a major victory by the Holy Magic Sect, resulting in several more toushins being called into production.

While trapped beneath the earth, Babolat's body continued to grow until, in the year GI0762, it became large enough to break through the rock that he had been buried under. As the Dark Lord War had ended over 300 years prior to his recovery, he simply returned to the Monster Realm and did not engage further in any kind of fighting.

In the year GI1015, Gi named Kurusu Miki, a human girl from an Alternate Dimension, as his successor as Demon King, kidnapping her from her home in order to pass on his blood to her. Before Miki was able to fully awaken to the power of the Demon King, however, she was rescued by her boyfriend Ogawa Kentarou, who was able to temporarily stop her transformation through the use of Hirami Lemons. With Gi having allowed himself to be killed by Kentarou, and Miki refusing to accept the position of Demon King, the Monster Realm was left without a leader and thrown into a state of civil war. The war was fought between Hornet, Gi's daughter who desired to follow through with her father’s wishes and embrace Miki as the new leader of monsterkind, and Kayblis, the oldest and most powerful Dark Lord who desired to become the Demon King himself and wage war against humanity. Babolat initially chose to side with Hornet, but was quickly pressured into switching sides by Kayblis, who he feared greatly.

In the year LP0007, the Kayblis Faction finally emerged victorious from the War of the Factions, causing Kayblis to be recognized as the ruler of the Monster Realm in the absence of the Demon King. Immediately following his victory, Kayblis ordered a full scale invasion of the Human Realm, sparking the beginning of the 2nd Dark Lord War. During the war, Babolat was tasked with invading the Helman Republic alongside the Elite Dark Lord Kesselring and the Great Monster General LeMay.

Due to his cowardly nature and limited mental capacity, Babolat was largely unmotivated and oblivious to his mission of conquering Helman, and was instead more focused on the simple acts of eating and sleeping. His subordinates were able to accommodate his cravings by placing him under a strict schedule, wherein he would be ordered to move across key points of Helman's territory before being allowed a nap and a meal. Humans captured by the Monster Army near Babolat's location were enslaved and placed into one of two groups designed to assist in maintaining his upkeep: a "cooking crew", which helped pile together the massive amounts of food needed to create his daily meals, and a "cleanup crew", which helped clean up any excrement he produced. These captured humans were worked tirelessly, with many of them dying from exhaustion and having their corpses incorporated into Babolat's meals.

In spite of the simplicity of Babolat's routine, his gargantuan size nonetheless made him an unstoppable menace to the people of Helman, as it allowed him to cause widespread destruction with every step he took. With no means of being able to effectively defend against the humongous Dark Lard, let alone damage him, the Helman Army could do little more than evacuate the country's cities before he passed over them and then attempt to retake the territory from the Monster Army after he had moved far enough away.

During the events of Rance X, the forces of the Human Realm were, through various circumstances, formally united under the warrior Rance to create the United Human Army. Due to possessing the Dark Sword Chaos, one of the only weapons capable of penetrating the invincibility field, Rance was able to form a specialized squad made up of humanity’s finest warriors designed to fight against and defeat each of the Dark Lords invading human territories. Titled the Dark Lord Extermination Squad, this group allowed humanity to begin to mount a more effective resistance against the Monster Army, providing hope in a seemingly hopeless situation.

Upon first arriving in Helman to assist in the war effort, Rance chose to prioritize defeating Babolat over Kesselring due to the Elite Dark Lord having been an infrequent participant in the Monster Army's campaign up to that point. Rather than devise a plan of attack beforehand, Rance chose to rush straight to Babolat's location, rationalizing that he would be able to better understand how to take down the Dark Lord after fighting him head-on. After a somewhat lengthy journey through waves of the Monster Army's forces, the Dark Lord Extermination Squad was able to finally reach the giant, whose size made him unaware of their presence. The group attempted to fight Babolat by attacking his foot, but were unable to deal anywhere close to enough damage to defeat him before he moved away from them, crying in pain about his foot hurting.

Following their initial failure, Rance and his allies returned to the Helman capital of Lang Bau to create a plan to battle Babolat more effectively. Noting the Dark Lord's disproportionately low pain tolerance relative to his size, Rance speculated that Babolat was actually quite weak, leading him to resolve to become a giant himself in order to defeat him easily. While Rance was initially met with skepticism for his plan, he was informed by the Dark Witch Miracle Tou that it was possible to brew a potion capable of transforming a person into a giant for three minutes, but that it required a rare 2-4 mushroom as an ingredient. As the 2-4 mushroom only grew in the harsh Tsungus Highlands of northern Helman, the party was forced to make a detour away from the battlefield in order to search for it.

After reaching the Tsungus Highlands, Rance's party was able to acquire a 2-4 mushroom and create the potion needed to temporarily turn a person into a giant. Prior to drinking it himself, Rance, cautious about the side effects, successfully persuaded Kentou Kanami into drinking it. While the potion worked without a problem, Kanami's clothing did not grow in size with her, causing her naked body to project itself across all of Helman. Unwilling to fight Babolat while naked, Rance called off the plan, seemingly rendering the entire trip pointless.

While on the way back to Lang Bau, Rance observed Babolat eating one of his meals in the distance. Noticing the giant's distinct tendency to push the plate containing his food directly up to his face, Rance immediately created a second plan to defeat him. Believing the Dark Lord's face to be more vulnerable than his lower body, Rance proposed to hide among the food on one of his meal plates in order to get an opportunity to attack it. While the strategy was seen as incredibly dangerous by even Rance himself, the group agreed to it and snuck onto the site where Babolat's food was being prepared.

Shortly after situating themselves amid the food on one of the many large plates, the Dark Lord Extermination Squad was lifted directly toward Babolat's face by the Dark Lord himself and began attacking it as quickly as possible. After receiving a significant amount of damage, Babolat began to bleed, causing him a great amount of pain and making him aware of the presence of enemies hiding within his food. While he attempted to rid himself of the threat by tipping his plate over, Rance was able to successfully jump off of it in time to deliver a powerful Rance Attack all across his face, causing the giant to topple backward onto the ground unconscious. Before hitting the ground, Babolat's chin was sharply kicked by Rance, forcing his head to tilt back and land directly on top of a large portion of his own troops while missing the nearby human slaves completely.

Despite successfully incapacitating Babolat, Rance's strategy did not deal enough damage to kill him, causing his body to remain intake even after losing consciousness. With no other choice available to him, Rance was forced to tunnel through the Dark Lord's massive chest using Chaos until he was able to reach and pierce through his heart. After several hours of long and disgusting work, Rance was eventually able to find and destroy Babolat's heart, reducing the titan to an ordinary-sized Demonic Blood Soul in the process. While Rance found a hero's welcome waiting for him upon returning to Lang Bau following Babolat's defeat, the experience had left him drenched in foul-smelling blood and with deep mental scarring, causing him to choose to take a bath and go to sleep rather than celebrate his victory as he normally would. Though the status of Babolat's blood soul following his death is unclear, it is presumed to have been placed under the custody of the AL Church as many others were some time following the conclusion of the war.

If the Dark Lord Extermination Squad is able to successfully deal enough damage to Babolat's foot during its first encounter with him, he will topple over in pain and be knocked unconscious, allowing Rance to dig to his heart and kill him much earlier. While nothing about this version of events is directly contradicted by anything shown in Rance X: Part 2, it is still assumed to be non-canon due to it being part of the process required to revive Kesselring, which is suggested to not have canonically occured.

During the events of the non-canonical Kichikuou Rance, Babolat assists the rest of the Kayblis Faction in decisively defeating Hornet and seizing control of the Monster Realm. After declaring war on the humans, Kayblis orders Babolat, along with RedEye, to invade the Human Realm through Helman. Unlike the other invading Dark Lords, Babolat is not accompanied by an army during his invasion, instead simply using his massive body to cause large amounts of destruction.

If any one of Barres Province, Arlcoate Marius, Ex Banquet, Cream Ganoblade or Gengorou Shinoda is deployed in battle against Babolat, they will each independently determine that the most efficient way to defeat him would be by building a massive pitfall to trap him within, and will send the strategy to Rance to consider. If Rance authorizes the strategy, he will gain the ability commission a construction company to dig a pitfall into any of Helman's territories. If Babolat moves through a territory containing a pitfall, he will fall into it, causing all but his head to become trapped underground, incapacitating him in the process. Following this, Babolat's head will be buried by various soldiers of the Leazas Army, who eagerly begin discussing the possibility of Rance appointing the spot as a national monument.

If Babolat is defeated through conventional combat rather than the pitfall strategy, he will fall to the ground in pain and be confronted directly by Rance, who calls for his body to be incinerated. After several days of constant burning, his body is finally successfully destroyed, with his demonic blood soul appearing amid the ashes of the fire.

Personality and Appearance
Babolat has the appearance of a blue-skinned oni with a muscular build, red eyes, several jagged fangs with two particularly large fangs sticking out from either end of his upper jaw, and elongated, discolored earlobes. He possesses a large pair of horns emerging from his forehead, as well as several similar-looking spikes along his back. After transforming into a Dark Lord, Babolat's body began to grow to enormous proportions, seemingly with no limit. By the time of the 2nd Dark Lord War, he stood at a staggering 57 meters tall, causing him to tower over mountain ranges and be fully visible from Lang Bau while standing hundreds of kilometers away from it. Prior to becoming a Dark Lord, Babolat was said to have been around two meters tall and slightly larger than his fellow former oni Dark Lord Lexington. Babolat does not wear any kind of clothing, which is viewed as disgusting by several characters due to his great size making it very easy to see his genitals.

While Babolat's physical appearance is largely identical to his canonical portrayal in Kichikuou Rance, he is significantly smaller, at only 22 meters.

Babolat is widely known throughout the Monster Realm as the least intelligent Dark Lord. As a strange side effect of his tremendous growth, his brain does not increase in size with the rest of his body, causing him to become increasingly less coherent the larger he becomes. By the time of the 2nd Dark Lord War, Babolat had become incapable of speaking in complete sentences, instead communicating mostly through grunts, and seemed to have largely lost any perception of the world around him outside of his immediate cravings for food and sleep. He requires constant supervision from his subordinates to ensure that he does not harm himself or their allies, and needs instructions to be repeated to him several times before showing any kind of understanding of them.

Along with his low intelligence, Babolat is also very cowardly and timid. This cowardliness causes him to fear any kind of physical confrontation, to the point of being absolutely terrified upon finally noticing Rance attacking him despite the human warrior being much smaller than he was. Babolat also seems to have an extremely low threshold for pain as a side effect of his fearfulness, as he ran away in agony upon receiving a light amount of damage to his foot. He is particularly afraid of Kayblis, and was pushed into defecting onto his side during the War of the Factions simply after being threatened by him.

Due to his enormous size, Babolat requires a tremendous amount of food to be kept fed. His appetite rivals that of Galtia, a Dark Lord made legendary by his gluttony, to the point where the combined cost of their food expenses accounted for half of the Kayblis Faction's total resources. However, unlike Galtia, who is notorious for his extremely discerning and robust culinary palate, Babolat will quite literally shovel anything, from raw or rotten food to dead bodies, down his throat so long as it is in large enough quantities. During the 2nd Dark Lord War, a special organization of captured humans was created for the sole purpose of keeping him fed, with countless hours of backbreaking labor being devoted to piling enough food together to feed Babolat for a scant few seconds.

Before becoming a Dark Lord, Babolat was said to have possessed an entirely different character from the one that he is known for. Where he is now oblivious and fearful he was once bold and outgoing, taking great pride in his strength and enjoying the thrill of fighting. Because of this, it is assumed that his current personality is the result of his ever-dwindling intelligence and not an accurate reflection of who he truly is.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Monster Generals that served under Babolat during the 2nd Dark Lord War were shown to have been very loyal towards him. Due to his limited mental capacity, these Monster Generals acted much more like caregivers toward him than they did subordinates, supervising his meal and nap times and patiently tolerating his tendency to ignore orders unless they were continuously repeated to him. Babolat's subordinates were shown to have been very distressed when they observed him being in great pain during Rance's battle against him, indicating that they genuinely cared for his well-being.

Babolat is portrayed as being marginally more lucid during his appearance in Kichikuou Rance, where he is shown to be consistently more aware of his surroundings and capable of speaking with greater fluency. He is also shown to be more consciously malicious, as he is seen deriving great pleasure from destroying buildings and spreading destruction. These slight personality differences can likely be attributed to his smaller size, which, by the logic of his power, would make him comparatively intelligent relative to his appearance in Rance X.

In Kichikuou Rance, Babolat is shown to be on good terms with Galtia, with the two bonding over song and frequently fighting together on the frontlines during the civil war in the Monster Realm. Despite this, no reference is made to their relationship in either character's following appearances, making it unclear if it still exists in canon.

Abilities
After transforming into a Dark Lord, Babolat acquired the mysterious power to continuously grow in size over time, at a rate of about 20 centimeters per year. Once a mere two meters tall, his body has expanded nearly thirty-fold across five hundred years and shows no signs of stopping.

The majority of Babolat's power is derived from his increasingly massive size. At a current height of 57 meters, the simple act of moving from one place to another is enough for him to crush armies, topple castles and shake the earth. The indentation of his footsteps can create enormous chasms while his urine can flood entire valleys. In addition, his enormous body grants him an unmatched level of defensive power, as even the strongest weapons are largely incapable of damaging him enough to produce significant results. For these reasons, conventional combat against Babolat is all but impossible, with Cream Ganoblade going as far as to describe attempting to fight him directly as being like "trying to kill a man using a toothpick".

In combat, Babolat utilizes crude attacks such as random flailing and body presses to attempt to crush his enemies. These attacks, while devastating, are generally slow and inaccurate. In addition, due to both his cowardly nature and general obliviousness to the world around him, Babolat rarely ever actually fights directly, and instead mostly defeats his foes by unknowingly stepping on them. As Babolat's body grows in size, it becomes increasingly harder for him to control his motor skills, making him become even more sluggish and poor at fighting.

Beyond his gigantic body, Babolat lacks any particular skills of note. Possessing a Level Cap of 100, which is among the lowest Level caps of any Dark Lord shown in the Rance Series, a current level of only 19 and no Skill Levels to speak of, he is actually rather weak for someone of his stature. While these apparent weaknesses are almost completely neutralized by his size, they are still indicative of his relatively low fighting ability compared to other Dark Lords. This was noted by Rance during his battle against him in Rance X, where he speculated that he would be able to defeat Babolat easily if he were similarly large.

Trivia

 * Babolat came in 48th place in the "Males" category of the Rance X Popularity Poll, tying with his fellow Dark Lord Pi-R.
 * An item known as the "Babolat Ring" appears in the game Kaeru nyo Panyo~n. The ring grants its wearer 70 additional health points, the largest of any item in the game, in reference to its namesake's great durability.
 * During the development of Rance X, Babolat was briefly considered to be redesigned to more closely resemble the iconic film kaiju Godzilla. This was eventually dropped in favor of having his design be virtually identical to what it was in Kichikuou Rance.
 * At 100, Babolat has the lowest level cap of all of the Dark Lords that participated in the War of the Factions. Similarly, he is also the only Dark Lord to have participated in the civil war to lack any kind of skill levels.
 * Babolat is the tallest organic being with a known height in the series, with only Eroyac ALV, the artificial intelligence contained within the Hyper Building, being known to stand taller.
 * The kana that make up Babolat's name (バボラ) can be rearranged to spell the word 'bakamono' (バカモノ), a term used to describe a moronic person.
 * Babolat and Medusa are the only Dark Lords fought during a Dark Lord Extermination mission in Rance X that cannot be recruited outside of new game plus bonuses.
 * Babolat is given the nickname of "The Dimwitted Demolisher" (愚鈍な蹂躙者) in the opening sequence of Rance X.
 * Prior to the release of Rance X, Babolat was stated to have been killed in the explosion caused by Toushin Zeta overloading its mana battery in the first Dark Lord War, only to resurrect from his blood soul roughly 300 years later. This was eventually changed to him simply being buried alive for the same duration of time, likely to make it so that no Dark Lords were successfully killed during the war.
 * In the rough outline of Rance X's story included within the game's script, the description of the scene where Hubert Lipton, Sanada Tourin, and Rolex Gadras meet with each other during the operation to defeat Babolat includes a note reminding the writing staff to "foreshadow the pitfall strategy". While this implies that Babolat was planned to be dealt with through the use of a pitfall in a way reminiscent of his appearance in Kichikuou Rance at some point during Rance X's development, no other mention is made of pitfalls at any point in the draft, and the summary of Babolat's defeat is identical to what it is in the final game, suggesting that this idea was scrapped before the story went into its final design stages.