KD

"KD"

- introducing himself to a visitor.

About
King Dragon (キング・ ドラゴン, kingu doragon), better known by his nickname KD, is a mysterious, cat-like being who wanders blithely across The Continent, providing unusual quizzes to all who encounter him.

KD's true identity is none other than Magiihoa, the king of the Dragons; mighty beings which once served as Humanity's precursor as the Protagonist Race of the Planner Scenario. Dragon society was structured around a strength-based hierarchy, with the strongest dragons reigning over the weaker members of their race. As the dragon king, Magiihoa, a ruby dragon, was recognized as the single most powerful dragon in existence, granting him absolute authority over all others of his kind.

During the KuKu Era, Magiihoa led the rest of his race in a war against the Demon King Kkulf Kkulf, an extraordinarily powerful creature that existed exclusively to bring suffering to the races of the Continent. The war between the Demon King and dragonkind waged on for several centuries until the year Kuku2014, where a sneak attack performed by the dragon Avel finally succeeded in felling Kkulf Kkulf, who had been weakened substantially by the millennia of endless fighting. While delivering the finishing blow, Avel inadvertently became coated in a portion of Kkulf Kkulf's blood, transforming himself into the Demon King in the process.

Following Kkulf Kkulf's defeat, Magiihoa, who did not perceive Avel to be a threat to his rule, made no effort to continue fighting against the Demon King. This attempted neutrality ended abruptly in the year AV0011, when Avel kidnapped Camilla, the sole living female dragon, and effectively neutralized the entire species' sole means of reproduction. Infuriated, Magiihoa proclaimed Avel to have violated the sacred rules of dragonkind by claiming breeding rights over a female without first defeating the dragon king in a duel, causing him to once again declare war against the Demon King in retaliation.

The war between Avel and dragonkind, entitled the “Final War”, continued until the year AV0056, where Avel was critically injured. Realizing the possibility of another Demon King being created in the wake of Avel’s defeat, Magiihoa refrained from killing his former underling, and instead opted to seal him within a Dark Prison from which he would never be able to escape. With the Demon King completely incapacitated, Magiihoa succeeded in bringing about an era of absolute peace onto the world. Uniting the other races of the Continent under his banner over a period of three years, he founded the nation of Tron, which he presided over with majesty and wisdom.

In the year AV0060, just one year after Tron’s foundation, Ludo-Rathowm, the creator God responsible for the Continent’s existence, grew bored with the permanent peace that Magiihoa had created. In order to curb Ludo-Rathowm’s boredom, the dragons were called to be purged from the world entirely and replaced as the protagonist race. Over the course of 700 years, the dragons of the Continent were relentlessly hunted by armies of Angel Knights, causing all but a select few to be slaughtered. Taking the form of a humanoid cat, Magiihoa was able to conceal his power from the angel knights, allowing him to miraculously survive the purge and live on to see humanity rise to the position of the dragons’ successor as protagonist race.

After the age of dragons had ended, Magiihoa remained in his cat form, seemingly rejecting all traces of his previous identity in the process. Choosing to go almost exclusively by the name "KD", an abbreviation of his title, he largely abandoned his duties as the king of the dragons in favor of wandering the world giving quizzes to every human that he encountered. Throughout his travels, KD also collected countless rare items, which he gathered together into a large sack. On the rare occasions when he returned to Rising Dragon Mountain, the location that the majority of the Continent's remaining dragons had claimed as their home, he would eagerly wait at the peak for adventurers talented enough to brave the mountain's many dangers, who he would reward with an item from his collection if they were able to successfully complete one of his quizzes.

As time passed, KD grew to become a rather infamous figure among adventurers as word of his tendency to obnoxiously appear before them within dungeons to obstruct their progress until they completed one of his quizzes began to spread. All records of his accomplishments as Magiihoa were eventually lost to history, causing his reputation as the riddle cat to eventually fully supplant his status as the hero who once saved the world from the Demon King.

At some point during the GL Era, KD witnessed British, the former leader of the famous adventuring party the Legendary Five, selling a golden sunflower statue that he had collected from the Ancient Ruins, the largest dungeon in the world, to a merchant. Recognizing the statue and its true purpose as one of the five keys needed to gain entry into the Realm of the Gods, KD tracked it across multiple owners, hoping to eventually claim it for himself. KD finally obtained the statue as a reward for saving its then-current owner, a young woman, from danger.

During the events of Rance 02, KD appeared before the adventurer Rance while he traveled through the pyramid dungeon of Mill Yorks. KD refused to allow Rance to pass until he was able to successfully answer three questions. While Rance agreed to take part in the quiz, boasting that his enormous I.Q. would allow him to complete it with ease, he was instantly baffled by the first question, which asked him to give the name of the tallest mountain in the world. Rather than admit his loss, Rance instead attempted to beat KD at his own game by challenging him to a quiz, demanding that he be allowed to pass through if the riddle cat was unable to answer any one of three questions asked to him. KD agreed to the proposition, amused by the idea of being the one taking the quiz rather than giving it for a change, and effortlessly answered each question.

Frustrated by his repeated losses, Rance presented KD with a surprise fourth question asking how it would feel to be slashed by his sword. KD replied that it would hurt a lot, prompting Rance to attack him in order to test the validity of his response. KD instantly collapsed onto the ground dead after being struck by Rance’s sword, but returned to life seconds later muttering dejectedly that he had answered incorrectly, and that the correct answer was in fact that it would hurt so much that he’d die. Having technically won the challenge, Rance attempted to move on into the next room, but was once again stopped by KD, still fallen on the ground, who demanded for a rematch. Rance obliged his request and asked how it would feel to be hit on the head with his sword, to which KD responded that it would hurt so much that he would faint, causing Rance to knock him unconscious to prove that the answer was correct, finally ridding him of the nuisance.

KD appeared before Rance again during the events of Rance IV, after he accidentally pushed his slave Sill Plain into a deep pit while exploring the depths of Toushin Upsilon. Emerging from within the pit, KD presented Rance with Sill and a blue doppelganger and asked him which of the two he had dropped down it. While Rance struggled with the choice, even briefly attempting to bargain his way into getting both, he eventually answered honestly and claimed the original Sill as his own. After returning Sill to him, KD warned Rance to never lose her again before disappearing into thin air.

During the events of Rance Quest, Rance was motivated to climb to the top of Rising Dragon Mountain after reading a sign claiming that no person had ever successfully done so. Upon reaching the top, he and his allies were greeted by KD, who challenged them to answer a three question quiz in exchange for a rare item, warning that he would launch them off the mountain if they got even a single question wrong. The party successfully managed to answer all of KD's questions, who upheld his promise by granting them an item from his collection before leaving them alone to finish their expedition. After scaling Rising Dragon Mountain once, Rance has the option of attempting to challenge it several more times, with KD giving him a new rare item each additional time he reaches the top and finishes a quiz.

During the events of Rance X, Rance and the forces of the Dark Lord Extermination Squad traveled to Rising Dragon Mountain while attempting to subdue the Dark Lord Pi-R in order to reach a point high enough to destroy the satellite cannon that the genius Dark Lord had programmed to target Rance's heat signature. After destroying the cannon, Rance has the option of climbing further up the mountain to its peak, where he will once again encounter KD. While KD attempts to give the group a quiz in exchange for a rare item, he is immediately stopped by Rance, who chastises him for being unable to read the air and understand the gravity of their situation, and demands that he give them an item without a quiz. Despite his disappointment, KD obliges and offers the party a choice between three rare items, with one of them being the sunflower statue he had acquired from British centuries before.

If Rance chooses the sunflower statue, the Darksword Chaos, the Lightblade Nikkou and the priestess Café Artful, three former members of the Legendary Five who now served as part of the Dark Lord Extermination Squad, all react with shock at seeing the item again. Surprised by their strong response, Rance admits that he merely assumed that the statue would sell for a high price, to which KD responds that it was invaluable due to being a key to understanding the secrets of the world. Rance attempts to inquire Chaos about the statue, but is met with silence, with the sword nervously stating that it wasn’t worth going into.

In the year RA0001, one year after the conclusion of the 2nd Dark Lord War, the followers of the recently-appointed Demon King Rance began construction on a new residence for their lord near the summit of Rising Dragon Mountain. Following the completion of the building, which became known as Amazing Castle, the once-unfrequented mountain became the site for several climactic encounters between the forces of humanity and monsterkind. While KD was mostly indifferent to his new neighbors, he was often bothered by the loud commotions that now regularly occurred beneath him.

In the non-canonical Kichikuou Rance, KD can be visited if a unit travels to the top of Rising Dragon Mountain. If Rance is selected as the unit and has acquired knowledge of the whereabouts of the five golden statues responsible for sealing the door to the Gods' Realm by speaking with British, he will demand that KD give him the sunflower statue that he possesses, which KD agrees to under the condition that he first complete a quiz. Should Rance successfully manage to answer all three questions of the quiz, KD will hand the statue to him without issue and cheerfully wander off elsewhere. Contrarily, if Rance incorrectly answers one of the questions, KD will exhale to create a powerful cyclone to blow him off of the mountain, forcing him to climb it once again to reattempt the quiz.

Personality and Appearance
KD has the appearance of a cartoonishly humanoid cat with a tall and lanky build, grey fur, large yellow eyes and an expression that is seemingly always contorted into a beaming smile. KD's clothing consists of a red suit with a blue bow tie and large white gloves. In his later appearances, an image of Magiihoa can be seen within the inner lining of his suit. On occasion, KD carries with him a large picket sign with the words "KD QUIZ" and a simplistic drawing of a cat written on it, likely in an effort to advertise his services.

As Magiihoa, KD was a large quadrupedal dragon with dark red scales, black horns and burning yellow eyes. He was said to have been a ruby dragon; a particularly rare subset of the species.

A cheerful and carefree individual, KD derives no greater pleasure from life than from giving trivia quizzes to others, and has devoted much of his later years to wandering across the Continent to do exactly that. As he has lived for longer than nearly every other being in the world, he has an abundant knowledge of the Continent and all that inhabit it, allowing the questions that make up these quizzes to cover a very wide breadth of topics. In spite of this, he is poor at gauging the difficulty of his questions, which results in them generally being laughably easy and his quizzes to in turn feel tedious rather than entertaining.

KD is a natural showman, and delivers the same set of well-rehearsed lines to all who he gives quizzes to, regardless of whether or not he has already spoken to them before. He rarely ever strays from this script, and will quickly reorient the conversation back towards his quizzes if a person attempts to derail it. These qualities, combined with the intrusive nature of his appearances, cause him to be surprisingly obstinate, to the point where many veteran adventurers dread encountering him in dungeons due to his insistence on blocking their progress until they are able to complete one of his quizzes.

Outside of quiz-giving, KD is a lackadaisical being who cares little for anything and has no real ambitions or goals. Despite his title as Dragon King, he rarely ever makes any attempt at leading his people, and shows outright indifference to serious topics such as the world being plunged into a state of total war. This apathy agitates many of KD's subjects, who find his behavior to be unbecoming of a king and wish that he would exert more effort toward guiding dragonkind into the future.

KD was said to have possessed a strikingly different character during his time as Magiihoa. The sole creature in history who succeeded in creating a lasting peace on the Continent, Magiihoa was celebrated by his people a wise and majestic ruler who possessed both the charisma needed to lead others and the insight needed to create a sustainable society for them. While valorous and militant, uniting the dragons and the other races of the world through overwhelming force, he was not at all reckless, and avoided entering into conflicts unless he believed that doing so was absolutely necessary. This outstanding leadership is what allowed the dragons to successfully rise against the almighty Kkulf Kkulf, one of the single greatest feats ever accomplished by the protagonist race.

While KD's radical shift in behavior from his time as Magiihoa can be quickly written off as mere eccentricity, the truth is considerably more complex. Having fought against impossible odds to unite the Continent, triumph over two consecutive Demon Kings and bring about an era of world peace, only to have all of his accomplishments immediately ripped away from him by the forces of the gods, he is one of the only mortal creatures in existence that possesses an understanding of the protagonist race's true purpose as a fleeting source of entertainment for an omnipotent being. Because of this, he has concluded that attempting to alter the state of the world in any way is a futile effort, and has near-totally detached himself from reality as a means of coping. The slapdash quizzes that he imposes on others darkly parody this outlook, with their frivolity being meant as a reflection of the pointlessness of existence.

KD is said to have a strong friendship with the Hanny King, another irreverent monarch who indulges in many similar bizarre hobbies. In contrast, he is also said to share a mutual grudge with the Devil King Rathowm, possibly due to KD's nihilistic apathy conflicting with Rathowm's dream of one day overthrowing his creator. KD is never shown interacting with either character directly, however, making the full extent of his relationships with them unclear.

Due to his previous identity as Magiihoa, KD is assumed to share some form of connection with the Elite Dark Lord Camilla, who served as the dragon king's exclusive breeding partner following the sudden destruction of all other female dragons prior to her eventual abduction and transformation into a Dark Lord by Avel. Despite never being shown interacting, both characters are listed among the other's bonds in their Rance X character cards, suggesting that this connection is indeed true. Notably, the description of Camilla's naked card in the same game mentions that she was forced to copulate with the dragon king from the moment that she was born, indicating an unsavory facet of KD's personality that is otherwise not suggested anywhere else.

Abilities
Due to his enigmatic nature and fleeting appearances, the full extent of KD's power is difficult to gauge. There is little doubt, however, that he is an extraordinarily capable being. He is known to possess the Dragon Lv3 Skill Level, granting him a level of potential that transcends the rest of his species, which on their own naturally maintain a class of power that far exceeds all other races on the Continent, implying that he is one of the most powerful non-divine beings in existence. He displayed the full extent of this talent throughout his time as Magiihoa, where he led the rest of dragonkind to victory against both Kkulf Kkulf, the strongest Demon King to have ever existed, and Avel, Kkulf Kkulf's immediate predecessor as Demon King, through a combination of stupendous power and wisdom. Following his victory against Avel, Magiihoa ushered in an era of genuine peace that required godly intervention to end, indicating that he was an outstanding ruler both on and off the battlefield.

Outside of raw strength and charisma, KD is notably able to transform his body into a form resembling a humanoid cat. This smaller form is stated to exert significantly less energy than his dragon form, allowing him to conserve his great power as well as conceal it from others. Though ostensibly weaker in this form, KD still displays a variety of impressive abilities while transformed into it, including creating gale force winds simply by exhaling slightly, breathing ferocious fire of much greater intensity than that of a normal-sized dragon, levitating midair above a bottomless pit, generating an identical duplicate of a living human being, and seemingly resurrecting from the dead instantaneously upon being struck down. In his sole playable appearance in Rance X, KD possesses significantly higher offensive and defensive values than almost any other character, surpassed by a slim margin only by the Supreme Dark Lord Hornet and the Hero Arios Theoman, further suggesting that even in this state he is far stronger than almost any other living being on the Continent.

Somewhat notably, KD is listed as having two different but similarly unconventional Level Caps in both of the instances where his personal statistics have been given, with his profile in the Kichikuou Rance guide book giving his level cap as the puzzling value of "0" and his profile in Rance X simply listing it as "???". What either of these are meant to imply regarding the state of his Soul and the limits of his potential is not entirely clear.

Along with his physical abilities, KD is an astoundingly intelligent and knowledgeable individual. As one of the most long-lived beings on the Continent, he has steadily developed an intimate knowledge of the world and all that inhabit it, including well-kept information such as the means through which mortal beings can enter into the Gods' Realm and personal details about complete strangers. KD has no interest in using this wisdom for any purpose beyond crafting questions for his quizzes, however, squandering any of the potential benefits that it may otherwise have. Several of KD's quiz questions overtly refer to things that exist outside of the universe that he inhabits, such as members of Alicesoft's development staff, though it is unlikely that they are meant to be taken as legitimate evidence that he is aware of his status as a fictional character, as Rance is inexplicably able to answer them without any kind of outside assistance.

Trivia

 * KD and Magiihoa have technically never been directly confirmed to be the same person, with sources instead consistently claiming them to "probably" be one and the same. Despite this, the sheer volume of evidence suggesting that KD is Magiihoa, along with the total lack of evidence of the contrary, is generally accepted as being proof enough.
 * According to Orion, the Rance Series' main character designer, Camilla's first action upon losing her status as a Dark Lord at the end of Rance X: Part 2 was to travel to the top of Rising Dragon Mountain and slap KD across the face, likely in retaliation for his treatment of her during their time together, after which she joined him in watching over the remnants of dragonkind. Orion made a point of noting that this information had not been verified by Alicesoft, and as a result should not be taken as fact.
 * Magiihoa's name is translated as "Maggiwha" in the English localization of Rance VI.
 * KD's appearance and personality seem to reference the character of the Cheshire Cat from the novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the protagonist of which notably serves as the basis for Alice-chan, Alicesoft's company mascot.
 * KD's appearance in Rance IV references the famous fairy tale "The Honest Woodcutter", which is referenced several other times across the Rance series.
 * KD's style of speech noticeably changes over the course of his appearances, with him speaking in an archaic and grandiose manner in both Rance II and Rance IV before shifting to a more modern and casual way from Kichikuou Rance onward. KD's appearance in Kichikuou Rance also has him frequently end his sentences by meowing, which carries over into all following games.
 * In the original release of Rance II, the choice to kill KD is entirely optional, with Rance being able to legitimately answer all three of his questions and pass through non-violently as the riddle cat intended if the player so chooses. Rance 02, Rance II’s remake, instead combines the two options into one, with Rance agreeing to take the quiz only to quickly kill KD in frustration over being unable to complete it. KD is also shown recovering from his apparent death in Rance 02, whereas he is not suggested to survive being killed in the original.
 * KD's name serves as the basis for the name of the character QD in Alicesoft's Evenicle Series.
 * The questions and answers to each of KD's quizzes are as followed:
 * Rance II:
 * How many legs does a starfish have? (16)
 * What is the Discovery? (an umbrella)
 * Who is the current Prime Minister of Japan? (Oda Nobunaga)
 * Kichikuou Rance:
 * Which is Pink Unyuun!? (pink unyuun)
 * Where did I first appear? (pyramid in Rance II)
 * Which one of these people transforms when the moon is out? (Imaamu)
 * Which of these are aliens? (Kurupistonians)
 * What's the name of Ho Raga's beloved Wanwan? (Yodel)
 * Rance Quest:
 * Which is pink unyuun!? (pink unyuun)
 * What's in the vending machine on Rising Dragon Mountain right now? (randomly chosen based on the outcome of an event earlier in the mission)
 * What has four feet in the morning, two feet at noon and three feet in the evening? (Takahashi)
 * How many snowmen are on Rising Dragon Mountain? (none)
 * What's TADA's dog's name? (Chikuwa)
 * In the popular manga Chimidoro!, what does the main character always have in his right hand? (a frozen mandarin)
 * What is the name of the person who discovered the first law of mofumofunurun? (unguu~ lady)
 * What does Rising Dragon Mountain mean in flower language? (naughty virgin gal)
 * Which snack is the chewiest? (dried pudding)
 * Akamakigami, aomakigami, kimakigami? (kimakigami)
 * What's the active ingredient in Sanuki aloe? (nulutonan H)
 * Rance 02:
 * What's the name of the tallest mountain in the world? (Rising Dragon Mountain)
 * As Rance is unable to answer this question, no others are given.
 * Additionally, the questions and answers to the quiz that Rance gives to KD in Rance 02 are:
 * What's my favorite food? (pink unyuun)
 * What's my slave's name? (Sill Plain)
 * What's my job? (hero)
 * How much would it hurt if I cut you with my sword? (so much that I'd die)
 * How much would it hurt if I bashed your head with my sword? (so much that I'd lose consciousness)