Maha Margaret

"Maha Margaret"

- struggling to reconcile his feelings of resentment and worship for his sister.

About
Maha Margaret was the younger of General Minerva Margaret of the Helman 3rd Army and an antagonist in Rance IX.

Orphaned shortly after his birth, Maha spent much of his early life living in poverty with his sister. Growing up in the unforgiving slums of Helman caused him to cling to Minerva for safety and guidance, never leaving her side unless explicitly told by her to. While Maha admired his older sister's strong will and relentless drive to elevate herself beyond her means, she often mocked him for his over-reliance on her, claiming that a true man would be able to make decisions and look out for himself. Over time, this bullying made him develop a complex about his own weakness, breeding a contradictory desire within himself to become a strong and independent man to simultaneously earn his sister's approval and escape from her oppression.

At some point into his childhood, Maha accompanied his sister as she enlisted in the Helman 3rd Army stationed there. Though he was too young to serve alongside her, he would often run errands for her in and around the 3rd Army's barracks, and became a regular presence to the soldiers there. Maha was well-liked by much of the 3rd Army, who were endeared by his diligent and hardworking personality and sympathized with the poor treatment he received from his sister, who had herself developed a reputation for being ruthlessly cunning even to her own allies. After reaching the minimum age needed to join the army, Maha wasted no time becoming a soldier, and began training in the Magic Arts to serve in the 3rd Army's mage unit. Despite his youth, he proved himself to have a natural talent for spell-casting and was recognized as an advanced level trainee after only a few months of work. He payed little attention to this achievement, however, and remained concerned solely with his sister's response to his progress.

In the year LP0006, Minerva was called to meet privately with Stessel Romanov, the prime minister and shadow ruler of Helman who she had forged a tenuous partnership with for the sake of advancing her career. Stessel revealed that Empress Sheila Helman had fled from the imperial palace incognito with a small box he referred to only as the "key to destruction", and gave Minerva a mission to locate and retrieve it from her through any means necessary. To accomplish this task, Minerva ordered Maha to search around the capital city of Lang Bau for Sheila and befriend her, taking the box from her possession after earning enough of her trust to make her drop her guard around him. Maha diligently complied, using transformation magic to alter his appearance and conceal his identity.

After some work, Maha succeeded in intercepting Sheila, who had been going by the name Russian Kalette, just as she was exiting Lang Bau. Adopting the alias of Maitrea Meishian (マイトレイア・メイシアン, maitoreia meishian), Maha presented himself to the empress as the son of nobles who had been assassinated for speaking out against the government's corrupt actions, and asked to accompany her on her journey. Sheila took him at his word, too naive to question his intentions, and happily accepted him as a companion. The duo's travels were brought to an abrupt land as they wandered the arid land outside of Lang Bau, where they were abducted by a caravan of slave traders and taken to Helman's border with the Free Cities Alliance to be sold as property.

During the events of Rance IX, the slave traders transporting Sheila and Maha crossed paths with the warrior Rance and his allies, who had entered Helman to assist Prince Patton Misnarge in staging a revolution to reclaim the country. Hearing the cries of women from within the traders' cargo, Rance swiftly led his party in defeating the group and began having his way with the captured innocents afterwards as a self-imposed reward. To ensure the safety of the younger girls she had been imprisoned with, Sheila agreed to work as Rance's slave for the duration of his time in Helman in exchange for him not laying a hand on them.

Shortly after Sheila was released, Maha was found in a separate caravan alongside various other captured men. Desperate to remain close to the empress, he begged Rance to take him with him, claiming to have nowhere else to go. Rance instantly refused his request, disinterested in working alongside a young boy, and left it to Patton to decide what to do with him. Maha then attempted to persuade Patton and his friend Hubert Lipton to accept him as a companion, insisting that he would not be a burden to them. While the two tried to dissuade him, asserting that what they were doing was not something for a child to become involved in, their reticence allowed him to correctly deduce that they were a part of the Helman Revolutionary Army that had been rumored to be developing along the nation’s outskirts. Maintaining his cover as Maitrea, Maha introduced himself as an aspiring soldier who turned his back on the government after it arranged the deaths of his parents. His story proved enough to move Patton to accept him as an ally and convince Hubert, who remained firmly opposed to the idea, to relent on the grounds that they would leave him at the nearest village if he proved to be too much of a liability.

While serving as a member of Rance and Patton’s party, which quickly earned the nickname of the Outlaws for its disruptive activities, Maha continued to remain beneath suspicion by posing as Maitrea. Now working directly with the leading members of the Revolutionary Army, he expanded the scope of his mission from simply stealing the box from Sheila, as Minerva had asked him, to sabotaging the revolution itself, believing that doing so would prove his independence and ingenuity to his sister. After contemplating stealing the Tulip #1 and floating fortress, two unique and powerful weapons that provided the Outlaws a considerable advantage in battle, from their respective owners, he eventually decided that doing either would ultimately be pointless due to him lacking the knowledge necessary to operate them. He instead settled on taking more discreet measures to compromise the group, such as by deliberately interrupting a pair of Haniwa as they were in the middle of reproducing to cause a vengeful swarm of the creatures to attack Tokugawa Sen and Merci Archa, two key members of the Revolutionary Army, while they were out gathering supplies. To his chagrin, his efforts were routinely foiled by the Outlaws, whose outstanding fighting abilities enabled them to miraculously survive any danger he engineered for them to fall into.

With each of his attempts at disrupting the Outlaws' progress ending in failure, Maha resolved to return his focus to his original mission of obtaining the mysterious box. A few nights after the Outlaws entered battle against the Helman 1st Army, he snuck into Sheila's quarters in Rance's portable cottage and began rifling through her belongings. Just as he located the box, however, Sheila returned to her room and expressed confusion as to what he was doing in it. Rather than fabricate a cover story, Maha instead showed the box to Sheila and coldly asked if it was the key to destruction. Sheila instantly told him not to touch the box upon seeing it, confirming that it was the item he desired. When Sheila tried to get him to explain himself, Maha bitterly told her that Maitrea never existed before incapacitating her with a snowstorm spell and rushing out of the room. His exit was blocked by the Ninja Kentou Kanami, who arrived on the scene after hearing the commotion, but he quickly blew her out of the way by casting another snowstorm spell.

Just as Maha neared the door that led out of the portable cottage, he was stopped by the mutated Human Pigu Geliciam, who divided her body in two to overwhelm him. After being disoriented by a strike from one of the Pigus, Maha had the box pulled from his hands by the second. Rance entered the cottage to investigate the noise as this occurred, creating a small opening for Maha to run past him and away from the camp. Though the box was returned to Sheila's possession, the Outlaws were left dumbfounded by Maha's sudden betrayal and uncertain of his whereabouts after he made his escape.

His status as a spy exposed and the box wrestled from his grasp, Maha was forced to return to Lang Bau empty-handed and full of anxiety over the consequences of failing his sister. Minerva, who had already connected the Outlaws' activities to those of the Revolutionary Army, showed little interest in the information Maha obtained about the group during his time as a part of it and pressured him into explaining why he had not brought her the key. Maha tried to justify himself by describing the incident that caused him to lose it, but was immediately dismissed by his sister, who informed him that a true man would never give up halfway and bluntly ordered him to go back and retrieve the box. Believing that Rance would kill him if they ever reunited, Maha questioned Minerva as to how he was supposed to get close to the Outlaws. She answered by handing him a Puchi Hanny, a powerful explosive, and telling him to detonate it if the situation looked bad to take out their enemies alongside himself. Terrified by the notion of dying, Maha meekly tried to argue against the plan, only to be quickly goaded into compliance by Minerva, who taunted him for being useless and claimed that he would earn her praise if he succeeded in bringing the key back to her. Equipped with the puchi hanny, Maha departed from Lang Bau in the direction of the Outlaws' floating fortress, his mind abuzz with a variety of emotions.

Maha approached the Outlaws encampment sometime after the group's victory against the crazed doctor Oama Motohide. Clutching the puchi hanny in his shaking hands, he hesitated in entering the camp itself and instead chose to linger in the surrounding forest. He was seen by Kanami, who had been scouting the perimeter around the camp, causing him to run away. Kanami reported her findings back to the rest of the Outlaws, which prompted them to split up and begin searching the forest to find Maha, concerned for his well-being and eager to hear an explanation for his past actions. He was eventually found crouched down in grief near a cliff by Rick Addison, a legendary swordsman from the Kingdom of Leazas who had been accompanying the Outlaws on the orders of his queen. When asked why he had done the things he had, Maha revealed to Rick his true identity and the mission Minerva had given him. On the verge of tears, he admitted that he could no longer handle the stress of being his sister's puppet and begged Rick to help him. Rick maintained a kindly calm, encouraging Maha to explain his circumstances to the rest of the group and apologize, and approached him to offer his hand and help him to his feet.

As Rick moved toward him, a demented grin sprouted on Maha's face. Mocking the swordsman for his idiocy internally, Maha reached into his clothing for the puchi hanny and prepared to detonate it, reassuring himself that he would be able to break away from his sister and become his own person after killing the Outlaws. Before he could go through with the plan, he was slashed through the shoulder by Rance, who had appeared suddenly on the scene and proceeded to mercilessly kick him off the nearby cliff soon afterward. Barely able to register what had just occurred, Maha could only muster a few feeble profanities as he plummeted downward before offering a final apology to his sister for failing her as his explosive was finally set off.

The remaining members of the Outlaws arrived just as the explosion went off, and expressed a combination of horror and confusion at the event. Rick relayed what Maha had told him to the rest of the group, and was angrily scolded by Rance for his reluctance to harm a child even when his own life was at stake. Observing the depth of the cliff Maha had been knocked off of, Patton mournfully stated that it would be unlikely for them to find and bury his body, quietly seething over the ease at which Minerva was willing to sacrifice her own brother. The cruelty and pointlessness of Maha's death weighed heavily on many of the Outlaws for the remainder of the revolution, who felt frustration over their powerlessness to prevent it. In the non-canonical Kichikuou Rance, Maha appears as a member of the Helman 3rd Army serving under Minerva. He is not depicted as having any of the internal conflict relating to his sister that he is shown to have during his canonical appearance, and is instead presented as being innocently oblivious to how she perceives him to be an expendable pawn.

Maha will engage the Leazas Army in battle with the rest of the 3rd Army after it approaches either Pawn or Micrograd while at war with Helman. If his unit is defeated in battle, he will die calling out in vain for his sister to save him.

If the Leazas Army approaches Lang Bau from the western city of Laurengrad while Maha is still alive, he will be ordered by his sister to lead an expedition to assault the Kalar village to obtain forehead crystals to enhance the 3rd Army's weaponry. Maha is apprehensive about the mission, having heard rumors of the kalar placing a deadly Curse on all who abduct their crystals, but is assured by Minerva that she possesses a special charm that will make him immune to the curse. Choosing to believe his sister, the fearful Maha launches an attack on the kalar village with his soldiers, who encourage him to assist in sexually assaulting the defeated kalar to transform their forehead crystals into their potent blue form. The group returns to Lang Bau with 467 crystals, which are each quickly forged into powerful magic swords.

Soon after the crystals arrive at Lang Bau, Maha and the rest of the soldiers involved in the attack fall victim to a curse conjured by the kalar queen Pastel Kalar in revenge for their crime and begin to rapidly die off. Maha begs Minerva to use the charm she had told him about to save him, only for her to admit that she had simply made the item up as a means of getting him to do what he wanted. In his final moments, Maha weakly mutters to the indifferent Minerva that he trusted her before collapsing dead on the ground.