Zulki Crown

"Zulki"

- on the difference between 1st and 2nd class citizens

About
Zulki Crown was Zeth's secretary of finance and the leader of the northern city of Italia.

A member of the prestigious noble Crown family, Zulki lived a life of privilege for most of his existence. He took full advantage of his position as secretary of finance by extorting money from lower class citizens in order to increase his own wealth. During his free time, he would often capture second-class Zeth women and brutally torture them.

During the events of Rance VI, Zulki was first seen at the estate of his close associate and the nation's Secretary of Education Radon Alphorne. Zulki greatly enjoyed watching the second-class slaves fight to the death in Radon's coliseum, to the point of considering the idea of installing one for himself in his own home. When his son Hassam Crown was captured following his crimes as Saberknight, Zulki lamented his mistake in being too obvious and getting caught by Punisher Mito. Later on, however, when Rance raided the Cooperative Bank in order to obtain funds Ice Flame, he was forced to flee with the protection of Cutie Band and her men, but soon ran into the Punisher, who he discovered to be none other than the king of Zeth himself.

Though officially jailed for his crimes, thanks to his friendship with Zeth's Secretary of Education Radon Alphorne, Zulki he was instead sent to the women's prison managed by Radon's daughter Emi Alphorne, where he continued living a comfortable life with his son, and even started indulging once more into his vicious habit by torturing some of the prisoners. However, he made the mistake of capturing Elizabeth Lacock, second-in-command of the anti-mage terrorist organization the Pentagon, causing the group's leader Nelson Server and his men to invade the prison in order to rescue her. During this time, Zulki was cornered by the Pentagon, who stabbed him repeatedly with their weapons, resulting in his death. Zulki and his son were eventually brought back as a pair of zombie necromancers by Papaya Server, after which they took refuge in the cemetery of a sleepy village on the outskirts of Zeth. During this time, the undead aristocrats began raising several corpses from the dead in hopes of amassing a zombie army large enough to conquer the world with. Their plans were foiled by the duo of Rance and the AList priestess Sel Curchgolf, who destroyed their strongest zombies and purified their souls, returning them to the afterlife once again.

Personality and Appearance
Zulki was a fairly tall and thin man with similar red hair to the rest of the Crown family, thick eyebrows, a perpetual smirk on his face and fairly traditional formal attire, with its most distinguishing feature being a purple cape.

Zulki was perhaps one of the best examples of the horror caused by Zeth's magic caste system: he was an extremely corrupt man, managing his city more like a glorified loan shark than a civic leader. His city was littered with distribution machines lending money to uneducated citizens at exorbitant interest rates and killing those who failed to pay the fee. This, combined with the lack of any law enforcement has led the lower class district to be particularly rife with mugging and murder.

In addition to this, he was extremely sadistic and considered second-class citizens to be worth no more than animals. Working with the manager of the Cooperative Bank, Zulki spread the rumor of a "secret entrance" to the bank through an underground cave which eventually did lead to the vault, but was littered with traps, security systems and even monsters. Many second-class citizens ended up captured by this ploy before being used as their own personal playthings, and usually end up mutilated and tortured until their death. Despite this, he himself was a bit of a coward, and when faced with danger would rather flee or beg for his life than stand and fight.

He was on good terms with the manager of Zeth's cooperative bank in Italia and would occasionally visit him to indulge in his "hobby". He was also good friends with Radon Alphorne, the nation's secretary of education and the two of them even decided to unite their houses through marriage, with Zulki's son Hassam Crown betrothed to Radon's daughter Emi Alphorne. Despite Radon being the leader of Zeth's conservative party, it was Zulki who was far more focused on suppressing the reformative actions of their king, to the point where he would occasionally chastise his friend for being so indifferent to his position as party leader.

Zulki's son Hassam more or less followed his father's footsteps of cruelty and under the name of Saberknight, would roam Italia in heavy armor in order to hunt down and kill second-class citizens for his own amusement. Zulki was shown to fully support this homicidal behavior, only criticizing Hassam for not being discrete enough about doing it to avoid getting arrested.

As a member of the Crown family, Zulki was actually the uncle of Zeth's Flame General Saias Crown. While the two are never shown interacting, Saias' vocal distaste of nobility and his attempts at distancing himself from his family name suggests that they were not close.

Abilities
Despite his high-ranking position, Zulki was quite weak as an individual, possessing a Level Cap of only 7. Rather than fend for himself, Zulki relied entirely on the protection of the Zeth Security Force to ensure his safety, and was quickly killed when forced to fight the forces of the Pentagon on his own. After becoming resurrected as a zombie, Zulki became much more powerful, to the point of being able to fight formidably against the forces of Ice Flames Green Corps. However, as an undead creature, his weakness to holy magic allowed for Sel Curchgolf to kill him with very little effort.

As a first-class citizen of Zeth, Zulki possessed enough talent in the Magic Arts to pass his nation's magic exam. Zulki was shown to have been capable of casting magic spells such as Silence and Flame Arrow with little difficulty, suggesting him to have been fairly capable as a mage. Despite this, as he lacked a Magic Skill Level, Zulki's magic power was hardly notable when compared to the likes of other, stronger magic users.

Trivia

 * Along with his son he was one of the few characters that Rance meets both when he was alive and as a revenant, and one of the few named zombies of the series.