Nightmare Fuel / Black Clover

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Introducing: The Word Devil

As a battle fantasy series with supernatural elements, Black Cover has its fair share of nightmarish scenes.

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Magic Knights Entrance Exam Arc

• The opening sequence depicts a giant, four-armed demon destroying a village, with fires spreading everywhere. The citizens are left completely helpless to stop it.
• Asta manifesting his own grimoire forms the shadow of a malicious, grinning devil behind him that causes Revchi to scream in fear.
• Heath Grice is a mage who detests peasants with low mana, and orders his subordinates to kill them all simply for existing. Given the setting, his attitude is the view held by most nobles to the extreme.

Dungeon Exploration Arc

• Mars, a powerful sorcerer who single-mindedly tries to kill the heroes, is this, grievously wounding Asta by sending a shard through his gut. He's the first major challenge the protagonists face with a ruthless determination to defeat them.
• Lotus's Smoke Magic releases this poisonous gas that suffocates and slowly poisons someone, which is more Nightmare Fuel when the usually jovial mage gets serious.

Royal Capital Assault Arc

• Rades Spirito's Wraith Magic, which uses the stitched up corpses of dead mages to fight on his behalf. He uses them to terrorize innocent civilians and threaten the life of an innocent girl.
• Fuegoleon, a powerful captain looked up to by many, comes out of a portal comatose with a mess of blood where his cut off arm was.

Eye of the Midnight Sun Encounter Arc

• Neige and Marco's plan to capture little kids. They lure them to sleepwalk in a cave at night to collect their mana, in the process torturing them all for money.
• Licht himself qualifies, being an eerie man bathed in light whose holy appearance hides a monstrous rage against humans.

Underwater Temple Arc

• Vetto is a juggernaut of a mage who desires to crush others' hope and put them into despair. He stands as a giant brute of a man with jagged teeth. He slashes Kahono's throat and slices off Kaito's leg, all with a nightmarish Slasher Smile.
  • Once Vetto activates his Mythical Beast Magic, he becomes even more demonic, savagely attacking and crushing Asta's arms all with a nightmarish, joyful glee.
• The deaths of the Elves at the hands of someone who's assumed to be a human using Light Magic.

Forest of Witches Arc

• The Security Golems hidden in the Forest of Witches will actually kill intruders unless they act quickly, as Dominante and her party learn the hard way. Yikes!
• The Diamond Kingdom's destruction of the Forest of Witches caught quite a few people off-guard.
• Fana is the embodiment of Unstoppable Rage, trying to burn alive anyone who slights her. It doesn't help that she has the power of the Flame Spirit Salamander, creating gigantic flames that burn down a whole forest.
• The Witch Queen looks demonic as she uses her Blood Magic to manipulate Asta into killing her friends, while they are on scaffolds made of blood, nonetheless. The anime adaptation emphasizes this by making the sky darker and the ground glowing light blue.
• Asta speaking to the devil in his grimoire, a giant demonic figure in his mind who tries to convince Asta to give up and let him control his body.
• If you interpret the threads she created as part of Vanessa's imagination while she's in the cage, it puts into perspective how much psychological damage has been done to the girl due to her mother locking her up in the cage.
• This is downplayed after Vanessa's magic manifests itself in front of the Witch Queen. The situation where Vanessa can only watch in horror as Asta kills her friends one by one was only being witnessed from the Queen's perspective. As the Queen notes, Vanessa can only see the favorable outcome where they end up saved thanks to her Red Thread of Fate. This is all still very unsettling to say the least as this only comes to light after the audience has already seen Asta killing Noelle and Finral.
• When her plans to kill Noelle and Finral have been foiled, the Witch Queen use her Blood Magic on her own daughter as a last resort so that she can obtain the Red Thread of Fate personally, giving a Slasher Smile in the process.

Royal Knights Arc

• The magical lifeforms in the Yultim Volcano Trail are giant beasts made of lava that try to kill the trainees. As if the Yultim Volcano wasn't deadly enough as is.
• Langris's cold bloodlust against Finral, his own brother. He unleashes his magic to blow holes in the poor guy's body.
• Luck's cold, unsmiling voice as he threatens to kill Langris is very chilling, especially in the anime.

Elf Reincarnation Arc

• The beginning part of Chapter 149. Rades, Valtos, and Sally get sacrificed as part of Patry's plan, and the sight is not pretty. Their bodies appear to be crumbling at first before their souls get forced out of their bodies, and afterwards, the bodies are blackened, as if they had been burned. The smile that Patry gives as he reveals his true self to them is truly creepy as well.
• What the whole elf reincarnation deal Patry instigated sums up as; Imagine walking around the streets of Clover Kingdom as you witness pillars of light showering into the ground hitting your powerful mage friends. When they rear their heads in front of you they show up with strange marks on their faces and pointy ears. And when you start calling for them, they won't even recognize you as anything other than vermin to be exterminated, and identify themselves as someone else about to commit mass genocide against your kingdom. Then they start using the magic of your friends — woe is upon you if some magic knight you know personally learns incredibly powerful magic, as in the Luck or Rill types, gets possessed and turns their magic against you. And once Patry inserts all the magic stones, you may not even be able to get the person you know back, having them permanently overwritten by an absolutely spiteful being who wants you dead. It's just as bad if you're the one being possessed — because the real you is suddenly replaced with a murderous beast of revenge, unless you're lucky enough to be possessed by Licht and Tetia's son, an unborn infant with magical powers, at which the only thing that changes about you is your appearance.
• Rufel, while in Luck's body, rampages throughout a village while screaming about his hate for humans. It gets so bad that his body begins to darken and become more demonic with his teeth sharpening.
• Lira uses Rill's Picture Magic in much more nightmarish ways, fitting with the elf's anger. The drawn monsters include giant snakes, a cyclops, and human-faced wyverns: Charmy summates it nicely:
  "And where am I?! Oh. In hell."
• Zagred, the Word Devil, is this in spades, appearing as a clawed, winged demon with cracks around his red eyes, small, sharp teeth, and black lines down his mouth that make it look like a Glasgow Grin. But this is nothing compared to what he actually did and what he actually wants from all of that. As it turns out, neither the human royals and especially not Lumiere committed the genocide against the elves — Zagred manipulated the royals by telling them that the elves will harm them, baited Lumiere into his trap and locked him there before Secre unseals him, and when the two reached the wedding venue, it was too late — the royals already drained all the mana of and he killed almost every elf in there...by copying Lumiere's light magic and using magic tools to reinforce it, so it would look like as if Lumiere betrayed the elves, gave their power to the royals and killed all of them, nonetheless. All this chaos and misery were apparently done for the sake of giving him a solid body to wreck havoc. Patry, the other Elves and the whole Clover Kingdom was effectively screwed over no fault of their own, just like the Joker said:
  "All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy."
  • The demon seen being slain by Lumiere in chapter 1, that became the demon skeleton in Hage with the wizard king's statue on top of it? That's actually the real licht. He turned himself into the demon to prevent Zagred from possessing him.
  • It gets worse as the heroes fight him. He summons eldritch, worm-like monsters that drain the mana and life of anyone they touch. And he sprouts countless mouths all over his body.
  • The worst thing? That's just one devil. It's not just him and Liebe, either. And he's not even a supreme devil, just a stronger than average one. Just how many of these things are lurking around the surface world trying to fuck up mankind?
• Last but not least, Damnatio. He is the walking embodiment of a Hanging Judge and Kangaroo Court combined. The guy is willing to condemn his own father, a little girl and an orphanage full of children in order to fulfill his sense of righteousness and justice. Even after Julius convinces him, he still sentences Asta and Secre to exile, and threatens them that he just postponed the trial, something that is not officially absolved even now.

Heart Kingdom Joint Struggle Arc

• The Spade Kingdom's treatment of their low mana subjects, with them forced to supply their mana as fuel for fortresses until they die. When one woman asks her little sister to be spared, the soldier strips her of her clothes and tells her to make herself useful. This thankfully ends with a Black Comedy moment where Finral attempts to hit on the same woman only to remind himself to hold back on any woman but Finesse.
• Dante fighting the Black Bulls has him callously stab Gauche just to get an angry reaction out of Asta, with Asta going berserk and using a more demonic form.
  • Dante shows his second magic when Yami manages to wound him. He warps his flesh, transforming it into a mass to cover over his wound. It's as unpleasant as it sounds.
  • Dante's face when Yami pushes him to use his Body Magic to regenerate his torso, smiling menacingly with a shadowed face and sharp teeth before he has tendrils of his flesh reform his body.
  • Dante himself is also very disturbing; despite his handsome appearance, this guy literally thinks that evil is a part of human nature and feels nothing even when sleeping with women and killing people or animals, the latter he passes off as completely ordinary. He's practically the Johan Liebert of Black Clover.
• Vanica is yet another very unsettling character. A hedonistic Blood Knight taken to an absolutely insane level, Vanica's whole motive is to literally kill people for fun, sometimes even committing heinous acts to self-sabotaging degrees, like kidnapping and brainwashing Lolopechka for no reason other than to absolutely piss Noelle off.
  • The first thing she does with her Blood Magic is create a giant, faceless monster to rampage on her enemies.
  • Being taken over by Megicula has the devil turn half of her body black and speak in an eerily affable tone as it takes over Lolopechka, curses Undine and injures Secre and Noelle, referring to all of them as an experiment.
  • Once she gets Lolopechka in her hands, her last action before leaving is to turn all of her dark disciples into living bombs for more collateral damage, showing that she just treats them as disposable despite their loyalty towards her. The Dark Disciples bloat and disfigure into balloon-like-forms, then explode.
• The third member of the Dark Triad, Zenon, is no less disturbing than Vanica and Dante.
  • Zenon's attack on Golden Dawn with his Dark Disciples, with him slaughtering half its members all by himself. He uses his Bone Magic to curb-stomp enemies by impaling them throughout their bodies with his sharpened bones. The only time he smiles is when he uses his devil's power, which takes the form of a giant shadowed demon, to disparage Yuno for being too weak. The panel then shows Yuno left seemingly lifeless.
  • As for Zenon himself, he lacks the wanton cruelty of Vanica and Dante, but he makes it up for being eerily competent. Unlike his elder siblings, he doesn't play around — he shows up, curbstomps the magic knights he meets and captures both Yami and Vangeance all by himself. Had Yami and Asta managed to beat him after dealing with Dante, the Dark Triad will end up empty handed bar Lolopechka, who shouldn't be priority anyways.

Spade Kingdom Raid Arc

• Thanks to Morris, the first gate to the underworld opens... and Lilith and Naamah◊, the first of the high-ranking Qliphoth devils, arrive with the eldritch, terrifying appearances and Creepy Twins vibe to match.
• Nacht tried to arrogantly summon the supreme devil Lucifugus in a devil-binding ritual. Here comes an ominous, giant devil shrouded in black to Nacht's horror. Lucifugus then goes on to kill all the ritual participants and Morgan sacrifices his life to destroy the relic used to stop the ritual.
• Dante and Megicula's fates worse than death. Sure, they're unrepentant, murderous maniacs who murder people for fun and most likely deserved it, but the way they end with is just...oh gosh.
  • Dante's body magic goes out of control after Magna beats him in a one-on-one fist fight because they all run out of mana, and transforms into a horrifying Humanoid Abomination resembling less like a person but a bundle of vaguely humanoid flesh with his grossly disfigured face on it. Despite the figure's intimidating appearance, the disfigured Dante can't even talk properly and just gets knocked out in a single hit.
  • When Noelle was about to kill Vanica, Megicula bursts out from her body and used it like a puppet. Then the devil proceeds to turn Lolopechka into a demonic puppet for no apparent reason other than messing with Gaja and Noelle, and uses Vanica's magic combined with Acier's to create steel spikes.
• Pertaining to the same Megicula scene above, right before Megicula bursts out from Vanica, the latter's last words is she wants to become friends with Noelle. Mind you, she slowly cursed Noelle's mother to death. And this is said completely unironically, showing her lack of shame and remorse of all the death and destruction she leaves in her wake.
• Megicula herself might as well as be some of the most horrifying things that the heroes ever fought. As frightening Zagred might be, at least he had a concrete, but petty goal in mind. Megicula has no rhyme or reason in her actions, she just curses people to death for amusement.
  • She has curse-warding magic that slowly deteriorates someone until they die, with no known cure as of yet but killing Megicula herself. Even mentioning her name is enough to get you cursed.
  • When the magic knights fight her, she's a Soft-Spoken Sadist in its finest form. Not only she never raises her voice by a hitch, she even openly declares that she enjoys experimenting her curse on humans and seeing them suffer, and wonders why do they even bother struggling despite everything is hopeless.
  • Then there's how she fights. When she manifests out from Vanica's body, the first thing she does is to turn Lolopechka into a devil For the Evulz. The devil Lolopechka has all of her former memories, but is forced to fight Gaja, the man sworn to protect her on Megicula's orders. AND THEN SHE ORDERS AN EXPLODING LIFE ON HER AND VANICA so she could fully manifest and potentially make herself unbeatable. When Asta came to cancel out the spell, she resorts to outright killing them instead. Thankfully it's stopped by Charlotte, forcing her to resort to brute force.
• Zenon, in his rematch with Yuno, tells Beelzebub to replace his heart with the devil's, turning him into a full fledged devil that will never die as long as the Spade Kingdom exists.
• Zenon's past. It's a mockery of Yuno and Asta's Friendly Rivalry, and is every bit as frightening and saddening as it sounds. Unlike the wantonly malicious Dante and Vanica, Zenon used to be an optimistic young man who had the best interests of the Spade Kingdom in mind. Despite ridicule from fellow kids and even his siblings, he enrolled into the Spade Kingdom's mage defense force and engaged a Friendly Rivalry with Allen, a young man that bears a resemblance with Asta. However, when on a mission, he encountered a demon and had to sacrifice Allen in order to kill it immediately or face the destruction of Spade Kingdom, which he regretfully did. Having been reached well into the Despair Event Horizon, he came to believe that strength is the only thing that matters and his elder brother finally convinced him into becoming a devil host himself.
• Last but not least, Lucifero. The supreme devil lord and the arch-devil to end all devils, Nacht fears that his full manifestation will mean the end of the world. And he spends every bit of his time he's allowed to demonstrating that he meant every bit of it.
  • When he first manifests by killing Morris, Lucifero merges with all the upper and middle layer devils into one giant, monstrous creature. Asta easily slays it, but this only prevented him from fully manifesting. He still manifests in a much more refined and humanoid form anyway, but only with half his strength. Aside that even with half his strength, he's still a complete nightmare as stated below. Which means had he fully manifested, it's game over. No exceptions.
  • The first thing Lucifero did when he awakes is to demonstrate his status and immense power by forcing everyone to bow their heads to him with his gravikinesis, because their heads "are too high". There's no wonder why Adrammelech tells people to "run" as soon as he manifests. Then he mercilessly pummels Asta into the ground until he couldn't move. This was the guy who was considered an unbeatable trump card when it comes to devils, but Lucifero just treats him as nothing other than a nuisance before he managed to cut him with his sword, at which he gets truly mad and decides to utterly destroy the boy over that injury.
    • It's also implied that Asta's Anti-Magic is working against Lucifero at that time, but Lucifero is so inhumanly strong anyways that Asta wouldn't be able of dealing with him normally, until he enters True Devil Union and smashes him to pieces.
  • What happened to Asta might be bad enough, but if you're still wondering how well the other magic knights fare...don't even think about it. He literally just manhandles every single one of them before they can fire anything, and those who do find themselves completely unable to hit him. Not even Mereoleona, the undefeated, unmatched lionness can do anything against him save for continuously fighting and fighting until her arm burns off and Lucifero almost gleefully smashes her into the ground if not for Yuno teleporting her away.
  • After his defeat, he's been reduced into a mass of flesh and tentacles and was trying to run away and plot revenge for another time. Thankfully, Asta cuts him down once and for all.
• The Stinger in Chapter 331 drops one last surprise. When everyone thinks the war against the Dark Triad and devilkind is over, Damnatio enters Julius's room and questions Julius about discrepancies about time magic, Megicula and the time devil Astaroth. He then assumes his true form, incapacitates Damnatio and his cover-less grimoire turns into a Spade Grimoire with two spades, and as Adrammelech enters his room with Lucifero's heart he flashes a Slasher Smile and proclaims: "The time has come". This is where we knew the well-beloved wizard king of Clover Kingdom is actually Lucius Zogratis, the devil host of Astaroth who manipulated all of his siblings into becoming fellow devil hosts by playing into their malicious desires, while staging a decade-long mind game with humans, elves and the devil hierarchy alike, all to kill 90% of the world population and resurrect them as immortals.

The Ultimate Wizard King Arc

• The arc begins with Lucius finally defeating Lucifero in a half-dead state. However, it's implied that Lucius killed Lucifero by eating his heart. 15 months later, in a celebreation of Asta's inauguration as a senior magic knight Lucius suddenly appears right in front of Asta when he's having some banter with Sister Lily and declares that this is his "final destination".
  • What makes this exceptional is unlike most major villains like Patry, Zagred or Lucifero, when Lucius makes his presence known, it isn't a grand introduction with him demonstrating his power or a close-up of him. It's just a seemingly friendly man resembling the Wizard King with black hair and a Spade Kingdom uniform abruptly appearing in front of Asta with absolutely no warning while making a thinly veiled death threat.
• Damnatio is reported by Fuegoleon to had been vanished. However, based on what happens on the previous chapter, it's implied that he's still been frozen alive by Lucius. For 15 months. The truth is even worse — when we see Adrammelech discussing Yuno with Lucius, we do see a figure that looks a lot like him next to Sister Lily, making you wonder did Lucius turn him into a Paladin. And the next time he shows up in the final battle, he's already a Paladin.
• Midway into his fight with Asta, Lucius grabs Sister Lily and uses her to demonstrate his innate magic attribute, the incomprehensible Soul Magic, modifying the sister's soul and turning her into a Paladin of Lucius, who tells Asta to die before Lucius seemingly kills him and easily incapitates Mimosa, Noelle and Secre with her purified Spatial Magic. All the while when she non-chalantly praises Lucius while something obviously wrong is with her.
• Lucius's Soul Magic is one of the most dangerous and incomprehensible things in the series. He uses to rewrite people, living or dead alike, into Paladins who loyally serve his cause. There's something extra unsettling when a natural magic attribute is capable of not only instantly putting someone out of action but converting them to someone else. Worse is he technically didn't brainwash the victims like the Witch Queen did to Asta nor did he awaken the other self within them like Patry did, he overwrites them into completely different people. Oh and he doesn't really need to go close to someone to do that — he could do the same to dead people, best shown when Heath Grice mysteriously returns alive. When the Paladins arrive to the Land of the Rising Sun, Ryuya orders the entire town in their line of attack to be emptied and its whole population out of sight, because if he let them have any civilian causalities, they will all become Paladins themselves.
• The Paladins he creates are all insanely powerful mages capable of exceptional feats unprecedented by the other non-humans before them. One of them has Beast Magic, but unlike Vetto who just granted his body parts the power of those from animals, this guy can outright summon legendary magical beasts, including a legendary five-headed dragon once slain by the Land of the Rising Sun. They don't even have the sole weaknesses most non-humans have; instead of spamming powerful magic spells wantonly, the Paladins are smart enough to put opponents down on their same level before they even act. As long as you have an opening, they will exploit it to drag you off the ground. What makes this really horrifying is Lucius likely amassed entire hordes of people like that alongside devils under his control as the week passes before his holy war commences. It's effectively a literal supervillain ploy of creating entire races of augmented Super Soldiers, but with mages than with science, and the person behind it was a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to fix the crappy status of the world in the darkest and most twisted way possible.
  • What makes this even worse is unlike the reincarnated Elves, the Paladins Lucius creates and resurrects have their core personalities completely intact. A transformed Sister Lily is still a kind woman who cares dearly for Asta, and a resurrected Paladin Acier still deeply cares about her children, even expressing disappointment to Nebra and Solid's corruption and congratulating Noelle for being like her in the past. It's just their loyalty is only to Lucius and they're hardwired to kill everyone and have Lucius resurrect them as angelic superhumans. Therefore, Sister Lily will instead beg for Asta to die as she uses a souped-up version of her Holy Fist of Love, and Acier kills her own children so they could become one again. It's completely and utterly wrong in a way worse than the Elves massacring Clover Kingdom, especially when the stuff Lucius does create and resurrect can easily gravely injure to even things like Jack the Ripper and Nozel, while a Paladin Morris gives Mereoleona an equal fight.
• Ichika and Yami's family situation. Resenting Ichika for being responsible for his wife's death and being bored with perpetual peace, their father abused Ichika and Yami would attempt to stop him, up until he gave a pill to Ichika that caused her to go insane and kill her entire clan, her father congratulating her for living up to her family's namesake in an extremely twisted fashion before Ichika kills him too. Yami then took the blame for the kills and ran to Clover Kingdom. Worse is that Ichika considered slaying her father worse than the abuses he put her through, so revealing the truth breaks her steely stance completely.
  • The spell that reveals this is a rather frightening spell coming from the Beast Paladin who summoned the Five-Headed Serpent. It's a Beast Magic spell that summons a Bogeyman that physically manifests as its victim's worse fears and it instantly put Kezokaku and Ichika out of action courtesy of all the Mind Rape it ensues. Even worse, the manifestations are physical so it can go for the kill instantly after the opponent is left a hapless wreck. It's clearly not a spell that is simply intended for torture but one that is intended to end battles quick. Since Lily and Heath Grice incapacitated the other three Ryuzen beforehand, if Asta didn't stop the Bogeyman cutting down Ichika while taking the form of her dad, they will all get killed and become Paladins turning against the country they once protected.
• Judgement Day begins in Chapter 354, where Lucius and his army of Paladins go to Clover Kingdom and prepare to annihilate all of humanity, with all of the Kingdoms bar the Diamond Kingdom staying put on constant alert. And Lucius has revived Morgen Faust and Acier Silva as Paladins, much to Yami, Jack the Ripper and the Silva's horror.

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