The Hero of this tale!
Being a series focused on exerting Religious Horror tropes up to eleven, you can expect the story to literally be drowning in horror and all sorts of supernatural terror. Even the main character is Nightmare Fuel from his origin to his current character and what he faces only makes things scarier from there.- The eponymous protagonist Ivan Isaacs's entire backstory. He was an orphan who was adopted by a man in order to give his daughter Gena someone to keep her company. After said father finds out that the two of them have developed feelings for each other, he kicks out Ivan and sends him off to seminary, where he gains a passion for studying and researching religion, as well as writing religious thesis. After his newfound passion and talent gets him put on a team of people researching an Ancient Artifact, he realizes all too late that said artifact is really an Artifact of Doom housing Sealed Evil in a Can, and that the head of the team plans on releasing that evil. It only gets worse from there, as he eventually witnesses Gena sacrificed in the nude and crying his name no less, has his religious faith utterly destroyed, and is nailed to a cross and killed, all in the span of a few minutes. After he is resurrected by Belial, who offers to take his soul in exchange but agrees to take only half until consented, he suffers from one of the worst cases of Sanity Slippage you'll ever see, and in a frenzied, grief-induced rage, slaughters several undead townspeople in the town where he was raised including the resurrected corpse of his beloved Gena bitten previously by some of the undead townspeople who pleads him to hold and love her. Now, having relinquished half of his soul to Belial, the only thing keeping his body alive is his sheer anger towards those who sent his life into complete chaos. It's implied that his only pleasure left in life is killing, and the little sanity he has left is put towards focusing on his personal mission of finding and slaughtering Temozarela and his other Fallen Angel subordinates. Yikes.
- Not to mention how Ivan is when he's in battle, he's slaughtering zombies with his silver knife, guns, and bare hands while bearing a Slasher Smile that would make monsters from Hellsing piss themselves.
- Furthermore according to Belial, The Power of Hate is literally the only thing keeping Ivan alive and still retain his memories and real self. If he ever stops hating, he'll just turn into another undead corpse that he's been slaughtering throughout the series.
- A nasty scene was when he was attempting to return to his adopted father's home after his resurrection and return to his normal way of living... with Gena's dead corpse. And then a scene occurs a little while after that shows him flipping between laughing madly and letting loose cries of anguish showcasing how utterly bonkers he is by this point and he only gets worse from here.
- The Order of St. Vertinez aka Michael's Sword. They're a brutal secret organization within the Vatican that answers only to the Pope himself and often takes authority into their own hands without the Pope's knowledge. That authority includes wiping out entire cities of people in the name of exposing and destroying all heretics to the Church or simply whoever gets in the Order's way. Not to mention their roster is composed of ruthless Super-Soldier Implacable Men (a team of Alexander Andersons!) who are completely insane and completely fanatical in annihilating whatever they deem as unholy or heretical, including innocent people caught in the crossfire.
- Vascar de Guillon's backstory also mimics the nightmarish Start of Darkness via Evil Stole My Faith that his successors Belial and Ivan would experience. He was the literal definition of a Knight Templar crusader who led a swathe of death and destruction during the Crusades that was so brutal, his enemies and fellow crusaders alike were terrified of him. During his campaign, his wife and two daughters contracted a strange plague and were burned alive in their homes by the priests sent take care of them to prevent their disease from spreading. The experience destroyed his faith but turned his blood lust into overdrive, until eventually the Crusaders abandoned the wars leaving Vascar to wage a one man bloody crusade against innocents he came across without an army or papal blessing. After reaching the apex of his Despair Event Horizon, Vascar found the stone prison holding Temozarela and his fallen angel brethren and allowed them to possess Vascar's body and soul completely, like Ivan almost did.
- Temozarela and his angel brethren are angelic Nightmare Fuel at their worst, their true forms are androgynous winged male figures that are known to be vicious cannibalistic monsters and they're pissed off that God favors humanity enough to give them free will and aid them despite Temozarela's loyalty in helping to banish Lucifer from Heaven. He's so pissed off he's made it his personal mission to destroy everything God ever made in mankind by driving mankind insane with bloodlust and depravity, willingly at first through corruption. After being damaged from being released from his prison, his disgusting charred body is held together loads of tubes connected to sacrificed bodies pumping blood into him and his master plan? To use a giant sacrificial circle to unleash a plague that would turn the world into a Zombie Apocalypse! All to piss off God!
- The angels also display horrendous levels of Body Horror when manifesting inside a human host body as with the case of Jarbilong, the first angel Ivan faces off against. The priest he possessed has a moment of clarity and begs for help before Jarbilong manifests his head out of the priest's spinal cord. Imagine a person's body manifesting from someone's back and breaking bones to fit a body working in the opposite direction!
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- The angels also display horrendous levels of Body Horror when manifesting inside a human host body as with the case of Jarbilong, the first angel Ivan faces off against. The priest he possessed has a moment of clarity and begs for help before Jarbilong manifests his head out of the priest's spinal cord. Imagine a person's body manifesting from someone's back and breaking bones to fit a body working in the opposite direction!
- Achmode is also frightening piece of work considering he's a Mad Artist with a tendency to kidnap and mutilate people into monstrous angelic forms in an attempt to "share" his visions of Heaven and angelic grace with them. His first appearance shows him doing this to a little girl and the results are not pretty. He's even more monstrous when he transforms into his battle form, especially when Achmode eats Ivan's arm during the battle.
- The town of Windtale's persecution and eventual slaughter of Nera's group of carny outcasts is pretty gruesome considering how kindly the characters are and two of them included a blind little girl and a giant mentally-underdeveloped Manchild. This slaughter even pushes the resident Nera to allow herself to be killed via hanging by the town Mayor whose responsible. All this even causes the kindly priest Father Lucian to declare the whole town bound for Hell.
