Baal

Baal is the highest-ranked Devil, a transcendental being who calls himself a World Collector. He makes bargains that trade regression or dimensional passage for souls and worlds, destroys the worlds he reaches, and seeks a complete descent into Earth through the Demon Realm Gate. He is neither Bell nor Bell's aliases Krisbell and Yeokma. Bell is a human incarnation body who houses Baal for centuries, retains separate agency, and eventually tries to arrange the Devil's annihilation. Baal's resemblance to Bell comes from using that host as his material incarnation, not from a shared identity. (Chapters 292–337)

When Bell's body is dismantled, Baal emerges early, builds a castle and barriers around the Transnational Peace Conference, and begins a worldwide Devil invasion. His plan fails in stages: the castle linking him to the Transcendent Realm is destroyed, his first conquered world survives its reconstruction, and the resulting coalition reaches him before his hasty descent stabilizes. Baal turns that failure into a final war against his own perceived creator and the people defending Earth. A deterrent-bearing bullet and the coalition's combined attack annihilate his true self, leaving only a diminished piece of consciousness voluntarily contained by Bell. (Chapters 337–378)

Biography

World collection, regression bargains, and Bell

Baal's earliest role in the story is mediated through bargains. He is called the Ghost of Regression because the Regression Stone draws him to people willing to exchange their souls and worlds for another chance at life. Shin Myungchul accepts that cost to return to the person he loves, despite Bell's warning that Baal will destroy the resulting world. Bell makes a comparable bargain to see a loved one again, gives his soul to Baal, and becomes the Devil's incarnation body. Baal's “collection” is therefore built through human choices that he exploits and enforces on a world-sized scale. (Chapters 321–324)

Bell remains a separate consciousness during centuries of possession. He wants to die, but Baal supplies a survival instinct that activates when the host faces annihilation; killing Bell's ordinary body is insufficient because Baal reacts only when the underlying existence is endangered. Bell consequently recruits Jin Sahyuk and Kim Hajin to prepare a death capable of eliminating the Devil rather than merely changing containers. The arrangement reveals a crucial division of agency: Baal needs Bell as a vessel and can force self-preservation through him, but he cannot make his host desire the Devil's victory or abandon a long plan of resistance. (Chapters 292–316)

The incarnation plan and a forced descent

Baal's descent requires more than possessing a body. Because his existence transcends the material realm, he accepts the Demon Realm Gate as a restraint upon himself: it reenacts the first world he entered and provides a medium through which he can transfer between dimensions. Bell explains that stopping Baal in this recreated world would prevent the Earth descent. The Devil's larger plan is to rebuild that first world, connect it to Earth, destroy it again, and use the released energy at his castle while the connection weakens the universe's deterrent force. Host, Gate, castle, and reconstructed world are all necessary infrastructure rather than interchangeable expressions of one power. (Chapters 316–358)

The struggle over the next host complicates that plan. Yi Yeonjun seeks to succeed Bell as the incarnation body and imagines becoming Baal, but Bell can resist the Devil and works with others to stop the succession. When Sahyuk finally manipulates Bell's material body until it disappears, Baal breaks out of the container in a form modeled on his host. He immediately covers Leores Plaza with a barrier, then fulfills Bell's promise by giving Sahyuk a stone capable of opening a dimensional portal. Baal calls Bell a useful friend after 693 years, yet treats freedom from possession as permission for the host to “go,” exposing the ownership underneath the language of friendship. (Chapters 329–337)

Baal finds Yi Yeonjun willing to continue where Bell refused, but the Devil's own priorities change after receiving memories that establish the world as a novel. He can distinguish truth from falsehood well enough to accept the revelation, and his enormous ego converts it into fury at the author rather than resignation. Declaring himself the destroyer, he resolves to end the created world. Before the plan can mature, an arrow carrying Dismantling breaches the castle and destroys its shell. The castle's loss cuts his infinite demonic-energy supply and reduces the soldiers he can summon, forcing Baal to descend hastily instead of completing his intended process. (Chapters 343–345)

Descent, massacre, and a coalition of worlds

Baal survives the castle's destruction and answers it with a ritual-like grand magic. A pentagram forms in the sky, and Devils including Morax enter Earth while Baal's demonic forces spread across continents. At the Korean border he kills Heroes with the indifference of someone crushing insects, scatters Kim Suho's sword strike, destroys Chae Nayun's magic sword by striking its core, and slows the surrounding Heroes in time to inspect them. Bell's memories give him their names and attachments, but also burden him with enough human context to ask whether this gathering is the fate for which his many worlds were destroyed. (Chapters 345–353)

The coalition against him expands beyond Earth. Crevon's army, the Genkelope Vessel, the world's major Heroes, and survivors of the first world converge, while other Devils refuse Baal's call or negotiate separately with humanity. Baal learns that reconstructing his first victim without destroying it has overcome causality in an unexpected direction: the people he once erased can now hunt him. Harin, Airun, Shimurin, and the returned Bell stand among them. Baal briefly recognizes old familiarity, but the realization does not change his decision. Even after admitting that victory is no longer guaranteed, he rejects withdrawal and promises to destroy the world alone. (Chapters 353–355)

The labyrinth barrier and the final battle

To complete a hasty descent, Baal turns the battlefield into a vast barrier resembling his Transcendent Realm. It absorbs land and people, separates groups through a labyrinth effect, blocks ordinary approaches, and shields him from the world's deterrent force while his fluid, dragon-like true body reconstructs. The same structure creates openings. Hajin claims a small hidden area with Stigma, Chae Joochul grows branching nature through the artificial space to guide others, and Shimurin analyzes the labyrinth. Because Baal descends before stabilizing consciousness and form, the coalition receives time to organize while waste demonic energy leaks from the reconstruction process. (Chapters 354–360)

Once the descent completes, Baal's gaze alone collapses weaker Heroes, and his world-destroying breath fills the barrier with destructive demonic energy. Suho cuts the fact that the energy was released, while Rachel, Aileen, and other specialists damage the nonphysical true body. Baal recognizes that isolating the space from the world's deterrent force also removes the limits placed on Suho, enabling the Sword Saint's Authority to reach a transcendent enemy. The barrier protects Baal from direct worldly interference, but it is not a one-sided advantage: the condition required for his full power simultaneously frees the human most capable of countering it. (Chapters 359–362)

As blades, nature, elementals, Spirit Speech, purification, electricity, flame, and exorcism attacks strip his body, Baal stops spending energy on attacks Suho will erase. Chae Nayun's sword reaches his true body, and Baal concedes that he cannot defeat the coalition conventionally. He chooses to contract and detonate the entire barrier, expecting everyone inside—including himself—to die. That outcome would still favor him because ordinary death is temporary for Baal, whereas the defenders would be gone. Chae Nayun physically delays the falling sky, and Suho cuts Baal apart, but neither can sever the Devil's will or destroy the protective barrier outright. (Chapters 362–363)

The heart, annihilation, and the remnant

The barrier's self-destruction stops when Hajin fires a refined, exorcised bullet carrying deterrent force through Baal's exposed heart. The impact severs Baal's will from the barrier, and Suho erases the retaliatory breath. The entire coalition then concentrates its powers into the Sword Saint's strike. Baal still stands after the barrier disappears, but his heartbeat is failing from the wound and his defeat is decided. He refuses Bell's pity, recognizes Shin Myungchul's soul within Shin Jonghak, and accepts one last fight. What he finally pursues is the experience denied to an ordinarily returning Devil: true death and annihilation. (Chapters 363–364)

Baal's fall ends the worldwide invasion and becomes the crisis through which previously divided Heroes, kingdoms, Devils, and reconstructed worlds cooperate. His response to learning that he may be a created antagonist contrasts with the humans he dismisses: he tries to pass responsibility to origin and destroys because he refuses to be a “toy,” whereas Sahyuk later rejects the same excuse and accepts responsibility for her own harm. Baal's annihilation does not instantly erase every consequence. The worlds he destroyed remain visible in memory, devastated societies require reconstruction, and the battle reshapes both the Hero Association and relations between Earth and other dimensions. (Chapters 354–375)

The true Baal is annihilated, but Bell absorbs one piece of his consciousness before it can erupt as a world-destroying soul. That remainder is reduced to an ordinary human soul without Baal's body or Authorities and converses with Bell as a distinct captive consciousness. Bell voluntarily serves as its container, reversing their earlier arrangement; Baal can still wager lifespan and tries to punish Bell with immortality, but no longer commands an incarnation or invasion. When regression later produces a world whose history follows the annihilation, the account explicitly states that Baal will not exist there. His final fate is therefore not survival through Bell, but containment of a remnant after the true self's extinction. (Chapters 377–378)

Appearance and personality

Baal's first material form closely resembles Bell because Bell is his incarnation body. He has the same handsome human appearance, distinguished by a horn on his forehead, crimson eyes, a voice that vibrates beyond an ordinary human register, and an overwhelming demonic presence. He can also personify himself as a giant face assembled from demonic energy. These resemblances do not make him Bell: they show that the Devil's manifestation borrows the host's shape, while their conversations, conflicting goals, and final containment establish two independent minds. (Chapters 337, 344–345)

During the completed descent, Baal abandons the human shell for a fluid, semi-incorporeal true form described as closer to a dragon than a humanoid Devil. His eyes resemble black holes and display worlds he has destroyed; wings, demonic skin, breath, and a vast body fill the barrier. The form is difficult for conventional physical fighters to damage, yet it can bleed reddish-black blood, lose skin, arms, and wings, and suffer a failing heart. Baal is transcendental rather than formless in every sense: when the conditions of descent give him a body, coordinated attacks can progressively expose and destroy it. (Chapters 353–364)

Baal is proud, possessive, calculating, and accustomed to overwhelming inferiors. He calls worlds a collection, treats Bell as both friend and container, and considers human lives so insignificant that massacres barely stir him. He nevertheless keeps explicit bargains: after Bell's death, he gives Sahyuk the promised dimensional stone without trying to substitute another reward. This reliability is not benevolence. His contracts place desperate people inside systems whose true price includes possession, destruction, or danger to entire worlds, allowing him to honor the literal exchange while exploiting the desire that made it acceptable. (Chapters 321–337, 353)

The revelation of his origin destabilizes the composure that millennia of destruction did not. Baal believes he was designed as evil and initially treats this as the nature of his existence. Learning that a human novel may be that design fills him with humiliation and rage. He refuses withdrawal, lashes out at the author, and interprets resistance as proof that fate created him to lose. Near annihilation, bitterness gives way to exhilaration: rather than accept Bell's pity, he embraces a final contest with Jonghak and the possibility of true death. Curiosity survives in the remnant, which bets on Chae Nayun's future rather than commanding it. (Chapters 344, 353–364, 378)

Gifts and abilities

Transcendental existence and demonic power

Baal exists beyond the ordinary material realm and can distinguish truth from falsehood at a level others call transcendental. In combat he emits immense demonic energy, forms cutting threads, shatters large magical constructs, slows time around groups of Heroes, and releases a breath credited with destroying worlds. His completed gaze carries destructive pressure capable of collapsing weaker opponents, while roars and waves of demonic energy fill an entire barrier. He also performs a large summoning ritual that opens a pentagram and brings Devils to Earth. These are demonstrated applications; the corpus does not define an unrestricted catalogue of every spell available to him. (Chapters 344–359)

Raw scale does not guarantee unlimited output. Baal's castle links the Phenomenon and Transcendent Realms and supplies effectively inexhaustible demonic energy and soldiers. Once Dismantling destroys it, his energy becomes finite and summoning capacity falls. Exorcism and purification weapons can penetrate his defenses, while Suho's Authority can erase released attacks as facts and cut into the true body. Repeated coalition attacks strip Baal's protective skin and create vulnerability to an external shot. His strongest form therefore depends on infrastructure, descent conditions, and a body that can be exhausted or opened by sustained pressure. (Chapters 345, 353–364)

Incarnation, possession, and descent

Baal uses an incarnation body to bridge transcendental existence and material life. Bell sells his soul and carries Baal in his head for 693 years, acquiring a forced survival instinct but retaining his own memories, preferences, and resistance. Ordinary bodily death does not end the arrangement; Baal reacts when Bell faces annihilation, and manipulating the host's underlying material inside the Gate releases the Devil. Baal emerges looking like Bell because the host supplies the incarnation form. Yi Yeonjun can seek succession, but the attempt does not make him Baal, and Bell's resistance shows that a container is not a mindless possession. (Chapters 292, 321–337)

Complete descent additionally requires a recreated first world, the Demon Realm Gate, a castle, and energy from destroying that world. These conditions weaken universal deterrence enough for Baal to cross dimensions. When the castle falls before the first world is destroyed, he descends early and must reconstruct himself inside a barrier; until that reconstruction completes, he lacks stable consciousness and form and emits waste energy. The preserved first world also gives Shimurin time and a route to return with its people. Baal can force a descent after the intended mechanism breaks, but the result is slower, finite, and strategically vulnerable. (Chapters 324, 337–358)

Barriers and spatial control

Baal creates dome-shaped spaces large enough to swallow Leores Plaza, key buildings, and later a broad battlefield. His main barrier resembles the Transcendent Realm, acts as a labyrinth that prevents direct approach, separates combatants, and isolates its interior from the world's deterrent force. He can fill it with demonic energy, alter apparent distance, absorb additional people, and contract its sky and earth toward a catastrophic explosion. The barrier also protects the transcendent state from external interference; even Suho cannot simply cut the structure while it is performing that role. (Chapters 337–363)

Several counters work without proving the barrier generally weak. A heavily amplified Mystic Key opens a localized crack, letting additional fighters enter. Stigma can claim and mask a small area from Baal's influence and detection. Chae Joochul generates natural terrain whose branching streams map a path through the labyrinth, and Shimurin completes a formal analysis that guides the coalition. Chae Nayun's enormous magic sword delays contraction by physically supporting the falling boundary. Finally, the heart-piercing deterrent attack severs Baal's will from the barrier, stopping its collapse. Each counter addresses a specific function rather than dispelling the whole domain through ordinary force. (Chapters 338, 355–363)

Death, annihilation, and fate

For Baal, death and annihilation are different states. Destroying a temporary body ordinarily allows him to return, which is why detonating the barrier appears favorable even though the blast would kill him. True annihilation requires an attack capable of reaching his existence and preventing that return. The coalition achieves this through successive removal of his defenses, a refined bullet bearing exorcism and deterrent force through the heart, and a final combined strike centered on Suho's sword. The attack stops the barrier, causes the heartbeat to fail, and leaves Baal facing an end he cannot confidently classify until it arrives. (Chapters 292, 363–364)

Baal's effort to escape the world's restraints produces a paradoxical limitation. By isolating the barrier from deterrent force so that his true body can descend, he also removes the force keeping Suho's Authority at a human level. This lets the “main character” transcend within Baal's own space and counter attacks that should otherwise be overwhelming. Baal calls the outcome fate and views himself as created to lose, but his own choices—preserving pride, refusing withdrawal, rushing descent, and constructing the isolating barrier—produce the conditions of defeat. Fate shapes the confrontation without functioning as an automatic attack available at his command. (Chapters 353–364)

Power progression

Relationships

Bell is Baal's incarnation body, long-term companion, and eventual jailer, not an alias or alternate name. Bell sells his soul for regression and carries Baal for centuries, but grows tired of existence and arranges a death intended to annihilate the Devil. Baal imposes survival instinct through the possession while also calling Bell a useful friend. After the final battle, Bell absorbs a fragment of Baal's consciousness and contains the now-authority-less soul. Their power relationship reverses completely: the Devil who once occupied Bell becomes a captive voice whose remaining leverage is a wager over lifespan. (Chapters 292–337, 355–378)

Jin Sahyuk is both the person Bell chooses to release Baal and a beneficiary of a bargain. Her Reality Manipulation can dismantle Bell's container at the material level, initiating the descent. Baal then keeps Bell's promise and gives her a dimensional stone for returning to Akatrina. Sahyuk does not become his follower; she joins the coalition, dismisses his claim that created origins excuse conduct, and later uses the stone for her own reconstruction project. Their relationship demonstrates that a completed demonic bargain can furnish real power without creating loyalty or moral agreement between the participants. (Chapters 316–337, 355–375)

Kim Suho is Baal's central battlefield counter. Baal initially treats him as another human made insignificant by transcendence, but Suho's Authority can erase emitted demonic attacks and cut the Devil's true body. Baal's own barrier removes the world's limitation on that Authority, creating the condition for Suho to reach him. Bell's memories tell Baal that Suho will protect people regardless of whether the world began as fiction, an answer that frustrates Baal's attempt to make origin decisive. Their final duel becomes a conflict between Baal's imposed meaning and Suho's chosen responsibility. (Chapters 353–364)

Kim Hajin becomes Baal's target after the Devil accepts that Hajin wrote the novel from which the world developed. Baal interprets authorship as responsibility for his forced evil and decides to destroy both creator and creation. Hajin hides in a crack of the barrier, dismantles the castle, coordinates allies, and fires the heart-piercing shot. Baal's rage toward him is real, but Sahyuk later identifies its moral failure: created circumstances do not erase the choices made within them. Hajin supplies the decisive deterrent force, while the coalition—not a solitary author—turns the wound into annihilation. (Chapters 343–364)

Yi Yeonjun attempts to replace Bell as Baal's incarnation. He welcomes an endless cycle of destruction and death and offers less resistance than the existing host, making him attractive to Baal after Bell seeks release. The Devil shares Bell's memories with him, including knowledge of the world as a novel, but that truth drains Yeonjun's purpose rather than enlarging it. Baal rejects the same despair and declares himself a destroyer. Their alliance never matures into a completed succession; Yeonjun dies within the larger barrier, and Baal is forced to descend through Bell's broken container instead. (Chapters 329–357)

Shin Myungchul and Shin Jonghak connect Baal's first bargain to his final battle. Myungchul's use of regression opens the path that eventually brings Baal to Earth, and he later asks Jonghak to reveal that selfish choice publicly. Near the end, Baal senses Myungchul's soul within his grandson. Jonghak challenges him with the inherited power meant to correct that mistake, and Baal welcomes the confrontation as the final test of a life shaped by contracts and recurrence. The descendant of the contractor thus participates in ending the Devil summoned by the original bargain. (Chapters 324, 354, 364)

Items

Baal does not consistently wield a named personal weapon or artifact. His Demon Realm Gate, Devil's Castle, dimensional stone, and barriers are created media or pieces of descent infrastructure rather than a signature possession carried through battle. The only scoped item directly linked to his defeat is the refined Misteltein bullets. Hajin combines and further refines that ammunition with exorcism and deterrent force, then fires it through Baal's heart. It belongs to Baal's opponents and targets him; it is never owned or wielded by Baal. (Chapters 354, 363–364)