Superbia

Superbia is an S-class Awakened Judicator and one of the Theocracy’s principal military authorities. Her blue hair, blue eyes, cold manner, and blue-and-black robes mark her as both an individual combatant and a representative of the Theocracy’s sacred order. She first appears as a formidable official whose power is inseparable from the institution she commands, but her later injuries, resistance, and dependence on Jack’s help reveal the human cost beneath that authority.

First Encounter and Historical Hostility

Superbia is introduced in a technologically equipped Theocracy settlement, where armored Templars study a holographic city map and wait for Jack’s arrival. She approaches him formally, offering a welcome before he identifies her by name without having met her in person. Jack explains that he knows her from Frelia, where he watched her cast an Anti-Army skill against the walls. The recognition immediately changes the room’s atmosphere: Superbia realizes that Jack was connected to the mountain massacre, while the Templars instinctively move to flank him as the mana between the two figures shifts.

The encounter establishes Superbia through confrontation rather than biography. To Jack, she is not merely a Theocracy commander but a surviving figure from a previous catastrophe. To her followers, his accusation transforms the diplomatic meeting into a potentially violent reckoning. Her authority is therefore built on a contradiction: she represents a sacred political order, yet her past actions have made her vulnerable to the charge that the order’s defense was itself murderous.

Theocracy Campaign and Disputed Sovereignty

During the assault inside the Theocracy, Superbia remains engaged in direct combat with General Cerda while Captain Verlance reports that traitorous forces have retreated into the audience chamber. Their choirmen have raised an apparently unbreakable golden barrier, and Hellspawn agents are killing the attacking Paladins. Superbia is consequently absent from the immediate breach, but her continued battle is important evidence of her position: she is not a distant administrator directing expendable troops, but one of the commanders personally carrying the fighting.

After the enemy is defeated, Superbia objects when Jack insists that the Empire has need of a surviving prisoner. Fresh from her battle with the papal general and covered in injuries, she declares that this was not part of the agreement with the Imp Queen. Her protest makes the political stakes explicit. The Theocracy’s cooperation with Jack’s Empire is conditional, and Superbia refuses to let military victory silently erase its boundaries. She later rejects Jack’s asylum proposal even more fiercely, insisting that her people must not abandon their home. When her outburst is interrupted by sudden physical collapse and the Templars lose their mana while trying to help her, the scene turns the question of sovereignty into a bodily crisis: the commander defending independence is herself rendered helpless by forces she cannot control.

Jack’s proposal is deliberately limited. He does not offer to abolish the Theocracy or absorb its people as Imperial citizens; he proposes a refuge within the Imperium where they may live freely and practice their faith. Superbia’s refusal shows that survival without homeland remains unacceptable to her. Her position is neither simple fanaticism nor uncomplicated patriotism. It is a refusal to treat displacement as a neutral administrative solution, even when the alternative is continued danger.

War, Prisoners, and the Limits of Mercy

Superbia later stands among the Paladins and other forces guarding prisoners from the Lost Battalion and the Solomon expeditions. Jack addresses the dissidents as people who know him, while calling them enemies of the world and traitors to humanity. He argues that their false prophet and political leaders turned grief into an instrument of chaos, concluding that they were deceived. Superbia’s presence gives the judgment institutional and military weight: she is part of the armed authority before which the prisoners await their fate.

She also appears in the larger machinery of Jack’s wartime decisions. Before an assault on Roland, Jack orders that a call for surrender be issued and that a unit be assigned to receive and house prisoners. Superbia is not named as the officer responsible for that order, but her later participation in prisoner custody places her within the same tension between annihilation and controlled mercy. The contrast is especially sharp beside Jack’s execution of Dorian Jazz. Jack grants Jazz a final opportunity to speak, hears his request that his men be spared, and then kills him because of his role in raising an army in Archangel Michael’s name. Superbia’s surrounding military world is therefore governed by selective mercy rather than universal clemency: surrender may preserve soldiers, while command responsibility can still end in death.

At the prisoners’ weighing, Lilith materializes and Sahaqiel descends beside Jack, with the arrangement rehearsed in advance to make judgment appear sacred and unmistakable. Superbia’s role in this scene places her on the side of order, spectacle, and coercive legitimacy. Yet the scene also complicates her authority, because the prisoners’ reverence is directed toward Sahaqiel as their patron saint rather than toward the officers who physically control them. Religious legitimacy can be claimed, staged, or contested, and Superbia stands at the unstable intersection of all three.

Wounding and Wartime Cooperation

Superbia’s most severe trial comes during the battle against three Apostles. Mi'shka finds her lying in a crater, breathing raggedly, with half her body gone. Dead Paladins and broken MECHs surround her, showing that the devastation is not the result of an isolated duel but of a failed defensive stand against enemies far beyond ordinary agents and guardians.

Jack reaches her while corruptive mana infects her flesh. He warns that he can save her life but that she will lose the use of her arm. Superbia accepts the price without hesitation, replying that she does not need the arm to cast spells. Jack, aided by Lilith and Sahaqiel, cuts through the mangled flesh and heals the wounds before she can fully react. The exchange preserves her defining stubbornness: even when reduced to a half-destroyed body, she evaluates survival in terms of continued magical function and military usefulness rather than bodily wholeness.

Jack then orders Mi'shka to take Superbia to medical care and rest. When Mi'shka asks what Jack will do, Jack answers that he will lead the tip of the spear and tells the Imperial soldiers to leave melee combat to the Awakened. Superbia’s rescue therefore does not remove her from the war’s moral center. Her survival becomes part of the same tactical division that places ordinary troops behind Awakened fighters, while her injury demonstrates how little protection even elite power provides against the Apostles.

Character Arc and Significance

Superbia’s trajectory moves through three forms of resistance. At first she resists Jack as the man tied to the mountain massacre. Then she resists the Empire’s attempt to convert asylum into an acceptable substitute for homeland. Finally, she resists death itself, accepting mutilation so that her magical and political function can continue. These stages do not erase her earlier severity; instead, they show that the same uncompromising will can defend a sacred state, reject imperial absorption, and endure catastrophic injury.

Her relationship with Jack consequently develops without becoming simple reconciliation. He recognizes her past violence, contests her control over prisoners, offers a refuge she rejects, and later saves her life on the battlefield. Their connection is structured by mutual necessity rather than sentimental trust. Jack needs capable Awakened allies in wars against the Apostles, while Superbia must accept assistance from the ruler whose history makes him an object of suspicion. The rescue does not cancel their political conflict; it proves that cooperation can exist inside unresolved antagonism.

Superbia also embodies the book’s recurring contrast between institutional power and physical vulnerability. She commands Templars and Paladins, casts an Anti-Army skill, and speaks for the Theocracy’s sovereignty, yet she can be brought to her knees, stripped of mana, and left half-destroyed in a crater. Her later survival belongs to a world where the old hierarchies have been further destabilized by the Shutdown: mana-dependent technology becomes inoperable, enormous numbers of resurrected people appear across the world, and new political arrangements must manage the resulting disorder. Against that background, Superbia’s importance lies not in remaining untouched, but in carrying the damaged authority of the Theocracy into a future where authority itself must be rebuilt.