Ganishka

Ganishka
Kanji	ガニシュカ
Rōmaji	Ganishuka
Debut
Manga	Dread Emperor
Profile
Gender	Male
Hair color	Black
Species	Apostle; Human (formerly)
Status	Deceased
Affiliation	Kushan Nation
Occupation	Emperor of Kushan

Emperor Ganishka (ガニシュカ, Ganishuka^?) was the head of the Kushan Nation. He was also an Apostle, but one who is against the God Hand rather than their follower compared to the others.

Appearance

Ganishka was a large built man with thick beard and mustache. He wears the Royal sherwani with a turban. While his eyes were originally normal when he was human, they changed to light blue irises with blackened sclerae and his mouth became wider and filled with sharp teeth.

Personality

Ganishka was a merciless king who killed countless people in-order to secure his life and throne. While he acted fearless, he was at a constant state of fear and mistrust from those around him. This caused Ganishka to create a belief that only fear could ensure his survival. Truly evil and inhumanly cruel, he would string up women to be eaten by crocodiles for his amusement and had hundreds more imprisoned to be raped and violently killed by dunking them in his artificial Daka generator, causing the infant Daka to tear their way out of their mothers. Even other Apostles were not safe from his cruelty, having used some of them and stitched them together alive to create the Reincarnator that creates the Daka.

Ganishka was shown to be very arrogant, as seen when he stated why he would not follow Griffith. When he met and discovered a branded Guts, he offered to join forces to defeat Griffith. He admitted that he thought favorably of those who possessed enough strong hate to survive the inescapable fear and despair of the endless night of spiritual torture. However, when Guts rejected his offer, he didn't second guess his decision to try and kill him.

Abilities

File:Ganishka's Mist Form.jpg

Ganishka in his Lightning Mist form.

As an Apostle who tapped deeper into the Astral plane, Ganishka 's Apostle form is the second strongest seen yet, shaming even Zodd and second only to the God Hand themselves. Unlike other Apostles, who transform directly into their alternate forms, Ganishka's Apostle form is a monstrous proxy he creates out of fog. This proxy is several hundred feet tall and resembles his face, and he can in fact speak and hear out of it and is capable of triggering it anywhere, from any location he wishes. This proxy can generate lightning strikes that give it an extremely powerful offense. It had only one weak point, and only Schierke was able to locate it through her magical powers: the spot directly between its eyes. Striking this point destroyed the proxy and caused Ganishka's real body, many miles away, some measure of pain.

Griffith, however, being a God Hand, shamed Ganishka completely in front of the ruined Kushan forces. When Ganishka became enraged and triggered his proxy, Griffith blew it away with a powerful wind he summoned, and claimed that he should be careful not to do such a thing on windy days.

Second Transformation

File:Ganishka's Shiva Form.png

Shiva form.

After his stalemate with Griffith, Ganishka decides to enter the Man-Made Behelit he commissioned for creating his Daka to transcend into a form equal to Griffith in power. This transformation that Ganishka undergoes by tapping in the depths of the Astral Plane itself required him to use all his forces within Windham's walls as sacrificial offerings with only Daiba surviving through a barrier as he witnesses his lord's rebirth with the entire city destroyed in the process once dawn approaches.

In this state, referred by Daiba and the other Kushan to be their god "Shiva" incarnate, Ganishka becomes a giant taller than Midland's mountains with whip-like arms and a mound of multiple heads on his shoulders that all breath fire. Despite his power, Ganishka loses all sense of rational thinking and self, unable to register the fact that he is now a huge entity and sees everyone around him as insects. It can be observed that his mental state deteriorates as he stays in this form. At first he is able to recognize Daiba. But then he is disoriented and starts to get lost in his own power and loses his sense of perception. He crushes his army under his footsteps and considers the gore thus produced as "Crimson Flowers" while sired familiars emerge from the corpses' remains.

History

Past

Ganishka nearly assassinated.

Long ago, Ganishka was born the son of the ruler of Kushan, yet his mother favored his younger brother and sought to poison him. But Ganishka survived and took his revenge by killing his own brother, forcing their mother to commit suicide out of grief soon after. Though he has political rivals, Ganishka managed to properly maneuver his way through the dangers as he grew into an adult. When Ganishka met the emperor, his father, in person, he noted the man's eyes were full of fear and suspicion before arranging the emperor's death and killing the assassin he hired to cover his tracks. Upon taking the throne, Ganishka resolved the best way to remain on the throne is through fear and conquest, his campaigns not leaving him time to spend with his remaining family whom he secretly feared.

Years later as he began to envision himself as the rightful ruler of the entire world, Ganishka attended a banquet in his honor before learning it was an assassination set up by his own son. Being poisoned and then stabbed numerous times by the spears of the surrounding guards, Ganishka lived long enough to reach an oddly-shaped stone that was given to him by Daiba. Ganishka activates the Behelit, sacrificing his son to be reborn an Apostle so he would never again feel pain inflicted him by other humans. But despite being an Apostle, rather than be their follower like the others, Ganishka instead acts against the God Hand for his own whims. During the plague that has struck Midland, Ganishka takes over Windham as part of his campaign to conquer the country while sending Silat to find and capture Griffith.

Falcon of the Millenium Arc

In the present day, Ganishka is a terrifying emperor, insane and cruel, with two goals: conquer the world, and destroy Griffith. While Silat searches for Griffith, he occupies Windham and counterattacks Locus' forces, and later attacks Vritannis upon the failure of the Kundalini. Afterwards, he sends an immense army to destroy the allied rebellion, only to be thwarted by Griffith and his forces. This would prompt Ganishka, who was powerless before Griffith, to find true power, and he jumps into the Reincarnator he created, a vessel made of still-living stitched-together Apostle bodies, using all of Windham who did not seal themselves off as sacrifices for a second Apostle transformation. This creates Shiva, the miles-tall monstrosity Griffith sets out to destroy in order to set himself up as a messiah.

Trivia

• Emperor Ganishka is based on Kanishka, who was a king of the Kushan Empire in Central Asia, from 127 AD until 151 AD.
• Ganishka is the only Apostle not to revert to his original human form upon death. This is due to his body being transformed into the World Tree.