Character · That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
Diablo
A demon old enough to predate most of the world's history decides what he really wants is to be somebody's butler.
In Otakana the clue reads: Primordial demon who insists on serving
- Type
- Character
- Series
- That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Diablo is a primordial demon, one of a small set of beings that existed before nearly everything else and have never needed a body to be terrifying. Rimuru summons him for a job and expects a transaction. Diablo takes one look at the slime, decides this is the most interesting thing on offer, and asks for a name and a position on the staff.
He gets both, and then behaves like a butler who could dismantle a country between courses. He is polite to the point of menace, contemptuous of anyone who is not his master, and delighted by any chance to demonstrate the gap. Fuse uses him to raise the ceiling of the setting without handing Rimuru another rival.
The name is deliberate. The primordials are colour-coded, and Diablo was Noir before he had anything else to be called, which puts him in a naming scheme that leans on French colours and devil names from several languages at once. His arrival marks the point where the series stops being about a slime surviving and starts being about a slime governing.
Spelling DIABLO
DIABLO is the Spanish word for devil, borrowed straight, six letters with three vowels spread evenly through them. Japanese writes it ディアブロ, which needs a small extra character to produce the DI sound at all, since the kana chart has no plain DI. Nothing is lost coming back into English. Watch the vowel order: I, then A, then O.