Character · Berserk
Nosferatu Zodd
An apostle who has been looking for a good fight since before anyone currently alive was born.
In Otakana the clue reads: Immortal horned apostle who seeks a real fight
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Berserk
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Nosferatu Zodd turns up early in Berserk as a mercenary legend that happens to be true. In human shape he is a tall, scarred old warrior. In his real shape he is a horned, winged monster who has been killing people for something like three hundred years, and he does it for roughly the reason a bored man joins a gym.
He is an apostle, one of the humans who used a behelit to trade something they loved for power. Most apostles spend that power on eating. Zodd spends it looking for an opponent who might finally end him, which makes him the closest thing the series has to a sporting villain. He fights Guts, loses interest in killing him, and issues a warning instead.
The warning is the important part. Zodd sees something in Griffith long before anyone else does and tells Guts to run, which the swordsman ignores. Kentaro Miura used him as a barometer: when Zodd is impressed or unsettled, the reader should be too. He returns throughout the series, usually to raise the ceiling on what counts as strong.
Spelling ZODD
ZODD is four letters with a doubled D, and the second D is where guesses stop. Japanese ゾッド, zoddo, keeps the double consonant, so for once the sound is a real clue. Z is the useful letter here: very few four-letter answers start with one, so a single confirmed Z narrows the field to almost nothing.