Oliver Schtrom

Oliver Schtrom was originally named Oliveira von Stradius.

He had been a duke of the Blue Sphere Empire with a claim to the imperial throne.

He was once a wise and compassionate noble who worried about the empire’s corruption.

Following the example of Earlshide, he promoted policies that put commoners first.

Two years before the main story, his political rival Herald von Richmond set a trap for him.

As a result, enraged townspeople turned on him and murdered his pregnant wife Aria.

Driven into despair by the deaths of his wife and unborn child, he lost control of his magic and transformed into a demon.

He then became the first demon in the world to retain complete reason.

In the anime, his voice actor is Toshiyuki Morikawa.

Before his fall, Oliver was a reform-minded aristocrat inside an empire deeply shaped by class prejudice.

He opposed the empire’s contempt for commoners and tried to create a fairer system.

However, false charges were fabricated against him by Herald and other political enemies.

The people he had tried to protect believed those lies and betrayed him.

That betrayal broke him completely.

His transformation into a demon was born from rage, hatred, grief, and overwhelming despair.

After becoming a demon, he gathered followers such as Zest and other imperial intelligence operatives made up largely of commoners.

Many of them also held deep resentment toward the imperial nobility.

Oliver often appears calm, polite, and gentlemanly.

Underneath that refined exterior, however, he is chillingly cold.

When he became a demon, he lost nearly all emotion except for vengeance, hatred, and a faint trace of pleasure.

Because of that, he can use, manipulate, or kill others without remorse if it helps him achieve his goal.

At the same time, he is not portrayed as a merely ugly or vulgar villain.

He still shows traces of the intelligence and depth he possessed as a human.

He is humble in a strange way, not driven by simple greed or lust.

He also reflects seriously on the meaning of demons and on his own existence.

Even so, his hatred of the empire runs so deep that it extends to everyone in it, nobles and commoners alike.

After destroying the empire, he largely lost interest even in his own demon subordinates.

His followers, including the deeply loyal Milia and Zest, never truly became exceptions to that detachment.

Their devotion to him was real, but his concern for them was minimal.

To hide his demonic nature, Oliver concealed his red demon eyes with an eye mask.

He posed as a refugee noble who had lost a succession struggle, gone blind, and fled the empire.

Using that cover, he infiltrated the Kingdom of Earlshide and became a magic teacher at its junior academy.

There he quietly began artificial demonization experiments.

During his time as a teacher, he noticed Kurt von Reetzburg, the eldest son of a count’s family.

Oliver trained him personally and improved his magical ability.

At the same time, he deliberately planted elitist ideas in Kurt’s mind, similar to those held by imperial nobles.

By destabilizing Kurt’s personality on purpose, Oliver established a method for artificially turning humans into demons.

Kurt did transform as planned after entering the advanced magic academy.

However, he was soon defeated by Shin Wolford, the “Wise Man’s Grandchild.”

Soon after, an investigator named Olt used a leading interrogation to expose Oliver’s involvement in Kurt’s indoctrination.

Oliver beat back the soldiers sent after him and tried to flee.

By chance, he encountered Shin and fought him directly.

Although his identity as a demon was revealed and he suffered serious injuries, he escaped by using an explosion spell to withdraw from the battlefield.

After returning to the empire, Oliver used what he had learned from Kurt as the basis for further human experimentation.

He turned his subordinates into demons and used them to throw the imperial military into chaos through disinformation and covert attacks.

He eventually annihilated the empire’s forces, including Emperor Herald.

In the anime version, Oliver personally kills Herald.

He then expanded his ranks by demonizing commoners who submitted to him.

Everyone else in the empire, noble or commoner, was systematically slaughtered.

With that, he completed his revenge and destroyed the empire entirely.

From then on, the former Blue Sphere Empire came to be called the Old Empire.

Because Oliver and his followers remained in its territory, they effectively took control of the land.

Other countries did not recognize their domain as a legitimate state.

As a result, the area became known as the Demon Territory.

The former imperial capital, now serving as the demons’ stronghold, was called the Demon Capital.

Once his revenge was complete, Oliver lost his original purpose.

He became almost entirely indifferent to everything around him.

He avoided active involvement and showed little interest in governing, ambition, or expansion.

That emptiness defined his life after the empire’s destruction.

Even his demon followers no longer drew much attention from him.

With his revenge complete, he drifted in a state of detachment.

As part of an experiment, Oliver tested whether two demons could conceive a child.

Through this experiment, he fathered a son with his subordinate Milia.

Their son was named Sylvester, also referred to as Silver in some accounts.

His birth changed Oliver’s outlook in a major way.

The child did not inherit demonic traits.

From this, Oliver concluded that demons were not a truly viable species within the world’s natural order.

He interpreted this to mean that demons had no future of their own and could never prosper as a people in place of humanity.

If there was no place in the world for demons, then in his view the world itself deserved to be destroyed.

That realization pushed him into his final objective.

He declared war on the entire world and announced his intention to exterminate humanity.

In the decisive battle at the Demon Capital, Oliver awaited Shin Wolford and the Ultimate Magicians in the deepest part of the castle.

There he confronted them as the final enemy.

He displayed overwhelming power and endured attacks from nearly all of Shin’s allies with little damage.

He had even independently learned how to cast multiple spells in parallel, a technique associated with Shin.

During the battle, Milia moved to protect him.

Oliver attacked anyway, piercing even her with offensive magic and fatally wounding her.

This act enraged Shin.

Shin answered with a thermonuclear spell that erased Oliver completely, leaving not even a fragment of his cells behind.

The manga presents parts of Oliver’s final arc differently.

In that version, he tries to force Shin into demonization by making him experience the same kind of despair that created Oliver himself.

To do this, he throws an unconscious Sicily von Claude from a great height in front of Shin.

He intends for her death to break Shin completely.

However, Sicily survives thanks to Thor von Flegel and others who were acting separately.

Shin also overcomes his rage and despair, avoiding demonization.

Oliver is infuriated by this failure.

Then Shin turns the argument against him and dismantles his beliefs.

Losing his sense of meaning, Oliver’s reason finally collapses.

He becomes a mindless demon with power surpassing even Kyle, the demon once faced by Merlin Wolford and others.

As in the original version, Shin ultimately destroys him with a thermonuclear spell.

Shin even mourns his death, regretting what Oliver might have been if he had never become a demon.

After Oliver and Milia die, their son Sylvester is taken in by Shin and Sicily.

He is raised as the eldest son of the Wolford family.

Later accounts describe Sylvester as growing into an excellent and kind young man.

In that respect, he resembles the man Oliver had once been before his fall.

As a demon, Oliver possesses immense magical power.

Because he retained his reason after demonization, he also combined raw strength with patience, planning, and cunning.

For over two years, he carefully prepared his revenge.

That long-term discipline made him one of the strongest figures in the story, second only to Shin in many interpretations.

His magical technique is highly advanced.

In his first battle with Shin, he was the first character in the story to demonstrate flight magic.

Shin later copied that idea and developed his own flight magic.

This highlights how impressive Oliver’s magical sense was.

He is also excellent at adapting in combat.

Even after being cornered by Shin, he immediately used an explosion spell to disengage and escape.

In the final battle, he demonstrated enough talent to master parallel spell activation on his own.

This put him on a level far beyond ordinary mages.

He was not only dangerous in battle but also highly capable as an instructor.

During his time as a teacher, many of the talented students he personally tutored greatly improved their magical skill.

The manga also shows him teaching subordinates like Zest how to artificially turn animals into monsters.

That further illustrates both his expertise and his ability to pass it on.

For all his intelligence, Oliver is not flawless.

His contempt for humans often leads to carelessness and overconfidence.

That arrogance shows up in the Kurt incident, where he falls for Investigator Olt’s guided questioning.

It is a rare but important example of him making a simple mistake.

His greatest weakness may be philosophical rather than tactical.

Once his revenge is complete, he has no real answer for what should come next.

Oliver shares several striking similarities with Shin Wolford.

Both are highly intelligent, strongly analytical, and exceptionally gifted at both magic and teaching.

Oliver also deeply loved his wife and unborn child when he was still human.

That emotional depth mirrors the kind of devotion Shin shows to the people he cares about.

Because of these parallels, Oliver can be read as a dark reflection of Shin.

In a sense, he is the kind of figure Shin might have become in a far more tragic world.