Chudelkin

Chudelkin is the chief elder of the Axiom Church and operates in the upper levels of the Central Cathedral, where the elders monitor and manage violations of the Taboo Index.

Although his office sounds solemn and noble, his actual appearance and personality are the complete opposite of a dignified religious authority.

He has an extremely disproportionate body: an oversized, bulbous head perched on a small torso, giving him a clownish, three-to-four-heads-tall silhouette.

He appears overweight at first glance, but this is mostly due to his puffed-up clothing; his real build is simply small and slight.

His speech is vulgar and coarse, freely using filthy expressions and insults that are unthinkable for a high-ranking church official.

His tastes and behavior are equally base and repulsive, making it hard to believe he stands at the top of the “holy” Axiom Church’s hierarchy.

Despite all this, Chudelkin is utterly infatuated with Quinella and worships her with fanatical devotion.

When she accepts his desperate plea to “share a night’s dream” with him as a reward, he bursts into tears and even snot from sheer joy.

Chudelkin is a blatant egoist, focused entirely on his own desires and status.

He treats everyone beneath him as expendable tools, with no empathy or sense of responsibility.

He refers to the Integrity Knights only by their numerical designations such as “Number XX,” literally calling them by “unit number” rather than their names.

To him, these knights are not people but mere instruments designed to execute the church’s will.

When the Integrity Knights warn the Axiom Church leadership about the growing threat of the Dark Territory and request increased military preparations, Chudelkin brushes them off.

He tells them dismissively that “dealing with that is your job,” embodying the worst traits of a lazy and incompetent upper management.

Unsurprisingly, he is completely despised by the Integrity Knights.

They fear his authority but loathe his character, seeing him more as a poisonous parasite than a leader.

In contrast, his attitude toward Quinella is fanatically reverent.

He longs for her approval, dreams of physical intimacy with her, and is willing to degrade himself in every possible way to win even a scrap of her favor.

Chudelkin is not just a grotesque comic relief; he is a highly advanced user of Sacred Arts.

His role as chief elder and his duty in memory manipulation show that his technical skills in sacred-arts systems are top-tier within the church.

His bizarre body shape becomes a combat advantage.

By performing a headstand and using his oversized head as a pivot, he can free all four limbs for simultaneous casting.

In this inverted stance, he can deploy Sacred Arts not only from both hands but also from the toes of both feet.

With sufficient concentration, he is even capable of casting Sacred Arts from his eyes, turning his entire body into a multi-directional casting platform.

Chudelkin is also in charge of procedures related to Deep Freeze and memory adjustments on the Integrity Knights.

He handles the erasure of excess or problematic memories when knights approach the limits of their memory capacity due to repeated sealing and reconfiguration.

As a result, he holds terrifying power over the knights’ identities and history, able to literally erase parts of their lives at will.

This further deepens the knights’ hatred and distrust toward him, even as they are forced to obey.

After Bercouli Synthesis One is defeated, Chudelkin steps in and petrifies him rather than killing him outright.

He then captures Eugeo and brings him before Quinella, aiming to eliminate Kazuto Kirigaya (Kirito) and Alice Zuberg as “rebels” against the church.

His plan backfires when he underestimates Kirito and Alice.

Instead of eliminating them, he is beaten in this encounter, suffering a humiliating setback.

Later, on the top floor of the Central Cathedral, Quinella gives Chudelkin a chance to redeem his previous failures.

She promises him both a chance to restore his honor and the intimate “night together” he desperately desires, using his obsession as a leash.

Fueled by this promise, Chudelkin goes all out in his battle against the trio of Kirito, Eugeo, and Alice.

However, Kirito and the others cleverly exploit his one-sided devotion to Quinella, manipulating his emotions and timing.

Blinded by infatuation and desperate to impress Quinella, Chudelkin drops his guard at a crucial moment.

Kirito lands a direct hit on him with the powerful sword skill Vorpal Strike, leaving Chudelkin grievously injured.

Even then, Quinella shows no true concern for him.

She dismisses him as an annoyance and roughly smashes him against a wall to get him out of her way, treating him as a disposable pawn rather than a devoted follower.

Although he appears to be dead after Kirito’s strike and Quinella’s cruel dismissal, Chudelkin survives for a short while longer.

This lingering spark of life sets the stage for his final, twisted act of devotion.

In the anime adaptation, Chudelkin is voiced by Wataru Takagi.

Takagi’s performance emphasizes the character’s shrill hysteria, grotesque affectations, and sudden swings between obsequious fawning over Quinella and vicious cruelty toward others.

During Quinella’s last stand, she attempts to flee from the collapsing situation and escape to the real world.

At this point, Chudelkin, still alive despite his injuries, drags himself back into the scene.

He calls out desperately after Quinella, begging her not to leave him behind and insisting that she take him along.

In a final frenzy of obsession, he transforms his own body into flames and hurls himself at her.

Clinging to Quinella while engulfed in fire, he unintentionally destroys the last of her remaining Life (durability) along with his own.

The very flames born from his warped “love” for her utterly consume the self-proclaimed ruler who preached that “love is control.”

This creates a sharp irony: Quinella, who believed that love is nothing more than domination, is killed by the blazing, twisted devotion of the one person who truly “loved” her in his own perverse way.

However, even his last act does not redeem him in the eyes of anyone else in the Underworld.

Before this final scene, Chudelkin had attempted to release multiple Integrity Knights from Deep Freeze to confront Kirito and Eugeo.

Due to his timing and the process involved, at least ten of those knights were still not awakened even when the War of the Underworld began.

Even Sheyta Synthesis Twelve and Renly Synthesis Twenty-Seven, who did awaken before the conflict, only did so after Quinella’s death.

Chudelkin’s interference and mismanagement effectively crippled the readiness of the Integrity Knight forces at a critical moment.

In the grand scheme of the war, Chudelkin ended up hindering the Integrity Knights far more than he ever helped them.

No knight mourned him, and his death passed without grief or ceremony.

From a strategic perspective, his death might even be considered a blessing in disguise for the Human Empire forces.

Had he survived, he would likely have continued obstructing Bercouli and sabotaging key decisions, further weakening the human side’s chances against Gabriel Miller, the incarnation of the Dark God Vector.

Because both Quinella and Chudelkin died when they did, the Human Empire Army was barely able to mount a viable defense in the coming war.

In the end, Chudelkin remained a grotesque, selfish figure whose only constant was his devouring obsession with Quinella—an obsession that finally burned both of them out of existence.