"Fifteen year old Theo. How many people's lives will you touch in these coming two years, because I've spared your life? Two hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? How far will the flaps of your butterfly wings extend? ... I'll kill nine hundred and ninety-nine people in your name. I'll even break my usual rules to get the body count that high, so it's something special, beyond my usual habits. Maybe a bomb, maybe poison. I'll come up with something. I can target the people you love, those you're closest to, people you've affected. Aster there can be the nine hundred and ninety ninth, and you'll be the thousandth. Perfect. Canceling out the impact you've made in the world, it's poetic."
— Jack Slash to Theodore Richard "Theo" Anders, Worm, Interlude 11b
The world of Parahumans is home to sadistic serial killers and gangsters, multiverse-spanning conspiracies, malevolent god-like abominations, and countless other threats that make use of nightmarish powers to turn Earths Bet and Gimel into Crapsack Worlds where anyone purely good is hard to come by. These are the vilest, most horrifying villains that Taylor Hebert and Victoria Dallon come to oppose.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
Series-wide
- Teacher, real name Benjamin Terrell, is a megalomaniacal criminal mastermind who has authored numerous atrocities throughout the setting. Imprisoned in the Birdcage for several high-profile assassinations, Teacher hides the truth of Scion's malevolent nature so he can use the chaos of Gold Morning to secure his release, enslaving Dragon and usurping access to multiple safe havens during the conflict. Teacher takes over Cauldron's resources and employs the likes of the Fallen to facilitate his rise to power, allying with The Theocracy of Earth Cheit to fan the flames of interdimensional war before giving Mama Mathers free rein to inflict her nightmarish beliefs on the other universe. To add onto his crimes, Teacher assembles an entire city of brainwashed thralls and soldiers he works until they break, later scheming to enslave an army of imprisoned villains and attempting to activate their explosive restraints when this fails. Orchestrating a terrorist attack on the Gimel portal network to create a tear in reality, Teacher's ultimate goal is to merge with his shard and expedite the crippled cycle of the Entities so that other shards may overwhelm their hosts and become Titans, allowing him to take over the shard networks and reshape reality to his whims in the midst of the desolation. Despite his many justifications of working towards the greater good, in the end Teacher is nothing more than a self-centered madman who would abandon his humanity and see untold devastation brought upon the multiverse to achieve ultimate power.
- Jack Slash is a psychopath obsessed with being remembered as one of the most wicked people to have ever lived. The leader of the Slaughterhouse Nine, Jack tortures and murders the loved ones of the Nine to corrupt and break them into malleable pawns he can use to rampage across the world, indoctrinating Bonesaw into the group with this method to turn her into a Mad Scientist with a penchant for fates worse than death. Regularly wiping out thousands just for fun, Jack at one point targets a hospital and murders not only all of the staff and sickly patients, but the entire maternity ward as well, later threatening a hero's baby sister to keep him in line. Jack, upon learning of his destiny to be the catalyst for the end of the world, creates a superpowered army to bring mass murder upon the whole Earth and leave humanity ruined through the devastation, and uses Gray Boy's specialty powers to subject victims to truly horrific fates. Even when beaten, Jack convinces Scion to revert to his primal instincts as a cruel predator and kill billions of people across the multiverse as a final act of villainy. Jack was one of the most purely evil beings Taylor ever faced, a sadist who prided himself on his personal kill count of hundreds and who was happy to doom the multiverse just to satisfy his raging ego.
- Heartbreaker, real name Nikos Vasil, is Regent's father and a wretched Serial Rapist with the power to manipulate emotions. Isolating and permanently twisting his victims to form a cult-like harem of constantly adoring women, Heartbreaker sends them to commit crimes on his behalf and "rents them out" alongside his children, having any he tires of driven insane with fear or killed in shootouts that see hordes of brainwashed victims war with law enforcement. Heartbreaker also uses his powers to traumatically discipline the many children fathered from his slaves with waves of paralyzing terror and abusive "tests" held on their birthdays, one of which sees an entire party of innocent children tortured, and he uses any he can get to trigger as Child Soldiers whose spirits he breaks into loyalty by forcing them to commit murders. An amoral narcissist who ruins countless lives to prop up his hedonistic lifestyle, not even his own children are safe as he obsessively attempts to control and corrupt them into sociopathic rapists, murderers and torturers like himself, with his legacy of abuse continuing to torment them long after his death.
- Shell & Tangle (arcs 4 & 6): Bakuda is Lung's newest lieutenant in the ABB (Azn Bad Boys), a Tinker with an expertise in crafting bombs. Introduced going on a city-wide bombing campaign to free Lung that sets off a massive gang war, Bakuda uses a wide variety of explosives with countless destructive effects, ranging from melting victims to trapping them in time bubbles to warping organic matter into a state of permanent agony. To aid in her reign of terror, Bakuda assembles an army of ABB goons and hundreds of forcibly conscripted innocents, all of whom she's implanted with Explosive Leashes she randomly sets off as the mood strikes her, and sadistically melts one teenage conscript when he can't bring himself to shoot another person, before giddily crafting a "superbomb" to hold Brockton Bay and around an entire fifth of America hostage. One of the earliest villains faced by Taylor and the Undersiders, Bakuda set the stage for the monstrous underbelly of the world of capes.
- Sting (arc 26): The clone of Gray Boy, real name Nicholas, is the magnum opus of Jack Slash's "Slaughterhouse Nine-Thousand." Sharing the powers of his less lucid genetic template, Gray Boy traps his victims in time loops, with the only changes to the loops being the progression of the victims' minds and whatever Gray Boy inflicts on them. Gray Boy uses this to cause eternities of torture, allowing people to relive stab or burn wounds over and over "until well after the sun goes out" as they are driven insane, find their way back to sanity, and crack again in an unending cycle. Trapping numerous people in these loops and threatening to do the same to a baby as The Dragon to Jack in his plans to end the world, Gray Boy uses his power on Scion in an effort to doom the world to the Endbringers before turning on Jack out of disgust for his weakness, viewing himself as always on the hunt for more prey.
- Cradle, real name Ryan, is a sociopath who came to despise Rain for their cluster's personality bleed-through "violating" his identity, setting out to ruin his life in revenge and making use of the bleed-through to infect their fellow clustermates with his Lack of Empathy. Influencing Snag and Love Lost into warring on the Fallen and the many innocents seeking refuge with them, Cradle later allies with March to pop the time bubbles in Earth Bet and release the destructive broken triggers within, betraying Love Lost to steal her and Colt's powers in the process. To cap off his cruelties, Cradle invents a weapon that keeps his victims alive as they are cut to pieces while allowing them to still feel all the pain, not hesitating to use it on even children, and ultimately intends to either secure power and influence after backstabbing March or see Earth Gimel utterly annihilated to curry favor with other universes. While once genuinely seeking to become a good person, Cradle rejects any desire for redemption or empathy with the apocalyptic consequences of his petty vendetta.
- Christine "Mama" Mathers is a chief member of the Fallen, dedicated to the worship of the Endbringers. Consisting of bigoted Christian fundamentalists, the Mathers faction of the Fallen is focused on kidnappings and Human Trafficking to strengthen the other branches, brainwashing young innocents and heroes into loyal soldiers or breeding slaves. Mama uses her powers to constantly monitor her subordinates and Mind Rape failed allies and enemies alike with horrific hallucinations, mentally torturing hostages taken from her own community during Breakthrough's siege. Later allying with Teacher, Mama extends her influence over thousands on Earth Cheit, inflicting terrifying visions on her victims to enforce her prejudiced ideals of religion and white supremacy on the other world. Even abandoning her own son to die, Mama Mathers proves time and time again that the only things she truly cares for are herself and her twisted interpretation of faith.
- Eclipse & Black (arcs X & 13): The Orchard duo, Mr. Bough and Mr. Drowsing, are sickening slave peddlers with the respective powers to mutate bodies and alter minds. Specializing in creating "custom orders" for their clientele to use however they please, including sexual slavery, the pair traffic prisoners from overseas and brainwash them into believing they are anything from Case 53 lookalikes to twisted half-animal hybrids, then change their bodies to match. Already veterans of cape conflicts like the Boston Games, Orchard continues their practices in the post-Gold Morning world, inflicting Body Horror on countless victims to sell them off as slaves.
