the protagonists at the beginning. Also, it is revealed that the monstrous behemoth encountered at the beginning of the manga, and later shown occasionally as the "mother" of the creatures, was Shizuku herself, the beast being an unconscious armor to seal herself from the world. While often mentioned by Kasumi during the course of the story, Shizuku appeared often, other than in her monstrous form, through ominous apparitions, often Kasumi's delusions or unconscious mental links between the sisters, and only in the end she appeared at the core of her mutated form, begging Kasumi not to uncover the fact that she was only a Medusa-made creation, and that her true self had died. With the death of Zeus, she too ceased to exist, her monstrous body crumbling to pieces and her essence fading away peacefully. Zeus is considered to be the best hacker in the world and a closely observed subject by both NSA and CIA, Zeus is the main antagonist of the series and the archenemy of Marco. The two were apparently rivals in their past, until Zeus broke into the CIA mainframe and then framed Marco for the crime, escaping soon after. At some point he was approached by Karol Vega and made security chief for Venus Gate's labs, especially Level 4, for which he created the tight security systems. A deeply disturbed person, he saw war, strife and conflict as a boring, unrealistic form of entertainment, and claimed that humanity as a species had lost its will to survive. Keeping such ideas a secret from his employers, he devised a way to control Medusa carriers at will, applying it to Shizuku when he found she was much more powerful a carrier than Alice herself. His last act as a human being was amusing himself while looking at Shizuku creating deformed aberrations, before turning his own self into data and entwining it with the monster Shizuku would later become. Zeus was only seen or mentioned in flashbacks during the course of the story until the end, where he presented himself and declared his will to use Shizuku, a never-ending supply of creatures defying the laws of nature, to build up his own army of beastmen warriors and other fantasy-like beings and with them plunder the world into chaos, an endless game of survival for his own amusement. To do so, and knowing that Shizuku would wake up her