Pillar Men

The Pillar Men (柱の男) are powerful humanoids that serve as the main antagonists of Battle Tendency.

Description
The Pillar Men are ancient, humanoid, super-human beings. They are now a near-extinct species of humanoids which used to live hundreds of thousand of years ago in the American continent. They are highly intelligent, extremely strong, and able to manipulate their bodies to a very fine degree; however, they are vulnerable to the rays of the Sun and to the Ripple.

Although they closely resemble humans, their physiology is very different from ordinary humans. The only visible feature that can differentiate them from humans is their horns. An individual Pillar Man can possess one or several small horns. Moreover Pillar Men are inherently powerful, having athletic physiques exclusively and are immortal. Their immortality causes Pillar Men to not produce children often and sleep for millenias instead of hours, staying awake for comparable periods.

The four remaining Pillar Men in the world are Kars, Esidisi, Wamuu, and Santana, in descending order of hierarchy. For them, displaying their horns is a sign of honor. Led by Kars, this group awakens in 1938 to continue seeking out the Red Stone of Aja, which, combined with their technology of the Stone Mask, will convert them into "ultimate beings"; resistant even to the Sun and Ripple.

High-Level Body Manipulation
Pillar Men can freely change and manipulate their bodies to a greater degree and speed than any vampire created by the Stone Masks, being able to dislocate or even break their own bones as well as flatten organs in order to achieve any form they desire. With their near-immortality and powers of regeneration, they can survive, endure attacks, and restore their bodies even after being reduced to only a brain.

Advanced Intelligence
The Pillar Men's most dangerous trait is their superior intelligence. They are capable of perfect recall and are able to instantly analyze and understand the mechanics behind anything, even complicated things such as languages, machinery, tactics, systems, and people's minds and actions, within a matter of seconds. Santana instantly learned the procedure to dissemble a gun that might have taken a human hours to learn; and Esidisi was able to match Joseph in wits.

Enhanced Senses
Pillar Men possess extremely enhanced senses. These are demonstrated a number of times, such as Santana sniffing out the area like a dog, or Kars being able to detect the number of people in a room via heat signatures.

Absorption
The Pillar Men's main method of sustenance is absorbing living beings (including Vampires), which they accomplish through physical contact. Each one of their cells releases a digestive fluid that eats their prey's cells individually, creating the illusion that the Pillar Man appears to be merging with his prey. Wamuu demonstrated the ability to "chain" this effect; after fusing multiple targets together and simply touching one, he absorbed the entire group.

Elemental Battle Mode
The more experienced Pillar Men each have their own special fighting style, characterized by a specific "element" such as fire, wind or light. Powers based around these elements are referred to as "Modes".

This ability and their body manipulation ability appear to only be usably by those associated with Kars and the Stone Masks; the Pillar Men race originally used primitive weapons such as spears before they were massacred.

Ultimate Being
A Pillar Man can reach the state of Ultimate Being by activating a Stone Mask affixed with the Red Stone of Aja. Only Kars has achieved this form. A Pillar Man in this state becomes much more powerful, with a massive enhancement to his abilities as well as new ones:
 * Being unaffected by sunlight
 * Immortality
 * Reshaping one's body on a cellular level to the shape of any kind of human, animal or plant
 * The ability to use the Ripple

History
The Pillar Men came from an ancient race of humanoids that had extraordinary strength, intelligence and lifespan. This race once ruled the Earth, living at the top of the food chain and consuming ordinary humans.

However, because of their great abilities and physique, the race followed the "rule of evolution" regarding the trophic level: the "higher" it "evolved", the fewer its population became. They remained unable to overcome its adversity to sunlight.

Hoping to overcome that one weakness, Kars invented the Stone Masks in order to bring out the race's full potential through acupuncture. He found that the mask worked on ordinary humans (which would turn them into vampires), and presumably unlocked the use of Elemental Battle Modes in their own bodies.

However, the race of Pillar Men, fearing Kars's genius, sought to execute him. Kars along with Esidisi massacred the opposing members of his race, including his parents. They along with two infant children (Wamuu and Santana) were the sole survivors of their race.

The remaining pillar men first appeared in human history 5000 years before Battle Tendency, capturing hundreds of thousands of humans and testing the effects of the stone mask on them. Kars found through his research that an unflawed Aja stone would be needed to completely pierce their brains and create an ultimate being invulnerable to the sun. To this end, he along with Esidisi and Wamuu travelled the world to find such a stone, and nearly wiped out the entire Ripple Clan in the process. The three of them left Santana to fend off for himself in America and never contacted him again.

Reaching as far as imperial Rome because of rumors the Roman emperors possessed a perfect Aja named the Red Stone of Aja, they were ultimately unable to find the Red Stone of Aja before they needed to hibernate. The Pillar Men fused themselves into a stone wall hidden within a cave under the Coliseum near the 1st Century A.D..

The Aztec correctly predicted that they would awake in the year 2852 of the Aztec calendar, the equivalent of the year 1938.

The Pillar Men placed traps to feed themselves on greedy humans while sleeping, and one of their victims was Mario Zeppeli.

Battle Tendency
In the winter of 1939, Santana's slumbering body was discovered in a Mexican temple by the Speedwagon Foundation. However when Robert E. O. Speedwagon brought in Straizo to purge Santana, Straizo instead killed everyone present but Speedwagon to take one of the Stone Masks nearby and become a Vampire.

Meanwhile the Nazis discovered Kars, Esidisi and Wamuu in Rome. Unwilling to interact with so many of the Pillar Men, they sent a group of Nazis in Mexico stealing Santana away from his temple then bring him in an underground facility hidden under a hacienda for studies. Moreover they also retrieved Speedwagon for interrogation. When Santana was awakened artificially, he rampaged through the facility, killing everyone but Speedwagon and Rudol von Stroheim, a Nazi officer supervising the experiments when he was interrupted by Joseph Joestar, here to retrieve Speedwagon.

Joseph wielded the Ripple, a natural weapon against the Pillar Men, but it is only the combined effort of Joseph and Stroheim, then Stroheim's sacrifice, that allowed them to neutralize Santana.

Several days later, Wamuu awakened himself, then after killing the team watching over him, also awoke Esidisi and Kars. Coincidentally, Speedwagon, Joseph and Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli along with a soldier named Mark came into the cave to join with the Nazis. When they inadvertently killed Mark, a fight ensued between Caesar, Joseph, and Wamuu. Both were easily defeated, but Joseph managed to save Caesar, Speedwagon, and convince Wamuu to spare him for a future confrontation, Wamuu and Esidisi then placed a Wedding Ring of Death on Joseph to force him to seek them. The three Pillar Men then scattered in search of the Red Stone of Aja.

Several weeks later, as Joseph completed his training in the Ripple, Esidisi learned that the Red Stone of Aja was in the possession of the Ripple Master Lisa Lisa. He infiltrated her base, Air Supplena Island, and killed Loggins. However Joseph managed to defeat him and take the first antidote from him. Nonetheless, Esidisi, surviving as a mere brain, managed to possess Suzie Q and steal the Red Stone, sending it to Switzerland where Kars was hiding. Esidisi was then finished off by Caesar and Joseph.

The Stone was intercepted by the Nazis, forcing Kars to confront them. A fight ensued between Kars, Stroheim then transformed into a cyborg, and Joseph for the possession of the Stone. Kars failed in taking it, but decided to bide his time. Events accelerated when Caesar, learning of the location of the Pillar Men's hiding spot, decided to go there alone to fight them. It caused all the Ripple users to go to his pursuit to save him, but they arrived too late. Wamuu killed Caesar and incapacitated Messina. Lisa Lisa and Joseph confronted Kars and Wamuu, but trapped with an army of Vampires, Lisa Lisa bluffed that the Red Stone would be destroyed if none of them came back to it, and proposed a double duel to the death between the Ripple users and the Pillar Men. Kars accepted the challenge and let Joseph go with Messina, setting a meeting point at the Skeleton Heel Stone.

Joseph came to meet the Pillar Men again at the Skeleton Heel Stone to begin a chariot race to the death with Wamuu. Wamuu was defeated and killed, leaving only Kars to battle Lisa Lisa. However, Kars had no intention of honoring his contract and ambushed Lisa Lisa with a body double, sicced his army against an exhausted Joseph and seized the Red Stone of Aja. A timely intervention from the German Army and the Speedwagon Foundation, armed with miniature UV lights, saves Joseph who manages to confront Kars. Cornered, he uses the UV lights to activate his Stone Mask and becomes the Ultimate Being.

Now invincible, Kars proceeds to chase Joseph for revenge. Joseph flees on a plane and manages to lure Kars into an active volcano. With Stroheim, Joseph throws Kars into a lava pit from which Kars comes out unscathed and cuts Joseph's arm. As Kars deals the final blow with the Ripple, thinking it an appropriate ending, Joseph uses the Red Stone of Aja and Kars' Ripple to trigger a volcanic eruption. Kars is sent flying out of Earth's atmosphere, freezing solid in the vacuum of space. Immobile and immortal, he eventually ceases intelligent thought.

Trivia

 * The Pillar Men's appearances consist of a combination of Roman sculptures, the Great Sphinx of Giza, and the Nio Buddhist guardians.