Solo Leveling Season 2 ends with two figures nobody names. They step out of a gate on Jeju Island, seem to search for someone by scent, and leave through a portal of their own before a single hunter can react. The anime never says who they are. The manhwa already has — and they’re not new arrivals. They’re two of the nine beings this story has been quietly building toward since Jinwoo first picked up a dagger.
Those beings are Monarchs, and the anime has been showing you pieces of them since Season 1 without ever using the word. The relentless boss at the bottom of the Demon Castle. Baran, defeated months before Season 2 even aired. Here’s what a Monarch actually is, which ones you’ve already met without knowing it, and which ones are still waiting in the manhwa.
Quick spoiler map: everything through the section on Rakan and Sillad reflects what the anime has aired through Season 2. Past that point, marked clearly below, everything comes from the manhwa and hasn’t been adapted yet.
What Is a Monarch, Exactly?
A Monarch is one of ten beings created by the story’s god-like Absolute Being to wage war against an opposing faction called the Rulers. Each Monarch commands an army built from a specific type of creature — dragons, insects, beasts, ice — and each is powerful enough to level a country without breaking a sweat. Jinwoo’s rival hunters spend years clearing S-rank gates one at a time. A single Monarch could walk through most of them without slowing down.
The show hasn’t used the word “Monarch” much yet. That’s by design. Solo Leveling spends its first two seasons establishing Jinwoo as the strongest hunter alive before it starts revealing that hunters were never the real players in this story. Monarchs are.
Where the Monarchs Came From
According to the manhwa, the Absolute Being built two symmetrical armies: ten Rulers, meant to preserve order, and ten Monarchs, meant to spread chaos. The two sides have been fighting for longer than any timeline the story gives in human terms. Earth’s gates, the System, hunter ranks — all of it exists because that older war eventually spilled onto Earth’s dimensional layer.
Only nine Monarchs are ever given a name and a personality on the page. The tenth seat is the one this entire story turns out to be about.
Ashborn, the Monarch Who Used to Be a Ruler
That tenth seat belongs to Ashborn, and he didn’t start out as a Monarch at all.
The manhwa establishes Ashborn as a former Ruler — an angelic soldier fighting on the Absolute Being’s own side. When the Rulers turned on their god, Ashborn defended the Absolute Being and was struck down for it. The Absolute Being had hidden a dormant power inside him for exactly that moment, and it activated as he lay dying, remaking him into something closer to his enemies: a Monarch built from shadow instead of light.
That origin is why Ashborn never fully belonged to either side. He fought through the war that followed, but two fellow Monarchs, Baran and Rakan, feared how strong he’d become and tried to remove him. Ashborn survived, killed Baran with his bare hands, and still lost most of his army in the process. By the time the Absolute Being died and the war lost any real point, Ashborn had stopped looking for allies among Monarchs entirely. He went looking for a human vessel instead — someone who could end the war rather than keep feeding it.
He picked Sung Jinwoo. That choice is the reason Jinwoo commands a shadow army instead of just leveling up like every other hunter, and it’s the reason a former Ant King answers to him at all.
The Monarch the Anime Already Put in Front of You
Baran is the one Monarch the anime has technically already used, without ever saying so.
Early in Season 1, Jinwoo clears the Instant Dungeon known as the Demon Castle and fights its final boss on the 100th floor: a horned, fire-wreathed king credited only as Baran. It’s one of the hardest fights the show gives him before the Jeju Island arc, and it plays like a straightforward dungeon boss.
It isn’t the real one. According to the manhwa, that Demon Castle Baran is a clone, recreated years later by an NPC guarding the dungeon specifically to give S-rank hunters something strong enough to test them — and explicitly weaker than the original article. The actual Baran, King of Demons and Monarch of White Flames, died centuries earlier, killed by Ashborn during the betrayal described above. Jinwoo spent one of his toughest early fights against an echo of a Monarch who was already dead.
Whether the anime ever draws that connection on screen is still an open question. Through Season 2, it hasn’t.
Rakan and Sillad, the Two Monarchs Season 2 Already Showed You
The unnamed figures at the very end of the Season 2 finale are Rakan and Sillad, and the anime introduces them the same way it introduced Baran: without telling you what you’re looking at.
Rakan, the manhwa’s Monarch of Fangs and King of Beasts, is the beast-shaped figure who communicates in something closer to an animal’s language than human speech. He commands beast-type creatures, can shift into a massive wolf-like form, and is, by most accounts, one of the more cowardly Monarchs — dangerous in a fight, but the type to flee rather than die proving a point.
Sillad, the Monarch of Frost and King of the Snow Folk, is the ice-elf figure standing beside him. He’s built around cold and calculation rather than brute force, and the manhwa writes him as more of a strategist than a berserker.
Both spend that final scene searching for someone on Jeju Island, and the fact that they leave through their own gate instead of attacking suggests they’re scouting rather than invading. Whatever they’re actually looking for is the question Season 3 has to answer.
Manhwa Territory — Spoilers Start Here
Everything above reflects what’s aired. Everything below comes from the manhwa, which wrapped years before the anime catches up to it. If you only watch the show, this is where to stop.
Querehsha, Monarch of Plagues. The only named female Monarch, and the manhwa’s Queen of Insects. She commands parasitic, disease-based creatures and fights through corruption and attrition rather than direct confrontation. She’s eventually killed during Jinwoo’s push through the Monarchs’ side of the war.
Tarnak, Monarch of Iron Body. Built entirely around durability — a Monarch who trades speed and range for a body that shrugs off damage most creatures couldn’t survive. His downfall comes from being overwhelmed rather than outmatched: by the time Jinwoo’s shadow army is tens of thousands of soldiers deep, it buries Tarnak in numbers his defense was never designed to handle.
Yogumunt, Monarch of Transfiguration. The most indirect of the group — an old, illusion-focused Monarch who prefers spatial tricks and misdirection over open combat. He’s also the one who warns Antares that the other Monarchs are plotting against him, which matters once Antares stops trusting anyone on his own side.
Legia, Monarch of the Beginning. Built more like a fortress than a person, with no organic body to speak of. Legia ends up a hostage rather than a combatant, captured by the Rulers using tools built specifically to contain a Monarch’s power, and used as leverage in the story’s endgame.
Rakan and Sillad’s endgame. Both eventually face Jinwoo directly. Rakan’s cowardice catches up with him — he tries to talk his way out of the fight before it starts, transforms into his full beast form as a last resort, and loses anyway. Sillad’s arc ties more closely to the human side of the story, connected to the death of a senior Hunters Association figure before Jinwoo gets his own confrontation with him.
Antares, the Monarch Everything Has Been Building Toward
If the Monarchs have a final boss, it’s Antares: Monarch of Destruction, King of Dragons, and by most accounts the strongest Monarch other than Ashborn himself.
Antares doesn’t show up to fight hunters. He shows up leading an army of dragons into the human world specifically to deal with Ashborn’s chosen vessel, which makes him less a random threat and more the one Monarch whose entire motivation is Jinwoo personally. He’s also the oldest of the nine named Monarchs, old enough to have fought in the original war against the Rulers long before any of it reached Earth.
The fight that follows isn’t close in either direction. Beating Antares takes more than raw strength — it takes the Rulers and Jinwoo working against a common enemy for the only time in the story. None of that has happened in the anime yet. As of the Season 2 finale, Antares hasn’t appeared on screen at all.
What This Means for Season 3
Season 2 spent its very last scene setting up Rakan and Sillad specifically, not Antares and not the rest of the roster. That’s the order the anime looks like it’s planning to follow: the two Monarchs introduced last get adapted first, with Antares held back as the arc’s actual endpoint.
What that means practically is that Season 3 has two jobs before it can even get near the war the manhwa spends its final arcs on: pay off the Jeju Island cameo, and explain what Rakan and Sillad were actually looking for. Only after that does the story have room to introduce Antares as anything more than a name on a wiki page.
You can already watch how Season 2 gets there on Crunchyroll.
The Fight That Was Never the Real One
None of the Monarchs the anime has shown you so far — the Demon Castle boss, the two shapes on Jeju Island — were ever the actual fight. They were the setup. The real one is a war that started before Jinwoo existed, and Season 2 just finally admitted it’s coming.
