⚠️ Spoiler scope: Everything up to the end of Solo Leveling Season 2 – Arise from the Shadow is fair game here. The last section is clearly marked and goes past the anime into manhwa territory — skip it if you’re anime-only and want to stay clean for Season 3.
The first thing the Ant King ever says to a human being is a question: “Who is your King?”
It plays like a taunt — a monster showing off in front of the people it just tore apart. It isn’t. The Ant King had no language of his own that morning. The Korean he used to ask that question belonged to a man whose head he had bitten off minutes earlier.
That’s the thing most people miss about Beru. He isn’t scary because he hits hard — Jeju Island is full of things that hit hard. He’s scary because every single thing that makes him seem person-like is something he took off a corpse.
Before He Was Beru, He Was the Thing Jeju Island Was Hiding
Beru started as the Ant King: the strongest offspring of the Ant Queen, and the hidden boss of the Jeju Island S-Rank gate. Not a boss the raid teams planned around — a boss nobody knew existed until it was standing in front of them.
The fourth Jeju Island raid is what established him. Japan sent a squad of S-Rank hunters onto the island, and the Ant King went through them one at a time — Akari Shimizu, Kenzo Tanaka and Tatsumi Fujishima first, then two more shortly after. These aren’t fodder characters. They’re S-Ranks, the tier the entire power system treats as the ceiling for humans, and he removed them without meaningful resistance.
He only left them because he heard his mother die. The Korean raid team had brought down the Ant Queen, and her death cry pulled him back across the island — which is how the Korean hunters ended up meeting him at all.
Gluttony Is the Ability That Actually Matters
Beru’s headline stats — speed, strength, durability — are the least interesting thing about him. The ability that defines him is Gluttony: when he devours something, he absorbs its skills and its knowledge.
Three examples from the arc show how wide that net is:
- From Min Byung-Gyu, the S-Rank healer he kills during the Korean raid: healing magic, fluent Korean, and enough of Byung-Gyu’s knowledge to understand who the people around him were.
- From one of the Japanese S-Ranks: ice magic, which the anime shows him turning on Jinwoo during their fight.
- From cone snails — yes, really — a paralysis venom he then amplifies with his own mana.
Sit with that list for a second, because it’s doing something sneaky. A character who grows permanently stronger by consuming what he defeats, accumulating other people’s abilities into a personal toolkit, is structurally the same character as Sung Jinwoo. The System levels Jinwoo. Gluttony levels the Ant King. They’re two versions of the same engine pointed in opposite directions.
That’s a real argument for why the Ant King is one of the most under-used antagonists in the series — he’s the only character built to keep pace with Jinwoo indefinitely, and the story resolves him inside a single arc. It’s also, to be fair, exactly why he makes such a satisfying shadow: the one enemy who could have grown alongside Jinwoo ends up growing for him instead.
“Who Is Your King?” Is the Scariest Line in the Arc
Monsters in Solo Leveling don’t negotiate. They don’t ask follow-up questions. The moment the Ant King opens his mouth and forms a sentence, the Jeju arc stops being a monster hunt and becomes something worse: a fight against something that is learning.
And the specific question he asks gives away how he thinks. He doesn’t ask who they are or what they want. He asks who they answer to — because in his world, everything answers to a monarch, and he’s trying to place these creatures in a hierarchy he already understands. He’s not mocking them. He’s filing them.
That’s my read rather than something the series spells out, but it lines up with how he behaves the second he loses: he recognizes a stronger authority and tries to leave. No last stand, no rage. Just a recalculation.
How Jinwoo Actually Beat Him
The fight isn’t close, and that’s the point of it. The Ant King empties his entire arsenal — raw strength, speed, stolen ice magic, paralysis venom, the surviving ant army — and none of it lands meaningfully.
What makes the ending memorable is the retreat. The Ant King works out that he’s going to lose and tries to escape, which is a genuinely unusual beat for a boss in this series. Jinwoo shuts it down with Ruler’s Authority, pinning him in place, and finishes him with Mutilation — the evolved form of Critical Attack. Jinwoo hits level 100 off the kill.
Then he does the thing the whole arc was building toward and extracts the shadow. If you want the full arc-by-arc walkthrough of how the season got here, we broke it all down in our Solo Leveling Season 2 breakdown.
Why He’s Named “Beru” — the Easter Egg the Anime Cut
This is the detail almost nobody watching the anime could have caught, because the anime doesn’t include it.
In the manhwa, when Jinwoo goes to name his new shadow, he gropes around for something fitting and lands on a memory of an author who wrote a novel about ants. That author is Bernard Werber, the French writer behind Empire of the Ants (1991) — a book that became a genuine bestseller in Korea in 1993 and stayed culturally sticky there. Pronounced through Korean phonetics, “Werber” comes out close to Beru.
So Jinwoo didn’t name the Ant King after a sound or a title. He named him after the guy who wrote the famous ant book, which is an extremely normal-person thing to do and one of the more quietly funny character beats in the series.
Werber himself found out and acknowledged it publicly, joking that Beru resembled him before his morning shower and coffee. The anime dropped the whole explanation for pacing — Season 2 covers a lot of ground — so it exists only on the page.
Beru’s Shadow Rank, and Why It Was a Big Deal
Jinwoo’s shadows are tiered. From the bottom: Normal, Elite, Knight, Elite Knight, General, Marshal, and Grand Marshal at the top. Most of the army sits at the bottom of that ladder and exists to swarm.
Beru arrives as a General grade shadow — the first Jinwoo has ever raised at that tier. General is where shadows stop being tools and start being minds: real intelligence, real communication, the ability to operate without being micromanaged. Jinwoo immediately points Beru at the roughly four thousand ants still alive on the island and lets him handle it.
It’s also Jinwoo’s working theory for why Beru can still talk after death, when Igris — extremely powerful, extremely loyal — communicates in gestures and silence. Worth flagging honestly: the series never fully confirms whether Beru’s speech survived because of his shadow grade or because Gluttony had already given him language while he was alive. Both explanations are on the table, and they aren’t mutually exclusive.
The Min Byung-Gyu Problem the Anime Quietly Fixed
Cha Hae-In is dying at the end of the raid, and the Elixir of Life isn’t holding her. Jinwoo’s solution is to extract the shadow of Min Byung-Gyu — the healer the Ant King had already killed — and have him heal her, then release him.
In the manhwa, that’s Jinwoo’s unilateral call, and it’s uncomfortable on purpose: he conscripts a dead colleague’s soul for a task without asking. The anime changes it. On screen, Byung-Gyu’s voice reaches Jinwoo asking him to use his power to save Hae-In, which converts an ethical shortcut into a dying man’s request.
Whether that’s an improvement depends on what you want from Jinwoo as a character. It makes him easier to root for. It also sands off one of the few moments where the story lets his power look genuinely troubling.
There’s a related argument fans keep having, and it’s worth knowing about: Jinwoo had just watched the Ant King heal himself using Byung-Gyu’s stolen power. So why raise Byung-Gyu at all instead of using Beru? The reasonable answer is that at that exact moment Jinwoo had no way of knowing Beru’s healing worked on other people rather than just himself. Call it a tight spot rather than a plot hole.
Manhwa Spoilers: Where Beru Goes From Here
🛑 Stop here if you’re anime-only. Everything below covers material past the Season 2 finale.
Beru doesn’t stay a General. He’s promoted to Marshal grade, the tier described as capable of fighting National Level Hunters — the handful of individuals who sit above ordinary S-Ranks entirely. Igris makes the same jump, and the two of them end up as the twin pillars of the army.
His healing is confirmed to work on others, too, which retroactively settles the Jeju debate above — Jinwoo later has him heal Yoo Jinho and Go Gunhee. The ability was always there; Jinwoo just didn’t have proof of its range when it mattered most.
Then there’s the speech. Beru’s oddly formal, archaic way of talking isn’t a translation quirk — it’s something he picks up from binge-watching Korean historical dramas while assigned to guard Jinwoo’s sister. A monster who learned his first words by eating a man learns his manners from period television. It’s a joke, and it’s also the most efficient character work in the series.
He is not, however, the ceiling. Bellion — Grand Marshal, and the first servant of the original Shadow Monarch — sits above both Beru and Igris. Which means the strongest thing Jinwoo pulled out of Jeju Island still isn’t the strongest thing in his shadow army.
Beru FAQ
Is Beru stronger than Igris?
They’re the two strongest shadows in the army for most of the story, and both reach Marshal grade. Beru brings versatility — flight, healing, absorbed skills, venom — while Igris is the more disciplined duelist. “Stronger” depends on the matchup more than fans usually admit.
Can Beru talk in the anime, or only in the manhwa?
He talks in the anime. Season 2 shows him speaking after his extraction and addressing Jinwoo as his king. What the anime skips is the explanation behind his name.
Did Beru kill Min Byung-Gyu?
Yes — as the Ant King, before Jinwoo turned him. That kill is where his Korean and his healing magic came from, which is why the two characters stay tangled together for the rest of the arc.
Will Beru be in Season 3?
He’s a permanent part of Jinwoo’s army from Jeju Island onward, so he’s expected to feature heavily. We track what’s confirmed in our Solo Leveling Season 3 guide.
The Reason Beru Sticks
Plenty of shonen series hand the hero a reformed enemy. What Solo Leveling does with Beru is stranger and better: it makes the loyalty itself unsettling. He is devoted to Jinwoo in a way no human character is, and that devotion runs on a mind assembled out of stolen pieces — a healer’s language, a hunter’s magic, a snail’s venom, a television schedule.
The Jeju arc is usually remembered as the moment Jinwoo became untouchable. It’s also the moment the series quietly asked what he’s actually collecting. If Season 2 was your entry point and you’re hunting for the next thing to watch, our list of anime like Solo Leveling is built for exactly that itch — and if you’re still deciding whether the series earns its reputation, we made the case with numbers.
Season 2 streams on Crunchyroll.
Image credits: Solo Leveling anime stills — A-1 Pictures, distributed by Crunchyroll. Based on the web novel by Chugong and the webtoon illustrated by Jang Sung-rak (DUBU) of Redice Studio, published by D&C Media. Empire of the Ants cover art — Bernard Werber. Images are reproduced here for commentary and criticism.
