Spirit Tortoise

The Spirit Tortoise (霊亀) is a mountain-sized tortoise monster, known to be a greater disaster than the Waves of Calamity. It is the first of the Guardian Beasts.

Base Form
The Spirit Tortoise is massive tortoise with a mountain and the city of Reiki on its shell. Throughout the mountain range there is occasional cracks that allow access into the interior of the Spirit Tortoise. When the beast charges it's electric beam attack, it's entire torso glows as the energy collects at the mouth.

Revived Form
After the Spirit Tortoise was improperly killed the first time, it came back in a more terrible form. This time, the Spirit Tortoise's eyes glowed red while a long web of drool dangled from its draping mouth. Whatever remained of the town on its back was destroyed and the shell was now covered in towering spike-long thorns that acts like missiles.

Skills and Abilities
The Spirit Tortoise's enormous weight is advantageous on most days, and it has powerful gravity magic which can immobilize its foes, leaving them helpless and unable to escape being crushed under it. The beast is painfully slow, but the fact it neither eats nor sleeps makes up for this almost completely. When pushed into a corner, it is capable of firing intense lightning (electric-type magic) beam attacks from its mouth or the eyeball on its heart - this attack has only been truly blocked by the Shield Hero while using the enhanced Wrath Shield 3 but can be mostly blocked with his enhanced Soul Eater Shield as well. What's truly terrifying about this attack is that it not only wipes out mountains, but it drains all of the victims' SP, leaving them truly helpless before the next shot, which can come as soon as immediately after if it had managed to absorb enough SP in the last one.

To compensate for its slow body and limited movement, the Tortoise is also able to summon Demon Bat familiars, as well as many others including those that resemble gorillas, Yetis, floating eyeballs, caterpillar-like familiars and even zombies made from the people who lived on the city on its back - this extends to the beasts inside as well. There are several more familiars that protect the heart that acts like a biological immune system. There are Mimic Type Familiars for path concealment as well, making it hard to even find the heart. Deep within the Tortoise is the heart, which is capable of using the same strong gravity magic and high-powered beam as the head, but the latter is slightly less powerful to avoid damaging itself.

The Tortoise was rendered almost immortal due to the blue hourglass within its body, the only means with which to kill it ultimately is for someone to take out both the heart and the head within moments of each other, likely before either can fully heal. Blasting its head clean off results only in the monster generating a new head just moments after.

Background
Though the origin of the Tortoise is still unknown, it is known to be tied to the Waves of Calamity. The beast was sealed away by a previous group of the four Legendary Heroes, which included a man named Keichi, who left behind instructions (currently illegible though) on how to kill it, and also left warnings about why they chose to seal it away instead of killing it in their time.

The tortoise is the first of four Guardian Beasts who are meant to protect the world from the Waves of Calamity by killing and using the souls of thousands of people to create a protective barrier. The other Guardian Beasts are the Phoenix, Kirin, and the Dragon King. They are only meant to be released if the Heroes were not strong enough to stop the Waves of Calamity by themselves. In order to fully stop the waves, they must eradicate 2/3 of all life in their world.

In order to fulfill its mission to stop the waves by collecting souls, the Spirit Tortoise created the human familiar named Ost Horai as a representative of its will. In the original unsealing procedure, she was supposed slowly and secretly collects souls. If Ost was not collecting enough souls, then the familiars would be released the collect more. Finally, if that wasn't successful, then the Spirit Tortoise's true form was to be unsealed to collect souls. Ost was supposed to give hints to the Heroes and finally show them how to unseal her true form once they had defeated her in combat. However, this was all bypassed once Kyo improperly unsealed the Spirit Tortoise.

There are similar Protective Beasts in Glass' World which are the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese Guardian Beasts of Raphtalia's World. In Glass' World, the first Guardian Beast is the Black Turtle which was defeated. Trash #2 researched in creating copies of the Protective Beasts and merging them with people.

Spirit Tortoise Arc
The beast was unbound in recent times by three of the present four Legendary Heroes, Motoyasu, Itsuki, and Ren, who believed themselves capable of defeating it individually. When its rampage began, the beast and its familiars more or less ignored the Heroes, who didn't even seem to be able to phase it, and pressed on. During its early rampage, its overwhelming might caused Motoyasu's and Itsuki's teammates to abandon them, while Ren and his party fought it until only Ren was left alive.

With the other three heroes MIA, and the Seven Star Heroes a fair distance away, the Shield Hero, Naofumi Iwatani, is left to find a way to defeat it. The will of the Spirit Tortoise in the form of Ost allied herself with Naofumi, claiming that her real body has been taken over. Allying himself with the Queen of Melromarc and several other country leaders to form an allied force, Naofumi battles the Tortoise once to assess its power, then a second time to buy his allies the time they need to infiltrate its body.

After rejoining his allies and reaching the beast's heart, Naofumi and his group had succeeded in sealing it, only for it to immediately break the seal and continue its rampage, forcing them to retreat. Realizing the ancient hero Keichi left behind hints written in Japanese on how to destroy the monster, Naofumi's party and the Knights assemble the ancient glyph upon its back so that he can read them. With this, Naofumi hypothesized that the beast will only die if both the head and heart are taken out. Fitoria destroys the head while Naofumi and the Queen's coalition army destroy and seal the heart. The beast then finally dies mere moments before it could kill anyone in Melromarc's Castle Town.

Travelling further into the Spirit Tortoise, Naofumi finds the mastermind behind the Spirit Tortoise's release and rampage, Kyo. Kyo has been taking the power gathered by the Spirit Tortoise and using it for his own experiments. After defeating him with the help of Ost, Kyo escapes back to is own world. Back in his own world, he uses the energy gathered to create demonic weapons and beasts as well as to empower himself. However, he was again defeated for good by Naofumi, Kizuna, and the rest of their party members. The experiments with the Spirit Tortoise's energy were destroyed and the energy was released.

It was later harvested for parts, and perishable items such as its flesh were disposed of. Being too massive to actually bother moving the beast out of the way, the Queen decides it will simply be better to leave its mountainous shell where it came to lay.

Trivia

 * As is stated in the story, the beasts might be based on the Four Benevolent Animals. Naofumi thus speculates that after the Tortoise there await at least three enemies of comparable or superior power in three and a half months.
 * Ren states that after the Tortoise comes the Phoenix, followed by Kirin, the fourth and final enemy is later revealed to be Dragon King. These beings constitute the 7th, 8th, 9th, and presumably 10th Catastrophe Waves respectively, with Dragon King, the 10th, being the last Wave.


 * Each Guardian Beast has a Demi-human race that closely resembles them. The Genmu, a turtle-like demi-human race, correlates to the Spirit Tortoise.