Nikolai Belinski

Nikolai Belinski enters the story as its punchline — a Red Army sergeant captured at Stalingrad who responds only to vodka-based serum, forever toasting wives whose number keeps changing — and leaves it as its author. Fred Tatasciore voices both versions, and the wives are the tell between them: canon holds that his one real wife died in the German invasion of 1941, and the imaginary ones were grief with a drinking problem. Primis Nikolai, drawn from before that loss, is sober, sharp and quietly the wisest man in any room.

His war

The Ultimis drunk stumbles from the swamp to the Moon and into Groom Lake custody; the Primis soldier frees Samantha at Origins and, in Gorod Krovi, calls a truce with his own Ultimis self to slay a dragon before killing him — the hard way of banking a soul. Great War Richtofen hands him the Kronorium at Alcatraz, and Black Ops 4 belongs to him: the one who reads the book and accepts what it says.

The campfire

What it says is that Primis and Ultimis themselves broke the universe, and victory in the Great War was never possible — only ending the Multiverse is. So at Tag der Toten’s campfire he poisons both crews’ celebratory drinks as a mercy, letting each describe an ideal afterlife first; shoots the undead Richtofen that poison cannot touch — “Me too, Richtofen” — and hands Samantha his Welling revolver for the last kindness. The saga’s final trigger pull is his request.