Ganryu

Ganryu dons the same armored suit as his fellow Dark Ones, though his is edged in gold rather than red to mark him as their head. Over it drapes a long black cloak lined in red, with a golden frill hanging from a crimson sash at his waist. He is a tall figure with white hair falling well past his shoulders, and a scar cuts diagonally from his forehead down to the edge of his jaw.

Cool and watchful, Ganryu can observe his underlings clash with the Gotei 13 without a flicker of worry. He has no patience for etiquette or ceremony, brushing it aside as a distraction from his goals, and his arrogance runs deep enough that he belittles and taunts opponents he assumes are beneath him. Above all he is consumed by resentment toward Soul Society for casting out his people, and he will gladly destroy it entirely to settle the score.

Ganryu once belonged to the Ryodoji Family, a house banished from Soul Society a millennium earlier and left to eke out an existence in the Dangai. Wandering that void, his people found the Valley of Screams and its Blanks, memoryless souls they learned to drain as a source of strength; the sheer number Ganryu absorbed lifted his power to a captain's level. He can shape the Blanks into weapons, keeps pace with Ichigo's Bankai through his own Shunpo, cloaks himself in invisibility, and fights as a formidable swordsman.

In Memories of Nobody he surfaces in the living world to seize Senna, whom he recognizes as the Shinenju, the condensed core of the Blanks' memories. After ambushing the Gotei 13 and running Ichigo through with a hidden spear, he spirits Senna to the Valley of Screams to force the human world and Soul Society into a catastrophic collision. Ichigo pursues him, and the two throw everything into a final exchange that ends with Ganryu cut in two and dissolving away.