Isane Kotetsu

Standing tall and solidly built, Isane has gray eyes set in a youthful face, and silver hair kept short and unruly. Two slim braids hang beside her face on the right, another pair sits at the back of her head, and a thin red earring dangles from each ear. As a lieutenant she wore the standard black shihakushō with her badge on the left arm. Her hair grew shorter and rougher in the months after Aizen's defeat, and a decade beyond Yhwach's fall it hangs straight and smooth, still keeping the side braids, now beneath a white captain's haori and a broad white sash modeled on Unohana's.

Reserved, timid, and watchful, Isane carries a fierce loyalty that sometimes overrides her caution, sending her charging after enemies well beyond her reach, Aizen among them. She looks on Unohana as both mentor and mother figure. Her sleep is plagued by strange, often absurd nightmares, one of them fixated on kamaboko, a fishcake she cannot stand, and she seldom speaks in a delicate, girlish way. Porridge is her great comfort, eaten so devotedly that she will make it all three meals in a day, and she stays close with her sister Kiyone. Her height is a lasting source of unease: she took up porridge hoping its thin nourishment would stop her growing past 170 centimeters, only to shoot up to 187.

Through the Soul Society crisis, Isane is rarely far from Unohana, releasing her Zanpakutō against Ichigo Kurosaki during Rukia's rescue and being swiftly, if gently, put down. She stands with her captain as Aizen's treachery surfaces and afterward turns her Kidō toward tracking the traitor and relaying warnings across the Seireitei. In Hueco Mundo she tends the wounded rather than give chase, and during the Fake Karakura battle she is dispatched to reinforce the forces in Las Noches. The war with the Wandenreich tests her hardest: sheltering the injured, she is toyed with by the Sternritter Guenael Lee and then watches Gremmy Thoumeaux murder the captains in her care, and she is shaken to the core by Unohana's death, drawing comfort only from Kenpachi Zaraki inheriting her master's title. Ten years on she has risen to lead the 4th Division, with Kiyone as her lieutenant. Her strength lies in support: she is a formidable Kidō practitioner and a swift, skilled healer second only to Unohana, and her ice-natured sword Itegumo, released with the word Run, carries healing properties of its own.