Kirio Hikifune

Hikifune is a fairly tall woman with a fair complexion, green eyes, and long, smooth purple hair that falls to her mid-back and curls at the tips, with bangs framing her face. She favors black lipstick and bears matching red swirls beneath each eye, and she usually gathers her hair into a bun pinned with a large, silver spoon-shaped ornament, wearing the standard Shinigami robes beneath a white, long-sleeved haori marked with the Royal Guard's crest.

Her body shifts between two states. While cooking she swells into a plump, squint-eyed form so altered that even old comrades fail to place her, and once the work is done or her Reiatsu runs low she slims back into her original slender shape, letting her hair down and her obi hang loose at the hip.

Bright and upbeat by default, Hikifune keeps her cheer even as she smacks people over small slights, as when she cuffed Shinji Hirako for failing to recognize her. She reins in the boisterous Tenjirō Kirinji with the same physical firmness and covers for him when visitors need things explained. Above all she takes fierce pride in her Reiatsu-laden cooking, treating the mastery of food as mastery over life itself.

Her cheerful streak drops away only when she warns others about the wildly unpredictable Ōetsu Nimaiya, and beneath it runs a strong maternal side: she mothered Hiyori Sarugaki during her Gotei 13 days and later pressed rice balls on Ichigo Kurosaki as he set off for battle. In a fight she is supremely confident in her own creations.

During her tenure as captain of the 12th Division, her lieutenant Hiyori Sarugaki came to love her like a mother. There she invented the Gikon, the artificial soul along with the means of placing it inside a body, a contribution the Soul King deemed so significant that roughly a hundred and ten years ago she was raised into the Royal Guard, leaving the Gotei 13 and passing her post to Kisuke Urahara, whose inauguration she skipped.

When Yamamoto fell in the Thousand-Year Blood War, Hikifune returned to Soul Society with the rest of the Royal Guard and escorted Ichigo and the wounded to the Soul King Palace. At her estate, Gatonden, she fed Ichigo and Renji lavishly, explaining that her Reiatsu-infused food would fortify them for the trials ahead and cautioning them about Nimaiya. As one of the Royal Guard her spiritual power is immeasurable, she is a swift practitioner of Shunpo, and the Ōken set in her bones lets her come and go from the palace at will.

When Yhwach's elite breached the palace, Hikifune raised her Cage of Life, a tree grown from her own Reiatsu that devours any spiritual attack hurled at it, sealing the Quincy in and shrugging off Lille Barro's arrows. She could not shield Nimaiya from Lille's power, and in the ensuing clash with Pernida Parnkgjas she was overwhelmed, reverting to her slender form as her energy drained. As a final measure she, Kirinji, and Nimaiya took their own lives to break the Blood Oath's Seal, freeing Senjumaru Shutara to release her Bankai.