Kushanāda

Every Kushanāda is an enormous creature that moves on all four limbs. Their heads stretch out long and skull-like, and a heavy plate of armor sits over the right shoulder. Their sheer scale matches their grim role as jailers of the damned.

These guardians keep watch over the Togabito, meting out punishment for the crimes those souls committed in life. A Kushanāda that catches a Togabito swallows it whole, though the sinner revives some time later. They also police Hell's boundaries: when a Shinigami slays a Hollow guilty of terrible deeds, the gates of Hell open and a Kushanāda spears the Hollow to drag it below, and any Togabito who breaks free and loses its mask is seized and pulled back, since the guardians can grip even the normally invisible chains that bind such souls.

Kushanāda can pass straight through the solid structures of Hell as though intangible. They are also extraordinarily durable; a single one shrugged off the combined force of Renji's Zabimaru, Rukia's Tsugi no mai, Hakuren, and Uryū's Licht Wind, walking through the attacks without a mark. They hold one further power, called Skull-Clad: a Kushanāda can pour its Reiatsu into someone it judges worthy, dissolving into a wash of yellow light that sheathes the recipient in skull-like armor, as it did for Ichigo Kurosaki. That armor lets its wearer manage feats otherwise impossible in Hell, such as severing the chains of the bound or shackling foes and casting them into a lower level to atone, and while it stays active the wearer and their allies are treated as friendly by the Kushanāda.