Sawatari

Consuming so many souls left Sawatari looking far older than his years, a gaunt figure with deeply lined skin, jutting cheekbones, a heavy jaw, and a high brow. His gray-brown hair is swept back above narrow brown eyes and thin, tapering eyebrows. He dresses formally in a black suit with metal buttons and a white pocket square over a white shirt, a violet ascot pinned by a large red brooch, a black-stoned ring, and metal cufflinks, finishing with black trousers and shoes. Away from Baura, whose back doubles as his seat, he steadies himself on a hooked wooden cane. Before the souls aged him he had smooth skin and brown hair, wearing a puffy shirt with cylindrical wrist fasteners under a light brown vest.

Though his manner is hushed and courteous, Sawatari is vain and utterly indifferent to human life, having slaughtered thousands purely to strengthen himself and regretting only the aging it cost him. He prizes the spatial tricks of Baura and turns furious when that power is mocked or outwitted, yet he readily flees a losing fight rather than risk himself. Confident in his own cunning, he ridicules foes for failing to predict him, which leaves him rattled the moment he is caught off guard.

His loyalty is a fiction. He secretly covets Kariya's position and would gladly topple him given the strength, and in his final moments he offered Mayuri Kurotsuchi every secret of the Bount to buy his own survival. The one bond he genuinely honors is with Baura, whom he praises, trusts completely, and addresses with unfailing politeness, even as he leans on the Doll to do all his fighting for him.

Generations earlier, Sawatari swallowed vast numbers of living human souls to swell his power, and the excess rapidly aged him into an old man. When Jin Kariya set out to destroy the Seireitei, Sawatari joined the other Bount and drank the concentrated soul-serum brewed by the Bitto, which multiplied his strength many times over. Sent to test that power, he hunted Yasutora Sado in Karakura Town and battled him alongside Rangiku Matsumoto, using Baura to swallow attacks into an endless void and to sink through solid ground and strike from unexpected angles. Noba's countermeasures and a tracking Kido eventually forced him to withdraw.

He crossed into Soul Society through the modified Senkaimon and, finding that its dense Reishi let him instantly mend any wound, came to believe himself untouchable. Assigned to hunt the Gotei 13's captains with Go Koga, he chose instead to confront Mayuri Kurotsuchi. Baura's knack for vanishing and reappearing in the Reishi-rich air first overwhelmed the captain, but Mayuri's poisoned Shikai slipped past his healing, and his Bankai, Konjiki Ashisogi Jizo, crippled Baura and left Sawatari dying. Stripped of the Doll he depended on, he begged for his life to the very end. His story unfolds entirely within the anime-only Bount arc.