Sōya Azashiro

For a man who held the Kenpachi name, Azashiro cuts a surprisingly mild figure. His long black hair is bound in a ponytail beneath a golden band fit for royalty, with two long strands left to hang at either side of his forehead, and his eyes stay narrowed in an air of detachment. He wears a distinctive captain's haori marked by a black-patterned golden mantle at the collar and long bell-shaped sleeves, over the usual dark robes; after allying with Kamui he adds a heavy golden belt fastened by four locks.

Blunt and unafraid to voice his thoughts, Azashiro was hardened by a traumatic past into someone aloof and vengeful, pursuing his own private notion of justice much as Kaname Tōsen did. For all his power, he prefers to expend the least effort he can, sidestepping any fight he expects to lose.

Azashiro entered the world as a scion of the noble Azashiro house in an age when Soul Society's great houses waged constant, deadly power struggles, and the losers were framed for crimes and fed to Hollows. His once-proud clan had grown soft on inherited wealth, but his older sister longed to become a Shinigami and drew him toward that path. When their house was falsely condemned, the family was thrown into a pit of Hollows; his sister gave her life to save him, only for the other nobles to break their word and send in more Hollows to finish him. The horror shattered his mind, and in that moment his Zanpakutō spirit, Urozakuro, awoke and butchered the assembled nobles, letting him flee into the Rukongai.

Some two and a half centuries before Aizen's fall, Azashiro challenged Kenpachi Kuruyashiki for the eighth Kenpachi title and killed him almost effortlessly with a technique that fuses his own body into a victim's and destroys it from within, claiming the name for himself. That power springs from his Bankai, Urozakuro, which is permanently active and lets him merge with everything around him, from the air to the ground. Over long years imprisoned in the Muken, he bonded his being to the whole of the Seireitei, sensing all that happened within it, and he proved potent enough to trade blows with Kenpachi Zaraki and to force the Royal Guard itself to step in. A master of Kidō, he could unleash even the highest-tier destruction spells without incantation. The catch is severe: while his Bankai stays active his body cannot grow stronger, and it is dangerously vulnerable to any power that absorbs spiritual energy.