Szayelaporro Granz

Slim and tall, Szayelaporro is marked most by the frames of his shattered Hollow mask, which sit on his face like rectangular eyeglasses and lend him a bookish air. His pink hair reaches his shoulders with bangs swept to one side and a pair of thin shaven lines above the other temple, above amber eyes. He dresses apart from the standard Arrancar cut, in a high-collared shirt that sheathes his whole torso, three stripes tracing his front, and white gloves; a cape joins the ensemble after one costume change. Once cast down into Hell, his form warps grotesquely: an eye and mask fragments vanish, chain-like markings coil around his head and body, one arm blackens to smoking bone, and a curling pair of ram's horns can rise from his temples at will.

A fastidious genius, Szayelaporro fancies himself both scientist and performer, staging his fights like theatrical productions and savoring the chance to toy with his prey. He is vain, lewd, and relentlessly cruel, regarding nearly everyone as raw material for study and privately hoping Aizen will one day erase all non-Hollows from existence.

Confidence tips easily into instability; he cackles whenever he holds the advantage and thinks nothing of stripping the limits off a doomed opponent's power for his own amusement. Even his late brother Yylfordt earns little warmth from him. Above all he prizes his supposed immortality, crowning himself a perfect being for his capacity to be reborn.

Long before Ichigo's group reaches Hueco Mundo, Szayelaporro helped Nnoitra Gilga ambush Nelliel Tu Odelschwanck, using one of his devices to distract her. When the intruders arrive, he lures Renji Abarai and others into his shifting maze of a laboratory, where he nullifies Renji's Bankai using data gathered by insects he had planted on Yylfordt. His method is analysis: by studying how earlier foes were beaten, he renders their attacks useless against him. Releasing his Zanpakutō, Fornicarás, he floods the room with a black fluid that spawns power-mirroring clones of his enemies, and later conjures voodoo-like dolls of Uryū Ishida and Renji whose torn-open innards let him wound the originals from within.

His undoing arrives when Mayuri Kurotsuchi enters the fray. Szayelaporro's ultimate trick, a rebirth that regrows his body from inside a devoured victim, works on Nemu Kurotsuchi, yet Mayuri has salted her body with a drug that warps his sense of time, stretching a single second into what feels like a century so that the blade crawls toward his heart across an eternity of pain before finally killing him. Years later he claws his way back out of Hell, remade as a Jailer with clairvoyant sight and conjured chains, to menace Renji and Ichigo before Jūshirō Ukitake drags him back through the gates.