Zennosuke Kurumadani

The feature that defines him is his hair, a rounded Afro so pronounced it earned the teasing nickname Afro-san. Bushy sideburns run down each cheek, and heavy brows sit above brown eyes. Tall and broadly built, he dresses in the ordinary black robes worn across the Gotei 13.

Kurumadani carries himself as though he belongs among the elite, which makes it all the more galling that so many ordinary residents of Karakura can dispatch Hollows before he ever arrives. Even so, he counted the posting a stroke of luck, untroubled that it came at the cost of Rukia's freedom.

When Rukia was arrested and hauled back to Soul Society, Kurumadani inherited her duty of shielding Karakura from Hollows. He soon grew exasperated: an unusual number of locals could perceive him, and most Hollows were slain by others long before he showed up. His complaints to headquarters went nowhere, and he was told to leave the town's spiritually aware residents alone. After Ichigo came home, the two crossed paths over a freshly destroyed Hollow, though Kurumadani had never heard of a Substitute badge and could only gawk when Shinji Hirako appeared and revealed the Visored to Ichigo.

During the clash over the counterfeit Karakura, Keigo Asano found him slumped and unconscious and borrowed his sword, reasoning it was the one weapon that would not crumble against Aizen. Kurumadani snatched it back, released his blade, and buried Aizen beneath a heap of stone before urging everyone to run. Aizen shrugged the rubble off effortlessly. Ichigo later mangled his name yet again, calling him Imoyama. By the Lost Substitute period, Hollow duty in the town had passed entirely to Uryu Ishida, Kurumadani having proven unreliable. In the Thousand-Year Blood War he shepherded rookies Ryunosuke Yuki and Shino into the living world, and during the Wandenreich's second strike he dragged a wounded comrade to safety despite his own injuries.

His weapon, Tsuchinamazu, meaning earth catfish, looks like a plain katana until the command Good Morning reshapes it into a bladed wheel wrapped in blue cloth and hung with a tiny bell. Slammed into the ground, it splinters the surrounding earth into rising spikes able to skewer foes, and those fragments can be raised into a crude cage that pens an opponent in place.