Sazanka

Purple eyes and medium-length purple hair set Sazanka apart, the hair drawn into a high ponytail with bangs sweeping across the left side of his face. In his student years he was lean and clean-shaven, soft locks framing both cheeks. By the time he sold his sword for coin he had thickened with hard muscle, his hair grown wild with long sideburns and a stubbled chin. He wound white bandages around his wrists and ankles and wore a sleeveless purple gi torn at the shoulders over baggy black trousers, a brown fur pelt hanging from his waist to the knees, and samurai sandals. At his side rode a katana with a red-wrapped hilt, a black sheath, and a round bronze guard stamped with a five-petaled flower.

In his earlier days Sazanka was warm and good-humoured, a young man who prized his friends and watched over them. He was fiercely driven as well, forever training to prove his worth, though under it ran a hunger to stand above everyone else. Falling to a foe he judged weaker gutted that self-image and hardened him. He cast off every bond he had once held dear and settled on a bleak creed, that a sword exists only to cut, and so he cut down anyone who opposed him. He hired out his skills and, in time, released even his wish to claim Kurosawa, deciding he had grown strong enough without it.

Sazanka rose as Mifune's star student, advancing so fast and winning so many bouts that others dubbed him the Second Coming of Mifune. He mastered the breadth of samurai arts, channeling chakra along his blade for devastating cuts with the Samurai Sabre Technique, his strokes so exact that a stalk of bamboo he severed could be pressed back together and mend. His attacks came without pause and left no room to counter, and he could shear straight through the powerful techniques of other skilled samurai, a steady swirl of chakra wreathing his edge.

As a junior disciple he had grown close to Tsubaki Kurogane, and the two trained side by side as friends. Both eventually entered a tournament said to grant its winner the right to carry Mifune's sword Kurosawa once the master retired, and Sazanka fought to win as proof of how far he had come. He held the advantage through most of the final against Tsubaki, only for her to seize an opening at the last moment and defeat him. Unable to bear the loss, he tried to take Kurosawa by force, cutting down every fellow student who moved to stop him save Tsubaki, and fled branded a criminal of the Land of Iron. The men sent after him never brought him in, and he drifted into work as a hired sword.

Years later, taken on by bandits to guard their raids against merchants, Sazanka's handiwork spread into the Land of Fire and drew Konoha's notice, and Team 15 was sent to investigate. Tsubaki sensed a samurai's hand from a merchant's reaction to her and confirmed it when she recognized his precise cuts on the bamboo at an attack site. The team posed as merchants to bait a trap, but while most of the bandits were seized, Sazanka struck back and wounded Tsubaki, who could not bring herself to draw on him. He withdrew, and when the two met again he welcomed the fight as a chance to finish the last of his old fellow disciples. He pressed on alone as Tsubaki grew stronger among her friends, and in their final clash she struck him down. She grieved having to end it as she did, and he at last acknowledged her as a true samurai before he died.