Flame Breathing

Flame Breathing imitates fire and turns it into the user's motions and attacks. Almost every form relies on a powerful, decisive strike that appears to burn whatever it touches, with most launched from a raised stance. As they cut, practitioners visualize themselves summoning and steering flames around their blade or body.

The style was devised during the Sengoku period by the head of the Rengoku family, one of the slayers Yoriichi Tsugikuni tried to teach Sun Breathing. Lacking Yoriichi's rare gift, that ancestor instead received a personalized art shaped to his own abilities, which grew into Flame Breathing (Chapter 178). The technique then passed down the Rengoku bloodline, with the family producing the Flame Hashira generation after generation. Kyojuro Rengoku followed his father Shinjuro into the role, but with Kyojuro's death the family's unbroken tradition of inheriting the style came to a close.

Nine forms are recorded, six of which appear on screen. The First Form, Unknowing Fire (Chapter 54), sends the user dashing forward to take an opponent's head with one horizontal cut. The Second rises in an arcing upward slash, the Third sweeps downward from a high guard, and the Fourth carves a fluid circular slice that can fend off attacks and behead several foes at once. The Fifth Form, Flame Tiger (Chapter 63), unleashes a flurry of cuts that take the shape of a blazing tiger wrapping around the user.

The most devastating technique is the Ninth Form, Rengoku (Chapter 64), an esoteric art reserved for the Rengoku family. The user assumes a high stance, charges at blistering speed, and delivers a single annihilating slash that tears open the ground and raises an enormous fiery whirlwind. In the Mugen Train film and the anime, the strike takes on the appearance of a flaming dragon enveloping the wielder.

The recorded practitioners are Shinjuro Rengoku, his son Kyojuro Rengoku, and Mitsuri Kanroji, who trained in the style before creating her own. Records owned by Shinjuro suggest twenty-one Flame Hashira preceded him, every one of them a Rengoku. The original founder is shown without the flame-patterned haori later associated with the line, an heirloom likely added in subsequent generations.