Danzō Shimura

In his final years Danzō leans on a cane and carries himself as a fragile elder. A pale x-shaped mark cuts across his chin, kept since boyhood, while his shaggy black hair frames a face whose right eye stays wrapped in bandages. That covering hides a stolen Sharingan. A dark grey robe drapes from his feet up over the right shoulder, deliberately masking a heavily bandaged right arm sheathed in three gold braces. Beneath the wrappings sit ten more Sharingan taken from Shin Uchiha, and the pale image of the First Hokage's features bulges from the shoulder where Hashirama's cells were seeded.

Images of his youth show a far more striking figure: the same tousled hair, longer then and falling near his eyes, paired with two ordinary brown eyes before any transplant. Era-typical armour once guarded his chest, back and lower torso while leaving the shoulders bare, worn with a black outfit, wrist guards, a thigh holster and a Konoha forehead protector. By the time he allied with Hanzō against Yahiko's Akatsuki he had concealed the right eye and switched to a flak jacket, and during the Third Shinobi World War he favoured a hooded black trench coat. For his infiltration of Akatsuki under the alias Kanzō he wore an eyepatch, a gas mask slung at his neck, gloves, a dark coat and an Amegakure headband.

As a young man Danzō burns with ambition and a hunger to prove himself, though when his squad needed a decoy he hesitated long enough for Hiruzen Sarutobi to volunteer first, a moment that fed a lifelong envy of his rival. He refuses warmth and the word friend, unwilling to lean on anyone or be leaned on. Age hardens him into a cold, unflappable operator who buries every feeling. Having survived repeated wars and idolised ancestors who fell in battle, he concludes that the village outranks ethics, morality, and any other Hokage's ideals.

His creed follows a blunt ends-justify-the-means logic: no deed is too monstrous if he judges it good for Konoha. He wields Root to erase perceived threats with or without a Hokage's blessing, brands its agents with tongue-sealing curses to guard his secrets, and treats them as disposable tools. He believes a village grows strongest when it has an enemy to hate, and so he stokes suspicion of the Uchiha and quietly leaks that Naruto carries the Nine-Tails so the citizens will scorn the boy. Treacherous by habit, he moves to eliminate allies who become too capable, as he tried with Nonō and Kabuto.

For all his ruthlessness he clings to a warped dignity. He scolds Sasuke for squandering both the Uchiha's sacrifice and Itachi's, and, mirroring Hiruzen, spends his dying moments trying to drag Sasuke and Tobi down with him. Yet he hypocritically dreads death, hiding the fear behind a claim that his survival is essential to the shinobi world, mastering it only at the very end. Beneath the rivalry he still nurses a boyhood attachment to Hiruzen, and his last thoughts circle back to what he ever meant to his old friend.

Ranked among Konoha's mightiest by his fellow elders, Danzō backs his authority with genuine power. Trickery and skill let him ambush and rob Shisui Uchiha of an eye, and though old age and his inability to use Shisui's Mangekyō contributed to his defeat, he still fought Sasuke to a standstill and dealt him a near-fatal wound. He commands and dispels high-level genjutsu, holds his own in taijutsu and kenjutsu, and moves with surprising speed for his age. His mastery of fūinjutsu spans the tongue-binding curses on Root, battlefield paralysis seals, and the Reverse Four Symbols Sealing, which draws everything around him into his own corpse. He can also summon the tapir-like Baku, whose suction amplifies his wind techniques.

Danzō handles wind, earth, water and fire natures, plus Yin and Yang, but excels with Wind Release, exhaling vacuum blades and spheres able to shred a reinforced wooden dome or dent a Susanoo. The First Hokage's cells grafted into his right arm grant him a crude Wood Release he uses sparingly, along with vastly enlarged chakra and near-instant healing without hand seals. Obito judged that his blend of Uchiha and Senju DNA gave him the theoretical means to seize control of Kurama.

The transplanted arm, once Shin Uchiha's, is studded with ten Sharingan and reinforced by Hashirama's cells. Through them Danzō wields Izanagi, the forbidden technique that turns his body into a physical illusion and nullifies any wound; each embedded eye buys another stretch of the technique, and the cells extend a single eye's use to about a minute, giving him roughly ten minutes across the whole arm. Shisui's eye in his socket grants Kotoamatsukami, a flawless mind-control that needs no eye contact and, boosted by Hashirama's cells, recharges in mere hours rather than once a day. With his final breath he destroys that eye so it can never be turned against Konoha.