Garyō

Garyo is slight of frame, with long white hair and a matching beard. One of his eyes appears sightless. His clothing is long and stiff in its cut.

Garyo took Madara Uchiha's failed bid to end all strife not as folly but as a worthy aim that simply needed a different route. To his thinking, money lay at the root of every conflict, breeding inequality that blessed the wealthy and cursed the poor. Freeing the world from its grip became his mission, and it drove him to found the Ryuha Armament Alliance. He drew many missing-nin to his banner with the promise of a life beyond mercenary work.

The Alliance turned to terror against the people of the Land of Waves, who had no hidden village to shield them; once enough had died to level the field, Garyo meant the country to stand as proof that other nations should adopt his creed. A year after the war, Sai and Naruto Uzumaki of Konohagakure found the group's mountain stronghold. Its members fought to keep Garyo from capture, but Naruto tracked him down and seized him, only to be blocked by the bodyguard Kahyo. Garyo pressed his case that the campaign was the surest road to real peace; Naruto granted that money corrupts the world yet refused to accept the lives it had cost, and Sai spirited both of them away. Locked in the Blood Prison, Garyo became the object of a rescue when his followers seized the airborne Tobishachimaru to force his release. When talks broke down, they strapped explosives to hostages and dropped them on the prison, breaching its walls and carrying Garyo off, until Ino Yamanaka's Mind Body Switch Technique wrested control of him and marched him back into his cell.