Hotaru

Blonde and wavy, Hotaru's hair falls to her back from a pronounced widow's peak, set above dark-green eyes and pale skin. She dresses in a violet kimono top edged in white and knotted with a black obi, black shorts holding a shuriken holster beneath a red-trimmed slit skirt of black, plus violet arm warmers and dark shinobi boots. Slim yet curvy and quite small, her height stands out whenever she is placed next to Naruto.

Resolve runs deep in Hotaru; she went so far as to request that the kinjutsu be embedded in her back so her clan's legacy would live on. A streak of independence shows early, when she turns down Naruto's aid, and she is relentless about her aim, drilling whatever Utakata teaches her again and again until she grasps the basics.

Utakata first crosses Hotaru's path after driving off a pack of ninja who are really hunting him; left wounded and unconscious by the fight, he is saved when she races home for help. Grateful, she pleads with him to train her, to his open reluctance. Certain she will fail, he sets her to walking on water, only for her to conquer it by morning after a night of practice; he next assigns the technique Water Release: Wild Water Wave, doubting she has the right nature, and is proven wrong when her chakra turns out to be water-natured. Though her earlier instruction came only from her grandfather and from Tonbee, she shows a genuine gift for ninjutsu, soaking up the fundamentals with barely any guidance.

When the Magaki group comes hunting the Tsuchigumo Clan's forbidden kinjutsu, Tonbee has Hotaru and Utakata spirit it away out of reach. Annoyed at being addressed as master, Utakata abandons her to Team 7 after Naruto mistakes him for her assailant. Naruto's group eventually talks her into accepting their guard, and she is brought to the Tsuchigumo village, not knowing it has already handed her over to the earlier bandits. She slips a trap set with a bomb dressed up as the secret scroll, is caught once more, and is rescued again by Utakata, at which point his past as a Kirigakure missing-nin who slew his own master comes to light.

A Kiri hunter-nin captain, loath to ignite open war with Konoha, offers to release Hotaru if Konoha will surrender Utakata once its mission wraps up. Naruto steadies her by insisting a person's flaws need not define them, firming up her wish to keep studying under Utakata, right before she buckles under a fever that exposes the clan's secret technique fused into her back. Tonbee concedes the clan has probably grown too weak to ever recover and offers to cut the seal out and destroy it; Hotaru balks, then names a gifted man, Shiranami, who had once pored over the teachings of En no Gyōja. Shiranami turns out to be a traitor, knocking Hotaru out, seizing the village by branding its people with his own fūinjutsu, and starting to unseal the clan technique so he can draw in natural chakra and wipe the village out. Convinced she has killed Naruto and Utakata when the unleashed power hurls them into rubble, a shattered Hotaru resolves to perish along with the technique, until Naruto chases Shiranami down and Utakata pulls her free. The two then set off to train, and Utakata asks her to wait at the spot of their first meeting; he never comes back, having fallen to Pain and his Six Paths, and Hotaru dances among the flowers still awaiting a master who will not return.