Jūgo

Tall and athletically built, Jūgo has a bristling shock of orange hair, eyes of a reddish orange, and normally a placid look. The palm of his left hand carries a bracket-like mark. Once his killing urge surfaces, his complexion goes dark, the whites of his eyes turn black beneath pale-yellow irises, a wild cast overtakes his face, and his frame sprouts blades and extra limbs suited to whatever fight is at hand.

His outfits changed with time. In boyhood he wore a yellow top over blue shorts, and at his first appearance a washed-out blue shirt with pale green shorts. Tamaki, unable to turn up a shirt his size, later gave him black pants, brown sandals, and a purple drape slung on like a cape. He put on an Akatsuki robe during their alliance, and much later, serving Orochimaru again, he had bulked up with a squarer jaw, worn his hair swept upward with the sides trimmed, and taken to a frayed dark cloak.

Jūgo can come across as bloodthirsty, yet Karin noted that the savagery only shows when his temper is lit; underneath he is a mild, tender soul with no real desire to kill. That gentleness extends to animals, whose trust he earns instantly and whom he cannot bear to see abused. Since his eruptions are random and beyond his control, he willingly locks himself away where he can injure no one, though he is glad to loose his crazed half in a fight because it sharpens him. Sasuke alone can halt his killing sprees, whether through raw killing intent or the Sharingan, which is the single reason Jūgo agrees to travel with him; the youth serves, by Jūgo's own admission, as the cage that keeps him contained. That role fell to Kimimaro before him, the one person he ever kept company with in his seclusion, and the two grew close. Certain that Kimimaro's spirit lives on inside Sasuke, Jūgo stays utterly loyal, returning to his side as a shield even after Taka dissolves. Pain branded him Jūgo of the Scales for his split nature, meek when settled and vicious once natural energy floods him.

Jūgo's gifts are dangerous enough to catch the eye of heavyweights like Orochimaru and Sasuke. He grasps and converses with animals, sending birds off to scout far and wide before reporting home, and he can pour his own chakra into others, as when he steeped Sasuke's Susanoo in senjutsu energy. His nature releases cover Earth, Water, Wind, and Yang. Chief among his powers is the clan trait of Sage Transformation, drawing in natural energy to remold his body whole or piece by piece; it hands him enormous chakra reserves but also condemns him to the involuntary fits that the ceaseless intake breeds.

By this means he has turned an arm into a piston-like ram, into a great axe, and into thrusters that fling allies or amplify his blows, and he can lengthen his limbs to snatch distant foes. Transforming fully swells his power while ceding his mind to slaughter, darkening his skin, blacking his sclera, and drawing a stripe down his brow; so changed, he weathered a chest-run strike from the lightning-wreathed Fourth Raikage and retaliated with the Multiple Lotus Nonself Connected Cannons. Because Orochimaru's cursed seals were brewed from his own fluids, he wields the power without it wearing him down, shifts among forms at will, and can even graft his flesh onto seal-bearers to mend them, which shrinks him to a younger shape until he devours another and reclaims his adult build.

Brought into the band first named Hebi, he took part in the pursuit of Itachi Uchiha, later battled Killer B when a reborn Taka set out to seize the Eight-Tails, and traded blows with the Fourth Raikage at the Five Kage Summit. Throughout the Fourth Shinobi World War he fed Sasuke his natural energy and remained at his shoulder into the finale. In the anime's later chapters he gave himself to healing birds struck by cursed seals in a settlement at the Land of Fire's rim, where the plotting researcher Tosaka baited him out to turn his power into a weapon before Jūgo, with Boruto and his friends helping, brought him down.