Kahyō

Long, curling hair frames Kahyō. In the field she wears snow-white clothing and a mask marked with a hook motif, while her disguise takes the form of a long dress in blue.

Years of being branded expendable by the Mist left Kahyō craving the respect her homeland denied her. Left a widow early, she gave everything to her boy, content with tedious, poorly paid work as long as it shielded him and harmed nobody. His meaningless death broke that calm and set her against a world she had come to view as hopelessly cruel, steeling her to slay even innocents for the cause. Yet a mother's tenderness endures in her: she overrules her own brother to answer another mother's plea for an ailing child, grieves hard when that brother is killed, and shrinks from needless bloodshed, in the end pleading for Kakashi to finish her once she grasps how badly she has erred.

Kahyō and her brother Rahyō come from Kiri, heirs to a subjugated bloodline the village would never trust. Chasing a kinder life, she and her husband depart for the Land of Waves, but esteem proves just as scarce there, and her husband drinks himself into a drowning. She keeps their son Hakuhyō fed through odd jobs until the boy, having called on his inherited Ice Release to rescue a playmate, is shunned, wounded, and left with no doctor to treat him because the Fourth Shinobi World War had claimed them all. His loss pushes her and Rahyō into the Ryūha Armament Alliance.

After Naruto raids the Alliance's stronghold and carries off its leader Garyō with Sai, the group hijacks the flying Tobishachimaru two months on to force his release. Kahyō boards as an ordinary traveler and quietly seeds ice particles onto the Konoha guard Kakashi. When the seizure turns bloody she trades blows with Kakashi and Guy, but the struggle rips a hole in the hull, tearing away her mask and hurling Kakashi from the ship. He keeps coming back, and each exchange chips at her resolve: he wins mercy for an asthmatic child, reveals that the passengers' parachutes are packed with explosives, and refuses to kill her when he sees that death is what she craved.

Jolted into conceding she was mistaken, Kahyō watches Rahyō cast to his death, then joins Kakashi to rescue the airship, binding it with ice as he summons rain to restore the moisture she has spent. She sets the Tobishachimaru down beside the Blood Prison without a single fatality. Spared execution, she is handed a life term as the prison's warden, holding its inmates fast with her ice, a role sealed when a demonstration sees her freeze the Fourth Raikage's beard clean off in front of the other Kage. Later she writes to Kakashi that her heart has at last come to rest.