Kinkaku

Kinkaku towers over most foes, a burly, thickly muscled shinobi. Dark sclerae ring his pale eyes, his skin carries a grey cast that the anime lightens, and long blond hair tipped in dark strands rises around his head like a Native American headdress, with two horns pushing through it. A rectangular mark sits on his nose above whisker-like streaks on his cheeks. Over a sleeveless, high-collared purple uniform he wears a Kumo flak jacket edged in black, plus a matching forehead protector and plain wrist guards; the kanji for gold is inked on his bared left shoulder.

Seen as a stain on Kumogakure, Kinkaku wages war through trickery and treachery, willing even to strike down his own side. Pride runs hot in him, and any slight, like Darui's taunts, sets him off, though he keeps a steadier head than his brother. The one soft spot he shows is for Ginkaku; the moment his brother is drawn into the Benihisago, grief and fury tip him into his Version 2 state.

The brothers built their infamy in the era of the First Raikage, when a mission to seize the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox saw them swallowed whole. They endured two weeks in the beast's belly by devouring its flesh, and when the fox finally spat them out they came away as shrunken images of it, charged with a slice of its chakra. That bond, plus their descent from the Sage of Six Paths, let them shrug off flesh that would kill anyone else. At a truce ceremony joining Kumo's Second Raikage with Konoha's Second Hokage, the pair launched a coup that left the Hokage near death, and when the First Shinobi World War came, Kinkaku ran him down for good, cutting down Tobirama Senju.

What made the two truly feared was their command of all five Treasured Tools left by the Sage of Six Paths, relics so demanding they bleed off enough chakra to kill an ordinary user, yet the brothers swung them for hours on end. Working together, they could snare a foe's word soul and body with the Kōkinjō, Shichiseiken, and Benihisago and seal them away for good, while the Bashōsen conjured any of the five elements from thin air. Though never a genuine host, Kinkaku's fox-laced chakra let him wrap himself in a demon cloak and rise into a six-tailed Version 2 form without losing his wits, its tails strong enough to hurl aside a rolling Human Bullet Tank or shatter a barrage of kunai.

Kabuto Yakushi revives him to fight in the Fourth Shinobi World War, and he rises from the waves beside Ginkaku amid the White Zetsu Army to fall on the First Division. Against Darui he lashes his enemies with the Kōkinjō to pull free their word souls and scorches Atsui with the Bashōsen to trigger a sealing, but Darui wriggles out of the same snare and seals Ginkaku instead. The loss throws Kinkaku into his six-tailed frenzy, and he tears across the field until Shikamaru's shadow and Ino's mind transfer hold him still long enough to trap him inside the Kohaku no Jōhei. Come nightfall, Tobi gathers the sealed pair and casts the pot holding Kinkaku into the Outer Path's Demonic Statue to harvest the Nine-Tails chakra locked within.