Kosuke Maruboshi

Age shows plainly on Kosuke. His once-black hair has gone grey and hangs in a short ponytail, and he dresses in a mesh armour shirt beneath a brown sleeveless kimono worn over grey trousers. Curiously, he hauls a wok everywhere he goes, using it both to cook on the road and to swing as a weapon in a fight, and he keeps a ladle close along with a sword sheathed sideways across his lower back. In his younger days his hair was dark and tied back the same way, paired with a blue jacket over a mesh undershirt.

Kosuke's whole life is shaped by an early tragedy. A rash decision as a boy got his teammates killed, and the shame convinced him he had no right to rise past genin. Tobirama Senju pushed him to keep training regardless, and he did, going on to serve the Second, Third, and Fourth Hokage across five decades while fighting beside the likes of the Sannin and Konoha's White Fang. That long history left him calm, warm, and quick to smile, rarely rattled even on dangerous work, though the ease can snap into hard focus in an instant.

His devotion to the Will of Fire runs deep, and it comes paired with a readiness to spend his own life for the village, a habit that earned him repeated scoldings from the Hokage he served. Meeting Naruto, whom he finds strikingly like the Fourth, gradually softens that self-neglect. Having long known the boy's true parentage, he takes quiet pride in the fine son Minato left behind.

Though his rank never climbed, Kosuke is plainly of jōnin caliber, having turned down the promotion again and again. Decades of service and instruction from Konoha's greatest gave him enormous experience both in and out of combat, and he is valued as much for his cooking and survival expertise as for his fighting. He defends himself deftly with nothing but his cookware, wields a tantō and a blade hidden inside his prosthetic left leg, and stays deceptively fast and nimble despite his years.

His signature Leaf-Style Willow fuses genjutsu with swordwork to disorient and petrify a target, and he also picked up the Shuriken Shadow Clone from the Third Hokage. Trained by the Second, he excels at high-grade Water Release such as the Water Dragon Bullet and Water Formation Wall, once overpowering an Earth technique in spite of the elemental disadvantage, and he can slip underground with Earth Release as well. These gifts surface across his missions, from a scroll exchange with the Land of Wood that curdled into an ambush to a border defence holding off Iwagakure raiders.