Nekomata

Nekomata takes the form of a huge white bakeneko with a forked tail, yellow eyes, and long whiskers and claws. Battle scars cover much of his body, and the tufts of fur sprouting from his ears are a distinct blue.

As the ruler of the ninneko, Nekomata is a fearsome ninja cat. His raw power and speed let him shatter stone pillars with ease, and he is a practiced hand at genjutsu, able to trap foes with his Cat Genjutsu. He can also shift his scale at will, shrinking from a towering beast down to roughly human size.

When Sasuke was small, Itachi turned the collecting of paw prints into a game, working up from ordinary cats to a lion, with Nekomata's print meant to be the last. Itachi once bested Nekomata and his ninja cats, and asked the boss to face Sasuke at full strength once the younger Uchiha had grown.

Years afterward, Team 7 was sent to obtain that final print and slipped into Nekomata's Cat Fortress, splitting apart inside. Sasuke reached him first and took him on, but Nekomata proved too much until Naruto Uzumaki and Sakura Haruno arrived to pull him out of danger. Rejecting their help, Sasuke exposed dozens of explosive-tagged kunai he had planted in the ceiling above the cat and set them off, dropping the roof onto Nekomata and claiming the last print for the Paw Encyclopaedia. Two years later Nekomata called on Nekobaa to buy supplies and spotted a photo of Sasuke beside his print, drifting back to the memory of their fight.