Raiga Kurosuki

Raiga had blue eyes ringed by a darker ripple around the pupil, full lips, and waist-length green hair with two long bangs framing his cheeks. As a Kirigakure Anbu he wore the standard uniform and a white mask marked with a smile, curved eye-slits, and red wave designs. After defecting he switched to a grey hooded mantle striped in red, beneath which he kept a knee-length dark vest, light trousers, and the body wrappings common to the Swordsmen of the Mist; a basket strapped to his back carried Ranmaru.

His years in Kirigakure left Raiga tormented and cruel, a lonely killer who slew at random on missions while searching for some meaning to his life and weeping inwardly for each life he took. He openly loathed Zabuza, Kisame, and the rest of the swordsmen for reasons of his own. Everything changed when he took in Ranmaru: the boy became his eyes and ears while Raiga served as the boy's body, and through that bond both men found the purpose they had lacked. Among his stranger indulgences was a love of funerals, so consuming that he buried victims alive as a punishment, insisting that the world thinks more kindly of the dead than the living, and he would grieve sincerely over those he laid to rest.

As both a former Swordsman of the Mist and an Anbu-ranked ninja, Raiga stood among the strongest shinobi Kiri ever produced. He carried Kiba, a matched pair of lightning-charged swords reckoned the sharpest ever forged, which he could join at the hilts into a single double-bladed weapon. Channelling them, he unleashed lightning attacks faster and more freely than usual and could call down natural lightning at will, drawing on it as an endless power source; a single bolt was strong enough to fell both Neji and Naruto at once, and he could blanket a wide area in strikes for defence or destroy his own body outright to leave no trace behind. Even without the blades he wielded Lightning Release, and he was adept at Water Release and at cloaking an area in blinding mist.

His downfall came during the mission to dismantle the Kurosuki Family, when an attempt to bury a villager brought him up against Naruto Uzumaki, Rock Lee, Neji Hyūga, and Tenten. He fought them through a screen of mist while Ranmaru neutralised Neji's Byakugan, but a Rasengan knocked him from a cliff. Revived by Ranmaru's chakra, he battled the group once more until Ranmaru, acting on his own conscience, begged him to lay down his swords, a plea Raiga took as betrayal. Knocked off a cliff a final time by Naruto, Raiga chose to end himself with a bolt of his own lightning in midair, telling Ranmaru he was now free to live among friends without fear or loneliness.