Sasori

From his mother Sasori took wide, greyish-brown eyes, and from his father the short, mousy red hair, and he usually wore a hazy, half-dreaming expression. The puppet body he built to preserve himself froze his features at the age he left Suna, giving a grown man the face of a teenager; when that true form is exposed, his eyes snap wide with an almost manic light. Over his tenure in the Akatsuki he hid inside the puppet armour Hiruko, dressing it in the organisation's robe so that few ever glimpsed his real face. His own puppet frame held a coiled cable stinger where his intestines had been, a scroll rack on his back, spinning bladed poles at his hips, and, at the left of his chest, the single living remnant of him: a core of flesh marked with the kanji for scorpion.

A childhood starved of parental love shaped Sasori into a cold, aloof man with little regard for human life. The puppets he built in his parents' likeness could never return the affection he craved, and in the end he claimed his heart had become as empty as his puppet frame, professing he would feel nothing even at Chiyo's death. He held no loyalty to his village, defecting to chase his own interests, yet he was oddly patient and even-keeled, rarely rattled by obstacles. His guiding conviction was that true art endures forever, a belief he argued endlessly with his partner Deidara, who prized art as something fleeting.

That obsession drove him to immortalize himself as a puppet, but it was not unshakeable. When his grandnephew Kankuro insisted that what truly lasts is the heart and soul poured into one's creations, Sasori came to accept the point, leaving the Mother and Father puppets in Kankuro's keeping so they might be passed to the next generation. In those final moments a buried tenderness surfaced in a man who had spent decades denying he had any left.

Trained by Chiyo, Sasori grew into an extraordinarily powerful puppeteer, credited with striking down the Third Kazekage, the mightiest ninja Suna had ever produced, and earning his blood-soaked nickname across the Third Shinobi World War. He could suppress his chakra threads until they were invisible and manipulate well over a hundred puppets at once, an amount thought beyond an ordinary shinobi, and unleash them as his Red Secret Technique. His most fearsome innovation was human puppetry: bodies rebuilt as puppets that retained their chakra, techniques, and even kekkei genkai. His favourite, the Third Kazekage, granted him Magnet Release and its Iron Sand, while Hiruko served as both armour and weapon.

Almost every blade in his arsenal was laced with an instant-acting poison so refined that he believed it incurable, until Sakura Haruno managed an antidote. His converted body made him nearly indestructible, feeling no fatigue, hunger, or pain, with his living core as its lone weakness. That weakness proved fatal in his battle against Sakura and Chiyo, when Chiyo pierced the core using the very Mother and Father puppets he had made, letting him lower his guard so he could die in their embrace. He was later reincarnated during the Fourth Shinobi World War before his soul was finally set free.