Sumaru

Sumaru keeps his long, smooth black hair bound in a braided tail, with a few bangs curling across his head and over the blue Hoshigakure headband. His eyes are a reddish brown. In childhood the hair ran shorter, straighter, and coarser, and he went about in a pale shirt.

In boyhood Sumaru clings to his mother Natsuhi and father Hotarubi, above all loving to watch the stars beside his mother and hear her sing. A lullaby she gives him, about the red star Natsuhiboshi, in truth the planet Mars, becomes the anchor of his resolve. Under his calm runs a stubborn will; once he grasps the choice his mother made, he finds it in himself to forgive her, and he pledges to claim the title of Hoshikage ahead of Naruto and to lift his village above even the Five Great Nations without relying on the star.

Counted the finest genin in Hoshigakure, Sumaru handles the village's advanced hidden arts far earlier than most. His combat turns on the Mysterious Peacock Method, which lets a user amplify and shape chakra into endless forms, growing wings to fly, striking at foes, or sensing the fallen star. Like his mother, he bears the training with rare ease, showing none of its usual toll and commanding unusually fine chakra control, though he also proves handy with a crossbow, once rigging a rope over the toxic Devil's Ravine. Once the method is banned, his body is purged of the star's power and the ability leaves him for good.

The two first meet just inside the Land of Bears, where Sumaru halts the Konoha genin before he wanders into the gas-choked Devil's Ravine. Naruto mistakes the warning for an assault, and a brief, pointless scuffle breaks out. After a masked thief takes the star, Akahoshi sends Sumaru to retrieve it, then kidnaps him while wearing that same disguise and locks him in suspended animation. Tenten and Rock Lee free him, and he leads Neji and the others to the culprit, who proves to be his own mother, Natsuhi, thought dead for ten years. They reconcile in her hideout, but she slips off to seize the star and end its ruinous training; when his pendant breaks, he knows she is gone. Spared from the burning training hall by what is called his mother's spirit, he is mended by Konoha's medics and vows to raise Hoshigakure into a power needing no star at all.