Wasabi Izuno

The most striking thing about Wasabi is how feline she looks: her green eyes carry slit, cat-like pupils, her canine teeth are sharply pronounced, and a cat tail dangles from her waist, hooked through the belt loops of her shorts. She is a fair-skinned girl of middling height with short, spiky brown hair. Early on she wore a cropped, sleeveless light green hoodie over mesh with puffy green shorts. After graduating she tied on a dark green headband and switched to a sleeveless green hooded vest above a mesh shirt, brownish-green shorts with mesh leggings, and brown shoes, keeping the cat tail throughout.

Wasabi is blunt and never hesitates to say what she thinks, an energetic, hyperactive girl with a soft spot for boys and for anything cute. Her closest bond is with Namida, whom she adores even as the friend's timidity gets on her nerves. Beneath the bravado she strains under the hopes her clan pins on her, growing flustered whenever her relatives cheer her on. She once assumed that only those born into great lineage could amount to anything, but Iwabee's pushback on that idea reshaped her thinking and left her more determined than ever to become a great shinobi on her own merits.

Growing up, Wasabi listened to her grandmother's tales of the Izuno clan's mightiest secret technique, but each retelling grew so grand that she wrote the whole thing off as a fable. She proved a genuine talent regardless, becoming the youngest member of her clan to reach chūnin while still a child and the first in generations to actually pull off that ultimate technique. Her fighting leans on a wild, clawing taijutsu that echoes the Inuzuka clan's Four Legs style, and she ranked among the two fastest students in her Academy class. Her signature art is the Izuno hidden technique Cat Covering, which draws cat traits from a scroll to sharpen her taijutsu, and by her second Chūnin Exams she had mastered the Cat God Possession technique, calling up an enormous cat avatar that moves as an extension of her body. She also picked up basic medical ninjutsu to serve as her team's healer and excels at collaboration techniques with her fellow genin.

Her Academy days ran alongside Boruto Uzumaki and her eventual teammates. After graduating she was placed on Team 15 with Namida and Sumire Kakei under Hanabi Hyūga. The squad tangled with the Byakuya Gang, chased escaped animals ahead of the Chūnin Exams, and, when a giant wolf threatened Namida, set aside a quarrel to bring the beast down together. She rushed to Iwagakure with her friends to back up an endangered Team 7 during Mitsuki's disappearance, and in the Jūgo affair she and Namida were infected with cursed seals before their allies cured them and Sumire's Nue turned the tide. Through the Time Slip troubles the team gained a new member, the samurai-in-training Tsubaki Kurogane, and slowly learned to work with her.

Wasabi's arc came to a head at a later Chūnin Exams, where she faced Iwabee in the finals. Carrying a scroll her grandmother had pressed into her hands, and spurred on by Iwabee's insistence that she dream bigger, she finally unleashed her clan's legendary technique to shield him and won the match. She was promoted to chūnin and made a team captain, later helping test Kawaki as a potential genin and lending a hand when the Academy festival came under a terror threat.