Hideo Kuze

The boy who became Kuze began with brown hair and eyes and soft, youthful features, dressed in hospital garb through his long recovery. After years of swapping shells he settled into a Peace-Keeping Force combat frame, a powerfully built body given a custom-sculpted, handsome face. That artistry came at a cost: his lips barely move as he speaks, worsened by his own choice to dial down facial motion and pain response so as to sharpen his physical control. His hair once fell black to the nape with bangs at the temples above dark brown eyes, but a vagabond stretch across Asia turned it white and left his systems worn. His wardrobe tracked his path, from a smock-like white coat among the Individual Eleven to a brown military jacket over a black turtleneck in his final campaign, a bayonet clipped at his chest.

In childhood Kuze was withdrawn and gentle, forever trying to lift the spirits of those near him even as he made hard demands, especially of the cyborg girl who kept him company. Adulthood layered a cold, distant, nearly inhuman shell over that core, yet those who spoke with him found a warm, patient, persuasive mind that drew admiration for its intellect. His years as a soldier honed him into a tactician and a clear-eyed decision-maker who relished deep discussion with the few who had lived enough to keep pace with him.

Revulsion at leaders who refuse to answer for their failures hardens him from a moral-driven assassin into something closer to a messiah figure, a man convinced he is powerful enough to reshape the world for war's victims without ever believing himself divine. Having abandoned his flesh in childhood, he drifts from his own humanity, sympathetic to the refugees in the abstract yet oddly detached from their concrete suffering. He concludes that any equal society will collapse under human selfishness, so he takes on a dictator's role to force balance, aiming to fuse countless minds into one network beyond the body. The Major sums him up as a figure carrying Hitler's method and Gandhi's intent.

As a six-year-old still named Hisaragi, Kuze survived a plane crash that killed his parents and left him partly paralyzed. In the hospital he bonded silently with the only other survivor, a fully paralyzed girl, folding origami cranes in the hope that a thousand of them might grant a wish for her recovery. When she was moved away he assumed she had died. Later a physician named Kuze brought a cyborg girl of the same age to visit; unknown to him she was that same child, healed. His single request, whether cranes could be folded with prosthetic hands, drove him to accept full cyberization once he resolved to find her. He took his adoptive doctor's surname and, years on, discovered her empty childhood shell, preserving it beside his own inside an antique gallery.

Conscripted into the Japanese Self-Defense Force, he deployed to Korea during the Peninsular War, where his unit halted a massacre only to be scapegoated by a smear campaign back home. Disgusted, he traded his rifle for a journalist's camera and vanished into the refugee camps, wandering Asia as a beloved figure the people nicknamed Ro, the wolf, his hair whitening because he never replaced his frame. A stay on Leigo Island brought him alongside Aoi, the Laughing Man, who gifted him the alias Hideo.

He infiltrated the Individual Eleven and was briefly seized by their engineered virus, mounting a theatrical strike on Prime Minister Kayabuki that the Major thwarted. Shaking off the infection, he alone walked away from the group's mass suicide and took up the cause of Dejima's refugees, forging their independence movement while secretly gathering their consciousnesses into a network of his own. A plutonium deal meant to coerce Japan collapsed into betrayal, and along the way he bested Batou in single combat. Trapped under rubble with the Major, he at last recognized her as his lost first love and shared his vision of a body-free cyber-realm before Tachikoma units sacrificed themselves to halt a nuclear strike. Captured as agreed, Kuze was murdered by an American agent's micromachines, leaving behind only a folded crane and the words that he would go on ahead, a hint that his ghost had already crossed into the net.