Senjumaru Shutara

Senjumaru looks like a slim, youthful woman with pale skin and long black hair, set off by a large golden crescent-moon ornament at the back of her head. Over the standard black uniform she layers a white haori and a further white robe fastened high across the chest, and she stands on very thick-soled okobo to offset her small height. In place of her own hands she works through six long, golden, skeletal arms mounted on her back.

Composed and courteous by habit, Senjumaru ranks among the calmer members of the Royal Guard, though a playful and even irreverent streak surfaces now and then, whether staging a full musical fanfare for the Guard's arrival or needling her old subordinate Mayuri after strolling into his lab uninvited. She keeps her focus firmly on the task at hand and can turn forceful when she wants something, once threatening to unman Renji if he would not strip for a proper fitting. She insists she lacks Mayuri's cruelty, yet she holds an open contempt for the Quincy, dismissing them as a people the Soul King has cast aside and relishing the thought of ending their bloodline. Her humor runs dark, and she favors the archaic self-reference warawa.

Long before her elevation, Senjumaru headed an unofficial circle of inventors in Soul Society, with a young Mayuri Kurotsuchi serving beneath her. More than two thousand years ago she devised the black Shihakusho worn by every Shinigami, a contribution the Soul King prized enough to raise her into the Royal Guard. When the Guard descends during the war with the Wandenreich, she gathers the gravely wounded Byakuya, Renji, and Rukia, along with the shattered Tensa Zangetsu, and carries them up to the Soul King Palace. There she measures the recovered lieutenants for new uniforms and later shapes a spiral stair to send Ichigo back down.

As Yhwach and his chosen Quincy breach the palace, Senjumaru meets him with her divine soldiers, only to find every strike turned aside by the hidden Sternritter Nianzol Weizol and his power, The Wind. She answers by quietly re-tailoring Nianzol's own clothing mid-fight, then killing him with needles left sewn inside it. The whole clash, it emerges, unfolded within an elaborate false landscape she had woven with her Shikai, Shigarami, a needle that spins endless reishi thread; the true palace stayed hidden while Kirio Hikifune finished a cage to trap the invaders. To unleash her full might she and the other three Divine Generals are bound by the Blood Oath's Seal, so the others take their own lives to release her. Freed, she calls up her Bankai, Shatatsu Karagara Shigarami no Tsuji, weaving fates into cloth and sealing away the empowered Schutzstaffel with ease. The turn comes when Yhwach's Almighty lets Uryu Ishida slip his bindings; using Antithesis, he reverses their positions, traps her inside her own Bankai, and drives a Heilig Pfeil through her heart.