Messina

Tall and heavily muscled, Messina keeps his hair short and bound in a ponytail, and sports a drooping Fu Manchu mustache. His outfit pairs a tall hat with a sleeveless tunic and wrapped armbands.

His forearms turn out to be quite hairy, a detail exposed when Caesar's Ripple scorches every hair clean off Messina's right arm during a training bout.

The manga spends little time on his inner life, yet Messina comes across as a firm and capable teacher to his two students. That sternness does not rule out humor, since he and Loggins enjoy needling their pupils throughout the grueling lessons. Both Caesar and Joseph regard him as a respected master, and his skill is underscored by serving as the final test of Caesar's twenty-day regimen.

As trained servants of Lisa Lisa, Messina and Loggins are seasoned Ripple masters. Over roughly twenty days they push Joseph and Caesar to absurd feats of control, such as drawing breath steadily for ten straight minutes or inhaling ten separate times within a single second. The course ends with the students facing their instructors in a Ripple duel, with Messina squared off against Caesar.

Partway through, Messina concedes, stunned that three weeks of effort had lifted Caesar's Ripple beyond what he himself had built over a decade, and noting that the young man's power singed the hair from his arm. He then joins Lisa Lisa, Caesar, and Joseph on the trip to Switzerland to seek the Red Stone of Aja. Caesar later races ahead to Saint Moritz to strike at Kars early, and Messina trails after him. Wamuu severs his arm in the ensuing clash and hauls him inside, leaving him unconscious but alive, so he never witnesses Caesar's death and is later carried to safety by Joseph.

With one arm gone he sits out the final showdown against Kars. He does turn up at Joseph's supposed funeral, sharing everyone's shock when Joseph proves to be alive. What becomes of him afterward is never stated, though it is widely assumed he died during the half century separating Part 2 from Part 3.