Asura Ōtsutsuki

A crop of short, bristly brown hair sat atop Asura's head, with a pair of strands bound in cloth that hung past each cheek, echoing the framing his brother wore. His expression tended toward the severe. Age brought him a heavier jaw and a trimmed goatee that recalled Hagoromo. Across his brow he first fastened an unmarked band, later switching to wound cloth. For clothing he favoured a pale kimono, its collar dotted with magatama beads and cinched shut by a dark sash, over which a full black underlayer covered the rest of him.

Warm and easygoing in his early years, Asura idolised his sibling and threw himself into play and study alike. Lacking any inborn gift, he learned instead to lean on the people around him, treating partnership as strength rather than weakness. That gap in ability left him restless and unsure of himself as a boy, yet it never dulled his resolve; once he fixed on an aim, he pushed until he reached it. He long assumed the mantle of successor belonged to Indra and made no bid for it himself. Only through relentless effort and the backing of many friends did his own strength surface, and the experience cemented his conviction that affection, not force, was what would bring the world peace.

When Indra drifted toward domination and shut others out, Asura, heartbroken at the thought, still concluded he had to stand against him. He first begged his brother to turn back from his bitterness, and when that failed he accepted the clash. Even then his regard for Indra never faded. His single wish was to be reborn again and again until the two of them could finally settle their quarrel, a hope that would one day live on through Naruto and Sasuke.

Born second to Hagoromo, Asura entered the world at the cost of his mother's life in the anime account, though his boyhood afterward passed happily beside his father and brother. Growing up overshadowed by the prodigious Indra, he displayed no gift of his own and came to prize the bonds he built with others; in time a power to rival Indra's stirred within him. To settle which son would carry on Ninshū, Hagoromo dispatched the two on separate errands to restore ruined lands. Asura's road led him, alongside a villager named Taizō, to a strangely flourishing settlement shadowed by a God Tree. He won the residents over by curing a girl called Kanna, then uncovered the grim truth: the tree's saplings enriched the soil while draining the life from the people. Rather than tear them out against the elder's wishes, he laboured for a year to sink a well, taught the locals Ninshū as they helped, and at last brought forth water enough to fill a lake, after which the grateful villagers burned the saplings and healed.

Judging that Indra's swifter methods had left communities aimless and self-serving, Hagoromo named Asura his heir and passed his power to him, urging him to help his brother rediscover compassion. Indra, envious and steered by the schemes of Black Zetsu, assaulted the village to seize the title by force. Asura's pleas went unheard, so he awakened his Six Paths Chakra; with the villagers channelling their own chakra into him, his strength ripened fully and he drove Indra off, the elder brother swearing to undo Ninshū. Years later Asura wed Kanna and raised two sons and a daughter. As Hagoromo lay dying and warned that Indra meant to unravel his life's work across future lives, Asura promised to reincarnate in step with his brother, trusting that a peaceful end might someday come.

The rift outlived both brothers. Their bloodlines, the Senju and Uzumaki on Asura's side and the Uchiha on Indra's, carried a hatred neither clan understood. Asura's chakra passed down the generations, surfacing in Hashirama Senju during the Warring States era and later in Naruto Uzumaki, while Indra's lived on in Madara and then Sasuke Uchiha. Where every prior incarnation had failed, Naruto finally closed the wound, winning Sasuke over to his ideals and fulfilling the reconciliation Asura had chased for centuries.