Gennō

Grief and vengeance drive Gennō at first, since the fall of his home village and the death of his son left him bent on razing Konoha. Yet he proves surprisingly sentimental beneath the grudge. Watching Naruto and the younger generation refuse to quit stirs something in him, and Naruto's spirit reminds him so strongly of his own boy that he sets the vendetta aside. In its place he turns the whole affair into a playful hunt, and even in his final moments he admits that revenge eluded him but the game was worth it.

Even in old age, Gennō remains a renowned and dangerous shinobi who blends all three core disciplines into expert combinations. His barehanded fighting is sharp enough that he matched Rock Lee, a devoted taijutsu specialist, and he seems to have fallen only because his body was giving out, all while pushing through considerable pain. His trademark, though, is the trap. He rigs smoke bombs or exploding tags beneath his clothes to punish anyone who closes in, and he can summon a large bird whose piercing cry signals allies, whose leg carries an exploding tag, and whose flight doubles as transport. Above everything sits his intellect. He once ran circles around a full Anbu squad, reading his surroundings and plotting several moves ahead with layered misdirection, then rewriting the plan the instant conditions shifted. That mind, paired with a talent for disguise and infiltration that Shikamaru judged worthy of legend, is what earned him the name Trap Master.

Kagero Village was destroyed with Gennō as its sole survivor, and decades later, after taking work in the Land of Sand and feeling his health fail, he resolved to complete the final assignment his village had given him. He slipped into Konoha disguised as a carpenter under the employ of a woman named Kanna, then stole the blueprints of the fortifications ringing the settlement to refine traps left over from an earlier infiltration. With the Leaf distracted by rumours of an invasion from a neighbouring land, the task of stopping him fell to the Konoha 11.

Gennō staged his own death convincingly and seeded explosive tags across the village in a chained pattern, until Sakura, Hinata, and Ino realised he was still breathing. He then had his bird scatter the stolen blueprints everywhere and slipped fresh tags onto the Hokage Mountain. Naruto finally confronted him there, where he laid out his aim to collapse the cliff face and bury the village. In the fight that followed he slipped past Kiba and Akamaru, escaped Shino's insects, and held his own against Rock Lee's taijutsu, revealing that tags hidden in the Third Hokage's carved face were meant to set off the blast. Once Naruto and Choji brought down the summoned bird, Gennō's worn body finally failed and he died from old, unhealed wounds. As Shikamaru later explained, the old ninja had meant to destroy Konoha on arrival, but after meeting Naruto he disarmed the bombs and reshaped the whole scheme into a treasure hunt, the same kind he had once shared with his son.