Giant Multi-Headed Dog

Brown fur coats the whole of the hound, which carries a large black receiver punched through its skull. Dark coloring rings its mouth, where rows of sharp fangs and teeth are set. The Rinnegan and its piercings betray Nagato's hand on the creature.

Pain reworked the dog with the Amplification Summoning Technique, so that any hit causes it to break into separate hounds that can later fuse back together. Each division leaves it with more heads than before, and every new head inherits both the black receiver and the Rinnegan of the original. Nagato explains that the only route to stopping it is to defeat the summoner behind it. Physically it is a brute, powerful and resilient enough to smash through an ANBU Captain's Earth Release: Sticky Earth Drop and a Lightning Release: Sixteen Pillar Bind, to take only mild burns from Fire Release: Fired Pottery Technique even with its legs sheared off by wind, and to keep multiplying under a Wind Release: Rasenshuriken rather than fall. Its anime sizes vary widely, from several stories tall to short enough to pass beneath the trees.

Pain first calls it during his duel with Jiraiya, though Gamaken manages to hold it back. In the anime it also menaces Tsurugi and his hunter-nin unit. When Pain invades Konoha it returns to battle Gamaken, Gamabunta and Gamahiro, who cannot stop it from dividing, and it only vanishes once Naruto beats the Animal Path itself. It surfaces a final time in the Fourth Shinobi World War as the revived Nagato and Itachi Uchiha fight Naruto Uzumaki and Killer B; Nagato warns that striking it head-on is futile, and the beast is at last shut down when a freed Itachi turns Amaterasu on it. The design blends two Greek monsters, the ever-regrowing Lernaean Hydra and the multi-headed hound Cerberus.