Hanzō

Hanzo lived in constant wariness, trusting no one and keeping himself guarded around the clock, allowing not even children into his presence unsearched. He prized his rule and crushed threats without mercy, ready to ally with hostile nations, or to betray without remorse, as when he lured the Ame Orphans into a fatal trap. Yet in his prime he had genuinely chased the ideal of peace, dreaming of uniting the Five Great Countries, and the orphans wore his headbands out of devotion to that cause.

Central to the man was a belief in faith: conviction, he held, outlives its bearer and can only truly be measured in battle, so he spared many strong-willed opponents and granted them titles in honour of their resolve. When he concluded that his methods would only breed endless war, he discarded that conviction and grew obsessed with hoarding the power he had won, so arrogant that he let his once-peerless skills rust unnoticed. Even in death, though, a spark of his old faith endured, and he placed it at last in Mifune.

Counted among the mightiest ninja ever to live, Hanzo once cut down an entire Konoha squad single-handed, sparing only the three who would become the Sannin. As a child his body was implanted with the venom sac of a black salamander, leaving a cross-shaped scar and granting him both immunity to poison and a toxic physiology so potent that even his breath could kill. To shield those around him he breathed through a heavy respirator and carried an antidote, fighting bare-faced only against weaker foes, since a ruptured sac would briefly paralyse him.

His speed was said to be unmatched in water, and his command of the Body Flicker made him the sole survivor of Nagato's rampage. From his youth he fought with a poison-coated kusarigama, delivering savage strikes with the sickle and chain, and he could pair explosive tags with Fire Release for devastating blasts. True to his epithet, he summoned the colossal salamander Ibuse, which stored and exhaled a paralysing mist, burrowed underground to strike from below, and could swallow enemies whole. Astride it in his youth he was strong enough to overwhelm all three young Sannin at once.

During the Second Shinobi World War, Hanzo defeated a Konoha force and, impressed that Jiraiya, Tsunade and Orochimaru endured his onslaught, christened the trio the Sannin. Years on he grew aware of a band of young idealists, the future Akatsuki led by Yahiko, who pursued peace within his country, and he admired them until Danzo Shimura persuaded him they endangered his rule. The two conspired to kill Yahiko and seized Konan, forcing Nagato to choose between his friend and his comrade, until Yahiko threw himself onto Nagato's blade to spare him the choice.

Nagato's grief-stricken retaliation wiped out Hanzo's forces, and Hanzo fled, thereafter keeping secret contact with Danzo. When Nagato launched a civil war against his regime, the Six Paths of Pain finally cornered the fading ruler, branding him a hollow shadow of the man he once was before killing him and purging nearly everyone tied to him.

In the Fourth Shinobi World War, Kabuto Yakushi reincarnated Hanzo to fight the Allied Shinobi Forces, and he was intercepted by Mifune, the samurai he had once bested and spared. In a reversal of their first duel, Mifune severed his kusarigama and cut him down, telling him his lost conviction had dulled his blade. Reclaiming that faith at the end, Hanzo overcame the reincarnation's control and committed seppuku, rupturing his venom gland to paralyse himself so the Fifth Division could bind and seal him, entrusting his faith to Mifune. The eventual undoing of the Impure World Reincarnation returned his soul to the afterlife.