Katsuyu

Just how large Katsuyu truly grows is anyone's guess. Even the piece that answers a summons stands about level with Konoha's biggest structure. Tsunade once notes, amid the Fourth Shinobi World War, that her and Sakura's joint effort can raise only a tenth of the creature, and that sliver still looms over the nearby mountains and, melted down, stretches far enough to shroud the Allied forces. Rather than being separate beasts of differing sizes like most summons, every slug the pair call up is a fragment of one and the same being.

Its hide is mostly a milky white, marked by three blue bands that run lengthwise down the center and flanks from head toward tail before thinning out. A faint grey washes the eye stalks, and two feelers flank the mouth on either side.

Next to louder summons such as Manda or Gamabunta, Katsuyu is hushed and dutiful, most of all toward its mistress. It tacks '-sama' onto Tsunade's name, greets everyday villagers with courteous suffixes, and earns the same 'Katsuyu-sama' from Sakura and Shizune, rendered 'Lady Katsuyu' in the English dub. A gentler, teasing streak hides under that meekness, along with an easy fondness for Tsunade. One omake has the slug spinning a yarn about a punishing trek to reach Team Three, complete with a fall from a rope bridge and hostile villagers, just to see Sakura fuss over it, a joke the two summoners laugh about together.

For attack, Katsuyu sprays a burning fluid through its Tongue Tooth Sticky Acid, a jet that bores through solid stone. The Slug Great Division splinters it into a swarm of tiny duplicates that scatter from harm or juggle many jobs, then knit back together at will. Those shards fasten onto the hurt so a summoner can pour restorative chakra through them, and since every duplicate shares a telepathic and sensory tie, they double as a live relay for collecting and passing along word. Katsuyu can even piece Tsunade back together after her body is severed in two, though a drained state drags the repair out.

Remarkably tough to harm, it can seal people within itself to blunt force like Pain's sweeping Shinra Tensei, or hold them frozen to keep them alive. A piece no bigger than a palm has outlasted both the caustic chakra of Naruto's tailed-beast cloak and Nagato's Chibaku Tensei. Able to divide, it may appear in several spots at once, and it can even dissolve into a puddle while carrying on as normal. Its might climbs or wanes in step with whoever summons it and that person's Strength of a Hundred Seal, so a weakened Tsunade pulls far less from the slug.