Zabuza Momochi

Tall and powerfully built, Zabuza has pale grayish skin, dark eyes, faint brows, and black hair that stands up in short spikes. He usually keeps bandages wound across his lower face like a mask, hiding a narrow jawline and the jagged teeth shared with his fellow Mist swordsmen. His forehead protector sits sideways on his head. When he first confronts Team 7 he fights bare-chested, the enormous Kubikiribōchō slung from a single belt, over striped baggy trousers and camouflage warmers climbing his arms and legs. His second look swaps in a sleeveless black top and trousers with a waist-guard, loose bandages knotted at the throat like a scarf, matching what the other swordsmen of his era wore. As a boy he dressed in a sleeveless shirt marked with the kanji for demon.

By the account of his former follower Gengo, Zabuza once carried real charisma, inspired by a vision of a world where shinobi ruled as the governing class. That dream fuelled his failed coup against the Fourth Mizukage, and its collapse soured him into a bitter, cynical killer for hire who would take work from anyone corrupt enough to pay. He presents himself as harsh, arrogant, and cold, treating people as pawns and calling shinobi mere tools split between the users and the used. Unusually for a villain, he does not disguise this with false kindness; he tells his recruits plainly what they are for. He raised Haku as a weapon meant to be spent, yet came to care for the boy far more deeply than he would admit. In battle he reads an opponent's technique after seeing it once, though he grows careless when he judges a move worthless. His buried tenderness surfaces only at the end: moved by Naruto's words about Haku, he weeps, acknowledges how much the boy meant to him, and dies wishing to follow him. After his later reincarnation he shows a streak of honour too, disgusted at being used as an undying corpse-tool and begging Kakashi to put him down as the human he had already died as.

Long before Yagura Karatachi's rule, Kirigakure ended its academy with a lethal exam that forced graduates to kill one another, and the deadliest were marked for the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist. Zabuza, not even enrolled yet, slaughtered more than a hundred students in a single stretch, which got the practice abolished and earned him the title Demon of the Hidden Mist. He rose to the Anbu, joined the Swordsmen, and carried off the great blade Kubikiribōchō, a sword that draws iron from the blood it spills to keep its edge and even reforge itself. He ranked among Kirigakure's strongest, a master of Water Release, Silent Killing, and the Hiding in Mist Technique, able to strike unseen in total fog.

Disillusioned with the Bloody Mist, Zabuza rallied followers for a coup against the Fourth Mizukage, only to be betrayed and driven into exile. He turned mercenary to fund a second attempt, taking Haku, a boy with a rare kekkei genkai, as his prized instrument. That path led him to the corrupt businessman Gatō, who hired him to kill the bridge builder Tazuna. Zabuza clashed with Kakashi Hatake, trapping him in a water prison, but Naruto and Sasuke broke the hold, and Kakashi's Sharingan eventually turned the fight. Haku intervened disguised as a hunter-nin, faked Zabuza's death, and nursed him back over a week for a rematch.

In the second bout Zabuza blinded the field with mist and shut his eyes to negate the Sharingan, wounding Kakashi badly, but the ninken tracked his scent and pinned him. Haku threw himself in front of Kakashi's Lightning Cutter to save his master and died. When Gatō then tore up their deal, Zabuza had no cause left to fight. Naruto's grief over Haku broke through his armour; in tears, Zabuza took a kunai in his teeth, cut a path through Gatō's thugs, and killed the man before collapsing. He asked to lie beside Haku and passed away wishing to join him. Team 7 buried the pair together with the Kubikiribōchō planted at their grave. Years on, Kabuto Yakushi reincarnated Zabuza for the Fourth Shinobi World War, but he was cut down again by Kakashi, sealed away, and finally released to the afterlife when the technique ended. Naruto long credited Zabuza and Haku as figures who profoundly shaped how he saw the world.