White Zetsu Army

Kaguya Ōtsutsuki brought this legion into being because she wanted living weapons capable of standing against others of her own clan. The rank and file began as ordinary people swept into her Infinite Tsukuyomi and bound by the roots of the God Tree, their bodies warping over long years until their old selves and individuality were stripped away entirely. Kaguya feared kin who meant to descend to Earth and drain its chakra, yet those relatives never arrived while she lived, and she herself decayed into the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path before her sons sealed her within the moon. The dormant creatures ended up housed inside that statue. Generations later Madara Uchiha drew the statue back down and, to outlast his natural span, grew a mindless copy of Hashirama Senju's cells inside a vast flowering tree beneath the Mountains' Graveyard. He assumed the pale figures sprouting there were an accident of that experiment, unaware that Black Zetsu had quietly loosed the ones stored in the statue. Feeding on the statue's chakra, their numbers swelled until a hundred thousand identical bodies waited in a flooded cavern, forming the backbone of Akatsuki's forces for the coming war.

Stripped of humanity, these clones neither slept nor breathed and could not bleed, which made them punishing to put down; they shrugged off blows that would fell most opponents. Each could slip through solid surfaces to spy unseen, split open its trunk like a Venus flytrap to grab a target and siphon off chakra, then transform into a flawless double of that victim, ideal for infiltration, quiet killing, and turning allies against one another. Their kinship to Hashirama let them wield a feeble form of Wood Release, though contact with an overpowering life force, such as Naruto channelling the Nine-Tails, reduced them to actual trees. When Tobi opened the war he sent the horde underground against the roughly eighty thousand troops of the Allied Shinobi Forces, only for scouts to expose them, and about half the army was gone by the close of the opening day. Under cover of darkness the survivors impersonated allied soldiers to slaughter medics and breed suspicion, a ruse Sakura Haruno helped uncover. Kabuto had earlier seized Yamato and used his research on Hashirama's DNA to make the clones sturdier still. In the anime, a portion took on the traits of a poisonous red soil at the Seventh Front, gaining a toxic mist but also a fatal weakness to lightning.

The force answered ultimately to Kaguya Ōtsutsuki as its creator, then to Black Zetsu, Madara Uchiha, and Obito Uchiha, who steered it through the war. Every identical clone traced back to a single figure they called their original, the Akatsuki operative White Zetsu, whose memories they could reach and whose personality they all shared; their chatty streak earned them the nickname Chatterbox, a foil to Black Zetsu, dubbed Wicked Tongue. Obito's own survival was tied to them, since Madara rebuilt part of his body from the same Hashirama-derived material and set White Zetsu and Tobi to oversee his recovery. Long after Akatsuki's defeat, a handful lingered cocooned in Ōtsutsuki ruins beneath the Mountains' Graveyard until a Konoha squad wiped them out fifteen years on. Remnants outlived even that: Ōnoki drew on a sample of their genetics to manufacture five artificial soldiers known as Fabrications.