Kyo

In the flashbacks set more than thirty-eight years prior, Kyo cuts a tall, heavily muscled figure. He crops his silver hair short and keeps sideburns at the temples, his thick-lipped mouth tends toward a scowl, and an X-shaped mark scars the middle of his broad chin. Spreading over the left of his chest is a dark tattoo: a pair of crossing strokes above a five-petaled half-flower design.

For clothing he chooses a dark kimono printed with pale axe-blade shapes, cinched by a light sash, with dark gloves and sandals to match. A long hooded coat drapes his shoulders, its hem edged in a flaming-tongue motif and its breast bearing the kanji of his name. Behind those dark, X-stamped sunglasses his eyes stay hidden, while a hulking single-bladed axe rides on his back.

The little that is known marks Kyo as somber and unyielding, prone to sudden violence, his name as a mobster and contract killer arriving ahead of him. An opportunist's instinct seems to explain why he signed onto Rocks at all, having walked into Hachinosu himself rather than losing a Davy Back Fight to Rocks D. Xebec. As with nearly every man aboard, a single look at the Kuja empress Shakuyaku left him helplessly taken.

Some forty-four years back, a few months after the crew claimed Hachinosu, Kyo turned up on the pirate island to enlist. By then his reputation preceded him on two counts, his record of brutal contract killings and his long-running grudge against Shiki, the two having tangled well before this point. During a raid that looted Foot Colony, he clashed with Shiki again after the latter lobbed a bomb to stall the others and seize a fatter share of the spoils. Forty-two years ago he was on hand when Shakuyaku, having stepped down from the Kuja Pirates, arrived to open a bar there, and like the rest of the crew he was floored by her beauty.

When she was captured and her location leaked to the island, Kyo set out for God Valley alongside his crewmates to rescue her. The crew paused to deal with King Harald on the way, an exchange that irritated Kyo and Shiki alike, before pushing on. Once the objective was settled as freeing Shakuyaku, with treasure to be divided later, Kyo accepted that whoever reached her first would effectively claim her. Rivals such as Gill Bastar, Gloriosa, Ganzui, Shiki, and John all scrambled toward her too, yet Rayleigh got there ahead of every one of them. With Edward Newgate ordering the others to grab what plunder remained, Kyo ended up trading blows with Polo Gram. He afterward led a band to commandeer a ship, revealing that none of them planned to return to Hachinosu, which effectively dissolved the Rocks Pirates. That clash entered legend as the God Valley Incident, and though he kept building his name, he never reached the renown of the crew's better-known members.