Shimotsuki Ryuma

Ryuma stood at middling height with black hair knotted at the back in a topknot. His everyday garb was a plain khaki samurai gi worn with simple zori sandals. A scar eventually crossed his left eye, leaving him a one-eyed swordsman late in life. His earlier look strongly echoed the pre-timeskip Zoro, while his older self resembled Zoro after the timeskip.

A rigid code of justice and honor governed him. Ryuma held that a saved life was a debt the virtuous must repay, and he treated repaying it as the heart of true swordsmanship, sometimes obeying a benefactor almost blindly. He measured any fight by what it protected rather than the glory it earned. One peculiar reflex defined him: should another sheath so much as graze his, even by accident, he read it as a challenge to a duel to the death, a habit born of his belief that the sword is the swordsman, and one that dragged him into needless bloodshed. He longed to cross blades with the famed warrior King, never realizing that the grateful people he had rescued had given that very name to him. He was also hopeless with money and often went days hungry and broke.

Tremendous physical power let Ryuma lop the head off a giant dragon in a single stroke and split a copper statue clean through. He ran great distances at high speed, leapt from and landed safely at great heights, and emerged from the dragon fight without a scratch. Revered across Wano for swordplay that blended kenjutsu and battojutsu, he was called the strongest swordsman of his era. He wielded Ryuo, Wano's name for Armament Haki, and through repeated battle forged his katana Shusui into a permanent Black Blade. Shusui, one of the twenty-one Great Grade Blades, became Wano's national treasure through its bond with him.