Kurozumi Family

Kurozumi Orochi, the ousted shogun of Wano Country, gives this clan its name. Over eighty-one years back it counted among the six houses that governed the land, yet a botched attempt to seize the shogunate cost it everything. A later plot, two decades before the present, paid off through Kaidou's aid, and Orochi claimed the shogun's throne, ruling with cruelty until Kaidou abandoned him for the New Onigashima Project. Kurozumi translates to black charcoal, and the family crest shows a downward pentagon encircled by five three-pronged forms.

Throughout its reign over Wano the clan kept a wide network of retainers and partners. Two forces stood beside it apart from the Orochi Oniwabanshu and the Mimawarigumi: Kaidou's crew of animal-fruit fighters, and the top yakuza organization operating out of the Flower Capital, run under the Kyoshiro name. Denjiro, posing as Kyoshiro, even served the shogunate as a money changer despite holding little genuine regard for Orochi, and he turned against him with his men once the Fire Festival came. The instant Kaidou struck off the shogun's head and absorbed his troops, every last tie and support the family had was severed.

Generations earlier the clan set its own downfall in motion. Its head, chasing the shogunate while the ruling shogun lacked an heir, poisoned the competing daimyo, but everything unraveled when a child, Kouzuki Sukiyaki, was born to the shogun. Once the scheme came to light the leader was condemned to seppuku, and the house forfeited all its holdings. For years afterward, righteous mobs across Wano tracked down anyone carrying the Kurozumi name and slaughtered even the blameless, an ordeal that handed survivors like Orochi and Kanjuro real reason to loathe the country.

Roughly four decades on, Kurozumi Higurashi sought out Orochi, grandson of the poisoner, and proposed to raise him to shogun. He accepted, amassed money, and slipped Kanjuro into the Kouzuki household as an informant, while Higurashi wielded her Devil Fruit to mimic Sukiyaki and declare Orochi his stand-in. Once Sukiyaki died, Orochi ascended with Kaidou behind him and bent his rule toward vengeance on Wano's citizens, subjecting Oden to five years of public shame. Following Oden's execution, the clan became the quarry of the Nine Red Scabbards, sent forward through time by Toki to strike Orochi down.

At the Onigashima raid, Kaidou lopped off Orochi's head in front of witnesses to dissolve their alliance, but the shogun endured through his Yamata no Orochi fruit and torched the castle in retaliation. He clashed with the Scabbards, lost his head a second time, and lingered on as a burning skull. Hiyori, wearing Komurasaki's face, ultimately staked him with a Seastone nail, and Denjiro landed the killing strike. Swearing the Kurozumi would haunt Wano for all time, Orochi expired while Hiyori threw Oden's own defiant words back at him.

Once Orochi lay dead and Kaidou was defeated, the fighters of Wano hailed Kouzuki Momonosuke as their new shogun, formally closing out Kurozumi rule; the clan's teachings were scrubbed from the schools and Orochi's ruin was staged for the masses. Kanjuro too died after a parting act of malice, loosing Kazenbo on the castle. The bloodline was nearly obliterated, and its sole confirmed survivor is Kurozumi Tama, whose lineage stays unknown to her allies and who sided against Orochi and Kaidou.