Shūhei Hisagi

Tall and lean, Hisagi has dark grey eyes and cropped black hair, with a trio of scars running down from above his right eye, left by a Hollow that attacked him in his youth. The number sixty-nine is inked on his left cheek in tribute to Kensei Muguruma, and a blue stripe runs diagonally across his nose. A choker sits at his throat, and a pair of armbands ring his upper arms, the latter able to detonate, all worn over a sleeveless uniform that carries his lieutenant's badge on the left arm. Some seventeen months after Aizen's defeat, he lets his hair grow out to frame his face.

Level-headed and composed, Hisagi carries a maturity that sits oddly against his rough, punkish look. He shoulders responsibility readily and steers away from violence where he can, sharing much of the upright outlook once embodied by Kaname Tōsen, the captain he formerly served under. That betrayal drew him into friendship with Sajin Komamura, and he keeps regular company with fellow lieutenants Izuru Kira and Renji Abarai.

He openly dislikes the shape his Zanpakutō takes when released, feeling it looks built to reap life itself, and he fears the weapon's power, holding that no one who fails to respect the sword in their hand deserves to draw it. Away from the battlefield a lighter, occasionally gloomy and secretly lecherous side shows through. He teaches himself guitar on an instrument brought back from the Human World, dreams of forming a band, and shoulders the editorship of the Seireitei newspaper, where his instructional column never quite caught on.

Roughly a hundred years earlier, the boy Hisagi and two companions were ambushed by a Hollow in Rukongai. He grabbed a stick to hold the creature off and was nearly devoured before Kensei Muguruma, captain of the 9th Division, arrived to rescue him. The sixty-nine on Kensei's chest so struck the boy that he later had the same figure tattooed on his own face. Already a known talent, Hisagi took field missions while still enrolled at the Shinigami academy, despite having failed its entrance exam twice.

In his final year he helped lead a soul-burial exercise for a freshman class that included Renji, Kira, and Momo Hinamori, only for a pack of Hollows to fall on them; he ordered the students to flee and fought on until the wound over his eye nearly cost him his life, with Aizen and Gin Ichimaru arriving in time to rescue everyone. Haunted by the fear he felt, he once asked Tōsen to strip him of his seat, but the captain reframed that fear as the very mark of a true soldier, a lesson that shaped him.

As a lieutenant, Hisagi trains hard as a swordsman precisely so he can avoid relying on his Zanpakutō. Released with the command to reap, Kazeshini becomes a pair of twin-bladed, kusarigama-style weapons joined by a long, extendable chain, which he hurls and swings to attack from unpredictable angles and to bind or strangle his foes. He is also a capable practitioner of flash-step and of high-level binding spells, and in the years after Yhwach's fall he claims to have mastered a Bankai that none of his peers have yet witnessed.