Kuro

Lean and tall, Kuro keeps his black hair slicked flat and rarely parts with his round glasses, which slid loose during his clash with Luffy while the lenses themselves cracked apart. In his butler guise he favored a black suit marked with gold detail, worn over a white shirt with an unusual spiraled collar and a plain dark tie, loosening both the collar and tie the night before the planned raid. His old pirate look was a captain's coat with red lining and the crew's Jolly Roger on the shoulders, layered over a white shirt and black knee-length trousers. The striped shoes carried over from his pirate days into his servant years.

Brilliant to the point of holding the second sharpest mind in the East Blue, Kuro boasted of plans that had never once failed. What he lacked was patience for a fugitive's existence, so he traded away his name and fame in pursuit of a comfortable, quiet retirement. That same pride blinded him: he dismissed Usopp and the Straw Hats as harmless children, an error that ultimately sank him. Cruel and self-serving, he regarded his own crew as disposable pawns, willing to kill any of them for failure or even bad luck, and he had decided long before that none would leave alive. He could act flawlessly, sustaining the polite, pirate-hating Klahadore persona for three years despite loathing both Kaya and Usopp, even switching pronouns to keep the two identities distinct. A crescent moon stirred a buried bloodlust in him that he struggled to resist, and his habit of nudging his glasses up with his palm rather than a finger, a leftover from wearing his Cat Claws, marked him as a man whose savagery never truly faded.

Kuro's subordinates feared him for a ruthlessness aimed at allies and enemies alike, and when the Nyaban Brothers tried to kill him believing his edge had dulled, he overwhelmed them at the points of his claws. With a bounty above ten million, he stood well over the East Blue average. His true weapon was his mind: a master tactician, he executed a three-year plan down to the smallest detail, manipulated an entire village into trusting him, and fooled the Marines into declaring him dead by using a decoy. Physically he is far above an ordinary East Blue pirate, his greatest gift being speed, with legs that cover a hundred meters in four or five seconds. His preferred weapons, the Cat Claws, are gloves tipped with full-length blades on each finger, capable of tearing through bodies and even rock. His signature Nukiashi technique blends speed and stealth into nearly undetectable movement, letting him slip past combined attacks, and his ultimate Shakushi sends him charging at blinding speed, cutting down everything around him.