Kei Uzuki

Uzuki is a slight man of middling height with medium-length white hair, its long fringe spilling across his cool blue eyes and sometimes his nose when he leans forward, the rest falling in a messy center-parted style over his ears. He typically dresses in a light grey turtleneck beneath a pale yellowish coat that hangs past his knees, with black trousers and formal black shoes. His look shifts with his alternate selves: when the Rion persona surfaces his eyes take on hers, and under the Takamura persona his pupils turn white.

On the surface Uzuki reads as calm and glacially cold, a sadist capable of murdering a quarter of the assassin world without flinching and cruel enough to menace Sakamoto by invoking his young daughter. Away from that mask, among the friends he trusts, a gentler and more vulnerable side emerges, seen in his warmth toward Gaku and his grief at Uda's sacrifice. It was not always so: in the past he was timid, reserved, and convinced that killing was wrong, refusing to take assassin lives unless a mission demanded it. His brother Sei Asaki exploited that gentleness, and the accidental killing of Rion Akao broke him, driving him to abandon his morals and become the villain he is today. Since losing Haruma, Gaku, and his old self, he has hardened into a jaded shell fixated on destroying the assassins' association whatever the cost.

Two conditions define how he fights and survives. Dissociative Identity Disorder, born of his trauma, lets him spawn alternate personas modeled on people he has met under extreme stress, copying their manner and even their skills so precisely that those closest to them struggle to tell the difference; his Rion persona was created to protect him, while his Takamura persona granted him swordsmanship he never previously displayed, enough to cut down the real Takamura. He also has situs inversus, a mirroring of his internal organs, which has spared him from would-be fatal strikes by Sakamoto and Nagumo that landed where his vital points should have been.

As founder and leader of his organization, Uzuki is a formidable assassin whose combat skill let him massacre a quarter of the industry, a rampage so severe that the Order itself had to step in. He moves with terrifying speed, materializing behind opponents unseen, stabbing an out-of-shape Sakamoto before he registered it and slashing both Shin and Asakura across the abdomen before either felt the cut. For all his slender frame he is remarkably durable and enduring, keeping pace with Sakamoto's blinding attacks, weathering a strike from Takamura, and somehow surviving repeated stabs to the chest. In battle he wields a segmented sword-whip that reaches at range yet still counters up close, and he has fought with Takamura's stolen katana, a blade sharp enough to shear through steel and concrete without a scratch.