Taro Sakamoto

Retirement rounded Sakamoto out into a heavyset, towering figure. His graying hair is pulled back into a knotted ponytail resembling a man bun, a modest broom mustache sits above his lip, and the shine off his round spectacles usually hides his eyes. Day to day he throws an apron over a T-shirt with long trousers, and he favors slippers even out on the street.

His former self looked nothing like this: trimmer, clean-shaven, sharp-featured, with his gaze plainly visible behind the lenses. By burning through stored fat he can briefly snap back to that leaner build, a shift Shin found strikingly handsome. During the JCC operation, Nagumo even dressed him up so he could pass as his wife Aoi.

A man of few words, Sakamoto lets what he does carry the message instead of speaking. Family sits at the center of him. He abandoned contract killing simply to stay near them, guards them fiercely, and holds enormous respect for Aoi, whose anger he is comically terrified of provoking. From that devotion grew his refusal to take a life, a rule he keeps even toward enemies who come after him and his loved ones, and one that has handed him an accidental streak of justice.

He typically keeps his feelings buried, sometimes to shield the people near him, as when Saw left Shin and Lu badly hurt and Sakamoto swallowed his fury rather than show it. Threaten his wife or daughter, though, and that calm shatters; the danger to his child once pushed him to the edge of killing the person responsible. As the story moves on he loosens up, voicing his thoughts aloud more and more.

His prime years were another matter. Back then he felt nothing on a job, a flawless killing machine, until Aoi taught him to value life and he came to bristle at the endangerment of innocents. He still enjoys the trade in spirit, cheerfully picturing himself doing away with Shin over petty irritations, and he readily helps neighbors with everyday chores, which has made him a beloved fixture in his community.

Widely regarded as the greatest assassin ever to live, Sakamoto stands above even his fellow Order members, and only Heisuke has ever bested him at pure marksmanship. His talent showed early: out of tens of thousands of students the JCC's living database ranked him the finest fighter, one of the three brightest prospects the academy ever produced alongside Nagumo and Rion Akao. He never once failed a contract, and Kei Uzuki is the sole person to survive his aim. Retirement has cost him dearly, with Granny Miya reckoning his heavyset body runs at roughly a third of its old capacity, yet even so he overpowers most active killers.

His raw power lets him decapitate foes, halt a speeding bus with a road sign, brace the collapsing top of Tokyo Tower using a steel cable, and beat a former Order member like Kanaguri. He shrugs off point-blank blasts from Boiled, an office-leveling suicide bomb, tall falls, and even scalding saunas paired with near-freezing baths. His signature genius is turning whatever lies within reach into a lethal tool, with frying pans, cough drops, stickers, playing cards, and paper all serving as well as any gun, though he prefers to fight bare-handed and dismisses reliance on weapons as amateurish. When he burns off his stored weight he reclaims a lean prime form that hugely amplifies his speed and strength, the state in which he thoroughly outclassed Boiled, until Granny Miya's treatments locked it away to force him onto his current physique. He keeps a few reliable tools too: bulletproof round glasses, an apron tough enough to blunt explosions, and a concealed arsenal behind the shop's rotating walls, opened by punching a code into the register.