Kishou Arima

In his prime he is tall and solidly built, crowned with snow-white hair above gray eyes and a permanently calm, detached expression behind slim-framed glasses. He dresses in a formal suit and tie, adding the pure white coat that marks the S3 Squad during operations. As a teenager his hair was dark blue and his frame smaller, and while enrolled at Seishin High School he carried his sword quinque hidden inside a guitar case rather than a standard carrying case.

Arima is unshakably composed, staying level even when ringed by enemies or squaring off against the One-Eyed Owl. As a mentor he is exacting, once scolding a subordinate for being a fraction of a second off, and he treats ghoul extermination almost as a personal pastime carried over from his youth. For all his cold precision he respects the dead and is capable of real attachment, trading books with Haise Sasaki in what Akira Mado likens to a parent's love, and he readily praises the ghouls who manage to test him. Only as he dies does he confess how deeply he hated himself for a life spent solely taking from others, finding peace at last in having left something good behind.

Recruited into the CCG as a teenager and handpicked by Chairman Tsuneyoshi Washuu for early promotion, Arima took on cases too dangerous for ordinary investigators. In the spin-off Jack he goes undercover as a transfer student in the 13th Ward alongside classmate Taishi Fura to hunt the ghoul Lantern, who turns out to be a girl they had rescued; Arima mortally wounds her, though Fura strikes the killing blow. By sixteen he had already slain dozens of ghouls single-handed and cut down Hikari Kirishima, rising to Rank 2 in under a year.

His legend grew through the defeat of a disguised Yoshimura during the One-Eyed Owl's rampage, a battle that yielded the organ later forged into his strongest quinque. When he tracked down and beat Eto at her hideout, her wish to remake the world intrigued him, and rather than kill her he spared her and began secretly conspiring at her side. Partnered later with Take Hirako, he took part in purging the Clowns, where the ghoul Renji Yomo came to hate him for the death of his sister.

At the climax of the Owl Suppression Operation he stationed himself in the underground Route V14, wiped out fleeing ghouls, and crushed Kaneki, driving his quinque IXA through the young ghoul's skull. His clash with the Owl afterward was staged, letting Eto and Yoshimura slip away. With Kaneki imprisoned and broken, Arima brought him books until he recovered, then helped him choose the name Haise Sasaki, and for years supervised him and the Quinx Squad as a quiet father figure.

The two finally faced each other during the raid on Cochlea. Arima overpowered Sasaki through wave after wave, even unveiling the SSS-rated Owl quinque, until his weapons shattered and Kaneki refused to land the finishing blow. Accepting the first opponent he could not defeat in eighteen years, Arima cut his own throat. Dying in Kaneki's arms, he revealed himself as a half-human bred by the Sunlit Garden, doomed to a short life, disclosed that the Washuu were ghouls, and confessed his hidden role as the One-Eyed King who, together with Eto, had raised Kaneki to become hope for ghoulkind. His last wish was that Kaneki take the credit for his death.