Hanzou of the Salamander

Hanzou was the founder of the Village Hidden in the Rain and universally acknowledged as the strongest shinobi to exist outside of the Five Great Shinobi Nations.

He was born of the Hattori Clan in the Land of Storms, a country perpetually covered by nimbus clouds and suffers from rainfall nearly every day of the year. His clan lacked the military success to stand out as a powerful force in the Warring States Era, with few distinctive skills aside from their proficiency with the kusari-gama. The greatest factor behind their survival was the symbiotic relationship they developed with a powerful salamander.

The salamander was a outcast among its kind for its pitch black skin which reflected toxicity that made it a danger even to its own species. It was discovered near the Hattori Clan’s settlement but instead of trying to fighting each other, they developed a more mutually beneficial partnership. The ninja provided it with food and shelter in return for its protection against invaders, even entering a contract to be summoned by their best warriors in battle.

When Hanzou was a child in the early days of the hidden villages, the salamander finally died of old age and left behind only a single offspring, Ibuse. The Hattori feared for their safety with the growing power of the surrounding nations and the loss of their greatest ally, leading Hanzou to step up and ask that the black salamander’s venom sac be implanted in his own body to protect his clan in its stead.

Hanzou adapted to the poison from the venom sac rather than succumb to its lethality, staining the white of his eyes black and making his flesh, blood and even breath toxic enough to kill grown men effortlessly. His resistance to this poison made him practically immune to any kind that might be used against him unless directly exposed to the gas of his sac.

The transplant allowed him to form a powerful bond with Ibuse as it recognized its parent through Hanzou, and his resistance to poison stopped the salamander from being a danger to him like it could be to his clansmen. As Hanzou couldn’t safely fight alongside his people on the battlefield without endangering them, he fought almost exclusively alongside Ibuse instead.

The fact that Hanzou operated without any human teammates when made him all the more famous for how successful his missions were and how many enemies he killed. He learned to alter the chemical makeup of the poison to replicate the effects of neurotoxins, hallucinogens, knockout gas and even narcotics. His greatest technique increased his toxicity to the greatest heights so he could taint the very land and air around him with his mere presence.

This poisonous nature and his salamander partner earned him his reputation as Hanzou of the Salamander.

The First Shinobi World War saw the Land of Storms used as a major route between the Great Hidden Villages, where it faced regular invasions and suffered horrific damage to its people and land as the entire country became a battlefield. The Hattori Clan were one of the many casualties to suffer from this war.

To protect his country from further threat, Hanzou gathered the scattered ninja of the land to work together under his leadership to repel the warring ninja from their towns and villages and finally build their own hidden village once the war ended. They constructed their new home with metal and stone, building it tall and strong to endure the never ending rainstorms. Hanzou was unanimously chosen to become the chief of the Village Hidden in the Rain and was considered as powerful as any of the Five Kages.

In the Second Shinobi World War, the opposing hidden villages tried to fight through the Land of Storms once again but found themselves stymied by Ame. Led by Hanzou, the rain ninja used their home advantage to great effect by taking down enemy forces, cutting off supply routes, disrupting intelligence networks and diverting enemies into one another’s path. Even as the chief of Ame, Hanzou continued to fight on the frontlines and struck fear into anyone caught on the opposite side of his battlefield.

But Hanzou actually had a remarkable reputation for mercy in spite of his deadly skills as those who earned Hanzou’s respect through the strength of their arms and convictions were often spared when he defeated. Because he believed in bringing peace to the shinobi world, he sought a balance between pragmatism and idealism to stop Ame from being considered weak but also showing compassion rarely seen, especially by one as strong as him, in the hope that it might inspire the same in others.

The man who would become the General of the Land of Iron, Mifune, was one such individual. Hanzou provided him the antidote to his poison after Mifune not only stood firm against when all of his comrades ran away but, on the verge of death, asked that Hanzou would spare their livees. And an even more famous example was one of the last battles of the Second Shinobi World War where Jiraiya, Orochimaru and Tsunade of Konoha fought against Hanzou to prevent him from decimating with the rest of their army division which would have destroyed Konoha’s chances at victory in the war.

It was a fight they would inevitably lose but the three of them held on and successfully delayed Hanzou enough that he recognized that Konoha would succeed. And in acknowledgment of their strength, Hanzou dubbed them the Sannin of Konoha and spared their lives in exchange for their names.

But even when the major conflicts of the war came to an end, the Land of Storms still suffered from foreign agents moving through their lands, refugees seeking a new hime with the hope that Hanzou could protect them and then the economic struggles of supporting a hidden village after war. In the meanwhile, Hanzou worked to unite the Five Great Shinobi Nations in the hopes of creating peace and preventing another war from erupting.

However events spiralled out of control and too soon the Third Shinobi World War began. Few dared to trespass on his territory knowing just how dangerous Hanzou was which made the effects of the war less harrowing for the Land of Storms. But fighting in another war despite all of his efforts weakened Hanzou’s conviction that peace was possible. As the war progressed and Hanzou fought in battle after battle, he lost sight of that dream of peace in the face of ninja’s endless capacity for destruction, greed and betrayal.

This disillusionment made Hanzou desire to simply keep the peace in his own country and turn his back on the rest of the world. He saw himself as the only one capable of protecting the Ame, making more and more tyrannical as he sought greater control over his nation.

By the time he learned of Akatsuki who claimed to be a peacekeeping organisation, instead of seeing kindred spirits who shared the same beliefs as he once did, he only saw fools on a futile mission that could potentially threaten his powerbase. The fact that they wore Ame’s headband without actually being shinobi under his command made them usurpers in his eyes, not people showing respect to him and his village as they intended.

This paranoia led him to seek aid to destroy Akatsuki without weakening himself by forging a secret alliance with the Darkness of Shinobi, Shimura Danzo of Konoha. In return, Danzo wanted to use Ame’s speciality for assassination to eliminate the Third Hokage without implicating him to become his replacement.

Hanzou met with the leader of Akatsuki, Yahiko, with the proposal that they cooperate with one another to help launch peace negotations between Konoha, Iwa and Suna to end the Third Shinobi World War.

In truth, the intended meeting was a trap. Prior to the meeting, Hanzou’s men captured one of the founding members of Akatsuki, Konan, and supposed love interest of Yahiko to force him to kill himself in exchange for her life and then use that opportunity to kill the other founders. It was a partial success in that Yahiko died but Hanzou discovered that Nagato possessed the Rinnegan and used its power to kill his and Danzo’s men, causing them to retreat before the other two founders could be eliminated.

Hanzou ended the alliance with Danzo after they failed to eliminate Akatsuki’s leadership and instead worked on strengthening Ame against potential retaliation. Said retaliation arrived in the form of a civil war as Akatsuki re-emerged after the end of the Third Shinobi World War with a mysterious new leader known only as Pain. He swept up those resentful of Hanzou’s regime under his wing and wielded techniques great enough for his followers to venerate him as a god rather than a man.

Already paranoid after years of war, Hanzou desperately sought to preserve his authority by almost entirely closing the Land of Storms’ borders and isolating himself in Ame, surrounded by bodyguards at all times and with the strictest security measures to ensure his protection.

None of which was enough to save him.

After launching an invasion of rebel forces inside Ame itself to seize control of the village, Pain entered Hanzou’s tower alone, slaughtered everyone inside, on the highest floor, found and killed Hanzou by himself. Weakened by the loss of his convictions and focus on self-preservation over self-improvement, Hanzou was nothing compared to how he was in his prime and ultimately suffered a miserable death without even understanding how far he had fallen.

Even his legacy was turned to ash after his death when Pain showed an awe-inspiring mercilessness when he killed everyone Hanzou had every known and cared for down to the last infant, including his parents, wife and children, burned down all of their homes and then cut down who ever had any connection to Hanzou. Everything that Hanzou once had, Pain either destroyed or took for himself until nothing was left.

There were some remnants who still believed in Hanzou after his death and continued to fight in hope of restoring the glory of old Ame but they too died in the end.