Konan’s Dance of the Shikigami

Konan of Akatsuki has a unique ninjutsu style which manipulates and weaponizes paper.

Her teacher recognized her talent for origami as a child and encouraged her to turn that artistic talent into an unorthodox tool. Infusing scraps of paper with chakra to make an impromptu weapon was a common tactic but Konan spent her entire life honing this skill to create something more useful and deadly than most would expect.

She even held the hope that she would one day pass these ninjutsu down to her children as the beginning on a ninja clan. This dream would never come to fruition but the tragedy that stole it from her is what motivated her to create her signature ninjutsu, the Dance of the Shikigami.

With this, Konan can physically transform her body and clothing into thousands of pieces of paper with yang chakra. She possesses instinctual control over every single sheet as they are essentially an extension of herself, as much a part of her as her own hands and feet. The ninjutsu actually made her one of the few shinobi capable of levitation and flight as she could control her own movement through the air just like her paper, partly inspiring her moniker as Amegakure’s Angel.

This paper is innately stronger than any other kind. It can be as hard as steel without losing any of its flexibility, water runs off of its surface without soaking it and particularly hot fire is needed to burn it. Konan’s favored method of attack is to shape her paper into weapons such as spears or shuriken to assault her enemies, combining their toughness with speed and numbers. And it is well-suited for restraining her opponents as she can wrap them in enough sheets of paper that they are incapable of any movement she doesn’t allow, levitating them along with the paper.

Her paper can even change its colour to camouflage itself against its surrounding, based on how Konan looks human even when she’s composed of paper as it perfectly replicates her true appearance. She can even create three-dimensional structures that look close enough to the real thing to fool most, potentially allowing her to surround an enemy with her weapons without them realizing until it’s too late.

And a related skill to this is Konan’s ability to inscribe sealing formula directly onto her paper which she uses primarily to create her own explosive tags. Any sheet of paper can be made several times more deadly when she can turn it into a explosive as well. This in fact led to her deadliest ninjutsu which is capable of a level of destruction that few can match.

And as long as she has enough chakra to sustain it, she is more paper than flesh. In this state, she doesn’t feel pain and is practically invulnerable to real harm since she lacks internal organs and can replaced her damaged parts by creating more paper. The way to truly defeat would be to destroy enough of her paper form that she can’t recover or drive her to exhaustion to end the ninjutsu and leave her as vulnerable as anyone else.

Related Techniques

Paper Clone Technique – Konan can create a perfect replica of herself from paper. It functions with few differences to many other clone techniques but is able to separate itself into sheets of paper and recombine at will, just like her Dance of the Shikigami. Its most useful trait is that Konan can mix explosive tags into their bodies so that they can explode at will without concern for their own ‘lives’.

Paper Person of God Technique – Konan devised this ninjutsu to defeat the one she believed to be Uchiha Madara by overcoming his powerful space-time ninjutsu. The idea behind it was inspired by Hanzou of the Salamander who once disguised his explosive tags to ambush Nagato. Over time, Konan prepares at least thousands upon thousands of explosive tags – if not billions upon billions – with her abilities and hides them within her chosen battlefield to detonate at the opportune moment and start several minutes worth of continuous explosions.