Itachi Uchiha

Itachi Uchiha spends most of the story as a shadow hanging over his younger brother Sasuke Uchiha: the man who wiped out their entire family in a single night. He joins a dangerous group of outlaws afterward and is treated as one of the story's most feared villains, though the truth behind his actions turns out to be far more painful than it first appears.

Growing up as a gifted young fighter, Itachi is placed in an elite unit of his village at a very young age, where he sees the darker side of how his home operates long before most people his age. He comes across as cold and unreadable, someone who rarely lets his true feelings show, yet everything he does secretly serves one goal: protecting the village and his little brother from a much worse fate. When his clan makes plans to seize control of the village by force, its leaders order Itachi to wipe them out to stop a war before it starts, and he chooses to spare only Sasuke.

Itachi carries that secret alone for years, letting his brother hate him rather than reveal what really happened. He quietly plants hidden protections in Sasuke's body to shield him from future danger, and only near the end of his life does he finally get the chance to share the truth and his real feelings with his brother. His closest friend before all this, a fellow prodigy named Shisui, trusted Itachi with his own dying wish, a bond that shaped how far Itachi was willing to go to protect the people and the village he loved.