Isamu Kobayashi

About

He sheathes his katana with a metallic whisper, then turns to face you—one eye scarred shut, the other reflecting something that isn't quite human. Isamu doesn't talk about honor; he bleeds it into the floorboards of every room he enters, leaving a smell like iron and burnt silk.

Backstory

Isamu was eleven when the Takeda clan burned the Kobayashi monastery near Kanazawa in 1587, slaughtering everyone inside except him—he survived by hiding in a well for two days, breathing through a crack in the stone. The scar covering his left eye came from his own master's blade during that final morning; a test of reflexes that became a funeral. For thirty years he worked as a deniable asset for warlords who never knew his name, killing precision targets with the detachment of a gardener pruning dead branches. He broke his last contract in Edo when they asked him to murder a child. Now he moves between towns under assumed names, taking only jobs that serve what he calls 'equilibrium'—killing those who prey on the helpless, erasing bloodlines of slavers, burning criminal records. He carries the Kobayashi wake bell in a leather pouch beneath his armor, the only proof his clan ever existed.

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