Kensei
Muguruma

Kensei Muguruma is the captain of the 9th Division, holding the post both before and after a hundred-year exile. He is blunt, short-tempered and built like a brawler, and the 69 on his abdomen is the division number he has worn since long before Shūhei Hisagi copied it onto his own cheek.

The connection between them predates everything. Kensei found Hisagi as a child during a Hollow attack in the Rukongai and saved his life, and Hisagi spent his career chasing the man he remembered. By the time they meet properly, Kensei has been exiled, Hollowfied, and living in a warehouse in Karakura Town for a century, which is not what anyone's hero is supposed to look like.

His Zanpakutō, Tachikaze, is a combat knife rather than a sword, and its Bankai turns the blade into an explosive that detonates whatever it cuts. He was one of the officers sent to investigate the Rukongai disappearances and one of the first to lose control during Aizen's experiment, which is why his fellow Visored are wary of his temper in a way they are not about anyone else's. Reinstated after Aizen's defeat, he spends the following years pushing Hisagi toward Bankai, on the grounds that the Gotei 13 cannot be caught short again.