Character · Naruto
Zabuza Momochi
The Demon of the Hidden Mist carries a cleaver the size of a door and kills without making a sound.
In Otakana the clue reads: Mist swordsman with a huge cleaver and no eyebrows
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Naruto
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Zabuza Momochi is the first real antagonist the series produces, and he arrives in an arc about a poor country and an unfinished bridge. He was a swordsman of the Mist, a village whose graduation exam once required students to kill each other, and he failed at overthrowing its leader. That leaves him a fugitive with an enormous sword and a price on his head.
The sword is Kubikiribocho, an executioner's blade that repairs itself using iron drawn from the blood it spills. His technique is silent killing inside a heavy mist, where sight and sound both go and he can hear a heartbeat well enough to find the throat attached to it. Kakashi has to use the Sharingan seriously for the first time in the story to survive the encounter.
He travels with Haku, a boy he picked up off the street and describes flatly as a tool. Whether he means that is the question the arc is actually about, and the answer turns up in the snow at the end of it. Kishimoto set the tone for the whole series here: the villain gets a reason, and the reason gets a scene.
Spelling ZABUZA
ZABUZA is six letters with a Z on tiles one and five, which is close to a free win. Z barely appears anywhere else in this dataset, so landing one usually lands the row. The pattern is symmetrical too: ZA, BU, ZA. Three beats, no long vowels, no silent letters, and the family name MOMOCHI is not what the game is asking for.