Arturo Plateado

Long hair in a pale turquoise shade frames Arturo's face above a pair of yellow eyes. What survives of his Hollow mask clings to his right cheek along the upper jaw, wrapping around the back of his skull into a three-pointed crest, while the telltale Hollow hole sits just under the base of his neck. He wears the standard Arrancar garb, set apart by a belt fastened beneath his sash.

Cold calculation and raw ferocity meet in Arturo, driven above all by a hunger for power that never seems sated. That craving is embodied in his sword, which drinks in the spiritual energy of everyone it slays and feeds it back to him, a threat dire enough to send captain-class Shinigami into retreat. He treats defeat as a form of weakness he flatly refuses to accept, hauling himself back up while wounded to keep fighting, and his self-assurance shades into open arrogance, enough that he once assaulted Soul Society entirely on his own. Even after striking a bargain with Aizen he twice hints at a wish to see the man dead. In the English script of Shattered Blade he speaks, unusually for an Arrancar, with a pronounced Spanish accent.

Arturo is a self-forged Arrancar of staggering antiquity, so old that only Yamamoto and Yoruichi's family scrolls still hold any memory of him. Loathing the Shinigami for hunting Hollows, he abandoned Hueco Mundo and threw himself at Soul Society, gutting close to half of its military in a single opening strike. Unable to overpower him head-on, the Shinigami baited him into a trap and locked him away beneath the Sōkyoku, where the seal slowly frayed across the centuries.

In Shattered Blade, that seal shatters when the Sōkyoku is destroyed during Ichigo's rescue of Rukia, turning Arturo loose to resume his rampage. He exploits his gift for changing shape, posing as captains and even Zanpakutō spirits to trick others into recovering the broken execution stand's fragments so that he can absorb them and swell his own strength. Depending on how events play out he is either purified or seizes the Sōkyoku and grinds Soul Society down.

The 3rd Phantom retells the story with a different thread. Beaten back during an earlier assault, he returns at full power roughly a century before the present day, cutting through the Seireitei while Ukitake and Kyōraku withdraw rather than feed their power to his absorbing blade. Yamamoto pins him with Ryūjin Jakka's flames and turns to a relic called the Shisuikyō to bleed away his strength; Konoka Suzunami works the mirror and drains him, though the backlash drags Arturo, Seigen Suzunami, and the Kudō twins into a rift. A hundred years later Gin finds his weakened form in Hueco Mundo and delivers him to Aizen, who restores his might and spends him as a soldier against Soul Society. When a fresh bearer of the Shisuikyō repeats the trick, Arturo is finally destroyed, and Aizen claims the mirror, admitting the ancient Arrancar had only ever been a pawn marked for sacrifice.