Akatsuki

The name Akatsuki translates to dawn, or daybreak. Living apart from the ordinary machinery of the hidden villages, the group reshaped itself over and over as the years passed. Each of its forms is remembered as either rebellious or flatly criminal, and its people sheltered in far-flung, heavily fortified hideouts scattered around the globe.

The vision of peace at the group's core shifted with whoever happened to lead it. Its earliest form took shape amid the Third Shinobi World War, when three young survivors of Amegakure, orphaned by an earlier conflict, joined forces to spare their rain-drenched country from the great powers that kept dragging it into battle. Those three were Nagato, Konan, and Yahiko, and it was Yahiko who established that first cell, though a masked figure introducing himself as Madara, actually Tobi, quietly worked the strings. When Amegakure's ruler Hanzo, pushed on by Danzo Shimura, judged the swelling movement a danger to his throne, he laid a trap that cost Yahiko his life.

Losing Yahiko shattered Nagato, who grew convinced that only staggering horror could steer the world off the path of war. He took up the name Pain, remade the organization out of S-rank missing-nin, and set after the tailed beasts, intending to build a weapon of mass ruin that would purchase brief stretches of frightened peace. He also aimed to gut the hidden villages by underbidding them on mercenary jobs, planning to bankrupt the lot and seize whatever remained, even as the group's genuine goals stayed hidden from most of its own people. The real puppeteer, however, was Tobi, who hoarded the beasts in order to revive the Ten-Tails and drown every living mind beneath the Infinite Tsukuyomi.

Once Tobi stepped into the open, he set off the Fourth Shinobi World War against the Allied Shinobi Forces, and with Kabuto's reincarnated corpses padding his ranks, he pressed the so-called Eye of the Moon Plan toward its finish. The whole design unraveled when Black Zetsu, the mastermind lurking behind it all from the very beginning, spent Tobi and Madara alike as pawns to bring back Kaguya Otsutsuki, whom Naruto and Sasuke at last put down. Long afterward, a onetime experiment of Orochimaru's named Shin claimed the Akatsuki title and fielded an army built from copies of himself, though that final revival crumbled nearly as soon as it began.

A single glance was enough to spot members, thanks to their sweeping black cloaks printed with red clouds, an emblem of the blood-colored rain that once fell over Amegakure, and thanks to the scratched-out village symbols on their forehead protectors. Under Nagato the members each wore one of ten distinct rings bound up in the ritual that sealed the tailed beasts, and they operated in pairs, gathering only when a beast needed sealing. Those pairings ranged from the steadfast trust between Itachi and Kisame to the poisonous but frighteningly capable match of Hidan and Kakuzu.

The three founders, Yahiko, Nagato, and Konan, launched the group from Amegakure. The later missing-nin lineup Nagato assembled pulled in some of the deadliest names in the series, including Itachi Uchiha, Kisame Hoshigaki, Deidara, Sasori, Hidan, Kakuzu, and, for a time, Orochimaru. The twin-natured Zetsu stayed on throughout, while Obito Uchiha, masked as Tobi, secretly nudged the whole group toward his Moon-Eye scheme. Sasuke Uchiha's squad Taka signed on as brief associates, and much later Shin Uchiha attempted to raise the name again with an army of his clones.