Housen Ryofu

A strong bisexual fighter with a very promiscuous personality and a habit for dressing skimpy. She was very skilled at making chi-blasts and was in love with both Saji and her best friend Chinkyuu. She had a love-hate relationship with Saji, who she claims once raped her (Saji only half denies this, claiming that she was not raped because she enjoyed it). Despite trying her best to escape her destiny, she ended up causing it anyway. Afflicted with a deadly illness that would kill her before adulthood, she ended up being manipulated by Saji into causing Toutaku’s death. When she found out that Chinkyuu was raped, she went in search of revenge as her last living act. She was found by Myosai, and the two fought each other. Myosai’s skill added with Ryofu’s failing health was enough for Ryofu to be defeated. She was saved from Myosai’s killing blow by Chinkyuu. Realizing that she was moments away from dying, Ryofu and Chinkyuu then committed a double suicide, dying happily together as their predecessors did 1800 years before.

Unlike her manga self, who is a skilled tactician, her anime self is more of a thuggish brute. She didn’t plan on acquiring the Gyokuji or betraying Toutaku and was more easily manipulated by Saji. She was still sick however. She was more emotional as well and more promiscuous and cruel. She actually molested Ryomou in the anime opposed to simply teasing her in the manga. She was just as powerful, however, as her manga version. In the end she died fulfilling her fate by using a chi blast to commit suicide with Toutaku. Chinkyuu died earlier in the series and so did not join her. The second season recalls a different scene however with Ryofu wearing the clothes she did in the manga when she fought Toutaku tackling him off a cliff but also accounts it as double suicide. Whether that is meant literally and that the past events have been changed metaphorically where in which it was Ryomou’s perspective or the aura-sensed perspective of others that has changed is not known. Though she is only shown in occasional flashbacks, Ryofu appears again as a living character at the beginning of the third season, Great Guardians, initially fighting and brutally beating Kan’u Unchou before being stopped by a sudden bolt of lightning from the sky. This incarnation of Ryofu, whose reappearance causes great turmoil to the still living toushi, is mostly opposite of her former one, being shy and introverted and pretty much devoid of malice or any flirtitous tendency. Initially amnesiac, after being taken care of by Ryomou she went to Rakuyou in search of clues regarding her past, there being abducted by Saji (known as Ohin Shishi) and brainwashed by the real Genpou Saji, thus gaining a more cheerful but visibily false persona. From there on she played with Shishi so as to fill Ryomou with jealousy, until Saji herself was discovered, when she was turned into a frenzied berserk as a mean of halting Hakufu and companions. The last episodes reveal also that, in fact, this Ryofu Housen is actually much like a living dead, a spirit partially resurrected by Saji, that after regaining her senses fades again from this world, bidding farewell to Ryomou. Still, one last line from her can be heard when Saji is praying at her tomb. “Thank You.