Overview
Ibuki Misaka was the original bearer of Cloud Gouger, the weather sword: Mei, Yui, Kou; lightning, ice, water; clouds and cloud-dragons. During the Seitei War he was a peerless swordsman, regarded as equal in skill to Seiichi Samura. Alongside his younger brother Natsuki, the pair were nearly invincible. Natsuki never received an Enchanted Blade. Ibuki did. That split is the Misaka story. After the war Ibuki abandoned swordsmanship for reasons the printed chapters have not fully given. He was assassinated by Hokuto of the Hishaku shortly after they murdered Kunishige. The Lifelong Contract opened. Yura sold the blade to Sojo. Chihiro bisected it. The public remembers the customer. The war remembers Ibuki.
He is off-page for almost all of Part 1 and still inside every Cloud Gouger panel. Sojo’s cloaked Mei, Chihiro’s black Mei: Shred, the Anti-Cloud Gouger Special Forces dying around a compound, Tenri later dying on fake Datenseki: all of that is weather that used to have a different owner. Hokuto was disappointed. He wanted the wartime Ibuki and got the retired one. Natsuki wanted to stand beside that wartime Ibuki and got a jacket with Hokuto instead.
The war
Six Enchanted Blades enter at plus one year and five months. Cloud Gouger is one of them. Magatsumi is the one that lets Japan walk onto the island. Tobimune is support. Kumeyuri is banquet and play. Enten does not exist yet. Ibuki’s equal-to-Samura reputation is the book’s way of saying the weather sword was not a lesser tool. Samura is fastest, blind, Iai. Ibuki is the other ceiling. Natsuki’s Lightning Menace is a family rhyme: voltage without Datenseki, still in the body. Together the brothers were a formation. Kunishige chose one of them for a contract that would shut the innate art off. The bearer loses sorcery. The brother keeps Raiku. After the war that math looks like a curse. During the war it looked like victory.
Then Malediction. Akemura uses Magatsumi after the treaty. About 200,000 civilians. The other bearers fail to stop him in the room. The Kamunabi file it as heroism. Kunishige confiscates the six swords. Ibuki, like the others who are not in a cell, has to live with a newspaper that will not print the flowers. He puts the sword down. Samura blinds himself further into religion and then into a Hishaku side deal. Uruha loses the will to live when Kunishige dies. Akemura waits in a basement. Subaru makes sushi. Ibuki’s retirement is the version of guilt that looks like a quiet house. Hokuto hates quiet houses.
Retirement and death
Three Hishaku hit the Rokuhira workshop. Kunishige dies. The six wartime blades are stolen. In the same campaign Hokuto kills Ibuki. The order of operations is the method: steal the steel, kill the bearer if the contract still holds, sell what you cannot yet sign. Cloud Gouger goes to Sojo in early October of the present, a customer who wants to industrialize Kunishige’s eyes using Kyonagi flesh. Ibuki is already a grave. Char is the next stabilizer on the list. Chihiro is the son who still has Enten. The Anti-Cloud Gouger Special Forces are the state’s apology for not protecting the original bearer: six people built to solve the sword after the man was gone. Four die. Hagiwara loses his legs. Kazane loses an arm. Chihiro loses an arm and still reaches True Realm first. Enten cuts Cloud Gouger in half. Sojo fuses with Datenseki. The compound goes. Ibuki’s blade is shown to be mortal in someone else’s hand.
Natsuki keeps training. He wanted Kumeyuri; Uruha was chosen. He wants recognition beside his brother and the other bearers. He wants Hokuto. Volume 10 puts all of that on one jacket. Ibuki is the missing face. The title is The Swordsmen. The dead swordsman is the reason the title has a body count.
What the blade became
Sojo finds cloaked Mei, wearing the lightning instead of throwing it. True Realm, for him, is slaughter, because that is his brief. Chihiro later contracts the dying stump and spends Mei: Shred, black because the blade is dying, the same dark-power rule that paints Suzaku. Residual charges at the Rakuzaichi, then disintegration. Chihiro keeps pieces. By the end of Part 1 his notes include a new Cloud Gouger as well as a new Enten. The original bearer’s sword, in the son’s ledger, is something you might forge again rather than something you avenge by finding Hokuto. Natsuki is still in the building for the second half of that sentence.
Cloud Gouger’s technique list (Mei, Yui, Kou, extensions) lives on the blade page. This page is the person the list used to belong to. Do not credit Sojo with inventing weather. Credit him with being the worst reader of a sword that already had a master, and credit Hokuto with the murder that made the misreading possible.
Notes
He is not given a long present-tense arc. He is given a brother, a killer, a customer, a bisection, and a reputation equal to Samura. That is enough for a file. When Part 2’s forge chapters show Kunishige cutting the first wartime steel, Ibuki is not yet chosen. The talks are still talks. The princess is still Chiaki. Fire is still a process. The man who will be Cloud Gouger’s first partner is still, in that past, a swordsman with a brother. The book has not printed that day.
See Natsuki, Hokuto, Sojo, and Cloud Gouger. Official chapters: VIZ / MANGA Plus.