Overview
Natsuki Misaka is an elite Kamunabi swordsman and squadron leader. He is the younger brother of Ibuki Misaka, wartime bearer of Cloud Gouger. Together they were nearly unstoppable. After the Seitei War, Ibuki put the sword down for reasons the chapters have not fully unpacked. Natsuki did not. He is still in the building. He still wants the kind of recognition the Enchanted Blade bearers got in the newspapers, and he still has to live with the fact that Yoji Uruha was chosen for Kumeyuri when Natsuki was in the room as a candidate.
Hokuto of the Hishaku murdered Ibuki so Cloud Gouger’s contract would open. Natsuki’s present-tense job is therefore double: serve the Kamunabi against the ten who raided the Rokuhira house, and avenge a brother who had already retired. He is not a bearer. Lightning Menace is an innate art, not a Datenseki overflow. Volume 10 still puts him on the jacket with Uruha, Hokuto, and Yura, because the book is willing to call a non-bearer a swordsman in the same photograph as a Hishaku killer and a wartime prodigy. That is the respect he wanted. It arrives as a war picture, not a parade.
Personality
Resentment of Uruha is printed, not inferred. It is not only envy of a blade. It is the specific injury of being almost chosen, then watching the chosen man lose the will to live when Kunishige died, then watching that man walk again because Chihiro exists. Natsuki kept training in the years Uruha sat in a Sanso. He wants equal recognition beside his brother and the other bearers. Equal is the word. Not above. Beside. The Misaka pair used to be a closed system. The war opened it and handed the famous sword to someone else.
He is not Hiyuki. Hiyuki is the pointed end with a hereditary skeleton and a temper that hides a kind line. Natsuki is a swordsman who thinks in duels and ledgers. He will fight next to Uruha when the Hishaku are in the headquarters, because the alternative is letting Hokuto write the end of the Misaka story twice. Working with the man who got Kumeyuri is the adult version of the childhood formation: two Misaka-adjacent blades in one corridor, except one of them is Uruha, and the weather sword is already bisected in Chihiro’s bag.
Abilities
Lightning Menace (雷躯, Raiku) imbues his movements and attacks with lightning. It is not Cloud Gouger. Mei is a goldfish-sized weather event that leaves the body as a dragon and a bolt. Raiku is still inside the nervous system: a man moving like a charge, a cut that arrives with voltage. Readers who flatten every lightning user into Sojo are doing the book a disservice. Sojo was a customer with a stolen katana. Natsuki is a government swordsman with a family art that happens to share an element with his brother’s former blade. The rhyme is cruel. It is also useful against Hokuto’s armor, which is built to discard pieces, not to ground a storm.
He is a squadron leader, which means the Kamunabi trust him with people, not only with a room. Kiri Shirakai is the other named squadron leader in the long book: odachi, dance-like footwork, a granddaughter at war with her grandfather’s curriculum. Natsuki’s kit is narrower and meaner. He wants to stand where Ibuki stood. The art is how he keeps standing there without Datenseki.
Story role
For most of Part 1 he is a name in the war ensemble, a jacket face, a reason the Misaka story is not only a grave. Chapter 91 is titled “Natsuki.” Chapter 92 is “The Swordsmen.” That pairing is the book announcing him as a person rather than a caption on Ibuki’s file. Inside HQ, after Kasen’s leak is on the table and Yura is spending Magatsumi at range, Uruha (alive, contract severed, Crimson Recital returning) joins Natsuki to confront Yura and Hokuto. Azami arrives when that goes badly. Yura is the remote masterpiece. Hokuto is the man who killed the older Misaka. Natsuki is finally in the room with both problems.
He does not get a True Realm, because he does not have an Enchanted Blade. He gets a volume title shared with three other men and a fight in a building that is about to host the Sword Master in someone else’s skin. That is the Kamunabi bargain: you can be elite, you can be a jacket, you can lose a brother, and the myth of the war still will not print your name on a katana. Chihiro, who does have a katana, is busy telling Samura that Enten exists to end the others. Natsuki is busy proving you can be a swordsman in this book without being a bearer. The jacket agrees. The cell in the basement does not care.
Notes
Ibuki was regarded as equal in skill to Samura during the war. Natsuki’s whole life is standing next to that sentence. After the war Ibuki abandoned swordsmanship; Hokuto found a shadow and was disappointed. Natsuki is the remaining sharpness in the family. Lightning Menace is the remaining weather. Cloud Gouger, once bisected, spends its last charges in Chihiro’s rebuilt arm at the Rakuzaichi and then dies. The Misaka blade is gone. The Misaka swordsman is not.
Volume 10, The Swordsmen, ISBN 978-4-08-884740-5, 5 January 2026. Jacket faces: Natsuki, Hokuto, Uruha, Yura. For the original Cloud Gouger bearer, see Ibuki. For the man who killed him, see Hokuto. Official chapters: VIZ / MANGA Plus.