Sakon Shino

Headless Sakon was once a Master Swordsman who gave up his social standing as a samurai to live as a street performer simply because he could not abide being a complacent part of the inherent injustice of the aristocratic class system in which he lived. He challenges Itto to a duel not because Itto has a contract in which he is tangled up or because he cares about the price on the Lone Wolf's head, but entirely because he is concerned for Daigoro and wants the boy to grow up with a proper father, whether it is Itto or himself, and cannot talk Itto into giving up his life as an assassin. ~!When the two meet, and he narrowly loses because Itto proves to be less of a samurai than Sakon, because he is willing to hurl his blade as a missile weapon, symbolically abandoning his honor, Sakon talks shop with him for a minute, before begging him in moving terms to think of his son, and to abandon his dark path to be a father rather than chasing after a revenge that is just as fleeting and impermanent as human life. Itto weeps stoically as he and Daigoro leave, declaring him, essentially, a Buddhist saint, and seemingly causing him to rethink things, given the next chapter is a flashback that finally reveals his past.!~