pact with Orochi that gave them greater powers but cursed them and their descendants forever. They renamed their clan the Yagami and set out to destroy the Kusanagi with their new powers. The curse also causes each heir to die young and each mother to die in childbirth. Iori becomes obsessed with killing his heir Kyo, disregarding their clans' past. This sometimes results in Iori helping Kyo to defeat his enemies and to finish their battles. To find Kyo, Iori sometimes enters the King of Fighters tournaments and uses his teammates as tools to reach him. Iori Yagami first appeared in The King of Fighters '95, in which he enters an annual tournament as the leader of the Rival Team with Billy Kane and Eiji Kisaragi. Iori learns that the heir of the Kusanagi clan, Kyo, is expected to be there. After the team fails to defeat Kyo's team, Iori betrays his teammates. In the next video game, Iori teams up with two women, Vice and Mature, servants of the Orochi demon. During the '96 competition, Iori meets Chizuru Kagura, the heir of the Yata clan who wants to gather Kyo and Iori on her team to seal Orochi. They defeat the Orochi follower Goenitz but neither Iori nor Kyo agree with the idea. When Iori leaves with his teammates, he cannot control his surge of Orochi power, resulting in their deaths. Iori continues to suffer from multiple outbreaks; during The King of Fighters '97 he attacks other team members and appears as a sub-boss character in the game, depending on the characters the player uses. He later joins Chizuru and Kyo to confront and seal Orochi. In most versions of The King of Fighters '99, Iori is a secret character that can be faced as a bonus fight at the end of the game if the player scores enough points. In the story, Iori discovers the creation of Kyo clones and enters the annual tournament, where he finds those responsible, an organization named NESTS. Iori follows the battles in secret and fights against the NESTS' agents to continue his fight against Kyo. An assistant version of his character named Striker also appears for Iori in The King of Fighters 2000 wearing an outfit based on illustrations in artbooks. In The King of Fighters 2001, an agent named Seth invites Iori to join his team for the next King of