Ten rings, a cloak scattered with red clouds, and a plan that only two members know in full. The Akatsuki is born in Amegakure as a pacifist movement set up by three orphans, before becoming the war machine that hunts the nine Tailed Beasts. This feature takes the story in order: the roots under the rain, the real purpose behind collecting the beasts, the complete timeline, then each major member, his techniques, his partner and his end. The group's visual codes close things out.
The Akatsuki brings together about ten S-rank rogue ninja, all listed in the registry of criminals wanted by their home village. The group has no territory, no army, no official building. Its power does not come from numbers: it comes from the individual worth of its members, each of whom is worth a full squad on his own. The Japanese word means "the dawn".
The uniform alone identifies the organization in a single image. A black cloak with a high collar, red lining, scattered with red clouds outlined in white. When traveling, the members add a conical straw hat trimmed with bells and a veil. Each one also wears a ring, on an assigned finger, and the forehead protector of his home village crossed by a line engraved into the metal.
The working method is just as sparing. The Akatsuki operates in pairs, never alone, and almost never gathers in full. Meetings go through chakra projections: a member's image appears hundreds of kilometers away from his body. The hideouts change, scattered across several countries, which makes the group practically impossible to locate.
The stated objective is the capture of the nine Tailed Beasts, those living masses of chakra sealed inside human hosts. Officially, the aim is to build the leading military force of the shinobi world, then rent out its services to countries that can no longer afford to maintain an army. Unofficially, every capture brings closer a project conceived long before most of the recruits were born.
This is where the Akatsuki goes beyond a band of interchangeable mercenaries. The organization works like a pyramid of lies in which each level has no idea what the one above is plotting. Nagato believes he is in charge, when in fact he is carrying out orders. Itachi secretly obeys Konoha. The others work for a paycheck or for a private passion. The most powerful soldiers in the story are also the least informed.
It all begins in a tiny country, wedged between the great nations. Amegakure has neither the size nor the resources of Konoha or Iwagakure, but it has the misfortune of sitting in the middle. The first three ninja wars were fought there, or nearly so. Foreign armies camp there, clash there, then leave behind ruins and children without parents.
Three of those children will matter. Yahiko is the leader, the one who speaks and who carries the others along. Konan already folds paper: the origami flower she gives in thanks to passing travelers will remain her signature gesture. Nagato, for his part, saw two Konoha ninja walk into his home looking for food and kill his parents. That day, his eyes change: the Rinnegan manifests.
The travelers in question are the three Sannin. Tsunade wants to move on, Orochimaru suggests putting the children out of their misery, and Jiraiya decides to stay. He camps three years in the ruins and teaches them to defend themselves. He spots Nagato's Rinnegan and believes he has found the child of the prophecy announced by the toad of Mount Myoboku. He will leave convinced he did the right thing.
Now teenagers, the three orphans found the Akatsuki. The initial program is nothing criminal: achieve peace through dialogue, put an end to the fighting on Amegakure's soil, offer an alternative to mercenaries. Dozens of shinobi join the movement. Yahiko is its face, Nagato its striking power, Konan its logistics. The organization grows fast enough to worry those in power.
That power is Hanzo the Salamander, the leader of Amegakure, the very man who gave the Sannin their title. He sees the Akatsuki as a threat to his authority and allies himself with Danzo Shimura, head of Konoha's clandestine branch. The trap is simple and final : Konan is kidnapped, the trio is surrounded, and Nagato is handed an impossible choice. Kill Yahiko, or let Konan die.
Yahiko decides in his place. He throws himself onto the kunai Nagato is holding and impales himself, so that his friend does not have to choose. What follows fits into a few panels: Nagato, beside himself, summons the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path for the first time, and its chakra tongues sweep away Hanzo's men. The technique costs him the use of his legs and a good part of his health.
The man who walks out of that ambush is no longer called Nagato. He sets Yahiko's body at the center of an array of black receivers and takes the name Pain. A few years later, he kills Hanzo, his family and those close to him, then rules over Amegakure like a god no one ever sees. The pacifist movement died with its founder; the organization keeps the name.
The official version circulates in every village. The Akatsuki collects the Tailed Beasts in order to become a military power for hire, able to replace regular armies and set its own prices. The explanation is credible, it motivates the recruits who are in it for the money, and it has the advantage of being impossible to verify. Above all, it is false.
The targets are the nine Tailed Beasts, numbered from one to nine tails and sealed inside human hosts called jinchuriki. Extracting them kills the host in almost every case. Each village shelters one or two of them, and hunting them down amounts to declaring war on everyone at once. The organization does it anyway, one beast after another, with a hunter's patience.
The vault is called the Gedo Mazo (Demonic Statue of the Outer Path). The members stand on the statue's fingers, in the spot their ring assigns them, and project their image from a distance while the Tailed Beast's chakra is drawn out. The operation takes three days for Shukaku: it is the only moment when the group is truly vulnerable. With every sealing, one more eye opens on the statue.
That leaves the fundamental question: why the nine. Because the Tailed Beasts are nothing but the pieces of a single creature. The Ten-Tails is born of the God Tree whose fruit Kaguya Otsutsuki ate. Hagoromo, her son, seals the beast inside his own body then splits its chakra into nine separate entities. Bringing the nine back together means reforming the Ten-Tails. The entire plan rests on that sum.
What comes next is called the Eye of the Moon Plan. Its author is Madara Uchiha: become the host of the Ten-Tails, awaken the Rinne Sharingan, project its pattern onto the moon and lock humanity inside a genjutsu no one escapes. The victims dream the life they would have wanted while the roots of the God Tree drain their chakra. It is, literally, a peace through illusion.
Obito inherits the project and claims it publicly at the Five Kage Summit. He demands that the Eight-Tails and the Nine-Tails be handed over to him, explains the program, meets a unanimous refusal and declares the Fourth Great Ninja War on the spot. That day, the Akatsuki stops being a secret organization and becomes a military camp, with an army of clones and a master of the reanimated dead.
One last level hides beneath all the others. Black Zetsu is not a creature of Madara's: it is the materialized will of Kaguya, at work for centuries to bring her back. He falsified the stone tablet the Uchiha pass down, so that a reader powerful enough would believe he had found in it the salvation of the world. The order of the nesting dolls is therefore as follows: Kaguya behind Black Zetsu, Black Zetsu behind Madara, Madara behind Obito, Obito behind Nagato, and Nagato in front of all the others.
Nagato is descended from the Uzumaki clan, which gives him an extraordinary chakra reserve and a vitality that explains how he survives his own techniques. His eyes, on the other hand, do not belong to him. The Rinnegan was implanted in him as a child by Madara Uchiha, without his knowledge, as part of a plan that already accounted for the moment it would have to be taken back.
Nagato's body has been ruined since Hanzo's ambush. He no longer walks, he no longer leaves the tower of Amegakure, and he moves only by proxy. That is the principle behind the Six Paths of Pain : six corpses pierced with black receivers, piloted from a distance, sharing a common field of vision. The whole world believes it is dealing with a single man.
Each body has its function. The Deva Path, the one that wears Yahiko's face, commands gravity: it repels everything around it, pulls in whatever it wants, and can tear off a piece of ground to turn it into a satellite. The five others absorb chakra, summon creatures, tear out souls, read minds or deploy a mechanical arsenal. Together, they make up an army all on their own.
Pain kills Jiraiya at the end of a fight in which his former master understands far too late who he is talking to. Then comes the invasion of Konoha : a single Almighty Push (Shinra Tensei) levels the village down to its foundations. Naruto catches up with him, refuses hand-to-hand combat and wins through words. Nagato then agrees to pay the price: he casts the Rinne Tensei, brings back to life everyone he has just killed, and dies from the effort.
The story does not end there. Forcibly resurrected during the Fourth Great Ninja War, Nagato is turned against his former allies. It will take Itachi, also called back from the dead, to seal him for good. His Rinnegan, meanwhile, returns to the hands of Obito, who had been waiting for it from the start.
Konan is the only woman in the organization, and the only member who never switched sides. Her art comes from a childhood detail: the origami flower she once handed out has become a complete combat technique. She turns her body into sheets of paper, scatters, reassembles, and travels on wings that lead the people of Amegakure to take her for an angel.
That paper is nothing decorative. It cuts like a blade, it wraps, it pins down, and it can be coated with explosive tags stuck on by the thousand. Its only weaknesses are water, which soaks it, and fire, which consumes it: the permanent rain of Amegakure is as much a handicap as a protection for her.
Her role in the Akatsuki is poorly understood. She is not one operative among others: she is Nagato's relay, the go-between linking the crippled body hidden in the tower and the six corpses roaming the world. She is the one who truly governs the village, who protects Yahiko's remains, and who watches over what is left of the promise they made as children.
Nagato's death sets her free. Konan leaves the organization, takes charge of Amegakure and tells Naruto that she believes in him, exactly as Jiraiya had believed in Nagato. She knows what is coming, though: Tobi arrives to claim the Rinnegan, and she is waiting for him.
The trap she sets is the most carefully built in the manga: six hundred billion explosive tags, an artificial sea, and ten minutes of continuous detonations meant to leave nothing behind. Tobi survives thanks to Izanagi, the forbidden technique that lets its user rewrite one moment of reality at the cost of an eye. He then finishes her off and takes away his former leader's eyes. The last of the orphans of Amegakure falls there.
Itachi is a prodigy, which in his case means a child who was spared nothing. He sees the battlefields of the Third Great Ninja War at the age of four, leaves the Ninja Academy in a single year, and becomes an Anbu captain at thirteen. From that childhood he keeps a horror of conflict that explains everything else in his path.
When the Uchiha clan prepares a coup against Konoha, he finds himself caught between his blood and his village. The village wins. The massacre of the clan unfolds in a single night, on the orders of Danzo Shimura and the elders, with the help of a masked man. Itachi spares only one person: his little brother, to whom he leaves a tailor-made hatred and a lie to carry.
He then joins the Akatsuki, but not for the reasons people assume. He remains a spy for Konoha, passing on what he can, and above all keeping Danzo in check: as long as he is alive, no one dares touch Sasuke. His presence in the group is also a watch from the inside, the only one his village has.
His arsenal is that of an Uchiha at the very top. The Mangekyo Sharingan gives him three techniques: Tsukuyomi, which locks the target inside an illusion where time stretches out, Amaterasu, whose black flames never go out, and a Susanoo armed with the Totsuka Blade and the Yata Mirror. Most of the time he wins without having to strike.
His end is a piece of staging. Ill for years, he arranges a duel he intends to lose, so that Sasuke inherits his eyes and the reputation of an avenger. He dies on his feet, pressing two fingers to his brother's forehead. Resurrected during the war, he breaks free of the control weighing on him and puts an end to the technique that was calling back the dead. The truth will only come out after his second death.
Madara Uchiha belongs to the founding generation. Leader of his clan, he founds Konoha with Hashirama Senju before breaking with him: their friendship ends in the Valley of the End, and the world believes Madara died that day. In reality he faked his disappearance, took away a fragment of his rival's cells and vanished beneath a mountain.
The old man who lives in that cavern has nothing of the warrior left. Grafted with Hashirama's cells, he awakens the Rinnegan after a whole lifetime, works out the Eye of the Moon Plan and prepares his own resurrection. He implants his new eyes in a child of Amegakure, Nagato, so that one day he will be called back from the dead. He also believes he created Black Zetsu: the opposite is what is true.
He is missing an executor. He finds him at Kannabi Bridge, where a Konoha genin has just been crushed under a rockslide. Obito Uchiha had given his left Sharingan to Kakashi just before, as a promotion gift. A White Zetsu digs him out on Madara's orders, and the crushed half of his body is replaced with grafts made from Hashirama's cells.
What finally turns him is not the pain, it is Rin. Watching his teammate die at Kakashi's hand, Obito concludes that reality does not deserve to be defended. He takes up Madara's plan, his name, and a method built on patience. Kamui makes him intangible and lets him pass through any attack: no one lays a hand on him for years.
Behind the mask, he first acts unseen. He attacks Konoha on the night Naruto is born by taking control of the Nine-Tails, he manipulates the Fourth Mizukage and therefore an entire village, he recruits for the Akatsuki while posing as a slightly dim henchman named Tobi. After Nagato's death, he takes over the group in the open.
The war undoes the two men in reverse order. Obito becomes the host of the Ten-Tails, fails, switches sides after seeing Naruto refuse to give up on anyone, then dies protecting his former teammate and his student. Madara, resurrected, awakens the Rinne Sharingan and finally casts the genjutsu that was meant to solve everything. Black Zetsu then uses his body to bring Kaguya back. The architect of the plan ends this way: betrayed by the creature he thought he had shaped.
Kisame comes from Kirigakure, a village that long made the final exam of its academy a fight to the death between classmates. He keeps a simple idea of the job from it. A member of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist, he leaves his village behind him with a reputation as a monster that is perfectly deserved.
His weapon accounts for half of who he is. Samehada is a livingsword, covered in scales instead of a cutting edge: it shreds flesh rather than slicing it, and above all it devours the opponent's chakra to give it back to its bearer. It chooses its master, and it chose Kisame. The two of them end up merging in the middle of a fight.
His own chakra reserve is so vast that he is nicknamed the Tailed Beast without a tail. On watery ground he becomes practically unstoppable: he creates his own sea, breathes in it, and unleashes chakra sharks there. Few opponents agree to follow him onto that ground.
Within the organization, he is Itachi's partner, and together they form the most feared assault duo of all. The contrast works: one barely speaks, the other comments on everything. Kisame also serves as messenger and escort, and he is the one sent out when an uncooperative jinchuriki has to be brought back.
His end says what he is. Beaten by Might Guy, then captured, he refuses interrogation: he breaks free, summons his own sharks and has himself devoured rather than give up a single piece of information. Resurrected during the war, he meets Might Guy again on the battlefield for one last exchange. The most brutal criminal in the group turns out to have been, to the very end, the most loyal.
The most talkative pairing in the Akatsuki spends its time arguing over a question of aesthetics. For Sasori, art is what lasts : a fixed form, preserved, taken out of time. For Deidara, art is what vanishes : a flash, a second, an explosion. Each one puts his life at the service of his definition, and each one dies in a way perfectly true to it.
Sasori comes from Sunagakure. His parents died on a mission when he was a child; raised by his grandmother Chiyo, he learns puppetry and builds two puppets in their image, which will never hold him in their arms. He defects, then crosses a line no one had crossed before: he turns his own body into a puppet and keeps only a living core, lodged in the chest.
His collection holds two hundred and ninety-eight human puppets, each built from a defeated shinobi and retaining his techniques. The centerpiece is the Third Kazekage, who manipulates Iron Sand. Everything he touches is poisoned, down to his blades and his strings. He ends up run through by the puppets of his parents, guided by Chiyo, and deliberately lets the blow land.
Deidara comes from Iwagakure and did not choose to join the Akatsuki either: he lost a bet against Itachi and had to sign up, which explains his lasting hatred of the Sharingan. His kekkei genkai, Explosion Release (Bakuton), combines earth and lightning to make any material explosive. Mouths set in his palms knead a clay charged with chakra.
His creations move up a level as the story goes on: miniature spiders, carrier birds, a dragon able to cross a country, then a bomb that takes the shape of a sun. He is the one who abducts Gaara and brings him back alive. Facing Sasuke, realizing he will not win, he pulls out the stitches on his chest and turns his own body into his final work. The blast hollows out a crater; Sasuke escapes it by a hair.
Kisame nicknames them the zombie duo, and the nickname is accurate: neither of them dies the way other people do. Their pairing owes nothing to chance. Kakuzu killed all his previous partners, usually out of irritation; so he was assigned the one member he is incapable of killing.
Hidan comes from Yugakure, a ninja village turned hot spring resort, whose easy way of life sickened him to the point that he left after slaughtering part of its population. He serves Jashin, a god who accepts only one form of prayer: human sacrifice. His three-bladed scythe is used less for killing than for harvesting.
His ritual is a piece of macabre clockwork. He tastes his target's blood, draws a circle crossed by a triangle on the ground, stands at the center, then wounds himself: every injury appears instantly on the victim, dozens of meters away. He cannot die, which makes him reckless and unbearably slow to finish the job. He kills Asuma Sarutobi that way.
Shikamaru corrects him on the one weak point of the setup: immortality is not invulnerability. He separates him from his circle, dismembers him with explosives, then buries the pieces in a pit in the Nara forest. Hidan is still alivedown there, conscious, unable to move. It is probably the cruelest end in the manga.
Kakuzu, for his part, is ninety-one years old and has a long memory. Sent long ago to assassinate Hashirama Senju, he fails, and his own village throws him in prison as the price of that failure. He escapes with a kinjutsu, the Jiongu, which replaces his muscles with black threads able to stitch anything back together, including what he tears from other people.
He collects hearts the way others collect trophies: five in all, each taken from a powerful opponent, each mastering a different chakra nature. Killing Kakuzu therefore means killing him five times over. As the organization's treasurer, he funds the group through bounty hunting and complains about the cost of funerals. Naruto and Kakashi finish him off by combining a Rasenshuriken and a Raikiri: the last heart gives out under the second of the two.
Two members never pursued the Akatsuki's stated goals. One of them predates it by several centuries, the other uses it as a library before slamming the door. Both are wrongly taken for supporting characters.
Zetsu presents himself as a single being cut in two, enclosed in a carnivorous plant that opens and closes over him. The white half was born from Hashirama's cells manipulated by Madara; it splits into clones able to copy the appearance and the chakra of anyone at all. He is the group's scout: he locates the jinchuriki, watches the fights, acts as referee and serves as its memory.
The black half is of another nature. Black Zetsu is the will of Kaguya Otsutsuki, shaped even before the villages were founded, and his work is a patient forgery. He rewrote the stone tablet the Uchiha pass down from generation to generation, so that a reader powerful enough would find the Infinite Tsukuyomi in it, presented as a salvation. Madara and Obito will have been nothing more than his detours.
He barely fights: he whispers. A piece of advice here, a calculated revelation there, and the entire organization moves in the intended direction. The war finally gives him his army, tens of thousands of White Zetsu, then his opening: Madara's body. He will be sealed away with Kaguya, without ever having struck a decisive blow himself.
Orochimaru, for his part, came shopping. A Sannin of Konoha and a rogue ninja, he joins the Akatsuki for the access it offers: rare techniques, exceptional bodies, village secrets. His partner is Sasori, with whom he shares a taste for experimenting on human beings, and a conception of eternity that sets them at odds on everything else.
His exit is brutal. He tries to take over Itachi's body to get his eyes, is caught in a genjutsu and loses a hand in the process. He leaves the organization taking his ringwith him, which freezes one seat for years: no one can replace him as long as the ring is missing. He founds Otogakure, devotes himself to Sasuke, and watches from a distance the plan he never wanted to serve.
The Akatsuki never sends a member out alone. The pairs are put together to complement each other technically, sometimes to keep watch on each other, and they are reshuffled after every death. Here is the full set of pairings in the story, in the order they appear.
The last two orphans of Amegakure almost never leave the village tower. Konan escorts the Paths of Pain, acts as the relay between Nagato and the rest of the organization, and protects the crippled body of her friend. It is the only pairing founded on a childhood friendship rather than on tactical calculation.
The most feared pair in the group, and the first one the story puts on stage. Itachi's genjutsu neutralizes, and Kisame 's chakra reserve wears the enemy down: few opponents survive both. Their relationship stays cordial and distant, each of them knowing that the other is hiding the essentials of his real motives.
Two experimenters who treat the human body as a raw material. The understanding does not survive Orochimaru's attempt on Itachi: after he defects, Sasori finds himself alone and plants a spy in the ranks of his former partner. That spy, Kabuto, will end up changing masters twice.
The most talked-about pairing in the manga, given how much time the two men spend contradicting each other about the nature of beauty. Together they abduct Gaara, which sets off the whole second part of the story. Their collaboration stops dead in the Akatsuki hideout of the Land of Rivers, where Sasori falls to Sakura and Chiyo.
Tobi inherits Sasori's ring and sticks to Deidara while playing the clumsy idiot, which drives the demolition artist into a rage. The mask is perfect: Deidara will die without ever knowing that he was serving as cover for an Uchiha. The comedy stops the second he disappears.
An immortal fanatic and a mercenary with five hearts, paired up because neither of them can really kill the other. They spend most of their time arguing, between the endless rituals of the first and the bounty hunting of the second. Konoha ends up separating them for good.
The only member operating without an assigned partner, Zetsu travels through the ground, splits into clones and joins any team as needed. He referees the internal fights, recovers the rings of the dead and reports everything he sees. His real function is not military: it is surveillance.
After Itachi's death, Kisame finds himself paired with the masked man, who no longer plays the fool in front of him. Together they take on the jinchuriki of Kumogakure, an opponent no one else has managed to bring back. The mission turns into a failure and in the end costs the swordsman his life.
After revealing the truth to Sasuke, Tobi hands him cloaks and a mission. Sasuke, Suigetsu, Karin and Jugo become the last team recruited by the organization. They believe they are capturing the jinchuriki of the Eight-Tails, bring back nothing but a decoy, then move straight on to the attack at the Five Kage Summit.
The organization has no flag, no headquarters and no anthem. Its visual identity comes down to a handful of objects, all functional and all loaded with meaning. It is that economy of means that makes it recognizable in a single panel.
A long black garment with a high collar, red lining, scattered with red clouds outlined in white. The name of the organization means the dawn: the red cloud is the cloud of sunrise. Each member wears it open or closed according to his habits, and some add purple nail polish.
On the road, the cloak is completed by a conical straw hat, trimmed with bells and a veil that hides the face. The accessory comes from traveling pilgrims, which makes it possible to cross a country without drawing attention. It usually falls off in the first panel of a fight.
Almost all of them keep the hitai-ate of their home village, crossed by a line engraved into the metal rather than painted on. It is the official mark of wanted rogue ninja. Itachi wears the slashed leaf of Konoha, Kisame the lines of Kirigakure, Deidara the stone of Iwagakure, Kakuzu the waterfall of Takigakure.
Each member receives a ring to be worn on one specific finger, never another. The position sets the spot where he will have to stand on the hand of the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path during a sealing. The codes of the organization rest in large part on that tiny, irreplaceable object.
The rings each carry a different character and a different stone color. Among them are zero for Pain, vermilion for Itachi, white for Konan, blue for Deidara, south for Kisame, jewel for Sasori, three for Hidan and boar for Zetsu. A lost ring paralyzes a seat.
Every member appears in the registry the villages keep on criminals at large, with his bounty and his rank. Kakuzu uses it both ways: he is wanted in it, and he draws his own targets from it to fund the group. A well-rated head is worth several million.
To extract a Tailed Beast, the members project their image onto the fingers of the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path and hold the technique for several days in a row. Extracting Shukaku takes three. Nine chakra dragons tear the beast from its host, who does not survive it, and one more eye opens on the statue.
The Akatsuki was meant to herald a new day for a country crushed by other people's wars. The name chosen by Yahiko outlived the project it stood for, which gives the organization its underlying irony. The same banner covers a pacifist movement and an extermination business.
Sasori falls first. Sakura Haruno and Chiyo face him just after the rescue of Gaara, and it is the Mother and Father puppets, carved in the image of his own parents, that run through his living core. As he dies, he gives Sakura the meeting he had set with his spy in Orochimaru's camp: ten days later, at noon, at Tenchi Bridge.
The next pair disappears in one go, on a single mission. Shikamaru Nara dismembers Hidan with an explosive tag and buries the pieces in the forest of the Nara clan; the Kai no Sho databook will specify that theimmortal eventually rots away from hunger underground, with nothing to eat. Kakuzu, for his part, loses two of his remaining hearts to Naruto's Rasenshuriken, before Kakashi's Raikiri reaches the last one.
Then come two deaths facing the same opponent, Sasuke. Deidara unstitches the mouth on his chest and turns himself into a bomb, a blast announced across ten kilometers that Sasuke escapes by summoning Manda. Itachi collapses from illness at the end of a fight he had arranged in order to lose it. Nagato follows shortly after: he spends what is left of his life on the Rinne Tensei, to bring back the people of Konoha he had just killed.
Three names are left. Cornered by Might Guy and then captured, Kisame orders his own sharks to devour him rather than give up information under interrogation. Konan, who had left the organization to take back Amegakure, is killed by Obito, who comes to claim the Rinnegan. Obito dies last, in the middle of the war: Kaguya pins Naruto and Sasuke to the ground and aims her ash bones at them, Obito and Kakashi throw themselves in front of them, and Obito deflects with a Kamui the shot meant for his former teammate before letting the other one hit him; Black Zetsu will be sealed away with Kaguya. Orochimaru appears in none of these deaths: he had defected long before.
The list of victors is surprising. Not one of the five Kage is on it. On it instead are a retiree from Sunagakure, Chiyo, and above all the Konoha generation that left the Ninja Academy at the start of the story: Sakura, Shikamaru, Naruto, Sasuke, led by Kakashi and Might Guy. S-rank criminals fall to teams of four.
The other half of the reckoning is internal. Four members die by their own hand or their own decision: Deidara blows himself up, Kisame has himself devoured, Nagato drains himself dry in his last technique, Itachi hides his illness and arranges his own defeat. A fifth, Konan, falls to her own side. The Akatsuki wipes itself out at least as much as it is defeated.
Working in pairs, presented as a strength, speeds up the fall. A single mission can erase an entire duo: Hidan and Kakuzu fall on the same day, to the same team from Konoha. Elsewhere the loss is indirect but real: with Sasori dead, Deidara inherits a partner he did not choose; with Itachi dead, Kisame finishes alone. And the empty seats are badly filled. Tobi joins the roster as a mere replacement for Sasori and a new partner for Deidara: the group's manipulator holds a subordinate post in his own organization. As for the pool of S-rank rogue ninja, it does not renew itself.
After Nagato, there is almost nothing left to dismantle. Konan leaves, Obito reveals himself at the Five Kage Summit and declares the Fourth Great Ninja War. The network of two-man cells gives way to an army of a hundred thousand White Zetsu. The organization, as an organization, ceases to exist before its last members do.
The Akatsuki begins with a good intention and ends in a world war. Three orphans from Amegakure, Yahiko, Nagato and Konan, found a movement so that their country will stop serving as a battlefield. The trap set by Hanzo and Danzo kills the founder, breaks Nagato's body and turns the project into a criminal organization: ten S-rank rogue ninja, a cloak with red clouds, a slashed headband, one ring per finger and systematic work in pairs. The stated objective, capturing the nine Tailed Beasts to become the leading military power of the shinobi world, hides another one. The nine beasts are the pieces of the Ten-Tails; bringing them together inside the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path makes it possible to rebuild the beast, awaken the Rinne Sharingan and cast the Infinite Tsukuyomi over all of humanity. This Eye of the Moon Plan is the work of Madara Uchiha, passed on to Obito, who has himself been steered for centuries by Black Zetsu, who obeys no one but Kaguya Otsutsuki. Between the two ends of that pyramid work men who know nothing. Itachi spies for Konoha, Kisame fights out of loyalty, Sasori and Deidara argue about art, Hidan prays, Kakuzu counts, Orochimaru does his shopping before leaving with his ring. They fall one by one, almost all of them before the war they were preparing without knowing it. That is the great writing achievement of the group: the most powerful soldiers in the story are also the worst informed.
The organization has ten rings, and therefore ten seats, plus the real leadership, which does not appear in the roster. The list includes Pain, Konan, Itachi, Kisame, Deidara, Sasori, Hidan, Kakuzu, Zetsu and Tobi, to whom Orochimaru is added before his defection. Sasuke's Team Taka will be the last recruit, late and temporary.
Officially Pain, whom all the members regard as their leader. In reality, Nagato carries out the instructions of a masked man who passes himself off as Madara Uchiha, and who is in fact Obito. Above him again, Black Zetsu has been steering the decisions for centuries. Only two members knew the organization's final goal.
The reason given to the recruits is military: gather the nine beasts to become a force that countries will have to hire. The real reason is that the nine Tailed Beasts are the pieces of a single creature, the Ten-Tails. Bringing them together makes it possible to rebuild it, then to cast the genjutsu of the Eye of the Moon Plan over the entire world.
Each member wears his own on an assigned finger, and that position determines the exact spot where he must stand on the hand of the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path while a Tailed Beast is being extracted. The rings are irreplaceable: when Orochimaru defects with his, his seat stays empty, and Deidara cares more about getting his ring back than his arm.
Working in pairs makes up for each member's weaknesses and allows two missions to be run at the same time without ever exposing the whole organization. It also serves as mutual surveillance, in a group where no one trusts anyone. Kakuzu, who had killed all his previous partners, was paired with Hidan precisely because Hidan is immortal.
No. The massacre of his clan was ordered by Danzo Shimura and the elders of Konoha, to smother an imminent coup. Itachi chose his village over his blood, spared his brother, then joined the Akatsuki as a spy. His presence in the group protected Konoha, and Sasuke, for as long as he stayed alive.
By successive elimination, over roughly two years of story. Sasori falls in the hideout of the Land of Rivers, Hidan is buried alive, Kakuzu and Deidara die in the same period, Itachi during the duel with his brother, Nagato after the invasion of Konoha, Konan facing Tobi, Kisame during the hunt for the Eight-Tails. Only Obito and Zetsu are left to set off the Fourth Great Ninja War.
In raw terms, Madara Uchiha and Nagato dominate, one for his Rinnegan awakened after a whole lifetime, the other for the Six Paths that give him six specialized bodies. Obito remains the hardest to reach thanks to Kamui, and Itachi the hardest to beat in a duel, since his genjutsu settles matters before any blows are exchanged.
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