Chapter 049: The Customization Phase
Why did he stop?
Because I have a soft spot for people who can't admit they've lost.
If he actually said that out loud, she'd go right back to maximum fury.
But the truth was simple. The moment he grabbed Soifon's right hand, the quest completion screen had appeared.
Which could only mean one thing.
Even if the person in question would rather die than admit it, somewhere underneath the surface, Soifon had accepted her own defeat the instant she was immobilized.
Right.
That was how tsunderes worked.
You lost, you lost, your mouth just hasn't caught up yet. Go ahead and stay stiff about it. Eventually you'll fold.
"I just thought... yeah. That was about enough."
He had to pick his words carefully. The fragile pride involved required at least that much consideration.
"There's no bad blood between us, no actual grudge. This was just sparring. An exchange. So..."
He raised both hands in something close to a surrender gesture.
"Call it my loss. How about that?"
I already collected the reward. The official record doesn't matter.
Soifon pressed her lips together.
The quest system had read her internal state to determine completion. Her reaction right now was a pretty clean readout of what was actually going on inside her.
She had lost.
And she wasn't entirely at peace with that.
But looking at Matsushita Yusuke's face, she felt the irritation spike all over again.
How.
How did someone who just messed around and laughed through the whole thing beat her?
She was the one who had put in the actual work. The actual hours. The actual suffering.
"I don't want a win that cheap!"
"What would an expensive win look like, exactly..."
Soifon sputtered.
Matsushita Yusuke shrugged.
"Ease up a little. We don't have some deep irreconcilable conflict going on here. Do we?"
Actually.
Just to be safe.
Better confirm that.
"We don't... right?"
Soifon stared at him with the particular intensity of someone filing information away for later, then after a long moment she straightened up.
And shook out her hand.
The Zanpakuto returned to its sealed form with that movement. Soifon turned her head away, expression set somewhere between displeased and resigned.
"This time, I lost. But." She paused. "I still find you irritating."
That's fine. I'm not particularly fond of you either.
He did not say this out loud. Adding fuel to the situation was not something he was interested in right now.
After a moment of consideration, Matsushita Yusuke asked carefully.
"So what are we... now?"
"...What?!"
"Wait, hold on, that came out wrong—"
Let me try that again.
"Can we get along normally? Going forward?"
"...You're someone Yoruichi-sama has taken an interest in. I'm your nominal superior. That's it."
As for anything beyond that.
"I'm not interested."
She wasn't even looking in his direction anymore.
He had some sense of how complicated her feelings were right now. But before he could say anything else, Soifon had already turned and was walking away.
"That's enough for today. We can spar again sometime."
Was that a slightly bold thing for the losing side to say?
The fight had been meaningful in a different way for Matsushita Yusuke too, though.
A released Zanpakuto wasn't everything.
When the power gap was close, what actually decided things was reading the moment correctly. The fine adjustments. The timing on decisions that didn't announce themselves.
She focused on landing the hit after releasing. That fixation on the objective was what opened up the gaps elsewhere. Trading one thing for another without noticing.
Her speed had gone up. But if Soifon had stayed cooler, adjusted her read at the key moment, approached it more carefully...
Even if he still won, it would have been a much worse time.
Was she just not good enough yet?
He was still thinking it through when he noticed something.
On his chest. And on his left wrist.
Two black butterfly-shaped marks, pressed deep into the surface. They had a peculiar quality: intricate, almost decorative, looking almost like they had been stamped onto the fabric itself.
Most people wouldn't know what they were looking at.
Matsushita Yusuke's reaction was immediate.
He'd been hit?! When?!
Genuinely, he had felt nothing.
And in that moment, the cold feeling running through him was real.
Soifon's speed had been faster than he'd calculated. Considerably faster.
She must have some kind of specific technique or movement pattern layered on top of the baseline.
Nothing else explained something that went completely undetected.
But the problem was visible as soon as he looked at it properly.
She'd hit him twice. Why weren't both marks in the same place?
Suzumebachi's instant-kill required two hits on the same point. That was the condition. Which meant Soifon had all the same understanding of dosage adjustment and escalation that any skilled combatant would have. She could have pushed for the lethal result. She wanted to win badly enough. There was no obvious reason she wouldn't have gone for the same spot twice.
Which meant it wasn't that she chose not to.
She couldn't.
The threads came back together.
She landed the first hit on my chest. Then she pushed for a finishing blow too quickly, trying to close it out, and that's what gave me the opening.
Which was why the mark on the left wrist was where it was.
Matsushita Yusuke worked through all of this and broke into a cold sweat.
He had won by significantly less than it had felt like.
The Physical +10 reward was, in hindsight, earned. He had come genuinely close to losing that fight.
He let out a breath, shook out his hand, and let his expression settle back into something normal.
A win was a win. Everything else: note it down, don't repeat the mistakes.
He turned and headed out.
The remaining mess, as always, would sort itself out.
Back in his room, cleaned up, Matsushita Yusuke sat at his desk and after a moment's thought pulled up his current panel for a proper review.
The base stat changes weren't dramatic. Skip those for now.
The Zanpakuto panel was the thing.
[Zanpakuto Ability Panel]
[Physical: 13]
[Elemental: 3]
[Kido: 6]
[Biological: 5]
[Rule: 4]
Steady gains across the board over the past weeks, nothing dramatic except for today. But today's number was significant.
Physical had crossed 10. The first category to do so.
And with that, for the first time, Matsushita Yusuke saw that something new had appeared.
[Appearance Design]
Here we go.
This was the part he'd actually been looking forward to. The part where you got to build your own Zanpakuto by hand.
The way the system was structured: at 20 points came the ability customization stage, where the actual power parameters got set. But that stage only defined the range, not the exact result. Final outcomes were never fully guaranteed.
He had strong suspicions that in any version of this that charged money, you'd get full customization for a premium.
If I could pay for it, I could probably get exactly what I wanted. Right?!
So. What did he actually want the thing to look like?
He thought about it for a while. Then he made his decision quickly.
He wanted...
This design.
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