Chapter 059: Old-School Organized Violence
When a captain and vice-captain were on the same page, it generally meant the rest of the squad didn't get much of a vote.
Matsushita Yusuke had gotten a solid read on Squad 5's internal atmosphere. He nodded to himself.
Genuinely useful. Whether any of it would ever apply directly was a separate question.
"Right then. No point in delaying. Shall we head out, Matsushita-kun?"
He'd been waiting for exactly that.
"Let's go, Aizen-sensei."
The whole reason Matsushita Yusuke had made the trip to Squad 5 in the first place was the request he'd put in weeks ago.
Find me stronger opponents.
As had come up before, the Gotei 13 was a large organization, but the number of Shinigami who could release their Zanpakuto and were actually willing to fight someone they'd never met was not large. And Matsushita Yusuke was still a student. Walking up to a ranked officer and asking for a spar without any introduction tended to read as a provocation. Having someone make the connection in advance eliminated that problem entirely.
The two of them left Squad 5's grounds and moved off in a direction he didn't immediately recognize.
Before they'd gone far, Aizen paused and looked over at him with an expression that had a slight edge of seriousness to it.
"Are you certain about this, Matsushita-kun?"
He pushed his glasses up once.
"In principle, what you're looking for is available where we're going. But I should be clear. The people there are not particularly easy to deal with."
Matsushita Yusuke rubbed the back of his head, thought about it briefly, and nodded.
"I think so. I've never been good at grinding things out the normal way. If there's a gap to work with, I'd rather find it. Why pass that up?"
"Ha. An average person wouldn't even recognize where the gap was."
Aizen seemed satisfied with that answer.
Nothing more needed saying, then.
"Let's move. The destination is a bit out of the way."
Which raised a question.
"Who exactly did you find for me, Aizen-sensei?"
Aizen folded his arms, considered for a moment, and produced an expression that suggested he was genuinely thinking it over.
"Mm. How to put it. A group I'd describe as... reasonably trustworthy, I suppose."
That description was doing very little work.
Matsushita Yusuke couldn't quite find words for it either, so he left it there and followed.
The route took them somewhere he'd never been. Still technically within Seireitei, but far from the noble residential areas, far even from the ordinary civilian districts. The streets had a deserted quality to them that didn't fit the location. This was supposed to be the center of Soul Society, and it felt like the outer Rukongai.
What kind of high-level fighter ends up out here?
He looked around as they walked. The few people he did see were moving quickly, eyes down, with the specific kind of urgency that came from wanting to get somewhere else before anything noticed them.
Everyone here looked like they'd seen something they didn't want to see again.
"We've arrived, Matsushita-kun."
He looked up.
They were standing in front of a large gate. High. Heavy. A sign across the top identified the building behind it.
Squad 11 Grounds.
Wait.
Squad 11?
Matsushita Yusuke's eyes went a little wider. Before he could say anything, Aizen was already smiling beside him.
"Does this one ring a bell, Matsushita-kun?"
It did. It absolutely did.
Squad 11's nature was distinctive enough that it stood apart from every other squad in the Gotei 13.
Where every other squad recruited through the Academy's formal examination process, Squad 11 didn't use that system at all. What they took in instead were fighters sourced directly from outside. People who had come up through the rougher parts of the Rukongai. People who, in some cases, had done things out there that would have been criminal by any other standard. Violence, worse than violence. None of that disqualified you, as long as you were strong enough to pass whatever particular test they ran. At that point you became a legitimate member of the Thirteen Court Guard Squads.
Because they didn't recruit publicly, the Academy had almost nothing on file about them. Most students treated Squad 11 as something to know existed and otherwise stay away from.
Then again, the Gotei 13 as an institution wasn't exactly built on gentleness.
A thousand years ago, when the old man Yamamoto could still swing a blade without anyone second-guessing him, the Gotei 13 had been, in the most direct sense, organized violence. The whole organization cut its way from one end of Seireitei to the other without anyone losing sleep over it.
A thousand years of accumulation and gradual respectability had changed the presentation significantly. But the foundation was what it was. The material underneath the surface hadn't been replaced.
Squad 11 was just the part that didn't bother pretending otherwise.
Combat was their stated function. Fighting was their culture. Every other squad looked at them and found the fit awkward.
"Pure violence as an organizational principle. That's probably the version Academy students hear." Aizen's smile didn't shift. "It's something of an oversimplification, though. Soul Society is not a particularly gentle environment at its foundation. The principle of the strong outlasting the weak runs through the Rukongai as openly as anything. People don't dress it up out there."
Inside Seireitei it was different, but only in presentation.
"The distinctions people draw here, rank, behavior, the line between noble and common, they produce a veneer of civility. But underneath it, the principle is the same."
Just packaged differently.
"Ah, I'm not actually worried about that part."
Matsushita Yusuke wiped a thin line of sweat from his forehead. The smile he produced was slightly strained.
The Gotei 13 as organized violence: he'd known that framing existed and it had never surprised him. That wasn't the issue.
What he was actually thinking about was Squad 11's specific institutional tradition.
The Kenpachi.
Squad 11 had a particular relationship with its captains unlike any other squad. Each generation's captain took the name Kenpachi as their own, keeping their surname and replacing their given name. The dual purpose was clear: it reinforced the line of internal succession, and it made something explicit about what that name represented.
Every Kenpachi earned the name by taking it from the previous one.
This was a squad soaked in a particular kind of history, and he knew exactly what kind.
And right now, walking through the gate behind Aizen, something clicked.
This point in the timeline. This specific moment.
The current Squad 11 captain wasn't Zaraki.
So who was it?
The thought hadn't finished forming when a voice came from somewhere ahead of them. Deep. Rough. The kind of voice that had never been smoothed over.
"Oh. You're here to see me?"