Chapter 229: But That's How Weaklings Think
Whatever was happening inside the domain, none of those outside had any way of knowing.
Matsushita Yusuke could technically use a probe to check on things. He just had no capacity to spare for it right now.
He genuinely could not afford the distraction.
Literally.
Facing Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni, Matsushita Yusuke had no room to let his attention drift anywhere. Both their reiatsu were locked together like interlaced current. Even a fraction of a second's loss of focus would break the whole equilibrium.
Honestly, Matsushita Yusuke had no objection to drawing this out.
He had a fair degree of confidence in his Rule-type Zanpakuto. After years of development and deep research, he had a solid grasp of each Zanpakuto type's particular strengths and the conditions needed to use them right.
The short version:
Jūni Innen Metsu was not built for one-on-one situations.
In a straight duel, the ability simply couldn't perform the way it was designed. The memory constructs it extracted were based on the opponent being targeted, and without adding extra variables, you typically ended up with a two-on-one at the cost of locking out all other Bankai abilities.
But was trading that much for a temporary ally worth it?
For where Matsushita Yusuke had been before, no. Clearly not. And the quality of the extracted construct had its own unpredictable elements besides.
In short: multiple constraints, uncontrollable variables. Those were the ability's weaknesses.
But in the right conditions, with a proper setup, Jūni Innen Metsu was where it was meant to be.
Wide-area barrier coverage. Isolated space. Group-based extraction. Those conditions produced a qualitative change in what the manifested construct could actually do.
As with what was happening right now.
The Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni carried in the memories of four people was already powerful enough to be effectively unbeatable. Add Matsushita Yusuke's continuous reiatsu supply pushing the construct's output, and the old man inside that domain was considerably more alive than he might otherwise be.
Of course, group extraction wasn't a universal solution either.
The ability worked best when the target pool shared a single specific figure they all deeply revered. Or feared. The clearer and more unified that shared impression, the sharper the result.
Put a Quincy, a Shinigami, and a Hollow in together, and what came out would be anyone's guess. The internal incoherence of the group might actively reduce the construct's performance.
But then again.
Hold on.
If you combined all three of those...
Matsushita Yusuke didn't usually think much about this sort of thing, but standing at the front of a battle with a moment to breathe, the idea had surfaced and turned out to be surprisingly interesting.
There was no time to act on it right now, obviously. Because not far away, Yamamoto's presence was already boiling.
The old man was not a patient party to this standoff.
"Not knowing where your subordinates and students are must have you worried, Captain-Commander."
The voice came through Kyoka Suigetsu's distortion with no recognizable qualities intact. Yamamoto abandoned any attempt to identify him by sound within moments.
He simply hurled himself forward, driving Ryujin Jakka down in a massive slash.
"I'm not worrying about those things. Kill you here, and that solves everything!"
Whoosh.
The blazing blade came overhead and the scorching heat arrived ahead of it, burning straight through the reiatsu field on the surface of his skin before the steel got anywhere close.
No room for carelessness. Matsushita Yusuke's expression sharpened. He stepped forward half a pace and swept his right hand upward.
As the motion completed, light moved across his palm and condensed into a simply-formed reishi Zanpakuto.
Clang!
Blades met. The reishi weapon scattered on impact. The force behind it staggered Matsushita Yusuke sideways to the right.
But that was planned for. Using the backward step, his left hand came up in a sweep, another reishi weapon catching the edge of Ryujin Jakka.
The motion was practiced and fluid, refined to the point of instinct, and the level it expressed was close enough to Yamamoto's to seem, for a moment, like genuine equivalence.
The blades caught and locked again.
Crunch.
Two consecutive hard collisions. The second reishi weapon shattered in Yusuke's hands, and Ryujin Jakka entered an unstable state.
"..."
The old man had never directly crossed blades with Kongozō before. But pure combat instinct was telling him something was off.
These reishi weapons were consistently targeting the Zanpakuto directly. And the way the blade-energy dispersed on contact was wrong. That wasn't how energy collapse worked.
Accumulated experience let him run the analysis at top speed. He reached a conclusion and acted.
"Die!"
He bellowed it and drove forward in a long stride, twisting his blade rather than cutting, the flames wrapped spiraling around the steel as it drove forward in a thrust.
A form he had not shown before.
That eliminates the weapon-versus-weapon conflict then?
The thought had barely formed when Matsushita Yusuke stepped to the side and simply reached out his hand toward the incoming blade.
His palms blazed with concentrated light, a glove of compressed reishi wrapping both hands, and he closed his grip around the blade directly.
Reishi weapons were not limited to Zanpakuto form. The real art of Kongozō was adaptation without limit.
After a brief wrestling exchange, Matsushita Yusuke met Yamamoto's eyes.
Three.
In theory, even a single collision should be enough to start the process. Ryujin Jakka had held on considerably longer than that.
Even Ryujin Jakka had its limits.
CRACK!!!
With a resonating hum, the Zanpakuto shattered and burst into spiraling fragments.
Tosen, watching from the side, could not hold back a quiet sound of triumph.
Yes. That's it.
With the Zanpakuto broken, any Shinigami would immediately lose most of their fighting capacity. Not just the raw power loss: the psychological impact of losing your blade was enormous. Very few people could adapt to that in real time.
In other words.
Win?
The greatest victory, inscribed in the Rukongai wilderness.
However.
Aizen's expression was not exactly pleased. Because things were not developing the way Tosen had assumed.
"It's not over yet..."
Before the sentence finished, a massive dark shape tore through the dispersing firelight and drove straight at Matsushita Yusuke's face.
The impact arrived with enormous force and came so abruptly that for a moment Tosen thought he had blinked and missed something.
In the space of a single breath, the shadow had closed.
It was Yamamoto's fist.
His right hand clenched tight, five fingers together, expression dead serious, and the punch carried the weight of something that could break the world in half.
Yamamoto had Hakuda. Losing his Zanpakuto changed nothing for him at all.
If that hit landed clean, Matsushita Yusuke's head would have the same structural integrity as a watermelon meeting a bat.
But the latter reacted as if he had known what was coming. He leaned back and extended his right hand forward in the same motion.
Because Yamamoto's four core disciplines had to be fully maxed, this situation required no more hesitation. No Zanpakuto? The old man could still cut a path through anything with his bare hands.
He caught the wrist. Redirected the force.
And using that deflection as the opening, Matsushita Yusuke moved in close in a single smooth step, his left arm swinging upward, elbow rising like a blade.
BANG!!!
A solid hit. Both figures separated.
Yamamoto's hands spread slightly. He stepped back, found his footing.
His expression didn't change. But he quietly turned his head, and spat blood.
Nosebleed traced down through the corner of his mouth.
Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni. After a thousand years.
Visibly, genuinely injured.
Admittedly, saying this out loud might have questionable effects on morale considering whose side was technically the one making trouble here. But drawing first blood against this particular person, even a single small step, represented something enormous.
Even Aizen Sosuke, watching, felt something move in him.
The reason was simple.
Matsushita Yusuke had just done something Aizen couldn't do himself. Aizen's raw reiatsu was comparable to Yamamoto's. But against an opponent at this level, he had no suitable means of attack. That was the part that had always frustrated him most.
Soldier against soldier. General against general. King against king.
Suppressing a truly great opponent required someone on the same scale. And if that had still been open to debate before, it wasn't anymore.
Matsushita Yusuke was standing on the same stage as Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni, competing for real.
Both sides looked at each other. A moment of silence.
Then Matsushita Yusuke bent forward and threw up bile.
The abrupt development threw both observers.
His face was twisted, expression thoroughly pained.
"You sneaky old man..."
At the exact moment Yusuke had landed the elbow, Yamamoto had slipped in a left-hand punch to the midsection. Coming from the left side, the fist drove so deep it felt like it was reshaping his organs and trying to find daylight on the other side.
And this was from a hastily-committed strike, not a fully-wound shot.
If Yamamoto had landed a clean, properly-prepared punch, Matsushita Yusuke genuinely believed he might have been folded in half. Not metaphorically.
Ripping a person apart with bare hands. The man really was that kind of monster.
Cases where Matsushita Yusuke actually broke composure and swore were not common. This was one.
He was clear-eyed about how he had managed to land that elbow at all: Yamamoto had never seen Kongozō before, giving Yusuke the information edge. He had known in advance that Yamamoto would push to close range. He had accurately predicted the attack pattern. Three factors stacking together had let him pull it off cleanly.
And even with all of that going for him, Yamamoto had still stolen a punch. He was currently seeing double.
"Thought I'd closed the gap considerably. Looking at it now, there's still a pretty clear difference on paper."
Which was something he'd known already.
If Yamamoto's four disciplines were all maxed, then the gap in raw stats still showed. And Yusuke's Hakuda wasn't anywhere near refined enough.
Land a sneak hit? Possible. Full frontal exchange? Stretching it.
"Not polished enough in Hakuda either. In a sense, I just put my limitations on display for him."
If my Hakuda were at maximum, you wouldn't have gotten that punch. I would've put you down for good with that elbow.
A brief mutual pause. Both sides needed time to assess, recover, and reset.
Kongozō's ability has been exposed now. But that was expected. The dismantling characteristic is precisely suited to this kind of use.
A tiger without its teeth was still a tiger. Just slightly more workable.
Matsushita Yusuke watched Yamamoto's reiatsu flow back in and reconstitute. Ryujin Jakka reformed in his grip. He raised it once and let it fall, then repeated the motion.
Then looked up at Matsushita Yusuke.
"I see. Quite a despicable ability."
"I'd prefer if you called it a useful ability."
"No need for more words. I'm done probing."
Then, directly:
"You have indeed gotten considerably stronger."
BOOM.
Scorching reiatsu erupted in an instant, close to boiling point.
"But thinking you can stand level with me, is still about a thousand years too early, boy!"
The last words came close to a roar. His expression went ferocious. Ryujin Jakka completed its transformation in the same breath.
Bankai: Zanka no Tachi.
Towering light and heat came rolling in. Matsushita Yusuke pressed his lips together and held his ground.
Here it is.
This is what going all out actually looks like.
He stood into the wave of overwhelming heat and felt it trying to burn straight through him from the inside.
This would be a good moment to say something cool. Serious style points on the table here.
So what was the right line?
He tilted his head and glanced up at the space above him.
Fundamentally, he only needed to stall. Inside the domain, the situation was developing in an obvious direction. If he held on long enough, all four would be accounted for. Weaken the Gotei 13's overall strength, and when the Club made its eventual move, things would go considerably smoother.
But that's how weaklings think.
He was going to fight straight through Zanka no Tachi and break the old man directly.
Inspiration arrived.
"Crank up the heat, old codger!"