Chapter 230: Old Man Won
Quite a bold line to open with.
But the tension hadn't left him at all. Because what exactly Yamamoto looked like at full fury under Zanka no Tachi, he genuinely didn't know yet.
The thought had barely started forming when Matsushita Yusuke's expression locked tight.
The man hadn't moved yet.
But the pressure had already hit him in the face.
Like standing at the foot of an onrushing wave and seeing it only when it was already past the point of stopping. Matsushita Yusuke's eyes narrowed against it. Skin pulled tight, pulse spiking, lips drying. And in that blinding white world, a single point of black pushed into his vision, needle-sharp, driving straight for his face.
Fast. Precise. Ruthless.
Three words. That was all he could find.
This was a blade aimed at his face.
A blade that intended to end things right here.
You've got to be kidding.
He gritted his teeth, stepped back half a pace, and swept his right-hand reishi weapon upward.
The idea was to use the same tactic that had worked before: clash, destabilize, wear down the form. Even if it didn't touch the total reiatsu behind it, a Zanpakuto without stable form was still a Zanpakuto in trouble. Even for Yamamoto.
The plan was the long game. Stall as much as possible.
As for actually winning. After these few exchanges, he had a fairly clear-eyed view of where things stood.
Outright breaking Yamamoto at his current level was not realistic.
Facing someone with all four disciplines maxed and every Zanpakuto stat at its ceiling, without fully closing the gap himself, Matsushita Yusuke had only one real path to victory: exploit openings, play angles, find the right trick.
A direct fight to the finish was not an option yet.
Thoughts still turning, his hands never stopped.
The reishi weapon connected with Zanka no Tachi in a forward sweep. Two forces collided. The weapon shattered.
The fragments scattered like scattered starlight and vanished without a sound.
And at the same moment, Matsushita Yusuke's pupils contracted sharply.
Hard.
Not an expression. A statement of fact.
In the instant the reishi weapon made contact, he had felt the shape behind it: a mass like a mountain range. Tall enough to vanish into cloud. His attack had struck it and produced nothing but a detonating reverberation. Not even close to toppling it.
In all honesty, this was the first time Matsushita Yusuke had ever felt something in the three worlds with this level of sheer physical solidity.
What is this thing?
The closest analogy he could reach for was taking a baseball bat to tempered glass. Probably not quite that extreme, but the sensation was heading in that direction.
In the single moment of contact, he had already made the clearest possible estimate.
To actually destabilize Zanka no Tachi, at minimum eight solid consecutive hits.
Eight.
Two hits had taken apart Unohana Retsu's Zanpakuto. This one required more than four times that. That alone told you everything about the gap.
Of course, the root cause was obvious enough.
Pure reiatsu volume. And the stat difference in the Physical-type Zanpakuto.
If both sides were level on those numbers, the required hit count would drop considerably.
The thought completed itself and the deflected blade had already recovered, swinging back at him again.
Through the blazing white light and heat, Yamamoto's outline emerged, face set hard, wreathed in fire that had never cooled, moving like a demon that had walked straight out of a battlefield from another age.
Too fast.
Even his hands still had a residual numbness in them.
Not going to make it in time.
Brief hesitation. Matsushita Yusuke gritted his teeth and made a sharp lean back.
Then drove his head forward.
He threw himself at the blade and met it with his forehead.
Has he lost his mind?!
CLANG!
And against all expectation, Zanka no Tachi was knocked aside.
Matsushita Yusuke staggered. A low sound of pain escaped him. His head dropped, swayed once, and then half his face was dark with blood.
He lowered his head and pressed his left hand firmly against the wound.
Forehead. Brow ridge. Something in that general area. There's a cut. Probably a wide one.
Didn't matter. He was still breathing. And the gamble had paid off.
Reishi weapons shaped into a helmet. He had used the natural disruption property to interrupt Zanka no Tachi mid-form before the strike could fully land.
Same principle as before: change the shape all you want, a reishi weapon is still a weapon.
The inherent destabilizing quality had deflected what would have been a killing blow. The residual force still landed.
He still wasn't entirely sure at what point in the sequence the wound had opened.
"The old man's Zanjutsu is just too strong..."
Same problem as the bare-fisted exchange. The stat gap between them made it impossible to fully track the movements and react properly.
He pushed through the pain and kept his eyes on Yamamoto. Because pain was his problem alone: if the old man suddenly decided to chain three slashes right now, that would be an entirely different kind of problem.
But against expectation, Yamamoto wasn't pressing forward. He had gone still.
"..."
His expression didn't change. But something in his eyes had shifted slightly.
The tip of Zanka no Tachi showed a barely-visible distortion.
Eight hits had been the estimate. But with each especially forceful collision, the process compressed significantly. The actual count needed was contracting.
Matsushita Yusuke caught it the moment it registered.
Before any response could come from the other side, light caught and moved, and Matsushita Yusuke was already sprinting forward, directly at Yamamoto.
One more push to shatter Zanka no Tachi entirely. Get the upper hand.
He surged and drove forward, reishi weapon extended like a needle, aimed straight at Yamamoto's chest.
Yamamoto's foot touched the ground to dodge. Matsushita Yusuke's left hand whipped sideways. A hurtling reishi weapon launched through the air.
With no good option, Yamamoto swept it aside.
CLANG.
The thrown weapon shattered. But the reishi coating Yamamoto's arm dispersed with it.
Yamamoto's brow visibly tightened.
Matsushita Yusuke saw it and felt his pulse steady.
There it is. Even Yamamoto can't walk away from this one clean.
Getting directly hit by a reishi weapon was technically manageable. These things weren't blades in the conventional sense. Impact-wise it was closer to getting struck with a padded mallet. Painful enough, but far gentler than steel.
What they actually did, though, was reach inside.
Forced disruption. Forced scattering. The direct target was the reiatsu operating within. Accumulated hits could temporarily compress total reiatsu capacity, eating away at the available ceiling.
Drain the mana bar.
It didn't last long, of course. Same as with the destroyed weapons. But the more hits stacked, the more difficult things became.
"Troublesome."
Yamamoto delivered the assessment in a single word and shook out his arm.
"I'll take that as a compliment."
Matsushita Yusuke accepted the evaluation happily and set himself for the next advance.
Wounded. Drained. Running on fumes. He was clearly the worse-looking of the two. But because of how Kongozo worked, he had to keep forcing himself into attack mode.
Kongozo's suppression only built momentum when he was actively pushing forward. The moment he stopped, the advantage evaporated.
He had to keep moving.
"How's that crappy blade holding up, old man?"
One last provocation, and then Matsushita Yusuke was already charging in, two reishi weapons sweeping horizontal and vertical in alternating arcs, crossing each other's paths, forcing Yamamoto into a constant cycle of evasion.
"..."
The old man probably hadn't felt this kind of pressure in a very long time.
The frustration was unmistakable in his expression now. He looked like someone who had been backed into a corner, and with patience finally gone, Yamamoto seized the fraction of an opening as it appeared.
Dodge. Sidestep. Left hand reaching forward.
Through the gap between the two crossing weapons, Yamamoto's palm drove through and closed around Matsushita Yusuke's face.
Hakuda and shunpo. The two disciplines where Yusuke ran weakest. They were exactly the reason Yamamoto had been able to find any opening at all.
No time to evade. Yamamoto had his face.
Five fingers closed like iron bolts, hydraulic and inexorable, crushing inward by degrees, like he intended to fold Matsushita Yusuke's skull from the outside in.
"BRAT!"
The roar came out with something real behind it, something that had finally had enough. He hadn't raised a blade against anyone in a very long time. And the first opponent he met turned out to have this utterly infuriating ability.
"I can hear you fine without the volume, old man!"
A helmet-shaped reishi defense materialized, using the simplest possible method to resist the compressive force bearing down on his head.
Matsushita Yusuke opened both hands and reached forward without hesitation.
He got a grip on Yamamoto's throat.
The original tactical plan was to stall. Reality didn't cooperate. Stay in this exchange long enough and he would simply end up on the losing side. Which meant changing the thinking entirely.
Trade damage for damage.
Ten fingers closed. The light pulsing through them was Kongozo working at full capacity.
At close enough range to see it clearly, Yamamoto's own protective reishi was approaching a boiling state. The erosion function of Kongozo held absolute advantage in this kind of close-range grinding contest.
Erosion. Fragmentation. Steady reduction of the available ceiling.
Feeling the various wrong sensations building in his body, even someone as iron-made as Yamamoto tightened his jaw without realizing it.
But that only seemed to push him further.
"Ha! Good. Then let's see which of us breaks first!"
He stared straight back and poured more fuel into the already-unstable fire of his reiatsu.
The boiling reiatsu began to expand. The entire Rukongai district was already ablaze from Zanka no Tachi. And now, with his emotional temperature climbing, the transformation in the surrounding world accelerated.
One specific district first. Then the adjacent areas. Then racing outward from those, moving in all directions at once, like a painted canvas catching fire from one end: everything it touched was rendered in a heat that could not be shed, heading toward the single destination called ash.
Tosen's voice was trembling somewhere below.
"Aizen-sama..."
Aizen Sosuke responded calmly.
"There is no need for alarm. This is simply the power Captain-Commander Yamamoto was already suppressing, finally appearing in its true form."
Zanka no Tachi.
The reason it appeared so rarely, at its root, was that the heat and light it radiated were enough to evaporate every drop of moisture in Soul Society. Left unchecked over time, that heat would keep spreading, eventually setting the entire world aflame. Eventually reaching all three realms.
"That the Captain-Commander has maintained suppression until this moment. What mercy."
In other words: the heat was spreading. Expanding.
Which also meant Yamamoto had now fully released the restraints he had kept on himself.
Continuously burned and consumed, and now feeling the genuine threat closing in, Yamamoto could no longer hold back the fire in the deepest part of him.
Hiss.
A searing hiss, and the blazing light wrapped around his body, enveloping Matsushita Yusuke inside it.
"This is the Captain-Commander's true strength... though perhaps even now it isn't fully released."
Hearing Aizen's quiet observation, Tosen could not help swallowing. He could feel his own lips beginning to crack. His voice was slightly unsteady.
"Should we..."
"No."
Aizen said it flatly.
"This too was anticipated. And Tosen: do not let your attention drift toward things that are not your concern. Remember what we came here to do."
At almost exactly the same moment.
CLANG!
A clear, ringing sound, and with it the certain meaning: someone's constructed defense had been completely broken through.
The contest between the two sides reached its conclusion.
Who won?
CRACK.
Yamamoto's palm moved further, pressing directly against Matsushita Yusuke's skin.
"I win."
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