Chapter 234: Captain-Commander, I Think It's Time to Show You What I'm Made Of
Though the inside of his head was in open revolt, the outside projected nothing but composure.
Like the ceiling collapsing in front of him was the kind of thing Matsushita Yusuke could watch without blinking. Every bit of Aizen's teaching showed in moments like this.
The performance was good enough that even Sasakibe Chojiro found himself looking twice.
Because technically, Matsushita Yusuke was a person of interest under formal suspicion.
And yet this person was acting far too settled. Like someone who already knew how this ended.
With those thoughts still working through him, Sasakibe stepped forward and gave Matsushita Yusuke's shoulder a light tap.
"If you'll come this way... thank you for your cooperation."
The response was a nod that had considerably more dignity than the circumstances called for. Less like someone being escorted in under suspicion, more like someone being graciously invited inside.
Walking in.
What met him was not the familiar faces of Squad 9.
Matsushita Yusuke's gaze moved across the strangers in front of him, uniformed and serious-faced, and settled into an expression of quiet assessment.
Something was different.
Under normal circumstances, Matsushita Yusuke made no shortage of visits to Squad 9 through the cover of Kyoka Suigetsu. The personnel composition here, the general organizational structure, were things he understood clearly.
Right now, none of those familiar faces were present.
Everyone standing in this room was a stranger.
"Squad 1 types? No, that doesn't quite fit either. The people under Yamamoto tend toward the administrative side. These eyes are harder than that."
The answer came quickly.
Central 46's own enforcement unit. Their own private force.
Not an unusual thing to exist: the original story had shown that Soul Society maintained specific arrangements to handle situations just like this one. Every graduating class from Shin'o Academy produced Shinigami who, facing various pressures and temptations, eventually left standard duties and entered Central 46's direct service.
No particular standout in the strength department, but numbers could compensate.
How many were there now?
"Thirty... no, more like fifty."
A group that size, working in combination, could theoretically suppress a captain.
Naturally, he was not included in that calculation.
Matsushita Yusuke swept a look across the room, then said in a perfectly level tone:
"What are all these people doing here? You think I'm going to walk out the front door otherwise?"
"Also a necessary measure."
"And what comes after? My hands are already bound. What's next, nail down my tongue? Gouge out my eyes? Some other more creative approach?"
Spending enough time near Soifon had given him an education in just how extensive Soul Society's interrogation methods could be. The Onmitsukido had occasion to be involved in this line of work from time to time, and none of it was pleasant.
Faced with the question, Sasakibe flinched slightly, and a visible hesitation crossed his face.
Fortunately the awkward moment didn't last long.
Because a calm, weighty voice came from nearby.
"It will not need to go that far. But necessary measures are necessary."
Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni walked in, moving with purpose. Neck wrapped in neat bandages, hair and beard caught in motion, projecting the quiet authority of someone who did not need to announce their irritation because the irritation announced itself.
Matsushita Yusuke turned to face him. His expression remained exactly as it had been.
"Captain-Commander, I—"
CRACK!!!
The sentence didn't finish.
Because Yamamoto, moving with the directness of someone settling a personal score, strode forward and seized Matsushita Yusuke's head in his palm.
He just... grabbed it. Right there, without warning.
The sudden movement sharpened the already-tense atmosphere into something more charged.
Yamamoto closed his fingers. He looked down at Matsushita Yusuke struggling and making sounds of genuine pain.
A few seconds, and he released, stepping back half a pace.
"..."
No words. But his brow was knotted into something severe.
Sasakibe moved close and murmured quietly.
"Is it different?"
"Mm..."
An exchange that sounded like a riddle to anyone else. Matsushita Yusuke understood it precisely.
Yamamoto was, at his core, a man who trusted action over words. He had always preferred to find things out with his hands rather than with speeches.
Decades of combat experience and the very clear memory of nearly crushing this exact head during their earlier exchange had given him confidence: he could make a direct judgment from touch.
Before reaching in, he had believed Matsushita Yusuke carried significant suspicion.
But now something didn't line up.
The feel was completely different. Had his analysis been wrong?
Matsushita Yusuke held his own head, swayed as he got up, and gritted his teeth.
"Captain-Commander! Are you trying to finish me off?!"
"...My apologies."
Here was the thing: Kyoka Suigetsu's ability was not simply visual camouflage.
With only three targets to maintain the illusion for, the quality of the effect scaled dramatically upward. Matsushita Yusuke's voice, appearance, and now the tactile impression his body produced when touched were all being distorted by the illusion simultaneously.
Combining illusion with information gaps and careful planning was a core reason the Club had been operating this long without exposure.
Yamamoto, however, was not backing off.
His verbal position was a concession. His actual behavior was not.
Because from a purely factual standpoint, the suspicion wasn't fully cleared.
"I believe you were involved in a malicious incident. Until we have a result, you are in custody."
What could you say to an authority like this. Matsushita Yusuke found no angle to work with facing that kind of absolute certainty. He could only furrow his brow and argue:
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Then I will help you understand."
CLANG!
Yamamoto drew his sword and looked at Matsushita Yusuke with cold eyes.
"Fight me again."
Words were secondary. What Yamamoto believed was his own hands and blade.
Standing in position without speaking, he paced slowly forward, then raised his left hand slightly, gesturing toward Matsushita Yusuke.
Not Kido. Nothing that sophisticated.
Simply taking a concentrated burst of dense reiatsu and releasing it in a focused point, like a compressed pulse.
Technically it was almost embarrassingly simple. For someone of Yamamoto's caliber, that was precisely why it worked efficiently.
The reiatsu pulse struck Matsushita Yusuke's wrists, blasting apart the layers of bandage wrapped around them.
The binding was nearly impossible to break from the inside, but easily unraveled by external force. The practical effect was efficient.
"One more fight. Just you and me."
Yamamoto walked in a slow arc, eyes on Matsushita Yusuke.
"Appearance, bone structure, voice: all of these can be manufactured. But one thing is genuinely impossible to conceal or disguise."
That being...
"Movement. And habit."
The angle of force release in combat. The subtle precisions in footwork.
For someone with Yamamoto's experience, these told you more than anything a person did in their ordinary moments.
Adding up the two previous exchanges, Yamamoto had enough data points to build a working judgment. He had filed away a series of specific small patterns and was confident: this line of investigation could be pushed forward.
His whole manner of delivery had carried a prosecutorial weight from the start, as though the conclusion was already written.
Which gave Matsushita Yusuke something of a headache.
The old man was proving surprisingly difficult to redirect.
He let his outward expression show the frustration.
"Does it really have to be a fight? I'm going to end up dead."
"I will hold back, naturally... but if you are confirmed to be the one responsible, then naturally I will not!"
Absolutely no room for negotiation. Matsushita Yusuke pressed his lips together silently and exhaled.
He took his sword back from a squad member nearby and stretched out briefly.
"Then, Captain-Commander, how would you like to start?"
"Do as you wish!"
Before the words were even out.
Yamamoto was already coming straight at him.
Reiatsu bloomed belatedly but with spiraling flame light coiling around him, making him look like something that had stepped out of another world.
The old man's bearing was considerably more ferocious than usual. Part of that was testing. Part of it was probably venting.
Matsushita Yusuke clicked his tongue internally.
Bankai: Ichion Enpo!
Azure reiatsu rippled outward through the air in an instant, wave-like patterns expanding visibly in all directions. Sasakibe Chojiro's pupils contracted.
Here it comes.
Matsushita Yusuke was no weakling. Ichion Enpo, by any assessment currently available in this building, was an extremely troublesome ability to face.
"Anyone who doesn't want to be caught inside this, move back now!"
By prior precedent, Yusuke's Bankai range could reach several kilometers. Which meant, if he chose, he could encompass not just Squad 9's barracks but a substantial fraction of the Seireitei in one sweep.
That was exactly what Sasakibe was afraid of. Even a cornered animal would fight back: a captain with nothing to lose was considerably more dangerous. If Matsushita Yusuke suddenly turned hostile, Yamamoto's presence might contain it before catastrophe, but the collateral was not something to take lightly.
But what actually happened was the opposite of the expected.
Ichion Enpo's range did not expand.
It contracted.
"...?"
It was so counterintuitive that even Sasakibe's expression shifted into something like shock.
What was this? No one had ever heard of Ichion Enpo pulling inward.
"You all seem to have some rather unrealistic misconceptions about this ability."
Matsushita Yusuke stood immersed in the azure current, expression composed and serious, voice carrying a quality that was difficult to put a word to.
"If my ability can expand outward, why can't it pull inward? Reiatsu control is inherently two-directional. Defining the full range of what something can do from a single observed behavior is its own kind of arrogance."
As he spoke, the reishi field that had already settled over the people in the room began contracting further. The ambient light drew in and pulsed softly, and one by one the bystanders were peeled away, excluded from the boundary, until only Matsushita Yusuke and Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni remained within.
The abrupt change in environment produced unmistakable reactions in everyone.
The most direct was Yamamoto himself.
The old man now moved like someone whose hands and feet had been bound, all freedom of independent action suddenly gone.
"When you contract the range and pull everything inward, you compress all the reishi that was spread outward into an extremely dense state. Let me put it plainly. If the normal reishi concentration in the air out there is like air... and the standard domain range is like water... then what it is right now..."
Is something close to hardened concrete.
Matsushita Yusuke looked at everything in front of him with calm indifference, and ignored the ring of stunned expressions from outside.
Because the truth of it was this: a pure Bankai was never the ceiling. A genuinely strong person would develop second-level applications from the original foundation, extending into uses that had not been seen before.
And this was exactly why Matsushita Yusuke had decided to expose this particular piece of himself in this moment: to redirect the investigation by first completely overturning the investigators' existing mental model of who they were dealing with.
"Coming at me again and again like this... I think it's time I showed you what I'm made of, Captain-Commander."
He raised his head slightly and snapped his fingers.
Inside the domain, Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni was immediately sent careening like a pinball ricocheting in three dimensions, bounced in every direction at once, his expression cycling through degrees of something that could only be described as thoroughly undignified.
If you're enjoying the story, toss a Power Stone or drop a review — it helps more than you'd think.
Advance chapters → patreon.com/Eatinpieces