Chapter 293: Where the Talent Lives
Matsushita Yusuke stood hidden in the rain and watched in silence.
The orange-haired kid kept staring into the empty space where his father had been, working through a continuous stream of "idiot," "no backbone," and "nothing like a real father" until two small girls came running out and dragged him back inside.
So that was the current state of the Kurosaki household.
Unexpected at first consideration. Less so when he actually thought it through.
The reason was simple.
Masaki was gone.
In the truest sense, she had been the center of gravity for that family. Everything had moved around her -- Isshin's entire way of being, and all three children's upbringing, the education, the day-to-day management of the household. With the mother gone, the effect was not small.
By timeline, this had happened roughly a year ago.
Yhwach, working according to a 999-year cycle, had conducted a Auswählen across the world as part of the process of reclaiming his own power. Masaki, as one of those selected, had lost her abilities in that moment -- and in the vulnerability that followed, a Hollow attack she would otherwise have survived took her life while she was trying to protect Ichigo.
None of the mechanism was difficult to understand.
And from the position of someone who had known it was coming --
Matsushita Yusuke could have prevented it. Stopping a Hollow that hadn't even reached Arrancar level would have cost him nothing. A passing errand.
But he hadn't been paying attention to that thread. At the time, there had been other things demanding his focus.
Looking back on it now, he found no regret in the decision.
Because.
Ichigo Kurosaki's development path -- it was better to leave it observable.
From the perspective of the original story, Ichigo was essentially a teenager who hadn't finished growing. His view of the world, his sense of self, his fundamental way of thinking -- all of it was still being formed. Which meant the people and events that moved through his life during this period had an outsized impact on everything that followed.
Masaki's death was going to be the most significant of those influences. From this point forward, this particular kid had a complicated relationship with rain. A quality of quiet that hadn't been there before.
Compared to the brilliantly positive, mother-raised, emotionally intact version -- this Ichigo was considerably more legible. The weight he carried was visible, and visible things were easier to read.
Of course, Matsushita Yusuke also held a second interpretation of what had happened.
Through this, Yhwach had given Ichigo a reason to develop a visceral aversion to Quincy power itself.
The Auswählen hadn't just removed Masaki's abilities. It had involved a reiatsu disturbance of specific character. Similar to what Matsushita Yusuke had felt years earlier, standing at the door of a hospital nursery -- the three forces inside Ichigo had always been present and capable of activation at any moment. What the external pressure of the Auswählen might pull out of him was something Matsushita Yusuke was genuinely curious about.
But the primary purpose of this line of thinking was simpler.
Establish the hatred between Ichigo and Yhwach.
Both of them traced their grievance back to the same source -- a mother's death. With that foundation confirmed, everything that followed in Ichigo's behavior and judgment had a clear frame of reference.
That said.
Stating all of this plainly, with Ichigo as the subject, was admittedly a little cruel.
"Sorry about that."
If Matsushita Yusuke had the kind of authority the Soul King exercised, he would not have minded giving Ichigo a life without this particular weight in it.
But the reality was that in the current position -- a situation that required careful navigation with no margin for strategic error -- he had to operate the way Aizen operated. Make precise judgments. Stay ahead of what was coming.
The light inside the house came on.
Matsushita Yusuke moved forward slowly, stopping at a position near the window.
As a spiritual being he was naturally invisible to ordinary people. But someone with unusual spiritual aptitude was a different matter -- and Ichigo's three-way constitution made him, even now, capable of sensing things he had no conscious framework for. So Matsushita Yusuke kept his distance and stayed a little further back than he might otherwise have.
The Kurosaki living room came into view.
The conversation inside, carried on the movement of reiatsu in the air, reached him without gaps.
"That guy is completely unbelievable!"
The words apparently weren't enough. Ichigo clenched his right fist and hit the table.
The water glass on the surface shook.
"I -- I don't mind. With my brother here, and Yuzu, I think that's... enough."
The black-haired girl had both hands pressed to the table, fingers knotted together, producing a smile that was doing more work than it should have had to.
It was gracious. But she was still a child, and the emotions underneath it were not entirely contained.
A birthday without a mother and without a father. Just siblings keeping each other company. That was apparently what the Kurosaki household looked like now.
Karin took a breath and stood.
"Well -- I'll go get the cake. Today is my birthday, so -- we might as well actually be happy."
Yuzu immediately grabbed her arm and said, loudly, that there was absolutely no way she was going to get her own birthday cake and pushed her back down.
"Brother!"
"Right, I'll -- I'll get it!"
Ichigo ran to the kitchen, came back with a cake that had been prepared in advance.
That was how it should have gone.
"Um -- why aren't there any candles?"
Yuzu leaned over and was going through the box alongside him, equally confused.
"And the forks don't match the headcount. Brother, where exactly did you buy this?"
"The shop Yuzu mentioned before was closed, so I found another one last minute--"
"You should have told me something like that in advance! I would have come with you!"
"I know, I'm sorry--"
He was visibly older than both of them, but in terms of managing the practical details of life, Ichigo appeared to be running several points below his two younger sisters.
Karin watched the two of them bicker, and something about the scene -- the noise, the complete inability of her brother to navigate a simple grocery run -- seemed to work on the gloom that had been sitting in her chest. The tension in her expression began to loosen.
She rested her chin on her right hand and looked at them from across the table, and eventually a small, involuntary laugh escaped her.
"All right, all right -- chopsticks. Let's just use chopsticks! There's nobody else here, it's just the three of us, so why are we being so careful about it?"
Ichigo pressed his lips together slightly and didn't say anything.
The eldest son's pride made it difficult for him to accept the graceful exit his sister was offering. Her consideration was genuine and the gesture was thoughtful, but accepting it meant acknowledging the failure, and that sat somewhere uncomfortable.
Then --
Ding-dong.
The doorbell.
All three of them looked at each other.
A second of silence, and then everyone spoke at once.
"At this hour?!"
"We put out the closed sign, didn't we? We're not taking patients now!"
"Do we just not answer?"
"We can't do that! What if it's an emergency? Even if we can't help, we have to tell them to go to a proper hospital!"
There were moments, in an honest assessment, where the absence of Kurosaki Isshin made the house genuinely difficult to hold together. Three kids managing the full scope of the situation on their own had its limits.
Fortunately.
When the doorbell rang again, a different voice came from outside.
"Hello -- delivery!"
After another moment, Ichigo moved cautiously to the door and pushed it open just a crack, his expression tightly guarded.
"Y -- yeah, um..."
He started to say something while still observing.
The figure outside wore dark green work clothes under a waterproof rain cover, and a long flat-brimmed cap pulled down low over the face. The light caught the lower half -- Ichigo could see from the nose down, and nothing more.
And then.
Young. Noticeably younger-looking than Kurosaki Isshin at any rate.
But the voice from a moment ago had been oddly deep. Hard to reconcile the two impressions.
Before he could form a clearer read on it, the figure gently raised the item in their hands.
"Is this the Kurosaki Isshin residence?"
"Uh? Yeah, yes, it is--"
"Please sign here. He placed an advance order for this -- it's a cake."
A cake.
Ichigo blinked. His gaze moved from the receipt to the packaging bag sitting beside the figure.
Insulated outer layer. A logo he didn't recognize. If he was being completely honest -- this did not look like a standard cake box.
Which also meant.
It was not cheap.
"Uh?! But we -- "
"The cake and delivery fee were both prepaid. Nothing to worry about."
The figure removed the receipt from Ichigo's hand with practiced ease -- even though Ichigo hadn't actually finished writing his name.
The square box was pressed into Ichigo's arms. A half-step back. A small, downward tilt of the cap.
"Happy birthday."
"W -- wait!"
On reflex, Ichigo stepped forward and grabbed the sleeve with his left hand.
Karin and Yuzu had crowded in behind him by now, watching, clearly uncertain whether the two of them were arguing.
Ichigo fumbled with the words for a moment, visibly aware of how it sounded even as he was saying it, and then -- with the particular hesitation of someone about to say something that might not land -- quietly asked:
"Have we... met before? Somewhere?"
Coming from most people, it would have read as an extremely awkward line.
But a ten-year-old genuinely didn't say things like that unless they meant them.
So this was something else. Honest instinct pushing its way out -- Ichigo's expression had gone to a specific kind of uncertain that looked like someone clutching something they didn't want to let go of, a life ring in deep water.
For the delivery worker who was actually Matsushita Yusuke in a cap and rain gear, the development had produced its own version of the same feeling.
The plan had been simple. Three kids looking a little miserable on a birthday night. Leave a cake. Go.
And instead this kid had grabbed his sleeve.
Something wrong here.
Have we met somewhere?
Well. Yes, technically.
But that had been the day Ichigo was born. He hadn't even had his eyes open. How was this working?
Reiatsu sensitivity? But his actual skill at channeling the stuff was rough by any measure--
Wait.
Matsushita Yusuke caught the thread.
The reason his reiatsu control was rough was that all three of his internal forces were constantly pushing against each other -- consuming most of his available output in the process of mutual suppression, leaving him with only the residual to actually use.
In a certain sense, right up until the moment in the Royal Palace where Nimaiya Oetsu reforged his Zanpakuto -- Ichigo had been fighting every battle using something close to a restricted state. The exhausted remainder after three powers canceled most of each other out.
Somehow nobody in Soul Society had ever noticed.
Which said something specific about Ichigo's instincts. The intuitive efficiency he managed with what was left over was, in its own quiet way, genuinely extreme.
And right now?
The three forces were still in mutual suppression, none of them dominant. No active trigger had been pulled. But with the internal conflict balanced at equilibrium rather than any one force asserting itself -- maybe that was exactly what was producing the heightened sensitivity. A stillness in the center that let everything else flow outward.
Matsushita Yusuke gave a small, slow nod. The expression on the part of his face the cap didn't cover shifted into something that was genuinely interested.
Every interaction with this kid produced some small, unexpected discovery.
The child of fate. Even just being near you, you learn things.
He let out a quiet breath, half-turned, and then reached over with his right hand and gave Ichigo a light pat on the head.
"Who knows. Maybe we'll run into each other again sometime." A pause. "Stay strong, Ichigo."
Then he was gone.
Matsushita Yusuke's figure came apart from the outside in -- dissolved into a scatter of pale blue reishi fragments that drifted outward with the rain, caught the wind, and disappeared completely.
"...?!"
One moment there was a person standing there. The next moment there wasn't.
For Ichigo, who had never encountered anything like this, the experience was approximately equivalent to watching someone vanish in broad daylight. His brain was not handling it smoothly.
"Aah -- AAAH!"
"Brother, what's wrong?!"
"The guy just now -- the delivery guy -- he MELTED!"
"Didn't the delivery person just walk away? Right, Karin?"
"Yeah -- anyway, forget that. Dad said he was busy, but he still ordered all this for us. I know this cake shop. It's actually really famous."
Neither of his sisters was taking his side on this, and Ichigo was clearly having some trouble accepting it.
"He disappeared! He literally disappeared right there in front of me!"
From not far away, Matsushita Yusuke was already watching and felt a quiet sigh come out of him.
Exceptionally high spirit sight was not always an advantage. Karin and Yuzu clearly didn't have it to the same degree -- and right now, that was the more comfortable position to be in.
The original intention had been to observe how Ichigo was developing.
An unexpected direct contact had occurred.
But under the circumstances -- this probably counted as a completed visit.
Matsushita Yusuke exhaled, and half-turned away.
He would shelve the monitoring of Ichigo Kurosaki for now. The next checkpoint would probably be just before the main story started.
After all.
He was also a man about to become a father.