The blood-soaked figure shot out of the dust cloud with terrifying speed. In a completely unorthodox maneuver, Lu Li snatched Yamamoto's wrist mid-air, violently contorting his body at an impossible angle.
His heavily corded, muscular legs clamped down viciously—one locking around the Captain-Commander's neck, the other trapping his chest. Using the leverage from the wrist grip, Lu Li arched backward with immense force.
It was a perfectly executed flying armbar.
Watching from the sidelines, Yoruichi's golden eyes widened in shock. She had never expected a crude brawler like Lu Li to utilize such a highly technical, complex grappling submission.
Yet, the Captain-Commander wasn't dragged to the floor. Remaining perfectly upright, Yamamoto merely tilted his head slightly, his ancient eyes completely calm as he looked at the boy wrapped around his arm.
"Fascinating. Brat, if you and I possessed the exact same Reiatsu, you would have already won."
Before Yamamoto could follow up with a 'but', Lu Li voluntarily disengaged the armbar. Kicking off the old man's chest, he landed gracefully and immediately dropped back into a fighting stance.
"Oh? What is the meaning of this?" Yamamoto asked, mildly curious.
Lu Li's eyes were practically burning with euphoric battle lust. He flashed a feral, bloodstained grin.
"This kind of victory isn't my style. Besides, if you hadn't voluntarily let go of my ankle, I would have never been able to launch that counter-grapple."
It was the absolute truth. When executing a brutal slam, if the attacker possessed enough overwhelming force to completely incapacitate their target, the optimal play was to release the grip upon impact to avoid absorbing the violent kinetic recoil.
But Yamamoto obviously didn't care about recoil. Furthermore, he possessed flawless, surgical control over his own strength; he had specifically calibrated the slam to severely injure Lu Li without killing him outright. Strictly speaking, Yamamoto had absolutely zero mechanical reason to release his grip.
From the exact microsecond Lu Li's ankle was seized mid-air, he had lost. The Captain-Commander had only released him under the assumption that the exchange was over, so he could assess the damage. Therefore, Lu Li considered his armbar a cheap shot.
Hearing this, Yamamoto let out a booming, hearty laugh.
"Hahaha... Brat, I am starting to genuinely like you."
He looked at the fresh blood streaming down Lu Li's face. The crimson liquid painted the boy's chiseled torso, snaking through the deep crevices of his hyper-developed musculature. Coupled with the fanatical, burning intensity in his pitch-black eyes, the boy didn't look pathetic or beaten; he looked like an Asura—a terrifying god of war freshly stepped out of a blood-soaked myth.
"Do you still wish to exchange blows with me head-on?" Yamamoto asked, smoothly shifting back into a Hakuda stance.
Lu Li took a deep, shuddering breath. His war-drum heart pumped violently, forcing oxygen and adrenaline into his aching limbs. Despite bracing for the initial impact, his head had still sustained significant blunt-force trauma from the slam.
He was drenched in his own blood, yet he had never felt so violently, vividly lucid. Standing face-to-face with the absolute strongest Soul Reaper in existence, he could feel every single cell in his body screaming that he was alive.
"Of course. Let's start round two."
Yamamoto's eyes filled with deep admiration. In the next microsecond, both of their figures completely vanished.
The heavy, percussive thud of rapid footwork hammered against the wooden floorboards. The deafening, rapid-fire crack of fists colliding with flesh and bone echoed violently through the air.
Their Shunpo bursts were so extreme, and their exchanges so blistering fast, that the vast majority of the first-year students couldn't even track their movements. All they could see were two blurry silhouettes violently careening across the dojo, leaving behind a terrifying symphony of shockwaves.
"He's actually keeping up with the Captain-Commander's movements..." Yoruichi whispered in absolute disbelief.
As the person who understood Lu Li's current limits the most, she was utterly terrified. She knew for a fact that in terms of sheer Shunpo velocity and foundational Hakuda mechanics, Lu Li was completely eclipsed by Yamamoto.
Yet, unlike their initial clash, Lu Li wasn't just surviving. He was flawlessly parrying the old man's onslaught and actively carving out microscopic windows to launch his own counterattacks!
Did he really evolve that much in the span of a single minute?!
Aizen watched the spar with deeply serious eyes. He had fully expected a completely one-sided massacre. But aside from the initial brutal takedown, Lu Li was somehow slowly "adapting" to the rhythm.
Aizen's analytical eye was far more venomous than Yoruichi's. He knew Lu Li's core Hakuda techniques hadn't magically transcended in a few seconds. Lu Li was simply adapting to the terrifying, chaotic cadence of the Captain-Commander's assault.
In every single microscopic combat scenario, Lu Li was making the absolute, mathematically perfect defensive choice. His unparalleled combat instinct allowed him to desperately thread the needle, constantly narrowly avoiding instant death, even while his overall technique was being violently suppressed.
Lu Li... just where is your limit?
BOOM—!
Amidst an earth-shattering detonation, a figure was violently blasted across the hall, slamming directly into the reinforced wall and cratering the stone.
The entire class gasped, their eyes snapping to the impact zone. Lu Li, shirtless and battered, slowly slid down the wall, collapsing heavily onto the floorboards.
This time, he couldn't get back up.
In the end, two thousand years of blood-soaked combat experience and the absolute pinnacle of Hakuda technique were insurmountable. During the blistering rapid-fire exchange, Yamamoto had found a microscopic flaw and delivered a single, decisive blow that completely shattered Lu Li's defense.
Aizen quickly stepped forward to help Lu Li sit up.
In the center of the dojo, Yamamoto slowly lowered his fists. He glanced down at his own chest, directly over his heart.
In that final, chaotic exchange, the boy had actually managed to land a strike on him. However, before Lu Li could channel his kinetic force into the blow, Yamamoto had already launched him across the room.
The Captain-Commander walked over to his discarded haori and threw it back over his shoulders. Without looking back at Lu Li, he spoke.
"Use your Kaido to heal yourself. I will be returning tomorrow and the day after."
Hearing this, Lu Li, who was currently painstakingly replaying the bout in his mind to locate his flaws, felt his eyes light up with manic joy.
He wasn't disheartened by the brutal defeat. But he also refused to accept that just because his opponent was a two-thousand-year-old monster, he was supposed to lose.
The fact that he was granted multiple opportunities to actively challenge the absolute zenith of the Soul Society... nothing in the universe could excite him more.
...
"Sosuke, what do you think it'll take for me to beat the Captain-Commander?" Lu Li asked from his bed later that evening, deeply lost in thought.
Aizen stared at him in utter exasperation.
"Lu Li, has your ego completely detached from reality? That is the Captain-Commander. The undisputed strongest Soul Reaper of the last two millennia."
To Aizen, Yamamoto's Hakuda technique existed on an entirely different dimensional plane than Lu Li's. Not to mention the sheer, terrifying disparity in their Shunpo speed. The fact that Lu Li had survived the second exchange for as long as he did was already a miracle. Hearing the guy genuinely plot how to defeat the Captain-Commander was bordering on insanity.
"Sosuke, haven't you ever heard the saying?"
"What saying?"
"A Soul Reaper who doesn't want to beat the Captain-Commander isn't a good Soul Reaper," Lu Li stated with absolute seriousness.
"I understand your desire to reach the pinnacle of Hakuda, but defeating the Captain-Commander right now is an impossibility," Aizen analyzed calmly. "It's not that I doubt your combat talent, Lu Li. It's that there is a fundamental, biological disparity between the two of you."
"What disparity? Combat experience?"
"That is certainly one factor. But more importantly, even if the Captain-Commander forcibly suppressed his Reiatsu to match yours for the sake of training, his physical constitution, his dynamic visual acuity, and his neural reflex velocity exist on an entirely different spectrum."
Lu Li's eyes widened slightly in realization.
Aizen was absolutely right. He hadn't considered that.
Reiatsu output could be artificially lowered. But the physical benefits of centuries of relentless Reiatsu cultivation—the iron-forged musculature, the supernatural eyesight, the god-like reaction time—could not simply be turned off.
To use an analogy, Yamamoto was essentially a max-level boss with hundreds of base stat points, artificially limiting his attack power to spar with a low-level player. But his passive buffs from those stats were still fully active.
To the Captain-Commander, Lu Li's maximum speed probably looked like it was moving in slow motion. Strictly speaking, it was never a "matched-Reiatsu" duel to begin with.
Even stripping away Yamamoto's two millennia of technique, his sheer base-stat advantage was an overwhelming, crushing force.
"I see..." Lu Li nodded thoughtfully.
Then, ignoring Aizen's increasingly concerned stare, Lu Li flashed a massive, manic grin.
"But doesn't that just make it infinitely more challenging?"
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