"Roll, Bokugetsuin (Ink Moon Halo)!"
Inside the Dangai (Precipice World), Yushima Ōko released his zanpakutō. Until today, he'd never truly fought a Captain-class Shinigami in earnest—but from now on, he'd be able to say he had.
"Taikō Shiu (Receding Crimson Time Rain)!"
Yushima plunged his zanpakutō into the ring of reishi cascading around him like a waterfall. The blade's power surged to life, and that reishi began to ceaselessly transform into pure reiatsu, flowing back through the zanpakutō and into Yushima's body.
Feeling Yushima's reiatsu climbing higher and higher, Sakahone Saizō, as a battle-hardened first-generation Captain, had no trouble seeing what kind of ability he was facing.
"Absorbing your enemy's reiatsu for yourself? Heh… not a bad ability."
He let out a cold laugh. Coming from that savage age, having clawed his way up through oceans of corpses, he'd seen all kinds of strange powers.
Absorb reiatsu?
Then he'd just cut him down up close. Among the originals, there wasn't a single one who didn't have the real stuff.
"Gokumei: Rakukotsu (Prison Howl: Joyous Bones)!"
A layer of pink reishi shimmered into existence around Sakahone's body, then quickly sank into him and vanished.
"I declare: with this strike, I'll take your left arm."
Even as Sakahone's voice still echoed in the air where he'd been, his body had already appeared in front of Yushima Ōko. His zanpakutō was about to bite into Yushima's left arm—
And then Yushima vanished.
Or, more precisely, his whole body slipped into another space he had created on the fly.
Raikū.
Standing within the space he had fashioned for himself, Yushima replayed Sakahone Saizō's attack in his mind, still a little shaken.
Fast. Way too fast.
If he hadn't honed the speed at which he could manifest his spatial ability to the peak over these last few hundred years, that strike really would have taken his arm.
Praise Shuuichi-sama. All thanks to Shuuichi-sama. The only reason he had drilled every basic aspect of Bokugetsuin's power to such an obsessive degree was Shuuichi-sama's training plan.
Yushima didn't even want to imagine what he would look like after this fight if he hadn't brought Raikū up to this level.
"Probably in Hell, huh…"
He thought back to what Shuuichi-sama had told him before about Hell and muttered to himself.
Then, within this extradimensional space, Yushima swept his zanpakutō in a circle through the air.
"Raikū: Tahkō (Raikū: Stepping Passage)!"
In that instant, everything within his field of vision—spanning the World of the Living, the Dangai, and parts of Soul Society—became a lattice of coordinates. Every location he had overwritten with his spatial ability over seven years in Soul Society and hundreds of years in the Dangai turned, all at once, into a web of doors he could walk through at will.
All it took was a thought, and he could step into any one of them.
Yushima chose the space behind Sakahone Saizō.
"I see now. Freely flitting through space like that is part of your zanpakutō's power as well, huh… To think I almost mistook it for some special technique of Soul Society."
Sakahone's expression remained as self-assured as ever when he saw Yushima slip away in that strange manner. It was as if he had expected Yushima to disappear all along.
"This is your fault. Inside the Dangai, no Shinigami can fight at full power. Because of the layered time streams, the stronger your reiatsu, the more pressure you take.
Just being able to endure this long here already proves my skill—but that's where it ends. You, first-generation Captain Sakahone Saizō, have no way of matching me, when I'm sitting safely in a different space where my reiatsu isn't affected at all!"
Within his own dimension, Yushima Ōko had not inherited Higashino Shuuichi's "silent in battle" passive. Even with nobody watching, this man who always longed to show off still couldn't help voicing his feelings.
"The hands of a thousand, the untouchable hands that reach for the stillness, the archer of the sky no light can reflect, the path where radiance falls, the wind that stokes the spark—gather without doubt, obey my command! Light orbs, eight-formed, ninefold paths, heavenly scripture, swift treasure, great wheel, o gray turrets, draw and loose into the distance, then vanish, pure and bright…
Hadō 91: Senju Kōten Taihō (Thousand-Hand Bright Heaven Culling Cannon)!"
No flashy extra tricks—Higashino Shuuichi had never taught him any of that. Shuuichi's entire plan for Yushima's fighting style was simple: use his absorption to push his reiatsu to the absolute limit, then finish the enemy off with a single, well-chosen Kidō.
With enough reiatsu, even Hadō 1: Shō (Thrust) could potentially obliterate a Captain.
So Yushima had no need to learn a bunch of extra gimmicks.
On this point, he fully agreed with Shuuichi-sama.
Within his solitary space, having completed the full incantation, Yushima directed the now-violent reishi—fat with a portion of Sakahone Saizō's reiatsu—into countless lances of light. Under his guidance, they pierced through space and erupted behind Sakahone.
Yushima was certain that even if Shuuichi-sama were facing this attack, he would have to treat it carefully.
But Sakahone Saizō simply began to "dance" in place.
The dance was anything but graceful. The dancer was anything but pleasant to look at.
But those spears of light were still cut down one by one.
That was the polite way of putting it.
To be blunt, what Yushima actually saw was Sakahone simply unleashing his overwhelming reiatsu, then swinging his zanpakutō to meet each beam in turn, ramming forward reishi so dense it was terrifying and smashing each lance of his Senju Kōten Taihō head-on.
In plain language: there was no technique here. This was pure pay-to-win.
He was paying in what felt like an endless ocean of reiatsu.
It made no sense.
Yushima remembered that even when Shuuichi-sama had come here before, he'd had to constantly burn through his own reiatsu just to keep the pressure of the time currents at bay in order to stay longer in the Dangai.
Even then, he still hadn't been able to remain for very long before having to retreat.
Otherwise, even for Shuuichi-sama, it would have started cutting into the bone.
But look at this Sakahone Saizō. Just because his name meant "Reversed Bone" didn't mean he got to ignore the normal rules, right?
Yushima simply could not wrap his head around it.
Lost in that confusion, he failed to notice the faint white rings that had appeared, one around each of his upper arms.
The fight had to go on.
Seeing that his usual methods weren't enough to finish Sakahone Saizō, Yushima rifled desperately through the tactical guidance Shuuichi-sama had given him.
According to the battle plan Shuuichi had laid out, when facing an enemy, his first option should always be to use overwhelming reiatsu to cast Kidō and take them down. If that proved ineffective, the second option was to use Raikū: Dangai (Raikū: Precipice World) to banish the enemy into the Dangai's depths.
If he couldn't kill them, he'd let the Dangai grind them down.
Unfortunately, for reasons unknown, today's opponent didn't seem the least bit bothered by the Dangai. In here, he moved like he was relaxing in his own living room.
So that plan could be tossed.
Which left only the third method Shuuichi-sama had taught him, not that Yushima had a very rich set of options to begin with.
"Raikū: Kiki (Raikū: Insignia)!"
Yushima drew three circles through the empty air with his zanpakutō. Countless hazy images flickered into being around the blade. Anyone looking closely would have noticed that these scenes were everything that had happened in the Dangai since the moment Sakahone Saizō entered Yushima's field of view.
Originally, this ability of Raikū could only record what happened inside the spaces Yushima himself had created.
But over the hundreds of years he'd spent in the Dangai, Yushima had successfully overlapped his spatial domain with the Dangai itself.
That had led to his second ability, Raikū: Dangai—and it had given him the right to overwrite anything that happened within the Dangai.
In other words, the Dangai really was like Yushima's second home. That wasn't just a joke.
Once he had recorded everything that had occurred, he could replay those events in their original form, exactly as they had happened.
"Gokumei: Hikotsu (Prison Howl: Sorrowful Bones)!"
Yushima's voice echoed through the extradimensional space. In the Dangai, the death-tinged reishi once more came crashing down in a waterfall around Sakahone Saizō.
This time, however, it was Sakahone trapped in the center, not Yushima.
"Didn't expect that. You really do have some tricks."
Even so, Sakahone Saizō's confidence remained unshaken. He even had time to pay Yushima a small, mocking compliment.
"Gokumei: Rakukotsu (Prison Howl: Joyous Bones)!"
Inside the extradimensional space, completely ignoring Sakahone's taunts, Yushima Ōko swung his blade toward him once more.
And the moment he did, he felt something was… off.
Strange. This slash didn't carry anywhere near the vicious edge of Sakahone's earlier lunge right up into his face. Which suggested something terrifying:
That earlier cut had been executed purely with Sakahone's base strength, not the boost from his zanpakutō's ability.
Worse still, the instant he completed this strike, Yushima noticed a faint white ring on Sakahone's left arm. And at some point, his own body—both arms and both legs—had been wrapped in identical white rings.
"Heh. You noticed, did you?"
Back in the Dangai, even though he couldn't see what Yushima looked like inside that other space, the sudden halt of the attack and the ring that had appeared on his left arm were enough for Sakahone Saizō to roughly guess what Yushima's power did.
An imitator, huh?
Something like that, anyway.
A trash ability, in his opinion.
Sakahone Saizō finally bared his fangs.
"Gokumei: Aikotsu (Prison Howl: Lamenting Bones)!"
Gokumei's power came in three movements—beginning in sorrow, ending in lament.
It started with the blade-tip entering the void, and it finished with that same tip driving into the ground to draw the final line.
Three notes, and the funeral is complete.
In Yushima Ōko's widening pupils, the white rings severed his limbs from his body.
In the space of a heartbeat, he lost all control over his arms and legs.
"What a shame. There was supposed to be a Rakukotsu ring around your neck as well, but since you figured out my ability, I had to trigger it early.
The end result won't be much different, though, right, little junior?"
Sakahone Saizō stood where he was, watching as the sorrowful bones faded and the joyous bones retreated. Yushima Ōko, reduced to a limbless stump, drifted halfway out of his extradimensional shell; just one bloodshot eye could be seen peeking through, staring at Sakahone from the little bubble of space still barely keeping him alive.
He only had his torso and his brain left. With desperate effort, he was still able to manipulate reishi to keep the space around him from collapsing.
If that shield shattered now, in his current state, he'd be swallowed by the Dangai's time currents in the blink of an eye.
"You… You can't be a real first-generation Captain. Who are you, really? What are you trying to do?"
Facing his fate head-on, Yushima Ōko didn't want to die with unanswered questions hanging over him.
He just couldn't believe that a true Captain of the Gotei 13 would go this far against a Shinigami like him, who was still, at least on paper, loyal and "pure."
But what Sakahone Saizō said and did next left him with no choice but to believe.
"If you want to be strict about it, I can't be called a pure Shinigami anymore. I'm a dead man. What you see now is nothing but a soul that someone dragged back.
But so what?
To those in the World of the Living, Shinigami are already just wandering dead souls. So what's the difference between a dead Shinigami and the dead of those dead souls?
Why am I here? It's simple. I was never satisfied with losing to that man back then.
Since someone went to all the trouble of hauling me out of Hell, fulfilling one old wish isn't too much to ask, is it?"
As he spoke, Sakahone turned his back on Yushima and pulled aside the part of his shihakushō that had been hiding it from view.
On his exposed back, Yushima saw a familiar pattern.
It was the same "divine crest" Shuuichi-sama had secretly asked him to study before—the one supposedly used by the Kabuma family, one of the Five Great Noble Houses, to communicate with Hell.
The lines and details were slightly different from the sample Shuuichi had given him, but Yushima was certain the mark on Sakahone's back was also a jinmon (divine sigil).
"Tsk, tsk. From that look in your eyes, I'd say you recognize this little emblem, hm?"
Sakahone closed his shihakushō again, then, in typical fashion, dropped a second depth charge.
"But that's not important. You know what is?
I slipped out early. Behind me, there are still plenty of people who never accepted that defeat to Yamamoto… all of them raring to go."
He chuckled darkly.
"But they might end up disappointed. By the time they finally get here, all they'll see is a Soul Society I've already beaten into the dirt.
Hahahahaha!"
His wild laughter echoed through the Dangai.
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