—————
The news reached him sideways, the way most things about Megumi did — through noise and collateral disruption.
Hatsu was midway through his afternoon patrol briefing when Ōkubo leaned across the bench and said, without preamble, "Your sparring partner broke a wall."
"Which wall."
"Training hall six. Eighth Division. Apparently he—" Ōkubo made a vague, expansive gesture that managed to convey both destruction and enthusiasm. "—released his shikai for the first time and took out the entire eastern partition. Three seats deep into the storage room behind it."
Vice-Captain Sōjun was still speaking at the front of the briefing room. Hatsu kept his eyes forward, his posture unchanged. Beneath the desk, his fingers pressed flat against his thigh.
Shikai.
Of course.
The seeds had been in Megumi for four weeks. Four weeks of roots threading through the man's spiritual architecture, not extracting but existing there, a secondary network of reiatsu pathways woven alongside the native ones. And Shizuka no Hana's roots were not inert conduits. They carried trace amounts of Hatsu's own spiritual signature — his stability, his discipline, the controlled architecture of a mind that understood structure.
Megumi's raw power had never been the issue. The man burned with enough reiatsu to light a bonfire. What he'd lacked was the internal coherence to hear his zanpakutō's voice through the roar of his own spiritual noise. The roots hadn't given him that coherence — they couldn't, that wasn't how the ability worked — but they had, perhaps, imposed enough structural order on the chaos of his inner world to create a moment of clarity.
A moment was all Megumi would have needed. One clear instant of stillness, and that howling, brawling spirit of his would have surged through the gap like water through a cracked dam.
Surprise and inevitability braided together in Hatsu's chest. He'd suspected this was possible — had considered it during his nightly communion with Shizuka no Hana, turning the theoretical implications over like a stone in dark water. But suspicion was not certainty, and the distance between them felt significant now, sitting in a briefing room with Sōjun's measured voice washing over him while somewhere across the Seireitei a man was practicing.
What else can you do? he asked the warmth at his hip. Not in words. In the language before words.
The zanpakutō didn't answer. It rarely did, when the question was one he could answer himself.
—————
The girl arrived on a Tuesday.
Hatsu was in the practice ground at his usual hour — first light, bokken, seventh kata — when the sound of multiple footfalls on the flagstone path interrupted the rhythm. Not one set of feet. Several. And beneath the footsteps, a sound he had learned to identify over the past few weeks with increasing reliability: the particular acoustic signature of suppressed giggling.
He completed the kata's final position. Held it. Breathed.
"Hatsu-san?"
The voice was bright. Confident. Pitched to carry, with an undertone of practiced warmth that suggested its owner was accustomed to being listened to. He turned.
The woman standing at the edge of the practice ground was tall — nearly his height — with auburn hair that fell in loose waves past her shoulders and a figure that her shihakushō was technically concealing and practically advertising. Her zanpakutō hung at her hip in a pale blue cord wrap. Her reiatsu, even at rest, had a languid, expansive quality — the spiritual equivalent of a cat stretching in a sunbeam.
Behind her, clustered near the equipment shed with the transparent nonchalance of people who had absolutely planned to be there, stood four women in Shinigami uniforms. Two he vaguely recognized from the Tenth Division. The others were strangers. All of them were watching him with expressions that ranged from open curiosity to something more evaluative.
"Matsumoto Rangiku," the tall woman said, inclining her head with a courtesy that didn't quite reach her eyes. The eyes were doing something else entirely — measuring him, assessing, cataloguing. "Tenth Division. I hope I'm not interrupting your morning routine."
"You are," Hatsu said.
A pause. One of the women near the shed covered her mouth with her hand.
Matsumoto's smile didn't waver. If anything, it deepened. "I've heard interesting things about you. About your shikai, specifically."
"Word travels."
"It really does." She rested her hand on her zanpakutō's hilt — a mirror of Megumi's gesture from weeks ago, though where Megumi's had been blunt and artless, hers carried the deliberation of someone who understood the visual language of body positioning. "I was hoping you might be willing to spar. If you're not too busy with your…" She glanced at the bokken. "…stick."
The same dismissal Megumi had used. Different delivery. Same intent.
Hatsu set the bokken on the rack. His gaze moved briefly — involuntarily — to the cluster of women by the shed. The giggling had stopped, replaced by a watchful silence. One of them had produced a small notebook. Another was standing on her toes to see over her companion's shoulder.
An entourage.
This was not a spontaneous challenge. This was an event — orchestrated, witnessed, designed to generate precisely the kind of social currency that flowed through the Seireitei's informal networks of gossip and reputation. Matsumoto had come to see his shikai, yes, but she'd also come to be seen seeing it — to position herself in proximity to the interesting new development and let the observation enhance her own social capital.
He understood the game. And he didn't mind. Let them watch. Let them whisper. The attention, properly managed, could serve as cover rather than exposure — the story they'd tell would be about the fight, about the spectacle, about Matsumoto's boldness and his shikai's beauty.
"Alright," he said, and drew his blade.
—————
Matsumoto was better than Megumi.
Not stronger. Not faster. Not more durable — in those categories, the gap between them was considerable, and it favored the absent brawler by a wide margin. But Matsumoto fought with a technical fluency that Megumi had never possessed and probably never would.
Her kidō was crisp. Hadō thirty-three — Sōkatsui — launched with full incantation in the time it took Hatsu to close half the distance between them, the blue fire spiraling with a precision that spoke of genuine study rather than rote repetition. He deflected it with his sealed blade and felt the impact resonate through the steel into his bones. Solid. Well-constructed. The kidō equivalent of good handwriting — not flashy, but fundamentally sound.
Her shunpo was the real problem.
Matsumoto moved with a fluidity that defied her frame. Where Megumi's speed was linear — point A to point B with maximum force — hers was curvilinear, arcing through space in trajectories that made prediction difficult. She flash-stepped behind him, above him, to angles that shouldn't have been accessible from her starting position. Not faster than him, but smoother, her transitions eating less reiatsu per burst, which meant she could sustain the pace longer.
She was also, he realized three exchanges in, deliberately keeping her distance.
Smart. She'd heard about his shikai's melee capability. She'd heard how quickly he'd dismantled Megumi at close range. So she was playing the perimeter — probing with kidō, using shunpo to maintain spacing, forcing him to expend energy closing gaps that she immediately reopened.
Hatsu stopped chasing her.
He planted his feet at the center of the practice ground, raised his sealed blade to a high guard, and waited.
Matsumoto paused mid-shunpo, materializing at the edge of the ground's western boundary. Twenty meters of packed earth between them. Her chest rose and fell with controlled breathing. The smile was gone now — replaced by the same focused intensity he'd seen on Megumi's face, though on hers it wore a different shape. Sharper. More analytical.
"Not going to come to me?" she called.
"No."
She studied him across the distance. The entourage was silent. The one with the notebook had stopped writing.
Matsumoto drew her zanpakutō. The blade was elegant — slimmer than standard, with a gentle curve that suggested it had been forged for speed rather than power. She held it in a two-handed grip that was technically orthodox but carried subtle modifications — the left hand positioned a half-inch lower than academy standard, which would sacrifice some leverage but improve rotational speed on draw cuts.
Good instincts, the grafted perception whispered. But the left shoulder is tight. She compensates by over-rotating the hip on her backswing. Exploitable at close range.
Matsumoto came in.
Not with kidō — with steel. A flash-step that covered the twenty meters in two bursts, arriving at his left flank with a rising diagonal cut aimed at the gap beneath his raised guard. Fast. Clean. The angle was chosen well — it targeted the precise line that a high guard left exposed, and her modified grip gave the strike a whip-like acceleration in its final arc.
Hatsu deflected. Pivoted. Counter-cut toward her trailing hip.
She was already gone. Shunpo. Reappearing at his right, another cut, this one horizontal — and now they were in the exchange, blade meeting blade in a rapid, percussive dialogue that filled the practice ground with the ringing of steel.
She was good. Genuinely, technically, impressively good. Her footwork was precise. Her combinations were inventive. Her kidō and swordwork integrated seamlessly — a binding art launched from the left hand while the right maintained blade contact, the two disciplines woven together rather than alternated.
But Hatsu had Megumi's perception grafted onto his own discipline, and at close range, every tight shoulder and compensated backswing became a telegraph. He read her the way a calligrapher reads brushstrokes — not the finished characters, but the tremor in the hand, the angle of approach, the pressure variations that revealed the writer's intent before the ink settled.
He released his shikai without announcement. The command was a murmur, nearly subvocal, and the blade shifted mid-exchange — shorter, iridescent, the flowering guard blooming in his grip. His reiatsu surged, and Matsumoto's eyes registered the pressure change with a flicker of something that lived between alarm and exhilaration.
The first cut found the outside of her sword arm. Shallow. Precise. A line drawn from elbow to wrist, parting fabric and the surface layer of skin beneath. She hissed — not a sound of pain, but of recognition. First blood. The acknowledgment that the dynamic had shifted.
She fought harder after that. The kidō came faster, less polished, sacrificing form for volume. Her shunpo grew more erratic — harder to predict, but also harder for her to control, each burst eating more reiatsu than the last. She was burning hot, spending her reserves in a bid to overwhelm him before his close-range advantage became decisive.
It wasn't enough.
The second cut crossed her left thigh as she landed from a poorly timed flash-step. The third found the back of her hand — a delicate incision that loosened her grip on her zanpakutō without disabling it. Each wound was a whisper. Each whisper was a seed.
Matsumoto dropped to one knee. Her sword arm trembled — not from the wound, which was superficial, but from reiatsu depletion. She'd spent too much, too fast. The ground around her was scorched with failed kidō impacts and the fading afterimages of shunpo bursts.
She looked up at him. The auburn hair was disarrayed, sweat-darkened at the temples. The languid, expansive reiatsu had contracted to a tight, defensive shell around her body. But her gaze was steady, and what lived in it was not defeat.
Interesting, Hatsu thought.
He sheathed his blade. The shikai receded.
"Your kidō integration is exceptional," he said. Not flattery. Assessment. "Your shunpo transitions need refinement — you're spending thirty percent more reiatsu per burst than necessary because your exit angles don't align with your intended arrival vectors. But the instinct is sound."
Matsumoto stared at him for a long moment. Then she laughed — a short, surprised sound, unguarded in a way that her earlier performance had not been.
"You're a strange one, Hatsu-san."
"Same time next week?"
She stood. Brushed the dirt from her shihakushō with her uninjured hand. Glanced back at her entourage, who had collectively frozen in various postures of astonishment and — from the one with the notebook — furious documentation.
"Next week," she confirmed. The smile returned, but it was different now. Less performed. "And I'll be ready."
She left with her retinue in tow, the sound of their whispered conversation trailing behind them like a wake. Hatsu caught fragments — did you see, and his reiatsu, and the way he moved — and filed them in the part of his mind that catalogued useful ambient information.
Three new seeds. A kidō specialist with excellent shunpo instincts and the social connectivity to spread his reputation without his having to lift a finger.
The garden was growing.
—————
The plan crystallized that evening, sitting at his desk with the window open and the last amber light of sunset painting the far wall.
Shizuka no Hana lay across his knees, sealed, its warmth a steady pulse against his thighs. He rested his palms on the flat of the blade and let his breathing slow until the boundary between his thoughts and the zanpakutō's presence became permeable.
If I am the only one who grows, I become visible.
The logic was clean. Unavoidable. The Gotei 13's institutional attention was calibrated to detect anomalies — rapid advancement, unusual power spikes, unexplained capability jumps. A single officer in the Sixth Division displaying accelerated growth would attract scrutiny. Questions. The kind of quiet, persistent investigation that the Second Division conducted with professional thoroughness and the Fifth Division — Aizen's division — conducted with something far worse than thoroughness.
But if several officers across multiple divisions displayed similar growth trajectories — if the Gotei 13 experienced a small but notable surge of emerging talent, a generational bloom of promising fighters and kidō specialists — then no individual trajectory would stand out. His own advancement would become one data point among many. Unremarkable in context. Hidden in the statistical noise of a productive era.
A forest, not a single tree.
And the forest would serve a second purpose. Every talented Shinigami he cultivated was a potential ally. Not now — now they were sparring partners, acquaintances, social connections. But later, when the timeline reached its crisis points, when Aizen's mask fell and the world split along its hidden fault lines, the people he had quietly, patiently helped to grow might remember who had sharpened them. Might trust his judgment. Might listen when he spoke.
Might.
The word was honest. He didn't underestimate the gap between cultivation and loyalty. Seeds grew in their own direction.
But it was a start.
—————
The next afternoon, he chose his second target.
She was standing at the edge of the Sixth Division's auxiliary training field — an elevated terrace overlooking the main grounds — watching a group of junior officers run formation drills. Her posture was immaculate. Spine straight, shoulders level, chin lifted at an angle that communicated not arrogance but expectation — the bone-deep assumption that the world would arrange itself appropriately in her presence.
Noble. Without question. The quality was unmistakable — it lived in the fabric of her shihakushō, which was standard-issue but tailored with a precision that standard-issue never achieved, and in the kenseikan-adjacent ornament pinning her hair, and in the way the junior officers adjusted their form when they noticed her watching. Not because she'd spoken. Because her attention had weight.
Hatsu had seen her in briefings. Akiyama — the family name carried minor aristocratic resonance, a branch house with connections to one of the four great noble clans. Her given name escaped him. She carried her zanpakutō on her back rather than her hip, the hilt protruding over her right shoulder — an unusual choice that suggested either a longer-than-standard blade or an affectation. Possibly both.
He approached from the terrace stairs, making no effort to conceal his footfalls. Courtesy, not caution. Surprising a noble was a social error with consequences that outlasted the surprise.
She turned before he reached the top step. Dark eyes. Composed features. The assessment was immediate and undisguised — she looked at him the way one reads a document, top to bottom, absorbing relevant information and discarding the rest.
"Hatsu," she said. Not a question. She knew who he was. The practice ground gossip had evidently penetrated even the elevated social strata.
"Akiyama-san." He stopped at conversational distance. "I'd like to request a sparring session."
The composed features did not change. But something behind them shifted — a recalculation, quick and silent, adjusting her model of what this interaction was and what it might become.
"You want to spar." Flat. Measuring. "With me."
"If your schedule permits."
"My schedule is not the issue." Her hand moved to the strap across her chest — the one securing her zanpakutō — and her fingers rested there, not gripping, just touching. A reflex. "You're a recent graduate. Unseated. Your shikai is—" A fractional pause. "—reportedly impressive, but impressiveness is not the same as competence."
"Then the spar should be brief."
Something flickered behind the dark eyes. Not amusement — she was not the type to be amused by impertinence. Something closer to recalibration. The document she'd been reading had contained an unexpected sentence.
The silence stretched. The junior officers below continued their drills, unaware.
"Tomorrow," Akiyama said finally. "Sixth bell. The north terrace." She turned back to the training field.
"Understood."
He descended the stairs without looking back.
—————
She was faster than he expected.
The north terrace was a smaller, more private training space — walled on three sides by the Sixth Division's administrative buildings, open on the fourth to a steep drop overlooking the division's ornamental garden. No audience. No entourage. Akiyama had come alone, and the choice told him something about her priorities.
Her zanpakutō was indeed longer than standard — a nodachi, slender and wickedly curved, the blade extending past her shoulder when sheathed on her back. She drew it with a cross-body motion that was itself an attack, the draw cut slicing the air where Hatsu's leading hand had been a quarter-second earlier.
Fast and angry turned out to be her resting state.
Her style was formal — high-clan zanjutsu, the kind taught by private tutors in estate dojos, technically immaculate and utterly humorless. Every position was textbook. Every transition was precise. And every strike carried a controlled fury that the technical perfection couldn't quite contain, leaking through in the depth of her cuts and the speed of her recoveries.
She was angry about something that had nothing to do with him. He was simply a convenient surface.
Hatsu fought her in sealed state for the first three minutes, testing, mapping. Megumi's grafted perception read her the way it read everyone — through the body's involuntary confessions. Her anger made her fast but predictable; the fury channeled her combinations into linear progressions that sacrificed lateral creativity. Her footwork was excellent but rigid, each position held a fraction too long, as if deviating from the trained form would constitute a personal failure.
Discipline as cage, he thought. She's trapped inside her own precision.
He released his shikai at the four-minute mark. Shizuka no Hana bloomed in his grip, and his reiatsu surged, and Akiyama's response was not Megumi's grinning respect or Matsumoto's flickering exhilaration but a tightening — jaw, shoulders, grip — as if the increased pressure was a personal affront.
The fight after that was brief. Not because she was outmatched in skill — she wasn't, not entirely — but because her rigidity made her readable, and readability against a close-range specialist with perception grafts from two different fighters was a terminal disadvantage.
Two cuts. One across the back of her hand, forcing her to adjust her nodachi grip. One along her left forearm, shallow, precise.
Two seeds.
Akiyama's knee hit the stone of the north terrace. Her nodachi's tip scraped against the flagstone with a sound like a bitten-back curse. She stared at the ground between her hands, breathing hard, and the fury that had driven her technique was no longer leaking — it was flooding, visible in the tremor of her shoulders and the white-knuckled grip on her hilt.
She didn't look up.
Hatsu sheathed his blade. The shikai receded. He waited.
When she finally spoke, her voice was controlled in the way that expensive porcelain is controlled — smooth, polished, concealing the kiln's violence.
"A freshman," she said. To the ground. To herself. "Beaten by a freshman."
"Your iai draw is the fastest I've seen outside the Eleventh Division," Hatsu said. "And your zanjutsu fundamentals are better than most seated officers'. But your combinations are predictable because you don't allow yourself to deviate from trained sequences. You fight the form instead of fighting me."
She looked up. The dark eyes were bright — not with tears, but with the particular intensity of someone whose self-concept had just received a structural crack.
The silence between them was different from the silence with Megumi or Matsumoto. Heavier. Loaded with social freight — clan expectations, hierarchical assumptions, the accumulated weight of a world that had told Akiyama she was exceptional and had not prepared her for evidence to the contrary.
She stood. Sheathed her nodachi with the same cross-body motion, the blade sliding home with a clean click that carried the finality of a closing door.
"Next week," she said. The words came through her teeth like something swallowed against its will. "Same time. And I will teach you the cost of presumption."
She left through the north terrace's gate. Her footsteps were measured. Precise. Furious.
Two seeds, settling into unfamiliar soil. Roots beginning their slow, patient descent.
—————
Over the following two weeks, Hatsu began to move with greater deliberation through the Seireitei's social landscape.
Not aggressively. Not visibly. The approach was oblique — a conversation here, a shared meal there, the careful construction of a presence that was noticeable without being conspicuous. He attended interdivisional training exercises and observed. He visited the Shinigami Academy's public exhibition matches and watched the graduating class with the specific, cataloguing attention of a gardener examining seedlings.
What he looked for was not raw power — power was common, power was cheap, power without direction was just Megumi before the foot correction. What he looked for was the shape of potential. The particular combination of talent, drive, and dissatisfaction that made a person susceptible to growth.
Dissatisfaction was the key. Satisfied people didn't change. Satisfied people didn't seek out sparring partners who would cut them and critique their footwork. Dissatisfaction was the crack in the armor through which the water of improvement could seep, and Hatsu was learning to read those cracks with increasing fluency.
A kidō specialist in the Third Division who performed flawlessly in drills but crumbled under pressure — dissatisfied with his own fragility, hungry for the kind of combat conditioning that formal training didn't provide.
A shunpo prodigy in the Second Division who had been passed over for a seated position due to her poor zanjutsu — dissatisfied with the institutional ceiling, eager to prove the evaluation wrong.
A quiet, intense young man in the Thirteenth Division who practiced alone at odd hours and whose reiatsu carried the particular density of someone approaching but not yet reaching their zanpakutō's voice — dissatisfied with the silence, desperate for the breakthrough.
Hatsu approached each of them differently. The kidō specialist received a direct challenge — formal, respectful, framed as mutual benefit. The shunpo prodigy received an observation delivered in passing, a single sentence about her blade angle that lodged like a splinter and brought her to his practice ground three days later demanding clarification. The quiet young man received nothing at all — just Hatsu's presence at the adjacent training field during his solitary sessions, a silent companionship that slowly, over the course of a week, became a wordless invitation.
Not all of them agreed to spar. Not all of them needed to. The connections themselves were the infrastructure — relationships that could be cultivated over time, channels through which reputation and reciprocity could flow.
But those who did spar — those who stood across from him on packed earth and learned what Shizuka no Hana felt like against their skin — they carried away more than scars.
They carried seeds. And the seeds would grow.
And Hatsu, sitting at his desk in the evenings with his zanpakutō across his knees and the last light dying against the far wall, felt the garden spreading beneath the surface of the Seireitei like roots beneath a forest floor.
Invisible. Patient. His.
The window stayed open. The night air carried the scent of wisteria. Somewhere across the divisions, a dozen small fires of potential burned a fraction brighter than they had the week before, and none of them knew the name of the hand that had fanned the flame.
He closed his eyes and let Shizuka no Hana hum its quiet, contented song against his bones.
More, it whispered.
Yes, he agreed. More.