Chapter 088: Shikai: Shingonkai
A question worth asking.
What was Matsushita Yusuke best at?
The answers could go in a lot of directions.
But narrow it down. Make the question specific: what was Matsushita Yusuke's strongest way of fighting?
Then there was only one answer.
Kido.
Kido had been the first power he had gotten a real grip on, and it was what he had spent the longest time developing, sharpening, pushing further. The relationship he had built with it went back further than anything else in this world.
His understanding of Kido, his genuine fixation with it, had been set from the very beginning. This was the ground he knew best. The one area where his footing was solid in every direction.
"True words, rise to the sea. All recitation, become void!"
Light surged. A slender, contained blade emerged and settled into his grip.
Shikai: Shingonkai.
Matsushita Yusuke's expression went very still. He looked down and said quietly, almost to himself:
"Reiatsu."
A breath of movement through the air.
Where the Physical-type had been broad and assertive, this was something else entirely. Thin filaments of reishi surfaced one by one, drifting and turning, moving around him the way fish move through water. He looked like someone standing in a current, the fabric of his clothes and the loose ends of his hair lifting and floating in it.
At the same moment: the blood on his hands evaporated.
Tosen, who had been watching without looking away, stopped.
"His injuries healed?"
"Not quite."
Aizen's tone was even, delivering a correction.
"Burned off."
Gentle did not mean weak. The softness of it was only the surface shape of the reiatsu, not a measure of its force.
And the fact of the matter was this: the reiatsu flowing through Matsushita Yusuke right now was running considerably stronger than it had been a moment ago.
The rising pressure reached everyone in the area at the same time and made them stop what they were doing. Every eye pulled toward him.
What was that?
Soifon's eyes had gone wide, something in them that was trying to confirm what it was seeing.
She said it quietly, like a question she was putting to herself.
"Is that... captain-level reiatsu?"
Almost.
But not quite there.
"Still a little short."
Matsushita Yusuke looked down at his own hands. The tears across both tiger's mouths were still there, muscle and fascia visible in clean lines beneath where the blood had been burned away. The reishi had cauterized the surface. That was all it had done.
The fight was not over.
Which meant the next move had to be made.
He raised his right hand and pointed toward Kijishi.
His index finger couldn't fully straighten from the pain. The point was loose, imprecise. He aimed it across the gap anyway and said, at a completely ordinary conversational volume:
"Thunder Cannon."
Bright yellow lightning rolled out along the line of his pointing finger and erupted into a crackling arc through the air, crossing the distance in an instant.
Kijishi's face snapped tight. He threw Bawei up instinctively to block.
The lightning and the blade held against each other for a fraction of a second. Then the lightning detonated, and the burst of light and heat that came out of it was not small.
"You little--!"
Kijishi's roar came through the smoke. He cut the ash cloud apart with a sweep of Bawei. The uniform on his upper body had scorched through, and there were visible burns across his face.
"What did you just do?!"
Matsushita Yusuke didn't answer. His expression had shifted into something focused and quiet. That first strike had been a read. A question. Now he had the answer.
That was the one.
The loose finger rose again.
"Thunderclap Scatter."
Several bolts of lightning drove in from multiple angles, each one finding Kijishi.
"Hado #73: Soren Sokatsui."
Two surges of deep blue reiatsu rose on both sides like a breaking wave and rushed forward together.
"Hado #88: Hiryugekizokushintenraiho."
The reiatsu gathering at his fingertip compressed for one held breath, then detonated outward as a blinding column of white light that crossed the street and hit Kijishi head-on.
Three techniques in less than a breath's span.
Kijishi disappeared into the overlapping light.
The expressions of everyone watching were identical. Blank shock, and nothing else.
"What was that?"
"Hado... wasn't it?"
"But there was no chant. At all."
"That's not even the issue. He threw three in a row."
Yes. That was it exactly.
In the space of a single breath's pause, Matsushita Yusuke had completed three distinct techniques. He had skipped not just the incantation but the entire process of calling and shaping the reiatsu. The output had simply arrived.
It was almost like...
"Words becoming reality?"
Aizen looked toward Matsushita Yusuke with an expression that sat somewhere between analytical and genuinely entertained.
That assessment was accurate.
Shingonkai's ability was not complicated.
Express what is within your current power, through reiatsu, by naming it.
As a Kido-type Zanpakuto, what Shingonkai worked with at its core was reiatsu itself. Kido had always required a sequence: incantation, formation, output. Shingonkai let him bypass the entire sequence. Not merely chant-free casting. In release, Matsushita Yusuke could achieve something closer to speaking a thing into being.
Efficiency, output, conversion rate: every number moved sharply in the same direction.
And the Kido application was only one part of what this Zanpakuto could do.
The deeper reason Matsushita Yusuke placed such confidence in Shingonkai came down to one specific aspect of how it worked.
The declaration of reiatsu.
When he said the word, he was doing something that functioned like borrowing against a balance he did not currently hold. An unconditional withdrawal from a reserve that was not technically his, temporarily generating a quantity of power from outside his normal ceiling.
It was probably connected to the Hogyoku fragment's influence. The link between Shingonkai and the Hollow power, the bridge that had formed between them, had produced this particular and unusual expression.
Through that loan, Matsushita Yusuke could push his reiatsu output up to something approaching Spirit Class 3 for a limited window.
Captain level? Not quite there.
But close.
And the window was short. So the fight had to be finished inside it.
Shingonkai had room to grow that had barely been touched. But right now, in this situation, what he could focus on was combat. Reiatsu application was the foundation he was standing on.
He watched Kijishi stagger out of the overlapping aftermath, scorched and furious.
Matsushita Yusuke drew a slow breath, lowered the hand that had been pointing at him, and raised it again differently.
One finger. Pointing up.
At the sky.
He said it in the flattest tone available to him.
"Kurohitsugi: Modified."
The dark clouds that Kijishi's own release had gathered overhead broke apart into a churning mass of chaotic light.
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