Chapter 155: Lonely People Listen to Sad Songs
Back at Squad 11 headquarters, Matsushita Yusuke went through the day's files as usual, sorted everything into its proper order, and separated out the portion that fell under Soifon's desk.
He headed toward the vice-captain's office, hand already raised to knock, and stopped.
Sounds from inside. Quiet and muffled. Like someone crying.
Matsushita Yusuke lowered his hand.
"..."
She had left Squad 2 behind, but Yoruichi's departure had still hit her hard. That much was obvious.
Yoruichi had been her captain and her mentor, someone she had genuinely looked up to. Watching things end the way they did, the emotional fallout was completely understandable.
So what was the right move here?
Matsushita Yusuke thought it over.
She's already lonely enough. I can't just leave her sitting with it.
"Soifon? I'm coming in."
Five seconds later.
Matsushita Yusuke came flying out through the doorway, files and all.
"GET OUT!!!"
He picked himself up with a pained grunt, rubbing the bruise already forming around his eye.
Actually, she seems fine. He let out a small breath of relief. Looks like she doesn't need checking on after all.
He made his way back to his office, and with that concern off his mind, turned his attention to the bigger picture.
The Hollowfication incident was more or less wrapped up. So what came next?
Not trusting his own memory on the finer details, Matsushita Yusuke pulled out a blank sheet of paper and started sketching a rough layout.
First: the timeline.
"Assuming roughly a hundred years until the main story kicks off. Close enough."
The exact turning points were fuzzy, so a rough axis would do for now.
He drew a long curved arc across the page.
Near the left end, he marked a point and circled it.
The current position. The starting node. The event called the "Visored Incident," a collective defection that had just played out. It had cleared out a substantial portion of the captaincy, elevated Aizen and the others to fill the vacuum, and opened up a lot of breathing room for everything that came after.
So what were the loose ends still dangling off the timeline?
He wrote down a name. Gin Ichimaru.
The kid's development arc and timing were both off from what the source material suggested. But working through it, Matsushita Yusuke had a reasonable theory: his own arrival had given Aizen enough of a confidence boost to move the Hollowfication operation ahead of schedule. Which pushed Gin's recruitment back.
"Aizen probably picked up on his talent early enough. Just didn't prioritize it. Quality over quantity for a startup, I guess."
An early-stage company running lean. Made sense.
As for what to actually do with the assignment now that it had landed in his lap, that was the more interesting question.
Develop the kid. Or find an opportunity to deal with him.
The answer came to him quickly. He let it go for now.
Go make contact in a few days when things settle. Observe first. Figure out the rest from there.
The other loose threads were mostly in the same vein.
Including, for instance, Vice-Captain Shiba Kaien of Squad 13.
In the original timeline, he was supposed to end up as experimental material and die at Aizen's hands.
But the way things were moving now, the Hollow research had already pushed past that original technical threshold ahead of schedule. The Shiba couple didn't necessarily have to die anymore.
So what did that change?
Matsushita Yusuke scratched the back of his head. Probably not much, honestly. From Aizen's perspective, that was just one small data point in a much larger plan. One person not dying when they were supposed to? There were always others to fill the gap.
More than any of that, the thing he was most focused on right now was Ichigo Kurosaki.
That dude, Ichigo's existence was, in every sense, the product of a very specific convergence.
A mother with Quincy blood. A father who was a Shinigami but had been running around in a Hollow-touched body for years. Plus a third-party Hollow power thrown into the mix on top of that.
It was like Alexander Fleming coming back from a vacation in 1928 to find his petri dish had gone completely wrong while he was away. Technically an accident. But penicillin entered the world's awareness at exactly that moment.
That was just how things worked sometimes.
Matsushita Yusuke tapped the four characters he had written on the page, eyes narrowing into something focused and sharp.
Ichigo's story had to happen.
Otherwise, who was going to fill in the achievement rewards he was missing out on?
More than that: as the single most overpowered stat monster in the three-way conflict, with a ceiling at endgame that made no sense by any metric, if it turned out that Matsushita Yusuke himself couldn't finish the job against Yhwach, he was going to need Ichigo to show up and carry.
"What, you think he'll come after me?"
Please. Ichigo was the most reasonable guy in the room once you got past the attitude. As long as he understood that someone had been working toward a larger goal the long way around, he would naturally come around and clear their name himself.
Taking a few hits from him in the earlier stages was basically just protagonist training. Part of the arc.
Strategy decided. Now the specifics.
Control the variables.
The biological parents. The power source. The coincidental circumstances. All of them were required. None of them were optional.
How to arrange it while making every person involved feel like it was "surprising but inevitable," that was the part that was giving him genuine anxiety.
Would need to think this one through carefully.
"Although... Squad 10 is still empty. Which means Isshin Shiba hasn't distinguished himself yet."
Not something to rush. But it did mean there was still plenty of buffer time to work with.
One step at a time, then.
With that settled, Matsushita Yusuke touched the tip of one finger to the corner of the paper. A faint azure glow flickered at his fingertip, and the sheet caught silently. The reiatsu wrapped around it, containing the burn to the paper itself, no spread, no smoke. It smoldered quietly and was gone, as if nothing had been there at all.
He watched it disappear, expression composed, and exhaled quietly.
Looked like this stretch might actually give him a moment to breathe. Maybe even coast a little.
BANG!
Before the thought had even finished forming, the door across the room slammed open.
Soifon walked in with a completely neutral expression. She made her way around to Yusuke's side without hesitation, picked up the files waiting for her review, and collected them with practiced efficiency.
"..."
Matsushita Yusuke sat there with his chin propped in both hands, watching her circle in and back out again like a stunned little bird, as she gathered everything up and set it in order.
She picked up the stack of files. Stopped at the doorway.
"Tonight."
"...Hm?"
Soifon kept her back to him, file folder pressed against her chest, and spoke quietly.
"Tonight. Have a drink with me."
What more was there to say?
Matsushita Yusuke broke into a genuine smile. The method was different from what he might have expected, but the fact that she was willing to bring it up at all meant Soifon was ready to let go of those tangled feelings. To set them down.
That was a good thing.
"Sure. When do we leave?"