Chapter 190: Extract. Fix. Form.
Yamamoto appeared to have noticed something.
And at the same moment.
The two figures fighting not far away had also abandoned any pretense of focusing on each other, directing most of their attention toward what was happening nearby.
Sasakibe Chojiro and Tosen Kaname, by mutual and unspoken agreement, had both refrained from pushing to final release. For Sasakibe, his released ability was simply too sweeping in scale, and the lightning attribute ran the risk of catching unintended targets in its reach.
For Tosen, it was purely a matter of concealing his identity.
Not everyone had the particular fortune of possessing multiple release forms like Matsushita Yusuke, or the particular nature of an ability like the Boss's that showed nothing at all.
The moment Tosen's Bankai activated, it was more or less the same as announcing who he was.
So the current state of things was also exactly what Tosen had been hoping for.
Being able to move freely without exposing himself was the best possible outcome.
Though.
How it would all resolve in the end was not something he had any ability to influence. Tosen was parrying incoming attacks with notably minimal effort, the bulk of his attention fixed on the situation not far away.
Sasakibe's situation was the same.
Both of them were going through the motions, wasting time, with almost everything they had pointed at the scene slightly further off.
So then.
What was actually happening right now?
In front of Aizen Sosuke, something spherical had come into being and was floating there.
It cut off all possibility of exchange between inside and outside. And within that entirely sealed-off space was precisely where Matsushita Yusuke and Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni were facing each other.
What exactly were they doing in there? What was actually unfolding?
None of the three people present could say. Because not long ago, as Matsushita Yusuke's figure had dispersed and faded away, a domain approximately two kilometers across had risen up without making a sound.
The two of them were fighting to the death in there.
CLANG!!!
Sasakibe drove a full-force slash that shoved Tosen back a step.
This opponent has real technique.
That was his first reaction, and he meant it in the way someone of his experience would mean it.
No common bandit could produce swordsmanship at this level. And the man's combat experience was just as apparent.
Without releasing his Zanpakuto, a quick resolution wasn't going to happen.
He stood in place, expression firm, and shook out his arm to ease the strain. Kido came to life around him without any ceremony.
"Thunder Cannon!"
A surge of lightning tore through the air, aimed directly at its target.
Tosen neither dodged nor retreated. He drew his blade in silence and blocked.
The column of reiatsu-formed energy was stopped entirely by the Zanpakuto, leaving behind only wisps of scorched air.
"..."
Tosen appeared to have taken no injury at all. He made a motion of flicking his blade clean, equally silent.
It was hard to say exactly when it had started, but going without incantations had apparently become fashionable within the Gotei 13. The approach could certainly speed up casting in theory, and in that sense catch someone off guard in a different way. The idea was sound. The reality was considerably less impressive.
Kido stripped down to its abbreviated form had more than enough power against ordinary people. But Tosen was at minimum a captain sitting in the lower-middle tier, and a reduced casting wasn't going to trouble him.
No damage?
Just what kind of ability level was this opponent carrying?
Sasakibe probed steadily, adjusting his read on his opponent one exchange at a time.
And the picture it was painting was getting bad enough to make him frown.
This person had ability at or above ordinary captain level. What would someone like that be doing here to ambush the Captain-Commander? For that matter: being ambushed at all, combined with the level of ability these people were showing, taken together it was already something worth thinking hard about.
As the situation had developed to this point, Sasakibe had begun to smell something considerably deeper. A conspiracy of some kind.
So what exactly was happening on the other side of that sphere right now?
Captain-Commander...
And at that very moment.
The old man his subordinate was worrying about was surveying several hundred figures with cold, level eyes.
The ground continued fracturing. The shapes emerging from it warped and shifted one by one, just as he had anticipated, becoming increasingly familiar.
Some were old enemies. Some were trusted companions. But not one among the figures appearing now could hold any real conversation with him.
Aside from "Yhwach," a suffocating silence permeated the crowd. It gave the whole scene a quality that felt deeply, fundamentally wrong.
"I see."
Yamamoto spoke.
He raised his blade casually, used the flat of it to deflect a long blade sweeping toward him, then stepped around it and cut down the figure with a single clean stroke, sending it shrieking apart into burning light.
His tone was low and carried something cold in it.
"All of these were formed from things within this old man's own memory, shaped into spirit bodies through some particular process?"
No answer came.
That was fine. The question wasn't actually directed at anyone. For Yamamoto right now, the purpose of speaking was not exchange. It was to find the approach that would break the situation open.
He swung. Another construct fell.
Another burned shell dropped. Yamamoto's gaze grew steadily colder.
"What you can draw on... is rooted in what I have seen, remembered, and kept."
He was still speaking when one of the figures came shrieking toward him, and Yamamoto's pupils contracted sharply for an instant.
The reason was simple enough. The face coming at him was another one he knew very well.
Sasakibe Chojiro.
Not the current one, though.
This was a younger version. Hair swept back without a single strand out of place. Fresh blood still wet on his face. Expression twisted into something wild.
Looking at that face, Yamamoto found himself drawing on old memories.
This was not the real Sasakibe. That required no discussion.
What Yamamoto was watching carefully, in this moment, was the appearance of the figure and the specific state it embodied.
Sasakibe had always held elegance and restraint as the core of how he carried himself. He had measured himself against those principles throughout his life. Yamamoto knew that clearly. And yet this figure was frenzied and unrestrained.
The blood spattered on its face. The look in its eyes.
Yamamoto brought his blade down without mercy, cut the figure across the middle, and said quietly as it fell:
"You have the ability to extract fixed images of specific people and construct them into form. That is what I'm reading. Am I wrong?"
Extract. Fix. Form.
That was the mechanism Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni had worked out.
Sasakibe's figure had been frozen at the moment he drove his blade into Yhwach from behind. The others were the same, each of them locked into a specific instant.
He had mapped the principle. But the confusion had not fully cleared.
He looked toward a figure standing further away.
Even understanding the method, by what means could someone at that bandit leader's level of reiatsu actually reproduce Yhwach's power?
Could someone at that level really produce something like that?