Chapter 192: A Fight That Should Never Have Existed
"I hope you can keep up with me?"
To be honest, Yamamoto's first reaction to that line was "what an absurd thing to say."
His ability had been fully read. He had no remaining reserves. Under those circumstances, what brand of arrogance would produce a line like that?
The advantage was his.
Yes.
From where Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni was standing, he considered the outcome of this situation to already be in hand.
And yet, that was only the surface.
"I never said that was everything I had."
If you had already decided to move, taking a certain degree of risk was simply part of it.
His mind made up, Matsushita Yusuke let his body reconstitute.
The moment he appeared, Yamamoto's figure was already there in front of him.
A horizontal slash came down.
The blade-light, powered by surging reiatsu, carried a pressure that demanded attention.
Flickering with searing brightness, the arc of the blade opened Matsushita Yusuke cleanly at the waist, splitting him in two halves in a perfect recreation of what Yhwach had looked like half a minute earlier.
Half of Matsushita Yusuke's body was sent spinning away. Even so, there was apparently enough presence of mind remaining to produce an extremely long-suffering eye roll.
Really, old man. You're something else.
"Is it so hard to just hear someone out without immediately going for a sneak attack?"
Yamamoto landed in silence. His cold gaze communicated all the response he felt the question deserved.
There was nothing worth saying to someone like this.
"But... fine, whatever."
Given the old man's combat instincts, Matsushita Yusuke decided to give up on trying to gather information through conversation.
Let the swords do the talking.
"Your guess just now was right. My ability does need to draw on another person's memories to work, and under certain conditions I can't filter or choose what comes out."
Which was why that particular Yhwach had been so thoroughly useless.
But despite having guessed correctly, Yamamoto showed not the slightest sign of relaxing.
If anything, he became more cautious.
Because by any reasonable logic, no one should be able to stay this calm after having their trump card exposed.
Running through the possibilities, only one explanation held.
This person still had more to use against him?
The thought had barely settled when Yamamoto "saw" it.
The surrounding scenery collapsed at high speed.
Everything visible was rushing toward disintegration, the entire space folding into ruin, as though the world itself was ending.
Visually overwhelming. But someone of his experience was not going to be unsettled by a visual effect. He watched what was happening coldly and without reaction, sweeping the environment continuously, analyzing and calculating.
What exactly was occurring here?
"Is the domain being reconstructed?"
If the original environment had been formed around Yamamoto's own mental state, then what was being stripped away and rebuilt now meant one thing.
The subject had changed.
This person was no longer using this old man's memories as their source?
The combat instincts Yamamoto carried gave him advantages across multiple dimensions. He could seize fleeting moments and read patterns from the smallest details presented to him.
"This would be the moment to break through. While it's still rebuilding."
The reconstruction process required time. During that window, the opponent would necessarily be exposed.
If he was going to act, it was now.
But.
Yamamoto hesitated.
He didn't move immediately. He chose to observe the situation first, then decide.
The reasoning was simple.
"Observe the opponent's ability and characteristics in as much depth as possible without showing my own hand."
Only by doing that would he be in a position to track down the insider later.
Two people, each holding their own calculations, each pointed in a different direction. And yet, in this moment, both had landed on the same outcome.
The reconstruction completed without encountering any resistance at all.
As the environment that had been close to boiling settled back into quiet, Yamamoto held his single-handed grip and stepped back half a step, casting his gaze around him.
"..."
It was entirely unfamiliar.
Shallow standing water spread across the ground beneath his feet.
But the water was extraordinarily clear. Clear enough to serve as a mirror.
He looked at the reflection of his own aged face in the still surface for a brief moment, then lifted his gaze and looked outward.
There was nothing around him that gave him anything particularly useful. What surrounded him was, in the most literal sense, rubble and collapsed walls. And from those things, Yamamoto could extract no useful intelligence at all.
Additionally.
"Architecture I've never seen before."
That was entirely understandable.
Because what lay collapsed and half-submerged in that shallow water was, in the most literal sense, a cluster of modern buildings.
For someone whose entire frame of reference was feudal, the structures were genuinely unprecedented.
From his observation position outside the domain, Matsushita Yusuke made a small sound.
The result was a bit different from what he had expected.
But close enough.
"This one can still fight, anyway."
As that thought landed, he also noticed his own reiatsu output: it was pouring out at close to the level of being wrung completely dry. Nearly three times what constructing a Yamamoto-based domain had required.
As he had mentioned earlier, the cost was related to the strength of the target, but more fundamentally it came down to the objective Matsushita Yusuke was trying to reach.
In other words: what scene was he trying to reproduce?
Yamamoto was still in the process of reading his new environment. And then, in an instant, he reacted as though a current had passed through him.
"...!"
He went still and turned halfway, looking toward the direction the sensation had come from.
His gaze locked onto the figure taking shape in the distortion.
What was this... what kind of "person" was this?
Its entire body carried a base color of pure white. The clothing was unlike any standard Shinigami uniform. In its hand was a long, slender blade.
Was that a Zanpakuto?
Before the question had time to settle, he heard it.
A voice, sudden and unlike anything he had encountered before.
"Yo."
Like current traveling through wire. A single short syllable, and yet it arrived with multiple layers of sound stacked on top of each other, creating an entirely uncanny quality.
"Do you know the difference between a king and his mount?"
*****
ngl that was a cold entrance line
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