Chapter 242: Crude Device
"To maintain deeper infiltration coverage, I've been developing my working relationship with Isshin Shiba. The practical benefit is access to internal shifts in the patrol schedule..."
Matsushita Yusuke kept going, working through the details, and eventually reached the summary.
"That's roughly everything I can report on the current operational side."
The usual work briefing. Just with a very different audience.
Aizen listened with a focused expression, nodding at intervals as the report went on, and at the end let something show on his face that was noticeably less guarded than his usual baseline.
"Well done."
Praise as a statement of position. For someone who kept his reactions as carefully managed as Aizen did, giving that kind of direct acknowledgment said something real about how he valued Matsushita Yusuke's work.
Another compliment. Nice.
Matsushita Yusuke nodded cheerfully and stepped down.
"You're too kind."
By comparison, Tosen's report, delivered first, had been notably less remarkable. Though that wasn't something Tosen himself gave much thought to. After decades of working alongside Matsushita Yusuke, he had developed a fairly clear-eyed understanding of the gap between them.
No point measuring yourself against a different kind of person. Recognize the situation and move forward. That was the conclusion Tosen had reached some years back and stuck with.
"Nice work, Matsushita."
"You too, Tosen."
Mutual acknowledgment exchanged.
Aizen picked up the thread and offered a broader assessment.
"By current progress, our infiltration of the Gotei 13 has been proceeding very well. That said, this is not a reason to relax our standards."
His tone shifted slightly.
"Our objective is complete disruption. Everything we do now is groundwork for what comes later. No amount of preparation before the actual move can be considered excessive."
Both Matsushita Yusuke and Tosen responded in the same beat.
"Understood."
With the formal portion closed, the meeting moved to other matters.
"Aizen-sensei, regarding the thing I asked you about a while back..."
He hadn't even finished the sentence before Aizen smiled and produced a small bag, holding it out.
"Already prepared. Everything's inside."
"Oh, great. Thanks."
He took the bag and shook it open, pulling out something that looked, at first glance, like a piece of fabric.
That description was technically accurate but didn't quite cover it.
What he was holding was an irregular trapezoid of deep purple material, roughly the size of a hand cloth. The texture felt something like fabric, but the moment you squeezed it, the comparison stopped working. It had warmth. It had give. Press it firmly and it produced a faint grinding sound that set your teeth on edge.
He turned it over.
The underside, which had been in shadow, came into the light.
Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.
Broken, intermittent sounds came from its surface. And when all three of them looked closely, the source became visible: dozens of small mouths, compressed and layered against each other, each lined with sharp pointed teeth. No eyes, no noses, just mouths, packed together and moving constantly, grinding slowly, producing that low, crawling sound.
The kind of thing that made your scalp tighten just from looking at it.
"..."
Tosen, who processed the world primarily through reiatsu rather than sight, read the shape of it differently and went quiet. Whatever he was perceiving, it was clearly more detailed and considerably more unpleasant than what the others could see.
His reaction took a moment to arrive.
"Are you actually going to use this."
Flat disgust. Two sources: the design itself, and his personal feelings about the whole thing.
What Matsushita Yusuke was holding was the result of taking Hollows, stripping them down to their most abstract components, and compressing and blending what remained. The specific components retained were the ones responsible for consumption and digestion. Everything else had been removed.
Theoretically, the process should not have worked. But under the pressure of Matsushita Yusuke's specific request, Aizen had put genuine time into attempting it, and the results had been, against expectations, viable.
Hollows were remarkably durable. Even compressed and reduced to this degree, the surviving specimens had held together. And those survivors had been consolidated and integrated into a single unit.
What currently looked like a piece of old cloth was, in reality, the compressed and fully integrated remains of tens of thousands of Hollow souls.
The logic of research.
Tosen had no particular objection on ethical grounds. Shinigami and Hollows were natural opposites. Even after Aizen's group had taken operational control of Hueco Mundo, neither Aizen nor the others held Hollow existence in especially high regard.
But the discomfort was still real.
Tosen described what he was sensing in a slightly strained voice, as though putting words to it required more effort than usual.
"Carrying this thing around is not going to be a pleasant experience."
Accurate.
Just the image of having all those mouths pressed against your skin was enough to make the idea deeply unappealing.
And beyond that.
"I genuinely cannot figure out what you're thinking."
That was fair. Because this wasn't something a normal thought process produced.
Matsushita Yusuke's current project was, in essence, a rough imitation of something he had seen in the source material.
As previously established: he needed a way to run daily challenges against the captain roster. The problem with his current stat distribution was that the reiatsu gap between him and everyone else made every fight one-sided before it started. A blowout had no training value and the System agreed with that assessment, as confirmed by the Isshin spar.
If he wanted balanced fights, he had to suppress his own advantages.
What suppressed reiatsu?
He had thought back to the source material and landed on an answer almost immediately.
Zaraki Kenpachi.
When he first appeared, had been walking around completely unconcerned with anything around him, and had every reason to be. But finding no one who could give him a real fight, he had gone to the Technology Development Bureau and requested something purpose-built to hold himself back. A reiatsu suppressor, in practical terms.
A different kind. Same principle.
Every shonen series had this setup. The strong character deliberately limits themselves in order to find real competition, then breaks free of those limits at a critical moment and the result is an explosion of power.
Zaraki had used exactly that structure. Though looking at how the series developed, the setup's effectiveness had a shelf life.
That was fine. Long-running series had that problem. Nobody expected it to last forever.
The specific mechanism Matsushita Yusuke had identified: use the Hollows' consuming nature to continuously strip a portion of his reiatsu. Keep them active around the clock. As long as they stayed alive and working, the output and consumption would balance into a stable loop.
Suppression through constant drain rather than a fixed cap. Adjustable. Practical.
It would not look elegant. Matsushita Yusuke was a pragmatist. Results mattered more than presentation.
Though, to be honest, he remembered having a strong reaction the first time he saw this many mouths in one place. The fact that he was now planning to attach them to his own body was a reminder that life had a way of circling back on you. Statements made with too much confidence tended to return.
"Don't you think if you look at them long enough they start to seem a little cute?"
"...Did something happen to your brain?"
"Ha. Sorry."
Some jokes were too cold to land.
Following the thread of Tosen's question, Matsushita Yusuke turned back to the thing in his hand and gave a small, slightly sheepish nod.
"I know it's a bit rough. But if I don't try, I definitely won't figure out if it works."
Aizen, who had been quiet throughout, let a calm smile settle across his face and nodded.
"I won't comment on everything else. But on this specific matter, I'm behind you."
Call it ambition or call it actively seeking a challenge: for Aizen, the willingness to step outside the comfortable and attempt something genuinely uncertain was exactly the kind of thinking he most wanted to see.
Which meant.
"The time I put into this shouldn't go to waste. Show me the results, Matsushita-kun."
The boss was applying pressure. Which made not trying even less of an option.
Matsushita Yusuke exhaled, turned the cloth over so the mouth-covered side faced down, and held it out for a moment, weighing it in his hand.
So how exactly did you wear this thing?
Copying Zaraki with some kind of eyepatch felt too theatrical and didn't fit his general approach. Somewhere else, then.
He found a workable spot quickly. He pressed his lips together and placed the cloth flat against the back of his right hand.
Thwap.
A soft, adhesive sound. The thing clung like a magnet.
"..."
Every nerve in Matsushita Yusuke's body was already primed. He felt the change the instant it began.
His reiatsu was dropping.
The sensation was like a full barrel that had suddenly developed a crack at the base. Water running out continuously. The total volume falling in a steady, measurable decline.
The body's response was immediate and didn't ask permission.
Every muscle pulled tight. The peak-level reiatsu surged upward like a wave that had been disturbed at the bottom of the ocean, enormous and reflexive.
BANG!
Tosen caught the full force of it and went over like something that had been hit broadside by a wave, struggling for a moment before managing to get back on his feet and retreat to a safer distance.
Aizen rose to his feet as well, turning slightly to the side, one hand raised near his face. His expression, partially obscured, carried something that had not been there before.
He had not expected this level of output.
The total reiatsu this person was carrying... was no longer below his own.
Matsushita Yusuke pulled himself back almost immediately.
If this kept going, the Hollows were going to be destroyed. Reiatsu at this concentration had a passive suppressive effect, and the gap between his output and the Hollows' tolerance was wide enough that the pressure alone was a threat to them.
He controlled his breathing, reined in the surge, and brought things back toward stable.
When everything settled, he exhaled with moderate relief.
He checked the level.
Dropped to roughly seventy-five percent of his full output. Still substantial, but the direction was right. The concept worked. All that remained was dialing in the specific intensity.
He looked at the thing on the back of his right hand and used his left hand to adjust it, pulling it slightly, reshaping it against his palm.
When he was done, he held it up and looked it over.
It looked more or less like a fingerless glove. Roughly made. But as a piece of cover, it was sufficient.
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