Chapter 245: Round Two
"Sure, drinks sound good, I..." A pause. "...wait, what?!"
He had answered on autopilot.
Then his brain caught up.
Something is wrong.
What had Aizen just said? Fight him?
"Aizen-sensei, did you just say..."
He kept his voice careful, confirming what he had heard.
Aizen simply nodded, expression unchanged.
"I want to see how far Matsushita-kun has come."
He adjusted his framing slightly.
"Honestly, I should have done this much earlier. Checking on the progress of the people working with me was always part of my responsibilities. It just got buried under everything else."
Shared conviction alone wasn't enough. The foundation had to be real strength as well.
That was one of the original principles behind the Club.
"It was actually seeing Matsushita-kun's recent development that reminded me of this part of my own intentions."
A quiet exhale. Aizen shifted his stance, facing Matsushita Yusuke more directly.
"Of course, calling it a fight is somewhat misleading. It's nothing that serious."
If he had to put a name to it.
Right.
"Think of it as a way to cut through the distance that builds up when two people haven't really talked to each other properly in a while. An exchange, through the medium we're both most fluent in."
That framing was considerably more refined than Matsushita Yusuke had expected.
But thinking about who Aizen was, it made sense. Aizen had never needed validation from other people. He had never operated that way.
So what was actually going on here?
Did he suddenly feel threatened? Was he worried about being surpassed by someone under him? No, that didn't quite fit either. From the beginning, the plan had been to develop Matsushita Yusuke specifically as the person who could be thrown at Yamamoto. Growing stronger was the expected outcome.
So what had actually prompted this?
After a short moment of thinking, Matsushita Yusuke found the answer.
The reiatsu.
Because he had needed to test the Hollow suppression device, the output that had come through during that calibration was his actual, unsuppressed level. Aizen would have registered that immediately.
And Aizen's sensitivity to reiatsu was more finely tuned than almost anyone else's.
In the original story, during the Thousand-Year Blood War arc, Yhwach had taken the time to classify the specific threats that would need to be accounted for before any move. The designation had a particular ring to it: Special War Powers. Aizen had been on that list, and the reason given was reiatsu that stood completely apart from anyone else in the same bracket.
Which meant.
Aizen had spent decades as the person whose reiatsu was simply in a different category from everyone around him. That was probably the thing he was most attuned to, the thing his instincts measured automatically.
And now someone nearby had pulled level.
The reaction wasn't threat assessment. It was something more like curiosity. Or the specific feeling of watching something you planted grow into something you genuinely hadn't anticipated.
How strong have you actually become? Have you already passed me? Or is there still a gap?
That was the feeling that had formed into this invitation.
Whatever you wanted to call it. Impulse. Unplanned. It didn't matter.
Aizen finished his thinking, let his gaze come back up, and settled his expression into the one that was most recognizably his.
"Shall we try it, Matsushita-kun?"
Framed as an invitation.
But there was no real space for refusal in it.
Matsushita Yusuke stood where he was, lips pressed slightly together. His chest rose and fell. Then he exhaled quietly.
His right hand moved on instinct toward his hilt, then stopped and dropped.
Because Aizen had made no move to prepare for a conventional fight.
Years of combat experience and an accumulated understanding of how Aizen operated let Matsushita Yusuke read the approach in an instant.
Of course. This kind of fight.
Both of them released their reiatsu at almost exactly the same moment.
But rather than the usual outward surge, what emerged settled downward. Heavy, contained, close to the surface. The reiatsu compressed against both of them, thickening, layering, until it had formed something almost visible: a thin membrane clinging to the exterior of each of them, dense enough to be seen.
Reiatsu made tangible.
This had been described before, in various contexts. But the descriptions had always been approximations, poetic shorthand. Not literal.
Reiatsu was an emanation of individual power. Making it take physical form and hold that form was, for most people, simply not achievable regardless of intent.
What made it possible was volume. Past a certain threshold, the raw quantity of power changed what it could be made to do. You could channel that outward surge inward, compress it, layer it, press it flush against your own surface.
The result was what both of them were now wearing.
Simple to describe. Genuinely difficult to execute.
It required extremely precise control. It required confidence in your own output that left no room for doubt.
Aizen had taught this technique years ago. Matsushita Yusuke had not expected to see it again as the format for this particular conversation.
Then the reiatsu mass representing Aizen began to move.
The first wave.
A raised right hand, one finger extended. A portion of Aizen's reiatsu field separated and twisted in the air, then launched toward Matsushita Yusuke as a compressed point of pale blue light.
Matsushita Yusuke raised his left hand, turned it, and blocked with the back of his hand.
The separated fragment hit the counter and both burst silently.
He knew exactly what that was.
A scaled-down Sokatsui, compressed and refined beyond what the standard casting looked like. The underlying mechanics identical. The reiatsu compressed down repeatedly until the size was a fraction of the original.
The result demonstrated something that needed no elaboration: Aizen's command over reiatsu was absolute.
Strong. No question.
But Matsushita Yusuke was not entirely without options.
The Tozansho application still needed more work before it felt natural, but he could adjust to it quickly enough.
"How does this feel, Matsushita-kun?"
Looking at Aizen's faintly amused expression, Matsushita Yusuke let a corner of his mouth lift.
"A little easier than I expected, honestly."
This format was well-chosen, in its own way. More refined than a straight exchange of blades. A subtler, sharper form of contest.
The air between them carried a faint smell of scorched residue from the first exchange.
Then, almost simultaneously, both of them separated another fragment from their reiatsu mass.
Thunder Cannon.
Twin Lotus Sokatsui.
Hiryugekizokushintenraiho.
Fragments of condensed power crossed the air between them in multiple colors, each operating on its own inner mechanics, colliding and canceling in pairs.
Neither of them looked injured. But both of their expressions had grown steadily more focused.
Because even at this initial level of contact, both had registered something real about the other.
This probe had barely scratched the surface.
To actually determine an outcome, one of them would have to escalate.
In the same instant, Aizen separated three fragments simultaneously from his reiatsu field. They twisted into three distinct forms, three different Kido attacks, and drove at Matsushita Yusuke from different angles at once.
He hadn't anticipated the simultaneous multi-type volley.
Even reacting immediately, he was a fraction too slow. One broke through his counter, reaching the membrane at his surface, and the impact rippled outward through it.
Like a water balloon struck from outside. The whole structure wavered, irregular, threatening to lose cohesion.
Stability.
The entire point of this form was maintaining the existing state. Take enough disruption and the structure failed. When the membrane broke, the fight was over.
Matsushita Yusuke stepped back half a pace without speaking, steadied his breathing, and brought his reiatsu back under control.
Aizen made no follow-up. He held his position and waited until Matsushita Yusuke had fully stabilized.
Then he smiled.
"Still keeping up?"
If Aizen had pressed the advantage just then, Matsushita Yusuke would have lost.
The current stability only existed because Aizen had chosen not to.
A genuinely undignified position.
He had expected that if he lost, he would at least lose with some composure.
That assessment had been too optimistic.
He exhaled once.
Using the motion of stepping forward, Matsushita Yusuke extended his right hand. The Hollow fragment that had been sitting against the back of it had already come loose in the process of stabilizing, and in that brief pause he had finished everything he needed to prepare.
"I got a little distracted. My apologies, Aizen-sensei. That was embarrassing."
Aizen made the exact same gesture in return and replied with a voice that carried no particular weight in either direction.
"That happens to everyone. Don't let it concern you. Shall we continue?"
Dancing on a wire was dangerous for anyone who had not yet learned the wire. For someone who knew it completely, the wire became something else entirely.
The opening probe was finished. What followed was the real exchange. Both of them settling into the actual rules of the contest, the way a player does after clearing the tutorial and reaching the part that was always the real game.
Matsushita Yusuke came forward.
Round two.
"Coming at you, Aizen-sensei."
"Give me everything you've got, Matsushita-kun."
They looked at each other for a moment, then raised their right hands at almost exactly the same time. Two fingers extended, aimed at each other.
The reiatsu mass between them began to shift toward something that could only be described as boiling, and in nearly the same instant, roughly a third of each field separated and took shape.
If they were going to show what they were made of, there was no more fitting way to start.
"Kurohitsugi."
"Kurohitsugi: Modified."