Chapter 247: A Distinguishing Specialty
"...???"
What was Aizen talking about?
Before Matsushita Yusuke could work out what the question meant, his Itto Kaso: Modified collapsed in an instant.
The mass representing Aizen's reiatsu was still moving forward.
Matsushita Yusuke's eyes went slightly wide. A short, involuntary sound escaped his throat.
"Wait."
What was happening?
How was Aizen's Kurohitsugi this dense? It hadn't been anywhere near this level before. Had he missed something? But that didn't track either. In a contest this close, there was no window for Aizen to have done anything undetected.
The thoughts kept surfacing and tangling.
He needed to defend. But before that, he had to reconstruct. But there wasn't time for reconstruction, which meant he needed something faster, something more direct.
By the time he reached that conclusion.
Crack.
A sharp sound, and the reiatsu membrane wrapped around him broke through completely.
The Kurohitsugi closed to point-blank range.
Which meant this was Aizen Sosuke's win.
Watching the Kurohitsugi arrive at arm's reach, Matsushita Yusuke's expression locked completely.
Even now, even at his current level, he still couldn't make sense of what had just happened.
This should not be possible.
The confusion had an answer waiting for it, though, because Matsushita Yusuke looked at the reiatsu field still moving along Aizen's surface, and it was nowhere near as full as it had been.
A short pause.
Then it clicked.
"Aizen-sensei, you put two-thirds of your total reiatsu into that Kurohitsugi?!"
Aizen made a quiet sound of amusement and turned his head to the side, tone carrying a light tease.
"A bit more than that, probably."
He played me.
It came together fully now. Aizen had used Kyoka Suigetsu to conceal how much of his reiatsu was actually being channeled into the technique. Matsushita Yusuke had been measuring against what he could see. What he could see was a fraction of what was actually there.
That single piece of false information had been decisive.
He had been running a completely uneven comparison the entire time. A miniature setup against a full-scale assault, without knowing the difference.
Matsushita Yusuke's expression shifted into something distinctly unimpressed.
"Aizen-sensei, that's cheating."
Aizen laughed and turned away, heading off without looking back.
"All's fair in a real fight. Learn something from it next time, Matsushita-kun."
Standing where he was, Matsushita Yusuke's face twitched slightly.
He wasn't certain, but based on what had just happened: was there any chance Aizen had been using this particular exchange to settle a score?
He straightened his slightly disheveled uniform and caught up.
"Just to put it out there, Aizen-sensei. Was there a personal element in that just now?"
"Of course not. I'm not the kind of person who takes his frustrations out on the people who work with him."
"Really."
"...Alright, this particular situation may have had some minor exceptions."
He actually admitted it.
Honestly, despite everything, Matsushita Yusuke was genuinely grateful for the exchange. Aizen had shown him a completely different way of thinking about how Kido techniques could interact with each other.
As Matsushita Yusuke had noted before: combining abilities correctly produced results far beyond the simple sum of their parts.
That still didn't make the information warfare acceptable.
"Next time something like this comes up, I'm not holding anything back either."
"Ha. I'll try to be ready."
Looking at Aizen from this angle, the version of him that existed outside of work hours, there was considerably more texture to him than the public persona suggested.
He felt a little less distant than expected.
Matsushita Yusuke was still looking at his back when another thought surfaced.
"Oh, right. There's one more thing I wanted to check with you. Is now a good time?"
Aizen half-turned, and nodded pleasantly.
"Of course. What would you like to know?"
"Nothing complicated. Just curious about something."
He raised his right hand and drew a circle in the air in front of himself.
"Your Kurohitsugi used more reiatsu, that's established. But shouldn't the output have been a little more proportional to that? The strength of it was a bit extreme."
In the immediate aftermath of the fight, some of what he had felt was probably colored by the embarrassment of losing. But once he separated that out and looked at the mechanics plainly, the problem was real.
Even accounting for the reiatsu difference, the results didn't add up.
Aizen's Kurohitsugi had blown through two of Matsushita Yusuke's defenses in sequence and still had enough left over to break through his membrane. Three layers, one through, clean. Unstoppable was the most accurate description.
After a brief review of the sequence, the conclusion was plain.
If he had been the one with the same amount of reiatsu available, he still could not have done that. Not even close. Three layers consecutively was simply beyond what he could produce.
Which meant the issue wasn't the resource gap. Aizen's attack ceiling was just higher than his.
The Kurohitsugi in Aizen's hands operated at a completely different level from anyone else's. Matsushita Yusuke couldn't replicate it. He could try all day.
So did Aizen have some kind of specific specialization bonus for Kurohitsugi specifically?
Aizen considered the question with a thoughtful expression, then raised an eyebrow and smiled.
"Is that right? Honestly, I've never paid particular attention to it myself. But if I had to say... I suppose I've used it enough times that I've developed some unusual understanding of it."
The signature technique effect. Aizen's feel for Kurohitsugi was simply not in the same category as anyone else's.
The original story had demonstrated this clearly enough. After the Visored returned to the Gotei 13, Hirako had deployed the same Hado during his fights against the Quincies. Hado at number ninety from someone at his level should have been significant. It landed like a party favor.
The gap in how the same technique performed across different users was not just a question of power. It was a question of depth.
Matsushita Yusuke was scratching his head again.
Because this fight had given him something to think about that he hadn't been sitting with before.
Maxing out the stats was not the destination. To actually stand out among people who had reached similar ceilings, you needed something that was specifically yours. Something only you could do at the level you were doing it.
Yamamoto had his flames. Aizen had his Kurohitsugi.
Matsushita Yusuke.
What did he have that he could actually point to?