Chapter 257: The Last Getsuga Tensho
Three sets of eyes cut through the thinning haze.
What came into view was Isshin Shiba.
He was standing with his arms crossed, and the flame that had been flowing continuously around him had expanded, swelling outward into a thin but visible shell of burning light wrapped around his exterior.
"Huh."
Matsushita Yusuke let out a sound that was somewhere between admiration and surprise.
"He converted the released reiatsu into a defensive membrane and used it to absorb the hit? So that's the real heart of Kouen Engetsu. I see it now."
Draw on it, deploy it, convert it instantly. No delay.
And that wasn't all.
"The reaction speed to pull that off is genuinely impressive."
Fast enough to make Aizen feel like his own reflexes were coming up short, which said something concrete about where Isshin currently stood.
The constant burn of the Bankai, the price of that ongoing consumption, was that it kept his reactions running at a speed that was frankly unreasonable.
Matsushita Yusuke half-closed his eyes, thinking it through.
Putting it all together.
"The short version of his ability is probably: fire everything in a short window. All-out assault, maximum output, nothing held back."
Aizen glanced sideways and gave a small, non-committal nod.
He agreed.
"It's a little awkward to deal with, but nowhere near the level of an actual threat. That said, if he gets more time with the Bankai, refines his handling of it, he could become worth taking seriously."
Aizen's read was measured and somewhat conservative, but the reasoning behind it was sound.
Because the externalized reiatsu had a natural flexibility to it that developed over time. More practice meant sharper control, and sharper control meant the technique's ceiling kept rising.
That wasn't flattery. That was just how the mechanics worked.
Matsushita Yusuke thought back to the original story: the moment Isshin appeared during the Fake Karakura Town arc alongside the other two, flicking Aizen across the sky without even releasing his Zanpakuto, the casual ease of it. No real lasting damage, but the gesture itself was pure reishi manipulation expressed at an extremely refined level.
The man had clearly kept training through his years in the living world. Nothing else explained how he reached that level.
As for the present.
Matsushita Yusuke looked at Isshin, breathing hard now, the edges of fatigue beginning to show, and exhaled slowly.
Honestly. As a captain, reaching this point was already no small thing.
But it was also where it ended.
"Where did it go? Matsushita-kun, is it..."
Tosen's sentence didn't finish.
Because in the same moment, the mist to Isshin's right shattered outward.
A battered figure drove through it and threw a punch directly at Isshin's face.
The Hollow alt's movements were still as wide and open as ever. No subtlety in the angles.
Isshin had no time to evade. The hit landed clean. He left the ground, tumbled through the air in a mess of motion, and hit the earth, rolling several times before stopping.
"Ugh..."
A low, pained sound. He pushed one hand against the ground, trying to use it to get back up.
It was clearly a struggle.
Running dry on reiatsu while taking fresh damage on top of it. Stacked together like that, the situation had reached the kind of point where just maintaining his current position seemed to require everything he had left.
On the other side.
The Hollow alt landed without any drama and began walking toward Isshin, slow and steady.
Not a performance. Not a theatrical pace for atmosphere. It was using the time to heal.
Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.
Small, short sounds accompanied the process. The deep wounds that had broken the surface, the cuts that had gone down to bone, were closing. Tissue moving, knitting, sealing.
Rapid Regeneration had been the Hollow alt's defining advantage from the beginning. Its talent in that particular area had always stood apart from any comparable Hollow.
Which meant.
"To beat this thing, you have to put it down in a short window. Overwhelming force, total destruction. No room for recovery."
In other words, unless the fight was already a complete one-sided erasure from the start, the Hollow alt had enough experience to lean on its healing and pull any extended fight toward the kind of attrition it was built for.
That was exactly where Isshin was right now. The exchange between them had been back and forth, neither side dominating cleanly.
But at this point in time, Isshin simply didn't have firepower at the level that question required.
This was one area where the comparison to Yamamoto was unavoidable. Zanka no Tachi really was the most severe thing the Hollow alt had ever encountered. Every time it appeared, it shut the alt down without a conversation.
"It's about over."
Aizen's voice.
Matsushita Yusuke blinked and came back to the present, lifting his head and looking out toward where the fight had settled.
One side down and struggling. The other walking toward it, healing as it went.
The reiatsu expenditure on each side wasn't even in the same range. Whatever measure you used, injuries or stamina or output remaining, one of them was clearly in a better position than the other.
Matsushita Yusuke wasn't surprised. The Hollow alt right now was benchmarked against upper-tier captains. Taking down Isshin, who was still in the early phase of working out his Bankai and nowhere near his eventual ceiling, was within the expected range.
Maybe by the time of the Fake Karakura Town arc, a fully developed Isshin could have traded blows with the alt for a while.
At this point in the timeline, the alt had the advantage.
Goodbye then. Just an ordinary person, taken out one version early.
The alt would probably forget about this fight after a good nap.
Alright. Time to follow the plan and get Isshin to the next part of the script...
"Wait."
Tosen said it suddenly, and before Matsushita Yusuke could even form a response, his own brow pulled together instinctively.
Something was off.
Isshin's reiatsu, which should have been declining, wasn't. It had reversed direction. It was rising.
A moment later, Matsushita Yusuke confirmed it wasn't a misread.
Because visibly, plainly, the light wrapped against Isshin's body began to boil.
Boom.
A deep resonant sound, and Isshin's head came up.
In the blazing, churning glow, his expression had changed entirely.
Drenched in sweat. Teeth bared in a grimace that looked like it had been pulled out of him by force. He looked like someone who had been holding something in until the last possible moment and had just reached it.
His throat worked. What came out was short and furious.
"At this point, it's all or nothing!"
He dropped his right hand and locked it around the hilt.
"Final Getsuga Tensho!"