Chapter 258: He Actually Made a Mushroom Cloud
Hearing those words, Matsushita Yusuke had an immediate, instinctive reaction.
Because "Final Getsuga Tensho" genuinely had a history attached to it.
One swing of that technique had cut Aizen in half. If the man didn't have his natural resilience, that would have been the end of the whole story right there.
Was this kid about to put on the same show? Black hair, bandages, one swing that cuts off the background music?
Please don't. I came here to find you a wife. Don't do this to me.
So Matsushita Yusuke reacted in about the most obvious way possible.
He grabbed Tosen by the arm and started walking backwards, fast.
He was sweating. Tosen had the expression of someone who had no idea what was happening.
"What's gotten into you? Why are you nervous? Is this technique actually dangerous?"
Matsushita Yusuke caught himself, registered that his reaction was probably a bit much, and made a sound of recalibration as he stopped moving.
"Not really, it's just... reflex, I think."
Aizen stared at both of them blankly.
No matter. The two fighters in the distance had already pulled all three sets of attention back toward them.
With Isshin's shout, the reiatsu still remaining in him gathered and consolidated.
Matsushita Yusuke's eyebrow rose slightly. He dropped Tosen's arm, stepped to the side, and looked out toward the distance.
Something was different.
Theoretically, Ichigo's version of the technique worked the way it did because of his specific bloodline and the particular form his power took: an attack style closer to how Quincies used reishi, which was what made it hit the way it did.
But this was Isshin, the original template. As a predecessor, there had to be elements worth reading.
So.
What was coming here? What was the specific signature of his version?
The thought was still forming when Matsushita Yusuke watched Isshin step half a pace forward, eyes blazing, blade lifting.
The reiatsu that surged out was ignited completely. It wrapped around Isshin like flowing water, following his movements, clinging close.
Everyone knew the fundamental nature of Getsuga Tensho: compressed high-density reishi, delivered as a cutting strike. Against a standard target, it behaved like a molecular blade, tearing through spiritual defenses in an instant and driving inside.
What Isshin was doing now was taking that principle to its limit.
A breath in. Hold it.
Moving off the front foot, Isshin's body blurred. Horizontal cut. Diagonal cut. Upward slash. The motions layered on top of each other in rapid succession.
Like a training routine performed at combat speed, the afterimages overlapped into something complex enough to be nearly unreadable.
All three observers ran the sequence and worked out what was happening.
In that single burst, Isshin had swung out six separate Getsuga Tensho.
That superhuman burst capacity, pulling his reiatsu into extreme compression and then releasing it all in a short window, was the core of what Isshin had available. This was his foundation.
Six Getsuga Tensho collided into each other.
And didn't explode.
Tosen couldn't hold back.
"How is that possible?!"
Six extremely unstable high-energy masses, compressed against each other at close range. One error and the whole thing should have gone off uncontrolled. And yet Isshin held them in a sustained standoff.
The sheer precision of it was breathtaking.
Even Aizen found himself genuinely impressed.
"Refining this kind of technique to this level of control, without years of work and hard experience, is simply not achievable."
As he said it, Aizen seemed to actually be seeing Isshin Shiba for the first time in the way he should have been seeing him from the beginning.
Alright, fine. You're the one who looks silly right now.
Of course, noticing Aizen's reaction, Matsushita Yusuke's expression also turned thoughtful.
Not the bandage form. Good, that's manageable.
But as Aizen had just said: even without reaching that level of absolute last resort, what Isshin was showing right now was genuinely elite. Stacking multiple Getsuga Tensho on top of each other without detonation was something that even in the original story, only a late-arc Ichigo could approximate, with something like a cross-shaped combined version.
In comparison, the father going six-into-one put him in a different tier of execution.
Though.
If this was the ceiling of the final technique, then this was probably where things ended.
Because after the extended exchange, the Hollow alt had developed a working read on Isshin's attack patterns. The countermeasure was straightforward: abandon active defense, take the hit while protecting the core, and rely on regeneration afterward. Being cut into pieces wasn't a death sentence when you could grow back.
Matsushita Yusuke had no sentimental feelings about the alt's body count. That was just the exp farming system doing its job.
Then, unexpectedly, Isshin kicked off the ground and went airborne alongside the Getsuga Tensho he had just sent out.
In midair, jaw clenched, visibly straining under pressure that seemed barely manageable, he hauled on the hilt with both hands.
The veins standing out on his arms were visible from a distance. This was something being pushed out past the edge.
He swung the blade once through the air above him, and then again, and then again. Three wide arcs of deep gold light, thick and sweeping.
"Nichi Rin Getsuga Tensho!"
Matsushita Yusuke saw it the instant it resolved.
This was a combination technique at its core.
The six blades of light had never been the main attack. They were the fuel. Compressed energy stored and ready. What Isshin had just swung out was the mechanism to unlock it: three final cuts acting as keys, giving the chaos a shape, letting it flow in a controlled direction rather than detonating randomly.
Reiatsu could absolutely be triggered through brute-force ignition. But just as he had noted before, raw undirected reishi exploding on instinct was never as effective as the same energy carefully organized through Kido structure.
The same principle applied here.
Which meant this was considerably worse than it looked.
He wanted to shout something. He quickly realized it wouldn't help.
Not enough time.
Nine overlapping arcs of cutting force, blue and gold woven together, hit the same point simultaneously.
And then the sky went dark.
The detonation that followed was the kind that made you turn your head.
The sound hit first, then the shockwave, and rising in front of all three of them, climbing straight toward the sky:
A mushroom cloud.
Matsushita Yusuke stood there scratching his head.
He actually produced a mushroom cloud.
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