Chapter 260: Here Comes the Hero
After a brief hesitation, Isshin Shiba made his decision without a second thought.
Go. Now. Move.
The balance between the three worlds was something people had discussed since ancient times, and alongside that, Isshin had heard various other theories floating around. In places with high concentrations of spiritual energy, spatial disturbances like this occasionally happened. Maybe because of Hollows passing through constantly. Maybe just coincidence.
Whatever the cause.
What was in front of him right now was a fact. A literal, visible, immediate fact.
Under normal circumstances he would have weighed the situation carefully before committing. There was no time for that now.
Staying alive came first.
Isshin drove himself headfirst through the opening, and the bull-headed Hollow, freshly released and running on three days of empty stomach, had a very direct response to watching its target run.
Chase.
Both of them went through, and the Rukongai district was empty.
Matsushita Yusuke let out a noise of satisfaction, raised his right hand, and tapped the air in front of him.
The space fractured. Visible cracks spread from the point of contact, like a stone thrown into glass.
Aizen and Tosen watched. Their expressions were different from each other, but both shared an element of surprise.
Tosen looked sideways. Aizen rubbed his chin with something like genuine interest.
What Matsushita Yusuke had just done was not standard procedure for a Shinigami.
Getting between worlds in a stable and reliable way was complicated business. The method Urahara had developed in the original story was genuinely the best available option for clean transit. Doing it properly, safely, with appropriate equipment, made sense.
Safe operations. Nobody wanted an incident.
But proper equipment wasn't available right now, which meant the fallback was a rougher version: punching through the space directly, mimicking the method Hollows used. Less precise, less stable, but functional.
"Come on, get through quickly."
He stepped in first without waiting.
Tosen blinked.
Matsushita Yusuke had already turned halfway around from inside.
"Don't just stand there. The space is unstable, it's going to compress. Right now you walk through. In thirty seconds you're crawling."
Before Tosen could fully process this, Aizen had already followed Matsushita Yusuke's lead and stepped through.
Aizen moved with the ease of someone who had made this kind of transit many times. Light on his feet, smooth in his movement, like a basketball player going for a layup. Effortless. He was through in a moment.
He even had time to fix his hair afterward.
Getting Aizen to crawl through a gap in the fabric of space would apparently have been worse than most other available punishments.
"Tosen. You're not through yet. The entrance is getting smaller."
"What? Ah! Okay, okay, I'm coming!"
Tosen caught the last window.
Matsushita Yusuke helped him the rest of the way in, which was the only thing that kept him from going face-first into the ground.
"Thank you."
"Don't mention it. We need to move faster, or we're going to lose them."
The two ahead were running for their lives. A leisurely pace was not going to keep up.
They moved, and while they did, Aizen finally couldn't hold the question back any longer.
"Matsushita-kun. What exactly is the point of all this complexity?"
Coming from Aizen, that was saying something. The fact that Matsushita Yusuke's behavior had produced genuine confusion in him was its own kind of remarkable.
Because looking at it from the outside, none of it followed a clear logic. Matsushita Yusuke had gone to the trouble of injuring Isshin without finishing him. Then instead of resolving that, he had set a specific and unusual Hollow to chase him. Then he had let Isshin run. And now he had punched open a connection to the living world.
Each step looked unconnected from the last.
That kind of unpredictability was the hardest thing to read. Aizen, by his nature, found disorder difficult to tolerate. And the longer this had gone on, the more he wanted to understand what the destination actually was.
Matsushita Yusuke scratched his head, made a sound that communicated mild difficulty, and thought for a moment about how to frame this.
How was he supposed to explain it?
I'm actually playing matchmaker for Isshin Shiba?
Saying it that way was only going to make things worse. The process was too tangled to explain directly. Better to come at it from the side, work with Aizen's particular interests, and get to a yes in two sentences rather than a full breakdown.
Matsushita Yusuke had been navigating professional relationships long enough to know the technique.
He exhaled slowly, tilted his head back, then looked forward again with the expression of someone working through something heavy.
"Aizen-sensei. There's something I've been sitting with for a while now. Something I started noticing through all the training."
"...?"
Tosen looked confused by the subject change. Aizen simply looked at Matsushita Yusuke and waited.
"What is it?"
"What I've been realizing, the more I train, is..."
He reached his right hand forward, fingers extended toward nothing in particular, jaw tight, the look of someone straining against something.
"That there's a ceiling to Shinigami power."
Tosen had no idea what was happening. He was completely lost.
Aizen was not.
His eyebrow rose before he caught it. He turned his head slightly to the side, pressed the expression back down with one hand, and then looked back.
"Go on."
"Sword work, Kido, shunpo, reiatsu. All of it. I can feel the limit in each one now. It's distant, but once you touch it, there's nothing past it."
Matsushita Yusuke kept talking, and kept watching Aizen from the corner of his eye.
The look on Aizen's face was the one he had been waiting for.
He's listening.
This was Aizen's core research. Breaking past the Shinigami ceiling was the whole point of everything he was building. Bringing it up was guaranteed to have his full attention.
"So right now, I'm looking for the opening. The method. How to push through it."
He kept going.
"And if I have a direction, I need a concrete approach. What to do, how to execute, who or what to test it on."
Aizen was nodding. Not performing agreement. Actually nodding.
Matsushita Yusuke didn't let the moment go.
"My experimental direction is fairly simple. Something like blending approaches: contact-based fusion through a mixing process. Aizen-sensei."
"...?"
Aizen had been listening from the side. Now, addressed directly, he turned.
"I mentioned the specific ability of that particular Hollow to you before. The unconditional fusion capability."
Aizen considered briefly. "The unconditional fusion ability?"
Yes. Exactly that.
Before Matsushita Yusuke could continue, Aizen had already moved ahead on his own.
"But we discussed this before. Absorbing large quantities of Shinigami souls in a short window produces no result. Raw volume doesn't produce a qualitative shift. The gap is too significant."
He had run similar experiments already. The fact that they had consistently produced nothing was precisely why he had stepped back from the bull-head research.
And that gap in information was exactly what Matsushita Yusuke needed to land his point.
"No. What I'm proposing this time is the reverse."
"...Reverse?"
"Not having the Hollow absorb. Pushing it the other direction. Injecting the Hollow's essence into someone else."
Some things were sufficiently strange that even Aizen found them funny.
A short silence. Then the corner of Aizen's mouth moved. Not mockery. Something closer to the recognition of meeting something genuinely unexpected.
"Your thinking..."
He raised his right hand and let one finger move in a slow, small arc.
"Is really something."
Simple words. But coming from Aizen, whose standards were famously and comprehensively difficult to meet, and whose sharp commentary on the ideas of others was something of a legend, reaching that response was not nothing.
"What exactly are you planning to do?"
The question came, and as it did, Aizen's gaze had already shifted toward Isshin in the distance.
The perpetually composed expression relaxed into something more alive. As though he had just found a project worth engaging with.
"Why don't we just capture Isshin Shiba directly? This chase is going nowhere useful. Extract the particular Hollow's essence, force him to absorb it. Though from an efficiency standpoint, that might be too slow."
He kept talking, and his voice dropped slightly. Something lit up in his eyes.
"Actually, it might be faster to cut off a limb and make him ingest the Hollow matter directly. Digestion is an efficient uptake pathway after all."
Matsushita Yusuke started laughing before he could stop himself.
Right, the mad scientist framing was always accurate. He was already planning the surgery.
He still stepped in.
"Hold on a moment, Aizen-sensei. There are a few other things I want to confirm with the arrangements around Isshin and the special individual. A few angles I still need to test."
Aizen had momentum. He stopped anyway.
Because his own impulse mattered. But what mattered slightly more was the judgment of the person who had consistently produced results he hadn't expected.
If he was being honest.
Aizen's anticipation for what Matsushita Yusuke would do next had been growing steadily for some time now.
His expression didn't change. But he reached out his right hand and put it on Matsushita Yusuke's shoulder.
"Take all the space you need. You have my full support for whatever you decide."
Tosen, following behind, had stopped understanding the conversation somewhere in the middle of it and had not caught back up since.
What were these two even talking about? Not a single word had landed for him.
Matsushita Yusuke quietly exhaled. At this point he could confirm: Aizen was fully invested in the plan. The hook was in.
Which left the living world side.
"We're here."
The two running ahead had punched through the boundary between worlds and the transit corridor snapped open. The light shifted.
The three followed them through.
Aizen lifted his hand in a practiced motion, fingers settling around the hilt at his waist.
Reiatsu flowed outward. Kyoka Suigetsu's established capability extended itself, and the presence of all three of them diminished: not invisible, but considerably less there than they actually were. The effect was roughly comparable to the cloak-and-rain-gear combination from the original story.
Matsushita Yusuke's attention, however, was partly on Aizen's grip on the hilt.
Interesting.
For a Shinigami to use a Zanpakuto's ability, the standard approach after release was to maintain physical contact with the blade. Holding the hilt was the most common form. There were individual variations, but the contact itself was generally necessary.
Then came the Thousand-Year Blood War arc. In that stretch of the story, Aizen had deployed Kyoka Suigetsu without holding his Zanpakuto at all. He had used the ability to confuse Yhwach even while Yhwach's eyes were open.
No sword in hand, but the ability still worked.
What did that actually mean?
Had Aizen lost his Zanpakuto, or had he fully integrated it, absorbed it into himself so completely that carrying it as a separate object was no longer required? A different form entirely, in the truest sense?
No answer came to mind immediately, but the question stuck. The evolution pathway it implied had become one of the reference points Matsushita Yusuke was quietly holding in the back of his mind.
He set it aside and looked ahead.
Isshin was on the ground, beaten down again, struggling back to his feet. No screaming. But watching from a distance, Matsushita Yusuke found a certain famous line coming naturally to mind.
Someone, anyone. Where's the hero? Please, someone come save me.
Right on cue, without any obvious source, a light appeared.
A column of vivid blue reiatsu came driving in from somewhere and punched straight through the bull-head's midsection, pinning it where it stood.
All three of them snapped to attention.
Here comes the hero.