"AAAAH! AAAAAH!"
Renji was raging again, and getting nowhere with it.
He swung Zabimaru hard enough that the blade seemed to hiss through the air, yet for all his fury he still couldn't leave so much as a scratch on Kazuma.
Kazuma decided he'd let this go on long enough.
The playful mood he'd been indulging faded.
Time to put Renji flat on his back!
One heavy slash drove Renji backward, and the clash between them broke apart.
Renji was still catching his breath, half-confused, when Kazuma slid his blade home into its sheath.
"Oi, Executive Militia. What's that supposed to mean? You think you're too good to fight me?"
Renji assumed the man had lost interest in the duel, and threw down another challenge on reflex.
'His Zanpakutō won't take damage, so I'll just come at him instead. Looks like he's headed back to the Fourth Division for another stay.'
Kazuma ran through his options in silence and settled on the tidiest one.
Another hospital bed it is.
While Renji kept running his mouth, Kazuma dropped into a familiar drawing stance — iai, blade low and ready.
Renji half-recognized it.
He knew he'd seen it somewhere, he just couldn't place where.
Then Kazuma's outline smeared, as though the air itself had glitched for a heartbeat.
It was only an afterimage, left behind by movement too fast for the eye to catch.
Before it could even fade, he had already crossed the distance, cut once, and returned to exactly where he'd started.
Renji never saw the strike.
He only felt it — a searing line drawn across his chest, a second wound crossing the first to form a bloody X.
Blood came like water through a broken dam.
It poured across the ground and pooled dark and wide beneath his boots.
'He didn't move. He clearly didn't move — so how? Some ability of his Zanpakutō? No. No, it doesn't feel like that either…'
Renji stared, wide-eyed, at the plain Asauchi resting in the soldier's hand.
That was no released Zanpakutō.
Could raw swordsmanship alone cut a man this deep?
The wound was brutal, and blood loss soon began to fog his thoughts.
Somewhere in that grey, sinking haze, the memory finally surfaced — where he had seen that odd stance before.
'That's it… back then…'
His mind drifted, carried back to the days just before he'd graduated from the Shin'ō Academy.
Rukia had come back to visit the school, and Renji had talked her into a spar, telling himself he only wanted to measure how far she'd come.
She chose to face him in Zanjutsu of all things which was never her strongest suit.
He'd smirked at the choice, but he hadn't smirked long.
The match ended in a clean, humiliating loss.
Rukia had used this exact strange style that day.
And she'd mentioned, once, that the odd Zanjutsu had been taught to her by the former Seventh Division Captain — Kazuma.
A thread of suspicion tugged at Renji's fading mind.
Could the Executive Militia soldier standing over him be tied somehow to Captain Kazuma?
The thought scattered before he could hold onto it.
His eyes slid shut, and he sank into the dark.
...
Kazuma sighed at the mess he'd made.
"And now the Fourth Division has more work because of me. Poor guy only just healed up, and here he is getting carried back to bed. I wonder if the rescue squad will decide he's too much trouble and just finish the job with one clean stab. Can't blame them, really — I am adding to their workload for nothing."
He said all this as though someone else entirely had carved Renji open.
The man had no shame at all.
As it happened, Renji's guess hadn't been far off.
If anything, he'd been too modest with it. It had never crossed his mind that the soldier standing over him wasn't merely connected to Kazuma.
He was the sneaky bastard himself.
Off to the side, Rukia had been watching the whole thing unfold, snacking as she spectated. Now she couldn't keep quiet any longer.
"Sensei, wasn't that a bit much? Look at the state of him…"
Kazuma didn't spare the complaint a second thought.
"Eh, what are you fretting about? He'll live. I know exactly what I'm doing — every one of those cuts was measured. He's only bleeding like that because it looks dramatic, its nothing serious."
He said it with the easy confidence of a man who was never wrong!
"But—"
He flicked her forehead before she could finish.
"Why are you always nagging? Don't you trust your own teacher?"
"Can your word even be trusted?" Rukia mumbled, rubbing the spot. "You told me it'd be fine to go back to Soul Society. You said Ichigo wouldn't get dragged into anything. Now I'm sentenced to death, and Ichigo nearly died because of me!"
Kazuma's hearing was sharp. Soft as the words were, he caught every one of it.
"Oh? Muttering about your teacher behind his back, are you? Questioning me?"
A second flick landed, no gentler than the first.
"Ow! That hurts! Teacher, why'd you hit me again?"
Rukia clutched her forehead, the picture of injured innocence.
"Whose fault is it for doubting me? I'm your teacher! You really think I'd let you come to harm?"
He grumbled it like a man badly wronged.
After delivering his lesson, Kazuma turned to go. He had more pressing business to attend to.
And what pressing business was that?
Drinking, naturally!
Nothing in the world ranked higher for him — Aizen included.
"I'm off. Aizen might come around looking for you, so just play along nicely when he does."
He offered no further explanation, only those few parting words.
"Sensei! What about Renji—"
Seeing him ready to stroll off without a glance at the man still bleeding on the ground, Rukia called out to stop him.
There was a badly wounded soul lying right there!
They could hardly leave him to bleed out.
"Relax. I'll send the rescue squad to collect him."
He didn't so much as turn his head, his figure blurred, and he was gone.
Rukia watched the empty space where he'd stood and let out a helpless breath.
Her teacher was always like this — doing as he pleased, leaving everyone around him to guess at what he meant by it.
Still, she trusted that he had his reasons.
He always did.
'Is Sensei using me as bait? Do I actually mean something to Aizen?'
She frowned and turned it over in her mind.
She'd known for a while that Kazuma, Urahara Kisuke, and the others were moving against the traitor Aizen — but not why she of all people had been pulled into the middle of it.
With her strength, her rank, there was no reason for a man like Aizen to give her a second look.
Yet Kazuma had said plainly that Aizen would come for her, and that left her at a complete loss.
She searched herself for anything that might draw his attention.
Nothing came.
And she knew nothing of what had swept through the Seireitei these past few days — sealed away inside the Senzaikyū, an outsider looking in on her own trial.
For now, all she could do was sit and wait for the storm to pass.
The unease in her chest wouldn't quiet, though.
She had no idea what came next, or whether she'd make it through in one piece.
'For now, I'll just have to trust Sensei.'
Then she remembered the sheer, crushing power Kazuma had shown back in Hell, and little by little the anxiety loosened its grip.
That much was true.
If Kazuma ever went all out, there wasn't a great deal worth worrying about.
'You'd better not mess this up, Sensei! Try not to play around so much that you get your own student killed.'
The thought drifted, and drowsiness crept in behind it.
She decided a short nap wouldn't hurt. Whatever was coming would come soon enough.
She had to admit — she may not have learned all that much from Kazuma, but the art of slacking off..... she'd mastered it to perfection!
On that front, she'd even outdone her uncle, Kuchiki Kōga.
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