The annihilation particles tore toward Unohana like a meteor storm, but the moment they crossed the boundary of her Blood Sea Domain, their momentum collapsed.
There was no visible wall and nothing solid for them to strike, yet the domain resisted them so completely that particles which had erased everything else in their path abruptly lost both their speed and their accuracy.
Then the direction of the entire attack changed.
Instead of continuing toward Unohana, the particles were seized by the Blood Sea and dragged into a sweeping curve.
A moment later, they reversed course completely and rushed back across the battlefield toward the Sternritter.
The Quincy formation immediately broke apart.
A broad torrent of annihilation particles ripped straight through the space they had been occupying, carving a massive gap through their ranks and forcing everyone nearby to abandon their positions.
"Lille Barro, what the fuck are you doing?! Are you trying to kill all of us?"
Robert Accutrone, Sternritter "N," shouted as several particles grazed the edge of his cloak.
The affected fabric did not tear or burn; it simply broke apart into nothing, disappearing so quickly that only a faint wisp remained where the cloth had been.
Robert used Hirenkyaku at once, flickering through the air in an effort to stay ahead of the redirected barrage.
Lille had already realized how badly the situation had turned.
Sweat gathered across his forehead as he tried to regain control and restore the particles to their original feathered state, but the attack had already been caught by Unohana's domain and sent through the Sternritter formation.
Even if he recovered control now, he could not undo the chaos he had caused.
The humiliation was almost worse than the danger.
He had released one of his most destructive attacks against Unohana, only for her to throw it back through his own allies.
Across the Blood Sea, Unohana gave him a deliberately provocative look that needed no explanation.
Lille could practically hear the unspoken message behind it.
'You still have a lot to learn.'
That was enough to burn through what remained of his patience.
"The X-Axis: Divine Judgment!"
Lille swung the rifle up and locked its barrel onto Unohana.
The three spiraling sections accelerated until a brilliant rainbow stream of reishi erupted from the muzzle, warping the surrounding space into the same impossible Klein-bottle geometry that had accompanied his transformation.
This shot went even further than the attacks before it.
It was not confined to the present.
The bullet existed simultaneously in the past, present, and future, occupying three points in time at once so that avoiding it in a single moment should have been meaningless.
Even if the target escaped the shot now, another version of the same attack had already existed before the dodge and would continue to exist afterward.
The rifle fired.
Unohana disappeared.
There was no gradual acceleration and no visible path from one location to another.
The image standing before Lille simply ceased to be the real one, and an instant later Unohana appeared behind him, running along the edge of her Zanpakutō.
Reflected across the blade was not the battlefield as it existed now, but the same battlefield twenty seconds earlier.
"Star-Track Engraving: Seventh Recurrence."
Her sword came down.
At the same moment, Lille's supposedly unavoidable bullet struck the afterimage Unohana had left behind.
The impact should have ended there.
Instead, the causal link between the bullet and its designated target became a path in the opposite direction.
Something traveled back along that connection.
Lille jerked violently.
A wet, ugly sound came from his chest, and when he looked down, a clean hole had opened straight through his heart despite nothing having physically crossed the space between them.
Pain hit him a heartbeat later.
He coughed hard, vomiting blood mixed with glittering fragments of stellar light, while the life in his body seemed to drain out with every mouthful.
Even the wings behind him began to deteriorate, their pale feathers loosening and falling one after another like petals from a dying flower.
But Lille still refused to fall.
"It's not over!"
His body exploded into light.
Rather than dying, he deliberately separated himself into 108 quantum units, each fragment racing into a different dimensional layer before beginning to reconstruct independently.
In an instant, the single Lille Barro who had been standing on the battlefield had become more than a hundred versions of himself scattered across dimensions.
Unohana touched the tip of her Zanpakutō lightly against empty space.
"Funeral protocol."
Her expression remained calm.
"Activate."
The sky changed.
The Six Stars of the Southern Dipper erupted with light, their radiance linking together across the heavens until six enormous Star Coffins took shape.
Each coffin descended into a different dimensional layer, surrounding the scattered quantum units with a pressure that ignored the boundaries separating them.
Then the coffins began to close.
Every version of Lille could perceive the others disappearing.
One after another, the quantum units were crushed into nonexistence until only the final fragment remained.
For the first time, it looked as though Unohana had successfully cornered every possible version of him at once.
Then Lille's face appeared within the last remaining unit, twisted into a cold smile.
"Did you forget what my Schrift does?"
The destroyed units responded.
All 107 of them.
The fragments that should no longer have existed suddenly converged again, but they did not attempt to rebuild Lille somewhere outside Unohana's reach.
They reassembled inside her body.
A muffled burst sounded from her chest.
A condensed reishi bullet tore outward through her torso, spraying blood into the air.
The captains watching from a distance barely had time to react before the wounded Unohana began to dissolve.
Her body separated into countless flecks of starlight.
Lille stared.
High above the battlefield, the Seven Killings Star flared with a violent radiance, and another figure gradually emerged from that light.
Unohana... completely unharmed.
"What?!"
For the first time, Lille looked genuinely lost.
The woman he had targeted throughout the fight had never been her true body.
When Unohana released Bankai, she had placed a stellar imprint within the Seven Killings Star.
At a critical moment, that imprint could produce a stellar phantom, allowing her to exchange positions with it while the substitute continued carrying her spiritual signature.
Lille's X-Axis had been locking onto the phantom.
The real Unohana had never been standing where he believed she was.
The X-Axis was an absurdly dangerous Schrift, the sort of ability that could reduce a battle to an execution if its opponent entered without understanding how it worked.
Lille's misfortune was that Soul Society had not entered this war blind.
Kazuma had already given the captains detailed intelligence on the Sternritter before the fighting began.
Their abilities, their tendencies, the ways they used their powers, and the counters available to the Gotei 13 had all been studied in advance.
Lille had spent the entire battle revealing cards Unohana already knew he possessed.
There was nothing unfair about his defeat.
He had simply walked into a fight where the enemy had prepared specifically for him.
Unohana raised her Zanpakutō.
"Goodbye, God's Rifle."
The Six Stars of the Southern Dipper began moving across the Seireitei sky.
Their arrangement shifted until the six points connected into a vast blood-red cross, while the six Star Coffins below resonated with the Blood Sea Domain surrounding the battlefield.
The two powers linked.
Then everything around Lille erupted.
A storm of annihilation burst from the combined formation, carrying the weight of the Southern Dipper and the Blood Sea as it swept toward him.
The force was so severe that the space around the storm twisted visibly, unable to remain stable beneath the pressure.
Lille resisted with everything he had left.
His wings flared, his reishi surged, and his transformed existence struggled to disperse itself across every state available to him, but none of it mattered.
The storm swallowed him before he could escape, shredding his body and then continuing to tear through the fragments after the body itself was gone.
Flesh disappeared.
Reishi collapsed.
Even the quantum structure that had repeatedly allowed him to reform was broken apart under the combined force.
When the brilliant light finally faded, the battlefield fell quiet again.
There was no corpse.
No surviving fragment.
No trace of Lille Barro's reiatsu remained anywhere within the devastated area.
Only half of his bloodstained rifle barrel was left behind, driven into the ruined ground where he had made his final stand.