"What did you just say?!"
Sarugaki Hiyori erupted. Her face went red, and before the thought had finished forming, her Zanpakutō was already out of its sheath, blade leveled directly at Yoji's face.
The three captains exchanged a glance, arrived at a wordless consensus, and stepped back in unison to give the two of them room. None of them made any move to intervene. They all looked very comfortable with where this was going.
Yoji's expression didn't shift. His voice came out calm and even, carrying across the entire training ground without effort.
"First. A Zanpakutō is a shinigami's most important partner — the blade that cuts down enemies and the shield that protects your allies." He let a beat of silence fall. "Drawing it against a fellow shinigami is an act of profound stupidity. It means you have taken someone who should be under your protection and decided to treat them as a target."
"I'm not an official shinigami yet!" Hiyori shot back, gripping the hilt hard.
Yoji's gaze remained completely still.
"Then the moment you chose to draw, you accepted responsibility for whatever follows."
He raised his right hand slowly and extended his index finger, pointing it directly at the center of her forehead from across the distance between them.
The dismissal in the gesture was absolute.
Immediate uproar rippled through the line of graduates.
"The nerve—"
"He's just a fifth seat—"
"Hiyori, show him what you've got!"
Hiyori's lip pulled back over two sharp little fangs. Her voice came out as a snarl.
"I know all that, you baldy!"
The word landed like a dropped cup in a quiet room.
"...Baldy?" Yoji's expression went briefly, genuinely blank.
Dead silence.
Then Kyōraku doubled over, one hand over his mouth failing completely to contain anything.
"Pff — hahaha — Yoji — he called you baldy —"
Hirako clapped a hand over his own knee, laughing in a way that had entirely abandoned any pretense of dignity.
Which was, under the circumstances, a fairly ironic reaction — because Yoji was actually known throughout the Gotei 13 as one of the better-looking seated officers going. Black hair tied loosely at the back of his neck, features that leaned toward refined, a particular kind of languid energy that some people found infuriatingly attractive. He'd had more than a few female shinigami go red in the face just from passing him in a corridor. One or two had left handkerchiefs.
Being called baldy by a teenage girl in front of an audience was a genuinely novel experience for him.
A vein appeared on his forehead. He breathed in. He breathed out. He kept the composure.
"You understand the principle and drew anyway. Then be ready to accept the outcome."
"Less talking, more fighting, baldy!" Hiyori raised her blade and came at him with everything she had.
Yoji tilted slightly to one side. The sword cut air, didn't come close to his sleeve.
"Good," he said, like a teacher marking a correct answer. "You committed to full force the moment you attacked."
His voice followed her as she recovered and swung again.
"But there's a gap between knowing something and actually understanding it. Against a real enemy, you need killing intent from the first step. You think this is a training exercise? A practice bout?"
"Shut up! Baldy! Baldy! BALDY!"
Hiyori stopped processing words entirely and gave herself over to attacking. Horizontal cuts, vertical ones, direct thrusts — she came at him in a continuous storm, nothing held back.
Yoji moved through all of it like smoke drifting around solid objects. Not dramatically, not with any wasted flourish — just the minimum necessary motion, again and again, while his index finger remained pointed at her forehead with the patience of a sundial.
The graduates had stopped muttering. The outrage had curdled into something quieter.
"She can't touch him—"
"Is this what a seated officer actually looks like?"
"She's not even close..."
Yadōmaru Lisa pushed her glasses up, the shock sitting uncharacteristically open on her face. She knew exactly how strong Hiyori was — better than anyone here. Hiyori's combat score hadn't just topped the class, it had cleared seated-officer benchmarks. And she couldn't graze his sleeve.
Have I been overestimating myself?
Kyōraku glanced at the tight line of Lisa's mouth and lowered his voice.
"Don't let it shake you too much, Lisa-chan. You're already exceptional. Fifth seat is absolutely within reach — lieutenant will come with time. The same goes for Hiyori." He paused. "Yoji just happens to be operating at lieutenant-level himself. Among lieutenants, even, he ranks on the stronger end. Pay attention to how he moves — it's worth studying."
Lisa looked back at the fight with different eyes.
Beside her, Hirako watched without comment, but his thoughts were running elsewhere.
Lieutenant-level. Is that really all this kid is?
His gaze drifted to the edge of the grounds, where Aizen Sosuke stood watching with a pleasant, undisturbed smile. That one set off every instinct Hirako had, in ways he still couldn't fully articulate — a feeling he'd never gotten from a Hollow, never gotten from anything he'd faced in the field.
Yoji didn't give him that feeling. But anyone who could stay that relaxed around something as dangerous as Aizen, who could sit by a river and drink with him like it was a completely ordinary evening...
Yoji. Simple, is he? I don't think so.
A pity Hiyori couldn't push him any further. Whatever he was actually holding back, she wasn't going to be the one to draw it out.
Hiyori was slowing down. The frantic pace of her attacks was degrading, her breathing starting to catch. Yoji noticed the exact moment it happened.
"Is that all?" His voice cut through the sound of clashing. "At this level, you haven't earned the right to act like you own the place."
"I told you to SHUT UP, BALDY!"
Something cracked open in Hiyori's reiatsu.
She planted her feet, seized her hilt with both hands, and pushed — and the pressure that came pouring out of her small frame was nothing like what had come before. It hit the training ground like a wind change, violent and sudden, sending the uniforms of the watching graduates rippling and snapping.
"That reiatsu—"
"Is she actually releasing her Shikai?!"
"She's one of the three in our whole class who can even do that!"
Hiyori launched herself off the ground and into the air, her reiatsu still climbing, and as it peaked, her Zanpakutō shifted in her hands — the blade lengthening, the shape going wild and jagged, something ferocious and entirely alive about it.
"Cut him down — Kubikiri Orochi!"
Shikai achieved.
The reiatsu multiplied in an instant. She came down from above with the force of something that broke stone, blade aimed to split him clean.
Yoji's expression didn't change.
Seven-fold increase from Shikai release. Exceptional. Most shinigami clear three to five on a good day.
Still not enough.
His lips parted. A clear, unhurried chant began rising through the chaos of the storm around him:
"At winter's last edge, the cold plum holds its branch—"
The tip of his still-extended index finger began to gather reishi — deep blue, dense, accelerating inward as the air around him dropped sharply in temperature. Barely visible in the cold air, ghost-shapes of plum blossoms began to form, each petal made of ice crystal.
"Thunder crosses the open sky — a thousand birds come to rest—"
The blue vanished. In its place, gold. The ice-crystal blossoms ignited at their centers, each one blazing with electric light, birds of lightning perched along every branch of every flower, burning and burning.
Lisa went rigid at the edge of the field.
"That's — that's a Kidō incantation? I have never seen that form in any of our texts—"
"We haven't seen it either," Kyōraku said, adjusting the brim of his hat. "None of us have."
Hirako clicked his tongue. "He's always showing off with his homemade techniques." The words were dismissive. The look in his eyes was not.
At the center of the field, Yoji completed the sequence:
"Bloom—"
Every fragment of light collapsed inward at once, condensing into a single point at his fingertip — and then he spoke the name.
"Hadō: Bairaijunka."
A thread of gold shot from his finger. Clean. Precise. Unhurried in the way that very fast things look unhurried.
Then it opened.
In the air between them, the compressed bolt unfurled into something vast and blazing — a plum blossom made entirely of lightning, enormous and wild and strangely, violently beautiful. It expanded to meet Hiyori mid-descent and swallowed the collision entirely.
The sound came a half-second later.
BOOM.
Gold arced in every direction. A short sharp cry. Hiyori's small body came down hard and fast, hitting the training ground and skidding, her Zanpakutō reverting to its sealed form somewhere in the impact. She tried to get up. Couldn't, quite yet.
Silence settled over the training ground.
Every graduate was staring at the center of the field.
Yoji stood exactly as he had been, one finger still extended, expression undisturbed, robes barely moving.