Kenpachi Azashiro's offensive continued without the slightest pause.
After Gosuke Shigure slipped past the first cut, the second came down like a falling star. Azashiro's shoulders rolled, hips set, and the blade carved a diagonal that seemed to split the horizon itself. A dense, compressed sheet of reiatsu gathered along the edge of his Zanpakutō, then burst outward the moment steel moved, unleashing a tidal wall of Sword Pressure.
This wasn't some secret technique. It wasn't a hidden ability of his Zanpakutō. It was a simple, frontal slash—brutal and direct. But in the hands of someone whose spiritual pressure had been compressed to an extreme, even an "ordinary" swing reached the destructive weight of high-tier Kidō.
Aizen's line from long ago threaded through the air like a cold truth: a shinigami's battle is a battle of reiatsu.
If you examined it too literally, there were caveats—skill, timing, angle, experience. And yet in most real fights, the maxim held. The denser will crushed the thinner one.
Like… now.
Shigure met the surge head-on. His body thinned into motion—Shunpo—and the rushing line of pressure scythed through where he'd been a heartbeat before. Dust climbed in sheets. His hand found his own hilt, the sealed blade gliding free with a clean whisper.
He did not perform Shikai.
He didn't need to—not yet. Reiatsu poured from his core into steel; a white edge of sword pressure formed at the tip and streaked forward to meet Azashiro's slash midair.
*Boom!*
The collision ruptured the local balance of reishi. The normally placid spiritual particles saturating the Zaraki air were shredded and thrown into chaos, spiraling into a wild, glittering storm. The ground trembled; hairline fractures raced outward, widening into jagged seams.
Azashiro stepped through his own recoil and swung again. The blade howled. Shigure slid, pivoted, and answered with another cut. White met blue; blue met white—each impact a muffled whump followed by a rolling crack as the wasteland absorbed the shock.
Azashiro's sword work was as unadorned as a hammer and twice as honest. Every stroke was a statement: yield. The condensed pressure around his Zanpakutō was so thick that even the dust near the edge vaporized before settling. Azashiro's power didn't look like grace; it looked like inevitability.
Shigure's movements, by contrast, were surgical. His sealed blade worked in thin, precise lines, shaving momentum off Azashiro's waves, redirecting, cutting into the seam, letting the larger force break itself on small angles. Every step was measured; every rotation was spent in perfect economy.
Another collision.
*Boom!*
Another fissure.
*Crack!*
Reishi rushed and roared, then fell into eddies. The storm rose. The storm fell.
…
On the far edge of the Zaraki district—
A tall figure stood among scattered bodies, his tattered, nicked blade still lifted from its last kill. The iron scent of spirit-blood mixed with dust. His single visible eye narrowed toward the north as the storm crested, a rolling pillar of light and pressure that rattled the bones.
He grinned. The sensation—raw power striking raw power—rang through him like a bell.
Maybe there was a worthy fight over there.
Without hesitation, he let the half-dead thing at his feet crumble, flung the lingering weight from his blade, and began striding toward the storm. The sword dragged for the first three steps—skrrrk, skrrrk, skrrrk—then lifted as his pace lengthened. He didn't bother masking his presence. Predators did not need to hide from thunder.
…
Seireitei Research Institute.
Under the Twelfth Division's authority, the Institute's cold lenses and humming arrays formed the Soul Society's sensory web. For all the archaic habits of Seireitei, this place was a shard of true modernity: circuits etched with reishi, arrays tuned to fluctuations, archivists who spoke in numbers and graphs.
Alarms trilled in layered tones.
"Massive spike! Northern Rukongai—signal class captain or above!"
"Two sources." another tech snapped, eyes tracking cascading glyphs. "Distinct compression profiles—both are approaching captain-tier density."
"Confirm the grid."
"Confirmed. District Eighty—Zaraki."
Voices tightened. A few faces went pale.
"Why there…?"
The director cut them off. "Save commentary for the canteen—signal the First Division now."
"Yes, sir!"
A Hell Butterfly lifted from the dispatch platform, wings black as lacquer, and slipped through the Institute's upper vents into open air, arrowing toward the central white walls.
…
First Division — Captain-Commander's chamber.
The butterfly alighted. The message whispered.
Yamamoto Genryusai's eyes opened, old and terrible.
"Captain-level conflict," he repeated, voice a slow ember, "in Rukongai."
The adjutant bowed low. "Institute readings identify one signature as the Eighth Kenpachi, Azashiro Soya. The opponent is unconfirmed, but the compression pattern is… shinigami."
In Seireitei, the law was older than most of its officers: shinigami do not kill shinigami. The Eleventh's succession duels existed as an exception, codified by blood and time. Outside that rite, swords turned inward were intolerable.
Yamamoto's gaze hardened to a polished edge. Reports had crossed his desk for days now—no, weeks. Disappearances. Souls gone without trace. It had stunk of something patient and methodical.
The paper screen slid aside with a soft clack.
"Old man Yama!"
Pink over white stepped through—Kyoraku Shunsui—hat shadowing his eyes for once.
"Speak." Yamamoto said, no hint of indulgence in the single word.
Shunsui's smile was thin. "Clues on the Rukongai vanishings. I don't have proof enough to indict, but—" He exhaled. "It points toward the Eighth Kenpachi."
Yamamoto did not blink.
Cane met floor.
*Thud*
"Go to Zaraki District immediately."
Azashiro straightened. "Understood."
"Kenpachi Azashiro is engaged now." Yamamoto continued. "With one of our own. You will intervene." He paused for a beat. "Bring him back alive."
Shunsui nodded once, turned, and vanished into the corridor, the flowered haori snapping behind him like a standard in wind.
…
Back to Zaraki.
The wasteland had been carved into a chessboard of ruptures and lifted plates. Sword Pressure had planed ridges flat; old gullies had been split into fresh canyons. The air itself seemed denser, the reishi storm turning even breath into work.
Gosuke shifted, Shunpo carrying him across a broken shelf just as Azashiro's line carved it away. He landed, knee flexed, then rose through an answering cut. White pressure lanced forward, struck the oncoming wave, and the two energies shredded each other to mist.
Azashiro didn't even grunt. He stepped through the dissipating cloud and cut again. The blade-track was a clean, underslung angle—surgical in its lack of waste. Shigure's wrist rotated; his own steel met the line just off center. Pressure slid down pressure and bit stone instead of flesh.
*Clang.Boom.Crack.*
The rhythm repeated, mutated, returned.
Azashiro's eyes were half-lidded, but the pupils had narrowed to sharp points. He wasn't playing with his food; he was measuring, compressing, stacking weight. Each successive stroke came heavier, tighter, nearer to the edge of what the barren ground could hold.
Shigure answered without panic. His sealed blade sang in short notes. He gave ground when he had to, stole it back when Azashiro's shoulder telegraphed a micro-shift. He had not called Shikai because he refused to flinch first. Not against this opponent. Not in this argument.
'He hits like a landslide,' Shigure noted, 'but it's not blind force. He's testing ranges. Testing me.'
Azashiro's left foot slid half a shoe-length. His hips told the truth: the next cut would be high, then reversed to low on contact. Shigure cheated the timing by a fraction and answered the second line before the first fully formed.
Pressure bucked. Stone geysered.
*Whhmp!*
Azashiro flicked debris off his cheek with a twitch of reiatsu and came on.
The duel was no longer about "captain" and "vice-captain". It was about two answers to the same question tearing the world to prove their point. Azashiro's answer was a blade heavy with 'necessity'. Shigure's answer was a blade that said 'no.'
They crossed again. The air popped.
*Bang—bang—bang*
Azashiro's grip narrowed a finger-width. His forearms tightened. When he swung this time, every ounce of compressed spiritual pressure locked along the edge and stayed there. The line felt like a metal rail sliding through air.
Shigure refused to be the nail. He met it with the smallest possible surface, shaving force away instead of catching it flat. The shock shuddered through bone anyway, but his stance ate it, and his return cut kissed Azashiro's sleeve and took a whisper of cloth.
They stepped apart. Dust moved between them like a low tide.
Shigure's breathing was controlled, each draw thin to reduce reishi disturbance in his own lungs. Azashiro's was unchanged—slow, cold. But a narrow light had entered his eyes. It was not delight. It was not the thrill of a brawl. It was recognition.
He slid his foot forward, toes testing grit. The set of his shoulders admitted what his tongue did not.
Shigure was not going to fall to mere pressure.
Azashiro's jaw worked once. His answer was more reiatsu. The blade came down. The wasteland answered with another seam of broken earth. Shigure's answer was steel, angle, and a line that said he would not be moved.
*Boom*
*Crack*
*Swish*
White arcs and blue arcs braided, broke, reformed. The reishi storm rose to a crest again, then spilled outward, hissing over shattered plates of stone.
From a distance—any distance—the scene would have looked simple: two figures trading lines until the world bent. Up close, the margin for error was a breath's thickness. The first man to misread half a shoulder, the first to let fatigue slip into his wrist, would lose an ear, an arm, a life.
Azashiro's next step was almost lazy. The cut that followed wasn't. Shigure slid right, Shunpo compressing distance down to two long strides, and the blow tore open a new gully where he'd stood.
He landed, drove his heel into the lip of a fractured shelf, and answered with a short, savage up-cut. Azashiro tilted a fraction; the line scraped air, sang past cloth, and sheared a drift of dust cleanly in two.
They reset without speaking.
Azashiro's face remained unreadable, but a flicker moved behind the eyes—a pale flame of something close to interest, perhaps even respect. For the first time since taking the white haori, the Eighth Kenpachi was no longer merely executing a plan. He was fighting an opponent.
He had expected an execution. He had expected Gosuke Shigure to buckle under the weight of blade and pressure and the idea behind both. He had expected the vice-captain to break quickly, because that was what happened when a mountain fell on a man.
But Shigure didn't break.
Step for step, stroke for stroke, he met him. He adjusted. He absorbed. He returned.
Even with Urazakuro drawn, even with his reiatsu stacked and sharpened, the clean finish he had predicted did not arrive. The duel lengthened by one exchange, then another, then another, until prediction itself had to move aside for the reality in front of him.
The wasteland, sliced into a map of violence, hummed underfoot.
Azashiro's mouth flattened to a line.
He understood now — however grudgingly.
Even for him… it seemed a bit difficult to kill him.
*****
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