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"See…"
"This is what happens when you ignore my advice and charge in like a reckless idiot. A beast will always be a beast. All that power and not a shred of brains. Honestly, it's pitiful…"
Though they were comrades, both captains of the Gotei 13, fighting on the same Shinigami side—
Watching Kenpachi's arm, nearly twisted off at the root, Mayuri showed not the slightest hint of concern.
On the contrary, he laughed loudly, utterly delighted.
In front of his subordinates, he didn't even bother hiding his gloating.
Hearing this, the seated officers and members of the Twelfth Division all recoiled in fear, instinctively taking a step back from Mayuri, trembling as they did.
Dear god.
A comrade was seriously injured, and he was laughing this happily?
Captain Mayuri…
Had he finally gone completely off the deep end?
Elsewhere.
Eleventh Division barracks.
With Kenpachi's left arm shattered, the lively, boisterous atmosphere vanished without a trace.
In its place was dead silence.
The air felt suffocatingly still.
"What's going on?!"
"How the hell did my arm just snap for no reason? That sneaky bastard, what did it do just now?"
Kenpachi snorted angrily, his brows knotted so tightly they nearly fused together.
He wasn't afraid of death, nor did he care about being wounded in battle.
But that didn't mean he could accept anything without question.
At the very least—
He needed to know how his arm had been broken.
Wasn't that fair?
"Was it hiding inside that cloak this whole time, just waiting for this moment? That's devious as hell," Ayasegawa Yumichika said, a chill running down his spine as he thought it through.
Who would've guessed?
The Soul King's left hand was actually a scheming old snake.
And worse, it had succeeded. That was what really pissed him off.
"What if its ability's like that poison guy's? Anyone who gets close automatically gets injured? That's insane!" Ikkaku was sweating bullets.
On the screen.
Kenpachi's severed arm continued to drip blood.
Even through the screen, just looking at the spreading pool on the ground made it easy to imagine the pain he was in.
A tearing, gut-wrenching agony.
The next moment.
Yumichika's eyes widened as far as they could go, his voice trembling.
"Look!"
"The spot on its head where the zanpakutō hit… it's swelling up!"
…
Now—
As blood burst from the wound like fireworks and splattered across the ground, the inside of the black cloak seemed to inflate, swelling at a visible speed.
"Hm? Is it growing?"
Behind his sunflower-patterned mask, Mayuri was practically vibrating with excitement, flashing a neat row of white teeth.
By this point, he'd already begun to suspect that the mysterious being hidden beneath the black robe might not even be human.
"The head's getting bigger and bigger. That's seriously uncomfortable to look at…" Kenpachi flicked his broken arm aside, not even bothering to bandage it, his gaze locked firmly on the monster before him.
Unlike the viewers in the present, watching the recorded footage,
The future version of him had no god's-eye view.
He had no idea that what he was facing was the Soul King's left hand.
Everything was unknown, steeped in fear.
And then—
When the black cloak expanded to a certain limit—
It exploded.
"Boom!"
Blood mixed with dense strands of nerves.
Amid scraps of cloth that had almost been blasted to dust, it spread outward in all directions.
And once the cloak was gone—
the true appearance of the Soul King's left hand was fully exposed beneath the sunlight.
"This is… what the hell?!"
Filling nearly the entire screen was a gigantic hand, its surface rough and wrinkled, frozen in a handshake-like pose. In the center of its palm, two eyeballs spun slowly in place.
Across the entire world of the Shinigami, everyone blurted out the exact same gasp at the same time.
"Gulp…"
Inside the small convenience shop, Shiba Isshin swallowed hard.
His pupils dilated, filled with shock and disbelief as fear crept into his voice.
"So it's… real."
"That withered arm… really is the Soul King's left hand?"
By the end of the sentence, Isshin's voice was trembling.
After all, even though the Shiba clan had fallen long ago, the accumulated knowledge passed down over centuries meant he had grown up well-informed and worldly.
And yet…
When it came to the Soul King, the records were practically nonexistent.
Even when he occasionally heard others mention it, Isshin had always brushed it off as nothing more than a legend, never taking it seriously.
In fact, until not long ago, even after personally seeing the Soul King Palace and witnessing the appearance of Ōetsu Nimaiya from Squad Zero, Isshin still wasn't particularly impressed by the so-called Soul King.
To him, the Soul King had always felt more like a spiritual symbol than an actual being.
Who would have thought…
Not only was the legend real,
but the Soul King's left hand could act independently, and had even become a pure-blood Quincy.
Even seeing it with his own eyes, it was hard to accept.
"The Soul King's left hand actually defected? Why is it mixed up with the Quincy?" Urahara Kisuke muttered, eyes spinning as he frowned in thought.
Compared to Isshin, he knew far more about the Soul King.
According to legend, the Soul King was the linchpin that maintained the stability of the three realms. For over two thousand years, he had been protected by Squad Zero, hidden away in the isolated space of the Soul King Palace.
So here was the problem.
How did the Soul King's left hand end up in the human world?
Unless…
Isshin's earlier joke had actually been true.
Had the Soul King really been dismembered?
The thought sent chills up Urahara's spine, and he didn't dare dig any deeper.
And just as he was lost in thought, something new happened in the video.
...
"Ha… hahahahaha!"
A beast-like roar of laughter shattered the fragments of the cloak still drifting through the air.
Raising his remaining arm, Kenpachi Zaraki grinned wildly, staring at the Soul King's left hand with eyes blazing in excitement, like a predator looking at prey waiting to be torn apart.
The so-called king of basic slashes roared with delight.
"This is way too fun!"
"Not long ago, I cut through magma, cut through freezing torrents, and even got lucky enough to smash a meteor!"
"I thought those were already the weirdest things I'd ever get to cut!"
"But who would've guessed…"
By the end of it, Zaraki's entire body was trembling violently with excitement.
When a beast bares its fangs, it means the hunt is about to begin.
"You've gotta be kidding me. He's already down to one arm, and Captain Zaraki still wants to go after the Soul King's left hand?" Ikkaku Madarame panicked inside the Eleventh Division.
As one of the people who knew Zaraki best, he could tell at a glance.
Their captain had forgotten the pain as soon as the wound healed. He was completely unable to resist the urge to start cutting again.
"…"
Yumichika Ayasegawa's eye twitched hard.
If his right arm got torn off too, Zaraki would be completely crippled.
And sure enough—
The moment the two subordinates finished speaking,
the video showed Zaraki letting out a furious shout, raising his single arm and charging forward with his Zanpakutō!
Seeing that, the entire Eleventh Division shut their eyes in despair.
Even Yachiru, who had been quietly watching the whole time, couldn't help getting angry.
"You idiot, Kenny! You could've watched a bit longer and figured out his weakness first!"
"Why do you always have to charge in headfirst? Serves you right if you end up disabled!"
With that, the little girl huffed and turned her head away, not daring to look at the screen again.
She was terrified of seeing Zaraki lose another arm in a bloody mess.
But then—
Just when things seemed utterly hopeless—
"Moron."
"I knew you'd rush in again. A brainless brute like you, all guts and no sense, should just lie down and watch how I deal with it."
In a flash of movement, Mayuri Kurotsuchi slipped behind Zaraki like a ghost, silent and unseen.
He lifted his arm, drew his Zanpakutō from his sash, and—under the watchful eyes of the entire Shinigami world—
drove the blade straight into Zaraki's body from behind.
"What?!"
In that instant, the Gotei Thirteen erupted.
They stared at Zaraki's suddenly rigid figure, then at the smug grin on Mayuri's face.
In everyone's mind, the same thought exploded at once.
"He stabbed a teammate in the back!"
"Captain Mayuri… is he a traitor?!"
...
At the Second Division barracks.
"What the hell! What the hell! What the hell?!"
The repeated screams nearly blew the roof off.
Ōmaeda clutched his eyes in horror, completely unable to look directly at the scene on the translucent screen.
It took a long while before he finally calmed down a bit.
He turned to Soifon, his voice shaking.
"Captain… did you see that? Captain Mayuri actually stabbed Captain Zaraki in the back!"
"Idiot. I'm not blind. Of course I saw it," Soifon snapped, rolling her eyes.
Her expression wasn't much better, though.
She still hadn't fully processed the revelation of the Soul King's left hand.
Now, on top of that, she had just watched Mayuri pull a betrayal-like move. Her mind felt like it was short-circuiting.
"So… what do we do?"
"He's already down to one arm, and now he gets suddenly backstabbed by an ally. Isn't Zaraki a little too pitiful?"
Ōmaeda never thought there would come a day when he'd feel sorry for Kenpachi Zaraki.
"What can we do? It's not like we can travel to the future," Soifon said, rubbing her temple in frustration. She hadn't expected something like this at all.
"But…"
After forcing herself to calm down, she thought it through.
"Based on what I know about Mayuri, and what he said just now, I don't think he's betrayed the Gotei Thirteen. He probably just thinks Zaraki is in the way."
"Huh? You mean… Captain Mayuri plans to solo the Soul King's left hand?" Ōmaeda froze.
The Soul King's left hand.
Just those words alone set it apart from any ordinary pure-blood Quincy.
Its existence went beyond species, beyond logic. It was the stuff of myth.
"Exactly," Soifon said, nodding calmly.
"Just like Zaraki wants to cut it, Mayuri wants to take this chance to study a legendary life-form with his own hands."
"Alright…"
At those words, Ōmaeda felt his heart lurch violently.
Using the Soul King's left arm as a test subject and conducting experiments on it right there on the battlefield.
Something that insane… only Mayuri Kurotsuchi would ever dare to do it.
At the same time.
In the Eleventh Division duty room.
The place nearly got blown apart by Zaraki Kenpachi's roar.
"Damn it!"
"Kurotsuchi, you bastard! You actually stabbed me in the back in the middle of a fight! What a despicable, shameless piece of trash!"
Watching the footage of himself staggering and collapsing, Kenpachi practically exploded with rage.
If his subordinates hadn't been clinging to him with all their strength, the so-called King of Normal Slashes would've stormed straight to the Twelfth Division to settle things on the spot.
"Captain, please calm down…"
"I took a close look. The wound from the blade is only superficial. It's mostly a numbing agent. It shouldn't be life-threatening."
While physically restraining Kenpachi, Ikkaku Madarame tried his best to talk sense into him.
"Just anesthesia?"
Hearing that, Kenpachi regained a bit of his rationality.
Still, his scar-covered face was far from calm. He snorted coldly.
"Then Kurotsuchi had better keep his promise and take down the Soul King's left arm all by himself."
"Otherwise…"
"I'll personally go to the Twelfth Division and make him pay."
"..."
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