Chapter 091: Gisei Hadō
The words left him.
Whatever remained of the fire scattered in an instant, vanishing without a trace.
Matsushita Yusuke was sitting on the ground in the middle of where it had been, looking the way a person looks when they have just been dragged out of deep water. Exhausted, wrung out, making no effort to appear otherwise.
He looked up as Soifon came walking through the last of the embers and crouched down beside him.
"Stepping in like that goes against the rules of a fair fight, you know."
Soifon said nothing. She took hold of his arm and pulled him upright.
"I don't care about that."
For someone who held to principles as a matter of course, choosing to set one aside entirely was not something Matsushita Yusuke had expected. He registered it as a small, quiet surprise.
And something else alongside the surprise.
She came for me. She was thinking about me.
But wait.
"Don't touch me."
He pulled back and stepped away, putting two paces between them.
The movement was strange enough that Soifon's brow came together immediately. She seemed to read something in it, and instead of stepping back, she moved toward him.
"What did you do? You... wait. Show me your right hand."
She moved to his side with something close to shunpo speed, came around behind him, and grabbed his arm.
Hot.
That was the first thing. The contact registered before anything visual did, and the small involuntary sound she made came out before she could stop it.
Her grip loosened for an instant. Then, after her brain caught up, she closed it again and held on.
What she was looking at was the color of charcoal.
Black. Cracked. The way wood looks after a fire has burned through it completely, with only the faint red glow of the last embers still showing in the deep splits. The kind of thing that crumbles when touched.
If it had been anyone else's arm, the shock might have been smaller. But this was Matsushita Yusuke's right hand.
Why did it look like this?
"What did you do?!"
He laughed a little, sheepish, and tried to find words for it.
"Just a bit of an... experiment that didn't entirely agree with me. It's fine. Don't worry about it."
The actual explanation was less casual than that.
Ittō Kasō had a second reason for being classified as forbidden. It was one of the very few Gisei Hadō, the sacrificial techniques. The activation requirement was specific: a portion of the caster's own body had to be carbonized as the price of entry. That was the cost for deploying a large-scale forbidden Hado from your own hands.
Exactly as in the original story.
Yamamoto, stripped of his flames by Aizen's Ryujin Jakka technique, had absorbed all of that heat back into himself and then used Ittō Kasō as a final strike. The result had not gone as hoped, but the raw destructive output of the technique had never been in question.
The power was real. So was the price.
Soifon looked at the hand, the forearm, and what had been a full arm up to roughly two-thirds of the upper arm. All of it in the same state. Charcoal-dark, cracked, pieces of it falling away in flakes.
The tingling that ran across her scalp was not going away.
"Go, go see a doctor..."
She hadn't finished the sentence when Matsushita Yusuke's right hand gave a small tremor.
Crack.
The sound she had been afraid of since the moment she saw the arm. Her head turned, and what she saw was the carbonized surface of his right hand splitting further, the way a piece of burnt coal fractures when it reaches its limit.
"No, you... wait, just..."
No clear thought available. No plan. Just the object in front of her and no idea what to do about it.
Not far away, Kijishi Kenpachi had been in the process of pulling himself upright. His body shook for a moment, he exhaled slowly, and began to push himself to his feet.
Then his legs went out and he went back to one knee.
Ittō Kasō had hit him at his limit. He was still there.
Humiliating, by any standard. The dignity and reputation of a captain, in a state like this.
But whatever else could be said about Kijishi Kenpachi, he had earned his title through his own ability. He had reached Bankai through his own strength.
The information gap, the raw output of high-level Kido, the tactical choices that had been specifically Matsushita Yusuke's: all of those things together had produced this outcome. This was the result after everything had been spent.
And yet.
There were gaps that no amount of planning could bridge. Some distances between people were simply what they were.
The same way Aizen had spent years and extensive preparation working around the gap between himself and Yamamoto rather than confronting it directly.
What Matsushita Yusuke faced right now was something in the same category.
"Still not quite enough..."
He watched Kijishi stabilize and settle his weight, and let out a quiet breath. The expression on his face was resigned but not bitter.
This was the result of everything he had. He had allowed himself to imagine winning cleanly, putting this fight to rest in one stroke.
Reality had its own view on that.
"Hey! Are you even listening to me?!"
The slap landed before he could say anything. Stars for a moment, vision going sideways.
When it cleared, he found Soifon standing in front of him with tears running down her face.
"What are we going to do about your hand? What are we supposed to do?!"
He stood there and looked at her. The expression that moved through him went from startled to something quieter, in the space of a few slow breaths.
His voice, when it came, was entirely calm.
"You don't have to panic, Soifon. I have a way to deal with this."
"What possible way could you have?!"
The tears were falling now. To her ears it sounded like nonsense. The arm was carbonized and splitting apart. What solution could there be for that?
She was full of it right now, the sharp and useless feeling of wishing she had moved sooner. If she had known this was the outcome, she would have forced her way in regardless of what anyone said.
Matsushita Yusuke looked at her and opened his mouth to say something. Then he closed it again.
Arguing was not the fastest way through this. Showing her was.
He stepped back half a pace, put his left hand on her arm and moved it gently aside, and took a slow deliberate breath.
"Let me say this first."
His eyes steadied. His voice was still flat.
"I don't do things without a plan. And I don't gamble with my own body. So..."
All of this had been accounted for.
As the words settled, the light that appeared around him was deep blue.
The Zanpakuto that had been in his grip was gone. Somewhere in the process of deploying a forbidden technique at that scale, it had been reduced to nothing. The blade had not survived what the technique had demanded.
But a weapon was not something so inconvenient as that implied.
The essence of Shingonkai was reiatsu.
What it needed was a clear vessel for expression. A name. A word.
What Matsushita Yusuke did next was something that ran against the way the mind naturally worked.
He looked down at the cracked and carbonized arm.
And said, quietly:
"Replace."
Crack.
The charcoal surface of his right hand shattered completely, breaking apart into drifting fragments.
And at the same moment.
Blue reishi surged forward, woven and layered like something being knitted together, converging on the space where his right hand had been.