Chapter 890: The True Aizen, A Stirring in the Heart
"Combat readings are continuously spiking! Spiritual pressure has officially surpassed the Captain threshold!"
Inside the Research and Development Bureau, Mayuri Kurotsuchi and several seated researchers watched with unblinking intensity as the diagnostic gauges spiked into the red. These were the real-time feeds transmitted by the specialized sensory telemetry units he had affixed to the three Captain-class officers dispatched into the shadow realm.
The purpose was to measure the precise combat metrics of whatever forces engaged them—categorized across spiritual pressure, Reii density, and destructive yield—synthesizing a cumulative combat rating to gauge target lethality.
The baseline for Captain-level spiritual pressure was a threshold Mayuri had calibrated using his own baseline. Though technically holding a lieutenant's seat on paper, he had mastered Bankai centuries ago, and his operational Reishi density stood virtually on par with most sitting Captains.
While Mayuri disdained pure brawn, by raw data alone, he classified himself as a quintessential Captain-tier benchmark.
Naturally, a vast qualitative chasm separated him from frontline combat fiends like Kenpachi Zaraki.
Right now, across the telemetry arrays, Zaraki's spiritual pressure and destructive index had completely eclipsed standard Captain metrics.
Captain Unohana—who habitually arrived only after the dust settled to collect the wounded and mend fractured spirits—was demonstrating an astonishing, lethal combat profile.
And then...
The anomalous spirit, Mercenary Tao!
Looking at the off-the-scale readings for both spiritual pressure and Reii, paired with the violent spikes in destructive yield accompanying every strike, Mayuri could feel the suffocating, terrifying pressure even through the digital readouts.
Captain Zaraki and Captain Unohana were undeniably being pressed onto the back foot.
Conversely, Vice-Captain Aizen's parameters remained unnervingly flat. Though subtle micro-variations registered, his values hovered steadily right around the baseline Captain mark.
Mayuri glanced at Aizen's feed once before dismissing it, but Kisuke Urahara kept his eyes glued to those flat lines. The longer he observed, the darker his gaze became.
Snapping his paper fan open, Urahara's fingertips twitched microscopically, his spiritual pressure shifting with imperceptible rhythm as he triggered that specialized Kido once more.
The next second, Urahara's mind hazed over for a brief instant, completely erasing the suspicion he had just formed.
In a perilous warzone like the shadow realm, for a vice-captain's combat metrics to remain that flawlessly stable was a glaring impossibility.
Standing right beside Urahara, a Sosuke Aizen clad in a white captain's haori watched Urahara's eyes wander away from the screens before calmly shifting his gaze elsewhere.
Careless. He had not anticipated that under such high-intensity chaos, Urahara's terrifying intellect would still lock onto such an inconspicuous oversight and suspect him.
Fortunately, he was no longer an isolated, single-timeline entity. Ever since that enigmatic sovereign had granted him the authority to summon variant timelines of his destiny, he had already transcended this world without anyone realizing it.
Even the exalted Soul King could never bind this many iterations of him!
Aizen pondered the sudden escalation. The skirmish inside the shadow realm had detonated far too rapidly—meaning the native, authentic Aizen who had infiltrated the citadel deemed the local garrison vulnerable enough to initiate an open brawl.
BOOM!
The next second, an apocalyptic detonation erupted directly from the shadows cast across the Seireitei's flagstones! Azure and white Reishi exploded outward like a volcanic breach, collapsing an entire residential sector into pulverized rubble.
Amidst a torrential barrage of luminous Quincy light-arrows, nearby patrolmen were butchered in droves as legions of white-uniformed Soldat poured through the breach.
BOOM!
The atmosphere screamed. A tidal wave of blue-white Reishi—laced with silver-white blade pressure—cleaved outward from the shadow rift. A savage figure shrouded in golden spiritual pressure stood right in the path of the blast, only to be violently hurled backward through the air by the raw kinetic shear.
CRASH! CRASH!
Kenpachi Zaraki tore through several multi-story wooden barracks before finally skidding to a halt deep inside the Third Division grounds. He sprang to his feet, blood cascading down his face: a clean slash had sheared through his spiritual mantle, carving an agonizing, bone-deep fissure across his right cheek.
"The war has begun! Stand up and slaughter them, Soul Reapers! HAHAHAHA!"
Zaraki swept his gaze over the bewildered patrolmen, roaring at the top of his lungs before detonating his golden aura with unhinged ferocity. As the bedrock buckled under his boots, he gripped his blade with both hands, lunging headlong back toward the epicenter of the detonation.
The concussive shockwave kicked up by his sprint blasted charging Soldat clean out of the airspace.
On pure instinct, Zaraki had begun mimicking Mercenary Tao's method of compressing spiritual matter. Though he could not manipulate free Reishi, spiritual pressure could achieve a functionally identical effect.
Concentrating his spiritual pressure tightly across his skin—and even driving it deep into his muscles to unlock explosive kinetic multipliers—was a technique Zaraki deployed with brutal crudeness, inflicting severe micro-tears across his own flesh.
Yet he relished every drop of pain.
Schwing—SPLAT!
A serpentine arc of crimson sword intent traced jagged, erratic angles through the air, cleaving violently into Kaito's back.
The title Yachiru Unohana carried originated from her mastery of every sword school in existence during her slaughterous rampage a millennium ago. Her lethal bladecraft had reached the absolute pinnacle—a ruthless martial system engineered solely to butcher, deploying every conceivable dirty trick without hesitation.
Rather than a woman wielding a sword, when lost in the ecstasy of the kill, it felt as though the blade itself was dragging Unohana along its blood-slicked trajectory.
Unohana's face was equally drenched in blood, her pristine white captain's haori dyed crimson. Yet a wide, feral smile stretched across her lips, her meticulously braided hair unraveled and whipping wild with her violent movements.
Kaito turned his head. The twin manifestations of his Schrift [The Overlord]—the absolute defensive Armored Projection and the offensive Blade Projection—could not be deployed concurrently.
Consequently, while manifesting his Reishi blade, his passive defense naturally dipped. Unohana's full-powered strike had sheared through his Hierro-like mantle, driving corrosive, predatory spiritual pressure deep into the wound.
Yet in a fraction of a second, the foreign Reishi was incinerated clean by Kaito's internal reserves.
That corrosive spiritual pressure was mechanically treated as an exotic spiritual authority; against Kaito's overwhelmingly superior Reishi mass, it failed to take hold.
"Hah~"
Kaito spun on his heel, sweeping his blade in a vicious horizontal arc, cleaving a razor-thin white line straight through the horizon.
Unohana's neck bent at an unnatural, sickening angle, as though she had deliberately snapped her own spine to duck beneath the edge—a surreal, horrifying dodge that vividly reminded Kaito of his earliest deployments when first entering the Infinite Space.
SCHWING!
A deafening blade resonance tore through the Seireitei. The silver line sliced clean through multiple blocks of reinforced architecture, sending a wave of primal dread through the surrounding Soul Reapers.
Thud, thud, thud!
Rapid, thunderous footsteps closed the distance. Sprinting so low his torso leaned almost parallel to the cobblestones, Shunsui Kyoraku discarded his straw hat entirely. Disregarding his lingering trauma, his hands gripped his scabbards, chanting his release incantation at a dead sprint:
"Flower wind rages, flower god roars; heavenly wind rages, heavenly demon sneers... Katen Kyokotsu!"
Maintaining his sanity, he refrained from triggering Bankai, drawing twin scimitars to plunge directly into Kaito's guard.
Flanking from the opposite side, the aristocratic Captain of the Sixth Division, Byakuya Kuchiki, chained continuous Shunpo at blinding velocity, arriving in perfect synchronicity with Kyoraku. His blade slashed outward in mid-release:
"Scatter... Senbonzakura!"
The steel fractured into billions of razor-sharp cherry blossom petals, converging like a storm upon Kaito.
Simultaneously, the heavens darkened under storm clouds. Vaulting high from the distant rear lines, Toshiro Hitsugaya raised both arms skyward with a desperate roar:
"Bankai! Daiguren Hyorinmaru!"
Having clashed with an unarmed Mercenary Tao in Rukongai and failed to breach his guard even in Shikai, Hitsugaya knew holding back meant death. Unburdened by the collateral risks of Kyoraku's release, he engaged Bankai from the opening breath.
Multiple Captains committing their full output simultaneously shattered the flagstones in an instant, leaving nearby Soldat, Quincies, and unseated Soul Reapers ashen-faced.
Draped in icy composure, Lille Barro finally stepped out from the ruined threshold of the ice palace. Kaito's duel against the Captains had pulverized a massive wing of the citadel, tearing open the dimensional veil into the Seireitei.
Whether Mercenary Tao had shattered the gateway intentionally or through the collateral churn of combat remained unreadable.
Regardless, the Wandenreich could no longer remain concealed. The war was officially underway!
Lille Barro swept his gaze across the chaotic field. Too many high-value targets were charging into view; he refused to believe whatever illusionist had clouded his senses could deceive him across an open battlefield.
Lifting his sniper rifle, he acquired the sprinting officers.
Schrift X: The X-Axis—an absolute piercing authority. Between the muzzle and the crosshairs, everything in the trajectory was punched clean through, bypassing physical durability entirely.
Even Captain-level combatants possessed zero defense against it.
BANG!
A single shot rang out. Rushing into the sector, Momo Hinamori took the round straight through her chest. She had no comprehension of what had struck her: having heard that total war had erupted and the Quincies had breached the walls, she had simply followed Captain Hirako to reinforce the front lines, only to be cut down in the opening volley.
In the roaring tempest of the battlefield, that shot should have gone unnoticed. Yet Toshiro Hitsugaya—coordinating his Bankai assault against Kaito—remained acutely tuned to Hinamori's spiritual pressure.
Snapping his head around, Hitsugaya saw Hinamori collapsing into the dirt, blood vomiting from her mouth. His vision flooded with red as the ice flowers behind his back shattered instantly.
Abandoning the assault on Kaito entirely, he let out a guttural, anguished roar, driving his colossal frost wings forward to rocket straight toward Lille Barro.
Clad in standard black Shihakusho, Vice-Captain Aizen strolled out from the shadow rift. He could not entirely decipher Mercenary Tao's underlying game, though forcing an early war undeniably suited his grand blueprint.
The next second, Aizen caught sight of Hinamori, pierced through by a beam of blue-white Reishi. Her eyes were glazed with innocent bewilderment, having never grasped the brutal reality of war, let alone the apocalyptic caliber of the monsters standing on this field.
As Hinamori fell, her peripheral vision caught Captain Hirako's contorted, furious snarl as he spun his Zanpakuto to initiate Bankai, while Shiro-chan's freezing aura detonated with blind fury.
She knew Shiro-chan would lose his mind seeing her cut down like this.
Yet... the moment her fading vision registered the silhouette emerging from the shadows, none of that mattered anymore.
She saw Vice-Captain Aizen returning safely from the shadow realm, untouched and unbloodied. She had heard that both Captain Zaraki and Captain Unohana had suffered severe wounds.
Thank goodness... Captain Aizen is safe...
Clinging to that thought, a gentle, serene smile curved her lips as she drifted toward the dark.
Watching Hinamori collapse, the Aizen clad in black Shihakusho—the authentic, native Sosuke Aizen of this worldline—stood rooted in place, staring coldly at that dying smile.
His brow furrowed deeply.
Aizen could not fathom the psychological architecture that could possibly compel Hinamori to smile at a moment like this.
Struck down by an adversary hopelessly beyond her tier, swept into a meat grinder that stripped away all agency...
On the absolute brink of death.
Did merely beholding his silhouette genuinely warrant a smile?
Aizen had never understood such sentiment. Just as his monstrous intellect had condemned him to absolute loneliness from birth, failing to find a single peer capable of standing on equal ground had driven him to tear down the boundary of Soul Reapers rather than seek companionship. He had never truly registered what mortals called the heart.
He had spent his life gazing down upon the anthill from above, entirely immune to the trivial warmth of lesser beings.
Yet since peering beyond the veil—discovering that even the supreme Soul King was merely a scripted actor within a fictional box—everything had fundamentally unraveled.
Aizen, too, had tasted the bitter, crushing weight of insignificance. Before that astronomical dimensional gulf, he was merely another ant being observed from above.
In that single microsecond, Aizen's right hand twitched. Kyoka Suigetsu began to hum—a low, resonant vibration expressing an unbridled, euphoric clarity it had never displayed across its existence.
Across countless branching timelines, that foreign entity styling himself the King of Destiny had repeatedly mocked him: You held your own Zanpakuto in far too much contempt, leaving yourself hollow when absolute, decisive violence was required.
"Aizen! You're unharmed! Thank the heavens! That bastard... How dare he lay a finger on Hinamori?!"
Amidst blazing fury, Shinji Hirako had spotted Aizen emerging from the rift. Having perpetually watched over this gifted junior, seeing him emerge unscathed brought a momentary flash of relief.
Yet the sight of his subordinate bleeding out reignited his wrath. He locked his glare onto the sniper evading Hitsugaya's aerial assaults. That Quincy was leagues beyond ordinary soldiers, parrying every strike from a Bankai-state Captain with fluid ease.
"Captain Hirako. Might you leave this sector to me?"
Aizen spoke softly, his voice devoid of its usual affable warmth.
Hirako blinked, turning around to find his mild-mannered lieutenant smoothly drawing his Zanpakuto—a blade that, beyond casting optical mirages, had never demonstrated direct lethality in combat.
Yet right now, the polished steel of Kyoka Suigetsu radiated breathtaking, prismatic luminescence, as though sunlight passing through the edge was refracting into an infinite spectrum of lethal colors.
A crisp, soaring blade resonance rose from a whisper to a thundering crescendo.
The steel in Aizen's grip trembled with predatory hunger. In that single breath, Hirako felt a long-forgotten, paralyzing dread seize his chest.
"Aizen... you..."
Before Hirako could form another syllable, Aizen stepped forward.
In the span of a non-existent heartbeat, he manifested directly behind Lille Barro's spine—as though he had occupied that exact coordinate since the dawn of time.
Lille Barro's pupils shrank to pinpricks. So fast! Faster than thought! Quincies had always held Hirenkyaku as superior to Shunpo, priding themselves on infinitely finer Reishi manipulation.
Yet this Soul Reaper's Shunpo was terrifyingly instantaneous.
Rip!
Before Lille Barro could trigger Hirenkyaku to break the line, an icy, merciless edge cleaved cleanly across his spine, shearing diagonally from the nape of his neck down to his hip.
A stroke of breathtaking velocity and peerless brutality severed Lille Barro's physical form in two.
Hovering nearby amidst swirling frost, Toshiro Hitsugaya stared in stunned paralysis at the sheer, suffocating gravity rolling off the lieutenant.
Aizen... was he always this terrifyingly strong...?!