The colossal wall of fire rose without warning, brutal and overwhelming, spreading in every direction as if it had awakened in the heart of the world for the sole purpose of devouring it. It surged outward, expanded without restraint, swallowed the horizon at a suffocating pace, giving the impression that, in only a few more moments, the entire city would be reduced to ash.
Against that inferno, the stolen Bankais wielded by the top three Espada looked laughably fragile. Calling them moths throwing themselves into a flame would not have been an exaggeration in the slightest. That was exactly what it was. Impressive for an instant, meaningless in the next.
And in the final moment, just as Yamamoto-Taicho's flames were about to swallow Starrk, Barragan, and Harribel along with everything else, a voice cut through the chaos.
"Way of Destruction... number ninety."
Those words alone were enough to send a chill through the audience.
Everyone knew, instantly, who had made a move.
That spell had only appeared once before, and the memory of its first appearance was still far too vivid in the minds of the fans. If the wall of fire raised by Yamamoto-Taicho looked like a divine pillar capable of consuming the entire city, then the Black Coffin erupting from the earth was something even more terrifying. It rose like a sentence of death, as though it intended to force heaven and earth together, trapping the sea of flames and its master inside an absolute tomb.
It was Sosuke Aizen's supreme technique.
The very same one that, at the end of the Soul Society arc, had crushed a captain in an instant.
"Commander!"
Below, the Soul Reapers who had barely managed to stand again shouted with whatever voice they had left. Many of them had seen the horror of that spell before. They knew exactly what it meant to be swallowed by that compressed darkness.
For a few seconds, the world seemed to stop.
Then came the cracking sounds.
The Black Coffin began to shrink, releasing tearing, splintering noises, as though something monstrous was forcing its way out from within. In the next second, dozens of pillars of fire erupted from inside the black prison and shattered it completely.
The attack that burst out from within was the strongest technique of Yamamoto-Taicho's Shikai.
Scorching Hell.
When the darkness finally broke apart, Yamamoto-Taicho stepped out of it like an ancient god of war walking straight out of judgment day itself. There was no hesitation, no visible strain, not even the slightest disorder in his posture. He simply walked out of Aizen's technique after destroying it head-on through sheer force.
The top three Espada were stunned.
In front of their screens, the audience looked much the same.
Just moments earlier, many had believed Alex might have made Sosuke Aizen too strong, too untouchable, almost beyond reason. But now, after watching Yamamoto-Taicho shatter Black Coffin through raw spiritual violence alone, the doubt shifted in the opposite direction. Had Alex gone too far with Yamamoto-Taicho as well?
"Fall back."
Aizen's low, magnetic voice echoed above the three Espada, calm as ever, yet carrying an authority that left no room for defiance.
When they raised their eyes, the shock only deepened.
The flaming fortress that had trapped Aizen and the others shattered in midair, pulverized by his spiritual pressure. Yamamoto-Taicho had broken Aizen's Black Coffin. Aizen, in turn, had crushed Yamamoto-Taicho's wall of fire.
In that first episode of the final season, Alex clearly had no intention of holding anything back. From the very beginning, he was pushing the power ceiling of both sides to nearly absurd heights - and against all expectations, it was working perfectly.
"Lord Aizen."
Harribel and Starrk lowered their heads at the same time.
"Withdraw. You still do not wish to die, do you?"
Aizen spoke with the serenity of a man commenting on the weather.
"Yes, sir."
The two retreated immediately, not daring to insist. Their eyes stayed locked on the Soul Reapers who were beginning to stand again, ready to stop any interference. Barragan, however, remained motionless for a few seconds before finally leaving the battlefield. And that tiny pause was enough for many viewers to catch something interesting: the old Arrancar clearly did not show Aizen the same absolute respect the others did.
It was a subtle change, but one loaded with intent.
Alex had altered an important detail from the original version, and the audience picked up on it almost instinctively. After all, having Aizen wound Harribel for no real reason had never sat right. It was not merely the act itself. It was the image it created. A villain built with that much precision did not need to kill his own allies to seem threatening. On the contrary, it diminished his presence. It stained his aura.
In any work, disposing of your own subordinates for no reason almost always feels small.
Yes, that applied to Yhwach too.
After sacrificing most of his own men with his ruthless selection, it was hard not to look at him and wonder whether he had been sabotaging his own army all along.
"As expected of the strongest Soul Reaper in the last thousand years, Yamamoto-Taicho."
Aizen held Kyoka Suigetsu in one hand, while the other remained elegantly tucked in his pocket. There was even a trace of admiration in his voice.
"To destroy my Black Coffin through brute force alone... that truly exceeds expectations."
Yamamoto-Taicho let out a snort heavy with contempt.
"And a boy who can disperse my sea of flames with spiritual pressure alone is a rarity as well. In a thousand years, you are the first. And you will also be the next to die by my hand, Sosuke Aizen."
In the next instant, Yamamoto-Taicho vanished.
The space where he had been exploded with a deafening blast, shaken by the force of his movement. In the span of a blink, he had already appeared before Aizen, bringing his blade down without the slightest flourish.
Aizen raised Kyoka Suigetsu and blocked.
The two spiritual pressures collided head-on.
The impact was so immense that the air itself seemed to twist, and even space gave the impression of warping beneath the force of the two monsters. Captains and Espada alike - warriors who, in any other context, would have been monsters capable of carrying an entire war on their own - went pale at the same time. At that level, none of them had the right to interfere. None of them could even imagine surviving at the center of that battle.
Alex, together with the veteran actor playing Yamamoto-Taicho, delivered a close-quarters battle that was pure spectacle. Blade against blade, step against step, each clash felt as though it were rewriting the scale of power in the series itself.
Online, the comments exploded in real time.
"So they're opening the episode with the two biggest bosses going at each other like this... Alex never disappoints."
"The old man actually seems to have a slight advantage."
"Don't get excited too soon. Aizen is obviously still holding back. Just look at his expression. It barely changed."
"First episode and they already threw the two biggest monsters in the series into direct combat. This feels like a disaster waiting to happen."
And that was exactly the effect.
The sword fight was not merely beautiful. It was suffocating. The kind of battle that made viewers forget to blink. When the blades collided once more, the shockwave of pressure that spread from the impact obliterated several nearby buildings as though they were made of sand.
The two pulled apart for a brief moment.
Aizen, whose expression had barely shifted from the beginning, allowed another smile to appear and raised his left hand with a calmness that bordered on insulting.
"Do you intend to turn this into a battle of attrition, Commander? For a man of your age, that hardly seems the wisest choice."
Yamamoto-Taicho's eyes narrowed.
"Whether I am old or not, come test it with your own life, Sosuke Aizen."
Then the world changed.
In a single second, a spiritual pressure dozens of times more terrifying than anything that had come before descended upon the battlefield. Heaven and earth themselves seemed to lose their color, as though reality had been dragged into a savage contrast of black and white.
The smile disappeared from Aizen's face.
For the first time, ease left his features. In its place appeared something rare.
Gravity.
"Bankai."
When that word left Yamamoto-Taicho's mouth, there was a strange synchronization between fiction and reality. Inside the story, the Soul Reapers froze. Outside of it, the audience reacted in exactly the same way.
Finally.
Finally, they were going to see it.
The Bankai of the strongest Soul Reaper, wielding the strongest Zanpakuto.
The ultimate technique of the man who had stood at the summit for a thousand years.
And for that exact reason, disbelief came with it as well. How could he dare? Three captains had already lost their Bankais to the enemy. The threat was known, concrete, immediate. And yet Yamamoto-Taicho showed not the slightest trace of fear.
Did he simply fear nothing?
Even a beloved young actress, who had sworn she would not watch the series out of sheer pettiness toward the cast, had eventually given in to curiosity and clicked on the episode. And when she saw Yamamoto-Taicho release his Bankai under those circumstances, she frowned, unable to hide her disbelief.
Had the old man gone senile?
But confusion did nothing to lessen the anticipation. If there was one thing everyone wanted to see, it was that final form. After all, Yamamoto-Taicho was the absolute peak of the Soul Reaper side. By all logic, his ultimate power should have been something cataclysmic. The entire audience imagined a large-scale destructive technique, an inferno so vast it would turn the world itself into an ocean of fire.
But once again, Alex chose the opposite path.
In an instant, every flame that had covered the city vanished.
They did not shrink. They did not gradually die out. They did not retreat.
They simply disappeared.
And in Yamamoto-Taicho's hand, all that remained was a blade unchanged in size, scarred by burn marks, with thin wisps of smoke rising from its surface so faintly they almost seemed unreal.
It was so unexpected that many longtime fans instantly remembered a line spoken years earlier by Jasper Quin: that tiny thing... was really a Bankai?
Yamamoto-Taicho raised the slightly charred sword before him and pronounced the name of his final form with the solemnity of a man announcing the end of an age.
"Zanka no Tachi."
The audience had barely even begun trying to understand what they were looking at when he spoke again, staring straight at Aizen.
"What is it, Sosuke Aizen? Are you not going to absorb my Bankai?"
The line struck like thunder.
Hearts trembled at the same time, both inside and outside the screen.
What kind of madness was that? The old man had not only released his Bankai in front of the enemy - he was openly taunting Aizen over it. If he had said nothing, perhaps Aizen would not even have rushed to act.
But Yamamoto-Taicho said it.
And by doing so, he made one thing perfectly clear: he was not fighting like a man cornered.
He was fighting like a man utterly convinced that, from this point on, the battlefield belonged to him alone.
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