Chapter 021: Reaching the Top
When Matsushita Yusuke opened his eyes, he was looking at a completely unfamiliar ceiling.
He was exhausted. A thick, fuzzy kind of tired that came with no sense of how long he'd been out. He let out a groggy sound and turned his head, squinting at the room.
Wait. Hold on.
Give me a second.
He pushed himself slowly upright, right hand pressed against his forehead, and sat there with his eyes half-closed, working through it.
I am...
In the middle of a Shinigami practical internship...
And then?
We ran into Hollows during the field deployment.
And after that?
I stepped in to stop a mass casualty situation and pulled off a dual chant.
Right. That's everything.
The fog cleared. Matsushita Yusuke let out a quiet "oh" and felt his thoughts click back into place.
He must have passed out from total reishi depletion. When you pushed yourself past empty in a short window, or tried to pull off a technique your body wasn't built to handle yet, this was the kind of thing that happened. The system shut you down to protect itself. Same principle as a person who hasn't slept in long enough eventually just dropping where they stand whether they like it or not.
Reishi was a Shinigami's energy. It followed the same rules everything else did.
Alright. He knew where the before had landed. What about the after?
What happened while he was out? And where exactly was he now?
He looked around.
The room was bare and functional. White walls with a slightly modern look to them, nothing like the warm, worn wood of everything at the Academy. Iron-frame bed. A plain cabinet. A bathroom door in dull metal.
Actually, compared to the Academy's consistent commitment to making everything out of timber regardless of context, this place felt strangely familiar. Almost like somewhere from back home.
While that thought was still turning over, footsteps came from the corridor outside. Close, then closer.
Matsushita Yusuke turned his head.
The door opened.
The two of them made eye contact at the same moment.
The person stepping in stopped with one foot still in the air, clearly not having expected to find Yusuke already awake and upright.
"..."
"..."
An instant of mutual awkwardness. Then it dissolved.
The man cleared his throat, stepped properly into the room, and gave a respectful nod.
"We've met before, but I don't think we've been properly introduced. I'm Omaeda Kishinoshin. Squad 2 vice-captain. Good to meet you."
That big, solid-looking man with the pompadour.
Matsushita Yusuke was still not fully assembled but managed to return the nod in a reasonably appropriate way.
"I'm sorry, did you... need something from me?"
"I came to thank you."
A pause.
"Before we get to that — let me bring a doctor in to check you over first."
That snapped Matsushita Yusuke the rest of the way awake. He said thank you twice in quick succession, then leaned forward.
"Sorry — where am I right now? What happened after I went down? The other students — was anyone seriously hurt? Any casualties?"
"Too many questions at once. Let me take them one at a time."
"Right — sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself."
"Don't apologize for that. As I said, I owe you a thank you. So the least I can do is answer properly."
Kishinoshin smiled. A calm, level expression. Whatever Matsushita Yusuke had been expecting from this man based on limited exposure, this wasn't it. The exterior was all pompadour and gravitas, but the person underneath was noticeably more even-tempered than he looked.
He pulled a stool over, sat down, glanced through some papers in his hand, and began.
"Let's go through it in order."
First.
"Both Hollows encountered during the mission were not what the briefing described."
Kishinoshin laid it out plainly.
The first was the high-appetite individual, aggressive, combat-capable, driven by hunger in a way that made it actively dangerous even in controlled conditions. The second was what he called a battle-hardened individual: a spirit that had been undergoing Hollowfication for several months, long enough to develop genuine combat instincts from repeated contact with Shinigami.
Either one would have been a real problem for the student group. Together, and working in coordination the way they had been, both types were legitimately dangerous to even a mid-ranked seated officer going in unprepared.
By Ichigo Kurosaki's standard, that kind of threat was a warm-up. A single swing.
But that was Ichigo's standard, and Ichigo was not the yardstick here. For ordinary Shinigami working within normal parameters, breaking threats down by type and calibrating threat level was basic operational sense. The gap between those two reference points was enormous and worth keeping clear.
None of that was the issue, though.
"I have to ask," Matsushita Yusuke said carefully, picking his words. "Squad 2... wouldn't normally make this kind of mistake on a mission brief. Would it."
What he was actually thinking was considerably more direct. What he said out loud was the polite version.
"Sharp as ever, Matsushita-kun."
Kishinoshin gave a slow nod. Something in his expression acknowledged the point without flinching from it.
"You're right. We had the full picture on both targets well in advance. The decision to report a softer threat level was made at our captain's suggestion."
The captain.
Yoruichi Shihoin.
Matsushita Yusuke listened as Kishinoshin ran through her reasoning. Hearing it laid out plainly, he let out a slow breath and arrived somewhere between resigned and amused.
Well. That explains everything.
"If it came from Squad 2's captain, I don't have any complaints."
Complaining at a noble house ranked among the four great families was a project with a predictable ending. Even if there had been grounds for it, the practical result would be nothing. The structure of Soul Society was what it was. Knowing when to leave it alone was its own kind of intelligence.
Fortunately, this particular vice-captain seemed to be a man who believed in having actual conversations.
"Glad you see it that way. And on the matter of casualties: because of what you did out there, not one student died."
A beat.
"And both Hollows were completely vaporized by your strike."
Vaporized.
He'd been the one who fired it. He still needed a moment with that word.
The output had been genuinely unreasonable. He could acknowledge that now, from the outside, looking at the result.
Before a Shinigami achieved Zanpakuto release, Kido was effectively what they had in place of a finishing move. Not a regular tool. A last resort that cost everything you had. The fact that the underlying mechanic was essentially a manual spellcast didn't make it any less of a weapon. It made it more of one, because the entire cost was paid up front in concentration and reishi rather than spread across a sustained fight.
A single number thirty-three, at his current level, had apparently been enough to leave a crater.
Which made it a lot easier to understand, going back to the original story, how Aizen's Hado #90 Kurohitsugi had removed Komamura from the conversation so completely and so quickly. A technique nine ranks further up the numbering, fired by someone operating at an entirely different ceiling.
The numbers made sense now in a way they hadn't before.
Matsushita Yusuke looked down at his right palm.
And felt something.
Not satisfaction, exactly. More like a specific kind of forward momentum.
This was still the beginning.
The four core disciplines were still growing. His Zanpakuto's five categories were all barely off zero. When the groundwork was properly laid, when the understanding ran deeper across all of them —
That was when it would really start.
The top wasn't a place you arrived at. It was a direction you kept moving in.
And Matsushita Yusuke, staring at his own hand in a bare white room in some Squad 2 facility in the Rukongai, felt unreasonably certain that he was still pointing the right way.
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