"Aizen? Aizen!!!"
Inside the Squad 5 building, Hirako Shinji's voice rang down the corridor.
He moved at a fast clip, one hand cupped at the side of his mouth like a gaphone.
"Where are you? Get out here! I'll drink all the tea in your room if you don't show up!!!"
A squad mber passing through said quietly:
"Vice-Captain Aizen, sir... he left around noon, I think."
"Huh?"
Hirako stopped.
The expression he wore was genuinely confused.
Again.
This had been happening too often lately. A consistent wrongness at the edges of things. He'd rember an event one way -- a clear sequence, a specific outco -- and then soone else would describe the sa event differently. Small at first. Easy to write off.
Not anymore.
It wasn't just peripheral details. Events from minutes ago, things that had just happened, were producing these contradictions.
Aizen had left around noon? That was impossible. Hirako had spoken to him less than half an hour ago. Given him specific instructions.
So where exactly was the error?
He spun around and called after the retreating squad mber.
"Hey. Wait."
The man stopped, startled. He turned, clutching a docunt folder to his chest, looking at Hirako with wide, uncertain eyes.
Hirako's reputation was built on being easy to approach. He didn't raise his voice at people. He didn't startle anyone.
An easygoing person suddenly going sharp: the first reaction was always to flinch.
"C-Captain. Did you need sothing?"
Hirako looked at the expression on his face, pressed his lips together, and turned slightly away. A slow breath in.
Keep it together. Don't push this onto the squad. He was a captain. Composure was the baseline, not the exception.
"No, it's nothing. I just rembered sothing. Sorry about that. Remind later -- I'll give you a day off. Take a proper rest."
He walked away.
The wrongness was getting harder to ignore. And the thread that connected all of it, the source he kept circling back to without being able to fully commit to it, without a single piece of concrete evidence...
Hirako Shinji didn't need evidence to reach a conclusion. He needed instinct, and his instinct had already arrived sowhere.
Aizen.
Sothing about that man wasn't right.
Not the right mont yet. But it's almost ti to start probing in earnest. That man hides deep.
He returned to his office and sat watching the light outside gradually dim. He was still working through how to approach a formal probe when he heard it: rapid footsteps in the corridor, getting louder. The specific urgency in the pace was unmistakable.
He'd noticed them early. He waited.
Maybe nothing would co of it. Maybe this was his own wariness running ahead of reality. A false alarm. It was possible.
People found ways to hope even when they already knew better. Hirako Shinji was no different in that mont.
The ambiguity held for a breath longer.
Then the door crashed open.
BANG!
A ssenger in stealth gear hit one knee on the floor and called out:
"Ergency captains' eting. Please proceed to the Squad 1 conference room imdiately."
There it was.
An ergency captains' eting was not a routine call. It ant sothing had happened inside Soul Society that required an imdiate, coordinated response.
The equivalent, in the scale of things, of sothing like a full-scale enemy incursion.
What exactly had happened?
Hirako didn't know yet.
But there was sothing in the thod of notification worth reading. If the situation had required truly imdiate action, they would have used Kido. Specifically the broadcasting technique that reached every captain simultaneously and covered the entire Seireitei in seconds.
That hadn't happened.
Schrödinger's cat: still undetermined.
What he could say for certain was that the premonition he'd been carrying had just moved from uncertain toward sothing darker.
"Understood. Let's go."
He stood, reached for his outer robe.
Squad 5's captain. That was his position, his responsibility, the thing that belonged to him to carry.
Hirako Shinji left the Squad 5 building.
On the way, he crossed paths with a familiar face. No need to signal. The other man had already noticed him and drifted over with easy, unhurried steps.
"Captain Hirako. You got the ergency notice too?"
"Sa for you, Captain Urahara?"
Urahara Kisuke. A light scatter of blond hair, a short growth of beard, and the expression of soone who'd been interrupted mid-project and found it mildly inconvenient.
"First ti I've gotten one of these. I left an experint half-finished on the way out."
"You didn't even take a mont to put yourself together? The old man will have sothing to say about that."
"What? Really?!"
He'd been running a squad for a while now, but that particular personality hadn't changed at all. Perpetually half-interested. Vaguely unbothered by everything.
Whatever the intended effect, it worked. So of the tightness in Hirako's chest loosened slightly.
"Back to the point. What's your read on this? Any specific theories?"
Urahara rubbed his chin. Then shook his head. Completely blank expression.
Literally no idea whatsoever.
"Is that right."
"Does Captain Hirako have sothing in mind?"
A pause. Hirako seed to be weighing sothing.
"Probably soone went missing."
The reasoning was simple enough.
Urgent, but not panicked.
"We haven't been cleared to use shunpo over the Seireitei. That ans we're still in maintain-composure mode. Not an active combat situation."
For the Gotei 13, that particular combination ant one thing.
"Soone is missing. Investigation needs to be organized. Personnel and approach haven't been finalized yet."
Urahara gave a small nod and said nothing. Research disposition: limited interest in operational thinking. And honestly, the topic made him uncomfortable in ways he wasn't going to surface here.
Whatever it was, he hoped it wasn't going to be complicated.
When the two of them arrived, Sasakibe Chojiro looked at them both and said, without any preamble:
"Muguruma Kensei has gone missing."
****
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