"You want to find opponents with real ability?"
Aizen Sosuke lowered the nu slightly and looked at Matsushita Yusuke with a mildly distant expression, repeating back what he'd just heard.
"People who can release their Zanpakuto?"
He seed to catch himself a mont later. He turned toward the server beside them and smiled pleasantly.
"Let's start with what's on here and add more if we need to. Thank you."
The izakaya had a plain, unpretentious look to it. Wood paneling on every surface, private booth construction, the kind of place that had been doing the sa thing for long enough that the age had settled into the walls.
Matsushita Yusuke watched the server note the order and step away, then brought his attention back to Aizen.
He nodded.
"Right. I want to find Shinigami at a decent level and test myself against them."
Five days had passed since the fight with Soifon.
The academic year at Shin'o Academy was fully over. The next session wouldn't open for another month and a half.
The free ti was substantial. Students from the Rukongai were already heading back to their old districts to see family before the new year.
Matsushita Yusuke had no such obligations.
His attention was on improving his ability. With the Academy temporarily off the table as a source of gains, and with Soifon not being the kind of person he could pester into daily sparring, he needed to find another angle.
Which was what had brought him to Aizen's side of this.
A vice-captain had resources. There had to be sothing in there that could be put to use.
That was one reason, and not actually the main one.
The main one was that Matsushita Yusuke had decided to start letting Aizen see things about him. Carefully and gradually. The end goal was still the Standing Above Everyone Else Club, and Aizen wouldn't extend that invitation to soone ordinary no matter how well they got along.
Being genuinely unusual was the only thing that moved that needle.
Harder to crack than it looked, honestly.
"Before I answer that, I want to understand why." Aizen seed to notice his own question was too broad. He let it settle for a mont, then added: "Or rather, do you have any sense of how many people in Soul Society are actually at that level?"
Where is this going all of a sudden.
Matsushita Yusuke shook his head without overthinking it.
He had no idea.
"Including mbers outside the standard roster, the number of Shinigami who have received a Zanpakuto and trained it to the point of Shikai release... is not large."
That was accurate.
Across the Gotei 13 squads, the ability to release generally corresponded to a position in the upper ranks of the seated officers. And of those, only the standouts held vice-captain rank.
So stripped of the polite framing, what Matsushita Yusuke was asking roughly translated to:
"Find people roughly at my level for you to fight?"
It sounded a little abstract said plainly like that. But that was the request.
Matsushita Yusuke laughed awkwardly and rubbed the back of his head.
"If it's too much trouble, I can—"
"It isn't."
Aizen took a sip of the warm water that had been set in front of him and smiled.
"I'm just curious why you'd go to this trouble. Since, if you actually wanted a sparring partner... Tosen and I would both be fairly suitable options?"
Oh.
Was he supposed to fight Aizen Sosuke?
Just the thought of it sent a cold wave across Matsushita Yusuke's scalp. He shook his head imdiately. The actual reason was simple enough to explain.
Aizen and Tosen couldn't function as opponents.
This terrible System, for all its well-designed progression chanics, had what amounted to a built-in protection against grinding certain sources. Once a relationship with a specific person cleared a certain threshold, combat quests with that person stopped being available.
Which ant that endlessly provoking Soifon, dancing right at the line where her patience was about to snap, and using that to generate points, worked on her specifically because the relationship was still in the right zone. Running that sa approach on Aizen was structurally impossible.
It sounded arbitrary on the surface. But it made a certain kind of sense from the system's perspective. If a player invested ti in building a relationship with Aizen and then just sparred with him every day to grind Kido stats indefinitely, how was the ga supposed to stay balanced?
After working through it, Matsushita Yusuke told Aizen about the fight with Soifon.
"Through that match, I found that my understanding of my Zanpakuto went considerably deeper. I think it might be the opening I've been looking for in terms of developing further."
Words alone weren't going to make that point convincingly.
He reached down, pulled out his Zanpakuto, and set it on the table in front of them.
"After that day, I got a partial grasp on so of the... handling? The feel of it?"
As he finished the sentence, the light in his palm shifted, and after a mont, the shape of the blade changed.
The form had been customized. The release abilities weren't there yet. But the appearance was his.
This was what the Appearance Design stage had produced.
Aizen's eyebrow lifted slightly.
The blade, already lean in its standard form, had been extended and filled out by the customization. It was longer now. Heavier in proportion. The scabbard had disappeared entirely. In its place was a weapon without a handguard, with a distinctive ring at the base of the poml.
More aggressive-looking than the standard asauchi by so margin. One glance and Aizen found he couldn't quite look away.
The reason was imdiate and clear.
This blade radiated strength.
He could perceive it directly, without analysis: the blunt and honest spirit behind the form, the thing the shape was expressing without needing words for it. And this particular quality was exactly the kind of thing he found himself drawn to, in the rare monts he encountered it.
"I have to say..."
Aizen spoke before he'd quite decided to.
"That's a beautiful design."
Did he like it?
Of course he did.
Matsushita Yusuke had based the design on the Tang sword. One of the direct ancestors of the modern Japanese blade, in so sense the template from which later forms had descended. A cleaner and more straightforward expression of what the shape was trying to do.
Tosen, who had been listening to all of this from the side, couldn't help but say sothing.
"Without even releasing your Zanpakuto, you were already able to fully suppress an opponent in their Shikai state? Matsushita-kun, it sounds like you've been making serious progress lately."
Tosen's praise was not the polite kind that didn't an anything.
Because however unimpressive he'd looked in the original story, placed against the actual scale of Soul Society's power structure, the man was a Bankai-level combatant. Top twenty, no question. The reason he'd seed weak was simply that his opponents kept being stronger than he was. Bad luck in the matchup departnt, not a lack of ability.
****
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