Bleach: Dominating Soul Society in One Sting Chapter 150: The Day Yhwach Revives, The Time the Soul King

The fate of Sōsuke Aizen had perhaps already been decided — by the Soul King, by Soifon, and by Ichibē Hyōsube.

"Are you trying to let him drown in the intoxication of his own expanding power, expose a weakness, and be devoured by Yhwach?" the Captain-Commander pressed.

"Not at all, Captain-Commander." Soifon shook her head. "Captain Aizen's state of mind is not sothing I can control. If he can change the future in which Yhwach ambushes him, then the position of Soul King is his."

From first to last, Ichibē Hyōsube had never cared who the Soul King was. All he needed was for soone to take the throne and continue holding the Three Worlds together.

And Soifon, for her part, needed the Three Worlds to remain stable — so that she could turn her attention to the problem of Hell.

Soifon dusted off her hands and tore open a Garganta.

"Let's head back to the Seireitei, Captain-Commander."

"When the Three Worlds start shaking, that'll be my cue to get to work."

— Royal Palace. Omotesandō.

The space before Ichibē Hyōsube shattered, and violet light particles coalesced before him, reassembling into human form.

No one can truly resist the thrill of showing off — not even Sōsuke Aizen. He had appeared before Ichibē Hyōsube in exactly this fashion on purpose, purely to prove that the old monk's previous assessnt had been wrong.

— I, Sōsuke Aizen, am entirely qualified to beco the Soul King.

"Oh? You've returned, and in this state, no less…" Ichibē Hyōsube feigned surprise and rubbed his bald head. "Could it be that this old one misjudged you back then…"

"Well? What say you, Lord Ichibē Hyōsube?"

"Am I, as I am now, qualified to shoulder the Soul King's burden?"

Aizen savored the other man's expression of astonishnt. His voice arrived at Ichibē's ears from every direction at once, as though each phantom duplicate possessed a physical body of its own.

With a subtle shift of his eyes, Ichibē's gaze quietly settled on the real Aizen in one particular direction — then he feigned incomprehension, pressed his palms together, and closed his eyes.

"If it is the you of this mont… then yes, you are qualified to stand in the Soul King's stead and beco the wedge that stabilizes the Three Worlds."

"But…"

Though the monk desperately wanted to burst out laughing, now was not the ti. He still had to play the ga of reeling in the fish slowly.

"There are no 'buts,' Lord Ichibē Hyōsube."

Aizen flickered to stand directly before him, his Spiritual Pressure radiating outward with enough force to fracture the surrounding space. "I will beco a far more worthy Soul King. I will prove to all of you that the world was never ant to be this way…"

Because Aizen had repeatedly disparaged the Soul King, a perfectly calibrated flash of anger finally appeared on Ichibē Hyōsube's ever-smiling round face.

"Insolence! How dare you speak of the Soul King with such contempt!"

"I acknowledge that you have the qualifications to beco Soul King — but the Royal Palace will not tolerate such arrogance!"

He raised his hand. His wide sleeve billowed without any wind. Spiritual Pressure gathered in his palm and condensed into an enormous golden hand, which ca crashing down toward where Aizen stood.

Ten-Thousand-League Heaven-Reaching Palm!

Golden radiance exploded. Aizen's silhouette was sent flying, hurled from one end of the Omotesandō to the other.

Crack —

Then, dense fracture lines spread across it, and the massive golden hand shattered into countless fragnts of spirit particles that dissolved into the air. Ichibē Hyōsube's expression shifted faintly.

At the sa mont, without any warning, several long, narrow violet rifts tore open in the space around him. Within each rift glead a white eye, staring at him without blinking.

Instantly, violet beams lanced out from that dense cluster of eyeballs, skewering Ichibē Hyōsube's rotund body from every direction at once.

The white floor of the Omotesandō was painted with his blood.

After a long mont, Ichibē Hyōsube struggled back to his feet. The wounds across his body healed at a visible rate, but his aura seed noticeably diminished.

He glared at Aizen, his face a picture of humiliated fury.

"It seems… holding back won't do!"

"Be stained black — Ichimonji!"

He thrust his hand upward. The tip of his calligraphy brush transford into a short blade, and a torrent of jet-black ink poured down toward Aizen like a sudden squall.

Splash —

The ink ca shrieking through the air — yet it passed straight through Aizen's body like a reflection on water, spattering across the ground behind him without leaving so much as a mark.

"It's useless, Lord Ichibē Hyōsube."

"Just now, I transford my own existence into a false illusion. No attack can land on ."

"Your ink cannot touch ."

Aizen stood motionless, tilting his chin up slightly.

The eyeballs within the rifts had vanished, leaving behind countless thin violet tears in the fabric of space. The intersecting spatial turbulence sliced into Ichibē Hyōsube's massive body, producing a teeth-grinding sound of friction.

Ichibē Hyōsube tried to move but found himself pinned in place by the turbulence. His spirit body, reinforced by the Royal Key, kept him from sustaining true injury — but he could not break free.

The struggle continued for a mont before his resistance gradually weakened.

At last, he ceased his futile thrashing and let out a helpless sigh. He raised his head and looked at Sōsuke Aizen standing a short distance away.

"Perhaps…"

"You really can do it."

In that mont, he ran through every painful mory of the past million years in his mind just to keep the rolls of fat on his face from quivering into a grin.

With soone as inherently suspicious as Aizen, agreeing too readily to crown him Soul King would only have aroused his distrust. Letting the fight reach this point had been exactly right.

The instant Ichibē Hyōsube yielded, the countless violet spatial rifts that had been exerting their tearing and pulling force snapped shut at once. His body was free.

"Follow ."

Ichibē Hyōsube rolled his slightly stiff shoulders and neck, turned around, and began to walk with heavy, deliberate steps deeper into the Omotesandō, toward the inner sanctum of the Royal Palace.

Along the way, Ichibē Hyōsube glanced sidelong at Aizen several tis, his lips parting and closing as if he kept thinking better of saying sothing. An expression of barely concealed worry and unease was written plainly across his face.

This masterful performance drew from a million years of accumulated experience and cunning — more than enough to show no crack whatsoever to soone who, by comparison, was a re few-centuries-old youngster like Aizen.

The two of them walked one behind the other until they reached the edge of the Omotesandō and looked up at the inner sanctum of the Royal Palace floating in the sky.

Just as they were about to fly up toward it, Aizen smiled.

"Lord Ichibē Hyōsube seems to have sothing weighing on his mind?"

"If it concerns where Zero Division will stand and what role they will play after my coronation, I can give you an answer right now."

Ichibē Hyōsube nodded, then shook his head.

"The matter of Zero Division is certainly important."

"But what you intend to do with the world once you beco Soul King… that is also sothing this old one cares about."

This ti, it was Aizen's turn to hesitate.

His instinct had been to launch into a scathing critique of the rot that had taken root under the Soul King's reign, followed by a rousing speech — but the thought that the two of them would be colleagues for tens of thousands of years gave him pause. There was no need to poison the well before it was even dug.

In the end, Aizen chose his words carefully and spoke.

"I will begin by abolishing the aristocracy of Soul Society."

"As for Zero Division… nothing will change."

As they spoke, both of them stepped off the ground and rose into the air, landing on the platform of the Royal Palace's inner sanctum.

It was a vast and solemn hall.

No superfluous ornantation. No lavish furnishings. Only the purest emptiness — and, at the very center, a single enormous crystal seal suspended in the air.

Sealed within it was a figure of entirely androgynous appearance. All four limbs had been violently severed and fashioned into a grotesque, limbless form. Encased upright within the crystal, the figure's eyes were forever open, and within each socket burned four pupils — eyes that seed capable of seeing through past and future, penetrating the very essence of all existence.

This was… the Soul King.

The instant Aizen's gaze t those four pupils, an inexplicable chill shot up his spine without any warning.

Cold sweat seeped from his back.

An absurd feeling rose from the depths of Sōsuke Aizen's heart.

— Did he truly have the power to replace the Soul King?

The thought had barely ford before it was t with a violent surge of revulsion and fury from within him. He drew a slow, deep breath and crushed that mont of wavering down into the furthest depths of his heart.

He forced himself to lift his gaze and et the Soul King's inhuman eyes once more — forcing himself to look directly at the being he had spent centuries pursuing.

A re limbless wretch. Nothing to be afraid of.

And then he began to walk — one step at a ti — toward the crystal.

Ichibē Hyōsube stood where he was, hands tucked into his sleeves, quietly watching Aizen's receding back.

Aizen ca to stand before the crystal. He raised his hand and pressed it gently against the cold surface of the seal.

His fingertips traced slowly across the crystal. Within those ever-composed eyes, sothing surfaced that he could not suppress — a yearning and an excitent that he could no longer hide.

"So this… is the Soul King's seal…"

A dream cultivated over many years. A pursuit that had consud his entire life. Now it was within reach. Even with Aizen's composure, the tremor in his voice was undeniable.

As he spoke, the fingertips he had pressed against the crystal seal quietly began to glow with a dim violet luminescence.

"Then…" Aizen bade farewell to the Soul King before him. "Farewell, Your Majesty — the Soul King who once held the Three Worlds together."

In the very instant that the power at his fingertips was about to be unleashed at the Soul King, everything changed.

From the direction of the Phoenix Palace in the distance, water erupted in a great geyser, and even the inner sanctum felt a terrifying tremor.

Before he could even register surprise, the space behind Aizen's head was torn open by a trendous force, and five blue spirit-fla lances shot forth, forming a brilliant five-pointed star array in midair before pressing down toward his back.

— Altar Usurpation!

An attack from Yhwach — launched from two years in the past!

Suddenly, as though he had anticipated the ambush, at the very instant the pentagram array was about to take shape, Aizen's body beca like a reflection dissolving into water — blurring, then slipping away entirely into another dinsional plane.

Altar Usurpation caught nothing but an empty afterimage.

"Did you think… I wouldn't notice, Yhwach?"

Aizen's silhouette gradually solidified several ters away in another pocket of space. He turned around, his gaze calm as he regarded the black-and-white figure that had appeared behind him at so unknown mont — Yhwach.

"You never truly died back then," he said.

"You simply used the power of The Almighty to set an attack in motion, pre-programd to detonate at this exact point in the future."

"Surely you don't believe that I — having already fully analyzed the true nature of your power — would be completely blind to a trick like this?"

Having said his piece, Aizen permitted himself two confident laughs.

Yhwach stood where he was without answering. At his side lay Ichibē Hyōsube — torn to pieces.

Then, in the space beside Yhwach, countless eyes blinked open. White eyeballs pushed out through the rifts and turned in unison, locking onto Yhwach.

Thwip — Thwip —

Blood sprayed at the sa mont the eyeballs appeared. The spatial rifts shuddered violently — and then slamd shut.

"Useless."

"In the future, I destroyed all those little tricks of yours."

Yhwach finally spoke. He took one step forward. His three blood-red pupils shifted slightly, fixing on the spot where Aizen stood.

"So… you had already seen through my feigned death from back then, had you?"

"Then tell …"

"Did I — or did I not — see the future in which you dove into this dinsional rift just now, Sōsuke Aizen?!"

At that mont, deep within the dinsional pocket that Aizen himself had constructed, an ominous five-pointed star array blazed to life without any warning.

A second Altar Usurpation — launched from an even more distant future!

"What—?!"

Accompanied by the sound of shattering lenses, Aizen's eyes went wide. His Spiritual Pressure visibly collapsed at a rate visible to the naked eye. His body lurched — and he was blasted bodily out of the dinsional plane.

Yhwach walked slowly toward him, bent down, and seized him by the throat, lifting Aizen up off the ground.

"You think you understand The Almighty? You're nothing but a rat who swallowed the Soul King's left arm."

"Now…"

"Return every last drop of power I granted you… Sōsuke Aizen."

Aizen's face was reflected in Yhwach's three blood-red pupils.

Violet Spiritual Pressure surged madly from Aizen's throat into Yhwach's body. The white Hollow-like matter coating Aizen began to recede. The features born of his evolution started to unravel. The crystalline butterfly wings at his back crumbled piece by piece.

Yhwach's aura climbed ever higher. Once he had completely absorbed every last shred of Aizen's power, he tightened his grip in one sharp motion — and Sōsuke Aizen shattered into a cascade of violet light.

Without pausing for even a mont to mourn Sōsuke Aizen's death, the one who strode imdiately to stand before the Soul King's crystal seal was Yhwach.

Perhaps it was rely Yhwach's imagination — but the Soul King sealed within the crystal appeared to have curled his lips upward by the tiniest fraction of a pixel.

Four pupils t three pupils. Father faced son.

"Soul King."

"My father."

"This hideous state you've been reduced to — it's almost too painful to look at."

Yhwach's gaze swept over the mutilated body encased in the transparent crystal. Sothing complex surfaced in those three blood-red pupils.

A massive Heilig Pfeil slamd into the ground at Yhwach's feet. He pulled it free and transmuted it into a jet-black blade gripped in his hand.

Yhwach raised the blade and leveled it at the crystal before him. "Allow to end a million years of suffering… my father…"

The words fell — and the long blade drove down with savage force!

Crack —

A clear, resonant sound of shattering rang through the entire Royal Palace. The crystal seal of the Soul King — the wedge that had held the Three Worlds together for a million years — was cleaved apart by Yhwach in a single stroke.

Without the crystal to support it, the incomplete figure within tumbled helplessly down and collapsed amid the shards of crystal at Yhwach's feet.

Yhwach did not hesitate for even a heartbeat. He crouched down and pressed his palm against what remained of the Soul King — his torso and head.

Boundless power poured madly out of the Soul King's body and into Yhwach's. Yhwach trembled. His Spiritual Pressure surged violently upward.

Once Yhwach had consud every last thing the Soul King possessed, he raised his blade and let it fall in one clean motion —

The Soul King's head was separated entirely from his body.

At that very sa instant, the Three Worlds convulsed.

Unlike the resonance that had accompanied Soifon's Bankai, this was different — the wedge that had held the Three Worlds together had been ripped out. The sky cracked. The ground shook. The cycle of spirit particles fell into a chaos unlike anything that had co before.

The very foundation of the Three Worlds was crumbling.

Yhwach stood motionless at the center of the hall. Countless white eyeballs and a torrent of jet-black Spiritual Pressure surged up around his body. The eyeballs drifted across his surface, each one seeming to gaze upon a different future.

He had absorbed the Soul King — but that power was too vast, too imnse, for him to fully digest in an instant. The excess force overflowed from within him, transforming into countless streams of black torrent that poured down through the channels connecting the Royal Palace to Soul Society.

The sky over the Seireitei split open.

Countless black torrents of the Soul King's overflow poured down through the rifts in the sky like inverted waterfalls, slamming into the Seireitei's protective barrier.

Monsters with single eyes chewed at the barrier. Within monts, cracks appeared.

Black torrents flooded into the Seireitei. The eyeball-creatures ford from Yhwach's Spiritual Pressure rampaged through the streets, devouring everything in their path — yet the streets were utterly deserted. Not a living soul in sight.

Under Soifon and the Captain-Commander's coordination, the Gotei 13 had already gathered every non-combatant into a newly constructed shelter.

Standing before the shelter, Soifon's white Captain's Haori snapped and billowed in the wind.

Looking out at the torrents of the Soul King's overflow surging toward the shelter like a black tide, Soifon released golden Spiritual Pressure from within her and sent it grinding forward into the dark current.

Golden radiance and black torrent collided with explosive force. Like blazing sunlight lting through packed snow, every thread of that jet-black overflow dissolved the instant it touched the golden light, as if it had never existed.

The eyeball-creatures let out piercing shrieks before being incinerated within the golden brilliance.

"As expected, Captain Soifon is the one we can count on…"

Sowhere in the crowd, soone murmured softly — a voice full of relief at having survived the ordeal.

"I'll leave things here to you, Captain-Commander."

Soifon exchanged a single glance with the Captain-Commander, then launched herself like an arrow loosed from a bowstring, shooting straight up toward the Royal Palace overhead.

Royal Palace. Inner Sanctum.

Yhwach stood at the center of the great hall. The aura around him had finally begun to settle.

The excess power had been fully digested. The white eyeballs gradually subrged themselves back into the black tide of Spiritual Pressure.

At almost the sa instant, every single eyeball on his body turned in unison and fixed their gaze on the only entrance to the inner sanctum.

"You've co, Soifon."

"As arrogant as ever… Did you deliberately wait until I had completely absorbed the Soul King's power and stabilized myself before making your entrance?"

Yhwach spoke unhurriedly, tilting his head slightly upward and regarding Soifon through his nostrils.

Soifon's brow twitched. Since when had Yhwach developed a brain?

"What are you surprised about?"

"Did you think The Almighty hadn't seen this future?"

"Sōsuke Aizen's training in Hueco Mundo, the process by which he continuously refined his power with your assistance… I watched all of it."

Yhwach caught the fleeting shift in her expression with sharp precision. A sneer spread across the corner of his mouth.

His voice suddenly rose, and his tone turned cutting.

"But there is one thing, Soifon — that you miscalculated! Gravely! Catastrophically!"

"I have seen nothing but darkness ahead. The world will return to chaos once more!"

"And all of it…"

"Is the result of the arrogance of the Soul King, of Ichibē Hyōsube, and of you — Soifon!"

While he spoke, the phantom of Enma-Ten had already materialized at Yhwach's side and drove a fist straight into his temple.

Yhwach's eyes snapped wide — but Enma-Ten's fist slamd into what felt like an invisible wall and was stopped cold.

"Oh? You've acquired new power during all this ti?" Yhwach bared his pallid teeth in a grin. "In the end, it's nothing but fodder for my power, Soifon."

He raised his right hand and spread his five fingers —

Thwip!

A bloodstained golden blade tip burst clean through his chest from behind, appearing without any warning!

"Surprised by my new power?"

"Did The Almighty not see my Fullbring?"

With that, Soifon wrenched her hand sideways, cleaving Yhwach's body in two.

Yhwach's silhouette vanished from the spot and reappeared ten ters away, entirely unhard.

"Don't think that rely mastering so paltry Fullbring, along with the Schrift A I granted you, gives you the power to resist !"

His voice dropped into sothing cold and dark. His three blood-red pupils locked onto Soifon.

At the shoulder of Soifon's right hand — the one holding her blade — a burst of blood suddenly exploded without any warning, severing the tendons and bone in an instant. Her entire right arm dropped limp and useless.

"Your luck is rather good, Soifon." Yhwach gave a cold snort. "I had originally intended to cut you clean in half in the future."

Golden Spiritual Pressure surged. The wound on Soifon's right arm healed at a speed visible to the naked eye.

In the mont that this strike had lowered Yhwach's guard, Soifon had — just an instant before — passed the silver arrowhead from her grasp into Enma-Ten's hand.

This ti, she had used the power of Schrift A as cover.

The golden phantom swung its fist in place.

Enma-Ten's fist, wreathed in faint golden light and the finest ripples of spatial distortion, landed squarely on Yhwach's back with full force.

Yhwach's chest was blown clean through — a gaping, front-to-back hole punched straight through him, black Spiritual Pressure mingled with a certain golden energy spraying from the wound.

"Useless…"

His confident voice cut off abruptly. Those three blood-red pupils went wide.

The Almighty — had failed?!

Within the wound that had been punched through Yhwach's chest, amid the lingering faint golden imprint of that fist, sothing was gripped within it — a silver arrowhead.

"How… is this… possible…"

He raised his head and looked at Soifon.

Yhwach's field of vision began to sink. He saw his own lower half. He saw Soifon. He saw the Jashaku Raikōben that had divided his body in two.

His consciousness began to blur.

But in the monts before darkness swallowed him entirely, he finally understood.

Understood why The Almighty — in that last instant — had shown him nothing but darkness for the future.

That darkness had never been an image of the Three Worlds returning to chaos.

"So… this was… the future… I had seen…"

____

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