Bleach: Awakened — Chapter 121 - Hold Off on Dying for Now

"What... do you mean?!"

Aizen's voice cracked into a scream. His right hand tightened and tightened around Ichigo's throat, desperate to crack that flat expression, to shatter that look of quiet disappointment.

"What are you still looking down on me for?! The me right now has completely surpassed you! Ichigo Kurosaki!"

"Do you even believe that yourself?"

Red light flickered across his skin. Ichigo raised his left hand and, with complete indifference, swung it backhand toward the arm gripping his throat.

CRACK,

Just as casual as that motion. Aizen's right hand, every tendon standing out, every last ounce of strength pouring through it, was severed without effort, as though the arm of someone who had surpassed even a Transcendent was nothing but brittle paper.

"How... how is this possible?!" Aizen screamed, stumbling back step after step, his face twisting. "How can you possibly... reach this level?!"

Beneath the raw, torn-out screaming was an unspeakable helplessness. Aizen had burned through everything he had. He could go no further. And the Ichigo standing before him looked, by every measure, utterly beyond reach.

"Don't feel helpless. Don't feel despair."

Red spiritual pressure rose across Ichigo's body, visible to the naked eye, solidifying into a long black coat with narrow sleeves. It layered over the black robe woven from spirit particles, its hem long, its edges cut into jagged points, the inner lining the same deep red as his spiritual pressure.

"The gap between you and me is not something the Hogyoku, or Soul King Fragments, can bridge."

Two black blades, one long and one short, shimmered in and out of visibility as they floated in the air, resolving into two orbs of light. Within them, dimly, two figures could almost be made out: one black, one white, their faces carrying quiet, contented smiles.

"Honestly, that you managed to reach this realm at all already exceeds what I imagined."

The orbs sank into Ichigo's body. His spiritual pressure climbed in surging steps, and the black of the blade in his hand deepened into something more absolute.

"I expected too much of you. Expected that you might reach the point of standing at my side."

Every trace of light on his body converted into pure black. No other color of spiritual pressure remained on Ichigo, only that black which contained everything within it.

"Still a little short. Even if only a little."

The black blade rose high, like a god.

"But that little is a gulf you can never cross."

The black blade fell. No visible slash. Not even a detectable eruption of spiritual pressure. The terrain did not change. Space did not shift.

CRACK,

"So... it is like this..."

The right side of his body split apart. Aizen collapsed helplessly to his knees, and a terrifying black spiritual pressure erupted outward in an unceasing torrent.

"So you have reached this level, Ichigo Kurosaki."

The Hogyoku had granted Aizen an immortal body. White substance surged endlessly from the wound, but the moment it drew near that black spiritual pressure, it was extinguished.

"What a fearsome power!"

Aizen looked down at the horrifying wound and murmured. The white substance appeared in endless waves, and the spiritual pressure sustaining it was not drawn from Aizen himself but pulled from the spirit particles of the Three Realms.

"And yet, in the end, it still cannot overcome the power of the Soul King."

As if in mockery, the black spiritual pressure was gradually worn away, faint, but relentless, and before long it would be snuffed out completely, just like the white substance that kept dissolving around it.

"Possessing such overwhelming, magnificent power—why did you end up falling this low."

Ichigo stepped forward slowly, his face carrying nothing but calm, unmoved by Aizen's words.

"You cannot kill me, Ichigo Kurosaki."

His left hand pressed against Aizen's chest. The place where the Hogyoku had once resided.

"No matter how powerful your strength, it cannot touch the Soul King, who once accomplished the act of creation. Even if this is only a fragment of that power, it is still...?!"

Black spiritual pressure gathered and condensed, forming a flame. The outer layer burned as black fire. The inner layer held a calm, steady radiance of gold and blue.

"This... what is this... is this the deathly presence I felt during our fight... this is that power...?"

"Before you arrived... was this the same power burning on Kyoka Suigetsu...?"

"What is this power?! Ichigo Kurosaki!"

"I call it All Creation Annihilation."

The black flames spread across Aizen's body in an instant, clinging like a rot worked into the bone. No matter how the white substance surged and surged again, it was entirely in vain.

"A power that awakened after my own spirit body grew stronger."

"AAAAAAAGH!"

The unbearable agony tore screams from Aizen without end as the black flames consumed his body and soul piece by piece.

Even the power of the Soul King, the power that had created the world itself, burned away, little by little, under this terrifying black fire.

"How can... something like this exist?!" Aizen wailed in disbelief. "Have you already reached it?! The realm of the Soul King?!"

"Not yet." Ichigo shook his head. "But a mere fragment of the Soul King's power—I can still destroy it."

"Aizen. Go in peace. I will remember you always, one of the few who ever set foot in the realm of the Transcendent."

"AAAAAAAAAAGH!"

BOOM!

The black flames surged upward, blazing without restraint. Aizen's voice climbed to its peak, then faded little by little, growing weaker, as he moved steadily toward his end.

"You were already so strong, Aizen. It's just that your opponent was...?!"

His pupils snapped tight. Ichigo, whose expression had not shifted once from the moment the battle began, went pale in an instant. What lay before his eyes was no longer the screaming Aizen, but something else entirely.

"Ah... ah..."

The voice grew fainter and fainter. Under the burning of the black flames, Aizen's life drew toward its end, and in his mind he looked back across the whole of his existence.

The confusion of early childhood. The self-satisfaction of adolescence. The solitude of youth. As a Soul Reaper, Aizen had always been the genius standing impossibly far ahead of everyone else. In the deepest part of himself he had craved companions, people who could walk alongside him. Not one had ever kept pace.

After reaching the pinnacle of the Soul Reapers, that loneliness only grew heavier.

Without noticing when, the loneliness had transformed into arrogance. More precisely: Aizen had used an attitude of absolute arrogance to bury the loneliness inside him.

After witnessing countless things, after learning even of the greatest evil in the Three Realms, the desire for a companion had gradually become something else: the pursuit of becoming a Transcendent.

People always need a goal to aim for. If no companion could be found, then he would become the supreme existence itself. Aizen no longer needed someone to walk beside him. What he needed was that throne suspended in the void, above the heavens.

From that point on, loneliness lay buried deep in his soul, and what showed through Aizen to his very core was arrogance.

That arrogance, until the birth and awakening of Ichigo Kurosaki, until the final evolution that burned through himself and the Hogyoku, was shattered completely. Aizen had exhausted every last thing he had. Still he could not prevail. He had been utterly crushed.

[Ichigo Kurosaki... you, who possess such overwhelming power, have long since had no companions walking beside you. The you of now, even the progenitor of the Quincy, I imagine, could not match you... It is beyond imagining, what your reason for living in this world could be...]

"Will you become the next Soul King, Ichigo Kurosaki?"

In the very last moment, about to be burned to nothing, Aizen gave voice to what lay in his heart.

"I will witness it all from Hell—Ichigo Kuro...?!"

"You should hold off on dying for now."

➤ Next: The Scales of Balance