Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 329 - Illusion — Inner Fire

"Where is this..."

After a wave of dizziness, Aizen gradually came to. The moment he took in his surroundings, his eyes snapped tight.

He was inside an enormous classroom. At the front stood a Soul Reaper instructor. Around him sat dozens of students in academy uniforms. And he himself had reverted to how he looked in his youth, dressed in that same uniform, listening to a lecture.

"Hey, Aizen — you topped the academic exam again, didn't you?" A young voice sounded beside him. On instinct, Aizen shook off the shock.

"You're... Maekura?" The person beside him was a classmate from his student days. One who had died in a Hollow-confrontation exam before ever graduating.

"I've... been trapped in an illusion by Ace Wayne's ability." Aizen sorted out the situation quickly. Then, seething, he roared at the sky. "Pathetic! Ace Wayne — is this your idea of humiliating me?!"

His sudden outburst froze every student in the room. Even the teacher stopped mid-sentence, staring blankly at the honor student who had just screamed at the ceiling.

"Sōsuke Aizen — are you alright?" the teacher asked after a moment.

"This is genuinely boring!" Aizen was furious. Wayne clearly had no interest in responding. For a master of illusions like himself, that silence was its own insult. He cursed. Wayne ignored him.

"Student Aizen, you don't seem well. Let me take you to Squad 4."

"Get away from me!" Aizen tried to release his Reiatsu, and found he couldn't move the teacher at all. Only then did he realize it: his spiritual power was completely gone.

This bastard... how far has he pushed his strength, to suppress my power entirely? Aizen's composure cracked. The sight before him genuinely unnerved him.

"Aizen, if you keep this up, I'll have no choice but to restrain you by force." The instructor had noticed something was wrong and began releasing his own Reiatsu.

In his student days, Aizen's Reiatsu had never reached anything near its later heights, or perhaps Wayne had deliberately capped it so he couldn't function at all.

Either way, the result was the same. In an instant, Aizen felt the suffocating weight of a higher Reiatsu pressing down on him.

"Outrageous!" He, who had once stood above all others, crushed by an academy teacher's spiritual pressure. The humiliation was volcanic. "Ace Wayne, I will not forget this!"

Aizen erupted with everything he had. His rank and experience from past lifetimes let him adapt to the pressure faster than any real student could. Right there in the classroom, he struck first.

BOOM!

A single Reiatsu-charged knife-hand, straight through the teacher's throat. One hit. The man crumpled instantly, convulsing on the floor, both hands clutching the wound as bloody froth pushed through his fingers.

AHHHHH!

The screaming started at once. Every student bolted for the door, faces white with terror, unable to understand what they had just witnessed. They fled. Put as much distance between themselves and Aizen as they could.

"Hmph. Cheap tricks." Aizen shook the blood from his hand. "You think this can hold me, Ace Wayne? Just wait. Just, "

"Insolence."

The word came from the doorway. Aged, but iron-hard. Aizen turned.

Genryūsai Yamamoto stood at the entrance, not yet the withered elder of later years. He was in his prime, a scorching Reiatsu rolling off him in waves, and Aizen's body locked up completely the moment it hit him.

"A student who murders his teacher." Yamamoto's eyes were flat. "Such reckless audacity cannot be permitted to live."

He vanished.

In the same instant, something passed clean through Aizen's chest.

Aizen looked down. He could see his own heart, shattered, pumping blood in weakening spurts.

"This... what is..."

Three words. That was all he managed. Then his consciousness dissolved, and everything went still.

......

"Hey, Aizen — you topped the academic exam again, didn't you?"

WENG!

Aizen's consciousness lurched back. The darkness shattered into light.

He was in the classroom again.

"You're... Maekura?" The words came out on reflex before his mind had fully caught up. Then it did, and he looked around. The familiar room. The classmate beside him. The teacher at the podium, lecturing, his throat completely intact.

Aizen's brow creased.

"An infinite loop." His eyes narrowed. But unlike the first time, he was calm now. Completely calm. What exactly is Ace Wayne trying to do...

His own death had reset the cycle. That much was obvious. This time, Aizen sat through the entire lesson without incident, and the loop held. No reset.

After class, he walked alone to Squad 5 in the Seireitei. Standing outside, taking in a scene that was both familiar and wrong, Aizen felt the weight of his situation settle in.

He decided to probe it. Moved quietly into the Squad 5 barracks. But he was a student in a student's uniform, and he didn't get far.

"Who's there!"

He turned. His former captain, Shinji Hirako, was looking straight at him.

"So it's Hirako this time." Aizen's brows tightened.

"Who are you, and what are you doing here?" Hirako looked him over. "Academy uniform, you're from Shin'ō Academy?"

"Yes." Aizen nodded. "I got lost."

"Students know the division areas are off-limits." Hirako dug a finger in his ear. "Get back to the academy."

"Of course." Aizen kept his face blank, lowered his head in acknowledgment, and left.

"That kid..." Hirako watched Aizen's retreating back, one eye half-shut. Something was off. He couldn't name it. After a moment, he stopped trying and went back inside.

Back in his dormitory, Aizen reviewed what he knew.

His Reiatsu was that of a student, nowhere near seated-officer level. But as long as he stayed alive, he could keep moving through the academy. Gather information. Wait.

So that was what he did. He lived at the academy, attended classes, and quietly collected everything he could about this illusion's internal logic. Seven days in, he was caught during a nighttime infiltration of the Squad 12 Research Institute. Again, it was Hirako who found him.

"Knew something was off about you from the start. Looks like I was right." Hirako's tone was flat. "You've been digging around, haven't you, Sōsuke Aizen."

"Captain Hirako..." Aizen's eyes narrowed. "Actually, it should be Ace Wayne, shouldn't it? Is this game of yours really worth your time?" His gaze was cold. His infiltration had been flawless by any real standard. That Hirako had found him anyway meant only one thing: someone with a god's-eye view had been watching. Only Wayne could have done it.

"What... Wayne? What are you talking about?" Hirako gave the squad members beside him a look. "Doesn't matter. Seize him."

"Hmph." Aizen pushed what Reiatsu he had. It wasn't much, but it was more than enough for regular squad members. Against a captain, it was nothing.

"Taking out seated officers that easily." Hirako drew his Zanpakuto. "You really are something else, Sōsuke Aizen."

"Kill me if you want." Aizen picked up a fallen squad member's Zanpakuto from the ground and poured every last drop of his spiritual power into it. "Ace Wayne, I am thoroughly tired of this."

"Tch. Weird guy." Hirako's expression was pure contempt. He closed the distance with Shunpo, blade angled straight at Aizen's chest.

CLANG!

Metal hit metal. Aizen had parried it. That made Hirako's eyes go wide, the student had read the strike before it came. And because of that, Hirako stopped holding back on the next one.

CLANG!

Aizen parried again, but the difference in power was brutal. The Reiatsu behind the blow hit like a wave, tore through his guard, and sent him smashing into the wall. Blood ran from his mouth. Through blurring vision, he saw Hirako staring at him with an expression that had gone hard and serious.

Aizen's mouth curved just slightly.

Then his consciousness came apart, and everything went quiet.

...

"Hey, Aizen — you topped the academic exam again, didn't you?"

"Again..." Aizen opened his eyes. The classroom. Always the classroom. "Ace Wayne, have you had enough?!" The roar silenced the room.

"Student Aizen, are you alright?" the teacher asked, once the quiet had stretched long enough.

"Ha..." Aizen exhaled. "I'm fine. Sorry for the disruption."

"Ah, no trouble. Let's continue." The teacher didn't push it. Top of the class, after all.

The lesson resumed. Aizen sat at his desk and thought.

I just want to know... if one day you truly lost all your power, facing the suffering of this world, what choice would you make?

Those were the last words Wayne had said before triggering the ability. The memory surfaced slowly. Aizen's eyes narrowed.

He's trying to make me feel what it's like to lose everything. But what's the point?

He didn't understand it. But he was also out of options. Wayne's power had already exceeded his own, while sealed, breaking out of this illusion by force was nearly impossible. The only way out was to find the thread running through the heart of all this, follow it to whatever the final stage was, and clear it. That was probably the only path.

"Fine." The rage was gone. In its place was something older, the cool, measured composure he'd carried since his student days. "Let's see how long you can keep this running. It's nothing more than starting over."

And so, having found himself again, Aizen began.

But as Wayne had said, this rebirth had stripped him of his gift. No crushing Reiatsu. No singular talent. Just an unremarkable student at the Spiritual Arts Academy.

One year in, Aizen died in a combat-training exercise against Hollows.

Three years into the next life, he made it to seated officer in Squad 5, twelfth seat, before dying on a mission.

Twelve years into the one after that, he awakened his Zanpakuto, climbed back to lieutenant of Squad 5, and died under Shinji Hirako's blade when suspicion finally caught up to him.

One cycle, he broke down in the middle of class.

Another, he steadied himself, reorganized everything, and lasted over a hundred years. He brought down Shinji Hirako, clawed his way back to captain-class power, held on all the way until the Ichigo Kurosaki incident began, and was finally cut down by Captain-Commander Genryusai Yamamoto.

The next cycle, he broke down again.

On and on. Rebirth and collapse, rebirth and collapse, in numbers beyond counting.

Until, finally, one day, something shifted.

Countless cycles. The same paths walked, the same choices made, the same outcomes playing out like a script he'd already memorized. Or close enough. But somewhere in all of it, Aizen had begun to understand what the loop was actually asking of him.

This time, he didn't go looking for the Hōgyoku. He didn't pursue his research on Hollows. And more than anything else, he noticed something he had never once noticed before, in this world, he had never heard the Soul King's call. Not once.

Without his schemes, without his obsessions, he simply lived. An ordinary Soul Reaper. Ichigo Kurosaki never appeared. The great upheaval never came. The world turned quietly, the way it was supposed to.

Centuries passed.

Then a Hollow invasion came, and Aizen, as captain, led his division against a wave of Menos Grande. In the final moments of the battle, to pull Genryusai Yamamoto back from the edge of death, he threw himself at a Vasto Lorde-class Menos. The wounds it left were fatal.

He died having earned it.

When the battle ended and his eyes opened, Aizen found himself looking at Ace Wayne, the Hōgyoku resting in Wayne's open palm, Wayne's face unreadable as he stared down at him.

"Oh." Wayne's mouth curved slightly. "You're awake."

"Yes." Aizen let out a long, slow breath.

"How was it? That little journey of yours."

"Boring." Aizen turned his lips down. "But... also interesting."

"Tch. You and your pride." Wayne shook his head. "If you hadn't broken through on your own, you couldn't have come out. You were faster than I expected, though. I thought it would take you millions of cycles to reach the real answer. Apparently not."

"How long was I asleep?" Aizen used asleep deliberately, anyone who worked with this kind of technique understood what the word meant.

"A few hours, give or take." Wayne thought about it. "I control the time-flow inside it, after all."

"That ability." The hostility in Aizen's gaze was quieter now. What had replaced it looked more like genuine curiosity. "You used the Hōgyoku's power as a foundation, combined it with your own, and built something real enough that even I couldn't break it. I want to know: how did you conceive of something like that?"

"A departed friend taught me the concept." Wayne put the Hōgyoku away.

"Oh?" Aizen raised an eyebrow. "May I know his name?"

A sly light crossed Wayne's face.

"His name was Itachi Uchiha." He let that land for a moment. "And the ability itself, I call it Izanami."

➤ Next: Transaction and Intervention