Seijūrō sat in his office with three sets of documents spread before him.

The first was the Reishi circuit analysis data he had brought back from Hueco Mundo. White quartz sand still clung to the corners of the pages, and when he turned them, fine grains rustled down from between the sheets.

The second was the Reishi residue report from the Technological Development Bureau on the Hollow that had devoured Kaien Shiba, officially submitted by Squad 13 a few days ago, its cover stamped in red with "Mission Debrief."

The third was the Reishi record of the Shell Hollow he had brought back from the Human World's Underground Reservoir decades ago. The pages had yellowed. The edges had frayed. The paperclip pinned to the upper-left corner had rusted into brown spots.

The three documents lay side by side on the desk.

He read through them once, then started again from the beginning.

The Reiatsu waveforms of the Shell Hollow. The modified Hollow's waveforms from the Kaien incident. The circuit structures of ordinary Hollows on the outer perimeter of Hueco Mundo.

The degree of alignment at the key nodes was too high to be coincidence. Not identical, but the branching method of the core circuits, the arrangement of Reishi nodes, the technique structure of the encryption layer: all of it pointed to the same modification logic. The same technique. The same traces of deliberate interference. Spanning decades, stretching from the Human World deep into Hueco Mundo.

He set the documents down, leaned back into his chair, and closed his eyes.

The desk that had sat empty for so long after Kaien died. The full day of silence while Ukitake locked himself in the captain's office. Rukia on her knees in the gravel, clawing at the cracks between the stones, sobbing until she couldn't breathe. And Aoki, the eyes that never closed, the lips that moved without sound, the dying words that never came. And Heizō and Okishima.

He opened his eyes and began sorting the data on his desk into chronological order.

He had gone to Hueco Mundo without telling anyone.

In the early hours of that morning, he had stood alone before the Senkaimon at the southeastern corner of the Seireitei. The stone frame was carved dense with Kidō runes that glowed cold blue in the predawn dark. He hadn't borrowed a Reishi converter from the Technological Development Bureau, that would have meant registration, application forms, explaining his purpose and expected return to the dispatch division, and sitting through Mayuri Kurotsuchi saying something like I won't stop you if you want to get yourself killed.

He didn't want to answer to anyone.

He used an older-model backup converter from the Kidō Corps instead, surplus inventory left behind decades ago when Iwakizhi Tetsusai was still in office, stored in the dust-coated spare-parts room at the deepest end of the Senkaimon maintenance sector. Its output was just enough to sustain a single round trip for one person. It would essentially be decommissioned when he came back.

He left no formal application in the Senkaimon passage records. In the corner of the barrier maintenance log, he wrote a single line: Temporary inspection by the Grand Kidō Chief, borrowed one set of backup equipment. No registered destination. No accompanying personnel. Neat, deliberate strokes, exactly the same as when he reviewed official documents.

He didn't sleep during his 4 days in Hueco Mundo. Not because he wasn't tired. Because he didn't dare.

The Reishi concentration was high enough that every breath felt like swallowing thick rice porridge. The excess Reishi in the air pressed down on his lungs like an invisible weight, and each inhale cost more effort than it should have.

When he stepped out of the Garganta, the first thing that hit him was white. A cold moon hung permanently dead center overhead, flooding the entire wasteland in silver until it looked like a salt flat without end. The quartz sand beneath his feet was hard and firm, it never gave underfoot, leaving only a faint chain of footprints trailing behind him. Stone cliffs and withered quartz trees threw twisted shadows under the moonlight. Not a breath of wind could be heard anywhere in the outer ring. Quiet as a dry well with the air pumped out.

Ordinary Hollows in the outer ring went down with Shō and Byakurai. By the first day he had mapped the density, walk far enough and you'd find one or two low-grade Hollows wandering alone. Strike fast enough and quietly enough, and their dissipating Reiatsu was swallowed whole by the high Reishi concentration in the environment, leaving no trace.

But the further in he pushed, the heavier the Reiatsu grew. The excess Reishi in the air periodically overloaded his detection equipment, and every recalibration meant kneeling in the sand and troubleshooting parameters by hand.

On the second day, he rested briefly under a cliff face honeycombed by wind erosion, using the time to reinforce the Reiatsu shielding on his detector.

Leaning back against the rock, he noticed several metal fragments buried in the sand nearby. The fractures were fresh. The edges still had unpolished burrs from artificial cutting. Most of the Reishi coating on the surface had been ground away by quartz sand, but the trace Reishi structures clinging to the fractured edges couldn't escape his instruments.

He spent over an hour crouching in the sand digging the fragments out one by one, packed them into sealed pouches, and noted the coordinates and collection time in his notebook. The fragments matched the exact same design standard as the jammer Mahiru Tokito had used, the one he had seen decades ago in the abandoned node in Inuzuri. Not standard-issue gear available to an ordinary Shinigami. Not handwork cobbled together by some seated officer.

On the third day, he pushed to the edge of the inner ring and located an abandoned cave marked on an old Expeditionary Corps map.

The entrance was mostly buried under a partial cave-in. It took him several hours to clear an opening barely wide enough to squeeze through sideways. He went in with a handheld Reishi lantern and probed deeper slowly. The further he went, the drier the air became, the quartz walls throwing scattered reflections everywhere.

Inside, more discarded Reishi extraction equipment lay piled up. Older models than the fragments in the outer ring, more heavily corroded, their casings still bearing seal talismans that had mostly been torn away. But the core structure was identical to the sealing technique formula he had seen in the abandoned Inuzuri node.

Every casing showed signs of having been pried open by force. Formula fragments for precision manipulation were scattered inside, evidence of repeated disassembly and study.

On the fourth day, he penetrated the fringes of the Menos Forest. In the gaps between the slow movement of Gillian herds, he found a relatively concealed position and photographed several Gillian-class Menos at range with a high-magnification lens.

Every one of those massive frames bore old scars. Not the ragged claw marks and bite wounds torn out by Menos of the same class, something else. The aftermath of something unnatural. Their Reishi circuits also carried traces of artificial modification, more sophisticated than those of ordinary Hollows. Their evolutionary direction had been tampered with before they ever had the chance to evolve.

That night, covered in quartz sand and carrying sealed samples of black Reishi crystals, he returned to Soul Society through the Garganta without alerting anyone. Back in his quarters, he knocked a small pile of fine white sand from the soles of his shoes and stared at it under the lamp for a long time. Then he spent the rest of the night reorganizing every piece of data he had brought back. He hadn't said a word to anyone.

Now he slid the final analysis results into a dossier, sealed it, picked up the crystal samples, and walked toward Squad 12.

The corridor lights were as dim as always. The air carried a faint smell of ink and talisman paper. Two squad members on duty bowed when they saw him; he nodded without slowing. The old pine outside the Squad 12 gate stood straight in the night as ever. The upper-floor windows of the Technological Development Bureau glowed their permanent cold blue-white.

Mayuri Kurotsuchi was standing beside a high stool, a Reishi sample bristling with electrodes held in his left hand while his right adjusted the angle on a screen. The blue nail polish on his fingertips caught the monitor light. He heard footsteps and turned. The black-and-white paint on his face gave nothing away, but his brow had already furrowed.

"You again. I haven't even finished reading that stack of barrier anomaly reports you gave me last time. The Technological Development Bureau wasn't built for you alone."

Seijūrō didn't respond.

He set the dossier down on the blueprint-cluttered desk, then drew several individual sealed tubes from inside his sleeve and lined up the black Reishi crystal samples in a row.

Mayuri glanced down at them, set aside the tool in his hand, and picked one up, turning it over between his fingertips several times. He narrowed his eyes and held it up to the light, his pupils tracking back and forth across the surface of the translucent black crystal. His throat moved.

Then he slotted the crystal into the spectrometer's reading port. Layered Reishi circuit data bloomed across the screen. He clicked through them one by one, waveform after waveform, his fingers moving faster across the console, his face drifting closer and closer to the screen, until the volume of his voice dropped several degrees without warning.

"Where did you get these?"

"Hueco Mundo. The quartz cliff at the edge of the Menos Forest. The artificial cutting fractures were only wedged into the narrowest quartz fissures—impossible to form naturally. Both the ordinary Hollows in the outer ring and the Gillian-class in the Menos Forest carry similar modification traces. The samples and imaging data are all in the dossier."

Mayuri pulled up the documents and enlarged the telephoto images of the Gillian-class Menos frame by frame. The massive silhouettes lumbering between quartz pillars froze on the screen one after another: the outward-flaring angles of shoulder blades bearing old scars that could never have formed through natural evolution; Reiatsu readings that were clearly bordering on Adjuchas yet forcibly suppressed at the Gillian level; the carved scraping marks along the sides of their masks as they turned, precise as artificial sculpture. His finger lingered on one frame, an extremely fine, spiral-shaped groove running along the rim of a Gillian's mask, nearly identical to an early experimental subject preserved in archived footage from Kisuke Urahara's era.

He slammed his palm onto the console. The spectrometer shuddered.

"You see this." He didn't look up. "This is direction adjustment, not simple reinforcement. Whoever did this didn't push the Gillian straight toward Adjuchas in one go. They kept it locked at the Gillian stage while warping its Reiatsu ceiling upward by several degrees. Any ordinary person attempting this would be dead. But this individual carved out an entirely new path in the evolutionary branch."

He shot through several correction markers with the tip of one blue nail, words pouring out in a rapid murmur.

"The nodes in the third circuit layer begin deviating here. A normal Gillian would never be altered to this extent—you're right, there's nothing natural about this." His pace accelerated as he grabbed a second handheld tester to re-examine the crystal's core, scribbling the freshly calculated encryption index onto the back of a piece of scrap paper on the workbench. "The encryption layer on the crystal's outer surface isn't like those low-level seals you dealt with before. The Mahiru Tokito you encountered was using a simplified version—just enough to pass internal Kidō Corps scrutiny and cover for whoever was actually opening the breaches. This is the original." He looked up at Seijūrō. Faint fluorescent blue light played along the edges of his face paint. There was no room for doubt in his voice. "Look here." He overlaid another set of waveforms, pointing to an extremely narrow intersection node. "Completely identical to the Shell Hollow on the same branch. This is not coincidence. Factor in the cracked outer crystals as well, and I can reconstruct the missing links through experimentation."

He paused. Reached back and switched off the spectrometer. Resealed the crystal in its tube. Picked up another and examined it for a long time under the light from his palm lamp, rotating it through his fingers. Then he locked them all into a hidden drawer beneath the workbench lined with condensing plates, arranging the sample tubes side by side.

He gathered the papers still scattered across every surface, straightened them, and looked at Seijūrō, his voice flat and precise.

"The Shell Hollow Reiatsu waveform you gave me last time and the circuit branches extracted from these crystals are different stages of the exact same modification technique. The Shell Hollow was a mature specimen. These are byproducts of early experimentation. Whoever was behind this understood not only the Reishi structure of Hollows, but Kidō sealing formulas as well—the encryption layer on the outside of these crystals uses the exact same technique structure as the seal Mahiru Tokito left in the abandoned Inuzuri node."

Seijūrō nodded.

He walked out of the Squad 12 captain's office and through several empty corridors. The moonlight from the windows bleached the bluestone underfoot pale. It fell slantwise across the boughs of the old pine outside the Squad 12 gate, scattering needle shadows across the ground. He had just cleared the entrance when he saw Soi Fon standing beneath the pine tree a short distance away.

The Squad 2 captain's white haori hung motionless in the night breeze. Her arms were crossed over her chest, the long black arm warmers fitted close to the line of her arms. A few strands of her blunt-cut hair stirred in the wind and settled again. Her pale gray eyes were fixed on him in the moonlight, still as two chips of cold glass, her face giving nothing away.

"Vice Kidō Chief—no, Grand Kidō Chief now. Your recent movements have been quite interesting." She didn't raise her voice. There was no interrogative lift to it. "Starting a few days ago, the barrier inspection logs at the Kidō Corps station were all signed by Seijūrō Kidōin—but the person sitting in that office reviewing documents wasn't you. The Reiatsu frequency had only a minor discrepancy, but enough to trigger instrument suspicion. Squad 2 simultaneously detected abnormal usage traces at several barrier nodes across the Seireitei, including the backup converter in the southeastern corner of the Senkaimon, power adjusted to single-person round-trip mode, the application log scribbled with nothing but 'temporary inspection.' Coincidentally, every one of those terminals falls under your jurisdiction." She paused for a beat. "And today you visited Squad 12 carrying unidentified samples. You were inside for nearly 50 minutes."

Her last word landed, and she had already taken half a step forward without seeming to move at all, close enough now that he could see the cold light pressing against the surface of her pale gray eyes. "Tell me what you did."

It was a statement of fact. Her Onmitsukidō had been watching from the beginning. Every step he thought he'd taken without a trace had been seen. Every brief notation in those logs had a corresponding reading on Squad 2's instruments.

Seijūrō didn't answer immediately.

He looked at her face. The last time they had stood like this, alone at this angle, it had been years ago, when she had fastened the transformation device to her collar and covered his office for several days, then thrown back a single line when she returned: Don't make me review documents for you again.

"It's not a good time to discuss this."

"What isn't a good time." Soi Fon pressed half a step closer. Her chin came up. The anger in her voice was clear, and underneath it something held even tighter. "That equipment was a backup model left behind by Iwakizhi Tetsusai. It doesn't get pulled from storage without reason. You used your authority as Grand Kidō Chief to activate it without registering."

She stopped.

She didn't finish.

He knew what the rest of the sentence was: If someone else had found this like I did, do you think they'd give you a chance to explain? But she didn't say it. She swallowed it back down, clenched her molars, and held herself still, a bowstring pulled to its limit.

Seijūrō was quiet for a moment. Then he gave her the short version.

It started with the Kaien incident. The modified Hollow's waveform was too similar to the Shell Hollow's to ignore, and that had given him the idea of searching for the source in Hueco Mundo's outer ring. He'd used the backup converter left by Iwakizhi Tetsusai and crossed through the Garganta alone. The Hollows in the outer ring carried signs of artificial modification. An abandoned cave was stocked with extraction devices sharing the same origin as the Inuzuri sealing formula. Gillian-class Menos Grande had their evolutionary direction interfered with before they ever had a chance to evolve. The crystal samples he'd just handed to Mayuri Kurotsuchi matched modification records from Kisuke Urahara's era. The encryption layer formula was the work of whoever was standing behind Mahiru Tokito.

Soi Fon didn't speak right away.

Her jaw tightened several times. Whatever a captain's composure was supposed to hold back, it wasn't holding. She drew a slow breath, and when she spoke, her voice had dropped so low it nearly dissolved into the wind moving through the branches above.

"You went alone. You said all of that, and not one word about how going to Hueco Mundo alone means you could die at the feet of those Gillians at any moment. Not one word about the fact that you might not come back. Not one word about how, if you didn't come back, every piece of that intelligence would rot in the sands of the Menos Forest and no one would ever find it. And not one word about whether you ever once thought—sitting out there by yourself in that miserable sand, stuffing grains into test tubes—that if you got surrounded, there wouldn't even be anyone beside you to take a hit for you."

Her chest rose and fell. Her voice was trembling at the edges, but she was still holding on, still forcing the words out faster and faster until she barely caught herself at the end.

"From now on, you keep investigating. Squad 2 will cover all your encrypted dispatch logs at the Senkaimon under the name of Vice Kidō Chief Emiri Tsunayashiro's routine filings. Before you cross any boundary nodes or pull backup equipment from the Kidō Corps, you tell me first." She turned her face away. The moonlight caught the edge of her bangs and threw their shadow faintly against the tree. Then, muffled, barely carrying: "Do you hear me?"

Seijūrō looked at her. This woman standing in front of him, biting out every word short and hard, stubbornly refusing to turn back around. He realized there was something he owed her, something he should have said a long time ago.

"...All right," he said. "Thank you."

Soi Fon didn't look back.

She spun on her heel and took two sharp, short steps forward. The wing-like white haori flared open behind her in the night. "Don't think you can hide anything from me." Then her Shunpo pulled her into the dark, leaving only the faintest wisp of Reiatsu in the night sky, and the evening wind swept even that away.

Back in his office, he reorganized the full collection of investigation reports. Dozens of Reishi circuit analysis files on Hollows. Several black Reishi crystal samples. Environmental records from inside the Menos Forest. Telephoto imaging data of Gillian-class Menos bearing modification traces. Waveform similarity comparisons between the modified Hollow from the Kaien incident and the Shell Hollow from the Human World, decades apart. Everything collected into scrolls. What needed archiving, he archived. What needed sealing, he sealed.

Before he locked the archive drawer, he took out the scroll bound in black cloth that Iwakizhi Tetsusai had left behind, looked at it for a moment, then set it back inside, pressing it down on top of the reports.

➤ Next: Facing Genryūsai Yamamoto

Chapter 49 - Facing Genryūsai Yamamoto

The light in the Grand Kidō Chief's office had been burning all night. Seijūrō filed the final Reishi analysis report into the dossier, and when he stood, his knee let out a faint pop. Outside the window, the sky, that perpetual ambiguity between dusk and dawn, filtered through the Kidō Corps' barrier grid and fell across the edge of his desk in pale, indeterminate light.

He gathered the stack of files, pushed the door open, and walked toward the Squad 1 barracks.

The guards had already received word. When the heavy wooden doors of the Captain-Commander's office swung open, Chōjirō Sasakibe was standing at Genryūsai Shigekuni Yamamoto's side with a tea tray in both hands. His light-purple eyes lifted briefly, then he gave a calm, measured nod.

Seijūrō stepped across the threshold, came to a stop, and offered a standard salute.

Yamamoto sat in the chair he had occupied for over two thousand years. His cane was planted on the stone floor, his long white beard trailing to his waist, and the scars across his forehead and right temple cut deep in the dim light. His eyes were half-closed, his gaze heavy and slow as it settled on Seijūrō.

"Kidōin. This old man has already read the report you submitted." Yamamoto's voice was measured and deep, every word like water hauled up from the bottom of a very old well. "Modified Hollow Reishi circuits. Abnormal Reishi concentrations on the outer edges of Hueco Mundo. Abandoned Reishi extraction equipment. This evidence does point to someone conducting long-term experiments inside Hueco Mundo."

"Yes."

Yamamoto was silent for a moment. His cane tapped lightly against the stone. "And what manner of person would that be?"

"Which is why I've come to request the Captain-Commander's permission to go deep into Hueco Mundo and find definitive proof. Previous investigations couldn't trace the source from the outside — the origin of the encrypted technique can only be verified from within. The records of prior expeditionary forces have already confirmed this. Every attempt to trace it externally eventually loses the thread due to Reishi interference. Only by going inside can we lock onto the complete Reishi structure of the encryption formula at its source, and from there identify the single person behind it."

Yamamoto did not reply immediately.

His hands rested on the head of his cane, his narrowed eyes moving slowly across Seijūrō's face. "The records of those expeditionary forces are something both you and I have read. Eight or nine out of ten never returned. Those who penetrated deep and came back intact are few enough to count. Your duty is Grand Kidō Chief. The Seireitei's barrier system requires you here."

He paused, drawing his cane slightly closer, his voice slow and unhurried and still a warning. "Do not presume that bouncing around Hueco Mundo's outer rim a few times unscathed gives you the right to walk into its depths."

Seijūrō did not retreat. He raised his head and looked directly at Yamamoto, his voice quiet but every word driven in like a nail.

"Captain-Commander. I've reviewed the roster of every expeditionary force in history. Before every captain led their squad out, you personally signed and approved their deployment. You never stopped a single team. Even the ones who didn't come back — you never crossed their names off the ledger. Because your principle has always been that someone must search for the root. What you approved wasn't a death sentence. What you approved was letting them fulfill their duty as Shinigami."

He took a step forward. Beside them, Chōjirō Sasakibe drew a soft breath, but said nothing.

"The soul disappearances in Soul Society have stretched on for decades — from Kisuke Urahara's exile to Kaien Shiba's death in battle, I have been investigating every step of the way. When the Captain-Commander stood at the front of all Shinigami to face the enemy at the founding of the Gotei 13, I don't believe you fought just so you could sit in the rear waiting for the barriers to seal themselves. Resolving problems at their root has always been the most fundamental logic of what it means to be a Shinigami. I am only doing what I must."

He paused. His voice dropped even lower, but his gaze held steady.

"Or are you afraid? Afraid of losing another Grand Kidō Chief on this mission, and having no good answer for Central 46? Afraid the truth, once uncovered, will cost too much to face?"

The air went still.

A Reiatsu heavy as a mountain erupted from Yamamoto's body. The entire Captain-Commander's office shuddered under its weight.

The tea in the cup on the desk rippled outward in tight concentric rings. The tray in Chōjirō Sasakibe's hands gave a sharp clatter.

Seijūrō's knees sank nearly an inch the instant the pressure crashed down. It felt like the entire foundation of Squad 1 had been dropped onto his shoulder blades. But he held. He locked his legs and refused to move.

Cold sweat traced down his temple. The Reiatsu seemed to crush each word as it left his mouth and force it back together on the other side.

"Until the root is gone — I will not stop."

Yamamoto looked at Seijūrō's trembling shoulders. At the collar soaked through with sweat. Then, slowly, he closed his eyes. The crushing Reiatsu receded without a sound. The ripples in the teacup smoothed and disappeared. Chōjirō Sasakibe quietly steadied the tray that had nearly slipped from his hands.

When Yamamoto opened his eyes again, the edge in them had not aged a day. It had only sunk deeper. "Sasakibe."

Chōjirō Sasakibe stepped forward and set the tray down on the low table beside them.

"The departure date, personnel roster, and equipment manifest for Grand Kidō Chief Seijūrō's investigation unit will be drafted by him personally and submitted to Squad 1 for the record. Furthermore, his prior use of personal authority to requisition reserve equipment for multiple trips to and from the outer layers of Hueco Mundo will not be pursued."

Yamamoto paused. His cane came down hard against the stone floor.

"For this operation — you come back alive. That is the Captain-Commander's order."

Seijūrō's breathing hadn't fully steadied. He straightened up and bowed deeply to Genryūsai Yamamoto. Then he turned, walked out, and the heavy wooden doors closed slowly at his back.

Chōjirō Sasakibe watched his figure disappear behind the doors. He bent down, picked up the tray, and refilled the cup in front of Yamamoto. The steam rose slowly through air still thick with the lingering trace of Reiatsu.

Yamamoto set his cane against the stone floor once more, lifted the cup, and drained it in one motion.

"This old man wanted to know whether he would retreat when faced with a power far greater than his own. He did not retreat. He stood in the Captain-Commander's office and questioned whether his superior had grown old and afraid, solely to find an answer for the comrades who can no longer stand. A man like that will not be frightened off by shadows hiding in any corner of Soul Society."

He lowered his gaze to the surface of the tea, what little remained still trembling faintly in the heat. "Before the previous expeditionary forces departed, their captains stood in that same spot. Every one of them had their knees driven down by this old man's Reiatsu. The ones who truly refused to retreat, all of them came back alive."

---

Back in his office, Seijūrō sat with a blank expedition roster spread open on the desk before him.

The brush rested on the inkstone. The ink was already ground. He sat for a long time without writing a single character.

He'd been to Hueco Mundo several times, always alone. He knew the environment by now: the high Reishi concentration would slow down anyone unaccustomed to it; Gillian patrol routes shifted every few hours; and even the old expeditionary maps left vast blank spaces deep in the Forest of Menos. Too many people would only be a liability. If something went wrong, he could get out alone using Shunpo, but with squad members at his back, every step would mean turning around to check, every step would carry an extra weight. There was no reason to drag anyone into danger on his account.

He listed a few criteria on a fresh sheet: proficient in Shunpo, solid combat experience, able to function in high-Reishi environments, capable of withdrawing alone if scattered. Not many people fit.

Byakuya Kuchiki could, obviously. But he was head of the Kuchiki Clan and captain of Squad 6. Inappropriate and irresponsible, in equal measure.

The other captains all had their own duties and obligations. He set the brush down, leaned back in his chair, and stared at the blank roster. He was starting to think he might as well write "Grand Kidō Chief, one person" and turn it in.

The door swung open. No knock. No announcement. The white haori of the Squad 2 Captain shifted in the draft moving through the corridor.

Soi Fon stood in the doorway. The breeze lifted a few strands of her straight-cut fringe. Her pale gray eyes were fixed directly on him.

"Captain-Commander Yamamoto authorized you to form an investigation unit and go deep into Hueco Mundo. You didn't inform me."

"The roster is right here."

Seijūrō flipped the blank sheet face down on the desk.

Soi Fon stepped inside and closed the door behind her with a backward push.

Her pace was unhurried, but every step landed with weight. She stopped in front of his desk, crossed her arms over her chest, and tilted her chin up slightly.

"What is wrong with you. You always try to carry everything alone."

Her voice wasn't loud, but the anger in it wasn't far from the surface. "You think Hueco Mundo is your personal training ground?"

"I've been to Hueco Mundo several times and I know the terrain. Gillian patrol routes, the topography of the Forest of Menos, the concealment points in the outer perimeter, I know all of it. If something goes wrong, withdrawing alone by Shunpo is faster than leading a team out. More people means more exposure risk. Every extra person to worry about is another thing that can get me killed."

"So your plan was: go in alone, find the evidence alone, come back alone, and what happens if you can't come back?"

The muscles along Soi Fon's jaw tightened. She dropped her arms and jabbed the tip of her right index finger onto the surface of the desk.

"Same as last time. Last time you went to Hueco Mundo without registering it with anyone, and I only found out when I caught you at the gate of Squad 12 after you got back. This time the Captain-Commander approved it, and you're still planning to go alone. Do you think asking for help makes you weak? Do you think letting your comrades carry a fraction of the risk means you owe them something?"

"I don't think asking for help makes me weak. But this is my investigation. A case I've been chasing for decades. Every one of those debts is carved into my bones. I can't let anyone else throw their life away for my sake. Not even you."

"Who said I'm doing this for you."

Her gaze swung back to him. Her tone shifted, from anger into something near-cold, near-flat, but every word carried the weight of something that had been turned over a thousand times before finally being said out loud.

"Investigating the person behind all of this is your duty. Being captain of Squad 2 is mine. The intelligence you brought back from Hueco Mundo has already proven that the source of the modified Hollows is somewhere deep inside. If those things ever breach the barrier and enter Soul Society, the first people in their path will be the Onmitsukidō, my squad members. So I have to see it myself. Don't flatter yourself about your Shunpo, mine is better than yours. You're a Kidō practitioner; you still need cover in close combat. And those old men in the Shihōin Clan are still questioning why I inherited Lady Yoruichi Shihōin's position. Going on this mission makes it clear to anyone still doubting me that the captain of Squad 2 doesn't sit in the Seireitei waiting for someone else to hand her the intelligence."

Seijūrō looked at her. She wasn't looking at him. She was staring at the blank roster lying face down on the desk, as though the paper had personally done something to offend her.

She had given him a list of reasons: duty, intelligence, Shunpo, the pressure from the Shihōin Clan. Every reason was sound. Not one of them had anything to do with helping him. But as she finished that last sentence, the tips of her ears had gone faintly red.

He thought of an evening a long time ago, the first time he'd noticed Soi Fon, in the dense woods along the edge of the Squad 2 Onmitsukidō training ground. She had been trailing half a step behind Yoruichi Shihōin, still just a member of the guard corps, half-hidden in the shadow of an old pine tree. Her pale gray eyes had tracked him as he practiced Shunpo, sharp with hostility and something like assessment. Later, after Yoruichi's exile, she had stood alone in the empty captain's quarters of the Shihōin residence, staring at the Zanpakutō Yoruichi had left hanging on the wall.

He looked down at the blank roster. Turned it over. Picked up the brush. Wrote one line, then set the brush back on the inkstone.

"We leave tomorrow. I'll finalize the equipment list tonight. Whatever you need on your end, write it directly to me."

Soi Fon said nothing. She looked at her name on the paper for a moment. Then she turned, pushed the door open, and left. Her haori caught lightly on the doorframe as she went, and then she was gone, disappearing down the end of the corridor.

➤ Next: Shaoling Fon