Shinji Hirako walked out of the restaurant he'd been going to for years, hands tucked inside his sleeves, shoulder-length blond hair catching the faint afternoon light of the World of the Living.

He stood at the entrance, looking down at the owner's apologetic face, making absolutely sure he hadn't misheard.

"What do you mean someone bought all your rice balls? All of them? Every single flavor? Even the eel ones?"

"I am so terribly sorry. A gentleman came by just a moment ago — said he was getting takeout for his colleagues — and had every rice ball we made today packed up and took them all with him. I am truly, deeply sorry."

The elderly shopkeeper pressed his palms together and bowed so low his back was nearly ninety degrees.

Shinji stood there in silence for a moment, then let out a sigh.

Nothing to be done. He'd just have to head back and figure out with the others what else to eat.

He turned and walked toward the base.

The outer wall of the abandoned warehouse looked the same as always, peeling paint, rusted oil drums, wooden pallets stacked haphazardly by the door.

Shinji pushed open the side door and went down the stone steps one at a time.

From the outside, just another forgotten building. But underneath was a different world entirely, a wide underground space with sofas, bookshelves, training equipment, and a corner stacked high with every kind of bizarre doll Mashiro had collected.

Then he caught a smell.

Not instant noodles. Not takeout containers. Freshly made rice balls. Fried meatballs straight from the pan. And those familiar old-brand wagashi he knew by heart.

He picked up his pace down the last few steps.

The long table in the underground base was covered in food.

Rice balls in every kind of wrapping were piled into small mountains. Several boxes of fried meatballs were scattered between them. And a few bags of luxury pastries he couldn't name sat alongside everything else.

The Visored sat around the table. Everyone had something in their hands.

Kensei Muguruma was leaning back in his chair, a rice ball clutched in each fist, cheeks puffed out like a hamster's.

Lisa Yadōmaru had a book open in one hand and a meatball pinched in the other, sauce and printed text both reflected in her glasses.

Rōjūrō Ōtoribashi was eating pastries with slow, deliberate bites, his long golden hair tied neatly behind his head. He finished a piece, then produced a wet wipe from somewhere and cleaned each finger in turn.

Love Aikawa had claimed enough table space for three rice balls, hat tilted sideways on his head.

Hachigen Ushōda sat cross-legged in the corner with an entire box of daifuku in front of him, his round body and the round sweets somehow a perfect match.

Hiyori was crouched on her chair, mouth already full, still shoving in the next rice ball before she'd finished the one she was chewing.

And Mashiro was riding on someone's head, rice ball in one hand, meatball in the other, legs dangling loosely on either side of that person's shoulders.

She had his dark hair as a handhold. She was twirling a bamboo skewer between her fingers and biting into the next meatball before she'd swallowed the last one.

She looked down at the person beneath her.

"This plum-flavored dango is amazing. You want one?"

The person didn't answer. He just picked a mentaiko rice ball off the table, peeled back the wrapper, and took a bite.

Shinji stood on the steps.

He looked at Mashiro perched on that man's neck. He looked at that familiar face. He looked at the man quietly eating a mentaiko rice ball.

"Ah! Shinji's back!" Mashiro spotted him first, still astride Seijūrō's neck. She bit off a meatball and waved the skewer at him, sauce smeared at the corner of her mouth.

Seijūrō looked up at him. He was still holding the half-eaten mentaiko rice ball. His tone was as flat as if he'd bumped into an old acquaintance on a street in Nanamagari. "Yo, Shinji. Saved the eel one for you."

Shinji came down the steps, pulled a chair over, and sat down.

He didn't reach for the eel rice ball. He tucked his hands into his sleeves, leaned slightly forward, and looked at Seijūrō straight through the fringe falling across his forehead.

"Who sent you? Captain-Commander Yamamoto? Central 46? The Kidō Corps? Or are you here as — the teacher of Sōsuke Aizen and Gin Ichimaru?"

"Let's talk over food."

Shinji was quiet for a beat. Then he reached out and took the eel rice ball.

---

"What do you mean nobody cares!"

Hiyori jumped down from the chair, nearly crushing the rice ball in her hand.

Her eyebrows shot up, her eyes went wide, a single grain of rice still stuck to the corner of her mouth. "We've got captain- and lieutenant-level fighters right here. What do you mean Soul Society just quietly buried it and wrote us off to our faces?"

"Hiyori. Calm down."

"So what have you all been doing for the past however many years?"

"Building strength. Then killing Aizen."

Kensei's voice left no room for discussion.

"I'm saying this upfront, Seijūrō. Don't think you can put in a good word for him just because you were his teacher. Shinji, Hiyori, Hachi, Love, Rōjūrō, Lisa, Mashiro — Aizen owes every single one of us. That debt gets paid."

Seijūrō looked at Kensei and took a bite of his rice ball.

He didn't answer. Just kept chewing, thinking to himself, well. Can't exactly kill someone else's motivation.

Shinji finally took his first bite of the eel rice ball, cheeks bulging. "So what you're saying is, once the Technological Development Bureau completes the spatial lockdown, the Gotei 13 pushes into Hueco Mundo?"

"Yes."

"And you want us to hold down the World of the Living."

"More or less."

"The last progress report on the Hōgyoku's awakening had it at fifty percent. We don't know what it'll be capable of once it's fully awake, but just the fact that it turns Hollows into Arrancars already puts it at a serious threat level."

Shinji took another bite, sauce catching at the corner of his mouth. He wiped it off with his thumb.

"You came all this way just to tell us this?" Kensei leaned back, arms folded across his chest. "We were going after Aizen anyway."

"More strength means more confidence."

Lisa looked up from her book and pushed her glasses up.

"I agree with Seijūrō. Aizen isn't someone any one of us can take down alone. The Gotei 13 needs to concentrate everything it has to push into Hueco Mundo, which means the World of the Living and possibly Soul Society will be left completely exposed. If Aizen sends people to hit those gaps while everyone else is committed, the fallout won't be pretty. The Visored and the Gotei 13 together is the only deployment that makes sense right now."

"One more thing."

Seijūrō looked at Shinji.

"What's Ichigo Kurosaki's situation? His current strength feels like it's nowhere near what it was when he broke Rukia out at the Sōkyoku."

"Him, huh." Shinji shoved the last bite of eel rice ball into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and ran his tongue along the corner of his lips where the sauce had been.

---

Hueco Mundo. Las Noches.

Eternal moonlight poured down through the cracks in the dome and spilled across the smooth stone floor in cold white pools.

Sōsuke Aizen stood at the center of the main hall, hands hanging naturally at his sides.

Ulquiorra Cifer knelt on one knee before him. His white uniform still carried the scorch marks from the Kōtotsu grazing him inside the Dangai, but the face beneath it was as unmoved as ever.

"I sincerely apologize, Lord Aizen. I failed to complete your mission."

Ulquiorra lowered his head. His green eyes rested on his own reflection in the stone floor.

"No matter. If anything, the indelible pain my teacher left behind will serve as a useful reminder for a while longer."

Aizen raised his right hand and pressed it gently against the dark red wound on his shoulder. The burning was still there when his fingertips made contact. Then he drew the jewel from his sleeve, a soft, eerie blue glow emanating from within.

The Hōgyoku turned slowly at his fingertips. Blue and violet light twisted and shifted inside it.

It was brighter than before. The light within, spinning, merging, splitting, was accelerating at a rate the naked eye could follow.

"The original plan was to use you against Old Man Yama. It seems, however, that plans rarely survive contact with reality."

Aizen glanced at Wonderweiss Margela standing nearby, then turned toward a different corner of the room.

A figure sat there with his back against a stone pillar, hands resting loosely on his knees. Dark brown curls were heaped in a tangle on his head. His scruffy chin was buried in his collar. His chest rose and fell with slow, even breaths. His eyes were half-open, and he looked like he could drift off at any moment.

Aizen looked at him. The curve of his lips stayed gentle. Unhurried.

"So then. Would you be willing to accept what the Hōgyoku has to offer and help me deal with my teacher?"

The figure in the corner slowly unfolded himself from the floor and stood.

He was tall. Standing straight, he had half a head on every Espada in the room.

He stood there, half-lidded eyes looking through the loose hair falling across his forehead at the Hōgyoku in Aizen's hand. He looked at it for a long time.

Then he raised one hand and scratched the back of his head. His voice was lazy and a little rough.

"Yeah. Thing is, if I use that, I don't think I can control my Reiatsu. A lot of people would die, wouldn't they? Right now I can barely manage to stay alongside everyone else. Use that thing, and I'd go right back to how I was before. That's a real hassle."

Aizen's smile deepened, just slightly.

"You possess the greatest power of anyone here, and yet all you want is to walk beside others. That is precisely what makes you who you are, and precisely why the Hōgyoku is most suited to you. It doesn't force power onto its host. It draws out what the host truly wants. So what is it you want, Starrk? Companions? Or is it something more specific, the ability to turn power you can't control into something that protects the people beside you?"

Starrk didn't answer.

He slid both hands back into his sleeves and stood there, looking through the loose strands of hair over his forehead at the blue-violet light moving slowly across the surface of the Hōgyoku. He was quiet for a long time.

Then he exhaled, soft and slow.

"Ah... what a hassle."

➤ Next: Cacao Paradise

Chapter 81 - Cacao Paradise

When the news arrived that battle had begun, Seijūrō was standing in the living room of the Kurosaki home, holding a cup of instant coffee that hadn't dissolved yet.

But the one who fired the first shot wasn't Soul Society.

It was Aizen.

Hundreds of Picaro had been thrown into Soul Society and were tearing the place apart.

They pushed deliberately toward the Technological Development Bureau, shattering more than a dozen barrier seals along the way. Dense Cero fire pinned several patrol squads behind cover, leaving them unable to advance a single step.

But Squad 7 arrived fast. Komamura's forces hit the scene and engaged, lieutenant-level squads fanning out to cut off the zones, and the Picaro advance ground to a halt.

"Aizen's backed into a corner."

Renji poked his head out from behind the sofa and glanced at the Denreishinki in Seijūrō's hand.

"Throwing a bunch of kids over here to die — this kind of stalling is just pathetic. Even if they buy him time, how much? Half a day? A full day? What does that even get him?"

Seijūrō didn't answer.

Something felt off. He couldn't name it.

Aizen always acted with purpose. Every move that looked isolated was a chess piece laid long in advance.

But this, throwing the Picaro in without committing real strength, buying half a day at most, and not even managing to slow the Technological Development Bureau down.

Even if it had worked, so what? Half a day later, the Picaro would be suppressed, the Bureau would still be running. What could that time possibly mean to Aizen?

Unless Aizen truly had no troops left.

The Espada's fighting strength was finite. The Fracción had bled heavily in earlier battles. Las Noches itself was already at a disadvantage. Throwing forces in like this, recklessly, seemed like exactly what it looked like, a man backed into a wall.

That explanation was reasonable. It fit all the data. Experience supported it.

And yet.

He still felt something was off.

Because the opponent was Aizen.

The Denreishinki vibrated again.

Word came back from Soul Society: Mayuri Kurotsuchi's spatial-locking technology was nearly complete. Captain-Commander Yamamoto had issued the order, at midnight tonight, Tōshirō Hitsugaya would lead the World of the Living advance squad to Hueco Mundo to rendezvous with the Gotei 13 main force standing by.

Kisuke Urahara leaned halfway out of the kitchen doorway, a dripping ladle in hand. The expression beneath his bucket hat had shed some of its usual laziness.

"Whoa, they figured it out that fast? Spatial locking isn't something you crack in a few days. Last time the Technological Development Bureau tackled spatial locking was before the Hollowfication experiments — and back then, just gathering the preliminary data took two months. How did Kurotsuchi pull it off?"

"He clashed with a Quincy at some point. The guy had a shadow-based spatial ability. Mayuri probably took it apart and studied it."

Seijūrō moved to the window and looked out at the afternoon light over Karakura Town.

"Even so, having it ready by tonight is pretty remarkable. A Quincy's spatial ability and a Shinigami's spatial-locking technology are separated by several dimensions at the foundational level. Just adapting the Reishi frequency conversion alone should take days. Unless Kurotsuchi was already working on it before."

Urahara set the ladle back on the kitchen counter and added the rest in an offhand tone. "Of course, he might've used some method I don't know about. I've been away from the Technological Development Bureau a long time — I'm not exactly current on what his equipment can do these days."

Meanwhile, in Soul Society.

The Picaro had been fully suppressed.

Sajin Komamura sat on a slab of broken wall, the enormous form of Myō'ō slowly dissolving behind him. The front of his Shihakushō hung open, a wide scorch mark from a Cero burned across his chest. He was breathing in deep, ragged pulls, both hands braced on his knees, each breath carrying a faint stab of pain from his ribs.

Those children's Ceros had been relentless, dense, overlapping, hundreds firing at once. When they all went off together, the entire sky had blazed white.

Tetsuzaemon Iba crouched beside him and nudged his sunglasses up.

"Captain, why Bankai? That many Ceros, you could've Shunpo'd through them. And with targets spread that wide, taking it head-on just means a bigger injury surface."

Komamura pressed a hand against his chest. The force made the scorch marks ache.

"Iba. This is Seireitei. If I hadn't taken the hit, what would have happened to whoever those stray Ceros reached?"

He gripped Iba's shoulder and pushed himself upright, then looked down at the Picaro pinned to the ground by Bakudō.

Their wings had folded back. Resurrección forcibly undone. Several were still squirming, stubbornly working to break free and go another round. Even now, pinned flat against the stone, their faces carried those same easy, harmless smiles.

Komamura stared at them for a long moment. His broad, wolf-headed frame threw a wide shadow across them all.

"But that technique they used. The high-speed black spheres, less power than a Cero, didn't even graze Myō'ō's skin. What was the point of it?"

He crouched down and tried to soften his voice.

One of the Picaro, cheek smudged with dirt, pinned flat by Bakudō, wrenched his head back and lit up. The look on his face was the look of a child who'd been playing a game for hours and finally got asked to explain the rules.

"It's Cacao Paradise! It absorbs all the Reishi inside the area we surround, and if there are wandering souls or Hollows in range, they get completely swallowed up. We invented it ourselves! Even Lord Szayelaporro said it was super interesting!"

Komamura studied the child-like Arrancar. "Why did you come to destroy Soul Society? I feel no malice from any of you."

"We didn't come to destroy anything! We came on a field trip!" The Picaro blinked up at him, eyes bright.

"...What?"

"Soul Society is so much fun!" another one chimed in from nearby. "There are shiny things everywhere, and when you smash them, even more shiny things come out! You don't have sand scorpions here, but there's so much other stuff, it's amazing!"

Komamura lowered his head.

He was quiet for a long time. "Rampant destruction in the spirit of play. Hollows truly are, "

He stopped.

"...Let's go. Report their capture truthfully."

The Squad 7 members hauled the Picaro up one by one and marched them off. They were still chattering to each other about the highlights of their "field trip," not a single one of them seeming to understand that they'd just walked back from the edge of death.

Muken. The lowest level.

Sōya Azashiro coughed up a mouthful of blood.

Dark red splattered across the mirror-smooth stone floor and caught the cold, dim light in a hard, glinting sheen.

He was on his knees, both palms flat against the ground, the front of his plain clothes soaked through with blood.

Urozakuro had collapsed beside him. Her ornate silk sleeves were drenched, blood still welling from her mouth, and the bells that usually chimed so crisply were silent, trembling only when her body shuddered and couldn't stop.

"Sōsuke Aizen... this was what he was after all along?"

Urozakuro's Bankai worked by merging her own Reishi into the Reishi contained within other matter, living or inert, letting her move and command it as freely as her own limbs.

Once she fused with a space, she could monitor it, listen through it, sense it, and control everything within it.

She had long since assimilated with the whole of Seireitei. Every wall. Every stone slab. Every current of Reishi drifting through the air, all of it inside the reach of her awareness.

But there was a fatal flaw.

During fusion, if the Reishi composing the merged matter was destroyed, she took the damage. If the rejection reaction from a living being ran too strong, she took the damage. And if the Reiatsu of a fused living being was drained away, the backlash hit her soul at tens of times the force.

Things that could absorb Reiatsu were Sōya Azashiro's greatest weakness.

And Cacao Paradise, the Picaro's black spheres spinning at high speed, was, at its core, a Reishi-absorbing field centered on each Picaro's body. It wasn't consuming physical matter. It was consuming the Reishi in the surrounding area.

Every zone those spheres had covered was a chunk carved out of her fused space.

Hundreds. Thousands. All at once.

A backlash like that would have killed anyone else outright.

"There were several unusual Reiatsu signatures mixed in among those Picaro. Espada. Aizen hid several Espada inside their group. He used Cacao Paradise to mask their presence, then used the Espada's power to push the spheres' Reishi absorption far beyond what the Picaro could manage on their own, making it impossible for me to pinpoint their positions. He planned every piece of this." Urozakuro's voice had gone hoarse and faint. Fresh blood frothed at her lips with every word.

Azashiro tried to push himself up.

His arms had nothing left.

He needed to get this information out. Aizen knew the weakness of his ability. The Picaro invasion had been engineered from the start. The Espada hidden among them were still inside Seireitei, free to move, free to act, while he lay here unable to lift a hand.

He had to tell Seijūrō.

He had to tell them,

His vision was blurring. Urozakuro's outline was dissolving into a soft, spreading halo. The dozens-fold backlash was collapsing his consciousness the way a dry riverbed crumbles, fast, irreversible. He tried to speak. His throat produced only the faintest sound.

Then everything went dark.

The Technological Development Bureau.

Soi Fon stood against the pillar by the entrance, arms crossed, the ring bells on her looped braid swaying in the cold draft from the ventilation duct.

She watched Mayuri Kurotsuchi's back.

The painted-face man sat at the center of a mass of flashing, blinking instruments, his monocle filled with scrolling data streams she couldn't begin to parse.

"How much longer for the spatial-locking technology?" Her voice carried through the empty lab.

"Two more days. Two days." He didn't look up.

He raised one hand and fed a stream of Reishi into the analyzer in front of him. The complex waveform curves on the instrument panel stretched wide, pulled apart, and reassembled. On the display, a precise structural diagram took shape, dozens of layered, nested spatial walls stacked on top of each other, with a ring of bright green nodes on the outer edge slowly converging into a closed loop.

"Two more days?"

"Do you think this is some trivial thing? Opening a Garganta takes seconds, yes. But what we're sealing is the entire passage between Hueco Mundo and Soul Society. The precision requirements are nothing alike. And, "

Mayuri's hands paused over the keyboard. His monocle reflected a row of red warnings on the screen. "Why are you here at all? Squad 2's offices aren't close to the Technological Development Bureau."

"Ah. Because communications between Soul Society and the World of the Living have been cut."

"That sort of thing is hardly worth worrying about. It happens. Send a runner if you must. If you have nothing else to do here, leave — you standing there is making it impossible to concentrate—"

Soi Fon straightened off the pillar and turned toward the exit.

At the door, she stopped. She turned her head. The ring bells shifted against her shoulder.

"When the spatial locking is finished, send someone to inform me. Squad 2 needs time to set up defenses in advance. We can't wait until the whole thing is done to start mobilizing."

She walked out the side door. The afternoon sun hit her face.

A ninja stepped out from the shadow of a corridor pillar and dropped to one knee.

"Inform the Shinigami in the World of the Living: spatial locking is estimated to take two more days."

"Understood." The ninja dissolved back into the shadows.

Soi Fon stood alone on the stone path and looked up.

Sunlight poured down from above the Seireiheki and spread across all of Seireitei in warm, steady gold. The Picaro had been suppressed. Komamura's Squad 7 was still clearing the field. In the Technological Development Bureau, Kurotsuchi was pushing himself past the edge. Beneath the calm, everything was running at full speed.

She didn't know why. But she couldn't shake the unease.

Hueco Mundo. The main hall of Las Noches.

Kaname Tōsen walked the length of the corridor and stopped before Aizen.

"Lord Aizen. The operation went very smoothly. The Picaro inflicted severe wounds on Azashiro, he is unconscious at the lowest level of Muken. Several Espada have already used the chaos to slip inside Seireitei."

"At the same time, the severed communications and the false message sent to Seijūrō and the others in the World of the Living have been delivered. The information they are now receiving is: attack Hueco Mundo at midnight tonight to rendezvous with the Gotei 13 main force." Tōsen completed his report. Each word clean. Precise.

Sōsuke Aizen stood beneath the vaulted dome of Las Noches, his back to the eternal crescent moon.

His white Arrancar uniform caught the moonlight in a soft, quiet sheen. That same light fell across the side of his face. And his eyes, no longer hidden behind glasses, reflected the white sands stretching endlessly into the dark.

➤ Next: Could It Be the Prison Realm?