Chapter 069: Bro, I'm About to Snap
Matsushita Yusuke's expression was very calm.
He heard Aizen Sosuke's explanation, and leaned back slightly in a purely reflexive way. Then he sat back up. Then he crossed his arms, tilted his head, and reached one hand up to scratch the corner of his mouth.
His face rearranged itself into something that could only be described as a living question mark.
After nearly ten full seconds of silence, Matsushita Yusuke seemed to arrive at some conclusion. He slapped both hands together, laughed, and pointed across the desk at Aizen with the expression of someone who has just decided they are being messed with.
"You're joking, right, Aizen-sensei?"
Aizen smiled pleasantly, reached into his robes, and after a brief search produced what appeared to be a formal letter.
"He asked me to pass this along to you. It's a formal challenge."
Matsushita Yusuke looked at Kijishi Kenpachi's signature on the front of it.
The last of his hope evaporated.
"Why is this happening?!"
A sound of pure distress came out of him, and he genuinely could not work out the logic no matter how he looked at it.
Did this game really need to be this hard?
The feeling currently running through him was something like a child appearing on a television program expecting a friendly chess match and being told his opponent was the sitting world champion.
You just finished the Frigid Valley boss fight and now the very next encounter on the list is the stage-four raid?!
The difficulty curve on this thing was completely broken.
Matsushita Yusuke held the challenge letter and stared at it with an expression of total incomprehension.
"Aizen-sensei. What is actually going on here?"
The man across from him made a helpless gesture, one hand out, one shoulder up.
"Honestly, I'm not entirely sure myself. I only received this yesterday, through one of Squad 11's members. Apparently Captain Kijishi went to some trouble tracking down how to reach you."
A relevant piece of context.
Shin'o Academy was technically a public institution. In practice it had evolved from Yamamoto's private school and carried a certain weight that came with that history. Anyone with functioning judgment didn't come here looking to start trouble.
"He presumably felt that a squad captain formally challenging a student was embarrassing enough that he'd rather hand it off through an intermediary."
If you know it's embarrassing, don't do it.
Matsushita Yusuke held the letter and ran through both sides of the situation quickly in his head.
Kijishi Kenpachi.
Possibly the least impressive generation of Kenpachi in the title's history. But even that came with Bankai. Almost certainly.
Matsushita Yusuke.
A second-year student who hadn't even reached full Shikai.
How was this a fight? This was the kind of matchup that would get laughed off every serious discussion forum in existence. This wasn't a difficulty spike. This was the game asking you to clear the final dungeon in your starting gear.
At this moment, Matsushita Yusuke felt like a tectonic plate that had just been informed it was about to split.
Bro. I'm about to crack right down the middle.
Aizen Sosuke, for his part, appeared to be finding all of this quite enjoyable.
He watched Matsushita Yusuke work through the full cycle of distress, inside and out, before finally speaking.
"Matsushita-kun. There's really no need to be that anxious."
Does this man have an actual solution?
"Think it through. Why would Kijishi go out of his way to challenge a student?"
I have no idea.
He kept that off his face. Saying it out loud would almost certainly earn him a look he didn't want. Better to actually try thinking.
Matsushita Yusuke frowned. No immediate answer surfaced, but this was the kind of situation where forcing himself to think was the only way to find anything useful.
When he actually thought about it: there was no real personal conflict between him and Kijishi. He'd known the man for days. Nothing deep enough to generate this kind of response.
So change the angle.
Have I done anything recently that would make this person hold a grudge?
His first instinct was to say no. But fairly quickly, his expression went slightly off.
Because he thought of something.
He had maybe actually done exactly that.
When he'd fought Miasa, he might have made Kijishi look bad in front of his own people.
As if the thought had traveled between them without words, Aizen was already speaking at the exact same moment.
"You publicly defeated the opponent Kijishi put forward. That cost him face in front of Squad 11. What he needs to get back is a very specific thing. That's why he needs you to come."
Aizen seemed to have anticipated where Matsushita Yusuke was going, and added:
"You don't need to be surprised. For people like this, face is everything."
Different from the other squads in structure.
"Squad 11 is a particular case. The fighters who come out of the Rukongai, the ones who grew up in the rougher districts, care about reputation and standing in a way that runs very deep. In the outer areas, if you don't have a name that makes people hesitate, you never stop getting tested. Someone is always looking for a foothold."
One person's reputation becomes another person's stepping stone.
That cycle, turning without end, was the operating principle of those outer districts.
"Some things don't change just because someone's position and circumstances do. Even after entering the Gotei 13, getting a proper rank, those instincts stay. They run underneath everything."
Coarse, contemptuous of weakness, not particularly respectable by any formal standard.
Words to that effect, all roughly accurate.
Matsushita Yusuke's expression settled into something thoughtful. He had a reasonable read on what Aizen was getting at.
But what came after that?
"What am I supposed to do, Aizen-sensei?"
The uncertainty was genuine.
Aizen looked like he was weighing something, then said:
"Two options."
First.
"You accept the invitation. Go back to Squad 11. And lose to Kijishi Kenpachi."
The face that was lost gets recovered. Call it maintaining a certain kind of fragile peace. That was, ultimately, what Kijishi's Squad 11 ran on.
Second.
"You don't go. You simply declare you're not in his league and concede in advance."
"...?"
What was the difference between those two?
Before Matsushita Yusuke could ask, Aizen continued.
"The second option sounds easier on the surface. But from what I understand of people like this: they are at their worst when they think they have someone cornered. If you don't show up, they won't consider it a clean win. They'll push harder."
That was not a comfortable picture.
"What does harder look like?"
"Possibly waiting for an unguarded moment and handling things quietly?"
Aizen's tone wasn't entirely certain on the specifics. But he had something else to back up the general shape of the theory.
"The person you fought before. Miasa Susumu. You remember him?"
That guy?
Of course Matsushita Yusuke remembered him. The fight had paid out well.
"I remember. What about him?"
"He's dead."
Aizen said it without any particular inflection.
"He was found in the street in the second western district of Rukongai. Cause of death was a penetrating wound, stabbed through the abdomen and through the back. He bled out."