Sharp whistles tore through the air one after another as Tsunayashiro Mitsuhiko repeatedly drew the Bow of Conquest and released.
Each time the string snapped forward, another reishi arrow streaked toward Yamamoto Genryūsai Shigekuni, saturated with the power of Conquest.
The arrows were so fast that they left brilliant trails across the sky, their passage distorting the surrounding space badly enough that it looked close to tearing apart.
Yamamoto's expression changed slightly as the first volley approached.
'So this is what the Law of Conquest feels like.'
Before the arrows had even reached him, an unnatural impulse surfaced in his mind.
Kneel.
Submit.
Worship.
The command did not come as a voice, yet it pressed directly against his will with such authority that even Yamamoto felt his knees threatening to bend.
Realizing that Mitsuhiko's power was attacking far more than his body, he immediately drove the immense Solar Star power within him to its limit, using the blazing force to resist the law trying to force submission upon him.
Mitsuhiko saw that Yamamoto was still standing and his expression hardened.
"Kneel!"
The single word crashed across the Seireitei like thunder.
It carried the weight of the Law of Conquest itself.
Almost every Shinigami within the Seireitei felt the pressure at the same moment.
Legs buckled throughout the city as an irresistible force bore down upon them, demanding that they lower themselves before the man in the sky.
They fought it.
Most failed.
Nearly ninety-nine percent of the Shinigami present dropped to their knees, regardless of how desperately they tried to remain standing.
In only a few seconds, the Seireitei fell into an eerie silence, with entire streets full of kneeling figures and only a handful of exceptionally powerful individuals still on their feet.
That was the terrifying nature of the Law of Conquest.
...
"So this is the current Gotei 13?"
Hirako Shinji stepped through the Senkaimon with an unimpressed look.
"They can't even deal with something like this without calling us back?"
He had barely finished speaking when his expression changed.
"Wait—what the fu—"
An invisible force struck the backs of his legs before he had even found his footing.
Shinji dropped straight to his knees.
The rest of the Visored were only a step behind him, which meant they received the exact same welcome.
One after another, they came through the Senkaimon and immediately collapsed like dominoes under the Law of Conquest.
Yadōmaru Lisa and Kuna Mashiro had it worst.
Their resistance was slightly weaker than the others, so instead of merely kneeling, both women went face-first into the ground.
The entrance they had imagined had been very different.
Shinji and the others had deliberately delayed their return because they wanted to arrive at the perfect moment, sweep in dramatically, and remind everyone just how impressive the Visored could be.
Instead, they came through the gate and immediately ate dirt.
Their grand entrance had lasted perhaps three seconds.
Aikawa Love planted both hands against the ground and tried to force himself upright, but his arms were trembling badly.
"This… is what Soul Society is fighting?"
Any lingering fear he still carried from Aizen suddenly seemed almost quaint.
Compared to the pressure Mitsuhiko was exerting over the entire Seireitei, Aizen no longer felt like the worst monster he had ever faced.
Muguruma Kensei was not doing much better. He remained on one knee, breathing heavily as he tried to resist being pressed any farther down.
"What the hell was Kazuma thinking, calling us back for this?"
He grimaced.
"This isn't reinforcements. He sent us back here to die!"
Lisa, meanwhile, had stopped caring about her current position entirely.
Still sprawled on the ground, she stared toward the center of the battlefield with shining eyes.
"Wow…"
Her gaze locked onto the man standing beneath the blazing sky.
Yamamoto held a red-gold blade in one hand, his fiery battle robe flowing around him as he faced Mitsuhiko without yielding even an inch.
"He looks ridiculously cool."
Rōjūrō Ōtoribashi followed her gaze.
"That… should be Captain-Commander Yamamoto."
He sounded far less certain than he would have liked.
As far as he knew, only Yamamoto possessed a fire-type Zanpakutō on that scale, but the man standing before them looked far younger than the old Captain-Commander they remembered.
His body was stronger, his presence vastly heavier, and there was none of the frailty that had once accompanied his age.
Then Rōjūrō looked up.
There were now two suns hanging in the sky.
At that point, he stopped trying to understand what had happened while they were away.
Shinji and the others were all struggling on their knees, yet Yamamoto stood calmly beneath Mitsuhiko's Law of Conquest without a visible injury.
There was a reason.
The instant Mitsuhiko had roared his command, Yamamoto had already activated another aspect of his evolved Bankai.
"West Pole: Stellar Corona Battle Robe."
A mantle of compressed coronal matter had formed around him.
The robe was not made from ordinary flame. It consisted of superheated solar material, its surface constantly traversed by streams of solar-wind particles that moved like living currents of light.
Whenever outside force struck it, intricate magnetic patterns appeared across the robe, modeled after the tangled field lines of the heliopause.
Those magnetic structures acted like an invisible defensive shell, intercepting and dispersing hostile forces before they could reach Yamamoto himself.
Even Mitsuhiko's Law of Conquest could not penetrate it cleanly.
Yamamoto raised Ryūjin Jakka again.
"South Pole: Black-Hole Illumination."
At the very tip of the blade sat a permanent primordial black hole no larger than the point of a needle.
Its size made it no less dangerous.
Every time Yamamoto swung, that singularity could release a focused gamma-ray burst, allowing him to strike targets far beyond ordinary sword range.
At the same time, any spiritual pressure captured by the black hole was converted into glowing stellar markings along Ryūjin Jakka's blade, steadily feeding more power back into the weapon.
Yamamoto fixed his gaze on Mitsuhiko and swung.
The attack arrived almost instantly.
A gamma-ray burst tore across the battlefield with enough force to obliterate the reishi arrows still flying toward him before continuing straight toward the Tsunayashiro founder.
Mitsuhiko's eyes narrowed.
"A long-range attack?"
His first instinct was to raise the Bow of Conquest and meet it directly.
Then his instincts warned him.
Something about the incoming energy felt wrong.
He abandoned the idea without hesitation.
The Law of Conquest surged from his body and condensed around him, forming a thick oval barrier that enclosed both rider and horse like an enormous shell.
The gamma-ray burst struck.
Mitsuhiko's confident expression vanished.
"That powerful?"
A sharp crack rang out.
A thin fracture appeared across the barrier.
Then another.
The first crack spread outward in a branching pattern, creeping across the surface like a spiderweb.
Mitsuhiko stared at it.
The shield had held but barely.
And Yamamoto had only just started fighting!
...
"You think that was all?"
Yamamoto Genryūsai Shigekuni's voice carried through the battlefield with enough weight to make the surrounding air tremble.
He tightened both hands around Ryūjin Jakka.
"Zanka no Tachi, East—Supernova Remnant."
The red-gold blade flared with a brilliance that immediately eclipsed the fire surrounding it.
Every trace of light and heat across the battlefield seemed to answer the call, rushing toward Ryūjin Jakka and compressing into the blade at an impossible rate.
Within a ten-thousandth of a second, the accumulated energy reproduced the entire evolution of a star in miniature—from its birth and sustained burning to the violent collapse at the end of its life.
That collapse was the true danger of the technique.
Anyone struck by the blade would be subjected to pressure comparable to a blue supergiant collapsing into a neutron star. Worse still, the wound would not end with the initial cut.
Once the technique took hold, rings of iron and nickel would continue erupting from the damaged area like planetary debris surrounding a dying star, grinding away at the victim from within.
Yamamoto disappeared with Shunpo.
By the time Mitsuhiko reacted, the old Shinigami was already directly in front of him.
Ryūjin Jakka came down.
The barrier formed from the Law of Conquest had already been cracked by the gamma-ray burst, and under this new strike it offered almost no resistance.
Crack!
The shell shattered outright.
Mitsuhiko's eyes widened beneath his mask.
'Damn it.'
He had underestimated Yamamoto from the beginning.
On paper, the former Captain-Commander possessed only mid-stage transcendent reiatsu, while Mitsuhiko himself stood at the peak of the transcendent tier.
That difference had convinced him there was no need to take the fight particularly seriously.
Yamamoto's evolved Bankai had made a mockery of that assumption.
There was a reason he had once been called the strongest Shinigami born in a thousand years.
With Ryūjin Jakka already descending and no time left to establish another proper defense, Mitsuhiko hauled violently on the reins and forced his white warhorse into the path of the blade.
The horse reared.
Ryūjin Jakka passed through its neck.
Its head separated cleanly.
Mitsuhiko reacted instantly, yanking the reins again and driving the dying animal upward with whatever momentum remained.
The headless horse carried him several dozen meters into the air before its strength finally failed.
Its hooves stopped finding purchase on empty space.
Horse and rider began falling.
Mitsuhiko had no choice but to abandon the mount that had accompanied him into battle, pushing away from its back and stabilizing himself in the air while the carcass plummeted toward the ground below.
From the sidelines, Yhwach watched the severed horse fall and involuntarily touched his own neck.
"Damn…"
Even he had felt that one.
For an instant, he could almost imagine Ryūjin Jakka passing through his own throat instead.
Mitsuhiko was having a considerably less humorous reaction.
Behind the mask, his eyes burned with fury.
The white warhorse was not merely transportation. It was part of the image and authority he had carried as the embodiment of Conquest, and watching Yamamoto casually decapitate it felt less like the loss of an animal and more like a deliberate insult.
"YAMAMOTO SHIGEKUNI!"
His roar shook the sky above Soul Society.
Mitsuhiko tore off his mask.
A brilliant light immediately erupted from his right eye.
Within the pupil, an ancient and intricate mark gradually appeared—the sacred script associated with the Sixth Chapter of Revelation, the chapter that described the riders of the Apocalypse.
At the same time, an enormous phantom of the Bow of Conquest manifested behind him.
The spectral weapon was so large that it seemed to stretch across the sky itself, as though it had crossed the boundary between eras and dimensions merely to answer its master's call.
Its presence alone exerted a strange pressure on everyone looking at it, instinctively demanding awe and submission.
Then the bowstring vibrated.
The sound it produced was too deep for ordinary hearing.
Infrasonic waves rolled outward through the Seireitei, passing through buildings, barriers, and physical matter as if none of them existed. Their true target was not the body.
They struck directly at the soul.
Mitsuhiko raised the Bow of Conquest.
"Witness the power of Conquest!"
Seven arrows left the string simultaneously.
Each was different.
One carried an olive branch of ancient Greece, bearing the intertwined concepts of peace and victory.
Another bore the eagle standard of Rome, heavy with the authority of empire.
A third carried the sacred insignia of the Crusades, representing faith sharpened into the justification for conquest.
The remaining arrows were marked by symbols belonging to other civilizations and other ages, each one embodying a different chapter in humanity's long history of expansion, war, subjugation, and triumph.
These were not merely decorative emblems.
Every arrow carried the accumulated conceptual weight of human conquest.
Countless victories, fallen nations, annexed territories, toppled dynasties, and generations of people who had imposed their will upon others had all become part of the attack.
When the seven arrows crossed the sky together, the effect spread far beyond Yamamoto.
Space and time across the Seireitei began to distort.
Lower-ranked Shinigami looked down in alarm as the Zanpakutō in their hands started to change.
Rust crawled across polished steel, eating into blades that should have been maintained perfectly.
Edges dulled, surfaces lost their shine, and some swords even developed thin cracks as the concept of conquest imposed the weight of passing civilizations upon them.
Panic spread through the ranks.
Yamamoto did not move.
The seven arrows were almost upon him when the dark sunspot markings across his chest suddenly blazed with stellar light.
"North Pole: Star-Orbit Rewind."
Reality lurched.
The entire Soul Society was caught in the effect.
For the next instant, everyone experienced the profoundly unnatural sensation of time running backward.
The world rewound by twelve seconds.
Dust rose from the ground and returned to where it had fallen.
Cracks closed.
Motion reversed.
Words seemed to retreat into the mouths that had spoken them.
Most importantly, the seven arrows that had been racing toward Yamamoto began moving backward along their own trajectories.
The symbols of conquest retreated through the sky.
The arrows returned to Mitsuhiko.
One after another, they settled back onto the bowstring as though they had never been fired.
Yamamoto was already moving.
The moment the rewound sequence placed Mitsuhiko back into position, Yamamoto crossed the distance with Shunpo and appeared directly in front of him.
Ryūjin Jakka burned brighter in his hands.
Solar prominences curled from the blade, long tongues of stellar fire twisting through the air as Yamamoto drove the weapon toward Mitsuhiko's chest.
The thrust landed.
Ryūjin Jakka passed straight through him.
Yamamoto's eyes narrowed immediately.
Something was wrong.
The body impaled on his sword did not bleed.
Instead, Mitsuhiko fractured into countless translucent figures that spread outward through the sky.
Each apparition took on a different form drawn from humanity's history of conquest.
One resembled the brilliant stained-glass windows of Notre-Dame Cathedral.
Another became the columns of smoke that once rose from the beacon towers of the Great Wall.
Another took the shape of the blazing torch held aloft by the Statue of Liberty.
Dozens became hundreds.
Every image belonged to a different culture, civilization, or symbol of power.
And every one of them began singing the same triumphant hymn of conquest.
The real Mitsuhiko was no longer among them.
Yamamoto looked up.
High above the Seireitei, the Tsunayashiro founder had reappeared near the very peak of the sky.
The Bow of Conquest was drawn completely back in his hands.
This time there was only one arrow on the string.
It had been formed from millions of dead souls.
Faces shifted beneath its surface, appearing and disappearing inside the compressed spiritual mass as though an entire graveyard had been forced into the shape of a single projectile.
The pressure rolling from it was so immense that even before Mitsuhiko released the string, the surrounding space had begun to distort.
Yamamoto's expression hardened.
Mitsuhiko had finally stopped treating the battle as an inconvenience.
And the arrow in his hands carried enough power to turn a large part of Soul Society into a graveyard if it ever reached the ground.