As Hirako Shinji, Kurosaki Ichigo, and the others fell one after another, this massive rebellion finally reached its end.
Across the huge Tenth Division plaza, there were barely any living people left still breathing.
Rosse stood high in the sky, his indifferent eyes slowly sweeping across the battlefield below.
Aside from Kirinji and Zaraki Kenpachi, who were still fighting one-on-one in the corner like two wild beasts amid flying flesh and blood, there were only a few enemies left.
Sixth Division Captain Kuchiki Byakuya, Squad Zero's Nimaiya Oetsu, Hyosube Ichibe, Eighth Division Captain Shihoin Yoruichi, First Division Captain Sasakibe Chojiro, and some vice-captains who were too weak to join the fight and could only stand by trembling.
Most of them were either crippled or heavily injured.
None of them charged forward blindly anymore. They silently sat among the ruins below, each carrying complicated expressions of despair as they looked up at the two men in the sky who resembled demon gods.
To everyone present, Rosse and Aizen were completely impossible to overcome.
At this moment, everyone clearly understood one thing: When absolute power stands before you, the moment a blade pierces your heart is not actually the most painful part.
What truly breaks people is this feeling they are having right now, knowing every struggle is meaningless, knowing defeat is certain, yet still being forced to watch companion after companion fall.
Like lambs waiting for slaughter, quietly waiting for unavoidable death and judgment to arrive.
This torment, which strips away all hope, is the cruelest thing of all and the easiest way to destroy a person's mind.
"Rosse! This time, you won."
Nimaiya Oetsu covered his still-bleeding forehead and let out a tired sigh.
He looked around. Corpses and broken blades covered the ground, silently telling the story of the Shinigamis' crushing defeat.
He had fully accepted it now. There was no longer even the slightest chance to turn things around on this battlefield.
"From the day I stepped into Soul Society, I was already the victor. That is an undeniable fact," Rosse stood in the sky, smiling as he looked down at Oetsu.
He slowly raised both hands and lightly clapped.
Clap! Clap! Clap!
The slow, crisp applause echoed across the silent battlefield ruins.
But to the surviving people below, those claps carried no praise for warriors. They only sounded mocking and condescending.
"The reason I patiently waited until today was simply because I wanted to see how much entertainment the guardians of the old era could provide me when cornered," Rosse smiled as he commented, "But honestly speaking, the things you showed during your final struggles were fairly impressive."
Hearing those words, the people below felt like their hearts were bleeding.
They had gambled all their honor, fought until their final drop of blood, sacrificed countless comrades' lives.
Everything they did was to protect their beliefs, to kill Rosse, and to return this world to its former peace.
But in Rosse's arrogant eyes, all their sacrifices and bloodshed had merely been a clown performance to pass the time?
What mockery.
What sadness.
But reality was this cruel.
If you could not do it, then you simply could not do it.
The gap in strength was right there. No matter how loudly you shouted your ideals or how tragic your determination sounded, nothing would change.
And if they took a step back, if beliefs alone really could decide victory like in stories, then were the Shinigamis' beliefs truly firmer or purer than Rosse's?
Kyoraku Shunsui and the others sacrificing themselves to protect the existing order was a belief.
Aizen enduring everything to break limits and evolve upward was a belief.
And Rosse's absolute self-centered view of treating all things as chess pieces while playing with others' fates to satisfy his curiosity was also an unshakable belief.
The ones who stepped over countless corpses and finally stood at the peak of evolution, which one of them was not someone carrying the most extreme and ruthless belief?
"You went through all this trouble and even killed the Soul King... Don't tell me all you wanted was to watch defeated people like us collapse and kill ourselves like Kyoraku and the others?"
Nimaiya Oetsu slowly raised his head and looked toward Rosse in the sky. His tone carried calmness, as though he had already seen through everything.
"I don't think someone like you, Rosse, is that boring or that lacking in ambition," Nimaiya Oetsu could roughly guess some of the Rosse's intentions and twisted interests.
But honestly, right now, whether he killed himself or not did not seem to matter much anymore.
After all, from beginning to end, the personal grudge between him and Rosse had never really been that deep. He had only been tied to this battlefield because of Squad Zero's responsibilities.
And when death truly loomed over him, he sadly realized that even the beliefs he once took pride in had already become blurry.
Inside the Soul King Palace, during those endlessly dull years, he forged cold Zanpakuto day after day. Yet over that endless stretch of time, he had gradually lost too much of the humanity and passion that once belonged to him.
But strangely enough, now that he was staring at this suffocating dead end and watching his former comrades die, his numb heart had begun to beat again.
He remembered the things he deliberately abandoned and forgot, allowing him to truly examine his own heart during the final moments of his life.
Right now, he did not fear death very much, nor did he have much desire to continue dragging out his life.
This world... was simply like this.
He asked himself honestly. Although people honored him as the God of Swords, aside from endlessly hammering iron inside the Soul King Palace, he seemed to have never truly helped this broken lower world in any meaningful way.
Forging the strongest Zanpakuto was indeed his dream and something he genuinely loved doing, but in the end, he still failed to use his own hands to change this world's decay.
It was precisely because people like them in higher positions had failed their duties that an outsider like Rosse had managed to invade this far without obstruction.
As one of the lofty Squad Zero members, Nimaiya Oetsu now felt nothing but guilt toward this world that was nearing its end.
"Following a dull script exactly as planned will never produce anything interesting."
Rosse listened to Oetsu's words and shook his head with a smile, "What I want to see is every one of you, as living individuals, shining with a light that truly belongs to yourselves when standing before despair and choices. Whether that light is cowardly, mad, or hopeless, it's all fine."
"Look, many people already achieved that perfectly through their deaths. But those of you left standing at the end..."
Rosse's gaze moved across Oetsu, Byakuya, and the others, carrying a trace of emotion.
"Because you worry too much, think too much, and constantly struggle within yourselves, you can't release the brightest and most extreme light. Don't you think I'm right, Senior Nimaiya?"
"Heh! That really is true."
Nimaiya Oetsu smiled bitterly and shook his head, his voice full of self-mockery.
"If we had already found truly clear beliefs for ourselves years ago and firmly followed them from beginning to end, maybe we should have done something to change this world long ago instead of waiting until today, when you pushed us into a dead end."
"The longer people like us live, the easier it becomes for comfort to rot us away over time, until we lose too much of our real selves."
At this moment, Oetsu and Rosse spoke calmly, one above and one below.
They no longer looked like mortal enemies who had just fought through bloodshed and life-or-death battle.
Instead, they resembled old friends reunited after a long separation, casually discussing life over tea.
Nimaiya Oetsu's words pierced every survivor's heart like a needle.
Not just him, everyone else also fell into deep silence and self-doubt.
Hyosube Ichibe, covered in burns, sat weakly in the ruins.
His true-name ability was useless against Rosse at Soul King level. Even if he defeated Aizen with it, nothing would change.
At this moment, even he no longer knew what he should do.
The mission given to him at birth had always been to protect Soul Society and maintain the cycle of this world built upon the Soul King.
For that reason, he had guarded this place like a gravekeeper for millions of years.
But now, the Soul King was dead. Whether the world would be destroyed or reshaped depended entirely on a single thought from Rosse in the sky.
His millions of years of persistence had become a joke.
Under overwhelming power, he truly did not know what else he could do besides wait for death.
And nearby, Sixth Division Captain Kuchiki Byakuya was the same.
That noble face, always cold as ice, was now filled with confusion and pain.
His own grandfather, Kuchiki Ginrei, had just died before his eyes to ignite everyone's fighting spirit.
Whether emotionally or morally, as the current head of the Kuchiki family and as a grandson, he should immediately draw Senbonzakura and rush forward without caring about anything else to avenge his grandfather.
But reason held him back.
If he rushed forward and died senselessly now, then the Kuchiki family's thousand-year bloodline would end completely with his death.
Even in Hell, he would have no face left to meet the Kuchiki ancestors.
More importantly, if he died, then Rukia, whom he worried about most, along with everyone dependent on the Kuchiki family, would definitely be dragged down and erased by Rosse as well. In the end, nothing would remain in this world.
For the honor and blood debt of the noble family, he should draw his sword and move forward.
But for the survival of his family and the safety of his loved ones, he hesitated, his heart burning as he struggled over what choice he should make.
And... what caused Byakuya the most pain was that, deep inside, he sadly realized that unlike Kyoraku Shunsui, he did not truly want to resist Rosse from the bottom of his heart.
Putting aside family positions, Rosse's policies were not actually wrong.
Rosse broke old rules, gave commoners opportunities, and constantly maintained Soul Society's operation.
Everything happening today was simply because everyone held different ideals while trying to protect their own old interests.
If Kuchiki Byakuya could accept a useless human stick sitting above everyone's heads, then naturally he could also accept someone like Rosse, who was stronger and capable of bringing change.
But things had already reached this point. His family's blood debt stood before him, leaving him with no road back.
Even Kuchiki Byakuya himself, who always prided himself on being calm, had fallen into deep confusion and no longer knew what path he should take.
Compared to Byakuya's painful hesitation, First Division Captain Sasakibe Chojiro's thoughts were much simpler.
The loyal assistant with the small mustache simply stood there quietly with both hands gripping his Zanpakuto.
He never had great ambitions. He only wanted to protect the pure land that Head Captain Yamamoto spent his entire life preserving.
The reason he stood here before was only because he wanted to represent the late Head Captain and ask Rosse one final question. He did not want to see Rosse completely destroy Soul Society for selfish desires.
But if, just as Rosse showed while repairing the sky earlier, the man had never intended to destroy this world and even had the ability to do better than the Soul King, then everything they gathered here for today, all the deaths and sacrifices, would become a completely meaningless tragedy.
Sasakibe Chojiro did not know what he should do.
Truthfully, he did not carry much personal hatred toward Rosse.
But he also clearly understood that after today's massacre, things could never return to the peaceful days when Head Captain Yamamoto was still here.
Rosse had already revealed his fangs, those who followed him would prosper, and those who opposed him would die. He was no longer the gentle and fair acting Head Captain from before.
And among everyone present, the person whose reaction felt most unexpected was actually Shihoin Yoruichi.
When it came to hatred, she should have been the one who hated Rosse the most.
The Shihoin family had been wiped out because of Rosse. Uraha Kisuke, whom she trusted most, her beloved younger brother, and Sui Feng, the subordinate who admired her most, had all died trying to stop Rosse.
And during all this, she herself had once been captured alive by Rosse and suffered all kinds of physical and mental humiliation.
By all logic, she should have gone mad like Hirako Shinji.
But honestly... perhaps because of those dark days spent in Rosse and Shiba Kukaku's hands, because she had already experienced too much suffering, her nerves had instead become numb.
Yoruichi covered the still-bleeding wound on her stomach and lazily leaned against a broken rock.
Her golden cat-like eyes looked at the situation before her, and she understood it perfectly.
It was already obvious. Even Kurosaki Ichigo had lost. Hirako Shinji and Kyoraku Shunsui committed suicide. There was absolutely no way they could win.
But asking her to slit her throat and kill herself in frustration like Kyoraku Shunsui did left a tiny bit of unwillingness inside the wild part of her nature.
Still, right now, she truly was not in a hurry anymore.
Even though she usually acted careless and laid-back, as the former Commander of the Stealth Force, she was extremely good at reading people.
She knew very clearly what kind of terrible man Rosse was.
Because she had already been marked as a special pet, even if she lost here today and fell into Rosse's hands, her ending would not be as tragic as Hirako Shinji's and the others'.
After all, she had already endured the worst and most humiliating things once before.
'How much worse can it still get?'
"Haa! Whatever. Let it all burn already. Hurry up. I don't care anymore."
Looking at the god-like man in the sky, Shihoin Yoruichi thought to herself like a stray cat that had already accepted its fate.
'It is just death, isn't it?'
She had seen all kinds of storms before. Waiting a little longer made no difference.
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