Chapter 272: Forces That Won't Merge
"Hm? You're asking what my goals are lately?"
Matsushita Yusuke looked up from the soba he had been prodding, one eyebrow rising slightly as he glanced sideways.
Zaraki Kenpachi and Gin Ichimaru were both sitting to his left with their trays, and both of them nodded, speaking in turn.
"Yeah. You've got Squad 10 under your management now on top of everything else, workload went up, and somehow you're still walking around looking like none of it has anything to do with you. Honestly, you've got no urgency about you at all for someone in a leadership position."
"Just habit. Passing the work to other people. I don't have strong feelings about it."
A direct jab from Gin.
But Zaraki didn't take the bait. The two of them had been working alongside each other long enough that they each had a genuine read on what the other was capable of. The personalities didn't fit together cleanly, but they had made room for each other's way of operating.
Zaraki stirred his curry rice without looking up, then leveled his one good eye at Matsushita Yusuke with a flat, direct expression.
"So. Back to what I was saying. Don't you have anything you're actually working toward right now?"
Matsushita Yusuke opened the cap on the shichimi container and sprinkled chili flakes into his broth, using a pair of chopsticks to fish a piece of green onion out as he thought about it.
"I mean, not really. Is that a problem?"
"Of course it is. No goal means no drive, no push to actually get better. My read on you lately is that you've been too comfortable. Doesn't seem like you've been putting in any real work."
Zaraki said this to his own captain without any visible hesitation.
"If you stay this soft your strength is going to fall behind ours. Pull it together a little. The captain of Squad 11 shouldn't be like this."
What captain got dressed down at the lunch table by his own subordinate?
Given Zaraki's personality, the fact that he was saying it at all wasn't surprising.
Matsushita Yusuke looked at him, mouth slightly open for a moment, and then let the silence do its work.
"You're right. I'll put in some extra work this week."
Gin scooped a few more bites of curry, his gaze drifting over Matsushita Yusuke without fully landing, then pulled back and dropped his voice.
"Something weighing on you lately?"
Without waiting for an answer, he continued.
"You've seemed scattered recently. Work completion has been low. Everything basically needs someone else to clean up after you."
Matsushita Yusuke was in the middle of blowing on a spoonful of broth. He stopped.
He half-turned and produced a slightly sheepish smile.
"Is it really that obvious?"
"You wouldn't notice. You're not the one doing the cleanup."
A mildly uncomfortable silence settled over all three of them.
"Do you want to take some time off?"
Zaraki was the one who broke it. He straightened up, crossed his arms, and looked at the ceiling.
"I can cover squad management for a few days. I picked up some things while I was learning from the vice-captain."
Gin made a small sound on the other side, wiped the corner of his mouth with a napkin, and added as something of an afterthought:
"I can back him up. Between the two of us it should be fine."
So.
"What do you think?" Both of them, nearly simultaneously.
Faced with this unexpected display of concern from both of his squad members, Matsushita Yusuke's expression went through something complicated.
He had been a little off lately -- that was true. But he had been keeping it reasonably covered on the surface. Letting people see real uncertainty underneath was simply bad practice, the kind of thing a person in his position couldn't afford.
And yet.
These two had been close enough to him for long enough. Even with deliberate effort to keep it covered, there were things that were difficult to fully hide from people who knew what they were looking at.
His mouth opened. He turned it over for a moment, made a few false starts, and then let out a quiet, somewhat rueful laugh.
"Thanks for the concern. But I'm fine for now -- I don't need that much time off. And I have other things in mind for both of you anyway."
First.
"Gin, for the next stretch I want you over at Squad 10 helping Vice-Captain Matsumoto with her workload."
He paused briefly, then added with a smile:
"You already know her. It should be a lot easier than starting from scratch with a stranger."
Without waiting for a response or refusal, he turned to the other side.
"As for you." He looked at Zaraki. "I've actually been thinking about another round of changes to Squad 11's structure. I want your perspective on a few things." He paused, tilting his head. "Right, let me think how to put this--"
He rubbed his chin with his right hand, and then something seemed to come to him and his expression cleared into a broad grin.
"I've got a specific position in mind for you. For now I'm calling it Acting Captain. What do you say -- take it on for a while."
Both of them produced nearly identical expressions of profound reluctance.
What?
Before either of them could respond, Matsushita Yusuke had already slurped up the last of his noodles, stood up, grabbed his tray, and was walking away with a cheerful backwards glance.
"That's settled then. Both of you get ready. Work hard, don't slack off."
With that handled, Matsushita Yusuke made his way back to his office.
He sat down and rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the weight of accumulated tiredness in it.
About a month had passed since the covert trip to the living world to observe Ichigo.
Compared to the living world, where everything moved quickly and changed constantly, Soul Society had a particular stillness to it that ran bone-deep. Even across hundreds or thousands of years, most things held their course without deviation. That quality erased a certain kind of anxiety -- the fear of not knowing what came next.
But for someone who wanted to push forward, to move, to change something --
It generated its own very specific form of resistance.
It had always been this way. It still was.
Funny how the longer you stayed here, the more you understood the particular quality of contempt Aizen had for everyone around him.
Matsushita Yusuke shook his head lightly and settled back into his chair.
Soifon had recently gone back to the Shihoin household under the cover of a training visit. From Matsushita Yusuke's read, the odds were heavily in favor of the household having something internal to settle. With Yoruichi gone, Yushiro had not taken over immediately, and enough time had passed that there was probably some pressure to be applied to the people underneath. Even Omaeda, the current Squad 2 captain, had taken a few days off, which suggested this wasn't a small matter.
He was a little concerned, but.
If they didn't ask him to come, getting involved uninvited would only create headaches. And then Aizen would complain.
Soifon had grown considerably over all these years, with a non-trivial amount of that coming from his own contributions. Whatever this was, she should be able to handle it.
If things went wrong, she would reach out.
So the focus came back to himself.
Matsushita Yusuke leaned back in the rocking chair, thinking, and raised his right hand, making a light tapping motion against the air in front of him.
What surfaced in response was invisible to anyone else.
[Quincy Level: 49]
[Reishi Control: 56] [Combat Techniques: 66] [Blut: 52]
The Quincy panel.
As the latest of the three systems to be developed, the investment he had put into it was not small.
The progress was still unsatisfying.
Nothing he could do about that, really. The development pathway for this panel was considerably less accessible than either of the other two. The only reliable method was grinding squad management progress and collecting rewards from there. Even directly engaging enemies didn't generate clean stat numbers the way the other panels did.
The Quincy panel was very much end-game content -- the final version update of the Shinigami game. Trying to rush it while already working around the system's intended structure was always going to mean slow going.
The anxiety over the pace was probably one of the things leaking through to the others. But that alone wasn't enough to account for the extent of it.
The real problem was something else.
Matsushita Yusuke let his gaze drop and switched the display mode, pulling all three panels up side by side.
He looked at them for a while without doing anything.
Then he turned his head toward the door and pushed reiatsu out quietly, locking it from the inside. No unexpected visitors walking in on anything unusual.
He sat up straight, expression settling into something more concentrated, and extended his right hand.
A moment later, a visible cluster of deep, murky light rose from his palm.
Dark brownish, an almost chaotic-looking turbulence to it, with a quality that felt almost thick.
Anyone else in the room would have been alarmed by what they were sensing.
Hollow reiatsu. In a captain's office.
That was exactly what it was.
Matsushita Yusuke had called the Hollow panel, extracted the energy from it the way a Shinigami would gather reiatsu for Kido, and held the resulting mass in his hand.
He didn't maintain it long in isolation.
Because quickly, a second faint cluster of light appeared in his palm alongside it. This one ran hot rather than heavy, tending toward an almost milky white brightness.
This was his strongest foundation. The bedrock of what he actually was.
Shinigami reiatsu.
The moment both clusters existed simultaneously in the same space, without a single instruction from him, they went for each other.
The panels had very different numerical values, but by controlling output carefully, he could prevent the complete one-sided suppression. Precision of control was the key variable in this situation, and over the past stretch of time, through consistent effort, he had genuinely managed to reach something like equal distribution.
There was a reason he was tired.
The last time he had worked this hard at something, it had probably been studying for exams at the Shin'o Academy.
And yet, looking at the result, he was not satisfied.
His brow was pulled into a deep crease.
Why are you fighting again.
In theory, different outcomes should be possible. At minimum, it shouldn't be expressing itself this way.
Can you two not merge? Just calm down. Talk it through.
He watched the two clusters locked in aggressive, continuous collision, neither yielding to the other, clearly incompatible in the most immediate sense, and his expression became progressively more pained.
That's not what this was supposed to look like.
This is absolutely not the result I came here for.
The two clusters ground against each other fiercely and then both collapsed into nothing.
Where they had been, a perfectly clean, sharply defined dividing line remained for just a moment before fading.
Matsushita Yusuke closed his eyes.
No matter how many times he tried, nothing changed. From an experimental standpoint, the framework was wrong somewhere -- because the pattern of more effort producing worse results was one he recognized, and he knew what it meant.
But.
Ichigo had shown him that different energies coexisting in the same body was possible.
Different forms, different quantities, every variation he could think of -- he had run them all.
Still nothing.
What is missing?
The question kept coming back, sitting in him, producing a specific restless quality he couldn't shake entirely.
Theoretically, if all three panels reached 100, the merge should happen on its own. But was it genuinely impossible to force it through deliberate effort before that point?
Because Ichigo's situation wasn't a clean three-way equal distribution either.
Captain-level Shinigami reiatsu. The bull-head's Hollow power, clearly a step below that. And the inherited Quincy aptitude from Masaki -- unknown exact level, but almost certainly not equal to either of the other two.
Three unequal forces in tension, somehow maintaining a stable equilibrium.
Where was the actual key?
Matsushita Yusuke kept turning this over, and then made an attempt he had not made before.
As he had done a moment ago, he summoned two separate clusters of different reiatsu and held them fixed.
Then he summoned a third.
A vivid blue light.
Quincy reiatsu. This was the portion that had been accumulating at a slower rate, and because of that he had never pushed it into a three-way attempt before.
Level 49. To bring it into balance with the other two, the other clusters would need to be adjusted and reduced to match.
As he had observed with Ichigo -- without being able to replicate that specific three-way constitution, equilibrium was the essential precondition for anything else to happen.
He finished the preparations and released the constraints.
And then --
All three clusters hit each other like high-speed trains slamming into the same point.
Bang.
Matsushita Yusuke was on the floor.
A small mushroom cloud was dissipating in the middle of his office.
Squad members came running toward the door. He waved them off from where he was lying.
"It's fine. It's fine. Go back to what you were doing."
He stood up and took in the state of his surroundings. His office was thoroughly wrecked.
The feeling that came over him was somewhere between exasperation and an involuntary laugh.
Was it genuinely impossible to solve the power merger problem through deliberate human effort?
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