"Rats are rats after all. The moment things turn dangerous, all they know how to do is scatter."
Once Kazuma's attack forced the fleeing Sternritter out of the shadows and exposed them across the battlefield, Unohana made no effort to hide her contempt.
Haschwalth barely heard her.
His attention had locked onto the voice that accompanied the enormous palm descending from the sky, and the moment he recognized it, the color drained from his face.
"That voice…"
There was no mistaking it.
Satou Kazuma.
A thousand years might have passed, but Haschwalth had never forgotten what Kazuma had done during the first Quincy war.
Back then, Sternritter had fallen beneath his blade with horrifying ease, butchered so quickly that even now the memories could drag Haschwalth straight back to that blood-soaked battlefield.
He had spent centuries burying those images, yet the fear they left behind had never truly disappeared.
"It's him… It's him…"
Several newer Sternritter turned toward their commander in confusion.
They had joined long after that war and knew the old disaster only through fragmentary accounts, so seeing Yhwach's normally composed second-in-command trembling at the sound of a single Shinigami's voice was almost impossible to understand.
"Grandmaster Haschwalth, what happened? Why are you acting like this?"
Some of them were more puzzled than concerned.
As far as they could tell, Unohana had merely thrown out a few taunts, yet Haschwalth looked as though something had reached into his soul and ripped open an old wound.
"He's a monster…"
Haschwalth's eyes had gone distant.
"That man is a fucking monster."
He repeated the words under his breath, seemingly unable to pull himself out of the memories.
Smack!
Äs Nödt stepped forward and slapped him hard across the face.
"Get a hold of yourself, Grandmaster!"
Haschwalth's head snapped to the side.
Äs Nödt glared at him. "Look at yourself. We are the Sternritter. Are you seriously going to fall apart because of one man's voice?"
Whether the slap helped or not, there was no time to find out.
Lille Barro had already moved.
He tore off his white cloak, raised the enormous sniper rifle in his hands, and aimed directly at Unohana.
A gunshot cracked across the battlefield.
A condensed reishi bullet tore through the air toward her.
Lille understood the situation perfectly well.
The Soldat had been massacred, Bazz-B was dead, their planned retreat had just been disrupted, and Haschwalth's visible fear was threatening to spread through the Sternritter before the real fighting had even begun.
If someone didn't act immediately, their morale would collapse.
Yhwach himself was already occupied with Batsu'unsai.
That left Lille with the most obvious target.
Unohana.
If he could put down one of Soul Society's strongest captains in front of everyone, the Sternritter might regain enough confidence to break through the encirclement.
Unohana watched the bullet come.
"Bankai: Seven Killings, Minazuki."
Her voice carried no emotion.
Six blood-red stars appeared over the Seireitei, arranged in the ominous pattern of the Southern Dipper.
Their crimson radiance hung beside the moon Batsu'unsai had summoned, turning the sky above the battlefield into an eerie fusion of silver moonlight and bloody starlight.
Unohana swept her Zanpakutō across the ground.
The sixth star embedded in the weapon's guard—the Seven Killings Star—flared red.
Blood spread from beneath her feet.
Within moments, the battlefield disappeared beneath a vast Blood Sea Domain, its surface dark and viscous, reflecting the Southern Dipper overhead like a lake beneath an execution ground.
Lille's bullet had barely left the muzzle when it suddenly stopped.
The first star of the Southern Dipper, had moved directly across its trajectory.
Dense stellar markings crawled over the surface of the reishi round like cracks spreading through glass, restraining and weakening it as it forced its way through the star-track.
The bullet eventually broke free, but by then nearly seventy percent of its power had been stripped away.
Unohana dealt with what remained by casually swinging her sword.
Clang!
The bullet shattered against the blade and dissolved into loose reishi.
Lille had already fired again.
Before the next shot arrived, the second star began rotating overhead.
Its light intensified, and Unohana's figure suddenly split into six overlapping images.
The beam tore through several of them.
None were real.
Then the third star, erupted in cyan light.
Fragments of reishi left behind by Lille's destroyed shots changed shape in midair, stretching and twisting until they became chains.
They swept back toward their creator like striking serpents and wrapped around Lille's body before he could reposition.
His eyes narrowed.
Before he could break free, the fourth star descended.
The gravitational field around him changed violently.
Lille's knees slammed into the ground hard enough to crack the stone beneath them, dust bursting outward as the immense pressure pinned him in place.
Unohana raised her Zanpakutō.
"Southern Dipper Funeral Rite: One Star, One Kill."
The atmosphere changed with the declaration.
The fifth star lit up.
Lille's rifle moved.
Not because he chose to move it.
The barrel rotated in his grip until it pointed back toward him.
His expression changed sharply.
Then his trigger finger curled against his will.
At the same time, the Seven Killings Star burned brighter than all the others.
Fine threads of crimson light entered the veins of Lille's arm and spread toward the mark of his Schrift, slowly eating into the power branded there.
Lille tried to stop his hand.
It didn't matter.
The rifle fired.
The shot punched through his own left shoulder.
Blood sprayed behind him.
Before the pain could fully register, Unohana had already crossed the distance between them.
Her Zanpakutō drove straight through the Quincy cross at his chest.
The blade pierced the medal and continued into his body.
Lille stiffened.
Unohana leaned closer, her voice quiet enough to feel almost intimate despite the killing intent behind it.
"What you call life and death…"
She twisted the blade.
The core of the Quincy emblem cracked beneath the pressure.
Behind her, the Six Stars of the Southern Dipper connected with one another, their lines of light gradually forming the outline of some enormous execution device suspended in the sky.
"…is nothing more than the opening act of the funeral seen by the Seven Killings Star."
The medal shattered.
Had Lille remained in his ordinary state, that sequence alone would have ended the fight.
Unohana had dismantled his attack, bound him, crushed his movement, turned his own weapon against him, invaded the mark of his Schrift, and driven her Zanpakutō through his chest before he could properly respond.
For any normal captain-class opponent, it would have been an execution.
Lille was not normal.
"So I underestimated you."
His hand closed around the blade still buried through his body.
Then the left eye he had kept shut throughout the fight opened.
An overwhelming surge of reiatsu erupted from him.
The force of it drove blood and dust outward in a violent ring, and Unohana immediately released her sword and withdrew rather than remain within his reach.
She landed several meters away, Zanpakutō back in hand, while Lille slowly straightened.
The wound through his chest remained.
So did the blood running down his body.
But the pressure coming from him had changed completely.
Unohana's eyes narrowed as the two faced one another again.
The first exchange had belonged entirely to her.
Now Lille Barro was finally beginning to show what made him a member of Yhwach's Schutzstaffel.
"Witness the ultimate form of God's rifle!"
Lille Barro's roar echoed across the battlefield as the Quincy cross embedded in his wounded chest began to melt.
Silver liquid ran from the damaged emblem and poured into the hole that had been punched through him, spreading beneath his skin with an almost living purpose until it had worked its way through his entire body.
His left eye changed next.
Three brilliant rings opened around the pupil, layered one inside another like miniature star systems.
At the same time, six pairs of enormous wings unfolded from his back, each blazing with an intense green light that pierced the sky above the Seireitei and climbed into the clouds.
His rifle underwent an equally drastic transformation.
The barrel separated into individual sections before twisting back together in a triple-helix configuration, while the spiritual pressure gathering at the muzzle folded over itself into an impossible structure reminiscent of a Klein bottle, with no clear distinction between what lay inside and what lay outside.
Unohana's instincts warned her before she understood exactly what had changed.
A cold sense of danger passed through her body, and when she glanced down, she found a crimson targeting reticle glowing directly over her heart.
She had never seen Lille aim at her.
There had been no projectile, no line of fire, and nothing crossing the distance between them that she could intercept.
The mark had simply appeared over her vital point because Lille's targeting had gone beyond ordinary space and time.
He had locked onto the causal relationship between weapon and target itself.
The rifle fired with a deafening crack.
Several of the captains watching from farther away instinctively tensed, certain that the shot had already decided the outcome, but the Unohana standing beneath the crimson reticle blurred the instant the attack reached her.
Her body faded into a distorted image while the third star of the Southern Dipper flared high above Soul Society in a brilliant wash of cyan light.
Only then did everyone realize that Lille's supposedly unavoidable shot had struck nothing but a residual image.
Lille's transformed eye remained fixed on her, but surprise soon gave way to interest.
Countless possible outcomes appeared within those concentric rings, branching and crossing until his vision seemed filled with an immense web of futures.
"You're looking ahead?"
Rather than being intimidated, he seemed almost entertained by the discovery.
The triple-helix barrel in his hands began rotating at a rapidly increasing speed, each turn producing a higher, sharper whine until the sound itself became unpleasant to hear.
"If you can survive by choosing the future where my shot misses, then I'll simply destroy every future available to you. When I'm done, there will be only one outcome left."
His eye narrowed.
"Your death."
Tens of thousands of faint points of light appeared around the battlefield.
They were dimensional anchors, but they did not remain fixed in the present.
Each one moved between different temporal branches, firing from positions that belonged to alternate moments and possibilities.
Reishi beams crossed one another from impossible angles until the entire area around Unohana was covered by a dense lattice of fire that existed across more than one timeline at once.
The Seireitei itself began to suffer under the attack. Buildings caught in the overlapping fields of fire did not simply collapse or explode; their physical integrity started to fail on a much deeper level.
Walls, rooftops, streets, and foundations lost their stable form and broke down into drifting streams of particles as the surrounding matter slipped toward quantum collapse.
Unohana moved through the destruction without losing her composure.
The power of the Six Stars of the Southern Dipper had laid star-tracks through the battlefield, and she followed the path, placing each step precisely within the tiny seams between the ruptures in space and time.
From a distance, her movements almost resembled a dance, but there was nothing ornamental about them.
Every shift of her weight placed her exactly where Lille's overlapping trajectories failed to meet, allowing attacks capable of tearing apart the surrounding space to pass by without touching her.
The seventh wave was even denser than the six before it.
This time, rather than continuing to evade, Unohana raised her Zanpakutō and aimed toward a critical point aligned with theStar.
A gravitational vortex formed without warning, dragging at the incoming reishi shots until their trajectories bent sharply away from her.
What had moments ago been an airtight killing field was twisted out of shape as the bullets were caught in the artificial pull.
Unohana turned with the motion and snapped out her other arm.
A chain forged from condensed stellar essence shot across the battlefield, gleaming with cold starlight as it wrapped itself around Lille's left ankle.
He glanced down and scoffed.
The chain looked almost absurdly thin compared with the forces he had been using, and he clearly saw no reason to treat it as a serious threat.
"A cheap trick."
His left leg immediately began dissolving into countless particles of light.
By breaking the limb down into a quantum state, he intended to let the restraint pass harmlessly through him and reform once he was free.
Instead, the particles stopped.
Every fragment of the disassembled limb hung motionless in the air, and tiny flecks of dark starlight became visible across them.
Seven Killings Star dust had attached itself to each particle before Lille could disperse, and the foreign stellar power was now forcing those particles to return to physical form.
His expression changed as his leg began rebuilding against his will.
Unohana's smile widened.
"Did you really think I was only trying to tie down your leg?"
Her laugh carried a trace of the woman who had once terrorized Soul Society as its first Kenpachi.
She raised her Zanpakutō and traced a graceful arc through the air, causing the Six Stars of the Southern Dipper to appear in a complete celestial diagram above her.
"This chain isn't a restraint."
Her voice lost every hint of amusement.
"It's the countdown to your death."
Lille's confidence finally faltered. He looked down just as his left foot finished reconstructing—
and watched it disappear.
This time, he had not transformed it himself.
There was no voluntary particle dispersion, no shift into a different state, and no deliberate attempt to phase through an attack. The foot simply ceased to exist under the influence of Unohana's power.
Cold fear ran through him.
Until that moment, Lille had treated physical injury as something almost meaningless.
His transformed body could separate, disperse, and reconstitute itself in ways that made ordinary attacks irrelevant, but Unohana had just demonstrated that her stellar power could reach into the process itself and interfere with the very state that allowed him to recover.
He stopped underestimating her.
All six pairs of wings spread wide behind him, and their light intensified until the surrounding battlefield was flooded in shifting color. Then the feathers began to fall.
Thousands poured down at once, glittering with rainbow light as they passed through the air.
Each feather collapsed almost immediately into a microscopic annihilation particle, shedding its beautiful appearance and revealing the destructive force hidden inside.
The resulting storm expanded in every direction.
Buildings vanished the instant the particles touched them.
Streets were stripped away, rubble disappeared before it could finish falling, and anything caught within the spreading wave was reduced to nothing so quickly that destruction itself seemed unable to keep pace.
Within moments, the battlefield around Lille had been devastated.
The annihilation particles continued spreading toward Unohana's Blood Sea Domain.