The shattering of the Millennium Ice Prison caused Hyōrinmaru’s movements to stall for an extremely brief instant.
For the battle-hardened Isshin Shiba, that was the perfect opening.
“Now!”
Without the slightest hesitation, Isshin pushed Engetsu’s flames to their limit.
He burst out of the area filled with glittering ice dust and closed in on Hyōrinmaru at a speed beyond ordinary Shunpo.
His intent was clear.
Strike while the enemy was vulnerable.
“Getsuga Tenshō!”
The scorching flames compressed along Engetsu’s blade.
Wherever the edge passed, even space seemed to warp faintly from the heat.
Pshh—!
The sensation was wrong.
There was no resistance of cutting into a solid body, nor the hardness of ice crystals shattering.
Instead, it felt like cutting into a layer of thick, cold mist that was rapidly dispersing.
Isshin’s pupils contracted.
The “Hyōrinmaru” before him cracked from the point of impact like a smashed ice sculpture.
Countless fractures spread across its body before it burst apart into a spray of ice crystals.
An afterimage?
No.
Something far more refined— an ice illusion.
“Damn it!”
Alarm bells exploded in Isshin’s mind.
A chill shot up his spine, not from the outside, but from within.
Almost the same instant Hyōrinmaru’s illusion shattered, a terrifying cold appeared behind him at point-blank range like a silent ghost.
He didn’t even have time to fully turn around.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a hand covered in icy dragon claws.
At its fingertip condensed a point of deep blue light so absolute it seemed capable of devouring all light and heat.
It was pressing silently toward his back.
Hyōrinmaru’s true body.
At some point, through some unknown method, he had already escaped notice and moved into the blind spot of Isshin’s vision and spiritual sense.
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At the same time, Hyōrinmaru’s low, cold, emotionless voice sounded beside Isshin’s ear like a death sentence.
“Shikai Hyōketsu.”
As those words fell, a rule of “freezing” beyond mere physical cold spread outward from Hyōrinmaru’s true body.
It was not cold air expanding.
It was the concept of freezing itself taking form and unfolding as a domain.
Within four steps, the tiny space around Hyōrinmaru and Isshin seemed to be cut away from the world, becoming an independent domain named Absolute Freeze.
Light, sound, the flow of reishi, even the foundations of all matter began to solidify, crystallize, and turn into eternal ice-blue stillness at a visible pace.
Shikai Hyōketsu.
Everything within four steps, every element, every existence—was frozen.
This was one of Hyōrinmaru’s supreme abilities as the strongest ice-type Zanpakutō, a power touching the origin of rules themselves.
Isshin felt even his thoughts begin to freeze.
His spiritual pressure, his blood, even his consciousness were being rapidly corroded and solidified by that unreasonable power of absolute freezing.
The flames of Engetsu dimmed and shrank within the domain, like a candle guttering in the wind.
He wanted to move.
To resist.
To unleash his power.
But his body felt trapped inside the densest ancient ice.
Every movement required unimaginable force, and he was growing slower by the instant.
At that life-or-death moment…
“Tenshin—”
A calm voice, one that seemed to carry the power to shake the foundations of the world, pierced through the nearly solidified domain of Shikai Hyōketsu and rang clearly in both Isshin and Hyōrinmaru’s ears.
Yanagawa.
At some point, he had appeared behind and to the side of Hyōrinmaru’s true body.
His movements did not seem fast, yet they followed a strange rhythm, as if every step landed precisely on the nodes of space and reishi flow.
He had forced his way into this absolute domain that froze all things at the very instant it formed.
In his hand, Tenshin was wrapped in dense chaotic silver light.
A power far more terrifying than the force that had shattered the Millennium Ice Prison gathered and compressed along the blade.
“Shatter.”
Yanagawa brought the blade down toward the golden light on Hyōrinmaru’s forehead.
From the edge of Tenshin, a shockwave that made every sense tremble spread outward like ripples from a boulder thrown into a perfectly still lake.
The absolute domain that froze light, solidified reishi, and sealed even concepts came into contact with the power of vibration.
Countless dense, crisscrossing white cracks appeared throughout the domain.
These were not spatial tears.
They were the collapse produced when the very rule of “freezing” was disrupted and destroyed by “vibration.”
Frozen light began flowing again.
Solidified reishi scattered.
The icebound domain rapidly broke apart.
Then the shockwave pierced through the collapsing field and slammed into Hyōrinmaru’s true body.
More precisely, into the golden light on his forehead.
A low, muffled sound echoed as if from the depths of the soul.
Under Yanagawa’s violent strike, the golden light finally flickered to its limit.
Then— it went out.
Like a candle in the wind exhausting its final fuel, it vanished completely into darkness and nothingness.
The instant the golden light disappeared, Hyōrinmaru’s violet eyes, previously interwoven with gold, lost all brilliance and became hollow.
His vast spiritual pressure plummeted like air escaping from a punctured bladder.
His hands, covered in icy dragon claws, dropped powerlessly.
The point of absolute-zero blue light at his fingertips quietly dispersed.
His towering body swayed as though all support had been removed.
Then he toppled forward and crashed heavily onto the frozen ground, sending up a cloud of ice dust.
The blade that was Hyōrinmaru’s true body flew from his hand and embedded itself diagonally in the distance, its light dimmed.
The domain of Shikai Hyōketsu completely vanished.
Everything that had been frozen returned to normal, but the bone-deep chill still lingered in the air.
“Hah… hah…”
Isshin dropped to one knee, using Engetsu to support himself as he gasped for breath.
His face was pale, his body covered in thick frost, his eyebrows and hair rimed with ice.
For that instant, he had truly felt death brush past him.
With lingering fear, he glanced at Hyōrinmaru collapsed nearby, then looked ahead.
Yanagawa slowly lowered his blade.
The chaotic silver light on Tenshin receded like the tide, returning the sword to its plain silver-white appearance.
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