The warped world trembled as the assassin took a step back, his gray eyes widening a fraction. The air, already thick with oppressive Reiatsu, now hummed with a new frequency—a silent, predatory vibration that seemed to emanate from Akio himself.
The transformation was subtle yet profound. Akio's standard Zanpakutō shortened slightly, its blade becoming a sliver of absolute matte black, a tear in reality that drank the faint light of the pocket dimension. A thin, mist-like trail of shadows whispered from its edge, coiling in the still air. The guard reshaped into a perfect, sleek crescent moon, waning and ominous.
"Kagegari," Akio finished, his voice not a shout, but a low, carrying whisper that seemed to be absorbed by the newfound darkness of his blade.
The assassin's initial shock hardened into cold professionalism. "You are just on sixth year and have already achieved your Shikai? Impressive, brat. A truly troublesome development." His grip tightened on his twin daggers, Kageokami. "But a new power is a clumsy power. You don't know its weight, its balance. I will carve that lesson into your flesh."
He didn't charge. He flowed, his body dissolving into the ambient shadows of the warped street and reappearing instantly behind Akio, both daggers thrusting in a lethal scissor motion aimed for his kidneys. It was a perfect teleportation kill.
[A/N: This is the ability of his Shikai. By channeling his Reiatsu into the daggers, he can "unlock" a short-range pathway through the pre-existing shadows ). He doesn't truly move at incredible speed; he steps into one shadow and exits from another.]
But Akio was already moving. He didn't see the movement; he felt it—a ripple in the fabric of shadows he now commanded. Byakuya's training in perception and Kenpachi's instinctual awareness merged seamlessly with his new power.
He didn't turn. He didn't block.
"Position Play."
He vanished.
The assassin's daggers met empty air. His eyes shot wide with genuine confusion. 'That wasn't Shunpo. There was no burst of Reiatsu, no displacement of air.'
Akio reappeared ten feet to the left, standing calmly on the side of a building as if gravity meant nothing. His expression was unreadable, his new blade held loosely at his side.
"You talk too much," Akio said, his voice flat. "An assassin should be silent."
A snarl twisted the assassin's scarred lips. He vanished again, his own shadow-teleportation flaring. He came at Akio from above, daggers leading in a plunging strike.
Akio didn't even look up. With a flick of his wrist, he sent a tiny, nearly invisible wisp of shadow from Kagegari's misty trail. It zipped through the air and adhered to a jutting piece of rubble on the ground.
[A/N: The wisp can't be seen by anyone other than Akio.]
"Position Play."
He was gone from the wall just as the assassin's blades shattered the spot where he'd been standing. Akio reappeared standing on the rubble he'd just marked, now behind and below his bewildered opponent.
The assassin landed, spinning around, his movements for the first time showing a hint of frantic energy. "How?!"
"You rely on your eyes," Akio stated, beginning to pace, a hunter circling. "I don't need to see you to know where you are."
Enraged, the assassin lunged forward, not using his teleportation, but sheer speed. His daggers became a blur of shadowy strikes, each one capable of severing soul chain and sinew. It was a technique of brutal efficiency, honed for killing.
Akio met him head-on. But he wasn't the same fighter from moments ago.
He weaved under a slash, his body moving with the fluidity Shunsui had drilled into him. Instead of a straightforward counter, he parried a dagger with the crescent guard of Kagegari using Mune, the impact letting out a dull clang that seemed to be swallowed by the blade's darkness. As he deflected, his free hand shot out in a devastating Toryū jab, not aimed at the assassin's body, but at the air beside his head—a feint that forced the man to flinch back.
The assassin responded with a furious combination, but Akio was already anticipating the rhythm. He ducked a horizontal cut, and as he rose, he unleashed Sōryū. But it was different now. His fists and elbows were guided by the trailing shadows of his sword, making the flurry seem to come from multiple angles at once. The assassin blocked two strikes, dodged a third, but a shadow-wreathed kick he didn't even see slammed into his ribs.
He grunted, skidding backward, his gray eyes blazing with fury and now a sliver of doubt.
"Your Shikai… it's not an offensive type," the assassin hissed, reassessing. "It's spatial manipulation. A trickster's tool."
"A hunter's tool," Akio corrected softly.
He didn't give the man time to think. Akio shot forward in a burst of Shunpo, Kagegari cutting a silent, dark arc. The assassin crossed his daggers to block. But mid-swing, Akio whispered, "Position Play."
He didn't teleport far. Just a single, precise step to the left, reappearing at a new angle mid-lunge. The assassin's perfect block was now a fatal error, his defenses wide open. Kagegari's matte-black edge sliced across his chest, parting fabric and skin with a whisper. As Akio's attack landed, the assassin somehow managed to shift his postion a little. It was a shallow cut, but it was the first real wound he'd landed.
The assassin cried out, more in shock than pain, and kicked out wildly, creating distance. He panted, clutching his chest. "You little—!"
"You're predictable," Akio said, not even breathing heavily. "You teleport to kill. To the most obvious blind spot. It makes you easy to read."
The assassin's face contorted in rage. He wouldn't be insulted by a child. He raised his daggers high, crossing them again. "You want to see a real technique?! Kageokami: Kuromaku! (Black Curtain)"
The shadows around his blades erupted, swelling into a massive, billowing wave of absolute darkness that raced toward Akio, swallowing the distorted landscape whole. It wasn't meant to cut; it was meant to consume, to erase, to trap him in a void where nothing existed.
It was a terrifying, overwhelming attack. The old Akio would have tried to dodge or meet it with his own power head-on.
The new Akio simply raised his free hand toward the advancing tidal wave of black.
As the attack roared toward him, he focused not on the whole, but on a single, shifting point within the storm of shadows. With an almost casual flick of his fingers, he sent a single, pinpoint mark into the heart of the technique itself.
"Disrupt."
He didn't detonate a mark on the ground or a wall. He detonated it inside the assassin's own technique.
The effect was instantaneous. The perfectly formed wave of darkness shuddered violently. Like a sheet snapping in the wind, it convulsed, its cohesion shattered by the silent burst of disruptive Reiatsu from within. It didn't vanish, but it fractured into a hundred harmless, dissipating tendrils of smoke that washed over Akio harmlessly, rustling his clothes.
The assassin could only stare, his ultimate technique unraveled before his eyes, his confidence shattering along with it. "No… that's not possible… you can't…"
"I can," Akio said, his voice cutting through the man's disbelief. "This ends now."
He finally went on the offensive. He didn't use flashy teleports. He simply walked forward, each step measured. The assassin, panicked, threw a dagger, infusing it with enough Reiatsu to punch through a fortress wall.
Akio didn't slow. He marked the dagger itself as it flew toward him.
"Position Play."
He vanished, and the dagger harmlessly shot through the space he'd occupied. Akio reappeared directly in front of the now-unarmed assassin, whose eyes were wide with terror. The man swung his remaining dagger in a desperate, wild arc.
Akio caught the man's wrist in a crushing Gekiryū grasp, his fingers like steel vices. He squeezed. Bone creaked. The assassin screamed, his dagger falling from nerveless fingers.
"You… you monster…" the assassin choked out.
"No," Akio whispered, his face inches from the terrified man. "I'm the hunter."
And with a final, contemptuous thrust, he drove Kagegari forward. The matte-black blade slid into the assassin's stomach with a soft, almost silent sound. There was no dramatic spray of blood, just a deep, welling darkness where the blade met flesh.
The assassin's eyes lost their steel-gray glint, going wide and empty. His Reiatsu, once sharp and disciplined, guttered out like a snuffed candle. Akio held him there for a moment on the end of his blade, then withdrew it smoothly.
The body crumpled to the warped ground without a sound.
The pocket dimension, its master dead, began to immediately unravel. The twisted streets and false skies started to dissolve into motes of fading light and shadow, like a painting washed away by rain.
Akio stood over the fallen assassin, his Shikai still active, Kagegari's misty trail the only solid thing in the disintegrating world. He took a deep, steadying breath. The fight was over. He had won. Not just with borrowed power, but with his own. With the power that was, and always had been, his alone.
The world faded to white, returning him to the silent, moonlit Karakura Town's alleyway from where he'd been taken. The only evidence of the struggle was Akio himself, standing alone, his Zanpakutō whispering quietly in the night.