The terrifying, sky-cleaving pressure of the Almighty suddenly flickered. Its blinding golden luster dimmed into an unstable, micro-static haze around Ninten's body.
Ninten took a sharp step back, his teeth grinding together as internal system error codes flashed aggressively across his optical field. The raw reality of his situation crashed down instantly: the game architecture of Bleach: Rebirth of Souls was bound to a strict, lore-accurate progression engine. Just like the Quincy King who required nine hundred years to regain his heart, ninety to regain his intellect, and nine to regain his power, Yhwach's battle system was built around a mandatory zero-to-max scaling timer.
Ninten couldn't simply command instant, absolute future-rewriting right out of the gate. He was forced to start at Phase One, entirely locked out of the Almighty's true power until the in-game timer ticked up to Phase Three.
Freak's eyes widened. Operating in his Time Sight Form, his temporal vision instantly caught Ninten's sudden energy dip and missing command permissions.
"You bluffing bastard!" Freak spat, a cruel smile returning to his face. "Your Sakti is nearly bottomed out, and that foreign divine template is locked behind a build-up timer! You don't have the future in your hands at all!"
"Yeah, you're right," Ninten grinned, his thumb hovering over his internal selection interface. "Yhwach takes too long to load. Good thing my character select screen doesn't have a unit cap."
If one game-breaking character wasn't enough, Ninten would just crash the server with sheer data mass. Channeling every last drop of his Anomaly Merger Sakti, he bypassed the single-character limit, forcing a simultaneous multi-compilation from the Bleach gaming database.
SYSTEM OVERRIDE: INITIATING MULTI-SOUL SYNCHRONIZATION.
Subject 1: Kenpachi Zaraki.
Subject 2: Sosuke Aizen.
Subject 3: Ichigo Kurosaki.
Subject 4: Genryūsai Shigekuni Yamamoto.
Subject 5: Kisuke Urahara.
Ninten closed his eyes. In the digital void of his mind, a small, pink-haired girl—the manifestation of Zaraki's Zanpakuto spirit, Yachiru—whispered directly into his ears.
("Just use me properly... and there is nobody you can't cut.")
Ninten's eyes snapped open. They were entirely pitch black with piercing, demonic yellow irises. Gripping the hilt of a violently manifesting blade, he roared at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing with the combined spiritual pressure of five legendary titans:
"BANKAI! Zanka no Tachi! Kannonbiraki Benihime Aratame! Tensa Zangetsu!"
The entire Isle of Trials violently shook. A pillar of incomprehensible spiritual weight slammed into the earth, vaporizing the bedrock for miles.
When the light cleared, Ninten had undergone a terrifying, composite transformation. His skin had turned a deep, blood-red, radiating the raw, unhinged physical manifestation of Zaraki's Bankai. Two large, jagged hollow horns erupted from his temples, and his hands gripped a massive, dual-bladed broadsword bound by a heavy chain—the Horn of Salvation and True Bankai of Ichigo Kurosaki. Surrounding his demonic form was a suffocating cloak of absolute fire—the heat of a literal sun, courtesy of Yamamoto's Zanka no Tachi.
And hovering silently behind him, draped in red velvet with a hauntingly beautiful, melancholic expression, was a colossal giant woman—the physical manifestation of Urahara's Kannonbiraki Benihime Aratame, capable of restructuring anything she touched.
Freak's ten-second Future Sight flared with absolute red warning signs. Every single future he looked into for the next ten seconds ended in his instantaneous vaporization. Relying entirely on his temporal evasion, Freak abandoned his offense and frantically began dodging, completely unable to launch a single counterattack against the sheer, overwhelming density of Ninten's presence.
Zex, however, operating in his Cruelness of Consequences of Hell form, lacked Freak's temporal foresight. Blinded by hellish rage and fueled by the Abyss, Zex charged straight at Ninten, his claws dripping with spatial corruption.
What followed was not a fight. It was a one-sided, catastrophic dismemberment.
As Zex lunged, unleashing a wave of Divine Cruelty of Hellish Slashes, Ninten didn't even raise his blade. The giant woman behind him—Benihime—simply raised an elegant, velvet-draped hand.
Stitch.
The very fabric of space in front of Zex was instantly restructured. The Abyss-type slashes didn't just miss; they were physically disassembled and rewoven into harmless threads of ambient Sakti.
"What?!" Zex roared, his hellfire blazing hotter as he tried to push through the restructured space.
"Too slow," Ninten whispered.
Utilizing Ichigo's raw speed combined with Zaraki's demonic physical strength, Ninten vanished. He reappeared directly above Zex, swinging the blood-chained Tensa Zangetsu. As the blade descended, it was coated in the absolute, ash-making flames of Zanka no Tachi.
The blade struck Zex's hellish armor. The armor didn't shatter; it was instantaneously incinerated into nothingness. Zex screamed as the heat of a literal sun physically burned away the Abyss-type energy shielding his body. Ninten followed up with a brutal, point-blank kick possessing the raw kinetic force of Zaraki's unrestrained Bankai, sending Zex hurtling through twelve consecutive stone ridges, leveling the northern half of the sector.
Zex tried to recover mid-air, manifesting shadow clones to launch a coordinated counter-strike. Ninten simply pointed his blade at the swarm.
"Getsuga Tensho... Zanka no Tachi style."
A colossal, crescent wave of black, red, and solar-gold energy erupted from the blade, expanding to the size of a city block. It swallowed Zex's clones instantly, erasing the very concept of shadows from the battlefield. The wave slammed into the true Zex, crushing his beast form into the bedrock and melting the terrain around him into liquid glass.
Zex's form was completely overwhelmed. His arms were charred, his dark Sakti bled out into the atmosphere, and his physical vessel was failing under the impossible weight of Ninten's five-fold Bankai amalgamation.
Cornered, humiliated, and broken, Zex's eyes rolled back into his head. The entity he had contracted with—the Judge of Hell—recognized that the vessel was about to be destroyed. The final price had been met. The Judge granted Zex every single ounce of its absolute, primordial power, taking complete control of his soul.
CRACK-BOOM!
The liquid glass beneath Zex violently erupted into a geyser of pitch-black abyss fluid. A terrifying, deep voice—a sound that vibrated not in the ears, but directly in the bones of everyone present—spoke from the darkness.
"THE PRICE IS PAID. THE JUDGMENT IS ABSOLUTE."
Emerging from the black geyser was Zex's final, true transformation. He was no longer a beast; he was a towering, blackish-red Devil. Eight giant, leathery wings ripped from his back, casting a suffocating shadow over the sector. In his grip rested a massive, jagged red trident pulsing with condensed Bijoyi Abha.
The Devil Zex didn't just move; he commanded space to bring Ninten to him.
With a single, effortless thrust, the Devil bypassed physical distance entirely. The red trident pierced cleanly through Ninten's chest, erupting from his back in a shower of digital blood.
The Devil's deep voice chuckled. "Game over, anomaly."
But Ninten's impaled body suddenly rippled, distorting like a reflection in a disturbed pond. The red demonic skin, the horns, the giant woman—they all shattered like glass.
Crack.
"Since when were you under the impression that you stabbed me?" Ninten's voice echoed from thirty yards away.
Thanks to the passive activation of Sosuke Aizen's Kyoka Suigetsu seamlessly woven into the merge, Ninten had placed Zex under absolute hypnosis the moment the Devil transformed. Zex had merely impaled empty air.
However, even with the illusion saving his life, Ninten collapsed to one knee, clutching his chest. The sheer Sakti drain of maintaining five absolute-tier Bankais simultaneously alongside an active Shikai illusion was tearing his system core to shreds. The five-fold form forcibly deactivated, reverting Ninten to his base, heavily exhausted state.
Realizing he had been tricked, the Devil Zex turned his massive, eight-winged form toward the real Ninten, raising the red trident to unleash an inescapable wave of Bijoyi Abha.
"You can't trick the Abyss twice," the Devil spoke, his trident glowing with absolute eradication energy.
Before the trident could descend, a blinding, high-voltage flash of white-blue plasma tore across the battlefield.
KABOOM!
A terrific, hyper-condensed Thunder Blast slammed directly into the side of the Devil's face. The sheer kinetic and electrical density of the strike forced the massive Devil to stumble sideways, his eight wings violently flapping to maintain balance.
Stepping in front of the exhausted Ninten, radiating an aura of raw, unyielding electromagnetic godhood, was Prince Thunder.
His wounds from the Team Warriors gank were sealed by Mark's nanites, and his Sakti was overflowing with the raw, atmospheric power he had harvested from the sky. Thunder cracked his knuckles, the sound echoing like a sonic boom across the silent canyon. Sparks of white plasma danced across his irises.
"You've been throwing a lot of weight around for a contracted pet," Thunder said coldly, his voice laced with absolute regal authority. "Let's see if the Abyss can handle a storm."
The Devil Zex leveled his massive red trident at the Prince, his deep voice vibrating with malice. "A mortal prince dares to stand before the Judge of Hell? I will scatter your ashes across the void."
Thunder didn't bother replying. He simply vanished.
Moving at the literal speed of electrical discharge, Thunder reappeared directly above the Devil's head, executing a devastating, plasma-infused axe kick. The Devil brought the haft of his red trident up to block. The collision between Thunder's atmospheric plasma and the Devil's Bijoyi Abha created a concussive shockwave that leveled the remaining cliffs of Sector 1, reducing thousands of tons of stone to fine dust.
Thunder didn't let up. Utilizing his absolute mastery of electromagnetism, he repelled himself off the trident, twisting mid-air to unleash a volley of high-frequency lightning spears. The Devil deflected them with a sweep of his giant wings, sending waves of black hellfire to counter the lightning.
The sky above Sector 1 became a strobing canvas of white plasma and black fire.
The Devil thrust his trident forward, executing a high-tier Abyss art that warped the gravity around Thunder, attempting to crush the Prince into a singular point. Thunder countered by reversing the magnetic polarity of the very bedrock beneath him, launching himself out of the gravitational snare at Mach 50 speed. As he bypassed the gravity well, Thunder coated his fist in a dense layer of localized atmospheric pressure and slammed it directly into the Devil's chest plate.
CRACK!
For the first time since ascending, the Devil staggered backward, a hairline fracture appearing on his blackish-red armor.
"Insolent!" the Devil roared.
With a single flap of his eight wings, Zex launched into the upper atmosphere, raising his red trident toward the heavens to channel a meteor-sized sphere of pure, condensed hellfire and Bijoyi Abha. The sheer heat of the attack began to literally melt the oxygen in the air, creating a vacuum over Sector 1.
Thunder stood on the ground below, looking up at the apocalyptic mass of energy. He didn't run. He didn't brace for impact. He simply reached out with both hands, expanding his magnetic field to encompass the entire atmospheric sector.
"If you want to bring Hell to the surface," Thunder commanded, his voice echoing with the absolute fury of a Walid Maliqun, "then allow me to introduce you to the Heavens!"