Seated in Silent Vigil

"Yamamoto!!"

A tremor of despair had crept into Kyoraku Kui's voice, yet he still mustered all his strength and tightened his grip on his nearly disintegrated Zanpakuto.

The old man's eyes were bloodshot. He stared fixedly at the suffocatingly powerful figure before him and roared:

"There has to be a limit to how senile you are! This is my Bankai domain. There's no one else here! These delusions of yours are laughable!"

He was lying.

Not just to Yamamoto, but to himself.

In truth, the moment he had seen that wound suddenly appear on Captain-General Yamamoto's back, he had already begun to suspect the truth.

The hidden mastermind might not have been Shunsui Kyoraku at all.

If that mastermind could manipulate the five senses, then the ambitions he had supposedly heard and seen Shunsui Kyoraku express might all have been false.

From the very beginning, their Kyoraku Family had been nothing more than that person's pawns...

At that moment, only endless sorrow remained in Kyoraku Kui's heart.

But as the guardian of the Kyoraku Family, as a clown who had already taken the stage in this grand performance...

He could not stop, much less admit it!

If he showed fear now, if he acknowledged a third party's involvement, every sacrifice the Kyoraku Family had made and every scheme they had laid would instantly become a joke.

Even if he died, he had to shoulder the blame himself, securing one last chance of survival for Shunsui Kyoraku and preserving the family's final shred of dignity.

This was a solitary dance with no retreat.

"Enough noise!"

Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni merely raised his eyes and glanced at the old man still putting up a futile struggle.

There was no anger in those clouded yet piercing eyes, only the indifference and weariness of someone