"Arrogant fool."
Tōshirō Hitsugaya's gaze turned cold, and Hyōrinmaru in his hand pointed diagonally downward.
"Treat a Soul Reaper's blade like a child's game, and don't cry later."
Gerard looked down at the small figure standing on the stone beam and let out a long, deafening laugh.
"Cry? That word has never existed in a warrior of God's vocabulary!"
Without warning, the enormous golden sword swept across the sky.
Its heavy edge whipped up a savage gale, and the collapsed buildings on either side were instantly ground into fine stone dust by the air currents.
Byakuya Kuchiki and Tōshirō Hitsugaya became afterimages at the same instant, using Shunpo to scatter to the left and right.
The spire's stone beam where they had stood was smashed to pieces by a single blow from the giant sword.
"Scatter, Senbonzakura."
Suspended in midair, Byakuya Kuchiki held his Zanpakuto point-down.
The cherry-pink blades dancing across the sky formed a winding dragon that spiraled upward from behind with a roar, tightly coiling around Gerard's sword arm.
Hundreds of millions of tiny blades scraped and sliced rapidly across Gerard's skin, sending dense showers of sparks flying.
"An obstacle this feeble isn't even fit to scratch a warrior's itch!"
Gerard roared, the muscles of his thick arm bulging as he hauled forward with brute force against the biting storm of blades.
Yet in that brief instant when the giant sword was restrained, an intensely cold mist had already spread through the air.
Hitsugaya leaped into the sky along steps formed of frost, his blade's tip aimed straight at Gerard's savage face.
"Ryūsenka!"
With a sharp thrust, Hitsugaya became a straight beam of crystalline ice, instantly piercing Gerard's enormous chest.
Cross-shaped dark ice burst from deep within the wound, and a current of frigid air instantly spread outward