Fierce Fighting Conclusion! Release, the Final Getsuga Tenshō!

Ichigo scores a hit across Aizen's chest, but the wound seals as Aizen mocks his human defiance and undergoes yet another grotesque transformation into a winged, skull-laden creature. A single blast from one of those skulls devastates the landscape and sears Ichigo's arm, and Aizen seizes him to declare that the boy has fallen into a mere shadow of his former transcendent self. Ichigo breaks free, cuts across Aizen's chest, and announces he will demonstrate the Final Getsuga Tenshō.

A flashback recalls Ichigo's inner battle with Tensa Zangetsu, where he grasped that the spirit never intended to kill him and that mastering the technique required accepting the sword through his own body. Tensa Zangetsu wept because what he most wished to protect was Ichigo himself. In the present, Ichigo explains that the technique means becoming the Getsuga itself, at the cost of every last shred of his Shinigami power, then calls out Mugetsu and drops the world into darkness. Aizen is struck down, yet begins regenerating as Ichigo's transformation fades and his powers slip away.

Boasting that the Hōgyoku has judged him beyond needing a Zanpakutō, Aizen fails to notice a Kidō spell taking hold. Urahara reveals he cast a sealing spell during Aizen's most vulnerable moment before the transformation, timed to activate as the Hōgyoku abandoned him. Aizen rages and rails against the Soul King even as the seal locks him inside a triple-bladed device, and across both worlds the fighters sense that the battle is at last over.

Aizen transforms again under the Hōgyoku's influence. Ichigo uses the Final Getsuga Tenshō and strikes Aizen with Mugetsu, then loses all of his Shinigami powers. Urahara's earlier sealing Kidō activates as the Hōgyoku rejects Aizen, imprisoning him. The war for Karakura Town concludes.

The episode adapts chapters 419 through 421 and belongs to the Fake Karakura Town arc. It aired in Japan on February 15, 2011, and in English on August 4, 2013. In the closing picture-book segment, Kon is captured and dragged off by a purple-haired researcher to the SRDI before the skit is cut short.