LONG WAY TO SAY GOODBYE

Perched on one of the few scraps of earth her attack has not shredded, Yoruichi Shihōin stands wreathed in the crackling energy of her lightning-based Shunkō and asks whether her former pupil finally grasps why the technique was kept from her. Suì-Fēng, reeling, insists such a thing cannot be, only to be told the method was simply too perilous to pass on. Fury sends her lunging with Suzumebachi, yet Yoruichi cancels the strike using Hanki, seizing her wrist and pronouncing her unready. Realizing her opponent has met her Kidō with an opposing force of exactly equal strength, Suì-Fēng breaks free and retreats, unable to accept that a century of exile has not closed the gap between them.

Still hurling her own Shunkō, Suì-Fēng swears she will never pardon the woman who abandoned her trust, but the barrage ends when Yoruichi halts a fist inches from her face and tears open the ground behind herself. The captain's defiance dissolves into grief, and she sinks to her knees asking through tears why she was left behind, while Yoruichi gazes down at her without a word.

The memory reaches back to Suì-Fēng's earliest sight of Yoruichi, then a young noble riding in procession, hailed as princess of the Shihōin Clan and the destined head of the Keigun whom the girl would one day guard with her life. Born into minor nobility bred for generations as assassins and executioners, Suì-Fēng was the ninth-generation youngest of six siblings, and she set aside the name Fēng Shāolíng to carry her great-grandmother's instead. Five of her brothers fell in the line of duty across separate missions, leaving her mourning both their deaths and what she saw as their weakness. Her awe of Yoruichi, the clan's twenty-second and first female leader and a peerless Hakuda master, deepened into something closer to worship.

Seven years into her service, she was summoned to the corps attending the commander directly and knelt to pledge herself body and soul, only for Yoruichi to wave off such formality and invite the girl to use her given name, a familiarity Suì-Fēng could only meet halfway by settling on Miss Yoruichi. The bond grew until, without warning or farewell, Yoruichi vanished, and the charges soon followed: desertion, abetting Kisuke Urahara's flight, and evading capture. Stripped of her command over the Onmitsukidō and the Keigun, the woman Suì-Fēng had treated as a personal deity became, in her eyes, a traitor.

The installment closes the duel between the two assassins largely through recollection, devoting most of its pages to Suì-Fēng's history rather than combat. It belongs to the Soul Society arc and appears in the nineteenth collected volume, THE BLACK MOON RISING. Its events were adapted into the fifty-seventh episode of the anime.