end of hypnosis 5 (Standing to Defend You)

Bleeding from his sword arm yet keeping Rukia Kuchiki tucked against him, Renji Abarai levels his blade at Sousuke Aizen, who compliments the growth in his defense even as he warns that this stubbornness is ill-timed. Renji snaps at Rukia to be quiet and demands why the captain killed Momo Hinamori if he truly regrets harming subordinates. Aizen replies that her death was inevitable, since she could not go on without him and had already served her use, and admits he first tried to have Izuru Kira and Tōshirō Hitsugaya do the deed before finishing it himself. When Renji insists this is not the captain he knew, Aizen answers that the captain Renji remembers was always an illusion who never truly existed.

Enraged, Renji leaps and releases Zabimaru, but Aizen turns the segmented blade aside with a raised sword and then, when it comes again, halts it with a single bare hand before shearing the whole weapon apart. A slash across the back drops Renji to his knees as Aizen recalls sensing at their first meeting that Renji, Hinamori, and Izuru could all be used, which is why he had the three placed in the Fifth Division, kept the two useful ones close under himself and Gin, and shunted the troublesome Renji elsewhere. Ordered one last time to release Rukia and run, Renji recalls being parted from her back at the Shin'ō Academy and flatly refuses to leave her.

As Aizen moves to strike the defiant lieutenant down, Ichigo Kurosaki appears in his Bankai to catch the blow, kneeling between the two and joking that he has come to lend Renji a hand. The chapter deepens Aizen's manipulations by tying them to Renji's earliest days in the Gotei 13. Set in the Soul Society arc and collected in the twentieth volume, it was adapted into the sixty-first episode of the anime.