Hear.Fear.Here

Still sealed in the Garganta, a winded Ichigo Kurosaki cannot shatter the Reishi bars even with Getsuga Tenshō and discovers that his line to Urahara has gone silent. In the Seireitei, Byakuya Kuchiki takes a gash to the shoulder and slides back, waving off Renji's worry so his lieutenant can study Äs Nödt's power rather than rush in; Renji, he insists, lacks the discernment to draw the whole ability into the open. As Byakuya presses on, his hands begin to shake and his limbs feel as if they are freezing. He guesses the thorns bristling around Äs are laced with venom, but Äs corrects him: what grips the captain is not poison but something long since abandoned, an instinct that once made him strong. It is fear.

Äs describes how anyone pricked by his thorns comes to dread every possible path to death, from lifting a blade to drawing breath, until clear thought becomes impossible, and he notes that Byakuya is holding on through sheer will. Scoffing that a mere threat means nothing beside terror, he declares the captain's very core already hollowed out by fear. Byakuya denies ever fighting afraid, certain he had mastered such feelings, yet a vision of a smiling Rukia decaying into a corpse seizes him an instant before Äs punches a hand through his chest. Explaining that fear with a cause can be answered by removing the cause while true fear has none, crawling over its victim like a swarm of flies, Äs evades Byakuya's desperate strike, then raises his Medallion to unleash the stolen Senbonzakura Kageyoshi against its own master. Far off, Rukia watches a single petal drift past and senses that something terrible has befallen him as Byakuya crumples, bleeding.

Placed second in the fifty-seventh volume, Out of Bloom, this chapter was adapted within episode 371. Its staccato title mirrors the theme of creeping dread, and the decaying vision that breaks Byakuya recalls the earlier Arrancar Zommari Rureaux, whom he once fought. The turn dramatizes the Wandenreich's cruelest tactic, forcing captains to watch their own released blades wielded against them.