Tenchi Kaijin

The clash between the Captain-Commander and the figure wearing Yhwach's face reaches its end as a horde of scorched skeletons claws up from the split earth, collapsing the enemy's towering Reishi pillars. Demanding an explanation, the disguised opponent is told that Genryūsai Shigekuni Yamamoto's technique reheats the ashes of everyone his blade has ever felled, letting them serve as his limbs and chase a target until it crumbles to dust.

Scoffing at a Shinigami who would raise the dead, the enemy leaps upward, only to slam into a rising wall of bone. When Yamamoto tells him to look harder, the intruder recognizes Seydlitz, Huburt, and Algora, soldiers he himself butchered. Yamamoto turns his back and invites another attack once his foe has fought through the ranks of his own dead, then explains that the Wandenreich never chose to spare his Bankai; they simply cannot steal what they fail to see and comprehend, the same reason a still-evolving Ichigo Kurosaki unsettles them.

Noticing tears on the screaming enemy's face, Yamamoto reflects that crushing one's own troops to reach him must be agony, yet insists it is nothing beside the suffering of the Shinigami slaughtered that day. He finishes with Zanka no Tachi, Kita: Tenchi Kaijin, a blazing stroke that erases the intruder's left forearm and a wide stretch of his torso. As the blade seals away and rain sweeps the city, the fallen figure quietly concedes that he lacked the strength and begs the true Yhwach's pardon.

Zanka no Tachi, Minami: Kaka Jūman'okushi Daisōjin animates thousands of ash skeletons drawn from Yamamoto's past kills. The enemy is forced to cut down his own slain Sternritter to advance, recognizing their faces mid-charge. Yamamoto reveals why the invaders could never copy his Bankai, contrasting himself with the recently awakened Ichigo. The fight ends when Zanka no Tachi, Kita: Tenchi Kaijin removes the enemy's arm and much of his torso, after which rain falls and the beaten impostor asks Yhwach for forgiveness.

This installment closes the fifty-seventh collected volume, whose cover spotlights Byakuya Kuchiki, and its Japanese title translates as "Heaven and Earth Burned to Ashes." The opponent Yamamoto defeats is not the real Quincy emperor but Royd Lloyd, a Sternritter mimicking his appearance and powers, a twist that reframes the whole duel in hindsight. The events were animated as part of Episode 372, "The Fire," within the Thousand-Year Blood War arc.