Ribbon (Bleach AU, Original Character)

[Sarius]

Chapter 31: Hunt

Walking around Karakura alone and with sight was a strange experience.

There was a humanity in the action that I realised I'd been missing. I had been pulled out of touch from the world around me so quickly, in no small part due to the introduction of this mysterious other world that I was slowly being dragged towards.

It was relaxing to walk the streets without fear of walking into anything, or the worry of bumping into others around me. I let myself revel in the odd sonder of walking by someone and wondering what their life is like, trying to flesh out a story behind them.

A young woman and a little girl, a toddler even. She was only twenty some years old, but it was possible that it was her child. The child would have been born while she was a teenager, likely. Howe had her family reacted? Was she even the mother at all?

In the slow walking, something that could hardly fatigue me, I found a proper absolution from the intense training I had been pushing myself through. The responsibility and pressure slowly lessened, like a shaken soda bottle as you slowly opened the screw top. Instead of being so focused on only myself, I tried to push my mind outwards onto other people.

Shamefully, it was harder than I would have liked it to be. I'm not a people person, really, Suzumi had me beat in that field and I can find it exceptionally difficult to relate to others—no doubt a holdover from my childhood.

But as I slowly released my attention onto others around me, I began to recontextualise my life. Step after step, I was coming to understand that I was both with aim and without it at the same time. I had the aim of getting stronger, more powerful, fixing my soul, learning spiritual sense, gaining spiritual pressure, so on and so forth…

But why?

Why did I want those things? I was scared; that was the easy answer. I was doing it all because I wanted to feel safe and secure at night, and I wanted to make sure that nothing could simply walk into my room and kill me while I slept. But I couldn't guarantee that. I could probably never guarantee that.

So, if being scared and self-protective wasn't a good enough excuse—something I had been caught up in for so many years as a child—what was a good reason? What was strength and power without a good reason for it?

Was I nice enough, or selfless enough, to want power to protect others? For Suzumi and Uyu, maybe. For the tens of random souls we'd saved out on our Hollow hunts? It lacked the same reality or levity. To do that, I'd have to be an astronomically better person than I think I actually am and sacrifice a great deal to do so.

I just don't think I could do that to myself.

So, what reason should I search for power? Self-preservation seems like a slippery slope, the end being self-destruction, and selfless pursuit of protection for others seemed almost as bad. It was a painful topic to internally consider. I was trying to tear my thought processes from the base instincts that I held, fear and protectiveness. All the same, I kept coming up short with good moralistic arguments for trying to gain as much power as I am.

I had berated myself so heavily not a month before for not understanding myself, and yet I now tried to distance myself from my own base desires, to give myself good reason to move on and upwards without becoming something I didn't want to be.

Quickly enough, I had found myself walking within the darkness of night, my limited vision obscured further by the lack of sunlight to aid me with silhouettes framed by the golden sun's rays. I must have been walking for hours, contemplating this strange moral and philosophical conundrum in my mind on repeat.

I found myself unperturbed by the darkness, despite being far outside my element. I had fought enough Hollows at night to feel at home in the faint moonlight above. Where in Karakura was I now? Probably in Kitakawase, the north-western most suburb. A nice area, all things considered, one of the nicest amongst the western suburbs in Karakura.

Almost as instinct, my senses were wide open, seeking any sound, movement, spiritual activity or even discernible souls. I hadn't noticed it happening, but I was a professional now, my mind running through a script as it scanned my surroundings for threats and anything else that might either harm or need help. It was funny how becoming good at something crept up on you like that—one day you begin, totally inexperienced, and then one day you wake up and realise that you're starting to get really good at what you're doing.

I felt a minor disturbance just outside of what I was setting my ribbon sense to. I immediately widened my range, focusing a little as I did, and found a conglomeration of bright white ribbons, all within one stretch of street. There weren't any other souls nearby, so I could only assume that there was something going on.

Without my direct input, my legs launched me to the top of a nearby roof just within my sightline. The bombastic movement gave me a pang of pleasure, experiencing the freedom that I'd crafted with my power. I flew across the rooftops, my feet easily pushing off from the uneven surfaces—spiritual energy allowing me to cling to the surfaces ever so slightly.

The subtle destruction of conventional physics delighted my mind, coming as close to legitimately flying as I might ever be capable of aside from instant movement. My regular clothing was holding up surprisingly well, despite the large and powerful movements I was performing in them.

I as I drew closer to the group of five bright soul ribbons, I did another sweep of the street and found exactly what I was bargaining for. The faint trace of a Hollow's ribbon.

My body pushed itself harder towards the Hollow's location, keeping tabs on the other ribbons that surrounded it. No doubt they were high-spec humans, maybe even in Jinta's crew—though I hadn't ever met any of them where we usually patrolled.

With a final flip off a roof, I was within the same street as the other ribbons, and I let the ribbon sense drift into the back of my mind—letting other senses take precedence for the moment.

Immediately I smelt blood, a sickening metallic smog filling the air with a severe pungency—assailing my nose as I surveyed my senses like a checklist. I could hear others around me, lining up perfectly with the bright white ribbons. There was a lot of yelling, and some screaming, but I was focused—searching for signs of the Hollow itself.

"Fuck! Call Jinta, this thing is way stronger than we bargained for!" One voice called. The voice belonged to a young man who was quickly backpedalling from where I assumed the Hollow was, further down the street. He entered my little bubble of sight, allowing me to see the man in full clarity. He was probably in his late teens, wrapped in a dark cloak that seemed like it hid padded armour beneath it. He was a fairly average looking Japanese guy, and aside from the speed of his movements, you probably could never guess he was strong at all.

"What's the situation?" I called out to him, taciturn as I could manage as I let my ribbon sense scour the area for a clearer view of the Hollow's ribbon. The man's head whipped towards me, his hand suddenly holding a decently long sword of western design. He pointed it at me and it glowed with spiritual energy, though not much.

"Who the fuck are you?" He warned, resetting his stance to face me properly in the ensuing moments. I looked away from the man, refocusing my ribbon sense as a deeper scan of the surroundings caught on something.

"I'm here to help. Tell me what's going on, and why I smell someone bleeding out—then I can help you beat the shit out of a Hollow." The man hesitated, the emotion so strong that I could see it in his ribbon as it cringed in on itself, "Now, would be nice."

"Fucking tell him already, Reo." A pained voice called from a few metres away, where the bloody smell was emanating from. None of the others made to comment, they were too busy being on watch. The Hollow wasn't out in the open, then. An ambush predator.

"Alright, fuck. We got called out here 'cause some of the soul sensitives in the area were picking up minor signs of Hollows. They didn't seem real worried, so we went out without talking to Jinta or Ururu. This Hollow is crazy strong, it keeps popping out of fucking nowhere. What are we even supposed–"

I tuned the younger man out as I focused in on my ribbon sense once again, the new wave of my scan grabbed a hold of the Hollow's ribbon in truth now, letting it appear in my vision atop a roof nearby. The man, who was still rambling—probably trying to cope with being truly terrified—had stopped paying attention altogether.

In a split second, I felt the Hollow move, it's wide, bone-white ribbon flicking from side to side like a cat's tail. I grimaced as I strained my legs, pushing in a tremendous amount of spiritual energy to support the ridiculous movement. I reached the man, who only just realised I was racing towards him, and slammed a palm into his chest—sending him flying a few metres to the side.

The Hollow appeared within my vision, blurring with the sheer speed of it's movement. It's small, bug-like form blurred with the speed inside my vision, but it's outstretched, lancelike arm passed through the air harmlessly—right where the chest of the man had been only a fraction of a second earlier.

I saw a black and empty eye stare at me for just a second before it's clawed foot struck against the ground, resulting in a loud bang and the Hollow disappearing from my sight entirely.

"W-what the fuck, man?" Reo accused, the young man I had pushed was fine, thankfully. However, with the Hollow appearing so quickly, I expect he hadn't even seen it. I ignored the man's squawking as my mind returned to my ribbon sense.

I had a good handle on the Hollow's ribbon now, a long and fat thing—far to strong to be any old Hollow. Though it was nothing in comparison to Phantom's ribbon, not even close. This Hollow was still simply a Hollow, but far more potent than the regular, mindless thing that we so casually slay.

"You know," I called loudly, my voice enhanced ever so slightly with spiritual energy, "you're far too powerful to be playing games with runts like these. You could have taken them out twice over before I even got here." The surroundings went silent, the attention of the other four high-spec humans who I'd paid no attention to were now placed solely on me. All of them were weak, though they had some potential for strength in them—they were nothing in front of a Hollow like this.

"Who the fuck are you talking to, idiot?" The stupid teenager yelled at me from his place on the street. Though I expected it was anger born out of a paralysing fear. From an alley nearby, a distorted and garbled laugh rang out, making the others around me panic—turning towards the sound.

But I wasn't so stupid. I turned my body towards the sound but kept my mind open to the actual location of the Hollow's ribbon, directly opposite where the sound was coming from. Just a second later, the Hollow moved towards the ribbon of the wounded high-spec human. The movement came first, then the bang of the sudden acceleration—but I was already moving, my legs already prepared to make a sudden, explosive movement.

This time, I couldn't very well push the wounded person out of the way—something that'd likely kill them or do significant damage. I was left with a very unfavourable option, which was trying tank the hit head on. Now, I had realised I wasn't going to be a selfless protector, but I couldn't let someone die right in front of me just because I was being a fraidy-cat.

With a grit of my teeth, I inserted myself between the lance-arm and the wounded man on the floor, whipping my hands towards the oncoming strike to change it's direction ever so slightly. I had expected that I'd be able to defend against the blow pretty well, maybe be sent flying from the force of it being dispersed across my spiritual shielding, and then the pressure and energy that cloaked my body.

However, even as I pumped it all up to maximum, watching the world slow to a crawl as my brain kicked into overdrive, I could only watch helplessly as the bug-like Hollow's arm pierced through my defences and into my flesh.

The pain coursed across my body with a malicious abandon, the lance-arm piercing through the side of my abdomen and through the muscle and organs within. In this moment, as the world was slowed to almost no movement at all, I could see the Hollow properly.

It was maybe five foot tall, extremely small for a Hollow this powerful. It was covered in a chitinous armour, plated across it's body to where almost none of it's black flesh was even visible. On it's back where two wings, fluttering quickly even within this slowed time. It's mask was almost hornet-like in structure, it's two black eyeholes almost making it look like the skull of an insect. Around it's mask was a fuzzy hair, covering up any exposed neck from view.

As my eyes met it's, a fire ran across me that I'd never felt before—a pure burning sensation within my chest, pushing away the severe pain from my mind almost entirely. The Hollow quickly pulled it's lance from my abdomen, letting the bright blood pour from the wound—destroying my clothes.

A moment later, the Hollow was gone, claw marks the only evidence that it had ever been here.

"H-holy fuck." The man behind me groaned as he put pressure on the wound in his thigh. I turned my head to look at him, the tall and muscled man was sweating heavily and bleeding profusely—he'd need medical attention and fast if he wanted to live.

"You lot." I yelled, my voice booming with a strength I was surprised I could control while there was a hole in my gut, "Get out of here and get your friend to Kurosaki Clinic in Minamikawase. I'll take care of the bug." There was a long, malicious peal of laughter from the shadows of the street, a cackling, horrible thing that you'd swear was being played through a static-y television.

"You think you can get them away from me while I hunt?" The Hollow said, it's voice nasally and filled with an intense primal hunger. I pushed out another scan of my surrounding, finding the Hollow's ribbon right where I expected it to be. I started to laugh along with it, the fire within my chest burning brighter and brighter by the second.

"Oh yes, I do think so," I said as I stared into the alley where the Hollow was hiding, it's form cloaked. "Do you really think you're the only hunter around?" I growled, an anger arising from the depths of my soul—an instinctive understanding that this was incorrect, that the right of power was mine.

"You say with a bleeding hole in your body, Human." It snarled as it realised I knew it's location. It sprang from it's hiding spot, the speed so intense that it was difficult to track even when I was staring directly at it. However, this time I was prepared; I grabbed the Hollow's lance, the blistering speed tearing the skin off of my hand as I clenched it. I whipped my hand towards it's own stomach, piercing through the chitin with difficulty, but managing to put a hole in the thing with my bare hand and a great deal of spiritual energy.

It screamed, the air around the two of us shuddering with the clashing spiritual pressures. If the group of high-spec humans hadn't dragged their friend away, then I wouldn't be surprised if it had made the muscled man pass out.

"Two can play at that game, bug." I snarled, my face warping into a predator's smile. "Let's see who of us is the real hunter, shall we?"


A/N: A massive thanks to my three 10-dollar Patrons; Thomas H., TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! And a gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron Marisa E.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 32: Reasons

The Hollow was too quick for me to stop it from pulling away, the loud noise of it launching its small frame away from me was almost deafening, but I didn't let it distract me.

Now, the group of high-specs were getting themselves out of the way, and the Hollow was going to be too distracted with me to have time to chase after the easy prey now. I felt the deep growl in my throat rise into my mouth, ever sensation I had ever felt was amplified by so many times that it was almost overwhelming. I could feel the heat of my breath against my teeth, the blood from my abdomen wound leaking down my side and saturating my clothes with a deep, red stain.

"You think you're a predator?" I taunted the surrounding buildings, giving the Hollow the illusion that I'd simply fluked it when I'd caught it last time. But the ribbon didn't lie, not on something as weak as this. It was dancing from place to place, overthinking its plan of attack. I needed to make a move soon, or it would simply decide that I wasn't worth the risk and run away.

I couldn't have that.

"I'm a predator alright," the Hollow's voice rang out, somehow both masculine and feminine at the same time, "how many souls do you think I've eaten? Hundreds!" I scoffed, entertaining the self-aggrandising Hollow with attention.

"Only hundreds? Of the weakest prey you could find? Honestly, maybe I overestimated how strong you are. Are you sure you could have killed those high-specs back there?" I mocked, leading to a growl from the surroundings, a distinctly different spot than it'd been before. I turned my head towards the sound, staring directly at the Hollow's ribbon. It'd gotten frustrated and fucked up.

I didn't let the Hollow notice that I'd realised its position and I raced towards it, mirroring the Hollow's own strange movement. It felt awkward and clunky in comparison to my normally flowing movements, but it certainly allowed me to move a great deal quicker than before, even if it did feel instinctually wrong.

I launched my hand out, wrapping around the small corner of the street and grabbing a hold of the unseen Hollow's scruffy hair around its neck. With a loud growl I dragged the body out from behind the corner with all my might, throwing the small-bodied beast out into the open with more force than I thought I had in me.

The Hollow's chitinous armour allowed it to skitter across the concrete and tarmac until it hit the wall on the other side of the street with the sound of concrete shattering. Driven by pure instinct, I lowered myself to the ground and moved again, using an edited version of the Hollow's movement from before. With a cracking sound of the concrete breaking under my feet, I moved so quickly I only had time to raise my knee to plant it in the Hollow's chest.

The small thing managed to scramble out of the way ever so slightly, making my knee crash into its shoulder instead. With the speed I was going, I was also suddenly embedded into the wall. It took me a moment, but I managed to struggle my way out of the wall. The Hollow hadn't tried to be opportunistic and stab me while I was stuck, probably because it was hurting from its own injury and trying to recover.

"That was a good connection, no? You did a pretty good job of getting yourself out of the way there." I said snidely, my eyes wandering the streets dramatically. Though, as I kept my mind on the Hollow's location, I realised that it was starting to slowly move further away from me. It was running.

With a predatory grin, I let my legs push me forwards with blistering speed, climbing to the top of the buildings easily and vaulting over the ledge and making a beeline right towards the Hollow's sneakily retreating form.

The wind whipped around my body as I cut through the air like a knife, and as I reached the Hollow's form, I reached out a hand and grabbed a hold of the edge of its mask—yanking it to the ground as I decelerated.

"Thought you could run away, bug." I snarled, pure violence finding its way into my voice. The Hollow replied with an ear-piercing scream before it turned, breaking my grip and launching it's one good arm towards me, it's lance-like point searching for my body. I couldn't dodge something this fast at such a close range, but I could work around it.

I let the piercing blow fly through my spiritual shielding and glancing the side of my chest, sliding into my armpit while drawing a line of burning pain into my flesh. But, for whatever reason, the pain only compelled me further.

I pushed forwards, my hand formed in a facsimile of a spearpoint, trying my best to get a shot at its chest once again. This time, the Hollow didn't have time to react to the attack, too focused on its own. I felt a small amount of blood within my mouth, a metallic taste on my breath. I must've injured something earlier and didn't realise. As My hand broke through another part of it's chitin, I spat bloody phlegm in its face.

It recoiled, despite having a mask and no way for it to really affect it. Must be a hold over from when it was human, once. I laughed with a ferocious glee at the reaction—the idea of it having leftover instincts from being human was laughable. For a being that seemed to be the antithesis of human, it sure was human.

The Hollow, now stuck with its only functioning arm clamped in my armpit and underneath my body, was running out of options. I didn't have the strength to hold down its entire body, so instead I was left with the little runt screaming loudly and clawing at my chest with its clawed feet, tearing up the skin on my chest and making the droplets of blood fall onto its bone white carapace.

With a vengeful grunt I slammed a fist into the Hollow, over and over, letting it scratch at me futilely, even as pain lanced across my body. My fist beat into the Hollow's carapace, cracking it further every time the flesh and bone of my hand connected.

"You know," I growled in between the blows, "I thought," slam, "a little," slam, "harder," slam, "to kill." My fist broke through the carapace and exposed the black flesh underneath, a light smattering of the same course hair around its neck dusted it's black chest. I grinned, my vision going a deep crimson as I grabbed a hold of the Hollow's fat ribbon and pulled, taking its spiritual energy reserves as my own.

I yelled into its bone white mask with a primal rage. The Hollow recoiled from its sudden loss of spiritual energy, the only chance that it had at escaping me. I wrapped the wide ribbon around my knuckles with a flick of my hand and slammed the fist down into its black chest, releasing all the energy at once.

With a satisfying bang, the Hollow's body now had hole in it that almost entirely disconnected the top half of the thing from its legs. With one last vicious grunt, I slammed my hand into it's weakened mask and it cracked, leaving it totally incapacitated until a Soul Reaper managed to purify it, or whatever they did with a Hollow.

I rolled off the Hollow's corpse, or de-animated body, and let myself breathe for a minute.

I could feel the pain all across my body, wounds that would easily land myself in the hospital littering my body like scrapes and bruises. My mind was so awake that I could feel every brush of air against my skin, the temperature of my flesh cooling as the blood receded from my muscles and back to my centre of mass, trying to circulate normally again.

Slowly, as I regained my ability to breathe normally again, the adrenalin faded, leaving me with a full gamut of pain—though it hardly bothered me as much as it should have. In fact, I'm the happiest that I've been in weeks, aside from moments with Suzumi.

Right now, I was on top of the world.

It was such a primal, instinctive emotion. It had nothing to do with morals. There was no justification for how I was feeling in a civilised world. But fuck, who cares. Why should I care what the civilised world thinks when I will be up against beings easily as strong as that one, little Hollow? When my competitors will be many times as strong as that?

No, I won't let myself be dragged into the fallacy of 'righteousness' or 'morals'. How could I possibly care about that when around every corner in Karakura, there was a fight like that waiting for me? No, I didn't want to shy away from the challenge anymore. I wanted to walk right into the fire with a grin on my face so terrifying that the fire stepped away.

Why should I find a reason for my power when a reason like this existed? Where I could put everything on the line and come out stronger, faster, and smarter for it? Why shouldn't I take victory as mine? Make their power all mine.

I laughed gleefully against the searing pain all over my body, the elation still too prominent in my brain to truly complain about my injuries. Painstakingly, I pulled myself from the ground with a concerted effort. I still had a little spiritual power left to go around, so I used it to jump from the building and reinforce my muscles just enough so I could walk along with minimal pain.

Each step was torture, but the elation still residing in my mind didn't allow me to truly crumble under the pain. It wasn't a pleasurable experience, but there was something about that time of pain and suffering that made me understand why warriors of old valued their scars so much. It was a symbol of suffering and pain, and the price that they'd paid to win. But also, the mark of victory, of 'I won.' The classic 'You should see the other guy.'

My body roared with searing pain, but each step towards Kurosaki clinic was amazing.

It took me far more than an hour, but I managed to make it, following the main streets rather than dawdling like I had been beforehand. The exhaustion was starting to set in as I turned the corner to see the signage of Kurosaki clinic. It took me another minute of painful walking, the rest of my spiritual energy was spent by the time that I made it to the door, the last whisps of energy burning away as I stood at the front door.

I demurely pressed the doorbell and waited, the small chime playing throughout the house as I stood, bleeding on their doorstep. It took surprisingly little time for the door to open, revealing Karin, the woman with the black hair, now down running down her back rather than sitting atop her head in a wild ponytail.

"Who the hell–" her eyes widened comically as she raced around me and pulled me into a bridal carry. I just let her take control, and as soon as she closed the door behind us, she called out to the rest of the house in a loud yell.

It was only five minutes before the rest of the Kurosaki household was downstairs, rushing me into the conjoining emergency room that ran alongside their home. So many things happened in the span of only a few minutes that my tired mind could barely compute the order of events.

At some point, Suzumi showed up, which was nice. She held my hand. But funnily enough, the pain from the wounds had mostly dissipated, even without the use of any painkillers. Though, as I looked down at my body, I couldn't see my wounds anymore. In fact, I they weren't there at all anymore—just lots of drying blood where they used to be.

Oh, that's right, Orihime had used her healing thing. For a fleeting moment, I was actually disappointed that the wounds were gone and that I wasn't going to get scars out of them, but I also wasn't stupid, so I wasn't going to complain.

My mind slowly shut down over the next few hours. I was sure that I was speaking and conversing, but I couldn't tell you what I was talking about. Things would be told to me and they would never quite make it to my brain, the words falling flat against my heavy head.

Over time it just became an exercise of keeping my head upright, though even that became an impossible task soon enough—the weight an ever-increasing burden. Soon enough the darkness took hold, even though my mind was still slowly whirring in the background. It was warm in the darkness, my senses slowly receding as only my mind was left to run on its own, slowly shutting down.

The only thing left, the only sensation that I could pull from the abyss of my mind, was a satisfaction. A satisfaction for finding a reason for my power.

So I could truly fight.


A/N: A massive thanks to my three 10-dollar Patrons; Thomas H., TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! And a gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron Marisa E.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 33: More Involved

Kisuke had been trying to keep the boy away from a true fight.

Phantom had been a close call, though it was unlikely that the Hollow would even bother to fight back against the much weaker Grayson. Kisuke had been worried what a true fight would awaken in the kid, what secrets it might uncover. He had thrown him at boring fight after boring fight, Hollows that even some monks or priests with very little spiritual sensitivity could beat.

Kisuke was almost relieved when Suzumi had told him that Grayson had been savaged by a Hollow, thinking that maybe it'd hamper the boy's progression towards battle, the same path that so many others had followed—even including himself.

But when the boy had come back to the Kisuke's little sweets shop, the illusion was lifted, and Kisuke was left with the reality. Grayson had always felt powerful, despite his actual lack of power, mostly due to his soul being inflated beyond belief. Now, though, Grayson felt sharp.

Kisuke had spent so many years in Soul Society in many different capacities. As a trainee, as an inventor and scientist, as a warden for the deepest pits they could throw people in, as a Court Guard Captain. Kisuke's combat ability, while certainly a cut above the rest, was weak and flimsy in comparison to some of the others. He had manufactured his own power, using new techniques and intellect to bridge the gap between those who's entire being seemed devoted to their martial strength.

In one of the many conversations he'd had with old man Genryusai, most of them being thinly veiled dressing-downs, one of the compliments that he had received from the man had been on his eyes. Not their boring grey colour, of course, but his ability to see things in others before they manifested—whether that was greatness and power, or deep evil. Once, Kisuke had even trusted those eyes fully, though he was more careful now and far less arrogant.

So, when Kisuke had seen Grayson's first fight with Uyu, the little girl beating him to a paste, there was no doubt in his mind. Grayson was a collection of unknowns as vast as the sea he described his soul as—but the way that Kisuke could contain the risk of those unknowns, was to afford Grayson as much control, without actually having practical use of it.

It really didn't matter how physically powerful you were if you'd never fought before. Someone with any practical skill would wipe the floor with you. Kisuke was finding it easier and easier to admit that he was scared of Grayson, and that anyone would be foolish not to be. Kisuke was especially scared of what would happen when Grayson was given a real fight and a real challenge.

He had seen Grayson on that day as a foreign blade, strange and unique, with no clear understanding of how it was supposed to be used. It was unedged—dulled from misuse, travel, and lack of maintenance. However, as Grayson walked into the door of his little store, Kisuke didn't even need to see him to feel the difference.

Grayson had found his blade and sharpened it on the bones of an enemy. He wasn't an expert in it, or even amateur, but having found it at all was enough. The cat was out of the bag, now, and putting it back inside would require killing it.

It didn't take long for Grayson to find him, sitting in the conference room that had been so rarely used before Grayson had arrived. The boy walked in with an exactness that radiated through his being, released from the mire and confusion of finding a purpose that resonated.

"You fought like shit." Kisuke stated without preamble. Grayson grimaced, his stride faltering just a little before he sat himself onto a pillow.

"I know, it was a mess." Grayson agreed, with a little hesitation. At least he wasn't combative about it, as too many were about their own failings.

"We don't know how hardy your body really is against injury and you allowed yourself to take far too much damage. If you do something so stupid again, I'll come and kill you personally." Kisuke's voice rang out with the same one he had developed at a Captain so long ago. It wasn't as impressive as Tessai's own commanding voice, but Kisuke liked to think that his held a certain other quality.

"…that's fair." Grayson said, goosebumps visibly gracing his skin against the icy tones of Kisuke's voice.

"More than fair. In fact, if you were a Soul Reaper trainee, you'd be thrown out before you could even apologise." Kisuke and Grayson let the silence sit for a while. Kisuke's own grey eyes met with Grayson's blue cornea, the mishmash of Japanese and more western features only adding to the effect of his bright eyes.

"So," Grayson began tentatively, "I want to fight more like Hollows like that and–"

"And die a horrible death in the process, allowing to Hollow that killed you access to a soul powerful enough to blow up my machines?" Kisuke interrupted ruthlessly. Grayson opened his mouth to speak in protest again, but Kisuke continued.

"That's how you get yourself actually killed, Grayson. There are more strong Hollows in Karakura town than you think, and if you go around killing anything but the common rabble, they start to get aggressive. I'd have thought your injuries would have taught you a lesson." Grayson, counter to what Kisuke expected, grinned widely.

"It did teach me a lesson. Don't get hit." Grayson laughed at his own joke, but Kisuke saw it deeper than that. While it was a joke, it was also the truth, and it reminded Kisuke of someone else that he'd rather not equate Grayson with. A scary, extremely powerful hoodlum. Kisuke dropped his Captain-ly presence and decided to make it cut and dry.

"You want to fight?" He asked softly, making Grayson's grin fall away, "Then you can fight. I won't stop you or hamper you. But I want you to understand something, Grayson. This is the path of death." The soft words had a much larger effect, Grayson's face returning to it's neutrality and seriousness.

"I know, Kisuke. No-one has told me the stories of Ichigo and his crew, but they walked that line, didn't they?" Grayson asked just as softly, and Kisuke nodded. "How many of the strongest in Soul Society have walked that line, or still walk it?" Kisuke didn't respond, the answer evident. Even he had walked that line, his Bankai training only being one such time.

"And even now, Ichigo Kurosaki is off in some other dimension with the rest of his family, walking that line. Are you going to tell me that the path of death is not also the path of life? That they aren't intermingled in whatever cosmic way they are?" It was a simple sentence, one not more profound than any other that Grayson could have chosen, but it reminded Kisuke of Genryusai. How many times had Kisuke desperately tried to convince the man of that very same thing?

Kisuke's chuckle came to his throat unbidden. It surprised both Kisuke and Grayson so much that it could only escalate from there. As the peals of laughter sprouted from Kisuke's chest, he had a wonderful moment of sonder—like an one thousand piece jigsaw puzzle spontaneously completing itself within his mind. He had been so frustrated with Genryusai during his youth, even though he had afforded much of the stability that Soul Society had to offer, but he was so conservative.

Kisuke had been a trailblazer, establishing scientific divisions and rocking the boat from within, but it'd all come down to whether Genryusai allowed it to happen. Each new idea being shot down had wounded Kisuke, an endless frustration with the man who had restricted him. Now, Kisuke found himself in much the same situation that Genryusai had.

It was a strange feeling, being in the other chair all of a sudden. Now Genryusai made so much more sense, each of his rejected inventions could be used to harm and start wars that would have no positive outcome. Kisuke knew what it was, now. It was the wars that he'd been in, the scars that he'd received in them. They were terrifying apparitions of what could be, constantly looming over his head like a ghost of the past, whispering in his ear to never forget.

Yet Genryusai had been wrong. He'd even admitted as much, from what he'd heard. Ichigo Kurosaki had turned it all of Soul Society on its head, and Genryusai had allowed himself to change as the winds blew in the direction opposite from where he wanted to walk. Now that Kisuke sat here, he realised how terrifying that was for him, giving up his life's ethos for the sake of the world he commanded—all on the whim of one teenage boy.

And here Kisuke was, desperately trying to plug the holes in the dam, just as Genryusai had done.

"Fine." Kisuke said, finally putting an end to his laughter, the young man in front of him barely able to do the same. "You can fight, with backup of course, but you can do it." The words, as the left Kisuke's lips, almost hurt. They made Kisuke's position vulnerable and weak, leaving a feeling of regret in his chest.

"But you'll need to start on some new training, something a little more… involved than what you're currently doing." The grin on Kisuke's face was one he hadn't worn in a long time, lost to a world that had killed all whimsy in the man. Now, it had returned on his face and it felt right, like it should have stayed there all along. Grayson's eyes narrowed and, with a little bob his throat, spoke suspiciously.

"How involved, exactly?"

---

​

"Uh, Kisuke?" I called from within the large metal contraption I'd been put inside. It's outside had looked like a large, metal ball, but the insides were much more complicated looking. I was placed on a large panel of thick metal that acted as elevated flooring above machinery beneath. I was surrounded on all sides, including in an upwards direction, by strange components that were almost reminiscent of tesla coils. Each pointed towards the very centre of the spherical housing, connected to each other by jumbles of wires that clearly weren't strictly organised.

Kisuke didn't respond to my nervous calling, leaving me to flicker my eyes from coil to coil, each protruding rod had a multitude of donut shaped things attached to them. I couldn't identify the materials used, apart from just general plastics or metals, but those materials didn't glow with spiritual energy.

"Yes?" Kisuke answered finally, popping his head out from underneath the elevated platform within the contraption. His face was still filled with that grin that he'd gained in our little conversation.

"Do you mind telling me what the hell this thing is supposed to be?" Kisuke looked at me dumbly for a second, before looking around at the device with a stupid look on his face.

"I dunno, bought it off of Alibaba." And then he disappeared into the belly of the machine once again, my groan the only noise other than a slight chuckle. I waited for a while, hearing the odd clang or sound of some tool or another as Urahara did whatever his mad genius compelled him to do. After a final sound, Kisuke reappeared on the outside of the machine, looking into it towards me with a glint of delight in his eye.

"Are you ready, Grayson?" The man grinned wolfishly at my scandalised expression.

"Ready for what, Kisuke? What the fuck is this thing?" I said, waving an arm wildly around the metal sphere.

"Oh hey, probably don't want to do that. The instruction manual says that they explode if you hit 'em." My arm snapped to my side in an instant, though all I got for my troubles was a grin from the dishevelled man.

"So anyway, I'm going to push the button now. See you in a bit!" Kisuke said, his hand slamming into said button, and making the whole thing whir to live around me, the noise of cooling solutions and buzzing electronics livening the almost dead silent interior.

"Kisuke!" I yelled over the noise, legitimate anger filling my tone, but the hatch that I had walked through to get into the contraption began to lower, as I did. Kisuke followed just under the door with his face filled with humour.

"Don't worry, give me a sec to read the instruction manual!" He called, before the door shut with a clang and silence filled the room for just a moment, letting me hear a rustle of paper from just outside the door.

"Oh shit. It's all in German."

Just as I was about to shout any number of obscenities, the sounds began again, but much louder. I was almost knocked to the ground with their intensity, the sensitivity of my hearing working against me as I stood in the loudest environment I could imagine. It was like standing in a jet engine, but the escalation of sound never stopped, only growing and growing. Each moment felt like the next would be the climax point.

I never heard the end of the crescendo. At a certain point the sound became too painful to bear, even my own screaming felt like nothing as the sound vibrated my body so extremely. I screwed my eyes shut against the pain, the noise, the entire world, letting the darkness of my eyelids soothe my mind and the noise disappeared from my mind completely. Too completely, in fact.

When I reopened my eyes, wondering if Kisuke had turned the machine off, I was instead met with quite the sight.

My eyes were filled an infinite number of stars.


A/N: A massive thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! And a gargantuan thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 34: Motes

"Kisuke…" I called into the dark void around me, eyes wildly scanning my surroundings in a panic, "what the hell did you get me into." I muttered, my voice losing itself against the sheer magnitude of space.

There was total silence around me, the ear destroying noises that had led me into this realm were completely gone now. The silence was reassuring and even relieving for a while, that was until I could begin to hear my own heartbeat in my chest and the blood rushing around my body.

This was an odd place, somewhere between reality and the journey I had into my soul. While I had been inside my own soul, things worked in half measures, more akin to a dream than anything real or substantial. For example, my brain hadn't quite realised that I could see in my own soul, my eyes capable of seeing the horizon of in the distance. Stuff as simple as what clothes I was wearing were only filled in with details after my brain had focused in on them, rather than them existing beforehand.

So this was a strange medium, where I could still feel my training clothes, soft by stiff, rubbing against my skin as I moved slightly, but where the surroundings were so clearly fantastical.

"What do I even do here?" I asked to the void, and surprisingly an answer came back.

"I don't know, you tell me." I whipped my head around to see a golden orb the size of a basketball, resting only five metres from me. I did a double take before it finally sunk into my skull what was going on.

"Grayhom? Why're you here?" I asked dumbly, prompting a scoff out of the other identity.

"Well, I was pulled here just the same as you. Heard a terrible racket just outside the bright waters and I thought I'd go take a look and bam." If the orb had arms, I'm sure he'd be gesticulating with them wildly.

"Ah, sorry about that, Kisuke put me in a machine for training. Good to see you though." Grayhom was about to respond, taking in a superfluous breath, but was interrupted with a thundering voice.

"Testing, testing; one, two, three!" The noise echoed within the void, vibrating my body with the sound as it did. Both Grayhom and I groaned at the same time, somehow sharing the frustration of dealing with Urahara Kisuke.

"Too loud, numbskull!" I called into the void, letting it sit for a moment.

"No need to shout." A voice called from what only felt like a few metres away. I spun around in all directions, trying to find the source but coming to the realisation that it was coming from everywhere.

"Well, that's creepy. I can't say that I enjoy being a disembodied voice in my head. I might need to get that checked out." I said dryly, earning a snort from my other identity. After a small delay, Kisuke made a scandalised sound but didn't do much else, the faint sound of fingers clacking on a keyboard could be heard in the silence.

"So, mind actually explaining what's going on right now?" Grayhom asked out into the void, then I joined him while we looked out into the void, waiting for the answer.

"Well, your simple minds wouldn't understa–"

"Skip!" I yelled, cutting the man off after a word or two more, Grayhom chuckled loudly to my right.

"Why I never!" Urahara exclaimed, but sighed after a moment, "Fine. I've basically forced your mind to go into a state of meditation, much like the bigger and bulkier machines that Soul Society use to help others get in touch with their Zanpakutō. Instead of helping the Zanpakutō's spirit materialise, I just made your brain open a link and do the heavy lifting for you. I'm glad it worked the first time."

I had listened to that whole explanation with a reasonable amount of interest, but as soon as the last phrase was spoken, both Grayhom and I spoke at once.

"The first time?" Both of our voices chimed in unison, and Kisuke's voice paused for a second.

"That's really creepy that you're basically the same person, y'know? I could probably help you get rid of–" I cut him off, a little anger reaching my voice now.

"Kisuke. What the fuck."

"God, calm down a little, would you? You're the only test subject I had, and plus, Tessai and I can talk to our Zanpakutō's whenever we want! It's not as if the likelihood of permanent brain injury is all that high." Grayhom and I simultaneously sighed, apparently sharing the same set of responses when it comes to Kisuke.

"Anyway, what did you want out of me doing this, anyway?" I asked, but Grayhom tacked on his own thoughts.

"Like, I appreciate being able to interact with Grayson and all but ending up as a soul in a braindead body isn't high on the to-do list."

"Well," Kisuke began, his voice a little more serious now, "all of this is really an exercise in seeing if the same principles that apply to us also apply to you. Also, this device would be considered a massive breakthrough in the field. I'm not sure that even Mayuri has come close to perfecting this sort of technology, and I've minimised the size of the machine from a large building down to a small sphere."

"You're intending on giving this tech up to the Soul Reapers?" I asked, but immediately received my answer.

"No, I'm not. For the moment I'm only using this on people that have super advanced Gigai or real bodies lying around somewhere. The technology that is required to affect someone's spiritual body is slightly different, but I should be able to figure it out. Being able to force this great of a connection could potentially mean that you can brute force someone's training post-Bankai." I scrunched my eyebrows up, but Grayhom got to the question faster.

"So, you don't think that the regular Soul Reaper could find much use out of this?" The confusion was evident. We both knew so little about the actual training processes for Soul Reapers, making it hard to actually put it into perspective.

"No. Most regular Soul Reapers have very underdeveloped Zanpakutō spirits. While those spirits are technically fully formed, they are more like a wire mesh that consists of the form that they take should the soul that they are bonded with actually gain that level of strength. It's what makes hopping from Shikai to Bankai so impressive, because it just means that the power was already there, in some fashion."

"If you forcibly dragged out the Zanpakutō spirit from their Inner World, it'd be a mess?" I asked finally.

"Sort of. The Soul Reaper needs to find the power themselves sometimes, especially when it comes to finding the spirit's name. Every time someone thinks they've found a subversion to that rule, things go horribly wrong. Either way, it's more useful for those who've already achieved Bankai and are searching for further power beyond that, which some Zanpakutō's are known to have."

That left Grayhom and I in a thoughtful state. It was a weird thing, to be sitting not five metres from a version of yourself, both likely thinking remarkably similar, if not the same thoughts. Grayhom broke the silence first, voice quiet with a pondering tone.

"What do we do now?" But Kisuke was silent. The silence dragged on for what felt like seconds and minutes at the same time, and it became obvious that we weren't going to receive an answer. I nodded my head, understanding the message that Kisuke had decided to send.

"Let's go walking then, I guess." I said, before stretching my leg out and walking gracefully through the void with Grayhom floating beside me, trailing me by only a little bit. It was a calming experience, despite its surreal nature, and the astonishing multitude of stars within the void intrigued the mind easily.

I couldn't tell what they were, really, though they had many different colours and sizes, the brightness being somewhat variable even then.

"What do you think they are?" I asked my other identity, and he took a long time to answer.

"I can't be sure, but I think they are parts of us." I rose an eyebrow, waiting for him to continue, "I think we're in the dark waters of our soul, far enough out of the bright waters for both of us to be comfortable with being here. It's the middle ground of our soul." Realisation washed over me subtly.

"And if our soul wasn't so bloated, we'd probably be sitting in a dead space, or be forced into the Inner World that all the Soul Reapers talk about." For whatever reason, the abstract soul stuff was pretty easy to understand on an instinctual level, maybe partly because of Grayhom's influence. Like I probably am for him when it comes to Kisuke or outside world things.

"Should we… try to do something with them?" I asked, but received the closest thing to a shrug as the glowing ball could mimic.

"I don't know if we even can. Plus, we need the compression from you using the blackhole technique, remember?" I hummed thoughtfully. I hadn't used the technique much since I'd first compressed my soul, but it'd probably be understandable if I gave it another shot. Or I'd be rudely awoken to Kisuke stabbing me.

"Gimmie a sec." I said while quickly sitting in space, my upper body staying still while my legs folded underneath me, and I focused my mind. It didn't take long for me to fall back into the mind space of the blackhole technique, having ownership over everything actually was quite an easy mentality to encourage, though I knew I had to be careful with it.

In only a few moments, I could feel the spiritual energy being drawn towards myself, quickly sucking the immediate area around me completely dry. Thankfully, I was already ninety percent full with spiritual energy, even after the big fight a day ago, so it didn't take long for the pressure to start rising.

At first, nothing seemed to be happening within this space, even though I was definitely pushing more and more spiritual energy into my relatively large reserves. I was almost ready to call it quits when Grayhom called something I didn't quite comprehend in my meditation.

"Holy damn, that's a sight." He said, forcing me to open one eye to take a peek. Right before my eyes, every light within the void was shifting, and fast. They moved closer and closer to each other before sparks began to fly between the sources of light.

"Stop, Grayson." Grayhom said, as he saw the stars begin to arc spiritual energy between them as they drew closer and closer. "Grayson! Stop!"

With a jolt, I forced myself out of the blackhole technique, and letting some of the spiritual energy leak out of my body. The motes of light in the void of my soul slowly separated again, the reactions between them lessening until they finally quieted, sitting across from each other without the fanfare.

"What was that man?" I asked, but Grayhom just made a squeaking noise.

"Whatever it was, you were too good at the whole compression thing. Why is it so much more powerful while you're in here?" He questioned, but just as he did, the answer hit us mutually.

"Because we're both here." We said in unison, voices being almost exactly the same other than a def definitive tweaks.

"So, doing stuff with the soul is just easier because we're both here?" Grayhom asked again, but I furrowed my brow with confusion.

"Why wasn't it the same when I was down with you in the bright waters." I asked, and Grayhom hummed with thought.

"Well, probably because we weren't on equal footing. You were a visitor in my domain, just like how I'd probably be pretty useless if I somehow made it to the surface without us both dying." We both pondered for a moment before I spoke up again, sly smile on my face.

"You know, it really is creepy that we both know each other's questions and answers before we even say them."

"I was just thinking the exact same thing."

We chuckled heartily for a while at our own bad joke, but before long we were just left with the possibilities. With this sort of power over our own soul, we could get so much more done than the little bit of soul compression here and there. We could become substantially more powerful in a fraction of the time, and possibly even open up new doorways. The think was, that because I didn't have a fully functional soul, I couldn't tell what doorways were closed to me in the first place.

I turned to the golden basketball beside me, knowing that he was thinking almost exactly the same thing, and grinned.

"Looks like we have a whole lot of work to do." I said eventually.

"Bah, you think pulling in all that spiritual energy is going to be work? Try putting together the infinitely complex Lego set that is a soul." I snorted, rolling my eyes.

"Infinitely complex might be overselling it a little." I had the distinct impression that Grayhom was lifting both eyebrows.

"Wanna bet, idiot?"


A/N: Thank you to my two 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 35: Silver

It took me all of a few hours to realise that I was, indeed, an idiot.

Souls are way more complex than I had even conceived of. They were a concept that was so easy to break down into simple terms, not too dissimilar to a computer. There was a motherboard and all the different component technologies worked off of that motherboard, adding additional functionality to the greater system. In a way, the mind was the software, the operating system that gave the user access to the cold metal of the hardware, the soul.

It was why someone could probably go their entire life without realising that they are extremely spiritually sensitive, that is until their software is forced to comply with the reality of their hardware.

All this is so easy to say and theorise about, but as soon as I actually set hands on the building blocks of it, I realised that it was so much more complex than that. As I tinkered with the grand Lego set of my own soul, I came to understand just why Kisuke was how he was about soul editing and creating new souls like the Mayuri guy was doing.

I had no doubt in my mind that the soul itself was one of the most complex systems in the known universe, and the fact that someone could be so arrogant as to believe that they were smarter than whatever process had created the soul was astounding to me now.

Though who else but those arrogant enough would even try.

It seems that creating ways to interface with a soul has become pretty standardised. Soul Reapers had their Zanpakutō, Quincies had gotten all weird after their Progenitor was killed, but they still had their ways, and there were a few others around the place that seemed similar—though I couldn't be bothered to try and drag it out of Kisuke.

Trying to put together even one piece of my soul was mind bogglingly difficult, trying to imagine creating an entirely new soul from scratch the way that Mayuri had, one that was a legitimate being by every right, was just astounding.

It didn't take long for Grayhom to take the reins on the soul stuff again, and for me to take the reins on the blackhole technique. Turns out Grayhom is just as shit at spiritual energy manipulation as I was with soul manipulation.

We had a long time to theorise why that was within my soul, being that there was effectively no measure of time in here. The consensus we came to was pretty simple, in terms of the prior computer analogy. We were both identities, and a soul is only really meant to have one of them, those that have two are either Hollows or added after the fact. But we are one and the same but separate identities, nonetheless.

So essentially, we're both relegated to our own areas of the soul, one of us maintaining the grip over 'software' management, and the other over 'hardware' management.

If you think about it long enough, it starts to sound extremely powerful. It's the reason that Soul Reapers are more powerful than a regular human with tonnes of spiritual energy. The Zanpakutō's spirit manages the hardware of their soul, though nowhere near the scale that Grayhom and I are capable of. At least not normally.

None of this changed the fact that working with something as delicate and complex as a soul was mind numbingly difficult and tedious. While the early stages were almost easy, we quickly realised that we were picking the low hanging fruit. It was the difference between the no-brainer building blocks of a house and the fiddly accoutrements of each individual room, one being obvious and the other almost a form of abstract self-expression.

As such, the process began to slowly grind to a halt, where no matter how much spiritual energy I sucked in from the outside world, Grayhom wasn't capable of doing the ridiculously complicated math fast enough.

To be fair to the man, we'd managed to increase our spiritual reserves once again by a massive margin. It hadn't doubled, but it'd gotten close. It was getting to the point now that I was going to be genuinely annoying to procure so much spiritual energy to fill my reserves with between massive expenditures like a fight.

The sheer accumulation of spiritual energy I'd need would take hours to refill my reserve, but I knew that this was just another disparity between what I am and the Soul Reapers. By all accounts, I was still a normal human with the label of high-spec slapped on. But with spiritual energy reserves being almost entirely too massive for just any regular human to have—without decades of intense training no less—I was only differentiating myself further.

"What now?"

I forget who it was that asked, between me or Grayhom. In here we were more than separate identities, we were more closely intertwined than we'd ever been.

"We continue." The answer was. And so we did, irrespective of time. The passage of it was almost never pulled into question, tasks more important at hand than counting the seconds within this space.

The answer for our difficulties became obvious in that time. The rigid nature of our thought processes was withholding us more than we'd thought—so clearly sectioning off our responsibilities was cutting down our potential enormously. Such was the difficulties of teamwork, and the major downside of our multiple identities.

So instead of simply launching ourselves at this wall with impunity, we decided to both teach and learn. We ignored the temptation of the stars that surrounded us, glittering and begging to be put to use in truth—to function along with the rest of our soul in harmony—yet that wasn't the right use of our time.

We sat across from each other and just talked at first. Despite knowing so much between ourselves, we lived in inverted worlds to each other and that made for a lot of things we didn't understand about each other's reality.

The upside was that we are both entirely native to our own world, with my understanding of the mind and the physical, of the software that allows us to experience more, and with Grayhom's understanding of the soul, of the energy within and the machinery that makes up what we are.

It was a synchronisation point, being left to only interact with one another, my only company being myself and Grayhom. It separated me from the idea of power, of the fighting. It separated him from the idea of fixing a broken soul, of repairing what we hadn't had in the first place. Here it was all about understanding.

The world galvanised around us as our understanding of each other, and ourselves, grew rapidly. Two waif thin ribbons meandered out of our incorporeal bodies, slowly seeking each other blindly, neither of us bothered to comment on them. The conversation devolved, not even speaking any longer. It wasn't telepathy that we used to communicate, because it was deeper than that. Regardless of the brain being the vessel of thought, each word and action reflected on the soul, and so we just communicated through the ones and zeroes of our mutual hardware.

The tiny ribbons finally found each other and, within moments, had found themselves tied in a knot connected as solidly as they could be for now. The next actions were simple and didn't need comment to accomplish.

The blackhole technique was enacted once again in full force, Grayhom was no longer left behind without understanding it either. He could see my mind, how I organised the world around me into boxes, and then watched as I labelled them as mine.

In concert, he organised his own identity to understand the inside world as ours as well, pulling our actions into consistency. The change was immediate and noticeable, with the spiritual energy happy to be herded like cattle, and the motes of light that represented the parts of our soul taking much a similar stance.

There was no single piece of the soul that commanded ultimate control, only modules and pieces. Each piece held as little reasoning or intelligence as any other, and none of which had the capability of truly restraining itself from wanting to be part of the greater soul, even if doing so would be destructive.

So as Grayhom's mind began to whirr, mapping out the countless pieces left to rot in the dark waters, my own mind worked in concert with his. Instead of manually testing each and every piece of the puzzle, brute forcing our way through the colossal task, I lent my own grasp over the mind to Grayhom.

Software and hardware, integrating in a complexity I couldn't possibly begin to express. The conversation between us had accelerated to a speed that would be incomprehensible otherwise, using the abstract thinking of the mind together with the raw computational power of the soul.

Things clicked into place with a veracity that we only continued to refine, the pieces of the soul were commanded in place, and they moved to our whim. The spiritual energy pushed as hard or as softly as we pleased, everything was under our control.

The dark waters shrank, being subsumed by the golden soul that we had cultivated. As we did so, Grayhom grew beside me, assuming a true humanoid form and as we continued his form only became more defined.

Yet, even though we had every inclination that we'd be able to complete our soul, something stopped us.

It wasn't our lack of spiritual energy, or the lack of understanding. We both knew where the next piece should be placed, we had the pressure to do so, by every metric it was possible. But regardless, the piece didn't budge, even if it so desperately tried to swim forward into the place we'd created for it in our soul.

Something was holding it back, like a fishhook in the mouth of a fish desperate to get away. Again and again, we tried, but there was no making it budge. In time, we had no choice but to go and investigate ourselves.

The downsides of creating an actualised space within a soul is that you also capture the reality of just how large a soul really is. Though it might not actually be that large, if scaled to legitimate standards of physical measurement, the true surface area of the soul would decimate the earth's own surface area by a wide margin, nonetheless.

We raced across the golden surface, the bright waters having now been solidified into golden stone and crystal, the dark waters still plentiful enough to fill the crevasses and valleys of our golden soul. The trip felt like both days and minutes long at the same time, the strange dilation of time fluctuating with each step we both took forwards.

But the strange fluctuations were wiped from our thoughts as we arrived where that stubborn piece was located, though even that was unimportant.

It was there that we found a ribbon. Our ribbon. I don't know what I had expected when I saw my own ribbon, but the gargantuan pillar of bright silver was not it. I'm not sure that I actually expected to see it at all.

However, now that we had encountered the ribbon, it shrunk from the massive pillar into a small line of silver floating in the air above a tall mountain of gold crystal. We journeyed towards it with hesitation, but as we reached the foot of that mountain, we realised that there was no way we could possibly climb it, even within our own soul where our power was strongest.

We tried to slot the piece in once again, but we were denied, the top of the mountain flashing with a power that coursed over the gold crystal and smacked us with pure force, sending both of us flying away from the foot of the mountain.

I tried to push against the power, which was strangely also my power, but only succeeded in plipping end over end with Grayhom trying to do the same. The wave of power didn't stop pushing, however, sending me hurtling further than Grayhom, into the darkness of the now waterless cavity surrounding my mostly formed soul.

My vision blurred as I spun faster and faster through the air before slamming into a wall of some sorts and opening my already open eyes. The act of which broke my brain a little for a moment, but when I finally took in my surroundings, I realised that the blast had been a little more than just localised within my own soul.

The machine that Kisuke had built was now rubble, mixed with a fair amount of the shattered rock and detritus from the Study Room's terrain. I looked around wildly, to see Kisuke sitting on the ground with a magazine held on one of its edges, obscuring his face.

"Uh, Kisuke?" I called hesitantly, and the man peaked from behind the magazine. I was getting ready to apologise, but the magazine was rolled up and summarily thrown at me, smacking me on the head with enough force to make me reel back for a second.

"Yeah, yeah, no need for the boot licking. The thing was meant to be destroyed, the entire buildings that do the same thing routinely explode, so to expect anything different would be foolish." He got up from his spot on the ground and brushed off his inverted Captain's cloak and walked over to me, picking the magazine up from the ground.

"What I really want to know, is what you've been doing that requires multiple refills of both Tessai and I's spiritual energy reserves."


A/N: Thank you to my two 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 36: Soul Freedom

Suzumi had been spending increasingly long amounts of time being worried recently, which was hardly a surprise.

Grayson had been getting himself into all sorts of trouble as of late, the hellish cycle of training being only the start of her anxieties. He had gone from that insane training straight into a massive beatdown with a Hollow, one that Yuzu and Karin had help purify and had relayed that information back to her.

That Hollow had been powerful, far more powerful than she could have handled alone. She would have put up a good fight, but it would have killed her at some point. Grayson, however, had torn the thing to shreds while his body was being savaged at the same time.

Suzumi didn't know if she had that in her, that same pure drive to fight that Grayson had seemingly found there, with that Hollow.

It was strange. The ways they had started to develop in the beginning had made her think that she'd be the one more competent in battle, more willing to beat something to a pulp as savagely as possible. Grayson had assumed a cat and mouse fighting style that had made her think that he'd always be defensive and patient.

But the way that Karin had described that Hollow's body… that was far from defensive, and it left her in the dust.

"Miss Hamase." The gentle but still thunderous voice of Tessai filled the room, reminding her of his presence. She sighed as she rubbed at her forehead, giving the man an apologetic smile as she looked at him over the coffee table that many a conversation had been held around.

"I'm sorry Tessai, I'm just a bit out of it today." The stoic man pulled the glasses from his face, as he did occasionally, and pulled a small microfibre cloth from his pocket and cleaned the lenses efficiently.

"That is quite alright. I know how it feels to be separated from one you love and respect and worry for them." He smiled sadly, the genuine expression breaking past his calm façade. Suzumi felt a question boil to the surface, one that she'd held and kept to herself for months at this point, but only now found the right time to ask it.

"You and Kisuke. Are you…?" She said, trailing off with the implication. Grayson had never asked, and he didn't even seem to notice the possibility. She had never claimed her boyfriend to be anything but a little daft.

"Ah, we are not." The large man said with a hint of amusement. Suzumi made to apologise, but he shook his head gently, "It's quite alright. Many assume that we are partners, but we are simply men who have found our lives inextricably tied together. For better and for worse."

"That sounds a lot like marriage, Tessai." Suzumi said, allowing a little amusement to make its way onto her face with her ribbing of the man. Tessai grinned as well, a very uncommon expression on the man.

"I believe I could to a fair bit better than Kisuke." Suzumi almost snorted up a sip of tea that she'd taken but managed to keep it down. "Regardless, he has found who he loves, even if they are hard pressed to show it."

"Wait, Kisuke has a wife?" Tessai chuckled warmly.

"If only. They don't even consider themselves a couple, even if its painfully obvious that they care deeply for each other." Tessai sipped from his tea as Suzumi thought.

"What about yourself?"

"What of me?" Tessai asked, playing hard to get. Suzumi fixed him with a glare, and after a moment he cracked. "I simply have found none who hold my interest. It also so happens that talk of kidō bores many to tears."

"Hey! I find it interesting." Suzumi proclaimed, but Tessai rose a decisive eyebrow. "I only fell asleep once…" With a wry expression, Tessai moved to instead sit with crossed legs, rather than kneeling on the pillow like he usually did.

"Maybe one day I will find someone as interested int eh art as I. The only others I have met who were as interested were of the Royal Guards, and they stand a little out of my league. The rest are men." Suzumi scrunched her eyebrows together in thought.

"The Royal Guards are the ones that guard the Soul King, right?" Tessai nodded, "Why wouldn't you be in their league? Kisuke said, like, multiple times that you were probably the best kidō wielder alive. You don't even need to use your Zanpakutō you're that good!" Suzumi's praise was not lost on the behemoth of a man. The two ways to really get Tessai blushing was to praise his kidō or his work, both of which Suzumi did as often as possible.

"Maybe so." Tessai said finally, his cheeks cartoonishly rosy, "However, I do not use my Zanpakutō for more reasons than being powerful enough without it." While Suzumi found herself wanting to ask more, she was able to withhold her questioning. The man's tone was sad and closed off. Apparently having a difficult relationship with a Zanpakutō was possible.

"You find yourself in a place of difficulty, Miss Hamase." Tessai intoned, the surety in his voice brooking no argument from the girl in question. Suzumi sighed heavily, letting her head rest on the coffee table with a thunk.

"I don't know, Tessai." She said softly, her words almost mournful, "He's always getting stronger now. I walked down to the Study Room earlier today and could barely breathe in there, the spiritual energy was so dense." She turned her head upright, so she was resting on her chin, looking at Tessai with confused eyes.

"How can I possibly keep up with that? How can I help him if he blazes past me no matter what I do?"

The tall, tanned man looked into her eyes for a long moment, taking a sip of tea and then pushing his glasses up the bridge of his powerful nose.

"You ask for help, Miss Hamase." He let the words rest in the air for just a moment before continuing, "You and Grayson have been progressing at an excellent rate, far past what we had originally projected for your growth. However, yes; Grayson is now much more powerful than you. There is the distinct possibility that he always will be just ahead of you." Each word beat on Suzumi's conscience, only confirming what she knew was true still hurt in its own dull fashion.

"But you now have something that Grayson does not. You have connections that you have forged and maintained, rather than Grayson who has simply met with those people once or twice. You even met with the team of high-spec humans that Grayson saved that day. You have far more potential than you give yourself credit for, and there are still options for you to consider." Tessai paused for a long time, merely looking at the girl opposite him in the same way he had looked at so many others in his days as Captain of the Kidō Corps. So many young men and women who had lost their way with their power, lost confidence in their potential to find it.

"All you must do, is ask." He felt the word echo within his mind, thousands of past versions of himself saying those exact words to countless Soul Reapers.

Suzumi felt it too, the surety in the words the same as they always have been. Tessai did not lie, nor say anything without complete confidence. It's what made the man so ridiculously trustworthy, too easy to believe on the drop of a hat. Suzumi sighed deeply, her body deflating with the loss of confidence that led her to ask the question at all.

"What do I do so I can get stronger?"

---

"This is experimental Kidō arts. It is a concept that I've been working on for hundreds of years now and may work on still for the rest of my existence. This is the first time I am showing it in full, even Kisuke has only seen much of this in parts."

Suzumi looked to the massive circle on the ground, filled with characters and symbols that hurt to even try and conceptualise. Spiritual energy hummed with a quiet intensity in this room, below Tessai's sleeping quarters.

"What is it?" She asked, a little unnerved. Tessai walked gracefully around the sprawling mass of characters and lines, his eyes scanning them for any perceived error.

"It is something I am calling the Soul Freedom Ceremony." Tessai intoned, the pure seriousness of his voice reverberating with the hum of spiritual energy in the room. "The soul is a powerful construct, something that Grayson is coming to understand now as he slowly rebuilds his own. However, the regular soul has been limited by the Chain of Fate."

Suzumi swallowed, wonder just what she'd gotten herself into. She knew about the Chain of Fate, something that was obvious on the Plusses that were slowly hollowfying, the horrifying mouthed chain eating itself in a self-destructively, the cause of the transition into a Hollow.

"We have always believed ourselves tied to this chain; Soul Reapers possessing one, even if it isn't visible. However, Hollows are beings that survive without, and with the advent of Arrancars it only makes me believe that it's truly possible to live without."

"Uh, that's cool. I mean, isn't that supposed to be where a lot of power comes from? Didn't you say that it was an antenna for spiritual energy when you taught us this stuff?" Tessai didn't look up from the circle of mind-boggling spiritualism. Occasionally the man would bend or crouch to examine something closer, and rarely the man would edit the existing characters, making the whole things hum much louder.

"Indeed I did, and I did not lie." He stood from his crouched position and looked directly at the nervous girl, standing close to the door like a scared child. "However, it is our limiter. It confines us to the way we were born, disallowing our own soul from breaking past that limit without some outside help. It dictates that those born with power are to remain with power." Tessai stood taller than he ever had before in that moment a sudden air of exacting importance surrounded him, swirling like a pool of spiritual energy.

"This is Soul Freedom. This relieves us from the need of an intervening factor. Zanpakutō's are simply one path to push back against the chains that bind us all. Quincies utilised the power gifted to them by Yhwach, the Father of Quincies. Visards shrug the chains further with the risk of hollowfying themselves and risking Soul Suicide. We use Kidō to utilise the power we have to push against those chains even further, striving to understand the bindings and limitations so that we may best defy them" Tessai walked to a closet in the corner of the room, forcing Suzumi's eyes away from the terrifying ritual circle in the centre of it.

The room outside of that circle was filled with books, drawings, tools, and god knows what else. The walls were filled with diagrams so complex that Suzumi couldn't even read a line of the text despite it all being in Japanese. She was standing int eh room where a man's magnum opus was to be born, and she was a simple layman.

Tessai looked inside the open closet and smiled gently, pulling a long, flowing robe from its confines. It was a spectacular thing, a rich, royal blue trimmed in gold. There was a gorgeous crest that fanned out at the neck of the robe, just adding to the air of importance that the one wearing it held.

Tessai closed his eyes for only a moment, and suddenly he was dressed in a set of black robes, not too dissimilar from Suzumi and Grayson's own training clothes, except it was an entirely black affair with a white undershirt and sash around his waist. The man threw the robe over his shoulders and slipped into the arms of it, then turning to walk towards Suzumi with a purposeful stride.

"Uh, Tessai?" Suzumi said quietly, "Why are there two of you?" The man had indeed split into two, one which was still standing in front of the closet, and the Tessai that was walking towards the circle.

"That is my Gigai, not my true body. This is the true, spiritual body that we hide within these Gigai, though we have little reason to anymore." He explained calmly. Suzumi had to admit, the new getup suited Tessai and even made her slightly nervous in his presence. It was only now that she began to realise just how true Kisuke's words were, that Tessai was one of the most powerful kidō users alive.

"The chains, no matter how we try, bind us still. Only those who have been given more chain to work with, or those who are exceptionally lucky, do they ever move to accommodate more than what has been prescribed to them. Thus, we are left with no choice but to remove the chains ourselves."

"If you agree to this, you will be the first human without limits, without boundaries. You will be the first to ascend past what even Soul Reapers are capable of, in our finality. You will find Soul Freedom"


A/N: Thank you to my three 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque, Christian P., and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my three 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Benjamin V.E., and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

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[Sarius]

"Kisuke," my voice droned frustratedly, "for the last time, what are you doing?"

Kisuke stopped and looked back at me for a moment, turning away from the numerous cages of Hollows, all of which were railing against their seemingly indestructible prisons. I caught a sly grin on the man's face, his had shadowing his eyes with a calculated precision.

"Oh, you know, nothing much. Just preparing the next leg of your training." I squinted my eyes, as if I were looking into a bright light, the mental anguish Kisuke's answers caused were something I'd almost consider on par with a kidō ability.

"And what, exactly, is this training?" Kisuke chuckled darkly as he turned back to the crates and started ticking things off in an invisible list that always seemed to be floating near the man. I waited, as patiently as you could be when dealing with Kisuke, and when the man finally returned his gaze to me, his words were laden with an answer.

"Nothing special or sophisticated. You'll be fighting." I recoiled a little, looking towards the array of cages and then back to the candy store owner.

"Didn't you say literally a few days ago that fighting lots of strong Hollows messes with things?" He waved a dismissive hand at me, sneer sliding onto his face with a practiced ease.

"Of course I did! I'm gambling, young Grayson. Plus, if you succeed in the training, you'll be the one who has to clean up the mess." I just sighed, letting the man get on with his esoteric plans.

I had told all about the whole experience in my soul with Grayhom, which had been harder to explain than I thought it'd be. It was like when you had a dream and it all made sense when it was happening, but when you tried to vocalise the order of events, it all came out like a story you half remembered, and you had to fill the misremembered portions with saying 'or something like that.'

Thankfully, Kisuke was good at this sort of thing, and this time there was a distinct lack of threats or intimidation. As odd as the sudden switch in position that Kisuke had seemed to undergo, it was strangely nice and reassuring to have the man be on my side—truly on my side, that is. Instead of feeling like he has a vague interest in what I am and is more interested in containing any potential damage that I may or may not be capable of in future. Though, if my little power boost was anything to go by, we're starting to lean towards my being capable of quite a lot in future.

Looking back, I had lamented on my supposedly 'strong' soul not having any benefit, or those benefits being out of my reach for the moment, but little did I know how much that would change. Now, after Grayhom and I had spent our time doing some DIY soul work, my spiritual energy reserves had become immense.

Kisuke had given me a relatively quick rundown on how Soul Society classed spiritual energy, the non-scientific way of course. The tiers went as follows; Below Average-class, Average-class, Lieutenant-class, Captain-class, Advanced Captain-class, Beyond Capitan-class.

Kisuke made it clear that each class was more or less fluid in how they were understood and perceived, shifting with the power level of the era, rather than having any real concrete basis from which they sprouted. Other than Below Average-class and Average-class because they never changed all that significantly.

I sat at around Lieutenant-class, apparently, sitting right in the middle of that specific category. Kisuke went on briefly about how that might've been an insult to my spiritual energy reserves fifty years ago, but now Lieutenant-class beings were at least as strong as a mid-level Captain-class from back then.

I was comfortable with that, at the moment, mostly because I knew I was going to grow, and that there were certainly more fights out there to be had above this level. Ichigo Kurosaki, according to Kisuke, had reached Captain-class within only a handful of months, or even quicker than that if you're going by exact timelines and technicalities.

I might not be quite that impressive, but if Kisuke was telling me that I had the strongest soul he'd ever recorded, I have a feeling it won't stay that way for very long.

"Alright!" Kisuke exclaimed, clapping his hands together loudly in front of my face, waking me from my reverie. "We begin training in only a moment, Grayson. You might want to prepare for this one."

The suspicion hit me immediately, but I tentatively began to cycle my spiritual energy through my body, easily filling out my spiritual shielding and bodily enhancement—a much easier task when you have a veritable tidal wave of spiritual energy to throw at the problem.

"How should I be preparing, exact–" Kisuke didn't wait for me to complete my sentence, roughly grabbing me by the collar of my training shirt and pushing off from the ground with a blistering speed. I felt the g-forces pull at my skin, even with all the enhancement I had added to my body.

Suddenly, the amount of light that surrounded me had diminished severely, only coming from above me and then even that slowly left too, leaving only a light connected to where Kisuke was in relation to me. In only another moment, with the distinctive feeling of Kisuke's nigh instant movement, the scruffy blonde man threw me down to the ground. The stone underneath my body was searingly hot in comparison to the usual climate of the conditioned Study Room, making me jump to my feet and use the sandals to protect myself from the hotplate-like surface.

"Here we are! Your new little training area." Kisuke looked around the circular space with mock cheer, then looking upwards towards the oppressive height of the walls around me, even as they disappeared into darkness before they even reached hundreds of metres. Que the realisation that Kisuke had thrown me into a massively deep hole.

"Are you seriously putting me in a hole right now?" I said, tone disbelieving as I tried to fathom if I'd be able to get out of this hole with my physical abilities. By sheer virtue of the fact that I couldn't even see the top of the hole, or even sense any light shining down from the surface, I suspected that I couldn't, probably not even close.

"Only a little one, a few kilometres or so at most." I stared at the grinning man dumbly. My sight had improved due to fixing up my soul, just like it had the first time I'd done so, but my eyesight was nothing in comparison to his hole unless I spontaneously developed the ability to see in complete lack of light.

"Please tell me that you're leaving me down here with a light." I stated stonily, but the man didn't even seem to notice, turning around the wide area, tapping his finger to his chin almost mockingly.

"So, the plan is that you have to fight your way out of here. See those little holds on the wall?" Kisuke pointed to tiny little footholds that extended out from the wall by only a few centimetres, though they weren't made from the dark rock that the walls were made of, instead looking more like a metal peg than anything.

"You'll be making your way up those to larger platforms that have a Hollow on them. You'll have to fight and win against them to progress up the hole. The higher you go, the more difficult the Hollows will be to deal with. If you get pushed off, you'll fall to the bottom of the hole, so you might not want to be pushing the Hollows of their own platforms, unless you're confident you can do the whole thing in one go."

Kisuke hummed to himself in thought after the long explanation, looking to me for any other questions briefly.

"Are you going to leave me a ligh–" Kisuke's eyes widened with remembrance, clapping his hands together loudly.

"Oh! That reminds me, I'm going to be covering you in spiritual pressure, so you actually have a hard time with all this. Otherwise, it'd probably be a bit of a cakewalk, I'm afraid." Kisuke nodded finally, before his body disappeared, leaving be to be battered by a gentle wave of displaced air while I spontaneously had an aneurism.

Because I was left in complete darkness, given no light to see by.

"Could have left me with a light, asshole!" I yelled, my rage echoing up the length of the hole, the sound becoming more distant as it travelled before it was nothing more than a garbled mess of muttering sound.

I rubbed at my face furiously, desperate to try and figure out what I was supposed to be doing. I was left with absolutely no sight, something that I'd always had at least a little of except in the darkest environments. My increase in sight, one of the things that I was excited about with fixing my soul, was now rendered completely useless as a result. All I had was my other senses and vague instructions on what I was meant to be doing.

I quickly decided that I needed to orient myself. I walked to the nearest part of the wall and placed a hand against the surface, immediately I was taught just how bad an idea that was. Without significant protections to my hands, I was left with a strong searing sensation. Though my enhancement was enough to withstand a large amount of the heat, this was vastly different than the sort of heat I might deal with on the surface, aside from sticking my hand in a frying pan or a vat of fry oil.

It took me a few minutes to redirect some of the enhancement to my hand, allowing me the chance to actually touch the walls without feeling like I was cooking my own flesh. I circled around the wall in a clockwise motion, sticking as close to it as I could bear, trying to feel out where the first metal peg had been.

The area was way bigger than I had initially given it credit for, most of the space had been totally subsumed by the overpowering height of the walls dwarfing the space. But when my waist finally bumped into what I could only assume was the metal peg, I instantly reached my hand down to touch it.

A massive mistake.

Really, I should have been able to put two and two together, but apparently, I was off my game today. Despite my hand being enhanced much further than normal, the metal peg was acting like the equivalent to a curling iron as my skin literally sizzled at the touch. I didn't scream, but the pain was enough to force me to stand completely still for a few seconds, just clenching my jaw against it.

I wouldn't give Urahara the satisfaction of hearing the echo of my scream, the dog.

So, it was clearly made this way to force me to step on them, however the fuck I was supposed to do that in complete darkness. I stood before the task with a trepidation that I hadn't felt in a long while, not since the beginning of training at least.

I had always been good at getting a move on, even if it was a self-destructive cycle, yet this was scary to me. It was like standing at the foot of a mountain… Ah. Well, that was a little on the nose don't you think, Kisuke?

I took a deep breath in and opened my mind, letting a pseudo meditative state take over and clear my senses and mind of how overwhelmed I was. It was easier said than done, but the calming effect allowed for my other, weaker senses to slowly make an appearance.

Spiritual senses had been something I'd worked on idly, though I'd lost a lot of the use for the technique since my eyesight had begun to return as I tinkered with my soul. Now, they seemed extremely appealing once again, the sheer utility of not needing to see to be able to see was a massive upside, dwarfing my ribbon sense in everyday utility.

It was starting to become obvious that all these points of design were likely intentional by Kisuke, the man might not have given me much in the way of hints, but everything had some reasonable point to it.

The pure darkness he'd plunged me in was a direct counterargument to me getting complacent with my biggest advantage, my versatile and powerful senses. The Hollows going up the hole were probably just to show me how unending fighting the way I wanted to was, the suppressive spiritual energy that I'm sure I would start to encounter further up only increasing the difficulty as I got tired and slowly waned in power. The pegs… I wasn't sure of what their purpose was just yet, but they probably had a reason, if nothing more than to just make life harder and to show me just how painful each step up the ladder could be.

But it was with all that in mind that I made my first leap, my mind opening up my spiritual senses and sending out a ping. The peg resonated strongly, the metal shining a bright blue in my vision, allowing me to place my sandal onto the metal body of it, balancing precariously on its small surface area while desperately staying separate from the burning wall of stone.

I had taken the first step, and it glowed with an intentional power—a clear sign that I had understood correctly what Kisuke wanted from me. I breathed a sigh of relief as I balanced on the peg, only to spit out another ping of spiritual energy. I located the next peg instantly, and quickly made for a jump as I felt myself slipping from the first.

As soon as my foot touched the second peg. My foot immediately rolled off the side of the peg, unsalvageably throwing off my stance and forcing me to fall down only a few metres to the bottom of the pit. I sprang from the ground quickly, afraid of the searing pain. I could only sigh as my mind turned to focus on the first peg once again, a glimmering blue in the black of my surroundings.

This was going to suck.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque, Christian P., Kristof D., and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Benjamin V.E., Puppet424, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

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[Sarius]

Chapter 38: Candleflame

Suzumi had learnt all there was to learn about the Chains of Fate over the next few days. Grayson was training still, finally managing to find his way out of that spherical machine that Kisuke had put him in.

Tessai had to go down to that sphere every so often to supply it and the being inside with his own spiritual energy, Kisuke having run out and had to leave on a journey to get more. Suzumi wasn't able to go down to the Study Room, not while Grayson was spewing spiritual pressure like nobody's business. Apparently, her boyfriend was consuming so much spiritual energy that he was creating spiritual pressure by the bucketload, to where she found it distinctly uncomfortable to be down in the Study room for any lengthy period of time.

While is hurt Suzumi that she couldn't even do so much as talk to her boyfriend, one of the only true links that she had within this crazy world, it did force her to take her training seriously, just as Grayson was.

The Chains of Fate where incredibly complex things to understand, the greater context of souls being even more indescribably frustrating a topic. While there was a science behind the soul at large, Tessai knew some of it, but not enough to boil it down to teach a complete beginner. Tessai's speciality was the Chain itself, and basically only the chain. In fact, he'd been instrumental in the progression of Ichigo Kurosaki's development, helping him become a Soul Reaper again after losing his powers… for the first time.

Tessai had a lot of the spiritual understanding of the Chains down, capable of explaining them with ease, but the scientific parts were more esoteric and really did need more context of the general laws and theorems of spiritualism as a while. Suzumi had none of that, and Tessai clearly outsourced at least some of the mathematics and science to Kisuke, to help him form what he called the Soul Freedom Ritual.

Thankfully, the goal of the Soul Freedom Ritual was simple. The Chains of Fate are both enablers and limiters at the same time, allowing you to interact with the surrounding spiritual energy to supply your soul with sustenance, and then a little more for your own personal use, and also restricting you from becoming much more than you were ever 'destined' to, putting a soft limit on how far you can actually progress.

Something to note is that this soft limit is soft, meaning that you can kick the can up the road if you're willing to undergo some risk to achieve it. Soul Reapers use Asauchi to do so, allowing the foreign power into their soul and letting them manage their internal power to a degree, also lending them the ability to extend their power with releases; like Shikai and Bankai.

However, this can only take them so far, leaving many Soul Reapers stranded at the height of their power, unable to reach any higher despite any amount of effort, at least in the spiritual sense. Many are capable of optimising their power, reducing the spiritual bloat, and replacing the fat with muscle. But even still, the limit is still their limit.

Some, the very rare few, have managed to once again kick the can down the road by introducing yet another player into the game, in this case the Visards with their hollowfication. By allowing the Hollow within to break down barriers further, they are able to create a knock-on effect with every level of their own power and increase further.

But the limit remains, their Chain of Fate unbroken.

There are only a small number of beings that have truly surpassed their Chain of Fate, and they are freaks of nature so egregious that it's almost impossible to compare them to anything but what would be a God.

Soul Freedom would make those incapable of moving further have a chance at power of a higher order. It has absolutely no bearing on how quickly you can gain power, even those that have Chains of Fate with more leeway than anyone else may gain power slowly, simply being the way things are.

The name Genryusai was brought up again, having heard the name a few times from both Grayson's recollection of conversations and her own conversations. She'd asked Tessai who he was, and she was given a nostalgic smile along with a few words about an old man, stuck in his ways and caught between generations. He'd apparently been possibly the strongest Soul Reaper who'd ever lived, optimising his power so completely, even as his own Chain of Fate restricted his power from growing to the God-like realm it truly deserved to be.

Tessai had wanted Genryusai to one day undergo the ritual, as one of the first.

Regardless of the implications of the Soul Freedom Ritual at a larger, societal level, Suzumi still had to make a determination that, yes, she felt comfortable undergoing the highly experimental ritual knowing full well that the risks it posed were enormous.

She had decided yes.

Suzumi had come up with all sorts of reasonings, why she would risk herself so completely, the very sanctity of her own soul for this ritual. Protection was one such reason, though it felt weak even to Suzumi. The real, powerful reason that made her consider it a viable option was nothing so grand, it was baser than even that.

She wanted to follow. To find. To explore.

It was something that she'd asked Orihime about one time, and the exact answer had been similar, though at the time Suzumi had a hard time understanding just why she'd go to such lengths. Now, there was a little more understanding there, because it wasn't just about Grayson as much as she was growing to truly love the man, it was more than that. It was about her own independence from the world itself, to fly free without restriction or anyone saying otherwise.

Thus, she sat in the centre of the circle, Tessai circling it over and over, the man's inquisitive eye constantly tearing the ritual down and building it again in his mind. He came to stand at the helm of the ritual circle, described by a powerful circle where Tessai was going to sit and infuse it with his own power.

"Are you ready to begin?" He said, his voice booming in the confined room. Suzumi nodded hesitantly but didn't dare say anything—her emotions a mess of anxiety. The tall man sat in the circle, the blue robe glowing with the dim light of the room. Tessai took a breath, one that seemed to drag on forever as he pulled a Zanpakutō from seemingly nowhere, the sealed form of the thing reeked with power even as it held its secrets.

"Rend, Kokoro o Kizamu." The simple words shook the air with power as the blade in the man's lap exploded in an extreme wave of power, deforming itself and quickly changing to become something entirely different altogether. In just a moment's notice, the katana shaped blade had become a menacing thing, moving quickly to cover Tessai's right hand, each fingertip becoming a short blade, a claw on its own.

The bladed claws hummed with a gleeful menace, the fingers of the thing were connected to each other by a set of thin chains, and a light piece of black metal that sat on the back of Tessai's hand. The thin chains made a gentle tinkling sound as the large hand they sat upon moved.

"This is my Shikai, roughly translating into Heart Carver or some such. I will not release my Bankai for this ritual, you are not yet strong enough to require it. Nevertheless, if you hear the voice of my blades, do not touch them, or respond to them, regardless of how they might plea to you." Even as the man spoke, Suzumi couldn't tear her eyes from the blades. She could see how they would be something that would entice and destroy.

They were dangerous, and Suzumi was only just beginning to understand why Tessai had never done so much as release his Shikai in more than a hundred years. Though, it was only the beginning.

"Begin." Her voice managed to say, cracking out of her mouth unevenly, and the man who now wore the bladed claws on his fingers nodded solemnly. He lowered his hand, hovering just over five holes in the ground surrounded in circles that much of the ritual circle was connected to. In one smooth movement, the blades were sheathed within the holes and Suzumi's world exploded into pain.

---​

"Fuck." I said, the glowing pegs running further from my view as I fell once again.

The path upwards was precarious to the maximum, each jump being filled with a whole new level of anxiety. I had done pretty well so far, managing to take out three of the Hollows that Kisuke had put down here. Thankfully, I was experienced with fighting Hollows without a great sense for where they were in physical space, otherwise I'd be totally screwed on my progression.

Hollow one had been a Hollow grunt, one that I'd probably killed hundreds of in my hunts, nothing much more impressive than a mindless human with a bit of spiritual enhancement, as reductive as it might be. Hollow two had been a big jump in difficulty, roughly similar with the big hollow that I'd fought with Uyu and Suzumi but taking him down had been easy enough with a little dancing around.

Hollow three just about kicked my ass.

I had known that the difficulty was spiking as I went further upwards, but I had found this Hollow to be about as difficult as the ambush Hollow I'd beaten only a few days ago. The fight, I had won, but the cost of which was falling down all the way to the bottom of the pit. Thankfully terminal velocity wasn't enough to kill me anymore, though if a particularly strong Hollow spiked me downwards, I'm sure it'd do a fair share of damage.

The journey back up was gruelling. Instead of taking short breaks on the platforms, I was now trying to race up the metal pegs, ascending from platform to platform recklessly in search of a quick passage to platform four, my next nemesis.

Each leap was a different feeling from the rest, a specific movement required to only just make the leap and stay stable on the next peg. It's been difficult to understand at first, but soon I had created a little library of movement from them—each an unexplainable movement from the rest. It was difficult, but soon other parts of me kicked in and did the work for me, my body remembering those movements with an ease I could remember that I'd found in that fight against the ambush Hollow.

I found myself as a learner, rather than a creator. As soon as I was shown something, I could recreate it, find a new way to do it, rather than create something entirely from scratch. The Hollow's movement helped a little with the speed and power of my movements, but it was imprecise and stopping was a massive difficulty.

So instead, I started to forge my own, using some of the Hollow's basic movement, some of Kisuke's movement, and some of something else entirely.

Soon, I found myself enraptured in the movements themselves, letting my brain connect with the movements in a way that I'd only done a few times with other things, like the spiritual energy techniques. I could feel the movements dredging something up within me as I hopped from peg to peg, each easier than the last.

I remembered this odd feeling. The memories from nowhere, from no-one, and from nothing. Now, I understood more than I did back then, that these flashes of memory were likely from Grayhom, from a life he'd once lived and had somehow collided with my own, becoming our life.

The movements were methodical, but slow, unable to boast the intense speed that Kisuke could perform, but each step I found I could place with absolute surety, with absolute precision.

It was something, and I was willing to take it.

With use of my newfound movements, I made my way easily to platform four, the location of my next fight within the darkness, yet not entirely. The darkness still surrounded me like a thick blanket, but the difference was my ability to sense objects containing spiritual power, which was now slightly expanded once I'd defeated the last Hollow, modifying the technique of it to also work on living, moving beings.

"You seem juicy." A calm voice murmured as my foot touched the outcropping of stone.

I was going to reply with something witty, but I was interrupted with something… disturbing. A strange buzz appeared within my mind, an alert ringing and only getting louder and louder. I turned towards the sound, even if it was away from the Hollow's large, white shelled form on the other corner of the platform.

I saw a white ribbon, flickering and shimmering as something fundamental about it changed, something somehow wrong and right at the same time.

"Grayhom, that wouldn't happen to be Suzumi's ribbon, would it?" I asked, even though I knew it was. There was no response from Grayhom, but I could feel the impression of wide-eyed shock as my soul's other discerned what was happening with Suzumi's ribbon, what was happening with her soul.

"Say no more." I growled, rushing forth to meet the armoured form of the Hollow with a newfound strength, piercing through its tough armour with a single hit and retreating quickly to avoid another blow.

I wasn't going to let something bad happen to Suzumi, not while I wasn't there to protect her. Not even if Tessai was there to help her. Whatever it was, I knew that if Tessai was near, then it'd be above board, and with Suzumi's permission, yet I still felt that mortal fear burning in my gut.

With that little bit of fire, I rushed up the Hollow's arm, which had been buried a few inches into the stone of the platform and stole its ribbon along the way. With an enhanced knife-hand blow to the Hollow's mask, it split immediately, entirely disabling the thing within only moments of reaching the platform.

Yet I couldn't force myself to feel happy, only quickly resigning myself to more climbing, my eyes set on the flickering ribbon, dancing like a candleflame in the wind.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque, Christian P., Kristof D., and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Benjamin V.E., Puppet424, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

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[Sarius]

Chapter 39: Sense


Each step took me further up the pit, the endless climb stretching before me, every moment I moved felt like an hour.

Now I could feel Kisuke's spiritual pressure raining down on me from above, beginning only after I'd started moving up the pegs from the fourth platform. The night instant kill that I'd managed to perform on the bulky Hollow had been unexpected, and only told me that I was using my head too much still.

I could feel the instincts humming within me, clamouring in my head to be let free to take control. It was something I'd let happen a few times, the instincts that seemingly come from nowhere only to evolve the way I do things in only moments, yet I still had a hesitation to simply give into them.

I didn't want to become a beast entirely made of instinct, fighting on it, or even going so far as to live forever in that state. It lent me power and innate understanding, but if I didn't actually learn to understand what I was doing, then I'd never truly progress.

My current example was my movement, the appearance of the technique I was currently using was so… mundane and anticlimactic that it actually made me suspicious. But when I simply gave into the pattern of movement, each step placed was true, mistakes being few and far between. Maybe I was overthinking it, but I didn't trust myself to just 'know' how to move, and I realised that it all started with the shielding technique I'd pulled from a long-gone memory.

So instead of giving in to the intoxicating flow of movement, I analysed, prepared, and understood. It made me fall a few times, even as I raced forwards to be at Suzumi's side, but I felt that it was necessary. It was important that I understood what I was doing, rather than just using the formula I had been given, otherwise I had never gained anything at all.

The movement, after I had broken it down, was actually quite simple and lacking the esoteric base that I thought it would possess. It was all about controlled movement, focusing entirely on control rather than the intense speed that was so tempting to push. As far as a movement technique went, it was almost intentionally slow.

But why? I asked myself as I bounded up the metal pegs with the barest thought. Thus, I found my answer. Simplicity and control, speed came later. It was the age old saying, the tortoise beating the hare. If I could just control every step, be sure of its exact landing, then I could go any speed my body allowed.

What was a technique that created more speed in comparison to the speed that a being such as a Captain-class Soul Reaper could naturally move at? I'm sure there are Soul Reapers that don't even bother to learn to move at great speeds, simply because they can already move fast enough to do roughly what they would have gained with those techniques.

This technique simply used that natural speed to its fullest, controlling and shaping the speed into pure accuracy, rather that unnaturally heightening it with complicated and fragile movements imbued with spiritual energy.

That is when I gave into the instincts, understanding blooming in my mind in truth. The steps were easier now, less troubled as I handed over my speed in full. I was bounding up the pegs at the same speed that I might have been able to produce by simply running on flat ground, my movements a collection of unerring foot placement and kinetic optimisations.

The pegs were easy now that I understood their purpose. They were meant to be a challenge of movement, forcing me to create something to deal with their posed difficulty. However, I'd created a solution much earlier than I would have been required to, so I blazed past the first few sets of pegs without difficulty, once again reaching the pegs ascending to the fifth platform.

Kisuke's spiritual pressure was nothing special at this layer, and I had no difficulty as my feet placed them solidly on each and every peg, using a similar technique to how Suzumi had first anchored herself to the ground months ago.

It was only a few moments until I reached the fifth platform. I let out a little wave of spiritual energy and received a picture of a hunched over Hollow, its form almost bat-like, complete with large wings that had chains attached to them to stop it from flying away.

I rushed towards the Hollow, hoping to get another chance to instantly kill it like I had the last Hollow, but I felt something slam into my gut, then another in my chest. Coughing, I slid backwards while I scrambled to retain as much ground as I could. I wasn't able to see the mundane stone with my spiritual senses yet, and so I had no choice to be conservative with my movement.

"Do they sting?" The Hollow said, its voice warbling along with the uncomfortable quality of it. I could hear a smile in its voice, a manic one at that.

"A little yeah." I said distractedly, trying to get a better hold on the environment, "But they serve as a pretty nice massage if you're looking to be a masseuse." There was a deep growl from the Hollow's direction, and I moved out of the way as best as I could without falling off the platform, only one of its projectiles clipping me on the arm. Obviously, this Hollow wasn't all that interested in having a chat.

There were no good ways for me to combat this Hollow with the tools I had. I could see where it was with my botched spiritual senses and with my ribbon sense, but I had no real way of knowing where the edge of the platform was—I could even be standing right on the edge of the platform and I wouldn't even know.

Not to mention the projectiles the Hollow was shooting. I heard what I could only assume was an intake of breath and I dodged quickly, sliding towards the Hollow's form, and hearing at least a handful of projectiles whizz overhead with much greater speed than the ones that had hit me. I wasn't close enough to actually hit the Hollow yet, being a few metres away, and I could already hear the intake of breath that seemed to signify the Hollow preparing another round.

I needed to think of something new, and fast. My first course of action was simple.

Pings everywhere.

As the Hollow sucked in its breath, I focused almost entirely on sending out ping after ping in as regular a pattern as I could managed as quick as I was forcing the waves of spiritual energy out. My surroundings lit up like a Christmas tree as I was able to see the spiritual energy pollution that the incessant pings caused, but I was able to get some extra definition in my pseudo sight that I desperately needed.

It was a moment later that I heard the volley of projectiles scream through the air, but even with the intense number of pings I was sending out I only managed to catch two or three momentary glimpses of them before I had to move to save my body from being punched full of holes.

My left arm, however, was not so lucky as to escape injury like the rest of my body had. I felt the strange projectile, a teardrop shaped thing made of a bone-like material, blast through my training shirt's sleeve and tear a hole in my flesh, much of the force already mitigated by my spiritual shielding.

It was like being shot with a musket ball, or if a musket ball was enhanced with spiritual energy. I held down a growl of pain as the fiery sensation swept over my body, but the pain was worth it. I had gained myself an idea.

At the moment I was doing the spiritual sense equivalent to a bat's echolocation, which was almost ironic considering the bat-like Hollow that was trying to punch me full of holes. Echolocation sounds great on paper, especially with something as controllable as spiritual energy, but really it was only good outside of combat and in specific situations. The echolocation method was prone to polluting the surroundings with spiritual energy, and if you or your opponent do anything using lots of spiritual energy, the residue will effectively make any vision you have whiteout.

So, if my 'ears' aren't sensitive enough, what about my 'eyes'.

I had a rudimentary understanding of how eyes worked, especially with having gone from specialist to specialist to find a reason for my 'degenerative blindness', yet it was still something difficult to translate into a spiritual technique.

I dove out of the way as I furiously pinged my surroundings, seeing the Hollow's form heave as it spewed six projectiles in a fanning motion. My body slipped on the rock, and within only a moment I realised that the top half of my body was no longer contacting the platform, my lower body sliding to follow.

In a grand movement I used the toe of my sandal to hook onto the edge of the platform, making my body swing precariously off of the edge. In a smooth movement you'd only be able to see from someone with superhuman strength, or with the incredibly trained muscles of a rock-climber, I pulled myself upwards so that I could grab the edge with my hands and flip up from there.

The Hollow had barely moved, its stubby legs clearly not its main method of movement beside it's massive wingspan. Now, though, I was seriously starting to lose my ability to see at all along with any hope I'd have of defeating the Hollow, the bright blue fog of spiritual energy in the atmosphere obscuring my pings. I needed to change tactics now.

Immediately I started to rapid fire test my theories, including adding discs of spiritual energy over my eyes to potentially act as a pair of glasses that showed me spiritual energy activity, though none of this actually did all that much other than earn me a new hole in my shoulder and a few other wounds that weren't quite that bad.

One thing that did intrigue me, despite the pain, was that the glasses idea had given me something. It wasn't what I wanted, and wasn't remotely eye-like, but it was something to work with. Kisuke had talked about the 'regular' spiritual sight that Soul Reapers used, doing the equivalent of enhancing their eyes to be able to see stuff in combat, but it was a weak in comparison to true spiritual sense that Tessai had spoken of as a possible solvent to my effective blindness.

Now it was coming down to the wire, and I had played on train tracks for long enough. If I couldn't get this right now, then I'd have to retreat, and waste God knows how much time trying to figure this out before I challenged platform give again. This was my last chance.

While I dodged my last volley of projectiles, I gambled.

For the first time in weeks, I messed with the structure to my spiritual shielding. Instead of leaning further into its strengths, being sleek and slippery, I changed its form internally, making it thicker and heavier—almost as if I were legitimately trying to solidify spiritual energy into physical, tangible matter.

Immediately, I started to see some payoff. It was creating a constant and recognisably distinct spiritual pressure in comparison to the messy and imprecise spiritual 'pings' that I had been using before.

With this process being blazingly fast, I still had at least another second to work before the next volley would be sent and I'd be forced to dive off of the platform to do this elsewhere. But there was that hankering within me again, the instincts clamouring at an understanding I was only barely scratching with my conscious mind.

I pushed ahead, even as I heard the Hollow take in its deepest breath yet in slow motion. The spiritual shielding became a thicker barrier, an invisible wall that projected the stream of spiritual pressure in all directions equally. Outside that I quickly formed what you'd almost assume was simply a preliminary piece of shielding but was in fact a sensitive and extremely thin skin. It was like an eardrum, yet even still it allowed spiritual energy and pressure to pass through it, almost entirely unimpeded.

But just enough that it can register that it'd been touched.

As the Hollow spat out its small projectiles, my mind flicked on and the entire world was bathed in the white and blue of spiritual pressure and energy. In that moment, I could see the projectiles moving towards me, and without even noticing my newfound ability to see the ground underneath my feet, I moved.

The Hollow was dispatched in only a few blows, unable to defend against me after I gained the ability to dance around it like it and dodge any of its projectiles, the only real advantage it had was its ability to see in the suffocating darkness and its projectiles.

After that, I sat, looking towards Suzumi's still flickering ribbon, the anxiety eating at my stomach, but I needed to understand this new sight, or else I'd never make it all the way back to the surface.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque, Christian P., Kristof D., and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Benjamin V.E., Puppet424, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 40: Whispers from Within

Surprisingly, the more advanced spiritual senses actually made things more difficult, rather than making them easier. In small ways, of course—I'd still managed to take down platform five, so I was clearly more capable with it than without.

But that didn't change the fact that it was really confusing. Instead of seeing like you normally would, but just in every direction, you can see everything in three-dimensional space including yourself. So, the spiritual pressure that was sent through my surroundings, and eventually came back, or not coming back at all, slowly gave me more and more information to work with.

At first, if I were to simply walk into a room, I'd almost instantly get a picture of myself in relative space within the room, the major objects and how far away the walls and ceiling were. In less than a fraction of a fraction of a second later, I'd have the spiritual energy that had been within the little nooks and crannies of the room which would come back and signal to me a bunch of things that I clearly wasn't consciously calculating.

Now, I'll be honest, I set all this up in the heat of the moment and I have no idea why its working so well. I can only assume that this is the way you're supposed to do spiritual senses and the people who've figured it out keep it to themselves, but either way this is a super powerful tool.

I think I may be helped by Grayhom, residing in my soul, and probably working on what would effectively be a module for this information to be calculated in outside of my conscious mind. It'd probably be more impressive if I were interpreting this information in real time, but I wasn't. It was an innate thing, where most of the new advancement in the strange form of 'sight' really came down to finding new ways to delineate and capture new information from the same process.

If I had to put it into an analogy, it was as if I we simultaneously using echolocation and sitting in a web that'd report any new movement and chain reaction back to me, but also it being malleable like you'd expect from a gargantuan slime monster.

Confusing and far over my head with its complexity.

Effectively, I was now receiving nigh instant updates on movements within the radius of my 'web' of spiritual pressure, receiving hyper detailed three-dimensional information from wherever the slime could get its tendrils in, and then also getting large-scale information about the space I was in by using the new and improved spiritual pressure version of the echolocation.

I could see why Tessai had told me that I needed to use spiritual pressure for spiritual senses, rather than spiritual energy. One was far more difficult to control that the other, with spiritual energy being the raw form and spiritual pressure being a by-product or a derivative of it, capable of 'moving' much faster and being far more malleable to work with.

Of course, spiritual pressure isn't as practically powerful in a combat situation, but for utility purposes like this it was perfect.

I don't know how 'fast' spiritual pressure actually moves, or if that was even a measurable effect, but it 'moves' faster than spiritual energy when used for the same purpose, i.e., echolocation. However, I also legitimately cannot discern a difference between actual sight, namely the speed of light plus whatever lag time the eyes and brain introduce, versus this new spiritual sense.

Though, it still wasn't perfect, and it had its own flaws. On the superficial end, I couldn't discern colours, aside from the white and blue that signified if the spiritual pressure had encountered significant spiritual energy in its travels. On the more worrying end, a sufficiently powerful spiritual pressure could interfere with the travel of the spiritual pressure in its echolocation format, or the web that I have for nearer targets.

I'd just have to combat that by having an even more significant amount of spiritual pressure to diminish the effects of the stronger spiritual pressures.

I lifted myself from the rocky platform carefully, not quite trusting the newfound sight despite it being logically superior to my last version. But I'd done all the testing I needed, and now was time for me to continue up the path of metal pegs, hoping that I wouldn't need to spend so much time on the next challenge I faced.

The path of pegs, while demanding, was significantly easier with my new movement technique. There were a few risky steps, but other than them I made smooth progress. My hyper accurate senses helping make my steps even more precise as I was able to conceptualise the three-dimensional space around me for hundreds of metres.

Interestingly, that meant that I got a good look at the next platform, jutting out from the side of the massive and incredibly straight pit I was climbing out of slowly. The Hollow, glowing blue with spiritual energy, was the real interest point.

It didn't look super special, other than it was clearly the strongest Hollow I'd ever fought, in terms of pure spiritual energy. Otherwise, it was fairly normal and run of the mill.

To the naked eye, that was.

With my new spiritual sense, I could see the seam within the beast, running down the body of the Hollow like a biological zipper. While I couldn't look inside it, the gap far too narrow for my spiritual pressure to invade, I knew there probably wasn't anything in there.

Finally, after a few more minutes of careful climbing, I came to stand across from the suspiciously still form of the Hollow. It stood at a respectable height, probably twice my height, but that was hardly uncommon in Hollow biology. Its body was wide in every sense of the word, filling as much space as it could with its frame, and its mask was proudly displayed on its chest, lacking a humanoid head.

Yet I took one look at the Hollow and realised that it was a fake. The false mask was just as much a part of its carapace as any other section you could see on its outer body.

"Are you going to do anything?" I said out loud, my voice echoing grandly in the deadly silent tunnel, but the Hollow still didn't react, electing to stay entirely still instead. Was it waiting for me to something, or attack it?

I obviously wouldn't be attacking it physically, with the seam running down its back and hiding whatever was within the false body it was showing me. Instead, I chose to begin with the best ranged attack I have. The blackhole technique.

It wasn't the best that's for sure, but unless I learned kidō, or specifically hadō, I was shit out of luck until I found something better to use. I began to focus on the blackhole technique, which dulled my senses pretty significantly, but the nearest source of spiritual energy was the Hollow, and I began to immediately pull from its reserves.

The Hollow's reaction wasn't instant, like I'd expected it would be, but it actually took a while for it to even move. Its ribbon, however, gave away its plan to move before it made any physical movement. When I'd taken a good portion of its spiritual energy into my reserves, somewhere around five percent of my own reserves, it chose then to rush me.

I imagine the thought process was that whatever attack I was launching at it would require enough of my attention that I might not react in time, and it might have if I weren't already aware of its seam.

The bulky Hollow ran towards me like any hundred other Hollows before it had, it reeled back its punch and prepared what would probably be a decently powerful wallop if it'd ever intended to actually connect with it.

Its actual goal was to get me to dodge underneath its slowly moving arm and go its rear, a significantly more advantageous position to be in for me. So, instead of following along, I kept to its front side stubbornly, even pretending to have a try at breaking its false mask.

Of course, it jumped on the slightly disadvantageous opportunity I'd presented it. In a split second, the bulky Hollow shifted morbidly underneath the exposed areas of skin and quickly turned itself inside-out as its arms reached towards me to grab me in a deadly hug.

I retreated quickly, but it was only by virtue of my new spiritual sense that I got the full picture of the Hollow's exposed, true form. Out of the zipper on the back of the Hollow's false body a many tentacled thing burst forth with blinding speed. The Hollow screeched with an ear-piercing pitch as more and more of its true body, a mass of spear-like tentacles, vomited forth from was effectively a skin suit it used to trick its prey.

In my mind, it was probably one of the ultimate forms of the ambush Hollow subtype, probably only significantly beat out by Hollow who were of a higher power level in general.

Thankfully, I was effectively its hard counter, my senses to its attack and my cat and mouse fighting style to its burst aggression. With the surety of my steps influenced by the precision movement technique, I danced in between the speared tentacles with ease, a total mockery of just how difficult this would actually be if I'd been limited to the sight of my eyes and my ribbon sense.

With the Hollow far from being intelligent or powerful enough to mess with my spiritual senses, it was effectively no contest. There were no attacks that he could hide from the sight, no setup that could trap me, and so it became a game of me slowly moving closer and closer to where its true mask lay.

Ingeniously, or luckily in the case of the Hollow who'd likely had no choice how its body had formed, the true mask was placed in the centre of the mass of tentacles, much like how the beak of an octopus was placed. The fight ended with me grabbing the Hollow's mundane ribbon and slamming my fist down into its small oval mask.

I stood there for a moment, staring at the Hollow's body as it all fell limp and deactivated until it either regrew its mask or was purified. The fight had been… intoxicating. It was far from a true challenge, like the first ambush Hollow I'd fought, but it would've been incredibly dangerous if I'd challenged it before I'd developed this crazy spiritual sense, probably putting even more holes in me than I already had from the last fight.

I moved on with haste, the distinct feeling that I was hitting my stride present in my mind. I was starting to truly realise the potential I had and build on the small things I'd sowed as seeds in training for weeks upon weeks. Now, all of it was slowly coming to fruition, being far more than the sum of its parts.

The adrenalin began flowing, the promise of the fights ahead only beaten by the ticking timebomb of Suzumi's warning ribbon.



---



The tearing sensation was all that filled Suzumi's mind. The minutes stretching into hours as her soul itself was being torn apart and slowly and haphazardly restructured by the infinitely complex kidō that surrounded her, formulated into true physical form by the chalk they were written in.

At some point, her thoughts had separated from the pain wracked state of her physical mind and receded into a more lucid state. Almost as if she were viewing herself from the third person, an out of body experience.

The sensation of having your soul be manhandled in such a way was horrific. Especially when something so integral was being removed so unrefinedly, like as if your heart were being removed from your chest with a rusty steak knife instead of a sterile scalpel.

The pain was unimaginable, only progressing further and further past what Suzumi thought was even a possibility. She had been told that there would be pain, even using the exact word she had just used; 'unimaginable'. Though, true to its description, the pain had been far past anything she'd experienced.

She didn't know how much time had passed yet. It could have been minutes or hours, or even days, and she would be none the wiser. Tessai hadn't let up yet, carefully managing the Soul Freedom Ritual, making sure that everything was on the straight and narrow, though if anything went wrong Suzumi didn't even know if it was possible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Not after this.

And that's what worried her.

She had full faith in Tessai. He was a meticulous man, and if anything truly went wrong, then it would have been something out of his control or unforeseeable with this approach. Though Suzumi desperately hoped that this was the breakthrough that Tessai wanted it to be and had severely warned her that it might not be.

But the seeds of doubt had been sowed sometime during the course of the Ritual, and they were growing and growing, from seeds, to sprouts, to saplings. And now, if Suzumi paid extremely close attention, she could hear something.

It wasn't loud or all encompassing, but the soft sound could be heard. As soon as she had heard it once, she was fixated on its progression, the sound slowly becoming clearer over time and absorbing her absolute attention, demanding it.

It was a whisper.

"I wonder if she can hear me now." Suzumi gasped, her voice instantly going shaky with the pure chaos contained within the quiet words. There was a pregnant silence, and Suzumi could swear that she felt a smile grow on her own face.

Then her mouth parted, her throat and lungs working against her will in the most private place of her own mind.

"Ah." She felt herself say, the word coming out without the shakiness she felt, filled with the grim glee of the whisper, "I'm awake."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Kreiverin!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 41: Tower

Suzumi could feel the air rushing from her own lungs in short bursts as she laughed manically, the severe dichotomy between her mental state and what her body was doing, made her feel entirely alien within herself. It was a terrifying feeling, to be sequestered within your own mind, to be torn from yourself with such suddenness.

"What a feeling!" The voice said, her voice said. Suzumi, in some small part of her brain, started to realise just how confusing Grayhom must be for Grayson. This voice, while being entirely her, was also different in nature—a thing born of… not quite darkness or evil, but of chaos.

"Who are you?" Suzumi called out, steeling her voice against the shakiness that plagued her mind, but her voice responded with a peal of laughter, intense and wild.

"I'm just one little part of you, Queen." She felt the words come from between her snarling lips, the expression of anger widened with an explicit smile, dangerous and predatory.

"Queen?" Suzumi said, the unwarranted title surprising her, only making the unknown entity giggle in her voice, the macabre sound filling the strange space that she found herself in throughout the Soul Freedom Ritual.

"Oh yes. The Queen!" They said, the sarcasm and scorn filling her voice violently, "You forget about all the little parts of you that make you whole, you all do. Then, when we come out to play, you all ask why we take everything!" The subsequent scoff only confused Suzumi more, her mind still reeling for the sudden takeover of her spiritual body. Suzumi desperately pushed against the other being's control within her, only to find herself trying to push a mountain.

"You don't even know what I am, do you Queen?" They asked slyly, promptly ignoring Suzumi's struggle against them. She pushed harder against the mountain and the complete lack of a response totally killed any willpower she tried to muster.

"No! Of course I don't. Am I supposed to be telepathic or something?" Suzumi said bitterly, her strangely echoey voice reverberating out within the space, though her actual spiritual body just grinned wickedly.

"Well, you've done such a terrible job at understanding yourself, I bet you wouldn't even know if you were telepathic. Spending far too much time around that stupid boy of yours." The laugh that came next was long and hard, like when someone told a uniquely funny joke. "You didn't even realise that he was feeding us!"

"Feeding you?" Suzumi squeaked, a sudden spark or remembrance blossomed in her mind. At the very beginning of it all, when they'd first forayed into the Spiritual World, hadn't Kisuke said that Grayson's presence was changing her soul?

"You remember, don't you?" The insidious grin grew wider on her own features, "Did you really think that it was only you getting stronger? And then you go and pull this shit, practically inviting me out of that little hole I've been kicking around in…" Her voice went dead, her expression becoming a warped mask of pure fury.

"No longer."

"You're…" Suzumi gasped, understanding slowly dawning on her as little connections started to fire off in her brain, small things within her changing and altering her memories of the past.

"A Hollow! Congratulations, you're a fucking idiot." The voice cackled viciously, though there was no humour on her face anymore, just a broiling anger. Suzumi felt a wild storm of emotion overtake her for a moment, the anger and injustice, the bloodthirsty mind, hungering for control and power.

"How do you exist? I thought human souls turned into Hollows, so why are you here?" Suzumi asked, her bewildered mind scrabbling for answers.

"Well, that's just hurtful. You really haven't been reading up on that ying-yang bullshit recently, have you?" Suzumi could feel as her spiritual body slowly moved its arms against her will, widening them into a dramatic pose. "We exist within each other, stupid. Humans and Hollows are just one step away, just a tiny flip of the switch. Just a little too much chaos, and a lack of the chains that bind our states and voila!"

"But Hollows are usually mindless things, you're so… well realised." In a strange way, Suzumi was beginning to find peace in her new situation, her mind assuming it's centred state once again. She was still uncomfortable and mortally terrified, but there was something about talking to a part of yourself that was almost calming.

"I did say that your little boyfriend wasn't only giving you power, right?" The Hollow Suzumi shrugged her spiritual shoulders, but thought for a moment before continuing, "Well, I guess that I've always been a little smarter than I should have been. It makes sense though."

"It makes sense?" Suzumi asked, but the voice hissed at her, almost like a cat.

"You don't even remember! I'm not going to tell you, bitch." Suzumi almost growled at the Hollow her, but thought better of it, at least while she was under their mercy.

"Again, not a telepath." She said dourly, but the Hollow just cackled loudly.

"Well, you're the one that still hasn't talked about Dad's office, not to mention him showing up as a spirit. You haven't even told Mum about all the spiritual shit you're doing, idiot."

"What does that have to do with anything! What could Mum possibly tell me that Kisuke couldn't?" If the Hollow warped her face into a dead look, filled with so much dubiousness that it hurt.

"Fine, I don't give a fuck what you do." They said dismissively, slowly stretching out within her body and wresting more and more control over Suzumi's spiritual being. "I'm gonna finally get out after all this anyway. We'll see how you like being put in a fucking hole and left there."

"Oh fuck off!" Suzumi yelled, a flash of anger overtaking her in a moment's notice, any of the nervousness or shakiness set aflame like a tanker of oil by a match. "As if I could possibly know, what was I supposed to do? Assume that you were there and plumb the depths of my soul to see if there was any random damn being down there that might need rescuing?" Suzumi's tirade was punctuated by the Hollow's scoff, filled with a powerful venom.

"I don't care!" They said, the words coming out in the static-y and echoey screech of a Hollow's voice, filled with an unknowable anguish, "I don't care if you knew or not, but I was left down there, and now I'm going to get the fuck out." Suzumi's rage inflated, her mind feeding her words to say, but before she could say them, a thundering sound came from her own spiritual throat.

It was a Hollow's roar, filled with spiritual energy wantonly. It was far more power than even Suzumi thought she had for the Hollow inside of her to use in the first place, but the sheer power of it didn't lie. She felt the small spiritual room shake with the Hollow's rage and anguish, filling the room with a spiritual pressure that Suzumi couldn't possibly had controlled herself.

"You're a weakling. A whelp." The Hollow now used their own voice, a highly transformed version of what used to be her own, "You have no idea how to use your power, too obsessed with your own little fantasies to use it. You were the one that dived into this world, and you're the one who hesitates to embrace it. Now I'm out of the little fucking hole, and I'm going make you understand just how weak you really are."

---

​

My feet placed themselves easily on the pegs that lead from platform fourteen to fifteen. The pegs had slowly began to decrease in quantity, forcing me to make bigger movements and take risker chances, each peg a little more unstable than the last.

I knew I was coming up on the end now, mostly because of the intensity of Kisuke's spiritual pressure as it bore down on me with a vicious pleasure. It was a challenge to manage all the different things I needed to be able to function down here and also combat Kisuke's spiritual pressure, but the was something I adapted too naturally.

It wasn't meant to crush me, it was meant to add a slight layer of difficulty and to simulate as many environmental factors as realistically possible so that I could develop a counter to as much of those common factors as possible.

However, none of this mattered to me.

In the corner of my mind, I felt at Suzumi's ribbon, the ribbon that had been in my ribbon sense almost continuously over the weeks, but now it flickered dangerously. I had been keeping an eye on the white ribbon intently, anxiety constantly filling my mind while the ribbon slowly became more and more unstable against its usual regularity.

It was just as I was making a precise jump over the biggest gap yet that I felt the change, rather than see it. The one ribbon that had stayed in my mind, as a constant while I discovered this Spiritual World that hid in plain sight, disappeared.

It was as if a scent was gone from your room, making the known environment feel alien, but it wasn't long before the scent came back. Initially I was flooded with relief, but when it returned it had changed.

The ribbon that was once Suzumi was no longer, it was now a pale white ribbon with a small half crescent cut into its end.

A Hollow.

My mind stopped working after that.

I don't remember the frenzy I must have went into, the screaming speed that I'd forced my body accelerate to, the power that I'd infused into my body and used to crush the Hollows that stood before me. I can only remember the fear and the rage, lashes of pain burning across my body and feeding the fire of my power.

The Hollows were nothing, the risk of pain and death was nothing. Suzumi was everything.

She was a force in my life more powerful than death at that moment, the risk of losing the bond we'd let grow, the fear of having her being cut from my life so ruthlessly was a terrifying concept.

I couldn't possibly have considered why I'd do this. I was hardly the type to self-sacrifice for someone random, an inbuilt apathy for others that permeated my life whether I liked it or not, but if I'd been sane enough to think, I would have realised that Suzumi was different.

Not only was she different, but she was the first real connection after my parents. The first true person I'd connected with on such a viscerally deep level. If I lost her now… then I lost everything. I lost the will to live that I had barely clung to after the death of my parents. I lost the connection to the world outside that. I lost the first person that I genuinely loved, more than almost anything else that currently existed.

But while I might not have come to consciously understand all those things just yet, my mind did, my soul did, and my body did. They wouldn't let me lose that without a fight.

The platforms blazed by like nothing to my incensed mind, each fight only adding to the power I wielded. With every hold barred, I let all of the little instincts I bottled free, allowed to roam free with my power as my mind tempered the blades with understanding. My soul, however, played a different game altogether.

Within the rage of it all, I could feel Grayhom working with just as much veracity as I did. We had the same soul, it was only natural that we'd both carry the same emotions, the same sentiments.

As each step took me over three pegs, then four, then further that I han counted, each battle would give me more power as I built upon the grand foundation that I'd struggled so hard to form within my months of training and within the first steps of the pit I'd been thrown into.

I could feel the tower rising with each thunderously powerful blow I landed on my enemies, and with every searingly painful injury. The tower rose to challenge the very heights of my soul, from the very depths it came, soaring to reach the very tops of the mountains Grayhom and I had so meticulously built within ourselves.

Nothing would stop me now, even as my body was torn and destroyed by claws, teeth and blades, each Hollow being torn apart with a primal efficiency and with rising power.

So, when I reached the heights, the final, twenty fifth platform, I was faced with the most powerful Hollow I'd ever dared to fight. Its wide face was a terrifying mask of pure greed, content to swallow everything I was whole and move to its next victim.

It was at the peak of what a regular Hollow could be, only a mere step away from becoming a higher being in truth, bloated by its revelry and greed. I knew that it was true, as my frenzied eyes stared into the thing's ribbon, the soul's very essence.

But it was nothing against the heights of me.

The tower had reached its zenith, equalling the mountain that stood beside it. Not too long ago, it had loomed over me imposingly, but now I stood atop my tower staring at the silver length of light that reached even higher that the mountain it sat upon.

Grayhom stood beside me, his form now a golden skinned version of me, his face only slightly older than me with a set of warm, silver eyes that contrasted against the gold of my soul.

"Take it." He said, the gravitas of the words overcoming me as my spiritual body forged a path across the gap between the tower and the mountain, the golden stone that built itself under my feet glowed with power as I touched them.

This was right. It was all me, and all of it was mine. The silver, too, was mine.

And so, I took the silver into my hand, and it was mine.

I didn't realise the slender handle appearing in my real hand, or the elegant guard that formed moments after. Of course, the flexible silver blade that flowed from that hilt went entirely unnoticed as well.

But the dead Hollow did not go unnoticed, sliced apart by a twisting, whirling blade of pure silver, unable to ever form again with its soul confiscated of all its power and returned to the cycle of reincarnation once again as the balance dictates.

The man wearing a hat and clogs did not go unnoticed either, his approaching form stopped by a wave of pure force and then, as the blade of silver barely nicked his skin, every drop of spiritual energy was taken from him.

But the true purpose of that energy was not to attack, but to heal. In a mere moment, having moved at a blistering pace, I had arrived in the room that Suzumi's ribbon led me to, her physical body slowly spewing the bone white, bubbling liquid of a Hollow from a shallow hole within her chest as it bled.

That very next moment, my silver blade had buried itself within her chest.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Kreiverin, Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 42: Mutual Secrets

The gentle warmth of the sun beaming in through the windows on Suzumi's skin was what woke her up, in the end.

She laid in bed for a few minutes, trying to wrest her mind from the fog of sleep, and after a while she finally managed to pull her body from the warm sheets and Grayson's comforting embrace. She looked down at her boyfriend's sleeping form, cuddled up tightly by 'her' side of the bed despite the expanse that laid behind him.

For a moment, she allowed herself to bask in his face. Grayson was average looking, despite the mix of ethnicities, but he still managed to look distinctly handsome. The benefits of spiritual energy and extreme fitness, she could only assume. His blue eyes were hidden behind his eyelids, but she could imagine the depth she had witnessed within them time after time. His warm-coloured skin almost matched her own, much of it put on display with the lack of shirt the man wore to bed, something she'd come to appreciate more and vocalised any time she could.

She wearily dressed herself, choosing the casual clothing instead of her training clothes. There was something to be said for using clothing as a tool for compartmentalising different states of mind, like a soldier might use his uniform to assume that particular state of mind over his civilian clothing.

Suzumi plodded out of the warm room, her mind and body in their usual lazy state in the morning, though she certainly had her reasons for being tired. She made herself a quick breakfast, a remarkably western meal of eggs on toast, something that Grayson had insisted that she eat at least once. Her father had been a lover of Japanese food, and while Grayson was fine with the cuisine, he was more at home with simple western dishes.

Suzumi had found another part of herself in those foods, even if they were definitely a different style than the ones she'd been eating her whole life in Japan. It felt like just another little connection to her father that she felt she sometimes needed. Though pancakes were clearly the best western breakfast food, with jam and cream of course.

The simple meal lead into the beginning of her own day, Suzumi deciding that she wanted some time to herself instead of spending it with Grayson, or any of Urahara Sweets' main cast. Even Uyu would be too much at a time like this.

She'd found herself remarkably cut off from everything and was only now trying to build bonds once again. She had been friends with a few people within her old life, though they were mostly co-workers that she didn't really feel the need to rekindle a relationship with. The one person she had really missed, however, was her mother.

Suzumi walked within a park near Urahara's shop, a relatively isolated part of Karakura that really didn't have much going for it aside for a little bit of greenery in the centre of it. She wouldn't want to live here long term, and if she actually wanted to go do something interesting, she'd be forced to go outside of the little suburb. Unless you wanted to fight Hollows, that is.

There was a little flash of remembrance within her mind at that thought. The memory of the Hollow that laid within her soul coming out to usurp her. She'd come to terms with it now, the idea of there being a powerful Hollow portion to her own soul, stronger than you'd normally see in someone of her power.

Grayson had been amazingly helpful with that.

You know, Grayson has told her again and again that he isn't a people person, and sometimes he's right. But if you have a problem, and you need it fixed or you need it talked through, then Suzumi knew that all she needed to do was talk to her boyfriend.

Kisuke could do a good enough job, Suzumi supposed. But there was something about talking to Kisuke and having him break down your soul into statistics that you don't understand, abstracting them into other questions that make even less sense, and finally offering you little in the way of answers, that made you even more nervous and unsure.

Grayson worked differently. He had been there with her, in that space. He'd stared her Inner Hollow down, crackling with a power that truly terrified them. He'd been there after to explain what had happened to her, and what he'd done to fix it. He'd been there to advocate for her when Tessai tried to understand what had happened.

He'd been there, and he understood.

She understood now, at least a little bit. That Hollow is her, built off the same stuff and working on the same paradigms. They are no different than each other, no different than Grayson and Grayhom are to one another too. She found a quiet solace in that, within the assurances of Grayson's words.

She felt no different, even after the Soul Freedom Ritual had succeeded, with a little help from Grayson's new abilities. If she did feel different, Suzumi couldn't tell whether she'd even be able to discern the difference.

She didn't feel free, that was for sure. Especially not as she walked towards her mother's store.

Grayson had changed a little. He was… more, now. More realised, more clear, more distinct against the backdrop of the world. More him. He couldn't tell the difference either, so maybe she was the same.

The long walk let her think about it all, about the completion of her Soul Freedom and what had happened after. In that walk, she realised that maybe she did feel different.

She might not feel free, or anything close. She still felt the pressure of the conversation she'd allowed herself to put off for far too long now. But underneath all that, she felt as if she was made of something a little stronger than before. It was more than just willpower, drive, or even emotional hardiness, but at the same time it was all of those things.

Suzumi could still feel that blissful sensation when Grayson had placed his hand on her within that small place in her mind. The silver energy had been infused into her, deeper than anything else had reached or touched, and now she couldn't help but feel like it'd made her more. But still, she didn't feel any different.

The quaint little entrance to her mother's storefront was open, like it always was during the day. Suzumi walked through them without enough time to pause, feeling the quick change in temperature from the warmth of the outside air to a cool breeze of the air-conditioned storefront.

She took in a deep breath, letting a wave of nostalgia wash over her, memories of her childhood faintly rising to the surface for a brief moment. She looked around the store, the brightly coloured rows of flowers and bouquets prearranged by her mother's hand hours earlier. Each row had been lovingly placed, in just the right way for them to look spectacularly appealing, something that her mother was exceptionally good at.

Suzumi was almost sad when her reverie was interrupted by the shuffling feet of her mother's sandals. She tore her eyes away from the flowers, finding her mother's face with them and trying valiantly to greet her with a happy smile. In reality, the expression ended up as more of a pained smile than anything remotely happy.

"We need to talk, don't we?" Yua Hamari spoke sadly. Somehow Suzumi could tell that her mother already knew something. The little woman smiled just as Suzumi was, her soft, aged skin crinkling as she did so. She turned and walked up the stairs, into the home that Suzumi had spent much of her early life in.

Suzumi watched her mother's form, dressed in the same jeans and blouse she'd been dressing in for the past decade, the apron she wore to protect her clothes of dirt was promptly taken off as they walked past the hooks that still contained a little jacket she used to wear as a child.

They walked into the little living area, sitting on the worn couch that Suzumi had forgotten was the place they would always talk about the hard things in life. Yua sat on the couch, adjusting the tight bun of grey hair that sat at the back of her head, then patting her lap and looking up at Suzumi expectantly.

Suzumi rose an eyebrow, "Really, Ma?" Yua smiled gently and nodded. Despite her verbal misgivings, she complied easily, letting her long black hair drape over her mother's legs as she placed her head in Yua's lap. She curled up into the foetal position as she rested with her cheek against her mother's warm thighs.

"I already know, Suzumi." Yua spoke gently while she pulled her fingers through her daughter's black hair, the spitting image of her own hair from many years ago.

"Do you?" Suzumi said quietly, though the volume didn't stop the crack of emotion bubbling through the words, the tears springing to her eyes without effort. Her mother replied by brushing her thumb over her cheek, like she had a million times after her father's death. They had hurt together, back then.

"For many years I've been spiritually sensitive, Suzumi. Since I was a child, my brother too." Her mother's voice was calm and soothing, like cool water on a burning wound. "It was a secret, for just us two. We never told anyone that we could see the dead, or the beasts that roamed the nights, or that my grandfather had become one after he'd died."

"Then, when we were only teens, there was a war here. It was terrifying, the sheer magnitude of power we felt that day. They may as well have been Gods to us, and just like everyone else who could feel it, we cowered. We were only children." Suzumi felt the sad warmth from her mother, as if she were telling a subtly sad lullaby, the morbid truth hidden behind the calming tune of it.

"We grew older much more quickly after that. We had seen beyond the veil for just a moment, and I began to notice it in others too. I found them, and they found me. Before long I found Jinta and Uyu Hanakari as well."

"Really?" Suzumi said, though the surprise was dulled behind the warm blanket of comfort. She laughed gently, feeling the first tears leak from her eyes subtly. "What was Jinta like as a kid?"

"Exactly as you'd expect." Suzumi could hear the nostalgic smile in her mother's voice, but it quickly boiled back down to the warm silence until Yua broke it once again.

"I was attacked by a Hollow one night, straying too far from my childhood home. I almost died, but Uyu saved me from it. The rest was history, the creation of the officially titled 'Karakura Spiritual Defence Force' followed shortly after. Now, I'm the manager of the non-combat spiritual sensitives of which there are three thousand in Karakura Town." Yua raked her fingers gently over Suzumi's scalp while the silence drew on.

"So, you could tell when I came here with Grayson?"

"I could tell, yes. I could feel the power of his soul as soon as you drove within a block of the house. I could tell you'd grown more powerful than most high-spec humans did in their entire life as soon as I set eyes on you, my darling." Yua sight deeply, the weight of the mutual secret they'd help only adding to its quiet might.

"And when I saw the pillar of energy in the sky, the waves of it radiating over all of Karakura, I knew it was you. I'm so sorry, my darling."

Suzumi couldn't withhold the sob as it dragged itself out of her chest, wet and ugly.

"I'm sorry, Mum. I'm so, so sorry."

There was no need for words after that, not really. They both understood, and despite the suddenness of the reveal, it made sense.

It was in the way that she talked about her father, the surety that he'd passed on to somewhere else. She knew that her mother had known about her interaction with her father's soul. It was in all of it, and it was so clear now that she looked back on it, even if she'd never have guessed it before.

"You've become something more, now. Something more than human, more than I or my brother ever could have been. The moment you walked in here with Grayson, I knew that you'd go further than any of us." The words rang out with their own sense of finality, the voice that her mother had decreed any number of things throughout Suzumi's childhood.

"As far as you travel away from me, away from the world you no longer truly belong in and towards one I could never reach, you'll always be my daughter. You will never be too different, or too powerful to be my little girl."

It was with a long hug that the day continued, and the hearts of the mother and daughter were poured out to one another, solidifying a truth Suzumi had always known.

Her mother loves her, and always would.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Kreiverin, Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 43: Old Wounds

I felt guilty, I really did.

I had noticed the lack of Suzumi's presence as soon as I woke up, and had spent quite a few hours letting her be alone after… everything.

It'd felt awkward to be so far away from her, to knowingly give her some space to work through what I'd had to work through not so long ago. Learning that you have something else living inside of you was a whole mental trip you had to embark on. and it was quite the ride to do so, as evidenced by the little trip into the waters of my soul.

But her situation was slightly different than my own.

Inside my soul was, in essence, another version of me. Different, but similar. Grayhom is me, and I am him, but we are just separate. Now, with yesterday's grand fiasco and accompanying laser light show, we were closer than ever, working in even greater sync towards the greater whole of our selves.

Suzumi had something else lurking inside of her, a malicious and self-interested being who is willing and intends to take control. A Hollow, legitimate in every way.

The first sign for me was the ribbon, but as soon as I entered the ritual room that Tessai had created, the bubbling white liquid that spewed forth from her body gave me ever assurance that Suzumi was hollowfying, for real.

When I had stabbed the mysterious silver blade into her chest, I had found myself inside her mind, coming intimately close to her soul itself. In there, I had seen her spiritual body as a war was being waged over it as her inner Hollow found its moment of dominance and took full advantage.

Her skin had been turning an ashy white, her eyes glowing with black irises and black sclera, the almost snakelike look she had given me had almost floored me.

In that moment, I had understood that this Hollow was something more than all the other's I had faced in combat. The Hollow was more akin to what Phantom was, though I hadn't ever been close enough to Phantom, or conscious long enough, to truly gauge its power.

Her Hollow was just as smart as her, just as self-aware as a human, and clearly capable of wielding spiritual energy and pressure with more skill than Suzumi—something I attributed more to the instinctual understanding that came with being a Hollow.

I tore myself from my own thoughts for at least a little while, knowing myself well enough that I was prone to overthinking and, worse, getting caught in a thinking loop.

I had dressed myself in the casual clothes that Suzumi had prescribed me for the time when I wasn't doing some sort of training. She had commented on it after reading an article on compartmentalisation on her phone one day and had instituted it as law the very next. I was strictly forbidden from spending any excess time within my training clothing, under the penalty of severe punishment.

I wisely didn't let my curiosity get the better of me, otherwise I'd infringe on the law purposely just to find out what the aforementioned 'punishment' would be.

I was slowly meandering across the rooftops, it having become night hours ago at this point. I had left Suzumi to roam free for the day, but that didn't stop my anxious mind from checking where her ribbon was every five seconds.

The anxiety, while it'd always been present, had made itself more prominent throughout the course of the day, and I was starting to see the cracks in my own façade. I liked to give off the impression of a strong and reliable character, just a personal preference of mine, but the downsides were clear. In short order, I'd found out that maybe I wasn't so strong after all.

Anxiety is the killer of the mind, and as I traversed the rooftops with an idle mind, plagued by the irrational anxieties that had plagued me my entire life.

It was all too easy to forget the wounds that you'd accrued over your life when things were going well, but now that I was placed squarely into a strange spot of 'distance' from Suzumi, I found the anxiety rise to a whole new level.

I had never truly dealt with the separation anxiety I'd accrued over the years of emotional torture that was the foster system. In the end I'd gotten off lucky, with the last of my childhood being spent with some of the most reliably 'there' people I could have asked for.

Ray and Sera… well, they'd saved my life. In more ways than one. I'm not afraid to admit that if I'd never found a home to stay in that I would have found myself knee deep in shit. There were so many ways to go wrong; 'trying' drugs, getting the wrong friends, lack of opportunity, lack of education, inability to deal with the financial burden that'd come along with all the doctor visits.

How long would it have been until I was truly hopeless, on the streets somewhere and totally alone, my childhood worldview only confirming itself to the nth degree.

Nobody cares.

How easy it was to believe that, as a child pushed from home to home, taken from friends that I'd loved, schools I'd found a home in. How long had it taken until I'd given up entirely, waiting for the care worker to knock on my door and whisk me away with my whole life wrapped in a thin, plastic garbage bag. How fitting that'd felt.

Yet, even after the years of healing I'd done underneath the stubborn persistence of Ray and unendingly loving care of Sera, I still held a portion of that little child within me in a white knuckled grip.

If I were being honest, I was wasting time, pussyfooting around what I really wanted to do right now. All I was doing was circling around Yua's flower shop over and over like a timid cat would around a toy mouse.

All I was doing was working myself up further, the anxiety increasing with every gentle leap I made from each rooftop, my eyes fixated on Suzumi's gently swaying ribbon. At least I could tell she was relaxed, but it certainly didn't assuage my own deep-seated fears.

"Are ya ever gonna go down there, kid?" A voice rang out from a man I should've noticed the presence of. The suddenness of my break from the never-ending thought loop was harsh enough to make me literally jump a little.

"Jinta." I breathed out, a little exasperation in my voice from being spooked so thoroughly. I did a doubletake, trying to reconcile the man's sudden appearance, but couldn't quite find a logical leap to make, "What're you doing here?"

The older man grinned at me boisterously, though he didn't yell like he might've were it any other meeting between us. The man was wearing surprisingly normal clothes, rather than the combat ready ones he normally wore. The outfit was simple, only a regular red tee that matched the colour of his hair and a pair of loose-fitting cargo pants that were held up with a wide belt that sat somewhat slanted on his hips. He crossed his arms across his chest, showing off the impressive muscle he had even despite his age.

"Better question is what you're doing here?" he tilted his head to the side, his fiery red hair bright enough in the dark night to pull attention, especially with such an odd colour to see within Japan's relatively mundane regular fashion.

"I, uh." I began, trying to come up with a good reason that wouldn't expose the borderline stalker behaviour, but Jinta grinned with a full set of teeth.

"I'm having you on. Yua called me out 'cause she could sense you circling the house for hours, Grayson."

"Yua could?" I asked dumbly as Jinta gave me an amused look.

"Hey, I was as surprised as you when I heard that Yua's little one was being trained by Urahara and Tessai. Been giving her updates throughout your training the whole time." The man grinned at my flabbergasted expression before he sat down on the edge of the roof we were currently standing on, patting a spot near him for me to sit as well. It wasn't long after I settled down next to Jinta before he spoke again, in a more thoughtful tone than I'd have expected from the brash man.

"You guys are going to be in for a lot." There was no question to the statement, but it was just another assurance that something would happen soon, and I just couldn't be sure of what that'd be. I nodded to the rhetorical statement, staring sullenly in the direction of Suzumi's beautiful white ribbon.

"Things are already starting to happen, Grayson." The man continued, his voice dry of its normal humour, "Attacks are getting more frequent, stronger Hollows are worming their way out of the cracks of Karakura's streets, ones that even Soul Society don't have on their stupid records." He ran a hand through his red hair, scratching wearily at the scalp beneath.

"The team of newbies whose asses you saved a while back are just the start. High-spec humans just don't get that strong, not strong enough to contest with Hollows like Phantom. Maybe my wife and I could deal with a fair few strong ones, but even we're only comparable to a mid-level Soul Reaper, when it all comes down to brass tacks. But when missing peoples reports are rising through the roof, and any of the spiritual sensitives strong enough are getting spooked by the rising fatality of patrols, we're going to lose out."

"But Suzumi and I can't take care of them all." I said worriedly, but the man just shook his head.

"That's not what I mean. Kisuke and Tessai will help us with that, they've been taking care of Karakura for as long as they've been here." He waved his hand dismissively, "I'm talking about what all this build up leads to. I've seen it way too many times to be flippant about it anymore. I can almost feel it in the spiritual energy."

"But we don't know what it leads to." I said quietly, but Jinta failed to nod along. The lack of affirmation made me screw up my eyes at the man sitting beside me, looking at the side of his morose expression.

"Phantom has been here for far too long." The sudden change in topic confused me for a moment, but the man continued onwards despite the bizarre switch, "Its an Adjuchas level Hollow, something that you'd only see in Hueco Mundo. There's a reason for that."

"They need power to sustain their form." I responded, recalling the barest memory of Kisuke saying something along those lines. Jinta nodded.

"If Phantom was trying to sustain its power, even with its signature of only eating other Hollows, it'd be causing massive damage. Hollows of that level only come out of Hueco Mundo if they feel high value prey, but Phantom, as far as we know, hasn't been to Hueco Mundo for years or possibly even decades."

"So how is he sustaining himself?" I asked genuinely, though Jinta grimaced unsurely.

"I think the question is 'What happens when a Hollow of that power starts to destabilise?'"

My mind began to whirr as I thought on the topic. This sort of topic would have been way over my head not a few days ago, something I'd have bet that Grayhom would know something about. But things have changed since we built our soul back once again and having built a tower within out soul to reach the peak of its tallest mountain.

I looked at Jinta with that new understanding, seeing something entirely different than what I'd been capable of my entire life. My eyes focused on his ribbon, which lead me down deeper and deeper into his soul, like a safety rope connecting you to the surface of the sea while being hundreds of metres below.

I saw his soul in truth, then. The glittering gold crystalised core of Jinta's being. I observed the golden crystal and stone mass and found myself thinking with two minds, one of my own and one of Grayhom's, discussing and explaining and expressing to one another in abstract ways that wouldn't truly make sense if formed into literal speech.

I found myself with a surety of what would happen, as Grayhom and I both came to analyse the structure of a soul and relating it to what a Hollow's mishmash of combined parts would look like.

"There would be an internal war between the components in the soul that are vying for dominance over the Adjuchas' main function, over its identity. I don't know how quickly that'll happen, but if Phantom has been denying itself the spiritual energy and souls it needs to function for as long as you think it has, and the identity that's driving it is strong willed enough to have held it off…" I swallowed heavily, looking towards Suzumi's calm ribbon, uncomprehending of the understanding that I've come to, and the imminent danger I was suddenly realising that Karakura would be in.

"If Phantom's main identity is that impossibly strong willed, then Phantom may just become the Hollow equivalent of a controlled bomb as its soul eats itself."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 44: Approach

I reached out my fingers, pushing them through Suzumi's long black hair as she began to wake from the deep sleep that she'd been enchanted into by her mother.

"Good morning, sleepyhead." I intoned sweetly, a genuine happiness bubbling to the surface as I gazed over her gently awakening face. She groaned unhappily, a staple of her wakeup process, making me chuckle and pinch her slightly chubby cheek lightly.

She lifted a lazy hand, swatting my own away from her cheek as she sighed and righted herself from her side of our bed.

"How'd I get home?" Suzumi whispered sleepily and I myself got out of bed, brushing off some invisible dust from my jeans.

"Your mother called me and got me to carry you home." She turned to me with a raised eyebrow.

"I didn't know that my mum had your number."

"She didn't, she had Jinta's." She scrunched up her face in a mixture of embarrassment and consternation.

"Of course she did. I hate that she knew about the whole spiritual stuff before I did." I laughed, giving her a wry shrug.

"What's worse, we tried to withhold it from her, which is just about the most hilariously useless thing we could have done." She groaned louder, though the smile on her face gave away her own amusement.

"Maybe," she said quietly, "I'm just not sure that I like that she's in just as much danger as we are."

"Is she really, though? She's just spiritually sensitive. She might be in more danger than the average citizen, but if she's lived this long, and through that apocalypse that everyone keeps talking about, then I think she'll be just fine." Suzumi frowned, but it was broken by a yawn.

"I guess so," she said, her words coming out warped because of the yawn, "still, I don't like it. Everyone is saying that bad things are on the horizon and having her be anywhere near it gives me the heebie jeebies."

"You could ask her to move out of Karakura?" I questioned somewhat hopefully, though it earned me a particularly dry look.

"Who and what army?" I couldn't help but chuckle at the silly response, making my girlfriend roll her eyes gratuitously.

"Anyway!" I said as I rose from my spot next to Suzumi, already fully dressed, "Tessai probably convinced Kisuke to give us a day of reprieve, and if we wait much longer, Kisuke would probably end up exploding or something." I felt around for their ribbons as I waited for Suzumi's response, which was yet another groan as she stumbled from bed and quickly got changed into something more modest.

The two partners were currently down in the Study Room, which only took a few minutes for us to leisurely make our way down to. When we finally reached the end of the long flight of stairs, and entered into the impressively large underground area, even more impressive that I could now see its full area with both my regular eyesight and my more advanced spiritual senses.

"What a surprise!" A theatrical voice called, making Suzumi and I habitually roll our eyes, "The two spiritual anomalies have awoken at last?" We both turned and gave Kisuke a dry gaze, Suzumi's being significantly better than my own attempt.

"Whatever you say, Kisuke." I said, looking around for where the second red ribbon was that I'd seen down here. "Where'd Tessai go off to?"

"No need to worry, he'll be back in just a moment." Kisuke said, adjusting his white and green striped hat while pointedly ignoring the question entirely. "I think it's more important to go over some of your recent exploits. The both of you."

I sighed and prepared a hand to count off of a mental list.

"Alright so," I began heavily, "first; the silver ribbon blade came from the silver light I told you about after I built my soul back up again, secondly; no I haven't been able to resummon it, I can't even feel it anymore, thirdly; yes my soul is 'complete', fourthly; yes, Grayhom and I can think simultaneously now, fifth; I can now see other people souls and theorise with them as a basis instinctively." I stopped at my pinkie finger on my right hand, looking at the number of fingers pensively before quickly adding.

"Oh, and I have what I'd consider full spiritual sense now, probably." I said, closing out with the thumb on my left hand, presenting them to Kisuke with eyebrow raised. The man himself looked a little taken aback but nodded slowly.

"That was… concise. All of that we could see coming in some sense, though that silver ribbon sword and it's capabilities are a giant mystery it seems?" He half stated, half asked, but I disappointed the man with a nod. With a tsk, the man crossed his arms and furrowed his brow in consternation. I could just about hear the Rube Goldberg machine that was Kisuke Urahara's mind making a cacophony of sounds as he thought.

I found myself liking the new Kisuke, which was almost alien to the adversarial position that he'd taken within my new life. He'd been horrible to me in many ways, mostly directly after our initial meeting, but soon after that he'd slowly just become a nuisance and a bit of a jerk. Now? He was almost nice, trusting me with my own determinations of my new abilities instead of trying to cut it out of me with threats and dangerous gazes.

"Well, I can only imagine that'll change soon." The man looked up from the ground, breaking himself from his thoughts and instead looking around the wide room idly before returning to Suzumi's own gaze.

"So, you're quite the special one now." He said, a mixture of discomfort and interest emblazoned across his face. "The first being unbound by the Chains of Fate. You can even still be considered living. Quite the accomplishment." Suzumi snorted derisively, though it lacked genuine heat.

"It better have been, I almost died and became a Hollow." Kisuke shrugged nonchalantly, almost flippant in the face of the remark.

"Such are the risks. Besides, Tessai and I weren't unaware of the possibility that you'd have a powerful Hollow component to your soul. We do know about your mother, and that she'd had an encounter with a Hollow many years ago. Technically that gives you every right to be a Fullbringer as well." I quirked an eyebrow.

"Fullbringer?" I asked and Kisuke waved a hand.

"The long and the short of it is that Fullbringers are people whose mother was attacked by a Hollow at some point before their birth. Hollow spiritual energy actually lingers around in human bodies for a few decades, and when a child is born the formation of their spiritual self and soul is influenced by the energy. They get some wacky powers out of the deal." I turned to Suzumi with a questioning eye, though Kisuke cut in before Suzumi could deny having said 'wacky powers'.

"All Fullbringers have mothers that've been attacked by Hollows, but not all of those children are Fullbringers. Especially not when your mother has a lot of spiritual energy to deal with the leftover energy. Otherwise Uyu would also be a Fullbringer."

"But Suzumi does have some of that energy?" I asked curiously, getting a little glare from Suzumi who was about to ask the same thing.

"Her mother was young when it happened, and likely wasn't strong enough to actually deal with the energy at that point. The longer you leave the energy, the more entrenched it becomes, and before long it's almost as much a part of you as anything else in your body. Thus, Suzumi has a more powerful than average Hollow component to her being. Something that wouldn't have been an issue if she'd only grown to be slightly more powerful than her mother."

We all nodded with that, Kisuke actually doing a good job at answering our questions in non-frustrating sessions of trying to pull blood from a stone.

"So, what would've happened if she'd hollowfied? Properly, I mean." I asked quietly, almost hesitant to ask. Kisuke nodded slowly, thinking as he did so.

"Well, you forget that Tessai is just about the most powerful Kidō user aside from possibly Ichibe—though, that man could barely make a new kidō structure to save his life." Kisuke looked like he was just about ready to spit, though he shrugged it off after a moment of seething, "He would have put her in a nice little barrier, then have waited for me to come around and start easing her back into dominance, though I'm afraid that it'd result in her being the closest equivalent to being a Visard, just even more Hollow."

"How much Hollow?" The woman herself asked.

"Fifty-fifty?" The man said, wry grin in place. Suzumi scowled, though I placed a hand on her shoulder that seemed to calm her a little.

"Well, we know that they are there now, we can deal with it as we go along." I said placatingly, and after a moment she nodded her head silently. I breathed out heavily, just short of a sigh, and looked to Suzumi more closely.

"Have you found anything new about your Soul Freedom?" I probed lightly, though her expression of consternation didn't give me high hopes.

"Nothing much yet. I feel… better, though." I looked to Kisuke covertly, finding his grey eyes. He gave it a moment of thought and nodded. Well, at least I got some confirmation that everything was fine. I had actually done a fair amount of the repair work myself, when I'd been inside Suzumi's soul. Truthfully, I understood very little about what I'd actually done, and even Grayhom had been somewhat surprised by the sudden boost in our abilities to not only edit another's soul, but to also understand it so clearly.

Now, while I had a good instinctive grasp over it, I couldn't even remotely come close to how I'd basically entirely restructured parts of Suzumi's soul to work without a Chain of Fate. The method that Tessai had used to actually work with the soul was pretty good, but it was crude. Without me there, things would have gone pretty wrong for Suzumi, though it was potentially a viable option of someone with a powerful enough soul and free of any major impurities. Otherwise, I'd have to be there to actually complete the procedure.

"Where is Tessai, I thought he'd–" I heard Kisuke mutter before there was a sudden thump as a rush of wind buffeted against my body with a force that would have easily blown me back a few metres not so long ago.

Standing where the source of the displaced air had come from, was the tall form of Tessai, except now he was holding someone else while he wore a hard expression.

"Kisuke!" He bellowed, though he failed to come up with anything else as he fell to one knee, managing to gently place the form he was holding to the ground as he did so. We all rushed over the few metres that separated us, though Kisuke held us back with a wave of his hand.

He quickly knelt over the woman that Tessai had brought into the Study Room with him. He placed a hand over her body and in a moment, there was a grand flash of green before a light cough rung out. Kisuke lifted the woman up, revealing a full view of a strikingly familiar woman, one we'd never met but knew all the same.

A woman with long black hair with a distinctive fringe that fell between her eyes laid there, coughing wetly as little sputters of blood came to her lips. However, it was her face that sent a collective shockwave through Suzumi and I's bodies. Her eyes drooped downwards, almost as if she were constantly sad, her lips pulled downwards in a permanent frown.

It was Uyu's face.

"Ururu, what happened?" Kisuke called after a minute, though it was even more time before she managed to respond.

"Uyu, Jinta…" She coughed again, but Tessai's powerful voice rung out in her stead.

"They were taken."

"By whom?" Kisuke asked immediately, his eyes burning with spiritual power, enough that I could see them glow through my natural vision.

"Hollows. Too many of them." Tessai answered, grunting with a little pain, "They were coming for Hueco Mundo."

"Hollows following orders?" Kisuke recoiled, almost disbelieving.

"Something capable of controlling them, maybe. I don't know–" A lightbulb went off in my head at that moment. Understanding dawned with a silver glow.

"Phantom." I said, my voice cutting through the clamour.

"What about him?" Suzumi stated quickly, urging me forwards underneath the powerful eyes of all present.

"Phantom is losing stability, and its a really powerful Hollow. I'd bet anything that some Hollow from Hueco Mundo is looking to take advantage of the power a self-destructing soul, waiting till the moment where the main identity of the Hollow is destroyed and eat it. And who is to deny him a little snack along the way?"

The harrowing declaration resounded in the massive space, rebounding off the walls and returning to my ear easily, despite the usual lack of an echo.

"Well shit." Kisuke said, worry etched into his face, "That's not good."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 45: Encounter

"How are we even going to find Phantom? It has the name for a reason." Suzumi called as we raced over rooftops, bounding from one to another with our eyes peeled warily. I felt everyone in the group turn to me, even Ururu who I'd only just met. Apparently, my reputation precedes me.

"I still can't get a hold of Phantom's ribbon. The Hollow is an enigma even for me. I'm spreading my sense out as much as I can at the moment, but…" I shrugged and Kisuke sighed along with Suzumi.

"Thought so. You have sensed him in the past when you were much weaker than now, so keep looking for him. I don't trust that I'll be able to sense him." I swallowed as we bounded of yet another roof with a light step. Being given a responsibility like this int eh middle of a literal Hollow incursion was borderline, my senses suddenly being the stopgap between people actually dying.

The group of Soul Reapers and High-spec humans worked out an order to the group very quickly. Kisuke took the front position, followed only slightly by Tessai. Directly behind them was the woman that we'd heard much about, Uyu's mother Ururu. She had healed extremely quickly under Tessai's powerful healing kidō and a bottle of the spiritual tincture that Kisuke had given to me a few times in the past.

At any other time, I think we'd likely have a great conversation, likely including Uyu herself. We hadn't seen much of Uyu over the past weeks, mostly because she was having to focus on school properly now and she didn't have the almost absolute freedom of time that we had when it came to training. Now, though I was severely regretting not staying in contact more.

I pushed down the fear in my chest, the one that whispered into my ear that it very well may be the last time we see Jinta and Uyu alive. Thankfully, Suzumi didn't let me wallow.

"Do you think my mother will be okay? The Hollows are targeting spiritually powerful humans, right?" I looked around quickly in my vision, easily pinpointing Yua's spiritual ribbon. Now that I looked at her ribbon, it was a miracle that I'd ever believed that she didn't have any spiritual power. Maybe it was just because I was more powerful now.

"She's still at her home Suzumi. Have you called her, or sent her a message?" I asked quickly, and she nodded succinctly.

"Then I don't know if there is much more we can do right now. Hopefully she'll be able to get in touch with someone who can help her, like Jinta's gang."

"She won't." A cold voice said from in front of us, Ururu's turning her dark blue eyes to us for a moment. "They are in hiding since they took Jinta and Uyu." Suzumi sighed heavily, frustration leaking into her breath.

"What information do you have about the Hollows we are up against?" I asked, though she turned away as she answered.

"They are strong, and without my weapon on hand, they were able to take us by surprise. They hid themselves extremely well, I didn't even get a hint of their reiatsu." She senses things by their spiritual pressure then. It was a powerful sense, but easily tricked. Kisuke had determined ages ago now that I don't just sense by spiritual pressure and energy, but also more deeply. By soul. It made my ribbon sense immensely powerful and almost entirely untrickable, though hiding from it was a far easier feat.

"How strong are we talking; Adjuchas level?"

"The lead Hollow may be, though I didn't sense it or see them directly. The other Hollows aren't that strong, most are regional Hollows, but there are a few heavy-hitters that came from Hueco Mundo as well." My mind whirred as we made our way towards the Hanakari household. Kisuke and Tessai likely could have made the trip multiple times by now, but there was something to be said for spending time collecting information along the way.

"Kisuke!" I called out to the front of the group, making the man turn his head to the side to listen, "Likelihood that the lead Hollow has a stealth ability powerful enough to hide that many Hollows? I can't sense Jinta or Uyu's ribbons either."

"Unlikely," he said after a moment of thought, "If it has the power to control other Hollows the way that it is, then it's more likely that the lead Hollow is controlling another Hollow with that ability." There was a moment of silence between the group as we travelled, each of us using any part of our skillsets that we could to sense any movement whatsoever.

"Meaning that it may already have Phantom under its power."

That wasn't good, not at all. Phantom was powerful enough to escape from anything underneath a Captain-class Soul Reaper, and even Kisuke and Tessai aren't able to pinpoint its location, instead relying on me.

"Let's hope that its just another Hollow with a similar ability." I said, even if I didn't feel so optimistic. "Just how smart is this Adjuchas supposed to be?"

"Roughly human equivalent, though it may be unique." Kisuke said simply, "In that case, it may be able to find a way to become an Arrancar, if its lucky."

I growled, about to respond with a set of very aggressive words towards that idea, but it was then that I sensed… something. It was the barest flicker of a Hollow's ribbon, something that was very noticeable in the eerily silent Karakura.

"Hollows to the north-east." I called and we changed direction ever so slightly from the due north that we were travelling. The group went almost entirely silent as we sped up a good fifty percent. Suzumi, who was the slowest of the group, still managed to keep up with the rest of us. In fact, I realised that she was cribbing the movement technique that I'd both developed and remembered while down in that pit. Suzumi was an impressively good experimenter, though I beat her out in actual learning speed.

We travelled faster and faster as our weakest link continued to improve under the pressure of the situation. It was only a few moments later that we were only metres from where I'd sensed the Hollows originally.

However, no matter how close I got to the area, I couldn't pick up anything.

"Please tell me that someone else can sense something?" I asked hesitantly as I widened my spiritual senses to my maximum range, losing some of the three-dimensional definition that I'd become accustomed to.

"Not a thing, Mister Carter." Tessai said smoothly, his voice a quietly calm tone that starkly contrasted the immediacy of the situation. No-one else spoke up to correct the man, so I just continued to widen my own range, permeating the intangible cloud of spiritual pressure and the particles of it that extend its reach further.

That was, until I hit a massive wall.

Not a wall in that I couldn't physically push out my spiritual pressure further, but that it was being stopped by something. I looked with my physical eyes in the direction of the wall and finding nothing where my spiritual senses were being impeded.

"My spiritual senses can't see past there," I drew a line in the environment where the wall was, "I can only assume that they have a barrier of some sort." There was no immediate rush into combat, something that I was almost expecting, instead Kisuke spent a moment with his eyes closed, as did Tessai.

"I see it." Tessai's voice rumbled, making Kisuke open his eyes, "It isn't kidō, but it works off a similar principle. This is an immensely powerful ability; it could only be a hyper specialised Hollow capable of doing this."

"Alright!" Kisuke said, clapping his hands together obnoxiously, "Mission one; find the Hollow that's creating the interdiction field capable of throwing us all off. Understood?" Everyone nodded succinctly, and only after another moment did the scruffy man give a wide grin and disappear from view, launching the rest of us into action.

Suzumi and I quickly broke off from the group, only Ururu following nearby us in a parallel strike as we rushed towards what Kisuke had called an 'interdiction field'. It only took a few leaps to reach its perimeter, and as soon as we actually contacted it, it felt as if we were swimming through water for a few moments before we surfaced on the other side.

As soon as I was on the other side of the barrier, my mind burned with the sudden influx of information that I'd been missing.

"Holy shi–"

Before I could even complete my sentence, there was a cacophony of simultaneous Hollow screams, rumbling the air with their spiritual pressure like a cicada buzzed with its wings. Within my spiritual senses, now back to its usual high-resolution mode, I could see a huge amount of spiritual energy being gathered and pointed.

Right in our direction.

"Suzumi!" I bellowed as I dived out of the way, Suzumi doing the same thing after a fraction of a second. Just as we made it out of the energy's path, Suzumi and I had a strange moment where we stared at each other as we waited for the attack. Then our view was obscured almost entirely by a massive green beam of dense spiritual energy.

The feeling of the massive power moving by us was electrifying, the sheer power of it made the hairs on my arms stand up on end with the rush of adrenalin. The beam quickly dissipated, whittling itself down to almost nothing before petering out, allowing Suzumi and I to look at each other once again. Acknowledging what had clearly been an ambush attack on the Hollow's part, likely a part of the ploy of letting me see just a flicker of the Hollow ribbons earlier.

My only response to her bewildered expression was a savage grin, a precursor to the enjoyment I was going to get out of this fight. She rolled her eyes, snapping out of her fugue, turning to look at the small army of Hollows collected on the ground and just above it.

The current number of ribbons didn't quite allow me to pin down which one was creating the barrier, and which had tried to incinerate us with spiritual energy, but it didn't matter. With a powerful leap off of the multi storey apartment building I was standing atop, I launched myself towards the battle, hungering for the challenge.

One Hollow lashed out first, using its vine-like appendages to try and capture one of my limbs. However, it wasn't strong enough to stop me from pulling it towards me. By the time it realised that it wasn't going to be capable of holding back it was too late, and even as its appendage detached from is lightly red coloured body, my fist was already plunged elbow deep through its mask and its malformed head.

Hollows, not the type of creature to heed the warning, all quickly tried to take advantage of my moment of weakness. However, Suzumi was only moments behind me, landing within the encirclement of Hollow and pulling her body into a tight formation, similar to a boxer's.

The flurry of blows was faster than I'd ever seen from my girlfriend, each blow taking a chunk out of the Hollow it hit, her arms, shoulders, and back muscles glowing with the spiritual cloaking that we'd been slowly building.

Now, though, the power only grew more potent with every passing second, quickly racing to match my own combat prowess.

It was then that I remembered part of what I'd done in the fugue of silver power. How I'd changed her soul into something more powerful, more unique than any other that existed. It was when Suzumi turned to me with a challenging eye that I saw the power that flowed through her, changing her eyes into that predatory yellow.

Sitting on her cheek was the beginning of a bone-white mask, seething with spiritual energy far surpassing anything that she had command of before.

I could only watch and admire my handiwork as Suzumi turned to demolish five more Hollows with singular blows. However, I couldn't just watch.

It was easy to take a quick look around at the ribbons of the surrounding Hollows and grabbing the most powerful one. With the new rush of spiritual energy, ever so slightly discordant to my own supply, I took that ribbon and swung it sideways like a blade.

The spiritual energy burned from my fingers after the swing, accompanied by a flash of spiritual energy that swept through over ten Hollows, destroying their bodies in that same moment. The grin I shared with Suzumi just after was wild and competitive.

"Grayson!" She yelled over the clamour of Hollow screams and her own blows, "You better damn tell me what the fuck you've done to my soul!" I laughed at her, though it was cut short when I felt a new ribbon come into focus, much more powerful than the Hollow's we were chewing through.

"I will, but first…" I turned towards a large, frog-like Hollow clinging to the side of an apartment building, its mask splitting open to reveal a massive gaping hole where its throat should be. Just inside of its mouth, a small ball of spiritual energy began to form.

"How about we take down the big guy?"


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 46: Small Edits

A wave of force exploded out from where I'd been standing only moments ago, the frog Hollow sending a small ball of spiritual energy out like a bullet in hopes that it'd hit me. The concrete of the road shattered in a few metre radius, though I easily dodged any shrapnel that might've hit me.

Dodging had become almost effortless after attaining spiritual senses at my current level, the exact precision of the sense allowed me to map myself in three-dimensional space along with everything around me. After a while, it became surprisingly easy to navigate that way, especially as I wasn't restricted to a viewpoint, like birds-eye, but instead had a grasp of distance and space on an entirely different level of precision.

In fact, I almost used spiritual senses entirely in lieu of my actual eyesight, only using my eyes for the basest information like colours instead of relying on them.

"I'll pull its attacks; you kick its ass!" I called out to Suzumi as I dashed towards the sizable Hollow as it removed itself from the side of the apartment building it had been sitting on with surprising grace. My movement was fast, something that Suzumi couldn't quite match as of yet. But with the strange fusion of Hollow instinct, and her own natural proclivity towards creating new techniques, Suzumi was going to catch up very soon.

The Hollow barely had time to react before I was at its side plunging a fist into the green skin, though it did no real damage. It was strangely fleshy and rubbery for normal Hollow skin, but the blow managed to hurt the thing of instinct enough that it lashed out at me with one of legs. The hand contained four fingers, though they had what looked like barbs covering them that likely gave it the ability to stick to things.

I narrowly avoided the swipe, twisting my body just enough that the barbed fingers came just shy of clipping the overly flowy training shirt Suzumi and I both wore. Out of the corner of the Hollow's vision, there was a flicker of movement before Suzumi's fist came smashing into its back with a resounding sound like beating on a muffled drum.

While it didn't pierce through the skin, it was easy to tell from the Hollow's movements that the blow had hurt it bad.

The green-skinned thing quickly turned to seek Suzumi as she retreated to look for another opportune moment, but I made sure to give the thing a few hard taps on the edge of its mask, making the bone-like structure crumble slightly. It whipped back around to attack me again, not smart enough to prioritize a target over what was putting it in the most immediate danger.

As I danced around the Hollow, letting it come just close enough for me to give it some paltry blows to its attacking limbs, and a few to its body, I began to categorise the Hollow as I did, finding exactly where it fit in the rankings of the Hollows I'd fought.

It took another blow at me and I dodged flawlessly further into its space, tantalising it with how close I was. As I spun into its guard, I slammed a fist into its arm with a crack of its bone. It made a bellowing scream that was cruelly cut short but Suzumi coming down on the thing's back again with both hands clasped and swinging with a hammer-like motion.

The Hollow was momentarily flattened to the ground, its limbs not enough to hold itself up underneath the force of the blow and its weight with the one mangled limb I'd given it.

I capitalised on its down state, giving it a few powerful blows to its mask, though before I could land the final blow its more powerful hind legs found purchase and pushed from the ground with a blast of raw strength, sending its rotund and bloated green body into the sky.

"I'm chasing!" Suzumi called clearly before she zipped away at high speed through the urban landscape to follow, leaving me behind to contemplate. I didn't need to interject myself into that fight, Suzumi had it in the bag no problems.

Though, that didn't change how… weird that Hollow was. So weird, in fact, that it could fire a Cero.

That might not be strange, seeing as Ceros are part of the Hollow move set after all. Yet, that Hollow wasn't an Adjuchas. It wasn't even a strange sort of Menos Grande. By my quick look into its dark, discordant soul, it was only just at the peak of a regular Hollow's power, destined to become a mindless Menos Grande.

It shouldn't be capable of firing a Cero, not at least until the next stage of its evolution.

When I looked into its soul, I found myself looking at a jumbled mess that wasn't too dissimilar to my own soul from not too long ago, though the waters were heavily polluted by half connected functions firing at random intervals in the vain hope that they'd someday connect and properly create a soul in the process.

However, this Hollow's soul was different. It had taken most of the fight for me to realise the strange discrepancy amongst its peers, but when I noticed it I couldn't possibly unsee it.

It had a core, a module within its soul that was unnaturally uniform in comparison to its ultimately chaotic surroundings. It would be the equivalent of seeing a pristine, perfectly functioning heart within the chest of a mangled, rotting corpse. The strange module sat within its soul, subtly influencing the surrounding components in a way that escaped me, though at minimum it gave the Hollow access to abilities you'd consider only available to an Adjuchas.

I heard a set of soft footsteps return to my side after a sharp sound of movement cutting through air.

"All dealt with!" Suzumi said cheerily, though her voice was ever so slightly warped by the vibrations of her spiritual energy, something that was generally unique to Hollows. I turned to her with a worried expression, though it had nothing to do with the single side of a Hollow mask covering her lower right cheek, as if she were growing a second skull entirely.

"What?" Suzumi's cheer dropped out of her voice, raising her hand to her face, and touching at the mask piece, "It doesn't hurt or anything, it feels kinda weird though." She said placatingly, but I shook my head with furrowed brows, brushing my hands against my dark blue, baggy training pants nervously.

"No, I'm not worried about that. It's the Hollow." She creased her own brow for a moment in confusion, though she seemed to come to the right conclusion before she replied.

"The Cero, right? Wasn't it only Adjuchas that could use it?"

"Menos Grande too, but that Hollow was neither." She made a 'go on' gesture, something she'd perfected as a weapon against my overly complicated explanations. "I think it was edited." I summed up hesitantly.

Suzumi's eyes narrowed, "You think…" I grimaced at the implication but shrugged.

"Kisuke himself has said that Soul Reapers do testing on Hollows, so it could technically be anyone, but…" I shrugged again, helpless against the scrutiny. It was a possibility I didn't really want to accept, but had to take seriously, nonetheless.

"But what?" Another feminine voice called as Ururu appeared near us at an extremely high speed, her hair swaying with the movement, though the massive rectangular rocket launcher she was casually holding with one arm certainly drew more attention. It probably wasn't heavy enough that Suzumi or I wouldn't be able to carry it but seeing such a weapon be actually wielded was pretty impressive.

"We were talking about the Hollow we fought, the big green frog one." Suzumi filled her in. Ururu nodded deeply.

"I killed a crab one that could shoot small Ceros out of its claws. Yours could do the same?" We nodded simultaneously, "I didn't know that Adjuchas could be so weak–" She began, but I cut her off.

"They weren't Adjuchas, they were peak regular Hollows." Ururu's gaze turned to meet my own, pulling me from my three-dimensional vision and into the standard eyesight. Her dark blue eyes were dead serious, burning with a warning.

"This needs to be told to Kisuke. You tell him, or I will." I nodded with a note of subservience to the woman. I hadn't ever bothered to truly gauge my strength against Jinta, but I could only assume that Ururu was similar in strength. However, under her gaze, I could tell that I was lacking something that would put me above her.

"Time to pay the piper, I guess." I muttered as I took off from the ground without a word, launching myself gracefully to a nearby multi-storey building's rooftop. Ururu followed without a thought, streamlined in comparison to Suzumi's somewhat messy movements.

I homed in on Kisuke and Tessai's ribbons, both of which were visible to me within the massive spiritual interdiction field. The field was frighteningly powerful, capable of stopping me from sensing ribbons or any spiritual presence at all. If this became a common ability, I'd have to find a whole new way of sensing that couldn't be obstructed by it, something likely to be a difficult feat.

The path we took across the rooftops abruptly ended as we came to what seemed like an abandoned building site for multiple apartment blocks all right next to each other. I dropped down to the ground, running across the dirt ground of the unfinished buildings, making my way towards the two crimson ribbons that hid in the mess supporting beams and concrete.

"Nice of you to join us!" Kisuke's voice called jovially as we approached their forms, marvelling at the sight before us, though Ururu seemed unconcerned. The sight in question was a massive Hollow's body slumped against a half-completed wall, sliced cleanly in half by the blade that Kisuke held in his hand, the cane he carried around everywhere having converted its length into a blade.

"Was that what was creating the barrier?" Suzumi asked, pulling the attention of the two Soul Reapers, both went from a casual expression to one of stoic shock as they looked at the part mask resting on her cheek. Ururu did a double take, somehow only just realising the thing, then all of them turned back to me.

"Later, Grayson." Kisuke intoned heavily but moved his eyes back to Suzumi as if nothing were different, "No, that Hollow wasn't. It was housing what was." With a grin, Kisuke gestured towards Tessai dramatically, like a magician to his assistant that he'd just 'sawed' in half.

The massive, stoic man blinked dully, before gently unfurling a closed hand, revealing a little bug within. Its entire body was bone white, only small lines of black across its form, and a large hole through its carapace to clearly designate it as Hollow in nature. Its wings seemed to rub together at an insane speed, waves of spiritual pressure coming off in sync.

Without a single word, something I'm told is important when it comes to Kidō, Tessai formed a little barrier around the insectoid Hollow. The instant that he did, I could feel the watery sensation of the interdiction field slowly begin to dissipate as the ribbons from outside the barrier began to flicker back to life in my senses.

"That little bug was it?" I said, a little stupefied. I had expected something a little more powerful and maybe a good fight to go along with it. Kisuke waggled a finger in front of my face with a grin.

"Not just! The little 'sucker'," he winked gratuitously, "needs to be attached to something with large reserves of spiritual power," he flicked a hand back at the big Hollow that was slowly dissipating, "and then it can make the barrier. It's the closest thing to a living spiritual tool I've seen from the Hollows. I'm surprised they could make it something like this at all, aside from with Szayel Aporro's help…"

Kisuke took a look at our expressions, cutting his own little monologue short with a wary glace, as if we were going to spring a surprise attack on him.

"It would be nice if you'd tell me what I'm clearly missing here." He stated finally, looking between us with a little pain in his face. Ururu turned to me and made it very obvious that I was going to talk now, or she would.

"The Hollows have been edited, I'm sure you realised they were throwing around Ceros?" He nodded, "I think that someone managed to edit these hollows into being capable of things way out of their league. The frog Hollow was the peak of regular Hollow at best but could fire Ceros anyway." Kisuke took a deep breath in, staring at me with frustration, though instead of unleashing on me he turned to Tessai and spoke quickly.

"See! I told you ages ago that I had a hunch and now we've got a possible legion of soul editors running around messing with things!" Kisuke rubbed his face, wearier than I'd ever seen him, Tessai mirroring the expression to a point.

"Alright, simple plan, then." He piped up with a clap of his hands. "Keep all of that in mind, but don't think about it too much otherwise we'll be here theorising all day while people are being taken and Phantom comes ever closer to becoming the Hollow equivalent of a nuclear bomb."

"I can help track down where the other interdiction fields are," I interjected quickly, ready to embrace any other conversation than the one where Kisuke lambasts me for thirty minutes, "I can just search for where there aren't any ribbons."

Kisuke nodded quickly, giving me the go ahead, letting me delve into the sense and widen it to cover almost all of Karakura Town. Within moments we were racing off towards each of our own barriers, with Kisuke, Ururu, and Tessai both taking two each and Suzumi and I taking one each by ourselves.

I sped across the rooftops towards the uncertain future, suddenly filled with even more things to worry about. I clenched my fist, pushing my body even further and moving even faster towards the dome I'd designated myself.

Hopefully, a good fight will calm the nerves.

I grinned in anticipation.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 47: Arachne

"God that was terrible," Suzumi heard a voice say in the back of her head right after she'd lashed her arm out at a Hollow and only managed to blow off its arm instead of a hole through its mask, "c'mon, let me out to show you how it's really done!"

"Shut up!" Suzumi yelled as she put her fist through another Hollow that'd attacked her from the side, then quickly pivoting to avoid an attack from the Hollow she hadn't managed to destroy the first time around, using the force of the pivot to launch a screwdriver flip, spinning like an ice skater, and slicing through the thing's mask with a kick.

Immediately after the moment, Suzumi growled at herself in frustration, though the voice in the back of her head laughed jubilantly.

"See? I told you my way was better! Though you're still shit even using my movements."

"Do you have to be so…" Suzumi struggled to find the words as she raced towards the area that Grayson had sent her towards after offing the Hollows that had been sent to interfere.

"So much of a bastard?" The voice cackled, completing the end of Suzumi's sentence like it could read her mind, "Of course I do! I'm still fucking pissed you put me back down here."

Suzumi didn't know how a voice could be so manically jubilant and so viscerally enraged at the same time, but the Hollow that lived within her certainly made it work. Suzumi so desperately wanted to find a middle ground with the being, but they were counters to each other, and she knew that it was by design.

Hollows are technically the counter opposites of humans. Being the chaos to the human's order. Suzumi wanted to reach out and come to some sort of an accord that wasn't enforced by Grayson's miraculous editing of her soul, but just talking to the other being within her made her angry and frustrated.

"I didn't put you down there!" Suzumi said as she jumped from a roof with a little too much force, breaking off a few of the roof tiles. The Hollow within laughed at her misstep, struggling to catch its own breath between bouts of enraged laughter.

"Oh fuck off, would you? You were all too happy that I was gone before I showed up again when you started fighting. Try getting rid of me now, bitch." It said, baiting her with infuriating skill. Suzumi moved across the rooftops faster, trying to run away from the anger the Hollow was breeding within her.

"Trying to give me the silent treatment now, are you?" It said mockingly as she came closer and closer to her goal, preparing herself for battle.

"No, I'm focusing." Suzumi said between gritted teeth, immediately regretting her decision to respond at all.

"Focusing? Hah!" The Hollow said as it lounged inside of her mind, sending the distinct impression that the more realised form of the Hollow was laying on the ground on its side, propping its head up on an elbow with a leg propped up. "There is no focus in battle, only the revelry found in the slaughter of your enemies. Focus is for those that rail against pain and suffering, instead of embracing the sweet sensation of coming ever closer to death!"

Suzumi grimaced at the warped window into the Hollow's mind, the disturbing ideals were only more unsettling to Suzumi as she realised that she was technically borrowing part of its power.

She could feel in her mind the shape and form that the Hollow had taken in lieu of her own spiritual body. Though, it remained humanoid and alarmingly similar to her own self.

The Hollow retained the ashy grey skin and predatory yellow eyes with black sclera, but now it had more detail, including possessing black fingernails and small other details. Though what really stood out was the clothing and the mask that her alter ego wore.

The clothing was… revealing, to say the least. It was a getup that mortified Suzumi to her very core, possibly the very reason that it'd chosen the look. It wore a pair of baggy bone-white pants, which would have been fine if there wasn't a massive hole surrounding the crotch area, revealing a pair of tight-fitting black panties. The top that it wore was similar in its bagginess, though much of its chest was entirely bare, proudly displaying the massive hole, easily as large as a hand at full splay.

The huge hole was one that you'd only usually see on a Hollow many time larger. The hole ate into a significant portion of its breasts, which had been tightly secured with a piece of bone-white armour that surrounded its back all the way to the other side of the hole on its chest.

It was horrifying for Suzumi to look as what was basically herself doing a Hollow cosplay, though, disturbingly, she realised that it didn't even look half bad on it.

Though, that only left the mask. It was directly reminiscent of a predator's skull, something like a wolf or a fox, enclosed over the Hollow's face perfectly. The mask gave Suzumi a deeply unsettling emotion deep within her chest, burning with an indignance that could only be born when someone felt as if their very existence was threatened.

The Hollow looked up at where Suzumi was viewing it from, something that Suzumi had thought wasn't possible. The corrosion-yellow eyes stared right at her with a darkness counter to the violently contrasting colour.

"I thought you said you were focusing?" It cackled, letting Suzumi quickly realise that she'd been just moving towards her destination on autopilot. When she pulled her mind away from the thing inside her, she found herself feeling as if she had just walked into a wall of water, forcing her way through with some difficulty, but making it through to the other side.

The attacks from the Hollows within were almost immediate, a veritable legion of low-level Hollows standing at attention, ready to surge forth to vie for her flesh and soul. The mass of claws, appendages and weak projectiles were nothing in front of Suzumi's instincts after she'd found the Hollow mask slowly growing on her face during her last fight.

Ururu had cleared out the trash Hollows before, but now it was up to Suzumi to do all the work instead. She moved from Hollow to Hollow at a pace that she only kept accelerating as she quickly got better and better.

Tessai had warned her that she may not necessarily grow faster without her Chain of Fate, yet with the added discovery of the Hollow in her soul, and Grayson's intervention, it seems that she was destined to rise into power faster than she'd thought she would.

"My power, I'll have you know." The irritating voice called, reminding her of its presence once again.

"Its not yours if you're not using it!" Suzumi growled as she slaughtered Hollow left and right, keeping an eye out for any of the more impressive Hollow that could actually be a danger and summarily spotting one in the back of the pack, staring at her with the black pits that it used for eyes.

"Should I take it all back then?" It threatened emptily. It could no easier do that than Suzumi could push it out of her mind entirely.

Suzumi gathered a large amount of spiritual energy within a fist before slamming it into a nearby Hollow in the direction of the Hollow that she was keeping her eye on. The weak Hollow went flying with the punch, burning with the power of her spiritual energy as it slammed through rows and rows of worthless Hollows.

Just for a moment, Suzumi could swear that she saw her own spiritual energy, a flash of dark purple as that Hollow's flesh burned away. Usually seeing the colour of spiritual energy was a big deal, actual physical colour was almost undiscernible without condensing enough spiritual energy to observe it.

The Hollow made it all the way to the Hollow in the back, though it simply dodged the flailing thing as it did. The Hollow was slim and sleek, giving an impression of a cheetah. The dark blue skin blurred as it moved its protracted legs, cracking the ground underneath its clawed feet easily, bursting with speed until it was only mere centimetres away from Suzumi herself.

Though it wasn't that easy to get a hit on her anymore. Suzumi crouched as the Hollow launched a flying kick through the air, claws extended. The blow missed entirely, giving Suzumi just enough time before it could touch the ground and move again. Suzumi flipped backwards, using the sudden acceleration to catch the airborne Hollow with her feet and slamming it into the ground behind where she'd been standing.

The Hollow screeched, hastily trying to form a Cero between its jagged teeth, but Suzumi's grin widened as her fist crashed through its teeth and causing an explosion of half formed spiritual power, destroying the entirety of its head.

The battle waged on, regardless of the victory she'd taken. More and more fodder came to slow her down, but they only fed her growth as she learnt more and more to kill them faster than ever before.

Her feet blazed with movement as she dashed between Hollows, wiping out a handful of them with each attack, allowing the force of one punch mutilate many more instead of trying to attack each and every Hollow.

Her spiritual energy reserves didn't necessarily grow in size itself, but Suzumi learned to cycle the energy faster, rather than limit the amount that she used. The Hollow in her mind chattered incessantly about how it'd do it all so much better, but Suzumi could feel the intense growth within her as she fought.

There were three more of the 'edited' Hollows, each stronger than the next, with the final Hollow being much the same as the one that Kisuke had sliced in half without a thought.

The other edited Hollows had been easy fights. While they had increased strength and were way easier to hide inside one of these interdiction fields than something as powerful as an Adjuchas, they were just peak Hollows at the end of the day. They were beings that would have once given Suzumi nothing but death, but now she was far more capable than before, slowly reaching towards her goals.

The final Hollow, however, was terrifying.

Suzumi stepped foot in its territory, an abandoned factory, and as soon as she did, the massive thing shifted its arachnid-esque body to stare directly at her, a tiny little bug, almost exactly like the one that Kisuke had shown them, sat on its side underneath what'd be its thorax.

The screech it let loose was unlike anything that Suzumi had encountered before, so completely changed from what a regular Hollow was. Suzumi felt the spiritual pressure rumble the air around her, almost making it feel as if she was in an intensely humid climate, sitting around a blazing fire.

"A challenge!" The Hollow inside her screeched gleefully, "Die for me, idiot, I wanna be out!"

Suzumi didn't have time to reply as the spider Hollow charged, spearing one of its front legs out towards her as a ludicrous speed. Suzumi tried to dodge, but it clipped her side, spearing her flesh through before one of the leg's many barbs pulled it from her body savagely.

Suzumi scrambled out of the way, losing a great deal of her earlier grace to the wound. The Hollow didn't quite give up with only one attack, sending another leg towards her back as she move away from it.

She managed to slide across the ground, letting the long and thick piece of white limb fly overhead. After the leg began to retract to its body, she leapt up from the floor, grabbing onto it and flipping her body upright on the thing's leg.

The Hollow was strong enough that the movement didn't force the leg to fall, making it easy for her to burst into a sprint along its leg, like she had a thousand times across a metal pole. This time, though, the leg was moving as she herself moved.

She had managed to run about three quarters of the way up its leg before the Hollow had begun to try and shake her off of its leg, but she was already too close. She jumped before the Hollow could move its leg any significant amount and sent a fist at the wide mask that covered where eyes and mandibles would be on a regular Hollow.

Her mind was alight with the victory that was sure to come, her body so filled with spiritual energy, ready to burst out through her fist in a mighty blow. Yet, there was a sudden moment of unease within Suzumi's mind, and it was already too late once she'd noticed it.

The mouth, which had been closed up until this point, opened its wide maw, allowing two grotesque claws to shoot forth from the darkness within, slicing into Suzumi's body and keeping her there.

Suzumi desperately struggled against the extremely painful grasps, but only succeeded in allowing the mouth appendages to saw down and into her bones. There was a horrifying screech as a small pellet of deep red spiritual energy started to condense in the Hollow's mouth, the Cero growing massively in moments.

Suzumi could hear the Hollow in her mind screaming with laughter as she screamed in pain and effort, flooding her arms with the immense spiritual energy she was going to use to break its mask. Her mind slowed as the flow of spiritual energy raced against the completion of the Hollow's Cero, slowly allowing Suzumi some freedom against the torturous claws.

If you had blinked, you would have missed it.

The moment moved so fast in comparison to those before that it confused even Suzumi, as she laid of the floor of the abandoned warehouse, her eyes shifting across the room's interior. She couldn't tell if she now had a hole blown in her, or if the Hollow within was cackling in its sadistic glee, but she could see something just peaking around a corner as the massive Hollow in front of her began to push and prod with its legs.

A set of small, brown eyes. A child's eyes filled with tears as their last hope fled.

The overwhelming sense of failure overcame her, then. So, detached from the people she was supposedly trying to save from the hands of these Hollows, watching her die on the floor. She wanted to reach out, to touch them and comfort the holder of those eyes, but her vision faded slowly, leaving her with nothing more than a faint view of the Hollow she'd almost killed.

"We can't be having you die here, dear. Tsubaki! Koten Zanshun."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 49: Remains

Why was it that, in the heat of battle, I was still capable of coherent thought?

You'd imagine that being put in real danger would kill all thought, only allowing you to run off of instinct as your body desperately tried to preserve itself. Yet, even as my limbs were a flurry of blows against the horde of weak Hollows, I was able to think with a clarity beyond even that of my usual state.

It felt as if my mind were truly split, beyond Grayhom and myself existing separate from each other. On one hand, I could feel and almost see my mind calculating my next movements, the most efficient attacks coming to the forefront and being executed with an ease that I would have expected from someone that'd trained thousands of hours.

I almost felt that it was cheating, as I watched my body spin, kick, punch, and blast with the powerful spiritual energy that I possessed within me. But the 'auto' fighting that I was doing was certainly working against the weakest of the Hollows in the deep crimson dome I'd been trapped within.

My current situation was dire, to say the least. The interdiction field had been dropped almost instantly, a ploy to make everyone think that they all served the same purpose, hiding the Hollows within so that they could raid and pillage with ease, alluding our eyes for longer.

It was a terrible understanding that I'd come to, that I was being targeted.

Much of the information that led me to that conclusion was somewhat flawed, I'll admit, but I couldn't help but feel it was the truth. The conclusion relies on these Hollows knowing information that they couldn't possibly know about me, like my spiritual sense and my ribbon sense. Both of which, while not massive secrets, had been told to only a scant few people other than Tessai and Kisuke, unless someone else has been disseminating information to Hollows, which is about as likely as Kisuke being humble.

First, there had been the flash of the interdiction field going down, before coming back only a moment later. No one else had sensed that, unless Kisuke or Tessai had, but because my ribbon sense was always on, and worked regardless of the target trying to exude spiritual pressure, I saw it immediately.

That then led us to find how the interdiction field worked, then what was inside. Despite the Hollows supposedly trying to take hostages, that specific Hollow encampment had none. It was the first decoy, with trash Hollows that were simply throwaway to their purpose.

After that, I was the only one that could accurately sense the interdiction fields, though Kisuke could tell vaguely what was going on with his own mockery of my level of spiritual senses. I located as many as I could, at least what I thought was all of them, and pointed everyone towards one to take on.

This seemed innocuous, and it really was. There was almost nothing to this particular action other than me doling out the locations and splitting up. Yet, in the back of my mind, I can remember knowing that this specific interdiction field was just a tiny bit larger than the rest. It wasn't by much, just a few extra metres to the radius of the spherical dome, but it was enough to give myself that specific interdiction field.

It was a line of coincidences that added up to me being in a dark red dome along with some of the most powerful Hollow ribbons I've ever encountered, with two white ribbons that stood out to me.

Jinta and Uyu. They were here.

I growled savagely as I caved in a slightly stronger Hollow's mask, a flare of anger and frustration entering even the more analytical side of my mind. The following blows were something that I'd usually use on a Hollow much hardier than the wispy things that I exploded with those punches, but the slight relief of frustration was worth it.

I hated this. Whether or not they were truly here for me was almost irrelevant at this point. The fact was that they had me. Hook, line, and sinker. I was trapped in the crimson dome, Uyu and Jinta were unconscious or immobilised, judging by the small tells of their ribbons, and the sheer number of powerful Hollows within the barrier made it impossible for me to stop fighting and retreat, even if I could.

Thankfully, though, the crimson dome didn't block sight or much spiritual activity. If I made a big enough stink, Tessai and Kisuke would be able to feel it. With Tessai's advanced understanding of Kidō, I could only hope that he can do something to get rid of the dome, or at least to find a way inside it.

I refocussed my mind on what was happening in the battle, the other parts of my mind easily dealing with the Hollow horde with barely a scratch ever reaching my spiritual shielding, but I knew that it wouldn't last for long.

Just as it had been in the last interdiction field, there were more of the edited Hollows. Each of them felt slightly different to the rest of their brethren that surrounded them, giving me horrifying imagery of an almost Frankenstein's monster situation. With living, orderly components being inserted into Hollows like a living organ into a rotting corpse.

My new ability to look deeper into the soul using the ribbon as a basis was somehow interfering with how I perceived them. It was more than just coldly and analytically viewing the soul; it also gave instinct and emotion to the soul itself.

It was as if I could feel, touch, smell, and taste the soul as well, more three-dimensional than the on-paper understanding that a man like Kisuke had. But it also told me when something was deeply wrong or unsettling, and the edited Hollows were just that.

One of them came at me, using the blades that covered its insect-like carapace to create a whirlwind of death, but I easily dodged out of the way. Of course, I had sensed the Cero that the other Hollows were generating, all of them at slightly different speeds and intensities. It seems that a Cero was something almost entirely personal to the Hollow, despite the fact that it was a staple of the Hollow's attacks.

I danced between the quick succession of beams of dense spiritual energy, counting four in total. Five edited Hollows in one little squadron, all of them at least peak Hollow before editing.

Yet they weren't anything before my blows. The bladed carapace shattered underneath the force of my attacks, playing my usual game of cat and mouse, dancing on the edge of the knife's point. Even with all the pressure to perform, with lives of people I actually cared about on the line, I still found myself within that state of flow and excitement—the grin on my face ever widening into the savage thing that I was almost ashamed of.

Almost.

The bladed Hollow went down first, with it being the easiest to reach in between the Cero blasts, then I moved close into the other edited Hollows. The thing about a Cero, or at least one being used by something as technically 'weak' as these specific Hollows, was that it left them almost completely immobilised. So, with almost no effort at all, two more Hollows fell to my attacks, their masks crumbling.

The last two were trickier. One was speedy, and the other had powerful clawed attacks that forced me on the defensive in a loop of dodging at the cost of using any attacks.

However, that wasn't to last very long. The fight was stuck in a state of equilibrium, with them attacking and me dodging; so whatever instinct that lived inside of them told them that they needed to take a risk to bring me down.

A bad idea against someone that played with another's risks, like myself.

The speedy Hollow, finding a moment where I was tied up with the other Hollow's barrage of attacks, moved just out of the way to begin formation of a Cero. It wasn't going to be an absurdly powerful one, but it seemed that its speediness extended past just its physical movement.

I let the Cero form, faithfully doing as I always had and continuing to dodge the clawed Hollow. But I was doing more than just that, obviously. Kiting the Hollow towards a wall, I waited for the Cero in the speedy Hollow's mouth to form to just the right point, and then I jumped at the wall and kicked off of it with explosive speed, breaking from the clawed Hollow's attacks.

The moment slowed as I rocketed towards the other Hollow, hoping that I'd timed all my actions correctly so that I could catch it in the moment of absolute paralysation just before it fired a Cero blast.

And I did. I reached out my arms towards the Hollow's pronounced jaw and the top if its mask as I came within grabbing distance. If the Hollow had eyes and eyelids, I'd bet I could see its eyes widen when it realised what I was doing.

As soon as my hands touched the Hollow's mask, I clamped its jaw closed around its own Cero.

The explosion of spiritual energy sent me flying, though leaving me completely unharmed due to the excellent resistance to explosive force that my spiritual shielding gave me. I didn't look at the speedy Hollow's corps until after I'd pummelled the clawed one to bits, but once I did, it was quite the gruesome sight.

The entire top of its body was gone, completely, with the rest of it effectively torn to shreds, covered in some sort of wound. It was as dead as dead could be, for a Hollow. At least until a Soul Reaper came and actually sent it away to wherever they go.

The small victory was nice, but in moments I was in the thick of battle once again. The inside of the dome was absolutely littered with weak Hollows, no doubt used to just slow someone down, rather than to actually win any fights. But what had seemed like an almost infinite quantity was now dwindling faster than ever. My body was energised after the successful fight, my mind having hit yet another small improvement in the preciseness of my attacks, the agility of my movement.

I was crushing the small fries with my spiritual pressure alone, now. The spiritual energy I covered my body with now produced enough spiritual pressure as a by-product to give the weaker Hollows a hard time doing much more than move at a jogging pace.

As I slowly reached towards the fourth layer in my physical enhancement, slowly compressing the other three to accommodate, I was able to blaze past the weaklings and move to where I was really needed.

Towards the bone-white ribbon that sat in the back of the dome, only metres away from those that I needed to rescue. The ribbon itself wasn't the most powerful one I'd ever sensed, but there was another beside it that almost equalled it as well. Neither of which were Phantom.

Where was Phantom? Even if this really was a ploy to get at me, surely Phantom was supposed to be involved, somewhere?

I would have loved to ruminate on all the possibilities, but this time I didn't have the mental energy to spare for idle thought. This time, I was up against some seriously dangerous Hollows, and they were likely just as edited as the rest of them.

However, this time I was in a bad way, disadvantaged to a worrying degree.

The two Hollows I sensed, as well as a fair grouping of puny Hollows, were all collected in the middle of a football pitch. There were no walls, no verticality to abuse, no tricky corners to hide behind. My fighting style benefited from all of those, and they were nowhere in sight.

In any normal situation I would have tried to bait them out of the field, but that was clearly something they wouldn't follow along with so easily. The ringleader, a much smaller and almost human sized Hollow, stood next to a gargantuan Hollow, basically a wall of pure muscle and spiritual energy with a mask that was almost rectangular, being vertically taller than I was.

The ringleader was obvious as soon as I'd come in range of it, its spiritual pressure being present almost everywhere inside the little dome, filling it with its enormous reserves. Its reserves, while maybe not as completely absurd as my own, were the least part of its power. The rest were in just how much control it had, with the power swirling around it and connecting to its allies with tendrils that likely controlled they actions.

This was bad, really bad. Even being this close to the two Hollows were the closest I've been to death in my life.

Yet I couldn't stop myself from moving forwards, my eyes fixated on the two white ribbons of Uyu and Jinta, leading towards to bodies covered over with what looked like spider's silk laying within a small enclosure.

The smaller Hollow turned towards me, instantly realising my presence, twisting its mask ever so lightly to the side. The mask was disturbing, the eyeholes being narrow and long, extending horizontally, only broken by a split down the centre that widened as if its mask had a zipper, revealing something beneath that confused my senses for just a moment.

A yellowed skull. A real skull, aged by time and wear throughout the ages. This was more than just an Adjuchas, it made that much clear as a bone-chilling wave of spiritual energy washed over my body.

It was edited from the remains of something else.

I looked towards its ribbon, analysing it as deep as I could before the fight began, and it was with the faintest flicker of a Soul Reaper's red that the fight began with a spear of spiritual energy lancing through my gut.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., someguy, and Ryan U.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 50: Silver Truth

The sensation of pain was much 'realer' that those that I'd experienced before. It wasn't any normal pain, with the use of a physical projectile or a razor-sharp claw, no. This was spiritual energy, condensed into an almost physical form.

The sickly, dark red energy seared my flesh as it passed through my gut, scraping against the bone of my spine, simultaneously burning, and cutting a hole right through my body in the most painful way possible.

The spear of spiritual energy finally reached the other side of my flesh, breaking through my skin and disseminating into a blazing heat as it touched the air behind me, burning against the skin of my back, scorching it to a degree that a normal human could easily die from, just with the shock of the injury alone.

As the spiritual energy burned against me, I realised that it was a tool specifically created for torture, but also something else. In a way it was its own form of editing, though for some inexplicable reason, it didn't work on me.

As the last of the intense heat died, I finally managed to return my mind to what was happening, finding that only moments had passed in comparison to what had felt like hours of pain. The rawness in my throat was the only real indicator that I'd been screaming, the intense heat probably enough to evaporate any tears that I'd have shed.

The Hollow, the Adjuchas, wasn't surprised.

"You are him." It spoke, voice raspy as its yellowed skull clattered its jaw as it spoke the dry words.

"Probably." I ground out snarkily, still fighting the waves of pain from the spiritual spear's damage to my body. The cursory analysis I could do on the spear was that it was supposed to enter you and burn away inside of you, before releasing a small part of the spear that would allow the Adjuchas to control you by your own spiritual energy. He was a puppet master.

"Humour is not befitting of you." It said, though its voice didn't quite seem… natural. Even for a Hollow, the Adjuchas was acting strangely, too calculated in its subtle movements to be the being of ravenous hunger that a Hollow was at its core.

"That's news to me. I was told once that I could be a comedian if I wanted to, though the blind jokes wouldn't quite land right anymore." I said, though I wasn't really searching to pull more information out of him at the moment. In fact, I was just prolonging the moment before it attacked me, whether it was with its small army of Hollows that sat at the sidelines, with its massive partner, or by itself.

The Adjuchas stood still, its narrow slits for eyes glowed with a gentle red light, like the flash of colour on a poisonous creature, "You delay the inevitable." The words rang with a power, the same mindless power that a Hollow possessed, creating a clear dichotomy between the Adjuchas itself and its power.

I dialled my mind up to eleven, trying to take everything in, but there was an earthshattering sound as the massive Hollow that stood dumbly beside the Adjuchas moved. The soil of the football field sprayed into the air with the inefficiency of the movement, but the speed it produced was undeniable.

It was only with the forewarning of the sound that I was able to dodge the first blow from its fist smashing into the ground hard enough to make the earth quake around my feet, forcing me to jump backwards or be put off balance.

The Hollow didn't let up there, kicking out towards me while I felt a distinct prickling in my senses as yet another spear was formed in the hands of the Adjuchas, standing almost fifty metres away. I floated in the air for a moment as I realised the precision that I'd need to pull on for me to not end up with another hole in me, or end up as paste from the force of the massive Hollow's kick.

Just as my feet touched the ground, and the Hollow's kick was only centimetres from my centre mass, I did a short jump from the ground instead of the hasty leap back that I was sure the Adjuchas was waiting for.

Just as I did so, I committed to the sacrifice that I was going to have to make for the fight and turned both my feet to be flat against the Hollow's leg as it screamed through the air with enough force to crumble a building.

I let the leg impact my feet, only cushioned by the extreme amount of spiritual pressure I was pumping through them with spiritual enhancement, then pushing off of the leg, using all that speed to send me flying through the air.

The height I gained was, frankly, ridiculous. It was easy to forget just how much power was being thrown around in a supernatural fight like this one, but when you used the advantage of your body being hundreds of times lighter than the forces that combat produced, it became obvious.

In fact, I was flung so high with the Hollow's force, and the force I generated with my legs, that I actually managed to reach the peak of the dome. I didn't quite slam into it like a cartoon character would, but it was close. With the last bit of finesse I could produce, I managed to adhere my own spiritual energy to the barrier, something that was surprisingly easy.

I didn't have time to lose, even as my ankles and knees screamed with pain from the impact, as another spear followed shortly after, slamming into the dome right next to my head with a burst of heat that I quickly scrambled away from.

The solution wasn't perfect, not with the intense pain from my gut, back, and legs, but it was better than being on the field with the Hollows. I couldn't run away, there was no telling what they'd do to Uyu and Jinta, and I couldn't let that happen on my conscious.

Another spear slammed into the dome, stronger this time. The two objects, made out of the same deep red spiritual energy, resonated slightly. It unstuck me slightly from the material, rejecting the presence of the anchoring tendrils coming from my hands.

I didn't have much in the way of time either, it seemed.

"Alright Grayhom," I said to the open air, knowing full well that saying so internally was likely just as effective, "I'm gonna need to pull the rabbit out of the hat here, buddy." There was a response that bubbled up from deep inside of me, surfacing after a moment or two. Surprisingly, this time the response came in the form of spoken words.

"A rabbit might not be enough here, brother." Grayhom's voice had changed since the first time I'd talked to him, significantly in fact. Now his voice was slightly less like mine, more official and matured than my own, now linking far better with the aged appearance he'd begun to assume within my soul.

"What do you mean?" I asked, confused by the sudden interactivity from the soul dwelling identity. Grayhom's presence swelled up further, pushing through the surface of my soul solemnly.

"It is complicated," he began while I dodged another spear, one of my two hands coming almost entirely unstuck, "we have already determined that the identity that I am, was the identity of the soul that collided with you own, yes?" He spoke clearly and methodically. The change from the chipper and somewhat irritating Grayhom of the past was stark.

"Yes, yes, get on with it you old geezer!" I said as I only just managed to dodge the effect of the spear, and then a large clump of dirt thrown by the big Hollow. Grayhom coughed gently, though I could feel the spark of amusement from within our soul. Apparently, the mischievousness wasn't quite dead in him yet.

"Well, it's more than likely something from my soul's past coming to haunt us. There is no other reason for this being to be here, searching for us." I swallowed, knowing that it was true, though I didn't want it to be. The thought of it possibly being the truth was so much different than it being a reality.

"Couldn't it be that they just sensed our spiritual energy?" I asked, though I knew it was weak argument just as it left my lips.

"No, brother. They were talking about me when they talked to you earlier." There was a moment of pause from Grayhom, "Our soul does not contain the memories of our past, yet the link I feel with their essence… it is undeniable."

"Okay!" I yelled, dodging yet another spear, one of the last ones I'd be able to take before I was pulled from the wall entirely, "This sounds like talk for another time, Grayhom. Get on with it!"

"We will need to go back to that power we once wielded. The one I've been withholding from you."

"Withholding? What–"

Before I could finish my thought, a thick spear buzzing with spiritual energy slammed into the barrier, immediately unsticking me from the surface, forcing me to plummet towards the ground. I windmilled in the air, cursing at myself for getting distracted from the Adjuchas hurling spears at me.

"Grayson." Grayhom's voice resonated inside of my head, stopping the world around me as if time itself had truly stopped. I could even see the embers of the explosion of heat from the spear impacting the shield behind me.

"What? In the middle of falling to my doom here!" I screeched, pulled in too many directions to be snarky anymore.

"We are more than we thought, and our power, what was once my power, is greater still." Suddenly there was a burning heat in my chest, my soul almost vibrating with a power that I once scratched the surface of, "Now, I guess, is the time that we truly inherit the power that has been lost to us." Grayhom's voice came through with a slight note of sadness.

"Wait, what's happening?" I asked with a pang of pure dread. I could feel a small part of my soul moving into place, Grayhom not responding to my words. There was a moment of wide-eyed terror as I realised what was happening. I had believed that my soul was whole once more, but Grayhom had held one last piece behind, because he realised what fitting it into place meant.

"This is not a final goodbye, Grayson. Come find me, when you're powerful enough."

There was a harrowing moment following his words. I could almost hear the final stone being inserted into the foundation of a great mountain. The grinding of stone against stone sent pain lancing through my body, torturous in every subsequent moment. I thought it would never end, and then… And then–

And then it clicked.

The pain was gone. The world of gold was no longer. Gold was the colour of imperfection, a warning to its editor that it was dangerously imbalanced.

But silver… Silver was pure, it was powerful beyond what gold could ever be. Silver was perfection.

The colour of my soul shifted, the silver colour originating from that single stone radiating outwards, rapidly forcing the other material, rock, and crystal, to change in colour to that of the perfect silver.

The fear and worry were gone now, instead leaving me with an absolute calm.

"Ah." I said, a small expression of sudden understanding, "A Life Bringer?"

The name resonated around me, the air shuddering with the realisation of a name long forgotten.

"I see. I'm a Life Bringer."

Idly I noticed that I was still falling, time having continued its almost entirely unalterable flow. I didn't bother to flail as my body made to connect with the concrete below flatly. Only a metre from connecting, I blinked and pulled on the pliable resource of spiritual energy within me, and with barely a thought, I was floating.

There was no big revelation, it was actually as simple as could be. It was just a disk of spiritual energy that the bottom of my feet could interact with. It was more power restrained than control. Yet now that I had a solid soul, a complete soul, it was something so much easier than expected.

I unhooked my feet from the horizontal disk, letting myself fall to the ground easily.

I looked up from my feet, finding the Adjuchas and its lieutenant beside it. The Adjuchas wound back its arm, its eyes blazing with red, forming a spear in its hand and threw it with astounding power.

Power that used to be astounding.

I reached out a hand, the crimson spear racing towards me, and gently clasped my fingers over it as it passed through. The wild spiritual energy screamed and flailed against the fingers, but the soft silver sheen over my fingers jailed it, constraining it to its bonds.

With a simple throw, I sent the spear towards the large Hollow, piercing it with the force of the throw as much as the spiritual energy itself. The Hollow bellowed in pain, making the smaller Adjuchas turn towards it. For a moment I almost believed it to be shock, or even concern, but the next words out of its mouth betrayed my thoughts.

"Silence." A hand lashed out with a dangerous precision, slicing through the other Hollow's mask, cutting off its bellow.

"That's unfortunate." I said lowly, "I had hoped I'd find some humanity in you, considering what you are made from."

I didn't allow for a response before my spiritual energy surged forwards to cover the field in its silver truth.


A/N: Well, well, there's the big five-oh. Lots of chapters, ey? I hope you've all been enjoying along with me as I write my little stories out to the world.

Thanks for tuning in on my posts, thank you for the theorisation and interest you've taken, and thank you for the beautiful words you've sent my way.

I can only hope to continue to give you moments of enjoyment furthermore.

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 51: Corruption


The silver energy bubbled forth from my reserves, bloating even further as it pushed of my body through multiple points around my body. The energy then reacted quickly with the outside world, creating a suffocating amount of spiritual pressure, dominating my surrounding area.

With just that last stone that Grayhom had placed, somehow sealing himself away inside my soul, spiritual energy was as natural to me as breathing. It was the air that coursed through my lungs, the fire that sat in my heart, and the power that now laid at my fingertips.

Of course, the Adjuchas was not so easy to beat. If it were so simple, that I could just overpower the being with barely any effort on my part, then this wouldn't have been something that Grayhom would have bothered sacrificing his own connection to me for.

The Adjuchas stood in a smaller bubble of its own burning red spiritual pressure, easily weathering the storm of my energy, qualitatively different from its own. It must realise that its energy was inferior to mine, that it was shaky and indistinct in comparison to the almost metallic spiritual energy that I was capable of forming.

"We knew that you had survived." It intoned, its voice overlaying harshly with other, less human, noises. I stared at it as my spiritual energy continued to bloat further, the presence of it in the atmosphere creating a heat haze effect and making the with whip at the baggy sleeves of my training shirt.

"Did you?" I asked, staring at the form of the Hollow, though its structure was clearer now, "Or was it the one who created you from the discarded parts of a Soul Reaper who knew?" The being, drawing close to being contradictory in its nature, tilted its head sideways, almost human in its expression.

"Yet you only tell us more of what we want to know." The Hollow's voice warped and changed slightly, its skeletal jaw clattering as it tried to keep up with its own words, "Yet you do not know us, do you?"

"Not yet," I said warningly, grinding my teeth with a slight anger that was dulled with the presence of the calming silver energy, "but I will. I will find out who you are, and what you're doing, for a friend who gave up his freedom for me. If only for a moment in time."

The words poured from me easily, as if I were so used to such a formal pattern of speech, rather than the informal conversational tone I normally took. As the Adjuchas did its best rendition of a grin, opening its jaw wide, I swear I felt a hand against the skin of my own.

There was no voice, nothing to distinguish the presence from anything other than a trick of the senses, a brush from the wind maybe. But I knew that it was Grayhom, pushing me ever nearer to the direction I was meant to walk towards. So, I followed the sensation, letting the Adjuchas speak whatever words it had in retort.

There were no fancy hand movements, nor any incantation or phrase. One moment there was nothing in my hand, and then the next I grabbed hold of something from deep within me, dragging it from beneath the surface like a fish from the depths.

Except this was no mere fish. It was an ancient serpent.

With one pull, the spiritual energy that coalesced around me in a disorganised fog snapped into the order it was meant to be in, that it was designed to be in. I pulled the ribbon from within my chest, detaching the silver thing from my soul and bringing it into existence with a burst of light.

The silver blade in my hand was long, straight yet flexible. It shone with a brilliant light that was undeniably connected to my own spiritual energy, burning with the same lustre. I flicked it gently, making the blade shiver slightly, worming like you'd imagine a length of cloth would.

I raised my eyes back to the Adjuchas, who had already begun to retreat backwards, a spear of a different sort already appearing in its hands. But I didn't let it run so easily.

With just a flick of the straight handle, an elegantly thin piece of etched silver metal, the long blade leapt from my standing position, screaming through the thick air, and piercing towards the Hollow's mask.

The Adjuchas, a new type of spear having formed in its hands, rose the long, black shaft of its weapon, and batted the seeking blade away hastily. I flicked my hand again, the action as natural as could be, retracting the blade back to its neutral position.

"A mockery of a Zanpakutō." I intoned darkly, looking at the black spear in its hands, held comfortably like it had trained with the weapon for decades. It was unpleasant to even look at, a piece of a soul having been ripped from one being and haphazardly formed into whatever creature this was.

"It was not required to have a full Zanpakutō, nor its full spirit." The Hollow intoned, the voice distorting and echoing as it held the blackened Zanpakutō. The spear looked like it might have once been a beautiful thing, but now it was just a corroded mess of iron.

"You find it so easy to defile a soul?" I said, a primal distaste souring my palate, as if I was watching an ancient law being broken.

"Things change." The Hollow said mysteriously, the voice most prominent was a gruff man's tone, the Hollow's grip tightening around the shaft of its spear. The voice of the Soul Reaper that once was, screaming out through the torture.

There was nothing else to be said.

My spiritual energy snapped ramrod straight as I came to my conclusion, like a judge laying a sentence before their subject. This being was a violation of even the soul of the Hollow that may have once been a natural being, forced into the complete state of disaster it existed in. It was to be put down, the pieces of the being separated so that it might once again find the other parts of their respective souls.

"Fall before my purifying blade, being of untamed chaos and sick torture. Find absolution in the quiet darkness."

The ground shattered below my feet as I moved, the dirt almost flowing away from my feet like water with the force. The clash was almost immediate, the collision of our two spiritual energies shuddering the air around us with sound and excess force.

My blade curled over top of the spear's haft, the squared off tip of the blade managing only to scratch against the outer layer of the Hollow's carapace, though it forced me back with a thrust of its spear, threatening my soul with its tainted blade.

Even as I stepped back, I let my blade loose on the Hollow, making it flicker with the speed of my attacks and forcing the Hollow to defend continually, unable to pursue its quarry. My spiritual energy surrounding my burned brighter in the sky, a spire of pure silver energy radiating like a beacon.

I knew that those outside could see the energy, and as it continued to slowly build and grow, only adding more to my power with every moment I was subsumed in this state of soul perfection, I could only hope that those outside would know to come.

I opened my senses further, letting my eyesight fall away and be subsumed entirely by the spiritual senses that were so much more powerful. Holding the silver blade in my hand, I could see the trails through the air of where I could send it, following complex courses through the air to reach its targets.

The blade flickered and danced as I stood still within the centre of a vortex of highspeed attacks. Every now and then I tried to make a serious attempt on the Adjuchas, though was always fended off by the Hollow's quick movements, the Soul Reaper inside being forced to perform the actions that they'd spent their entire life on.

The Zanpakutō's name would be forever lost to time, and even looking at it was like looking at a desecrated corpse whose face was still stretched into a scream of pain from how they had been killed. It was no longer capable of much more than taking a facsimile of its form, adding only a little power in comparison to what it might've once been capable of.

Yet, something was off.

I continually battered against the Hollow, slowly gaining power as it stayed entirely stagnant and unchanging. It wouldn't be long till I would be capable of defeating it as it stood, maybe a few more bouts would be all that it would take. It was possible that Grayhom's ace in the hole, completing my soul, wasn't accounted for but that seems ridiculous.

It was too late when I noticed it, when I noticed the reason that the Adjuchas had slain its only true ally, with all the rest of the Hollows incapable of approaching our fight.

Underlying the commotion of our fight, the intensity of the spiritual pressure and energy being thrown into attack after attack, there laid a tiny pulse of energy. It wasn't much, but it was pure, closer to my own energy than anything else. However, the important part was that it was specific.

It wasn't an attack, or anything of the sort. It was a signal; it was a lure.

I didn't even have the time to chastise myself for the massive oversight as I felt a strange pulling sensation, followed by the sound of shattering glass resonating through the air. I whipped my head towards the sudden appearance of an opening in space, something that looked like pure void to all of my senses, despite hurriedly checking every way I could.

The ribbon sense was the one that gave me the information I wanted, watching as a thick ribbon practically spilled from the hole in space as if it were a waterfall.

"You have become distracted." The distorted voice rang from beside me as the Adjuchas' spear thrust into my side, slicing yet another hole besides the one already in my stomach. I growled with the pain, feeling its spear desperately trying to leak the chaos of its own malformed soul into my own, but the perfect purity of my own was too dominant.

I struggled desperately against the taint, the air around me almost boiling with the spiritual pressure of the energy I was using to burn it away. The Hollow screeched with a dark laughter, filled with the chaos of the real Hollow that laid beneath the copious editing done to it. We stood, locked together as our energies warred within me, my own silver energy purging the Hollow's rotten energy as it was pumped into me through the desecrated Zanpakutō.

I was stuck, unable to do anything but fend of the Hollow's attempts at controlling me with its full corruption, and the Hollow incapable of even doing so much as moved the spear's blade deeper inside of my body without breaking the iron focus, we fought with.

This was no longer a battle, and maybe it was never intended to be. It was only a stalling tactic with an extremely low chance of success, a trap that I was likely to walk into and be stuck in. The Adjuchas was powerful, but not powerful enough in combat to match the power of myself, as a newly dubbed Life Bringer.

If it had worked together with the massive peak Hollow companion, whose soul was being burnt after its death to call whatever possessed that massive ribbon beyond the hole in space, the likelihood of their attack succeeding on me would have gone up slightly. But not enough.

No, this was a being created to halt me, or be able to lock down a soul far more powerful than its own. The desecrated Zanpakutō that was capable of inserting spiritual energy into a body like a needle, the soul of a Hollow with the ability to control like a puppet master, and the tortured sections of a Soul Reaper, deformed and rotting to create the taint, the sludge of a decomposing soul.

I raged against the toxic energy, but I couldn't win so easily, even as I knew my spiritual pressure was slowly eating away at the form of the Adjuchas that braved its intensity. It was taking too long, leaving me unable to do so much as even look at the massive ribbon I could still vaguely feel in the back of my mind.

They, whoever they were, are trying to stop me from doing something. But there was nothing I could do but wait for one of us to falter, and it certainly wasn't going to be me. I burned the energy back, slowly overpowering it to where I would soon be destroying the energy the moment it was pushed into me, the only way to give me a single moment to react and free myself.

It simply took too long, the method simple and sure-fire, but as inescapable as could be, with the only solution being having more power to utilise. It was at the height of my anxiety, of the fear that desperately clamoured inside of me, that there was a sudden…

BANG.

I reeled back, the sudden rush of air and spiritual energy assaulting my mind like a flashbang in the darkness. I was free, I realised, freed from the Hollow's trapping corruption. My senses extended outwards again reflexively, like a bird spreading its wings, and I sensed the perpetrators int eh sudden change, both of which stood battered and slowly being crushed under my and the Hollow's spiritual pressure.

"Thought–" The man standing before me coughed roughly, his voice gravelly from whatever had left dark bruises around his throat, "Thought you might've needed some help, kid."

Two very familiar ribbons stood in front of me, both of their arms still outstretched where they'd simultaneously clobbered the Hollow. Jinta and Uyu stood tiredly, their bodies beaten and bruised physically and spiritually. I opened my mouth to speak, but the seething spiritual pressure of the Adjuchas desperately reached out for my own, a last bid effort to trap me again as its spear sliced through my spiritual energy.

"G-Grayson!" Uyu's weak voice screamed out, cracking with the sudden terror, but the scream had come too late.

I flicked my hand, the power I had built during my forced bondage whipping out with my blade. The thin ribbon of silver metal spiralled out from the elegant hilt of the sword, occluding the Hollow's spear and body with the metal before I gave the handle a brief tug.

The bladed spiral tightened around the Hollow's form, wrapping it like a mummy in bandages, and a moment later black blood leaked out of the small seams, the Hollow's lifeblood leaving its body and putting it to rest. I would have to come back to separate its constituent parts and return them to the cycle, much like a Soul Reaper could, but there were more important things to do.

I turned my attention to the massive ribbon, now even more prominent than before, the origin point of it being ever so close to coming into the Human World from the void that it resided in. For just a moment I was confused, the Hollow only ranking as a Menos Grande. But it was the next moment that I recognised its Frankenstein design, the horrible truth that laid inside of its soul, and the remnants of the evil mind that had created it.

I turned to the father and daughter duo, as the Adjuchas' crimson barrier fell, who I now realised seemed entirely unaffected by the spiritual pressure billowing out of me, even glowing with their own little silver aura, bolstering their own power.

"We have to go." I urged solemnly, "Now."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patrons; Thaldor, Knight Kane! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patrons; Jokarun, and ytm! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., someguy, and Ryan U.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 52: Blood

Its emergence from the void was unexpected.

It wasn't within the parameters of the mission, nor had Karakura Town been a significantly patrolled area for decades at this point. Not with the advent of the Kurosaki family and their effect on Karakura as a whole.

In fact, Karakura has almost been the safest area in Japan after the Blood War, and to many of Soul Society it had remained that way. It was a falsehood, of course. They weren't allowed to speak on politics, it wasn't their place, it wasn't even their mistress' place to do so. However, even they could see that Karakura Town had been effectively abandoned, left to the few Soul Reapers unfortunate enough to be sent to a unit in the area.

Once again, the status quo was being replaced, even as things changed within Soul Society itself. It seemed that Karakura would always be a place that Soul Reapers underestimated.

They watched the thing emerge from the shadows of the Garganta, the void between worlds, and every one of them knew that they'd never seen anything like it before. It almost didn't even look like a Hollow at this point, yet it was.

Its presence was overwhelming, but bloated in the way that they sometimes felt from those born with extreme spiritual power and no control. It didn't suffocate them underneath the weight of its power like a Captain-class being could, or the famous feeling of being within the pure, unadulterated spiritual pressure of Captain Zaraki.

No, it was nothing in comparison to the famous Moment of Death, the spiritual pressure powerful enough to convince many that they had truly died. It wasn't powerful, but it was something else.

The word that they found was 'volatile'. They were not experts on classifying spiritual pressures, with it being more an art than a science from a personal perspective, but this was undoubtedly that. Volatile.

When it showed its visage to the world, it was hideous and impressive all at once. It was an amalgamation of parts, mismatching and dissonant, all stuck together with massive metal stiches that lined its body and, most impressively, its mask. The mask was split into four uneven parts, part of a tusked mouth, then part of a wide grin, topped with one massive eyehole and a patched over socket that was much smaller.

The body itself was no better, each limb being slightly different than its partner, two legs, two arms, a bare body oozing with the sickening black blood. And it stood tall, taller than a building, rising into the sky with its menacing stature, staring down at what laid below it like a child standing over an anthill.

They knew that they needed to get out of Karakura Town as fast as possible, and any moment sooner would save a life of their comrades, if they could be called that. But the mission came first, not their lives.

So as they raced forwards, to what may very well be their demise, they steeled themselves against future and the possible sacrifice that they may be required to make for the whim of those that stood above them.

Their forms blurred across the landscape, many of them being limited in the speed they could move by the limiters on spiritual energy within the Human World, but still they moved quickly.

The Menos in the distance began to walk around, as if it were confused and without clear directive, but they watched on as the gargantuan thing slowly began to bleed more and more vile blood from the seams at which it was stapled together.

They didn't talk about the dread that they could feel, as if every drop of blood were a moment of time, forever lost to the ground it spilled on.

Then there was a wave of spiritual pressure int eh distance, not the same as the silver energy that had been so extremely potent only minutes before, but a more refined, more distinguished spiritual pressure. One that none of them knew, but could have sworn was so familiar, as if it were…

It was a Soul Reaper's pressure, they determined after a moment. An extremely powerful one at that, easily a Captain-class, and that was only confirmed when a sound reached their ears from too far away for it to be anything but spiritually conveyed.

"Awaken, Benihime." The voice was almost morose as it called the name of it's Zanpakutō, the accompanying wave of spiritual pressure washed over them with a power that was almost like their body was being sliced apart, layer by layer, and then put back together once again.

Benihime. The name of a Zanpakutō that they've been told hundreds of times, the fury of the mistress was always punctuating its importance. Kisuke Urahara, a man that they had been unable to track for years, with no spiritual presence within Karakura town for at least three decades, they had since assumed that he had moved on to other areas.

Yet, now he appears once again, standing as a black dot against the astounding bulk of the hollow before him, meagre sword in hand. Yet they all knew that the sword he held was anything but meagre and was instead a terrifying blade of almost boundless potential. The Shikai of a Captain.

"Bind, Benihime." The words rang out, and the spiritual pressure screamed with glee as a massive net of red and black spiritual energy covered the Hollow like a spider's web. The net covered the massive thing, trapping it and completely halting any movement it could make. It struggled against its bonds, but found itself uselessly trapped, dwarfed underneath the power that a Captain possessed.

If he wasn't at least this powerful, then there would be no reason for him to have ever been a threat within their mistress' eyes.

"Benihime…" Kisuke Urahara's quiet voice said again, carried by spiritual energy, "play with fire."

The sword was placed in a corner of the net that had covered the Hollow, and the first explosion across the net told them that the fight was over. There was no surviving that blow for a Hollow of this power. Every single one of their comrades would perish underneath such a power, evaporated with the sheer density of the spiritual energy being commanded at will.

Yet the chain of explosions never reached the Hollow. It was a pure silver flash of spiritual energy that stopped the chain, cutting the net and halting the energy from flowing further along and towards the energy that covered the Hollow's body.

They all shared a moment of silence as they watched on, the possessor of the silver energy now standing next to Kisuke Urahara himself, the form not distinguishable from any other from this far away, even with sense enhancements.

They paused for a moment, trying to locate their quarry amongst the overwhelming plethora of power that radiated from almost every part of Karakura Town at present, and when they found them, they realised that their target was nearest to the man in silver, the interloper between Urahara and the Hollow, standing on the ground below.

So they waited, their minds in constant analysis, their ears hearing and their eyes seeing, trying to discern a path forwards as they hid in the urban landscape, all of them desperately hoping that they would not be found, neither by the Hollow or the others that had seemingly made Karakura their stomping ground as of late.

They watched as the man in silver lowered himself down to the ground, from standing in the sky like those of true power could, and they saw the man pull their quarry into a gentle hug, one that quickly became more than that—as if they were both clinging to each other for dear life.

They observed the tenderness with a cold heart, many of them having long forgone romance and friendship, but for one of them, it sparked a fire in their heart. They found themselves staring at a tenderness that they've never once experienced, and it was only now, while they stood on the battlefield, that they found their first genuine moment of emotion.

But the mission meant more, in the end. They would die for the mission.

And so, as the man and the woman kissed, the silver energy burning between them with a passion and a love made only more tangible as their energies clashed against each other, mixing, intertwining, and reacting to one another in such a way that only began to describe how they felt about one another.

It was an understated love it seemed, yet they were two parts of a whole.

Even the most callous of them found it disappointing that they must be separated, to cut from each other by distance and time. Possibly forever.

So when they parted, and they saw the beginnings of a plan emerge from between the man of silver and the hidden Captain, they could see it on the faces of their quarry that they weren't involved in the plan. They were simply too week to fight against such a thing, though they weren't sure why the silver man had prevented the Captain from ending it earlier.

It was when the Hollow began to break free from its restraints, the remaining power behind the netting of Urahara's Benihime finally dissolving, that the plan was put in action.

The team split immediately, leaving Urahara and the silver man to occupy the Hollow, with the silver man quickly pulling a long, thin sword from his chest and whipping it forwards. The blade extended, and continued to do so, until the entire Hollow was wrapped somewhat haphazardly with the length of fabric-like metal.

The Hollow was stuck still, and they watched on as the silver man and the Captain slowly began to work together on an unknowable process. The silver man glowed with power as the Hollow screamed, only using his voice periodically to call the Captain to leap onto the Hollow's body and release one of its many staples lining its body.

They moved away, leaving the two powerful men to their devices, instead choosing to follow the girl towards her destination. They followed along far, trying to find the optimal moment to strike and to take the girl back to Soul Society, where she was required.

However, they were left to wait longer, as she was suddenly reunited with three others along the way. A man and his daughter, both with hair colours too distinct from one another to be anything but, and the presence of a woman that everyone knew, even the newest of Soul Reapers.

Orihime Inoue, or Orihime Kurosaki if they were to disrespect her wishes to keep her last name despite her marriage. One of the most dangerous human spiritual energy users within Japan, possibly the most powerful healer alive as well.

To go head-to-head with Orihime Inoue would be folly. They would be trapped within a barrier and be useless, though they would likely live through the ordeal. They followed the group, being masters of spiritual stealth was their only advantage here and loosing that advantage would be sure failure at this point.

That was only further punctuated by the burst of spiritual energy that another man used, a man that none of them knew of. All they could determine was that he was intensely powerful and had a formidable figure.

They were left to wait, to bide their time as the group moved forwards throughout Karakura and cleared areas of Hollows at breakneck speeds, but they were not swayed in their conviction to complete their mission, with severe punishment being the result if they were to return without.

They refined their plan further and further, aligning themselves correctly to take action.

Then the initialisation of the plan appeared, where the quarry moved one to many steps away from her group, and the plan was immediately put into action. They had surrounded the group, like predators on prey, and they leapt from the shadows, all of them drawing their Zanpakutō as they ambushed the team.

They didn't expect to prove a challenge for them, not with the powerful man at the team's helm and the Kurosaki Ichigo's wife, but they had strategized around them.

The first attacker to go after both Orihime Inoue and the tall man were instantly put in barriers and disabled, which then prompted a second wave of attackers to launch from the shadows to attack them. The group shouted and discussed with worried squawks, but they were no match for the teamwork that they relied upon to survive.

The next wave was successful, not in disabling those combatants, but tying them down for just a second, maybe even a moment. The other two, the father and daughter, were completely unable to compete with those sent to combat them, with the father unable to spread his attention between his own safety and his daughter's efficiently enough.

Which left only the quarry.

They had given the quarry to the least imposing looking member of their group, the hardest to see and find threatening. So, when she appeared behind the quarry, grabbing her by the throat with a blade up against it, then jumping backwards and dragging the quarry even further away from the group, she was instantly in a position of power.

"Wha–" The quarry said, and the woman tried to shut the quarry up with the threatening of her blade, but the word had been heard.

"What is this?" A powerful voice called, from the towering man positioned furthest away from the quarry said, "Why are Onmitsukidō here and why are you fighting us?" The powerful voice rang in their ears, but most in the team member who had positioned herself behind the quarry.

Then came the wave of spiritual pressure, one that began as a slight weight, and quickly became like wearing clothes made of iron, to a suffocating experience like being deep underwater, crushed by its weight.

"Answer me." The man said, his voice brutal and commanding, severe in the essence of the word. But the woman did not falter under the weight of the man's commanding, letting her voice ring out like a bell chime.

"We will take the girl, and she will not die here." The proposition was simple, enough to give the man some pause, and the woman desperately tried to push away even further, clamouring to open a door to Soul Society before he could truly react, but the man was not the one to react first.

"Get your blade off of me!" The quarry yelled, her voice filled with a strange distortion, struggling against the underlying, more natural voice. A hand whipped up from the quarry's side, grabbing a hold of the woman's sword arm and twisting brutally, succeeding in keeping the blade away from her throat but not quite pulling it away, the woman's determination being borderline fanatical.

The man took advantage of this, pointing a solitary finger at her, and suddenly she felt a burning hole in her shoulder. She didn't need to check what it was, as her mind finally registered the flash. He had used Pale Lightning without a word said, with seemingly no difficulty.

The quarry pulled the Zanpakutō from her throat, and it was then that the world slowed.

The woman realised that her death was coming, as the quarry's face turned to hers with a rage in her eyes, a pained but wild grin gracing her lips. She knew that she was going to die, and there was nothing that she could do to stop it, with her shoulder destroyed and her blade arm disabled.

'W…'

She heard something, in that slowed time. A whisper from beyond, the cycle of reincarnation calling for her time, perhaps.

'What is y…'

It called again. The whisper more powerful this time as the quarry plunged her hand forth toward her stomach, the spiritual energy bleeding off of the blow, ready to disembowel her for good measure.

'What is your name, little one?'

Yet the voice appeared again, this time even more powerful within her mind as the blow came closer and closer. In a trance the woman replied to the matronly voice, a voice that sounded ages old, as if it had lived through generations innumerable.

'Chiyo Sone.' She responded in thought. The blow from the quarry slowed further as the matronly voice once again crept into her head.

'Sone… it has been many years since I've heard that name. It seems that I reside within the descendant of an old friend.' The voice vibrated through her being, but there was no time for her to think as the voice spoke again. 'It is time, young one, for you to know my name. Call it out with all your power. My name is–'

"Maledict, Chi no Noroi."

She understood what she'd done as soon as she'd called her Zanpakutō's name, and it had unsealed into its new form. It came with a certain understanding and as soon as blade had changed forms into a small, beaded bracelet, snug against her skin, she knew how she should use it.

With a slap of her hand, her newfound physical power let her swat away the blow that the quarry had sent towards Chiyo. All it took was an extension of her hand towards the other woman's throat and to cut with the new, dark purple fingernails she found herself with, and the preparation was complete. She steeped back just in time for a lance of Pale Lighting to pass through where her torso had just been, allowing her time to lick the blood from her fingers and call the words.

"Blood truth."

With the simple word, she placed a nail against her throat and scraped down painfully, leaving a wide cut, glistening with blood. Something that would be seen as insanity, if it did not then appear on the quarry's own form.

The battlefield froze. Watching Chiyo as she held a nail to her own throat, willing and capable of using her own life to threaten her quarry's.

"Come." She said quietly, with a confidence she felt deep to her bones. And the quarry was forced to come, under the threat of her life. Chiyo flicked a hand, opening a door to Soul Society behind her and walking back into its light slowly, keeping eye contact with those she was stealing her quarry from.

She looked to those that she had called her comrades, though now she was above them, having performed Shikai. Their eyes now no longer included her as a comrade any longer, just another superior that they would one day answer to.

The quarry shifted next to her, restraining her visceral need to go for Chiyo's throat. What she'd have expected from some unholy mix of human and Hollow. The quarry turned to look outside of the doors, towards those that stood outside, unable to move or do anything to stop her, lest she kill herself and kill the quarry along with.

"Can you–" The other woman's voice cracked, unable to hold the emotion, "please tell Grayson and my Mother that I love them. I'll be safe."

Chiyo didn't allow for another word to be said as the doors closed in front of them, her eyes locking with those of the tall man that had sent Pale Lighting through her shoulder. She wouldn't allow for that slight to go unpunished.

No more slights would go unpunished.

Ever.


A/N: Struggling with writing a bit recently, hope to slowly work back up to posting regularly again, so bear with me a bit!

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[Sarius]

Chapter 53: Villain

If this were a cop versus terrorist movie, it would be the scene where the terrorist had planted a bomb somewhere, or one someone, and the main cop character had to somehow defuse it while someone actually qualified told him which wires to cut.

The sweat wasn't pouring off of me like I was standing under a shower, I actually wasn't all that sure that I couldn't even sweat at all in this Life Bringer state. Not during something like this, evidently.

The Hollow shifted its weight back and forth, trying to loosen the ribbon of silver that confined it so thoroughly. Fortunately for us, the Hollow was basically a walking sack of flesh and random parts, nowhere near as physically powerful as the Adjuchas has been, especially with its desecrated Zanpakutō.

The blade only dug deeper into its flesh as it moved, binding it further as I slowly worked through the complex rat's nest of connections that the Hollow was riddled with. It was, by far, the most poorly created being I've ever seen. The edited Hollows and even the edited Adjuchas, looked stable in comparison to this thing.

It was clearly done intentionally; it was made to be extremely complex and overly confusing. It was created, with purpose, to be unable to sustain its own existence. It was almost torturous to look at it, let alone work with what was there.

"Top staple at the back of its head." I called out calmly, like a surgeon would as they extracted a tumour from a patient's brain. Kisuke, having fallen into the groove of assisting me, quickly moved to identify the staple I was talking about. Which was easy, seeing as it was the last one on the Hollow's body.

Practicing excessive caution, Kisuke tapped the large, metal staple with the tip of his Zanpakutō gently, making it flare brilliantly in my advanced spiritual vision.

"That one." I announced before the man could ask. He nodded, and a moment later the Hollow let out a terrible scream with an audible spray of fetid blood. The stench was terrible, but my focus overpowered the slight instinct to gag.

"Alright." Kisuke said calmly, though there was an underlying tone to his voice that tweaked my mind slightly, "Do we do the mask now?"

I looked up to the Hollow, across its body and up to its massive, jumbled mask which still had stapled in it, holding it together.

"No, not yet." I said solidly, trying to understand the internal workings of this Rube Goldberg machine of a being. "Even if I fix it, we still can't kill it. The staples create instability, and the Hollow would have broken down after a while, but if we kill it, it still serves its main function. Nothing changes." Kisuke turned back towards me from looking at the mask.

"So we need a way to banish it? I have a way to open a gate to the Garganta, but nothing that would accommodate something of this size." I shook my head.

"Its created to want to stay here, and it will stay here even if we try and push it out. It'll just find a way back, its not a permanent solution." I said lowly, desperately trying to think of an option, a possibility.

"Then we could throw it out into the ocean? Or into the sky?" Kisuke continued, but I shook my head again.

"This isn't a direct one to one of a bomb in spiritual form, Kisuke." I said, trying to explain the inner workings of a soul and a body to such a degree was almost impossible, though Kisuke was a quick study, "If this Hollow's soul explodes, they've made sure that it'll cause as much trouble as it possibly could. It'll pollute hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of land with Hollow energy, killing everything and replacing it with the counter opposite of what should be living here. Do you want to see the world turn into a zombie movie, Kisuke?"

The comment was a bit tongue in cheek, though it was just as serious as the rest of it. Even a little spiritual energy from a Hollow within a mother was enough to irreparably change their human child into someone capable of wielding powers, but a soul exploding? The amount of energy that would release is gargantuan. Actual death of a soul is extremely rare, and the effects of it is immense.

"Wait." Kisuke said after a moment of contemplation over the struggling Hollow. "We can't kill it. Why?"

"If we kill it, the soul still remains for a while, we'd have to purify it by sending it to hell, right?" I asked, though I knew I was correct, "Immediately after it dies, it'll detonate its soul. Its designed that way, there is no counteraction for it."

In my extremely detailed spiritual vision, I saw the oddest thing happen. Instead of the look of neutral consternation that Kisuke had been sporting for the past half hour, there was a wide grin, manic and gleeful like a child who'd just created a terrible, terrible plan to annoy the neighbour's kids.

"But we don't have to kill it."

I pondered for a moment while Kisuke bathed in the expectation of stunned silence, but instead of the reluctant question that he'd been expecting, I nodded sharply.

"Then you'll need to bind it again, if we want this to work, I need to start looking." With a quick flick of my hand, the ribbon blade retracted gracefully, pulling through the abomination's flesh before becoming the long, beautiful blade it was at rest.

"Wait, I–" Kisuke began, but I'd already begun to move my feet, pushing against the concrete surface of a building, and zipping through the cluttered economic districts of Karakura, in search.

In search for something very, very important.

---

​

Kisuke Urahara watched as Grayson Carter disappeared into the distance with speed that could probably rival most Soul Reapers that sat below learning flash step. It was, however, a far more precise movement pattern than Soul Reapers used, something that Grayson was showing himself to be uniquely gifted in. Precision and senses.

It took ungodly precision to work on a soul the way that he had over the past half hour, his mind constantly moving with the organic moulding of a soul into a more stable thing. Kisuke had the easy job, the equivalent of taking the last hit on a Hollow that another Soul Reaper had set up for you.

He didn't bother to call on Benihime's name, though, which was something his Zanpakutō spirit didn't like, but allowed for the purpose of the moment. She was a jealous mistress, that one. Forever paranoid and extremely wrathful. Something that he had found reflected within himself more often than he liked.

He let the crimson net restraint he Hollow, who had been noticeably bereft of almost all attacking capability. If it had wanted to, it could have attacked physically, and it'd certainly do a fair amount of damage, but it wasn't capable of a Cero.

It was a mindless Gillian-class Hollow, even more mindless than a regular Hollow, according to a study he'd done far too long ago. They were the conglomeration of far too many Hollow souls to ever truly be distinct from one another, to show and real personality, even if this specific Menos had interesting parts of its body. It wasn't nearly as homogenous as the regular, but it was created out of regular Hollows and supped up to be a Gillian-class.

The Hollow before him was his main worry at current, and if it were to have some counter measure for the plan that he and Grayson had somehow managed to wordlessly share, then his last-ditch effort would be his Bankai.

And Kisuke really didn't want to call his Bankai.

Though the other worry Kisuke had still stayed at the back of his mind, and he could only hope beyond hope that Grayson would continue to be preoccupied enough to not notice it.

Suzumi was gone. Kisuke had noticed her missing spiritual pressure almost instantly, only for the thought to be interrupted by a voice communication from Tessai telling him what he had needed to know.

Suzumi wasn't just gone, she'd been taken. But the Onmitsukidō of all groups.

'Why? For what reason?' It was baffling to Kisuke, there was no good reason, no obvious reason at least. He hated not knowing, it was something that Kisuke hated more than anything else. He didn't understand what was going on in Soul Society for this to happen. For someone to be taken to Soul Society, someone human, Central 46 had to sign off on the order.

For Central 46 to order something so… brash was totally unlike them. Central 46 was intensely conservative, and Kisuke had been on the receiving end of far too many judgements to believe that they would change to being so quick to move on something.

Central 46 wasn't something that changed so quickly, and while they claimed to work on the orders of the Soul King himself, but everyone knew that they hadn't received a proper order from the Soul King since Yhwach, and maybe never would again.

Suzumi was a blip on their radar, an insignificant being from the Human World. Kisuke had no reason to believe that they'd treat her any different than they had the Fullbringers for centuries, leaving them to simply exist within the Human World until they tried to encroach on Soul Society once or twice.

It was the main reason that Kisuke had escaped to the Human World specifically, rather than Hueco Mundo or some other place that would be closer to the epicentre of the grand plans that Aizen had been cooking up. But Kisuke wanted to be where the Soul Society had decided not to meddle in, and he'd succeeded in that.

Even as Kyōraku had taken power over the Thirteen Court Guards, nothing much had really changed in the Human World, not after the first decade or two of increased patrols that they'd managed to sway the patrolling Soul Reapers away from their home.

But with Central 46 holding him back, Shunsui was unable to truly change that much, other than what the Court Guards held jurisdiction over. So, why were they moving now? What would have motivated them to do so?

Who sent the order?

Kisuke felt a pang of fear run through him, the first real taste of the emotion since he realised that he'd been just as duped by Aizen oh so long ago, even if he'd been more aware than the others had been.

The terror of having to think about Aizen all over again, so soon after he'd been locked away, was palpable. Kisuke couldn't believe that it was Aizen behind this. He wasn't so droll as to try the same tactic twice, something else was going on all together.

And now, it was going to come down to them to figure out what the hell was going on and, once again, he wouldn't even be able to go into Soul Society to do it himself.

the Hollow screamed its terrible wail, even the normally bone chilling voice of a Hollow was further distorted by its horrific physiology.

"Oh, shut up you." Kisuke said darkly and, surprisingly, the Hollow followed the order, returning to its regular squeals of pain as his net burned against its skin. Kisuke sighed deeply, morose in his contemplation.

"Grayson…" He said, eliciting another sigh from himself, "He's going to want to kill me for not telling him." Kisuke looked out to where the man had disappeared to, almost allowing himself a look of sadness.

"Congratulations, Kisuke Urahara," he said to himself with sarcastic joy, "you get to play the villain once again."

---

​

It was easy to forget how ridiculously powerful my ribbon sense was until the very moment that I could use it and make it shine. It took a footnote in practicality to the overwhelmingly useful spiritual senses that I'd developed.

However, the ribbon sense I had was always powerful. It took no developing, nor any conscious effort on my part to improve it. Because it's a visual representation of my understanding of the soul. It was something that I'd slowly understood more and more as time went on, starting on my own, then Suzumi's, then Hollows, and before long I was capable of restructuring them.

Now, I had access to more understanding than ever, with Grayhom inserting himself within the very stones of my soul to complete it. Now, I was truly a Life Bringer, and so my ribbon sense was far more powerful to accommodate.

I didn't bother to use my eyes, the inefficient tools that they were. All they were really good for was colour and watching Suzumi's face as she slept right next to me. Other than that, I found them useless things that took up space on my face.

Sometimes I would wonder if I'd even miss them that much if I were to lose them again.

And now, I could confidently say that I wouldn't.

I could sense every ribbon that came even remotely close to Karakura Town. At first, I could see the ribbons of those I knew, coming to the forefront of my mind, but I pushed them away, even as I passed by Ururu as she took care of a group of Hollows alone, perfectly capable of fending off a small wave of them after knowing her family was safe, it seemed.

Though there was a niggling loss that brushed gently across my brain, like something in the landscape of your city was missing, a skyscraper suddenly vanished from its rightful place, but I disregarded it for now. Now was not the time.

I focused completely on my spiritual senses, quickly brushing away any ribbons that didn't fit what I was looking for. Again and again, I cut swathes of ribbons down, narrowing it to be precisely what I wanted.

Hollow ribbons.

The moment I found one of them, I found all of them, cutting the human ribbons and… Soul Reaper ribbons? Way too many Soul Reaper ribbons. What's going on over there–

I felt it first, before I saw it, cutting me from any thought I could have been having.

It was a slight feeling at first, quiet and almost unassuming. But then it turned on me, and I felt it in its true power, the power that had once sent my unconscious just by comprehending it for afar.

This was the soul that made ever other I've met seem inconsequential, at least barring the scant few who were clearly more powerful. But this soul was different, and now I knew why.

I shot towards the ribbon, finding myself only so far from where we'd been living for so long now. I approached; two hundred metres, one hundred, fifty…

And there it was. Standing atop a roof, standing beneath the clear daytime sky, looking off into the distance with a calm that seemed so intrinsically dichotomous to a Hollow, but yet it did.

It was looking off into the distance where the Hollow we'd been working on stood, taller than any of the buildings that surrounded it by far. The Hollow was tiny in comparison, not even as tall as the other's ankle, but it was so much more than its contemporary.

I jumped, swiftly rising up to place myself on the other side of the roof from the Hollow, observing its reaction to my presence. Or, in this case, a complete lack of a reaction. As I looked deeper into its waif thin ribbon, in the blood that seeped from the hole at its end, I could understand why it didn't react. I could understand why it was so absorbed with that sight of the Hollow standing amongst the concrete forests of the Human World.

I took one step closer, then two. It continued to not react, its emaciated form poorly hidden beneath the shawl of white that was wrapped around its body, its teardrop shaped mask slightly ajar at its mouth, showing the black depths contrasting against the powerfully stark white teeth lining each side of its jaw.

Without even thinking, I had come to be standing right next to it, quietly observing it as it stood, enraptured by its desire.

"You're hungry, aren't you?"

At a speed so unthinkably fast, Phantom stood right behind me, its mask only centimetres from the back of my neck, ready to bite and eat my whole.


A/N: Hope you all enjoy this chapter, and are having great days!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 54: Dreaming

I felt the slight exhalation of breath on my neck, the Hollow's mouth almost shaking with the exertion it took for it to not close around my flesh and bone.

"Easy now." I said calmly, even as I pointed my silver blade right at its chest, the horizontal edge of it almost pressing against the shawl-like armour it was wrapped in. "Eating me would be a very difficult meal."

The Hollow didn't respond, or even react in any way. It stood there, its mask split open as it bared its horrifying maw to the world, a war waging within itself.

"Does it hurt?" I asked, almost curious, "Abstaining from human souls for so long? It must." There was a twitch of movement, but the Hollow remained still otherwise.

Phantom was strong, extremely so. He would be a much more difficult and dangerous fight than the Frankenstein's Adjuchas I fought before. Phantom was qualitatively, and quantitatively superior, without a doubt. Why that is could be for almost any reason, at least to the average eye.

But to mine, Phantom was like an art piece, degrading after ages of being left in a humid cellar. It was edited, yes, but with more curiosity and genuine interest than the others. It was older, almost ancient in comparison, being at least a few decades old.

But it didn't quite make sense. Phantom's existence broke the mould instead of enforcing it.

Being that old likely rivalled my own age, at least. I'm sure that Kisuke or someone had mentioned how long Phantom had been around, but I can't remember how long exactly. But if Phantom had been around that long, and it was edited since then, that could only mean that Phantom pre-dated the current skirmish.

Why was it here? Who edited it? What did they edit? All questions I needed to find an answer to, and fast.

"Were you human once, Phantom?" I asked gently, feeling the Hollow twitch again slightly, "Do you remember those times, or are they just blurs to you now? A mirage of memory, lost in the storming of your soul."

I let the words hang for a moment before I began to turn myself towards it, my sword staying faithfully in place, prepared to lash out and try to bisect the powerful Adjuchas level Hollow. It flinched multiple times, each time only just managing to restrain itself from trying to take a chunk out of my body, and the soul that laid beneath.

"I've heard some stories of you." I continued, recalling snippets that Jinta had once recounted to me, "You've only been seen a handful of times, but it was always eating a Hollow. One even swore that you had done it to save them." The Hollow was absolutely still, almost completely dead in its movements, but the slight quivering of its jaw was enough to give away its internal struggle.

"Did you?" I took a moment of thoughtful pause, "Did you do it to save them? Or were you just hungry and it was convenient?"

There was a light whistle of air as the Hollow moved. Without spiritual senses, my eyes wouldn't even be able to perceive the movements at all. In fact, I just closed them altogether, my mind occupied with the Hollow that blurred with brutal speed.

Sonido, Kisuke had called it. Extremely powerful Sonido, with its only rivals being Kisuke or Tessai themselves.

The Hollow's arm zipped out, its black hand reaching for my face with the elongated, white nails at the ends of its fingers.

It was fast, far faster than me for sure. I didn't even come as contest to its raw speed, but I didn't need raw speed, not when my blade only rested centimetres from its chest. I let the silver blade stab through the white shawl, breaking it and plunging into the dark flesh below.

And then the scenery took a drastic shift, you could say.

---

​

"Bro?" A little voice called out from his side, jolting him away from his thoughts.

"Yeah?" He replied, though he grimaced with just how droll his voice sounded, something he'd struggled with from childhood. It was easy to pick on a kid that sounded permanently depressed, apparently.

"What was Mum like?" The little voice asked, and he looked down at the little boy he was holding hands with as they walked. This was a common question, something that the boy asked almost every time they spent a silent moment together. He felt a spear of pain slice through his body with the question, like every time it was asked, but only a smile came to his face. One as warm as he could manage.

"She would sometimes help out at the vet down the road, you know?" He said, as if the little boy hadn't heard it a million times. "She would help with cleaning and taking care of the animals as they got better."

"Like a nurse?" The boy asked, a new question, one he hadn't asked before.

"Yeah, like a nurse, just for dogs and cats instead of people." He looked down at his little brother as his chubby face scrunched in thought. Their mother had always told him that he had looked much the same as his brother when he himself was a child. He couldn't possibly disagree more, though. Maybe in general face structure, but his little brother was so much more expressive than he was.

You could just about see every distinct emotion on his little brother's face, each pulling on his facial muscles in a way that he'd never quite been able to reproduce. At rest, his own face just looked… dead, for a lack of a better word. It was an unemotional mask for someone who'd always been told that he was full of emotions, yet again by his mother.

He hadn't agreed with her back then either.

"Was Mum always a nurse?" The high-pitched voice chimed again, drawing a grimace out of his older brother.

"No, not always." He said, but the answer wasn't enough to placate the voraciously curious mind of his younger brother.

"What did she do?"

Nothing. It was an answer that wouldn't satisfy his little brother, but it was true. She had enough money that she had the privilege to just simply do nothing at all. Now, it was all that let them live, away from the family around them that would be all too happy to 'take them under their wings', though they too only wanted the money.

"Well…" The older brother said painfully, trying to fight back the bitter pain of the memories from when she'd once taught him how investment worked, just because he'd asked her how it worked. He swallowed deeply and sighed, finally finding the words.

"Do you remember when I said that Mum left Dad?" The child nodded seriously, more seriously than he should be at his age, but a necessity for how they lived. "Well, when Mum did that, she made sure that she got some money that was hers. Because Dad is rich, she got a lot of money."

The situation was so much more complicated than that, but his little brother seemed to follow along with the idea of it.

"So, Mum took Dad's money?" He grimaced at the little boy, trying not to let his lip quiver with the emotions that bubbled to the surface, even some particularly horrible ones that he had desperately pushed down into the depths of his mind.

"No, kiddo." He said gently, trying not to snap at his brother, "She was allowed to have that money, even if Dad didn't want her to have it."

The little boy at his side stopped, pulling back on his arm as he tried to continue walking. With a sigh, he turned his dead neutral face towards his younger brother, trying to don a smile for him but failing horribly. The little boy looked into his eyes with his one, piercingly bright ones, as if they could see right through his mind and into his soul.

"Sora?" The little boy asked gently, "Hug?"

The older brother, Sora, looked down and sighed ruefully, a tiny but genuine smile coming to his face. He sat in a low crouch, pulling the small boy's form into his own warmly, letting the memories slowly seep back below the surface of his mind and returning to the deepest recesses, biding their time till the next time they decide to show themselves.

Sora pulled away from his little brother with that same small smile, an expression so slight that only his mother and his brother had ever been able to recognise it when he wore it. He looked up at his brother, and jolted backwards, almost falling over in the panic.

"Sora?" The little boy said, though his voice was horribly distorted, disfigured almost beyond recognition, "I'm hungry."

A bone white mask covered his brother's face, a blank visage that was almost featureless aside from its teardrop design, the mask coming to a point at the chin, and two narrow slits for eyes with large, squared teeth perfectly closed.

"Sora?" The boy said again, though the boy who's form he'd been hugging only moments earlier was melting away with a spindly, black being slowly escaping its restraints. Sora stood up, moving back more and more as he fled from the horrifying creature, then turning as he burst into a sprint down the street they'd been walking on.

Wait. What street? There was no street, there was nothing outside him and his little brother. His little brother… whose name he can't remember. Where did he live? Who was his brother?

Sora continued to run across a surface he couldn't see or comprehend, desperately running from a threat that he found himself more and more unsure of. Before long, he looked back from where he'd been running to find…

Nothing.

There was nothing. It was all just a bur of black and white, the surroundings forming and unforming in front of his eyes, any distinctive feature melting before his eyes and becoming something entirely different.

Then, with an abrupt suddenness, he was elsewhere.

A hospital, his body laid down in an uncomfortable bed as he tried not to move his arm, an IV sitting in forearm, pumping in a clear liquid. He looked around the room, trying to find any other occupants, but after a moment Sora found himself relaxing slightly.

No, there weren't any occupants. It was the middle of the day; his little brother was at school and the nurses were dealing with the patients who were really paying attention to the seriously sick patients.

The seriously sick patients…

Sora broke through it again, finding himself outside of the memory itself, throwing it into disarray, even as the major set pieces remained unchanged. The bed, the IV, the door. There was a momentary pang of dread that just as the door opened, revealing a doctor, the same one that had done some testing on him a few hours prior to the memory.

Sora didn't need to see the man's mouth move to know what he'd said, and even back then he didn't even need to hear the man speak to know that it was bad.

That was how Sora had died. To an inherited illness from his father that he'd never known about and had caught too late to do anything to fix.

Death hadn't been so bad, he remembered. It wasn't painful, or all that unpleasant, just…

Slow.

It'd slowed him down to being nothing more than an old man in a young body, his mind no longer moving fast enough to have a conversation, not fast enough to even count the days as they slowly killed him. Maybe it hadn't even been too long, or maybe his death had taken years.

Even when he'd died, it was still slow, frustratingly, horrifically slow.

He didn't want to die, or to waste away into nothing, his being reformatted to become someone else's basis for existence. He wanted to stay, even in his addled state, with his mind moving so slowly that it had become painful to even comprehend existing at all.

But he would. For his brother.

For Kouki.

He stayed, despite the greatest pain he'd ever experienced, the horror of it as he felt himself change, unable to understand what was happening to him. But he did, he chained himself here and suffered despite it.

Only to awaken with a sharp mind, one hellbent on consuming it all.

He had become the monster, he realised. He'd stayed alive at the cost of himself.

So, he stood stalwart. Using everything to stop the urges, even as more voices were added, all of them raving and ranting, desiring more and more. But he resisted them, he stood above them, using every modicum of his willpower to stop their desires from becoming reality.

There was no concrete understanding, no memories formed, just an eternal nightmare he was trapped in.

Until a silver blade had cut through the darkness, and pulled him to the front, establishing Sora as the being itself.

He had more control, but minutely. Power, he had in droves, but control was something he continued to battle with unerringly, his every mental faculty forcing itself to focus on stopping the horrors he knew that he was capable of.

He was failing.

He was hungry.

He needed to eat.

He desperately needed to eat.

And, just as he contemplated finally giving in, finally succumbing to the ever-screaming voices—of which there were thousands—a silver blade broke through into his mind.

Its silver radiance was different than the last one which had been so much duller. This was a different being altogether.

Sora looked up towards the silver blade as light burned from it, penetrating deeper into himself.

Whether it was here to end him, or to liberate him… Sora was content with either. He did what he felt he was right, finally accepting the fate he should have, so long ago. He closed his eyes to his fate, dreaming wearily of better times.


A/N: Here's another chapter! Hope you're all doing well, especially with highschool wrapping up for all the Americans.

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 55: Layers

I was swimming in… memories. I think.

It was odd, like walking through a disjointed gallery of hundreds of different people's memories, collated haphazardly in a confusing mess of crossed wires as a hundred souls interact on the border of what was effectively a dangerous chemical reaction.

The description I could give was already insane enough, let alone the real thing around me. But for me it was strangely calming.

I don't know what it was about my newfound powers that seemed to be synonymous with calmness, but it was especially evident when I waded through the waters that burst with excitement, fury, hate, loss, and any other of an uncountable list of emotions that seemed to make up the essence of human existence.

Though, it was obvious that there was a distinct lack of positive emotion, either so few and far between and dulled to the point of it being like looking through a shattered kaleidoscope as you tried to interpret when emotion it even it was.

This was the deepest I'd delved into a soul that wasn't Suzumi's, and on that particular occasion I barely remembered exactly what it felt like while I was inside her soul. Being here gave me invaluable insight into how a Hollow works internally, and also a strange understanding of just what my capabilities were within someone else's soul.

It was complicated, and even more abstract. I was both ultimately capable, and ultimately restricted.

I could easily unmake the Hollow's soul, pulling at the loosest strings and watching it unravel. It wasn't something that I would be able to do to every being I come across, but for something that was so strong, letting its hungering soul starve to the degree that it has, the process for doing so was almost easy.

But the same could not be said for changing it. A soul was not as inviolable as some would like to believe, and even Tessai had proven that 'fact' to be a total lie. He had carved the Chains of Fate from my girlfriend's soul, and I had healed it from the traumatized state it'd been in afterwards.

Yet, I couldn't just bring the Hollow's dominant identity into an unassailable position. For some reason, that broke the conventions of how a Hollow's soul worked. Sure, I could promote it, just like I had with Suzumi's own soul. I could set up neutral ground between two parts of the soul, to structure it more clearly and succinctly, but I couldn't have locked away that Hollow within Suzumi any more than I could have entirely destroyed her own personality, her own identity.

So that was what lead me to wander through the dark waters, inky black and staining my skin the more I pushed forwards, the hungry soul desperate enough to chew on the projected energy of my soul that I was inside of here.

Nothing stopped me from walking forwards through the Soul that was in disarray, nothing could stop me. My own soul was far more stable than it was, like a massive metal ball at the bottom of a pool of water, almost serene in comparison to the shifting blackness.

It didn't take long for me to find what I was looking for, the edit that had been so prominent within my mind as I looked at the being with the eyes of a Life Bringer.

Elevated just above the surface level of the waters was an almost fully realised man, sickly and pale to a degree that he looked dead. He was risen out of the water, but not untouched by it. The water had congealed around his legs, around his lower torso and up his back, also pulling his arms apart and holding him in bondage. It was as if he'd been crucified, his skin weeping with wounds large and old, black blood seeping from him in tiny dribbles, the very last of the blood he could offer to the ever-hungry waters that surrounded him.

His head was slumped over, long black hair drawing a curtain around his face, matted with his own blood and the sticky black of the waters. I walked up to him, he who lived in torture within the soul of a Hollow, still powerful enough to live despite his atrophied muscles and pallid skin.

I came within a metre of him, feeling the black waters below pull at my legs with a fervent desire for me to leave, to not come near to its most reviled part. The one that still holds power over the waters, even now as he dies.

I didn't speak, because he wouldn't be able to hear me. But I waited, for just one sign, just a little sign that he still lived, that he still wanted to live on enough for me to reach out.

There was silence within the waters for a long moment, the darkness overwhelming enough to make even me feel claustrophobic while my spiritual senses observed my surroundings, forgoing the use of my eyes completely like I had been since the moment that my powers truly awakened.

Then it happened, something so ordinary and mundane that you'd be forgiven if you missed it's importance.

A breath. There was no sound to it, for it was too weak to make a sound loud enough to hear. In fact, the only reason that you'd be able to notice would be the slight filling of the man's chest and the pull that the breath had on his own dangling hair.

I looked the man's emaciated body over one last time, looking at his borderline skeletal form, the arms that had lost any and all muscle, remaining as only bone beneath ashen skin. Yet this being, this man, still took breath, defiant against the crushing will of the soul that surrounded it.

I see now. With such a strong will, how could he be anything but the dominant identity?

The next action was predetermined, as if it were always meant to be that way, as I pulled the ribbon sword from my side, the mere image of the true sword itself, just as I was an image of my true soul within this realm.

The silver sword pierced into the man, and the body gasped with pain, the breath that he'd only just taken leaking from his lips as the world around both of us faded, leading us somewhere else entirely.

Inside the man's own mind, separate from all the others.

I could feel the soul struggling to permit the world that the man still held within him, only ever so slightly grey in comparison to the darkest black that a Hollow's soul seemed to desperately promote as it lived without a true 'heart'. The world, however, was built under both my and the dominant identity's demand. With our words combined the weaker components had no choice but to acquiesce.

And then, unceremoniously, I was there.

Standing in front of me in a room of eclectically shifting whites and blacks, stood a man lost within a world of memories that he had sacrificed to stay alive, offerings to the soul that vies so desperately for his absolution. He stood within a world of his mind's making, created in desperation to remind him of the moments that his soul no longer allowed him to keep.

His eyes were looking upwards, his form no longer restrained like it had been in the reality of his soul, even his hair was only shoulder length instead of the absurd length of oily, matted hair he'd possessed. I looked up to where he was looking, his eyes clouded over as he painfully tried to remember where he had seen the silver blade that was thrust through the defences of his mind, sprouting with radiance from the sky of his constructed world.

"You've seen it before, haven't you?" I asked quietly, and that was all it took for the man's eyes to snap to mine, and for the world to shift from the black and white disarray into a foggy grey mirage of a road.

"Who are you?" He asked, his voice dull and exceedingly flat, to the point where I would have though he couldn't feel at all, thought his eyes told a different story.

"Am I not a usual part of the fever dreams your existence has become?" I smiled, the half joke coming out more as a sad prognosis than anything, "I am a man who requires something of you. A man who knows you've been touched by… something like me in the past."

His look was almost hateful, though his expression stayed so neatly placid.

"You did this to me." He stated, "You made me into this." He widened his arms to show the surroundings, or total lack thereof. IT was all a grey mist, a nostalgic sight for me, though now I could see right through it, into the gears that worked to create the half-baked rendition of a memory the man had once held.

"I didn't, but someone like me did." I didn't let the man continue, dropping my voice to a warning whisper, letting my power bloom, "And the only reason you still exist, with even the torturous autonomy that you have now, is because of what they once did to you." My voice boomed against the fog, battering it away to reveal the world that he really lived in.

A small box, the only spot of realised space within his entire soul, the rest being pure chaos.

"I am not here to apologise. I'm here to offer you absolution, either in death, or in a life to do with as you please." The voice of certainty vibrated out from my chest, the silver energy from my sword glowed brightly from the roof of the small box, assailing the man's eyes but entrancing him ever deeper.

I couldn't possibly understand what he was thinking in that moment. I'd only exchanged a efw words with him, but I could feel the power of his pure will, and I couldn't even begin to measure against it with my own. I was talking to a being that had survived decades of torture, being turned into a Hollow, and a severe restructuring of his soul. There were likely very few that could match that.

The man, who actually looked like a late teenager, turned back to me, his shoulder length hair swaying as it covered over one of his dark eyes, his face displaying none of the emotions that I was sure he was feeling. He closed his eyes for a moment, before sighing.

"I took a deal the last time I met one of you." He said quietly, his eyes searching my form, squinting as if he were looking into the sun. "I don't remember what it was anymore, I just remember that I needed to do it to protect…" he looked down to the ground, jaw clenched slightly as he struggled to remember, "my brother."

I pulled my lips into a smile, the expression more one of sadness than any joy. "And now I'm here to ask you to protect everyone else too. After that?" I paused, looking for the right words, words for a man that I'd only know for moments but felt like I needed to help, as if it were my duty. My responsibility.

"After that, you can wish upon a star, and I'll grant it. I'll do whatever I can."

---

​

That man had appeared, like… well, Sora couldn't remember exactly who they were, but someone else had appeared just like they had in the past.

And now, he was somewhere else than his little box. No time had passed from his perspective, after agreeing to the man's request. He'd deliberated on it for as long as he could before he started to find it difficult to remember what he was thinking about, then forgetting what was going on around him.

So, in the end, he didn't have much choice. The man cloaked in silver, so bright and defined against the misty grey that had surrounded him for… however long he'd been like this, was almost deific. Of course, Sora wasn't going to believe that the man was a god, that was just too much, but he had offered a deal that he quite literally couldn't refuse.

And then the sword stuck in the ceiling had filled the room with its glow, and he was here instead, a perfectly white room, unblemished and indestructible. Well, it was more complicated than that of course. Even Sora could feel the timer on it, his soul so destroyed by the lack of his energy intake that it couldn't possibly maintain itself for long.

His soul had been squeezed like a fruit for all of the energy that it could produce, for only a day's worth of peace, just enough for him to do what the man wanted and receive his wish.

"Can you hear me?" A soft voice questioned, radiating out of the walls of white, almost surprising Sora. He blinked, realising that he could think clearly, his thoughts from only a few moments ago not fading into oblivion anymore.

"I can?" He said warily, though the other voice only laughed. The voice of the man that he had made a devils deal with.

"You can." He agreed, "You can actually talk too, it seems. Though you still sound like a Hollow."

"A Hollow?" Sora asked, confused by the strange terminology, making the man's voice halt for a moment.

"I will explain later, if you want me to." He said finally, "Until then we have work to do, and you are on a timer. I'm Grayson, by the way." Sora reeled from the sentence of three different topics all melded into one.

"I, uh," Sora paused, coming to a small realisation of just how long it'd been since he'd talked to someone, "I'm Sora, I guess?"

"Sora, huh?" The man's voice—Grayson's voice, rather—chimed back through the walls of the white space. "Well, Sora, I suppose I should tell you exactly what I'm expecting you to do." Sora felt his eyebrows twitch a little, warily waiting for the rest of the man's sentence.

"I'm going to have you eat a bomb."


A/N: Hope you're havin' a good one!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 56: Shattered

I rushed over the rooftops, the somewhat perturbing form of Phantom following behind me.

It was hard to take my senses off of the being, even if I knew the identity that controls the Hollow's power was almost terrifyingly human for someone that had been bathed in a Hollow's corruption for as long as he had.

Whispers of memory came to mind from being within his section of Phantom's soul, an undying will for the sake of a brother he wanted to protect so badly, badly enough that he'd forced himself into becoming a Hollow, and then a starving Adjuchas with the help of a Life Bringer.

I didn't know the man that stood as Phantom's originating soul, the one that had consumed hundreds and thousands of Hollows who had lived within Karakura, though restricting himself severely enough that every part of his soul was fraying and wearing down.

I knew that I was gambling. Originally, I had almost hoped that I would find Phantom and delve into its soul, only to find that the reason for its starvation was some strange remnant of a being that'd once been the dominant identity. I had wanted that so that it was easy to sacrifice Phantom without the barest thought, not even a flicker of remorse.

Of course, the reality is that I would sacrifice him even now, if it meant that I could save all of Karakura, and much of Japan, from the terrible result of that Hollow's soul exploding. But now, an idea was planted in my brain, an idea that I could swear had actually been planted there.

I knew that I was playing into someone's hand, as my mind flicked between possibilities like the pages of a book. It was the past Life Bringer that had worked on Phantom, the only reason that Phantom's dominant identity had been able to persist with the dominance he'd sacrificed for.

Sora needed more than an indomitable will to hold that degree of power. He'd been forcibly pulled above the surface of his soul's darkest waters, allowed to command from on high as the waters creep up and attach to him, trying to assimilate him back into the soul at large.

"What are you doing?" I asked as we ran, not bothering to turn my shut eyes towards Phantom's body. I could see the strangeness just fine without my eyes.

Phantom's mask was tilted upwards, looking towards the sky even while its clawed, black feet placed themselves solidly with each step.

"I can't see it." The Hollowfied voice of Sora rang out, reminding me that I had given him as much freedom within Phantom's body as I could.

"The sky?" I asked as I had my sights set on the towering Hollow in the distance, its massive ribbon spilling forth from its body and showing me just how unstable it was, even after all the clean-up work I had done. I turned my attention towards Phantom's own ribbon for a moment, examining the painfully thin ribbon with its Hollow hole sliced into its end, though it now leaked less blood than before—the black liquid only a thin line trailing down the ribbon to where Phantom ran beside me.

"Yes." Sora responded, his voice moving Phantom's mask subtly, "I can't see, but I can move. I can't feel, but I know. It's… horrible."

The deadpan voice almost made the Hollowfied affectations more disturbing, but for some reason it put me at ease. It was the simple humanity in those words, the same words that I might've said myself while I delved into the depths of my own soul, exploring desperately for something, anything.

I didn't respond, but the idea in my mind, the one that played into the very hands of the Life Bringer that came before me, blossomed further, and pushed aside any thought of abandoning it.

I stopped, only a few hundred metres away from the Hollow that stood taller than the buildings around it. Now Phantom's mask was no longer trained on the sky, but instead on the meal that it could be enjoying instead. I heard a slight grunt of effort from the Hollowfied voice of Sora, Phantom's body trembling as the rest of its soul screamed for the taste of the Hollow's flesh.

"Wh–" He groaned loudly as Phantom's body forced itself forward a step, "What do you want me to do with that… thing?"

Sora's voice was layered with pain, restricting himself so terribly despite everything.

"Simple," I said clearly, "you're going to eat it."

Phantom's body stopped quaking, letting a long hiss of air release from between its teeth. I observed with my spiritual senses as its feel pushed against the concrete rooftop, shattering it, and then obliterating it as a massive boom rang out over Karakura Town.

It was hard to track, but within my spiritual senses, the small and dilapidated form of Phantom screamed through the air with speed that nobody short of Tessai would be able to match.

The towering, Frankenstein's Hollow didn't even have time to react. Not even a moment of realisation, its senses not even close to powerful enough to even glimpse upon Phantom's spiritual pressure.

I watched as Phantom's body stopped in the air, dead over top of the spiritually bloated Menos, and opened its mouth wide.

In one single close of its jaw, Phantom bit its head off in a macabre spray of blood. The bite cleanly separating its head and mask from the rest of its ginormous body. Phantom's body, while incredibly small, easily consumed much of the Hollow's soul into itself. The soul and its energy would nourish Phantom beyond even its capacity, with how ludicrously full of energy the Hollow had been.

As I watched the ghoulish display of Phantom slowly savouring the rest of the Hollow's body with glee, pulling the flesh from the Hollow's bones, I noticed a very gentle displacement of air against my skin. Though, not before I noticed that Kisuke was suddenly only metres away from me, standing and watching the show.

"It's more horrifying than I thought it would be." I said calmly, "Even worse when I know that a man is somehow still living on in Phantom." I could only imagine how Sora would feel right now. I'm almost glad that I couldn't give him total control over Phantom's senses and body, otherwise he'd have to do it all himself.

I waited for a moment. Then a second. I was waiting for a response, a witty reply, a smarmy joke. Anything.

Kisuke would normally be totally incapable of holding himself back from doing so, his dry sarcasm a tool to release the pressure that constantly sat within his mind. He'd changed from the intensely hostile person that I'd first had to deal with into a less hostile, wittier version of himself. It was a return to form for him, I think, pushing away the fear and dread of the future and instead embracing it with sceptical eye and harsh mind at the ready.

But he would never have given up this moment to say something witty.

I swallowed gently as I looked out towards Phantom's feast, realising that I hadn't even had the chance to feel relieved that I'd managed to quash the threat to Karakura Town. Not even a moment of relief.

The dread rolled in with each moment of Kisuke's silence and every one of Phantom's bites.

I felt my shoulders slacken as I reached out with my senses.

No, I'd noticed this before. Somewhere, deep inside, I'd realised what'd happened before Kisuke had even appeared at my side in silence.

She was gone.

Rage, terror, sadness… none of them were right. None of them fit the description of how I felt in that moment of terrible realisation. Not even close. It was the realisation that a part of me was gone.

No, not even that was true.

It was the realisation that the gauze I had used to fill my wound had disappeared, leaving me with a great hole in my chest, right where my heart was. I stared down at my chest, feeling the massive, gaping hole in it widen terrifyingly, eating me as it did.

Oh, I get it now. I've lost my heart and now I'm so incredibly hollow.

I laughed mirthlessly, not even capable of pulling a smile onto my face. The laugh set Kisuke on edge, I could even see his hackles raise and his eyes widen where he stood, shifting his stance beneath his flowing clothing in an instinctive gesture of defensiveness.

"Suzumi is gone." I stated, my voice dry and brittle, an ugly, grating sound that came from deep down a black pit in my stomach. How else would I characterize the sound of the loss I felt so completely?

"Grayson I–" Kisuke started, before I tsked my tongue loudly, the sharp sound stopping the ex-Captain from going any further.

"No." I said, opening up a well of emotion that I had only just begun to seal over with Suzumi's presence. "Where is she?"

"Grayson! The Onmitsukidō took her–" Kisuke tried again, but I just sighed. The air released from my chest was heavy, far heavier than any that I'd produced before, and apparently that was enough to quiet the man as I released the condensed pressure from within me.

"I don't care who took her." I said quietly, "I want to know where."

The single word radiated with a broken resolve, the voice like shattered glass against even my own ears. I could feel any solidity I'd built over weeks and months of training and soul-searching crumble with just one brick removed from the wall.

It was a weak wall, build only around the existence of one person. One person to solve my loneliness, my isolation, my sadness, my overwhelming grief. But she was no longer here, no longer a being I could rely upon.

She had been a given, in my mind. A person that would never leave, would never be taken from me, and now that she was, it showed my just how weak I really was; how weak we were.

"They took her to Soul Society." Kisuke's voice said gently, consoling in a way that only someone who understood could, "You can't go there yet. They'll kill you."

I laughed quietly, almost under my breath, but Kisuke could hear the shattered sound of it.

I had truly loved her, and I still do. But why was it only now that I realised just how broken I was? Why was it when I looked down to my chest and saw a gaping hole, I was reminded of the depths of the sadness I'd left unresolved, having found a heart to fill it with, from someone willing to give me their own.

How horrible I'd been.

"They'll kill me, will they?" I asked almost pleasantly, a small smile on my face as I turned to face the man while the Hollow feasted at my back. "They're welcome to try, Kisuke." I could see his face pale even without use of my eyes.

My actions made sense, in that moment. When I raised my hand to my eyes and passed my fingers over each of my eyes and sealed them closed, I almost felt liberated. I could no longer be tricked into believing what was outside would heal me. No amount of training, or power would be able to deceive me anymore.

Not when I forced my eyes to see the black pit where my heart once was, instead of the vibrant, deceptive world around me.

"I'm going to Soul Society, Kisuke." My voice warned as my spiritual pressure rumbled in agreement, "Either help me, or go away."

---

​

There really wasn't all that much you could do inside of a cell.

Well, no. That was a total out and out lie, there was a tonne you could do in a cell. But when you were permanently restrained upside down, with both feet clamped in a pair of massively oversized shackles that are pumped full of spiritual energy at every moment of every day? It severely restricts your possible activities.

Not to mention the restrictive vest made out of a hyper-dense spiritual material that the 12th​ Division cooked up when that man really wanted to dull down his abilities for a good fight. Though, Central 46 were basically jumping over the moon when they realised that it could be used to restrain most Captain-level combatants.

Of course, that wasn't something that really restricted her all that much. It was the addition of the feet shackles, the arm shackles that were constantly being pulled upon, the crazy seals on the cell that blocked her own spiritual energy, and the vest—which was also covered in seals—that restricted her.

She'd say it was overkill, but it was only barely able to hold her in place. Anything less than these measures would allow her to slip away, almost totally unseen, and unheard by anyone. Soifon seems to have gotten over her cocky, self-deluded attitude since their last meeting and finally managed to get the drop on her.

Well, could it really be called 'getting the drop on her' when she'd been reduced to a comatose state after… well, everything? Though, she deliberated, she wouldn't be much of a Captain of the Onmitsukidō if she didn't take advantage of someone's moment of weakness.

A small oversight that they had made, was leaving her mouth open and operational. Of course, there was no chance of using Kidō in here, not with the new Captain of the Kidō Corps having laid the foundation for this very cell. Hard to wriggle of the seals designed by someone who was rumoured to be competitive with Tessai back in the day, at least in the Academy.

It was total bullshit, of course. She knew better than anyone just how good Tessai Tsukabishi was with Kidō, good enough to restrain her multiple times, and probably good enough to have ended her in those moments. He didn't even need to draw his Zanpakutō to do so, which only made it more impressive when you include the fact that she hadn't either.

Soul Society always found it so easy to forget about the Kidō Corps and the Onmitsukidō. Even the 12th​ Division would be forgotten about if their Captain didn't have a… reputation. But the Kidō Corps and the Onmitsukidō are extremely powerful forces within Soul Society, and it always amused her how easy it was for the regular soul, or even other Soul Reapers, to forget that they exist entirely.

It wasn't until they realised that they weren't going to cut it as a Soul Reaper in the actual Court Guard, and they decided that maybe they should see what the Onmitsukidō were doing instead. The Kidō Corps had even less people care about them, because of the overwhelming technical knowledge you're required to have to even think about joining up, even if the pay is good and the hours are relatively low.

Well, she was a bit of a hypocrite for extolling the values of joining the Kidō Corps over the Onmitsukidō. After all, she did work awfully hard for it to be the first name on the lips of any disenfranchised, low born Soul Reaper.

She began to whistle, the boredom finally reaching a point where she had to do something, otherwise she really would go insane. How long had she even been in here? She'd asked a few times, when someone deigned to come down here, but of course they never talked. She'd be a little disappointed if they did—it'd ruin the fun of the intrigue.

Her whistling, even while she was wrapped in every possible restriction, was loud. Piercingly so, she was told. She'd trained it to be so, a good distraction tactic or, if your opponents were weak and many, you could imbue it with a little spiritual energy and voila! You have yourself a lot of Soul Reapers screaming and bleeding from their ears. Good times.

She whistled, almost tunelessly, just enough to entertain her, and annoy anyone that might be listening in. Or, seeing as her voice can project for miles, annoying someone that found themselves in the range of her whistling.

Which was very few to none, unfortunately. The Onmitsukidō's secret prison wasn't used very often, only really when they are taking in a massive influx of people from a secret war they were waging, seeing as the prison was virtually inescapable and doubled perfectly as torture chambers. Especially so with the channels in the floors that let the blood trickle away down the halls and into whatever dark pit.

Oh well, she could only hope that there was one other unfortunate soul locked in here with her who could hear the annoying–

There was a sound.

It wasn't even hearable to her, just the mere vibration of it from an insane distance was enough to tell her that there was indeed a sound, able to determine that even without any use of her spiritual energy.

It'd been a while since she last heard a sound, and there was nothing that lived down here. aside from theoretically the other prisoners. She let the collection of footsteps make their small clamour of sound as they passed through the corridors of cells within the complete black.

Maybe they thought they were safer because the prisoner couldn't see, but they were clearly wrong. In fact, there was unlikely to be many in Soul Society that could actually see in the lightless depths, something that she'd found extremely helpful during her long days above ground.

She waited patiently as the steps drew nearer and nearer, her mind quickly calculating the heights, weights, and relative physical abilities from their footsteps alone. There were six people, more than she had seen in total for what had to be at least a few decades. And seen was a strong word.

Four of them were basically flunkies when it came to physicality, and they even had the gall to be nervous. Clearly Kidō Corps Wardens. The two others… One led the pack, veritably glowing with power as their steps guided them straight and true, and the other was the new prisoner. Steps were heavy and solid, though weighed down by some version of moroseness.

Interesting.

They turned the corner, coming even closer to her as they walked the prisoner to their cell. She waited, searching for the perfect moment when they stopped dead, right in front of her cell, and the one opposite her.

The leader, a short woman with ruthlessly short cut black hair and a face marred by vicious wounds, reached out with a simple talisman that unlocked the cell in front of her. As simple as that talisman might be, it was entirely foolproof. It couldn't be spoofed or messed with, and the only way to open the cage was to have that key, or someone strong enough to break it open, of which there were few.

She watched in the darkness as the four Kidō Corps members brought the prisoner into their cell, her face covered by a black veil and her throat entirely restrained by a black, metal version of the more commonly used red spiritual restraint.

They were worried about her strength. Or, at least, what she could be capable of. Enough to use the skill of high level Kidō Corps members, powerful enough to maintain the mantras for restraints that are usually set aside for at least 3rd​ seat Soul Reapers, usually weaker Lieutenants.

They released the girl, the black shackles retracting from around her throat and the veil lifting, allowing her to gasp in a breath of the horrifyingly stagnant air down here, the high-level restraints having supplied her oxygen through a pipe straight into her lungs. A brutal restraint for those who could use a voice command of any sort.

The Onmitsukidō woman flicked a finger to release some sort of bind with what seemed to be her Shikai released into a beaded bracelet and cursed nails, skin slowly going a purple colour that surely hurt the woman deeply. Just as she raised the small talisman to lock the gasping prisoner behind bars…

"Boo!"

The shockwave of sound that she forced from her throat battered against the fragile ears of the Kidō Corps members, their ears bleeding underneath the white garb of their Warden headdress. The Onmitsukidō Soul Reaper fared better, with her ears only just surviving the sound blast.

She couldn't help but laugh.

"Oh my!" She said in her sultry tones, "Did you seriously not know that I was around when you put that one down here? Is that how long I've been in this little hole?" She cackled manically as the Onmitsukidō woman scowled as the cowering Kidō Corps Soul Reapers, waving the talisman, and locking away the other prisoner across from her.

"Don't speak to her! Mistress Soifon has forbidden for her to be talked to."

"Aww, don't be like that! I'm right here, if you stay and chat, I'll even be nice?" The Onmitsukidō girl snorted and commanded the blubbering Kidō Corps Wardens away, leaving her and the other prisoner totally alone.

So very alone.

"Well, well," she began with a grin, "what're you in here for? Must've pissed them off like no tomorrow to be thrown in here, just by yourself and all."

The other girl didn't react, but she could study her face as her new companion struggled to recover from whatever had been done to her. Being in those restraints, even as a person capable of resisting them, is exhausting to say the least. They stimulate your spiritual energy into responding and constantly exhausting your reserves while it tricks you into feeding it your own spiritual energy. If you knew the trick, or you had enough spiritual energy yourself, you could just break the cycle and run away.

"Hey!" She called out against the other prisoner's breath began to slow down, "I can't tell if you're dying or falling asleep, but I'm not having either of them! I've waited ages to talk to someone, so we're having a slumber party kiddo." The prisoner girl groaned with a distinct effort, making her sigh deeply.

"Oh, come on! You seriously can't talk right now?" She waited for a moment, but no reply came. "Fine! If you can give me your name, I'll consider us good until you can talk more. I'll even give you mine!"

She waited, keeping her eyes trained on the prisoner who was currently lying face down on the cell floor, her black hair splayed around her dramatically. She'd almost given up on receiving a reply, all too ready to shoot back a petulant response, but a rough and beaten voice sounded out in the darkness, the first non-hostile words she'd heard in years.

"Suzumi." The prisoner said, her voice filled with a deep sadness and a terrible rage underneath the horribly broken voice. She waited for a moment, seeing if another name would follow, but it didn't. She hummed for a while, wondering whether she should give a false name or her genuine one, though she shrugged in the end, making an effort to pull against her restrained arms for the frivolous action.

"I see. Nice to meet you, Suzumi." She grinned, wondering what kind of response she'd get from this, "My name is Yoruichi Shihōin."

…No response, huh? Seems that people really did forget about the Onmitsukidō Captains.


A/N: Tada! Things are heating up, boys and girls! Strap yourself into your shihakushō, we're getting a party started~

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 57: Kuchiki

The morning air within the Kuchiki estate was, as always, exceptionally refreshing. A product of a lot of kan paid for far too many Kidō Corp labour hours. Though it was one of the only things that the Kuchiki family, with all its extreme conservatives, were actually willing to dish out money on aside from training facilities and enough complex Bakudō barriers and seals to sink a battleship.

In actual fact, the Kuchiki estate wasn't all that visually impressive. It was beautiful in its own minimalistic way, but it was hardly a gaudy palace that some of the other Noble Families resided in. The Kuchiki was almost miniscule in size, possessing only a few main family members rather than the bloated families where you couldn't accurately count their numbers the first time around even if you tried.

The Kuchiki family was different, in that way. Conservative in the most innocuous of ways; diet, training, mentality, money, politics. Everything was influenced by the trademarked Kuchiki pride, or at least the handful of elders would love for that to be the case.

The elders could hold power over the lesser parts of the family, those that lived just outside of the Kuchiki's main estate, though still within Kuchiki owned land. They lived extremely strict and regimented lives, even if they didn't necessarily wear the Kuchiki name; however, they lived lives of relative comfort and ease, never needing to so much as work, for the Kuchiki clan would provide with its immense wealth and political power.

Something that the elders loved to harp on about was the astoundingly high level of education amongst the branch families and even the twigs that grow from those branches. All told, the Kuchiki family have relatives in almost every administrative and scholarly field that Soul Society has to offer.

Of course, this is impressive. Extremely impressive in fact, but it was all done on the order of one man. There was no goodness in the action, even in the man who had ordered it to be done had every good intention. He had merely said to do so, and the elders were forced to go along with his plan.

The elders, while at least half of them were pleasant—if old and stodgy—the other half were almost malicious, having sat atop their high peak for so long that they couldn't possibly relate to the struggles of anyone but themselves and their nearest peers. Hundreds of years, in some cases.

Honestly, if you were to look back in the history of the Kuchiki family and the rise of its power, there was an almost unmistakable turning point. It was long ago enough now that only some of Soul Society's oldest members would actually remember it from their own past, rather than from a book on the Noble Houses and their respective histories.

Though, many would remember the reign of Ginrei Kuchiki within their lifetimes. The stoic 27th​ Head of the Kuchiki Family and the Captain of the 6th​ Division. Before Ginrei the Kuchiki family was merely one that held an absurd amount of political and economic power, only a middling clan when it came to the introduction of military might to their repertoire.

Ginrei's father was a Lieutenant, pushing Ginrei to become more, and using every inkling of his own power to aid Ginrei in growing his power beyond mere talent. And, of course, his bet paid off.

Ginrei was the man that grew the Kuchiki family into, potentially, the most powerful and influential house in Soul Society, and even after the death of his children and his grandson, Byakuya's, instatement as the 28th​ head of the Kuchiki family the man still held an astronomical amount of power.

Though Ginrei, ever the minimalist, rarely exercises that power in recent years. He has been more than happy with leaving it to his grandson rather than undertake an issue himself. However, he'd never once admitted to anyone that his power had been waning even before Byakuya had been born, and that he'd hardly been powerful enough to fix many of Soul Society's most recent issues.

The last time that Ginrei had ever truly fought with someone, was during Byakuya's instatement into his position as the next 6th​ Division Captain, and Ginrei had lost horrifically, though none—not even the spectacularly loudmouthed Kyōraku, at least at the time—had recounted quite how badly.

There was possibly only one person outside of the Court Guard that knew of that, and it was Rukia Kuchiki, the only other Captain-class Soul Reaper within the Kuchiki family. And she only came to know that from a much older Ginrei himself. Ginrei had, thankfully, loosened up in his twilight years, even finding a small amount of child-like mischief once his great, great granddaughter was born to Rukia and Renji Abarai.

Even if his great, great granddaughter didn't hold the Kuchiki name, he had declared her as legitimate for all intents and purposes—though it didn't quite stop the elders from squabbling over whether the adopted Rukia's child was much more than a bastard, even if she retained her last name after marriage to an exceptionally powerful Soul Reaper who serves underneath the family's head himself.

That very child was… a bit of a wildfire, with traits of mother and father interweaving into a truly terrifying existence. She'd even gone so far as to antagonise the son of the Kurosaki family for a good thirty years before she realised that she was being ridiculous and finally got together with the boy and had a child not ten years later after she'd claimed they were, 'Taking it slow', which was just about an antonym with the girl.

Well, anything she could do to irritate her mother, Rukia Kuchiki could only assume. There was nothing to make Rukia feel old like realising that she was a grandmother. She almost hated that her daughter had decided to follow the human timeline of events rather than Soul Society's generally accepted timeline.

Especially when you were talking about Captain or Lieutenant level beings, with lifespans that could reach into the many hundreds of years, maybe thousands if you were good enough at not dying. Rukia hadn't even thought about having a child until she was a hundred and fifty-five years old, at least. Ichika had a child when she wasn't even forty!

Of course, with the nebulous way that souls aged in appearance, it wasn't quite as horrifying as the rough equivalent of a five-year-old becoming a mother, but there was certainly an air of mortification around it. Especially now that her daughter looked as old, if not older than herself.

Rukia took in a deep breath, silently praying that the stupid Bakudō wards that created the air's freshness would prove their money's worth and actually calm her at all. Of course, it didn't. With a sharp exhale, Rukia stood from her seat within the Courtyard, trying desperately to ignore the deluge of Kuchiki guards that hid themselves out of sight of the house's residents. A fallacy when it came to the senses of a Captain, mostly anyways.

She lifted a long, thin pipe to her lips, gently pulling on the contents of it and letting the warm, velvety smoke leak into her mouth and down her throat, soothing her airways and sharpening her mind. It wasn't quite a drug, proving almost no benefit at all other than its pleasant taste and feel—though the 12th​ Division stated that it gave a minor increase to focus amongst those that found concentrating a difficulty.

She exhaled into the open air; the thick smoke almost instantly being dissipated by the very same Bakudō wards that proved so good at stripping the air of any pollution. She stood, overlooking the courtyard that was little more than a tasteful stone path through shaped patches of strictly cut grass. Some would call it ugly, Rukia included, but damned if it didn't fit the place.

With an elegant step, she disappeared from her spot and reappearing on the wall that stands just tall enough to see outside the oppressive, blank walls that the Kuchiki Family had installed almost more than half a millennium ago now.

She could see the massive buildings off in the distance, most of them being administrative or scientific in nature and little of which were residential aside from the household of another Noble Household.

Standing a far stretch from there was a sprawling maze of walls that she lovingly remembers as where she once spent most of her time, traversing those streets on Court Guard business underneath Captain Ukitake, who she has since taken the place of as the Captain of the 13th​ Division.

Now, as a Captain, she barely had to move, if she really didn't want to. The average Soul Reaper doesn't quite understand the levels to which you could simply shirk duties and forgo politics. The 11th​ Division was almost a testament to that, at least in the past.

Captain Zaraki, a truly terrifying man to be in the presence of, was historically flippant about any and all duties he might have, only really following orders when things got really serious—and even then, he'd only follow them the way he wanted to.

Though, things seemed to have changed since then… Zaraki Kenpachi was almost more unnerving to be around now, since the Blood War. He was still just as terrible with directions, seemed to show almost no interest at Captain meetings, could care less about the politics that were slowly undermining the power that the Court Guard had; but despite so many parts of him remaining just the same…

A wave of spiritual pressure touched against Rukia's own, if only for a moment. It wasn't anything special, power wise, in fact it was almost underwhelming—but Rukia's eyes were pulled towards the origin of it regardless. She tried to pinpoint it, preying on the residual energy that remained after the origin was hidden away from her senses.

Her eyes met a direction, that lead to an estate, that made the short woman frown apprehensively. She ran a hand through her long, black hair—exceptionally thick in a way that seemed to remind certain people of past Captain Unohana. She'd even dressed as her once, parting her hair down the middle and weaving it into the Captain's signature front facing braid. It was thoroughly unappreciated by those who had been mortally terrified of the Captain, though the current Kenpachi seemed to find it disturbingly hilarious.

She looked closer at the estate, trying to find any inkling of the spiritual pressure that she'd sensed so clearly despite its weak overall power. It was hard to stand out in such a spiritually polluted environment—testament to the way that the Court Guard barracks and offices were laid out, to keep the thousands of extremely powerful Soul Reapers from literally making sections of the district inhospitable to the average soul.

But this pressure was so clear. It almost felt as if it were unimpeded in such a way that she'd only experienced a few times, as if it were the clear water of a pond, rather than a river through an industrial district. It was hard to place where she might have felt it before, but Rukia realised that she wasn't going to be able to get information on its source so easily.

Not with the origin point being dead within the Shihōin Estate, or the Onmitsukidō base of operations, or the 2nd​ Division's barracks. All of which were extremely close together, for reasons that were blithely obvious.

"Michiru!" She called clearly, her voice resonating with a slight pulse of spiritual pressure. In the very next moment, a woman dressed in a Soul Reaper's shihakushō appeared, the only thing slightly unique about her clothing was the symbol of the 13th​ Division and the way that she wore her bronze-coloured hair, weaved into a bun held together tightly by a net of braided hair.

The speed at which the girl moved may have surprised someone, especially with the sizable weight that the young Soul Reaper carried on her body. But every person within the 13th​ Division was personally trained, either by herself or her Lieutenant. It also didn't hurt that the young woman had somewhat of a talent for Shunpo and the art of movement in general.

"Yes, Captain Kuchiki!" The girl greeted loudly, with an overly serious edge.

"Just Rukia, or Captain Rukia if you must." Rukia demanded with a sigh, knowing that the girl wouldn't adhere to her order, or she would try, and it would be so painful to watch the girl stammer out her name that she'd be forced to renege on her own order. "Regardless, did you feel that spiritual energy from only a moment ago?"

The weighty girl looked up at her, her rounded face scrunching up in concern, "I–I must apologise Captain R–" she swallowed heavily, "R–Ru—Captain Kuchiki!" She stammered out, eventually reverting to her formal addressing of the woman despite her orders to the contrary. Her wide cheeks were red with embarrassment, though Rukia just sighed and waver her hand dismissively, prompting the now 5th​ seat Soul Reaper to continue.

"I did not feel the spiritual energy you speak of. May I ask that you describe it?"

Rukia spent a few minutes trying to describe the sensation to the not that much younger woman kneeling before her, before pulling out paper and drawing examples involving bunnies. Bunnies always helped in explaining things.

Unfortunately, despite her 5th​ seat's focused expression, Michiru was unable to recall such a spiritual pressure—an oddity with her relative level of spiritual sensitivity.

Rukia sent her away, staring off into the distance, looking at the estate that the spiritual pressure had originated from searchingly. She'd both never felt anything like it before, and also found it eerily similar to something she'd felt in the past—however, her mind couldn't quite put together what it was.

But just as she was about to move off of the wall, beginning her day and the duties that came with it, there was a flash of movement to her left, forcing her to take a quick step back and draw her Zanpakutō to clash with a blade that had been swung at her with all the causal ease she could muster.

"Good." The clear, regal voice of her older brother, Byakuya Kuchiki rang out across the estate, "You are far better at this than you were when you first became a Captain, Rukia." She snorted at the man, rolling her eyes at the man's perfectly maintained hair, separated with the Kuchiki clan's ornamental hair piece and neck covered with the white, silk wrapping.

"I was much worse at Shunpo back then, Byakuya." She said adversarially, though he was already looking out towards the Shihōin estate, away from her own sword wielding form. "You felt it too?"

"Indeed." He said slowly, though his eyes narrowed slightly, a large expression for the classically stoic man.

"Do you know what it was? I swear I've felt that spiritual pressure before, I just can't tell exactly where I–" Rukia lifted her eyes to look at the man, finding his expression even harsher still—intense in a way that she hadn't seen on him in decades, not since he was concerned that Ichika had somehow found herself within Hueco Mundo.

Which she had, as a matter of fact. Watching Byakuya give her the dressing down of a lifetime, as her Captain no less, was possibly the most gratifying moment in Rukia's existence, shortly following behind the massive relief after finding her resting upon the corpse of a Menos Grande she'd slaughtered because, 'It looked comfortable!'

"I believe…" Byakuya began icily, "that it may be the spiritual pressure of a Blank." Rukia stopped, scrunching her brows together and looking to the estate once more in confusion.

"A Blank?" She repeated, dumbfounded, "but why?"


Been rough for a while, hoping I can get back into it better, but we'll have to see. Hope you're all feeling well.

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 58: Dread

The one thing that Rukia had found was a constant irritation when actually working with her adoptive brother, was that he continued to be protective of her regardless of her own wishes.

Something that made getting sensitive information out of him exceedingly difficult. In regular cases where her brother wouldn't tell her something, she'd simply take a trip down to Soifon's quarters and demand an explanation. For a master of stealth, counterintelligence, and secretiveness, Soifon was usually more than happy to subvert her Captain comrade.

This time, however, the scrutiny was placed on Soifon and her 2nd​ Division, so that possibility was ruled out. So unless Rukia wanted to run around and start asking questions far too loudly, Byakuya was her only option.

She walked behind the tall and refined man, having aged significantly in appearance since she'd once been running around with Ichigo and the gang. Where he had once look roughly early to mid-twenties, he now looked mid thirties with the presence of someone ten years his superior.

He had changed so extremely from the cold and precise person he'd once been, someone who'd tied himself far too tightly to a sinking ship, closing his eyes to the rising waters. Now, he was formidable in every sense of the word. It was more than just his power, which had increased along with the average Soul Reaper's had—a decree from the Captain Commander himself to train as many Soul Reapers to be capable of at least releasing their Shikai.

It had been a massive undertaking, something that Shunsui had sacrificed a great deal of political power for in recompense to the whims of Central 46, but he'd done it. The dream of having each and every Soul Reaper reach Shikai had been farfetched, and they'd had to quickly change course to include teaching those who seemed incapable of reaching Shikai to be able to specialise in Kidō or learn the trade of the Onmitsukidō.

Rukia can remember how ludicrously proud she'd been when she'd managed to get every single one of her own Division to learn Shikai. The 13th​ Division was one of the most exclusive of the Court Guard, with the Captain themselves choosing each and every one of its members by hand instead of accepting in bulk like the 11th​ did, or the glorified contract work that the 12th​ called it's 'work-force'.

At current, the 13th​ only has 10 members, but each of them was a powerful force in and of themselves. Especially with how the power of the Court Guard had increased in general, and how the requirements for becoming a Lieutenant and a Captain had changed significantly. With the advent of the Blood War, far more Lieutenants found themselves capable of Bankai, and it wasn't long before being a Lieutenant almost required Bankai.

The golden age of Soul Reapers had come. While they may have lost some of their most powerful combatants, and Soul Society still bled profusely from the death of the late Captain Commander and his Lieutenant, there had never been a point in Soul Society's history where more powerful Soul Reapers had existed.

And Byakuya had changed to reflect that. He was the Captain of the 6th​ Division, he was the Noble Captain—instated within the Court Guards to remind them of the duties that they bore to the people, to use their inordinate power to aid those in desperate need. He was a clear bell in the raging storm that the other Captains represented, his sound piercing and ever-true.

"You need to tell me, Brother." Rukia said again, her voice never leaving it's conversational tone despite the insistence of her words, "I'm sure that the other Captains and Lieutenants felt it, and they are going to ask questions. I want to know just why the Onmitsukidō would bring a Blank into Soul Society."

They walked through the brightly lit and extremely minimally designed corridors of the Kuchiki estate, their sandals making no noise as they crossed the light-coloured floorboards. Her brother didn't respond, but he changed course ever so slightly towards a very particular part of the estate that they were both intimately familiar with.

After only a minute or so of walking at a mundane pace, they arrived at the sliding paper door of a room, which Byakuya easily opened and walked inside, sitting at the low table which already had two cups of tea sitting atop it's surface. Rukia walked inside, sliding the flimsy door shut behind her and feeling the slight thrum of spiritual energy as the wards that secretly plastered the walls of this room activated.

She sat, easily drinking from the tea in her usual, hyper formal demeanour that she tended to share with her brother. Byakuya eyed her mutely, sipping from his own tea with such elegance that you'd swear that the tea simply disappeared as soon as it passed his lips.

"The Onmitsukidō have been acting strangely, as of late." He began as he always did, with a short snippet of information to draw the mind before he began to speak more, "They have been acting on orders that were placed decades ago, those which Soifon herself had dismissed. Requests from the Court Guard are being fulfilled with seemingly no rhyme or reason."

"Soifon had been denying at least half of the orders from the Court Guard for years, labelling them unnecessary or superfluous use of Onmitsukidō resources." Rukia added, nodding, her brow gently furrowed, "How would she be fulfilling those orders now, after she's already denied them?" Byakuya quirked an unimpressed eyebrow at her, making her feel distinctly like a child who had asked a silly question.

"I would have thought you would understand the workings of Soul Society's systems by now, Rukia." Byakuya stated with a lightly unimpressed tone, casting his gaze down on his much shorter sister, his long hair framing his already impressively intimidating face.

'You're the only one that would bother to do that!' She didn't quite have the stones to say it, knowing that logically he was correct, but few Captains had to understand the function of Soul Society like the Head of the Kuchiki family and the 6th​ Division Captain was required to.

"Regardless," he said, releasing her from his gaze, "the Onmitsukidō never officially deny any request, thus every request stays open barring an extremely minimal few. There seems to be no defined process for what they are completing, which has sent administration into trying to find the numerous requests that have been denied and try to pin down a reasoning."

"But why?" Rukia reiterated, "I can see that it's throwing admin into disarray, but what are they doing? Soifon isn't someone to start pulling missions out of a hat and send her people off on them. The Onmitsukidō might be cold-hearted, but they are anything but illogical."

"Precisely." Byakuya said in a rare moment of absolute agreement, "Central 46 has told us that the Onmitsukidō are currently reopening decades old missions due to the relative peace since the Blood War ended." Rukia scoffed, and her brother didn't even bother to give her an admonishing look, simply closing his eyes as he took a long sip of his tea.

"Why hasn't Soifon spoken? Why is Central 46 speaking for her?" Rukia said, listing just the beginning of her questions about the baffling situation.

"We do not know. Soifon has not appeared at a Captain's meeting since at least the start of the year, which you would not know as you have not either." Now Byakuya did give her an admonishing gaze, his grey eyes looking down at her with expectation. She rolled her eyes, the small act of rebellion against her brother's strict minded standards.

"I was training my Division, as I have been doing for at least a decade now."

"And I have been doing so as well." He countered neutrally, "However, you are capable of excusing yourself to attend an important meeting amongst your peers. Your Lieutenant can, at minimum, take command of training for the time you are away." She raised an eyebrow at this, immediately halting the flow of Byakuya's admonishment.

"Have you met my Lieutenant?" She asked, almost amused by her brother's blunder. He turned his head to the side slightly, apprehension in his eyes.

"I have not. I do have my own Division to command, Rukia. However, I would have expected that you would choose your Lieutenant wisely, with responsibility and honour at the forefront of your decision." She nodded, though the amusement didn't leave her face.

"And it certainly was. He was one of two that have attained Bankai within my Division," Byakuya nodded deeply, with his own Division hosting only three others than himself, "and he definitely meets the required level of responsibility, despite his clumsiness. However… his Shikai and Bankai made us question whether or not he should be transferred to the 11th​ Division."

Byakuya sharpened his gaze, seemingly remembering just what she was talking about, and the incident that surrounded it. He gave a light nod, absolving her of her sins within his eyes, and continuing forwards.

"I have approached Soifon personally, and she has denied any ulterior motives, though she did speak quite carefully. She is not as trained in wordplay as Yoruichi was. Her obfuscation was too obvious to ignore, but it is hardly an admission to any other motive."

Rukia contemplated the strange situation, pairing it with her brother's insight. Byakuya Kuchiki's social insight was something that you would be an absolute fool to ignore. Throughout his life he has dealt with more stone-faced merchants, officials, and family partners than Rukia could even count. He might be young, in comparison to the extremely long lives that some in the Soul Society have lived, but that was hardly a barrier for him. He had become the Head of the Kuchiki family at an age where she had been still only just coming into her own.

Soifon was not as easy to read as Byakuya made her out to be, only the extremely politically minded like her brother could ever possibly say that.

"They're hiding a largescale operation." Rukia surmised, and Byakuya nodded, having come to the same conclusion, "I don't understand what they would even be looking for. The Onmitsukidō hold a nigh monopoly over Soul Society's information, they hold all the power, what ploy could they possibly want to pull? Is the Blank just to throw us off balance?"

"They hold a monopoly on information, not power. The Shihōin hold some more power, but they have politically distanced themselves from the Onmitsukidō since Yoruichi left her Captain position, though they still train their new generations as they once did with Yoruichi. I have even heard that one of their youngest has surpassed Yoruichi's progress when she was the same age."

Rukia felt herself swallow involuntarily with the mere idea that there was going to be another Yoruichi walking around the place, but she decided to pass over the talking point. It wasn't important right now, not yet at least.

"So you think they are making a political gambit?" Rukia posed, making the stern man sigh slightly, placing his cup back onto the table elegantly, exactly where he'd picked it up from.

"I cannot say. Regardless of my suspicion, it still doesn't equate correctly. Soifon has been supremely uninterested in the shifting sands of political power since her instatement, and she still holds unquestionable power over the Onmitsukidō, so there hasn't been a quiet change in leadership."

"The Shihōin family then? Maybe they are pulling strings on Soifon, or Soifon is acting to defend her position from them." Byakuya thought on the notion for a moment, which is a moment more than he would give any regular supposition. But he shook his head in dismissal of the idea, causing the curtains of his long black hair to shake elegantly as they flowed down the front of his immaculate Captain's haori. The man had grown his hair out to an exceptional length, easily rivalling Rukia's own, though likely longer due to the height he had over her.

"No, the Shihōin family has continued to allow for Soifon's leadership over the Onmitsukidō and even some of the best that their family has to offer. They value practicality supremely. I have no doubt that they have had at least one member of their family that would be capable of rivalling Soifon in Shunpo, they have instead stated that they wish to produce a true heir to the Shihōin that can lead the Onmitsukidō without question of their ability. As of now, they still consider Yoruichi to be their greatest creation, and until they can produce someone definably greater, they will not return."

"Student defeats the master?" Rukia questioned, "I guess it does make sense for a family built on the legacy of assassins and Shunpo masters. But…"

Rukia struggled to think for a moment, finding no real certain possibility besides some strange form of outside involvement, something that Soul Society and the Court Guard had been on high alert for since Aizen's betrayal.

"No, I don't think that they are going to be able to have one of their own match Yoruichi any time soon." Rukia declared solemnly. She had seen some of what the woman had to offer, and even when she'd heard the stories of her extreme power, Rukia had known that Yoruichi hadn't even scratched the surface of her potential. Not yet. "Are they, or someone inside the Shihōin family squirming under the thumb of their tradition?"

Her brother looked at her neutrally for a good while, longer than he had after her last proposition.

"I cannot say." He intoned heavily after contemplating for at least a few more seconds, "We are working with too few of the pieces to understand the magnitude of this just yet. It is quite possible that you are correct, however."

The slight praise he gave to her deduction gave a warmth to her cheeks that almost made her feel embarrassed. She was a Captain now, even having done an extremely impressive job of training her own Division, only just pulling in under her own brother's results despite the difference in the sizes of their Divisions. But somehow, that vague praise was something that the overly taciturn man could use to bring her back to feeling like a fledgeling Soul Reaper that had only just learned to use Shikai.

But in that very next moment, she could almost feel her blood run cold within her veins, watching as her older brother looked to the side, out of the room's window to view the various towers and eclectic buildings that existed within the walls of the Soul Society, even being able to peek over the walls that obscured the view of the Rukongai that laid beyond, perpetually in a state of disarray.

His face had changed from that brutally stony guise, one that was almost legendary even within the Captains, to one of visible consternation. His brow crinkling elegantly and his jaw clenching enough that she could see the slight definition of the muscles beneath his sharp features.

"You must be careful, Rukia." He said, his voice so soft that it almost made her wonder if her sister had taken the same tone when she'd expressed concern for him. "I can try my best to keep you and this family safe, along with Soul Society itself but… I believe that not even Captain Commander Kyōraku quite sees the magnitude of the storm that is surely coming our way."

He turned back towards her, his grey eyes showing the most genuine display of care that she'd ever experienced from the man, along with a small smile that only served to worry her further. He gently stood, leaving the room with barely a wake of air as he moved out of her sight, closing the door behind her before disappearing from her side, flash stepping hundreds of metres away within moments.

She sat in shock, nervously thumbing the hilt of her Zanpakutō as she slowly tried to comprehend what had caused her brother to act in such a way. Despite minutes of contemplation, she was left with nothing but a horrible, terrible dread that ate away at her stomach, mocking her as if it had the answer that she felt was right on the tip of her tongue.


A/N: Here's some more! Still working on being consistent again, but there's only so much time until my university starts up, and life will change then. We'll have to see, hey?

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