The Soul Society was being steadily plagued by unusual events, such as the atrocity in the Seireitei's aristocratic quarter. And that might have just been the beginning of it. Oddly, it had begun the day Shuhei Hisagi learned that Tokinada was taking on the role of head of the Tsunayashiro household.
Signs of the budding malevolence spread, like branches and shoots, extending into the Soul Society, the world of the living, and even Hueco Mundo.
≡
Seireitei,
Fourth Company Barracks
A lone, timid Soul Reaper stood silently in front of the Fourth Company barracks. He was looking down the wide road that led to the other barracks as though very concerned about something behind him.
"What's wrong, third-seat Yamada?"
The mousy young man—Yamada Hanataro—turned toward the other fourth company members who were exiting the barracks.
"Huh? Oh, sorry. It's nothing! ...I think."
"Well, that answer is the opposite of reassuring," Ogido, the cool-headed seated officer, replied.
Hanataro answered falteringly,
"Assistant Captain Hisagi just headed toward the Ninth barracks with this extremely terrifying look on his face. I thought something awful must have happened..."
One could hardly imagine he was anything but a timid new recruit when he replied with such a frightened expression.
But in actuality, he was one of the Fourth Company's distinguished practitioners of healing kido, or kaido. And although he was fainthearted in some ways, his genial personality made him widely trusted, and he had been elevated to the position of third seat of the Fourth Company.
Hanataro, however, believed the only reason he had been promoted to the third seat was because the original seat-holder, Yasochika Iemura, had transferred to another company. Hanataro, while still trying to fulfill his duties, battled with the pressure of feeling that under normal circumstances he never would have gotten the position.
A very large Fourth Company member reacted to Hanataro's mention of the Ninth Company's assistant captain.
"You saw Hisagi like that...?"
"Hey Aoga, aren't you from the same generation as Assistant Captain Hisagi?" Ogiba asked.
"Yes, but I haven't had many opportunities to see him lately. We met each other while visiting a friend's grave about half a year ago, and the last I saw of him was in a hospital room after the war."
Though Ogiba seemed the much younger of the two, Aoga spoke to him deferentially because Ogiba was a seated officer.
The other Fourth Company members nearby started talking excitedly when they heard Aoga's comment.
"So Aoga's from the same generation as Hisagi..."
"That's amazing. Didn't that era produce a ton of elite Soul Reapers?"
"Yeah, that generation has produced a lot of captain-rank Soul Reapers in the decades since Assistant Captain Hisagi, like Assistant Captain Abarai, Assistant Captain Hinamori, Assistant Captain Kira, and, of course, Captain Hitsugaya. They're legends, even in Shinoreijutsuin Academy, because of how exceptionally fast they got promoted."
"If we're talking about quick promotions, what about third-seat Yamada from our very own company?"
Hanataro bowed his head to his other company members when his name suddenly came up in conversation, even though he was their third-seat officer.
"Uh, um... ...Sorry."
"Why are you apologizing?"
"Well, compared to Hisagi and the others, I'm just an incompetent causing trouble for the Fourth Company..."
When Hanataro spoke so disparagingly of himself, despite being praised, Ogiba said with a deadpan expression,
"What are you saying, third-seat Yamada? You're an elite among the elites, just as good as any of them with the same lineage and skill. They say even Kisuke Urahara acknowledged that your kaido ability was better than his."
"I genuinely feel terrible... Wait, actually I feel like I kinda always get sucked into a horrible situation whenever I get involved with Urahara..."
"By the way, there's someone who's been waiting in the visitor's room for our very own third-seat Yamada for the past half hour."
"What!? Y-you could have told me that to begin with!"
After watching Hanataro scramble into the barracks, Ogiba muttered, unconcerned,
"Sorry, I misspoke. He just arrived, so he hasn't been waiting very long."
One of the exasperated company soldiers who overheard that scolded,
"You would've had to tell him eventually anyway. You're as unpleasant as always, Ogiba."
"Well, I would have told him if it had been someone he couldn't keep waiting. Anyway, as far as unpleasantness goes, I think that visitor is way worse."
"Huh?"
Ogiba just shrugged, and the other soldiers cocked their heads quizzically. Aoga was the only one of the group looking at the main road Hisagi had run down just a short while ago. He seemed conflicted as he said to himself, "He had a terrifying look on his face, huh?"
Aoga remembered when Hisagi had been in a grave condition after the war and had been brought into the Fourth Company for treatment.
Hisagi had been so horribly injured, it was a wonder he was still alive. He had somehow managed to briefly survive thanks to Orihime Inoue, but it had taken quite some time for him to replenish his spiritual pressure after that.
After Hisagi had regained consciousness, Aoga had asked the Soul Reaper,
"Are you planning on fighting again?"
When they had reunited in front of their classmate Kanisawa's grave, Aoga had thought that Hisagi had cast his fear aside, since he had continued to fight after so many close calls.
But when Aoga saw Hisagi on the verge of death again, he realized that no matter how many times a Soul Reaper cast it aside, they could never escape fear on the front lines.
Hisagi's strength came from his being prepared to keep surviving even while battling his perpetual fear. That was why Aoga had known what Hisagi would say. But he still couldn't leave the question unasked.
Hisagi had just made one remark, smiling all the while.
"Why are you making a face like that when we just got through the war? Kanisawa would've given you a talking to."
The next day, Hisagi forced his discharge from the hospital in order to witness Aizen's reimprisonment. It made Aoga very concerned that the very same person had just run by with a frightful look on his face. As though half praying and half frustrated by his own powerlessness, Aoga muttered,
"I hope that nothing happens to make him put his life on the line in a fight, at least until reconstruction of the Seireitei is finished."
If anything happened, Hisagi would head right toward the fight, regardless of the state of the world around him. Aoga was incredibly familiar with that aspect of Hisagi's personality.
But destiny, which had Hisagi in its grasp, was already trampling Aoga's wishes underfoot.
≡
Seireitei,
Fourth Company Barracks, Visitor's Room
Kaido functionality had been put first when the Fourth barracks were built, but a room with slightly more splendor in mind had still been included in the plans. It was the visitor's room, used by the Captain General or aristocrats as needed.
However, the Fourth Company prioritized the lives of the soldiers of the Thirteen Court Guard Companies foremost and had opened the visitor's room as a temporary aid station during the war. The smell of medicine and other such things still lingered faintly in the space.
Hanataro Yamada ran into the visitor's room, accompanied by the sound of his rushed footsteps. He tripped on the edge of the doorway but used the momentum of that near tumble to bow his head and apologize.
"Oh whoa... Uh...um...apologies...for the delay."
Hanataro had displayed his awkward manners before even seeing the visitor's face, but the guest did not reproach him. Instead, the visitor's sage voice filled the room,
"You seem and sound just as dreary as usual. When you try to sympathize with your patients, do you allow their ailments to take root in your own heart, Hanataro?"
Hanataro felt nostalgic as he realized the voice was one he was long familiar with. His eyes went wide and he raised his head.
"Uh...um...S-Seinosuke!?"
"Oh, even your face has grown dreary. I worry your patients might hang themselves after a face like that treats them."
That was Seinosuke Yamada. He was also Hanataro's older brother and until a few decades ago had been the Fourth Company's assistant captain. He was currently decommissioned and had retied from the Thirteen Court Guard Companies, so his zanpaku-to was in safekeeping at the barracks.
He wasn't unemployed though. Seinosuke Yamada had withdrawn from his post as assistant captain because he had been headhunted into a new occupation, which made him an exception of exceptions.
The Thirteen Court Guard Companies usually stuck any discharges into a special prison called the Maggot's Nest on principle, and had required Seinosuke to formally retire in order to leave his post.
Hanataro was puzzled specifically because he knew the new occupation his brother had been recruited into.
"W-what happened? Do you have the day off? I heard you were quite busy."
"Hm. More or less. But the work is worthwhile. Those old aristocrats who don't want to die even though they're Soul Reapers come to see me incessantly. Watching such authorities floundering as they disgracefully cling to something out of fear of old age is always a pleasure."
"Uh, um...are you really sure you should be saying that? E-e-especially about the aristocrats..."
"Of course I shouldn't. It's defamation and possibly even a death penalty offense. Are you planning to tattle on me, Hanataro? If you're saying you want me to die, I suppose I'll just need to be brave and give up on life as my dear little brother wishes."
"Uhh...I-I wouldn't do that, Seinosuke..."
After waving his hands back and forth in a fluster, Hanataro awkwardly disclaimed,
"Y-you certainly are spiteful, and no one's a fan of your personality, but...there are good things about you if people look for them...I think... We can't let anyone who has it out for someone join the Fourth Company to begin with!"
"It hurts me in its own way that you'd consider it so seriously."
Despite his words, Seinosuke smiled as though he were enjoying himself and shrugged before he broached the subject at hand.
"Well, it's my day off and I had some business here. So I came to give you some advice while I was around, Hanataro."
"Advice...for me?"
Seinosuke narrowed his eyes slightly, and his smile disappeared as he got to the crux of the conversation.
"Hanataro, how would you feel about taking some time off from the Fourth Company?"
"Huh?"
"A lot of rumors come my way in my line of work."
When Hanataro seemed puzzled at the sudden request, Seinosuke, the Seireitei Shino-Seyakuin delegate—in other words, the highest authority in the relief office that specifically catered to the Four Great Noble Clans and specialized in serving the upper nobility—snickered.
"Now that we've done away with the Quincy threat, it's unlikely that we'll be having any big wars for a while. Instead, the Seireitei will probably hit a rough patch. And not one that's small enough to stop just by putting some effort into it either.
"If you don't want to get dragged into the mess, you should distance yourself from positions of responsibility for a while and keep your eyes and ears closed."
≡
The World of the Living, Kakakura Town
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I can't believe we got dragged into this! We're really deep in it this time!"
It was dusk in Karakura Town. Keigo Asano, who had been enjoying his day off just minutes earlier, was running down a deserted alley and filling the area around him with tearful shouts.
Mizuiro Kojima, the poker-faced boy running next to him, said, "You've got to be quiet, Keigo. You're wasting your energy by yelling."
"You know, I've been wondering about this for a while, but how do you always keep a cool head whenever something like this happens?"
"Because there isn't really a point in panicking, I guess." Mizuiro kept up his pace as he glanced behind him.
"I've never seen a monster like that before, but I suppose it's better than that walking pile of lies, Aizen."
He was looking at a giant crab-shaped abomination, a Huge Hollow that was closing in on them, raising its claws with an unpleasant gnashing sound.
Mizuiro Kojima, Keigo, and Tatsuki Arisawa had once been pursued by Sosuke Aizen. This time as their pursuer got close, they didn't experience that feeling of death bearing down on them.
That made things better than last time, but it was their only consolation. Their lives were still in danger. At least the monster wasn't directly after Keigo and Mizuiro right then.
The target the Hollow was trying to crush with its claws was a young man in a shihakusho running just behind Keigo and Mizuiro.
"Ahhhhhhhhh! Th-this is dangerous! It's dangerous, so leave this to me and get out of here! Also, somebody save me! Anyone!"
The young Soul Reaper, wailing just about as much as Keigo, kept running away from the Hollow without even the mental composure to activate his zanpaku-to's shikai.
Ryunosuke Yuki, the Soul Reaper in charge of Karakura Town, had come across a Hollow stronger than he was and had, in the middle of running away in a panic, gotten Keigo and Mizuiro caught up in the mess as they were walking down the alley.
Keigo and Mizuiro had been swept up in many such incidents because of their friendship with Ichigo Kurosaki, and they had even received something called soul tickets from an eye patch-wearing Soul Reaper. All in all, they had become rather attuned to spiritual phenomena.
They had occasionally caught a glimpse of Ryunosuke and at least knew his name from Orihime and the others. But they hadn't tried to get involved in his business themselves, believing that he had to be stronger than "fro-man" if he'd been picked as that guy's successor.
But while the young Soul Reaper had replaced the man Keigo called "fro-man" and whom Ichigo referred to as "Imoyama" and whose real name was Zennosuke Kurumadani, Keigo and Mizuiro were just now realizing he was actually much less dependable than they had imagined.
When Keigo saw Ryunosuke fleeing and the unpromising way the Soul Reaper failed to even unsheathe his zanpaku-to, Keigo screamed even louder. On the other side of things, Mizuiro was serenely wondering, Can we can get to Mr. Urahara's shop if we keep up this pace?
Mizuiro had more or less heard about Urahara Shoten from Ichigo, who had told him it was a safe place to escape to if a Hollow ever attacked while Ichigo wasn't around.
During the Aizen incident, Mizuiro had gathered what information he could and had concluded that the owner of Urahara Shoten was a big shot of captain rank or higher.
"He'll probably try to con you into buying all kinds of crap though. Well, just think of it as thanks for him saving you and go with it."
After Ichigo had told him that, Mizuiro had gone to check out the store many times when nothing bad was happening.
It had indeed been stocked with dubious products like the ghost medicine rub Stiff-Be-Gone Theta and the spirit repellent Spray X, which were obviously not being sourced from normal manufacturers.
"Oh, actually!" Reminded of something, Mizuiro started to rummage dexterously through his bag as he ran.
"W-w-w-what are you doing, Mizuiro!? Are you going to pull out a stun gun again or something like that!? But I can't see a chance in hell of us holding that thing back with a stun gun!"
Mizuiro pulled a ball with a strange face drawn on it out of his bag. It was a Zeta Ball, as Mizuiro recalled. An electromagnetic capture bomb.
When he had asked the girl who looked like she should have been in middle school but who was working as the shop clerk how to use it, she had explained,
"Uhh...if you're being chased by something beyond human understanding, twist the knob on the back and throw it at the Hollo...at the monster."
"Well, this is a last resort," Mizuiro muttered. He took the thing he'd been carrying around in place of a good luck charm, did as he'd been instructed, and threw it at the gigantic crab monster.
Lightning and a terrible sound engulfed them in the next second, and the monster's whole body twitched as its movements slowed.
"Whoa, that's harsh. If I'd chucked that thing at a person, they'd probably be dead."
Keigo was taken aback at Mizuiro's calm statement. He slowed down.
"What was that!? A stun gun!? Uh...huh? What was that!? A stun gun!?"
Keigo repeated himself, as though he'd given up thinking after the initial utterance.
Mizuiro kept Keigo in the periphery of his vision. He expected the young man in black to start going on the offense. But Ryunosuke Yuki, the essential part of that equation, had been so shocked by the recent roar and lightning that he was paralyzed with fear.
"Guess we've got to restart the marathon." Though its movements had been impaired, they hadn't completely beaten the monster. Mizuiro started to think that at this rate, they might need to grab Ryunosuke and run.
But his train of thought was abruptly derailed by a voice echoing through the alley—a girl's powerful shout!
"What do you think you're doing, Ryunosuke?"
Mizuiro saw the silhouette of a girl leap down from the roof of a building and confirmed that she was the Soul Reaper who had come to Karakura Town with Ryunosuke. 'I think her name was Shino Madarame?'
As her shihakusho billowed, Shino used her downward momentum to swing the naginata blade of her zanpako-to with as much force as she could muster.
The terrific impact of the blade shook the surrounding alleys like an earthquake. The huge, crab-shaped Hollow was smashed to smithereens, and the resultant soul particles were purified by the zanpaku-to.
Keigo looked at the Soul Reaper who had defeated the gigantic monster in a single swing with surprise while Mizuiro calmly grasped the situation. Oh, so some Soul Reapers are dependable.
Ryunosuke, who realized that the Hollow had been purified, looked at Shino with relief and said,
"So you're safe, Shino... I'm so glad."
"That's what I should be saying to you, you fool!"
Shino, who had landed with her back to Ryunosuke, leapt backward immediately and crashed into him with her shoulder.
Whether it was intentional or coincidental, she sent Ryunosuke tumbling to the ground as though performing a luchador's tope en reversa and then locked his arms and legs while he was down.
"You're pitiful! How could you freeze up during the chance of a lifetime?!"
"Ow ow ow! You're going to tear me apart! My arms are going to fall right off, Shino! You're going to break my arms and neck and back at this rate!"
Keigo let out a huge sigh as, watching the two Soul Reapers exchange what could have been dialogue in a comedy skit, he realized that they really were finally out of danger.
"Whew, you saved us. It's Shino, right? I think I've seen you around before."
"Huh? Oh, you're that guy, aren't you? The one my big bro Ikkaku took under his wing when he was in the world or whatever."
"Your big bro Ikkaku?! Is that what he thinks of me?! That baldy didn't take me under his wing! He didn't do a single kind thing for me at all!"
When Ikkaku Madarame came to the world of the living, he had threatened Keigo Asano into housing him, partly against the boy's will.
One of the main reasons the Soul Reaper had been allowed to stay was because Keigo's older sister had been all for it.
"I'm just going to pretend I didn't hear that... Ikkaku would kill you if he found out you called him baldy."
Once they were in a calmer location and could talk, Mizuiro and Keigo found out that Shino was probably Ikkaku Madarame's little sister or possibly his cousin.
The uncertainty was because their family had been in daily violent struggles in the Rukongai, and their parents had died one after another before they had been old enough to form memories.
They were then passed around to various relatives, so they themselves didn't know exactly what their relationship was to each other.
Although she had followed in Ikkaku's footsteps and attended Shinoreijutsuin after he had unexpectedly be-come a Soul Reaper, Ikkaku had told her, "I think you'll have a tough time in the eleventh company."
The top brass must have come to the same conclusion, since she was currently assigned to the Thirteenth Company.
"Seriously, we've been training ever since that war with the Quincies ended, but there's no point if you wuss out right at the critical moment!"
"Ugh, I'm sorry, Shino..."
Ryunosuke's shoulders slumped as Shiho chewed him out.
Possibly because he couldn't just stand by and watch Ryunosuke suffer anymore, Keigo tried to redirect the conversation in order to put an end to the lecturing.
"So actually, I haven't been too concerned about it since Ichigo came back safe, but shouldn't there be fewer of those white monster things now that the fight's over?"
Shino breathed a small sigh at the question from the boy who had been dragged into their business.
"It's not like we or Kurosaki were fighting against the Hol-lows. And Hollows are already more likely to appear here anyway..."
Mizuiro nodded as though he understood.
"Right, since this is a special sacred place. Supposedly that's why Aizen targeted it."
"You sure know a lot for a human. That's right. That's why anything could happen here. So we can't ever let our guard down."
Ryunosuke spoke up with a serious look in his eye.
"Well, I think that I've been incredibly careful since the moment we were dispatched!"
"Stop making that call for yourself!"
Ryunosuke's shrieks as Shino put him into a joint lock echoed through the streets of Karakura Town. Then, as though to extinguish his screams, a loudspeaker boomed from the main street.
"...and so, they were unsatisfied remaining in the present, yet humanity was left with no desire to return to the past, and those seeking a spiritual guide broke away to form a new world…"
"What's that?" Shino scowled when she heard a voice flowing out of what seemed to be a campaign van.
Mizuiro replied, "It's a new religious group. They formed because most of the world was in chaos after the earthquake half a year ago."
The extended earthquake had happened during the war between the Soul Reapers and Quincies, when the boundaries between the Soul Society, the world of the living, and Hueco Mundo had almost been destroyed at the death of the Reio.
The world of the living had been hit by a gradual and deep unease because the monumental, protracted earthquake had been caused by something outside the known geological processes and was scientifically unexplainable.
Many people had felt a foreboding, and it could even be said that they had sensed something.
They had experienced an incredibly powerful force that surrounded the world, a force inexplicable by science or logic.
Although it had officially been reported as "a large-scale seismic shift that, according to all collected data, was of unprecedented magnitude, the source of which is still being investigated," that hadn't been enough to clear away the disquiet in people's minds.
As a result, spiritual leaders seeking their own answers or people looking to take advantage of the fears of others had started forming new religions one after another, which gradually spread across the world in a jumbled chaos of and bad.
At present, the new religions that had particular momentum had started to broadcast their doctrine using campaign vans.
To bring Mizuiro up to speed, Keigo told them what he knew with a serious look in his eye.
"Apparently they're saying that their religious leaders can actually perform miracles or something. But what's most important is that there are rumors that a ton of the sect leaders are hot girls with wicked bods!
There's actually a world out there where one of the hotties might come to recruit me directly! I've been waiting half a year—gotta be patient!"
Shino looked unimpressed as she asked Mizuiro, "Hey, can I punch this guy?"
"I don't see why not."
As Mizuiro nodded, Ryunosuke asked something he had been wondering about.
"So what's it called again? That new religious organization?"
"Right, I'm pretty sure it's..."
≡
The World of the Living,
The President's Office Of A Large Corporation
"Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak to you, President Vorarlberna."
The woman, who had been led into a simple room with a black color scheme, sat down on a sofa and respectfully nodded her head toward a boy playing a handheld game.
She wore an alluring designer suit, and although her ensemble was pragmatic, anyone who saw her would notice the enigmatic sensuality about her.
But the boy, Yukio Hans Vorarlberna, gave her not even so much as a glance as he continued to fiddle with his game, saying in an uninterested tone,
"You can skip the fake pleasantries. What do you want?"
The woman politely replied to the boy's question,
"My, my. There's only one reason to meet with President Vorarlberna, spokesperson for Y-Hans Enterprises, the company destined to be the champion of the future.
A young genius like you has the talent to lead the people into the future. As the guides to the righteous world that will inevitably be revealed to us, we'd like you to support our doctrine."
Y-Hans Enterprises was a colossal company in Yukio's portfolio that was currently vigorously expanding its undertakings. Yukio had usurped leadership from his father, and although he didn't care much about the company itself, he had decided that one of his current life goals was to expand it.
After battling Ichigo Kurosaki and the Soul Reapers, he wanted to create a foundation for the future that would welcome other stray Fullbringers like himself.
Riruka Dokugamine had joined him in the endeavor, and with things moving faster than he had anticipated, Riruka was bringing Jackie Tristan in to join them.
The young company president and secret Fullbringer asked the woman he had invited into his presidential office in a cold tone, "Do I look like somebody who'd fall for that fake intro?"
"Would you rather I go right into 'We'll help you with your expansion if you donate to our organization'?"
"That's a load of crap too. You—no, your organization—isn't looking for donations from me."
Yukio continued speaking indifferently, in the same tone as someone muttering to themselves while reading a book.
He took a hand from his game and pulled a business card out of his breast pocket before putting it on the table. Then, seeming somewhat annoyed with the woman, he said,
"This caught my eye earlier, and now that you've come to see me, I'm certain. You don't have any retries after this, so personally I think you should be honest."
The business card was the one that had been passed through from the front desk when the organization had made this appointment. Staring at the name of the organization on the card, Yukio once again asked,
"What's your aim?"
The woman's name was written on the card in a simple script. And under it was a name Yukio could never overlook.
Aura Michibane,
Xcution Representative
[Img]
≡
Hueco Mundo,
Half A Year After
The Great Soul King Protection War
(TYBW)
Hueco Mundo, the world of the Arrancars and home to the Hollows, was undergoing a gradual change. After the Arrancar hunts of the Vandenreich Quincies had come to an end, the powerful Arrancars like Halibel and Grimmjow had temporarily disappeared, and Hueco Mundo had entered a new era of civil war.
But now that Nelliel, who been previously missing, had up till then, had returned with Halibel in tow, ambitious Arrancars and Vasto Lordes-level Menos Grandes had immediately been discouraged and gone back to their own colonies.
Several Arrancars had attempted to launch a surprise attack on Nelliel and Halibel in order to "get them while they're tired," but most had been beaten at their own game.
And those who had run had the unlucky fate of bumping into an irritated Grimmjow.
The return of the king had gradually returned peace to Hueco Mundo, and so a man wearing a mask resembling a cow skull sighed.
"It was a short-lived dream, wasn't it?"
He was Rudobon Chelute, the former Arrancar leader of the Exequias who had once been under Aizen's control and had single-handedly taken over running Las Noches after Aizen's exit.
"It truly was presumptuous of a weakling like me to have dreamed so big in the first place."
He was one of the Arrancars who had attempted to unify Hueco Mundo after Halibel's disappearance.
Rudobon still felt indebted to Aizen and, to the best of his ability, had been attempting to protect the new order Aizen had created when he usurped Hueco Mundo from King Barragan.
There were many Arrancars who were stronger than him, including the Tres Bestias and the Espada, and from the start they had had little interest being ruled and had never attempted to participate in the fights for the right of succession.
In a way, it could be said that Rudobon had been the only one who had put public order foremost and fought for hegemony.
It wasn't like he didn't have ambition. He couldn't deny that his dream had been to develop Hueco Mundo someday and be recognized by Aizen as something superior, like an Espada.
He had heard that Aizen had been disappointed in the Espadas and had literally cut down Halibel, but when Aizen returned Rudobon wanted to tell the man that he had done something with the power he had been granted.
He wanted to do that even if Aizen was disgusted by his clumsy results and killed him on the spot.
Right now, Rudobon was naturally fighting against the Quincies to protect Hueco Mundo's order.
"My, to think that there are still Quincy survivors."
After stealing Halibel's throne half a year ago, a Quincy hunter unit called the Jagd Armee had spread across Hueco Mundo, pursuing Arrancars everywhere they went.
Most of the detached Quincy forces had been stranded in Hueco Mundo after Ichigo Kurosaki beat their general hunt commander Quilge, as well as Grimmjow and the other Arrancars.
They had taken on all sorts of forms as they kept up their hopeless resistance with desperate suicide attacks and guerilla warfare, but most of the Quincies had been annihilated by Rudobon and his Exequias.
There had been no Quincy movement in the several months since then, and Rudobon had thought their exterminations complete when he received word of a Quincy sighting and prepared for attack.
"How utterly cowardly. The Picaro aren't listening to me, as always, and I heard that they went off to the world of the living with Paramia Roka. And Master Grimmjow is still refusing to help repress anything in Hueco Mundo. How many days must we wait until proper order is reinstated?"
Rudobon shook his head at his own inadequacy and headed toward the area of the Quincy sighting, but someone spoke up to protest his statements.
"Wait a sec! Don't just go around sighing. You've got to fight occasionally too! You're always shoving the work off onto us and the minions you created!"
"Don't push it, Loly. It's no use telling him that." Menoly Mallia, an Arrancar with cropped hair, chided the pigtailed Loly Aivirrne, the Arrancar who had just told Rudobon off.
Rudobon had taken them in when they were brought to Las Noches on the verge of death after a fight with Quilge. They had been accepted into the Exequias immediately because of their combat abilities, with the aim of helping to dismantle the Quincies.
But they had refused to fall into line, possibly because they weren't under Rudobon's direct control.
"No, I'm going to say it! You know what, Rudobon?! Where were you when Lady Halibel was kidnapped? You weren't even here when that Quilge guy came!"
"Since the invasion started everywhere simultaneously, we needed someone everywhere to stop them. If you really want to talk about it, not a single one of us was there when Ichigo Kurosaki defeated Lord Aizen. We, myself included, must take our incompetence to heart."
"That has nothing to do with what I was talking about."
Rudobon sighed and shook his head at Loly as she grumbled complaints.
"Though you are both immature, I allow you to stay in my unit because you respect Lord Aizen. Normally knaves like the two of you would have no place in Hueco Mundo because of the disruption you bring to the public order."
"Oh? And what exactly are you saying gets disrupted by my just being here?"
"I said quit it."
"Let go, Menoly! He acts all high and mighty, but what do you think he was doing when the Soul Reapers attacked? They say he almost croaked when he got beat up while Yammy was passing through!"
"But that happened to us too." Menoly pulled Loly away from Rudobon by the arm.
The girl, veins popping on her forehead, was still trying to have her say even as she was dragged away. But then a single ray of light passed in front of her eyes.
The shot of light pierced a rock some distance from Rudobon and the girls. As though something had taken a gigantic bite out of the massive boulder, a piece of it went flying.
"What!?" Loly's eyes opened wide and she turned toward the direction the light had come from. She found a woman holding a bow standing on the upper floor of a collapsed building.
The woman's clothes looked very similar to what the Quincies who had tried to capture them had worn.
There were other human-shaped figures stirring be-hind the woman, and it seemed like several people must be attacking them at once.
Menoly saw that even more Quincy arrows had been sent flying toward them at a terrific speed.
Menoly and the others tried to dodge in a fluster. Rudobon's skeleton soldier followers got caught up in the attack, and countless columns of sand sprayed up from the Hueco Mundo desert.
Loly looked fearfully at the crater of sand that had been left behind and yelled in a cold sweat,
"Wait, these guys aren't the usual nobodies! There're still Quincies like that around?!"
"Those Arrancars have nothing if not numbers. Feels like they came to take care of us," said a girl with a poker face holding a short bow that made one think of a shark tooth.
A voice responded to her from the darkness of the building half-reduced to rubble.
"Actually, looks like all you've dealt with are the underlings. Did you really miss from this distance? Wow, so pathetic. I bet it's cuz you don't practice."
"Shuddup, Gigi. You could lift a finger every once in a while. This is a chance to get more pawns under your control, isn't it?"
Giselle Gewelle, the Quincy called Gigi, had a mechanical smile on her face that revealed none of her thoughts to the other girl.
"You already know that I can only turn Hollows into zombies temporarily, don't you? I thought it was common sense that Hollow reishi and ours doesn't get along. Did you forget?"
"Who cares if it's only temporary? You pretty much treated everybody except Bambi like they were disposable anyway. The zombification ran its course over there, so it'll be the same here, right?"
"It makes me tired, so I don't want to. But if you're so insistent, why don't you become a zombie for me, Lil?"
Gigi cocked her head at Liltotto Lamperd, but Lil remained expressionless as she turned her spite on her partner.
"You want me to eat you? No, I'd better not. You'd definitely give me the runs."
"That's so mean, Lil! Telling a girl she'd turn your stomach is such an insult. Hey, don't you agree, Bambi?"
Gigi kept smiling mechanically as she turned to the girl with clay-red skin who had been placed in a corner like a doll among the debris.
The thing that Gigi had called Bambi—a corpse doll seemingly lacking all warmth in its head, torso, and exposed limbs—replied,
"Y-yes, e-exactly like you said, Gigi... So, so please, Gigi...please...blood..."
"Really, Bambi. You're so greedy. If you're going to be so demanding... Well, you know what you need to do, right? Because you're so smart, aren't you? You're clever."
"...I-I got it...I'll defeat...the enemy... I'll...protect you...because I love...your blood..."
Bambietta Basterbine, the red corpse, staggered up. Lil seemed exasperated as she said,
"It doesn't look like she's completely healed yet. And isn't her ability to speak getting worse? She's like Frankenstein's monster or some kind of a horror that accidentally made its way out of the woods and into civilization."
"She's fine. She'll fix up just fine once I give her my blood. But I think she looks so much cuter when she's hurt, so I'm going to keep her like this for a while, all right?"
"You really are scum." Although Lil was blunt in her disdain of Gigi's notions, she didn't try to stop Bambietta from heading toward the enemy.
That was because Lil understood. Bambietta's mental faculties were minimal, that while as long as her abilities were working, she wouldn't have any trouble knocking around the average Arrancar or Hollow. And as though to prove that—
Innumerable clumps of reishi ejected from Bambietta and pierced the gathered enemy. The white desert was filled with brilliant explosions.
Liltotto Lamperd.
Giselle Gewelle.
Discounting Bambietta, who had been turned into a corpse doll, how were the women who should have died after rebelling against Yhwach in the Soul Society still alive and in Hueco Mundo?
To find out, we must journey back to the time immediately after the conclusion of the war between the Soul Reapers and the Quincies.
≡
Half A Year Ago,
Somewhere In The World of The Living
When Lil woke, she was in an unfamiliar room. A bandage was wrapped around her torso, and a dull pain rushed through her when she touched it.
Someone must have used a specialized Quincy healing technique on her, but she hadn't made a complete recovery. Obviously I wouldn't.
She could remember challenging Yhwach to a fight and being cut down before she could even use her abilities. Right before she had collapsed, Bazz-B's spiritual pressure had vanished from the position where he had been battling further away.
'My guts were gouged out and shredded. That should have been fatal if left untreated. Why am I alive?'
Lil turned to her side and saw Gigi still unconscious and what looked like Bambietta in the back, prone and wrapped all over with bandages like a mummy.
All three of them had been laid down on simple cots and given the bare minimum first aid.
Lil recognized that the pillow beneath her head was a provisional article from the Vandenreich and guessed that this was one of their bases in the world of the living.
'I sense a lot of Quincies outside the room, but most of them probably just barely scraped by with their lives.'
As Lil sat up and looked around her, the door opened and a woman poked her head in.
"Are you awake, Liltotto Lamperd?"
It was a female Quincy with dark eyes and a frigid expression.
"You're..."
Lil was on her guard. "Aren't you Yhwach's lapdog? You accidentally saving your enemies now?"
Lil was referring to Jugram Haschwalth, who was basically number two in the Vandenreich and carried the Stern Ritter B.
The woman who had just walked into the room was one of Haschwalth's attendants who had no Schrift, a prominent Quincy among the common soldat.
Though she was said to exceed some of the Stern Ritter in pure archery skills and battle ability, supposedly she hadn't received a Schrift because she herself preferred to remain under Haschwalth's command rather than become one of the Schrift holders who stood as equals, although not to Yhwach, of course.
Her superior, Haschwalth, had been Yhwach's retainer. This woman should have had reason to help Lil and those who had started a rebellion against the Vandenreich.
"What's gotten into Haschwalth's head? We ain't givin' you nothing if you interrogate us. The only reason we betrayed Yhwach was because we were annoyed."
Haschwalth had a cautious personality, and he had probably assumed that traitors like themselves had bugs on them from the Soul Reapers or some other organization.
That thought was going through Lil's head, but the female Quincy shook her head slightly.
"Lord Haschwalth passed in battle after offering his power to his majesty."
"Huh?"
Lil scowled at the unexpected news. But the explanation that followed left Liltotto Lamperd, former member of the Stern Ritter, absolutely shocked.
"His majesty also passed away in the battle between Ichigo Kurosaki, who was particularly powerful, and Sosuke Aizen."
"What!"
Unusually for Lil, her eyes grew wide and her mouth gaped open and closed several times. After a dozen or so seconds, her expression resumed its usual composure.
"You serious? I knew that Kurosaki was stupid strong, but I didn't think he was that ballsy. I thought he was as naive as he was strong."
Lil remembered the orange-haired Soul Reaper who had yelled "Get out of the way, idiot!" when he had released a gigantic slashing attack, and grinned somewhat derisively at herself.
"Hey, what happened to Candy and Meni?"
She meant Candice Catnip and Meninas McAllon. They were part of the group she had been working with during the war, and though it was unusual for her, she had accepted them as her friends among the Stern Ritter.
Normally she spewed vitriol at them, but apparently her relationship with them was such that she could ask about them by name directly in this sort of situation.
Lil was half resigned to that fact as she waited quietly for the other Quincy's reply.
"We went to rescue them, but we didn't make it in time. They were captured by the Twelfth Company right after his majesty used Auswählen to take their Voll Stern Dich. Lord Najahkoop's status is unknown too, although we believe he was transferred as well."
"I don't give a rat's ass about that lecher NaNaNa. But wait, you said Twelfth Company. Ahh, might've been better if they'd just straight up died."
Lil knew from previous information what kind of man Captain Mayuri Kurotsuchi was and what kind of department the Twelfth Company ran.
"Actually, I guess that means there's a chance they're still alive."
Lil glanced at Gigi, who slept next to her. As long as they had Gigi's Schrift Z, The Zombie, the others could be revived even if they lost some flesh to the Twelfth Company's experiments and dissections.
And at worst even if they were dead, as long as their bodies and brains remained intact, they could be revived into zombies like Bambietta.
But there was nothing that could be done about the wounds to their psyches. After thinking that far, Lil asked the Quincy woman in an indifferent tone,
"Back to the main point, why'd you save me?"
"It was Lord Haschwalth's will. When his majesty had his final slumber, Lord Haschwalth ordered us to collect and treat the soldats under direct command, such as you and the other wounded."
"I don't get it. What happened to the direct guard?"
Though she scowled in her confusion, Lil continued seeking to gather more facts.
Lil's question was met with the female Quincy mournfully shaking her head as she said,
"They all passed in battle. According to reports from the scouts, Lord Gerard's powers were fully absorbed by his majesty and disappeared."
"So even Nakk Le Vaar got done in. That'd definitely be lethal then."
' Guess we just underestimated those Soul Reapers.'
Lil looked like she went about things at her own pace, but she was cool-headed enough to gather information in advance.
She knew the direct guard's capabilities to a certain extent, so if those unrivaled men had been removed from the equation, she could certainly believe that Yhwach and Haschwalth had died in battle.
If they crushed even Gerard, a trusted retainer who took the Reio's heart, does that mean Yhwach really was driven into a corner? He was going on and on about being able to see the future when he got Gigi and me, but what kind of future did he see with those creepy-ass eyes?
Wait a sec…
"You said Haschwalth told you to save us when Yhwach was sleeping, right?"
"Yes. It was immediately after his majesty fell asleep."
Haschwalth was only only given the Mask of the Ruler at night while Yhwach slept, and was then able to fully exercise power in Yhwach's stead.
"So, did Haschwalth see the future too?"
Lil asked the question almost as though speaking to herself, but the female Quincy dropped her eyes as she went on.
"When he conveyed his orders to me, he mumbled, almost as though to himself, that the ability to see the future was unfair."
"What'd that jerk see? Are you saying that he saw a future where he and Yhwach were dead?"
"I cannot know."
The features of the female Quincy who had been Haschwalth's most trusted retainer appeared overcome with sadness.
She continued speaking with faint grief tinging her shamed voice.
"Lord Haschwalth did not make clear what was on his mind. Not to we Stern Ritter, and I believe not even to his majesty. He simply said at the very end, 'No matter what happens, keep the Quincies' futures connected.'"
"So you were naive enough to save traitors like us? I'll tell you this for free: don't expect Gigi or me to feel like we're in your debt."
"I do not mind. We weren't expecting compensation. I was simply following Lord Haschwalth's orders."
Lil lightly clucked her tongue at the woman's dispassionate response and said,
"Well, we survived because of you. I'll at least thank you for that. But don't expect Gigi to thank you. She might even turn you into a zombie when she wakes and try to use your flesh to heal her wounds."
"..."
"Don't look at me like that. At least I know how to take responsibility for things. I'll keep Gigi in check, and we'll leave as soon as we can move."
Haschwalth's trusted adviser left the infirmary as Lil checked on Gigi. The female Quincy had told Lil one lie. Before going into his last battle, Haschwalth had left behind other words.
"Perhaps Uryu Ishida was his majesty's last trial for me. I do not know the reason why, but he is the only one who can leave me shaken. If I am ever swayed by my emotions and forget my role as balancer, then on that occasion I will likely need to return the power I have been entrusted with and my life to his majesty."
He had said it almost as though he had seen that future himself.
But if he had seen it, why hadn't he been able to avoid it? If he hadn't been able to hold back his emotions even though he knew the future, then what did Uryu Ishida say, or perhaps what had he done to Haschwalth?
At this point she just didn't know anything, and as his trusted retainer she could only be proud of her master. Even if he had seen his own future, he had been fully prepared for it, and she believed he had chosen that path for himself.
Liltotto, Giselle, and Bambietta disappeared the following day from the base hidden in the world of the living.
≡
And now Liltotto and her two companions were fighting the Arrancars in Hueco Mundo.
Although it had taken several months for them to regain their strength, they had finally recovered all their abilities, other than the Voll Stern Dichs that Yhwach had stolen from them.
"If we could just go into Voll Stern Dich, we could absorb all their reishi."
A Voll Stern Dich was a Quincy's final form. As long as they had the Sklave Rai ability from their heiligenschein halo, they could decompose all the reishi around them and force the particles to submit to them.
Even Hollow reishi, which was naturally poisonous to Quincies, could be fully decomposed and therefore absorbed by Quincies without harm. But there were no longer any Quincies with that power.
Uryu Ishida and his father, who had escaped from Yhwach's Auswählen, might have been able to do it. But when Lil thought about how much use it was to her if her enemies had that power, she just shrugged.
Gigi spoke up from behind her. "Huh? But can't you practically do the same thing, Lil? You could just swallow all those guys whole. Or are you on a diet?"
"It's not like I can't eat them, but poison is still poison. I'd get horrible heartburn, so no thanks," Lil answered without interest as she watched Bambietta overrun them.
Gigi kept speaking. "In the end most of them got done in, didn't they? The survivors of the Jagd Armee, I mean."
"Every single one of them was pitiful. Even after marching through this boring desert for two whole months, we haven't found a single one worth anything in a fight."
The girls were presently taking it upon themselves to rescue independent units of Quincies to find people they could force into being their pawns.
Their ultimate goal was to launch a surprise attack on the Soul Society's Twelve Company and rescue Candy and Meni.
"You could just leave them there, but you sure do value friendship sometimes, don't you, Lil? Plus I bet part of why you're rescuing the dregs of the Jagd Armee is to repay that infirmary for their kindness instead of making them into your pawns, right?"
"Who knows. I'm just forcing those guys to deal with ones who'll slow me down."
"It's really gross when your chilly features look all passionate like that, but I also totally like it."
"Could you just choose between praising me or badmouthing me, you dirty tramp?" Lil spoke dispassionately and without expression.
For some reason Gigi smiled as though she were kind of happy about being called a tramp. She answered as though enjoying herself,
"Oh you got me, it's all a lie. You're so cute when you're embarrassed, Lil. It's not like we can just leave them there like that. And if Candy and Meni are dead, I can make them my zombies."
Gigi's happy expression disappeared as a certain man's face came to mind, and her voice filled with resentment.
"And I just won't feel right until I give that bedazzled pervert hell."
"Don't. That guy completely outclasses us."
Gigi continued even though Lil had scolded her.
"We'll be fine as long as we're using our heads. Like, what if we turn Ichigo Kurosaki into a zombie?"
"I'd really rather you not do that, specifically. I'm not going to commit suicide with you."
Honestly, it wasn't like Lil hadn't thought of that plan herself. He'd be the strongest thing they could get if they turned him into their pawn using Gigi's abilities.
But when Lil had looked into it, she realized that Ichigo was always surrounded by his father (who had experience as a captain in the Thirteen Court Guards), Uryu Ishida (who had defeated Haschwalth), Uryu's father, Ryuken Ishida (who was a pureblood Quincy), and Kisuke Urahara (who was particularly strong in battle). Lil wasn't the kind of fool to step a foot into that den of thieves, even if she was impatient.
"So if we keep just crushing Arrancars like this..."
The way the Quincies were destroying the Arrancars was a taboo that would cause the balance of the world to collapse. If they overdid things and got too flashy about it, the Soul Reapers would probably notice and send an assassin after them.
Lil had joined Bazz-B and some others to lend the Soul Reapers a hand, so it wasn't impossible for her to negotiate with them. But she didn't think it would result in the Twelfth Company captain releasing Candy and the others.
More to the point, as soon as they realized that Gigi was the person who had turned so many Soul Reapers into zombies and made them kill each other, any kind of formal parley would be difficult.
"Well, for now we'll go back to the world of the living once we clean up these guys and make a plan to—"Lil stopped muttering abruptly.
Bambietta was running down the Arrancars with The Explode. And that's when Lil realized there was something wrong.
"She isn't done yet?"
It wasn't like Bambietta was being leisurely about it. She might even have been bombing more recklessly because her ability to reason had been compromised. And yet the number of Arrancar soldiers hadn't dwindled at all. It almost felt like their ranks were increasing.
"Are they getting reinforcements? No, that's not it...."
The countless skull-faced soldiers were piling themselves up and creating a wall so that the core force was partitioned off and protected.
They were doing it without hesitation, as though they had already accepted their own deaths.
"What's with them? What's going on here?"
Let us rewind to several minutes earlier.
"W-we're in hot water! What's with that pale girl? All she's doing is making everything explode all of a sudden!"
Loly, hiding in the shadow of the skull soldiers, screamed and broke into a cold sweat.
Menoly, to whom the question had been directed, had been overtaken by fear and was shivering.
"Th-this is so bad, Loly! She might be as strong as that Quilge guy with the glasses..."
Next to Aizen's two panicking bodyguards, a man was analyzing the battle calmly. He was the Exequias leader, Rudobon.
"Hm... Those reishi seem to have the ability to turn anything they touch into an explosive. Because the origin of the reishi themselves does not have explosive properties and she can release them rapid fire like that, planning to wait until she runs out of spiritual pressure would seem unwise."
"Wait a sec! How can you talk like everything's fine? Things are only going to get worse!"
Rudobon, on hearing the half-shrieked complaint, sighed and shook his head.
"Those who served with Lord Aizen should not expose their shame for an even instant. You should always be composed. You cannot feel despair when faced with death. Even if your life ends here, you should think about what you could do in your final moments to benefit Lord Aizen."
"Don't talk all calm like that, Zommari! All Lord Aizen's gonna get at this rate are the ashes of our nails!"
"I am honored that you would compare me to Zommari. There is no reason to worry. In any case, I do not plan on dying here." Rudobon pulled out his zanpaku-to and held the blade ready, horizontal to the ground.
"Please observe the ability that I polished to wash away my shame after falling behind the Soul Reapers...!"
"Grow, Arbol!" In an instant, Rudobon's zanpaku-to shifted into something like tree ivy and spread, twining around Rudobon's arms and his lower body to transform him into an arbor.
He then created skull-masked soldiers one after another from the branches growing from his back, and the fresh soldiers also turned into a wall to protect them from the enemy's explosions.
"What? This is exactly what you were doing before..."
Loly's eyes went wide midsentence. The sand to the front of her was rising, and new skull soldiers were starting to come to life from inside the desert.
Rudobon's roots must be spreading through the ground like bamboo shoots to produce a mass of new soldiers.
Calaveras, the zanpaku-to Arbol's ability, let Rudobon suck up the reishi in Hueco Mundo through his roots and use them to create an endless supply of loyal soldiers.
Although the nature of his ability hadn't changed, the speed at which he could create soldiers increased astoundingly as new trees grew where the roots spread, expanding his reach.
It was a technique he had developed while attempting to create soldiers underground where the cold couldn't reach them, in response to the time Rukia Kuchiki froze and sealed his branches.
The extraordinary speed at which he could manufacture his soldiers had become a new weapon that had significantly increased Rudobon's abilities.
[Img]
The number of newly created skull soldiers eventually exceeded the rate at which the enemy Quincy could destroy them with her explosions.
By the time she realized what was happening, a mass of troops unafraid of death had surrounded the clay-red Quincy.
"I...I don't like these guys...they're not scared of dying..."
In Bambietta's half-broken mind, past fears came back to life.
"Why? Why is this happening...?"
It was the fear she had felt when the canine-faced captain Komamura, who had sacrificed his own heart to become an undead soldier, approached her.
Bambietta mostly fought because she didn't want to die. In the Vandenreich, the death that awaited the defeated was called "execution."
That was exactly why she continued to fight. She saw fighting as a way to forever escape death, so she couldn't understand someone who threw their life away for the sake of a fight.
When she had fought Komamura, she'd been seized by a fear she had never experienced before. The Soul Reaper had said, "I did not throw my life away, I simply staked it on this match."
In that moment, Bambietta had genuinely felt the terror of facing a true god of death. But now, the skull faces swarming her were even more foreign to her.
They weren't staking their lives on anything or throwing their lives away. They were simply soldiers acting as though they had no life to begin with.
As though their own deaths were merely part of a system, the horde of skulls accepted their unnatural deaths as they came for her.
They were neither Hollows nor beasts. It was as though an enormous swarm of insects had formed a colony to bring Bambietta into their own cycle of death. That would strike terror into Bambietta, the living corpse.
The horror, which had been fundamentally engraved into her soul and brain, temporarily activated the scarred girl's psyche, but only to give rise to the voice of fear.
"No...nooo...no, no, I'm scared, I'm scared..."
The hundreds or thousands of teeming skulls overcame the unending explosions and rose from beyond the flames. The swarm of skulls used the corpses and living bodies of other skulls as footholds in order to form into a gigantic tentacle that attempted to swallow Bambietta as she fluttered through the air.
The face of the girl who had forgotten she was already dead contorted and trembled like that of a child.
"Lil...Candy...Meni...Gigi...! Help...help...everyone...!"
The gigantic wave of skull soldiers tried to engulf her but then abruptly vanished, following a white, sinister undulation.
"!"
Rudobon and the others watching the panoramic view from a distance were taken by surprise at the progression of events.
"Wh...what was that just now..."
Loly watched with cold sweat dripping down her cheek as the petite Quincy flew toward them from the ruins. The Quincy's mouth began to contort, and a gigantic maw that seemed like it could take a bite from the sky gaped open. Nearly a thousand skull soldiers were swallowed in a single bite.
There were no hints of where such a mass could have disappeared to. Nothing remained under the night sky save the forms that appeared to be Quincies.
"Uh...wah...L-Lil...?" The image of Liltotto chewing on something and swallowing lightly was reflected in the quaking zombie's eyes.
"Yuck... Well, they were tasteless to begin with. What's this?" Lil appraised the meal she had just consumed with dissatisfaction.
Gigi popped up behind her and grabbed Bambietta's head in both her hands.
"Seriously, what are we going to do with you?! You're really so useless, Bambi! Whaaat was that? You don't want your reward? If you didn't want it, you should have just stayed asleep. That wouldn't have been a problem for me."
"Oh...n-no, it's not like that...sorry...sorry, Gigi..."
Bambietta was once again close to tears as Gigi looked on in ecstasy.
Lil watched them with cold eyes and said to Gigi in an indifferent tone, "It's hard to believe you when you tell everybody you're not a sadist."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
Lil shrugged at Gigi, who was looking at her with genuine puzzlement, then once again turned her eyes toward the enemy.
"Ah well, there's tons cropping back up. Are they goblins or something?"
"Hey, are you all right? Didn't you say that eating Hollows gives you heartburn?"
"I'm kind of stuck digesting them at this point, aren't I?"
Lil had used her Glutton ability to greedily consume her enemies with her grotesquely transformed mouth in order to absorb their reishi, but it absolutely wasn't an easy process.
Hollow reishi was poison to Quincies. Absorbing it was normally akin to suicide. Had Lil not been a Schrift-holder, she would have likely been immobilized.
Lil continued to battle the sensation eating away at her gut as she digested her unusual meal, but she kept even a hint of it from showing on her face as she spoke to Gigi and Bambi.
"I think I can do that two or three more times, but those guys seriously had no flavor or nutritional value at all. That filthy garbage pile did nothing to satiate my hunger."
She turned to look at the Arrancar, whose lower body had turned into an arbor and who was still creating skull soldiers with his branches.
"Guess I should hurry up and eat something tastier. Though he looks pretty unappetizing too."
"Ngh...!" Feeling a threat approaching, Rudobon groaned. The three Quincies were prancing through the air with Hirenkyaku, charging straight for him, including the Quincy who had just eaten his skull soldiers.
Rudobon tried to send the skull soldiers charging at her, but the Quincy who had set off the explosions had already released reishi to keep him in check.
Weaving through the troops that had been stopped by the force of the bombs, the petite Quincy came at him. As soon as Rudobon saw her, he created a flesh wall from the skull soldiers to defend himself.
"That's some pretty unattractive skin you're covering yourself up with."
The Quincy's face expressionlessly
contorted like slime, oozing straight to the side. Her nibble, meant to consume skin and innards whole, made quick work of the wall of soldiers. However—
"There's nothing in here!"
The wall had been a distraction, and Rudobon and the others who had sheltered inside had already moved somewhere else.
Loly leapt behind the Quincy, shouting her zanpaku-to's incantation, "Poison, Escolopendra!"
A gigantic zanpaku-to in the shape of a centipede wrapped itself around Loly, and she brandished part of it like a blade.
"Huh!"
The Quincy barely dodged it, and the sand it struck instead started to melt like slush.
"Melt!" Loly yelled as she tried to strike the Quincy again, but the centipede-like appendage disappeared midair!
"Wha...?"
"That was pointlessly spicy. But I guess it was all right."
"Y-you! My Resurrección, you...!"
It had been eaten. Loly paled as she realized that her zanpaku-to, where she had sealed away a vast portion of her power, had been consumed.
Although far from fatal, she felt the terror of losing part of herself.
But the truly terrifying part happened next.
"Hmm."
The Quincy scattered arrows around herself, piercing the skull swarm and the branches birthing the next wave of soldiers.
Both branches and soldiers instantly dissolved, just like the sand had a moment ago.
"My poison?!"
"Looks like I managed to digest it. Guess my stomach acid was just stronger,"
Lil nonchalantly muttered as she watched the enemy army melt away. The Glutton didn't just eat her opponents.
Her secondary power allowed her to instinctively know how to use the characteristic abilities of whatever she had ingested until it was fully digested.
Although she had once eaten a man named PePe, his powers hadn't seemed likely to work on Yhwach, so she likely hadn't used his specialties when she faced the king in battle.
Then again, as she'd told Gigi, "Like I would ever use that super disgusting guy's power."
So she could have just eaten PePe in order to get revenge and replenish her reishi.
"So...where are you hiding?"
'I don't want to rush things like Bambi did, but maybe I'll scatter around the poison I stole and smoke them out? No, I should kill the one who might be able to counter the poison first.'
Lil turned her bow on another Arrancar, the pigtailed one she had just stolen the poison abilities from.
"Eep!" Loly had never checked to see if she was impervious to her own poison. She had heard that Barragan, the former king of Hueco Mundo, had been killed by his own curse.
She immediately went pale and tried to run away.
But part of Loly's body, her Resurrección, had been eaten, and she lost her balance and fell.
"Loly!"
Loly opened her eyes wide and yelled at Menoly, who was running toward her,
"You idiot! You need to run—"
Before they could finish speaking, a poison arrow flew from the Quincy's bow. But before it could hit its target, a huge gush of water washed the poison arrow toward the surrounding skull soldiers.
"Huh...?"
"No way..."
When they saw a surge of water flying through the desert air, Loly and Menoly clung to each other as they guessed what had happened. They had been protected by a water barrier.
Rudobon, who had reappeared at some point, bowed his head deeply as he apologized.
"Ah, I never would have thought you would make an appearance here. I must extend an apology for troubling you and necessitating your intervention—"
As though to interrupt his apology, the newly arrived Arrancar said, "There's no need for you to apologize. I should be the one apologizing for getting here so late."
Tier Halibel, an Arrancar whose mouth was obscured by a mask full of shark-like teeth and further hidden by a long collar, manipulated the stream of flowing water with her zanpaku-to. She flipped the weapon as she turned her eyes to the Quincy who hovered in midair.
"Isn't your king dead? Why are you stirring up trouble in our territory?"
"Ha! Who cares why they're here? They picked a fight, so we just got to finish it."
Another Arrancar had appeared behind her and spoke as a fiendish smile spread across his face.
Loly and Menoly, who had once almost been killed by this new Arrancar, shrieked.
"Guh! Grimmjow!"
"Eep!"
Grimmjow just looked at the two in puzzlement.
"Huh? You look familiar..."
But he didn't seem particularly interested in them and immediately turned away.
"I came here thinkin' I'd finally felt some flashy spiritual pressure, and what do I find? Were you trying to leave me out of the fun? That's gutsy of you, Rudobon!"
"I asked you to help me suppress the Quincies many times..."
Rudobon seemed confused, and Grimmjow answered without seeming the least bit guilty.
"I'm not interested in the weaklings. But these guys seem pretty perky."
Although he wasn't as indiscriminate as he used to be, Grimmjow was still the stereotypical battle-crazed barbarian.
As if in remonstration, an Arrancar behind him said, "You can't just jump them, Grimmjow. You need to figure out your opponent's goals and abilities first."
"Huh? Stay out of this, Nelliel. They won't have goals or whatever once we wipe out every last one of them!"
"And who was it that almost died at the hands of a Quincy in the Soul Society?"
"Why, you little...!" Grimmjow turned to shoot an annoyed look at Nelliel at those provoking words.
In the desert, where stillness spread like oblivion, a flashy explosion was more than enough to attract the attention of the incredibly important Arrancars.
Rudobon's thoughts were choked with tears, and he hid his intense emotional reaction in the presence of these formidable Arrancars, who were top of the class even among the elite.
Menoly was simply relieved. "We're saved!"
Loly gritted her teeth in frustration and irritation at her own uselessness and the jealousy she felt toward the powerful Arrancars.
After the miraculous arrival of the three incredibly powerful Arrancars, the battle seemed likely to become all the more intense. But there was something no one had noticed yet.
The residents of Hueco Mundo weren't the only ones who had been drawn to the desert turmoil.
"Uh-oh, looks like we have quite the menacing group over there." Gigi spoke from even further back than Lil, who was keeping a cautious distance from the mass of water.
"Isn't that the prisoner who was in the Silbern fortress?"
"Yeah, that's the Arrancar boss Yhwach captured personally. We can't let our guard down around her."
Lil started giving out simple instructions as she estimated the abilities of the newly arrived Arrancars.
"Gigi, can you get your blood into that water—"
She was interrupted midsentence by a sudden zwoosh, and a chill assaulted her and Gigi's spines.
What is this? What is this creepy spiritual pressure?
Lil turned to look at the three Arrancars, but it didn't seem to be their pressure. In fact, the Arrancars seemed to have felt the same thing and had turned cautious eyes toward the Quincies.
As they searched for the source of the spiritual pressure, the likes of which they'd never experienced before but that still felt somehow familiar, something suddenly appeared in the sky.
A small gate, similar to a Garganta, had opened high in the night sky.
The small form that leapt from the gate disseminated the strange spiritual pressure as it dropped to the ground with such terrific force that a dust cloud rose several hundred meters high.
The impact formed a crater far larger than the ones created by the Quincies's earlier attacks, and at its center swirled the dense mass of spiritual pressure.
"What...? Is this spiritual pressure...?"
"It's strange. It smells like Soul Reaper and Hollows," Grimmjow responded in answer to Nelliel.
'It smells a bit like that masked blond guy who got in the way of my fight with Kurosaki.'
Grimmjow didn't know his name, but the pressure resembled that of Shinji Hirako, a Visored he had once run into.
Grimmjow turned cautious eyes toward the spiritual pressure that was even more ominous than the Visored's.
Halibel, who had been silent, spoke up.
"It reminds me of Apache and the others' Quimera Parca."
The Quimera Parca.
Although they still hadn't arrived, Halibel's three subordinates could each sacrifice one of their limbs to create that fiendish beast.
"You mean Ayon? It does smell like that for sure."
The ominous spiritual pressure was a mixture of countless components, all mingled together. What kind of monster had just appeared in the middle of the desert?
The Arrancars stayed on guard, but eventually the dust settled.
"Ouch, ow ow... Sand is hard when you land on it. I've sure learned something new!"
A voice rang out, breaking through the tense air, and a child in black clothing reminiscent of a shihakusho stepped from the crater.
The beautiful, neutral face that seemed to belong to neither a boy nor girl looked around at the gathering of Arrancars and nodded in satisfaction.
But when the child looked at the three Quincies, they seemed puzzled.
"Huh? Quincies? I don't have instructions for dealing with Quincies. What should I do?" They stood muttering to themself before turning back to the Arrancars.
"Well, first I need to do what Lord Tokinada asked."
The child, who seemed not the slightest bit nervous, stuck out like a sore thumb. Though it must have seemed humorous to an onlooker, not a single one of them laughed or allowed their guard to break.
To be calm in a situation like this was in itself abnormal, not to mention that the sinister spiritual pressure they had just sensed was unmistakably coming from the child in front of them.
"Stop right there. Who are you?"
Halibel, zanpaku-to at the ready, asked the child.
Rudobon had been busy creating countless new soldiers. Even surrounded by a horde of several thousand skull soldiers, the child smiled innocently and answered.
"Right! I'm Hikone! My name is Hikone Ubuginu!"
The child Hikone was not at all perturbed to be facing the hostile Arrancars.
Watching the Arrancars, Lil said, "I've got a bad feeling about this. That kid's eyes aren't smiling at all."
The child had an aura similar to one of Gigi's zombies. Lil, still expressionless, continued.
"And I feel the presence of a familiar scumbag. What's going on here?"
Hikone quietly bowed to the confused group and explained their goals,
"Um so, I have a gift for all the Arrancars from Lord Tokinada."
"Tokinada...?" The Arrancars were even more confused now that a name they didn't recognize in the slightest had been brought up.
"I heard there isn't a king here anymore, not since somebody named Mr. Barragan and someone named Mr. Aizen disappeared."
Hikone's bright tone while saying this turn-ed some of the Arrancars' confusion into hostility.
Hikone simply continued, seemingly oblivious to the change in mood.
"So Lord Tokinada said he'd let me become king of Hueco Mundo! Isn't that great? I'll work super hard to become a great king!"
Hikone bobbed their head in a bow. The skull soldiers' blades danced, aiming at Hikone's back.
"How boundlessly disrespectful. To even dare presume becoming Lord Aizen's substitute is absurd."
Though Rudobon's voice was calm, a tempestuous wave of emotion flooded him as he took Hikone's words to be an insult against Aizen.
Hikone didn't even try to evade the skull soldiers' attacks and simply took the blows all over their body. The skull soldiers' broken swords danced through the air with the sound of harsh collisions.
"Is that Hierro?" Nelliel yelled in surprise. Why would a Soul Reaper child have the hardened skin peculiar to Arrancars?
In the face of Nelliel's doubt, Hikone just looked happily at the Arrancars and said,
"Lord Tokinada said no one would accept my claim. Never doubt Lord Tokinada. It happened just like he said it would."
Then Hikone drew the zanpaku-to that rested at their hip.
At the appearance of that blade, the Arrancars felt the temperature around them drop. It had a presensce undoubtedly different from that of the zanpaku-to carried by normal Soul Reapers or used by Arrancars.
Before the Arrancars could ascertain the nature of the malaise that hit them, Hikone sonorously sang out the instructions given by one Lord Tokinada.
"In which case, until you bend your will and accept me as king, I'm supposed to give you a beating!"
Before the child had even finished speaking, Hikone gripped the zanpaku-to and spoke the name of the blade with a smile.
"Revolve around the stars,
Ikomikidomoe!"
....