Grimmjow saw the green and black explosion paint the sky from the corner of his eye. His pupils shrunk into icy pinpricks.
"Ulquiorra!" he roared, his voice cutting through the thundering sonic roar of the Kraken.
His instinct to jump into his brother's fray took over. He compressed the Reishi beneath his boots and executed a Sonido so violent that the sheer kinetic displacement vaporized the three hundred aquatic ants closest to him, turning them into a fine blue mist before they could even register his movement. He blurred across the water as a streak of blue targeting the mountainous beast.
But he didn't make it thirty meters.
The sea beneath him began to ripple and then, it practically inverted. A wall of chitin, claws, and clicking mandibles erupted directly in his path. Thousands of the ant-mermaid hybrids threw themselves into the air, creating a literal mountain of flesh to wall him off from the Kraken.
'Tch!' Grimmjow snarled, his fist embedding itself into the chest of the foremost drone, shattering its carapace and sending the carcass flying back into the horde. 'Killing these bugs isn't the problem. They're weak. Individually, they're nothing but glass. But the damn numbers…'
His internal complaints were cut short as the sea for a mile around him turned entirely blue-black as tens of thousands more aquatic ants crested the waves. They didn't lunge this time. Instead, they unhinged their jaws in unison, their throats glowing with a volatile, pressurized light.
'You've got to be kidding me.'
VUUUUUUM—!
A synchronized, catastrophic bombardment of high-velocity water needles erupted from the horde. It screamed forward as a solid wall of supersonic, metal-shearing force.
Grimmjow's eyes flashed as he fell back on his agility. He vanished, reappearing ten meters higher in the air, only for another grid of water lasers to slice through his afterimage. He twisted his body mid-air, dodging a beam that grazed his shoulder, leaving a damp tear in his already ragged white jacket. He kicked off the air, darting left, then dipping low, his movements became akin to an unpredictable dance of blue sparks.
Every time he stood still for a millisecond to breathe, the air where he had just been was completely shredded by the endless water cannons.
"How annoying! Get the hell out of my way!" Grimmjow screamed, his patience snapping. He thrust his hands forward, his palms erupting with a frantic, wide-angle Cero. The crimson blast tore through the sky, boiling the upper layer of the ocean and incinerating a massive swathe of the attackers.
But the moment the light cleared, the gap was already filled.
They were rising from the trenches, dropping from the sky, crawling over each other's backs. To him, it seemed that the abominable ants truly had no limits. This was their domain, their hunting ground, and they possessed an abundance of life that felt entirely unnatural.
Grimmjow gritted his teeth, dodging another three-way pincer attack from a trio of larger, armored drones. As he zipped backward using Sonido, he glanced past the chaotic swarm and saw the true catastrophe unfolding.
The Kraken, having successfully blasted Ulquiorra away, wasn't staying to fight. It was moving. The colossal, multi-eyed mountain of flesh was dragging its massive weight through the strait, forging a direct, unstoppable path toward Jeju Island where the main raid was supposed to take place.
"Hey! Blubbers! I'm your opponent!" Grimmjow yelled, preparing to charge the titan again.
He never got the chance as the ants intercepted him.
The aquatic ants didn't just attack him; they blanketed him. A swarm so dense it blocked out the sky and suddenly tilted and fell upon him like a collapsing net. Thousands of them clamped onto his legs, his arms, his torso, using their collective, crushing mass to overwhelm his spiritual pressure.
"Get off—!
THOOOOOOM!
The sheer, staggering weight of thousands upon thousands of ants slammed Grimmjow straight out of the sky, dragging him down into the ocean with a humongous, world-shaking splash. A geyser of white foam and blue gore shot into the air, leaving the surface of the strait entirely under the control of the swarm as the Kraken loomed ever closer to the shore.
Back on the shores of Jeju Island, the battle had descended into a relentless, exhausting massacre. Carcasses of the standard ant monsters littered the jagged rocks by the hundreds, and yet, for every drone that was cleaved or burned away, three more seemed to spawn out of the dark caverns of the island.
"Dammit! There's too many of them!" Tatsumi yelled, his blade flashing as he bisected a lunging soldier ant. "The scouting reports never mentioned a quantity like this! Something is fundamentally wrong with the hive's output!"
"Keep the formation!" Kanae shouted back, her speed blurring as she carved a safe zone around the perimeter. "We hold the line no matter what!"
Only a short while ago, the entire shoreline had been illuminated by a terrifying display of raw power. A humongous, dual beam of electric-blue and emerald energy had raced across the strait, parting the ocean itself. The residual shockwave had soared upward, vaporizing hundreds of flying ants in the sky like dried leaves caught in a furnace.
The blast had been so massive and unpredictable that it had strayed dangerously close to the shore.
Flashback
"Tanaka, watch out!" Ippei had screamed, lunging forward to grab the heavy-armor hunter by his collar and ripping him backward just as a stray arc of the blue *Gran Rey Cero* vaporized the boulder Tanaka had been standing on, leaving nothing but glowing, liquid slag.
Tanaka stared at the molten rock, his face pale underneath his helmet. "Wh-What the hell was that?! Was that the consultants?!"
The Korean teams stationed on the higher ridges had witnessed the cataclysmic light show as well.
"Did a dynamic tactical nuke just go off in the strait?" Ma Dong-Wook muttered, his massive hands trembling slightly on his weapon.
Cha Hae-In, her eyes fixed on the distant steam rising from the ocean, gripped her sword tighter. "No... that wasn't a normal skill. That was the raw mana being discharged, and it has the same signature as those two brothers… it would seem those two brothers. They're fighting the entire blockade by themselves."
Flashback end
But the awe didn't last long. Not too long after the brilliant flash, a second, far more sinister explosion of black and green light rent the sky over the horizon. Following the blast, a deafening, sub-aquatic bellow echoed across the water, a sound the hunters could only guess was a roar of victory or sadistic satisfaction from the Deep Sea Dweller.
Goto Ryuji stood atop a cliffside ruin, his eyes narrowing into slits as he stared at the distant smoke.
'Those two are doing surprisingly well against the Dweller and the aquatic ants... but according to what we calculated, that beast's defensive hide and mana capacity should have been completely impenetrable, even for S-ranks. Did they actually force it to use its true form?'
Before he could complete his sentence, the air on the island curdled. A heavy, disgusting aura began to emit from the deep chambers on the opposite side of the island. It was a dark, suffocating pressure that made everyone's skin crawl.
"What the fuck is that now?!" Akari hissed, popping her knuckles nervously. "Don't tell me there's a second boss on this godforsaken island!"
"Quiet, Akari! Focus on the front!" Tanaka refuted, slamming his shield into an incoming ant. "Don't lose your head over a bad feeling!"
Just then, the comms speakers crackled to life with a frantic, static-heavy announcement from the specialized infiltration team inside the tunnels.
"The Queen has been eliminated! Repeat, the Ant Queen has been killed! The core objective is secured!"
A collective breath of relief echoed through the earpieces.
"They actually did it," Tatsumi breathed, a faint smile breaking through his exhaustion. "The raid is a success. Now we just clean up the stragglers and—"
"LOOK OUT!" Kanae's voice tore through the comms, a frantic, blood-curdling shriek that shattered any illusion of victory. "THE STRAIT! LOOK AT THE STRAIT!"
Every hunter turned their head toward the ocean, and the color instantly drained from their faces.
A cataclysmic tsunami, easily a hundred feet high, was racing toward the island, swallowing the sky. And riding right behind the wall of black water was the titanic, mountainous form of the Dweller. The Kraken was charging the island, its multiple eyes burning with a furious, vengeful malice.
ROOOOOOOAR!!!
The beast's roar shook the bedrock of Jeju Island. The massive tsunami crashed into the shoreline first, completely submerging the outer docks and obliterating the defense structures in a swirl of violent foam. The S-Rank hunters scrambled backward up the cliffs, staring in absolute horror as the mountain-sized monster loomed just meters away from the island, its massive jaws unhinging to swallow the shore whole.
Choi Jong-In who made his way out of queen's lair looked over at the looming threat with dread, 'It's over. We can't stop something that massive on land. The whole island is going to be dragged into the sea.'
Goto Ryuji jumped from his position with his team, racing towards another side of the island. He looked over to see the immense beast. 'Impossible... how did it bypass our consultants completely? Did I overestimate their capabilities.'
But just as the Kraken's shadow enveloped the cliffside, a huge, absolute pressure appeared out of nowhere. It didn't fall from the sky; it radiated from the very fabric of the air, cold, heavy, and completely devoid of emotion.
The pressure was so suffocating that the charging monster was violently halted in its tracks, its massive thud echoing as if it had struck an invisible, planetary wall.
Every hunter, Korean and Japanese alike, froze, their eyes instinctively drawing back toward the open sea away from the monster.
Through the dense, superheated steam of the ocean, a pale figure stepped forward into the empty air. Ulquiorra's white jacket was slightly torn, but his face remained a mask of flawless, terrifying calm. He pointed a single index finger at the side of the stalled monster's head.
An emerald spark erupted into a colossal, blinding beam of a fully charged Cero. The light washed over the Kraken, completely erasing its upper flank before continuing onward, slamming into the western edge of Jeju Island and vaporizing a massive portion of the rocky coastline into absolute nothingness.
The emerald light of the Cero faded, leaving a perfectly smooth, glass-like crescent melted into the rocky cliffs of Jeju Island. The seawater that rushed to fill the void hissed violently, instantly boiling into thick white plumes.
Ulquiorra descended from the upper atmosphere, his feet settling onto the air as if stepping down an invisible staircase. His white jacket was scorched at the left shoulder, revealing pale skin underneath, but his posture remained entirely unbroken.
From the moment they had set foot in this world, both he and Grimmjow had practiced a meticulous, suffocating restraint. They had deliberately capped their spiritual output at less than half of their base capacity, a clinical experiment to gauge the structural density of this dimension and see exactly how little effort was required to navigate its "system."
But the script had become unnecessarily tedious.
"A flawed calculation I must admit," Ulquiorra murmured, looking down at the Kraken, which was thrashing in agony after losing a massive portion of its upper flank to the last blast. A blast of cero that carried his true power, not those cheap copies he'd been firing in fear of the excessive damage. "Amusing ourselves with limitations is no longer efficient."
Before the creature could swing its remaining limbs, a rhythmic, deep-seated vibration began to hum from the ocean floor. The water didn't just ripple, it swelled. A massive, localized dome of the sea, nearly half a mile wide, began to lift straight upward into the sky, defying gravity like a mountain of liquid glass.
Through the translucent blue walls of the rising ocean, a terrifying silhouette became visible at the very bottom of the trench.
"Tch. Keeping up that pathetic little charade was getting entirely too exhausting," a jagged, manic voice echoed from the deep.
Grimmjow stood on the sand of the exposed seabed, his knees bent slightly and his knuckles buried in the hilt of his zanpakuto. The wild, electric-blue Reiatsu that had previously sparked around him had transformed. It was now a thick, pale blue torrent. A dense aura that didn't just radiate; it possessed physical weight.
The sheer, unbridled pressure of his base form at a hundred percent hit the surrounding sea like a planetary hammer. The thousands of aquatic ants trapped in the lifted dome of water and the ones that had fallen from the air as his and ulquiorra's pressure had smacked them back down didn't even have the chance to screech. The spiritual gravity pinned them instantly to the seabed, their chitinous shells cracking, then shattering, before their bodies were completely flattened into dark blue sludge against the ocean floor.
Grimmjow threw his head back, his blue eyes burning with a savage, unrestrained light as the ocean wall collapsed around him in a spectacular, roaring deluge.
"Now," Grimmjow growled, his voice vibrating through the comms of every hunter on the island. "Let's see if this overgrown squid can actually stand up when we're not holding back."
——-
In Seoul, the global broadcast feed went entirely black for three seconds before the backup servers forced a low-resolution backup stream online. The sensors measuring the magical energy of the Jeju Strait hadn't just spiked, they had completely melted.
"The numbers... the numbers are gone!" the technician in the command center screamed, slamming his hands onto the desk. "Chairman! The mana readings from the consultants... they've bypassed the S-Rank ceiling and the energy is still expanding exponentially! The system can't categorize it!"
Go Gun-hee didn't answer. He couldn't. His hands were gripping the armrests of his chair so tightly the leather was tearing. On the screen, the reporter in the jet was huddled on the floor of the cabin, the microphone held loosely in his shaking hand.
———-
On the cliffs, the Japanese and Korean teams were still trying to process the absolute shift in the atmosphere. The pressure from the strait was so immense that several of the lower-ranked staff members had collapsed to their knees, vomiting from the sheer, crushing density of the air.
"What is this..." Goto Ryuji whispered, his hand trembling as he tried to draw his sword. His pride as Japan's strongest hunter was being systematically dismantled by the second. "This level of energy feels too dang heavy. It feels like... death itself."
Akari, stationed on the eastern ridge, was wiping sweat from her eyes, her daggers drawn but her focus entirely shattered by the display over the water. "Hey... if those two are down there... then who's handling the stragglers on the shore?"
She never got an answer.
The space behind her fractured. Without a single sound, a blur of pure, midnight-black speed erupted from the dark maw of the ant tunnels. It was larger than the other ants, its body sleek, dark, and radiating a twisted, royal malice that overpowered the S-ranks.
The thing moved with a silent, murderous intent, its long, razor-sharp claws aimed directly at the back of Akari's neck while she was distracted by the strait.
"Akari! Behind you!" Tanaka screamed from the lower ridge, but he was too far away. The distance was too vast, and the entity's speed was absolute.
Akari turned her head, her pupils shrinking as she saw the black claws inches from her eyes. She didn't even have time to raise her blades.
CLANG.
The sound wasn't the tearing of flesh, but the heavy, metallic ring of an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force.
The Ant's claws were stopped dead in mid-air.
Ulquiorra had appeared between them so quickly that the air around his body hadn't even had time to form a vacuum. He hadn't drawn his sword. Instead, his pale, slender hand was wrapped firmly around the King's wrist, his grip completely neutralizing the creature's forward momentum.
The Ant's red eyes flickered with a sudden, rare confusion. It hissed, its mandibles clicking as it tried to rip its arm free, but Ulquiorra's fingers didn't budge an inch.
"A fascinating specimen," Ulquiorra said, his emerald eyes looking directly into the creature's monstrous face without a shred of fear or excitement. "Your speed is commendable for a beast of this world... Beru."
The thing looked at him confused at the title.
"However..."
Ulquiorra's free hand slowly rose, his index finger extending until it was resting lightly against the center of Beru's dark forehead. A tiny, concentrated spark of emerald light began to hiss at the tip.
"...your trajectory interferes with the schedule. Step back."