BLEACH typeTWO
volume the FIRST – Soccer Girl And The Soul Reaper
We fear that which we cannot see
chapter ONE (I)
"Soccer Girl And The Soul Reaper"
2:23 AM, FRIDAY
KARAKURA TOWN
The night air was cool. A gentle breeze stirred it, moving across the rooftops. The raven-haired girl standing on thin air some eight meters above the ground did not feel it. The stirrings of crude matter simply passed through her without so much as a ripple. A black swallowtail butterfly circled around her.
I feel it here, she thought to herself. Strange…I sense enormous spirit energy.
1:43 PM, FRIDAY
KARAKURA TOWN
Kurosaki Karin
13 years old
Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
Occupation: Middle School Student
Special Skill:
"-and if the discriminant is positive, there are two solutions," the teacher said, chalk scritch-scritching on the board. Karin dutifully copied this down.
The boxer-clad old man ghost sitting on her desk yawned loudly, causing the chain dangling from his chest to jingle. Karin's scowl deepened, but she dutifully continued her note-taking.
The old man stood up, with much creaking of joints and grunts of discomfort, and shuffled towards the door. As he passed the teacher, he patted her behind. A chorus of giggles erupted from the back of the room.
Karin's pencil snapped.
Kurosaki Karin
13 years old
Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
Occupation: Middle School Student
SPECIAL SKILL:
She looked back over her shoulder, murder in her eyes. Three little girls floated in the back of the classroom, faces purple from suffocation, lengths of broken chain dangling from their chests. They pointed and giggled at the look of irritation on her face.
"SHE CAN SEE GHOSTS"
Later that afternoon, Karin was walking home, absently kicking a soccer ball as she walked. She was not looking where her feet were going, and a tilted pavement slab caught her foot, causing her to trip and boot the soccer ball across the street at shoulder-level, at a not-insignificant speed. Karin followed its flight with her eyes. It was headed right for an older girl walking on the other side of the street.
Karin's shout of warning caught in her throat as the ball hit the girl…and passed right through her to hit the ground with a thump. The girl looked at it, then turned to look at her.
Karin scowled. Another ghost. They were everywhere these days. She walked across the street to retrieve her soccer ball. The girl had already lost interest in Karin and continued to walk. "Stupid human," she muttered as she walked. "That felt really gross."
Karin glared at her back. The girl's strange outfit finally came to her attention. She was clad in a black gi and hakama and straw sandals, like some sort of goth samurai wannabe. A white scabbard hung at her side, and Karin saw the hilt of a sword protruding from it.
"Hey!" she barked. "You wanna talk about stupid? What's up with that outfit?"
The girl froze. Slowly, she turned to look at Karin. "Excuse me?" she said.
"You heard me, samurai wannabe," Karin said.
"You can see me?!" the girl said. Karin almost laughed at the expression of shock on her face.
"I really hope that was a rhetorical question," Karin said. "Of course I can see you. You haven't answered my question. What is up with that outfit? Did you die at an anime convention or something?"
"You dare speak that way to me?!" the girl barked. "Insolent worm!" She held out her hand, palm outwards, index and middle fingers raised, the others curled in her palm. "Binding spell the first! Sai!"
Karin's arms were yanked behind her and held together by an unseen force. She teetered for a moment, then fell onto her rear. It hurt.
"Stay there until you learn some manners!" the black-clad girl said smugly. With a swish, she vanished.
--
It took the invisible ropes two hours to fade enough for Karin to break free. She had managed to get to her feet and walk home almost immediately after the girl had vanished, whereupon she had gone immediately upstairs and spent all of her homework time struggling with the magical bonds. It had left her in a foul mood, and she had had to work like a dog to get her homework done.
She was sitting at the dinner table, eating the cooling dinner, when Ichigo finally got home.
"I'm home," he said as he closed the door behind him.
No shit, Karin thought to herself.
"You're LATE!!" bellowed Isshin as he jump-kicked his son in the head. "Do you know what time it is, delinquent?! Dinner in this house is at 7:00 sharp every night!!"
"Jerk!" Ichigo shouted back. "Is this how you greet our son who just helped a ghost find peace?!"
"No excuses! The rules of my house are iron! You break 'em, you gotta bleed!" Isshin snapped. He leaned towards his son, a scowl straight out of a manga on his face. "Or maybe you just want to rub it in my face that you can see ghosts and I can't!? Why can't I have the gift?!"
"Shut up! I didn't ask for it!"
"Please stop fighting!" Yuzu said. "Dinner's getting cold!"
"Let them fight, Yuzu," Karin said. "Leaves more for us."
"Your rules are way too strict!! Decent fathers don't make their teenage sons be home by 7:00!!" Ichigo declared, adopting a wrathful finger-pointing stance as clichéd and corny as his father's sneer.
"Ah! Ichigo, I think you have a new 'friend' haunting you," Yuzu said.
Ichigo looked over his shoulder. A grinning, middle-aged salaryman floated there. "Gah! When did you…? I exorcise one and another latches itself onto me! Crap!"
"He sees them, talks to them, touches them, and channels them," Karin said. "A quadruple threat. Must be a pain, strawberry, being in such high demand."
"But you know, we are bound to be a little jealous of you, Ichigo," said Yuzu. "They're just blurry shapes to me. I'd love to see one clearly."
Karin had a sudden flashback to the boxer-clad old man's ghost in her algebra class. "Not me," she said sourly, sipping her miso soup. "I don't believe in ghosts."
"Eh? But you see them too, Karin! Only Daddy can't," Yuzu said. Stung by the truth, Isshin assumed a pose of dejection and gloom in the corner.
"Dummy. I'm in permanent denial. If I refuse to believe in them, it's like they don't exist," Karin said, voice arctic. Then, suddenly, her scowl vanished. "So anyway, I have a new plan." She pulled an index card from her pocket and began to read from it. "'Want to flirt with ghosts while being caressed by the first breeze of summer? A limited engagement for the month of May, the Karuizawa ghost picnic.'"
"Last month was cherry blossom watching, right?" Yuzu asked.
"Dammit, Karin!!" Ichigo shouted, pounding the table. "You're not making money off of my grief!! I'm not a freakshow!!"
With a triumphant cry of "Dropped your guard!", Isshin fell from the sky like a heavy falling thing, knocking Ichigo to the floor. There was a brief pause.
Ichigo flung Isshin into the wall. He hit with a splat and slid down to puddle on the floor.
"That's it! I'm going to bed!" the orange-haired teenager said, storming up the stairs.
"He left. It's your fault, Dad," Karin said.
"What'd I do?!" Isshin asked plaintively.
"Ichigo's been under a lot of pressure lately! He says more ghosts than ever have been haunting him. He's fed up!" Yuzu said.
Karin turned this over in her mind. She had been seeing a lot more of the dear departed lately than she was used to (and a hell of a lot more than she enjoyed). Needy bastards, she thought to herself.
"What?! He talks about that kind of stuff with you?!" Isshin demanded. "That boy…why doesn't he come to me with his problems?"
"Are you serious?" Karin asked him. "I wouldn't bring my problems to you either. You're over 40 yet you have the emotional maturity of a preschooler."
Isshin choked out an inarticulate noise of crushing despair. Lower lip stuck out in an exaggerated expression of sadness, he turned to the gigantic memorial poster of his late wife on the wall. "Masaki…" he whined. "Maybe it's because they've hit puberty, but our daughters treat me like dirt…What should I do?"
"First, take down that stupid memorial picture," said Karin, turning away from him. She tuned out her family's weirdness and ate.
The first thing to cut through her haze of dissatisfaction and aimless anger was a blood-curdling howl that sent ice water down her spine and shook her water glass. The second was a cold pressure on a part of her that she hadn't even known existed until that second. She choked on her food, spluttering. Her chair screeched across the floor as she leapt to her feet.
"Did you guys hear that?" she asked.
"Hear what?" Yuzu asked.
Karin opened her mouth to respond…and the wall exploded. A chunk of masonry hit the table and flipped it, slamming her backwards. She landed with a short scream. A second blood-curdling howl ripped through her, agonizingly loud and nearby. It was followed by a scream that Karin recognized. Yuzu's.
She crawled out from under the table. Her eyes widened. There was a hole nearly three meters across in the wall. Silhouetted in it was a hulking, grotesque monster with a body like an ape and a white-masked head like a fish's. In one of its long-fingered fists, Yuzu was clutched like a crumpled piece of paper.
Isshin lay off to one side, his shoulder a bloody mess.
"Wha-" Karin mumbled. "What is that?" Her eyes widened. The monster leaned in, sniffing Yuzu like a hungry dog. It opened its mouth wide. "NO!!" Karin screamed.
The monster froze. At first Karin thought it was looking at her, but then it twitched its head backwards. A black blur flitted across her vision, and a spray of blood erupted from the monster's arm, just below the elbow. Karin blinked. The monster shrieked, and tossed Yuzu aside. She hit the pavement outside and skidded. Karin winced in sympathy. She turned and looked at the monster, then followed the line of its gaze. Her jaw dropped.
"You?!" she said.
The raven-haired girl form earlier stood confronting the monster. The sword she held in an easy, practiced grip was wet with blood. She did not hear Karin.
"Now you die!" she spat, and leapt at the monster, which swung at her with a shriek. Karin seized the moment to crawl fully out from under the table. She darted across the room, making for her sister.
As she passed through the hole in the wall, the sword-wielding girl saw her. Her eyes widened. "Her?" she said, disbelieving.
The monster's fist caught her on her sword arm and slapped her through the still-closed front door and out into the street. She hit the wall opposite the Kurosaki house with a crack.
Karin ran to her sister, whose back was scraped raw by its brush with the asphalt. She choked down rising bile at the smell of blood and felt for a pulse. She found one easily, strong but racing, so she checked her sister's head for wounds or breaks with gently probing fingers. She found nothing to concern her, although there was a shallow gash on her forehead that was bleeding enthusiastically. She was about to tear a strip off of her shirt to bandage it when something blocked out the streetlight. Karin turned, already knowing what was there. The monster stood over her, a line of saliva hanging from its mouth. She shuddered.
Suddenly, she heard Ichigo's voice, raised in a wordless battle cry. The hollow turned and swung a fist. There was another crash of breaking house. Then the monster shrieked in pain. It reared back, bashed its head on the ceiling (through the ceiling, really), and clawed at its face. Karin saw a baseball bat protruding from its eyesocket. She giggled despite the marked grimness of the situation, for it was a comical sight.
"Girl," came a hoarse cry. Karin turned. The black-clad ghost was looking at her, sitting against the wall. "Girl," she said again.
Karin left Yuzu and ran to her. The girl coughed, then spoke again. "My arms are broken," she said. "I can't fight it."
Karin blinked. "Shit."
"I can loan you a portion of my powers," she continued. "But the chance of success is low, and if I fail you die."
Karin mentally weighed her options. A) Get eaten by monster, B) Try to do something. "Whatever. Do it," she said.
"Take my sword and run it through your heart," the girl said.
Karin froze. "Are you serious?"
"Just do it or we all die!!" the girl yelled.
"Oh, crap," Karin said as she grabbed the snow-white blade and held its point to her chest.
"Your heart is a little further up," the girl said helpfully.
"Shut up!" Karin said. She threw herself forwards. There was an explosion.
The monster froze, just as it was about to give Ichigo an exclusive tour of its innards. It turned to look over its shoulder. The last thing it saw was a black blur emerging from the cloud of smoke.
Karin's first strike cut its legs off below the knees. Her second split its head (and the floor). She sighed in relief, then stood up, looking around. The house was in ruins. Ichigo was buried in the wall from the shoulders up, but he was wriggling, so he was alive. Isshin was unconscious and bleeding. Yuzu was lying in the street, as was the other girl. Karin sighed again, this time in concern. She was about to take a step when the monster vanished from underneath her. She fell and struck her head on the floor, and all was blackness.
Across the street, Kuchiki Rukia struggled to her feet, grimacing at the pain in her arms. She looked down at herself, and gaped. Her shihaukshō was gone, replaced by the plain white robes of a soul newly arrived in Soul Society. "No…" she said. "I meant for only half…I have lost all of my powers." She looked at the zanpakutō stuck in the floor. It was almost as tall as she was. The blade was as tall as its wielder, and its hilt added another thirty centimeters or so. The blade was also as wide across as her hand from wrist to the tip of her middle finger.
"The zanpakutō…it's huge," she said faintly. She looked at the unconscious Karin. "Who is this child?"
The sound of footsteps caught her attention. She turned around. A man in a green-and-white-striped hat and geta sandals stood there, a cane in his hand. "My, my," he said. "What a mess." He looked at Rukia. "Hello," he said warmly. "My name is Urahara, and I am a purveyor of fine goods and certain services." He waved at the chaos. "I can fix all of this – for a small fee, of course."
Rukia looked at him suspiciously. "Two people who can see a shinigami in one day? That stretches belief." She looked at him for a moment. "Fine."
Urahara clapped his hands. "Excellent! By the way, would you like to rent a gigai?"