Disclaimer: Bleach belongs to Kubo and its various license-holders. I am not one of them.

Writer's Note: This is about as AU as you can get while still being in the Bleach universe. The big idea here is that I'm writing a version of the series where Ichigo died with his mom, and is therefore not present to be the protagonist. To be clear: I love Ichigo, in all his hilarious, orange-haired Canon Sue omni-powered glory. But I think the stories Kubo has told might be equally interesting if there wasn't anyone like that to clinch all the victories. So this fic is the beginning of a series that answers the question "what if Ichigo Kurosaki was dead?"

This is, of course, only one possible answer, but I hope it'll be an entertaining one. The spotlight in this series will shift around; I want it to be realistically ensemble-oriented. But for the first arc of the show, I needed the focus to be on Rukia and Karakura town, so… the main roles are played by Rukia herself, Ishida, Urahara, and Yoruichi.

Gen for this fic, ships later. (I'm taking suggestions on what they should be, by the way).

The Butterfly Effect

A Bleach Fanfic

Chapter One: Initialize

Rain pattered off the uniform dark surface of Uryū's umbrella, and a quick glance at the clouds ahead confirmed that a storm threatened for later that night. A normal occurrence, for Karakura in the spring. The leaves had only begun to bud, so the clouds had made everything grey, from the sidewalks to the houses to the bare trunks of the occasional tree, branches forking dark against the pale sky like inverse lightning.

Uryū stepped left to avoid a puddle, mindful of the glass bottle with its sad, drooping flowers that leaned up against a nearby telephone pole. The color in the petals was stubborn, refusing to yield its stark whiteness to the overcast haze, and he moved his eyes from the blooms to the boy sitting beside them. He was grey, becoming indistinct at the edges, what had once been a bright crimson shirt faded to almost brown. His knees were pulled to his chest, his arms draped over them, face hidden from sight.

Spirits could not, of course, feel the rain in the same way the living did. Not in this world. The boy was dry, but still he shivered. Uryū's feet stopped moving, and he sighed under his breath, turning himself a ninety degrees so he was looking down at the child from the front.

"No one is coming for you," he said, his tone flat.

The child startled, his head lifting sharply to peer up at Uryū, who stared impassively back for a moment, adjusting his glasses with the first two fingers of his free hand. A car drove past on the road, its wheels sending up a sheet of water from near the gutter. It fell just short of the telephone pole, receding like a wave on the ocean, leaving a thin layer of silt behind.

"You—" the boy started, and Uryū pursed his lips.

"Can see you, yes." He adjusted the angle of his umbrella slightly, so that the water dripped off behind him instead of in front.

"Then you… can you tell my mom that I'm here? I got lost, and I don't know where—"

Uryū shook his head. "She is not coming." The newspapers this morning had made that clear enough. "No one is—and you shouldn't wait."

The child continued to stare at him with wide, dark eyes, and Uryū resisted the urge to shift his weight, or look away, even when the boy's eyes gained a glimmer that could only be tears. "B-but… mom… I want my mom!" He started to sob, and Uryū fought to keep his face from changing, swallowing thickly.

Shifting the bag over his shoulder, he crouched in front of the child. "You should—" but he was cut off by a wail, and for a moment doubted his decision to stop. The spirits of children were… difficult, in this way. He turned his face skywards for a moment, grimacing to himself. A few drops of rain spotted his glasses, evading the plastic barrier over the rest of him.

Laying a hand on the child's head, he waited a few moments for the sniffles to quiet before he tried again, making his tone softer than it was firm. "What is your name?"

The boy looked up at him, Uryū's fingers dragging through his hair and ruffling it slightly. "Kenta. Kenta Sawada." He leaned slightly into the hand on his crown, and Uryū left it there. The strands had a fluffy texture to them, like goose down.

"And your mother, she is Mayu Sawada-san, isn't she?"

Kenta's eyes rounded, and he regarded Uryū with something like awe, his mouth falling open slightly. "Y-yes. You know her? Where is she? Where's my mom?"

Uryū resisted the urge to sigh. "Kenta-kun. You've been feeling a strange thing for the past few days, haven't you? Something that feels like it's pulling you, from here?" He pointed at the short chain protruding from the child's chest. As usual, Kenta did not appear to have noticed its presence on his own, and he fell out of his seated position into an ungainly sprawl when Uryū drew his attention to it. He nodded slowly, his eyes moving back up from the chain to Uryū's face.

"That feeling is your mother. She's calling you, Kenta-kun, and you've been fighting her and staying here." The lie tasted bitter on his tongue, but this was the only way he could achieve what he needed to do, and so he told it as convincingly as he knew how, as bluntly as he said everything else. Another thing about child spirits was that they tended to believe whatever he said, the prejudices and skepticism of adults not yet wired into them.

"Really? You promise?" Kenta gripped his chain in a small fist. It clinked faintly, the bottom links shuddering together at the movement.

Uryū swallowed his distaste and inclined his head solemnly. "You belong where that feeling is pulling you."

That was all it took. Kenta's face split wide into a beatific smile, and he closed his eyes, pale yellow limning his body for a moment, until, with one final bright flash, he disappeared entirely, crossed safely into Soul Society. Uryū frowned slightly, then exhaled deeply and rose from his crouch, staring for a moment at the pristine white of the flower petals before he turned and fixed his eyes back on the grey sidewalk in front of him.

Reaching his destination at last, Uryū pulled open the sliding door at the front of the familiar green-trimmed building, freestanding between larger ones on either side. "I'm back," he called into the house, removing his shoes and setting them at the end of the neat row with the other pairs. The largest was conspicuously missing, a blank spot alerting him to the fact that Tsukabishi was out somewhere.

"You're late." The throaty, masculine voice came from his immediate left, and he flicked a glance momentarily to the cat sitting near the umbrella stand. Uryū shrugged, tapping his closed umbrella against the doorframe to knock off most of the excess water before placing it in the stand. The cat jumped away before any of the water could land on her, swishing her tail from one side to the other a few times.

"Talking to spirits again?" She cocked her head to the side, golden eyes fixed on him. She blinked slowly, her feline mannerisms almost indistinguishable from those of a real cat.

Uryū stood straight and adjusted his glasses, easing his school bag off his shoulder. "Is Urahara-san down in the basement?" Usually, if the shopkeeper wasn't annoying him as soon as he arrived, there was a good reason for it, and that reason was most often that he was in the shop's underground training facility, probably working on whatever project had most recently consumed his attention.

Yoruichi made a disgruntled sound, which Uryū took for an affirmation, and he crossed the storefront to settle himself behind the recently-installed counter, placing his bag down on the surface near the till and perching himself on the stool that sat against it. A few thuds from overhead informed him that someone was running around upstairs, probably Jinta. He ignored it; unless one of the children managed to break a hole in the ceiling, he didn't much care what they did. Yoruichi hopped up on the counter beside him, and he automatically reached for her before stopping his hand and diverting it for his bag instead.

"Ishida-kun," she whined, "you never pet me anymore!"

Uryū glared at her. "That would be extremely inappropriate, Yoruichi-san."

"Why? You did it before." Yoruichi nudged his hand with her head, but he withdrew it, removing his homework and textbooks from his bag and laying them out in a neat stack on the counter. One of the benefits of working at a shop that did no business was having plenty of time to complete his assignments. Not that they took him long.

"Yes. When I thought you were actually a cat."

"I am actually a cat. See? Ears, fur, everything." Her tone was lilting, and he narrowed his eyes at her.

"Absolutely not." Uryū, much to his own chagrin, felt his ears beginning to heat. Whatever her claims, actually witnessing her transformation from cat into person was… he cleared his throat awkwardly and elected not to think about it. It hadn't been one of his prouder moments, and he was still sour with her over it. Resolved to ignore her, he turned towards his homework, intercepting her when she made to lay down on top of his papers, long fingers closing around her middle and lifting her away from them before she could dig her claws in.

"You do realize that you're touching me right now, don't you?"

Uryū spluttered, releasing her immediately, where she fell easily to the floor, landing with almost no noise. Well, except her laughter, anyway, which he did his best to ignore, digging back into his homework, red-faced and annoyed.

He was just finishing with his last problem for maths when the sliding door to the back of the shop opened, admitting a fair-haired man garbed entirely in forest-green and white, a bucket hat shading the majority of the upper half of his face. Kisuke Urahara had what seemed to be permanent five o'clock shadow, and walked with a cane that everyone knew wasn't just a cane, though Uryū himself didn't know exactly what it was instead.

"Ishida-kun," he greeted, producing a fan from his sleeve and tapping it, still closed, against his chin. "How's business?"

Uryū gave him a flat look, arching an eyebrow. Urahara opened the fan and covered the lower half of his face with it. Uryū suspected he often did this as a poor attempt at concealing his amusement. "Tessai should be back with what you need for dinner soon," he continued, nonplussed by the lack of an outright answer to his initial question.

Uryū nodded, placing his school things back in his back, hopping down from the stool on the counter, moving to duck past Urahara through the door he'd left open. But the shop owner's hand caught him by the shoulder, too fast to track, though it held him only loosely. "Be careful on your patrol tonight."

Uryū blinked at him. "Why? Have you sensed something?"

"Who? Me? Sensed what?" Urahara fluttered the fan in front of his face. "I have no idea what you mean, Ishida-kun." His hand dropped, and he stepped away, leaving Uryū free to continue his way into the back of the building.

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes, but only just. Urahara could be annoyingly obscure sometimes, occasionally reverting to the pretense that he was literally nothing more than an ordinary shopkeep, never mind the fact that he lived with a talking cat and two supernaturally strong children. But Uryū rarely called him on it—the tenuous equilibrium that existed in the shop might depend on that.

Instead, he made his way to the kitchen, digging out the ingredients they had on-hand for dinner. Tsukabishi, the only person in the house besides himself who could cook to any degree at all, entered the room not five minutes after Uryū had started to chop the green onions, laying a paper grocery bag on the counter and taking up a knife himself.

They spoke sparingly, but compared to the kind of conversation he endured from the rest of the household, Tsukabishi's was quite normal. He asked Uryū about the events of the school day, and listened politely as he described his latest handicrafts club meeting, and provided in turn an update on the minor disasters Uryū had missed as the residents of Urahara Shop went about their exceedingly bizarre daily lives. It was a familiar pattern, and when they had nothing to say anymore, they simply lapsed into silence, passing each other utensils or ingredients as necessary and moving efficiently through the process of producing an industrial quantity of stir-fry.

Dinner itself was always a bit of a circus here. Uryū, who was used to eating alone, still wasn't quite accustomed to having to defend items in his bowl from errant chopsticks, usually wielded by Yoruichi, or, oddly enough, Ururu. It was rather interesting that Tsukabishi-san, who was six and a half feet tall, usually only finished half the bowls that little girl did.

Maneuvering his dinner to avoid a diving pair of utsensils from a (mercifully fully clothed) Yoruichi, Uryū glared at her and lifted another mushroom to his mouth. On the other side of the table, Jinta belched, earning him a frown from Tsukabishi, which he wilted under.

"Er… excuse me."

His contriteness vanished when one of his peppers disappeared, filched by Ururu, who was at every time but meals perhaps the meekest child Uryū had ever met. Jinta dove for her bowl, which she lifted out of his way without looking at him, too intent on examining Uryū's red onions. He sighed and tilted his bowl slightly. She gave him a mild smile as she swiped them off the top of his rice, and he tried not to consider how unsanitary this all was.

"So Tessai," Urahra said, "did you find anything?"

Tsukabishi shook his head. "No. After this morning, I detected no additional activity, and a search of the site produced nothing." His dark brows knit together, and he handed his leftovers to Yoruichi, folding his large arms across his chest.

"Hollow?" Uryū asked, keeping his tone disinterested.

"Mm," the big man replied, shaking his head. "I thought so. I suppose we will see soon enough."

At midnight precisely, Uryū's cell buzzed on his low bedside table, and he sat up in his futon, rubbing at his eyes before reaching over for his glasses and settling them on his nose. Around him, the house was quiet, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. Through his wall, he could hear the faint sound of Jinta snoring in the room he shared with Ururu, and he detected the very small amount of reiatsu Tsukabishi gave off just down the hall, but both Yoruichi and Urahara's reiatsus were absent. They were probably in the basement.

Folding his futon neatly, Uryū shed his pajamas and donned the white uniform that hung in his closet, adjusting the mantle so that it lay flat. White was not a stealth color by any means, but that didn't concern him. He wound his silver prayer beads around his wrist a few times, letting the five-pointed cross dangle comfortably, then pulled his curtains back and opened his bedroom window.

Clambering up onto the sill, Uryū paused as a low rumble of thunder rolled through, glancing to the sky, where the stars were cloaked in clouds, making them impossible to see. Shaking his head, he launched himself out the second-story window and jumped to the ground below, landing lightly and striking out westward, choosing one of his usual routes in the absence of any particular reason to pick another instead.

The rain itself started back up again within twenty minutes of his rounds, and the first fat drop of water landed on the crown of his head. It was warm, but not as much so as the ones that fell in summertime. Within seconds, it was a proper shower, and rather than be soaked through, Uryū manifested an invisible disc of reiryoku, shielding himself from the inclement weather and leaving his hands free.

He was passing his school when he felt it, the first flicker of something on the very edge of his spiritual awareness. It was barely more than a blip, but he remembered Urahara's warning from earlier and chose not to dismiss it, instead orienting himself in the direction of the disturbance and increasing his speed, gathering reishi beneath his feet and pushing himself into the air with hirenkyaku. The technique took him over the roofs, flashing several meters at a time in his haste to cross the majority of Karakura town.

As he moved, the niggling feeling at the edge of his senses grew, until it was a perceptible weight there. At first, it seemed to be one enormous presence, but as Uryū drew closer, he differentiated the feeling into several distinct signatures.

Most of them were Hollows. Uryū's teeth clenched; revulsion rose in him, a heat just under his skin, prickling along the surface as every part of him rebelled against the idea of such creatures in proximity to the living. He could not explain his disgust with them—he knew that they had once been alive, once been human, and if there was some way to return them to their humanity, he liked to believe he would take it. But…

Another reiatsu signature flared in the same area, and for a moment, his step faltered. That was…

Shinigami.

There was an unfamiliar shinigami in Karakura, fighting a large cluster of Hollows.

Uryū hesitated, taking a half-step forward in the air, then halting awkwardly. There were so many reasons for caution, even for turning and leaving the situation alone. But he wasn't sure any of them were good enough. For a moment, he watched the rain sheet past him, unable to go either forward or back, his hand clenched over his silver pentacle, pressing it hard into his palm, but then the reiatsu flared again, more weakly this time, and he decided.

With a leap, he bounded forward, riding the flow of reishi as fast as he could. Houses flew by beneath him, and finally the scene in question resolved itself in the foreground. They were all in a large clearing just outside of the town itself. Over the course of his trip, two of the Hollow signatures had disappeared—he could only assume this shinigami had dealt with them. Four yet remained, an unusually large cluster. He wondered what had drawn them here, but there was little time to consider the implications.

As Uryū approached, two of the Hollows leapt at once, converging upon the spot where the shinigami was. The figure—a woman, surely, for she was far too small to be a man—jumped back, landing hard several meters away. A crack of lightning lit up the clearing for a moment, reflecting off the trail of blood she left behind. Her focus was forward, and she held the white blade of a sword towards the Hollows, her shoulders rising and falling with heavy breaths.

Uryū landed as the third Hollow, using the attack of its allies as a screen, darted forward. It had a long, snakelike body, and before either Uryū or the shinigami could react, it struck, opening its jaws wide to expose two dripping fangs, which it sank into the meat of the shinigami's shoulder. She cried out, and the bright glow of her sword flickered, then dimmed entirely, leaving her holding a plain katana.

Uryū knew less about how shinigami weapons worked than he might have liked, but even he knew that was bad. The Hollow retracted slightly, rearing back to strike her again. Hissing a breath from between his teeth, Uryū threw himself forward, reaching out with an arm to hook the shinigami around the waist, leaping clear of the attack, which slammed into the ground, kicking up dust which was swiftly beaten down again by the rain.

He skidded to a stop at the end of his leap, grimacing when he felt the distinct warmth of the shinigami's blood beginning to seep into his white sleeve.

"Wha—?" Her eyes, clouded by something, turned upwards, and she lifted her head to get a look at him. Beneath him, her muscles twitched and stiffened, in a way that he didn't think had anything to do with her will. Poison, probably.

"Shinigami. Can you fight?" Uryū's eyes narrowed behind his glasses, searching hers. She went rigid in his grip, using her free hand to push off from his arm, righting herself with a stumble. It was hard to tell how much she was bleeding, considering the black shihakusho she wore, but if the smear on his sleeve was anything to go by, she would need medical attention soon.

"I… you can see me?" Her mouth hung slightly ajar, and the dazed look had not cleared from her eyes. The temptation to sigh was great, but the blunt response he was inclined to halted halfway up his throat when the fourth Hollow moved in. This one had a massive tail with what looked like a mace on the end of it, and the appendage whistled through the air with a dull sound.

"Move!" He commanded, and either the wisdom in the command was obvious or she reacted on instinct, but the shinigami jumped back, in the opposite direction from Uryū, the Hollow's tail crashing into the space they had occupied, now between them.

The other two Hollows, both smaller and quadrupedal, seemed to prefer attacking as a unit, which was odd, but not unheard of, and they tried again to converge on the shinigami. She staved one off with a swipe of her sword, cutting a line into its mask, which spiderwebbed into a network of cracks, but did not shatter it. Uryū intervened on the other side, leaping away from an attack by the snakelike Hollow and landing at her back. Manifesting a disk of reishi in front of his palm, he braced his left hand with his right and bent his knees to absorb the Hollow's charge, pushing back against it with a burst of reiatsu.

The blunt hit stunned it, and Uryū brought his knee up, jumping to hit it in the chin. The blow connected, and split the Hollow's mask nearly in half, a large portion of the right side cracking off and falling away. He frowned at the glimpse of human face beneath.

Behind him, he heard one of the Hollows wail, and felt its reiatsu shudder as it disappeared, banished by the shinigami's blade. He glanced over his shoulder, noting that she turned now towards his foe, and he repeated his earlier strategy, moving to cover her back. The Hollow he'd weakened didn't take long for her to finish off, he presumed, and he ducked out of the way of another swipe from the fourth one's tail.

She appeared at his shoulder, breathing hard enough that he could hear her even over the pounding of the rain. She moved forward, but her first step became a lurch, and she would have fallen to her knees had he not reached out to steady her. The other two Hollows, made more cautious by the death of the first pair, approached slowly, staying well out of range of the shinigami's blade.

"You… I won't last much longer," she said, one eye closing as she brought her free hand to the wound in her shoulder. "I need to… lend you my power. With it, you can finish them off." She met his eyes grimly, wavering slightly on her feet.

Uryū felt his lip curl. "That will not be necessary," he informed her, voice hard.

"But—"

He silenced the protest with a swift shake of his head. "Your grip is sure on your sword. Your legs are failing you, but mine will not."

He lowered himself, presenting his back to her, though he would have preferred not to. It was leagues better than the alternative. Apparently understanding his meaning, she climbed onto his back, surprisingly light. He wrapped his hands around her knees and held them in place, feeling her free arm, bloody and thin, slide around to grip the front of his uniform, in front of his clavicle.

"Don't let go," she told him, and he nodded solemnly.

Any further strategizing would have to wait, however, because the snakelike Hollow had finally run out of patience, perhaps rendered reckless by the prospect of two particularly reiryoku-saturated souls to devour. It struck, and Uryū was barely able to get them out of the way in time, his hirenkyaku faltering as he adjusted to the extra burden of carrying the shinigami. She hissed as the sharp motion jolted her, probably aggravating a wound, but her grip on her sword held steady.

"We're going in from above," he informed her, and he felt her nod.

Launching himself directly upward as the other Hollow's tail swept in from the side, Uryū used it as a springboard to carry them even higher, flipping them over in midair to get the right orientation for their incoming strike. It wasn't intuitive to him to lead with his right side, but he did, because she held the sword on that side, and needed to get close enough to deliver a decisive blow to its mask.

He didn't know how strong her arms were, if indeed she was poisoned, so in the air he kicked off another small platform of reishi, driving them downwards with much greater speed. Even soaking wet, his hair blew back from his brow, and they left a trail of water and blood behind them as they flew, curving in towards the tailed Hollow from the side.

It couldn't react fast enough, and though it raised its appendage to try and swipe them out of the air, it missed over the shinigami's head by several feet, and they bypassed it still at full speed. He felt the jarring impact of her sword on its mask, throwing them off-kilter, and adjusted quickly with another hirenkyaku step, but they still landed hard, Uryū absorbing the brunt of the impact with his knees as his teeth clacked together, barely avoiding biting his own tongue.

"Left!" The shinigami's cry goaded him just in time, and he actually felt the brush of the snakelike Hollow's fang against his pant leg, where it left a tear, passing centimeters from his skin. The fangs seemed incorporated into the mask, which would make it a bigger risk to attack directly. It also had greater speed and flexibility than the other one, which meant they'd have to be faster still.

Worst of all, he could feel the grip the shinigami had on his shirt weakening, a sure sign that she was succumbing to whatever poison worked its way through her system. Uryū jumped grimly into a series of dodges as the Hollow, enraged by its near miss, attacked them several times in quick succession, darting in from seemingly-random angles each time.

He could feel himself beginning to tire as well. They had to end this, soon, or he would be forced to more drastic measures, and he had no desire to deal with the fallout if that happened. Not tonight.

Another streak of lightning split the sky, and Uryū clenched his jaw. "Once more, shinigami," he said, and her grip tightened again.

"My arm…" she murmured, and he glanced down. The hand with her sword in it was shaking now, and her fingers looked loose around the hilt. Sucking a breath in through his teeth, Uryū adjusted his hold on her, moving her knee back into the crook of his elbow and pushing his hand forward to reinforce her grip on her sword, closing it over hers. He doubted he'd be able to use it like she could, but as long as her hand was on it and her heart was in it, it should function like normal.

One of his gloved fingers landed on the hilt itself, and he felt something, like a ripple in his reiryoku, but he ignored it. Whatever properties these shinigami swords had were none of his concern. He took to the air again, this time circling around the Hollow as quickly as he could. It followed, massive coils unwinding, and tracked his progress, the slitted eyes behind its mask fixed on the two of them.

It struck at the same time as Uryū jumped, its nose slamming into the ground as he alighted on its tail, following the near-circle its body made, determining his trajectory by its spine. Its scales were wet and slick, and twice he nearly lost his footing, saving himself with hasty applications of hirenkyaku. It tried to attack him, still, but he kept them both as close to its own body as he could, doubting it wanted to risk injecting itself with its own poison.

It lurched viciously underneath him as he approached its head, and he had to let go of the shinigami's left leg for a moment to stabilize them by grabbing onto a short, bony protrusion near the base of its skull. She yelped as she was suddenly overbalanced to one side, but squeezed her knees around him and stayed on. Three more steps got them to the crown of its head.

"Now!" They swung together, before the Hollow could try again to throw them off, and though the positioning made the blow awkward, their combined strength drove her sword through the mask, shattering the bone-white material and the Hollow behind it as well, which dematerialized into white reishi particles.

They fell, and, exhausted, Uryū couldn't slow them with hirenkyaku, so he twisted in the air as well as he could, aligning them so the shinigami was in front of him and landing on his back, distributing the impact across his whole body. Her weight coming down on top of him right after knocked the breath from his lungs, and he struggled to recover, pulling in air shakily. He lay there for several minutes, by his own estimation, and in that time, the shinigami did not move. He could feel her breathing, but it was shallow, and she was unresponsive, most likely unconscious.

Uryū wasn't sure what to do. This woman was a shinigami, someone who was his enemy. Someone who would probably kill him if she knew who he was, what he was. It would probably work out better for him if he let her die. Even her kind died, and like everyone else, they were born again in the other world—she would become human, by his reckoning a much better thing to be.

But. It would be dishonorable of him to let a comrade die when he could prevent it. And however forced and necessary it had been, for however short a time, they had been comrades. He owed her consideration for that, and a Quincy never left debts unpaid. He didn't know how to save her life, or if she would recover on her own, but he did know where to take her so that she had the best chance of survival. So he would do that, and consider his obligations met.

With great effort, he hauled himself to his feet, staggering slightly when a wave of exhaustion hit him all at once, but shook his head. Once he was sure he was steady, he gathered the shinigami up, placing her over his shoulder in a rescue carry. He'd have to take the long way back to the shop, but with luck, if he hurried, he'd make it back in enough time.

She was still breathing when he mounted the front steps to Urahara's, banging the side of his fist against the door. It took only a few seconds for someone to slide it open, and the proprietor of the establishment blinked at him, a strange smirk on his face.

"Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in."

Term Dictionary:

Hirenkyaku - 飛廉脚 - Literally, "flying screen step." It's basically the Quincy version of shunpo. Uryū can use it, but he's not an expert yet, which explains why it tires him out so quickly.

I'd really appreciate hearing any initial impressions or thoughts people have. Well... I mean I guess it would be kind of pointless to tell me that the idea of Bleach without Ichigo is stupid and bad, because that's what I'm doing one way or another, but I'm open to other comments.