Empiricism
"Until I see it, I refuse to believe it. This heart you speak of is a fallacy. There is no higher meaning to spirit particles than there is to physical matter. I could grind you to dust and not find a single grain of a metaphysical 'heart'."
Inoue glared at him. This distorted, pale monster discarding all mention of hearts, shunning the most valuable thing in her admittedly empty life: bonds. Bonds with her brother, her friends, relationships she treasured like diamonds and prayed were as unbreakable.
Though she knew they were never so safe. She had run away from her family and taken years to find a single true friend. But still, the only way to protect those bonds was to fight for them.
"Hearts are real." She glowered at the green-teared stoic. "It's right here." She clutched her hand over her own, that beat fitfully in the pain of separation from her friends and the fear of an alien environment.
Ulquiorra Schiffer let his eyelids dip slightly, giving her a chilling analytical stare. "Is that so." His voice was blunt.
"Heart is-"
She shuddered, consumed by savage clawing agony. Her eyes rolled back with the pain, barely able to register what the arrancar was holding out in his hand.
"Heart is muscle." His voice was clipped, emotionless. "Blood, tendons, nerves, flesh, valves, chambers, meat, matter, trash."
It was twitching in his palm, and the gouts of red were the most colour she'd ever seen on him.
Orihime gagged, crumpled. Red life bled out of her, dying the white dress and white floor a thousand shades of crimson. It stained her auburn hair a deeper scarlet.
Wordlessly Ulquiorra released his Resurreccion form, without a flicker of emotion he moved further into his true body. A slender, bat-winged, dismal gargoyle; acidic tear tracks burned into his thin cheeks, an ocean of sorrow flooding from the hollow bored straight through his core. The closest thing any Espada had come to achieving an arrancar's bankai. Orihime would have been fortunate, the sole person ever to see it if only her grey eyes were still functioning,
A black whip tail curled around her wrist and dragged the corpse nearer. The woman was bait, nothing more. There would be no reprimand from Aizen-sama for crushing a worthless fly. He would break her metaphysical heart now, hunt her into the mad solitude of being a Hollow.
"I will show you true despair," murmured the demon. "Your 'heart' will be worn away to a mote of emptiness, eternally tortured by pure hopelessness. And then you will wish that I had been correct."
