Summary: After defeating the Black Magician but being last-minute cursed into a different dimension in a somewhat near-death state, the legendary Aran wakes up in a world that needs his help and, as expected, saves the day. Set during when Ichigo and the others rush to go and save Orihime. AU & Pure crack.
Maplestory © Wizet/Nexon
Bleach © Tite Kubo
Facebook © Facebook, Inc.
Smartphones © whoever invented it
Note: Just to clarify, it's male!Aran at level 200. Oh, and some minor changes to the timeline (like that creepy sand-bucket-man won't be showing up and some references to skills that don't exist in this stage yet) will happen, but nothing very major.
Ichigo raised a hand to shield his eyes from the intense wind that whipped at him as he sat on top of the huge eel-like creature called Bawabawa, his eyes set determinedly at the faraway dot of buildings called Las Noches as he, Rukia, Renji, Chad, Ishida, Nel, Pesche, and Dondochakka rode the hilly ride through the seemingly endless mounds of white sand and dust. Sighing as Las Noches didn't seem to be getting any closer despite the hour or so they've been traveling on the incredibly fast worm, the substitute soul reaper turned around to see what his companions were up to.
Renji was snoring away on his side with Chad on his right being his normally silent and contemplative self. Rukia was doodling away on her art pad (where she pulled that out of, he'll never know) and Ishida was reading a book that he'd brought along as if he knew it'd take a long time before they could even reach their destination. Pesche and Dondochakka were chatting quietly (for once) amongst themselves, too bored to do anything else without waking up Nel, who was contentedly curled up napping on Dondochakka's lap.
Turning back around, Ichigo felt that this moment was probably one of the few times in his life where silence was not associated with something horrible happening. Resolving to take a quick bit of shuteye in order to be completely energized when they had to bust through the walls and save Orihime, Ichigo slumped forward a little and let his gaze lazily sweep over the expanse of white desert.
However, a tiny flash of bright orange from a distance caught the corner of his eye and Ichigo quickly jumped up and strained his eyes at the glaring orange. It was faint, but he could see long orange stripes flowing in the air as if it was hair which seemed to be connected to a body wearing a white bodysuit. The person with the orange hair, however, seemed to have been thrown over the shoulder of another person almost indistinguishable from the bleached sands of Hueco Mundo were it not for the assortment of dark green-blacks and splotches of tans and bright red that the Ichigo could barely make out from his perch.
The colorful person with the other thrown over the shoulder was moving at an almost untraceable speed towards them, possibly even faster than Byakuya's utsusemi, as the soul reaper saw bright streaks of blue energy exploding off its back and various afterimages appearing after every explosive dash towards their transport. Wary of an attack, Ichigo quickly kicked Renji awake and urgently pointed out the speeding whatever that was headed their way; the others, having felt a somewhat powerful pulse of reiatsu that did not belong to Ichigo (which was surprising), drew and readied their weapons in case of an obvious ambush. Nel hid behind Pesche and Dondochakka but curiously looked on.
As the rapidly advancing being came into clear sight, the group could see that the incredibly fast person was, in actuality, a muscular and tanned man with oddly styled white hair and strikingly cyan eyes and held a largely familiar orange-head over his shoulder singlehandedly, his other hand grasping an exceedingly hugely red-ornamented pole-arm tightly.
"It's Orihime! That man has Orihime!" Rukia's eyes widened as she shouted out, nearly dropping her Zanpakto. When the strange man came close enough to Bawabawa and changed his direction, he slowed down enough to keep up with the eel's speed and yelled out,
"ARE ANY OF YOU NAMED ICHIGO KUROSAKI OR RUKIA KUCHIKI?"
"I'M ICHIGO!" Ichigo quickly shouted back over the noisy sounds of Bawabawa's body traveling through the rough desert sand. The man cried in reply,
"SLOW YOUR WORM DOWN!" Nel, having heard this, slapped a chubby hand on Bawabawa's back several times, the eel-like creature turning around and heading towards the outskirts of Hueco Mundo instead. Once this was done, he called out, "PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND SOMEBODY GET READY TO CATCH!"
The man swung his pole-arm in a circle and clipped it onto a holder on his back, carefully minding the blade as he shifted the girl from his shoulder so that he held her in both hands. Looking up at the orange-haired teen with outstretched arms, the man grunted and threw Orihime's limp body into Ichigo's hands without breaking his fast strides.
"Got her!" Ichigo said as he nearly tripped off Bawabawa as his friend's weight almost caught him off-balance. Chad quickly took her off him, though, and laid her on the worm's back. Ishida pushed up his glasses higher on his nose and looked over to the still running man.
"Who are you?" The man looked at him with sharp sapphire eyes, seemingly hearing his surely inaudible question over the loud rumblings of Bawabawa's groans, but instead shouted out,
"TURN BACK AND HEAD FOR SAFETY! THIS PLACE IS GOING TO BLOW!" Ichigo, Rukia, and Renji looked confused but a huge blast of reiatsu that rivaled Aizen's radiated out from the distant building of Las Noches. Looking back, the group saw the building expanding into the sky at an alarmingly fast interval before contracting back to its normal size—
—Then it exploded, sending a 30-ft high visible wave of incredibly wild but concentrated yellow reiatsu, the mounds of sand and bare trees within a 20 mile radius flattening instantly from the blast as well as the random chunks of stone and rock that escaped being pulverized flew over their heads and landed quite a distance away. The group was barely out of the explosion area and Bawabawa had screeched to a stop immediately, trembling from onslaught of energy as the poor creature was pushed over onto its side, sending all of its riders tumbling onto the sand mounds.
Aran dropped to his knees besides the other humans, hands clenching in the white sand as he heaved glorious mouthfuls of cool air into his over-worked lungs. Every possible muscle of his body burned and his heart pulsed far too quickly for his liking from his hasty escape from the fortress with the orange haired girl (who passed out the moment he jumped out of one of the fortress' windows with his Combat Step) and he seriously couldn't feel his legs anymore… probably because he dashed frantically away from Las Noches for nearly 15 miles straight, barely stopping to drink one of his scarce Mana potions in fear of one of those strange bone-masked monsters popping up and swallowing him whole in his exhausted state. It really didn't help that he had to carry an extra 150 pounds on his achingly dislocated shoulder along with Maha, his stupidly heavy pole-arm, while bleeding from the various cuts on his sides that he obtained from his 'interrogation' sessions in Las Noches and stung like that time he took a fall down a hill in Ariant and rolled into a cacti field without any armor.
Sucking in some more air as his vision swam through his closed eyes, Aran immediately regretted that as he felt the stirrings of sickness coming up from his stomach. Pushing away the impulse to start dry heaving after eating nothing for the past three days, Aran drew in another breath of chilly air before his brain decided shut down, blanking out face first onto the sand like a light bulb.
After the moment of when Bawabawa had tipped over and sent everybody plummeting a few feet to the ground, Orihime woke up from her faint state at first confused at where she was until she saw her friends and proceeded to choke each of them to half-death with her hugs.
"ICHIGO!" She squeezed him nearly into half with her force.
"RUKIA!" The two girls seem to have equally crushed each other with their hugs. Some tears were probably shed too somewhere in the midst of their blubbering.
"RENJI!" Poor Renji got accidentally smooshed into her boobs.
"CHAD! ISHIDA!" Orihime practically threw herself at the two teens who had unfortunately been standing next to each other.
Nel got a hug too, although she was a teeny bit jealous of Orihime's breasts. Well, that was until Bawabawa gave a loud groan of discomfort as it lay on its side and Nel, Pesche, and Dondochakka rushed to go and comfort the poor hollow-eel.
While Orihime went and nearly killed the rest of their group with her hugs and tearful cheers, Ishida and Chad walked over to the unconscious man with the pole-arm lying in a splatter of blood that had given back their friend. Turning around, Ishida called out to Orihime,
"Orihime! Do you know who this man is?" The orange haired girl turned and looked confused as she wondered who Ishida was talking about but paled as she saw the body. Orihime cried out and rushed over in panic,
"No, Aran! You can't die! You just got us out of that place! You need to get home!" Her hands automatically went to her hairpins but before she could activate them she seemed to remember something and instead unclasped a small bag that usually hung from his back and dumped the contents onto the sand.
Several small, glowing bottles filled with either a purplish or magenta liquid tumbled out as well as a pouch that was filled to the brim with strange metal coins and the…Hogyoku? Orihime's eyes widened at the sight of the item that led to Aizen's betrayal but instead of picking it up she reached for one of the purple bottles instead.
"Someone please help me turn him over." Chad reached over and grabbed the nearest shoulder, frowning slightly as it took quite a bit of energy to even turn the strange man onto his back. Orihime uncorked the bottle and looked worriedly at it before proceeding to dump the purple mixture onto 'Aran's' face.
However, instead of splashing onto him as any normal liquid would, it froze quickly into colored ice within an inch away from his face; Aran's hand shot up too quickly to even see and gripped Orihime's wrist tightly, eliciting a cry from the girl as his cyan eyes snapped open. Realizing he was almost crushing the poor girl's wrist, Aran let go and sluggishly sat up, snatching the remaining half-empty (or half-full) potion and downing the rest of its contents in a single gulp, sighing in relief as he felt most of bruises fade and cuts heal from under his armor.
Then he looked to Orihime straight in the eyes and said, "I'm not dying just yet."
"Are you sure you're okay?" Aran's eyes twitched as he answered Orihime's question for the tenth time briskly, feeling incredibly not at ease as he wobbly got onto his feet, unhooking Maha and digging the head into the sand so he could lean on it tiredly. The group had immediately bombarded him with questions the moment he was coherent enough. At first, he had felt the auras of the others assail his senses into overdrive, but then he realized that most of it had come from the other orange head, Ichigo, so he hadn't much reason to worry that they were going to kill him or something… like that creepy blue-haired panther-man that gave him the evil eye every time he passed by his cell.
Feeling his Mana reserves recover quickly and his health returning at a moderately normal rate, Aran stood up straight as he finished putting back all his items back into his bag, his back protesting against the stretching movement as he followed the rest of Orihime's friends out of this place, supposedly called Hueco Mundo or something.
After a half an hour or so of complacently riding on top of the humongous eel called Bawabawa that he had seen the others do the previous five hours while leaving the rest of the group to their hushed conversations and looking at the smoking remains of Las Noches, Aran really didn't doubt he wasn't in his own world anymore. Nothing seemed to be familiar with his homeland, and even the skills that its inhabitants displayed were all foreign in his eyes. Lost in his thoughts, he almost missed the question asked by the strange child wearing the simple green gown.
"Hay mistha white head!" Turning his head so that he could see the lisping child, Aran nodded slightly to signal that she had his attention. Nel grinned hugely, displaying a mouthful of straight teeth, and said cheerfully, "Where didth yous come from? You don'th look like a Shinigami or a Hollowth!"
Aran thought for a moment, deciding how to tell the young child, before deciding to be as blunt as possible for his sake.
"I'm from another world." Nel's eyes grew wider at this. The murmurings from the group had stopped and Aran could literally feel the questioning eyes boring into his back; his hand tightened protectively around the handle of his pole-arm.
"What worldth? Are there other worldths than this one andth the human oneth?" Aran nodded again, as that would explain how the Black Magician could have sent him to this world. As he stared out into the vast expanse of Hueco Mundo, Aran felt quite homesick and was pretty sure that with his disappearance and the Black Magician's final defeat, his world wouldn't need him anymore. All of his friends and acquaintances, the Cygnus Knights, the Explorers, the Resistance, and heck even Lirin would finally be able to lay down their weapons and celebrate their hard-earned peace without him; nobody would probably even notice that he was in another world but either dead like the Mage or sealed up somewhere again.
That thought saddened him even further, and Nel seemed to have caught on his dismal expression and left his company to join her friends.
Orihime was worried, but even more so when everyone (including Nel, Pesche, Dondochakka, and Aran) managed to make it the Urahara's Shoten without any more life-threatening incidents, she felt unsettled by the calm that had descended. The quiet in the living room in Urahara's shop felt awkward as they all crammed inside the tiny room drinking tea.
Situated on the opposite side from Urahara across the small table, the two men were having some sort of stare-off; the calm stare of Aran's eyes meeting Urahara's piercing ones, each one silently reaching a standpoint after three minutes. Aran nodded his head slightly and put his cup of tea down on the table first with a soft tap, before asking coolly,
"What do you wish to know?" Urahara's tea cup went down next and everyone else could breathe properly again as the oppressive atmosphere relaxed. Urahara seemed to contemplate for a moment, his fan tapping against his chin a few times before he said,
"What were you doing in Las Noches?" Aran didn't as much as blink as he replied smoothly,
"A wayward spell cast by my nemesis, the Black Magician, ripped me from my world and into yours as I killed him. I only coincidentally landed in the building of your adversary." Urahara didn't seem to believe this completely, but nonetheless asked another question.
"How did you meet Orihime and were you aware of the war that is going on?" Aran didn't miss a beat in replying,
"After I broke holes through their walls from my impact, I was captured and sent in for… questioning. I was healed by her after every session. I had only pieced together the bits of information slipped by the masked people to know that there was a war between a person called Sosuke Aizen and an organization of people living in Soul Society." Urahara looked at Orihime for confirmation and received a truthful look from the young woman.
"So, how did you get out? Oh, and why did Las Noches blow up?" It was Ichigo who spoke; apparently if the walls of Las Noches (that were suggested to have been made out of the same unbreakable material of Soul Society) could be broken by this weird guy from another dimension, he could do it too.
"I…" Aran paused, thinking how to possibly explain his skills to people that'd never known of his world until now, "…hit the walls with my Final Blow and used Combo Tempest to freeze everyone that would hinder our escape and Combat Stepped–" Ichigo seemed to scoff at this.
"Final Blow? Combo Tempest? Combat Step? What kind of names-" He was cut off by an elbow into the gut by Rukia, who smiled sweetly at him and just told him to not mind Ichigo so he continued somewhat perplexedly,
"While passing through, I saw this shiny thing emitting a lot of energy floating in a tube in one of the rooms so I broke the glass and took it along with me. The loose energy must've filled the room after I left."
Urahara, on the other hand, ducked his head so that his hat would shade his entire face, his fan tapping a rhythm against his chin. His face seemed serious as he asked without looking up,
"What did you find?" Aran reached into his bag that was still strapped to his back, pulling out the Hogyoku and setting it gently onto the tabletop. The moment he set it down the Urahara snatched it up and tossed it to Tessai, who quickly put it into a small metal box he was carrying before and locked it before moving out of the room, presumably to put it somewhere safe for later. Silence reigned for about a minute before the creepy shopkeeper came to a decision, closing his fan shut with a sudden snap. His eyes pierced through Aran's placid expression as a goofy grin came onto his face.
"Well, if you're not lying, why don't we have a little demonstration to see how strong you are?" Nel, who had until then stayed quiet in a corner with Pesche and Dondochakka, pumped a tiny fist in the air and cheered.
Urahara ushered almost everyone (he sent Orihime to go and rest in one of his guest rooms, seeing as she had quite the lengthy journey to return home) down into his underground training room. Aran had mumbled almost inaudibly under his breath, something along the lines of "looks like Perion" and "Winston's quests," but Urahara didn't pay much more attention to that as everyone in the group moved a supposedly safe distance away from Aran, who stood quite confused and looked back at him.
"Aran, try using your Final Blow on one of those rocks over there," Urahara pointed with his fan at a moderately sized rock. The warrior nodded once, swinging his beloved Maha from his back and into both of his hands expertly. Concentrating, he focused on directing his Mana into his arms and through his weapon before whispering sharply,
"Polearm Booster!" The ethereal image of a blue, double-sided pole-arm emerged in quick wisps of Mana from his body and hovered over his head for a short moment before vanishing; Aran could feel his arms strengthening once more in this familiar action, making his pole-arm feel three times lighter as he swung an overhead hit at an invisible enemy, followed by two fierce, sweeping rushes of a Double Swing, the raw power emanating from his hits creating small craters in the dirt from impact.
Seamlessly transitioning from his Double Swing to his Triple Swing with a short battle shout, as he had practiced those basic moves since even before his time while cursed in the ice, his third swing had effortlessly sent a small shockwave to the rocks on front of him as he slammed his weapon down, cleaving a poor boulder ten yards away into half before it disintegrated from the sheer force of the power of Aran.
Readying himself for the final attack, Aran cried out the incredibly familiar name of the skill as he felt the immense power flowing from his large Mana reserves and taking shape in his spirit as he swung the last hit,
"FINAL BLOW!"
From his viewpoint, Renji knew that Aran hadn't been kidding when he said that he broke through the walls of Las Noches with his skills. He even made it seem like he did that every day multiple times without breaking a sweat.
Initially, his first swing seemed quite boring and standard despite its increased speed and power after he said some kind of weird enchantment with the ghostly pole-arm image, but the Double Swing was much more interesting as it caused the man to quickly teleport between two short distances back and forth once with a sweeping motion that immediately blasted apart two mid-sized rocks into tiny pieces.
Aran's Triple Swing was even more exciting to look at as it made him jump up in the air with the a speed barely traceable to the trained eye and slam down his weapon with a force he could feel, that from the aftershocks, it may even rival Ikkaku's power, all the while gracefully landing back onto the ground without a hint of exertion.
However, the strange warrior's Final Blow was even more monstrously powerful and fascinating than any of his previous skills. The shout itself from the man seemed to make the boulders tremble as his swing not only created a giant dust cloud and high-magnitude earthquake from the impact, but also conjured up a frightening clear (through the dust) image of a huge, enraged luminescent polar bear slamming both of its paws down onto the rock Urahara had pointed out a minute ago, completely decimating the boulder into even more dust particles that frustratingly clouded his vision.
Waving away the dust and coughing slightly, Renji's jaw unhinged (he could hear Rukia's mouth hitting the ground too) as he stared at the results.
Or rather, the remains of half of Urahara's underground training grounds. Not only had the targeted rock completely turned into dust but all the other rocks within ten yards had entirely crumbled into powder as an incredibly deep crater spanned from where Aran's pole-arm had dug into the ground all the way across the rest of the room and running up the walls, nearly having split the ground entirely in half with a crack the size of three San Andreas Fault lines.
Aran stood up from his ending crouch smoothly, hefted his weapon onto his shoulder, and studied the chasm he created, looking as if he had been just asked to go and pick flowers as he commented wistfully, "I was right in not adding any more buffs other than the booster; it would've exploded this entire room from the force."
Urahara froze in horror at the mention of further destruction to his basement, Ichigo paled at the thought of even more power, Renji fainted in general, and Rukia whipped out her smartphone and quickly changed her Facebook status to single.
Somewhere up in Soul Society, Kenpachi felt a surge of powerful reiatsu and grinned sadistically as he picked up Yachiru and announced that they were going on a field trip to the human world to fight something possibly even stronger than Ichigo.
It was a quite sad day when Aran, who had been hailed (yet again) a semi-hero for blowing up the headquarters of their enemies and killing most of the Arrancar and Hollows through it and successfully matching the fearsome Kenpachi in a duel that eventually ended in a bloody stalemate, had finally figured out how to leave their world after some weird old guy he called 'Grendel the Really Old' popped up in some sort of hologram in front of them during dinner one day a few weeks after his initial appearance in this strange dimension. It was sort of embarrassing and creepy, but at least now he was able to return home… he was pretty sure that Lilan would have his head on a platter the moment he stepped through the specially configured portal in Urahara's basement, but the fact he was going back was enough to stem the inevitable horror of Lilan's Rage ™.
"So…" Renji sauntered up next to Aran who, earlier, had swapped the clothes he borrowed while staying here for the outfit he originally wore before being blasted into this world and was currently polishing Maha in the living room of Urahara's Shoten, "Was that your girlfriend that the really old guy kept saying was really angry and was going to kill you for leaving? Y'know, she's kind of hot (not comparing her to Rukia, of course)—and her name's Lillian or someth-?"
At the slight butchering of her name, Maha found itself resting threateningly against Renji's throat as Aran calmly replied, "Her name is Lilan, and she's my wife."
The pineapple-redhead raised his arms up in his defense and drawled out, "Sheesh, I was just asking…wait, YOUR WIFE?"
But by then, Aran had Combat Stepped into the basement and slipped through the portal cast by Grendel that temporarily connected his world to this one.
The first thing that alerted Aran to the fact that he had successfully arrived at Rien was a random frying pan that hit him in the face, the rib-crushing hug from a simultaneously sobbing and laughing Lilan, and the ear-deafening cheers of hundreds of penguins.
Yep, it was good to be home.