His nerves are frayed to hell just trying to navigate the hospital. The place is crawling with masked monsters—hollows. Doors are smashed, desks and beds overturned, clear signs of struggle everywhere, but he's seen no uninfected humans yet. Just blood splattered on walls and, in one room, the remains of one.
The corridors are all blind corners and white walls and he can hardly tell one apart from another. Ryuuken's trying to direct him over the phone, but Ichigo isn't even sure where he currently is. He rounds a corner and manages to almost run into a hollow. His foot lashes out in a kick that catches it in the torso and slams it into the far wall.
"All right?" Ryuuken says.
Ichigo grunts. "Just about."
He has to go down the hallway he'd thrown the hollow down, and it quickly gets to its feet and charges to meet him. He slips his phone into his pocket to free up his hand, then grabs the hollow's swinging claw, yanks it off balance and to the floor, and smashes its mask and skull together with a kick.
He grabs the phone out of his pocket again as he runs. "Right or left?"
"Right. Ought to be, at least."
Ichigo nods and heads down the hallway. He immediately hears a howl and the sounds of claws against wood. He skids around the next corner and spots two hollows, one pounding at a heavy wooden door, the other pacing on all fours behind it.
"Oi!" he shouts. The hollows immediately turn to him.
"Don't be reckless," Ryuuken says tersely.
Ichigo dodges past the first slow strike and sinks his claws into the inside of its elbow. He leaps over its next swipe and kicks its head into the wall. He lands behind it. Before he can find his footing, a lashing tail slams into him out of nowhere, his ribs crunching under its spiked end. The phone skitters out of his hand.
"Kurosaki!" Ryuuken says. Ichigo can hear him clear through the door. "I told you not to take risks!"
Ichigo picks himself up, shaking his head to clear it. His wound is already regenerating. He's almost used to it by now.
"Kurosaki, get down!" Ryuuken shouts. A second later, the door slams open. A silver-haired man wearing a doctor's coat stands in the doorway, wielding a handgun which he immediately swerves to point at the hollow attacking Ichigo. With three cracks, three bullets bury in its skull. He turns it on the smaller hollow and fires once, but the bullet deflects off the horns on its forehead. He pulls the trigger again and the gun clicks.
Before the hollow can make a move, Ichigo tackles it and pins it to the floor, driving his claws into its unarmored throat until it stops struggling.
He looks up and his eyes meet with the silver-haired man's.
The man backs away, pointing the gun at Ichigo and seemingly forgetting it's unloaded. "Kurosaki! What is—"
His left leg buckles underneath his weight and he has to grab at the doorframe to stay upright. His foot looks swollen, wrapped in gauze and taped to a makeshift splint.
"Ryuuken-san," Ichigo says. "You okay?"
Ryuuken raises an eyebrow at him. "You're asking me? Who's the one covered in blood?"
Ichigo shrugs with one shoulder. "I'm better off than you." He sticks a hand out to the doctor. "Come on, let's got out of here."
Ryuuken stares at his hand, then at him. "You said you got bitten."
Ichigo turns away with a scowl. "I did." He glances down the hallway. "Hurry up. Before anything else turns up here."
"Can I trust you?" Ryuuken says.
"Will you stay here if you don't?"
"No." Ryuuken takes Ichigo's hand and lets him lend a shoulder for support as he hobbles.
"You don't know me. Why'd you come help me?"
"You know something about all this," Ichigo says. "If you're the one responsible then we're going to have a problem with each other. If you know a way to fix it, then I need you. Either way, I can't have you die here."
"I can't fix it," Ryuuken says.
Ichigo's silent for several seconds as they navigate the hospital's corridors. "I'm gonna save you anyway."
"The main lobby's the other direction," Ryuuken says.
"Too many hollows. I didn't enter through there."
"Then where?"
"The parking lot was crawling with hollows, all mobbing the entrances. I climbed to the second floor and busted in through a window."
"Climbing down from the second floor isn't exactly ideal for me, Kurosaki."
"I get that! I'm trying to think! You come up with something."
"We have to get to the basement first," Ryuuken says. "I need access to the weapons store there."
"There's a weapons store in the basement? Of the hospital?"
"You don't need to worry about it. The access stairs are that way."
"There are hollows that way."
"I think you'll find that there are hollows every way."
Ichigo sighs shortly. He leaves Ryuuken to cover his back, takes a breath, and jumps into the fray before his misgivings can stop him. The rhythm of battle is just ingrained habit by now—dodge that swipe, slash that tendon, that artery, duck out of the spray of blood that follows.
He takes a step back, breathing hard and watching one hollow fall to the ground before him—then nearly gets beheaded by a set of heavy claws. He leaps back, catches the arm strike thrown at him, but its force throws him off his feet and slams him into the wall behind him.
He growls and, bracing his feet against the wall, twists the arm to one side, sending the huge hollow slamming into its smaller companion and hurling them both to the floor. He gets up, pain stabbing through his ribs every time he breathes, his knees nearly buckling when they take his weight. He has to force himself to take every step, but he reaches the hollows before they get up and dispatches both with a claw to the throat.
He looks back to check on Ryuuken and finds the man studying him with a frown. "You're exhausted."
"I'm not…" He trails off as he realizes the denial is pointless. How many hollows has he fought, how many near-fatal wounds has he had to regenerate from? He's been running on nothing but adrenaline ever since the start of this nightmare. He might be still on his feet only thanks to sheer stubbornness by now. There's some part of his mind that just wants to curl up in a corner and scream until all of this stops being real.
He shakes his head. "It's not like we can stop." Though it's more like if he stops, he might never get back up.
Ryuuken sighs. "Basement for now. Then I know of a safe place. This hospital was supposed to be our stronghold, but it's been compromised. We'll have to hope my colleague has managed better for himself."
"What does that mean?" Ichigo says. Either Ryuuken really has been insane all along or Ichigo doesn't understand this situation at all.
Ryuuken doesn't respond so Ichigo switches tracks. "Why are there so many hollows in here anyway?"
Ryuuken gives him an assessing look. "The infection originated here. I was lax. An enemy caught up with me."
"Would this be another colleague?" Ichigo says. Ryuuken doesn't say anything else until they arrive at the basement room, which is behind a solid-looking featureless steel door. It glides soundlessly open when Ryuuken presses his hand against some kind of scanner device Ichigo's never seen the likes of before.
Ryuuken disappears into the room and leaves Ichigo outside. Ichigo tries the scanner out of part curiosity and part boredom and gets a result of 'reiatsu not identified, access denied'.
Ryuuken emerges twenty minutes later and tosses a small black and silver device to him, a curved tube with a grip that fits comfortably in his hand and a faint blue glow spilling from its ends.
"What's this?"
In response, Ryuuken holds up an identical one and light bursts from the ends in a flash that forces Ichigo to look away. When he looks back, two slightly arching limbs extend from both ends into the shape of a slim blue-white bow, seemingly constructed of solid light.
"A spirit bow," Ryuuken says. "My own creation."
Ichigo turns over the one in his hand. "How's that work?"
"There's no time to teach you," Ryuuken says. "Just hold onto that. Heads up."
Ichigo snatches another small metal gadget out of the air—a straight tube, purely silver, with faint blue light emitting from one end.
"That should be more suited to you. A Seele Schneider. Feed your reiryoku into it and it will manifest a blade designed to cut through spiritual bodies."
Ichigo stares at him. "Spiritual bodies?"
"Do you think a hollow is any sort of physical creature belonging to this realm? Put your spiritual energy into it."
"My…" Ichigo frowns at the silver tube, turning it over in his hands, then looks back at Ryuuken. "What's that now?"
Ryuuken looks like he's trying hard not to sigh. "You've been pulling off superhuman feats all this time. That's you using your innate spirit energy, albeit unconsciously, to augment your natural capabilities. Channeling it to your injuries to heal them, to your limbs to enhance your strength, endurance, and reflexes, to your feet to move faster than physically possible. So now you need to consciously control the flow of that energy and channel it into that weapon."
Spiritual energy? He has felt a drain on something inside him every time he's used his regeneration. But his regeneration is instinct. It'd take more effort on his part to have it not kick in. And even the fast movement he's managed—he feels like he wouldn't be able to do it if he was thinking about how. He barely even knows what his spirit energy is, let alone how to direct it.
He knows one trick. He feels for the flame blazing bright inside him and flares it as high as he can, until his power shakes the air around him. The tube in his hand bursts into raging black energy that forms a rough blade at one end, crackling like a lightning bolt in his grip and surging around his hand. He drops it with a wince. The blade vanishes, clattering to the ground as a hilt once again.
Ichigo flexes his hand gingerly, watching the minor burns heal. He reaches down and picks up the hilt, still smoking.
Ryuuken looks a bit pale. He turns toward the door. "Never mind. Figure it out on the way. We better get going."
Urahara busts inside the clinic to find a hollow tearing at Isshin's body. He dispatches the hollow with a single blow and leans down to Isshin to check vital signs, only confirming what his sensors have already told him—no one is alive in the house.
Ichigo can't be dead too, can he? It seems clear what happened here, with the shattered glass, the smashed drywall and furniture, the splatters of blood covering the floor. Urahara prays to every god he doesn't believe in that the boy's alive.
He sighs, standing up by Isshin's side. "I'm sorry." he says. "My contingencies failed. It really is the worst-case scenario after all."
Upstairs, he finds the bodies of Ichigo's sisters, covered in claw marks, blood splashing the walls and floor around them. No marks of teeth. A hollow didn't get to them? But the claws…
He brings out his scanner and has it perform another search for Ichigo's spirit energy, this time lowering the recognition threshold. Instantly, he finds a 68% match, a strange and powerful reiatsu lingering around the clinic and on the girls' bodies. His initial analysis just says it's close to a hollow's. What could that mean? He's already closely analyzed every type of hollow he knows. His system wouldn't fail to identify one.
He increases the range of the scan and halfway across town, picks up the same signal again at the Karakura General Hospital. Strange. What could Ichigo want there?
...Could it be Ryuuken?
Ichigo doesn't know. He's certain he doesn't know. But he's unmistakably at the hospital run by Urahara's colleague, the only other human who knows what's going on, and Urahara can even weakly detect Ryuuken near Ichigo.
If he's that close to a hollow, then Urahara will get there too late.
He really does fail everyone around him.
Two hollows are smashing their way through the main lobby. Ichigo leaps forward, the Seele Schneider in hand, and cuts them down with one slash each.
Half his concentration is just going toward maintaining the blade's shape and making sure it doesn't explode in his hands, and he's never used a sword before anyway. It's unwieldy to fight this way. Part of him just longs to do what comes naturally to him, hand-to-hand, but the sword cleaves through hide and armor and bone alike with hardly any resistance. He can't say it isn't helpful.
"Is the room clear?" Ryuuken says from the hallway behind him. Ichigo opens his mouth and then a hollow leaps in from outside with a crash of glass, smashing an even bigger hole through an already shattered window
A glowing bolt whizzes through the air past Ichigo and slams through the hollow's skull. It tumbles back with a wail and collapses, its body fading. Ichigo turns to see Ryuuken behind him, bow changed into a small crossbow so he can balance on his crutch with his other hand.
The lobby is quiet. Ryuuken steps out into it carefully. "You said there were a lot of hollows."
"Maybe they left," Ichigo says, almost hopefully.
They creep across the reception area, keeping to walls and behind desks, and by the time they're halfway across they're walking openly, Ryuuken's crutch clacking with every step, broken glass and plaster crunching under Ichigo's feet.
Why is this place so silent? Has he really never noticed how loud these sounds were before?
Ichigo peers out one of the broken front windows, back pressed against the wall next to it. "I'm gonna go check," he mutters, jumping through it outside.
"Wait," Ryuuken hisses. "Don't just—"
Ichigo slips on some shards of glass and lands unbalanced. He barely has time to look up and take in the packed parking lot, the smoking and overturned cars. A huge force slams into him like a sledgehammer and sends him flying.
He lands on the asphalt so hard he bounces, tumbling until his back hits a wall. He can't help the wild scream that comes from him at the jolt of pain through his shoulder. Glass on the floor cuts into his arms and cheek. Lying crumpled against the wall, he blinks dazedly as multiple huge shadows fall on him. Hollows, about a dozen of them, surrounding him in a tight circle, with more prowling the parking lot aimlessly or flocking to his location.
"Kurosaki!" Ryuuken shouts. From the sounds of his crutch, he's hurrying toward the window the best he can.
"Stay back!" Ichigo shouts hoarsely. He scrabbles in the dust, finding the Seele Schneider he dropped and wrapping his fingers around its hilt. He tries to pick himself up, but his shoulder erupts in pain like his bones are dissolving in acid and he collapses back on the floor in a tangle of limbs. He can't even think about moving his arm. Is it broken? It's dislocated at best.
The hollows around him don't attack, just cut off his escape and watch his every move with dull glowing eyes. They look almost as if they're waiting for something.
Ichigo props himself up on one elbow, breathing hard. The crowd of hollows parts to let a creature bigger than themselves through. Its shadow falls over Ichigo—a truck-sized four-legged beast covered in ragged grey fur and looking like a cross between a cat, an ankylosaurus, and a siege weapon. White armor covers its back, shoulders, and tail, studded with spikes the length of swords. It bares an eerily humanlike grin at Ichigo, flashing canines long enough to jut out of its mouth.
It turns to the hollows behind it and growls lowly. One by one, they disperse, wandering away across the parking lot or sniffing at the window Ryuuken's behind.
Ichigo gets up, forcing short hissed breaths through clenched teeth. He props himself against the wall behind him and gingerly feels his shoulder. The joint's definitely dislocated. He takes a shaky breath to steady himself, clamps his teeth down on his hand, and rams his shoulder into the wall behind him.
The explosion of pain sets lights dancing in front of his eyes. He can't quite keep back a choked cry from the back of his throat. He tastes blood and lets go of his hand to find his teeth have broken skin.
The pain in his shoulder quickly fades. When he can move it again, he flexes it to make sure it still works, then dives out of the way as the hollow pounces. A swipe of its paw reduces the wall behind him to rubble.
He straightens up, wiping blood from his cheek and backing up to try and draw the hollow away from Ryuuken. Behind its huge shape, he sees a flurry of blue arrows fly from the broken window and cut down the first rank of hollows. So Ryuuken's switched back to his longbow. He should be able to hold back the hollows for a good while, but he also can't walk with his broken ankle while wielding a bow with both hands.
Ichigo turns his attention back to the cat hollow. "Hey, big ugly! You wanna go one-on-one? I'd be glad to."
He doesn't have the start of an idea for how to defeat it, but he's not feeling in the most rational mood today. He activates the Seele Schneider, the red and black energy of its blade crackling hungrily in his hands.
The hollow growls, sounding amused. "You're weak, child. It's I who will feast today."
"Oh," Ichigo says. "It talks."
"What?" the hollow says, sounding affronted. "Of course I talk. Don't you?"
Ichigo twitches. "I… I'm not a hollow!"
The hollow's growl sounds like laughter this time. They charge at each other, Ichigo jumping to one side at the last moment. As it barrels past him, he leaps and his sword bites into the armor plate on its shoulder, drawing a spray of blood.
It snarls and turns around, but Ichigo's already leapt onto its back. He grabs onto a curved spike and raises his sword, only for the hollow to swing a heavy armor-plated tail at him, tipped with a vicious-looking spur of bone like a mace. Ichigo leaps off, but its tail catches his foot in midair, a spike ripping into his ankle.
He lands hard on one leg and falls, the flare of pain through his ankle taking his breath away. His concentration on his weapon falters and the blade flickers and vanishes. Gritting his teeth, he looks up to see the hollow charging, feet cracking concrete as they slam into the ground, raising one paw to bring dagger-sized claws down on him.
Ichigo lifts the Seele Schneider and activates it just in time to block the claws as they swing down. His back hits the ground, his arms straining to hold the hollow back. He turns the blade and slashes up, slicing through a claw and two of its toes.
The cat yowls and draws its paw back. It hobbles away, leaving blood droplets across the ground as it makes distance for another charge.
Ichigo gets up, gingerly putting weight on his injured foot, only for a stab of pain to shoot through his ankle. It's not as debilitating as before, though. He grimaces and stays standing, holding his sword in front of him in what he recalls as a basic kendo pose.
At a shattering sound of glass, he looks back. A hollow had thrust its head through one of the lobby windows, only to reel back with several arrows stuck through its skull, crashing to the ground. The surrounding hollows seem to be drawing closer. And isn't Ryuuken shooting less arrows than he was?
Ichigo turns and runs for Ryuuken. A huge weight slams into his back, claws scoring brands of pain through his flesh. It throws him to the dust, sending him sprawling. His mind curses himself over and over as he struggles upright, breathing harshly, warm blood trickling down his back.
"Fool boy," the cat sneers. "The human's as good as dead. Stand and face me."
Ichigo gets up slowly, gritting his teeth at the pain in his foot. His wounds aren't healing, he realizes with a chill. He's out of energy.
He raises his sword, trying to steady his trembling hands, and dives to one side as the hollow's tail plows a furrow into the ground beside him. His injured leg collapses and he falls to one knee. The hollow swipes down with his tail again. He holds his sword over his head, deflecting its tip off the edge and scoring a deep gouge into the bone.
A swinging paw slams into his chest, the tip of one claw slicing between his ribs. It sends him tumbling across the ground, his sword clattering out of his hand, shards of broken stone and metal grazing his skin. He struggles to prop himself up. His chest and back burn every time he breathes. His eyes take a long time to focus on the hollow, who's prowling toward him at a leisurely pace, sure in its victory.
Ichigo kneels on his hands and knees, his head throbbing, just trying to breathe. His limbs won't respond to him. Is he going to die here?
The hollow raises one huge paw, extending gleaming black claws.
He's not gonna die here!
The claws swing down and Ichigo ducks them and grabs the hollow's leg. A surge of foreign strength floods through him, like burning electricity through his limbs. He stands and yanks the hollow off its feet, throwing it to the ground hard enough to shatter concrete. His sword is blazing with energy in his hand again. He leaps at the fallen hollow, lashing out with his blade. It severs its paw with no resistance.
The hollow howls in pain, scrabbling at the ground. "How? What did you do? You were supposed to be dying! Die already!"
Its words cut off as Ichigo thrusts his sword through its throat.
He yanks it out. Blood splatters across his already-stained clothes and face. Blinking slowly, he raises a hand and wipes at it across his cheek. He stares at his hand and licks it, smearing blood across his mouth.
A wild laugh comes from his lips, high and veering on the edge of insanity. A vicious smile spreads across his face. Raising his sword, he advances on the hollow, who fixes one dimming green eye on him in a look of fury and terror.
The sound of broken glass comes from behind him. Ichigo pauses, frowning vaguely. What is it? He's forgetting—
He turns to see Ryuuken trapped in a hollow's hand, struggling and cursing. He manages to get one arm free and instantly a thin blue blade appears in his hand, forged of the same solid light as his bow. He slashes upward at the hollow's wrist with a spray of blood. It howls and drops him. Ryuuken lands on his broken ankle and collapses with a hoarse scream.
The sound's like someone dumped a bucket of cold water on Ichigo. "No," he gasps, stumbling forward.
One of the hollows surrounding Ryuuken pounces. The man's lying on the ground unmoving.
Ichigo runs. The world blurs around him as he pumps energy to his feet. He breaks into the center of the crowd of hollows, grabs Ryuuken, and turns around with his blade lashing at the attacking hollow and cleaving its mask in two. The rest let loose a cacophony of howls and advance. Ichigo stands and howls back, with enough savagery to make the hollows hesitate.
"Kurosaki," Ryuuken groans. "What are you doing? You can't beat them all."
Ichigo glances at him. Ryuuken stiffens. Ichigo turns away. He doesn't know what the man sees in his eyes.
He sets Ryuuken on the ground and takes a step toward the hollows. They all watch him, none willing to attack. His reiatsu lashes around him like living darkness, making some back away.
He raises one hand, fingers curled, a spark of red light gathering between his claws and becoming a tightly-focused orb of energy.
He's come this far. He refuses to die, he refuses to fail, he refuses to give up any more than he already has.
Anything in his way can just disappear.
"Cero!" he roars.
A tidal wave of red light drowns out everything. Ichigo stumbles a step back, planting his feet against the force of the blast. The heat takes the breath from his lungs and the roar makes the very air tremble. Ichigo almost collapses when the attack dissipates.
He lets his arm drop to his side, breathing raggedly. The hollows nearest him had been incinerated, several more lying on the ground disintegrating. The stragglers hang back, eyes pinned to him and unwilling to approach.
Ichigo steps forward, tries to call upon his powers, and it seems like all the fatigue he hadn't felt until this moment crashes down on him at once. Before he knows it, his knees hit the floor. The cut through his ribs and the gashes across his back burn dully. He looks up. A weight drags at his eyelids as he focuses on the handful of remaining hollows.
"Kurosaki!" says a voice from behind him. Ryuuken. "What did you do? Are you alright?"
Ichigo blinks at him over his shoulder. "Ryuuken. I'm sorry."
He slumps to the ground, his eyes sliding shut. The concrete is hard and cold and its rough surface presses against his cheek, but he feels none of it. He really could take a nap here, he thinks.
"Kurosaki," Ryuuken hisses. "The hollows are approaching!"
Ichigo cracks his eyes open to see a glowing arrow streak toward a hollow, only for a clawed hand to bat it out of the air easily. Ryuuken's crouched over him, bow drawn. Blood drips from where the string had cut into his fingers, and his hand clutches the bow too tensely. The man's clearly near his limit too.
Ichigo failed. He wasn't strong enough. They both die here.
He closes his eyes. What was he living for anyway? Running on borrowed time.
A hum that doesn't seem purely electrical fills the air. He hears a sharp intake of breath from Ryuuken. "You!"
Ichigo forces his eyes open for the second time, just as a strangely-dressed man jumps out of the air in front of him, wooden clogs clacking on the asphalt. He's wearing a strange contraption strapped to his back that looks like a clunky black jetpack, a blue glow emanating from the bottom of its thrusters that fades away as the man lands. When the hum stops, Ichigo realizes that it had sounded similar to his activated Seele Schneider.
The man gives the machine a run for its money in terms of strangeness. He wears a dark coat and old-fashioned clothes, and a striped bucket hat traps his unruly blonde hair to his head. He glances back at Ryuuken with a criminally cheerful grin. "Long time no see, Ishida-san! Wish we could be meeting under better circumstances. Ah, this is what happens when you decline all my invitations to tea. Time flies by and the next thing you know you're trying to catch up on old things while hell on earth is unfolding all around you."
"I have no intention of catching up, Urahara," Ryuuken says coldly. "Tell me you have a way out of here."
"But certainly," the man says. His eyes fall on Ichigo and his grin falters for the first time. "Ah, that one you have there wouldn't be the Kurosaki kid?"
"I'll explain later," Ryuuken says. "Make yourself useful now."
Urahara puts a hand on his hat. "Of course." he turns around, facing the hollows, and draws a thin metal sword from his cane. He holds it up. "Awaken, Benihime."
Ichigo closes his eyes, but flashes of crimson light still seem to stab through his eyelids. At some point, he falls into an uneasy sleep.
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