So, remember how I said that the changes between this version and the original one was minor for the previous chapter? Well, here's where the clues to bigger changes are coming in. Like, I seriously redesigned my OC (I can't believe I spent a whole week on her) so to those who are old readers, I hope you'll still like her.

I might upload her profile/background info on my profile page when we cover more of her later on in the story, as well as my ideas on how the Bleach universe works.

Warnings: Maybe-semi-SI (I'm not sure), OCs, anime-typical violence, AU-ish, and time is a funny thing (details found before the chapters affected). Also, I first wrote this before I read the Fullbringer's arc and will continue with the ideas I have then. 'New' canon information that contradicts my theories of how things work will likely be ignored.


Chapter Four: Segunda Espada


"Always hope for the best, and expect the worst."


"Had a pleasant day, Sangre?" Aizen asked in a suspiciously polite tone.

Sangre was not really having a pleasant day, but she had a feeling that whichever way she answered, her reply could easily be twisted to her disadvantage. So she kept her mouth shut and fidgeted with her sword, and got momentarily distracted by the realisation that it had no sheath.

She tested the edge of the silver blade with a finger, and while the blade had looked sharp, it didn't cut her hand. Sangre was sure she should be concerned with a blunt blade, but at the moment, having a sharp blade without a sheath would have been more worrying. So, satisfied, she raised her sword and let its blade rest comfortably across her shoulder the way one might usually carry a pole weapon.

Then she noticed Aizen watching her with an amused look, and hastily rearranged her expression to something more contrite. This too appeared to be amusing to the Shinigami.

"So," he began when he finally had her attention, making her feel like she was a child standing in front of a school principal. "How does it feel having defeated both your peers as well as your senior?"

Aizen's choice of words did not help.

And when it appeared that the Shinigami would no take silence as an answer, Sangre finally deadpanned, "Oh, it was just awful."

He raised an eyebrow at this. Sangre wondered if he had a sense of humour. She hoped he had.

"I didn't mean to beat them, Aizen-sama... But I just felt so... attacked," She delivered this with a straight face, then when she saw his other eyebrow rise as well, she threw in an extra-fake-and-cold smile. (She had a lot of smiles she didn't often use. Best to keep the good ones for when she really needed them).

But aside from raised eyebrows, Aizen did not react to her response in any way. A person with the right sense of humour would have chuckled, while most people might have rolled their eyes or made an exasperated remark about her use of puns, and others might have sensed the amount of hostility she had actually imbued into her words and smile and wisely retreat.

Aizen was none of these people.

Instead, he merely tilted his head the barest of fractions and seemed to contemplate something silently. His eyes were still fixed on Sangre, so she wasn't sure if he was ignoring her or not, but whatever he was thinking about, it took a long time of mulling and his stare was starting to get—

She barely kept her face from twitching as the possibility of Aizen doing this on purpose to disturb her occurred to her. She needed a distraction.

Swords usually come with sheaths, right?

The voice in her head was dry, If you must, you may swallow it.

Sangre nearly choked. What?

Stick it down your throat. Keep it in your esophagus. Maybe you'll gain a sharper tongue that way.

Sangre returned her attention to Aizen, who was now smiling that eerie smile of his again. A part of her—the ridiculous part—was disgruntled that he appeared to have creepier smiles than she had. The other part of her was starting to get worried about the voice in her head. Unfortunately for her, she didn't have much time to think about either of these further, because the Shinigami had turned his back the moment he gained back her attention and had begun to walk away.

"Come with me," he threw out to her, back still turned. Sangre briefly entertained the thought of throwing her sword at his back, but knew that she'd probably be killed in half the time it took for her blade to reach him, so she reigned in her reiatsu, hefted her sword and followed after him like an obedient dog.

Is there really no way to carry this around more easily? She asked when she realised that blunt or not, having a blade digging into one's neck was still not comfortable, and the sword was kind of long if she were to carry it in her hands instead of on her shoulder.

It's Kagerō.

Pardon?

The technique is called Meisai(迷彩: Camouflage), and the command is "Hikaru (光る: Glimmer)."

Sangre stopped in her tracks and pulled the sword off her shoulder. She had no idea what exactly the voice was telling her to do, but it hadn't given her bad instructions so far, aside from the earlier joke about knife-swallowing (which she hoped was really a joke).

She stared at it for a while, wondering if she was really about to command the sword to... do something. Every other technique she had used before had come to her instinctively, without the need for any incantation or command. This sounded like it was bordering on magic.

Sangre blinked several times, squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again.

She could see her reflection in the polished surface of her sword, and while previously she had been too busy admiring the weapon, this time she noticed what she couldn't believe she didn't notice before.

For one, her eyes were no longer the dark violet colour they once were. In fact, they didn't look normal at all. Instead, she now had a blood-red left eye, and her entire right eye appeared to be nothing more than an inky darkness (but she could see out of it, so it couldn't just be a hollow eye socket), which made her blink several times in an attempt to correct what she perceive to be a mistake, because her face now looked seriously creepy.

For another... Her hair had not only been cropped shorter than before (and her hair when she had been human hasn't been much longer than chin-length), as she had discovered earlier, but it was also sporting a strange new colour—some sort of bright golden tinged with pale green, as if someone had used a cat's iris as a palette and dyed her hair and eyebrows with it.

Sangre was even more alarmed now. She liked her hair black, and even if she were to dye it, she'd choose a really dark colour, like wine red or navy blue.

(The only bright side of having this ridiculous hair colour was that it detracted some of the creepiness of her eyes... Oh who was she kidding, she looked more like an alien than anything with practically luminous hair and one visible blood-red eye... Which made her wonder why the other Arrancars had tried to attack her when she looked like that. She wouldn't attack herself if she were them—she looked poisonous for heaven's sake).

Though a better question would be...Who dyed her hair anyway? Assuming it was dyed and not actually permanently this way?

The only person she could think of was unfortunately Aizen. He had been the one who turned her into an Arrancar, and she still did not know what that involved, so for all she knew, he could choose what hair colour the Hollow would end up having (especially if one considered the fact that many Hollows did not have hair until they became a Vasto Lorde or Arrancar). That would explain why Jaegerjaquez had that striking shade of blue as his hair colour, and she also recalled seeing someone with green hair and another with purple hair...

Sangre recalled her previous comparison of Las Noche to a school comprising of abnormally violent students, didn't know whether she should be horrified or amused at the idea that some of them could actually pass for human delinquents, considering how a lot of the Arrancars she had seen didn't appear older than 30 (their actual ages were another thing altogether, and Sangre suspected she might be the youngest spirit in Las Noche).

Focus.

Sangre startled at the sudden voice and shook her head. She'd ask Aizen later, maybe, after she was sure she wasn't going to be chopped up and fed to the other Arrancars for dinner.

Turning back to her sword and feeling a little silly, she muttered, "Hikaru, Kagerō."

Nothing happened for a beat, then soft silver light enveloped the blade and she watched as its form lengthen and change. When the light faded away, the weapon had turned from a sword to a polearm. It looked like a glaive with a black shaft that was probably two metres long, and a broad translucent blade as long as her forearm, with one edge curved like an ordinary blade and the other edge curved to form two hooks.

Sangre didn't think she had heard of a technique that could change the shape of one's Zanpakutō before. She spun the weapon around, but it didn't feel much different from its previous form despite the change in shape. She wasn't complaining, of course, but she was curious as to whether this change was just an illusion that could be dispelled or was it an actual change in the form of the weapon.

"Sangre."

The Arrancar looked up from her blade and realised that Aizen was no longer in sight. Filing her questions for later, she made a quick decision and tore off part of her sash, turned it into a makeshift harness for the polearm. Once the weapon was comfortably strapped across her back, she picked up her speed and sprinted to catch up with the Shinigami.

"You know," Aizen said the moment Sangre skidded to a stop behind him. "I can't have my Arrancars going around and killing one another as and when they feel like it. Especially when I've only just started building my army."

Here he paused, and Sangre wondered if it was just for the sake of dramatic effect. It was the sort of thing she would do. So she kept her expression neutral and tried not to worry about where this conversation was going...

(She recalled seeing the number 37 tattooed on her right cheek in bold black ink—further supporting her idea of younger Arrancars looking like delinquents and older ones looking like gangsters—which meant that she was the thirty-seventh Arrancar to be created by Aizen. She had also heard of naturally occurring Arrancar before, but she didn't think there were many of them. So there couldn't be more than forty of them in Las Noche at the moment... just enough for students to fill up either a large class or two small classes.)

"Fortunately, " Aizen finally continued, and Sangre quickly returned her attention back to him with a sheepish expression. He smiled genially back at her, but his dark eyes were as cold as ever. "We appear to have an Arrancar capable of stopping fights without maiming anyone. You should be glad to know I've found a use for you."

A part of Sangre was relieved to know that she wasn't going to become dinner, while another part of her was ringing alarm bells because she wasn't sure what 'use' Aizen meant for her to be. It appeared to be linked to her ability to fight combined with her reservation against unnecessary bloodshed (the general rule was that unless they had seriously pissed her off or if they were going to be eaten, there was no need to cut anyone up), so it couldn't be anything too bad, like being made to fight other Hollows in a gladiator match for entertainment, right?

Her thoughts wandering further, Sangre didn't realise the Shinigami had stopped moving until she nearly walked straight into him. She thanked the heavens that she didn't.

"Incidentally, have you chosen a last name for yourself?"

Sangre blinked at the random question. She already had a last name, but it was her human last name and she didn't think Hollows needed last names... Though Louisenbairn had a last name and Jaegerjaquez was also likely a last name though she couldn't tell because it was Spanish and she didn't know what was normal for a Spanish first name and what wasn't.

What's Spanish for 'Yoruka' (夜火: Night-fire)?

What makes you think I know Spanish?

Sangre thought the voice had a point, considering how it had just taught her a technique in Japanese, when everyone else seemed to have a tendency of using Spanish phrases and names. 'Cero' was an example, 'Hueco Mundo' was another, not to mention every evolutionary stage from 'Menos Grande' to 'Arrancar'.

Aporruon.

Aporruon? What does that mean?

It's not Spanish, was all the voice was willing to explain.

"Aporruon," Sangre said to Aizen. "Sangre Aporruon."

The Shinigami nodded to himself. Peering around the taller spirit, Sangre found that they were standing at the entrance of a conference-room-like hall. There was a long table in the middle and seated around it were a few Arrancars. Sangre recognised some of them from her exploration trip around Las Noche.

There was Jaegerjaquez, whose blue hair automatically drew her attention. Then there was the violet-haired girl who was seated right beside him. On her other side was an Arrancar with normal black hair but looked like a really emo clown because of his pale face, eyebrows that looked like they had been thickened with black paint, and a teal-coloured line running down each cheek like tear marks. But right opposite him was the young woman with green hair.

She counted the number of people with weird hair colour—there were five including the guy with burnt orange Afro hair that was brighter than her classmate's hair colour, and the guy whose entire head was just covered by some strange white helmet. Then she counted the number of people who looked remotely normal—there was only one guy and he was dozing off in his seat. The remaining three consisted of a large man with a weird-shaped head and orange eyebrows despite the fact that his hair was black, an unnaturally long guy with an eyepatch and a smile that had too much teeth, and the sad-looking guy that reminded Sangre of the faceless ghost from Spirited Away.

A sudden realisation came to her and after confirming that the perceivable reiatsu of everyone in the room was at a similar level to Louisenbairn's, she jerked her head to stare up at Aizen.

He merely inclined his head towards the room, wordlessly prompting her to enter ahead of him, an amused smile playing across his weasel-like face.

Sangre instinctively reinforced her skin with reiryoku as she stepped into the gathering of Espada, feeling most of their eyes follow her movements like watchful cats. Jaegerjaquez's in particular felt like it could burn through her if looks could kill... or if he were capable of firing ceros out of his eyes. (Sangre wondered if she should attempt apologising to him about his Fracción).

"Welcome, my dear Espada," said Aizen as he entered the room after her. "As you can see, Baraggan is not with us today, and will not be joining us in the future. That is because we have a new member in the team." He gestured to the youngest Arrancar. "This is Sangre Aporruon. She will be replacing Baraggan as Segundo Espada."

Sangre swallowed a hiccup. What?

Everyone else in the room appeared to have similar reservations, though the pirate-slenderman was the only one openly sneering at her, while the rest of those with visible facial expression (this automatically disqualified the one whose entire head was covered, the one who looked like he might fall back asleep anytime, and the emo-clown) simply looked like they were doubting Aizen's sanity but were unwilling to express their opinions on the matter.

She didn't blame them. If Aizen has been her peer, Sangre thought she would most likely have grabbed him by his collar and demanded to know if he actually thought she was stronger than eight of the Arrancars in the room. She was also curious if she would be able to draw out a outburst from one of the current Espada by announcing both her soul's actual age (thirteen years) and her Hollow age (three weeks).

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how one looked at it), before she could be tempted to try, Aizen actually invited the Espada to ask questions if they had any. Sangre couldn't tell if he genuinely wanted to hear their questions or if there was a threat hidden in his invitation.

But the violet-haired girl took him up to it, and raised her hand. Now that Sangre was paying more attention to her, she noticed that the Arrancar looked less like a delinquent and more like a fan of Gothic-Lolita fashion, because her outfit actually had frills and puffy sleeves, her violet curls looked carefully styled and she also wore fingerless evening gloves.

"Aizen-sama, what happened to Baraggan?" She asked. Something in the way she spoke made it quite clear to Sangre that she didn't care about Louisenbairn himself, but was simply eager to hear about what kind of misfortune had befallen him.

However, it appeared that it was a question that a few of them were also curious about, namely the pirate-slenderman and the strange-browed giant. Some of the others looked like they already knew what happened, and that was when Sangre realised that the Lolita-girl herself knew the answer—she was merely waiting for Aizen to confirm what she suspected.

But what had happened to the former King and Espada? Sangre knew she had knocked him out, but she didn't know what being demoted meant. What kind of punishment awaited him? Was this like the mafia or something different?

"As I'm sure some of you are already aware, his status has been changed to Privaron Espada, and he will be joining the Cientecimo Tercero. Ordinarily, I might have considered demoting him to Tercer and shifting all your ranks down by one, but we have no space in this team for those who underestimate their opponent so grossly that upon picking a fight with them, end up being defeated within less than a minute." Aizen smiled with narrowed eyes. "A piece of advise for some of you: being senior gives you more experience than your junior, but if you become complacent, the new will replace the old."

Silence followed his speech, and Sangre noted with some interest that the Lolita-girl was no longer smiling.

"That is all," said Aizen after a beat, as if he hasn't just threatened every other Arrancar in the room. "Cirucci, Gantenbainne, please stay back. The rest of you are dismissed."

When the Espada began filing out of the room, a few of them looking back to glance at her before they left, Sangre realised that the Lolita-girl was Cirucci, while the Arrancar with the orange Afro was called Gantenbainne, a name she was sure she was going to forget within the next hour.

"Ah, and Gin," Aizen called out just as Sangre was trying to figure out if she had been dismissed as well. "You may cease eavesdropping and give our newest Espada the usual orientation."

The newly promoted Arrancar barely kept herself from jerking in surprise when someone stepped out from the shadows behind the door. She had not noticed his presence earlier, either because he had been suppressing it particularly well or because she had been preoccupied with being the subject matter of an Espada meeting. It was likely a combination of both, as Sangre saw another Espada (the pirate-slenderman) do a double-take at the man's sudden appearance, before he gave Sangre a wide smirk and left.

Sangre did not like the look of the smirk and wondered if Aizen was about to introduce even more stress into her day. Her only comfort was that it seemed like the 'orientation' was something that the other Espada members had gone through before as well. An unofficial initiation trial perhaps?

"Sangre." Said Arrancar quickly snatched her gaze away from the leaving Espada and back to Aizen who appeared to be surprisingly patient because he had yet to call her out on her constantly wandering attention.

Aizen gestured to his eavesdropping follower, and Sangre froze when she realised she recognised him. "Ichimaru Gin is my subordinate; he will be your guide for the rest of today, and you can ask him any question you may have about Las Noche or the Espada."

Tall, silver hair, pointed face with slitted eyes and a wide grin like a fox's, and an obvious reiatsu now, which felt like it was coiling lazily around them. Even if Aizen had not introduced him as a subordinate, even if the man hadn't been wearing a uniform similar to Aizen's, Sangre knew without a doubt that this man was a Shinigami.

And he's not just any Shinigami, she mused to herself as she watched him casually reply to Aizen with a sharp grin, reminding her for a moment of a snake.

But while a part of her wondered how much of a coincidence it required for her to encounter the same Shinigami from that night here in Hueco Mundo of all places, another part of her was growing increasingly puzzled over the question of how a couple of Shinigami got themselves involved in Hollow business. It was hard for her to wrap her head around the idea of a Shinigami just striding into Hueco Mundo, overthrowing Baraggan and building an Arrancar army.

"So, you're the new Espada, eh? That's..." said Ichimaru, turning to face her, words faltering as their eyes met.

Sangre was proud to say that she saw the precise moment his eyebrows rose every so slightly and his smile slipped. It was just for a short moment, barely a blink and it was replaced by the wide mocking grin from before, but she had been watching carefully, having wondered if he would recognise her too.

A Shinigami's job, as far as Sangre knew, was to purify Hollows and protect ordinary souls from being attacked or eaten by Hollows. They were like a spiritual police force. So how often does a Shinigami kill Hollows? How often do they help a soul targeted by Hollows? How likely then, was it for a Shinigami to remember a soul they helped?

Ichimaru's reaction essentially confirmed that regardless of how often Shinigami exterminate Hollows it protect souls, it was highly likely for the Shinigami to remember the soul they helped... if said soul had attempted to tried to help the Shinigami in return, get injured in the process and ultimately become the very creature the Shinigami was supposed to protect them from. Even if said soul was now sporting a new hair colour and altered eyes.

Sangre smiled to herself. Now, time to test the waters.


Thanks for reading! Next chapter should be up by the end of this coming week if not earlier.

(Now, time for a little fact: Sangre's chosen last name 'Aporruon' is derived from the word/name 'Apollyon' (Ἀπολλύων) , which means 'Destroyer' in Ancient Greek).

(So, why Greek? Because I realise that the names of many of the Arrancars were not necessarily Spanish, and I heard some people say they were derived from the names of architects? Well, I didn't feel like looking for more architect's names, so I just found a name I felt would suit, and it conveniently followed the whole double-letter thing that Kubo-san has going (you know, like Grimmjow and Harribel)).