A/N: Thanks to those who reviewed. To those who didn't, this is the last chapter there is an epilogue after it but this is the last part of the story. Please just let me know if you read it or not. Ta.

Chapter Ten

Ichigo ran through the kicked in door, Uryu regretted solemnly that the door had already been kicked in; it would have added, he observed silently, such style to their entry. They looked around the room, taking the time to notice how small and how cramped it was; to them, it seemed a miracle that a group as large as them could even fit in the claustrophobic space. Their eyes collectively scanned the room, initially missing the significant sights and instead panning over the intricately inhuman instruments. They looked back. They saw it. It was a beautiful beast. A horn of gold hovered over its target.

"Stop!" roared Ichigo, who was already beginning to channel his energy into Zangetsu, just in case.

The unicorn's head snapped around. The horn brushed the fallen Captain's chest, causing trickles of blood to emerge from a wound so shallow that it could barely be considered a graze. The unicorn hadn't given the Captain a chance to defend himself; that was how many would argue, she won. Ferocity burned like lava inside of the glowing golden globules that sat inside her eye sockets. There was only the vaguest semblance of consciousness behind those eyes, it was a frenzied manifested zanpak-tō who feared, not only for her own life, but for that of her wielder, who remained tied down to the chair, semi-conscious.

"That must be her zanpak-tō." observed Chad simply.

"Wow!" squealed Orihime, "It's beautiful!"

And it was. Despite the fury, burning off it in waves of pure red aggression, the creature remained as beautiful as it would at any other time. Its pupils were gold that glittered delicately but powerfully just as the sun glares down intensely at those who look up to it. Its mane blew about wistfully in the immense gales of air the unicorn was creating through pure killing intent. Its coat was as pure, innocent, invisible and impenetrable as the snow itself, concealing underneath a fight on levels only one person in the room could ever understand.

"It doesn't look very happy to see us." stated Uryu, attempting to be clever and humorous and, annoyingly, succeeding.

"It's not thinking," explained Rukia, "There's consciousness there but it's buried so deep, it can't control itself."

"What about Kitty?" asked Ichigo, his eyes flashing towards her for the briefest of seconds to check her condition, which was invisibly worsening with each second that passed, "Is she okay?"

"If her zanpak-tō manifested without her permission and if her zanpak-tō has truly begun to go berserk," replied Rukia, "I doubt there will be much left of Kitty's mind if she wakes up."

"Is there nothing we can-"

"No! How dare you!" shouted the unicorn before them telepathically. The voice shot through their minds like a cannonball of pain, obliterating every other thought that tried to cling desperately to their mind beforehand. None of them were used to telepathy on this scale and they were certainly not used to one in which there was shouting. They all visibly flinched as though it were a physical blow, "How dare you even talk about her!"

"This is not good," shouted Rukia, fighting the pain throbbing in her skull, "There won't be anything left if we don't do something."

"Any suggestions?" asked Chad.

"Anything would be a good idea about now." stated Uryu, cupping his head in his hands, who could do little to stop the mental onslaught provided by the unicorn.

"I have an idea!" declared Ichigo, who was affected the least by the mental attack, having faced, what he thought, to be much worse mental sieges in the past. He raised Zangetsu and deftly attacked the unicorn that dodged with very little effort. From his new position, he threw Zangetsu's sharpest point down towards Kitty who was semi-conscious on the chair/table that the psychopathic captain had placed her on. The blow never landed, despite being aimed at the restraints holding Kitty down. Instead there was an intense blast of light which threw everyone within a five metre radius to the floor.

Ichigo awoke to ringing in his ears, the ringing drowned out every other noise except the patient throb of his heart, which continued to pound calmly despite the chaos of his brain. His eyes were blurry and slow to react to the simple commands given to them but the brain. His sense of smell had all but vanished, all that he could smell, dim as it was, was the smell of metal. All he could taste in his mouth was iron and his brain knew immediately what the liquid was and exhumed it from his mouth with an unattractive splutter.

He managed to stand up but found his legs swaying underneath his weight. He could feel Zangetsu's weight in his hand but was nervous about the wet and sticky sensation in his other hand. As he raised this mysterious hand to his eyes, he saw a red splat all over it and was able to make the connections. He looked around at his feet and saw blurred figures whom he was able to identify as his nakama, his friends. This annoyed him. This placed a fury and just sense of frustration in him. One that he had seen only a minute ago.

He looked directly ahead. The blurred white vision of a unicorn seemed strangely absent but with his eyes still refusing to focus through the tears of cleansing – the tears his body produced to try and clean the lenses – it was impossible to identify the figure before him whose power levels seemed unstable and immensely powerful, levels he had once owned himself before he had learned control off a certain man with a certain hairstyle. He tried to focus once more but this hesitation cost him dearly and the thing charged, firing him through the walls of the staircase and forcing him onto the corrugated roof of the building below.

Suddenly, his vision cleared and he was on his feet. Zangetsu was burning furiously with delicate blue strings of spiritual energy and Ichigo found himself doing very much the same thing. But it vanished. The strands of glistening blue energy spiralled off onto the wind as his eyes fell onto a figure he had tried to save. Before him stood Kitty. However, there was something significantly wrong and different. This significance became all the more apparent when his eyes glimpsed upon the wispy, ghostly apparition of the white unicorn standing where Kitty was.

"Kitty?" asked Ichigo, feeling it necessary to double check that his eyes were not betraying him, "Is that you?"

Her mouth opened and a single syllable fluttered on the wind currents before being snapped off by a mouth that could not be controlled by the mind. Kitty was no longer Kitty and was fighting for control in a body which was trying to make sense of the three consciousnesses that were trying to win dominance. Kitty had been there for a second but something had sucked her back into the fight for control, whether that were Gerechtes Einhorn, the dangerous side of the unicorn, or Purlicorne, the pacifistic side, remained yet to be seen.

"Kitty, I know you're in there," assured Ichigo, "What is it I need to do?"

"Beat-"

Dominance was lost again. Ichigo wanted to sigh but was aware there was no time. He observed Kitty. Somehow, she had achieved a state that either was bankai or some bastardised version thereof. Her eyes, just as Urahara had predicted, had turned gold, swimming in themselves. Her hair had become wild and had several individual strands of hair had converted from their safe copper brown to a blank white of nothingness. Her black and white kimono tops had been replaced by what seemed to be a black doctor's jacket; it was tightly done up and the coat tails of the black jacket flapped about uncontrollably in the wind. In her hand was a unicorn's horn whose composition was diamond alone; sharp enough to slice through anything. Over her own image, lay the projected, ghostly apparition of the very manifested unicorn that belonged inside her soul.

"Now, I can't understand what you might mean by 'sorry' and 'beat'," said Ichigo, "And I've never been much good at solving riddles. But, I've always been very good at knocking sense into people!"

Zangetsu struck the diamond sword that deflected the blow away from Kitty's legs. Kitty's eyes looked up, teary and gold with fear and rage. The blow was returned but Ichigo dodged, rather than blocked. He was aware that a sword of diamond could cut through anything, including diamond, and he was determined to not find out what would happen if it were to touch his weapon. He backed off a bit and activated bankai, knowing full well that even as inexperienced as Kitty was, you should never fight a bankai with shikai.

His own black white-edged coattails floated about on the wind and his compact katana of midnight black slit through the air with speed only his body could match. The diamond sword failed to block the blow but another solution had been created to avoid an amputation. The ghostly apparition had materialised for the briefest of moments and had blocked the blow for just enough time for the diamond sword to move into place, whereupon the very same apparition returned to its not-entirely-solid state. Ichigo leapt back and withdrew Zangetsu from the fight before the diamond sword could slice through it.

"BE CAREFUL ICHIGO!" screamed Rukia from a large hole in a tall building, "YOU NEED TO KNOCK HER UNCONSCIOUS WITHOUT LETTING HER SWORD CUT YOU! IT'S MADE OF DIAMOND!"

"I KNOW!!!" shouted Ichigo, annoyed at the Chappy-obsessed idiot just for having pointed out the very, very obvious but quickly, he had another reason to dislike her stupid statement. For it had provided the very hesitation that Kitty/Gerechtes Einhorn/Purlicorne had been waiting for and the diamond sword had had little pause in piercing Ichigo's left leg and pinning it to the ground, "ARGH!"

"ICHIGO!" screamed the gang.

"Shit!" hissed Ichigo, staring down at his left thigh whose bone had been broken in two by the diamond sword that had pierced a metre into the building below, pinning him like a cornered animal to the position he was in. He looked up and saw Kitty standing before him. Her face was contorted in confusion and sadness but her eyes burned with fury.

She was standing a foot away from him. His leg wasn't bleeding that badly. He'd had worse. And she was standing less than a foot away from him, closing the gap with every second. He smiled slightly. She took another step. He raised his fist. His fist collided with her face and her eyes rolled backwards. Her body fell limp to the floor, unconscious, and her sword returned to its normal zanpak-tō of steel and metal form. But the damage had been done and Ichigo's right leg buckled under the effort placed on it from the blood loss it was fighting against. The colour vanished, only to return under the watchful orange glow of a familiar friend.

***

"So," observed Uryu, "That proves it. You owe me five hundred, Ichigo."

"You're kidding! I never agreed to using sterling!" spat Ichigo, "You changed the terms!"

"I never said there were any terms to begin with." replied Uryu.

"You stupid Quincy!!" shouted Ichigo, launching himself towards a ready fist, which knocked him down faster than he could notice, "You bastard! My nose is bleeding!"

"Good," said Uryu, "It suits you."

A cough pierced the argument. A recovered Kitty and her guardian-until-she's-in-control-of-her-schizophrenic-sword stood before them. Kitty's face was peaceful and calm after having been healed into consciousness by Orihime. Aasa, the aforementioned guardian, was charged by the Soul Society, who begrudgingly freed him of all charges on the basis that they couldn't justify repeating what they tried to do to Rukia without risking yet another invasion by a group of teenagers, with the care of Kitty until such a time as she had achieved bankai and subdued both sides of her zanpak-tō.

"Oh, it's you." observed Uryu.

"Yup," replied Kitty, back to her bubbly, quirky self, "And I'm back to having to listen to my zanpak-tō argue with itself. I wanted to thank you guys for saving me and persuading the Soul Society into letting Aasa off the hook."

Ichigo smiled slightly. It wasn't exactly persuasion. Well, unless someone had changed the definition in the dictionary to something along the lines of blackmail, in which case, Ichigo had quite adeptly persuaded Soul Society to agree to terms they weren't entirely happy with. Though, the persuasion fell more along the lines of 'do this or I promise I'll invade with five people and a cat again and kick you into next year'. Though his language had not gone down well with the Captain Commander, he had been forced to admit defeat because he had more important things to focus on, such as the Winter War.

"It was no problem," said Rukia, "Ichigo's a sucker for saving people."

Ichigo frowned – more so than usual.

"And playing the hero." added Uryu.

Ichigo frowned even deeper – more so than usual.

"Oh, yeah," agreed Rukia, "Oh! And having epic battles which don't really last that long."

Ichigo glared – more so than usual.

"And getting injured!!" added Orihime.

Ichigo was ready to explode – more so than after a conversation with Kon.

"And destroying buildings." added Chad.

Ichigo exploded – more so than after being woken up by his father.

"WHAT THE HELL, GUYS?!" screamed Ichigo, "GET OFF MY BACK!"

"We'd better get going before Miss tracks us down and beats us up for not getting on the plane at the exact allocated time," explained Uryu, "I don't want bruises."

The group nodded in agreement and left. Kitty and Aasa waved after them, temporarily letting any unanswered questions remain unanswered. They eventually left and the group, now sitting on the plane, began to ask questions. Questions that they suspected would remain unanswered until Uryu finally bothered to go and research the answers – no one else would. The most prominent questions replayed over and over again in their heads. Where was Alfie? What would happen to Kitty and Aasa? And long would it be until War was upon them?

Despite the questions, they had picked up a lot of English. Most of it was useless and consisted entirely of idioms they didn't understand and swear words they already knew. Overall, it had been like any other adventure they had ever had; unforgettable but failing to benefit them in any way other than them having succeeded in whatever it was they had done.

A/N: Let me know what you think of the ending, epilogue still to come but let me know what you think. I like the way it ends – it ends very much in the way it begins: suddenly and without a hell of a lot of information – but I'm curious to know what you guys think.