A/N: Hey guys! First part of the fight!
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Enjoy!
Breathe in.
The hiss of cooling air ended with a screeching cry, orange sparks flashing wildly as metal ground against metal with unyielding force. Toushiko gritted her teeth, her sword arm wavering slightly against the pressure of Katsuo's empty blade, and spun to her left, throwing the much larger man off balance for a second as he stumbled through the gap she'd left in the air.
Breathe out.
She came out of her spin with a sweeping slash at the Crown Prince's momentarily unprotected side, her expression a careful mask of neutral boredom. But at the last second Katsuo turned, his dark eyes alight with fury, and in a blur of silver his blade was pressed up against hers, blocking her strike. With a surge of muscle, he shoved his smaller opponent away. Hitsugaya gracefully allowed the momentum to propel her, taking advantage of the reprieve to narrow her eyes and land lightly on her feet, observing the Crown Prince with distaste. Katsuo's Zanjutsu skills were on par with hers, that much was clear from their brief spar, but their styles differed just enough for her to have their advantage. Katsuo's stance and moves were meant more for fighting a stationary enemy, but that wasn't her typical modus operandi. Hitsugaya favored a dynamic, almost acrobatic style of fighting, one which combined a lot of sinuous, fast strikes with whirling dodges and leaping hakuda attacks.
In short, Katsuo was on the defensive, and it was clear that he did not appreciate it.
"Stay still, bitch!" he spat, lunging at her again, and Toushiko performed an overly-flashy front flip over his blade, placing one hand on the dull side of his sword in midair and snapping out her foot with practiced ease, her heel connecting with the top of Katsuo's black head as she arched over. The prince, not expecting the swift smackdown, lost his balance and fell forward to faceplant in the dirt.
Breathe in.
The box on his back rattled ominously, and Katsuo, wincing and grimacing again, stood back up, his pride cracked by the effortless takedown. Hitsugaya casually held out her blade, allowing a soft breeze to flutter her white haori and whiter hair. Her lips curled in a smirk, eyes ablaze.
"Why, am I going too fast?" she replied, the disdain in her voice clear. Katsuo snarled at her, suddenly sprinting forward at several times the speed she was expecting. She let out a sharp gasp, throwing herself to the side, eyes widening in shock as the prince's blade keened against hers again, then grunted with effort as she was forced to brace Hyourinmaru's length with her left hand. Katsuo grinned darkly.
"Oh, it just hurts you less if you don't move, that's all." he replied, some dark innuendo in his tone, but Toushiko just narrowed her eyes and ducked to the right, allowing Katsuo's heavier weapon to slide over her head as she ghosted down and reversed her grip on her Zanpakutou to drive the hilt into her opponent's chest. Her reiatsu flashed momentarily, reinforcing her attack, but even the tiny flicker was enough to turn the blow worthy of a Captain's skill. The distinct sound of bones cracking echoed over the wide plain, and several of the spectators flinched.
Breathe out. Very good.
The prince staggered and swiped messily at the small woman, prompting her to vanish in a burst of crisp Shunpo until she stood out of the wounded man's immediate range. She gazed at Katsuo calmly, privately disappointed.
"If this is your best, then the Royal Family is even more fraudulent than I was expecting." she said coolly, adjusting her grip on Hyourinmaru's cloth-wrapped hilt with a careless loosening of her fingers. Katsuo just looked at her, his previous temper oddly gone, and stood there wiping a droplet of blood from the corner of his lips. Hitsugaya raised an eyebrow in askance, puzzled by the sudden change in his demeanor.
Then the prince sheathed his sword, and she got really confused.
"I underestimated you, woman." he said suddenly, his dark eyes unnaturally bright. "It seems that you are indeed the wielder of a dragon, unlikely though it may seem."
Hyourinmaru's insulted snarl reverberated inside her head, and she winced, the bloodlust of her soul-partner spilling into her own in a clashing thunderhead of anger. Her reiatsu flared into the visible realm, barely suppressed to a level only twice that of a normal Captain. The audience, feeling the cold, dense pressure weighing heavily on their pores, gasped in shock. Low murmurs, exclamations over Hitsugaya's power, rustled through the crowd like drying leaves.
Katsuo watched her with dark eyes gleaming, then sighed faintly and raised his hands. The shade of ferocious worry was back in his face, not directed at the woman before him but rather inward, as if he was terrified of himself. The black box on his back suddenly became nebulous around the edges, a smoky haze of pitch darkness blurring its crisply defined edges. A few lines of pulsing black stained his skin, slowly growing darker and more intricate as the tattoos matured.
Hitsugaya froze as the telltale tattooed patterns of a matured connection with the Deep-magic crept over her opponent's skin. The shinigami watching said nothing, only looked on in bafflement as the Tenth Division Captain tensed visibly, her golden skin turning a shade lighter. Katsuo moved gingerly, testing his tattooed limbs with slow, deliberate movements, as if the application of the dark power on his skin had somehow strained his entire body. Then he glared, his gaze oozing sinister darkness.
"I will no longer pare my skills down to be on your level." he hissed. Then he flickered entirely out of existence.
A sonic explosion ripped the silence apart, and with a screaming howl of wind in her ears Toushiko flew backwards, the earth fracturing and tearing beneath her as she tumbled away. Her friends' cries of fury and fear from the audience was muted in her ears, a sudden rush of pain blotting out her conscious thought as the ground caught her, putting a stop to her backward flight through the surface of the field. A deep furrow had been gouged into the earth where she'd been sent flying, and she twitched from her crumpled state at its terminal point, half-dazed with shock.
She hadn't even seen Katsuo move, but yet her abdomen felt as if it had caved in on itself and she lay in a heap over a hundred yards from her original position. Suddenly there was a hand fisted in her shoulder-length white hair, and a soft whimper escaped her as Katsuo dragged her into a more upright position. Blood leaked in copious amounts from one corner of her mouth.
With a surge of icy willpower, she forced herself to ignore the pain and lashed out, catching the unsuspecting prince off guard for a moment and managing to slice a superficial gash in his cheek before he was out of her range in yet another unseen flicker of speed. Toushiko collapsed forward onto her hands and knees, puking blood, her emerald stare wide in confusion.
Katsuo merely looked at her, smirking.
"You can't see me move." he stated casually, as if the statement were simple fact and not a bloody miracle. "You're wondering why, aren't you?"
Slowly, the ice-wielder staggered back to her feet, a haze of healing kido reinforced by Deep-magic woven around the hand pressed to her collapsed stomach. She snarled wordlessly, the kido doing its work to numb the pain and heal her enough to fight again. Katsuo chuckled.
"You can't see something that you don't know is coming." he said, still smirking that infuriating smirk. "That should suffice for now."
Toushiko panted, but drew herself upright, eyes ablaze, and called upon her own power.
"Reign over the frosted heavens. Hyourinmaru!" she growled, abandoning all pretense and flaring her icy power to its fullest. The wings of ice, more finely crafted than ever before with detailed individual feathers, shot from her spine in flexible crescents of frosted rime, and the long, sinuous tail unfurled with a hissing of crystallized ice dust. Ice crept over her chest in overlapping plates of durable armor, and upon her head frozen spires of the clear material hardened into a gleaming tiara. Behind her, lotus flowers of ice bloomed in staccato bursts.
Frost crept over her skin, her temper cooling into glacial fury, and the sky darkened with storm clouds. Thunder cracked like a whip, the booming reverberations resounding across the field for miles. Blue bolts of lightning snapped from cloud to black cloud in ominous, ponderous threat. Icy reiatsu glowed in a shimmering coat over Toushiko's golden tan.
"You can't see something that you don't know is coming?" she asked, her voice low and dangerous, her eyes flashing with stormy winter coldness. Her senses cleared up, the unnaturally keen sight, smell, and hearing of a dragon slowly pulled to the forefront of Hitsugaya's mind. "How adorably naive. Nothing can hide from a dragon."
Katsuo kept smirking at her, his dark stare revealing his arrogance for everyone to see.
"Ah, but you're in Bankai now, and I haven't even begun to reveal the Royal Family's true power." he said smoothly, the serpentine manner of his cockiness grating on Hitsugaya's nerves. But then her coral-colored mouth split, revealing a fanged grin, and she laughed aloud, raising her blade.
"I'm in Bankai?" she asked, realizing the fatal mistake that Katsuo had made. "Goodness me, how old is your intel on me?"
The prince started in surprise, confusion spreading across his face.
"But…the wings and tail of a dragon-"
A cold laugh from Toushiko cut him off in midsentence, and ice crackled across the vast plain that was their arena until the crust of glassy rime over the cold earth was an inch thick. It crunched sharply as Toushiko stepped lightly across it, power gleaming in the green crescents of her eyes.
"This is my Shikai, Oshiro-san." she breathed, the frosty coldness of her breath crystallizing on contact with the air and clinking to the icy ground in a sprinkling of icy powder. Hyourinmaru's keen edge glinted with cold rage as she raised her Zanpakutou, effortless confidence in her eyes. "Remember it well."
Katsuo barely had time to raise his hands to protect his face before icicles materialized in front of Toushiko's face and shot forward .
"Guncho Tsurara!"
The series of explosions of frosted dust and icy shrapnel where the flock of icicles impacted with the frozen ground were enough to cause the audience in the stands to cover their faces, the shockwave rushing over them with merciless fragments of ice. But Katsuo still stood amidst the icy craters, black energy wrapped tightly around his body. It retreated with a careful tug of his willpower, returning to the black box strapped to his back. He stared at his opponent with no slight trepidation now, the small scratches along his face and arms a testament to Hitsugaya's power. His eyes narrowed.
"You are much stronger that I anticipated, to be able to injure me through my shield." he said with a curious tilt of his head.
Hitsugaya smiled a vampiric smile, the sheer coldness on her pretty face enough to chill the blood of all watching.
"I am Hitsugaya Toushiko, the North Star, wielder of the Winter Dragon, Hyourinmaru. If you misjudge my strength, you will not live to see another day." she said, her voice cold. "Now, come."
The dark-haired prince growled low in his throat and once again disappeared from Toushiko's sight, another sonic explosion pealing through the air.
The air. Of course.
She closed her eyes, allowing the Deep-magic in her soul to bleed into the fabric of the world around her, and the wind responded. Suddenly she could feel the sharp absence-presence of Katsuo's flashing footsteps, the air cracking around him as the sound barrier caved and broke. He sped in circles around her, waiting for an opportunity to strike, and then with perfect clarity lunged.
Even with her sense of being spread through the wind, she still couldn't react fast enough to avoid Katsuo's fist as he slammed into her again, but she did manage to shift enough so that instead of crushing her ribcage, he dislocated her shoulder. She bit her lip on the screech of pain that threatened to escape her and slid to the left, knowing that this would be her moment to strike.
A spinning ring of frosted wind lashed around her and she focused with laserlike intensity on the absence of air that was Katsuo lunging past her.
"Ryusenka!"
She ducked just in time for the enormous blossom of ice to explode over her head and the pealing scream of agony to ring in her ears. She spun out from under the floating flower of ice, her right arm dangling limply and turned around to face the flower of ice. Katsuo was stuck half-encased in the ice, one arm and one leg sealed tightly inside the below-freezing prison. The beginning reddish flush of frostbite had already spread the prince's pale skin.
With a quick jerk and a muffled howl, Hitsugaya managed to pop her shoulder back into its socket. The icy plating over her chest, which had cracked from the force of Katsuo's punch, sealed back together. The cold quickly numbed the pain, making her sword arm once again usable. At almost the same time, Katsuo shattered the ice freezing his arm and leg, simultaneously shattering pieces of the brittle flesh which Hitsugaya's frozen reiatsu had corroded, leaving bloody gashes in the two limbs which she'd caught.
The dark eyes were wild with anger, and suddenly the Deep-magic tattoos on the prince's skin shifted. He spat viciously at his opponent, spitting blood.
"I was going to spare you." he snarled. "But you've gone too far, bitch. I'll obliterate you."
Hitsugaya snorted, unable to contain herself.
"Yes, because you've done so well at that so far." she said dryly. But then Katsuo went oddly still, raising his arms with a blank look in his black eyes.
"Shinigami." he said simply, a slight tremor in his voice, and Hitsugaya blinked, narrowing her eyes. But Katsuo didn't say anything more, and suddenly Toushiko felt sleepy and weak, her heart stammering, her breath weakening. She collapsed to her knees, gasping for breath and wondering what the hell was going on. Hyourinmaru's tip pierced the iced-over soil, and frost trembled from the blade for only a moment before melting. Green eyes peeled up to meet a blankly-staring Katsuo.
"What…what did…" she wheezed, the world starting to go dark around her. She could feel her reiatsu draining away, Hyourinmaru's spirit receding. The wings, tail, and crown of ice on her head began to crumble into dust. In the stands, she could hear her friends screaming. Katsuo sighed, shaking slightly from both anger and…fear?
"This is the power which the Royal Family wields, much like other Kenmeinarei spirits." he said, his voice trembling. "Our power is Death. You cannot run from it, you cannot hide from it, you cannot even defeat it. Death takes everyone silently, and its presence is always lurking around the corner just waiting for you to misstep so it can sweep your soul back into the cycle of reincarnation."
Toushiko stared, trying desperately to process that before she lost consciousness, but her hand fell limp on Hyourinmaru's hilt and she crashed to the frozen ground, her cheek pressing firmly against the melting, grey ice. She could feel her power bleeding from her fingertips, her life bleeding from her heart.
And then…
"Shiraaaaa!"
Suddenly, her lips curled up, Ichigo's cry resounding in her darkening world.
"I told him I would win, didn't I?"
She slowly clenched her hand into a fist, the slow thud of Katsuo's footsteps coming closer to where she lay fighting death, and allowed her eyes to close. Air filled her lungs as she breathed in, cold, pure air.
"Stupid Strawberry…but you're right."
The grin on her face split into a vicious snarl.
"I won't lose here!"
Her eyes snapped open, Hyourinmaru howling in her heart and she opened her mouth in a bloodcurdling roar.
"Bankai! Daiguren Hyourinmaru!"
For a heartbeat, nothing happened, the only result of her ferocious cry the echo resounding off the faraway white walls of the arena, but then she felt power uncoil in her chest and the world exploded in wintry storm. The sky howled madly, wind shrieking in unfettered insanity, the thunder-clouded heavens crackling with blue lightning. The air became charged, saturated with pure energy as the fog enshrouding Hitsugaya's petite frame began to roil with mutinous fury.
And then her world crystallized, her mind expanding, and suddenly Katsuo seemed very, very small, and very, very human.
In the stands, the captains rose to their feet, cries of shock escaping them. Ichigo felt his jaw fall off. Matsumoto, Hinamori, and Rukia pinched themselves frantically. And the King and Queen of the Royal Family turned pale. Queen Eiko reached a trembling hand toward her firstborn son.
"Katsuo, dodge!" she screamed.
Toushiko opened her gemlike emerald eyes, turning her head carefully in the Queen's direction. The frills of white fur and scales around her head and neck shimmered with iridescent icy power, and she breathed out, frosted air puffing from her slitted nostrils.
"Calm yourself, human soul."
The lilting, enchanting music of her voice rang softly in the arena, and Hitsugaya took the opportunity to stretch her translucent, opalescent wings, the shifting radiance of the thin wing membrane pulling taut. She rose to her clawed feet, the bone white talons carving deep gouges in the iced plain. Her scaled tail twitched back and forth, the crescent barb on its end severing the wind neatly. A benevolent gleam came into those emerald eyes. The Queen fell faint at the sight. Katsuo, in the arena beneath her, stared up in terror.
"You're…you…"
The quaking in the prince's voice was clear, his black eyes wide. Toushiko looked at him in pity.
"This is what it means to be a Tamashino Kenmeinarei spirit, prince." she rumbled, the soft music of her draconic voice airy and light. "I will give you this one chance. Surrender now, and I will spare you."
The white dragon lowered her head, baring the ivory fangs, and spread her wings wide. Wisps of bluewhite icefire curled from the gaping mouth. The green eyes glinted like cold chips of sea-ice, pure bloodthirst gleaming shamelessly there.
"But if you choose to fight…I will show no mercy."
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