The Iron Sole Alchemist and the Soul Reapers (Chapter 43) Remembering Why We're Here
by Howlin
(Disclaimer: I don't own any rights to any of the universes, places, or characters, and only claim the protagonist, Sloth, and Loki as my own creation. This is fan fiction, and I don't profit from it. Please don't sue me.)
At breakfast the next morning, I brought up a preparation I'd wanted to sleep on before pursuing, as it was a gamble. After a good night's sleep, the potential payout still looked good enough to be well worth the risk. That meant it was time to sanity check it with an outside source. Sloth recognized the look on my face and braced herself. The soul reapers just kept on chewing their bacon.
"I think it's time I talked to Ran Tao about becoming immortal," I said.
"Last time we talked about this, you said the side effects were too severe," said Sloth while Rangiku patted her captain's back to help him with the food he'd choked on. "What changed your mind?"
"I'm still not thrilled about the side effects," I said, "but there just isn't enough time to master my powers without time turning. What I'd like to do is invest some time in a loop up front, working with her to see if we can refine the process."
"I'm sorry, but when you say immortality, what are you talking about exactly?" asked Yumichika.
"Ran Tao, the scientist who created the bounts, has a treatment that can effectively halt the ageing process in soul reapers," I explained. "Currently, it comes at a huge cost in stamina. I'm hoping that with the data I took from the Department of Research and Development, we can bring the price down. I was going to wait it out and see what developed, but now I'm thinking it's important to help things along."
"I'm with you on this plan," said Sloth.
"If it pans out, let us know," said Rangiku.
Expelling our souls from our bodies, Sloth and I left our homunculus selves in the world of the living and I called Koga to open a senkaimon.
Sloth and I spent a subjective month working with Ran Tao, occupying every room in the newly built Rukon University silmotaneously. The tissue samples we worked with experienced a much longer time frame as we used hour reversal charms to rapidly age our test samples a hundred years at a time to test out our theories on the treatment modifications.
The extra energy for staving off the ageing process had to come from somewhere. For the bounts, it was taken from the souls they consumed. In Ran Tao's original treatment, it came from needing much more sleep than an ordinary soul.
Our new treatment derived the necessary energy primarily from food. It was a far less rich energy source than the souls the bounts consumed, so the amounts needed were pretty significant, on the order of a Hogwarts style feast at every meal and considerable snacking between. If I couldn't get what I needed from food alone, the adjusted treatment would revert to Ran Tao's original method of extra sleep to make up the difference.
I was pretty satisfied with the balance, and after making sure nothing unexpected came up in the tissue samples from my hollowfied soul, I underwent the process. It felt good knowing that with proper upkeep, my soul could last as long as my homunculus body. We tested the modified treatment on tissue samples from a variety of different soul types. Between the real world testing of tissue samples and simulations run using the very thorough data in Mayuri's database, we were confident that the treatment would work on anyone with spirit energy.
Providing the treatment to Seireitei nobles and soul reapers would fund future research projects for decades, perhaps centuries to come. Very few souls really had to worry about dying of old age. Even without this treatment, denizens of the Soul Society were sufficiently long lived that some other cause of death like injury, starvation, or disease actually caught up with them first. For most, this treatment was more about quality of life, maintaining the youthful appearance and vigor of their prime. It wouldn't upset the balance of souls reincarnating between worlds.
I stayed under observation for the next subjective week, making sure the treatment had taken and no unexpected side effects showed up. Finally, satisfied that all was well, I returned to the world of the living with Sloth the same morning we'd left.
"Good news," I announced to the gathered soul reapers who'd just seen Sloth and I leave. "The treatment was a success. I brought enough for all of you."
"You just left," complained Ikaku.
"I know we mentioned time loops," said Sloth.
"You did. He just wasn't paying attention," said Yumichika.
After explaining the details to them, Hitsugaya and Ikaku didn't particularly care. Rukia and Renji found it interesting and needed to take the time to think through the decision. Rangiku and Yumichika were over the moon enthusiastic about it.
"This sounds too good to be true," thrilled Rangiku. "You never get old and the 'price' is you get to eat a lot of food that never makes you fat?"
"And if you don't feel like eating that much, you can substatute extra beauty sleep," Sloth reminded her.
"I can teach a spell you can use to multiply any food you have," I offered.
"Okay, I'm still not sure about this immortality treatment, but I have got to learn that spell," said Renji.
"With your kido skills?" said Rukia dubiously.
"If it means never having to ask for seconds again, I'll learn it," said Renji firmly.
Divination attempts indicated there was a conflict paired with a vitally important oportunity coming up in about a week. I scheduled my training accordingly. The martial arts and fencing practice done in homunculus form continued as before. Likewise socializing with our friends, helping chad and Orihime train, and giving Tatski and Keigo alchemy lessons. In spirit form, Sloth and I ramped up our training.
With no Grief Seeds, lethal sparring was out, but building up my levels of raw spirit energy wasn't my top priority at the moment anyway. I sparred with Sloth under limiters the same way I did with the Visoreds, building up the amount of time I could maintain my hollow mask and cutting down the cool down time between my mask breaking and when I could call it again. While I was working on my hollowfication, sloth was improving her magic efficiency, getting a better intuitive handle on which muscles to enhance when throwing a punch, and how to flare her aura to absorb a blow using the least magic possible.
After an hour of work with my hollowfication, we switched off for an hour of training with the quincy bangles. Our accuracy, power, and speed of our hirenkyaku all improved. After that, I worked on stealth for an hour with a long game of hollow hide and seek using hollow bait in the isolated woods near the mansion. There was no hiding the magic in Sloth's Soul Gem without an invisibility claok, so she sat out that hour, using it instead to go over the Soul Gem and Grief Seed data the surveillance bacteria had recorded in the hope of better understanding her own powers.
The next hour was bankai training. While I meditated and worked to pull my sword spirit into the outside world, Sloth experimented with her magic. Improving her control over powers she knew she had and trying to access powers her research and intuition told her she might have allowed her to improve her versitility.
The first day, we repeated that cycle a few dozen times, only calling a halt when I'd reached the point where donning my hollow mask was almost instantaneous, the cooldown time shrank to nothing, and I could remain hollowfied more or less indefinitely. Only then did I go train with the Visoreds. After demonstrating I could hold my mask for an hour sparring with Hyori, they consented to teach me how to use a cero.
The first thing they had me do was release all my limiters and hollowfy, bringing my spiritual pressure to its peak. For the next step, they got me angry. This was accomplished by Hyori throwing insults at me while the other Visoreds tossed cans, old chinese takeout boxes, and other trash at me from differant angles. I was prohibited from dodging, blocking, or looking around. It was a terrible method for building up rage and only managed annoyance. I called a halt after enduring half an hour of this pointlessness.
"Look if the point is to make me lose my temper, snap so all coherent thought shuts down and I go into a screaming, spitting rage, this isn't going to cut it," I said. "But I think I know what will."
"And what's that?" asked Shinji.
"I need to relive a memory," I said, getting out a rune engraved stone basin called a pensive. I explained its function as I drew my wand and used it to pull silver threads of memory from my temple. I plunged inside with the others following after.
Within the pensive, the nine of us were immaterial observers, able to interact with one another, but unable to touch the memory itself. We watched the action unfold from a third person point of view as Kyubey tempted Sloth with a wish that would let her clean the blood off her hands, as he slowly revealed how the magical girl system worked, as he taunted Sloth in order to tip her over the edge, as he turned his back on me once his business was finished. I let go of the emotional control Snape taught me in service to my occlumency. I let myself really feel the hurt and loss and rage I'd held in check at the time in order to keep moving, keep thinking, and get Sloth the help she needed.
I screamed at the top of my lungs, clenching my fists so tight, my nails dug into my palms. My eyes never wavered from the hated creature's swishing tail as an orb of bright red spirit energy gathered itself near my mouth. The cero released with a blinding flash. When the light faded an instant later, and of course, the memory of the creature was untouched, I started to charge a second cero. Shinji clasped my shoulder and I came back to my senses, letting the energy I'd gathered dissipate harmlessly.
The other Visoreds were silent as we left the penisve, I returned the memories to my mind, and stowed the pensive. I'd shown them all something deeply personal, a time I'd been unable to protect the one I loved. They'd seen the ragged psychological scars the experience left on me, and they understood well enough to respect the trust I'd shown them and give me a moment.
"All right," said Shinji when the moment had passed, "the first conscious cero is the hardest, since you have to teeter on the edge of consciousness and instinct to bring it out. Now you'll need to practice until you can do it with a calm mind and a clear head."
Mastering cero was my next benchmark. I gradually teased technique from instinct over the course of the following day's training with Sloth. First I learned to perform the technique while calm, then I mastered executing it under power limiters, and finally, I got the hang of firing it from my hands and feet instead of being limited to performing that dangerous energy buildup directly in front of my face.
When I went back to the Visoreds having mastered cero, I was shocked to learn that was the limit of what they could teach me. High speed regeneration, soinido, even bala were as much of a mystery to them as they were to me. It had taken them a hundred years of trial and error to get this far. If I was going to master those techniques and learn to control the fully hollowfied form my body had taken on while I warred for control of my spirit, I'd have to look elsewhere.
Soken, on the other hand, had a few new tricks to teach. After going over how to open shadow portals, which couldn't be done with the bangle, but which I eventually managed using my own spirit energy, he showed us how to overcome the paralysis of Mayuri's shikai. The technique involved wrapping your limbs with strings of reshi and manipulating your own body like a puppet.
Since her body was already a remote operated puppet, Sloth had a head start on me. We were both able to get an arm to move using the bagle, and I was even able to do the same with my own spirit energy.
The technique was traditionally the domain of elderly quincies. They used it to compensate for the diminished strength and speed in their weakening limbs. As Uryu had demonstrated, it could also be used to overcome paralysis and other crippling injuries. The real reason it was usually used only by elderly quincies was the insane levels of precise spirit energy control and mutitasking required just to stand and walk, let alone fight with all of your muscle control replaced with reshi puppet strings. Uryu was an absolute genius to have mastered it in less than a decade when some quincies never master it well into old age.
We weren't going to reach Uryu's level anytime soon, but the technique was perfectly suited to training up fine control of spirit energy. Like with bankai, spending years at a time in looped training wasn't psychologically feasable, especially when it was so focused on a single technique. Instead, we added an hour a day of work on this technique to our regular exercises.
The soul reapers Yamamoto dispatched did a great job keeping the pressure off Chad, Ichigo, Uryu, Orihime, Sloth, and I so we could focus on improving our abilities. Not long before the star charts predicted trouble, Hitsugaya took most of his team back to the Soul Society. It was a planned rotation. Rukia stayed on to coordinate with the new soul reapers.
Every one of us had gotten stronger and faster. Ichigo's mask was still a bit unstable, but his times were improving. Chad could now surround objects with a green light visible to even mundane senses and levitate them through the air with fullbring. He could stand in midair and accelerate his already devistatingly effective punches by using fullbring on the air. With Soken's guidance, Uryu worked to increase the speed, accuracy, and control of his new bow so he could take full advantage of its ability to fire hundreds of arrows at once.
Sloth cracked the secret to Orhime's offensive power. Tsubake, the rika who held that power, could slice anything short of soul forged silver in half with contemptuous ease. The problem came when facing living targets. His cutting power and durability dropped in proportion to how humanoid the target was and how much Orihime could empathize with it. Obviously inhuman and malevolent hollows were wiped out quickly and easily, but after Sloth finally talked Orihime into trying, Tsubake couldn't even cut Tatski's hair.
Rather than try to fight her nature, Sloth had Orihime practice disarming tactics with Tsubake. Destroying the inanimate swords of the arancars without trying to hurt the human looking hollows themselves would prevent htem from using their resureccion abilities and make the rest of us fighting them much easier. Kiske had called her weak, but with disarming added to her already epic defensive and healing powers plus the quincy bangle bosting her speed, she was going to be an absolute goddess in a combat support role.
In terms of her own powers, Sloth had picked up a couple new tricks. Having figured out some time ago that the exact form of her magical girl weapon wasn't set in stone, she pushed the limits on variety and found that with a lot of practice, she could summon almost any item she needed with her Soul Gem's magic. She likewise learned how to alter her magical girl combat outfit, though given how much she liked the black catsuit and red cloak, it didn't mean much.
After days of pouring over the Soul Gem and Grief Seed data, Sloth had developed a theory about her powers and how they might be increased. It was evening after a long day of training when Sloth brought me down to the privacy of our lab to explain her idea. She'd prepared visual aids on the computer to help get the complex ideas across.
"The reason Kyubey creates magical girls is that the energy our emotions produce isn't bound by thermodynamics," she began. "That doesn't just refer to us putting out enough power to keep the stars burning a few more years when we witch out. The hope that I use to power my magic never actually gets dimmer. The amount present in my Soul Gem is constant. It just gets obscured by grief.
"When I use my powers I generate an equal quality of hope and grief. The hope gets channeled into making my power work, and the grief builds up. It doesn't work the same way for witches. They are bound by thermodynamics. Creating a body, forming a labyrinth, producing familiars, all of it relies on stored grief. They can recharge themselves by drawing on the negative emotions of those bearing their kiss or those trapped in their labyrinth, but once a magical girl becomes a witch, she loses the ability to violate thermodynamics.
"Grief Seeds can draw grief out of Soul Gems, and both witches and familiars can use that grief as a power source. If I could spend grief like a witch while remaining a magical girl, my powers would be basically infinite."
"Any idea how to do that?" I asked.
"No," Sloth admitted. "Soul Gems become Grief Seeds, so all the hardware for using grief has to already be in there. My best guess is it's a deliberate limiter Kyubey built in that either breaks or shuts down at some point in the transition into a witch. Unfortunately, even with the advanced computers and sensors in this world, the technology is impossibly advanced."
"Well, we cracked the memory encryption," I said. "Give us enough time and we can do anything."
"I can channel my magic through a wand already," noted Sloth. "If my magic was unlimited, I could cast the killing curse with enough power to kill Kyubey."
"That seems way more likely than me being able to build up enough spirit energy to do it," I admitted.
"I wanted to get your opinion and put the idea on your radar," said Sloth. "Obviously taking out Aizen and the other local threats to our friends in this world is a more immediate priority, but if one of those opportunities we predicted could help us crack this, I wanted to make sure you kept an eye out."
Author's comments:
Analyzing the Incubator technology and finding a way to kill Kyubey remains a long term goal even as they prepare to deal with the more immediate threat of Aizen and his arancars.