I flashed off across the slippery tree-tops. Finding purchase along the slick deadwood to land long enough for another flash spring was chancey. I wasn't a light guy, so I had to move quickly to avoid staying on the branch so long that it would break. As soon as I landed on it, it started to snap so I could only pause for half a heartbeat, long enough to find my next spot and leap there. Good training I guess. I couldn't smell a whole lot over the thick, heavy miasma of the swamp but I could definitely make out the very very powerful lingering traces of the Shadow that had passed by recently. There was no mistaking that aura for anything else. I'd have to be cautious while tracking it, I wanted to get close to it, but I didn't want to give away my position.

I tracked the soul-scent of that Shadow across the slick, muddy, stinking terrain of the swamp carefully. I didn't really consider myself to be a fastidious kind of guy, but this place smelled, and I really didn't want to slip and fall into that muck and come out smelling like it. Plus, this damn gigai, excuse me, mortal body was hard enough to keep from smelling on its own. None of the other Gigai's I'd owned had ever excreted water from the skin after one measely little practice session that started to smell after a while. It seemed like every time I turned around I was having to wash it off again. I liked a good bath as much as the next person but I was beginning to feel like a neurotic here.

:Whoah! Close one there,: I thought with a small heart-start as the branch I landed on snapped immediately under my weight almost before I could spring to my next spot.

The smell was getting stronger, so I was getting closer to the enemy, but I hadn't seen anything that resembled a way across this swamp besides my way.

:I guess it shouldn't be too bad though. I'll just carry the little missy same as I used to, and Yoruichi is already the Goddess of Flash so she won't have any troubles keeping up.:

I wanted to at least sight the enemy before I turned back and got my companions. If I were going to approach it however, I should probably dim down my reiatsu so it didn't sense me coming. It felt strange to try to do it while on the move, instead of pausing so I could concentrate, but if I didn't want to fall in a sink-hole, I had to keep moving. It took more than a few tries, but I finally focused my concentration enough to enable me to completely bind up my chakra and meridians to the point that the barest whiff of spiritual power trickled out, and this was what I used to flash-step.

The smell was getting steadily stronger, I could tell by the under-scent of the Shadow's spiritual residue that it wasn't the specific Shadow that had turned me Mortal, but a different one. Right then, however, I would have taken what I could get. I pulled out the crystal recording device from the rolled-cloth sling across my back and activated it.

"Sixth Squad Lieutenant Renji Abarai, Involuntary Mission Log seventeen, dated following morning," I said in a low whisper to the recording device. "I've tracked down a different Shadow in the Realm beyond the World Gate that I met Yoruichi at last night. As you can see, this world is a swamp..."

I zoomed in on the strange pieces that were missing from the horizon and the sky and decided to add

"This world shows the same attributes of a lot of the other worlds mentioned earlier; it seems that it is becoming unraveled somehow. I'm not sure if this is just a sign of it growing old, and being unoccupied, or a sign of something larger, but the fact that the Shadows have chosen to travel through the dying Realms more often than they've picked whole ones might be important. Anyway, the Shadow should be just up ahead. I can feel the funny burn of thier weird magic from here, it's hard to describe, it's sorta like when ya stand next to a really loud base-speaker at a rock concert and you can just feel yer gigai being pounded by the music, only its has a sort of uncomfortably warm feeling to it. That's as close as I can come to describing it. Anyway, it's been getting stronger for the last half hour or so, and I think I'm getting close. I'll scout and observe this first run, then head back to the others before we decide on a course of action."

I kept the recording device on and silently sprang from tree to tree, trying to keep my presence as slight and unnoticeable as possible. At last, the forest started to thin out a bit and the ground below me, instead of being lakelets made of dirty water interspersed with little islands made of masses of weed-choked mud, began to firm up into something that resembled solid ground. There were still massive copses of water-weeds every-where, more than enough to provide cover, the bad part was that I'd have to get down onto what passed for ground in this place.

"Yick," I muttered sotto voce. "I really don't want to go down there, but there's no help for it."

Besides, I was a Rukon brat, chances were that I'd had worse stuff splattered on me at one point or another. Still... I sighed a little as I decided to try to save my footwear. I pulled off the shoes Isana had picked out for me and strung them over one shoulder by the shoelaces then tried to find the least muddy spot that would offer me cover. I took a quick breath and landed gingerly in it. It tried not to make any noises of disgust as I felt cold mud squelch through my toes. I crept quietly closer to the clearing making no noise at all and paused at the edge to bring the recording device to bear on what lay there.

There were three Shadows there, I could tell they were Shadows because they were made of the same not-substance that the sole Shadow I had encountered face to face (with Mortal results) had been made of. They were like miniature storm-clouds of matte dark, shot through with strange strands of sparkling substance in the heart of them that shimmered darkly, even in the cloudy light of this Realm. Their substance-less forms seemed to sway rhythmically, and they were... singing? I'd never heard a Shadow make any sort of sound before, but I couldn't determine any other source for that strangely melodic trilling sound. The three Shadows were at an equal distance apart and they were centered around some kind of...

I barely restrained a gasp of surprise as I recognized one of those fiery diagrams with the circles and the sigils that I had come to recognize as the way that magical arts were practiced in the Divine Realms.

:I wish this thing had a zoom lens,: I thought to myself.

Then to my surprise the picture in front of me jumped into larger and clearer focus. The diagram and the Shadows suddenly became much easier to see and I panned slowly over the scene before me for long minutes, trying to take in everything.

The Shadows were trilling some kind of strange wordless chant with their diagram glowing darkly in the stone beneath them. In the very center of the diagram, floating in mid-air, was a bead, or a gem of some sort. The air around the gem warped and swayed, like heat-haze over a highway and up from around the diagram there were strange motes of light, like starlight sand flowing into the gem which seemed to pulse with power. I wasn't sure exactly what was going on, but I could sorta begin to guess. After a few more long minutes of silent observation I turned the recorder off and slowly, silently crept back to a safer distance then made for the tree-tops and made all speed back to where Yoruichi and Isana were.

I arrived back at the Gate platform, the Shadows seemingly unaware of my presence, to find the two of them settled in nicely on the flat stone walkway that hovered in midair.I wondered if I should have an ominous feeling of foreboding that the two of them seemed to be getting along well with each other. The only subject I could think of that the two of them might have in common (without Yoruichi revealing more than she safely could to the mortal woman I was keeping very carefully ignorant of a few key details) was me, and I shivered to think of the kinds of conversations they might choose to indulge in on that subject matter.

:Some times, for a man, ignorance truly is bliss,: I decided.

The first thing Isana and Yoruichi had to say to me after I tried to approach the steps was

"Ugh! Go and wash off, Renji, you smell!"

So much for the warm welcome. I looked down at myself and realized that I had the muck of the swamp weighting my pants legs down the whole trip back. There was a layer of grime caked on me all the way up to my waist from where I'd had to immerse myself in muck to keep my cover and there was splatter on my shirt form ducking down into the weeds to hide. It was on my arms and face, a move I'd stolen from some of the soldiers I'd observed in 'Nam during my stint there on Red-zone missions earlier in my career as a young officer a few decades ago. It helped to camouflage me in with the surroundings.

Yoruichi pointedly activated the gate and not-so-subtly said to me

"There's a stream you can wash in on the other side."

Isana tossed me a handful of fresh clothes and a towel wrapped in plastic and pointed the way, only the gesture more closely resembled someone telling their dog to go out into the garage.

"Thank ladies," I said dryly. "It's nice to know that I'm loved."

"We love you better when you don't smell like something that died," Yoruichi said frankly.

I tossed her the recording device with its image-sphere in its carrying case and said

"Look at that while I'm gone."

Nothing loath to wash this smelly nastiness off me, I flashed across worlds to the one I'd left previously that morning and stripped down to wash up in the stream. Like all the other lakes and streams I'd bathed in over the course of this little leap-frog across the Realms, this one was unpleasantly cold. Not freezing, but certainly it wasn't warm. My gentlemen hated cold baths, they were trying to crawl up in me, possibly not to come out again. I ducked under and thrashed about a bit to shake the worst of the mud that had caked on and clung to me like a second skin. I washed up vigorously with the river water to get the worst of it off, then, when I was sure I was clean enough, I used the soap. A little bit later I was toweling off and putting on the clean clothes. Still barefoot, I hopped back to the swamp-world where Isana and Yoruichi were waiting for me.

I found them both poring over the images in the sphere I'd recorded.

"Whatcha s'pose they're up to?" I asked without preamble.

Isana might not know a whole lot about our world, but Yoruichi was a master at Kido, she'd have to be in order to have taken a post as the Captain of the Special Ops Division. She might be able to give and educated guess, 'cuz I wasn't any sort of detective or kido genius.

A long pause followed my question while we all watched the image of the three Shadows and their weird spell circle being played out on the recording sphere. The picture quality wasn't the best, it sort of warped a bit around the edges, but other than that I guess I couldn't complain too much.

"I'm not sure," yoruichi said consideringly after a long moment of study. "It's clear that they're doing something, but it's anybody's guess as to what. If we knew what that spell-circle of theirs was for we'd have an answer, but aside of Isana here I don't have any contacts in the Divine Realms who use the system of magic that the beings of the Divine Realms use."

My thoughts flashed back to that enormous library in the Katschei's Realm and I wondered if something useful might be found there. Too bad none of us had the time or leisure for research, I certainly wasn't inclined that way and we were in the middle of a mission and couldn't really afford to be sidetracked right then.

"Let's catch one and beat it out of them," I said, more than willing to get all this non-sense out of the way.

"Try not to be any more of an idiot than you absolutely have to," Yoruichi said quellingly. "I know you're used to fighting Hollows, but Shadows are another order of creature altogether. I'm not certain that even the Captains of The Court of Pure Souls wouldn't have difficulties taking them on."

"We're going to have to fight one sooner or later," I pointed out. "She needs ta find her kid and I need out of this damn body, and in order to do that we need that Shadow that took her boy. We'll just call this a practice round, just ta see what those things are made of."

Yoruichi shook her head a little but she seemed like she was amused by something all she said was

"Same Renji as ever, always thinking about your next fight."

"I think about other stuff too," I defended. "Like how are we all supposed to get across this swamp-"

My sentence cut off in surprise when one of my traveling companions did something unexpected. Surrounded with what looked like a blue glowing aura, Isana rose to her feet and made and elaborate gesture with her hands out before her. The chalice on her wrist glowed a neon blue and then expanded until it was the side of a small cauldron. Water swirled up out of it into a long rod that promptly iced over into into a crystaline icicle-like staff with what looked like a large six-sided snowflake at the top. Isana pointed her rod down at the murky water of the swamp.

"Freeze," she commanded.

Her voice sounded like a strange combination of her own voice and an echoing, serenely chill feminine voice.

The water in front of where she'd pointed her rod began to frost over with a thin rime, that spread out and turned to ice. The ice turned a blue-white color and Isana stepped down onto it, I was about to grab her shoulder to pull her back, but the ice supported her weight without a single crackle. The aura of blue faded around her and Isana slumped down a little.

She looked back at the two of us, Yoruichi and I exchanged a long glance. Isana, blinked for a long moment as if waking from a trance then once again faced the surface of the swamp before her.

"Freeze!" Isana commanded, pointing to the water in front of her.

A narrow pathway iced over in front of her and she started to walk forward, testing it. After a moment of it bearing her weight just fine she seemed to relax.

"C'mon if you're going," Isana said, looking both surprised and elated at this new ability.

"Yer jus' provin' yerself all kindsa useful today," I told her.

She beamed happily at me over her shoulder and gestured with her ice-rod and the ice grew thicker and more sturdy.

"Just leave it to me," she said cheerfully.

I grinned and gathered up Tanner's reigns, pulling the not-horse down the steps and out onto the the ice-path Isana had suddenly learned how to make. I was kinda glad I wasn't her though, having some Spirit-Guardian just up and dumping knowledge inta my head didn't seem like it'd be my cup of tea. Indeed, even as I helped her mount up, I could see she was a little pale and sweaty in the face and she held a hand to one temple like she was nursing a headache. We started off, myself going at a more leisurely pace across the ice to avoid slipping and falling on my ass. Isana looked relived, partly because, despite all the practice she'd been getting over the last two or three days, she was not comfortable as a rider, but mostly because she was not anticipating what was coming. She was willing enough to let me fight for her, but Isana was a pacifist at heart, she understood that battles were necessary in this case, but she didn't like them. She might not be eager for a fight, but she was anxious to get to her son.

Yoruichi looked at the two of us ready to go.

"I don't know who's crazier here," the cat-woman said as she leaped from the platform to the back of the not-horse Isana was perched on. "You for going, him for following, or me for not leaving you both."


Thanks so much to all the wonderful reveiws for the last chapter! I'm glad everyone liked it and it wasn't too over the top and turned people off my story. This chapter's a little short, just getting some scouting in. Isana's got a new ability and that should prove useful. Uh-oh, I just thought of something... now that she's got Shivna-Vatu's ice ability, Rukia might redundant for a while. Nah! That'll never happen! Thanks again for all your support, and I hope to hear your thoughts on this one.