The current lords of Hueco Mundo: to the south, the Centaur; to the north, the Shark; to the east, the Gargoyle; to the west, the Wasteland; in the center, in the white castle of the night that rose from the sands in a mockery of the pale moon, the one who called himself God-King.

Lesser menos came and went, but vasto lords, once established, were difficult to rout. Partly this was a result of their strength, and partly this was because there was simply no motive to. They were fiercely territorial, but for the most part cared little enough about the worlds outside their lands and had no interest in amassing more power than they already possessed. The young Centaur excepted, these lords had held their current domains for hundreds of years.

Recently, rumors had begun to spread. The Menos Forest stood unclaimed as the lingering traces of the Centaur's presence began to fade. The Gargoyle who had long held sentinel atop the peak of the desert world's sole mountain had abandoned his post. The winter that older hollows predicted would host the God-King's next Wild Hunt came and went without event.

Other tales told of a death god who offered salvation—salvation from his comrades' blades, from the hunger of the residents of the Hollow World, and from a hollow's own nature. Hollows who had fled from Las Noches claimed that the God-King had bowed his head to this interloper who would be their messiah.

It was wild, baseless. A single death god, even one of their vaunted captains, could never have defeated the God-King. They had tried before. The Old God, perhaps, might have stood a chance, but it had been so long since any hollow had witnessed this supposed leader of their nemeses that he had long since passed into the realm of tall tales, become merely a monster to represent all that their kind hated and feared about death gods.

But then the question still stood: where had the lords gone?

"When did the Gargoyle disappear?" Kensei asked. When the small hollow only huddled there, cowering, he prodded it with a foot. It sprung immediately to quivering attention.

"Wh— when? Er, lemme— sirs, two moon phases back, mebbe. Three? Te— Yes, three, it's right, jus' three, or two. Ain't so long ago. I jus' heard of it a phase ago, myself. I ain't one sirs want to be asking. Begging yer pardon, sirs. Don't mean to assume. Please don't eat me, sirs."

Kensei dismissed it. It wasted no time in scurrying off to vanish over a dune.

"Let's go," said Shinji. He reached out and pulled, ripping space apart to reveal passage to a lightless void. They pulled on their reiatsu-concealing cloaks before stepping through.

The garganta led out onto a grassy cliff that overlooked the sea. Puffins circled through the pale sky. The other Visored plus one had claimed an unoccupied patch of ground to wait at.

Shinji's and Kensei's ivory masks dissipated as their feet touched solid ground. Rose glanced up politely. Hachi started to stand, hand already moving towards his own face. "Are we switching?" the kidou user asked.

"Nah," said Shinji. "We got what we need—"

He startled—a puffin had tried to land where he was standing. The bird seemed just as surprised at the sudden resistance open air offered it and tried to flail away, making its moaning cries, but one wing, caught in Shinji's leg, flapped sluggishly. "Yeesh." The Visored moved off it and watched it make its escape out over the water. "Of all the places, Kisuke."

The only death god present had a yellow scarf on as a concession to the temperature. He didn't have a hollow's power warding him from the cold. "Oh, be careful with them, Hirako-san. Puffins are an endangered species."

Hiyori broke off her staring contest with a nearby puffin to kick her former captain in the face. "All the more reason not to be here! What happens if a menos follows us back, huh?"

Kisuke sat back up slowly, holding his bleeding nose. Despite the injury, he was smiling. "You haven't changed, Hiyori-san."

"The hell's that supposed to mean, baldy?"

"It's not a problem if you're followed here," he said. "There are no living humans nearby to be caught in the crossfire, there are no traces here to link back to your current place of residence, and, of course, puffins are unaffected by reiatsu."

That actually jarred Love and Rose out of their manga and book respectively. Shinji, who had just had one of the birds react to his presence, said, "Wait, what?"

"That's stupid," said Hiyori, scowling. "You're stupid. That's not how it works."

"No, no, it's true!" Kisuke gestured at the puffin Hiyori had been haunting. "Hadou 31: Shakkahou."

The bright red fireball hit its target dead-on. He had clearly underpowered it, but even a relatively weak spell wasn't something to scoff at coming from a captain-level death god. Against a physical body, it should have caused a painful burn, and indeed, tendrils of smoke crept up from the surrounding grass. The puffin gave the smoldering plants a concerned look and scooted away.

Hiyori stared at it with something like horror. "What did you do to it?"

"Me?" He flicked his fan open. "Puffins are naturally immune. It's one of the great mysteries of the universe."

Without looking up from her swimsuit model magazine, Lisa drew her zanpakuto and brought it down on the puffin's back. The bird began to dissolve from the cut outwards, breaking apart into scarlet dust.

"Whoops," said Kisuke.

"...Was it fake the whole time?" asked Hiyori.

"I'm surprised you didn't notice it wasn't blinking."

As Hiyori tried to pummel him off the cliff, Kensei asked, "Where's Mashiro?"

"She's scaring the birds down by the shore," Love said, and Kensei closed his eyes for a moment and let out an exhale that wasn't a sigh.

Meanwhile, Shinji pulled Hiyori away by the scruff of her cloak, holding her out at arm's length as she flailed at him. "What do you think you're doing, you baldy—"

"Calm down, really. We won't know what to do next if ya kill him now."

It took a few minutes for them all to put on at least a veneer of professionalism. Kensei dragged Mashiro back to the group with a hand over her face to stop her from making puffin noises, reading material was reluctantly put way, and Hiyori glowered down at them all from atop a rock.

Once everyone was settled, Kisuke took the stage. "What did you learn?"

"Aizen's nabbed the Gargoyle," said Shinji.

"Or killed him," Kensei said. "There were signs of a fight by the mountain. None of the hollows we questioned noticed anything, so it couldn't have been a large one, but Aizen wouldn't have to throw around much force to kill a vasto lorde."

Love's mouth twisted. "No one should have a zanpakuto with no limits."

"There's one he has to have," said Kensei.

He didn't blink when Mashiro's upside-down face leaned into his vision. "But we don't know what it is, so it doesn't matter, right?"

Kisuke idly spread his fan. "I haven't heard anything about a massive influx of new arrivals in Soul Society, but Aizen might have done something to redirect the vasto lorde's pluses if he didn't want to draw attention. Had one of his hollows eat him, maybe. There's no way to know for certain yet, so we'll operate on the worst-case assumption until proven otherwise. Aizen's recruited the Gargoyle. The other two are still independent?"

"Seems that way," said Shinji.

"In that case, is anyone here up for a meeting with the Wasteland?"

After a moment of strained silence, Shinji, the Visored's unofficial spokesperson, set his elbows on his knees and voiced what all the others were thinking. "Kisuke, we're not scientists out to steal your ideas. You're allowed to explain things. We followed you here to the middle of nowhere—"

"We're in Greenland," Kisuke corrected.

"—to the middle of nowhere," said Shinji, "because you might be crazy, but you've generally got an idea what you're doing. We're gonna need just a little more than blind trust, though, if ya want us to risk our lives."

Kisuke met his eyes. After a few seconds too many, the death god looked away, tapping the side of his closed fan against his cheek. He took a deep breath. Some of the tension leaked from his shoulders, and suddenly he looked much smaller without his heavy shopkeeper's robe. "It's been a busy two days," he said. "I've been pushing through mostly on momentum. Alright, I'll explain. We're in something of a rush, so please let me finish first before you ask questions.

"Two days ago, an unfamiliar death god arrived in Karakura. It seemed like the Thirteenth had learned their lesson from the last one, because this one's signature was significantly more powerful than death gods assigned to patrol usually are. Unsuppressed, it'd have been at lower captain level. There were no limiters on them aside from their own technique."

Several of the Visored were clearly itching to say something at that. Kisuke shrugged off their sharpened attention and went on, "Yoruichi-san has been staying at the shop since last week, so I asked her to look into it. About an hour before she returned, a second signature, this one the level of a two-year Academy student, appeared beside the first, followed swiftly by a hollow's emergence. The death god significantly lowered the strength of their suppression for seven minutes; when they renewed the technique, the hollow was gone, and the second signature had grown to a third-year Academy student's level. The death god immediately left, but remained at all times within four miles of the second signature.

"As it turned out, the second signature belonged to Kurosaki Ichigo."

"Shiba's—" Rose began.

"Shiba Isshin's son," said Kisuke with a nod. "The—"

"And you left Karakura with the Gotei—" Hiyori threw a wad of bird poop at him that passed through his head. He winced slightly. "You would not have left if the situation wasn't stable. My apologies."

"It's alright. As I was saying, the second signature was Isshin-san's son, while the first was a death god who has never had any contact with the Gotei."

"That's not possible," said Hiyori.

"He claimed to be from another living world with an afterlife that operates by very different rules that I won't delve into right now, and that he had ended up here by following a hollow through Hueco Mundo. Yoruichi-san suspected at first that he was messing with Kurosaki-san, but the hollow corroborated his story before he killed it.

"Leaving aside for a moment the issue of an entire world and afterlife we've never even suspected the existence of, Aizen has recently obtained his third vasto lorde. He'll need to deliver on some of his promises soon. To make an arrancar of a hollow that powerful, his own Hogyoku isn't enough. He needs mine. Meanwhile, a captain-level death god who the Gotei have no records of recently appeared in Karakura before vanishing just as abruptly, and an apparently unremarkable human he had brief contact with suddenly gained an unprecedented amount of spiritual power, both of which can easily be spun to sound like soul experimentation."

"You have the worst luck of anyone I've ever heard of," said Shinji, his grin all teeth. "So you need a hole to stick the Hogyoku in before Aizen brings the Gotei knocking, and you're going to use this other world for that by finding a hollow to take you there."

"Why don't you go into hiding?" Love asked. "This is risky. It's not like you."

"It's just like him," said Shinji. "He's always been reckless under pressure. You didn't see this coming at all, didja?"

"It is a bit embarrassing."

"It totally is," said Hiyori. "How did you miss an entire world? Were you too busy selling candy to children to actually do your job?"

"Ah, but selling candy to children is my job, Hiyori-san! I'm only a humble shopkeeper. Research is merely a hobby."

Lisa said, "How certain are you that the death god isn't pulling wool over your eyes?"

"More certain than I think I should be, less than I'm fully comfortable with. The majority of the evidence does point towards him telling him the truth, unlikely as it sounds. As things stand, I'm willing to gamble on it."

He pulled his hood lower. "We stand to lose too much if I don't risk it. We can't go into hiding without leaving Isshin-san's family vulnerable, right after Kurosaki-san put himself on Soul Society's radar, and if they left as well there would be no one stationed in Karakura."

"About Isshin," said Kensei, "what happened with his son?"

"Being exposed to such a large amount of reiatsu triggered his latent death god powers to awaken," said Kisuke. "It wasn't unexpected—before the Soul King and Captain-Commander consolidated the afterlife's powers, death gods interacted with the living world fairly frequently, so there are plenty of records of half-death god children taking after their dead parent in reiryoku. I had contingency plans prepared for when it happened. Yoruichi-san is helping him through them. He'll be fine. Probably."

"He's not going to die, is he?" asked Hiyori. "'cause I won't get to kill you if Shiba does it first."

"There is a zero percent chance of the process killing him," said Kisuke.

Hiyori looked unimpressed. "You'd better know what you're doing, baldy."

"Sounds like you have that covered without our help. So if ya just need a hollow for this," said Shinji, "why are you going after a lord?"

"It has to be a hollow from the other world, or one that's eaten a hollow from the other world. A vasto lorde should fit the latter criterion. That, plus it would only be helpful if we could convince even a single vasto lorde not to join Aizen. I know I've asked all of you before not to interfere with Aizen's activities in Hueco Mundo, but that was out of worry that he would frame me, again, and convince the Gotei of my building an army of hollows at Las Noches." He shrugged. "Since the Gotei will be coming down on us in Karakura regardless, there's nothing to lose by acting anymore. As for if you're wondering why the Wasteland, Aizen might already be making overtures to the Shark. The Wasteland, on the other hand, is a complete unknown; he'll be saving them for last."

"This is moving rather quickly," Rose said. "Instead of over a year, it seems like we have than a less a week before we go to war."

"Sorry for springing this on—"

"It's no trouble."

"We've spent long enough waiting," said Love.

"Wait a second," said Lisa, "this other world has an afterlife. Are they going to attack us for smuggling a dangerous artifact over?"

"Naruto-san says he's the only death god in his world. I'm inclined to believe him."

Lisa leaned back against the rock face. "Whatever."

Kisuke cleared his throat. "Now, about the Wasteland..."

"How many are you bringing?" asked Shinji.

Kisuke smiled faintly, snapping his fan open. "Oh... two should be enough."

"Ah, I'll go." Shinji glanced over the rest.

Lisa stood laboriously when his eyes flicked over her, one hand drawing her mask over her face. "I'll do it." She brought her sword down in a line, splitting the salt-tinged air.

The garganta gaped over the cliff. Lisa stepped inside first, then paused on the threshold to wait when Kisuke half-turned to the others. "If we're not back by tonight, everyone, would you be willing to assist Yoruichi-san in Karakura? I'd count it as a favor."

"'Count it as a favor'," Hiyori repeated nasally. "Didn't you say you were in a rush? Get moving already."

"We'll hold the fort down," said Kensei.

"Please be careful," said Hachi.

Love added, "Don't die."

Kisuke bowed and followed Lisa through. Shinji slid his mask on, then closed the garganta behind them.