WARNING: Brief mentions of abuse and references to suicide.
Like the unwitting Ichigo Kurosaki when he'd first gained the powers of a Shinigami, young Sosuke Aizen did not possess a zanpakuto forged as an Asauchi, though that fact was unknown to all but him. Where he'd gotten it, even he did not know, but seeing as it had assisted him in quickly rising through the ranks to become Third Seat of the Fifth Division of the Gotei Thirteen, he rarely dwelt on the mystery of its origins. As a seated officer in his Division's upper echelon, he was expected to be ready to venture into the heart of Hollow territory, the desert of Hueco Mundo, should the need arise, and one day, it did.
The density of reishi in the barren landscape gave Sosuke the notion that the world of the Hollows, while seen as an aberration, was more real than the one he and his compatriots had come from. As he strode effortlessly across the dunes without slipping or sinking thanks to a level of precise reiryoku control that he'd intuited before he could be taught, Sosuke decided that he found pleasant the feeling this world gave him of almost having awoken from the unending dream that was his life in Soul Society.
In contrast to the world of the Hollows, nothing in Soul Society felt like it was actually happening to Sosuke. No one ever remembered the start of a dream, they would simply go about their imagined business without questioning how or when they'd begun, their critical thinking dulled by the control of the subconscious. Sosuke felt much the same way in his own life, his memories of which only stretched back a year into his past. He'd become aware of himself already walking somewhere, a zanpakuto already in his hand. Because of the sword he held, he made his way to Shin'o Academy, but the curious thing about that was how he already knew what the Academy was. Like a person dreaming, Sosuke found himself with knowledge of a world he couldn't remember walking into that nevertheless allowed him to get by in it.
But, also like being a dreamer, Sosuke observed himself as the only thing that seemed to be substantial. Sometimes structures he would get too close to would begin to crumble if he momentarily lapsed in reining in his reiryoku. People in the street had dropped dead or had pieces of their bodies disintegrated just by being around him. If, at some point in his life, that had shocked and revolted him, then the thought that he was affecting people as real as himself was further back than he could then recall. He had been disallowed to train with other Shinigami hopefuls or instructed by anyone less than Vice-Captain class. He'd never seen what could've been termed classmates of his, and yet, when he walked out into the Division barracks with his reiryoku fully under his command as an early graduate, there had been others in the same unseated position as himself ready to start their careers on the same day. Where had they come from? Could they be real if he hadn't seen them training as he had done?
Perhaps it was the intoxicating realness of the desert that had set Sosuke on alert so that he was soon the only one of his squad left alive as the rest bled out on the bone-white sand. It was unsurprising to him that the rest had died. Events were happening to him, they were merely incidental bit players in his story. Had he even been sent with a squad, or had the lonesome dunes caused him to see mirages of comrades? If they had been real, why had they so easily fallen to Hollows that Sosuke barely registered, swishing his sealed zanpakuto through them as though they were gossamer phantasms?
It's all a dream, what we do is no different, he was told as he sheathed the spiritual sword. As he looked ahead, he became aware of having wandered through the dream at some point to end up in a nightmare, for he was face-to-face with a bogeyman. A crowned skull loomed above the young Shinigami, its head seeming to hang in the air against the black sky as easily as did the moon.
"Keep killing my subjects, and you're going to incur my wrath, young one," a voice echoed when the skeleton opened its mouth. "Are you a Shinigami or a Hollow? I see we're both wearing masks, is yours an attempt to gain the king's favour?"
The irony which had intrigued the skeletal Hollow had not been lost on Sosuke, that being the standard practice of the Gotei Thirteen to wear protective masks which covered the lower half of the face and encompassed the chin when venturing into Hueco Mundo, which had been the style at the time. In the days before Kisuke Urahara reformed the Twelfth into the science Division, it was only the best guess of what could charitably be termed researchers within the Gotei Thirteen that protection should be worn in a place such as they'd sent Sosuke into. Though Sosuke knew such precautions to be little more than theatre, he couldn't afford to be insubordinate and decline to wear one. Since his comrades had fallen, he'd simply forgotten to remove it, so enamoured had he been by the place itself.
This, along with his not yet having donned the glasses which would become his true mask outside of Hueco Mundo, would result in him going unrecognized when he would encounter Baraggan Louisenbairn again in the future, at that time bringing with him an offer to turn the King of Hueco Mundo into one of his Espada.
"I don't believe in kings," said the young man simply as he started to walk again. When his foot took as long to reach the ground on the fourth step as the last three steps had taken together, the watching Hollow saw the image of the boy flicker backward in one blinding movement that made it seem as though he'd turned back time to undo his last few steps. "That's an interesting field you have surrounding you," observed the boy, sounding amused.
His amusement amused the King of Hueco Mundo, who cackled. "That's my Senescencia," he proclaimed proudly. "It—"
"Slows time for those who come near you," the boy finished for him. "The Shinigami know only a few methods for controlling the flow of time, all kido that are forbidden. That Hollows can do it innately is fascinating."
"You're not afraid?"
"I'm intrigued."
"I could easily kill you, whelp."
"I don't think so," smiled the boy. "I think we intrigue each other. And I doubt I'm as easily killed as you imagine."
Baraggan gave the boy no quarter for such a blasphemous remark, his large, double-bladed axe flying out on its chains to exact the toll for showing such hubris before a king. It missed.
"Do your abilities affect time in other ways?" asked the many flickering images of the boy as they blinked in and out of Baraggan's view with each swing of his axe. His tone was easy, his speech uninterrupted by the attacks launched at him.
"I am the master of life and death," howled the Hollow king as he continued his frenzied swinging. He'd never had to use his axe so much in his entire time as an evolved Hollow. "All things age and die at my touch."
Clang! The very instant that Baraggan had said that last statement, the boy had parried his axe with his skinny sword instead of dodging it, even though both feats should have been of equal impossibility.
"So, the power of Hollows can truly trespass in the realm of God," grinned the boy as he seemed to hold his blade only loosely in his hand. "I would like to know more about this power."
Had the Zero Division been attentive enough in the following decades to follow up on those in whose lives they deigned to intervene, and if such transgressions as the artificial creation and manipulation of Hollows could be classed as more a science than a sin, Sosuke Aizen surely would have earned himself a place among their ranks thereafter. Though he assumed correctly that the Shinigami had something to do with his forgotten past, no kido that he'd learned, whether it had been allowed or forbidden to him, had proven useful in rekindling his lost memories. He had the unshakable feeling that beyond the barrier of amnesia lay the secret of why his entire life up to then had been an inescapable dream. If kido would be of no use, then he would endeavour to see for himself the events which had led to his current circumstances, even if he had to break all of God's laws to do so.
The potentiality of subverting time's paradigm naturally belonged to Hollows, who were living perversions of a natural state of being. Baraggan was but an example of that potential unlocked, and science abhorred the possibility of an occurrence that could not be reproduced under the right circumstances. So, it simply fell to Sosuke to ensure the right circumstances. Eugenic selection of those with preferable abilities transplanted and undesirable ones weeded out across many short-lived iterations eventually led to what would be only the first of many artificial Hollows to be brought about by Aizen's design: a prototypical monster known as Black.
Though impressive in its own right as a triumph of experimentation over morality, Black was not an example of what Aizen had aimed for, but a means to that end. In the many subsequent excursions back to Hueco Mundo that the power of his zanpakuto had allowed him to make entirely unnoticed, Sosuke Aizen had come to the conclusion that the ability he'd predicted to arise would only do so if the lineage of its potential crossed from Hollow to humanity.
A relatively new possibility brought on by advances in both Living World and Soul Society medical science, humans born of those attacked by Hollows had become an intriguing prospect to Sosuke Aizen. Inheriting traits from their parent's spiritual attacker, the humanity of such persons could be seen to distill the abilities of Hollows in novel ways unseen in the masked creatures themselves. To that end, Black had been created as a blunt instrument for the transference of Hollow essence into a living human, much like its eventual successor, White—who would one day perform the heinous deed on the Quincy Masaki Kurosaki—would be bred for.
The first attempt was an abject failure, as, unlike its future iteration, Black was not possessed of a strategic mind. Though uniquely empowered, it proved a mindless beast barely controllable by its creator, and no viable humans had been left alive in the wake of its first release from Hueco Mundo. Realizing that the unique abilities of Black were useless if it left no survivors, Aizen pivoted to release it into Soul Society instead, where kido could heal wounds too grievous to be treated by the medical science of the day. That had been a success, with Black enacting its transference upon a random victim during its rampage through Rukongai whom Sosuke would later learn was named Hisana. Once she successfully survived the attack, the only problem that remained was the fact that she was not a living human.
That was fixable, given time. By then, Sosuke had ascended to the rank of Captain in his Division, and so, found it slightly more difficult to make trips to and from Hueco Mundo, even with the assistance of his zanpakuto's illusory powers. Those powers did prove useful, however, in faking the death of Hisana after he'd found out that she'd become impregnated by the man she'd married following her attack, Captain Byakuya Kuchiki of the Sixth. An interesting development, to be sure. Using such forbidden kido as he'd mentioned to Baraggan in the past, the time-stopping Jikanteishi, Aizen suspended Hisana's body in temporal stasis as he worked alone on the development of a gigai that could convert a soul being within it into a regular human. Many years later, Kisuke Urahara would, incidentally, attempt to use an identically functioning gigai of his own creation on the woman's younger sister, Rukia.
"Kisuke Urahara can never invent anything that has not already been conceived by my mind", Aizen would later spitefully orate to Ichigo Kurosaki from inside his prison, Muken. In truth, Urahara's version had been inferior, for Aizen had had to work harder to ensure that his own could accept and convert the souls of both the host and an unborn child.
Every so often, Aizen would release Hisana from her chronal imprisonment to check that the kido was not negatively impacting her pregnancy, and during those times, he was always reminded of the surprising resiliency of the woman both physically and emotionally. When the gigai had been at last perfected, he'd released Hisana for the last time and forced her to inhabit it. Then he'd dropped her into the Living World, only a short time away from the onset of labour, and kept a distant eye on her. He'd decided against devoting the energy it would take to keep her conscious and deliver her child in Hueco Mundo, what with his needing to keep up appearances as Captain of his Division, but he never lost track of her.
Ichigo's birth was still five years away when Isshin was surprised by the arrival of an unexpected visitor at the front door: Hisana, the Rukongai girl he'd once saved from a maliciously designed kido when he'd still been with the Corps. Isshin never forgot a face, but he was shocked to see it on a girl in the Living World. The rapid, shallow breaths she was taking precluded his questioning her situation any further as he ushered her inside.
In her state, Hisana had been able to explain far less than Isshin could gather just by putting the pieces together with his often-obfuscated intuition. Luckily for both of them, one thing the man didn't need explained was the act of delivering babies. As someone who'd come up through the medical corps, it had occasionally fallen to Isshin to perform such a task within the Gotei Thirteen—it wasn't unheard of for members to fraternize, and his own cousin had even been married to a fellow seated officer—and as a medically trained nobleman, he was often requested by those of equal social standing to assist with the birthing of their children. The combination of his lineage and military profession made him a doubly respectable selection in the eyes of the aristocracy. As it turned out, the skills required for the delivery of soul and living babies resided in the same wheelhouse.
"Hey there, it's been a while," he'd said to her in an attempt at calming reassurance, lowering her gently onto a futon. "Looks like I'm going to be your doctor again today." His smile as he'd said this, recalling the words he'd spoken to her so long ago, had been a hopeful one.
The body he was forced to inhabit in the Living World, however, meant that Isshin could no longer call upon medical kido which may have been able to keep Hisana alive following the delivery of her healthy baby boy. Though he could diagnose no reason for it beyond simply the stress and strain of the pregnancy and subsequent labour, Hisana's body began to shut down shortly after they'd ensured her son's safe entry into the Living World. He couldn't have known that it was an unfortunate and callously disregarded side effect of her having been transformed into a living human through Aizen's machinations. After he had spent each following night sleeplessly striving to find anything known to the medical science of the Living World that might save Hisana, Isshin had been forced to come to terms with a heartbreaking inadequacy like he'd never faced growing up a prodigy. One that would, in turn, fuel him to study all the more diligently and one day open his own clinic for emergency cases like the one that would haunt his mind as his greatest failure.
"Shukuro...please, you must...tell Byakuya-sama...about our Shukuro..." had been Hisana's dying words, spoken scant days later to the man who'd saved her life twice over. Such a request was not then one that Isshin had the power to grant, but he knew of the one man who could.
"You've got to get a message to Byakuya," Isshin had demanded of Kisuke Urahara with all the sternness he could muster, cradling the deceased Hisana's new baby in his arms. "Tell him about his kid. I know he might not be able to come right away, but you have to let him know, for Hisana-chan's sake."
Kisuke Urahara had hummed at that contemplatively. "And what's going to happen with him until then?"
"I'll take him," Isshin had replied immediately without hesitation.
"Well, then it gets complicated," Urahara had replied seriously after a spell. "Yours and Masaki's souls are entwined so that your Shinigami essence can stave off the essence of the Hollow that would otherwise be killing her from the inside," he'd explained. "This boy has Hollow reiryoku inside of him...in fact, I'd guess that's why he was born in the first place." This he'd said ominously, the brim of his striped bucket hat shadowing his eyes as appropriately as if he'd ensured it on purpose. "Him being near you or Masaki for an extended length of time could disrupt the equilibrium the two of you have. The Hollow power inside of him could work against you two at this delicate stage, and it might end badly for Masaki."
"Do you know that for sure?"
"No, but I don't have all the information," Urahara had admitted, still as serious as Isshin had never seen him. "The method I used to tether your souls together to save Masaki was already experimental, we don't even know for sure the long-term effects it might have on your Shinigami powers. This kid, I haven't seen too many like him before, but I'm sure you can tell as well as me that he's got Hollow flowing through him, and it might only get stronger as he gets older." Isshin had nodded solemnly. "The effects of that extra Hollow influence is something I can't account for at this stage, but if you want a guess, I'd say it doesn't look good." Isshin had looked down at the peacefully sleeping baby in his arms with pain in his heart when he'd heard Urahara continue. "However, if you want more than a guess, I could always run some tests on the kid," he'd said.
"Not a chance," had been Isshin's frowned reply. "I'm sure Masaki-chan knows somebody around here who can take him. I'll only check in on him once in a while, but at least he'll be safe until Byakuya can see him."
And that had been that. Isshin had left, putting his full faith in Urahara, the man who he knew had already gotten farewell messages to select inhabitants of Soul Society on his behalf. But Isshin had been a man thinking with his heart, something Kisuke Urahara could not afford to compromise himself by becoming as he played a long, multifaceted game of mental chess against Sosuke Aizen, whose insidious plans had previously led to his own exile from Soul Society. Urahara had correctly assumed that the whole situation with Hisana surrounding the birth of her child had been some scheme of Aizen's, and so, for his own reasons, he'd decided against alerting Byakuya Kuchiki to the existence of the child. He'd figured that the less attention they drew to Shukuro, the better it would be for everyone involved, including the boy's ignorant father. Sometimes, cold calculations had to be done in order to make the right moves in matches such as the one in which he and Aizen were engaged.
Masaki Kurosaki had known somebody, a family friend named Tsukishima who'd taken the baby in under his own motivations that Isshin couldn't afford to question. Masaki trusted Tsukishima, and Isshin trusted Masaki. That trust proved well-founded, as Isshin had confirmed in his occasional visits during Shukuro's first few years, and the man named Tsukishima had been, by all accounts, a loving foster parent to the boy. Eventually, Tsukishima welcomed into their lives a woman who, unbeknownst to him, resented his adopted child. When Tsukishima was tragically killed in a car accident, the loss saw young Shukuro's life take a tragic turn. It wasn't until he was found by Deputy Shinigami Kugo Ginjo that Shukuro Tsukishima had finally been freed from his stepmother's abuses.
This Aizen had not minded terribly. Though he'd managed to keep tabs on the boy up to then, it had mostly been as a formality, as he viewed Shukuro as a failed experiment. Though he'd successfully brought a Fullbringer into the human world, his powers, though they could affect the personal pasts of individuals, weren't anywhere as useful as he'd hoped they'd be to him. On top of that, his goals had evolved since he'd first encountered the Hollow king lifetimes before, and knowledge of his past held less allure to him than visions of his glorious future ever since he'd made his greatest discovery. When Kugo Ginjo had come across the boy, Aizen had simply ceased to track him, writing him off as the loss of a single contingency out of many. Though he would never admit it, even his mind had not then conceived of—or been interested enough to bend its efforts towards conceiving—that which Kugo Ginjo would one day exploit Ichigo Kurosaki for: the ability of Shinigami who possessed Fullbring to enhance the powers of other Fullbringers.
Sitting on the hard floor of his cell in Seireitei, Shukuro Tsukishima finally felt as though fate had finished the cruel game it had played with him always as its favoured piece, even if that meant he'd finally been removed from the board. It felt as though there was nowhere else for his life, or afterlife, to go.
Kugo Ginjo had taken a boy who'd had his self-worth beaten out of him and had instilled a sense of superiority in its place. Though not an equivalent feeling, it had served to numb Shukuro's inner pain. If Fullbringers such as himself were innately superior to regular humans, then the physical and emotional wounds inflicted on him by his regular human stepmother could be no more harmful to him than the bite of a mosquito. He told himself such things while using his power, the proof of his status, to make himself as important to others as he should have always been to his blind, ignorant, human stepmother. If their minds broke in the process, that was okay, because Tsukishima had learned from Kugo that there was nothing to be done about the weakness that defined humans.
Then they had both died. Tsukishima had found himself wondering how someone above the problems of humanity could be struck down by the kind of literal embodiment of death that humans feared so much to encounter. Had he not been special, and did being special not mean that one was exempt from human problems such as dying? These things he'd been questioning after the defeat of Yhwach that he'd helped to bring about when the one who'd rescued him from Rukongai, Kukaku Shiba, had told him the awful truth about his death being at the hands of his own biological father.
On top of everything that he'd been through, it had turned out that he'd also been denied a life with a father who could have come to his rescue had the man only been made aware of his son's plight. Not only that, but his life had amounted to nothing in the end, the evidence of his Fullbring vanishing from the world as he died, alone, with fate having wielded his own father against him to undermine his perceived superiority.
After his failed attack on Kisuke Urahara, before he'd been escorted to his prison cell in Seireitei on the orders of his injured father, Shukuro, crying on his hands and knees, had been approached by a devastated Isshin Kurosaki.
"Shukuro, I'm sorry," the man had said, sounding to Shukuro as though he was crying too, though he couldn't see as he watched his tears wet the grounds of the Urahara Shoten below him. "It was my job to watch out for you and I failed. When Kugo found you, I lost track of you, but after we found out about Tsukishima's wife...well, I thought life with Kugo might be better for you. I was wrong." Then a pendant had appeared next to Shukuro's hand, dropped on the ground gently by Isshin. "Hisana was wearing that on the day you were born. I was going to give it to Byakuya, but right now I think you need it more. You're a Fullbringer, so you should be able to pull memories out of things like this, right? I want you to see what you can of your mother."
Shukuro was sure that Isshin had meant for the memories of his mother pulled from the pendant to be calming, or sacramental, but instead, they filled him with a longing he would never be rid of from then on. He'd felt his mother's love for him from the time before he was born up to the days after, when she'd died. It was love like he'd never felt from anyone before, even the man who'd adopted and shared his name with Shukuro. It was a love that, now that he'd felt it, he felt chillingly sure that he could no longer bare to live without. Had he been able to bring his bookmark with him...
The door outside of Shukuro's cell opened with a clatter that mercifully broke his mind away from despairing thoughts. In walked a Shinigami with short black hair which stood up at the front whom Shukuro didn't recognize even though the man looked at him with a knowing seriousness that made him suspect that he should.
"Hi, Shukuro," came the voice of Isshin Kurosaki from the incongruously youthful face. He sneered sourly as he seemed to size up the Fullbringer's cell. "Damn, I thought they'd put you in a nicer place than this," he huffed.
"It's no less than I deserve," put forth Shukuro without sadness in his tone or self-pity in his heart. He was merely stating a fact, one that Byakuya Kuchiki had opened his eyes to moments after he'd received the achingly pure feelings of motherly love from the pendant.
"Stand up," the Sixth Division Captain had commanded coolly of his previously unknown son just as he'd come down from the euphoric high of tasting unconditional love for the first time in his life, gasping for air as if he'd just surfaced after a long dive. After a moment spent processing everything he'd seen and felt, Shukuro had shakily done as commanded.
"For daring to escape into the Living World, and for attacking an ally of the Gotei Thirteen in the presence of a Captain, the law of Soul Society demands that I should cut you down a second time," recited Byakuya as if from a script he'd memorized by rote.
Upon hearing this, Isshin had frowned at the man, chiming in grumpily, "I'm a Captain too" while scratching his nose unprofessionally.
Hearing his father's cold words, Shukuro had calmly turned to face the Captain, his supernatural sword having reverted back to a plain bookmark held loosely in his limp hand. He'd had no intention of brandishing the blade again that night. Bringing himself to verbally assent to this punishment proved as difficult for Shukuro as meeting Byakuya's steely gaze, but the boy stood firmly, implicitly giving his one-time murderer permission to take another crack at killing him. By then, he'd been cruelly drained of the feelings of love that had blissfully filled him up moments before. And, in the wake of their loss—which was infinitely worse than their mere absence had been during his lifetime—Shukuro saw, for the first time, the entirety of what he'd become thanks to Kugo's influence, and every facet of it looked disgustingly unworthy of the love that he desperately wished had remained unknown to him.
"But," came Byakuya's voice, "I will not knowingly raise my sword against the child that Hisana gave me."
"You're...letting me go?" Shukuro had managed to ask, finally lifting his head to face Byakuya as the Captain turned gracefully away. At those words, the man had stopped his walk towards the paper door which had appeared a short distance away.
"I'm allowing you to redeem yourself, for Hisana's sake," he'd said without turning back to look at Shukuro. "When I killed you, you were a person who had callously used his abilities to shatter the minds of innocent people for nothing more than amusement. Whatever love you felt from that pendant was meant for someone you should have tried to be instead, not the man I killed. You did not become someone worthy of the love Hisana gave to you," Byakuya had said, unintentionally verbalizing Shukuro's own feelings. "If she had seen who you grew up to be, it would break her heart." This last statement had sounded as sad as the one preceding it had sounded cold. Then Byakuya had finally turned to face his devastated son. "If you have any respect for that woman at all, you'll use that sword of yours to save me the trouble of dishonouring her."
"Byakuya, stop," Isshin had tried to interrupt, all righteous anger, but before the words had left his mouth, Book of the End was gleaming in Shukuro's tensed hand. "Shukuro, hold on..."
Three things had happened simultaneously in the following instant: Isshin had used shunpo to lunge at Shukuro, Byakuya had moved equally swiftly to intercept him, and Shukuro had crossed his arm in front of his chest to put the edge of his supernaturally sharp sword on the left side of his neck to rest in the crook of his collarbone, a simple tug away from opening his carotid artery. He could see Byakuya holding one of Isshin's arms in a tight grip from the corner of his eye.
"Isshin," Shukuro had said using the deep breath he'd slowly drawn to steady himself, "thank you for letting me see Hisana."
"Shukuro!"
For a split second, Shukuro had thought that the ringing he heard in the next moment was the audible sharpness of his sword being drawn across his neck, then the vibrations in his hand told him that the blade had actually been swiped aside by a strike too fast to comprehend. Byakuya was suddenly standing beside him when he opened his eyes, his zanpakuto raised, and Shukuro took no action to stop Book of the End from falling to the ground from his jostled hand. Shunpo was truly on another level compared to the speed that Fullbringers could achieve. Byakuya had managed to knock away the tool of Shukuro's intended suicide in the time between his brain deciding he was ready and the signal to do it reaching his muscles.
Sheathing his sword, Byakuya spoke calmly to Shukuro with his eyes closed. "Your sword behaves similarly to a zanpakuto," he'd informed the boy. "When our blades meet, our souls connect and your intent becomes clear to me. I felt your repentance. I know that you truly planned to go through with it. In light of that, I'll consider your debt to Hisana paid." Then he'd looked at Shukuro head-on. "Leave the sword behind and let's go."
"Listen, Shukuro, I know you've been through a lot, but—"
"Why did you come here?" Shukuro asked, interrupting Isshin. He wasn't annoyed, he just wanted so desperately to be alone.
Isshin Kurosaki scratched his head and looked quizzically up at the ceiling. "My son told me that we have a date to meet Aizen sometime soon, so I just came by to let you know that I plan on giving him a piece of my mind for you." Here, he thrust an accusatory finger out toward Shukuro. "So you've gotta be here when I get back so I can tell you about it, got that?"
"I've got a better idea," said Shukuro, finally meeting Isshin's eyes, "I want to join you. I want to see the man who ruined my life."
I hope everyone's enjoying the story so far. The next chapter will see some of the things I've been setting up start to converge at the Kurosaki home, which will see a visit from Rukia, Harribel, Grimmjow, Uryu and a Fullbringer. Hope you guys are looking forward to it! Happy reading.
