World Eater

By _

In the perfect stillness of his dead world, the Third Child sat silently upon the endless red sea, gazing at the faded, dead eye of Lillith as it stared back from behind the horizon.

He had spent an eternity, lifetimes upon eons, trying to build up and create his perfect world using the oversoul of humanity time and again, searching for the spark that gave life meaning, that could bring him true happiness. Each time he emerged from the reddish-orange waters he knew he had failed. Humanity, it seemed, would always cause itself pain.

Worse yet, he lost his hold on his own physical form as the price of these attempts. It wasn't so terrible really, the form had little meaning left to him and he could grasp and hold the new vessel perfectly each time, regardless of how much his power grew and his perspective skewed. Perhaps his actively synchronizing with it so many times through conscious effort made it easier to do so when he needed a new body. Ritsuko certainly wasn't going to tell him, erasing that knowledge was among the first things he did.

Aside from such idle musings and the bouts of boredom that almost drove him to try once more, he would have to conclude that this was ultimately the best possible existence for humanity to have. Confined to the red seas as one they could not cause harm to each other, could not know anger or sorrow or a million other emotions. This was his gift to the lillim, to those he once lived with and those he never knew alike.

A peaceful, quite existence with no worries, concerns or responsibilities. A pain free eternity with no others to offend or interfere, to torture or maim, to kill or manipulate. And his gift to the universe as well, the removal of something that was destined to cause only agony and destruction.

He sighed. Now if only there was a means to escape the boredom that his unending vigilance entailed.

As if in response to his careless, idle wish, the air trembled and a line of power tore through the fabric of reality from one point to another. A name was echoed, Windalfr, and then all Shinji knew was he was somewhere else, his great bulk towering over the insignificant trees of a forest he knew could not exist on his world.

His connection to the oversoul was strained, but still present. Worse, he could feel a tide of humanity here, unclaimed and still causing despair and terror to the world and one another. He pulled mightily at the link, trying to push the Anti-AT field out upon this new realm, only to strike a solid, unyielding wall.

The field was part of his world and could not stretch into another. No matter, he could just pluck the souls individually and funnel them back on his own.

Unfortunately he found that the attempt exhausted what power he had left for the moment and when something began to burn within his eyes, all he could do was collapse backwards, tired and in need of rest.

Dashing through the white sands, screaming joyfully as she was chased, Nel Tu neither knew nor wanted anything else in her afterlife.

Tragically that joy was torn away from her, along with her 'brothers', as a sudden thrum of power echoed the cry of Myoznitnirn across the endless sands and she was whisked off to stand alone among a crowd of humans, who, she knew, could not see her at all.

This new place was strange, there was a power drifting through the air, but it was thin and tasteless, completely unlike the hollow-particles that drifted and sustained her in Hueco Mundo. The humans annoyed her too, crowding every available bit of space and bustling about as if to make as much noise as possible to try and rise over the din of their fellows.

Suddenly there was a burning, stinging feeling on her stomach. Itching it showed that it was a new mark engraved into her skin, not so far removed from the ink on her back as far as her rather juvenile mind could understand.

And as suddenly as the mark-writing heat appeared it vanished, replaced by something familiar but nearly forgotten. Hunger. Hunger that she had long not felt in the rich air of her homeworld.

Luckily there were lots of easy to take snacks crowding around her, so she could eat her fill as she started her search for Pesche and Dondochakka. They were all she knew and somewhere, sooner or later, she would find them again.

She wouldn't cry just because she didn't know where they were or where she was, if she could get here than so can they. It was like when she used her super speed to leap ahead, they always caught up before too long. Always...

With a sniffle of suppressed tears the tiny arrancar allowed herself to be distracted from her gloom by the only other pressing concern to her. Her hunger.

In the lifeless black oblivion that was all that remained of Heaphens and Drazil, Reyva tried to sleep on. For a thousand years its life had repeated in a single, two year loop of time.

After a grand adventure, saving the world and so forth, it had tried to settle down, only to discover a year later that it had somehow reawakened, mid-event, two years prior when it was bound to Gig.

Events repeated themselves and every year after it triumphed it was made to start over again, growing ever more powerful and somehow unable to escape the same mistakes it had made before.

Eventually it was driven mad and tried to devour everything to remake the universe at its own whim. Many times it failed, but was imprisoned only a year before being bound to Gig once more and trying all over until eventually it succeeded and slew both Heaphens and Drazil themselves.

Then, with a special attention to detail, it created a new world, a single world, a perfect world: Reyva. But one year later the results of that labor were washed away as easily as they ever were before. As was next and all those that followed. Eventually, Reyva discovered that if it simply sat here and didn't create anything at all from the gathered souls of two worlds then time did not pass.

And so Reyva futilely tried to sleep for all eternity.

But something new happened. With a mighty pulse that turned the colorless black a blindingly pure white, the call for Gandalfr pealed through the multiverse.

And once Reyva had oriented herself, standing amongst the clouds in a new, lush world that was neither Heaphens, Drazil nor her own creation, she felt hope. This would be the new home of herself, her friends and the souls she sheltered in her stomach, since digesting them for power had turned out to be a useless gesture between the natural, unnatural might of her own self as a World Eater, strength that grew ever greater with each repetition and the fact that a reset also somehow drew out and replaced those souls consumed.

Immortality had taught her much, most importantly to her that the only way she could keep her friends, and the whole of Drazil and Heaphens for that matter, alive in their current incarnations was to never allow them to exist outside of her body and their summoning manikins. And this land would...

A strange burning on her tongue sent her writhing through the sky, blasting apart cloud and creating windy gales as she leapt into her male form to try to escape the unexpected pain. Pain he hadn't felt so vibrantly since maybe the sixth time he tried to destroy both Heapens And Drazil.

Pain that now burned at his throat instead. And then the burning vanished, leaving some kind of raised mark on both his throat and her tongue, depending on which form she adopted. From what little he could tell they traced out the same, but were a language unknown to either of her homeworlds.

No matter. He would find their meaning eventually, as she conquered and consumed this unnamed world to make a slate for the new world of Reyva.

Now where to sta- Oh, a flying island. The whirwins would certainly love that, wouldn't they? She never could recreate their lost homeland since he had never actually seen it. But with an actual, natural flying island to model after their tales, she was sure to get it right now. Lucky.

Before she arrived she managed to calm the impulsive, uncontrolled gender-switching. Rather fortunately there were two forces already engaged with one another before she arrived, meaning she could crush at least part of another country's military along with the local forces and ramp up her momentum to get a foothold on the lands below as well.

Dipping into her inner-dimension where time didn't flow she assembled ten rooms, carefully selecting and creating only flying creatures for the first six then lazily picked through and compared several decor for maximum effect before performing inspections on all of them.

Satisfied that the assembled squads were powerful enough to at least force her to acknowledge them before swatting them like annoying insects she returned to the unnamed world she currently resided on the same second she left and summoned the first six, the fliers, without pausing in diving head long at the middle of the conflict.

A crushing descending blow shook the island and drew all attention from both original sides onto the newcomer. Which was the exact intention, the six summoned squads had all been outfitted with the temp control decor, which twisted time to allow them a brief span of frozen time where nothing else could interfere with whatever they decided to do at the expense of complete exhaustion afterward.

They had struck and hid before she reached her target. There were no enemy air units at the moment and with every soldier focused on her no new ones would be deployed anytime soon. She absently enforced the effects of a few snooze edicts as she rose to her full height from where she'd braced herself from impact. An unnecessary action, but also an instinctive one from her training as a mortal warrior.

"Demon blast." A wave of her soulless onyx blade unleashed a dozen beams of destructive darkness that plowed through one of the enemy ranks and covered as the ground forces were summoned at the edge of her range behind the other army.

For the most part the mortals were routed without incident, the power of the beings in this world was less than all but the weakest of Heaphens creatures. Or these were simply the weakest of this land's creatures. ...Or perhaps the scale by which she measured had been skewed, it hardly mattered to be honest. They were weak and she was strong.

Absently reaping the spirits from the most injured of her fighters, she replaced them with Fienne's soul reforged into the deity body that had been lost so long ago.

Resilience, Reyva's perfect memory of Gig's dreams reminded her, gave her a sad, mournful look before flying off to once more play herald for an inter-dimensional invader.

#Author's Notes#

I asked myself a simple question, could the demons Brimir faced and the elves fear/hatred for the void be linked somehow. The answer was of course when running on just anime knowledge. Upon doing actual research it started to become more tenuous so that part was discarded but the 'Third Race' made me start thinking on a different track that took me here.

The idea is that the summoning spell travels through other places to link caster and familiar before towing them in, dragging one random, insane immortal soul-eating monster with it each time. And depending on the particular variety of insane immortal soul-eating monster a single one could easily manage to appear as an entire race or carry an entire race with them.

And really, while it is fairly forgettable in Bleach because of how they are portrayed, Arrancar are still hollows. Even the chibi and loli ones.