The Crack of the Other Side
#8: D-Roy, Chick Magnet (Negatively Charged)
"Giiiiive us doooooooughnuuuuuutsh..! We prefer jelly-fiiiiiiiiilled..! And maybe shome cruelleeeeeeeeersh..!"
D-Roy was having a fine time all by himself, imagining the slack-jawed faces of the three stooges of ghost hunting already as he howled the "spooky" voices into a new recording device he'd just found. A green light lit up on it briefly, indicating that the message was received (in whatever quality it had happened to be recorded). D-Roy let his jagged teeth poke free, smugly swaggering along out of the side door of the once-grand theater.
Place's probably never had anyone bust any rhymes on that stage... D-Roy glanced over his shoulder, Poor thing! But I don't have any memorized right now. You gonna have to wait, Whatever-your-name-is Theatre!
D-Roy's day-dreaming did not come to a halt until a flash of reiastsu above him dove down towards him. Noticing it with a stunned fit of blinking, the scrawny-looking Soldado peered up in time to see a steel blade chopping down at his forehead.
TANGGG..!
The blade halted easily to his last millisecond resistance. It scraped and slid, it and its holder's arms quivering, against D-Roy's upraised wrist.
"Who the hell're you?!" Even D-Roy did not need to look twice to tell what his attacker was--an obvious Soul Reaper, garbed all in black except the pure white sash about his waist. D-Roy craned his neck up, blinking with a slight squint as he scrutinized his opponent.
He was the exact opposite of D-Roy: Tall where the Arrancar was short, thick where he was thin, and severely lacking where D-Roy was gifted with shaggy pale hair. Despite his overwhelming size compared to the Arrancar, he was shaking with the effort to keep his sword in the same position against D-Roy's arm.
"I shaid, who're you?" D-Roy sneered slightly. The Soul Reaper withdrew to the roof, retracting the blade but keeping it held out in an aggressive stance, "What'sh the big idea?"
"Dammit, Rikio, I thought I told you to wait until we'd sent out the signal!"
D-Roy jumped slightly and turned halfway around, spotting the source of the annoyed voice. A different Soul Reaper was perched on top of one of the Demon Journey supply vans, a few meters away.
"But... I caught 'im off guard..!" The first Soul Reaper grumbled, still tensed and ready. D-Roy glanced back and forth between the two, cocking his head to the side and smirking.
"Hesheh...Didn't do ya much good, did it?" D-Roy retrieved his zanpakuto from where he'd slung it in his sash, sheathed and all, "If you wanted to fight you coulda jusht ashked me, heh!"
"Watch out, Rikio!" A third Soul Reaper darted in from the open street, his blade thrusting out just as D-Roy left the ground. The Arrancar saw him just as the blade connected with his foot, glancing off.
Whoa, they're pretty...slow, he realized. I wasn't even dodging that time...
Pausing mid-leap, D-Roy retaliated, putting his foot squarely into the ambusher's face and sending him scuffing along the pavement at a high rate of speed. The Soul Reaper's clothes ripped and fell away as he rolled twice and came to a halt against a gnarled tree trunk.
"Owww..." the Soul Reaper groaned and tried to sit up, giving up and collapsing back on the ground. "What're you...made of..?"
"Keshesheshehsheh..!" D-Roy straightened, beaming, "I'm made of pure aweshome, man. Thought you could gang up on me, huh? Nope, no shir. That ain't happening--!"
The deceptively scrawny Soldado was forced to block once more as the bald Soul Reaper leaped down from the roof and slashed wide at his neck. D-Roy growled and snagged the blade out of its trajectory, ripping it out of its owner's hands in the process. As the huge man hissed and rubbed the raw spots forming on his palms he looked up with an expression of pure "Aw, crap". Then it was lights out--D-Roy threw a backhand with his fist balled around his zanpakuto. The thug caught it with the side of his head.
"Shee, now, that'sh why we Arrancar don't like you guysh!" D-Roy huffed and brushed some dust from his shoulder, "Talking'sh a free action! You can't jusht interrupt people while they're tryna shay shomething to ya..!"
The remaining Reaper stared at his opponent, dumbfounded. D-Roy snorted and jumped into a SonÃdo that took him right in front of the quaking grunt.
"Y'all are sho weak..!" he said as he caught the Soul Reaper's retaliatory swipe with three fingers. Grinning wide and running his tongue over his wicked-looking front teeth he lifted his enemy up a few inches off the ground. The Reaper made a sound most similar to "yeep", or perhaps a noise like a startled fowl would make, "Hah! I can't even kill ya. It'd be sho damn eashy it'd be unfair..."
With his tongue receding D-Roy's face transformed into a playful smirk, and he tossed his captive high into the air. The Soul Reaper "yeeped" again, scrambling to find footholds in the atmospheric reishi before he fell back down (he wasn't doing too well; he seemed to only be an amateur at flash step, or really any other move aside from "swing sword at target").
His eyes became as big as the bulbous mask piece on D-Roy's head as he saw the Arrancar dart up skyward to join him.
"'Wheee!', right?" D-Roy let out a cackle. It trailed off and his face went blank. He scratched his neck, "Enh, well, I'm bored. Nice meetin' ya!"
At the last word D-Roy wound up his best ass-kicking foot and booted the grunt out of the sky. The sound of his limp body crunching through the flimsy paneling of the supply van's roof made the skinny Arrancar wince and hiss though his teeth.
"Yowchiesh..." He descended to the roof, surveying his handiwork. Nice, three random Soul Reapers regretting the day they met the awesome D-Roy Linker, all in under three minutes. The gnashing cackle manifested itself again.
It stopped abruptly at the light swishing sound from behind him. A voice, this one a coo of a morning dove, made him turn.
"Have you killed all my men..?" The voice belonged to another Soul Reaper, this one a very petite woman, her hair coiling about her shoulders and waist like a very patient pale blue python. D-Roy made a slight choking noise as he noticed that the neck on this particular Soul Reaper's shihakusho was...very low.
"Uhhh..." I can see the Valley of Wonders... "Th...They ain't dead."
"Oh, they aren't..?" The woman drew her sword, and D-Roy's gaze instantly snapped to it warily...for about three seconds, "Hmm. Then you're more sporting than you look."
Heeeeey... D-Roy's expression narrowed, suspicious, She's insulting me..!
"Hey, if you can't shay shomething nice..." D-Roy growled, but stopped when he realized that the female Reaper wasn't listening to him. Instead, she was rearranging her voluptuous hair and weaving it into a delicate pair of braids, "..! Are you even lishtening to me?!"
"Oh, sorry. I was getting ready."
"Getting ready? For what?"
"To fight," the Soul Reaper smiled sweetly. D-Roy's heart rate increased tremendously; he felt that any moment steaks of crimson blood might rocket from his nostrils, "We are going to fight, aren't we?"
"I think...Maybe..." D-Roy licked at a thin trail of slobber he'd just noticed creeping onto his left cheek, "Ehesheh...We don't h-have ta fight, ya know...?"
The Arrancar grinned and stared with a massive amount of greed into the canyon on the Soul Reaper's chest. She noticed this and curled her lip up in a snarl. Her zanpakuto raised a fraction of an inch higher.
"No, I think we do have to fight," she scoffed, fluffing one of the shimmering strands of woven hair from her shoulder. "And would you mind not drooling at me like I'm some piece of meat? Look, I know you're a Hollow and all, but it's very irritating..!"
"U-uh, sure sorry--" The Soldado's head snapped up to her face suddenly. He bore a look that was just as insulted as her own now, "Wait a sec, I'm not a stinkin' Hollow!" He quite easily forgot her ravishing beauty (booty) and glared knives at her, dropping instinctively into a battle crouch, "Go on, call me a damn Hollow again, see what happens..!"
Staring at him blankly for a moment with her eyelashes whisking elegantly over her deep green eyes, the Soul Reaper gave a small smirk.
"Hollow."
That's IT..! Cleavage or no cleavage--
"YOU'RE GONNA DIIIIIIIIE!" D-Roy finished his thought with a charge. Rage and painfully kicked dignity had built up in him and he forgot himself for that brief moment, throwing himself head-on at the readied enemy.
As he came within range he thrust out a stretched hand towards her neck, the rigid fingers shrouded in reiatsu sharp as fractured animal bone.
The Soul Reaper seemed to wait, poised on one slightly bent ankle, for the longest possible time until she chose to evade the attack. When she did, she tilted her blade up and raked him across his bare ribs with it.
"Yaaagh..!" D-Roy tracked the woman's flash step until she vanished from his periphery, the red haze lowering and his movements returning to a more disciplined set. He breathed raggedly not because of the severity of the wound, but to control himself better. He placed his free hand on the cut and winced as it smarted and twitched. Not too bad, no worse than sparring accidents. Only a quarter inch deep, maybe less. What surprised him the most is that her weapon had bit through his hierro so easily.
Eyes flicking around, D-Roy found his attacker again. She was almost directly behind him, winding her sword back for a thrust that he was sure she imagined would be a killing blow. He growled to himself and began to smile at the same time.
The Soul Reaper was mildly surprised that the blade swooshed air instead of piercing the Arrancar through as she had intended. But then again, her superiors had warned her that Arrancar were very advanced Hollows, so similar in skills and makeup to Konpaku and Soul Reapers that it was a shock that they were even Hollows at all. She licked her lower lip slightly and gazed upwards, spying the silhouette of the skinny man against the dropping moon.
D-Roy reached up and lifted some of the worn wraps from one side of his mask, unveiling his right eye somewhat. He also revealed his next move; a ruddy glow radiated from the eye, quickly focusing into a straining orb of pure energy.
"This," D-Roy huffed. "Ish for calling me a Hollow!"
The orb burst. A massive cone of destructive force ate up the space between he and she. The Soul Reaper's eyes widened as she tried to twitch out of the way, but fear stuck her to the ground and refused to let her legs go.
THOOOOOOM!
A portion of the theater's roof was disintegrated into rubble instantly, and what was left of the cero tore through the first two layers of asphalt in the parking lot beside it. A telephone pole, long out of use, creaked and toppled from having half of it's width removed near the bottom. D-Roy kept his eye uncovered and scanned the ground, hoping his enemy would turn up for a second dose.
"Ugh..!" A portion of concrete slab that had been tossed from the wall shifted and buckled, then shattered altogether. The Soul Reaper stood from where she had been crouching underneath, relatively unscathed.
D-Roy was startled, but angry. The glow lit up around the mask eye orbit shadowing his right eye once again.
"And this one..." He grinned savagely, "Ish for cuttin' my shtomach!"
The Soul Reaper was far more prepared for the attack this time. She stepped off from the ground and nearly disappeared for her speed, leaving the remains of the back stage room of the theater to be pulped yet again and another layer of road stripped.
She reappeared at D-Roy's side, slamming the hilt of her blade into the side of his head.
"Gah!" The Arrancar skidded in mid-air, ending up several meters away, clutching his jaw with hate dripping from the ends of his exposed fangs, "You...You bitch..!"
"Temper," she winked as she spoke. D-Roy watched in stunned silence as she ran a delicate hand over the shiny surface of the blade. Suddenly its edge got a malicious gleam of its own.
"Enhance." The pressure in the air above the theater doubled, and D-Roy took a wary step back, holding onto the loosened bandages over his mask fragment, "Miryoku mukudori."
Shimmering iridescent light exploded from the edges of the woman's katana, surrounding both D-Roy and his opponent in a shroud of shifting light patterns. D-Roy glanced around in awe, wondering if he should try to escape now, or rush her while her blade was in a state of releasing its power.
Nah, can't do that, he thought, dismissing the second option, Just because she's a rude little bitch doesn't mean I gotta be one...
The light gradually turned deep blue, almost invisible against the night sky. D-Roy prepared to dart down towards the ground and regroup himself, but found that his legs weren't responding.
"I...feel funny..."
The Soul Reaper fluffed her hair and giggled, lowering the tip of the zanpakuto towards his chest.
"The burn says it's working."
D-Roy's eyes doubled in size as he realized that not only his legs but his entire body was frozen in place.
Oh...SHIT.
Author's Notes:
He'll be fine... right? O_O Poor D-Roy, always stuck fighting the deceptively strong chick.