It's Thursday here in the world of Last Seraph, which means it's time for an update for Soulborn! I must admit, I'm impressed with you guys. Over 1,700 hits, 15 favorites, and 9 reviews in a week was a lot more than I expected. Maybe I should go on unforeseen breaks more often?
Just kidding, just kidding.
We're approaching the end of the first volume of Soulborn, which should appear in about two chapters. As it stands, I intend for Sable Foil to consist of five volumes, though I may decide to extend that number to six at the rate my outline is expanding. When we do reach the end of the first volume, though, I intend to give you reader's a nice little treat to mark the occasion. What that treat is... is well... a surprise!
Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach, Rosario + Vampire, or any of the characters contained therein either story. I write this for my own amusement, the amusement of my fellow fans of said series, and for the sake of technical practice in writing itself. Do not ingest without first consulting a physician.
I waive ownership rights to any original characters created by me, for this crossover, if the original creator(s) of either of the two aforementioned manga wish to use them. However if said event occurs, I humbly ask to be consulted first.
Though frankly, if either author even so much as acknowledges this story exists, I think I might die from shock.
This story is rated M for violence, coarse language, and mild innuendo. Reader discretion is advised.
Chapter 6: Small Victories
"What the hell happened here?" Echoed Isshin Kurosaki in a low whisper, a feeling of cold dread growing in the pit of his gut. Up until just a moment ago, the father and single parent of the Kurosaki family had been enjoying a fine day in Honolulu with his little girls, Karin and Yuzu. Sure, they were supposed to have met up with Ichigo and the other group of people for some function at a private beach, but Isshin scoffed at such a preplanned notion. No, he was going to get some quality time with his two youngest children, and his depressed, brooding son was going to enjoy a quality afternoon in the company of three lovely young ladies at a beach. He might put on a silly front for people, and indeed Isshin's sense of humor was rather slapstick, but the man was most certainly no fool. He felt that for an adolescent male Ichigo's age, having to hang out with his father and little sisters amidst such a... how would Kon have put it? 'Bountiful garden' would have only muddled what could have been a rather eventful afternoon for the young man.
Besides that ulterior motive, Isshin had been confident in his sensing abilities to tell him if something dangerous was approaching Ichigo, so the shinigami became complacent in his skills. That, he now realized had been his first mistake. Isshin had only focused on Ichigo's presence, and then only so much so that he would know whether or not the boy was injured, or in the presence of a spiritually advanced creature such as a hollow or shinigami. Because of that, Isshin's senses never picked up on the presence of the Scraken, as the monster's spiritual presence was so pitifully miniscule that it didn't even register on his passive spiritual perception. It wasn't until Ichigo was physically wounded by the Scraken that he had realized something was even wrong.
Isshin's second mistake had been allowing Ichigo to remove his protective charm after the end of the White Invasion. He had agreed to Ichigo's choice only because in Karakura Town, the patrols of shinigami were so active and robust that no hollows were able to get even a few steps out of a garganta before they had someone on them. As such, he had felt it was rather pointless for his son to continue wearing the charm. Isshin reluctantly relented, and because of this he had to get to the other side of the island the hard way, via shunpo.
When Isshin arrived, he was already too late. Whatever had happened was already over and done with. Ichigo was pretty banged up, he instantly recognized. Slouched on his knees before the front of the cliff, his injured child stared blankly out at the smoking remains of the rental car that had ended their attacker's life. It was as if he was hypnotized by the destruction down below, a thought that made Isshin's heart sink. It was the same dumb look on the boy's face he'd had when he had been forced to step between his boy, and the traitor during the last battle of the White Invasion. To top it off, his injuries were serious. A few broken ribs, a nasty welt on his forehead, and several shallow lacerations lined his back. But compared to some of the others, his son was in relatively good shape.
The ones worst off were clearly Tsukune and Koji, as they were dead. That was simply all there was to it with that one. What irritated Isshin about the fact that they were dead was that he could only sense Koji's soul nearby. Neither whatever attacked them, nor that kid Tsukune's soul were presently in the area, or within the boundaries of his senses. It confounded and irritated the shinigami, but he had bigger concerns to worry about than a lost soul.
The lavender haired girl that had been on the trip with them, Mizore, was dying. Isshin wasn't sure how she had been reduced to the state she was in, or what it meant, but his senses knew what someone who was dying felt like. He had no doubt in his mind that this girl was going to die if he didn't get her some kind of help now. The pink haired girl, Moka, wasn't fairing that much better. She wasn't about to die on the spot like Mizore, but she had sustained heavy wounds. Isshin reasoned that if she didn't receive adequate care soon, there was a chance that as time passed, she could be a goner just as easily.
As just about anyone would suspect, everyone else who was conscious and able to move was either hysterical or in a state of shock. The blue haired girl, Kurumu, was passed out in the back seat, and if Isshin had to wager a guess, was in shock from her injuries. Koji's wife, Kasumi, was passed out, fainted in the driver's seat of the car she'd most definitely tried to flee in, and the brown haired little girl with the strange outfit was hovering over Tsukune's body, weeping softly.
Isshin sighed. He felt guilty that he hadn't been there to stop whoever had attacked them. Yet he knew right now, that he didn't have the luxury of time to feel guilty. He had to take care of business, or people were going to die. While he was a shinigami, Isshin also happened to be a doctor. Right now, though, he was going to be a doctor who also happened to be a shinigami.
'Come hell or high water, I'm going to save their lives!'
Moving swiftly to a place where he had clear view of the injured, Isshin drew Engetsu and slammed it into the ground, embedding the blade halfway into the ground. Raising his arms, the shinigami brought both limbs over the hilt of his blade in a perfect horizontal line, forming an awkward, disemboweled shape between himself and his zanpakuto that strongly resembled an 'h'. Isshin began to chant, summoning up a mass of spiritual energy that's pressure sent visible fluctuations through the atmosphere.
"Heavenly serpent, raise high tide..."
It was a kido spell that was forbidden to teach anyone who's skill was beneath a certain level. Technically counted amongst the Bakudo, the unique spell was often utilized by skilled members of Fourth Division, or the Kido Corps. It was rare for someone outside of those groups to even learn this spell, let alone be able to use it as well as Isshin could. In the known reaches of Soul Society, the only two individuals who knew this technique and could perform it better than he were Retsu Unohana and Hachigen Ushoda.
"float the surface, expose, divide..."
Why it was forbidden to teach to general practitioners of kido was actually a rather simple matter. When used, the spell required the user to divide the flow of their spiritual pressure evenly between whatever creatures were caught within the barrier, so that the distribution of energy was even. If the flow was divided incorrectly, it would cause feedback that had the potential to be fatal to both the bound and the binder.
"grace to the haunted, serenity to the damned..."
In addition to binding the affected parties in place by way of freezing their muscle control, the kido had a number of useful features that made it an excellent tool. With a bit of concentration, the caster could focus their spiritual energy in the exact same manner that one uses a standard healing kido, in essence allowing them to simultaneously heal every bound target at the same time. The only reason why Retsu and Hachigen didn't use the spell more often was because their innate abilities were superior.
"peace be to the faithless! Stay thy hand! Bakudo #94: Wa ataeru seikatsu!"
The effect was immediate and dramatic. Emanating from the buried mass of Engetsu's blade came a flourish of glowing green energy, that swept over the parking lot in the blink of an eye. In seconds, the churning tide of viridian magic solidified into a flat, perfectly smooth plane resting upon the ground in a circular shape. From it, a small lump of the energy mound up beneath where Kurumu, Mizore, Moka, and Ichigo were each at rest. In an instant, a multitude of serpent-like tendrils of energy burst out of the mounds, completely ignoring whatever barriers of metal, glass, and plastic that existed between them and their target to wrap around each of them. Once firmly in control of their bodies, the coiling serpents coalesced into thin bubbles of light that hung around each of them like a nimbus.
The connection established, Isshin immediately set to work channeling his spiritual energy into them. Ichigo, as he suspected, was healed of his wounds almost instantly because of his lack of spiritual energy. Kurumu and Moka took longer to recover from their wounds, but like Ichigo, they were both totally restored in less than a minute, which allowed Isshin to drop the spell effect on them and focus entirely on Mizore.
Perhaps it was because of the... odd nature of her wound, or simply the extent of the damage, but Mizore's wounds simply were more difficult to repair than the others. What surprised Isshin, though, was that as he healed her, the severed limbs she'd lost in whatever calamity that had befallen them grew back – which was something that the 94th bakudo was not normally capable of. Under different circumstances, this would have fascinated Isshin professionally, but now was not the time. In all, it took about five minutes to repair the full extent of the damage.
After he released the channeling of his spiritual pressure, two things happened. First was Ichigo, who had been fully aware of what was happening to his body, jerked his head back and forth, desperately trying to find the source of his temporary paralysis. Second was Yukari, who on the other hand, immediately turned her gaze towards the very spot in which it originated.
"H-how...?" Yukari stammered out, visibly terrified by what was apparently in front of her, "you're human... I know you are. How did you u-use magic?"
'Can't even tell the difference between the living and the dead, can she?' Isshin pondered to himself, as he retrieved Engetsu with a sigh and returned it to it's saya. He'd known that these girls had some level of spiritual awareness, but the spiritual pressure they each gave off was criminally weak. There was something odd about it, sure, but he could sense for certain that each of them had less pressure coming from them than a typical unseated shinigami. Karin gave off more pressure than each of them except the brown haired pipsqueak did at this point.
Isshin was open minded enough to realize that just because their pressure was weak, didn't necessarily mean that they weren't dangerous, though. Yet despite this open mindedness, he had relaxed his guard. It seemed, to Isshin, that these individuals, regardless of what they were, had nothing else in mind than to have fun on vacation. Had their attitudes not come off as so harmless, he might have been more inclined to be more diligent in using his senses to keep track of them. The realization that he had made such presumptions so easily about an unknown entity was a painful sting to Isshin's pride.
So when Isshin turned to look at the young witch Yukari, his expression was uncharacteristically somber. "No, I'm not human young lady. What I am can wait, though. I need you to tell me what happened here."
Yukari shook her head, and spoke in barely above a whisper, "a monster attacked us. His dad drove a car into it, and the car blew them both up."
Isshin didn't need to ask for clarifications, he could tell what she was talking about well enough. Deciding not to push the young girl, Isshin used shunpo to appear down on the smoldering mess of a beach below. Isshin didn't like doing it, but someone had to be responsible for letting those who had departed pass on. With no other shinigami apparently in the area, it was his task to commit konso on Koji and Tsukune. All he had to do was find them.
Smoke and heat dominated the senses of Koji Aono. He had just drove a car straight off a cliff at over forty miles per hour, using it like a battering ram to drive a terrible monster to it's death. He had been flung from the crash on the moment of impact, through the windshield by the fireball he suspected. 'Why am I still alive?' Koji thought to himself as he laid on the sand, staring at the sky, 'and... why is this damn chain sticking to my chest?'
Sitting up, Koji examined the chain that was connected to the center of his chest. It was strange, resembling an exaggerated form of a choke chain used by some people to restrain their pets, though his wasn't connected to anything like a collar, this was apparently fused to his very body. Going over the links, the man noticed, to his displeasure and confusion, that the end of the chain was broken.
"No!" Koji cursed, casting the chain aside, and falling onto his back as he drew a haggard breath, "why! Why am I alive!"
Time stopped being much of a measure as Koji laid there, staring up into the sky from behind his tearful, bloodshot eyes. His last act, some would have called heroic. He gave up his life to save his wife, and several young people from dying at the hands of that strange blue monster. That wasn't the truth, though. Heroism had nothing to do with it.
For Koji, killing the Scraken had been about two things. Foremost, obviously, was revenge for the murder of his son, Tsukune. Anyone within earshot of the conflict could have probably guessed that. What wasn't quite so obvious was the second, and more subtle reason. In reality, the act of driving the car off the cliff had been just as much about suicide as avenging his son.
If Koji had really wanted to, he could have easily left the driver's door open and flung himself from the vehicle after it hit the Scraken. There was enough space between the cliff and the monster for him to survive, albeit with a number of scrapes and broken bones. Koji simply didn't want to. The moment the father was forced to witness his son being skewered cleanly on the point of a sword in such a brutal and unforgiving way, all sanity left the Aono patriarch. In that moment of total irrationality, all Koji wanted to do was end his life. He just happened to have an easily accessible way to do it. Yet to Koji, it seemed as if even that death had been denied him.
The defeated man was so distraught that he didn't even notice that after a few moments, he was no longer alone on the beach.
"You're not alive," called out the voice, "I can assure you, you're rather quite dead."
Koji heard the voice clearly, but didn't bother responding. No, Koji preferred to stare up at the sky, defying the voice and it's claims of his demise. Unless it brought his Tsukune back to him right there, he was going to keep denying the entire world. Sanity, it appeared, wasn't something that could return so quickly.
"Poor man, no father should ever have to witness what you did," the voice said sadly as it neared, a sound of metal sliding upon a surface ringing out along with it like a ghostly echo. "For what it's worth, I truly hope you're able to meet up with your son in Soul Society."
Koji still refused to draw his eyes away fro the sky. He barely noticed the butt of a katana come into his line of vision and press against his forehead. Then, before he knew what was happening, he was unable to see any more. All that was, was light.
"Good bye, Koji Aono."
For the next five minutes, Isshin spent his time going over the area with a fine toothed comb. Yet no matter what he did, he simply could not find the soul of Tsukune Aono. The sheer amount of spirit energy he had shot into the atmosphere when he'd used the 94th bakudo made it harder to sense things in the immediate vicinity, but Isshin was undeterred. He'd found that strange blue thing he estimated was their attacker, presumed it to be some form of exotic hollow, and dealt with it on the spot. It hadn't even put up resistance as Isshin crushed it to it's second death with his spiritual pressure alone. No, that problem had been solved about thirty seconds after he finished performing konso on Koji. Now, Isshin was at a loss.
He could guarantee that Tsukune Aono had died. He'd seen the body, there was no soul in it. Yet at the same time, he would have given his personal guarantee that the soul of Tsukune Aono was not on the island, and that he was the only shinigami presently on O'ahu. It was impossible that some other shinigami had beat him to doing the konso. What's more, he couldn't sense any hollows anywhere, so unless that blue thing had ate his soul, he was still out there somewhere.
Isshin decided he'd send an inquiry to Soul Society as soon as he was able. He wouldn't be surprised if they simply ignored the inquiry, especially with their current case load, but the last time Soul Society decided to sweep news of some disappearing souls under the rug, it got them Aizen. While Isshin knew that the traitor captain was safely locked away forever unless someone with the power to do so deliberately set him free, (and only the royal shinigami he'd sought to kill and displace had that power) this event stunk of the same brand of foul play that the would-be usurper was famous for.
When he returned to the parking lot, Isshin immediately knew something was wrong. Ichigo was frantically doing... something... to one of the girls in the back seat of the car. Knowing damn well that Ichigo would sooner remove an offending limb than take advantage of a wounded, unconscious woman, he knew that there had been complications with one of the girls that his kido had not repaired. Using shunpo, Isshin appeared behind his son and peered over the unaware boy's shoulder. What he saw caused his eyes to widen.
The wounds of the lavender haired girl, Mizore, were gradually returning.
"Sorry, Ichigo!" Isshin whispered as he placed a hand on the boy's shoulder and pushed him aside, sending the surprised boy onto the ground with an unceremonious plop. Channeling spiritual energy, Isshin sent healing pressure into the girl and found that the wound repaired almost immediately. Frowning, he removed his glowing palm from her person and noted, to his growing displeasure, that the wounds he had just healed were slowly starting to return. Closing his eyes, Isshin expanded his senses and focused them directly on the girl. It didn't take him long to figure out what was wrong.
"Is that, poison?" Isshin asked himself, his eyes snapping open as he looked on towards the girl in confusion and disbelief. Curious, Isshin decided to check the other two wounded young women and found them to be in the same condition. Whatever had caused these wounds was not only explosive, but it was laced with some kind of toxin, or similarly insidious substance that made wounds reopen after they were healed! It was like the mine was made by that lunatic clown who was in charge of 12th division these days.
"This is outside my area of expertise," Isshin admitted to himself, "I don't know enough about their physiologies to try and treat this. All I can do is delay it at best."
"I know you can hear me!" Ichigo said as he stood up, looking towards Mizore, "I know you just healed her, but you can't do anything about it either, can you?"
Isshin nodded in understanding. He and Ichigo had developed a few systems for if they ever needed to communicate while he was in spirit form. Reaching out, the shinigami tapped the surface of the car door once. For this mode of communication, one tap signified the answer was no, two taps signified yes, three signified he didn't know, and four signified the question couldn't be answered yes or no. They had a few methods that worked better, but at the moment they lacked a pad of paper and pen for Isshin to write upon. So for better or for worse, this would have to work.
"I'll ask Yukari if she can do anything," Ichigo suggested, "she said she could help Tsukune when we were attacked, maybe she can do something about this."
Turning, Ichigo walked over to Yukari, who was still weeping over Tsukune's body. Slowly he reached out, and put a hand on her shoulder. He wouldn't have been afraid to admit that he was torn. Part of Ichigo wanted to respect her privacy and let her mourn in whatever way she wanted, but he knew that if she might be able to help the other three girls, he had to pull her away. Another part of him wanted try and wisp the child away from the gruesome sight of Tsukune's mutilated form. No child should have to have that burned into their mind.
"Yukari," Ichigo said softly, "I'm sorry... but your friends need you now."
That got her attention. Turning to face Ichigo, the trembling young girl's expression was alarmingly neutral. It wasn't what Ichigo expected. She was still crying, but her expression didn't look like someone who was crying. It was closer to someone who was... bored? The child nodded wordlessly and stood up, falling in line beside Ichigo. He could hear her stifle a sniffle or a sob every so often, but it seemed, to Ichigo at least, like she was trying to keep calm.
Isshin simply shook his head. He knew that wasn't an expression of boredom. The girl's spirit was broken, and she was so shell shocked by the sudden events that she simply didn't know what to do in the situation. So she followed, and she cried. The shinigami knew the poor girl would need years of counseling to recover from this. All of the girls would, he suspected. If they survived, at least.
"They're poisoned," Isshin explained simply, getting Yukari's attention. The child nodded at him, and he continued, "I can heal them, but whatever this poison is, it causes their wounds to return soon after I'm done. Do you have any way to help them?"
Yukari turned her attention to the back seat of the car and let out a ragged sob. She shook her head, and said in a faint, shaky voice, "I've heard of this... someone I know told me about a forbidden poison that some witches use. It makes wounds continuously re-open if any kind of healing magic is used to close them. I don't have the knowledge to get rid of it myself."
Yukari's eyes drifted, by chance finding their gaze resting softly on Ichigo's flank, just above his oblique. She noticed that a red mark was beginning to form, and said, her tone emotionless, "you were exposed, too." Following Yukari's eyes, Ichigo looked down and stared at the growing red mark just below his rib cage. He was only hearing half of the conversation, but he could put together the pieces well enough to realize that this was very, very bad for him. Yukari continued, "all of us probably got a dose from being around the wreckage of the explosion, but I didn't get hurt, so nothing will happen to me. You and everyone else will need the antidote, though, or you'll..."
The girl couldn't finish her sentence, and finally broke down again, collapsing to her knees in defeat as she wailed. Ichigo's eyes widened, and Isshin frowned. They were in a situation where they only had one course of action, and that was to get this antidote. Pronto. If they didn't, then Moka, Mizore, Kurumu, and Ichigo could be joining Tsukune. As far as the the fiery haired former shinigami was concerned, he had absolutely no desire to find himself back in Soul Society so soon. To him, failure wasn't an option.
"Where can we find the antidote, Yukari?" Isshin asked, in a no-nonsense tone of voice.
Yukari shook her head, and managed to squeak out between sobs, "the Academy has some, I think, but that's thousands of miles from here."
Isshin audibly swore.
"Can you open a senkaimon and use Soul Society to bring us all there?" Ichigo asked, guessing at what Isshin had asked.
A single loud thunk indicated that the answer was clearly no.
"If... Kurumu or Moka was awake," Yukari said softly, "I could use the magic item we borrowed to bring us there. I can't activate it by myself, it requires at least two people to use."
While they were unaware of it, both Isshin and Ichigo asked at once, "where is it?"
Yukari had never moved that fast in her life. When Isshin had picked her up and used shunpo to take them back to the hotel where they were staying, Yukari's mind was effectively blown. While many understood that the basic principle of shunpo revolved around making the user cover more ground in less steps at higher speed, few who were unfamiliar with the technique understood exactly what mechanism the technique used to do it. After experiencing it once, Yukari decided that the nature of the technique was going to remain a mystery to her, because she never, ever wanted to move that fast again.
So of course, after they retrieved the object they were looking for, Isshin promptly used shunpo to bring them back. Yukari was not amused at being subject to supersonic movement so many times in quick succession, but Isshin didn't have the patience to care what she thought. Time wasn't on their side, and every minute they spent without the antidote for the poison was a minute closer everyone back at the parking lot was to death. He'd done konso once today, and he had no desire to have to do it again. Especially on his own son.
Landing on the parking lot with a gentle swish, Isshin stepped out of shunpo and found things much as he'd left them. Ichigo was moving back and forth between the three unconscious girls, doing his best to try and treat their wounds as they re-opened, while Kasumi was still unconscious. Isshin couldn't help but smile slightly at what he was witnessing. Despite how quickly the situation was falling apart, despite the fact that his own life was in danger, despite the fact that his own wounds were starting to slowly re-open, and despite the fact that his own thoughts and feelings were probably in turmoil – his son had the mental fortitude to cast aside his own distress and do what he could for the others in the midst of the metaphorical storm. It made the shinigami's heart swell with pride.
"You've grown, haven't you, Ichigo?" Isshin muttered quietly as he sat Yukari down in the parking lot. In her hands was the magic item that they had borrowed from a person Yukari had identified as Ruby, a girl who worked at the academy where the girls lived and went to school. At roughly the size of a dinner plate, the object resembled a round loop, with seven equilateral triangles, each a different color of the rainbow, laid on top of each other in a slightly off alignment. When held, the triangles rotated slowly, each at a slightly different velocity than the others.
From the way Yukari had put it, the 'borrowing' was probably done in bad faith, and involved some measure of deception or blackmail. That was merely Isshin's assumption, though. The object used a power source that Yukari had identified as 'youki', which once described to Isshin, strongly resembled the spiritual power that shinigami used in principle. When activated, the object opened a portal that could be then aimed towards a desired place, and used as a door way between where the portal was opened and the desired destination. Yes, there had to be some measure of deception involved, Isshin thought. Why else would someone let a group of teenagers off with such a potentially dangerous item?
"How do you turn it on?" Isshin asked the girl, crossing his arms in impatience. He disliked being serious for this long, especially when it meant he might be having to leave his daughter's with a mod soul for any length of time.
"I'll take one side, and my partner will take the opposite," Yukari answered in a shaky voice, "we channel youki into the item, and state our destination. The portal opens, and then we walk through."
"Sounds simple enough..." Isshin stated flatly, as he took an object out of his pocket and handed it to the girl. It was a small stone with a few odd symbols stitched into it. The symbols resembled kanji, but if they were, they weren't any that she'd ever seen before. Looking up, the girl gave him a questioning look. Isshin sighed, and said, "I'll be able to track you with that charm. My daughters are here on the island, and I can't just leave them here by themselves, in another country. I'll follow you via senkaimon after I've made certain that they're in place where I can leave them alone for a little while."
Accepting his explanation without word or gesture, Yukari waited as Isshin gathered the girls together and sat them down on the asphalt. The young witch had no idea what a senkaimon was supposed to be, or how he would follow them with it, but she had no desire to question him. Questioning him implied thinking about something, and Yukari didn't want to think right now if she could avoid it.
Meanwhile, Ichigo stood next to the girls after Isshin laid them down in formation, and spent his time trying to minimize the impact of the resurrecting wounds as best he could. His own pain was starting to catch up to him though, as his movements were becoming more and more strained with each passing moment. Ichigo's wounds made it impossible for him to even attempt another stunt like with the picnic table, and Isshin wasn't following them through the portal. That meant that the responsibility of carrying the wounded through the portal fell to Yukari and her magic wand.
Yukari had long since retrieved her magic wand, which, to her horror, she had found laying in the midst of some debris in the parking lot. In the confusion, she hadn't even realized that by all rights, it should have been destroyed, as it had been resting in the car Koji had drove over the cliff. In a stroke of dumb luck, the wand must have somehow found its way out of the car before Koji drove it off the cliff. She had no idea how it got there, but she wasn't one to question small victories of fate.
"Wait a minute," Ichigo said, casting a sidelong glance towards Kasumi Aono, who still laid untouched where she'd fainted, unconscious. He asked, "what about her, aren't we taking her with us?"
Isshin shook his head, and stomped the ground once. No, they were not.
"What the hell do you mean, no?" Ichigo cried, staring at the spot just above where Isshin had stomped with a fierce glare, presuming it was where his father stood.
"W-we can't bring her with us," Yukari answered cautiously, "humans aren't allowed to go to the Academy. It's place where monsters can find sanctuary from the human world."
"What?" Ichigo echoed, disbelievingly, at the glaring flaw in her logic, "then why am I being allowed to go?"
"What do you mean?" Yukari asked, clearly confused, "your father said himself that he isn't human, why shouldn't we let you in?"
Isshin sighed in irritation, and flared his spiritual pressure, just enough to shut his son up through an acute case of paralysis. It didn't take much pressure to paralyze a person without any sizable measures of spiritual pressure through exposure, and the method of doing so had aided many shinigami several times in the past. Right now, Isshin was thankful that his son didn't have his previously inane amounts of spirit energy. They didn't have time to be arguing about why's and hows.
"We'll let the local authorities take care of her," Isshin declared, wondering just how long it was going to take for them to get here. It's not like that fireball had been small. "Yukari, start up your device, I'll help you."
Yukari held up the magical object as Isshin ordered, and the shinigami took hold of the artifact on the opposite side as she'd told him. Yukari's eyes widened in shock upon feeling the sheer, overwhelming amount of power flowing into the object from the black robed man. Looking up, she eyed the man with something that was akin to awe, fear, and confusion at once.
"Just what are these people?" Yukari thought to herself as she stared blankly, earning her a curious glance from the shinigami. Shrugging it off, Yukari set to work. With her left hand clutching the device, Yukari raised her outstretched right hand and placed it above the artifact, palm side towards it. A tiny, pea sized orb of swirling lavender and red began to coalesce between the witch and the magical item, as she cried out the name of the place she desired to go.
In a flash, a swirling, flat oval of constantly shifting shades of lavender and crimson warped into existence just to the group's immediate left. A sheer vertical plane, the portal itself was about five feet across and eight feet tall, hovering just about six inches from the ground itself. The surface of the gateway was impossibly flat, as if it was simply drawn into the air as is. If one looked past the otherworldly nature of the gateway and the oddity of the portal's geometry, it was actually a rather unimpressive sight.
Isshin nodded his approval, releasing his side of the artifact and turning away from the group. He said, "I'll be with you as quickly as I can. Remember, girl, their lives are in your hands. Take good care of them."
Yukari gave only a shallow nod in reply. Lifting her magic wand, Yukari channeled youki into the object and used it's power to gently levitate Moka, Kurumu, and Mizore. Basic feats of telekinesis such as this were no problem for Yukari. Even in her diminished mental state from everything that had happened, she could concentrate enough to manage this. Her affection for Moka was well known, but deep down, Yukari didn't want to see any of them really, truly get hurt. It was that small part of Yukari Sendo that was keeping her going at that moment, even though every ounce of her wanted to fall, to curl up into a ball and reject the harsh reality that had come to exist in her little world.
The young women, and a few seconds afterwords, Ichigo, silently passed through the portal without sight or signal to announce their departure. A few brief seconds later, the portal itself faded into oblivion, and Isshin disappeared to address the situation with his daughters. After a few minutes, as if on queue, the loud shriek of sirens that signified the inevitable arrival of the police and fire departments rang out through the air. There, they'd find a lone foreign woman, caked in soot and apparently delirious, muttering something incoherently in her mother tongue that amounted to, 'monsters killed my husband... monsters killed my baby!'
For a pair of onlookers on a distant, overlooking cliff, it was a rather pathetic scene.
"I can't believe we escaped that shinigami's search unscathed!" One uttered in a high pitched, sneering voice to the other. Dressed in red, hooded robes that covered his entire body from head to toe, the man resembled a monk, or priest of some nondescript esoteric order. He was tall, much taller than his companion, standing between seven and eight feet in height. His form, albeit hidden beneath his robes, was quite obviously thin to the point of being nearly skeletal. Only the tips of his fingers were not concealed from view, though the sharp, armored digits were closer to claws than anything else.
"We knew what we were getting into when we took this job, there was always a possibility that one could intervene," his much shorter companion answered in a rich, suave voice that practically dripped of pretentiousness. Dressed in red robes that matched those of his companion, the shorter of the two truly was short. At less than four and a half feet tall, he was short enough to be considered a dwarf. His visible hands appeared gnarled and leathery, as if they belonged to one who had toiled endlessly with his hands through what one could only assume was a very long life. "That's the very reason we set up the barrier before we had the Hunter Killer dispatched. To prepare for such possibilities."
"Please!" The taller of the two scoffed, "if that shinigami hadn't used such a tremendously powerful spell to heal those little monsters, I'm certain he would have detected us. The only thing that saved us was the fact that he released so much spiritual pressure into the atmosphere that it masked your little barrier."
"Be that as it may, we wouldn't have survived at all without it," the shorter one replied, turning away from his companion and to a small black briefcase that sat at his side. He chuckled, reaching down to lift it up carefully. "Besides, even if we lost the Hunter Killer in the end, the mission was a success."
"One certain teenage boy, dead, and his soul harvested as proof of the deed," the taller man cooed approvingly as the shorter man opened the briefcase, revealing a small black gem that glistened with a barely perceptible lavender aura. "Our client will be pleased."
"Frankly, I'll just be glad to end business with strange bat," the shorter man chided, "anyone who runs around in a big, dark cloak to disguise their identity is just too creepy to be around, don't you think?"
"You do realize we both wear big, dark cloaks to disguise our identity, right?" The taller man deadpanned.
"We do not!" He countered indignantly, "we wear stylish, red cloaks! There's a huge difference!"
"Whatever, let's just get out of here," the taller man hissed, "I want to make contact with the client so we can get our money, and move on with our lives."
Wordlessly the shorter man agreed, and instantaneously the both of them vanished. It was as if they were never there.
Ichigo had seen many sights in his short life, indeed, more than many people see in a lifetime. He'd walked the desert of Hueco Mundo, meditated in the Dangai, and done battle on Executioner's Hill. So upon arriving at the blank wasteland that surrounded Youkai Academy, he was hardly impressed. Dominated by dead, rocky soil coming out into jagged cliffs over a sea of red, and a forest of lifeless, bare trees, the atmosphere of the place seemed designed to unsettle those who gazed upon it. To Ichigo, had the ambiance not felt so overwhelmingly presumptuous, it might have worked. To one who'd experienced real horrors in the realm of hollows, however, the environment was almost comical.
The portal had dropped the four academy students, plus Ichigo, near the bus stop where students arriving and leaving the Academy were let off or picked up, respectively. The fact that the marker of the stop was dressed up like a scarecrow, with a jack-o-lantern for a head was an oddity that was lost on Ichigo for the moment. His ribs had just begun the process of slowly but surely re-breaking themselves, and the pain from such was great enough to where it was all the former shinigami could do to stay standing, and not pass out.
Mustering up the determination to try and speak through the pain, Ichigo was about to pose a question to Yukari about what they did next, when he became aware of six men, dressed in the black garb of a Catholic priest surrounding them. Although dressed to appear as clergymen, the six tempered the outfit with black sunglasses, like a mix of a holy man and a bad secret agent cliché. Eying the men warily, Ichigo was mildly aware of the strange sensation of being watched, and it wasn't coming from the wanna-be spies.
"I know you're there," Ichigo demanded in a hoarse, forced voice, "show yourself!"
A man, dressed in the pure white robes, and matching klobuk veil of an eastern catholic bishop slipped into view, out from behind large tree. His features, all but lost beneath the clerical garments that disguised his form, appeared distinctly human. Yet there was something beneath the surface, hiding in obscurity beneath those robes. Something mysterious, perhaps even more than human. Only the lower half of his face was visible, beneath the cowl of his veil. It revealed an expression of deadly seriousness, one that did not appear amused at being present here at the moment.
"Well, isn't this a surprise?" Echoed the words of the Headmaster of Youkai Academy, "what is the famous Ichigo Kurosaki, savior of the White Invasion, doing here at my school, together with four of my students?"
Ichigo didn't have an opportunity to answer. The first of his ribs to break had just broken completely, and the spasm of pain that came with it was too much for his already overwhelmed mind to take. Losing his balance, the fiery haired warrior fell to his stomach, and merciful darkness enveloped him as he fell unconscious.
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Bakudo 94 – Wa ataeru seikatsu (輪与える生活): Translates to 'life giving ring'. Also used as 'Wa shibari komu seikatsu (輪縛り込む生活)', or life binding ring (lit. ring life restraints). A bakudo spell originally designed to bind multiple enemies in place so that another ally can attack them while the caster holds the enemy in place, or as a desperation move, overload the balance of spiritual pressure between the bound and the binder as a powerful suicide attack. The healing variant of the spell was designed and developed after the spell was initially created, and has since become a much more widely practiced variant of the bakudo than it's original, restraining form. The life giving ring form of Bakudo 94 is so much more well known compared to it's binding form that many who know of the spell but cannot perform it are unaware of it's intended function and name. Can only be used by shinigami with both captain level spiritual energy, and skilled control over their spiritual pressure. Is relatively ineffective if the foe can use their spirit energy to create more pressure than the the binder, and therefor despite being a powerful binding technique, it is usually passed over for either lower grade sealing techniques that are easier to perform, or more reliable techniques, such as Bakudo 99.
Next time on Soulborn: Sable Foil – Ichigo collapses, only to find himself awakened in another place strongly resembling a hospital room. There he meets a new face, and is taken to see the Headmaster. What happened to Kurumu, Mizore, and Moka, and what will come of the meeting between Ichigo and the Headmaster. Plus, when will Isshin arrive?