Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach. I do, however, own this story.

Torn

Chapter 18: Nightmare's Wings

Mayuri looked his stoic opponent straight in the eye, evaluated his threat and his stance with the eyes of an expert scientist, and proceeded to do the last thing Ulquiorra Schiffer ever expected.

He began to laugh. Long, loud, shrill and disturbing to the ears of all but the most hardened or accustomed listeners, the cackles almost unsettled even the Fourth Espada. Almost.

"You're… you're… oh, this is too good… you're going to destroy me, Espada?! Gods, you're even funnier than that whore I have shackled up in my lab, rotting to death. What was her name again…? Oh, that's right," he finished, a manic light in his eyes and a grin plastered on his skull-like face, "it was Neliel."

Ulquiorra's fist had been clenching tighter and tighter around his sword's hilt as the slime in front of him had carried on his rant, but even though blood was beginning to run from his hand the Fourth Espada was determined to bide his time and wait for an opening. When he heard Nel's name spoken that way by the bastard of a Soul Reaper in front of him, however, something deep inside of Schiffer snapped. It was as if every single ounce of emotion that he had kept locked away and stagnating since the moment he had become an Arrancar burst forth at once with the strength of a tsunami.

It almost crushed him, the impulse to tear and rend and slaughter and wreak upon this garbage one hundred times the suffering the Soul Reaper had inflicted upon Neliel. But Ulquiorra mastered the initial onslaught of emotion and stood firm, focusing that raw hatred, the visceral, primal need to kill into a cold, hard edge of tempered malice that would cut through any obstacle in its path.

Mayuri Kurotsuchi was going to pay, and pay dearly. Concentrating every ounce of his reiatsu into his sword arms and the blade grasped between his hands, the Fourth Espada vanished with a buzz and reappeared in front of the Captain. Ulquiorra swung down with all of his might…

And hit nothing but air and the stone in front of his feet.

What the hell?

No sooner had he finished the thought than the Fourth Espada felt a searing pain in his right shoulder. His eyes looked over slowly in shock to behold a deep gash that had suddenly appeared, running from his shoulder blade to halfway down his pectoral muscle. When he tried to move the wounded limb, Ulquiorra found that it had somehow been paralyzed, despite still managing to hurt like hell.

"Surprised, Espada?"

Schiffer spun around, shifting his sword to his left hand exclusively and fighting the urge to cringe in pain. He never cringed for any reason, let alone a wound inflicted by this scumbag. Mayuri Kurotsuchi had somehow wound up a few paces away, holding the shikai of his zanpakuto in his hand. The three-pronged blade was dripping with black blood, and those damn amber eyes were still gleaming with that same insane intensity.

"You're wondering how I was able to outpace you, and inflict such a deep wound, all without you noticing. I can see it in your bewildered, ignorant little eyes, boy. I guess I was wrong to expect so much of you, but after that bitch wouldn't stop moaning and screaming about how you were going to come rescue her, well," here the Captain's grin widened, "I guess I got a little too excited at the prospect of a new specimen to experiment on."

"Who are you?" Ulquiorra asked as calmly as he could, stunned that a Captain whom Aizen had only given a passing mention was outflanking him, the Fourth Espada and one of the precious few Vasto Lorde in Hueco Mundo. Mayuri let loose with a fresh bout of cackles.

"That's always the first question they ask," he spat out, half to himself. "Who are you, who are you, who are you… that doesn't matter, you imbecile!" he finished with a scream, vanishing again. Schiffer boosted his reiatsu up as high as he was able in his state and tried to get a bead on his opponent. The only thing he sensed, though, was another flash of searing pain, this time in his left leg.

"What matters isn't who is using the techniques," the mad scientist hissed from behind the Espada once again, "but how they have achieved such power. That is where true understanding lies, boy, although I would not expect someone such as yourself to comprehend such a concept."

"Damn it…" Ulquiorra cursed, his traitorous leg giving out from under him and forcing him to one knee. "I refuse to be defeated by a worm such as you, Kurotsuchi. I have not come this far to fail now."

"Quite right, quite right," the Captain replied, vanishing again.

"You came here to die, Arrancar."

Realizing that his enemy would probably try to slash at his left arm and render him totally helpless, the Espada raised his weapon into a blocking stance as fast as he could and was rewarded with the sound of steel clashing on steel instead of another burst of excruciating agony.

"Hmm, interesting," Mayuri mused. "It seems as though you have a brain in your head after all. No matter," he continued, breaking the deadlock. "That will only elongate this farce by a minimal amount."

Schiffer's eyes widened as Kurotsuchi's arm became little more than a blur, and it was only a reflexive roll to the side that kept his head from being cleaved in half. As the insane Captain vanished again and reappeared some paces off, the Espada had a decidedly unpleasant revelation.

This bastard wasn't using flash steps. That was why it had been impossible to draw a bead on him earlier; he was masking his reiatsu and literally running circles around him. But how could someone be so fast? It was…

"Impossible, no?" The Captain crooned. "Under normal circumstances, I would be inclined to agree with you, Arrancar; however, these circumstances are anything but normal. Shall I tell you the secret to my strength?"

"Save it for your last breath," Ulquiorra shot back, raising his forefinger from the hilt of his zanpakuto and firing off a quick bala. It didn't make contact, but it did act as a perfect diversion to cover his real gambit. When Mayuri appeared directly in front of him, sword high and poised to impale him right in the chest, Schiffer let a rare smirk form on his lips as he angled his right hand upward. A full-blown cero had just finished coalescing there, and it hit the surprised Kurotsuchi dead-on.

"You should've cut my whole arm off, fool," The Arrancar said with icy scorn as he forced himself to his feet, beginning to limp away before a surge of reiatsu from behind him stopped the Fourth Espada in his tracks.

"Fool?" a voice rasped out from behind him. "I, a fool? Watch your tongue, boy!"

Having regained his footing and conquered his shock, Ulquiorra was more than prepared for the straightforward attack as the Captain charged right at his back. Positioning his sword behind his back at a diagonal angle, the Espada braced himself and received the blow without giving an inch.

"So, you have your weaknesses after all," Schiffer spoke evenly, his voice returning to its normal state of tightly-controlled lethality. "Your pride will be the death of you, Mayuri Kurotsuchi."

Before he gave the Captain the chance to go on the offensive again, Ulquiorra vanished with a buzz, reappeared behind his foe and let fly with a bala. Kurotsuchi twisted out of the way, and Schiffer noticed with savage glee that he could follow his enemy's moves now. It must have been some kind of augmentation or drug that had allowed him to move so quickly, and it was about to wear off. Forcing his lame leg to cooperate with another burst of sonido, the Fourth Espada flashed forward with a buzz and slashed out, finally landing a blow as his zanpakuto ripped through the Soul Reaper's shoulder and severed his arm completely.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit!" Kurotsuchi swore. "Bakudo number 81: Danku!"

The Captain used the time it took Ulquiorra to shatter the barrier to regain his breath and his footing. Removing a small syringe from his robe, Mayuri jammed it into the stump of his amputated arm and began the limb's regenerative process.

"God damn that trifling whore I call my Lieutenant," he raved. "She assured me the dose she'd mixed would last for ten minutes, and it's barely been five!"

Schiffer's eyes narrowed in satisfaction as his hypothesis was confirmed, but the nagging question of how this piece of trash had been able to carve through his hierro was still unanswered.

"So I was right," the Fourth Espada said coldly. "You need to rely on artifical means to conquer your opponents, Mayuri Kurotsuchi, because you lack the strength to do it yourself. You shame the title of Captain, Soul Reaper."

"Silence yourself, brat!" the skeletal-faced man shouted, raising up his newly-healed arm and launching a burst of raw energy at the Espada. Ulquiorra was able to dodge most of it, but the edge of the blast nicked his shoulder as it flew by. The Arrancar's green eyes narrowed in pain as he suddenly felt like his shoulder was being melted; which, as it turned out, was the truth. His skin, for all of its vaunted hierro, was being seared away faster than butter melting under a hot flame. Schiffer reduced his shout of pain to a gritted grunt as layers of flesh and muscle dissolved to reveal shining white bone. Before he could give voice to the question screaming in his head, Mayuri took it upon himself to edify his opponent.

"Did you know that the hierro of every Arrancar shares the same basic composition of spirit particles, Espada?" he spoke out. "All that varies from Arrancar to Arrancar is the density of that layer of particles. Which means that once I know how to break through one hierro, I can break through them all. And guess whose skin I used to crack the code?"

Ulquiorra's eyes widened in shock and then narrowed in murderous rage as images of a mutilated, burned and scarred Neliel flashed through his head.

"That's right," the Captain crooned. "It took me a couple hundred tries, but eventually I managed to cut through that slut's supposedly impenetrable hierro. Of course," he finished maniacally, "after I'd solved that puzzle, further experimentation was required. You should have heard her screams, Espada. Oh my, were they exquisite."

The raging pain in his shoulder receded like wheat before a scythe as Schiffer felt the purest hatred he had ever known well up from the core of his being, obliterating all sense of pain, discomfort and hesitation as it spread. It lifted him up like a thermal rising from the pits of Hell, and soon the world had been reduced to Ulquiorra's hand, the zanpakuto it was holding and the miserable bastard who he was about to hack to pieces.

Disappearing in a flash of sonido so fast it singed the air in his wake, Schiffer gripped his sword in both hands and willed his right arm to life, bringing his zanpakuto up in a rising slash that would have split Kurotsuchi in half had he not jumped back at the last possible second. As it stood, though, a deep gash had been torn from the Captain's abdomen up to his sternum, all but disemboweling him. Ulquiorra pressed his assault, heedless of the face that he was pushing himself close to his limit given his current state. The only things that mattered now were relieving this bastard of his head and rescuing Neliel before it was entirely too late.

Mayuri, on the other hand, was hovering around the polar opposite end of the emotional spectrum. Stripped of his one major advantage, the Captain was becoming more and more frantic as the supposedly maimed and incapacitated Espada was driving at him like an unchained whirlwind. He had to do something to even the odds fast, or he wasn't going to make it out of this alive. And when he did walk away from this brat's emaciated, poisoned corpse, Mayuri vowed that he was going to stab Nemu through the chest with his zanpakuto and snap the blade in half.

"Hado number 58: Tenran!"

The Captain smiled in perverse glee as he watched the Arrancar before him get swept up into the air like a ragdoll by the kido, his momentum stymied completely.

"Hado number 63: Raikoho!"

Ulquiorra saw the wave of destructive golden kido racing towards him and powered up a cero, slamming his own attack into the heart of the offensive spell. As the kido split apart like a cloven piece of timber, Schiffer executed a hasty sonido and returned himself to the ground, mindful of the enchantment placed over the Seireitei that prohibited harnessing reiatsu to walk on air.

"Die!" Mayuri shouted, launching another burst of the hierro-obliterating energy at his foe. Ulquiorra dodged and charged again, the blade of his zanpakuto grinding against Kurotsuchi's shikai until one of the zanpakuto's blades was sliced clean off. As the sword itself howled in pain and rage, the effect of its ability on Schiffer's limbs seem to slacken. It didn't restore his full range of motion, but even the ability to twitch was preferable to complete paralysis.

As his right arm lurched back to a sort of lethargic, half-mobile state, the Espada cracked a vicious smirk and began his assault afresh. Finishing a string of strikes off with a bala that obliterated the Captain's newly-repaired arm, Schiffer moved away and began to prepare for a massive sonido when a rasping cackle jolted him out of his thoughts.

"You think this is over, Espada?" the Captain barked, the blood ebbing from multiple gashes and wounds not seeming to faze him in the slightest. "This battle ends when you are reduced to a plague-ridden husk! Bankai!"

Ulquiorra's face twisted into an expression of exasperation, bizarre wonderment and disgust as the cape-wearing, mutant caterpillar-baby hybrid known as Konjiki Ashisogi Jizo made his grand entrance.

"What the hell is that thing?" the Fourth Espada asked, and Kurotsuchi smiled.

"This is my bankai," he crooned, "Konjiki Ashisogi Jizo. The poison this thing breathes will obliterate you, Espada. Destroy him!"

The freakish monster that perfectly reflected the abomination that was the soul of Mayuri Kurotsuchi charged, spikes protruding from its abdomen and some kind of vile purple gas flowing out from its mouth. Ulquiorra dodged to the side and carved a gash along the flank of the monster with his zanpakuto, but the beast showed no signs of slowing down.

Fighting back the urge to snarl in frustration, Schiffer swallowed his pride and accepted that he was going to have to pull out his last ace-in-the-hole if he was going to end this quickly. And as embarrassing as it was to have to release his zanpakuto to deal with this piece of trash, Ulquiorra was in no mood to waste time; for all he knew, Neliel was being vivisected at this very moment. Giving himself some space by tearing a hole through the bankai monstrosity with a cero, the Fourth Espada held his sword out vertically in front of him and spoke.

"Engulf, Pesadilla."

The mask fragment on top of Ulquiorra's head shattered into countless pieces and floated behind him, where they split apart into two groups and melted into black, shadowy wings that affixed themselves to Schiffer's shoulder blades. They seemed ethereal and almost angelic, but within them thrummed an incredibly dark, immense amount of power that spoke of horrendous pain and suffering. As a final touch, the green streaks below his eyes shifted in color, from green to pitch black.

"This is the first time anyone has beheld my true power in this form, Mayuri Kurotsuchi," the Arrancar spoke in a venomous tone as the force of the release blasted his jacket from his body, leaving the brand on his chest visible in the sunlight. As his zanpakuto flared with power and the blade was surrounded by the same black, shadow-like energy, Ulquiorra readied it in his now-healed right arm and prepared to end this sick joke of a duel.

"You should be honored that your eyes have been graced by it," Schiffer continued icily, "but know that it speaks more to your conniving nature than to your skills as a warrior. Perpare to die, Soul Reaper."

The Fourth Espada leapt forward and slammed his sword into the side of Konjiki Ashisogi Jizo. The monster started violently at the contact, writhing like a snared beast. Slowly but surely black tendrils of energy began to run along the length of the creature, both beneath its skin and above it. As they grew in number, every inch of flesh that they covered went as still as death.

"My Pesadilla's ability is a simple one," Schiffer explained as Mayuri could only look on in shock and twisted admiration at such power. "It spreads its energy throughout its prey, and sows the seed of nightmare within the core of its soul while paralyzing the flesh. As the tendrils grow, the clarity of the phantasm sharpens until the victim is left completely helpless. Soon at the mercy of their worst nightmare, the image drives them, inescapably, into madness and destruction. Surely you have begun to feel an inkling of its effects by now, Mayuri Kurotsuchi?"

The Soul Reaper in question clutched his chest as his bankai thrashed one final time and faded away, overwhelmed by power of the nightmare rampaging through its head and assisted by a mercy stroke from Ulquiorra's blade. The same dark tendrils of shadow began to spread over Mayuri, beginning in the center of his abdomen and coursing through his veins as they simultaneously coiled around his body. Kurotsuchi fell to his knees and screamed in a strangled, primal tongue as the shadow dove into his mouth from above and flooded out from behind his eyes in the same soul-shattering instant, engulfing him in darkness and carrying him off to Hell's waiting embrace.

The Fourth Espada stood over the body of his vanquished foe for a moment as the shadows receded, his resurrecion ebbing away and returning the mask fragment to crown Ulquiorra's head. Inclining his head downward slightly as he sheathed his now-sealed zanpakuto, Schiffer took a moment to spit a stream of blackened blood down onto the corpse of his fallen enemy before flashing away with a buzz.

There was someone who needed rescuing.

The green-eyed Arrancar wretched as he felt Mayuri's fatal poison finally take effect, one last mocking parting shot from beyond the grave. Limping down the stairs as all of the injuries he had suffered during the duel decided to come back to life at once, Ulquiorra forced his way through the haze of the pain and finally made it to the bottom of the stairs inside the maniac's laboratory. His gaze fell upon a terrified Soul Reaper with a Lieutenant's insignia on her arm, and Schiffer put his palms out in a gesture of peace.

"Do you have an antidote for this poison, woman?" he asked in a blunt rasp. The Soul Reaper removed a bottle from behind her insignia, holding it glinting in the light.

"Is he dead?" she asked simply, and Ulquiorra nodded. The woman, who the Espada assumed to be the 'Nemu' Kurotsuchi had been referring to, gave a small smile and tossed him the bottle. Schiffer chugged it down and chucked it to the side of the lab, sighing slightly in relief as the medicine spread throughout his body.

"Get out of here."

Nemu responded almost instantaneously to the command, disappearing in a flash-step quick enough to rival Stark's sonido. Ulquiorra's sharp eyes scanned the room and widened as they fell upon a ragged, scarred and dirtied figure huddled in the corner of a cage. Racing over to her, the Fourth Espada was almost knocked over as he slammed into the kyomon barrier that Shunsui had set up earlier. As he reeled backwards, the noise of the impact roused Neliel from her sleep and she looked up, first in fear and then in stunned happiness as she recognized who her visitor was. Rising shakily to her feet, the captive Arrancar broke down the kyomon with a touch.

Schiffer blinked a few times and shook his head to clear it, but as soon as he'd gotten his footing again the Espada was almost knocked over by a bone-crushingly strong hug that should have been impossible given Nel's current physical state. Ulquiorra's shock deepened as his shoulder began to feel damp, and he realized that Neliel was weeping mutely. Fearing the worst, the Fourth Espada let the tears ebb away completely before he gently parted their embrace somewhat, raising the green-haired Arrancar's face up by her chin and examining her throat. When he saw no scarring there, Schiffer's expression became puzzled.

"Can you not speak?" he asked as evenly as he could, and Oderschvank nodded sadly. Motioning to Ulquiorra's blade, the Fourth Espada gave it to her and waited anxiously, unsure of what was going through her mind.

Placing the zanpakuto's point against the ground, Neliel carved her explanation for her muteness into the dirt. As he finished reading the characters, Ulquiorra's eyes widened in horror.

"No…" he forced out, but all Nel could do was nod weakly.

He shattered my Zanpakuto.

The Fourth Espada knew exactly what this trauma meant: Neliel was trapped in her Arrancar form forever, unable to return to the state granted by her resurrecion ever again. Not only had it crippled her in a core, fundamental way, but it had stripped her of her voice. As fatigue and grief cut her legs out from under her, the green-haired Arrancar slumped forward and Ulquiorra braced her against him, sweeping her frighteningly light form up into his arms and sighing as he looked down at the broken Espada.

"It'll be all right, Neliel," he said in as comforting a tone as he could manage before taking them both away from the hellish room in a buzz of sonido,

"I promise."

A/N: Man, that was fun to write. Hope you enjoyed it, and that the payoff was satisfactory. And if Ulquiorra seemed a bit OoC at points, it was kind of necessary to both keep the fight from getting really boring and to continue his character growth. By the way, in case you were curious, 'Pesadilla' means 'Nightmare' in Spanish. As always, please review!