Torn
Chapter 33: Ventum Ad Supremum Est
Ulquiorra knew how dangerous it would be if Yammy was allowed to assume his gargantuan resurreccion form, which was why he had cut off the Cero Espada's sword-arm the first chance he had. But despite only having one arm, dealing with a shifted center of gravity and fighting without a sword Rialgo was still managing to give him trouble, thanks in large part to his pure brute strength, immense size and bestial tenacity.
"What's wrong, Ulquiorra?" Yammy asked as the former Espada blocked another left hook and fired off another cero that did little more than cause Rialgo to retreat a few steps. "Why don'tcha release your zanpakuto? You aren't gonna beat me without it."
"I don't need to go that far to bring a brute like you down, Yammy," he said as calmly as he could, worry tugging at the edge of his mind more and more persistently as he felt Neliel's reiatsu fluctuating dangerously.
"Oh ho, really?" the giant Espada boomed humorously. "Well, if I'm a brute, you're a proud idiot, Ulquiorra!"
Ulquiorra was about to retort when he felt Nel's reiatsu disappear completely from his senses, and his normally impassive expression became dominated by shock and disbelief.
"See what I mean!?" Yammy shouted, using his enemy's distraction to his advantage and slamming a bala into Ulquiorra's chest, sending him backwards. "If you'd released your zanpakuto earlier, maybe you'da beaten me and you could've run off to save your woman. But now she's dead, Ulquiorra," Rialgo finished as he drew his zanpakuto out of its sheath with his left hand while his enemy rushed forward to try and stop him from releasing,
"And you're about to join her! Destroy, Ira!"
Ulquiorra's desperate advance was rebuffed yet again as Yammy's release resulted in a huge shockwave of reiatsu, the impact of which sent Schiffer's mind reeling even as his body remained stationary. As the smoke and dust from Rialgo's resurreccion began to clear, the green-eyed Arrancar felt the enormity of what had just occurred slam into him with ruthless bluntness.
Neliel was dead. Not severely injured, not unconscious: dead. He would never see her again, never listen to her consistently upbeat voice nagging him over the most trivial of things. He would never be able to wake up with her in his arms again, just looking at her untroubled face and wondering how it was that someone who had been through so much pain could ever find peace of mind again.
Yammy took a few moments to adjust to the new form his resurreccion had given him; thanks to that Shinigami's earlier energy-siphoning attack he wasn't nearly as large as he'd planned on, but Rialgo was confident regardless that this would be more than enough strength to crush the annoying former Cuarta Espada. But as Yammy's eyes refocused on Ulquiorra, he had to blink twice to make sure he wasn't seeing things.
His opponent was just standing there, shell-shocked, with a blank look on his face and none of his usual calm, stoic composure in his eyes. The sudden trauma of feeling his woman vanish from existence entirely had clearly thrown Ulquiorra into a borderline-comatose state, and Rialgo chuckled with sadistic glee as he realized that he would be a fool for not taking advantage of the situation. Moving forward with speed seemingly disproportionate to his massive size, Yammy pulled his healed right arm up before surrounding his right fist with red energy and sending it barreling towards his opponent.
The former Espada saw Rialgo's attack coming, but saw no reason to stop it. He had lost one of the few people he truly cared for, and the one he had undoubtedly cared for the most, because he had allowed his pride to get in the way. He wasn't going to let that happen twice; he deserved just retribution for his error in judgment, and there was no way he would try to shirk from that when he had nothing left to lose.
But Ulquiorra's higher brain functions, or what remained of them, anyway, could only go so far in overruling his baser survival instincts through sheer nihilistic desire to die. His arms moved his zanpakuto up into a guarding position, his blade acting as a buffer despite the lack of conviction in the Arrancar's grip. The attack still hit him with enough force to send him down hard into the dirt, burned and broken, but he was still alive. Yammy followed up his attack by reaching down and wrapping his massive left hand around Ulquiorra's waist, hauling his enemy back up off the ground until he was eye-level with the Cero Espada. Yammy then used his right hand to snatch Ulquiorra's zanpakuto from him, using the massive size of his hand to crush the entire blade into nothing more than a fine powder with a single clench of his fist. This done, he began to charge up a cero with the same right hand and pointed it square at Ulquiorra's head, determined not to take any chances.
"Let him go, Yammy."
The Espada recognized Stark's calm but immense reiatsu in an instant. But rather than turning around to properly address the Seguenda Espada, Yammy growled angrily and spoke, his eyes still focused only on Ulquiorra even if he had banished the cero from his hand.
"What do you want, Stark?" he spat, and Stark did little more than give an irritated sigh in the face of his comrade's blatant disrespect.
"Aizen's orders were for you guys to soften them up," Stark answered plainly. "You've done that, so get out of here; leave the cleanup to us."
Lilynette only half-listened to Yammy's heated reply, knowing that the idiot was going to either provoke Stark into attacking—or just attack them himself—and preparing mentally to recombine with Stark in case he needed to release their full powers. As she focused on calming herself down, however, the petite Arrancar felt another presence tugging at the edge of her senses.
A Shinigami was trying to sneak up on them. Some piss-ant thought that they could not only slip past her, but also pull a fast one on Stark? She was doing the world a public service by killing off people that stupid, Lilynette thought as she drew the sword she kept hidden away in her helmet. The action caused the Shinigami, who she recognized as Yumichika Ayasegawa, to make his move sooner than he had apparently planned, and the barely-controlled tension in the atmosphere spilled over into barely-controlled chaos.
Stark's head turned to see what the fuss was that had caused Lilynette to draw her sword, and Yammy chose that moment to strike out at his fellow Espada with one of his sizeable fists. As Yumichika launched himself towards Stark, the Seguenda and his fraccion locked eyes for a fraction of a second and realized that if they were going to avoid a prolonged duel on two fronts, they had to act immediately. Lilynette used the fastest burst of sonido she'd ever pulled to bring herself next to Stark and the Espada put his hand down on her head, speaking the release command for their resurreccion just as Yumichika came within striking distance.
"Kick, Los Lobos."
The flash of light from the release was blinding, but Yumichika willed himself to keep moving forward. He was almost there—
Until a cero blast struck out from virtually point-blank range, completely stifling the Shinigami's advance as he fell out of the air like an eagle that had gotten its wings unexpectedly clipped in mid-flight.
Yammy knew what form Stark's release would take, but there was nothing he could do to stop his momentum at this point. Despite their gap in rank, the Seguenda was still much faster than him, and speed was all that mattered in a situation such as this. The first blast completely incinerated his attacking arm, and before Yammy could strike out with the other one Stark had turned both pistols on him and pulled the triggers, engulfing the Cero Espada in the destructive energies of several thousand cero blasts.
The light from the barrage faded almost as soon as it had appeared, leaving no trace of Yammy in its wake. Sighing shortly in annoyance at being forced to act in such a rushed way, Stark took a few moments to catch his breath before turning his attention to the prone form of Ulquiorra Schiffer. He was still alive, but only by the thinnest of threads; it would be much easier just to let him die naturally than go through all the effort of shooting him to only speed up the process by a few minutes.
"Stark, you're not seriously thinking of leaving him alive, are you?" Lilynette's voice jabbed sharply from the guns he held in his hands. "Hurry up and finish him off, I wanna go back home already!"
"If doing that is the only thing that'll get you to shut up," the Seguenda grumbled, raising the longer of his two pistols and leveling it at Ulquiorra, "then I guess I don't have a choice."
Stark pulled the trigger and let loose with just a single cero, although it still contained more than enough power to obliterate what remained of Ulquiorra.
The cero beam never reach its intended target, however, as an unfamiliar presence appeared almost too fast for Stark's eye to follow and placed itself in between the attack and the wounded Arrancar. The cero was swiftly and precisely bisected an instant later, and the smoke from the explosions of the diverted halves soon cleared to reveal a woman holding a nodachi-shaped zanpakuto, with black hair arranged in a long ponytail and wearing wireframe glasses.
"Who are you, woman?!" Lilynette shouted, in sharp contrast to Stark's careful appraisal of the newcomer. "Get the hell out of the way!"
"You use guns, Arrancar?" Lisa mused, completely ignoring Lilynette's words. "That's a first."
"Why did you stop that cero?" Stark asked calmly, his analysis of the opponent complete. "He's experienced a trauma that has broken him mentally; he wants to die."
"I don't care about broken-hearted self pity," Lisa parried with a scoff. "Our part of the deal was to protect that kid Héctor's allies, and that's what I'm gonna do. Besides," she continued, pulling her diamond-shaped mask down over her face and looking out from the line across the middle, "dying's a pretty irrevocable decision. I'm sure he'd be happier making it in a clearer state of mind."
Stark just sighed as the Vizard rushed forward to attack, pissed off that he'd been drawn into another fight and determined to end it quickly.
"What's wrong, uncle?" Ichigo quipped as he threw another Getsuga at his opponent. "You look like you've gotten slower."
Kago sliced through the attack easily, but had to bite back a slight grimace as he heard the truth ringing spitefully in Ichigo's words. Gin had put up a much better fight than he'd expected, and the injuries from that duel were still plaguing him to a degree.
Still, he told himself as he set his feet and prepared to try a different tactic, all this means is that the fight will take slightly longer than anticipated… the outcome will remain the same.
"Hado number 4: Byakurai."
Ichigo had faced a powerful version of the Byakurai spell before, in his fight with Byakuya on Sougyoku Hill, but this kido made that one look like it had been the work of Renji. A veritable pillar of while lightning came rushing at Ichigo with terrifying speed, and it was only a last-second dodge that kept his injuries to a slight burn on his arm, instead of getting blasted clean in half. Forcing himself not to panic, Ichigo remembered his own hellish kido training and decided that two could most definitely play this game.
"Hado number 58: Tenran!"
"You really think using a higher-level Hado is going to make a difference, Ichigo?" Kago asked with thinly-veiled disdain as he weathered the cyclone, breaking it apart with a single forceful swing of his sword.
"The number of a spell means nothing if you lack the strength to bring out its full potential," the elder Kurosaki continued. "In battle, every ounce of experience counts one-hundred times more than a pound of brute strength. Hado number 1: Sho."
The younger Kurosaki felt like he'd been hit by a Shakkaho from Tessai, for all the force that was behind the simple kido. He was sent flying back as he felt several bones splinter and crack in his chest, but his enemy wasn't done yet.
"Bakudo number 63: Sajo Sabaku."
Ichigo was helpless to escape the golden ropes as they encircled him, pressing his arms to his sides and holding him completely immobile, like a mouse in the grip of a python. Kago's expression remained icy as he advanced, disappointed that the warrior he had tried to hard to sway over to his side was, in the end, nothing more than an inexperienced brat.
Ichigo struggled briefly against the bonds of the Bakudo, but soon realized that breaking through with physical strength was going to be impossible even considering the enhanced power his Hollow bankai gave him. Relaxing his muscles and allowing his reiatsu to flow calmly out around him, Ichigo wove his own energies into the kido surrounding him like threads, looking for structural weak points in the spell. When he had thoroughly infiltrated Kago's Bakudo, he pulled hard on the myriad threads he had placed and grinned in satisfaction as the binding stripes fell away from him like cloth.
"Don't underestimate me, you bastard!" Ichigo shouted as he charged at his uncle, whose own brown eyes were as icy and calculating as Ichigo's were simmering with brashness and obvious power. Tensa Zangetsu's blade rose and fell, and Ichigo smirked in victory as he watched blood arc from a massive gash across Kago's chest. An incredibly slight pulse of reiatsu behind him, however, quickly reminded Ichigo that he was dueling someone for whom illusions and deception were as natural as breathing. Shifting his stance to allow for a fluid sidestep and turning his body as he moved, Ichigo was barely able to deflect a thrust from Kyoka Suigetsu that would have otherwise skewered him.
Quickly striking back, Ichigo unleashed a flurry of blows that had soon the elder Kurosaki on the defensive. Not even thinking about holding back in the slightest like he had against Halibel, Ichigo let loose with all of his power and only increased his ferocity as he felt his enemy giving way beneath his attacks. He could win this!
"Hado number 90: Kurohitsugi."
The words didn't come from the Kago that Ichigo was currently beating back, and he realized with anger and no small amount of fear that he'd been tricked into leaving himself wide open for a potentially catastrophic attack. The walls of the Black Coffin swiftly formed themselves around him, the scores of lacerating spears following close behind.
Kago watched his spell unfold from several paces away with wry amusement; seeing someone chase after nothing but thin air with all of their might never ceased to amuse him. And because of his lack of perception, Ichigo had waltzed right into the trap the elder Kuroaski had set for him; once this attack finished, destroying the impertinent brat once and for all would be a small matter—
But something felt off with the kido, enough to make Kago's brow furrow in confusion: the Kurohitsugi had stalled completely. What was going on?
A few seconds later the black cube shattered into thousands of impotent shards, revealing Ichigo standing there without so much as a scratch. Kago's expression of confusion quickly shifted to one of anger as he realized what had happened: Ichigo had stopped the blades of the Hado spell with his zanpakuto and raw power, before literally ripping the entire attack to shreds. When was he going to get it into his thick skull that this wasn't a fight he was capable of winning?
"It's gonna take more than that to bring me down, uncle!" Ichigo called out as he charged, and the elder Kurosaki made sure that the next strike with Kyoka Suigetsu had enough power behind it to atomize this whelp.
But then Ichigo suddenly disappeared completely from Kago's sights, and words followed from off to his left a fraction of a heartbeat later.
"Hado number 33: Soukatsui!"
Kago turned smoothly and deflected the large flame of kido with his sword, only to have Ichigo's voice ring out yet again from an unexpected direction, this time directly behind him.
"Getsuga Tensho!"
"A diversion, huh?" Kago mused evenly, using his hand to stop the black crescent of energy cold before flexing his muscles and exerting a strong enough burst of opposing energy to diffuse Ichigo's strike completely. "That only works if one of your two attacks actually hits the target, boy."
"What about the third attack, then?"
Kago barely had time to register Ichigo's new position before his strike came, the energy of Getsuga contained in the sword lending increased power to the blow. It landed with lethal precision, and Ichigo knew as his opponent failed to vanish that he had struck his opponent genuinely this time. As the younger warrior grinned viciously and tried for another strike, however, something changed in Kago's reiatsu. It was as if all Ichigo's attack had done, rather than seriously injure his enemy, was make him finally start to take him seriously. All of a sudden the scales tipped yet again, as a massive surge of reiatsu rose up around Kago and threw Ichigo backward with its sheer force.
Before Ichigo could right himself, the elder Kurosaki appeared next to him in a whisper of shunpo and struck, carving a gash across his nephew's chest to equal the one that Ichigo had just given him. Fighting though the searing, spreading pain that threatened to make him lose focus and drop his guard, the younger Kurosaki tried to strike back at his enemy. But Kago merely shifted out of the way of the blade like he was doing nothing more strenuous then dodging a bamboo kendo sword, gripping the hilt of Kyoka Suigetsu with both hands before delivering a second crushing blow.
Ichigo shouted in pain as dual gashes now crossed over his chest in a gruesome 'X', and strength fled rapidly from his limbs as he fell to the ground and stayed there, unmoving. Kago could still sense reiatsu pulsing in the younger Kurosaki's core, however, and he smiled.
"It's truly impressive that you are still alive, Ichigo," he began, walking over and hauling his nephew's limp body up onto its knees. "But like I told you so long ago," the Shinigami finished, raising Kyoka Suigetsu up and preparing to cleave Ichigo's head from his shoulders,
"Your physical strength and your will to survive not being equal is your greatest weakness."
The blade of Kago's zanpakuto arced downwards, but right before it made contact with Ichigo's neck, the younger Kurosaki's eyes snapped open and sharply into focus as he lifted his sword up with a shout.
"Getsuga Tensho!"
The full force of one last, desperate gambit slammed square into the elder Kurosaki's chest, and he reeled backwards with the first expression of genuine shock on his face to have resided there in thousands of years.
"You're wrong," Ichigo forced out as he rose shakily to his feet, black reiatsu flowing out from him stronger now than it had throughout any of their previous clashes. "My willpower… is my strength!"
Gathering every single ounce of reiatsu that he still possessed, Ichigo focused it into Tensa Zangetsu and prepared himself for one final strike: the attack that would decide everything. Kago, not too proud or too stupid to realize how wounded he had been by that last sneak attack, did the same.
"Kill me here, Ichigo," the elder Kurosaki said seriously as he wrote his own epitaph, "and it will have consequences far more dire than your mind can even conceive of."
"What should I believe a single word you say!?" Ichigo shouted back fiercely. "I'm going to kill you here and now, and this is going to end!"
Kago merely smiled sadly as the pair rushed towards each other.
No, he thought to himself as they clashed with all of their might, it's not going to end.
Unohana felt the reiatsu exploding from the other room and had to shield herself from the resultant shockwave as stone rained in chunks down around her, rent from the foundation of Las Noches by the immense power of the final clash. As soon as the chaos had settled down once again, the Shinigami sprang to her feet and ran down the halls to the Throne Room. What she saw there made Unohana's blue eyes darken with sadness:
Ichigo Kurosaki was dead.
His corpse was splayed out on the floor, facing the night sky above his head with a blank gaze that might have suggested he was still sleeping at first glance. But the grievous wounds that covered the rest of his body told another story, and Unohana felt a piercing shame that a war she might have been able to stop had claimed the life of someone so innocent.
Her eyes next passed over the body of someone she recognized with shock as Kago Kurosaki: the man who had been a part of the Royal Guard all the way back before the founding of the Divisions, when she had been a new inductee training under his brother Isshin. As her mind swiftly put all of the macabre puzzle's pieces together, Unohana felt guilt weigh down on her with even greater strength. She had not been able to perceive Aizen for whom he had truly been; she had failed to uncover that secret, just because she had assumed that Kago Kurosaki was a dead man.
A very faint pulse of reiatsu snapped the Shinigami out of her thoughts, and Unohana hurried to get the rubble off of the survivor before they suffocated to death. The pulse flickered weakly just as she moved the last large piece of stone away, and the bruised face of Gin Ichimaru was brought into the light. When the former Captain saw who stood over him, his expression was split by a wide smile. Unohana said nothing, looking deeply into Ichimaru's open garnet eyes before drawing her zanpakuto from its sheath.
Eris stood apart from her hybrid opponent and took stock of her wounds; Shinji Hirako was no slouch with a blade, that was for certain. Taking a brief moment to worry about how Saika might be holding up, the Primera then shoved those emotions firmly out of her mind and prepared to release her zanpakuto in order to finish the battle off quickly. Right before she began to speak the command, however, the reiatsu link that tied the top Espada to Aizen's direct control was suddenly severed. She could tell from the shifts in the energy of the other four Espada that they had felt the connection break as well, and when she and Shinji had clashed in yet another deadlock, she calmly spoke to the Vizard.
"You're not on the Shinigami's side, are you?" she asked him. "If you were, there was no way you would have waited this long to show up."
Shinji's mouth curled up into a grin, the glint in his eyes reminding the Primera of Gin Ichimaru's opaque cunning to a rather uncomfortable degree.
"We're here 'cause we made a bargain with that kid," he answered casually. "We got no loyalty to the Shinigami, not anymore."
"Then I would be correct in assuming that if I were to bow out of this duel, you would not pursue me?"
Shinji's eyes narrowed in perverse glee as the pieces fell into place in his head.
"Aizen's dead," he said after a moment, "ain't he?"
Eris stayed stone silent, choosing to let her reaction speak for her rather than openly admitting defeat. The Vizard just smiled wider and shrugged, slacking on the grip of his zanpakuto enough to let Eris back away. Moments later Saika appeared at the Primera's side, breaking the silence.
"He's really dead," the Tercera declared, "there's no doubting it. What's the plan, Eris?"
"Why're you even asking that question, you moron?" Ajax spat as he appeared in a buzz of sonido as well, his blue eyes flashing. "We have the Shinigami right where we want them; let's butcher all of these fools and end this war here and now!"
"No," Eris replied, her tone steely, "we cannot continue to fight. I was almost forced to release against my opponent, and if that holds true for me I can only assume that the rest of you would have eventually lost your battles. We will take Aizen's death for the improbable boon that it is, and retire to Hueco Mundo. This war is over."
"Like hell it is," Ajax barked, half-mad with rage as he brandished his zanpakuto at the Primera. "If you're just gonna pussy out and let them slide, then I'm gonna have to kill you and take your place as leader!"
As soon as the words had left Ajax's mouth, there was another burst of sonido as Stark appeared suddenly between the Quinta and the Primera, one gun raised and pointed so close to Ajax that all he could see was the blackness of the barrel's maw. The Quinta's eyes widened in fear as Stark's narrowed in hatred, understanding what was about to happen but powerless to stop the Seguenda from obtaining his long-delayed revenge.
Stark coldly pulled the trigger and blasted Ajax straight to hell, taking a moment to watch his ashes blowing away in the wind before turning to the last Espada to arrive, and the only other Arrancar Stark knew might have objections.
"What are your thoughts on this, Barragan?"
"You fools can do what you like," he said gruffly, "but don't expect me to hang around. I served no one but Aizen, and now that he's dead I don't plan on kowtowing ever again."
"As is your right, of course," Eris answered, before tearing open a garganta with a wave of her hand. "In any case, there is no further reason for us to remain here, is there?"
The surviving Espada walked through the garganta and shut it behind them with a faint whine. The wounded Shinigami could only watch them go with confusion, stunned at the sudden turn of events and the fact that their enemies had departed with them still breathing. Silence reigned as the conscious warriors took stock of their wounds, while the ones who had passed out were seen to by their Vizard rescuers.
The silence was broken as another rift opened above them. The Vizards kept their weapons lowered, however, as they saw Unohana appear, head bowed and silent as she carried the orphaned blade of Zangetsu in her arms.