The first couple of districts surrounding the Seireitei, (the ones still in the single digits) weren't so bad really; there was usually food to be found at the market and plenty of water that was actually purified by a septic system. The houses generally looked normal: with roofs that were not about to collapse and walls that were well maintained. They even had lawns and many held vegetable gardens as well. The streets were in good repair, there were even parks at regular intervals. The children and adults here were not dressed in rags, fighting for scraps. In fact most of the residents of the inner districts were the spouses and children of the Soul Reapers in the Seireitei. As one got farther and farther out, the buildings and streets slowly segued into a greater state of disrepair. The buildings became more run-down and less well-maintained, the parks and benches disappeared to be replaced with lots where collections of homeless built shanties out of whatever they could find. When one reached the very outer districts, places like the one he'd grown up in, the buildings were so flimsy a high wind would knock them over, and they were often no more than a collection of nailed-together junk (like the shack Rukia and I had grown up in). The outer districts had a certain... savor to them too, an aroma compounded of unwashed bodies, stagnant water and sometimes bloated corpses. Strays fought with ragged, unwashed kids over scraps from the garden and the older men and women fought amongst one another for status in order to get a decent share of what little there was. I skipped over the rooftops in a blur, headed for my old stomping grounds of Hangdog; if there was anything amiss I'd know it there.
:This place ain't changed,: I thought as I secured my hooded cloak and dropped soundlessly down into the streets, hidden in the shadow between two shanties. I stepped out cautiously into the main part of the street to get my bearings and looked around.
It still smelled like a trash-heap and I reflexively dodged as two forms came flying out of the ramshackle building behind me and started brawling in the streets. Prostitutes hung their "wares" outside of nearby second story windows to invite passersby to come buy. There were small roving gangs of ragged children, skinny and quick, skittering about like rats eying any likely prospects for food. And the inevitable furtive pickpocket...
"Don't even think about it," I growled at him, voice dripping with menace.
He tried to spit on my shoe in reply as he passed me by, so I cuffed him once for his temerity. He had the smarts not to pursue it further.
:Now, where's the best place to go about getting information,: I thought considering to myself.
Merchants heard everything, but the old skinflints that managed to protect their wares long enough to sell anything out here wouldn't let it go without a price, and as soon as I left they'd be happily selling info on a possible new mark in town. Some of the higher-ranking thugs in the area might be keeping tabs purely in the interests of guarding their turf from threats and challenges to their status, but they wouldn't like an outsider poking his nose into their business. I could fight them over it, but I'd upset the balance of power around here by damaging some thug's status by beating the crap out of him. Any perceived weakness was grounds for the lesser ranked thugs to move in. I wasn't there to make waves, I wanted to just slip in, find what I was after and slip back out without anyone the wiser.
:It's the kids then,: I thought, not unhappy with it.
The street kids of the Rukon District were everywhere and no-one ever paid any attention to them except to try to catch them when they inevitably stole food. If there was anything to hear or know they heard about it or knew someone who'd know. They were easy to buy too (once you got past their initial mistrust and hard-won wariness of strange adult males) one good meal and they'd tell you everything useful they knew.
I took my time, circling the market square and scanning the possibilities carefully. There were three different gangs on raid today, I could see them skirting the edges of the square and crowding in the back alleys, just waiting for the right chance to strike. Ah, it took me back. One of the gangs was made of mostly older boys, it wouldn't be long before those ones would be starting to work their way into the nearby thug rankings. They would probably know something and tell it to me but it was just as likely that they'd try to surround me and beat me up for money (or kicks). I wasn't interested in wasting time fighting punks. The other two sets of kids were younger, clad in clothes that were more hole than cloth, and so skinny if you turned any one of them sideways you'd loose him. I noted that they were also less in number than was usual for a raid.
:Huh, must've been a plague or fever hit recently,: I thought to myself.
It usually happened in the summer, the hot sun and recent rains of the winter made the perfect nesting-grounds for things that carried sickness, and kids generally didn't have whole lot to protect them in the first place. It took a small effort of will for me to shake off the memories trying to take hold of a time when, as the leader of our little family one of my own fell sick and faded day by day and I'd tried desperately to get a way to cure him. I'd stolen medicine, extra food, blankets... but nothing had worked. Poor Tomi had still died, with Haru following soon after him, taken in the crossfire of a drunken brawl while trying to beg food.
I was feeling puckish that day so I picked the wealthiest, most prosperous-looking merchant in the small run-down little market square, the one who seemed like he could stand to loose a little of his merchandise and wandered over to inspect his wares like I was gonna buy something. He looked at me with a combination of wariness and avarice as I looked his goods over. I reached for a nearby basket of woven rushes from the river filled with small, hard little apples and pretended to loose my balance.
"Hey! Watch it!" he cried angrily as I pitched forward into the center of his selling mat.
"Gosh sir, I'm really sorry," I said not feeling a bit of it as the old skinflint tried to shove me off without helping me up.
Right on cue both groups of kids darted out from the alleyways and made a textbook running snatch, gathering up armfuls of food while I purposefully floundered around, tangling myself up with the old merchant in his blanket, and "accidentally" knocking him down when he got up. It was funny, seeing him fall on his ass a couple of times and curse the skies, calling on his ancestors to witness his misfortunes. I actually felt pretty good about it. I took careful note of the direction the children scampered off to and, since I'd had my fun, I released the poor merchant and helped him straighten up. Since I sort of felt a little bad about ruining his display of wares I flipped him a silver coin, worth probably twice what he'd lost to the kids, and said
"You never saw me."
A sharp look entered his eyes and I could see it written on his face that he was thinking of who, in the delicate pecking order of the streets he should inform first of a possible new target on the haystacks.
:Ah Hangdog, it never changes,: I thought to myself.
Part of me was sort of glad to see that some things never changed, the rest of me was sad about it.
I blurred into a flashstep out of the market, disappearing as soon as the merchant took his eyes off me. I knew all of the places that the alley they'd taken went too, and all of the likeliest places that the kids would use as a gathering place to divide their wares and discuss whether or not they'd been followed. I flashstepped over to the nearest one and waited, leaning against a nearby wall that looked stable enough to hold me. They'd be down this way in due time.
While I waited, I watched a small dogfight between two ragged curs in the nearby alley way. They were both fighting over a scrap of meat and really going at it with their all. I wondered absently if I ought to make a mental bet on which one would win. The fur flew as the air was filled with the sound of fierce growls and yips of pain. The dogs scored on each other pretty badly in some places, bad enough to weaken one another, and I figured it was going to be a draw and they'd have to split the meat, but then, out of the shadows of the alleyway behind them, a third contender came. He was a little larger than the two fighting dogs and more importantly, he was fresh for the fight. It didn't take a genius to figure out which way this was going to go. Sure enough, a few minutes later the new dog had overpowered and drove off the first two dogs and took the prize meat. He lay down contentedly under the rim of a barrel on its side and ate the meat with an aura of smugness about him.
I frowned a little at the scene that had just unfolded before me. Something about it bugged me for some reason... but I couldn't pinpoint why. I shrugged, dismissing it from my mind, it'd probably come to me in time.
It wasn't a minute later when the sound of small, bare feet pelting against the dirt of the street echoed up through the alley to where I was, growing steadily louder as they ran in my direction. The boys were looking behind them for the most part even as they slowed, sure that they were safe from pursuit. They were so focused on ascertaining safety and seeing what they'd got that they didn't notice me, leaning casually back and observing them.
They were two distinct groups but I was betting that after this raid they'd be working together. The leader of the smallest gang was actually the largest of them and I detected a faint whiff of soul force about him. The leader of the second gang was younger, more uncertain of himself; group dynamics would probably make him the Second in the new gang.
"Yo," I greeted them, catching their attention and startling them.
True to my estimate of him, as soon as they got out their sounds of surprise and turned to see who had managed to sneak up on them, the older boy stepped out in front and took a defensive position between me and his comrades. I smiled a little at that, approving of his instinct to protect his own. It sometimes seemed like only yesterday when I was this kid.
"R'lax," I said. "Ain't here t' take yer food."
They heard the street cant and recognized that I was indeed one of them, but at the same time they got warier too, some of the adult male types around these parts made nice just because they liked 'em young. I held up a purse to show my intentions and jingled, letting them hear the coins clink softly. The older boy frowned and eyed me suspiciously, even as I could see him mentally tallying how much food and fresh water the coins in my purse would buy.
"An' I ain't the type t' go lookin' fer a pretty boy," I added, sensing the reason for the wary look in their eyes.
"Wotcha want then?' the older leader asked me.
"Information," I said. "Happen a young street-ear like yerself 'ud hear things...?" I trailed off into a suggestion.
"Wot kinna things?" he asked next.
It wasn't an agreement that he'd work with me, simply a way of saying he might be interested. I was to show him that I was willing to bargain with him.
"Interesting things," I replied, pulling out a copper and flipping it to him. The kid caught it deftly from the air.
I couldn't contain my smile of amusement as he promptly bit into it and ran a quick eye over it to check for shave marks.
"Hear lotsa things inna day," he said after verifying its authenticity. "We c'n talk easier back at the flop though."
This in and of itself could be something of a test, if I agreed too quickly they'd probably read it as me lying about not looking for a pretty boy and try to find some way to get rid of me. Also, if I followed them back, they could easily set up an ambush with their mates by sending a signal to a listening runner along the path back. I'd done that trick a time or two myself.
"Nah then," I negated. "I'll meecha at Steadies, y' know where that is, aye?"
Steadies was a well-known bar in the district, they served actual cooked food as well as drink. Meeting me there would be neutral ground and it would give them time to head back to their flop and hide the food in their horde. The boys eyebrows raised a bit, I was treating them like a full-grown thug; meeting in public, and tacitly paying in advance, that was the way it was done in the adult world there... usually that was the way a guy arranged a hit.
"Don' hev th' skills t' kill a mun!" he protested scornfully.
I couldn't hold back my derisive snort. The day I went looking for some wet-eared little baby to do my killin' they'd better be laying out my squad funeral!
"Just info," I said firmly and walked out of the alley way.
An hour or so later I waited at Steadies for my expected guests. I'd grabbed one of the tables set up outside (under guard to keep people from walking off without paying of course) and had it filled with real cooked food, enough to feed a small starving army. They'd be more amenable to talking with me if their stomachs weren't full of empty. It wasn't long a wait; out of the alleys (in different directions and in ones and twos) a small goup of about ten mixed boys and girls (all skinny as rails) entered. The two leaders, both the elder and the smaller, met me face to face.
"We're all here, watcha need?" the older boy asked.
"Hava seat," I said, seating myself and laying my hands out flat on the table as a gesture of goodwill.
There wasn't anything in Hangdog that came fresh, all of it had been somewhere else before arriving in this sector. The stew had bits of meat that it was probably wisest not to question the origins of, it would most likely either meow at you or squeak. And that was the "fresh" stuff at one of the better inns nearby, I'd heard that some of the other places in this hell-hole featured menu's that were made of the scraps that no-one would feed to kill a rat. The bread looked okay, but their 'butter" smeared on it was grease from the cooking fat that they used to fry up ends of vegetables that were probably only half-rotten by the time they made it there. The swill they passed off as wine was a collection of all the dregs tapped from the bottoms of the barrels of all the better inns in the other districts, and the poison they called 'sake' was a rotgut moonshine that could take the rust off a steel ships hull. I was betting that the only reason that the sewage they served at this place hadn't killed anyone yet was because the alcohol that came with the meal killed off any virulent bacteria in the stomach before it could grow.
:I've gotten spoiled by the academy,: I thought to myself in partial amusement.
I'd ordered a lot of the food, it wasn't good but there was plenty of it, and the kids as they emerged from the alleys eyed the pile of slop like they'd suddenly been presented with an unexpected bounty. I wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole but I could recall a time in my life when I would have jumped at the chance to eat as much of it as I could without hesitation.
The children needed no more encouragement, and fell to with a will. It was interesting to note that there was no fighting between what was essentially two different gangs of kids, usually there would be some squabbling between them, over territory and grub if nothing else. That told me that the two of them knew of each other or had had contact in the past.
"Heard some rumors," I said as the furor over the food calmed down a bit. "About somethin' attacking in the night. Something about the shadows?"
The older leader boy and a young girl from the other camp under the younger leader, I scented Reiatsu on her too, exchanged a look. Now that I looked at them, the two of them looked like they hadn't been getting much sleep. I had at first simply marked down the hollowed-out eyes in their faces as one more sign of hunger but now I recognized sleeplessness and fear.
"Whad'ja hear?" the younger boy asked, his manner a bit wary.
"Nuthin' much," I said. "Just heard someone mention that there's something out there, attacking people and it doesn't seem to be a man."
A couple of the kids exchanged a long look, I wasn't sure if it was because I'd accidentally slipped back into the better speech I'd mastered in the Seireitei or if they were simply trying to decide whether or not to trust me. Finally the girl, seemingly possessed of a spine, or at least too afraid to keep silent, said
"We call 'em th' Shadows," she said a little hesitantly. "We lost three of our mates to 'em."
"There's more than one of them?" I questioned carefully.
"We dunno," the older-boy leader said. "Only one of our mates has ever spotted one, and he really couldn't say much about it."
" 'E wuz scared stiff with fear an' wuden sleep fer a week," another kid volunteered, it was hard to tell if he was a boy or a girl under all the dirt.
"They come out at night," the girl said. "When the shadows fall thickest. They only seem t' target other kids like me an' him."
She pointed to the older leader.
"Kids that have reiatsu?" I asked.
They looked blankly back at me and I demonstrated quickly by summoning up a small light-globe of reiatsu.
"Yeah," she confirmed.
"Mitsu and Cori could both do that, Cori was a little stronger an' he got took first. Sumat o' the other gangs in the area ben sayin' th' same things. Ben sayin' that some o' their mates got tookt in th' night too. One kid said he saw one. He said that it looked like a shadow, came out of one of the shadows itself, made all of nothing, flew over at his mate and wrapped around him like a blanket. Next thing he knew his mate was gone. Disappeared. Nuthin' left of 'im."
"Made all of nothing?" I asked, trying to keep my disbelief from my voice.
"Yeah," the boy said, a little defensively. "I thought I saw one once too, just a glimpse outta the corner o' my eye. It looked like a blur of blackness, like someone took a dark night sky and put it on the ground, kinna like th' fog, only black as tar. It c'n move on its own, saw it move along the ground like a snake or a spider. Thought I wuz seein' things but then it stopped an' it felt like it was looking right at me, 'cept there weren't no eyes. Y'know that feeling y'get when someone's watchin' you on yeer back... felt like that. Give a covey a real case o' the collywobbles, it do."
"And yer mates disappeared?" I asked next.
"Yeah," the boy said. "I lost one a few weeks ago, back when the attacks first started. He was in the pile with the rest of us--"
I nodded understanding, in the cooler months of spring and of course winter, the kids all slept in a large pile surrounded and covered by as many blankets as they could scrounge, to preserve warmth. Me an' my gang had done the same once.
"He was beside me when we went to sleep, when I woke up he was completely gone. We all tried lookin' fer 'im, asking around to see if he'd got snatched up by a flesh-peddler or somethin' but he was just gone without a single trace."
"Hunh... Innerestin'," I muttered to myself.
There was a chance, a good probability in fact, that if this had been an isolated incident, the missing kid would have just run off and gone to another sector... but it wasn't an isolated incident. There were other kids missing in other districts apparently, enough of them to make even adults wary if what I heard in that tavern that night was anything to go by.
"And you said this has been happening to other gangs beside yer own?" I asked next.
"Yeah, Kilto's gang down south 'cross Pinstreet had one o' his taken in the night," the older boy leader said. "Shezie's had three of his go missin'... here one night, gone the next. Ketsu's the one I heard it from that saw it, an' he ain't in the habit o' lyin' to his mates. If he said he saw sommat, he saw it alright."
"Iffen it were Shezie, i'da said it was just him puffin' up ta scare the littles," the younger boy gang-leader said. "But Ketzu's a good one and as honest as they come here-abouts. He even warned me an' Shira here about the Shadows first chance he got."
"Hm," I said, adding up the facts as I could guess them.
They could be makin' it all up, but by the haunted looks in the eyes of the two kids with Soul Force in the group, I didn't think they were. These kids knew something was out there, something they didn't know how to fight. The little girl in particular looked like she was partly resigned, partly terrified of her fate. Just like Rukia had looked. I made a snap decision that I was going to investigate further.
"And yer sure it weren't solid?" I asked next. "Like it didn't have a bone-mask or it wasn't missin' holes from it?"
"Nah then, them critters usually stay outside the Line," the younger gang-leader said confidently. "This be sommat else."
The edges of Rukon's outer Districts all had something called The Line, it was a dividing line that established the edge between where the Soul Society proper began, separating it from the Outer. The Outer was a place that was not quite a place, a no-mans land bewteen the Soul Society and what was generally called the Dangai, or the dividing world. The Dangai was that plane between the Soul Society and the Mortal Realm, the one that forever seemed to have the Cleaners running through it at all the wrong times. The Gates in the Seireitei were all portals to the path that led through the Dividing World and the opposite Gate on the mortal realm. There could be Portals made anywhere that would connect the two (as well as various other places like Hueco Mundo) but they were notoriously unstable and difficult to hold up for very long. I'd heard that Urahara had done research on ways to stabilize portals in his tenure as Twefth Division's captain but when Kurotsuchi took over, the attempts to build more stable Portals had been abandoned.
Hollows, or even Menos Grandes, that could penetrate past the immense spiritual barrier that was The Line were beyond just rare, they were practically unheard of. The spiritual power it would take for a Hollow to penetrate the spiritual barrier would have to be massive and concentrated. Hollows didn't have the intelligence to do so, though they seemed to be able to manipulate portals to the living world by instinct, their efforts were basic, crude, and easily detected. Even Uruhara's gateway into the Soul Society had definitely not gone unnoticed by Twefth Divisions monitors when Ichigo had dropped in to rescue Rukia. For something or someone to be able to put up a portal into the Rukon district and do it undetected...
:I'd say it's impossible, but recent days have been showing that the things we thought were impossible weren't as hard as they seem,: I thought.
What if the kids were right? What if it was something else? But what else could it be? Hollows, Arrancars and Espada all left a certain signature when the Portaled into an area, a signature that was easily detected. Even if their manipulation of spirit energy when they opened a portal or a gateway didn't give them away, the sudden influx of Reiatsu sure as hell did, so it couldn't be them.
:I'da smelled 'em if they were here or had been here lately,: I thought.
Deciding to be on the safe side I mentally nudged Zabimaru and borrowed his sense of smell, sucking some of the air nearby through my teeth and rolling it over my tongue, tasting it and sorting all the different smells, spiritual and physical, out on the back of my mouth as I breathed out. Nuthin' unusual at first. But wait...
I leaned closer to the older boy next to me and caught something.
"Hold still," I commanded absently.
I pulled in another breath, running it again over my teeth, sorted out his scent, the scent of his mates and the cling of the Rukon District and at last caught something. It smell/tasted smokey-sweet, heavy with a slightly cloying edge to it. It wasn't a human soul, and Hollows smelled like burnt hair and graveyard flowers.
"You got something of his on you?" I asked him next.
"What's it to ya?" the boy demanded, hand automatically straying to his pocket.
"I'm a tracker," I said shortly. "I c'n track a man by his soul-scent, better'n a dog. That thing yer mate left behind has got the scent of the thing that took him on it too. I might be able to use it to track whatever it is down. Lemme borrow that thing."
The boy looked at me with blatant suspicion on his face.
"I don' want yer trinket,' I said, letting my exasperation show on my face. "I'm not so bad up that I'd wanna steal from a kid!"
Hesitantly, the boy reached in his pocket and handed it over. It was a small toy, a paper yo-yo made of a small stick and a long ribbon of wax paper wrapped around the top that could be flicked out at length, a little like Zabimaru, although I was sure he wouldn't be too pleased with analogy. I brought the toy up to my face and breathed in. To this day I still felt a little weird about it, but it worked for me the scents brushed over my tongue, letting me get a sense of thier owners. The most obvious and heavy scents were that of the boy and the previous owner, but underpining both of those scents I could just detect a faint trace of something else. I'd never before smelled anything like it.
"What the--?" I muttered to myself.
Trying not to feel self-conscious about it I actually had to put out my tongue and touch it to the object itself to get a better reading. It helped, the scents became stronger and clearer.
Still strange. Powerful and strange. I pinpointed what that strange cloying scent reminded me of... incense. The kind of incense they burned at temples as offerings. The underlying feeling of power and a very odd sense of otherness to it told me that whatever had made this scent wasn't of human origin and it wasn't anything I'd run across before.
Just because I'd never seen it before didn't mean someone else hadn't though. I was young as far as Soul Reapers counted years, only a couple of decades old; some of the Soul Reapers in the Seireitei were centuries old, it was said that the Head Captain had been around when Jesus was nailed up. It wouldn't surprise me. The next logical step in my investigation would be to ask around, see if anyone knew anything.
:Anything about a predator that seems to be making Rukon kids with spirit-powers disappear, that supposedly comes from out of the Shadows and smells like temple-offerings.: I thought to myself.
The Reapers in the Seireitei probably wouldn't be too terribly interested in the Rukon kid part but the part where they could infiltrate past the Line without being detected should get thier attention. Still, if I wanted to bother the Captains with my own pet project I should investigate more thoroughly before going to them.
"Can you sense him mister?" The kid asked me after a minute.
"Yeah," I answered absently. "I'd like ta take a look around yer place, see if I can't get a lead on which way the bugger went before I try any other leads."
The kids all exchanged long speaking looks for a moment until three of them shrugged a 'why not?' at the leader and he said
"We'll take you there on account o' you findin' whut happened to Zan, but don't go tellin' no-one else where we flop."
It was almost cute the way he tried to look so tough and manly about it when I was twice his size and could take him in a blink. Still, the pride of a young man was a touchy thing, and he had his own status within his group to look after, so I nodded solemnly and spat in my palm.
"I'll be in an' out fer a look-see," I promised, doing my best to keep a straight face.
He spat in his own and shook on it.
"M' name's Aki, this here's Lota," he gestured to the younger leader-boy.
"Renji," I said easily.
The name Abarai wasn't uncommon here-abouts, a lot of littles had spent the first five or six years of their life at Barai House, being tended by the onee-san's before being turned out to fend for themselves so that there was room and food to feed more infants.
I tried not to bruise his dignity by wiping my palm off right away, I at least waited until he'd turned to lead his group on its way back to their roost. It didn't take more than a few turnings of the familiar streets that I knew like the back of my hand for me to recognize the way we were going. With a churning feeling of dread and anticipation I continued following the motley gang of street kids through he streets, fully recognizing that they were giving me a bit of the run around.
:Well, well,: I thought with an internal shake of my head. :I certainly never expected to see this old place again.:
Waiting before me was a familiar run-down shack, sheltered partly by a nearby wood. The river nearby gave easier access to water though after having flowed through the city it was neither fresh nor clean. There was better hunting in the woods and the stream but not so good that it was a reliable source of food. The shack itself was run-down, the walls had holes and missing planks and the cracks between the boards were never filled in all the way so the wind passed through the walls like water through a sieve. The ceiling leaked and the floor was tramped down dirt. Still, it had always been better than nothing, and its position was easily defensible. Even in the fifty some-odd years since I left, it seemed this place was still housing orphans.
"Here we be," Aki said, pointing to his home. The other kids went on ahead and I followed gingerly behind them.
My mind insisted on showing me memories of my own time there. The apple tree she had used to like to stand under in spring while I shook the branches to rain flower petals down on her. Where she used to bully me into washing clothes and hair alike, brandishing a scrub brush threateningly if I didn't fall into line, prompting the other boys to tease me about who was really running the gang. The place we used to bring our fish to cook up. The time she'd yelled at me for picking on a poor defenseless bunny rabbit and I'd tried to tell her that it was the same as eating fish and she'd said no it wasn't and we'd gotten into a fight over it... which she'd won. As usual. Hard times, but looking back on it, good times as well. We'd been a family. I was still surprised by how much I missed that.
I shook my head at myself; now was not the time for woolgathering, I had work to do.
I entered and looked around, sucking in deep breaths and brushing my tongue over the captured air to taste and sort out the scents. The air was heavily laced with the scent of the current tenants naturally, the light slightly musky smell of their bodies I mentally put aside, trying to sort out the scents underneath them. There was the scent of the outdoors they brought in with them, as well as faint traces of food and soap. I was about to give it up as a lost cause when I ran across a cold spot. The air in one particular place was icy and as soon as I breathed in the smokey-sweet cloying smell of incense was thick enough to be called a stench.
"Found it," I muttered. I searched over the area where the air was cold and stank of whatever creature had come and gone, but there were no other traces, no leavings left behind, no clawmarks, no hair or fur or bone. Just a spot of cold air, a scent and...
:I can sense a residual energy trace,: I thought, feeling in the center of the cold spot.
Kido wasn't really my thing, someone like Rukia or the boys and girls in Fourth or Second Squad would have been able to tell me what kind of creature made it, where it came from, how long ago it had been here and whether or not it was still alive, but that was thier thing. My thing was "beat it with my sword until it can't get up anymore" that's what I did well.
:It's not a Hollow, and... I'm pretty sure it isn't even Human in origin...: I thought, puzzled.
Human souls, no matter how twisted or debased carried a certain signature about their origins, a core of themselves that later lives and reincarnations were built around. I'd heard someone compare it to the way an oyster created a pearl by layering the stuff around a bit of dirt, the Kido energy eventually got great enough for a human soul to become a Soul Reaper if it was so inclined. This carried none of that energy signature. it was a mystery.
There were some things I could tell about it though, one major point stood out. Whatever the thing was that made the cold spot... it was strong. Not in size or strength but in pure, raw power.
"Hn, thanks kid," I said to the boy and the friends that had followed him. "I guess I found something useful."
I turned to go and was stopped by a tugging on my sleeve. The girl with the spiritual-power looked up at me with wide, helpless, pleading eyes.
"What if it comes back?" she asked. "Me an the others' we don't have any way of fightin' it, so what if it comes back? It's gonna take me next, an' I don' wanna go."
I paused.
:Good point,: I thought.
I couldn't sty there and guard them, much as I might see the rightness in keeping an eye on a buch of helpless kids, I hardly thought that my boss would be willing to part with his paper-filer for the mission. Secondly, I wasn't going to find out what this thing was by hanging around there, I needed access to the libraries and databases in the Seireitei, which contained data collected over the course of hundreds of years of Soul Reaping. There was bound to be some mention of something like this in it. I wasn't a world-class detective and research wasn't exactly my thing either...
:Come to think of it,: I thought with chagrin. :A lot of things aren't my thing.:
It was something I'd have to work on.
::If you over-specialize, you breed in weakness.:;
:I thought you weren't talking to me,: I said.
Zabimaru gave me the spiritual equivalent of a humph and ignored me. Typical. Still, good advice. I was something of a one-trick wonder, I could fight and I could track but my fighting ability was limited by my weakness in the area of strategy (as demonstrated painfully by that pink-haired Espada asshole) and tracking didn't do me a whole lot of good if I didn't know what I was looking for. I'd already achieved Bankai so I wasn't going to get any stronger, I'd just have to learn to fight better.
"Here Kid," I said, pulling out a thread of reiatsu and carefully weaving it into a ball.
It was one of the more passive Kido spells out there and as such, not my forte. Usually I just balled up my Kido and lobbed it, that is if it didn't get away from me first and just strt blowing holes in the surrounding vicinity. Kido spells that required more delicacy and concentration I left up to fighters like Rukia who had the focus (and the attention span) to master the intricacies of the spells. Still oddly, this is one that I actually remembered how to do fairly well. I scuffed a large circle on the floor and then infused my reiatsu inside the circle erectign an inactive barrier.
"If you see another one of those Shadows," I said, "You and all your mates run into the circle. Then you summon up your own reiatsu into your hand and push it down on the circle. It'll activate the barrier. Nothing will be able to cross in from the outside, and as long as none of you go out and break the circle then you should be safe long enough for the sun to rise. It'll only work once though. I should be back in a couple of days, if something really is after you then that means I can just wait for it to show up."
"Are you gonna kill it?" she said hopefully.
"I don't know yet," I said honestly. "It depends on my orders."
With that, I walked out of my old home and flash-stepped my way back to the Seireitei. By now it was starting to get dark as I'd spent most of the afternoon in the Rukon District. Kuchiki the Elder probably had more paperwork waiting for me. I should amend that report anyway. I'd eaten and hour or two earlier so there was no need to drop by the kitchens and I headed straight up to my quarters. As I'd expected, there was a whole new stack of papers waiting for me, all routine stuff it looked like. Things like reports form the Reapers out on feild missions, weekly food requisition forms, and other things like that. It shouldn't take too long.
Aware now that there was something else out there hunting people with spiritual power I paid closer attention to the list and type of the targets and victims in the feild reports, searching for a hint that my new little gremlin might be active in the wider world, but I didn't notice any. I added a synopsis of the reports to the weekly log book and added my own afternoons work in red ink at the bottom of the last page so he wouldn't skip over it. It only took about two hours for me to finish my paperwork, which was a minor miracle in and of itself. I had something of a free evening in front of me it looked like. All I had to do was drop off the forms I'd just finished on my captains desk and see if there was anything else he wanted from me. Probably.
I knocked on the shoji of the Captain's office and quarters and waited to be acknowledged.
"Enter," his voice replied with cool precision.
I slid the door aside and walked in, placing my forms in the usual spot for new ones, directly under the less new ones that he hadn't gotten to yet. As usual, he didn't look up from what he was doing or acknowledge that I was waiting there on his permission to be released for the day. I was not a huge fan of this particular ritual, it smacked of me being some kind of pup being brought to heel. And that sort of irked me. But it hid it, as i usually did, under the neutral mask of an obedient subordinate, and waited with little to no outward sign of impatience. Byakuya Kuchiki was not the kind of guy who'd be rushed. He finished perusing the form in front of him and signed off on the bottom.
"I was called over after the Captain's general meeting this afternoon by Head Captain Yamamoto and Captain Hitsugaya," he said with no preamble as usual.
Apparently, manners were things reserved for his peers.
"I was congratulated on my lieutenant's loyalty and dedication to the organization," he noted absently, eyes already flicking over the next form.
Captain Kuchiki wasn't exactly known for his conviviality and sparkling conversational skills either... rather the opposite in fact. If he was saying something, then he had a point to it. I just waited. It was a given that no-one could play the waiting game like he could (certainly not me, unless there was a fight involved I generally had the attention span of a butterfly) but I was getting better at it. Sort of. It wasn't driving me as crazy anyway.
He signed off on another form and I restrained my impatience with an effort. Get the point already dammit!
"I was not aware," he said at last. "That testing the loyalties of a most wayward and insolent Sixth Squad Lieutenant fell to the head of Tenth Squad and his own lieutenant."
"People start getting paranoid when the Punishment Squad starts barging in with its ninja skills," I said. "Hitsugaya and Matsumoto are well liked and trusted. In this case, they're probably better suited to sniffing out intrigue an' stuff."
"An'stuff..." Kuchiki said injecting my slightly colorful slang with an overly present sense of dignity, thereby pointing out that it was inappropriate.
"I suppose you may have a point," he said after a long pause. "However, the question as to your whereabouts this afternoon and your continued association outside of the Seireitei did come up."
It wasn't a question, it was a command for further explanation.
"I put it in the log book so it's nothing serious, I was only curious about it that's all," I replied. "Seems I found me a mystery."
Kuchiki gestured that I should be seated on a nearby cushion and elaborate to him the precise nature of this mystery. I took seiza on the cushion and proceeded to do just that, giving him the basic overveiw of the anomalies I'd sensed the night before, a detailed report of the sniffing about and information-gathering that I had done in Hangdog today, and concluded with my desire not to say anything until I had something a little more concrete to go on.
"Hm," was all he said, frowning ever so slightly.
He was mulling it over. For a man who could flash-step like no-one's business, I had never seen Captain Kuchiki act in haste.
"Your impression of this.. Shadow, was it?"
"That's what they're callin' it," I confirmed.
"Your impression is that it is not human." His tone sounded downright skeptical.
I shrugged helplessly and said
"Yeah, I know it sound's weird, but humanity has a basic scent underlying all the individual scents, and this Shadow-thing didn't have that. That's the only way I know how to explain it."
"Hm," he said again, still frowning ever so slightly in thought.
"You ever hear o' somethin' like that Captain?" I asked curiously.
I figured it couldn't hurt, the guy was pretty old after all, he had to have run across something like it in however long he'd been around.
"The signs of the entity you've described is unfamiliar to me," he said, waving me to my feet and turning his attention back to the forms in front of him.
"However, I have yet to work with a person who possesses your unique skill at detection. It may be that the being you have heard described is already known but simply filed under another set of refferences. You may look into it, provided that it does not conflict with your other duties."
That was all the approval I needed as I rose to my feet and bowed at his tacit dismissal. I was free for the evening.
Ah, and the plot thickens. We have an enemy's name, but what's this? It doesn't seem human?As for the dog fight... could it be foreshadowing?
Clocking in at over eight thousand words, you almost need a Snickers Bar to get through this one.
Zabimaru makes a breif cameo, but this definately isn't the last time we'll hear from him. After all, I like Zabimaru. I saw this funny fanart of a chibi Renji hugging on a big (proper) Zabimaru who was sweat dropping in embarrasment and I was very amused by it. I think I want to make it me avi. And as far as that Zanpakutou arc Zabimaru goes, as far as I'm concerned, if I haven't seen it, it doesn't exist. So we're working off the real Zabimaru, who, for those who are not anal about details like me and didn't spend thier time looking it up on Wikipedia, happens to be a Nue. A Nue, for those who don't know (myself included until I looked it up) is a sort of Japanese Chimera. The following is a quote lifted wholesale from Wikipedia on the matter...
A nue (鵺) is a legendary creature found in Japanese folklore. It is described as having the head of a monkey, the body of a raccoon dog, the legs of a tiger, and a snake as a tail. According to the legend, a nue can transform into a black cloud and fly. Due to its appearance, it is sometimes referred to as a Japanese chimera[citation needed]. Nue are supposed to be bringers of misfortune and illness.[citation needed]
According to The Tale of the Heike, Emperor Konoe, the Emperor of Japan, became sick after having terrible nightmares every night, and a dark cloud appeared at two o'clock in the morning on roof of the palace in Kyoto during the summer of 1153. The story says that the samurai Minamoto no Yorimasa staked-out the roof one night and fired an arrow into the cloud, out of which fell a dead nue. Yorimasu then supposedly sank the body in the Sea of Japan.
In a local expansion of the story, the nue's corpse floated into a certain bay, and the locals, fearing a curse, buried it. A mound which exists today is supposed to be this grave.
I thought it interesting and seful that the true form of Renji's Zanpaktou would come from an ancient legend. Pay attention to that, there'll be a quiz later. Or, at least, it'll pop up again.