The tunnel we found ourselves on looked a lot different from the one I was used to. The floor of the tunnel was like a path made out of stars and the walls around swirled with streaks of light moving in an ever-twisting spiral. I felt a tremble around me as the portal started to slowly iris shut behind us. Knowing that as soon as that portal shut down the tunnel would collapse, destroying us, I picked Isana up and rushed toward the end. We were able to make it there quickly because the tunnel wasn't terribly long and stepped through the terminal on the other end.
"Where are we?" she wondered aloud as we stepped out into a strange new world.
The sky was a reddish color and clouded over. The land around us stretched beside a strange stagnant sea that smelled heavily of brine and decay. The beach-head was riddled by worn, toppled-over pillars sticking up out of the sand; the skeletons of ancient buildings long fallen to ruin. The horizon of the sea stretched on forever in one direction. Dotting along the horizon lines of the land-side, in among the ruins that were overgrown with vines, were platforms with great rounded arches on them. I could sense and smell a curious sort of energy emanating from them and I wasn't sure if it was some strange terrain feature of this new Realm we found ourselves in, some kind of trap, or what it might be and even I was a little hesitant to go sticking my nose in a potential bear trap.
"Dunno," I said absently, already rolling the unfamiliar scents over my tongue, trying to detect the scent of the Shadow we'd come to track.
I wasn't getting anything yet, but we'd just gotten here. I could sense a strange humming feeling of energy skittering over my reiatsu. It wasn't anything I recognized but considering the fact that we were in an entirely new sort of place, I should probably get used to coming across stuff that I wasn't familiar with. Strange new worlds.
"Let's go," I said, pointing in the direction that I sensed the strange reiatsu coming from, keeping my nose to the wind, hoping to catch a scent.
She seemed to notice my preoccupation and thankfully stayed silent to let me work without distraction. We walked along the beach for a little way, coming closer to the nearest of the archways. Isana, curious and investigative, walked up to the arch as we approached it before I could grab her arm to pull her back and tell her to be careful. I had a bad feeling of premonition that this was going to be a regular occurance throughout our new-made relationship. Great, out of all the people I could be saddled with for this little journey across the wild and unexplored Realms of the Dangai, I had to be stuck with one of those types that was always rushing in and getting into trouble and who didn't have the strength or skill to get themselves out of it. It looked like I was going to be bored for the next several days.
The platform where I sensed the strange energy coming from glowed with lines written in light in a strange pattern. A large circle with circles in an equidistant triangle around it flared to light. On each of those three circles dotted along the larger circle had three smaller circles with a symbol in each of them. Curious, Isana touched the symbols and dragged her finger along one of them. It moved in a circular motion, twisting like a dial on an old rotary telephone. The symbol that touched along the line of the largest circle was the one that was brightly lit while the other two symbols were a dull grey. Isana twisted the other two symbol circles, changing the positions of each symbol. A line of light from each symbol appeared and pointed towards the center of the main ring, forming a small humming dot of power in the center.
"Hmm," Isana murmured. "I think this is how that they get these gateways to work. You must just change the setting of these symbols in order to change where the gate goes to... but I wonder how you get the gate to open up."
She reached forward to touch the light at the center of the circle but I firmly took her hand and pulled her away.
"Okay, enough playtime for you missy, maybe you shouldn't go toying around with things you don't really understand. We don't know for certain what they do."
Privately though, I was sort of inclined to think she'd pegged it right. It made sense. Even so I didn't really think that it was a very good idea to go toying around with those things; who knew where they might take us if we just started entering random coordinates and running around willy nilly. I was just going to ignore for now the fact that tracking a mysterious enemy I'd only seen once across a bunch of equally random worlds wasn't a whole lot better as far as scenarios went.
:Nevermind,: I told myself. :Let's just get going. That Shadow isn't getting any closer to being found and snuffed while we're sitting here woolgathering.:
I could pick up small things scurrying about in the underbrush, and my sense of smell picked up the scent of strange spiritual residues but nothing that smelled like what I was looking for yet.
"C'mon," I beckoned, pulling her off the platform and heading towards the strange energy I sensed. "Let's keep moving."
She didn't need any further urging. The curiousity over the strange symbols and the arch visibly faded at the prospect of finding her son again. We continued walking through the sandy, dune-weed covered land by the sea. It was a strange place, a place where the wind howled. Seeing the staggered ruins hanging about made the scene seem somehow more lonely. This must have been one of the abandoned Realms that the Mountain Spirit had talked about.
Not quite so abandoned as I had at first thought, I discovered a moment later as we passed too close to one of the vine covered ruins and a plant-tentacle shot out at us. Instinctively I dodged out of the way, but Isana did not have any fighters instincts and she screamed in fright as the tentacle grabbed her by the waist and lifted her up.
"Howl, Zabimaru!" I commanded.
The immense hour-glass-shaped blade materialized and I flicked it upwards in a light slash and severed the tentacle. There was a screaching roar of pain from the nearby building and the greenery began to thrash and move.
In all my years of fighting Hollows, and even in going to Hueco Mundo the fight some Espada, never before had I seen anything like this. I wasn't sure exactly what to call it, parts of it looked plant-like and other parts were animal-like. It had a bulb-shaped body with bandy, furred, reverse-haunched legs and tentacles growing out of the back of it. It didn't look like the enemies I was accustomed to fighting; Hollows could be monstrous enough, but they were usually a skeletal sort of monstrous, this creature looked more biological. It sprang at us and, even though I had no idea what the hell it was or did, I knew what I was supposed to do with it... kill it!
I slashed at it with my sword, lopping off the tentacles that launched themselves at me. I also made sure to cut off the tentacle that it had wrapped around Isana and once she hit the ground I told her to get back, which she did at top speed. It tried to spit some kind of green juice at me but I moved out of the way and countered by taking out the little nozzle things on both sides of its body with a quick flick of Zabimaru. I was pleased to feel that my body seemed to be liking fighting with Zabimaru's new form. The plant-critter next tried shooting darts at me but I blocked them easily with the flat of Zabimaru's blade and followed in to slice off the top bulb that was dealing out the darts. Once it was disarmed I started hacking away at the main body. It was great good fun. Not much later, the plant-thing cave one last chittering creel and died. I stuck my sword straight through the heart of it to be sure. With that motion, a small burst of light flared up and tiny motes of rainbow-colored light began to leak out of it as the corpse disintegrated, rising up into the air like puff-mushroom spores. It was surprisingly pretty.
The thing had been dispatched in a little over a minute, not my best time, but I was working with an unfamiliar weapon and I didn't know anything about the monster so I guessed I could give myself a little slack in this case. I'd do better next time. There was one mystery solved, the Realm might be abandoned but there were still hostiles hanging around. They weren't Hollows, but they seemed fun enough to kill, albeit a little easy.
"Wow," Isana said into the silence, looking at me in amazement.
I didn't bother hiding the smug smirk on my face. If she thought this was impressive, she should see my bankai.
"Let's go," was all I said.
After all, we had a quarry to catch and I didn't intend on remaining a bound vassal to anyone for very long.
"Uh, sure," she said. I noted that she stuck a lot closer to me after that and eyes the nearby greenery suspiciously.
:Aha!: I thought in triumph as I at last caught a very faint whiff of the scent I was looking for; the smell of burnt metal and temple incense.
"What is it?" she asked eagerly, seeing me tense up and turn sharply in one direction.
I probably looked like an English Pointer.
"Found it," I muttered, setting off firmly in the direction that I could smell the scent.
Not coincidentally I was sure, the scent headed straight towards one of those arches built in top of the platforms. The one that had a strong energy emanating from it, that probably meant that it had recently been used. We encountered a small nest of about five of those plant-critters along the way before we managed to reach the platform. Now that I knew what to expect, taking care of them wasn't hard, the only real challenge was keeping between the attacking enemies and my charge, Miss Isana. We walked up the stone steps to the gateway platform and as we approached the circle in the stone in front of the arch it glowed into life. Three sigils were already selected from the nine and placed along the main line. The glowing dot in the center seemed to be waiting for us to do something.
:Well, the main gate in the Seireitei requires that a Soul Reaper use his reiatsu to access it. Maybe the same principle applies here,: I thought.
I centered myself and summoned a small red ball of my reiatsu to hover above the palm of my hand and fed it into the glowing ring hovering in the air above the center of the main ring. The energy I fed to it dispersed along the ring in a small flare and the empty air inside the gateway shimmered like heat haze and flickered a bit. Then nothing. We waited for a beat and exchanged a glance.
"Maybe it needs more power?" Isana suggested. Just what I was thinking.
I summoned up a greater amount of reiatsu, forming a basketball-sized globe of it in between my two hands and unleashing power from more than just my bottom chakra, I went up through orange into yellow and kept pouring and condensing it until it started to turn green. Satisfied, I fed that ball of energy into the circle. The pattern on the floor flared to light and the gate opened properly, just like the Senkaimon in Seireitei that I was used to. I didn't know how long we had before it collapsed so I just grabbed up Miss Isana and flashed across the threshold before she could blink. I ran quickly down the long white tunnel that seemed to swirl on all sides with a strange milky, misty-white glow. The path beneath my feet seemed to be made of a sort of gravel of starlight and all around me the tunnel walls seemed to move in a constant spiraling motion.
We emerged on the other side in a dark-looking realm with bare dead earth, dilapidated ancient-looking buildings done in an ancient Moroccan style and scrubby, dead, droopy trees. Oh, joy. I set the woman down on her feet and straightened, looking around me. I weeded out the scent of the new realm I was in, the smell of bare earth and rotting plants, and quickly isolated the scent of the Shadow-creature I was chasing. It was stronger than it had been in the other world. We'd gotten really lucky, it could so easily have ended up that the scent was gone. I guessed that the lingering trace made by a forgotten god was something that stuck around for a little while. Still, it was an immense stroke of luck that we'd located it at all.
"Can you smell it? Was it here?" Isana asked.
I nodded, already hot on the trail. She followed silently in my wake as, with one hand on Zabimaru alert for trouble, and the rest of me concentrating on following the trail, we began to walk through the strange realm.
It wasn't a very pleasant place, most of it seemed to be subsumed in darkness. I could smell the stagnant rot of a swamp nearby, and it was difficult to keep track of one scent with all of those other smells, most of them unpleasant, vying for dominance. I had to go back and backtrack once or twice when my nose and tongue got overwhelmed by the pervading stench of decay that saturated this place.
"I wonder what kind of god lived in a place like this," Isana muttered in distaste as she looked around. "Maybe it used to look nice but the real estate value sure has gone downhill."
I wasn't paying much attention to her, being distracted by trying to find the place where I had last smelled its trail. Isana picked up something shiny from off the ground and held it up to show me.
"Hey look at thi-" she called over to me, shortly before the ground began to rumble and shake.
I sighed inwardly. This girl... I wanted to call her a girl even though she was clearly a woman approaching her thirty's, she had a young-looking face and the attention span of a butterfly. Like a kid she seemed to find the shortest, most direct route, into the nearest spot of trouble. This was gonna be a lo-o-ong trip, I could tell already.
Well, I'm back safe from Akon and boy did I ever have fun. You're all gonna be so jealous. I scored myself a drool-worthy pin-up of Renji. With His hair down. In the moonlight. Taking off his top. Ahhh, bare-chested yumminess! I got it both poster and in a bookmark. Yay! I got some other goodies too, so fun! My little sister was too cute for words! Well, okay enough of my silliness, i hope you all enjoyed the new chapter and look forward to all the great fights that Isana gets Renji into.