A/N: Thank you for any and all reviews, favorites, and follows, as well as all you other readers out there!
Bleach and all products thereof are copyright to Tite Kubo, et al.
Friday, February 21, 2003
It's an interesting historical observation that during the Sengoku period Japan was one of the foremost adopters worldwide of the gun. I say this is interesting because the Japanese and American martial traditions are at first glance very different. Briefly: Japan tends to view weapons as an extension of the self, America tends to view them as tools that augment the self—a reflection of one's inner-abilities versus something that can empower anyone. There are many reasons for this, but they're unimportant for these purposes.
He checked the alignment of the sights, adjusting them slightly.
You might by now think that with a reliance on reiryoku, on your own soul, that the Japanese perspective is clearly correct. However, even the basic Shinigami combat techniques of zankensoki reveal that this is not so. You know these by the terms zanjutsu, sword-fighting, hakuda, unarmed fighting, hohō, high-speed movement using shunpo, and kidō, direct application of reiryoku. A zanpakutō is one feature of a holistic system. Even every zanpakutō begins as an asauchi.
He checked the firing mode of the rifle, ensuring it was it to semi-automatic.
So you might ask which comes first: the method of self-actualization, or the desire to self-actualize? The answer is actually of course: both and neither. They develop together. I doubt you've ever heard the USMC's Rifleman's Creed, so allow me to cite part of it to you: "This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will…"
He flipped off the safety selector.
"My rifle and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit... My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will..."
He raised the rifle to his shoulder and aimed down the sights.
Does it sound like any part of that actually requires the rifle to you? Could it not just as easily be your zanpakutō? Of course it could. The weapon is the expression, and the expression is the weapon.
He steadied his breathing, let his reiatsu flow, and adjusted subtly.
It doesn't matter if it's a rifle or a zanpakutō or your bare hands. What is really being discussed is, of course…
He held his breath in a controlled fashion, slid his finger into the trigger guard, and smoothly squeezed.
…your killing intent.
A beam emitted from the M161 Moonlight Scythe in Ichigo's hands and cleanly pierced the target at the end of the firing range right through the center of its chest.
Whether you choose to use a gun in addition to your standard repertoire is up to you. Every weapon and technique has benefits and drawbacks. Your task is to match your method with your circumstance. Your true weapon—your killing intent—is what will always remain the same, as will your goal: victory.
"Wow, that was a pretty good shot," Rukia said.
Ichigo withdrew his finger from the trigger-guard, reengaged the safety selector, and held the weapon at ease on its strap. He then yawned prodigiously, even as a voice in his head said Yeah, Queen's right, not bad, King. The Hollow in his conscience rather seemed to like the reiatsu rifle, and even kidō, whereas Zangetsu had said nothing about either. "I was just remembering the intro to the video, is all," Ichigo said lazily.
"Don't make it sound like it's so easy," Rukia chided. Her best single-shot so far from a cold start standing position had hit the target in the shoulder. She paused to recall the brief intro to the highly accelerated marksmanship briefing. The videos had been put together by various Nightmare Eclipse personnel, presumably including some from Alan's department—they had come to learn from studying organizational charts that he was actually the head of the East Asian department. "I still think it's weird how much they know about Soul Society's training," she muttered before adding "That was such a short part of it too and it didn't even really discuss shooting! Why were you thinking about it?"
Ichigo rubbed the back of his head and looked at the ceiling. He didn't really know the answer himself. "It just helps me focus I guess," he said. He then looked at the back of his left wrist. They had been provided with rather basic watches in their kits and had taken to wearing them while downstairs to tell time, as there were no other clocks available and using their phones proved inconvenient. It was 9:56 PM. "Tch, we've been down here for four hours!"
"Already?" Rukia sighed. "Come on, let's make dinner and get some sleep, there's a lot to do tomorrow," she added, trudging off back to the gun-room to re-rack the rifle.
Ichigo followed after saying "Fine by me, but either we order out or I get to cook."
"Don't even start!" Rukia called back at him from further up the curved hallway. Her efforts at cooking were improving, but only slowly.
Their schedule had not been the most grueling thing that either had ever done, but had been merciless even so.
On Monday, Rukia had returned to school with Ichigo, explaining away her long absence as having to do with the vagaries of family business. No one had asked as to her living arrangements, but they had prepared a story that her brother had set her up with a house and gotten Ichigo to be her roommate to make sure she wasn't living alone. (That she was as if not more violent than him remained largely ignored and unknown.) They had actually paid attention that day to make sure they were on top of what was being covered in class going forward, and had enjoyed lunch with their friends. Neither had discussed it but both did their utmost to maintain their public images at school, so they returned to their previously usual antics.
Returning home, they had knocked out homework and briefly studied for a test in math for an hour. Ichigo had then caught Rukia up on what little of his 'homework' he had done and they then spent the entire rest of the evening reviewing the historical foundations of US paranormal and supernatural activities units, breaking only shortly for dinner. They had gotten well into WWII.
The Frightener units of the Civil War era had been repurposed into pacification units in the American West, where conflict with the Native American populations had often taken on a paranormal and supernatural bent. It reminded Ichigo in many ways of the Quincy and Shinigami conflict. Neither side's hands were clean, but the Frighteners were overwhelmingly more brutal and adaptable. This, along with activity in the South in support of Reconstruction and token suppression of spiritual activities, was their primary mission for several decades. This came to a head with the Ghost Dance movement in 1889 and the subsequent Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. While the official physical death tolls were rather small as battles or wars went, there was an attendant spiritual war in which the Frighteners decisively came out on top.
The Frighteners were then briefly engaged in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898, and had little time to recuperate, being deployed to China in 1899 as part of the Eight-Nation Alliance to combat the Boxer Rebellion. It was there that for the first time they had greatly interacted with similar units from other countries and had confronted Eastern spiritual traditions. When the war had concluded, they were immediately redeployed into the Philippine-American War and the Moro Rebellion. It was the last of these, in addition to the Banana Wars in Central and South America, which was to serve as a constant drain on their strength until WWI.
WWI itself had seen the battered remnants of the Frighteners redeployed to the European theater, where they were shattered. Although American entry decisively ended the war and the Entente achieved victory over the Central Powers, the constant bloodletting saw the attacks of things like Hollows skyrocket and both sides' spiritual forces had long-since taken to attacking one another as well. While hardened through long years of guerrilla campaigns around the world, the Frighteners were not prepared for full-scale war. It was in this time that what a Shinigami would identify as the first crude reishi and reiatsu projectile weapons were developed.
The interwar period saw the Frighteners disbanded and their remains reconstituted into a new organization, the Titans. The Titans were much more centrally organized out of the Department of War and other than their continuing involvement in the Banana Wars, they spent the years before WWII quietly studying what they could from other nations and traditions and developing new techniques and equipment. The Titans particularly corresponded with their European counterparts and seemed quite keen on locating the few remaining Quincy to learn from them.
WWII changed everything. The Titans were deployed to both the Pacific and European theaters, but the Pacific was relatively quiescent. Given the strength of Soul Society (which rather clearly did not take part on Japan's behalf, and seemed to be reviled by the Japanese military authorities of the time), Japan had a rather quite atrophied spiritual military branch, and this combined with the naval and island-hopping nature of the war made Titan operations overwhelmingly defensive against horrors drawn to and resulting from carnage and atrocity. Europe was a different story.
Rukia and Ichigo had ultimately gone to bed disturbed and with only as much as "Goodnight," exchanged between them, and both had slept poorly as the true scale of what was going on began to become apparent to them.
On Tuesday, they had both gotten up somewhat late and had been forced to run out the door with toast-in-mouths, only barely having snatched up some of their reading material on the way out. They had spent a good portion of the day largely ignoring their classes and studying Nightmare Eclipse's field manuals and organizational information. It was largely broken up into regional units attached to American Unified Combatant Commands as a sort of shadow-skeleton, and was rather less formal than the military proper except when having to engage with it. Ichigo reported to the East Asian department of Nightmare Eclipse within SOCOM as embedded in PACOM. Alan was not, technically, his boss, but rather his boss thrice-removed, while Riley was twice-removed from him in turn. It had explained the man's pull, at any rate.
They had again unwound at lunch, and returned home promptly at the end of the day. Once there, they again spent an hour on school work and then had booted their computers to review the various subject fields they were expected to verse themselves in. They rapidly made a decision to start with Close Quarters Combat. They watched several of the unarmed combat briefings, and then descended to the underground dōjō (it was then that they had settled on obliquely referring to it as just 'downstairs') to start training, with Ichigo leaving his body and Rukia her gigai in the gun room. Rukia, although by no means a master of hakuda, was proficient in the basics and walked Ichigo through an introductory lesson while at the same time comparing and contrasting with the CQC techniques they had just learned.
They had spent the next several hours practicing stances and movements in slow but gradually increasing quicker motion; Ichigo wasn't yet at a stage to "properly" fight regardless of his street-brawling experience and neither really liked the idea of fighting one another anyway, so they used it as an opportunity to prepare to fight more serious trainers—likely to be Urahara and Yoruichi. By the time they had finished it was deep into the evening and so Ichigo had prepared a simple dinner while they quizzed one another over contemporary Japanese literature. Afterwards, both exhausted, they had gone to their rooms to fall asleep.
On Wednesday, they had actually got up early, and did a little more studying in the morning before heading to school after a hearty breakfast. They once more spent most of the day ignoring their school work in favor of completing their study of Nightmare Eclipse's organization. They had to run out of class to deal with a Hollow before lunch—it had been determined Chad would take Mondays, Inoue would take Tuesdays, Ishida would take Thursdays, and they would take Wednesdays and Fridays; none of them found they wanted to trust Zennosuke completely—but it was small-fry and the day was otherwise uneventful except for having to deal with Keigo heckling them about their living arrangements, which drew the notice of Chizuru, Michiru, and everybody else who didn't know. Keigo would've gone to the hospital were he not so resilient from years of abuse.
They went home, doing their customary hour of homework and a brief warm-up session of mixed slow hakuda and CQC in the living room before having dinner early and making their way to the Urahara Shop to meet up with Ishida, Chad, and Inoue.
They spent the entire rest of the evening practicing kidō, even being joined occasionally by their trio of friends—as it depended solely on reiryoku, they could all do it. After only a brief consultation with Tessai, Rukia had led the instruction herself, as she was an expert. She had only ever heard about Ichigo's efforts with the reishūkaku during the invasion Soul Society second-hand, but knowing full-well that he had never applied himself to kidō, she grilled him relentlessly far above and beyond the others. Ichigo was forced once more to confront exactly why she had been made fukutaichō as he was time and again scolded for managing to blow himself up.
It had been many hours and Ichigo's shihakushō, skin, and hair were covered in soot by the time he finally managed to extend a finger, say the incantation, and declare "Hadō Number 4: Byakurai!" without self-detonating. It was at this junction that the dangers of teaching Ichigo kidō became apparent: he wasn't skilled enough (yet) to perform them without incantation, but with incantation he did them with full force. Byakurai in the hands of a skilled kidō user normally took the form of a lightning beam perhaps twice the width of a man's arm.
Ichigo's was about the width of a car and had several more accompanying spirals, looking more like some sort of science-fiction super weapon than the traditional form. It lit the entirety of the training room up in incandescent blue in the moment before firing and it was only the timely intervention of Tessai declaring "Bakudō Number 81: Dankū!" that kept it from significantly expanding the size of the training room.
In the aftermath of stunned silence and the clatter of debris only seconds passed before Rukia had recomposed herself and shouted "You're a regular natural disaster, Ichigo—now: again!" Ichigo's disbelief was met with a beating; and so on the training had gone until late into the night.
By the time they had arrived home, Ichigo went straight to shower and to bed. Although he wasn't mad at Rukia, he wasn't in a happy mood either. Her ruthlessness had been predictable; it was the way the Hollow in his conscience had reveled at each successful burst that disturbed him. Rukia, unused to drilling others and worn out by it, likewise promptly went to bed.
On Thursday, they had discovered during the course of their morning routine that a fax had come in sometime the previous evening. They found that Ichigo was being ordered to make his way to Yokota AB the next weekend for an official marksmanship assessment (and Rukia was strongly advised to accompany him). Instructions were enclosed directing them to their official credentials for the same purpose. After having looked at one another suspiciously before going to their closets, they found them.
Ichigo had been provisioned with a US Air Force Active Duty ID, insignia, and accoutrements in addition to the service uniform they had already discovered. Rukia found the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force service dress she had been given for the first time, as well as an ID listing her as a First Lieutenant in the same. There was a small notice attached that this fiction had been agreed to by the Japanese government for the purposes of international cooperation. Laying their things out on their beds, they rejoined one another and briefly discussed adjusting their plans for the day to cover the "Military Bearing" and "Military Discipline" briefings. They would at least have to learn to act the part.
Having established they would do so, they had made their way to school. Since they had developed a thorough if shallow understanding of Nightmare Eclipse's operations (they were technically far over on the "supernatural" and not the "paranormal" side of the group) over the last two days, they had turned their attention to other matters. Unwilling to repeat bringing highly classified documents to school, they had both decided to start improving their English. Finding it less engrossing than the military documents, they only ignored two-thirds of what went on in class instead of almost all of it.
Lunch passed with Rukia trying to rather ridiculously insert basic English into her everyday speech, drawing odd looks from everyone but Ichigo who had been torn between laughing and sighing and so said nothing.
Returning home and finishing their homework in timely fashion, they had once more eaten early, and then gone to review the briefings they'd discussed earlier in the day. They took a few hours to review, and after both had managed to find USAF and JSGDF basic manuals on the shelves of the office, they had gone to their rooms to dress and practice on each other. They'd discovered conventional fatigues downstairs in addition to the Nightmare Eclipse standard issue, but elected to try those later.
Ichigo had finished first and waited in the living room in his service uniform shoes and all (only since they'd never been worn outside yet) for Rukia to appear. For the purposes of their own operations and those of both Soul Society and Nightmare Eclipse they were regarded as equal in rank, but for the purposes of the fiction they would be presenting to the actual armed forces, they were an enlisted man and officer, respectively. Although it had been made clear the US Uniform Code of Military Justice was rather loosely followed in Nightmare Eclipse, and Ichigo as both a foreign national and a contractor wouldn't be much held to account to it, he would have to play along with it in front of other military personnel. Rukia, in turn, was held to no account, and merely expected to play the part.
At last he had heard her door open, and waited to catch the merest sight of her before snapping to attention and rendering a crisp salute as he had seen performed. It was when he actually saw her that his eyes had widened in shock.
She had come around the corner in a rich dark green uniform jacket and skirt, wearing black heels and conservatively colored hose. The uniform itself was a crisp design featuring only chrysanthemums at the collar and her rank insignia. She had pinned her persistently troublesome hair back and topped it off with the uniform's hat, and seemed to be wearing just a little bit of makeup. The whole thing seemed to highlight and contrast with her eyes. It was the first time he'd ever seen her dress up so, and he found himself completely taken back by how she looked even in so severe an outfit. Her glance had shifted to him dispassionately, that cool Kuchiki look all over her face, and she had smoothly saluted back, before saying "At ease," to him. His hand had dropped in awe.
"No, no, all wrong!" she had immediately complained, and the illusion had been broken just like that. They immediately began to pick apart what the other had done wrong in terms of gig line and everything else before much later transitioning into acting out military skits with one another, covering everything from standing at attention to marching. Rukia didn't dare mention that he actually did seem rather dashing at times when he really got into character. This continued long after the sun had gone down and so at last they collected themselves, went to the alcove that led to their rooms, smartly saluted one another as a final capstone, and retired for the evening.
On Friday, they had been awoken early by a Hollow attack. Ichigo had told Rukia to go back to bed while he dealt with it, which she had seemed to do grudgingly. He had returned at sunrise to find she'd made tamagoyaki omelets for both of them. Although they'd been a bit messy, they'd been surprisingly good and so Ichigo encouraged her by suggesting she make lunch for them both too. Lunch had turned out to be rather less successful, and had thankfully been interrupted by another Hollow attack. It had otherwise been another mostly uneventful day of studying English.
Reviewing their homework upon getting home, they had dedicated two and a half hours to knocking everything out that would come due on Monday, and then had promptly begun reviewing Marksmanship. The lesson was structured around the M161 Moonlight Scythe because it was an extremely low-maintenance reiatsu rifle that required basically no cleaning and no maintenance, and so it had been a rather brief lesson focused on proper shooting. They had noticed an inventory of everything that was down in the gun room (except what was within the mysterious cases) but decided to review it later. And so they had gone downstairs to learn to shoot.
Ichigo yawned again and pushed away his plate. In the end they had both been too tired and had ordered a relatively simple delivery of yakiniku and put it together with rice and mixed vegetables that they'd done up together while waiting for it to arrive.
Rukia likewise yawned before poking him in the forehead in irritation, saying "Stop that, it's contagious!"
"Sorry, I can't stop it," Ichigo droned, before collecting both their dishes and going to clean and wash them.
"Hey, I can help," Rukia offered from the dining room.
"Forget it, it's not a big deal and if Byakuya ever thought I was making a member of the Kuchiki clan clean dishes he'd turn me into a fine puree," Ichigo called over the running water.
"You know nii-sama doesn't hate you," Rukia admonished, her voice indicating she was in the living room.
"Do I?" Ichigo asked aloud, as much to himself as to her. He was quite confident he didn't know any such thing. The next time he looked up Rukia was looking over the breakfast bar at him curiously, elbow on it and chin in hand. Her expression was contemplative. "What?" he asked.
She seemed to consider for a moment and opened her mouth before closing it again, getting up, and walking toward the bedroom alcove, saying at last "Nothing, just don't stay up too late, we have to be up early. Goodnight, Ichigo!" She shut the door before he could say anything.
He turned the water off and started to dry the dishes. They did indeed have to get up early: tomorrow was the day they would start learning hakuda from Yoruichi and Urahara. It's gonna be so much fun, King, a voice in his head said. He said nothing internally and put the dishes away, giving Rukia's door a glance before heading to brush his teeth and go to sleep.