Wow, this chapter was awful when I took another look at it. No wonder my readership dropped off sharply after this chapter. Seriously, I apologize for how bad it was. This one should be readable.

Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach, nor make any money from this fan-made fiction.

4. Meatball Hackery

Not everyone who had been mutated disliked their changes and no less than three cults had formed as a result of this. They holed up in various buildings and made for fairly dangerous challenges when it came to purifying the corruption. This is why, towards the end of their visit, Chad, Orihime and Tatsuki would each join one of three counter-terrorist squads made up of JDF and police specialists in order to remove the active threat.

While Chad and Orihime were fine with regular bulletproof armour, Tatsuki didn't generate enough passive spirit pressure and would need to use most of the very expensive and even more specialized tactical hazmat suits designed by Kisuke and built at the Urahara shop back in Karakura. These suits cost the equivalent of around $1,000,000 USD—and that was per use, up to two hours. The only part Tatsuki didn't need were the powered glasses created in the Urahara clinic—created from farmed crystal—as she could already see the spiritual realm. This saved ten percent of the cost of each suit. Realistically, if everything went well, the operation was expected to cost more than $90,000,000 in suits alone.

More impressive than that was the conviction of each spiritually blind member of the ten person squads: they knew this could damage or destroy both their lives and souls—most of them were surprised when they received the classified briefing—and then would take this experience with them to the grave. No one would know what they did and they were fine with that.

The goal was to safely apprehend and bring every cultist to the clinic for curing. There would be five surgery rooms prepared on this day, leaving only three crowded recovery rooms on the other half of the second floor nearest to the elevator that landed in the lobby.

Next to the recovery rooms, on the north side of the hallway, was exam room five. Ichigo would be working here, helped by one of the most experienced surgical assistants from the Fourth Division of the Thirteen Court Guard Divisions located in Soul Society. Her name was Hiromi.

Directly across the hall, in exam room four, would be Kisuke assisted by Fuku, who was just barely qualified enough to be there. The setup and staffing of these two rooms would allow Fuku to learn while also making sure Ichigo had quick access to Kisuke's knowledge if something extremely bizarre showed up.

Beside Ichigo's room was room three, where the most experienced of their visiting surgeons and one of her surgical assistants would be set up: Retsu Unohana, the captain of the Fourth Division. She would be assisted by one of her newest surgical assistants, Miyuki Kato.

In room two, across the hall and beside Kisuke's room, was Ryūken Ishida, the most capable surgeon at Karakura General Hospital—and its owner. He would be assisted by one of his most trusted surgical assistants.

The person who would take the exam room on the first floor was Ichigo's dad, Isshin. Assisting him was one of the nurses at Karakura General selected by Ryūken. They would handle any emergencies that weren't part of the cultists being brought in.

They weren't the only help, however. Support staffing was important and Yuzu and Karin, Ichigo's younger sisters, had been cooking in the kitchens of both penthouses on the top floor and would be keeping the lunch room stocked so that no one at the clinic went hungry. Yoruichi—a master agent of espionage, former captain of the Second Division and Kisuke's best friend—would be organizing and managing all the administration happening between the counter-terrorist operations and the clinic while Jinta and Ururu—the latter another artificial soul raised by Urahara—made sure patients got registered and released quickly and smoothly with the help of another nurse selected by Ryūken. Cleanup would be handled four other people from the Fourth Division.

That was how the day started for most of them, at least. Yoruichi's day quickly turned into external damage control as she took on the task of hunting down cult individuals that had not been in their respective headquarters when the raids hit them. As more names were found, she went after them. Ururu ended up covering for her, leaving Jinta to deal with in and outpatient work by himself.

Once the first cultist was brought in there was no time for break aside from when the rooms were being cleaned. Surgery after surgery with minimal breaks was the pace and this would go on well into early the next morning. One hundred and eight people would be operated on over the next twenty-eight hours, and that was not counting Isshin's work in the walk-in part of the clinic.

Ichigo's hardest case of the day was a man who looked part hive in his chest. He was almost a candidate for a full soul transfer, but only almost, which made the job incredibly tedious. Once the copy body was ready both it and the man were brought in and Ichigo got to work. He carefully made a clean slit around the skin and muscle, peeling it off the rib cage and placing it into a cool saline solution. He did the same to the hole-ridden flesh of the man he was operating on, took a sample, and placed the rest into a waste tray.

Seeing the condition of the ribs and what was underneath, he used a bone saw to cut most of them out, taking a sample and discarding the rest. Underneath was a web of holes in the tissue, and after another sample was taken, he cut and discarded the rest of that as well. It was a messy job and required a lot of the temporary clotting formula to keep the man from bleeding to death from every open vein.

With full access to the heart and lungs Ichigo could see those would need replacing as well. Going to the copy body he cut the ribs oversized and placed them aside in a clean wrap. Cutting the chest muscles out from the source, he placed them on a clean table and got to the organs. Carefully cutting out the good respiratory system and heart, he placed them on ice and tied off the arteries, clogging the veins to keep the area clean in case he needed the muscle behind it all.

Quickly he removed the original heart and hooked the man up to a mechanical one while he got to removing the respiratory system and looked over the organs and muscle. The heart looked like a nest of larvae, and cutting it in half Ichigo saw that the large insect-like creature he scanned moving erratically, causing the half of the heart it was still in to pump very quickly. "It must have been the reason his heart was still pumping," Ichigo said to himself. He carefully placed both parts of the heart into a sealed mini-cooler reserved for samples that needed to be kept at a near-live condition for as long as possible.

The area that made up the back of the chest cavity had a hardened shell-like surface, and puncturing small holes into it and using a special lubricant, it came out in mostly one piece. A sample was, of course, taken. Cleaning the lubricant out, Ichigo used Kisuke's full-body scanning machine and the computer quickly pointed out a few contaminated areas that were then removed or cleaned. Then Ichigo placed the new heart into place, gluing in a good inner pocket to hold the new heart with bio-glue. Then came the new respiratory system including a fresh pair of lungs. Afterwards was the special tissue that surrounded the heart and caused it to pump the natural way.

Ichigo asked his assistant, Eri, to get the closest available doctor. When she returned with Kisuke, Ichigo attached the new heart to the existing arteries using a temporary stint and bio-glue to quickly get the body supporting itself. Kisuke left once that was done.

From this point forward, with liberal amounts of bio-glue, the remaining tissue was attached. For the ribs, he scanned the cutoff point of the original with the potato scanner, and the cutoff point of the new ribs, and let the computer guide him in cutting the new ribs a bit further for the best fit possible. A special marrow glue, a variant of the flesh based bio-glue, was used to attach the new ribs, with a slowly dissolving, hard, shrink-wrap sleeve to keep it in place as he glued the last piece: the new top layer of muscle attached to skin.

A final full body scan was made to ensure that everything was right with the man before he was covered in a clean sheet and moved to one of the recovery rooms by Ichigo. Eri had been a huge help throughout, grabbing tools and being a steady extra pair of hands. Her job at this point would be to dispose of the bad flesh, eat and drink something, and then clean the room. Ichigo took the cart with the samples away and into the lab where things needed to be labelled for later research that he would no doubt be part of.

Coincidentally, Ichigo and Fuku met each other in the lunch room.

"So how has your night been?" Fuku asked. "Because I think it's light outside again." She yawned and then grabbed an energy drink.

"Long and tedious," he replied, a bowl of miso soup in hand. "The next one better be easier or I'm protesting."

"Yeah, it feels like you've been getting all the annoying work this week. You get home, eat, barely hang out with your friends for an hour, then fall asleep. If this keeps up, I'll need to force-feed you energy drinks just to talk with you." A wide, teasing grin spread across her face. "Or maybe kiss you like Orihime did. That woke you up!"

"Don't remind me. I now know she likes me, but this—us—complicates things."

Ichigo and Fuku weren't romantic but, due to their nature, they were intimate in just about every other way. Orihime had expressed her disapproval of this and caused a bit of an argument. Tatsuki suggested they talk it over at a time when they actually had time.

"Not really, I just need her to accept me as part of the harem and then we're all good."

Disapproving, Ichigo stared at Fuku until she burst into laughter, causing him to let out a chuckle and smile. "Just don't make that joke in front of her; I think she'd faint."

"Now I wanna see if she does."

"No."

Fuku intentionally exaggerated a pout. "You're no fun!" She did, however, smile when Ichigo ruffled her hair in response.

They quickly finished their respective means of sustenance and walked back to their respective operation rooms.

It was morning and Kisuke's first patient was in front of him: a woman in her twenties with hair was alive—and aggressive—changing colours and even displaying patterns. "Well," Kisuke began, "this is something I haven't seen before. What do you think, Fuku?"

"Very exotic. I wonder if you could make a die like that? Like the hair version of a mood ring?"

"Maybe," Kisuke replied.

A scan had revealed that the 'hair' wasn't too much different from normal hair in terms of root, so with deft hands, Kisuke plucked one. It immediately turned into a standard, brown strand of hair. "Interesting." He placed it in a sample bag regardless. Doing a full body scan, a small, corrupted brain tumour was found. Quickly an idea came to him: he ran down to the lab and grabbed an energy spectrometer, and used it to figure out if anything he couldn't normally sense could be found. And something was.

"Fascinating, the tumour gives a sort of psychic field around her head. It's active even though the patient is unconscious. Though it is rather weak. Perhaps her hair was the only thing that could be affected?"

Still, it would have to go. Using a more conventional treatment—in a portable package he created—a small radiation beam was used to burn the tumour to death. Afterwards, an injection of immune system adaptable bio-scrubbers would be used to remove any bad material over the next month. It was like a powerful booster shot. An expensive, powerful booster shot. This one would cost her a few months-worth of the average wage.

The woman's hair was once again normal and she was wheeled into a recovery room. Kisuke personally hoped every case brought new insight like this one did.

It was half-way through the day and by then Retsu and Miyuki had already treated several extremely complicated cases; this one, however, took her by surprise. The woman in front of her, in her mid-thirties, needed quite the unconventional treatment compared to every other case: the woman's body had many glowing tendrils of flesh—almost like short antennae—sticking out of her from head to toe. Cutting one out as a sample, it began rotting immediately and left a spiritual tendril that quickly generated a new physical one to cover it back up.

Scanning the woman, it was discovered that several corrupted spores had embedded themselves into the skin of the woman's soul. Using a tool designed to separate the body and soul temporarily, the woman's soul was moved to a new bed, the chain that connected the two still intact. The tendrils on her physical body immediately began rotting away.

"Miyuki, work on the physical body; I'll call out which spores to remove. Please let me know if I miss any."

Retsu picked up one of the spiritual scalpels and began cutting out each spore, storing one with its connected tendril in a bag made of spirit matter and discarding the rest appropriately into a tray made also made of spirit matter.

Miyuki kept up and both made quick work of the patient. It took less than twenty minutes for over a hundred to be cut out of each body and have the area spritzed with a growth accelerator and covered in a bandage. The spiritual body would recover inside the protection of the physical body.

Retsu let out a graceful breath and looked at the patient, happy this treatment was over. It was not difficult, but it was tedious and time consuming. This had been her first patient with a cause that was solely spiritual, and she hoped it would remain an outlier. Looking around as one of the room cleaners came in, she was reminded of some of the new equipment Kisuke had developed; she would be sure to talk to the man about acquiring it for her own hospital.

Ryūken's patient, a man in his twenties, had almost died several times on the operating table. It started with a scan that revealed a fungus inside his brain and an anti-fungal to treat it, but that was only the beginning. As it turned out, the fungus was not defenceless and began releasing an aggressive neurotoxin that caused the patient's brain activity to nearly stop.

Thankfully Kisuke had developed a mesh helmet capable of stabilizing brain activity by reading and near instantly amplifying the synapses from each set of neurons. It was even capable of replacing the brain tissue for a few seconds if Ryūken remembered the manual correctly. The treatment only lasted ten minutes but it felt like several hours had passed.

If only the living world could embrace technology that utilized spirit energy: there were so many useful machines that could save so many more lives.

Isshin had been a doctor in the living world for decades now, and that kind of experience did both much and little to prepare him for this situation. Since everyone else was on cult duty he volunteered to run the walk-in clinic and take in emergency cases that came in and weren't related to the cult. A sign outside read "Emergencies Only" and listed what counted as an emergency.

Six people had come in over the course of the day—it was now six o'clock in the evening—most delivered by ambulance. The people, he was used to; the conditions, he was not. An old man had grown a tail full of scabs which were getting infected, and that required a soul transplant, as replacing and fixing such a thoroughly mutated spine wasn't possible. A blood sample was taken to create a new body and the old man was left on powerful antibiotics while the new body formed.

The nurse who assisted Isshin was Yoshiko Takeda, one of the most trusted nurses at Karakura General. She was proud to have been selected by Ryūken for a job that paid three times her normal wage. What initially caused her to feel uneasy was the lifetime non-disclosure agreement she was required to sign. Then she was told to expect the unexpected. Certainly, this day had shown her things she had never even imagined, but for this patient she had doubts on the dosage.

"Won't this much kill him?" she asked. This was yet another in a long line of decisions she disagreed with and, as much as she liked Isshin, she also had her duty to save lives.

"His body? For sure. But he was about to die, anyway. We just need time."

Yoshiko had been proven wrong over and over—in her mind, she had only asked questions so far—but it didn't seem possible to save this patient. And then she saw it: Isshin wheeled-in a body exactly matching the patient.

"What is that?"

"A new body. Also part of the non-disclosure agreement you signed."

Isshin used a 'weird device' to do something to the body, but she wasn't sure what it was. It looked like pseudo-science and the patient's heart monitor immediately flat-lined as Isshin picked up something invisible like it was a body, placing it onto the new one like a mime, and moving his hands to do… something.

It was all wrong, and once the patient's body was disconnected and rolled out, she had decided she would endure it no more. For all his charm, this butcher was a hack and Yoshiko started yelling at him.

"Unbelievable! I've seen some crazy things in my years, but this takes the cake. You're a menace—and I'm going to make sure you spend the rest of your life looking out of a jail cell!"

Then the new body woke up, acting like the patient and asking questions that only the original patient would have known. Yoshiko didn't know what to think and her knees became week.

Isshin, seeing that his nurse was about to faint, gently sat her down in the corner of the room on a chair. "Careful, I don't need you becoming patient."

He said it as a joke and laughed with the hope that it would calm Yoshiko down. "Just remember the non-disclosure agreement." Isshin didn't need her informing the patient of how he had been healed while the original body was being disposed of.

Once the patient was out another one came in. All in all, it was a busy day and night—though not as busy as the other doctors': one patient had an eye that had turned to crystal and was causing them hallucinations, another was growing a plant out of their back which had caused paralysis, another had warts that bled and needed to be treated for anemia, a young boy was coughing up bugs, and the last patient of the day had fallen from a height and broken most of the bones in his body—this one also got a new body. There were more patients but those weren't as memorable.

Daylight was once more lighting the waiting room as Kisuke relieved them of their duty and they disposed of their lab coats.

"I'm exhausted, but afraid to sleep." Yoshiko admitted to Isshin. Much had been seen and some of it was too much. She had also apologized to Isshin earlier, and while she still didn't know what exactly was going on, she now held great respect for the man. He was also gracious enough to not hold a grudge for threatening him with prison. He seemed very understanding.

"It happens sometimes. Why don't we go get a morning drink and I'll take you home after that?"

Even after all the time spent without sleep—or perhaps because of how long she had gone without sleep—Isshin came across to Yoshiko as bigger than life. He had also told her proudly about his family throughout their time together; even his deceased wife. "What about your daughters?"

"Ichigo will take care of them; you look like you could use a drink and an open ear."

Yoshiko sighed. She really did need someone to talk to and had so many questions. And Isshin would be far more likely to answer her questions than her boss. "Fine, let's go."

The day's counter-cult operations finished around midnight and had gone better than expected: only ten cultists had been killed without a single casualty on the special operations side. They were, however, extremely tired and decided to store their gear and sleep before debriefing in the morning. Orihime, Chad and Tatsuki were not part of the debrief and were working on the next site with the normal agents—though that didn't stop a woman who went by the callsign "Hibana" from offering Tatsuki a job once she graduated from university and received her degree in criminal justice.

It was the ending of this debrief Ichigo and Fuku walked in on.

"Dr. Kurosaki, Fuku," Agent Rin said, "we just finished with the NDA reminders and are planning a small celebration. Would you like to join us in Dr. Urahara's apartment?"

Fuku eagerly wanted to join them so she could ask questions and talk to new people and that eagerness was enough to get Ichigo to follow suit. It wasn't a big celebration, but Ichigo did find himself swamped with questions about his job and what operating on the horrors they fought against was like. Fuku was in the same boat, though as an assistant surgeon she didn't have as many explanations to give.

The atmosphere was somewhere between calm, coping and cheery. Things had gone well but there would be nightmares for many of them and the only place to talk about it would be one of a few designated psychologists. Once the party finished, Ichigo and Fuku went to their bed where Karin and Yuzu were already sleeping.

"Well, so much our bed," Ichigo whispered quietly. He immediately went for one of the futons that was next to it, Fuku taking the next closest one and dragging it beside him.

"Your dad knows he can't get back in the quarantine area, right?"

Ichigo let out a sigh. "I guess we'll ask agent Rin to get them to the checkpoint."

A/N:

Fun fact: I had to add the word "neurotoxin" to Libre Office's spell checker. I've done this a lot, actually, but when I went to try and contribute to the project, there was no easy way to submit updates to their dictionary.

The chapter title is a reference to the term given to surgeries that happened in the Korean War (which only lasted 3 years, 1950-1953 but somehow got 11 years of television in the form of a show called M*A*S*H). The injured were many, many woulds were fierce, and operations had to be done quickly, so sometimes it was called 'meatball surgery'. Since the surgeries are unconventional and Yoshiko thought Isshin was a hack, I thought it was a good fit.

M*A*S*H is a fantastic television show/war drama/comedy, by the way. One of the greatest television shows of all time, really.

JDF, in English, stands for the 'Japanese Defence Force'. Until recently, Japan didn't allow itself to have a full military in terms of power projection; hence the name. I wonder if the name is going to change now, or if it's going to still be called a "defence force" in the coming decades?

Have a great 'until next time' and may God bless you,

SomethingAncient