A/N: ********** IMPORTANT BLEACH CONTINUITY NOTE **********
re: Ichigo's zanpakutō
For the purposes of this story, the zanpakutō developments from the Thousand Year Blood War manga arc have not happened. Zangetsu's blade looks as it does at the end of the Lost Agent arc. As for the spirits within it, well...
§ x § x §
§ x § x §
§ x § x §
DREIUNDDREIßIG
TIMELINE X + N
Usually, Akon would be extremely conscious of being observed by multiple captains as he worked, would feel their stares as an itch between his shoulders as they watched and expected scientific miracles to fall from his fingertips. Instead, he was part of such a frenzy that he barely noticed captains filing into the control room until the Captain Commander himself graced them with his presence. The frantic technicians flinched as one at the feel of his very unhappy reiatsu, but kept working. If anything, they worked even harder. Nemu coolly nudged Akon aside and took over the terminal he had claimed beside Hiyosu, her hands smoothly continuing to rewrite code much faster than Akon was capable of. Oh, he was good— he had to be very well-rounded to get to Third Seat— but he was more a physical sciences kind of guy. Nemu probably dreamed in code compared to him. Akon looked around and found that his subordinates were doing their jobs excellently... leaving him nothing to do but observe and wait. And answer questions.
"Report," rumbled Captain-Commander Yamamoto.
Akon looked around. "Captain Kurotsuchi—?"
Without even glancing at him, Nemu murmured, "Our captain is engaged in a delicate experiment upon the Grief Seed in our custody." She fell silent, obviously handing the responsibility of reporting to Akon. The Captain-Commander expectantly raised his brows at Akon, who took a deep breath.
The Third Seat was only a few sentences in when Hiyosu interrupted with a loud, "Japan/Korea data interface restored!"
It was probably quite rude, but Akon ended his report and wheeled around to look at the screens. "Status?"
"Still lagging at minimal functionality. Better than nothing. I'll pull up the map." Hiyosu went still. After a moment, he looked at Akon and said, "Uhhhh." He tapped a series of keys that put his screen on the main monitor.
Everyone looked at it. Busy scientists glanced, blanched, and turned back to their work. The captains stared. Most of them didn't know what they were looking at except that it was a map of Japan with random colored blotches.
Captain Hirako, having lived in the World of the Living for an extended period, whistled lowly. "I'm guessin' this works like human weather radar, but for spirit stuff? Scale'a blank is good, green ain't too bad, and red is really bad?"
"Yes," Akon replied distractedly.
Captain Hirako scratched his head, face considering. "So that red, purple, and black hurricane-thing over Karakura is seriously bad news."
"You could say that," Akon strained.
"What is it?" asked Captain Ukitake.
"I don't know, but it is a Witch wavelength," Akon replied. "We think. Massively amplified— beyond Espada class, even— but more Witch than Hollow. We were still tinkering with Witch calibration when this happened."
"I thought a Hollow hurricane was supposed to drop on Mitakihara," Captain Muguruma grumbled, crossing his arms in annoyance. That part of the map was clear.
Akon blinked, thought, and looked back at the screen. "Oh."
"What 'oh'?" drawled Captain Kyōraku.
"I wonder if this is that rumored Walpurgisnacht thing Urahara reported."
There was uneasy silence for a moment. Nemu broke it with a cool, "Mid-range on-site remote operations partially restored. Stationary sensors inoperable. Deploying surveillance drone."
While waiting for further word from Nemu, the Captain-Commander turned his eyes back to Akon. "Were you able to contact our assets in Karakura?"
"No, sir," Akon answered grimly.
Yamamoto grunted. "Keep trying."
"Yes, sir."
"Video," Nemu announced. She tapped a few keys and took over the main screen. "Drone is approximately fifteen kilometers from the center of the disturbance."
The image wasn't the best, but the Karakura skyline was recognizable. The video jittered and shivered from clarity to static and in and out of focus at random intervals. Above Karakura was an inverted doll-like figure hanging from a series of cogs that were roughly as far across as all of downtown Karakura. Hundreds of small figures were darting through the air, the flashes of reiatsu-based attacks glimmering among the confusing mess.
"It looks like a damn alien invasion," Captain Hirako said incredulously. "Mothership, dogfights, an' all."
"A mother-what now?" Captain Kyōraku asked in morbid curiosity.
Captain Soi Fon glared at Shinji. "Have you withheld knowledge of an enemy, Hirako?"
"Fiction, Soi Fon," Captain Ōtoribashi interrupted with a deep sigh. "He's referring to a popular opponent in human fiction."
Akon wondered if the reinstated Visored were tired of the culture gap still driving a wedge between them and other shinigami after over two years back in Soul Society.
Before Soi Fon could snap a reply, the screen flared brightly and went blank.
"My fuckin' eyes," snarled Captain Zaraki. His tiny pink-haired lieutenant giggled from her perch on his shoulder.
"Mid-range sensors offline again," Hiyosu reported unhappily. "Aaaand the Japan/Korea data interface has frozen again."
Nemu's fingers flew over her keyboard as all the technicians tensely tried to reconnect with the World of the Living. A breathless ten minutes later, Nemu manged to hobble the drone up onto a building, turn it in the correct direction, and get a shaky visual of Karakura once more.
Something like a multicolored bonfire was raging at the base of the giant invader. The air below, which had been dense with flying combatants, was clear of everything but hundreds of colored circles. Except for the dancing flames, all was still.
No sign of any surviving defenders.
Captain-Commander Yamamoto scowled. He turned to the door and began to leave. He glanced at his Captains, eyes hard. Akon held his breath.
"Deploy."
§ x § x §
It took several moments for Isshin's eyes to adjust to the sudden dimness of the cavern he found himself in. The first thing he noticed was an overpowering smell of sweets— chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla, that indescribable scent that meant that something containing a great deal of sugar had been baked to perfection. When he could see properly, he was immediately disturbed.
Though the ground and walls felt solid, they were brown with swirls of white that reminded him of chocolate cake with white icing drizzled onto it. A closer look convinced him that at least half of the icing was actually gauze bandages haphazardly strewn about. Everything the cavern contained seemed to be a twisted hospital scene. Red and blue tubes were draped along the ceiling in a manner that suggested blood vessels, but they connected a great number of IV bags that also hung from the ceiling. Each bag had a stamp on it that looked like a pink mouse wearing a white nurse's cap. One side of the long hall was divided into uneven staging areas like those in emergency rooms, each stall separated by shoddy pink railings and giant surgical scissors that had been stabbed into the cake floor. The staging areas were numbered out of order and each featured a crude bed made out of a dessert— flans, cupcakes, tiramisu, even a gelatin mold. Upon each "bed" sat lanky nurses wearing pink dresses and white nurse caps. Instead of faces and hair, their heads featured uneven concentric white and blue rings that looked like they had been scribbled with blue ballpoint pen. The heads bobbled on their necks as they... well, it was hard to say they looked at Isshin when they had no eyes, but they seemed to turn in his direction.
The nurse Familiars lurched to their feet and approached the former shinigami captain, shrieking without mouths and wielding clipboards, syringes, IV poles, scalpels, and other medical items. They fell to Engetsu's blade fairly simply. Isshin heard squeaking and turned just in time to see several creatures hurry further into the labyrinth. Not seeing any other choice, he followed them.
The dim cavern wandered in every which way but straight. The path was lined with giant sewing needles stabbed into the cake floor with thick thread draped through their eyes. Syringes varying from small to giant, filled and empty, were jabbed into the walls and floors along with surgical pins, tweezers, scissors, and even bandaids. Whatever creatures were nearby managed to stay out of sight but the steady squeaks they made betrayed their presence. Giant desserts were littered throughout— chocolate chip cookies, Belgian waffles, rock candy, slices of pie, eclairs— a sugar addict's dream amid the ominous medical equipment.
Isshin finally saw what the squeaking creatures were when he rounded a corner and found a chamber lit in garish overhead hospital lights. This area strongly favored donuts and jellybeans. Strewn among them were giant glass vials. Some of them contained medicine, others candy, still others held surgical instruments. Hurrying around the bottles were bulbous... things... as tall as his hip with pink stick legs. They were black with red spots. While their faces were the same featureless rings the nurses had, these creatures also had droopy purple mouse ears, pink mouse tails, and squeaked like mice. Isshin mentally dubbed the Familiars the Mice From Hell. They seemed non-threatening up until Isshin realized he was surrounded by them. He swung Engetsu back just as they all pounced.
The skirmish was sloppy, the sheer concentration of enemies making it difficult to do anything fancier than repeatedly slash around him. They didn't seem to be able to do much harm to him on their own, but as a mob they seemed determined to bury him. Whether they meant to suffocate him or stall him, Isshin couldn't say. Whichever it was didn't matter anyway— he had a fight to get back to outside.
Isshin flared his reiatsu to repel the Mice From Hell just enough for him to shunpo to the top of an upright stick of Pocky while charging a Getsuga Tenshō on his blade. He paused for a moment for the mice to regroup then slung the burning moonlight at the entire pack. He clinically repeated the attack several times. There was a cacophony of rodent screeches, but it soon died down. Isshin stayed where he was until the air cleared; nothing was left but the scent of burnt sugar.
The shinigami dropped from the cookie stick and extended his senses before cautiously moving toward the strongest source of Hollow-like reiatsu. He soon found a door. Its hinges creaked as he slipped through it and shut it behind him. The new area was even dimmer than the initial maze. The only source of light was a hazy white mist that glowed softly around a collection of big, free-floating glass medicine vials with the same strange contents he had seen in the others. He looked down and couldn't see much of his own feet in the blackness. Looking forward, he didn't see a solid path. Just darkness and the occasional row of soft white dots that could be anything.
The moonlight power Engetsu held within Isshin's soul waned to a crescent, the zanpakutō spirit as taut with unease as his master.
Isshin cautiously stepped forward and found solid ground. He wanted to shunpo through the section as quickly as possible but was wary of doing so when he couldn't see what he might land on. So he walked the hall of vials with a measured pace, constantly waiting for the invisible floor to give out under him. It was anticlimactic when he reached a glowing white door with chocolate bars on it.
On the other side of the door was an area littered with more sweets leading up to a bridge through darkness. It was black with large pink polka dots and warped pink railings. The absolute quiet was getting unnerving— at least when the mice had been squeaking, he had known they were there. Isshin didn't know what to expect. He settled for crossing the bridge on foot, on alert for attack from any direction.
Birthday candles as big as streetlights flared to life in the darkness on either side of the bridge as Isshin walked. Medicine capsules fell from above like snow while warm will-o'-the-wisps floated upward. Candies and desserts and dead Mice From Hell dangled from the distant ceiling on the hooked ends of surgical sutures. Though on a mission, Isshin found his mind wandering, comparing this labyrinth to— the one he had seen before. The significance of the items in— the one he had seen before. The juxtaposition of sweets and hospital miscellany provoked several ideas about what struggles the soul at the center of the labyrinth had faced in life. One thought led to another until he had the disconcerting realization that he was walking through the soul of some other father's daughter. Some other father's daughter had been manipulated into selling her soul and becoming... this. He had known it, yes, but thinking in those terms made it all so much worse.
Engetsu waxed, warm summer moonlight reassuringly settling on Isshin's shoulders in the eerie dark. Thirst for justice thrummed through them.
At the end of the bridge, Isshin found himself on top of a cliff that looked like frosting. He cautiously approached edge and peered around the new chamber. Mice From Hell were marching along ledges made of messily stacked strawberry charlotte layers. Isshin searched the room and saw a door on the far end. He glanced between it and the marching mice, calculating. The things hadn't seemed particularly fast or smart and he really did need to get this over with as soon as possible. Mind made up, Isshin sprinted across the room with shunpo and wrenched the door open as the mice screeched and started tumbling down to confront him. He slammed the door shut, cast a quick temporary barrier, and looked around. Barring a door with a giant slice of fruitcake wasn't something he ever thought he'd do, but hey, it worked.
So he advanced, rushing through chambers with as little fighting as possible. He hit a snag with another hall full of the disturbing nurse Familiars, but they didn't slow him much because he managed to take out most of them with a wide Getsuga Tenshō launched straight down the hall. It wasn't long before he found himself in a small, round room whose walls were made of Neapolitan cake and featured a door with a black silhouette of the stamp he had seen on IV bags, cookies, and medicine jars throughout the labyrinth. The words "chocolate flavor" were obvious, but a long word was scribbled beneath it in illegible runes. There was a big cupcake on either side of the door with giant hors d'oeuvre forks jammed in their pink frosting. He could sense that the Witch was on the other side of the door— the Hollow-like reiatsu was sharply more powerful as he approached. On the one hand, he was pleased to have gotten through the labyrinth unscathed. On the other... Isshin frowned.
Too easy.
Suspiciously easy, considering— considering the difficulty reaching the center of— of his daughter's labyrinth.
…He hoped he had sufficiently expressed his limitless rage toward the Incubators for putting his baby through that when he had written his time capsule contribution. He wanted to ensure that his past self would be just as wrathful as he felt without his girls having to suffer and without Ichigo and him having to live through the horror and grief.
Anyway. Back on track: The Witch beyond the door. Homura had obliquely implied the Witches varied in strength and ability to snare victims, so perhaps this Witch was just weak. Call him paranoid, but what he sensed beyond the door didn't feel weak. Tense, Isshin opened the door and stepped through it.
The area beyond the door was immense and dim. From what he could see, it was a wide plain littered with more gigantic desserts. When he craned his head back to look up, he saw distant white sparkles. Not liking this one bit, he adjusted his grip on Engetsu and cautiously stepped forward.
The cavern echoed with the sound of a cellophane bag of cookies being jostled as a cluster of multicolored sparkles in its center revealed a tea table and pair of chairs with ridiculously tall legs. Bright white icing oozed down the cavern walls and gradually lit Isshin's surroundings. The plain turned out to be the top of a giant frosted cake. Isshin glanced down and wiggled a foot. The surface was mostly firm, but had a mud-like slipperiness beneath a hard crust— buttercream. As the light improved, Isshin saw that dozens of the tall tea tables were scattered around the chamber at varying heights and angles.
Isshin snapped his head up as the sound of a cellophane bag being torn open came from above, accompanied by a burst of Hollow-like reiatsu. The lights brightened still more as a pink... mouse plushie? wearing a red and black cape, a black mantle with pink polka dots, and a loose-sleeved brown shirt fluttered down from the ceiling and landed on one of the chairs at the central tea table. It was definitely the Witch, but with its white face, rosy cheeks, and blue button eyes it looked like a stuffed animal his Yuzu would dote upon. If Isshin had to do a threat assessment on appearance alone, he'd rate it a zero on a scale of one to ten.
Engetsu's banked embers smoldered brighter. You thought it yourself: Suspiciously easy. Be careful.
Isshin grunted agreement and leapt up onto the nearest tea table. Wanting to get it over with quickly, he darted from table to table with shunpo until he was higher than the middle table and launched himself straight at the plushie, Engetsu's blade thrust out before him.
The pink plushie fell aside at the last moment and fluttered toward the ground like a fallen leaf.
Isshin looked at the Witch strangely as he turned in midair and flared his power through his blade to burn off the remains of the wooden chair, then slung a Getsuga Tenshō at the plushie. Its seemingly random fluttering twisted aside at the last moment. It plopped to the ground haphazardly, as though discarded by a distracted child. Isshin landed on a shorter table and threw a flurry of the same attack, herding the plushie toward a giant slice of cake. When it was trapped against the improvised wall, Isshin sped in close with a Shakkahō spell gleaming in his fist and punched the plushie's body. There was a small explosion and a sound of tearing fabric as the doll's simple, straight line of a mouth opened.
Engetsu's alarm had Isshin jumping backwards with shunpo before he even knew what he was reacting to. Something bulged forth from the toy's mouth, illogically enormous compared to that which contained it. First came a round white face with doily-like scalloped edges, mismatched eyes with multicolored rings in their irises, a conical nose like a party hat with a puffball on top, and two winglike moth antennae— one blue, one red. It was followed by a long black body that just kept coming.
At first Isshin thought the creature that emerged like a tasteless canned snake prank and ballooned hundreds of times larger than the little plushie was laughably cartoonish. Then it opened its mouth.
Teeth, teeth, and more teeth.
In one frozen moment of clarity, Isshin remembered the audio file Kisuke had sent him of Homura's initial interview.
"Then Mami fought the monster by herself. She tied it up and shot it but it didn't die— a bigger monster came out its mouth a-and bit Mami's h-head off and ate her body."
He had no way of knowing if this was the Witch that had eaten Mami Tomoe, but the mental image of the goofy face opening its mouth full of horrific teeth as the gentle girl in the missing persons posters stared at her oncoming death did something profound to him. Hardened him.
The Witch soared after Isshin as he kept moving backwards, crazed eyes tracking him as it followed. Isshin lobbed a Getsuga Tenshō into the cavernous mouth. The creature's head exploded, but the mouth peeled back farther as another face burst out of it. Isshin scowled and dodged around the chamber, stalling by forcing his pursuer to weave between the tea tables. He doubled back and slung a Getsuga Tenshō at the Witch's midsection, completely slicing it in two. Again, a new body emerged from the mouth of the damaged one.
So it behaved like a disturbing hybrid of nesting dolls and a hydra. Okay.
The Witch's silly face morphed into rage, apparently as frustrated as its opponent. It rolled its coils like a snake, swishing its tail hard to snap tea tables apart at their bases to be rid of obstacles. Isshin withdrew as far as he could, reassessing the cavern and considering his options as the Witch's destructive tantrum continued. He watched its undulating body and had an idea, but...
I'm not as fast as Yoruichi, Isshin mourned to his zanpakutō spirit.
Very few are, Engetsu said drily. We're fast enough, though.
Isshin's lips quirked humorlessly as he jumped into action. He appeared a distance in front of the monster and threw a weak Getsuga Tenshō in its face— just enough to get its attention. He led it on another chase, this time down low around the giant sweets— more solid obstacles than the tea tables. Isshin lured it to a cluster of Piroulines jutting up out of the buttercream floor like a copse of trees and drew it into a rising circle around them. It dogged his heels as they completed one revolution and dove after the shinigami as he dropped sharply left and down behind a Pirouline. The Witch plowed into its own long body face-first. Its eyes blinked comically as it wobbled in a daze and its party hat nose fell off. It didn't even see Isshin coming until the shinigami's blade was hilt-deep in the space between its eyes.
Isshin warily maintained his finishing strike pose and watched the Witch's body glow milky mauve-white and break apart into sparkles. His eyes were drawn back to his blade by a quiet gasp.
Engetsu's hilt was flush against the chest of a small girl with wavy white hair. Her wide eyes faded from the surreal multicolored rings of the Witch to natural hazel. She looked as surprised as Isshin felt.
He knew her face from the Mitakihara articles: Nagisa Momoe.
Nagisa's eyes teared up. Her mouth moved as if to speak but she broke apart and vanished, sparkling white reiatsu condensing into a white Soul Gem as the cave of sweets melted away.
§ x § x §
In an instant, Ichigo went from a stormy morning sky to a clear night sky dotted with acid green stars. The disorienting transition felt eerily similar to the many times Riruka and Yukio had admitted him to their Fullbrings, each of which had tossed him into a world completely controlled by its creator. That was disquieting enough without the creeping sense that he should know this place. That he recognized the feel of it at some level but couldn't quite place it. He had no memory of the bizarre cardboard town and its absurd number of telephone poles and high-tension power lines patrolled by arcing electricity. Still, the place gave him the creeps. Stranger yet, he could sense the unease in his usually implacable zanpakutō spirit.
Zangetsu?
Summer moonlight filtered through churning clouds. I do not like this place, the spirit commented in the younger tone of his bankai form. This place... I hate it. Strong words for such an aloof spirit.
Get the fuck outta here, King, snarled Ichigo's Inner Hollow. He sounded unnerved beneath his anger.
Well, that was ominous.
Uneasy, Ichigo looked around from his vantage point in the sky. "Can only do that if we defeat the Witch. I think." He spotted a menacing radio tower in the distance. "Well, if that doesn't scream 'villain's lair,' I don't know what does," he said drily.
Ichigo rolled his shoulders uncomfortably and descended to the city, leaping through the deserted streets by using the power poles as stepping stones to conserve energy. He had plenty to spare, of course, but better safe than sorry. There was still a massive enemy to fight when he got out of this place and Captain Unohana wasn't around to restore his reiryoku like she had during the war.
As he progressed, he began to pass clockwork birds perched on wires and cardboard buildings. They rustled their wings with a whirring of tiny gears and mechanically droned "piroripara pirirora" in lieu of birdsong. All at once, the flock mobbed him. The birds weren't particularly threatening on their own and were fairly simple to kill by slashing around with a Getsuga Tenshō charging his blade, but reaching talons and pecking beaks occasionally landed a hit and drew blood. The running battle left a trail of broken clockwork behind him as he bounced from roof to roof. Soon, he found himself on the last rooftops before the base of the tower. The remaining clockwork birds balked and retreated as though more afraid of the tower than the shinigami
The radio tower was made of classic metal latticework. It looked like a cheap knockoff of the Eiffel Tower, spindly bare-bones steel reaching high in the sky. Green electricity arced over the steel at random intervals. A large plasma ball full of green arcs of energy crowned the tower. Pink warning lights pulsed at major joints of the structure. Something bulky hung clustered in the hollow of the tower just beneath the plasma ball.
Ichigo frowned up at it. "What am I supposed to attack? Is the Witch inside? Is the ball the Witch? Is the whole tower the Witch? The one outside is gears and stuff..."
Don't matter, the Hollow said. Destroy the whole mess 'n get the fuck outta here. He gave Ichigo the distinct impression of a threatened cat with its hackles up. Disturbing as hell— the Hollow was usually eager to run into danger and gleefully cause mayhem. Still more disturbing, Zangetsu echoed the same feeling. It made Ichigo's skin crawl.
Eager to get out get out get out, Ichigo swung his arm back and charged his signature attack. He roared as he launched it and felt oddly relieved as the crescent of energy split the tower in half from top to bottom. The mood was short-lived. Thick electrical cords snaked out of the collapsing tower and reached in every direction like a monstrous collection of tentacles. Ichigo prepared another attack but was forced to defend when several sizzling cables whipped his way like anacondas. He dodged around and countered innumerable cables as his ears rang in the shrieking cacophony of fax machines, modems, and distorted human screams. His bankai-enhanced speed was all that kept him from being captured. It became obvious he needed to shake off the relentless cables if he wanted to figure out his next move.
Ichigo dove down into the cardboard city once more and zigzagged through the streets. The huge cables stabbed down from above, missing him and piercing the flimsy building façades. He thought he was doing pretty damn well until he rounded a corner and plowed headlong into a makeshift net of smaller power lines that had been diverted from their poles and woven together.
Trapped.
Ichigo flared his reiatsu and tried to wrest himself free, but it only made the cables tighten. His reiatsu was channeled away by the conductive wires. He was breathless when the big cables descended and dragged him skyward again. Zangetsu and the Hollow were furious at his binding, but before they could react, their triad of power hitched at a sudden sense of déjà vu.
"I got a call. I need to do something." He was drawn dreamily forward, heeding a call as undeniable as gravity.
Ichigo startled and blinked. His head swam. "The hell was—?" He cut himself off at what he felt from his dual spirits— they were both appalled, dread threading through their link. What the hell, guys?! No answer.
Within the sideways city of skyscrapers that formed Ichigo's Inner World, Tensa Zangetsu and the Hollow watched aghast as cracks spiderwebbed through the windows of the top three stories the eighteen-story building that held Ichigo's memories of the time they lay dormant in his soul. The sixteenth floor of that one building was the only place in their shinigami's mind they had been unable to access. Neither spirit knew what lay within. The pane of glass at the very center of the sixteenth level crumbled completely and left a gap. Green sparks fizzled in the dark hole.
The cables dragged Ichigo back toward the wreckage of the tower. The cracked plasma sphere sat atop the rubble, green and pink energy arcing angrily. The tower had been reduced to electrified, twisted metal. As he approached, half of the cables doubled back and reached down into the wreckage. They went taut and hauled up a jumbled mess of oversized electronics. Surge strips, CPUs, analog telephones, alarm clocks, keyboards, computer mice, speakers, cameras, cell phone chargers, fax machines, modems, routers— all were tangled around a particularly large smart phone whose screen portrayed a glowing red eye with a flat black iris on a black background. The eye rolled around and looked at Ichigo.
His own voice came as though from a great distance. "Here. I won't need it anymore."
Ichigo blinked rapidly. Guys? No reply. Just angry uncertainty.
A digitized female voice rang in his head. mine mine mine mine mine—
He was trapped in a Hollowfied girl's soul, ensnared in cable-snakes, and facing a tech trash heap that was using goddamn Siri to telepathically chant in his head because God knew he couldn't physically hear anything but screeching fax machines. And here he had thought his weirdness scale would forever be topped by Aizen turning into a butterfly monster.
mine mine mine mine mine—
"I'm not yours!" Ichigo snapped.
Silence. Even the fax and modem sounds died. Then every monitor and screen among the mess of electronics flared to life with static. The digitized voice said, i have wanted you for a long time and i got you i had you but you were taken from me
Ichigo's face screwed up in confusion. "What the hell are you talking about?! I've never been here in my life!"
Modems trilled angrily. almost you were the only one who came when invited and you were mine you bore my mark and they took you from me mine mine mine mine mine
Figuring out what the insane soul was talking about was hard when he was also struggling to break free of his binds.
"I won't need it where I'm going," he said calmly. He promptly climbed... something. It was gone.
those girls won't take you from me this time mine mine mine mine mine
Ichigo shook his head, trying to think clearly. Disoriented, he asked, "What girls?" aloud.
More shrill modems and faxes, this time accompanied with more agitated thrashing of cords. tHoSe gIrLs
The various screens snapped into focus on different video clips of girls. Ichigo froze, eyes wide.
His sisters.
Ichigo turned to face his sisters, looking their direction without really focusing on them. Everything seemed so remote and floaty and pleasant since that idea first wandered across his mind. Face cheerfully relaxed, Ichigo declared his destination. "Soul Society. Do you want to come with?"
Surveillance camera footage of Karin bearing a katana while wearing the red costume he had seen so briefly before she turned into a Witch right in front of him. Images of Yuzu in a frilly yellow costume, face cutely serious as she figured out how to wield a whip. The two of them bouncing around in metal latticework.
tHoSe gIrLs tHoSe gIrLs tHoSe gIrLs
"I understand if you don't want to. I know you don't need me anymore."
Ichigo felt dizzy and sick. Had he not been suspended by cables, he may have even fallen over. Within him, Tensa Zangetsu and the Hollow's horrified rage intensified as green sparks sped the breaking of the windows and released suppressed memories. They felt foreign and familiar at the same time.
Karin sprinted up to him and grabbed his left arm, screaming at him to stop and listen to her. Ichigo glanced at her, frowned, and shrugged his left arm. She didn't let go. Karin didn't understand. Karin wanted to stop him from moving on. He didn't have time for this. So he used his right fist to punch Karin square in the jaw. Karin shrieked and writhed on the ground, hands holding her bloodied face. It was sad that he had to do that, but it really couldn't be helped. He needed to go. The Voice that spoke soothing death in his head the same way Zangetsu used to advise him in battle said so.
Ichigo craned his head up and looked at the tower he planned to jump from. Jumping would solve all of his problems. The Voice had said so. Peacefully determined in a way he hadn't been in sixteen months, he grasped the ladder's first rung.
In Ichigo's Inner World, the entire top three floors of the cracking building exploded and launched shrapnel in every direction.
Ichigo dry-heaved, his vision fluctuating in dizzying time to the skull-busting headache that felt like he had taken several blows to the head. He had been lured, convinced to commit suicide, had cheerfully begun his attempt in front of his own sisters, and had attacked one of the precious people he had vowed to protect. He was only alive because his sisters had somehow risen to the challenge of saving him. They weren't costumed in his memories. But they were costumed on the screens showing their battle. Had they contracted because he—?
As Ichigo neared blacking out in shock, his blade's spirits leaped skyward in his Inner World with their faces twisted in rage.
They had failed to protect their charge. They had slept through the entire incident, deep in the abyss that had once been filled with Ichigo's power. While they were sleeping, their shinigami had been preyed upon, nearly devoured, had become a threat to that which he fought to protect, had been marked as property of another spirit. And they hadn't known.
tHoSe gIrLs were mean they were so mean they took you away when you were MINE and came back and hurt me tHeY ArE MeAn gIrLs i hOpE ThEy dIe DiE dIe DiE dIe
Unforgivable.
you are mine now mine mine mInE MiNe mInE
Like hell.
The dual spirits worked in concert. Tensa Zangetsu enveloped Ichigo's psyche in warm moonlight and dragged him deep within their rapidly flooding Inner World to protect his mind before he went mad. The Hollow rose to the surface of their shared soul, their body's eyes bleeding into black and gold as a bony mask formed on their face. The mask had scarcely completed itself when its teeth tore open to allow the Hollow to bellow a wordless challenge before screaming, "KING DON'T BELONG TO NO ONE BUT ME!"
The Hollow's reiatsu burst around him in a black and red nimbus, incinerating the cables that bound him. The fight that ensued was the very definition of "one-sided." The Hollow was vicious and relentless, a monstrous cross of berserker and tactician with a single-minded goal of destroying the thing that had tried to claim his shinigami as its own. The Witch threw everything it had at him, but he lobbed black Getsuga Tenshō crescents into each wave of oncoming electronics as the Witch fled behind them like a frightened spider. Dodging behind the tower wreckage did little good— the Hollow just sliced through girders like grass and kept coming. With his devastating speed and strength, the Hollow soon had the Witch whittled down to a sparking mess of tightly-knit broken electronics. The Hollow hauled his arm back and prepared to slice it in two. In a last desperate effort, the Witch made a cable whip from behind him and ensnare his sword hand at the apex of his backswing.
The cable wasn't strong enough to hold him back by a long shot but the very fact that the Witch dared to try to restrain him— cage him, claim him— pushed the Hollow to new levels of fury. The red stripes on the bone mask broadened as it grew forward-pointing horns and its mouth opened again. As it shrieked, red light gathered between its horns, condensed, and shot forward as a Hollow's signature attack— a Cero.
The ball of red light blasted straight through the giant smart phone's eye, glass and tech guts exploding violently as something solid launched out its back. The Hollow snapped the cord around his wrist and pursued the thing that had been knocked back. He found it writhing among ruins: a shifting, vaguely human-shaped mass of wires, circuitry, and electrical tape shedding green and pink sparks as it made a keening sound and bled brilliant green antifreeze.
Without a moment's hesitation, the Hollow shifted his grip on his sword and plunged it into the mass. He shrieked as he stabbed it over and over, not bothering to stop when the whole construct glowed green and formed a magical girl with bright green hair in two thick pigtails. The last thing the terrified soul saw was the demonic gold glow of the Hollow's eyes peering out of the dark holes of its mask as it shrieked and stabbed her face. Then she burst into green light and reformed into a green Soul Gem.
The Hollow cleaved the Soul Gem in two and howled in triumph as the labyrinth evaporated.
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A lightninglike surge of power sizzled in the sky north of Karakura and rapidly expanded into a glowing pink rectangle. It spread wide, its glow fading as a long series of shoji panels manifested in front of it. The shoji split in the middle, panels sliding to either side to form a large doorway. Black butterflies fluttered out over the shoulders of many high-ranking officers of the Thirteen Divisions.
The reinforcements had arrived.
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WITCH DATA
CHARLOTTE, The Witch of Sweets. Her nature is tenacity. She desires everything. She will never give up. Though she is capable of creating infinite amounts of any dessert she desires, she is unable to make the cheese that she loves most. One could easily catch her off-guard with a piece of cheese.
Minion: Pyotr, whose duty is to is to search for cheese.
Minion: Polina, whose duty is to nurse the cheese when the cheese is sick or hurt.
ISIDORA, the Digital Witch with a spiteful nature. She seems silent and harmless, but will viciously tear her enemies apart behind their backs. You'll know you've pushed her too far when she actually speaks to your face.
Minion: Gabriel, whose duty is to maintain the Witch's digital network. They do not want the Witch to punish them for a dropped signal.
This chapter was replaced with an edited version on November 1, 2019. Reviews with timestamps before that date refer to a slightly different version of the chapter.