LXXXXI. Dagger of the Mind
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
LXXXXI. Dagger of the Mind
"We're not surrendering," Tesla says in his rumbling basso - not to Tessai, but to you. His one eye gleams as he stares at you, as if challenging you to contest his words.
Does he distrust you? For your reputation, your crime in Las Noches, for the fact that the man he is trying to serve so obviously despises you?
Or is he… afraid? That you will leave him alone to die, saving your own skin like any good Hollow would?
You can't tell, because his face is a beast's, hiding all human feelings. Like your own mask of propriety, in a way.
You shake your head. Of course you're not surrendering. But you can't fight this man, not the two of you, not in your state…
Tessai walks upon the flood still pouring down the street, still fed by the storm of Cirucci's challenge to this world. It shows no sign of stopping, and in this you find comfort, as if she were still at your side. The ex-Captain's eyes are unreadable behind the shine of his glasses, his presence growing stronger and stronger by the moment. His pace is slow, deliberate - that of someone who is studying you intently, waiting for you to make a mistake driven by fear. It is not the pace of one giving you time to think. It is the inexorable advance of a flame building up to a bonfire, preceded by a wind of ash, all the secrets this man has forgotten and lost, more than you would ever know in the first place. It is choking your lungs, making your breath raspy and ragged, and beyond the ash is still that guttering flame. Each of his steps making you feel hotter and more oppressed, echoing louder with the whispers of the secrets it holds in its burning embrace. Is he even walking slowly? It is as if time stretches out a little more as he advances, leaving you a growing eternity to contemplate your doom.
Even outnumbered, even with an ally to protect, he still seems in total control. With an act of his will, this trance will break. One step will take him up to you and shatter your body with his mighty fists. Or he will simply raise his hand and speak a name, and you will be destroyed by the heavenly flame. You live at his mercy. How much power do you have left? Enough for maybe two Ceros, weak ones, and a handful of Balas. A pittance. This man will dip his hands into the pyre of his self, and pull forth your utter ruin.
Polilla's shadows whisper in your mind. Not one voice, not a self-willed entity, merely the deep, aching urge to survive. If you released her, you would reclaim so much more power… Enough? No, not with only Tesla at your side. But…
Your eyes wander past Tessai, further down the street, to where a young girl is kneeling before a dome of light.
You know what you would do, the instant you released, the instant you became her again, free of all your doubts. His power is too great to challenge, so Polilla would challenge his humanity. You would dash past Tessai as an intangible shadow to skewer the girl, too surprised to defend herself. You would prompt the ex-Captain to panic, turning his back on Tesla to save Orihime, and he would be struck down.
You shudder, clenching your clammy hands. No. You will not do this.
Ilforte. You look up at Tesla, nervously proposing the only solution. Grimmjow and his group are too far to reach, the Shinigami would land one of his binding spells long before you crossed the distance. He's your only hope, even if he would only add another Fraccion's strength to your little group. It's better than nothing.
Tesla ponders this for a moment, then nods back.
Ahead of you, Tessai stops walking. Ten yards of shallow river with a bed of asphalt and banks of concrete separate you from him, and these ten yards are his world. He no longer needs to wait for you to make a mistake, if he ever did. You stand in a wind that smells of ash and embers.
He opens his mouth…
***
Really, you don't even understand why she wants this lesson. Why would she seek to perfect her Cero, when she is one the only true witches of Hueco Mundo? The power she displayed with her sisters during the Exequias Contest is something far more terrifying than mere energy release.
Sung-Sun laughs in her sleeve, a little haughtily; you think she likes holding knowledge you don't have and delivering it like precious morsels. You don't begrudge her for it; after all, you're learning, and you have a long way to go walking across the sands to your destination.
"Is that what you think Cero is? A 'mere' energy release? Oh, it's true, yes - but only in the most technical of senses. The witch arts are… Yes, they are more complex. More refined. They are unnatural."
You tilt your head. An odd choice of word.
"An accurate one, nonetheless. They are an imposition of will upon the reishi and reiryoku which permeate oneself and the world. Shaping them to one's own design. Such an art can do… incredible things. Call upon the power of one's mistress. Manipulate the instincts within another Hollow. Conjure a beast out of nightmares…"
She shudders at that last one, but you're too busy thinking to ask about it. Instead you wonder if this is similar to the Shinigami's Kido - you've rarely seen it in action.
"Yes!" Sung-Sun claps her hands happily. "Quite! You see, the Shinigami are crippled, blind. They lack the innate relationship of a Hollow to her own power, the ability to simply output it as easy as one would breathe. They must codify, systemize, learn techniques by rote, prod sightlessly at the shape of power until it becomes a spell. And yes, this is what we Tres Bestias do - because there is versatility in such a craft. It can create a thousand possible outcomes, which one must painstakingly learn one by one."
You frown. This sounds like an extollation of the virtues of witchery, not an explanation of why you're taking her very far from any building of Las Noches to teach her the Gran Rey.
"Because, Nemo," Sung-Sun says with a smile, "all of that power is a sideways path. The Shinigami only have that path. They must learn their demon arts to achieve such effects. But the truth is that such an art - such a versatile power - will never be equal to the simple, instinctive, wild, untamed, visceral nature of Cero and Bala. They are a toolkit, and tools are indeed incredibly valuable. But if any given spell may be a hammer or a nail or a pocket knife..."
You have reached your destination, and make a motion for her to halt. Sung-Sun smiles, looking at you with a shine in her eyes.
"Cero is a sword, and Bala a dagger."
***
Tessai opens his mouth and raises his hand, his power surging in one instant, casting ochre shadows on the buildings around you.
"Hado Eighty-"
You punch the air. Your Bala hits him in the face before he can finish shaping his spell, giggling with the voice of child-like madness. His head wreathed in smoke, the ex-Captain stumbles backwards, swaying to keep his balance.
You don't let him recover. You drag power from every inch of your burning muscles. Your lungs feel like old, dried leather being pulled taut, your inner wounds like tears in the fabric of your body. You still find the strength for that Cero, a whirling vortex of grey phantoms splitting the waters of the street.
"Danku!" the man ahead shouts, and a brilliant wall of light is erected in the path of your attack. Your beam scatters against it, the explosion filling the street, shaking the walls, shattering three windows.
Mists immediately arise and curl in like a voracious maw, engulfing Tessai, mocking voices echoing from everywhere around him. You gasp for air and almost topple backwards, your chest burning.
Your Bala barely gave him pause. Your Cero never even reached him. That was your best shot. Time to run.
Tesla's enormous hand catches you, almost gently, and pulls you to him. You feel your insides jolt up against your skin, your eyes lose all focus as the world turns upside down - and then you are soaring across the sky, one leap from the boar-giant taking you above the houses, your stomach twisted by nausea and lanced by its old wounds at the same time. You hear the crack of thunder entirely too close, feel heat on your shoulder and smell the sharp scent of ozone - a lightning bolt of pure white misses Tesla by a few feet, disappearing in the clouds. A moment later you touch down into another street with a heavy thud. You feel the pulse of Tesla's Pesquisa, and he immediately leaps again, hopefully in Ilforte's direction.
Tessai is already in pursuit. The mists delayed him only a little, and he is now striding through the air on a trail of lightning, power burning at his fingertips. You try to warn Tesla, but he is entirely focused on the speed of his escape - when Tessai shouts a word of command, he is unprepared. Six rectangles of golden light manifest in the sky and slam into him; the giant's arm almost crushes your chest as it the bindings squeeze him, knocking the air out of you. There is a flower of light around both your bodies now, squeezing you like a vice, beauty that is agony.
This leaves you both sitting still in the air, a single perfect target. Your mind is wrenched back to that moment of dread when this very same spell bound you, helpless before the Shinigami - but you broke out of it then, with the strength of Cero Fantasma. Even now Tesla is doing the same, titanic muscles straining against the flower. Tessai knows this. He will not give you time to break out.
"Hado #73: Souren Soukatsui!"
Still a hundred yards away, Tessai slams both his palms into the air, and a torrent of blue flame erupts out of it, searing the sky, turning rain to vapor. It hits Tesla from the back and the giant lets out a desperate moan. For one horrible instant your nostrils are filled with the smell of roasted pork. Then the fire engulfs him and burns you as well. Tesla falls out of the sky, still clutching you, the ground rising at precipitous speed and then a great noise.
Your vision goes black for a moment. Your lungs are burning. You are crushed by hundreds of pounds of steel - no, not steel. A body. You shove Tesla's arm away, pull yourself out of the crater where he fell, stagger to your feet.
He shielded you with his body. Perhaps not an intentional gesture - the binding spell froze him with his back to Tessai and you held against his chest - but it saved your life; that spell would have killed you.
But not him. The giant groans deeply, and then that still, fallen mountain stirs again, pushes himself up on his giant fists, black-burned back still smoldering with blue embers, and faces the sky. He exchanges no words with you; no words are needed. In this moment you are each other's lifeline. This close, you can feel his reiatsu more strongly than Tessai's, a heady pulse of lifeblood, an oversized heart in a shell of carefully-crafted porcelain that has now ruptured, that is filling up its cracked vessels with visceral, inhuman strength, too long hidden. A perfect China figurine of an elegant squire, at the heart of which resided a writhing, squirming mass of muscle and animal strength, now free.
Perhaps there is hope yet.
Why are you not dead yet? You must have blacked out for a second, you are still both on the ground, and it takes Tessai only a moment to conjure such powerful spells…
"Sprinkled on the bones of the beast…"
The voice comes out muffled by the wind and rain, distant. Tesla is scanning the sky, seeming not to hear it. You realize only your bracelet lets you. You feel a surge of power gathering in the sky, a lightning about to strike, lightning stronger than that of the storm itself.
"Sharp tower, red crystal, steel ring!"
There in the sky. Tessai - much farther than he should be. Or no - the spell he cast was a directed torrent of flame. It must have hurled you and Tesla even further away from him than you were before. And he is flying in your direction, but not straight towards you, and though he is a distant shadow you think you can see his head turn left and right.
The storm. It is not a natural one, it was conjured by Cirucci's power. Now that she is gone, it is slowly fading, but it will be a long time before it fully disappears. In the meantime, not only does it provide concealment from rain and darkness, it is filled with spiritual energy, obscuring the mind's eye. Tesla is not seeing your enemy - only you can, through the bracelet's power.
And Tessai does not see you either, not yet. His spiritual senses must be keen, it will only be a moment until he does, and he is using that moment to charge up a spell that will no doubt finish you off the moment he spots you. Perhaps one chosen specifically to avoid destroying everything around you and killing the mortals in their homes.
"Move and become the wind…"
But you can see him.
You lay your hand on Tesla's arm, the other pointing at the sky. He understands. His one eye turns from brown to a deep crimson, a bead of light forming before it like a drop of blood, growing like a nascent sun. His Cero screams its way to the sky, aiming for the point you showed him.
It was too far - Tessai feels the surge of energy and flash-steps out of the way, though his motion is hasty, leaving him unbalanced, not helped by the storm-like surge of energy is he harnessing. He is now close enough that you can make out the faint grey wisps of Envolver still lingering on him.
"Stop and become-"
You didn't intend for that Cero to hit him. You only needed that moment of vulnerability. Your first Bala hits Tessai in the chest, the second in the face. Bindings build up on each other. Tessai falls down out of the air, lightning streaming out of his body as his spell unravels. You doubt this will do him any real injuries. He will recover in moments.
Could you open a Garganta now, escape for good? No - you could open it, hurl yourselves inside, but he'd catch up with you before you can close it. His magic might even help him hold it open. The race is all there is now, and then the fight.
Tesla's hand grabs you again, lifting you as if you were nothing more than a twig, and your stomach lurches as you are wrested from gravity's hold again. Your bones shake as you hit a rooftop, and then are gone again - in the distance you hear the scream of an angry parent and a spurned hunter, all hate and frustration. The storm begins to recede, pushed away by a fire its rain cannot put out.
You land again, with earth-shaking weight, mud spraying on all sides of Tesla. You push down the nausea and the vertigo. He does not leap again, and so you slip out of his grasp, stagger a little until you find your footing. Pain wracks your chest and you pause to cough up blood on your sleeve.
You stand in the middle of a labyrinth of ice.
This is some kind of construction site, you think. The ground is still rough earth, full of bumps and holes, now filled with water and turned to thick mud. The skeleton of a high-rise building towers over you, bones of steel reaching out to the sky. Cranes and bulldozers lie abandoned, faintly sinking into the now-soft ground. Even though it's as dark as night, you arrived in the middle of the day; there must have been workers, but they fled for shelter, discarding tools, hard hats, even food, some of which is still there, tossed around by the wind.
And the ice. Great walls of it, jagged like teeth, rising here and there, some connecting, some curving strangely, some swallowing up the steel beams of the unfinished building. Spikes from a frozen pillar that shattered, planted in the ground like fallen swords. The lightning casts your own reflection on the walls, making the half-open space feel claustrophobic. You take a step forward as Tesla stretches above you, his one eye squinting in a pain he refuses to express. There is still that damnable smell, with a tinge of burned hair to it. Sickening.
Someone stumbles ahead of you, turning the corner of an ice wall, and slumps against it. You freeze.
A Shinigami. A woman, short, dark-haired - bleeding heavily from her chest. She turns her eyes to you, and her mouth twists into a pained grimace. With one hand, she holds out a white sword, and your breath is taken away for a moment at the beauty of its make, its cold perfection
"Well," the Shinigami says with a strained voice, "at least he won't be able to brag he killed me on his own."
Another ice wall shatters. A beast of terrible bulk, white as bone, with horns as piercing as any spear, armored shoulders wider than its head, emerges in a shower of hail. It brings with it a smell of beastly musk and the dusk of an untamed savannah, of beasts taller and stronger than any predator, rulers of the tall grass. Within its skull is one open human eye; the other is closed by the deep burn mark that covers half of the beast's right flank. But that one eye sees you and pause in its charge, confused.
"Grantz-" Tesla begins.
Then Tessai comes hurtling out of the sky, his hand hurling a fireball. You and Tesla feel him coming at the last second and jump aside, the boar-man's Sonido shattering an ice wall while you merely leap over another, ignoring the burning of your lungs. The fireball hits the ground where you both stood an instant before, melting the ice around you in a second, licking at your shoulders and feet. You roll in mud to put out the flame, teeth clenched on your pain.
Your pursuer lands in the wake of his deflagration, huffing. You crawl out of the mud, feeling it slide off your uniform, and one hazy glance tells you Ilforte and Tesla are stepping back in fright, flame dancing in front of them.
"T-Tessai?" the woman stammers. "What are you-"
"Miss Kuchiki," the ex-Captain says, his voice rumbling with chaotic emotions, "you're wounded. Let me take care of these opponents."
"Like hell I'm leaving the guy who-"
"Miss Kuchiki!" Pain in his voice, now. Anger at her and… himself? "As long as you are here, I cannot risk my more powerful spells. Please. Leave."
A moment of hesitation, then the Shinigami woman nods. She pushes herself up from the support of her ice wall, lowers her sword, and jumps into the sky.
"You're not getting away!" the giant bull screams, launching himself after her - faster, less wounded.
Ilforte's mistake is to pursue a fleeing enemy when a new one has entered the fray, one whose power he does not know. It's a reckless move, and as he charges through the air to catch up with his prey, Tessai braces his hand and hurls a bolt of lightning, screaming a name you can't catch. The Fraccion is struck in full, its guard wide open, and the bolt explodes into a ball of crackling blue lightning stretching electric tendril all the way to the earth like some demented squid. Ilforte falls out of the air with a wave of mud and solid dirt, and the Shinigami woman escapes.
Tessai's mistake is to extend himself in a panicked move to save an ally when he is surrounded by two foes. You move as soon as he does, urging your body into motion, and as the lightning flees Tessai's hand you slam both your fists into the air, simultaneous Balas singing counterpoint to each other in a wailing dirge. They carve a path through the melting ice shards and hit the sorcerer's flank, just as wide open as Ilforte's. He staggers, spitting a curse, and you make a hook motion to hurl a third Bala at him, striking him in the face. His glasses shatter; his nose breaks. A minor injury, unlikely to impair him in any way.
But you've drawn blood at last. And five layers of Envolver now wrap around him, whispering silken ribbons becoming half-formed cocoons around his chest and limbs. You don't follow up with another; you have nothing to follow up with. You fall knees-first into the mud, gasping, blood backing up in your mouth, hands clawing at the ground. One more Bala, and you won't have strength enough left for even the weakest Cero you could possible manage - and you need one last card to play, even if you know one half-baked Cero won't bring this man down, not nearly.
But then Tesla slams his shoulder into Tessai, and you are spared his comeback. Two giants slide in the mud in a chaos of wrestling limbs, smashing walls of ice on their path, shimmering shards of frost casting lightning-flashes on their moving shadows. Their blows echo like pounding hammers, louder than the storm's thunder, a steel factory in motion mere feet away from you.
You push yourself up, again, like always, just one more step, forget the pain, forget your lungs, forget how little power you have left, how little you matter in this fight now. You stagger amidst the field of broken ice, find your way to the colossal body lying prone. Ilforte, lying on his flank. Still breathing, thank god.
...Holy Virgin, he isn't even incapacitated. The lightning bolt hit him in his left shoulder, a humongous pauldron-like extrusion, perhaps meant to help him ram straight through fortress walls, or to protect his vitals from ranged attacks from ahead as he closed the distance with his enemy. Why do you think these things? They're irrelevant - you blink. Your head is light. Reiryoku burnout catching up with you.
The lightning bolt hit his shoulder and blew it up. It should have killed him, would have if it had hit anywhere else, but that shoulder is several inches of bone-like armor already harder than steel before Hierro compressed layer upon layer of reiatsu into it. It's half-gone now - there is a hole in it the size of your chest, bone shards scattered in the mud around him - but beneath you see flesh, blood, a deep laceration wound.
Ilforte's one good eye opens to stare at you. He lets out a low chuckle.
"I was doing much better before you showed up, sister, I must admit. Did you really have to bring that monster to my duel?"
You smile awkwardly. Behind you, Tesla's reiatsu surges, a wave of feral strength washing over your shoulders, and the whispering flame responds in turn. The boar screams in rage. You don't have the time to look at this fight. You can't influence its outcome.
Except in one way. You pluck the hem of your uniform, and let the strands of it reveal themselves to your mind. You pick one, and pull it out, a thin, perfect thread, reinforced with weeks of attunement to your reiatsu. You take a needle out of your inner pocket - and stab it into Ilforte's shoulder. He screams, more in surprise than in pain, to his credit.
"I have to compliment… your composure… when a Captain has come for us," Ilforte says haltingly as you tug at his skin to pull it together.
He can't see how terrified you are, you realize. How powerless you feel. And you can't tell him - if there is any comfort he can find in your seeming confidence, it is the least you can do for him.
You have done this work too many times to count, practicing on yourself for the day you knew you might need to save Cirucci in the field. Opening up your own body, combining your mastery of weaving and your growing medical expertise - self-taught through self-punishment - to weave a thread through a wound in mere seconds, stitching it with supernatural strength. You only ever had to do it to another once, when you and Cirucci came home, after Nnoitra's death. You fumbled then, a little, so unused to operating on another body. You let that memory guide you now, and there is no more clumsiness.
You pull away from Ilforte after a handful of seconds, and he looks at you surprised. He tests the rotation of his shoulder, and winces only a little. Brilliant thread, shining faintly with grey light, keeps the wound closed.
"So," he says, and you think he is smiling behind his mask, "at least I can go die without making a fool of myself."
"Hyapporankan!" shouts a booming voice behind you. You turn on instinct to see Tessai manifest a rod of silvery light in his hand and slam it into Tesla's chest - and then that rod multiplies, dozen upon dozen of glowing energy hafts hurling him back until his back hits a truck. The rods rain down on him, pinning him like a bug, piercing the vehicle around him, surrounding him like a thicket of thorns. Tessai's hand glows with more summoned power, a follow-up spell on his stunned opponent -
"Thank you," Ilforte says - and then laughs, and laughs, and erupts out of the crater like a volcano of flesh and bone, knocking you on your back with the sheer strength of his charge. Tessai turns barely in time, redirects his spell, but he is under the curse of your Bala. His reaction is just not quite fast enough. Ilforte hits him like an avalanche, horn first, and the hand releases its surge of destructive energy above the bull's shoulder, swiping the mid-section of the building-skeleton, sending a shower of steel beams down into the mud with a cataclysmic cacophony.
Even so, the old man holds his ground. His two hands grasp the beast's horns and push against it, force its course to slow down, prevent Ilforte from trampling him. Their feet all dig into the damp ground, drawing deep furrows, soon filled with rain. Tessai roars with fury, two forces of nature locked in a deadly embrace. Lightning backlights them, making them seem like shadow-play. You can see Tessai's eyes now, without his glasses, brown and hurt and too human, straining in effort, pain and anger.
You see so much now that he is fighting others, that you no longer have anything to bring to their aid, that your head is too dizzy for you to bother forcing down your mind's eye. You had been too preoccupied to consider the fact that he bears no sword, but it makes sense now - his inner flame pulses throughout his body with each heartbeat, and has no recipient, no bounded weapon in which to pour. "Captain of the Kido Corps" - a Shinigami, yes, but not one of their numbered divisions. Perhaps he never had a Zanpakutou, training only his magic and his body. It would explain why a sorcerer has the strength to wrestle Tesla and Ilforte mano a mano.
But there is more. You understand now - the eldritch whispers spoken by his flame, they are not meant for the world. They are murmured to him; and he does not hear them. The flame is too deep within him, lonely and in the dark. The weight of a century separates him from it, and in that century the flame has receded, leaving a wasteland of burnt-out grey ash around it.
He has not grown weaker, no. His reiatsu is still as strong as it ever was. He is still capable of the same spells, the same heights of power he once could. What he lost was the ease, the connection. The ability to conjure these spells with one thought, one word. Now he has to chant the incantations, he must dive within his own self, plunge his hands into the flame, dredge out bits of wisdom. He is as strong as he ever was, only… slower. Clumsier.
An old man.
Bala Envolver doomed him, you realize. It makes him slow enough that Ilforte and Tesla could engage him in close combat instead of letting him bind and shoot them from afar. His force is immense, but he cannot bring it to bear against them.
But he still has the power of a Captain. His resilience is immense. He has survived Ilforte's goring horn, and eventually Envolver will dissolve - and then the tables will turn. The fact that he is forced to use lesser spells while still having the fathomless reserves of a Captain means that he can keep up his storm of weaker spells for ages more.
As you understand this, Tessai lets go of Ilforte's horns and reaches past them, grabbing him by his mighty shoulders - digging his fingers into the freshly-stitched wound, making the bull yelp and miss a step - and then he pivots his feet, twists his back, and turns the bull's own speed and strength against himself. He heaves him into the air and hurls him into foundations of the high-rise, collapsing it entirely at last. Ilforte is buried under a mountain of steel.
An entire truck hurtles through the rain, silvery rods still planted in its side, and Tessai turns to face it. He plants his feet in the ground, braces his arm, and hits with both palms, deflecting the projectile. Then comes the howling red fury of Tesla's Cero, and the sorcerer raises one hand.
"Danku!"
Again Cero is defeated by his shield of light. But Tesla has seen this stratagem already, and anticipated it. He is already charging Tessai as the shield dissolves, raising his fists to pummel him into the earth. With a grunt of pain Tessai waves his hand, unfurling a great rope of light and throwing it at Tesla; the rope coils around him in an instant and the giant falls to his knees, arms stuck against his chest, unable to move. Tessai begins to gather power for his next spell -
Tesla's one eye shines a deep, malevolent red, and the thing that comes next is neither quite Cero nor Bala, but halfway between both, a cursed glare, the evil eye of myth. You see neither beam nor bolt, only the light in his eye, a dim reflection on Tessai, and the ex-Captain screams as he hurls into the upturned truck he deflected a moment ago, hitting it with his shoulders and slumping down.
Tesla stands up, trying to force his way out of the bondage. Ilforte bellows, his mighty shoulders sending steel beams tumbling as he makes his way out of the wreckage of the building. You approach tentatively, your right hand flexing unconsciously. The bindings of Envolver are unraveling - should you risk another, throw away the chance of a last Cero to give your two allies a better shot?
A halting, strained breath. Words stained by blood dripping on a man's lips and chin.
"Freeze, O river…"
Any spell that Tessai bothers chanting is one that can end this fight on its own. The moment for coordination is past. Ilforte charges the sorcerer, obscuring your line of fire. Again Tessai receives him head-on, but he is weaker now and his back is against the truck; the bull pins him, squeezing a cry out of his lips, crushing him against the steel mass.
"...and let me walk on a path…"
Power. Power unlike anything you've seen before flowing out of him. The occult flame no longer whispering but laughing madly, for it has been heard at last. Spells unused in a century weaving themselves into the sorcerer's body, burning his flesh and soul.
No. You have felt such power once before. By your own hand, when the Gran Rey tore apart the fabric of space itself. This is the power that bends the laws of reality, the forbidden arts.
Tesla shouts in triumph as the rope of light finally shatters. He takes one step towards Tessai, ready to add his strength to Ilforte and crush him, and it is too late.
"...of frozen starlight."
Time stands still.
You are locked in a prison of your own flesh in a world without wind, where every raindrop is a floating diamond, for only a moment, as Tessai slowly stands. Then even your mind is overcome by the spell, and all you know is blurred motion too fast to comprehend, blinding light, searing heat, and crushing force.
You are on the ground, staring at the sky, your eyes open and your mouth agape, a great cut across your chest, the mid-section of your jacket burnt off. Pain only comes after an instant, twitching your body in a spasm, your hand raking the mud.
There is no more battlefield. The vehicles have been hurled across the air, the steel beams tossed by the wind of some instant explosion with such strength that they are now planted at the far end of the construction site like twisted, half-melted trees. Glimmering constructs of reishi bind Tesla and Ilforte's bodies to the ground, dozens of yards from you. You push on your elbows to raise your back, teeth clattering with sheer shock, eyes twitching.
Ahead of you, Tessai stands in the rain, strong hands clutched into fists. For a moment, he seems an apparition of utter terror, a god of magic who just made all of your efforts moot in an instant. Even the grey wrappings around his limbs, your curse on him, seem like the shining garments of a deity. His head slowly turns, looking at each of your defeated allies, their reiatsu fading by the moment, neither of them even trying to break out of the bindings - you are not sure they are even still conscious. Then his eyes stay on you and you freeze, unable to breathe.
Then he moans in pain and bends his chest, coughing up blood, and you hear how ragged his own breathing is.
"Six Kido spells cast in the frozen time… Damn it. I thought I could last long enough to also bind you. That chantless Zangerin took more out of me than I thought."
You force yourself to inhale and exhale, willing your body through actions it should normally take on its own, but your body is only fear now. You are crawling away, pushing on your elbows to drag your limp legs one inch at a time, without even thinking it.
The giant wipes the blood of his mouth and pinches the bridge of his nose. Greenish light crackles between his fingers, resetting the bone. He passes his hand over his chest, where Ilforte's horn gored him, and the bleeding stops. Healing Kido. Another thing in his arsenal you had managed to keep him from using.
The silken cocoons of Bala Envolver finally crack, fading in the wind in moments, and Tessai rolls his shoulders in his hands, testing his mobility. You are still crawling. Still staring. Still willing yourself to breathe by force of will.
He crosses the distance between you in a blur, towering over you. And he has yet more power to call upon, you can tell. The flame in him is content, purring like a lazy housecat, its whispers more coherent. He hears it again; he begins to remember, his old skills reforged in a crucible of war.
You will not stand up to him, not even with your Resurreccion, not now that you are alone. But with his wounds, could it let you escape? Leaving Ilforte and Tesla behind…
"It's over," he says, and it feels as if he were talking more to himself than to you. "It's over."
Power surges in his hand, and you understand he will kill you now.
...why?
That mad, absurd question comes to you in a flash of insight born of panic, terror and desperation. Why would he kill you now, when you are utterly at his mercy, when you are the thief who stole Urahara's files, when you have incredibly valuable knowledge, Tessai knows it, and he is a master of the binding arts who could render you powerless with ease now that he has no other opponents to care about? Why would he kill you now when…
...the girls were trying to take you alive…
You lift your hand off the ground, the very last of your reiatsu bleeding into your arm, past your skin, into the threads of the Memory Glove, and you fire your final Cero, the weakest of all those you've launched today, yet also the quickest, barely taking the time to shape the power before unleashing it from your fingertips. It stretches out from your fingertips like five streams of grey wind curling together into one vortex, and it screams with Ururu's own voice and pain.
Tessai steps back, slashing the air with his hand, reshaping the power he'd gathered for his killing spell with a second's thought. Again he raises that barrier of light, deflecting all the power of your Cero. It never reaches him, never burns him, not even a little.
But the light sees him, and the mists reach out past his shield and brush his cheek with a gentle caress. His shield fades, and the mist rise between you, engulf the rain-soaked devastation of the battlefield. You do not hide in them. You could hardly stand, much less evade anything. You fall on your flank, wheezing, hair caked with mud.
All you can do now is watch.
Between the giant and you forms the shape of a man, unkempt hair and floppy hat and long coat framing a featureless face.
"You think illusions are going to stop me?" Tessai roars. "I have seen how you fought Ururu - I know your tricks!"
The face of the hat-wearing man is split as if by a knife, a wound becoming a smile.
"It is not the illusions that hurt, Tsukabishi," says Kisuke Urahara, not unkindly. "It's the truth they show you."
"And you stop and listen to them," drawls another man from Tessai's right - the one you saw fly away from Cirucci's rooftop, but with longer hair and half a Hollow mask over his face, dripping like molten wax onto his chest, "because you know everythin' they say is true, and you deserve it, and you hate yourself for it, and welcome your punishment."
With a grunt, Tessai swipes his fist at the new apparition, scattering it - and just as when Ururu did the same, it only reforms again.
"Because you know your fault," the Urahara of mists says sadly. "There was a war coming, and you looked away."
Tessai clasps his hands, blue-white motes gathering around them.
"Bakudo #53, Evil-Cleansing Mandala -"
"Will you cleanse me away, too?" says a child's voice, and Tessai falters. Ururu stands before him, bleeding. Tessai reaches out with one shaking hand, and she steps back.
"You thought you could retire," Urahara says behind him. "That because you were now an exile, a renegade from Soul Society, you could abdicate your responsibilities. Hold a simple store, purify the local Hollows now and then, and eventually, raise a child."
"But the war was coming," the half-man masked whispers. "It was always coming, and you knew it. And because you gave up, because you pretended to yourself that you could just be an old man, you committed the sin of all old men."
"You left the next generation to fight your war," Ururu says, her eyes slowly turning into the dead pupils of her Slaughter Mode. "You let that burden fall to us."
"And when they did," Urahara says, "and got hurt, could have been killed, you lashed out in wrath at those who hurt them, but that too was a lie."
"Your true anger was aimed at yourself," the half-Hollow says.
"I only fought because you would not," Ururu whispers, fading into mists.
Tessai howls in an agony beyond any of his physical wounds. He raises his hands to the sky, screaming, weeping, reiatsu billowing around him, scorching the mud to hardened clay, tears streaming down his cheeks.
"It's not true! I tried to keep you out! I tried to fight this battle-"
"Too little, too late," Urahara says with a mirthless chuckle. "I spent a century preparing for these events, but you did not. You forgot. You let it go. It is too late now to fix it."
An inarticulate cry escapes Tessai's lips as he clutches his heart.
"It's all right," Urahara whispers, reaching out with one mist-hand trailing faint vapor, and touching his cheek. "I am your friend. I should have seen this coming, I should not have let you make this mistake. We both share the blame."
He finds the strength at last. The giant claps his hands with a sound like thunder, light erupting from them, forming a great mandala of blue-white light, and that symbol turns in the air, shedding light that scours away the mist. The two mist-men close their eyes and smile sadly, and dissolve in the wind.
The mists fade, and Tessai finds you standing in front of him, hunched over, clutching your bleeding chest with your left arm, legs wobbling.
You reach out with your right arm, no strength at all in your hand, and touch his hand.
***
"-training is not complete."
You fume as Urahara explains to the young ones how terrible their idea is. You're all standing in one of the shop's basement rooms, those leading to the great training space below - and without anyone doing so consciously you've fallen into two sides, you with Urahara and Yoruichi on one, the teenagers on the other, shouting in unison. Arms folded against your chest, you give them a scolding glare, but it seems only to make Tatsuki bolder.
"Our training will never be 'complete' enough for you! We need to actually get out there and fight if we are ever to learn what it's really like, and the Arrancars are right here! Ichigo is probably being an idiot and flying off to fight them alone as we speak!"
"That is very nice, Tatsuki dear," Urahara says with mock kindness, "but Ichigo has been doing this for a lot longer than you have."
"Pfft, yeah, like, less than a year?" Tatsuki scoffs.
"That's a pretty long time when the point is that we're still teaching you the basics," Yoruichi says from her perch - sitting on top of a bookshelf like the cat she is. "I mean yeah, you got them down pretty well, but your reiatsu is too low, all of you - and we've barely started teaching you proper teamwork to make up for it."
"That's not true!" Orihime jumps in, doing her best to sound determined. "I've been doing teamwork since we first went to Soul Society! I'm the most senior here! I have been in lotsa fights!"
"Orihime, darling," Urahara sighs, "you need teamwork because you're so good-natured that after three weeks of me doing my level best to be the most infuriating, painful, dastardly teacher you've ever seen, you still can't muster enough killing intent to hurt me."
"But I can't be angry at you because I know you're being a jerk for my own benefit! Real enemies will be different!"
This is going nowhere, and you're getting increasingly frustrated at their stubbornness. Why won't they accept the wisdom of their elders? You sigh.
"Enough. Ururu," you say, your voice a low rumble. "Don't you remember the last time you went out? You could get hurt again - you are not ready. You can only control one level of your limited release, and by the way I still think trying to harness Slaughter Mode is a terrible idea, and the prototype Anti-Hierro Armor you have is incomplete-"
"She'll be there," Ururu says quietly, instantly raising the hair on your back. "I know it. I… I have to find her."
"Why?" You exclaim. "She could have killed you! She's one of the enemy!"
"But she didn't," Ururu says. "I attacked her first. I was not in control. I tried to kill her. And she still stopped and helped me, even though that almost got her caught. I need to see her again."
"Yes, well, I myself am quite keen on having a chat with our little thief," Urahara says. "But I can just capture her myself. There is no reason to risk yourselves like this."
"But we-" Tatsuki begins to shout, and you huff, flaring your power, silencing her in an instant. All the girls look at you, shocked. You let your reiatsu flare with your anger at their childish recklessness, deliberately and slowly weighing down on them.
"This," you say. "This is the kind of power you might be facing. There will be Espada among the assaillants, and we are not letting you risk your lives against them. This argument is over. You will stay here, and we will go. End of the discussion."
"He's right," says the giant in the corner, the last of the trainees, always so quiet. "I hate it. I want to help Ichigo. But we're not ready. Just close. We should wait."
Tatsuki looks at him with a look of betrayal, and then crosses her arms in a fit of childish pique, sulking. You sigh at this, but she makes no further argument. Instead she looks to Ururu and Orihime, and both of the girls nod, a silent agreement between them. Good. You would hate to have to lock them up to keep them from getting involved. You only want them to be safe, need them to be safe, especially Ururu, who is only a child. The three girls turn their backs and leave the room, followed by Chad-
-and you hear a clicking sound.
Your heart drops in your chest. You feel power rising, a hum in the walls around you, and your eyes widen behind your glasses as your previous anger turns to dread.
"Tatsuki, daaarling, what did you just do?" Urahara says with a very wide, very fake smile. At the edge of the door, all three girls turn to you, and Tatsuki's hand slides off a button in the wooden panel.
"Oh, nothing. I just tripped one of the Kido traps you built in case the thief ever came back."
"You little-" Yoruichi shouts, leaping from her shelf, but it's too late - great blades of spiritual energy slide across the door, barring the way, just as the walls begin to glow with power.
"What have you done!" you shout, trying to suppressing the sudden twist in your gut, the raw panic. Failing. Your eyes fall on Ururu, and she stares back at you with deep sadness.
"Tatsuki," Chad says, the one word conveying unfathomable depths of worry.
"Oh, don't be dramatic," Tatsuki says with a shrug. "You built those; you'll be out in a jiffy. Just… Not quick enough to keep us from getting to Ichigo and Ururu's thief."
"Tatsuki, you idiot!" Urahara screams, finally losing his composure and waving his cane wildly around. "The thief has some kind of memory dredging ability! I didn't put any way for me to disable the traps from the inside because she could just divine it!"
"Well," Tatsuki says, "that sounds like a you problem right now."
"S-sorry mister Urahara! I promise we'll make you proud!" Orihime says, waving her hand. Ururu says nothing. She gives you one last look, smiles weakly, and turns away - and then the girls are gone. Chad looks at the stairs, distraught, and turns to you.
"Go," you say, voice strangled. "They need all the help they can get until we break out."
The giant nods, once, and then leaves. You turn to Yoruichi and Urahara.
"Well," the Shihoin princess says, "we underestimated their cunning."
"And overestimated their wisdom," Urahara grumbles. "Tessai? Break us out of here."
You want to shout at them, to scream until the walls come down, to blame them for what just happened, but the truth it's that just as much your fault for not seeing it coming, and your anger is merely at their calm, their composure when children and running towards death.
But they're right to be calm. You must be too, if you are to save them. You breathe in, wipe your glasses, and begin the weaving of Kido.
You stagger back.
Tessai falls to his knees, hands in the mud, tears washing away in the rain.
You understand now. You smile weakly, open your mouth. Your overstressed lungs rebel as you breathe in. You rein in the cough, spit black phlegm on your glove. Breathe in again. Each word is harsh on your tongue, but harder still on Tessai.
"It's not about me."
It was only ever about him. About the fault he could not articulate. About letting himself become an old man, about abandoning that war without accepting that others would have to fight it instead of him. About losing control - worse. About having given up control. Seeing the world move on and knowing he could not hold it back and that it was his fault, that he let this happen. That he let the burden fall upon others, and could not simply take it up again when he finally saw his mistake.
He looks at you, eyes red, lips twitching, unable to speak. He could destroy you in one blow now, you have no power left. But instead he is on the ground and you are standing above, clutching your wound, looking at him with sadness and pity.
You are not his redemption. Killing you won't make anything better. You're sorry you had to hurt anyone. You spared their lives, but you know it doesn't make it better. You're sorry you didn't understand what drove Ururu. She is a child, and could not articulate the feelings that brought her to fight you, and you did not see past her offer of surrender. Perhaps if Cirucci had not been fighting Ichigo, if all of them had not felt they needed to help their friend, you could have talked. You could have understood each other.
Perhaps you still can, some other day.
But his hate is not aimed at you. The only thing he hates is how the world has slipped between his fingers, and how he knows it is his fault. In the end he grasped at the fabric of time itself, because time is what wounded him, time is the enemy to which he had to surrender. But he could not turn it back. Only hold it still, for a second, and in that second he could touch again the power he used to hold as his own.
And then that second passed, and he was only himself again, naked before the mists as they revealed his soul to him.
Killing you won't fix his mistakes.
"You're still…" He says, words broken up by his sobs. "...Still my enemy. Arrancar. Aizen's servant."
Yes. You're still a soldier in a war waged against his kind. If he lets you live, you will fight against his side again. Perhaps even Ururu, or any of her friends, Orihime or Tatsuki or Chad or whoever that white-clothed boy is.
But even in war there can be mercy, and truce, and compassion. You've tried to show it to others, even if just a little. It doesn't make you feel better about yourself - you still hurt children who did not understand the stakes. You still did terrible things. Your allies are fighting somewhere else, and perhaps they did kill. Ilforte and Tesla would have killed their opponents without hesitation - but they did not get that chance.
This small side of the war, this one battle, can end without deaths.
He should just go be with his daughter, if that is what she is to him.
"She'll come after you again," he says, clenching his fists. "I will not see her killed, because she ran into another one of your kind, or because your 'compassion' ran out."
You understand. It is all about the girl for him. You must respect this.
You reach into your jacket, finding a small item, a memento you kept close to you, a reminder not to forget the one you pushed away. You pull it out, and let it fall to the ground before Tessai.
It's a glossy card advertising a coffee shop not far from this town. The last place you met with Esmeralda and Riruka. Perhaps you can meet there, you and Ururu and Tessai as her guardian, and talk. On neutral grounds. You know a third party that could mediate. You are at war, but even in war there can be diplomacy. Maybe you can convince her that a child has no place on the front lines, and that there is no mystery about you, no secret to uncover.
For a moment there is silence. Then Tessai reaches down, plucks the card out of the mud, rain glistening on its soft plastic.
He places it in his own pocket, and looks away.
The rain is beginning to let up. There has been no flash of lightning for a moment now, and the wind is more gentle. Soon there will be blue skies again.
The bindings spell on Tesla and Ilforte dissolve like salt in the rain, and as they do, so do the two Arrancars' Resurreccion, bony armor eroding like a mountain on fast-forward, fur and flesh melting like wax. You walk with a limp, one staggered step at a time, until you reach Tesla and pull his slim human body over your shoulder. Your wounds seem to tear up with each steps you take to reach Ilforte, but reach him you do. Then you slide your hand across the air, and the world unravels. Darkness welcomes you.
You turn one last time to Tessai, and in his eyes are sorrow, anger and doubt. Even now he knows he will regret letting the three of you go; but perhaps he would regret killing you more.
Death is forever, when you have already died once. Something that cannot be taken back. Wounds heal. Scars fade. You have left others to live and have been left to live in turn. All this will be gone, washed away with the rain.
You pull Tesla and Ilforte into the Garganta, and it closes with a sigh.
For the first time, the shadows' whispers are not malicious. They murmur in respect. For you did as shadows do, and whispered in another's mind as they do in yours, and turned their resolve to bitterness and pain.
They welcome you.
Somewhere, armies clad as men do battle. You cannot influence the outcome of that fight.
But you can choose which warrior to follow.
[ ] Luppi, the Betrayer, who contends for the nature of love.
[ ] Grimmjow, the King of Hunts, who drags the weak screaming to glory.
[ ] Urahara, the Candyshop Owner, whom even gods fear.
This is not a tactics vote. It only influences which point of view you follow. It will not be the entire update. "Ulquiorra" is not a valid write in.
There is a moratorium of two hours on this vote.
"We're not surrendering," Tesla says in his rumbling basso - not to Tessai, but to you. His one eye gleams as he stares at you, as if challenging you to contest his words.
Does he distrust you? For your reputation, your crime in Las Noches, for the fact that the man he is trying to serve so obviously despises you?
Or is he… afraid? That you will leave him alone to die, saving your own skin like any good Hollow would?
You can't tell, because his face is a beast's, hiding all human feelings. Like your own mask of propriety, in a way.
You shake your head. Of course you're not surrendering. But you can't fight this man, not the two of you, not in your state…
Tessai walks upon the flood still pouring down the street, still fed by the storm of Cirucci's challenge to this world. It shows no sign of stopping, and in this you find comfort, as if she were still at your side. The ex-Captain's eyes are unreadable behind the shine of his glasses, his presence growing stronger and stronger by the moment. His pace is slow, deliberate - that of someone who is studying you intently, waiting for you to make a mistake driven by fear. It is not the pace of one giving you time to think. It is the inexorable advance of a flame building up to a bonfire, preceded by a wind of ash, all the secrets this man has forgotten and lost, more than you would ever know in the first place. It is choking your lungs, making your breath raspy and ragged, and beyond the ash is still that guttering flame. Each of his steps making you feel hotter and more oppressed, echoing louder with the whispers of the secrets it holds in its burning embrace. Is he even walking slowly? It is as if time stretches out a little more as he advances, leaving you a growing eternity to contemplate your doom.
Even outnumbered, even with an ally to protect, he still seems in total control. With an act of his will, this trance will break. One step will take him up to you and shatter your body with his mighty fists. Or he will simply raise his hand and speak a name, and you will be destroyed by the heavenly flame. You live at his mercy. How much power do you have left? Enough for maybe two Ceros, weak ones, and a handful of Balas. A pittance. This man will dip his hands into the pyre of his self, and pull forth your utter ruin.
Polilla's shadows whisper in your mind. Not one voice, not a self-willed entity, merely the deep, aching urge to survive. If you released her, you would reclaim so much more power… Enough? No, not with only Tesla at your side. But…
Your eyes wander past Tessai, further down the street, to where a young girl is kneeling before a dome of light.
You know what you would do, the instant you released, the instant you became her again, free of all your doubts. His power is too great to challenge, so Polilla would challenge his humanity. You would dash past Tessai as an intangible shadow to skewer the girl, too surprised to defend herself. You would prompt the ex-Captain to panic, turning his back on Tesla to save Orihime, and he would be struck down.
You shudder, clenching your clammy hands. No. You will not do this.
Ilforte. You look up at Tesla, nervously proposing the only solution. Grimmjow and his group are too far to reach, the Shinigami would land one of his binding spells long before you crossed the distance. He's your only hope, even if he would only add another Fraccion's strength to your little group. It's better than nothing.
Tesla ponders this for a moment, then nods back.
Ahead of you, Tessai stops walking. Ten yards of shallow river with a bed of asphalt and banks of concrete separate you from him, and these ten yards are his world. He no longer needs to wait for you to make a mistake, if he ever did. You stand in a wind that smells of ash and embers.
He opens his mouth…
***
Really, you don't even understand why she wants this lesson. Why would she seek to perfect her Cero, when she is one the only true witches of Hueco Mundo? The power she displayed with her sisters during the Exequias Contest is something far more terrifying than mere energy release.
Sung-Sun laughs in her sleeve, a little haughtily; you think she likes holding knowledge you don't have and delivering it like precious morsels. You don't begrudge her for it; after all, you're learning, and you have a long way to go walking across the sands to your destination.
"Is that what you think Cero is? A 'mere' energy release? Oh, it's true, yes - but only in the most technical of senses. The witch arts are… Yes, they are more complex. More refined. They are unnatural."
You tilt your head. An odd choice of word.
"An accurate one, nonetheless. They are an imposition of will upon the reishi and reiryoku which permeate oneself and the world. Shaping them to one's own design. Such an art can do… incredible things. Call upon the power of one's mistress. Manipulate the instincts within another Hollow. Conjure a beast out of nightmares…"
She shudders at that last one, but you're too busy thinking to ask about it. Instead you wonder if this is similar to the Shinigami's Kido - you've rarely seen it in action.
"Yes!" Sung-Sun claps her hands happily. "Quite! You see, the Shinigami are crippled, blind. They lack the innate relationship of a Hollow to her own power, the ability to simply output it as easy as one would breathe. They must codify, systemize, learn techniques by rote, prod sightlessly at the shape of power until it becomes a spell. And yes, this is what we Tres Bestias do - because there is versatility in such a craft. It can create a thousand possible outcomes, which one must painstakingly learn one by one."
You frown. This sounds like an extollation of the virtues of witchery, not an explanation of why you're taking her very far from any building of Las Noches to teach her the Gran Rey.
"Because, Nemo," Sung-Sun says with a smile, "all of that power is a sideways path. The Shinigami only have that path. They must learn their demon arts to achieve such effects. But the truth is that such an art - such a versatile power - will never be equal to the simple, instinctive, wild, untamed, visceral nature of Cero and Bala. They are a toolkit, and tools are indeed incredibly valuable. But if any given spell may be a hammer or a nail or a pocket knife..."
You have reached your destination, and make a motion for her to halt. Sung-Sun smiles, looking at you with a shine in her eyes.
"Cero is a sword, and Bala a dagger."
***
Tessai opens his mouth and raises his hand, his power surging in one instant, casting ochre shadows on the buildings around you.
"Hado Eighty-"
You punch the air. Your Bala hits him in the face before he can finish shaping his spell, giggling with the voice of child-like madness. His head wreathed in smoke, the ex-Captain stumbles backwards, swaying to keep his balance.
You don't let him recover. You drag power from every inch of your burning muscles. Your lungs feel like old, dried leather being pulled taut, your inner wounds like tears in the fabric of your body. You still find the strength for that Cero, a whirling vortex of grey phantoms splitting the waters of the street.
"Danku!" the man ahead shouts, and a brilliant wall of light is erected in the path of your attack. Your beam scatters against it, the explosion filling the street, shaking the walls, shattering three windows.
Mists immediately arise and curl in like a voracious maw, engulfing Tessai, mocking voices echoing from everywhere around him. You gasp for air and almost topple backwards, your chest burning.
Your Bala barely gave him pause. Your Cero never even reached him. That was your best shot. Time to run.
Tesla's enormous hand catches you, almost gently, and pulls you to him. You feel your insides jolt up against your skin, your eyes lose all focus as the world turns upside down - and then you are soaring across the sky, one leap from the boar-giant taking you above the houses, your stomach twisted by nausea and lanced by its old wounds at the same time. You hear the crack of thunder entirely too close, feel heat on your shoulder and smell the sharp scent of ozone - a lightning bolt of pure white misses Tesla by a few feet, disappearing in the clouds. A moment later you touch down into another street with a heavy thud. You feel the pulse of Tesla's Pesquisa, and he immediately leaps again, hopefully in Ilforte's direction.
Tessai is already in pursuit. The mists delayed him only a little, and he is now striding through the air on a trail of lightning, power burning at his fingertips. You try to warn Tesla, but he is entirely focused on the speed of his escape - when Tessai shouts a word of command, he is unprepared. Six rectangles of golden light manifest in the sky and slam into him; the giant's arm almost crushes your chest as it the bindings squeeze him, knocking the air out of you. There is a flower of light around both your bodies now, squeezing you like a vice, beauty that is agony.
This leaves you both sitting still in the air, a single perfect target. Your mind is wrenched back to that moment of dread when this very same spell bound you, helpless before the Shinigami - but you broke out of it then, with the strength of Cero Fantasma. Even now Tesla is doing the same, titanic muscles straining against the flower. Tessai knows this. He will not give you time to break out.
"Hado #73: Souren Soukatsui!"
Still a hundred yards away, Tessai slams both his palms into the air, and a torrent of blue flame erupts out of it, searing the sky, turning rain to vapor. It hits Tesla from the back and the giant lets out a desperate moan. For one horrible instant your nostrils are filled with the smell of roasted pork. Then the fire engulfs him and burns you as well. Tesla falls out of the sky, still clutching you, the ground rising at precipitous speed and then a great noise.
Your vision goes black for a moment. Your lungs are burning. You are crushed by hundreds of pounds of steel - no, not steel. A body. You shove Tesla's arm away, pull yourself out of the crater where he fell, stagger to your feet.
He shielded you with his body. Perhaps not an intentional gesture - the binding spell froze him with his back to Tessai and you held against his chest - but it saved your life; that spell would have killed you.
But not him. The giant groans deeply, and then that still, fallen mountain stirs again, pushes himself up on his giant fists, black-burned back still smoldering with blue embers, and faces the sky. He exchanges no words with you; no words are needed. In this moment you are each other's lifeline. This close, you can feel his reiatsu more strongly than Tessai's, a heady pulse of lifeblood, an oversized heart in a shell of carefully-crafted porcelain that has now ruptured, that is filling up its cracked vessels with visceral, inhuman strength, too long hidden. A perfect China figurine of an elegant squire, at the heart of which resided a writhing, squirming mass of muscle and animal strength, now free.
Perhaps there is hope yet.
Why are you not dead yet? You must have blacked out for a second, you are still both on the ground, and it takes Tessai only a moment to conjure such powerful spells…
"Sprinkled on the bones of the beast…"
The voice comes out muffled by the wind and rain, distant. Tesla is scanning the sky, seeming not to hear it. You realize only your bracelet lets you. You feel a surge of power gathering in the sky, a lightning about to strike, lightning stronger than that of the storm itself.
"Sharp tower, red crystal, steel ring!"
There in the sky. Tessai - much farther than he should be. Or no - the spell he cast was a directed torrent of flame. It must have hurled you and Tesla even further away from him than you were before. And he is flying in your direction, but not straight towards you, and though he is a distant shadow you think you can see his head turn left and right.
The storm. It is not a natural one, it was conjured by Cirucci's power. Now that she is gone, it is slowly fading, but it will be a long time before it fully disappears. In the meantime, not only does it provide concealment from rain and darkness, it is filled with spiritual energy, obscuring the mind's eye. Tesla is not seeing your enemy - only you can, through the bracelet's power.
And Tessai does not see you either, not yet. His spiritual senses must be keen, it will only be a moment until he does, and he is using that moment to charge up a spell that will no doubt finish you off the moment he spots you. Perhaps one chosen specifically to avoid destroying everything around you and killing the mortals in their homes.
"Move and become the wind…"
But you can see him.
You lay your hand on Tesla's arm, the other pointing at the sky. He understands. His one eye turns from brown to a deep crimson, a bead of light forming before it like a drop of blood, growing like a nascent sun. His Cero screams its way to the sky, aiming for the point you showed him.
It was too far - Tessai feels the surge of energy and flash-steps out of the way, though his motion is hasty, leaving him unbalanced, not helped by the storm-like surge of energy is he harnessing. He is now close enough that you can make out the faint grey wisps of Envolver still lingering on him.
"Stop and become-"
You didn't intend for that Cero to hit him. You only needed that moment of vulnerability. Your first Bala hits Tessai in the chest, the second in the face. Bindings build up on each other. Tessai falls down out of the air, lightning streaming out of his body as his spell unravels. You doubt this will do him any real injuries. He will recover in moments.
Could you open a Garganta now, escape for good? No - you could open it, hurl yourselves inside, but he'd catch up with you before you can close it. His magic might even help him hold it open. The race is all there is now, and then the fight.
Tesla's hand grabs you again, lifting you as if you were nothing more than a twig, and your stomach lurches as you are wrested from gravity's hold again. Your bones shake as you hit a rooftop, and then are gone again - in the distance you hear the scream of an angry parent and a spurned hunter, all hate and frustration. The storm begins to recede, pushed away by a fire its rain cannot put out.
You land again, with earth-shaking weight, mud spraying on all sides of Tesla. You push down the nausea and the vertigo. He does not leap again, and so you slip out of his grasp, stagger a little until you find your footing. Pain wracks your chest and you pause to cough up blood on your sleeve.
You stand in the middle of a labyrinth of ice.
This is some kind of construction site, you think. The ground is still rough earth, full of bumps and holes, now filled with water and turned to thick mud. The skeleton of a high-rise building towers over you, bones of steel reaching out to the sky. Cranes and bulldozers lie abandoned, faintly sinking into the now-soft ground. Even though it's as dark as night, you arrived in the middle of the day; there must have been workers, but they fled for shelter, discarding tools, hard hats, even food, some of which is still there, tossed around by the wind.
And the ice. Great walls of it, jagged like teeth, rising here and there, some connecting, some curving strangely, some swallowing up the steel beams of the unfinished building. Spikes from a frozen pillar that shattered, planted in the ground like fallen swords. The lightning casts your own reflection on the walls, making the half-open space feel claustrophobic. You take a step forward as Tesla stretches above you, his one eye squinting in a pain he refuses to express. There is still that damnable smell, with a tinge of burned hair to it. Sickening.
Someone stumbles ahead of you, turning the corner of an ice wall, and slumps against it. You freeze.
A Shinigami. A woman, short, dark-haired - bleeding heavily from her chest. She turns her eyes to you, and her mouth twists into a pained grimace. With one hand, she holds out a white sword, and your breath is taken away for a moment at the beauty of its make, its cold perfection
"Well," the Shinigami says with a strained voice, "at least he won't be able to brag he killed me on his own."
Another ice wall shatters. A beast of terrible bulk, white as bone, with horns as piercing as any spear, armored shoulders wider than its head, emerges in a shower of hail. It brings with it a smell of beastly musk and the dusk of an untamed savannah, of beasts taller and stronger than any predator, rulers of the tall grass. Within its skull is one open human eye; the other is closed by the deep burn mark that covers half of the beast's right flank. But that one eye sees you and pause in its charge, confused.
"Grantz-" Tesla begins.
Then Tessai comes hurtling out of the sky, his hand hurling a fireball. You and Tesla feel him coming at the last second and jump aside, the boar-man's Sonido shattering an ice wall while you merely leap over another, ignoring the burning of your lungs. The fireball hits the ground where you both stood an instant before, melting the ice around you in a second, licking at your shoulders and feet. You roll in mud to put out the flame, teeth clenched on your pain.
Your pursuer lands in the wake of his deflagration, huffing. You crawl out of the mud, feeling it slide off your uniform, and one hazy glance tells you Ilforte and Tesla are stepping back in fright, flame dancing in front of them.
"T-Tessai?" the woman stammers. "What are you-"
"Miss Kuchiki," the ex-Captain says, his voice rumbling with chaotic emotions, "you're wounded. Let me take care of these opponents."
"Like hell I'm leaving the guy who-"
"Miss Kuchiki!" Pain in his voice, now. Anger at her and… himself? "As long as you are here, I cannot risk my more powerful spells. Please. Leave."
A moment of hesitation, then the Shinigami woman nods. She pushes herself up from the support of her ice wall, lowers her sword, and jumps into the sky.
"You're not getting away!" the giant bull screams, launching himself after her - faster, less wounded.
Ilforte's mistake is to pursue a fleeing enemy when a new one has entered the fray, one whose power he does not know. It's a reckless move, and as he charges through the air to catch up with his prey, Tessai braces his hand and hurls a bolt of lightning, screaming a name you can't catch. The Fraccion is struck in full, its guard wide open, and the bolt explodes into a ball of crackling blue lightning stretching electric tendril all the way to the earth like some demented squid. Ilforte falls out of the air with a wave of mud and solid dirt, and the Shinigami woman escapes.
Tessai's mistake is to extend himself in a panicked move to save an ally when he is surrounded by two foes. You move as soon as he does, urging your body into motion, and as the lightning flees Tessai's hand you slam both your fists into the air, simultaneous Balas singing counterpoint to each other in a wailing dirge. They carve a path through the melting ice shards and hit the sorcerer's flank, just as wide open as Ilforte's. He staggers, spitting a curse, and you make a hook motion to hurl a third Bala at him, striking him in the face. His glasses shatter; his nose breaks. A minor injury, unlikely to impair him in any way.
But you've drawn blood at last. And five layers of Envolver now wrap around him, whispering silken ribbons becoming half-formed cocoons around his chest and limbs. You don't follow up with another; you have nothing to follow up with. You fall knees-first into the mud, gasping, blood backing up in your mouth, hands clawing at the ground. One more Bala, and you won't have strength enough left for even the weakest Cero you could possible manage - and you need one last card to play, even if you know one half-baked Cero won't bring this man down, not nearly.
But then Tesla slams his shoulder into Tessai, and you are spared his comeback. Two giants slide in the mud in a chaos of wrestling limbs, smashing walls of ice on their path, shimmering shards of frost casting lightning-flashes on their moving shadows. Their blows echo like pounding hammers, louder than the storm's thunder, a steel factory in motion mere feet away from you.
You push yourself up, again, like always, just one more step, forget the pain, forget your lungs, forget how little power you have left, how little you matter in this fight now. You stagger amidst the field of broken ice, find your way to the colossal body lying prone. Ilforte, lying on his flank. Still breathing, thank god.
...Holy Virgin, he isn't even incapacitated. The lightning bolt hit him in his left shoulder, a humongous pauldron-like extrusion, perhaps meant to help him ram straight through fortress walls, or to protect his vitals from ranged attacks from ahead as he closed the distance with his enemy. Why do you think these things? They're irrelevant - you blink. Your head is light. Reiryoku burnout catching up with you.
The lightning bolt hit his shoulder and blew it up. It should have killed him, would have if it had hit anywhere else, but that shoulder is several inches of bone-like armor already harder than steel before Hierro compressed layer upon layer of reiatsu into it. It's half-gone now - there is a hole in it the size of your chest, bone shards scattered in the mud around him - but beneath you see flesh, blood, a deep laceration wound.
Ilforte's one good eye opens to stare at you. He lets out a low chuckle.
"I was doing much better before you showed up, sister, I must admit. Did you really have to bring that monster to my duel?"
You smile awkwardly. Behind you, Tesla's reiatsu surges, a wave of feral strength washing over your shoulders, and the whispering flame responds in turn. The boar screams in rage. You don't have the time to look at this fight. You can't influence its outcome.
Except in one way. You pluck the hem of your uniform, and let the strands of it reveal themselves to your mind. You pick one, and pull it out, a thin, perfect thread, reinforced with weeks of attunement to your reiatsu. You take a needle out of your inner pocket - and stab it into Ilforte's shoulder. He screams, more in surprise than in pain, to his credit.
"I have to compliment… your composure… when a Captain has come for us," Ilforte says haltingly as you tug at his skin to pull it together.
He can't see how terrified you are, you realize. How powerless you feel. And you can't tell him - if there is any comfort he can find in your seeming confidence, it is the least you can do for him.
You have done this work too many times to count, practicing on yourself for the day you knew you might need to save Cirucci in the field. Opening up your own body, combining your mastery of weaving and your growing medical expertise - self-taught through self-punishment - to weave a thread through a wound in mere seconds, stitching it with supernatural strength. You only ever had to do it to another once, when you and Cirucci came home, after Nnoitra's death. You fumbled then, a little, so unused to operating on another body. You let that memory guide you now, and there is no more clumsiness.
You pull away from Ilforte after a handful of seconds, and he looks at you surprised. He tests the rotation of his shoulder, and winces only a little. Brilliant thread, shining faintly with grey light, keeps the wound closed.
"So," he says, and you think he is smiling behind his mask, "at least I can go die without making a fool of myself."
"Hyapporankan!" shouts a booming voice behind you. You turn on instinct to see Tessai manifest a rod of silvery light in his hand and slam it into Tesla's chest - and then that rod multiplies, dozen upon dozen of glowing energy hafts hurling him back until his back hits a truck. The rods rain down on him, pinning him like a bug, piercing the vehicle around him, surrounding him like a thicket of thorns. Tessai's hand glows with more summoned power, a follow-up spell on his stunned opponent -
"Thank you," Ilforte says - and then laughs, and laughs, and erupts out of the crater like a volcano of flesh and bone, knocking you on your back with the sheer strength of his charge. Tessai turns barely in time, redirects his spell, but he is under the curse of your Bala. His reaction is just not quite fast enough. Ilforte hits him like an avalanche, horn first, and the hand releases its surge of destructive energy above the bull's shoulder, swiping the mid-section of the building-skeleton, sending a shower of steel beams down into the mud with a cataclysmic cacophony.
Even so, the old man holds his ground. His two hands grasp the beast's horns and push against it, force its course to slow down, prevent Ilforte from trampling him. Their feet all dig into the damp ground, drawing deep furrows, soon filled with rain. Tessai roars with fury, two forces of nature locked in a deadly embrace. Lightning backlights them, making them seem like shadow-play. You can see Tessai's eyes now, without his glasses, brown and hurt and too human, straining in effort, pain and anger.
You see so much now that he is fighting others, that you no longer have anything to bring to their aid, that your head is too dizzy for you to bother forcing down your mind's eye. You had been too preoccupied to consider the fact that he bears no sword, but it makes sense now - his inner flame pulses throughout his body with each heartbeat, and has no recipient, no bounded weapon in which to pour. "Captain of the Kido Corps" - a Shinigami, yes, but not one of their numbered divisions. Perhaps he never had a Zanpakutou, training only his magic and his body. It would explain why a sorcerer has the strength to wrestle Tesla and Ilforte mano a mano.
But there is more. You understand now - the eldritch whispers spoken by his flame, they are not meant for the world. They are murmured to him; and he does not hear them. The flame is too deep within him, lonely and in the dark. The weight of a century separates him from it, and in that century the flame has receded, leaving a wasteland of burnt-out grey ash around it.
He has not grown weaker, no. His reiatsu is still as strong as it ever was. He is still capable of the same spells, the same heights of power he once could. What he lost was the ease, the connection. The ability to conjure these spells with one thought, one word. Now he has to chant the incantations, he must dive within his own self, plunge his hands into the flame, dredge out bits of wisdom. He is as strong as he ever was, only… slower. Clumsier.
An old man.
Bala Envolver doomed him, you realize. It makes him slow enough that Ilforte and Tesla could engage him in close combat instead of letting him bind and shoot them from afar. His force is immense, but he cannot bring it to bear against them.
But he still has the power of a Captain. His resilience is immense. He has survived Ilforte's goring horn, and eventually Envolver will dissolve - and then the tables will turn. The fact that he is forced to use lesser spells while still having the fathomless reserves of a Captain means that he can keep up his storm of weaker spells for ages more.
As you understand this, Tessai lets go of Ilforte's horns and reaches past them, grabbing him by his mighty shoulders - digging his fingers into the freshly-stitched wound, making the bull yelp and miss a step - and then he pivots his feet, twists his back, and turns the bull's own speed and strength against himself. He heaves him into the air and hurls him into foundations of the high-rise, collapsing it entirely at last. Ilforte is buried under a mountain of steel.
An entire truck hurtles through the rain, silvery rods still planted in its side, and Tessai turns to face it. He plants his feet in the ground, braces his arm, and hits with both palms, deflecting the projectile. Then comes the howling red fury of Tesla's Cero, and the sorcerer raises one hand.
"Danku!"
Again Cero is defeated by his shield of light. But Tesla has seen this stratagem already, and anticipated it. He is already charging Tessai as the shield dissolves, raising his fists to pummel him into the earth. With a grunt of pain Tessai waves his hand, unfurling a great rope of light and throwing it at Tesla; the rope coils around him in an instant and the giant falls to his knees, arms stuck against his chest, unable to move. Tessai begins to gather power for his next spell -
Tesla's one eye shines a deep, malevolent red, and the thing that comes next is neither quite Cero nor Bala, but halfway between both, a cursed glare, the evil eye of myth. You see neither beam nor bolt, only the light in his eye, a dim reflection on Tessai, and the ex-Captain screams as he hurls into the upturned truck he deflected a moment ago, hitting it with his shoulders and slumping down.
Tesla stands up, trying to force his way out of the bondage. Ilforte bellows, his mighty shoulders sending steel beams tumbling as he makes his way out of the wreckage of the building. You approach tentatively, your right hand flexing unconsciously. The bindings of Envolver are unraveling - should you risk another, throw away the chance of a last Cero to give your two allies a better shot?
A halting, strained breath. Words stained by blood dripping on a man's lips and chin.
"Freeze, O river…"
Any spell that Tessai bothers chanting is one that can end this fight on its own. The moment for coordination is past. Ilforte charges the sorcerer, obscuring your line of fire. Again Tessai receives him head-on, but he is weaker now and his back is against the truck; the bull pins him, squeezing a cry out of his lips, crushing him against the steel mass.
"...and let me walk on a path…"
Power. Power unlike anything you've seen before flowing out of him. The occult flame no longer whispering but laughing madly, for it has been heard at last. Spells unused in a century weaving themselves into the sorcerer's body, burning his flesh and soul.
No. You have felt such power once before. By your own hand, when the Gran Rey tore apart the fabric of space itself. This is the power that bends the laws of reality, the forbidden arts.
Tesla shouts in triumph as the rope of light finally shatters. He takes one step towards Tessai, ready to add his strength to Ilforte and crush him, and it is too late.
"...of frozen starlight."
Time stands still.
You are locked in a prison of your own flesh in a world without wind, where every raindrop is a floating diamond, for only a moment, as Tessai slowly stands. Then even your mind is overcome by the spell, and all you know is blurred motion too fast to comprehend, blinding light, searing heat, and crushing force.
You are on the ground, staring at the sky, your eyes open and your mouth agape, a great cut across your chest, the mid-section of your jacket burnt off. Pain only comes after an instant, twitching your body in a spasm, your hand raking the mud.
There is no more battlefield. The vehicles have been hurled across the air, the steel beams tossed by the wind of some instant explosion with such strength that they are now planted at the far end of the construction site like twisted, half-melted trees. Glimmering constructs of reishi bind Tesla and Ilforte's bodies to the ground, dozens of yards from you. You push on your elbows to raise your back, teeth clattering with sheer shock, eyes twitching.
Ahead of you, Tessai stands in the rain, strong hands clutched into fists. For a moment, he seems an apparition of utter terror, a god of magic who just made all of your efforts moot in an instant. Even the grey wrappings around his limbs, your curse on him, seem like the shining garments of a deity. His head slowly turns, looking at each of your defeated allies, their reiatsu fading by the moment, neither of them even trying to break out of the bindings - you are not sure they are even still conscious. Then his eyes stay on you and you freeze, unable to breathe.
Then he moans in pain and bends his chest, coughing up blood, and you hear how ragged his own breathing is.
"Six Kido spells cast in the frozen time… Damn it. I thought I could last long enough to also bind you. That chantless Zangerin took more out of me than I thought."
You force yourself to inhale and exhale, willing your body through actions it should normally take on its own, but your body is only fear now. You are crawling away, pushing on your elbows to drag your limp legs one inch at a time, without even thinking it.
The giant wipes the blood of his mouth and pinches the bridge of his nose. Greenish light crackles between his fingers, resetting the bone. He passes his hand over his chest, where Ilforte's horn gored him, and the bleeding stops. Healing Kido. Another thing in his arsenal you had managed to keep him from using.
The silken cocoons of Bala Envolver finally crack, fading in the wind in moments, and Tessai rolls his shoulders in his hands, testing his mobility. You are still crawling. Still staring. Still willing yourself to breathe by force of will.
He crosses the distance between you in a blur, towering over you. And he has yet more power to call upon, you can tell. The flame in him is content, purring like a lazy housecat, its whispers more coherent. He hears it again; he begins to remember, his old skills reforged in a crucible of war.
You will not stand up to him, not even with your Resurreccion, not now that you are alone. But with his wounds, could it let you escape? Leaving Ilforte and Tesla behind…
"It's over," he says, and it feels as if he were talking more to himself than to you. "It's over."
Power surges in his hand, and you understand he will kill you now.
...why?
That mad, absurd question comes to you in a flash of insight born of panic, terror and desperation. Why would he kill you now, when you are utterly at his mercy, when you are the thief who stole Urahara's files, when you have incredibly valuable knowledge, Tessai knows it, and he is a master of the binding arts who could render you powerless with ease now that he has no other opponents to care about? Why would he kill you now when…
...the girls were trying to take you alive…
You lift your hand off the ground, the very last of your reiatsu bleeding into your arm, past your skin, into the threads of the Memory Glove, and you fire your final Cero, the weakest of all those you've launched today, yet also the quickest, barely taking the time to shape the power before unleashing it from your fingertips. It stretches out from your fingertips like five streams of grey wind curling together into one vortex, and it screams with Ururu's own voice and pain.
Tessai steps back, slashing the air with his hand, reshaping the power he'd gathered for his killing spell with a second's thought. Again he raises that barrier of light, deflecting all the power of your Cero. It never reaches him, never burns him, not even a little.
But the light sees him, and the mists reach out past his shield and brush his cheek with a gentle caress. His shield fades, and the mist rise between you, engulf the rain-soaked devastation of the battlefield. You do not hide in them. You could hardly stand, much less evade anything. You fall on your flank, wheezing, hair caked with mud.
All you can do now is watch.
Between the giant and you forms the shape of a man, unkempt hair and floppy hat and long coat framing a featureless face.
"You think illusions are going to stop me?" Tessai roars. "I have seen how you fought Ururu - I know your tricks!"
The face of the hat-wearing man is split as if by a knife, a wound becoming a smile.
"It is not the illusions that hurt, Tsukabishi," says Kisuke Urahara, not unkindly. "It's the truth they show you."
"And you stop and listen to them," drawls another man from Tessai's right - the one you saw fly away from Cirucci's rooftop, but with longer hair and half a Hollow mask over his face, dripping like molten wax onto his chest, "because you know everythin' they say is true, and you deserve it, and you hate yourself for it, and welcome your punishment."
With a grunt, Tessai swipes his fist at the new apparition, scattering it - and just as when Ururu did the same, it only reforms again.
"Because you know your fault," the Urahara of mists says sadly. "There was a war coming, and you looked away."
Tessai clasps his hands, blue-white motes gathering around them.
"Bakudo #53, Evil-Cleansing Mandala -"
"Will you cleanse me away, too?" says a child's voice, and Tessai falters. Ururu stands before him, bleeding. Tessai reaches out with one shaking hand, and she steps back.
"You thought you could retire," Urahara says behind him. "That because you were now an exile, a renegade from Soul Society, you could abdicate your responsibilities. Hold a simple store, purify the local Hollows now and then, and eventually, raise a child."
"But the war was coming," the half-man masked whispers. "It was always coming, and you knew it. And because you gave up, because you pretended to yourself that you could just be an old man, you committed the sin of all old men."
"You left the next generation to fight your war," Ururu says, her eyes slowly turning into the dead pupils of her Slaughter Mode. "You let that burden fall to us."
"And when they did," Urahara says, "and got hurt, could have been killed, you lashed out in wrath at those who hurt them, but that too was a lie."
"Your true anger was aimed at yourself," the half-Hollow says.
"I only fought because you would not," Ururu whispers, fading into mists.
Tessai howls in an agony beyond any of his physical wounds. He raises his hands to the sky, screaming, weeping, reiatsu billowing around him, scorching the mud to hardened clay, tears streaming down his cheeks.
"It's not true! I tried to keep you out! I tried to fight this battle-"
"Too little, too late," Urahara says with a mirthless chuckle. "I spent a century preparing for these events, but you did not. You forgot. You let it go. It is too late now to fix it."
An inarticulate cry escapes Tessai's lips as he clutches his heart.
"It's all right," Urahara whispers, reaching out with one mist-hand trailing faint vapor, and touching his cheek. "I am your friend. I should have seen this coming, I should not have let you make this mistake. We both share the blame."
He finds the strength at last. The giant claps his hands with a sound like thunder, light erupting from them, forming a great mandala of blue-white light, and that symbol turns in the air, shedding light that scours away the mist. The two mist-men close their eyes and smile sadly, and dissolve in the wind.
The mists fade, and Tessai finds you standing in front of him, hunched over, clutching your bleeding chest with your left arm, legs wobbling.
You reach out with your right arm, no strength at all in your hand, and touch his hand.
***
"-training is not complete."
You fume as Urahara explains to the young ones how terrible their idea is. You're all standing in one of the shop's basement rooms, those leading to the great training space below - and without anyone doing so consciously you've fallen into two sides, you with Urahara and Yoruichi on one, the teenagers on the other, shouting in unison. Arms folded against your chest, you give them a scolding glare, but it seems only to make Tatsuki bolder.
"Our training will never be 'complete' enough for you! We need to actually get out there and fight if we are ever to learn what it's really like, and the Arrancars are right here! Ichigo is probably being an idiot and flying off to fight them alone as we speak!"
"That is very nice, Tatsuki dear," Urahara says with mock kindness, "but Ichigo has been doing this for a lot longer than you have."
"Pfft, yeah, like, less than a year?" Tatsuki scoffs.
"That's a pretty long time when the point is that we're still teaching you the basics," Yoruichi says from her perch - sitting on top of a bookshelf like the cat she is. "I mean yeah, you got them down pretty well, but your reiatsu is too low, all of you - and we've barely started teaching you proper teamwork to make up for it."
"That's not true!" Orihime jumps in, doing her best to sound determined. "I've been doing teamwork since we first went to Soul Society! I'm the most senior here! I have been in lotsa fights!"
"Orihime, darling," Urahara sighs, "you need teamwork because you're so good-natured that after three weeks of me doing my level best to be the most infuriating, painful, dastardly teacher you've ever seen, you still can't muster enough killing intent to hurt me."
"But I can't be angry at you because I know you're being a jerk for my own benefit! Real enemies will be different!"
This is going nowhere, and you're getting increasingly frustrated at their stubbornness. Why won't they accept the wisdom of their elders? You sigh.
"Enough. Ururu," you say, your voice a low rumble. "Don't you remember the last time you went out? You could get hurt again - you are not ready. You can only control one level of your limited release, and by the way I still think trying to harness Slaughter Mode is a terrible idea, and the prototype Anti-Hierro Armor you have is incomplete-"
"She'll be there," Ururu says quietly, instantly raising the hair on your back. "I know it. I… I have to find her."
"Why?" You exclaim. "She could have killed you! She's one of the enemy!"
"But she didn't," Ururu says. "I attacked her first. I was not in control. I tried to kill her. And she still stopped and helped me, even though that almost got her caught. I need to see her again."
"Yes, well, I myself am quite keen on having a chat with our little thief," Urahara says. "But I can just capture her myself. There is no reason to risk yourselves like this."
"But we-" Tatsuki begins to shout, and you huff, flaring your power, silencing her in an instant. All the girls look at you, shocked. You let your reiatsu flare with your anger at their childish recklessness, deliberately and slowly weighing down on them.
"This," you say. "This is the kind of power you might be facing. There will be Espada among the assaillants, and we are not letting you risk your lives against them. This argument is over. You will stay here, and we will go. End of the discussion."
"He's right," says the giant in the corner, the last of the trainees, always so quiet. "I hate it. I want to help Ichigo. But we're not ready. Just close. We should wait."
Tatsuki looks at him with a look of betrayal, and then crosses her arms in a fit of childish pique, sulking. You sigh at this, but she makes no further argument. Instead she looks to Ururu and Orihime, and both of the girls nod, a silent agreement between them. Good. You would hate to have to lock them up to keep them from getting involved. You only want them to be safe, need them to be safe, especially Ururu, who is only a child. The three girls turn their backs and leave the room, followed by Chad-
-and you hear a clicking sound.
Your heart drops in your chest. You feel power rising, a hum in the walls around you, and your eyes widen behind your glasses as your previous anger turns to dread.
"Tatsuki, daaarling, what did you just do?" Urahara says with a very wide, very fake smile. At the edge of the door, all three girls turn to you, and Tatsuki's hand slides off a button in the wooden panel.
"Oh, nothing. I just tripped one of the Kido traps you built in case the thief ever came back."
"You little-" Yoruichi shouts, leaping from her shelf, but it's too late - great blades of spiritual energy slide across the door, barring the way, just as the walls begin to glow with power.
"What have you done!" you shout, trying to suppressing the sudden twist in your gut, the raw panic. Failing. Your eyes fall on Ururu, and she stares back at you with deep sadness.
"Tatsuki," Chad says, the one word conveying unfathomable depths of worry.
"Oh, don't be dramatic," Tatsuki says with a shrug. "You built those; you'll be out in a jiffy. Just… Not quick enough to keep us from getting to Ichigo and Ururu's thief."
"Tatsuki, you idiot!" Urahara screams, finally losing his composure and waving his cane wildly around. "The thief has some kind of memory dredging ability! I didn't put any way for me to disable the traps from the inside because she could just divine it!"
"Well," Tatsuki says, "that sounds like a you problem right now."
"S-sorry mister Urahara! I promise we'll make you proud!" Orihime says, waving her hand. Ururu says nothing. She gives you one last look, smiles weakly, and turns away - and then the girls are gone. Chad looks at the stairs, distraught, and turns to you.
"Go," you say, voice strangled. "They need all the help they can get until we break out."
The giant nods, once, and then leaves. You turn to Yoruichi and Urahara.
"Well," the Shihoin princess says, "we underestimated their cunning."
"And overestimated their wisdom," Urahara grumbles. "Tessai? Break us out of here."
You want to shout at them, to scream until the walls come down, to blame them for what just happened, but the truth it's that just as much your fault for not seeing it coming, and your anger is merely at their calm, their composure when children and running towards death.
But they're right to be calm. You must be too, if you are to save them. You breathe in, wipe your glasses, and begin the weaving of Kido.
***
You stagger back.
Tessai falls to his knees, hands in the mud, tears washing away in the rain.
You understand now. You smile weakly, open your mouth. Your overstressed lungs rebel as you breathe in. You rein in the cough, spit black phlegm on your glove. Breathe in again. Each word is harsh on your tongue, but harder still on Tessai.
"It's not about me."
It was only ever about him. About the fault he could not articulate. About letting himself become an old man, about abandoning that war without accepting that others would have to fight it instead of him. About losing control - worse. About having given up control. Seeing the world move on and knowing he could not hold it back and that it was his fault, that he let this happen. That he let the burden fall upon others, and could not simply take it up again when he finally saw his mistake.
He looks at you, eyes red, lips twitching, unable to speak. He could destroy you in one blow now, you have no power left. But instead he is on the ground and you are standing above, clutching your wound, looking at him with sadness and pity.
You are not his redemption. Killing you won't make anything better. You're sorry you had to hurt anyone. You spared their lives, but you know it doesn't make it better. You're sorry you didn't understand what drove Ururu. She is a child, and could not articulate the feelings that brought her to fight you, and you did not see past her offer of surrender. Perhaps if Cirucci had not been fighting Ichigo, if all of them had not felt they needed to help their friend, you could have talked. You could have understood each other.
Perhaps you still can, some other day.
But his hate is not aimed at you. The only thing he hates is how the world has slipped between his fingers, and how he knows it is his fault. In the end he grasped at the fabric of time itself, because time is what wounded him, time is the enemy to which he had to surrender. But he could not turn it back. Only hold it still, for a second, and in that second he could touch again the power he used to hold as his own.
And then that second passed, and he was only himself again, naked before the mists as they revealed his soul to him.
Killing you won't fix his mistakes.
"You're still…" He says, words broken up by his sobs. "...Still my enemy. Arrancar. Aizen's servant."
Yes. You're still a soldier in a war waged against his kind. If he lets you live, you will fight against his side again. Perhaps even Ururu, or any of her friends, Orihime or Tatsuki or Chad or whoever that white-clothed boy is.
But even in war there can be mercy, and truce, and compassion. You've tried to show it to others, even if just a little. It doesn't make you feel better about yourself - you still hurt children who did not understand the stakes. You still did terrible things. Your allies are fighting somewhere else, and perhaps they did kill. Ilforte and Tesla would have killed their opponents without hesitation - but they did not get that chance.
This small side of the war, this one battle, can end without deaths.
He should just go be with his daughter, if that is what she is to him.
"She'll come after you again," he says, clenching his fists. "I will not see her killed, because she ran into another one of your kind, or because your 'compassion' ran out."
You understand. It is all about the girl for him. You must respect this.
You reach into your jacket, finding a small item, a memento you kept close to you, a reminder not to forget the one you pushed away. You pull it out, and let it fall to the ground before Tessai.
It's a glossy card advertising a coffee shop not far from this town. The last place you met with Esmeralda and Riruka. Perhaps you can meet there, you and Ururu and Tessai as her guardian, and talk. On neutral grounds. You know a third party that could mediate. You are at war, but even in war there can be diplomacy. Maybe you can convince her that a child has no place on the front lines, and that there is no mystery about you, no secret to uncover.
For a moment there is silence. Then Tessai reaches down, plucks the card out of the mud, rain glistening on its soft plastic.
He places it in his own pocket, and looks away.
The rain is beginning to let up. There has been no flash of lightning for a moment now, and the wind is more gentle. Soon there will be blue skies again.
The bindings spell on Tesla and Ilforte dissolve like salt in the rain, and as they do, so do the two Arrancars' Resurreccion, bony armor eroding like a mountain on fast-forward, fur and flesh melting like wax. You walk with a limp, one staggered step at a time, until you reach Tesla and pull his slim human body over your shoulder. Your wounds seem to tear up with each steps you take to reach Ilforte, but reach him you do. Then you slide your hand across the air, and the world unravels. Darkness welcomes you.
You turn one last time to Tessai, and in his eyes are sorrow, anger and doubt. Even now he knows he will regret letting the three of you go; but perhaps he would regret killing you more.
Death is forever, when you have already died once. Something that cannot be taken back. Wounds heal. Scars fade. You have left others to live and have been left to live in turn. All this will be gone, washed away with the rain.
You pull Tesla and Ilforte into the Garganta, and it closes with a sigh.
For the first time, the shadows' whispers are not malicious. They murmur in respect. For you did as shadows do, and whispered in another's mind as they do in yours, and turned their resolve to bitterness and pain.
They welcome you.
Somewhere, armies clad as men do battle. You cannot influence the outcome of that fight.
But you can choose which warrior to follow.
[ ] Luppi, the Betrayer, who contends for the nature of love.
[ ] Grimmjow, the King of Hunts, who drags the weak screaming to glory.
[ ] Urahara, the Candyshop Owner, whom even gods fear.
This is not a tactics vote. It only influences which point of view you follow. It will not be the entire update. "Ulquiorra" is not a valid write in.
There is a moratorium of two hours on this vote.
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