"In other words, one's own reiatsu acts as a form of armor. While a suit of physical armor may protect a shinigami from incidental wounds, there is no material that would be capable of any meaningful defense against any but the weakest of hollows."
"Oh. But wait…what about a zanpakutou? It's basically just super-condensed spirit particles, right? Can't you do the same to make a suit of armor like you do with other things?"
Two minutes into the discussion of other-worldly physics with Komamura-taichou, and I've completely forgotten that I'm in public, wearing armor, holding a sword at my waist that only I can see, and holding a meaningful conversation with a chunk of thin air. Behind me, Hisagi-fukataichou and Tousen-taichou are having a conversation of their own, staring at my back.
"You are correct. His growth is not natural. Most likely, he was exposed to a strong source of spiritual energy for a prolonged period of time."
"Then we need to find out what it was! He's so young…if he received that kind of power in such a short period of time…"
"Then such unfocused power is a danger to himself and everyone around him. Hollow activity has been increasing in this area recently, and I believe we now know the reason."
Up ahead of them, Komamura was tapping a finger on his leg, thinking about my latest question.
"I will speak to him after the patrol is complete. Concentrate on your task."
"Yes, taichou!"
A short while later, the group had arrived at an old factory complex at the edge of town that hadn't seen use in years, and the shinigami began setting up the exercise. I watched the older students begin unpacking what looked like chibi-hollows and placing them around the area.
"Hisagi-san, are you alright?"
"W-What? I'm fine, why?"
"Just the look on your face."
"Ahh…it's nothing. Take a seat with the other students, it'll be starting soon. …I'm going to double-check with the barrier team…"
He turns and disappears in a flash, and I take my place among the junior shinigami, holding my sword nervously, waiting for whatever it is to begin.
"-Shakkaho!"
A blast of red light destroys the target crawling across the wall, and the student who fired the shot whoops with joy and dashes forward, only to have another drone-hollow drop onto him from the shadows among the ceiling. It sprays red paint over his back, and one of the examiners watching from above makes a note of the board he's holding.
"Awww!"
His team laughs as he tries to throw the weight off his back, one of them spearing the drone and tossing the remains away.
Outside, I'm trading blows with a much larger version. It has some serious muscle but the brains of a wind-up toy, and a tight shunpo dash brings me behind and above it. The head severs cleanly, bouncing away, and I close my eyes, searching for the next target.
Further away, the two captains and their lieutenants are watching their own teams, marking down everything from swordsmanship to demon art skill, even psychological notes.
The largest golem I've seen turns the corner in front of me, easily twenty feet tall. It charges forward, making the ground shake beneath my feet. I shunpo straight into the thing's face and slide my katana into it's neck, through the gap in the armor plates. I twist the blade and shunpo once again, spinning myself like a top. My head spins, but when I can stand up straight again the pieces of it are lying in a pile, limbs and torso neatly diced and ready to serve with your choice of sauce.
I wonder what my profile reads like…
An hour later, and I stagger back to the main group, grinning madly, the examiners picking up the leftover bits of the training robots. It takes them a while. I take the time to flop onto some grass and catch my breath, the students around me chatting excitedly with each other. A few minutes after that and the captains are calling everyone back together, students forming ranks, and I take a spot for myself, in line but apart from the main group, drawing a few stares. The officers and examiners are standing to one side, waiting as the captains give a few words to the assembled students.
When that's finished, Tousen-taichou nods to Hisagi-fukataichou, who taps an earpiece he's wearing, speaking into it, and I can feel the barrier around the training area vanish. With a word, the students stand and the whole group begins the walk home.
We don't make it two steps before the air grows cold.
Hisagi grabs the radio he's wearing and his face goes white. I'm twenty feet away from him and I can hear the screams through his receiver. The students have slowed slightly in confusion, a few of them noticing that something is wrong. The officers have their hands on their blades already. And precisely three seconds after this all happens, I see the first dark blob appear in the night sky above me, a dozen white faces peering out.
The temperature drops past freezing in an instant, and I turn at a scream to see a student disappearing over the top of a building, a clump of tentacles wrapped around him and carrying him away.
Time slows. There are cries of surprise, fear, the first syllables of yelled orders. More masks then can be counted appearing over the edges of the rooftops around us.
The tentacles are severed, and the spin carries me around, a foot smashing the mask to my left, a hand pointing out and immolating the reeling hollow.
Time speeds up again. The student crashes back to the ground. Words are formed. Blades drawn.
"Ikkaku, you bastard. I've always been such a nice guy. Never acted like this before…"
I'm trembling, but not with fear. Not this time.
"Why'd you have to go and show me…"
Angry, hungry screams erupt all around me, and there's another feeling, faint but malicious behind all the others that feels strangely familiar, somehow.
"How a fight to the death…"
Something gray and spindly is on my left. Another, red and sharp, is a blur coming up on my right. I twist and dodge by a hair's breadth, a sickle-arm severed and flying away. Riposte. The beat screams and dies twitching.
"Could be so much damn FUN!"
Blood, aching muscles, masks. That was all there was. The students were in a tight circle in an open field, fighting for their lives.
Tear-streaked faces wide-eyed with fear held shaking swords at the outer edge, and those inside threw what magic they could at things flying above them.
The officers were on defense, keeping them safe.
Iba had released his zanpakutou, holding a barricade he'd made with the hollows he'd killed, shouting at the top of his lungs like a general from the feudal era, ready to give his life defending his lord's castle. Hisagi was a blur, back and forth, in and out, kicking hollows away from the students behind him, nothing, not claws or fangs or the slightest breeze from their attacks getting past him.
The captains were the offense.
Komamura-taichou was mangling huge swaths of hollows with a floating, giant-sized gauntlet that held a sword of massive size. Tousen-taichou was tearing hollows to pieces with a rain of blades and some kind of soundless pressure-wave.
Where was I?
Everywhere. Nowhere. I couldn't keep track. Some part of me kept the rest of me out of the captain's way, and focused on whatever was reaching for my life. Before I realized it, I was far from the fighting. Something inside me pulled away for a moment, and I realized how tired I was.
Everything hurt. I could barely feel that part of me that the shinigami had awakened, and I slumped to the ground covered in blood and dirt and kami-knows-what.
"No good, no good…"
Something dropped from a hole in the ceiling, adding to a pile of rubble in the darkness. A shape moved, and moonlight streamed in through a broken skylight.
That wasn't a pile of rubble.
It was a pile of corpses.
Bloodstained white uniforms. Students that had been too slow to escape.
"But perhaps…this one?"
It was that same voice. Same shape, too. It was a snakelike body that had two huge pincer-like claws, and a second set of human-sized arms. It unfurled itself, clinging to a beam as it lowered itself to the ground. I was past the point of fear, just a calm, detached feeling that made my first thought a wondering if one of the students had managed to hurt it.
The hollow's mask was broken, with one human eye peering out at me.
"Yes…powerful…good…do nicely…"
A gasp for air became a rough laugh and then a cough, and the hollow paused a moment, tilting his head in curiosity.
"That's…that'swhatthe…last one said."
"Oh oh oh?"
It shifted its body, slowing stretching out and slithering around me. A stone's throw away from me, and it's body nearly formed a complete circle, the head almost reaching it's own tail. It spoke again once I was completely surrounded by it.
"You know?"
"Yeah…he was weak."
"Student." The thing shrugged, a very human gesture. "Young. Impetuous."
"And you?"
"Strong."
The circle of flesh around me shrunk, and I took every breath, reached for every scrap of reiatsu I could, focused as deeply as I could for as long as I dared before I stood, slowly, bringing my sword up.
"Me too."
"Better…"
It dove forward, preceded by its reiatsu, that alone nearly knocking me out. The left pincer came first, and I dodged inward, towards the main body. It didn't seem to expect that, and the human eye widened twice, once in surprise as I willingly moved closer to him, and again in pain as one of the hollow's human hands lost it's fingers.
The entire body reared back, jumping away from me, looping itself around the machinery and walkways that crisscrossed the large structure.
"PAIN! PAIN PAIN PA-"
It broke off mid-word and stared down at me. The head tilted again, one way and the other, before turning completely upside-down, staring at me all the while.
"Good? Nice?"
I could have said something, but wit had escaped me at the moment, so I only stared as the creature came back down, babbling as it did.
"TOO good. TOO nice."
The mask suddenly shifted to one side, the edge of a human face appearing. The voice changed, becoming almost normal.
"So much held back. Instincts dulled. Desires denied. I can see it in your eyes."
The entire mass of the hollow's body was on the floor now, slowly moving towards me again.
"The entire life you have known cannot compare to this moment, in this place. Because here, away from the light, as I once did, you have realized that this is where you belong."
"You're wrong! I…"
The hollow merely shook it's head from side to side, the motion slipping the mask back over the human face, the voice and speech changing again.
"Save you."
The body shot forward, pincers out, jaws wide. I put what I could into a single flash-step, straight up, his forehead slamming into my legs and something cracked. I jammed my sword down but missed the mark, the back of the head not covered by the mask, the blade digging into his back and I held on as the hollow smashed against walls and rubble, trying to dislodge me. I held on. And then I was pressed flat against him as he shot upwards.
Anything that hadn't been broken before was shattered when he slammed me against the ceiling. Lift fought gravity, and I was held between them, floating in the air. Gravity pulled me down, and a part of me suddenly realized my sword was broken. Bastard. I liked that sword.
Halfway to the ground, his jaws closed around me.
"Free you."
Bristling with blades and needles, his human hand pierced my back, clawing, digging, tearing, reaching for something. It found it, grabbed it. Twisted and began to change it.
I think I was screaming.
Something began to spread through me, and the pain lessened. The fear was gone as well. And in a single moment of clarity, I realized that I had one arm free, and it still held what was left of the zanpakutou Iba-san had given me.
The motions of it's hand inside me slowed, became careful, deliberate, and the hollow's human eye looked down at me softly, an almost caring expression.
Just in time to see the expression of joy on my face before the tip of the broken blade dove in, disappearing into his skull, followed by hand, hilt and forearm.
Tousen-taichou stood above what was left of me. My sword arm was gone, torn out in the hollow's death-throes. Not much left of my legs, either. And everything else inside me somehow felt wrong. He pulled something from his belt and smeared it on the butt of his zanpakutou before pressing it to my forehead.
"Taichou!"
Hisagi ran up to his captain as he emerged from the ruin, and Tousen didn't stop at the call, continuing on towards the small army of reinforcements and support personnel that had arrived.
"Did you find…"
Hisagi saw the blood on his taichou's sword, smeared over the Kanji for 'Soul Society.'
"You will see him again. For now, tend to your duties."
"Sir!"
Hisagi dashed off, and Tousen didn't look back. Wouldn't. Kept his gaze forward, to what he sought, couldn't hesitate, couldn't regret.
Not when what he did was ultimately for the sake of justice.
In torn and tattered clothes, the figure skipped down the street. In his wake, men were laughing and a few children being scolded, advised not to repeat the bad words that the man had begun screaming over and over again at the top of his lungs the second he had materialized in the village.
But a little joyful profanity is understandable when you've just found out, that yes, praise be, there IS an afterlife and it wasn't all in your head like you might have worried.
Nope.
The grass was warm beneath his feet, the sword at his waist heavy and real, feeling the wind brush over the metal as clearly as he felt it on his face. It was a part of him, after all.
And in no time at all, he stood before the gates of Seireitei, the massive gatekeeper a little put off when the stranger didn't react in the slightest to his size or sudden appearance. Only bowed and greeted him as politely as possible.
"What?"
"Teranaga Hikaru. I wish to become a shinigami."
I waited as patiently as I could while hoops were brought out for me to jump through. Dammit, I thought this was supposed to be heaven! Why the HELL is there paperwork in heaven?
Ugh.
First thing I'm doing is grabbing myself some food. Lots of it. Can this take any longer to do? I had some food on the way, but I guess it wasn't enough.
I'm starving.
It's done! There may be a sequal, if i feel like it.
Btw...This was originally (the first chapter) a self-insert. But SI's rarely turn out well, so I made him into an OC. But I held off giving him a name, cause hey! Not like I was hijacking the canon story, nothing wrong with daydreaming, right? So he was somewhere inbetween.
But if it was a self-insert, then...I would be basically writing about my own death.
Yeah. That felt too weird. So I gave him a name.