Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 28 - Battle of the Forest of Menos

The core of the forest was over ten kilometers from the fringe where Wayne had been lurking. His enormous body ate up the distance slowly, and it was a long walk before he finally drew within a thousand meters of the summoner.

Once inside that range, he found himself surrounded by a dense press of hundreds of Gillians. They didn't quarrel or attack each other, they simply marched, step by step, toward the source of the summons.

Wayne could have torn through dozens of them without breaking a sweat. He didn't. Instead he concealed his form and Reiatsu, fell in behind the mass of Gillians, and watched.

The Reiatsu ahead kept building as he drew closer. They were almost there.

When the Gillians in front of him stopped, Wayne knew what was waiting behind that black wall of bodies. The summoner. The one who had started all of this. The Reiatsu pressing down from the front was oppressive enough to mark its source as a peak Adjuchas-class Hollow at minimum, something not far from Vasto Lorde. One successful war might be all it needed to make that leap.

Why a powerhouse of that caliber hadn't moved to the inner circle to develop, Wayne had no idea.

He revealed his form and pushed deeper into the Gillian horde. Third row in, he finally got a clear look at the summoner.

A sandworm. An Adjuchas-class Menos Grande built like one, anyway, roughly forty meters long, a wall of living flesh.

Twenty-odd segments, each one bristling with two blade-like appendages on either side. A grotesque Hollow Mask gripped its head like a vice. Beneath massive mandibles, four rows of jagged, saw-like teeth hung open, and dark green liquid dripped steadily from its mouth to the ground below, where it hissed on contact.

Whatever that liquid was, you did not want it on you. The sound alone made that clear.

The sandworm Adjuchas kept hissing — still summoning, still pulling more Gillians in.

The scale of this war was no small thing. Hundreds of Gillians and still not enough to fill it.

Wayne went quiet and still. This was a major operation, either a clash with another Forest of Menos, or an internal power struggle within this one. Either way, it wouldn't be over in a day or two.

He decided to stay buried in the middle-rear of the force. Gather intelligence on one side, feed on the other.

The summoning lasted three full days. By the end, nearly six thousand Gillians had assembled in the core zone. The numbers weren't small to begin with, but as the summons dragged on, more and more Gillians with actual consciousness showed up. In Wayne's section of the horde alone, he counted three.

None of them moved against him. A Gillian with consciousness had one priority right now: eating. Nobody was going to make trouble when there was food in front of them.

The summoner understood the same thing. He knew he couldn't stop Gillians from eating each other, and over three days, each one eating roughly ten others was the realistic ceiling. That kind of attrition he could absorb.

Adjuchas were a different story.

There were dozens of them in the assembly. They didn't cause trouble. After casually putting down a few unlucky Gillians, they settled in near the sandworm and waited.

Wayne wasn't going to let that opportunity rot.

Reiatsu suppressed, he moved through the horde, bite a Hollow Mask, shift positions, repeat. He kept his feeding spread out and irregular so the summoner couldn't track any pattern back to a single source.

He had an edge the other Gillians didn't: Reishi compression. A normal Gillian needed one to two hours to process a consumed companion. Wayne needed about thirty minutes. And he only took the masks, leaving the enormous body behind for the mindless Gillians to swarm. It kept the local death rate looking natural, nothing that would spike fear or chaos in the surrounding crowd.

He also used his Concealment ability to keep shifting his position after each feeding. Even an Adjuchas with sharp perception couldn't single out one Hollow in a sea of thousands. There were simply too many bodies packed together to lock onto any individual.

Three days. Nearly a hundred masks consumed.

Before the war had even started, Wayne had already become its biggest winner.

The problem was he couldn't leave. No matter how well concealed he stayed, the moment he peeled away from the horde, those Adjuchas-class Menos Grande would lock his Reiatsu in an instant. Getting surrounded was not something he could survive. Not yet.

Then the sandworm Adjuchas let out a single cry.

The massive Gillian army stopped feeding and turned south, marching together toward the edge of the forest. Wayne moved with them, buried in the middle-rear, waiting for any gap he could use to slip away.

War meant nothing to him right now. He had no stake in this.

But he'd been too optimistic.

There was no gap. Not one Gillian dropped out of the march, not even the ones with consciousness. They all pressed forward, howling with something that sounded almost like excitement, as if the summoner had called them not to war but to a feast.

After the southern edge of the forest fell behind them, the sight ahead put Wayne's stomach through the floor.

The sandworm Menos Grande's mandibles shifted. A massive black void tore open in front of the army.

A Garganta. The spatial technique, usable by a rare few Gillian-level Hollows, a portion of Adjuchas, and anything Vasto Lorde and above. Its interior ran through the Dangai, a subspace corridor connecting Hueco Mundo to the World of the Living and Soul Society. For moving large numbers of Hollows, there was nothing better.

Where this one led, Wayne had no idea. But not entering meant death. And once he stepped through, there was no coming back until he walked out the other side.

"Well... I'll just walk into the dark and see where it goes. Should've kept my head down and not gotten greedy."

He regretted it, a little. If he'd known it would come to this — if he'd just stayed out of the war — he could've used the window when all these Adjuchas-class Menos Grande cleared out to hunt faster than ever.

Gillians pressed around him on all sides as he stepped toward the opening. He couldn't help it, just before he crossed the threshold, he glanced toward the sandworm Menos Grande standing beside the Garganta, watching the procession file through.

Wayne was fifteen meters tall. Impressive, by most measures.

The sandworm was nearly forty.

He looked small.

The sandworm's gaze snapped toward him, as if he'd felt the glance. Wayne yanked his eyes away and walked quickly into the dark.

He didn't see what happened behind him.

After he disappeared through the opening, a strange expression crossed the sandworm Adjuchas's massive Hollow Mask. Then a low, rasping voice cut through the air.

"Hmph. An amusing little ant."

---

Inside the Garganta, Wayne found a pitch-black corridor stretching straight ahead of him. It reminded him vaguely of a stalactite cave he'd seen once, back when he was alive. The Reishi density matched the Forest of Menos, but there was something else here, an underlying wrongness to the atmosphere. Looking too long at the walls made his vision swim. He kept his eyes forward and followed the flow of Hollows, not daring to do much else.

There was no way to track time in the dark. He didn't even know whether time inside the Garganta ran at the same rate as outside. All he knew was that the walking kept going, and going, and going, until his mind started to fray at the edges.

By his own estimate, at least a month had passed. Still no destination in sight. If his rank had been high enough to risk making noise, he would have started cursing out loud long ago. Fortunately, his patience held.

Just before he hit his breaking point, the darkness ahead began to lighten.

The Garganta was ending. Which meant whatever came next was starting.

He braced himself. Quincies hiding in the World of the Living, maybe. Or Soul Reapers from Soul Society. Either way, a fight was coming.

He was wrong on both counts.

When Wayne stepped through the final curtain of light, the world that met him was dim and barren. The pale sand, the colorless sky, the empty expanse in every direction.

Still Hueco Mundo.

Different location, but still Hueco Mundo.

Several thousand meters ahead, another Garganta was opening. Thousands of Gillians were packed on that side, dense as a storm cloud. And between the two armies, stretching across the ground between them, lay an enormous graveyard.

There was no other word for it.

A Menos Graveyard. Endless skeletal remains of Gillians, scattered across the earth as far as he could see.

Hollows dissolved into Reishi when they died, that was how it worked. But not here. Here, the bones remained, thousands upon thousands of them, piled and bleached across the ground. The Reishi pouring off them was so thick it made the air feel viscous. And it was wrong, corrupted by the sheer weight of malevolence that had soaked into this place over what must have been ages. The Reishi in the atmosphere was too violent, too chaotic to be properly absorbed. Hollows didn't need to breathe. They still felt the wrongness pressing against them from every direction.

"A Menos Graveyard?!"

Wayne stood still for a moment, struck by the scale of the thing. He could feel the savage, restless Reishi pushing against him from all sides. It was absorbable, technically. But too much of it would rot his mind. That was a hard limit.

He understood now. This was what the Adjuchas had assembled tens of thousands of Gillians for. Two purposes: feeding and evolving for their own advancement, and war against another Forest of Menos.

The outer circle of Hueco Mundo had three Forests of Menos, each one holding the others in check. Periodically, two of them went to war, grinding against each other, devouring each other, creating the conditions that let conscious Gillians and Adjuchas push toward their next evolution. In theory. In practice, almost all the real gains went to the commander-level Menos Grande at the top. Surviving as a Gillian in one of these battles was nearly impossible.

ROOOOAR!

The violent Reishi in the air hit the assembled Gillians like a drug. They didn't think. They charged, surging toward the enemy across the graveyard without hesitation. To Wayne the Reishi was a hazard. To the mindless Gillians it was a stimulant, something to gulp down as fast as they could. They wouldn't understand what it was doing to them. Not even when it tore them apart from the inside.

Thousands of Gillians screamed and lurched forward.

Minutes later, two mindless Gillians fired the first Ceros.

The war started.

Reiatsu detonated across the graveyard like a chain reaction. The sky — already dim, already a sickly yellow — turned dark crimson as Ceros crisscrossed the air in every direction. Nearly a hundred Gillians were vaporized in the opening exchange. Chunks of flesh rained across the graveyard floor.

It didn't slow the ones behind them. It accelerated them.

The smoke and debris from the first wave hadn't settled before the second wave of Ceros was already screaming through it. The stench of blood hit like a wall.

"How do I get out of this?"

The Gillians behind him were pushing hard. Wayne had his Reiatsu locked down to almost nothing, but moving against the current was like trying to walk upstream in a river, he could resist, but he couldn't stop. The horde didn't care about him. They just kept pushing forward.

His mind was already working.

The Gillians up front are expendable. Cannon fodder, every one of them. The real players are the dozen or so Adjuchas. I need to wait until they engage, that's when the chaos gets deep enough to slip through. Concealment? Not yet. Too early.

First priority: get to the rear.

He turned around, planted his feet, and backhanded the Gillian directly behind him hard enough to send it skidding sideways. Then he let his Reiatsu flare, not to attack, just to press. A wall of pressure rolling backward through the horde. The Gillians closest to him flinched. He walked.

Any Gillian that didn't get out of the way got slapped down. The ones behind them trampled over the fallen bodies. Wayne kept walking, methodical, one heavy step at a time, carving a path through the surging mass toward the rear.

One risk. If the Adjuchas on his own side spotted a Gillian breaking away from the charge, they'd take notice. He knew that. He kept moving anyway. The window before the Adjuchas engaged was the only window he had.

WOOOOO, ROOOOAR!

Several hundred meters back, a shriek rose over the din of battle.

Then a Reiatsu like a falling mountain slammed into him from behind.

Wayne activated Concealment in the same instant and cut sideways, trying to break the lock. It didn't work. Within seconds, a massive shape blew through the Gillians between them like they were paper and landed directly in front of him.

The sandworm Menos Grande.

"...Sonído," Wayne muttered, taking two involuntary steps back. The shockwave still rolling off that arrival pressed against his chest like a physical thing.

"Ant." The sandworm's voice carried the absolute weight of something that had never once been told no. "Where exactly do you think you're running to?"

Wayne stared up at that towering form. The Reiatsu alone was enough to make his legs want to give. He forced himself to straighten, pressed one arm across his chest, and bowed.

"...My lord." A beat. Then, steady: "I wasn't running. I was trying to win this war."

➤ Next: The North-South Conflict