Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 54 - The Snipe and the Clam
Both sides' subordinates began pouring into the battle. Wayne had assumed this would be his perfect opportunity to harvest.
He was wrong.
Atak didn't send his subordinates charging forward to clash with Gross's Adjuchas-class fighters. Instead, he gathered every last one of them behind him and formed them into a single-file line, a Dragon Formation stretching back across the terrain.
"Oh?" Wayne watched from a distance with genuine interest, curious to see exactly how Atak would fight.
The next moment, Atak's Reiatsu exploded upward. It blew past the ceiling of mid-tier Adjuchas in an instant and drove hard toward high-tier, still climbing after that breakthrough.
"Kill!"
The roar tore out of him, and Atak became a streak of silver-gray, a meteor hammering into Gross's lines. A brilliant flash, and the lead Low-Class Adjuchas had its skull crushed by a single blow. Then the second. Then the third. He punched through four Adjuchas-class fighters in one unbroken surge before the fifth held, a power-type that actually absorbed the hit.
It held the first strike. It did not hold the second.
Atak's other hammer came down. The power-type Hollow was driven straight into the ground.
The offensive wave paused. Atak immediately turned and launched a Cero at Gross, loaded to five times normal Reiatsu output.
THRUM!
The Cero's characteristic muffled detonation rolled across the field. Gross raised every tentacle he had to block it, and the Cero punched clean through anyway.
A five-times-Reiatsu attack was more than Gross could fully stop. His domain's corrosive effect chewed away at it, at least, that bought him something. But it wasn't enough. The Cero tore through Gross's left arm, kept going, and incinerated an unlucky Low-Class Adjuchas Hollow Beast somewhere behind him on the way out.
His left arm burned through. Gross's Reiatsu dropped sharply.
"Damn it — he chose now to burst!" Gross's voice went cold, the words grinding out like he was already imagining chewing Atak's Hollow Mask to splinters.
"All of you, get up there! He'll burn out fast — take him down!" The order hit, and every one of Gross's subordinates howled and slammed their Reiatsu to the limit, surging toward Atak in a wave. Cero of every color and dark-red Bala opened up simultaneously.
"Hmph. Dream on." Atak knew his own power was reaching its ceiling. He wheeled toward his subordinates and bellowed.
"Formation, rise!"
WHOOSH!
An orange curtain of light dropped from above and wrapped around Atak, and every incoming attack stopped dead against the outside of that barrier.
The instant the barrier locked into place, Atak's Reiatsu began to crater. He dropped into half-exhaustion, and the entire sequence proceeded with the smooth, inevitable rhythm of something rehearsed a hundred times.
"Negación?" Wayne's eyes sharpened. Since his own days doing the same, this was the first time he had seen a Hollow Beast use Negación as a defensive tool. He filed Atak's entire tactical structure away in the space of a few seconds. It was an N-shields-2 rotation.
Atak's burst formed the primary assault. When he entered the weakened period, his vice-officer would drop a Negación over him for protection, while the remaining subordinates formed a screen around whoever was maintaining the barrier. If the vice-officer went down, the next subordinate in line would pick up Negación duty without interruption, all the way until Atak fully recovered and began his next assault cycle.
That single wave hadn't just severely damaged Gross, it had wiped out six of his subordinates outright. On paper, Atak was ahead. But Gross had already closed the distance to just outside Atak's position, and his Acid Mist domain was beginning to creep into the subordinates clustered around him.
"Dragon Formation Tail — fall back!"
Atak's command was immediate. Seven or eight Hollow Beasts broke off and retreated, pulling clear of the Acid Mist's reach. The rest of the formation, already locked in position, didn't move.
They erupted together. Reiatsu flared from each of them in unison, and one barrier of light rose after another in rapid succession. A straight, unbroken band of Negación stretched before the eyes of every Hollow on the field.
"That's a well-built tactic." A trace of genuine admiration showed in Wayne's eyes. Not just using Negación, actually training subordinates to coordinate a simultaneous formation array. Every Hollow Beast inside Gross's domain would stay shielded from the Acid Mist until Atak finished recovering. And if Gross tried to press the tail end of the formation, the Dragon Formation could pivot, tail to head, flipping the defensive facing without breaking the line.
The trade-off was real. Fewer Hollow Beasts could actually fight this way, and some Adjuchas-class fighters were going to die for it. But if it bought enough time, victory would tilt their way regardless. Atak in full burst was more than capable of killing Gross head-on. That was the whole point.
"This Atak," Wayne said, scratching his chin as he watched the Negación stand in the distance like a wall of light, "probably wasn't born a Hollow. Transformed from a human, most likely." The Hollow Mask covered his face, but it didn't interfere with the very human gesture.
Wayne had been in Hueco Mundo long enough. But Hollow Beasts who had actually studied Negación, understood it, built tactics around it, were vanishingly rare. Stumbling across one had genuinely caught his interest.
"You there, go harass from the rear. The rest of you, get positioned and ready to fire Cero at Atak!" Gross wasn't stupid. He knew exactly what would happen once Atak recovered.
"Yes!" The Hollows split into two groups and moved out.
"Surround him and hold the line, the moment that Negación drops, blast this bastard apart!"
Gross was grinding his teeth hard enough to crack them. One arm severed, Reiatsu down by a dramatic margin, his plans to push out of his territory and expand were now delayed significantly. If he didn't finish Atak here today, the losses would be ruinous.
In recent days, Yinfeng's side had cut down a substantial portion of Atak's subordinates, already grinding down his territory's overall strength considerably. Now that the bridge was burned, there was no point in half-measures. Take Atak's territory. Take the whole thing. Whatever it cost.
With his subordinates locking Atak in place, Gross broke away and flew toward the Dragon Formation Tail. As he moved, he began compressing his domain, tightening its range while the concentration of Acid Mist inside climbed in a straight line upward.
The yellow-green mist had thickened until it was barely distinguishable from liquid acid. Where it touched the Adjuchas-class fighters, their Hierro began to hiss.
Gross scattered his own subordinates and used the domain to envelop the Hollow Beasts that hadn't established a Negación. One by one, the Hollow Beasts inside began to wail and scramble out of the mist's reach, breaking into individual fights with the surrounding Adjuchas. In the end, only the last Hollow Beast maintaining the Negación held its ground in the acid domain, straining, slowly disintegrating.
WHOOSH!
The Hollow Beast died. The Hollow it had been sheltering inside the Negación was instantly exposed, and the Acid Mist began spreading toward it.
The isolated Adjuchas hit Sonído and ran, and immediately got boxed in. Gross's subordinates cut off every exit and drove it back.
No way out. The isolated Adjuchas set its jaw, reversed the flow of spiritual energy in its body, and a blinding white light poured from the eyes beneath its Hollow Mask. For its lord, it chose Self-Destruction.
THRUM!
A yellow-green Cero struck it dead-on, right as the detonation was building. The corrosive charge ate through the body before the explosion could fully form. Self-Destruction, canceled.
The second Negación dropped. Another Adjuchas was exposed.
THRUM!
Not waiting for Gross to press forward, the newly revealed Adjuchas swept a Cero straight through the position where Gross stood.
It was only a Low-Class Adjuchas. The faintly red Cero never reached Gross, the Acid Mist ate through the vast majority of it before it got close, and what little remained was shredded to nothing by Gross's acid-mist tentacles at the last moment.
"Lord Atak, please avenge us!" The words tore out of the Low-Class Adjuchas in the instant the Cero shattered, raw and desperate. It reversed its Reiatsu, one final act. If it was going down, it was taking one of Gross's Adjuchas-class subordinates with it.
BOOM!
The detonation hit hard. The Low-Class Adjuchas drove itself into Gross's subordinates on the way out, and the explosion caught a good number of them. Not nothing. It counted for something.
"Hmph. A mayfly shaking a great tree." Gross's eyes narrowed, his gaze already locking onto the next target.
"Return to formation!"
Before Gross could move on it, Atak had already come back online. The moment the Negación vanished, Atak's Reiatsu surged again.
THRUM!
Ten-plus Cero fired on him simultaneously. Atak, Reiatsu blazing, punched out of the blast radius before most of them landed. One caught a leg, that was the only damage.
"Gross! You're dead!"
Injured, already clear of the explosion zone, Atak flew straight at him. Behind Atak, the subordinates who had been holding the Negación barriers dropped them and turned on the Hollows that had been harassing Atak's position.
CLANG!
The hammer found its mark. Gross was launched by a single blow, hit the ground, and skidded several hundred meters before stopping.
THRUM!
Bright silver light. The five-times-pressure Cero swept toward Gross, the ground scorched black in an instant, the Acid Mist evaporating where the beam passed.
The brilliance died. The extreme Reiatsu detonated against the earth in a massive explosion, and smoke and dust billowed up. Atak used the cover immediately, driving toward his vice-officer subordinates and cutting down three of Gross's fighters in quick succession with his Reiatsu advantage alone.
He scattered the assembled Hollows, and then crashed into his weakened state again. His subordinates were ready. The moment his condition dipped, a Negación came down and sealed him inside.
Gross's vice-officer subordinates took one look and bolted toward their lord, scrambling to regroup the formation and set up for another assault.
"A — TAK!"
The voice cut through the smoke and dust. Shrill. Grating. But this time Gross's Reiatsu had cratered, the sound of something badly hurt.
Yellow-green Reiatsu blew the smoke apart. What it revealed was Gross, his Hollow Mask cracked and split open.
He had gone completely berserk. The mask breaking meant his spiritual energy was already leaking. A Hollow in that state didn't get second chances, advancement was no longer possible.
What had started as an accidental dispute had crossed a line it couldn't come back from.
This was a fight to the death now.
➤ Next: Type Zero Storm