Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 94 - Ulquiorra Cifer — Face to Face

The next day, Wayne and Baraggan brought Harribel deep into the Forest of Delusion to search for Ulquiorra, who had gone to ground somewhere in the forest's heart. Nel stayed behind at the base with Bawabawa.

The deeper they went, the more the color drained from the forest. The outer ring was lush and green. The middle stretch turned dim and weathered. The interior was the gray of dead ash. Every step forward deepened the sense of desolation.

Why Ulquiorra would choose to hide himself here was anyone's guess.

"Boy, something's wrong with this place." Baraggan spoke without breaking stride. "I can feel my law's power being suppressed. This place may not be as simple as we think."

"Suppressed?" Wayne immediately reached inward and tested his own law's power. Nothing. No discomfort at all.

"I don't feel anything." He shook his head slightly, but he didn't doubt Baraggan for a second. The ruler of Hueco Mundo had no reason to joke about something like this. "Could it be mutual interference between laws? Great Emperor — does your Time Law conflict with any others?"

"Aside from the Life Law, this king cannot recall any law that directly opposes mine." Baraggan's skull dipped slightly. "Since that battle, too much of this king's memory is gone. Much of what I once knew about the laws is lost. You should have gained some understanding of the laws when you advanced — but know this: until you reach a certain height, do not speak of these matters lightly."

"Understood." Wayne nodded. Baraggan had already hinted at the existence of the Hollow World Sovereign without spelling it out. There was no need to push further. Some things were better left unspoken between them.

"That said — there must be a law present here, right? Otherwise a Vasto Lorde wouldn't be lingering in one spot for so long."

"Mm. Perhaps that fellow Ulquiorra was lucky enough to stumble across the remains of a King Hollow or an ancient Hollow beast somewhere in this forest. The law power stored inside — it's possible he absorbed it."

"Oh?" Wayne filed that away. Another crucial piece of intelligence.

"Hmph. You brat, you know far too little about Hueco Mundo." Baraggan's jaw creaked. He began to recount what remained of his memories.

"Beyond the law powers of the Nine Great King Hollows, many ancient Hollow beasts also carried fragments of law power. Through devouring, they could fuse that stored power into themselves — enough to rival the law powers of the Nine Great Kings. Hollow beasts are different from Soul Reapers and Quincy. At our stage, as long as we never stop devouring, we can keep accumulating Reiryoku without limit. The legend goes that if a Hollow beast were to devour everything in existence, the Three Worlds would collapse and all living things would be wiped out, until at last nothing remained but one enormous Hollow beast."

"Good grief." Wayne let the corner of his mouth curl. "That's basically Instrumentality. Don't tell me that Hollow beast's name is Lilith."

"Hm?" Baraggan turned his head. The deep hollows of his skull were full of question marks.

"Ah, never mind. Forget I said anything. Please, continue." Wayne laughed it off with an awkward wave.

"As for the origin of the nine great laws, I imagine you already know. Fragments of the laws fell across Hueco Mundo, that much you should be aware of. And concerning the great war between the King Hollows and the ancient Hollow beasts: I have one fragment of memory left from that time. If any of the Nine Great King Hollows failed to find a worthy inheritor for their law, they would seal their own Reiryoku and form a zone, what we call a ruin. Likewise, if an ancient Hollow beast fell not by the blade but by its own passing, it would leave behind a skeletal ruin, its Reiryoku sealed within the bones."

"A ruin?"

"The name is just a label. In truth, it is nothing more than the bones and law power of a King Hollow or ancient Hollow beast. The scale varies. Large ones, you saw the crumbling fortress at the heart of my Las Noches, didn't you? That was left behind when an ancient Hollow beast died there. Why else do you think this king placed the center of his domain in that spot? At the other end of the scale, a ruin might be nothing more than a single bone."

"I see." Wayne turned it over in his mind.

"It is a pity that the skeletal ruin this king claimed held no law power. The remains of the ancient Hollow beast gave me a portion of Reiryoku, nothing more."

"Oh?" Wayne's eyes narrowed with fresh curiosity.

"Don't read too much into it. A ruin's stored Reiryoku fades with time. If no inheritor ever finds it, eventually the ruin disappears and the law power crumbles into fragments and scatters. This king simply arrived at a ruin that didn't have much Reiryoku left. And besides, this king is, after all, one of the Nine Great King Hollows."

"Ha. Fair point. I was getting ahead of myself." Wayne smiled sheepishly. He had been imagining finding a ruin, devouring the remains inside, and leaping straight to a higher tier, but clearly it wasn't that clean.

Made sense, though. If every ruin produced a Vasto Lorde-level Menos, Hueco Mundo's fighting strength wouldn't be getting stomped by Soul Society.

"Ruins are a minor matter regardless. There are no more than fifty in all of Hueco Mundo, and ruins that actually contain a law are rarer still. Those are the true ancient relics this world has left behind. With the right affinity, one can gain extraordinary power from them. That's almost certainly what happened with Ulquiorra. Among all the Hollow beasts this king is aware of, the ones who surpass this king in strength are few indeed."

A law capable of suppressing Baraggan's abilities. What on earth could it be?

Wayne let the question go and kept walking. As the Hollow World Sovereign had told him, he was not the only Hollow to have been chosen. There had to be at least seven others like him, possibly more. The nine great laws had shattered into tens of thousands of fragments. Gathering them all was no simple task. His own Spatial Law was almost certainly incomplete. He could feel it: beyond the abilities he had already unlocked, there had to be other uses, other methods of qualitative transformation still waiting to be found.

"Who knows? We'll find out when we get there." Baraggan offered nothing more and kept advancing.

As they pushed deeper, the gray-white around them bled into a sickly pale. The once-dense woodland rotted away into something decayed and broken. But the pale-gray shrubs thickened on every side. They were getting close to the center.

Then Wayne stepped into a clearing, and a crushing wave of Reiatsu slammed down over all of them.

"That Reiatsu... that's Ulquiorra." Wayne braced against it instinctively, pushing his own Reiatsu up to meet it, but there was a clear pressure working against him, something actively suppressing him.

"Mid-tier or above, as expected. Not yet high-tier, but formidable all the same." Baraggan's voice was unhurried. He was a king with deep roots. Reiatsu like this wasn't enough to rattle him.

"This king can feel it clearly, though. This power is suppressing this king's law ability." As he spoke, Baraggan released his Respira and sent it drifting toward the source of the pressure.

A moment later, the shrubs on the far side of the clearing erupted. A deathly pale figure burst through and landed in the open space. Reiatsu spiked. A dark-green Cero tore across the clearing toward them, scattering Baraggan's Respira and driving straight for his body.

"Hmph." A cold snort. Baraggan raised one great skeletal hand and fired back a black-red Cero of his own.

Two Vasto Lorde-level Ceros met in the middle.

The explosion was enormous. The entire clearing split open around a massive crater. When the smoke thinned, Baraggan stood on one side, his dark-purple cloak drifting in the aftershock. On Wayne's side, a spatial rift shimmering with faint, mysterious light held its shape in front of him, Wayne had thrown it up to shield himself and Harribel. On the far side of the crater, a pale figure stood motionless in the settling dust.

Wayne stared across at it and went still.

That was Ulquiorra. No question. But Ulquiorra as a Hollow beast, before anything else had touched him.

The body was humanoid but deathly white from head to torso, with pitch-black limbs. Gaunt to the point of looking like a dried corpse. The ends of two thin arms tapered into razor-sharp claws. The feet were no longer human, they were demonic talons. But none of that was what stopped Wayne cold.

What stopped him was the mask.

Half a mask, shaped like a helmet, stretched across Ulquiorra's face. Two bone-white demonic horns jutted from the top. The eyes were green, vivid, luminous green, but the sclera surrounding them was pure black, like emeralds burning inside ink.

Half. Not a full mask. Half.

No wonder Tiber had said this Vasto Lorde's Reiatsu was terrifyingly high. It wasn't just raw Reiatsu. He had already entered the stage of Arrancarification.

"Arrancar?!" Wayne felt like he had just stumbled onto undiscovered territory.

So that was it. In the original story, Ulquiorra could perform a Segunda Etapa. That had always seemed like something only the Hōgyoku made possible, but no. Long before Aizen ever used the Hōgyoku on him, Ulquiorra had already Arrancarified on his own. Add the Hōgyoku's amplification on top of that, and of course he became something monstrous.

Whether Ulquiorra had also inherited a law was a separate question. Either way, Wayne was fairly certain his own arrival hadn't disturbed Ulquiorra's timeline. What he was looking at right now, this was the Ulquiorra who would one day stand beneath Aizen's banner. This was where that story began.

"So he's Arrancarified." The ghostly flames in Baraggan's eye sockets flickered.

"You know about Arrancar?"

"Of course." Baraggan's tone was measured. "It is a mutation. When Reiatsu accumulates past a certain threshold, a transformation of very low probability can occur, the Hollow Mask breaks. But the Hollow beast does not fall in rank. Its Reiryoku actually increases. We call this Arrancarification. In all of Hueco Mundo, the instances this king knows of do not exceed five, and every single one occurred at the Vasto Lorde level, never before.

"Based on the Reiatsu this one is putting out, he Arrancarified at the initial stage of the Vasto Lorde tier. That accounts for what we're feeling. Most likely he stumbled across the ruin here while he was still at that initial stage, inherited the law and the stored Reiryoku from the remains, and the combined pressure triggered the mutation." Baraggan paused. "In any case, it doesn't matter. Once we take him down, we may be able to claim that law power for ourselves. I had considered recruiting him, but devouring him would likely benefit us more."

"If we devour him, can we become Arrancar too?"

Baraggan gave Wayne a flat look. "Do you think it's that simple?"

"Then I'd rather try talking first." Once it was clear that devouring Ulquiorra wasn't a shortcut to Arrancarification, Wayne's thinking shifted. He needed to learn how it actually worked. In everything he knew, there had been only one Hollow beast who had self-Arrancarified: the wolf king Coyote Starrk, who he had encountered when he first arrived in the inner circle of Hueco Mundo. Starrk had been the sole confirmed case, and yet here was Ulquiorra. If Wayne could pull the secret out of him, the advantage going forward would be enormous.

"You want to recruit this one too?" Baraggan's distaste was plain. Probably the law affinity clash.

"Let's at least open a dialogue. One more friend is always better than one more enemy."

"Hmph. Do as you like." Baraggan stepped back and reined in his Reiatsu, content to watch.

"Who comes here." The voice was low and rough, scraped out of a dry throat. Ulquiorra had spoken first, the intruders hadn't charged, so he was taking stock. His Reiatsu didn't drop a fraction. Every last bit of his guard was up.

"First time meeting. I'm Wayne, Ace Wayne." Wayne stepped forward. "Sorry for the intrusion. We come without hostile intent. We're building a faction of our own, and we came hoping you'd be willing to join us."

"Not interested." Flat. Cold. "Leave."

"Don't refuse so fast." Wayne raised a hand. "I know you're a possessor of a law. Am I wrong?"

"Law?" A pause. "What is that?"

"Hm?" Wayne blinked. He turned to Baraggan.

"Not every Hollow beast knows its own ability is part of a law," Baraggan said. "And not every Hollow beast has been as fortunate as you."

So Ulquiorra had never met the Hollow World Sovereign.

Wayne understood immediately. That angle was closed. He filed it away and tried a different door.

"Is it just you out here? Would you be willing to come take a look at what we've built? There are comrades waiting, allies you haven't met yet."

"Comrades." Ulquiorra repeated the word like it was a foreign object. "Not interested. Leave."

Wayne exhaled slowly. This was like pushing against stone.

"Boy, let me try." Baraggan moved past him. "Your approach isn't working on this one."

He stopped a few paces in front of Ulquiorra and let the silence stretch.

"Brat. Do you know who this king is?"

"Enemy."

"I am the king of Hueco Mundo. Baraggan Louisenbairn." The name fell like a decree. "Brat, give me your name."

"Ulquiorra Cifer." The words came quiet and unhurried. Then his Reiatsu surged to its absolute ceiling. "Leave this place."

A beat of silence.

"Otherwise, die."

➤ Next: Black Cero