Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 99 - Spoils of War

Chapter Ninety-Nine

BOOM!

The Flash of the King Hollow erupted with savage force. Wayne seized the moment both Vasto Lordes broke away to dodge and locked onto the lanky Hollow Beast.

The Flash of the King Hollow had been a feint. His real target was the Adjuchas-class fighters battling below, and the Flash's trajectory happened to pass straight through the two Vasto-level Menos.

That was Wayne's true one-stone, two-birds play.

Whatever damage the Flash of the King Hollow dealt to the Adjuchas below didn't matter right now. Wayne's eyes were on the lanky Vasto-level Menos.

He flickered forward with a Void Flash and swung the Sky-Rending Greatsword in a horizontal slash. The lanky Vasto reacted fast, it spun and raised its blade to block, but Wayne's force was overwhelming, and the impact sent it crashing backward. An instant later, Wayne simply vanished. His Reiatsu signature disappeared from the battlefield entirely. The lanky Hollow Beast spun around, searching, and the Sky-Rending Greatsword drove straight into its back.

Full Concealment deployed in a single heartbeat. That one moment became the pivot that locked the fight in Wayne's favor. He had kept his abilities hidden for exactly this, waiting for the instant the enemy relaxed. As an assassination-type Hollow Beast, Wayne had pushed every advantage he had to its absolute edge.

The greatsword buried itself deep, but Wayne didn't stop there. His right claw swept up and a Space-Rending Slash carved a bone-deep gash across the lanky Hollow Beast's neck. Not quite enough to take the head.

"Tsk." Wayne clicked his tongue. His right claw seized the thing's cervical bone, pressed his face in close, and fired a point-blank Cero.

That did it. The head came apart.

"Bastard!" Kamula, the tank-type Hollow Beast, watched his partner get cut down and erupted. He poured every drop of Reiatsu into his body and charged. Two against one, and they'd been getting pushed around the whole time, and now he'd lost one of his own. Rage burned through him as he surged toward Wayne, and in that moment he truly looked like a heavy tank crashing into motion.

"Rending Brilliance Charge!"

Crimson flames roared to life across Kamula's entire body as he thundered forward. The raw speed of it caught Wayne off guard for just a second.

After stowing the lanky Vasto-level's corpse in his Innate Space, Wayne threw out a Void Flash and left the spot, trying to put distance between himself and the charge. Kamula didn't let up. If anything, he accelerated, and his speed was creeping up on Wayne's Void Flash.

"Hiss... homing?" After the second Void Flash, Wayne had his answer. This technique had locked onto him. The longer Kamula charged, the faster and harder he hit, and at this point the tank was already leaving afterimages in his wake. Let him accelerate any further and dodging wouldn't be an option. He needed to bleed that speed somehow.

Swoosh. Swoosh.

Wayne carved two Sword Gleams toward Kamula, a cross pattern, flying straight and true. They shattered on contact.

The Space-Rending Slash's Sword Gleams hadn't slowed the charge by a single step. If Wayne tried to take this with his body...

"Tsk. Problem." Wayne kept retreating, throwing up Spatial Barriers one after another. Kamula smashed through every one. At this speed and power, the guy could probably crash straight through a Negación. Still, the barriers weren't useless, each one chipped away at his momentum, and Kamula's speed did come down a notch.

"Annoying." Wayne glanced toward Baraggan. The old man had already gained the upper hand over his opponent. A dozen more exchanges and it'd be finished. But Wayne's side couldn't afford to wait that long.

He started retreating toward Baraggan, hoping the old emperor could hit Kamula with his deathly aura. The problem was that would cost Baraggan his advantage, he'd have to rebuild from scratch. And if Kamula could reactivate that technique after being forced to abort it, Wayne's window for a killing blow would be nearly impossible to find.

"Vasto-level Menos, every last one of them," Wayne muttered. He'd underestimated just how deep their reserves ran.

"My lord — move!"

A woman's voice cut through the chaos. Wayne turned. Harribel had the Imperial Shark Greatsword leveled in his direction.

She'd gone to check for attackers coming from the rear. Back already, and not a scratch on her, she must have come up empty, but the timing couldn't have been better.

Wayne's eyes sharpened. He fired a Void Flash toward her, drawing Kamula's charge trajectory along with him. The moment Kamula adjusted course to follow his new position, Wayne flashed behind Harribel and started building up power. Even a few seconds of cover was all he needed to compress his Reiatsu into something devastating.

"Cascada!"

Harribel's shout rang out, and a high-pressure torrent of water surged from the Imperial Shark Greatsword and slammed into Kamula head-on.

BOOM!

The flames wreathing Kamula's body hit the water and exploded into billowing clouds of steam, swallowing the area in a dense white haze. The immediate slowing effect was modest at best.

But where Wayne's attack had been a single burst, Harribel's Cascada was sustained. She kept the pressure on, a continuous wall of water crashing against Kamula, grinding down his speed with every second. The drop was gradual, nothing dramatic, but it was the opposite of the accelerating nightmare from before. On Wayne's end, the Flash of the King Hollow was building in his palm. Given a few dozen seconds, he could push it to something catastrophic.

Kamula felt the momentum shifting. He pushed through the water pressure as long as he could, then cut the technique and vaulted backward.

The moment he aborted, the fight's advantage transferred wholesale to Wayne.

War Drop!

Harribel swept out a rapid series of water blades, cutting off Kamula's escape angles and pinning his movement. Wayne didn't hesitate. One Void Flash, and he delivered the Flash of the King Hollow point-blank.

BOOM!

The explosion tore through the sky. The blast connected clean, punched through nearly half of Kamula's torso, and seared everything so thoroughly that the blood never had a chance to flow before it was cauterized. And even then, the tank-type wasn't dead. He hung in the air on one knee, a sluggish milky-white Reiatsu seeping from his body as he tried to push it into repairs.

A tier below High-Speed Regeneration, by the look of it. Nothing that impressive, but for a tank-type Hollow Beast it made sense. Wayne had no intention of letting it matter.

He brought the greatsword up and charged. Kamula caught the blade with his free arm. The steel sank three fingers deep into the flesh and stopped. The arm didn't come off.

"Huff... huff..." Kamula's breathing came in ragged heaves. "Despicable outsiders. You've cut us down... Lord Saros will not let this pass."

"Oh?" Wayne's gaze sharpened. "You're saying there are Vasto-levels above you?"

"Hmph." Kamula forced the words out between labored breaths. "The greatness of Lord Saros is beyond anything you could comprehend. Here in the Central Region, Lord Saros is one of the Three Great Chieftains. Cross him, and in the Central Region you'll — AAARRGH!"

Wayne's claw tore through his throat before he could finish. Then he reached in and ripped the Hollow Mask free with his bare hand.

"Saros, Sephiroth — doesn't matter. We came here to grind all of them to dust. And you lot?" He held the eye contact a beat. "You'll be our nourishment."

SQUELCH!

One stroke. The maskless Ramula's head left his shoulders, and the Vasto-level battle was over.

It wasn't that Wayne hadn't wanted to ask questions. It was that a Vasto Lorde who'd served its master loyally to this point wouldn't give up location or capabilities without a fight that could take longer than it was worth. So he hadn't bothered. There were Adjuchas-class fighters down below who'd be far easier to crack open.

He looked back. Baraggan had just split his opponent clean down the middle with a single axe blow. Before the body could use any recovery ability, the old emperor bit the Hollow Mask apart and poured his Death Sigh directly into its brain, putting it down for good.

Both Vasto-level fights. Finished.

Wayne's group had walked away loaded.

"Tia — thanks." Wayne raised a hand toward Harribel.

Harribel blinked, visibly caught off guard. Her lord didn't make a habit of this. "It — it was nothing. It's my duty, my lord."

"Heh. Go help Nel and the others sweep the battlefield. I'll go check in with Baraggan. We'll talk when I'm back. Leave a few of them alive."

Simple order given, Wayne crossed to Baraggan's side. This ambush had come out of nowhere. He wanted answers: why had it been so easy to get blindsided, and where the hell had their sentries been?

"Boy, you have my thanks this time." Baraggan had just finished absorbing a lower-stage Vasto-level and let out a long, slow breath. "If you hadn't kept those two occupied, I might have had to pull my people back and run."

"Emperor, what actually happened? With this many of us, how do three Vasto-levels walk into our camp without a single person detecting them?"

The battle below was wrapping up. With Harribel in the mix, neither of them needed to worry about it. Better to focus on the question.

"This old man doesn't know." Baraggan's skull shifted side to side. "They seemed to materialize out of nothing. The sentries and vanguard I brought, nearly all of them were wiped out before I even knew what was happening."

"Vasto-level Menos. Still, slipping close enough to camp without anyone catching their Reiatsu means they must have had some kind of concealment. At least we dealt with all three of them. The remaining Adjuchas-class aren't a concern." Wayne glanced down at the fading fight. "By the way, Emperor, one of those Vasto-levels mentioned a chieftain above them. Someone called Saros. Claimed he's one of the Three Great Chieftains. Does that name mean anything to you?"

"I never concerned myself with the Central Region's affairs." Baraggan's eye sockets flickered. "Perhaps while I lay wounded and dormant, something significant shifted there. Three Great Chieftains, this old man has never heard that title before."

"If they've got three Vasto-levels serving under them, then whoever these chieftains are, they'd need at least mid-class strength to hold that kind of authority. Otherwise nobody would follow them. Emperor, is it possible the Central Region has been growing in the dark, and we simply weren't paying attention?"

"Hmm." Baraggan went quiet for a moment. "I've been occupied with the eastern domain, pushing its borders, extending reach across the wider stretches of Hueco Mundo. The Central Region, for all that I knew it held Vasto-level Hollow Beasts, was never somewhere I found time to deal with. I didn't expect that while I slept, they'd come this far." The ghostly flames in his eye sockets stirred. "Negligence on my part. I failed to keep watch over what was moving in those shadows."

"It's not too late. If the total number of Vasto-levels born across Hueco Mundo in ten thousand years hasn't cracked a hundred, then the ones alive right now won't be much higher than that. We still have room to expand before this becomes unmanageable."

"Mm. This old man has considerable confidence in his own abilities. Whatever strength they've gathered, defeating this king is no easy matter." Baraggan's arrogance sat as naturally on him as his crown once had. The pride of a former king never fully faded.

"Speaking of concealment, boy, when I first sensed their Reiatsu moving in, I saw what looked like a black liquid curtain hanging in the air. And earlier, while you were fighting, I caught a glimpse of the same thing, and then your Reiatsu dropped off the map entirely. Thought you'd gotten yourself killed."

"Oh?" That detail caught Wayne's attention. He raised his hand and pulled the lanky Vasto-level's corpse out of his Innate Space, and Bawabawa came with it. The little loach was latched onto the dead Vasto's arm, gnawing away with a steady crunching rhythm, grinding its teeth, by the looks of it.

"This little creature..." Wayne shook his head, amused, but let it go. Without his say-so, Bawabawa wouldn't dare swallow an entire Vasto-level whole, that kind of stunt might earn it a very unpleasant on-site dissection. Chewing on an arm for teething purposes was a different matter entirely.

"Is this the Hollow Beast you mean, Emperor?"

"That's the one." Baraggan nodded. "When the attack first came, he was the first thing I saw burst out from behind that black curtain. Which made me wonder, whether that strange concealment method came from him."

"Hmm..." Wayne turned the memory over. When they'd fought, that black liquid barrier had cut off his vision completely, replacing it with a stretch of Alternate Space. If it could alter its shape from the inside, then there was every chance that curtain could restructure itself from the outside as well.

➤ Next: The Three Great Lords