Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 169 - Crisis
Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Nine
"Growl, Haineko!"
Rangiku drew her Zanpakutō, and in an instant the blade in her hand dissolved into a handful of ash-gray sand that swirled around her, awaiting her command.
"Tsukishiro, hurry up and get Kitagawa out of here. Go find backup — I'll hold them off!"
At the critical moment, Lieutenant Rangiku's aura surged outward.
Unfortunately, what she was facing was an Adjuchas-level Hollow.
This Adjuchas already possessed mid-level Reiatsu; it could match a captain-class combatant in raw power. Even with Rangiku's strength, pinning it down would only be possible for a short time, let alone killing it. And on top of that, standing beside this Adjuchas was a silhouette with a full head of orange hair, still dressed in a Shin'ō Academy uniform.
Yagami Kina.
More precisely, Yagami Kina after Hollowfication. A Hollow Mask now covered her face, and her left shoulder along with her left arm had been completely wrapped in the Hollow's Reiatsu, layered over with a thick coating of pale white hardened bone.
"There's no backup to find..." Wayne knew that once they had moved beyond the battle perimeter they had entered from, making it this far meant no reinforcements would be coming. Every 10th Division member who had deployed here was probably already in a fight or rushing toward one. With Aizen's hypnosis at work, he would certainly ensure they never encountered each other, and Wayne himself, being immune to that hypnosis, had no doubt already had a kill order placed on him, with an Adjuchas-level Hollow dispatched directly to hunt him down.
As for why Aizen hadn't come to kill him personally, it was likely because there was a more important test subject over where Isshin Shiba was.
"Miss Rangiku, I have no idea how to use the Senkaimon." Wayne stood up and drew his Zanpakutō. "One Adjuchas is already going to be a brutal fight. Miss Rangiku, I'll hold it off for now — you draw Yagami Kina away. Once you've dealt with her, come back and help me."
"No, that's too dangerous." Rangiku replied. "I promised the captain I wouldn't let you put yourself at risk. I'll hold them off — you take Kitagawa and get out." Without giving Wayne a chance to respond, she swung her Zanpakutō, commanding Haineko as she charged forward.
"Don't be foolish." Wayne's brow tightened. He immediately used Shunpo to overtake Rangiku, drew his Zanpakutō, and a blade arc instantly launched from the tip, flying straight toward the massive Adjuchas.
Boom!
The Adjuchas raised a hand and blocked the incoming arc, but a shallow gash appeared on its thick arm. The strike fully enraged it, and it came charging at him at full speed.
"Idiot!" Rangiku's expression hardened. She then commanded Haineko to form a shroud of mist, obscuring the Adjuchas's line of sight. "Get out of here now — this thing is not something you can handle!"
"SKREEEEE!"
A hideous screech rang out as Yagami Kina, half a step behind the Adjuchas, came surging forward.
"Damn it!" Wayne's expression darkened. He had spent years fighting Hollow-class creatures and had considerable experience doing so. Even if he couldn't beat this massive thing right now, getting away would be no problem. But Rangiku's sense of duty had completely ruined his plan. With no other choice, he could only lead Yagami Kina away first, pulling her into a nearby dead-tree forest to temporarily separate the two combatants before thinking of something else.
Wayne broke away with Shunpo, and the Hollowfied Yagami Kina pursued him relentlessly from behind. Gradually, the two of them drew far from the battle circle where Rangiku stood.
They reached an open clearing. Wayne stopped, turned, and cut a blade arc toward Yagami Kina. She swatted it apart with one swing of her hand.
"As expected — Hollowfication has massively boosted her Reiatsu." Wayne assessed the situation before him.
Yagami Kina's baseline ability was already above 10th Seat level. Now with Hollowfication on top of that, she likely already matched or exceeded lieutenant-class strength.
"I recall there are two ways to control Hollowfication." Wayne began working through his memory. The first method was to use the Hōgyoku to balance the Shinigami's own spiritual power against the Hollow's Reiatsu; once the two reached a certain equilibrium ratio, the Hollowfied individual would no longer lose their mind to the Hollow's runaway Reiatsu. Unfortunately, Wayne didn't have the Hōgyoku with him right now. Of the two known Hōgyoku, one was in Kisuke Urahara's hands, and the other was with Aizen.
The second method was for the Hollowfied person to regulate themselves by exerting their own control over the Hollow Reiatsu from within. However, the Hollowfication Seed planted in the subject worked by forcibly injecting a massive surge of Hollow Reiatsu into them. Even a captain-class Shinigami could only endure it for a few minutes, let alone Yagami Kina.
"Is there no other option?" Wayne frowned. But quickly another thought surfaced. If he could draw out and eliminate all the Hollow Reiatsu inside Yagami Kina's body, would that restore her senses? It would have to be done somewhere with no one around. Somewhere like, for instance, here.
SKREEEEE!
Yagami Kina's voice mingled with a Hollow's shriek as she came barreling straight at him. Wayne no longer dodged. He drew his Zanpakutō and prepared to meet her head-on.
CLANG!
The sound of metal on metal exploded through the air. Wayne's Zanpakutō came down onto Yagami Kina's Hollowfied arm, and only lodged there, without cutting through.
"Hierro?" Wayne's eyes went slightly wide. Just how many Hollowfication Seeds had Aizen planted in Yagami Kina? Enough that the hardened bone layer had already developed into Hierro.
"ROAR!" Yagami Kina clearly had no intention of giving Wayne time to think. She swung both arms continuously, crashing them against his Zanpakutō one after another.
"Forget it — let's just try something." Wayne landed a strike that pushed Yagami Kina back, then released the full force of his compressed and refined Reiatsu. Quickly his Reiatsu climbed to lieutenant-class and kept rising. Yagami Kina charged again. Wayne didn't flinch or dodge, he swung a blade arc directly at her. The same arc that had just been shattered by a single swipe now carved a deep, vivid red line into the thick Hierro.
"ROAR!" It seemed she felt pain. Yagami Kina let out a sharp, grating shriek. She shook the blood from her arm, and a clump of white substance instantly filled and sealed the wound.
"High-speed regeneration?" Wayne's eyes went wide, and he immediately assumed a defensive stance. Fortunately, the Hollow Reiatsu had only covered Yagami Kina's upper body. It had not yet consumed her entirely.
Wayne flipped the Zanpakutō in his grip and charged at Yagami Kina again. His blade was now suffused with a faint blue luminescence. Since acquiring the Zanpakutō, his precision at channeling Reiatsu through it was far beyond what he had managed with a regular katana. In a single forward rush, a flash of the blade landed across the Hollow-infested chest of Yagami Kina, and blood sprayed out instantly.
Immediately after, Wayne reversed the Zanpakutō's direction, gripping it in a reverse hold, and brought it down across Yagami Kina's legs. She dropped to both knees and briefly lost her ability to move.
In the instant she fell, Wayne closed the distance with Shunpo, came around behind her, and drove the blade into her lower torso, pinning her entire body to the ground.
"ROAR!" In agony, Yagami Kina let out a howl, and white Reiatsu rapidly began spreading downward from the wound.
"Now!" Wayne pulled out his Zanpakutō, dropped to his knees and pressed down onto Yagami Kina from behind, then grabbed her by the hair, lifted her head, drew back his fist, and drove it hard into her Hollow Mask.
Boom!
Wayne's punch shattered half of Yagami Kina's Hollow Mask. Beneath it, Yagami Kina's face was exposed, along with one eye whose whites had turned black and whose pupil had gone gold.
"SKREEEEE!"
The mask broken, Yagami Kina screamed in pain. But as the Mask's Reiatsu began to dissipate, Yagami Kina's own spiritual power drew the fragments back together and began pulling them toward her face once more, as though trying to repair the Mask.
"The Hollow's Reiatsu has completely overtaken her original spiritual power." When it came to Hollowfication, Wayne, who had lived as a Hollow in a previous life, understood it better than anyone. The Hollowfication Seeds Aizen had implanted in his test subjects all worked by using powerful Reiatsu to erode the Shinigami's natural spiritual power from within. In the process, that orderly spiritual power was broken down and driven into a chaotic, rampaging state, that was the root cause of Hollowfication. And after days of corrosion, Yagami Kina's spiritual power had likely already been eaten away by a large margin. Once her spiritual power was fully eroded and reduced to chaos, she would become a Hollow completely.
Moreover, due to the Hollow Reiatsu's damage to the brain, she would lose consciousness entirely. She would become a high-powered Hollow beast with no mind left.
The Mask was beginning to reassemble. Wayne raised his fist again and drove it back down into the Mask, then used his Zanpakutō to smash every fragment apart. But Yagami Kina's spiritual power had already formed thin thread-like filaments connecting to the scattered shards, pulling them back together once more.
The Reiatsu pulled the Mask back again. This fusion of Hollow and Shinigami power was proving more resistant than Wayne had imagined.
He raised his hand and struck again. This time, Wayne simultaneously reached out and snatched one of the flying fragments, and shoved it directly into his mouth. In an instant, Hollow Reiatsu began raging through his body. Wayne immediately unleashed his own surging Reiatsu to suppress it, forcing it to become his own power. Through careful observation, he determined that a shattered fragment of the Mask could only reconsolidate inside Yagami Kina through the Hollowfication Seed, it could no longer be pulled back by Reiatsu alone. This, in effect, indirectly depleted the power of the Hollowfication Seed within Yagami Kina's body.
The digestion process was not fast, but the rhythm of Wayne's fist coming down on the Mask never stopped. And so a tug-of-war over Hollow Reiatsu began.
One fragment, then two, Wayne kept digesting the Reiatsu the Mask fragments carried. On the other side, the Hollowfication Seed kept drawing on Yagami Kina's spiritual power, converting it into Hollow Reiatsu and reconsolidating the Mask.
For a long while, that clearing in the dead-tree forest held only the howling of a Hollow beast and the repeated boom of a Mask being shattered.
As time wore on, the speed at which Wayne digested the Hollow Reiatsu began to increase, while the pace at which the Hollowfication Seed could reconsolidate the Reiatsu slowly declined.
No one could say how much time had passed. Amid the unbroken Hollow shrieking, a single cry of pain broke through in Yagami Kina's own voice.
Her voice had come back. The one eye visible beneath the Mask was gradually returning to clarity. Wayne had consumed the better part of both her Reiatsu and the Hollow Reiatsu; her own consciousness was beginning to return.
Seeing this, Wayne straightened up, released Yagami Kina's body, and turned her over. One hand pressed against her lower torso to treat her with Kaido, while the other continued to smash the Mask and feed the fragments into his mouth.
"Moon... -chan?" It seemed the massive loss of Reiatsu had left her utterly spent. Yagami Kina's voice came out faint and weak, still faintly trembling with the residual vibration of Hollow Reiatsu, but with her mind clearing, she could now make out the face in front of her. At this point, the portion of Mask that could still reconsolidate on Yagami Kina's face was about three-quarters.
"Moon... -chan, is that you?"
"Don't talk yet." Wayne raised his hand and brought it down on the Mask again, then swallowed another small shard. With each movement Wayne made, Yagami Kina saw that the hand he was using to shatter the Mask had long since been torn open by the fragments, bleeding freely.
"How did you... end up here?" Yagami Kina, too weak to lift herself from the ground, lay there watching Wayne's blood scatter across her face with every successive blow.
"Otsuka returned and reported that something had gone wrong with the assessment students. I happened to be nearby, so I came along to Hueco Mundo with 10th Division Captain Shiba." Wayne answered briefly without slowing his hands. "Do you remember anything from before?"
"No... no memory... at all." Every time the punch landed, Yagami Kina felt tremendous pain. But she didn't dare make any large movement, she could only try to relax her body and let her spiritual power stop circulating. "The assessment started off fine, but for some reason a massive number of Hollows appeared. Among our group, students also began showing signs of being corroded by Hollow power. Just as I was trying to help a classmate, a powerful Reiatsu struck me. I felt the Reishi inside my body explode into chaos in an instant, and the intense pain gradually pulled my consciousness away."
"When I came back to myself... it was just now. Moon-chan, what... happened to me exactly?"
"You were corroded by Hollow Reiatsu. I'm working on fixing it." Wayne's fist came down and shattered the Mask once more as it tried to reconsolidate. He grabbed a small fragment and put it in his mouth, then erupted his Reiatsu to begin digesting the surging impact it brought.
"You... ate the Hollow's Mask?" Yagami Kina's gaze flickered. She knew all too well how much damage something like that could do to Wayne.
"It's fine. My constitution is a bit unusual." Wayne had no interest in explaining himself to Yagami Kina right now. She had already spent far too much time here. There was no telling whether Rangiku Matsumoto could hold on much longer, he had to finish things here and get back to her. She was the only one who could open the Senkaimon, and only she could save Kitagawa Sawa and Yagami Kina.
"Moon-chan..." Yagami Kina watched Wayne hammering and consuming without pause. Through her clear eyes, tears began to show, whether from the pain or something else was impossible to say.
With Wayne's continued consumption, Yagami Kina's Mask was gradually vanishing. Only half remained now. But Wayne could feel clearly that the nearly depleted Reiatsu still inside her body had not stopped raging. The Hollowfication Seed had begun drawing on Yagami Kina's own life force to generate new Reiatsu, reconsolidating the Mask. Continuing down this path would without question drain Yagami Kina's life.
"What is the right thing to do here." Wayne briefly stopped his fist. He looked at Yagami Kina, her eyes had long since lost focus, yet she was still desperately holding on, and for a moment he truly did not know whether he should continue. Even after everything he had lived through, all the deaths and survival, Wayne found he could not think of a single answer.
And yet...
BOOM!
A massive explosion echoed through the trees. Wayne snapped his head around, and saw that the Adjuchas-class Hollow that had been fighting Rangiku Matsumoto had crashed its way to where he stood. Rangiku Matsumoto was clenched in the Hollow's hand. She had been injured in the blink of an eye and had already fallen unconscious.
SKREEEEE!
That hideous screech rang out again. Wayne's expression went utterly cold.
The situation had reached its most critical moment.
➤ Next: Two of Them