Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 182 - Counterattack II

"Tell me about your leader Karlov. His abilities. His Reiatsu level." A few minutes later, Wayne sat on a rock, gazing down at the three Adjuchas pinned flat against the ground. Their limbs had been crippled by his Hollow Beasts. They couldn't move a muscle. They were completely at his mercy.

"Pfft. You think I'd give up a single word about Lord Karlov?" One of the Hollow Beasts forced its head up, glaring at Wayne before sweeping its gaze across the others surrounding it. "A pack of degenerates siding with Soul Reapers. You should all be ashamed of — WAAAH!"

The words never finished. Jekain's blade had already taken its head.

Wayne didn't flinch. He simply turned to the remaining two. "And you two?"

"I — I'll talk." One of them, a grotesque Hollow Beast whose face seemed to sprout a long beard, spoke in a trembling voice.

"K-Karlov is a lower-tier Vasto Lorde. His ability is healing."

"Oh?" Wayne raised an eyebrow. Healing-type Hollow Beasts were rare. He had only ever hunted one before, back when he was with Baraggan. And now here was another. Could this one also be a Hollow Beast who had grasped the Law of Life?

"Be specific."

The Hollow Beast spilled everything.

According to this Adjuchas, Karlov's healing wasn't simple regeneration. It was a form of temporal reversal, restoring any injured part of his body to its pre-injury state in an instant. The limitation: it only worked on himself. He couldn't apply it to others. Even so, the ability was monstrous.

Compared to high-speed regeneration, this power restored wounds faster and consumed less Reiatsu. Most importantly, it produced none of the faint misalignment that came with regenerated limbs. That slight offset from high-speed regeneration was admittedly so minor it was almost negligible, but a restored limb still couldn't match the fluidity of the original.

"Hiss..." Wayne drew a sharp breath. This didn't resemble the Law of Life at all. It was closer to Old Bai's Law of Time, the inverse of his decay, a reversal. Could this Vasto Lorde have grasped a fragment of the Law of Time?

"Do you have anything to add?" Wayne turned to the other Hollow Beast. It said nothing, staring back at him with cold, dead eyes. Its limbs had long since been broken. It couldn't even stand.

"If you have nothing to add, you're of no use to me." Wayne waved a hand. Jekain immediately drove his claws into the Hollow Beast's skull and tore its Hollow Mask clean off.

Wayne took the mask, his expression blank. "And you? Anything else to say?" He looked at the last survivor, the bearded one.

"I — I also know the abilities of Karlov's inner circle. Four of them, all peak-stage Adjuchas. Their abilities are strength amplification, water-element control, explosive flame projectiles, and mind control." With both companions cut down one after another, this Hollow Beast spilled everything it knew, Karlov's four close subordinates, the lower-tier Hollow Beasts beneath them, the overall troop layout, the defensive sectors. The information broadly matched what Timd had already observed on his own, which lent it reasonable credibility. Still, Wayne had no intention of trusting it completely. This was an enemy captive. If even one sentence out of ten was a lie, the damage it could cause wasn't something a single sentence could sum up.

Still, the captive had cooperated well. Perhaps Wayne's methods had simply frightened it past its breaking point.

"Good. I'm pleased by your attitude." Wayne gave a satisfied nod. "Jekain, drop the barrier and let him go."

"Huh?" The imprisoned Hollow Beast blinked. "You're... willing to let me go?"

"The wise know which way the wind blows. I appreciate a Hollow who understands the situation." Wayne smiled faintly. "Go. Before I change my mind."

The containment barrier lifted. Jekain tipped a vial of powder onto the bearded Hollow Beast's legs. Within moments feeling returned, and it could move freely again.

"Th-thank you." The bearded Hollow Beast gave a small nod, then took off on its two stubby legs with a clumsy, thumping trot and vanished.

"My King, are we really just letting him go?" Timd asked, rubbing his face. "He'll go straight to warn them."

"That's exactly the point." Wayne was completely calm. "If no one reports back, the enemy won't know who wiped out their hunting squads. They'll send out random patrols — that works against us. But if we give them a target and draw the bulk of their forces out, our attack and our traps become far easier to execute. Besides, Timd's clone is still inside the castle, isn't it? It can monitor their movements at any time. After that..." Wayne curled the corner of his mouth into a faint smile, beckoned the assembled Hollow Beasts close, and quietly opened an impromptu strategy meeting.

......

"You're telling me there's a force of roughly eighty Hollow Beasts outside right now, preparing to attack us?" Deep in the castle, the Vasto Lorde Karlov sat on a stone platform, listening to the sole survivor of his hunting squad deliver its report.

"Yes, Lord Karlov." The bearded Hollow Beast bowed its head respectfully. "An entirely Adjuchas-class force. And their leader is a Soul Reaper."

"A Soul Reaper?" Karlov, humanoid in build, wearing a mask like a wyvern, felt his Reiatsu begin to fluctuate. He was already furious. How could a Soul Reaper command Hollow Beasts? Over eighty Adjuchas, no less.

"My lord, I speak only the truth." The bearded Hollow Beast knelt motionless, not daring to stir. "That Soul Reaper truly commands those Hollow Beasts. They're stationed less than twenty li from the castle. If they haven't already fled, we could reach them in no time at all."

"Hmph." Karlov gave a cold snort. "And that is precisely why he let you come back, isn't it."

"My lord!" The bearded Hollow Beast prostrated itself in terror, knocking its head against the ground. "My lord, I have always been loyal to you, my lord!"

"Drag him away." Karlov shook his head, his voice frigid. He waved a hand, ignoring the bearded Hollow Beast's wailing as it was hauled off.

"My lord, what do we do?" One of Karlov's inner circle stepped forward.

"What do we do? We fight!" Karlov slammed the stone slab beside him. "A Soul Reaper commanding a pack of Hollows — what a joke! Men!"

"Sir!"

"Follow your king out for a feast!"

"Yes, sir!"

In an instant, the castle stirred. Over a hundred Hollow Beasts mobilized behind Karlov, leaving only twenty Adjuchas to guard the fortress. Every last one of the rest charged out toward Wayne's position.

Wayne's group was less than twenty li from the castle. At Adjuchas speed, they would arrive quickly. And when they reached the location the bearded Hollow Beast had described, what greeted them was not a horde of Hollow Beasts. It was a humanoid Hollow seated alone atop a tall stone platform, resting its cheek on one hand, perched on the platform's single stone seat, gazing down at the creatures below like a sovereign. In its left hand it gripped a broad-bladed greatsword. Its right hand tapped lightly against its temple, as though waiting for something.

"You're the one who killed my hunting squads?" Karlov tilted his head back to look up. The Reiatsu he sensed from this Hollow Beast was only Adjuchas-class. It hadn't even reached peak Adjuchas.

The Hollow Beast on the platform gave no answer. It simply rose in silence, raised the greatsword horizontally, and hurled a massive arc of blade energy down at the creatures below.

BOOM!

Karlov raised a hand and shattered the blade arc. But the blow still wounded him, deep red blood seeped out. Under his formidable reversal ability, however, the wound healed over almost instantly, as though it had never been. This was clearly how Karlov had cut down his enemies one by one and climbed to his current height.

"You've got nerve, brat. Looks like you don't think anything of me at all!" Karlov's anger flared. He used Sonído to appear behind the Hollow Beast, and with a Vasto Lorde's power slipped effortlessly past its field of vision. He coated his claws in Reiatsu and drove them straight through the Hollow Beast's chest.

THUD!

The dull sound of flesh being pierced rang out. But no blood sprayed. The humanoid Hollow figure, wholly indifferent to the wound in its chest, reached back and seized the wrist buried inside it, then raised its greatsword and cleaved downward with full force.

Another dull thud. A severed arm tumbled to the ground, trailing blood.

"You bastard!" Karlov snarled. His left hand blazed with searing light, and a colossal Cero reduced the Hollow figure before him to nothing.

Yet the moment the figure vanished, the entire platform began to shake. A violent explosion rang out, boulders blasted in all directions, slashing and wounding numerous Hollow Beasts.

Then a second blast. Then a third.

Explosions rippled one after another, continuous and unrelenting. Not just from the platform, within a full kilometer in every direction, endless detonations engulfed the landscape.

These were the gifts Wayne had left for this pack of Hollow Beasts. That Hollow figure had been the embodiment of Wayne's Zanpakuto, Wayne in his Hollow Beast form, whom we shall continue to call Levi. After a year of absorption, Levi now possessed half the strength Wayne had once wielded, and his physical form had grown far more solid, capable of fully recreating Wayne's appearance from those earlier days. Naturally, this was a form Wayne could control at will, the last thing he wanted was to reveal this aspect of himself to Aizen. The deliberate materialization had served one purpose: to deceive Karlov's eyes and ears, so that every Hollow Beast Mine buried across this stretch of ground could detonate simultaneously.

After extensive refinement, the Hollow Beast Mines were now genuinely capable of inflicting meaningful damage on Hollow Beasts at mid-Adjuchas rank and below. They could even cause light injury to high-rank Adjuchas if a blast landed squarely on a weak point.

Countless Hollow Beast Mines detonated at once. Everyone in Karlov's group, save for Karlov himself, sustained injuries of varying severity. Some of the weaker Hollow Beasts, those below mid-rank, were outright killed in the massive blasts.

Karlov broke out of the explosion zone. Alongside him were his four inner-circle subordinates and several high-ranking Adjuchas. The rest were caught in the blasts and toxic mist to varying degrees, unable to escape casualties.

"Save them!" Karlov raged, unable to contain his fury. He ordered his subordinates forward and immediately led them back into the toxic mist zone.

The poison had negligible effect on Hollow Beasts of high Adjuchas rank and above, less damaging, even, than the explosions themselves.

After roughly three-quarters of an hour, the toxic cloud dispersed. Of the nearly one hundred Hollow Beasts, virtually every Adjuchas below mid-rank had perished. Most of the mid-rank survivors were wounded. Only those at mid-to-high rank retained their full fighting capacity. A rough count put the remaining force at around fifty to sixty, with perhaps forty still at full strength.

"We've been played." Karlov surveyed his fallen and wounded subordinates, then looked out at the massive craters blasted across the kilometer-wide radius. The fury inside him erupted again.

He had considered it, that the bearded Hollow Beast had been released specifically to deliver a warning and lure him into a trap. He had even cautioned himself and his subordinates to guard against a surprise attack. But what he had imagined was Hollow Beasts launching an ambush. Who could have predicted that beyond cutting down a single high-rank Adjuchas figure, what awaited him was a sky-blotting barrage of explosions.

These explosions had clearly never been meant for him. They were a grand gift prepared for his subordinates.

"Damn it!" With still no enemy in sight, Karlov instinctively grasped the root of the problem. He hurried his troops back at once.

The explosions had been so violent that the castle would certainly have noticed something was wrong. Yet despite the dozens of minutes that had passed, not a single reinforcement had come from that direction. There was only one explanation: that unknown force had been after the castle from the very beginning. This entire sequence, less than an hour from start to finish, had already been more than enough time for the enemy to draw him away with the ruse.

"Move! Get back now!" Karlov led the remnants back at full speed. But it was already too late. When he reached the castle's outer perimeter, he could no longer sense a single trace of Reiatsu from his own subordinates inside. What greeted him instead was a Hollow Beast Mine that came flying toward him the moment his attention wavered, detonating in a burst of billowing purple mist.

"Who's there!" Karlov fell back beneath the castle walls.

"The castle's owner."

Standing on the battlements, Wayne looked out over what had once been a glorious stronghold. Without his protection and Mude's regular upkeep, every structure within had been reduced to crumbling ruins, stripped of all its former splendor. But here, now, Wayne had returned. Someday he would restore it to its former glory.

"Who are you? Why have you seized our castle?"

"Your castle?" Wayne let out a cold laugh. "This castle was mine to begin with. I am simply taking back what is mine. Since when did a pack of monkeys like you get the right to call themselves kings here?"

"Insolence!" The toxic mist cleared. Karlov could now make out the figure on the battlements clearly, black robes, pale gold long hair, light violet eyes, Zanpakuto in hand. Exactly as described in the report he had received.

"You're the Soul Reaper who ambushed my hunting squads!"

"Yes." Wayne smiled faintly and nodded. "And also the Hollow Beast commander who will destroy every last one of you clowns. Ace Wayne!"

➤ Next: Fragments