Bleach: Awakened — Chapter 125 - Ginjo and Ganju

The urgent voice made Ichigo start. He glanced around and noticed that none of the other students reacted to it, only his friends did.

A spirit, then.

With that settled, Ichigo looked up and spotted a tall, powerfully built man with rough features and clothes from a past era, shouting at the top of his lungs.

"Ichigo Kurosaki! Help me! Someone help!"

The desperate cries kept coming. Ichigo furrowed his brow and didn't move.

The man at the school gate was nobody Ichigo recognized. More critically, the man was carrying someone on one shoulder, a figure drenched in blood, seemingly gravely injured. And that person wasn't a spirit like the rough-looking man.

That was a human.

"Orihime, let's go help."

Ichigo told the homeroom teacher who had just walked in that he needed to leave. Orihime Inoue, Uryu Ishida, and Yasutora Sado each came up with their own excuses and did the same.

"Sure, go ahead." The teacher's response was completely flat. Leave granted. Just before they left, the teacher added: "Don't go doing anything bad, you lot."

At the school gate, passersby were starting to notice something was wrong. A man with blood pouring from wounds across his body, held in a posture so bizarre it looked as though something invisible was carrying him, was drawing stares.

"Oh my, oh my—they're filming a movie here, a movie." Uryu put on a strained smile and stepped forward to address the onlookers. "It's all fake. Don't believe me? Just wait and see, the actor doesn't have a single real wound on him."

"Soten Kisshun—I reject!"

An orange curtain of light wrapped around the injured man. Moments later, the gruesome wounds visibly closed before their eyes. But Orihime's brow was creased.

"The wounds are healed, but part of the attacker's spiritual pressure is still lingering inside the body. It'll be some time before he regains consciousness." Orihime's expression was grave. "Whoever did this is very strong. A weaker captain couldn't manage this level, at minimum, someone on par with Rukia's older brother."

"At least second-tier Rei'i, then..." Ichigo narrowed his eyes. "So what exactly is going on here? Care to explain?"

"Ganju Shiba."

"I'm Ganju Shiba." The rough-looking man introduced himself. "Kukaku Shiba's younger brother."

After clearing out the bystanders, Ichigo and the others carried the injured man to the school infirmary. Fortunately, the school nurse had previously worked at Karakura Town Hospital, knew Uryu, and didn't ask too many questions.

"Figured as much."

Ichigo pointed at Ganju Shiba's trousers. A swirling pattern ran across the fabric, the mark of the Shiba Clan. Even now, with the clan fallen from its former standing, nobody dared impersonate one of theirs.

"Last time Kukaku mentioned you'd gone missing. I even helped search for a while." Ichigo crossed his arms. "No wonder there wasn't a trace of your spiritual pressure anywhere in Seireitei, turns out you came to the World of the Living."

"So tell me. Whoever dared to hunt down a member of the Shiba Clan, who exactly are these people?"

His eyes were half-closed, his voice quiet. But Ganju felt an inexplicable weight pressing down on him. This man, who looked even younger than Ganju, spoke as though something tremendously powerful was coiled behind every word.

"We don't know who they are either." Ganju said slowly. "Everything goes back to three days ago."

"That day I finished my training as usual and headed home. While passing through a stretch of wasteland, I spotted a girl with green hair."

"She was wandering aimlessly in ill-fitting, tattered clothes. I figured she was just a soul who'd recently arrived in Soul Society, so I left her alone."

"Then several Soul Reapers suddenly appeared, trying to grab her. The Shiba Clan couldn't just stand by watching that, so I stepped in and dealt with them quick."

"But the moment I made contact with that girl, a Senkaimon opened out of nowhere. The two of us got sucked straight into it."

"Somehow we both lost consciousness. When I came to, we were in the World of the Living."

"Specifically Naruki City, just next door. That's where we ran into Ginjo, the injured guy right here."

"As for Ginjo—"

"I'll take it from here... cough, cough..." The man called Ginjo pushed himself upright and sat up on the infirmary bed. "I'm Kugo Ginjo. I've long heard of you, Ichigo Kurosaki."

"As you can see, I'm human. I can't hold a candle to your title with the World of the Living Special Operations Squad, but I once received recognition from Soul Society and was granted the position of Substitute Soul Reaper."

"Substitute Soul Reaper..." Ichigo's fingers tapped slowly against his arm. "I think I've heard Rukia and the others mention it. Before me, there was once a special human who gained the power of a Soul Reaper, got given something by Jushiro Ukitake, same as me, then kept under surveillance by Soul Society."

"But apparently, because nothing was explained upfront, this first Substitute Soul Reaper couldn't take the deception and the watching. In the end, renounced the title, killed a Soul Reaper, and defected from Soul Society."

"It wasn't that I couldn't take the surveillance." Kugo Ginjo shook his head. His voice was calm, but there was hatred packed underneath it. "Being monitored as a strong individual operating outside Soul Society, that part I could accept. What happened was that a Soul Reaper used that surveillance as cover to ambush and kill my companions, and took the Soul King Fragments from their bodies."

"And for the past year and more, we Fullbringers, special individuals who carry Soul King Fragments inside them, just like your two companions, have been hunted without stop."

"A year and more?" Ichigo frowned. "Then it's not Aizen... When exactly did the ambush happen? The one that killed your companions."

"That was many years ago." Kugo Ginjo said slowly. "Speaking of Sosuke Aizen, he never posed a threat to us. Several years back, a fox-faced Soul Reaper came looking for us, claiming to be one of Aizen's subordinates. But he told us to stay hidden and make sure Aizen didn't find us."

"The ones hunting us over this past year and more, it's the same group that killed my companions at the very start."

"...So certain people had their eyes on the Soul King Fragments a very long time ago." Ichigo's frown deepened. He murmured, "Let me work through this. Knowledge of the Soul King is extremely rare. Even among the captains, not all of them know the full picture."

"And I haven't heard of any captain entering the World of the Living over the past year and a half. So that points to nobility, and not just any nobility. Ordinary nobles don't have the standing or the power to hunt someone like you."

Gravely injured as Kugo Ginjo was, in Ichigo's perception Ginjo sat at least at second-tier Rei'i, only a single step away from first-tier.

Far below Ichigo, certainly. But that level of strength ranked comfortably in the upper-middle tier even among Soul Reaper captains. The kind of force it would take to hunt someone like that spoke for itself.

"We thought the same thing at first." Kugo Ginjo shook his head again. "Though it's called a hunt, the attacks have leaned more toward covert assassination. They've given us plenty of trouble, but nothing we couldn't handle."

"The problem came last night."

A beat.

"Several Soul Reaper captains attacked us."

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