Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 307 - The Belonging of Souls

"Just as you said — even after reaching the level of a King Hollow, our essence is still that of a Hollow beast. The thirst for power, the instinct to devour. We have never forgotten either." Wayne raised a hand and pulled lightly toward his side. A deep orchid streak of light landed on the orange-red membrane. The membrane shattered on impact, and the Zanpakuto flew back into his hand.

"Sorry — this time, you're playing on the second floor while I'm up in the stratosphere." He raised his hand again and made a light grasping motion toward Isfilit.

"Detonate!"

BOOM!

Inside Isfilit's body, a concentrated burst of Soul Reaper Reiatsu erupted, exploding directly from within her.

Having absorbed the full power of Wayne's Zanpakuto, the internal detonation struck Isfilit at the very root of her being. The form she had just condensed twisted and swelled in an instant. A mouthful of blood burst from her lips. All six wings lost their luster and plummeted to the ground along with the rest of her.

"This is... Soul Reaper power. What are you? How do you have Soul Reaper power!"

"You and Hermes share a resonant Law," Wayne said, amused. "So why did you overlook what his Law could do?"

"When you entered these ruins ahead of me, I deliberately lagged half a step behind. I used the power of illusion to mask the Soul Reaper Reiatsu, then transformed my Zanpakuto into a copy of myself and sent it walking into your trap. When you absorbed what you thought was my Reiatsu, you took in that portion of Soul Reaper power along with it — and never felt it rioting inside you. I also used the Law of Illusion to cloud your perception, so that even when you hit your absorption peak, you had no idea what you were actually pulling in.

"Though, honestly? It was almost too easy. Your mind was clearly gone, completely overrun by the hunger. That was the opening I needed. Under normal circumstances, you would have sensed something halfway through. I was actually worried only half the power would detonate, that it wouldn't be enough to put you down and I'd still have to grind through a real fight. I never expected the thirst to have eaten that deep into you. Or was it the Ancient Hollow Beast's influence? Did it get into your head?"

"You..." Isfilit forced herself upright. The six wings hung limp against the ground, wrinkled as crumpled paper. "You're just as despicable as Hermes!"

"Then you're truly lucky, tricked by the same kind of power twice." Wayne summoned the Sky-Rending Greatsword and walked toward her.

"Ha... hahahaha! Ridiculous!" Seeing him advance, Isfilit laughed. "Just because you couldn't be absorbed, you think I came here without a fallback?" White radiance ignited around her body, and a suction force on the soul level spread outward in every direction.

"A Soul Law link?" Wayne assessed it quickly. "You're pulling back the Soul Law power you gave your subordinates. Seizing a portion of their Reiatsu."

"Hmph." A cold snort. "Nearly all my subjects carry a piece of my power. That was always the fallback. When I broke the seal, I knew I would be at my weakest, they were meant to be my nourishment. I didn't expect an obstacle like you to appear. But despite the deviation, I have broken free. That much is done."

"You think I'll give you the time to take it back?" Contempt settled into Wayne's eyes. "Do I not exist?"

"Heh. You think you can stop me?" Isfilit rose fully to her feet. In just those few exchanged lines, she had already quelled the Reishi riot inside her body, her form easing back toward its original size. The blood at the corner of her mouth said otherwise, those injuries were real, and they weren't healing fast.

"Soul seizure takes less than a minute. I don't believe you can cut me down in one minute." She raised shield after shield of orange-red light around herself. "Hold out for that minute, and victory is still mine."

"I don't think you understand what I meant." Wayne's voice was perfectly level. He studied the deranged old woman before him with something close to curiosity. "When I said I wouldn't give you the chance, I didn't mean I was planning to kill you in sixty seconds. I told you a few minutes ago, this time, I'm in the stratosphere."

CRACK!

Isfilit's projected soul links snapped apart, one after another. Of more than a hundred connecting threads, only seven or eight remained.

"This, how is this possible!" She looked up in horror at the strands dissolving into drifting motes of Reishi. Her hollow black eyes were filled with nothing but shock.

"Want to know?" Wayne's mouth curved. "Then look."

He stomped down hard. A shockwave of Reishi detonated outward, and the entire ruin blew apart, debris scattering in every direction like ash on the wind. The pitch-black sky opened above Isfilit, a full moon hanging in it, sharp and cold. And floating in that sky, one by one, were Hollow beasts.

In the next second, their Reiatsu came down like a collapsing ceiling.

Nel, Baraggan, Szayelaporro, Starrk, four high-ranking Vasto Lorde at the front, every Hollow beast in Wayne's faction suspended in the air above, looking down at Isfilit with her face gone white. They were all stained with blood. None of it was theirs. It belonged to Isfilit's subjects, slaughtered to the last. That was why her soul links had snapped. Every one of them, gone. Her plan, dismantled completely.

"Well, Isfilit." Wayne let the Law of Illusion drop, releasing Nel and the others' full Reiatsu. The weight of it crashed against Isfilit from all sides, stripping away whatever remained of her dignity as a King Hollow. "Any trump cards left?"

"Damn you, when did you arrange all of this!"

"I already told you." Wayne's tone was light, almost playful, watching her with the easy amusement of someone watching the last move of a finished game. "I'm in the stratosphere."

The moment Isfilit had proposed a ceasefire and invited Wayne into her place of slumber, Wayne had already had Seibel carry a signal back, issued not in Wayne's name, but in the name of Tsukishiro Hinamori.

Nel and the others knew his methods well enough. The moment they received that order, they understood it was no ceasefire. It was the reverse: make the enemy believe in peace, then use the window to eliminate them entirely.

So while the four high-ranking Vasto Lorde held a brief ceasefire with the King Hollow faction's forces and finished off the Ancient Hollow Beast's side, they waited for the opening, then turned on the King Hollow faction without warning. With the King Hollow faction's Vasto Lorde commander already off the battlefield, the four ran through what remained. A handful of Hollow beasts with special abilities broke away and fled early. Everyone else was cut down. Wayne's faction had won, completely and without question.

A few dozen Adjuchas-class Hollow beasts were left to guard the spoils. The rest of the high-tier forces moved to Wayne's position.

And Wayne himself had been outside the ruins the entire time, ever since killing Seibel. He had laid an Illusion Law barrier across the surrounding territory to mask his faction's Reiatsu, then guided his Zanpakuto remotely into the ruins to play out the scene with Isfilit. Expending the Zanpakuto's power and the Ancient Hollow Beast's corpse, he had drawn Isfilit out of her protected barrier. Everything after that had followed naturally.

"Everyone, Cero, prepare." Wayne raised his hand and pointed toward Isfilit.

Countless Cero locked on from above, every color, every Reiatsu level, all aimed at the figure below raising shield after shield of light.

"Let's see whether those shells can hold against a thousand Cero." Wayne spatial-flashed back to Nel and Baraggan's side.

"Fire."

A thousand Cero fired at once.

The sound wasn't an explosion, it was the end of something. A blast cloud swallowed the ruins whole. No Soul Barriers, no Heart Walls, no Negación, none of it held. Nothing could have.

The heat continued for dozens of seconds. The canyon shook. Rock cracked and fell. Sand blasted outward in waves. The white sand at the crater's edge melted into liquid glass and ran down into the pit the thousand Cero had carved into the earth. By the time the last flash died, Isfilit was gone.

A few minutes later, Wayne sent his subordinates in to recover what remained, body fragments, mask shards. The others rested nearby. Most of the carbonized material was unrecoverable, but Wayne pieced together roughly eighty percent of Isfilit's Hollow Mask from what was scattered across the site. The rest — too finely pulverized to collect — was eaten by Timd, who had burrowed into the sand to find it and treated it as a meal.

Worth acknowledging: Isfilit had been a King Hollow. Several thousand Cero and she still hadn't been completely reduced to ash. The foundation was real. That was also part of why Wayne had ordered the massed fire rather than going in himself, he had been certain that even a thousand-Cero barrage would leave something behind. And he had no intention of fighting her alone with that Soul Law ready to bite him from an angle he couldn't predict. Saturation fire was cleaner. Final.

They cleaned the battlefield, gathered everything worth taking, and returned to Wayne's Innate Space together, Nel, Baraggan, Starrk, and the rest. The Ancient Hollow Beast's body had been absorbed by Isfilit, but its Hollow Mask was still in Wayne's space, carrying well over eighty percent of the great beast's Reiatsu. Between that mask and the several mid-tier and high-tier Vasto Lorde among the spoils, there was no reasonable excuse for him not to break through now.

Consuming Isfilit's mask would guarantee an advancement. But it would waste the Soul Law inheritance entirely. That power would eventually be reclaimed by the Dominator of Hueco Mundo, possibly the moment Wayne completed his advancement, before he could do anything with it, since the Soul Law wasn't his to use.

So Wayne made a different call. He wouldn't consume it himself. He would give it to someone else and see whether anyone could take hold of the Soul Law directly.

He broke Isfilit's mask into fragments and distributed pieces to several Vasto Lorde-class Hollow beasts he had marked as promising, letting them try. None of them reacted to the Soul Law at all.

What he didn't expect was the Adjuchas-class Arrancar who quietly slipped away a small fragment and ate it right in front of him. In an instant, white Reiatsu bloomed around her and rose in spiraling layers, the affinity was unmistakable.

That Adjuchas-class Arrancar was Yagami China.

"What the hell..." Wayne stared at her, wrapped in white light. "Did I just find buried treasure?"

Perhaps it was the modifications the Hōgyoku had made, combining the power of multiple Laws, whatever the reason, China's compatibility with the Soul Law was extraordinary. She absorbed the Law power within that small fragment with almost no effort and was already beginning to reach for control of it.

"Hehe, Tsuki-chan." Her voice surfaced in Wayne's mind, clear and bright. "Looks like I don't even need to open my mouth to talk to you anymore." In front of him, she sat perfectly still on the ground, not a word spoken, quietly pulling in the Reiatsu from the mask fragment.

"You little troublemaker." Wayne let out a short, helpless laugh. Power that others chased for lifetimes, and she just wandered into it. If the Yagami family ever found out, their daughter had become a Hollow, yes, but had somehow claimed one of the highest forms of power a Hollow beast could possess, he genuinely wasn't sure whether they'd cry or laugh.

"It's compatible with me, almost perfectly. But the Reiatsu inside is enormous." Her voice came through again, carrying a thread of difficulty. "I can't absorb all of it quickly."

Wayne felt every shade of it, the tone, the emotion, the strain behind the words. Nothing was lost.

"Take your time." His thoughts answered her. "Do it here. In all of Hueco Mundo, there is nowhere safer than this place."

"Okay~"

Sweet, simple, certain. China closed her eyes and turned her full attention inward. Wayne gathered every remaining mask fragment and laid them before her, then enclosed her within a separate pocket of space to keep the Reishi from bleeding away too quickly.

He turned to Nel.

"Distribute the spoils from this campaign to everyone. For the next stretch, each faction handles its own development. You, the Great Emperor, and Starrk can keep hunting in the Central Region, but the moment you hear anything about an Ancient Hollow Beast or a King Hollow, you contact me immediately."

"Understood, Lord Wayne." Nel nodded. Then, after a beat: "And you?"

"Me?" Wayne smiled and reached over to ruffle her hair. "I'm advancing. Right here." He let the smile settle. "To the endpoint of all Hollow beasts, King Hollow."

➤ Next: The Seat of King Hollow