Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 340 - True Purpose
Chapter 340, True Purpose
BOOM!
The power of Ryūjin Jakka surged into the Zanpakutō, and in an instant the long blade in Wayne's hand was swallowed by clusters of searing flame.
To perfect the Soul King's power within the Hōgyoku, Wayne had once extracted the old man's power from the blade, converted it, and infused it into the Hōgyoku. Now that the Bankai's power had returned, what had been taken was restored. From this moment on, Wayne could finally wield the old man's power within his Zanpakutō to its absolute fullest.
His body, already remade by the Hōgyoku, no longer needed Resurrección to amplify his strength. Whenever Wayne willed it, the power of his third-stage Resurrección could manifest directly on his own form.
In a single instant, pale-golden lines blazed to life across Wayne's body. Deep blue and illusory silver flickered within them. Around him, flames rose cluster by cluster, and within moments they converged into a suit of pale-golden battle armor that blazed like the sun itself.
His Reiatsu had been pushed to its absolute limit. Every gesture, every movement radiated a pressure beyond all comparison. Even Yhwach, standing before him, was suppressed by more than a notch.
"So this is the power of the King of Hueco Mundo." Yhwach narrowed his eyes, searching for an opening beneath that sun-like Reiatsu.
"Power?" Wayne swept his long blade in a diagonal arc, and a wave of pale-golden force sent countless structures of the Soul King Palace flying. "You talk as if you've actually beaten me." No further words. He charged straight at Yhwach, the Zanpakutō radiating scorching heat as it came slashing down.
CLANG!
Same slash. Yhwach raised his blade to parry, the same as before. But unlike last time, when he had deflected Wayne and sent him flying, this time he was simply overpowered. A single stroke sent Yhwach hurtling away. He crashed heavily into the floor of the Soul King Palace.
"What terrifying strength." The instant he hit the ground, Yhwach launched himself back into the air. He had no time to play dead in the rubble. He knew that if he stayed buried for even one more second, what awaited him was Wayne's supercharged Cero, powerful enough to punch straight through the entire Soul King Palace.
Yhwach surged his own Reiatsu upward and shot toward Wayne as a streak of deep blue light.
BOOM!
BOOM!
Wayne raised his blade to parry. His Reiatsu blazed like golden fire as the two of them collided in a contest of raw, absolute power.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
The sky above the Soul King Palace erupted with a chain of muffled detonations. Space shattered again and again. One streak of pale gold, one streak of deep blue, their collision nearly tore the entire firmament apart.
BOOM!
After thousands of exchanges, Wayne finally caught a hairline opening in Yhwach's guard and sent him blasting away with a full-force strike. Yhwach crashed back down onto the Soul King Palace. Only then did the fragments of space filling the sky slowly dissolve into motes of light. Not giving Yhwach a breath, Wayne raised a hand and launched tens of thousands of Ceros straight at him.
In an instant, the spot where Yhwach stood was blasted into an enormous crater. Yet there, at its very center, Yhwach still stood. His external Blut Vene had materialized around him, blocking every attack beyond its perimeter. The barrage of Ceros had not broken him.
"I never imagined that after absorbing Genryusai Yamamoto's power, your Reiatsu could reach such heights."
From within the dust cloud, Yhwach leaped high into the air. His battle robe was torn in places, but aside from that, he was largely unharmed.
"However, the density of Reishi within the Soul King Palace is more than enough for me to generate power without end. Faced with that, Your Majesty, King of Hueco Mundo — how do you intend to deal with it?" As he pulled back, a pale-blue radiance began to emanate from all around him. The ruined structures of the Soul King Palace, even the Reishi within the atmosphere itself, became visible to the naked eye, rushing toward Yhwach at a speed almost too fast to follow. "As long as I remain here, I am invincible!"
"Then I'll just take you somewhere else." Wayne raised a hand and snapped his fingers.
A sky-blotting Garganta tore space open. Amid a cascade of muffled explosions, it yawned like the gaping maws of countless demons, swallowing the entire Soul King Palace in darkness.
"A Spatial Fault?" Yhwach stared up at the sky, now dyed completely black, and let out a slow breath. "Before you, it seems one truly cannot afford to reveal the slightest opening." He extended his left hand and shook out his robe. A curtain of shadow unfurled and wrapped around him.
"Shadow Crevice?" Wayne gave a disdainful smile. "What's this — can't win, so you're running?" He let the taunt hang in the air, Reiatsu already sweeping the surroundings in search. "Did you forget? The Shadow Crevice is a type of spatial ability too. Its nature differs somewhat from mine, but trying to show off in front of a Spatial Law Controller — don't you think that's a little presumptuous?"
He lifted a foot and stomped down hard into the air.
Diagonally behind him to the left, a spatial rift shattered like breaking glass. Yhwach's figure tumbled out at the exact moment the space cracked apart.
"This guy, " Before Yhwach could finish the thought, Wayne had already raised a hand and fired a Black Cero straight at him.
Yhwach raised his hand toward it. His external Blut Vene materialized. But this time, it couldn't absorb the power within the Cero, because what Wayne had fired was a Black Cero, a power sharing the same origin as the Ancient Hollow Beasts, saturated with the power of destruction. It was something a Quincy fundamentally could not absorb.
The external Blut Vene shattered. Yhwach caught the strike with his Holy Sword, but even as he parried, the force of the Black Cero shoved him backward, straight into the range of the Garganta.
"Close!"
Wayne clenched his right hand into a fist. Every Garganta slammed shut at once. The sky returned to clear, azure blue in the blink of an eye.
"Hmph." With all the Gargantas sealed, Wayne tore open another spatial rift and slipped inside.
In the dark space within, Yhwach had barely landed when a dangerous presence pressed in from behind him.
He didn't turn around. He summoned countless Heilig Pfeil and sent them shooting backward. An instant later, Wayne appeared, and without so much as a change of expression, he swept his blade through the volley. A single arc of pale-golden sword light. Every last Reishi arrow vanished without a trace.
"You threw me into the Garganta — did you think I couldn't get out?"
"How could it possibly be as simple as just throwing you in?" Wayne clenched one hand. Countless forces of space solidified into tens of thousands of glass-like spatial layers, sealing Yhwach within them.
"A spatial prison of ten thousand layered barriers." Yhwach looked at the layers clinging around his body and didn't so much as flinch. He gave a light swing of the Reishi blade in his hand. Layer after layer of spatial barriers shattered effortlessly. "Why would you think I couldn't break something like this?"
"I never thought it could trap you." Wayne smiled. "The only purpose of those layers is to hold you. Even if only for a single second." He waved a hand. A spatial rift opened, and Wayne dropped through it, taking the imprisoned Yhwach, barriers and all, along with him.
The next moment, the two of them stood above a land of absolute nothingness.
"This place..." Yhwach stared at the void around him. "Where is this?"
"That's a question beyond the curriculum." The corner of Wayne's mouth curved upward. The moment he had arrived here, he'd stepped inside a spatial barrier of his own.
"With your experience surviving a thousand years inside the shadows, take a guess. Where do you think this is?"
"My body feels so light. I can't sense gravity at all." Yhwach turned slowly, scanning his surroundings. "Complete darkness, but this isn't shadow. It's distance. Vast, without end in sight. Where in the world is this? How can there be a space this boundless?"
"That's exactly why I told you, this question is beyond the curriculum." Wayne snapped his fingers lightly. The spatial barriers surrounding Yhwach's body vanished.
"Ugh!"
In that single instant, a wave of sensations crashed into Yhwach all at once: suffocation, searing heat, crushing internal pressure, bone-deep external cold.
"Vacuum." Wayne spoke, his voice converted into Reishi that carried directly into Yhwach's ears. "A place outside the world itself."
"In a vacuum, the blood inside a human body will instantly begin to boil. The exterior experiences cold that cuts to the bone. Without atmospheric pressure, your body will begin to swell, and blood will rush straight to your brain. In the end, you die of asphyxiation." Wayne's expression didn't change. He simply watched Yhwach slowly suffocating and kept talking.
"This is the environment outside the world we live in. Even you, Yhwach, I don't believe you can walk out of here unscathed. And furthermore..." Wayne paused. An invisible pushing force sent Yhwach hurtling outward.
That speed already surpassed Shunpo. Surpassed Sonído. Surpassed Hirenkyaku. It was a speed nearly comparable to Wayne's own spatial teleportation, but it wasn't teleportation. It was a continuous, sustained force, propelling Yhwach deeper and deeper into the distance.
"Over the next ten minutes, you will witness the most magnificent sight in the world." Wayne's voice reached him from within the spatial barrier. "In 3 minutes, you will see the world where the living reside, Earth. You will see it in all its radiance beneath the sun. In 5 minutes, you will begin to feel the sun's scorching heat. You can withstand Ryūjin Jakka's fifteen-million-degree flames, but you cannot withstand the sun's extreme radiation.
"In 8 minutes, you will make contact with the sun's surface. Five thousand degrees at the surface, that, surely, you can endure for a while. Long enough, in fact, to last until... you reach the sun's inner core. Twenty million degrees at its center."
WHOOSH!
Wayne watched Yhwach's silhouette shrink into the darkness, gaze calm. Then he turned and stepped back into the spatial rift.
He returned from the cosmos to the Soul King Palace.
The spatial coordinates of the universe were something Wayne had left for the old man years ago, a trump card to be used against him if Soul Society ever fell into catastrophic chaos. It had never occurred to him that, through a twist of fate, he would end up using them on Yhwach instead.
To briefly sever Yhwach's connection to the Reishi of the Seireitei, Wayne had first knocked him into the Dangai within the Garganta, cutting him off from Reishi as the first step. Then, inside the Dangai, he had isolated space itself and sealed Yhwach within ten thousand barrier layers, completely severing his connection to the Reishi in the surrounding atmosphere.
But for someone of Yhwach's strength, breaking through ten thousand barrier layers was the work of an instant. Even without a connection to external Reishi, he could simply absorb the Reishi from the barriers themselves. Yet an instant was still time. The entire reason Wayne had gone through such elaborate lengths was for that single instant.
He opened a spatial rift, hurled Yhwach, barriers and all, out into outer space, and withdrew the barriers in the same moment.
In vacuum, a single instant was enough to inflict massive damage. Yhwach didn't know the properties of the cosmic vacuum; he would need time to adapt. And during that window, Wayne used the Law of Illusion to completely deceive Yhwach's senses, trapping him in the sensation of losing his power, then used his own Reiatsu to propel him toward the sun.
Once inside the sun's core, even with Yhwach's heaven-defying abilities, the vacuum — completely devoid of Reishi — would offer him nothing to absorb. He would perish from the inability to replenish himself.
Of course, this was all part of Wayne's plan. But Wayne knew the truth: someone as powerful as Yhwach would never truly die from a method like this. The purpose wasn't to kill him. It was to weaken him, and to buy time. Even just a few minutes would be enough.
Back in the Seireitei, Wayne didn't hesitate for a moment. He shot straight for the Soul King.
Battles were still raging across the palace. The fact that those Quincy were still alive meant Yhwach wasn't dead yet. And Wayne had to use these brief minutes to do something he himself had never conceived of before.
BANG!
The doors of the Soul King Palace flew open under Wayne's kick.
The Soul King, sealed inside a crystalline barrier like amber, had long since fallen silent. Ichigo Kurosaki had bisected him at the waist with a single slash, the Soul King had completely lost the ability to sustain the Three Worlds. Now, a massive, shadow-like hand was barely holding the Soul King's body together through its own power alone. But judging by its trembling, faltering state, it wouldn't be able to hold on much longer.
Wayne strode toward the Soul King, reaching out toward the corpse as he walked.
"What... do you intend to do?"
Just as Wayne's hand was about to touch the crystal encasing the Soul King, a deep, weighty voice sounded from behind him.
"What do you intend... to do to the Soul King?"
Wayne turned. A bald-headed monk stood in the corner of the Soul King Palace, nearly three meters tall, with a physique like a mountain and a thick beard on his face. In one hand he held a giant calligraphy brush taller than he was. His gaze was fixed on Wayne, sharp and guarded.
"Zero Division?" The hand Wayne had been about to extend went still. He could already feel the monk's Reiatsu rolling toward him like a tide.
"Zero Division, the Monk Who Calls the True Name, Ichibē Hyōsube." The monk strode forward and came to a halt directly in front of Wayne, looking down at him. "You must be the King of Hueco Mundo, Sir Ace Wayne."
"You heard about me from Ichigo?" Wayne smiled faintly. "Good. Saves me the trouble of introducing myself."
"Your deeds reached my ears when I descended upon Soul Society several days ago. A truly extraordinary account." Ichibē paused. "Several decades ago, another member of our Zero Division faintly sensed the emergence of a strange Zanpakutō. I presume that was your blade."
"Oh?" Wayne's expression flickered with mild surprise. They're actually filling in a plot hole from several hundred chapters back?
"Plot hole?"
"Nothing." Wayne shook his head slightly. "Since you were able to sense me back then, you should already understand the significance of my existence."
"Naturally." Ichibē didn't dwell on the aside. "When the Soul King was dismembered, a portion of his power drifted into Hueco Mundo and became the progenitor of the Hollow Beasts. You, I presume, have come as the incarnation of that portion of the Soul King's power within Hueco Mundo."
"We call him the Dominator of Hueco Mundo."
"I can sense it. Within your body right now lies power of the same origin as the Soul King's. Though the quantity is not particularly great." The great monk's expression cooled. "This monk therefore judges that you have come here to absorb the Soul King's remaining power. Am I correct?"
"Heh." A soft laugh escaped Wayne's lips.
"And what if I said... yes?"
➤ Next: The World-Annihilating Strike