At the edge of the quartz deadwood forest, moonlight fell across Lilynette's sand-covered calves.

She sat beside Starrk with her legs stretched out and ankles crossed, digging quartz sand from the seams of her shoes and flicking the grains forward one by one.

Starrk leaned against the same stone pillar, his grayish-blue eyes half-lidded, looking like he might slide down to the ground and resume his nap at any moment.

"Hey," Lilynette said, flicking away the last grain and clapping her hands clean. "Are we really just letting them leave like that? We finally found someone who can actually hold a conversation with you. We stepped into his trap, apologized, exchanged names—and then what? That's it? Nothing comes after?"

Starrk didn't open his eyes. His voice was lazy, barely more than a hum through his nose.

"After that, they head to Baraggan's territory. A long way north."

"I know they're going north! I mean us! We finally made a friend—so what are we supposed to do next?"

She knelt upright in the sand, the eye beneath her half-mask wide and round.

Starrk was quiet for a moment, then slowly opened his eyes.

"I've never successfully made a friend before. Other Hollows either shattered immediately or fled. So I never thought about what you're supposed to do next, after."

Lilynette tilted her head, thinking it over. "We could play! Travel along with them, chat on the way, play hide-and-seek, or—"

"They have a mission."

Starrk cut her off. His voice stayed lazy, but something more serious had crept into it. "They're going to see Baraggan. That's not a place you go for fun. Holding someone up just because you want to play—that's not what friends do."

Lilynette flopped back onto the sand, lacing her hands behind her head and staring up at the cold moon hanging frozen in the dead center of Hueco Mundo's sky. The left half of her mask caught the moonlight and gave off a faint white gleam. She pouted and went quiet.

"I feel so stupid. Every day going on about making friends, every day nagging—'Starrk, let's go check over there, maybe someone will talk to us.' And then we actually make one, and I have no idea what to do with it. Like picking up a pretty piece of quartz and turning it over and over in your hands without knowing what to do next."

She popped the last piece of pastry Seijūrō had given them before leaving into her mouth. Her cheeks puffed out. The sound of her chewing rang out crisp and clear in the quiet of the desert.

Starrk jolted upright. His perpetually half-lidded grayish-blue eyes snapped wide open.

He lunged for it, fast, nothing like the man who had been too lazy to lift a finger a moment ago, but Lilynette had already bitten down.

"Leave one for me!"

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him, the vexation in his voice completely undisguised. "He gave us two! One for you, one for me, the one you just ate was mine!"

Lilynette pressed her hand over her mouth, cheeks still bulging, her voice leaking out muffled between her fingers. "You never said I couldn't eat it..."

"I didn't get the chance to say it!"

Starrk's words came faster now. "With pastries, shouldn't you ask first? He gave two, one for you, one for me. The one you just ate was clearly my share. You'd already finished yours."

"I forgot, okay! It was too good, I couldn't help it, and besides, don't you always say you don't care? You don't care what friends are supposed to do next, but you care about one piece of pastry?"

"That's completely different."

Starrk let go of her wrist and leaned back against the stone pillar, turning his head the other way and closing his eyes. His brow stayed tightly furrowed, the corners of his mouth pulling down slightly. "Getting started is the hardest part. Even after splitting into two, most Hollows still couldn't come near us. The ones who could either wanted to devour us or use us. So when it came to making friends, I only ever watched from a distance. Watching that Shinigami crouch in the ruins to close the eyes of his failed specimens. Watching him come and go from the outer circle over and over, hauling back piles of wreckage each time. I thought about talking to him. But every time I did, I just ended up staying where I was."

"Because you're lazy."

"...It's not laziness. I just don't know how."

His voice dropped low and slow, like he was talking to himself as much as to Lilynette. "I thought about asking if we could travel together. But for people who'd just met, wouldn't that be too much?"

---

Meanwhile, Seijūrō and Soi Fon were moving north.

The quartz sand thinned beneath their feet, gradually giving way to broad slabs of hard, dark bedrock. The Reishi concentration in the air remained high, but it no longer pressed down on every breath the way it had in the outer circle.

Soi Fon walked ahead, the hem of her plain black clothes swaying lightly with her stride, her Reiatsu sense stretched to its maximum range. They'd kept this pace for a long time now. Neither of them had spoken.

Then Soi Fon opened her mouth without looking back, a distinct edge of amusement threading through her voice.

"Wonderful, isn't it. Our Grand Kidō Chief takes a trip to Hueco Mundo and comes home with two Vasto Lorde-class Hollows as friends. If the old men at Central 46 ever found out, their faces would twitch in unison for a good while."

"They genuinely held no hostility. You felt Starrk's Reiatsu, power at that level, if it wanted a fight, we'd have clashed back in the quartz pillar forest. Instead he raised his hands to show he meant no harm. That wasn't an act. Plenty of Hollows can feign peace. But the only one I've ever seen dismantle a Shihōin Clan custom-made trap and then yawn, that was him."

"So you just believed him?" Soi Fon's tone stayed cool. "You weren't like this before. Mahiru Tokito spent decades playing the lazy superior inside the Kidō Corps, and you still pulled every secret out from under her. Now you're heading off to meet a former Hollow king, and you made friends with a guy who has a Hollow hole in his chest along the way."

The tail end of her voice tilted upward, less an interrogation than someone holding back laughter behind a critical edge. "If Central 46 found out, the notice stripping me from Squad 2 would probably come down right alongside yours."

"At least we wouldn't end up in prison."

Soi Fon let out a short hmph and turned her head away. They walked in silence for another stretch, quartz sand grinding faintly under their feet.

"But you're right. I've been thinking about it."

Seijūrō slowed his pace and looked up at the cold moon hanging frozen in the dead center of the sky overhead.

"Soul Society's textbooks say: Hollows are fallen souls, monsters that know only devouring and destruction, and any Hollow capable of speech is an extremely dangerous entity that must be eradicated immediately. I taught that doctrine for decades. I believed it for decades. But in a single day, I encountered three Vasto Lordes, Ulquiorra never attacked us, only watched. Starrk and Lilynette's first reaction after stepping into the trap wasn't to strike back. They raised their hands and showed they meant no harm. Their Reiatsu is immense, strong enough to crush any lieutenant-class fighter. And not one of them moved against us. It wasn't an act. They simply had no desire to."

He stopped and looked at her. "Is what I taught wrong? Or has it always been this way, and no one ever bothered to stop and look closely? Have I been seeing the world from the bottom of a well? Have I been teaching my students the wrong things?"

Soi Fon didn't answer right away.

She stood a few paces ahead of him, looking at his profile, his slightly furrowed brow, the hand hanging at his side. His fingers were moving without thought, rubbing the hilt of the Asauchi at his waist. It was a habit she knew well. He did it whenever he was turning something over in his mind.

She had recognized that gesture for a long time.

Years ago, when he was still the Vice Kidō Chief, he'd sit in the office after working through a stack of contradictory barrier reports, fingers working back and forth along the hilt, brow tight enough to crush a fly.

Back then, she would bring her own work to the Kidō Corps office, liaison business between Squad 2 and the Corps, she called it. But that wasn't really why. She just used it as an excuse to sit across from his desk and watch him frown.

Seijūrō lowered his eyes. Aizen's face rose in his mind, half-lit by Hueco Mundo's moonlight. The student who had once asked him: "Sensei, have you ever considered that Soul Society itself might be the greatest wall?" He'd answered with the essence of Hadō and Bakudō, with rules and control, with the things he'd believed for decades and still practiced.

He hadn't fully understood the question back then.

Now he stood in Hueco Mundo's wasteland, watching three Vasto Lordes refuse in their own quiet ways to play the roles Soul Society's textbooks had written for them, and something inside him cracked. A wall he hadn't known was there split open. Was it really just that his own horizons had been too narrow? His experience too thin?

Since parting with Starrk and Lilynette, one thought had been stuck in his mind, suspended and unresolved.

Not about the modification experiments. Not about Baraggan. About himself.

He was thinking of long ago, not Soul Society's long ago, but further back than that. Before Rukongai. Back in the world where a person could be hit and killed by a truck.

He'd been young then, living in a city that wasn't particularly large.

What they taught in school was simple: the people over there are all enemies. Rotten to the core. Evil from birth. You don't need to understand them. You only need to hate them.

He had believed that without question.

Then he grew up, went further out into the world, and met the people he'd been told to hate.

They weren't anything like what the textbooks said.

They worked their jobs. They kept flowers. They left food out for the stray cats on the street. When he got lost, they pointed him in the right direction, smiling, in clumsy accented words: "Hey kid, you're going the wrong way."

He realized they were just people with their own problems. The man who gave him directions had argued with his wife that morning. The one who fed the cats was saving up for a used car. They weren't symbols of anything. They were just people.

From then on, he understood: some things, textbooks will never tell you.

Not because the textbooks are trying to lie. But because the people who wrote them had never been to those places, and never met those people.

Soi Fon turned around to face him directly. She stepped forward, closer than the distance they usually kept, close enough that Seijūrō could see his own reflection in her pale gray eyes.

"Listen. I don't care how many Vasto Lordes you ran into today, or how many people beyond the textbooks you met back in the World of the Living. There's only one thing you need to know, what you have actually done in Soul Society all these decades. While others fell asleep in captain meetings, you were reviewing documents. While others spent their days off drinking, you were practicing Shunpo on gravel. While others walked around cases with complicated causes of death, you walked straight into them. Did you think what you were chasing was just the trace evidence of modified Hollow experiments? You were chasing accountability for the souls who didn't even leave behind their names."

She paused. Her pale gray eyes stayed fixed on him, but her tone had shifted, less a calm accounting of facts, more something deeper, held low in her throat.

"I used to think you were just an assignment Yoruichi left behind. But you're not. You don't listen to anyone. You don't bend to anyone's advice. Not even the Captain-Commander could move you. You just stayed in that dark little room at the back of the archives and kept working, until every piece of evidence was forced into the open. You are not someone who follows textbooks on faith, every culprit you've ever dragged into the light was someone everyone else assumed was beyond suspicion. So today, in Hueco Mundo, when you saw a Hollow that yawns, a Hollow that argues about wanting to be your friend, that wasn't your narrow-mindedness being corrected. That was you arriving at the evidence before anyone else."

She stepped back, putting distance between them again. Her eyes didn't move.

"So drop that look. Stop asking yourself if you've been staring up at the sky from the bottom of a well. You're doing exactly what you've always done, going further, seeing clearer. I just..." She paused. "I don't want to see you stop. Not now."

Seijūrō looked at the tight line of her jaw, the faint flush at the edge of her ear. He was quiet for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth curved up.

"Thanks, Shaoling Fon."

She turned and walked north. The back of her plain black clothes was very straight in the moonlight. After a few steps she slowed, just slightly, until he fell into pace beside her as he always did.

Side by side, one in front and one behind, they passed through the last of the quartz deadwood forest's stone pillars. The view opened ahead of them. Along the northern horizon, a low dark outline was just barely visible, the outer edge of Baraggan's territory.

Hueco Mundo's endless night stretched on without end. But Seijūrō's steps were steadier than before.

➤ Next: Fall and Wrath

Chapter 56 - Fall and Wrath

Findorr Calius and Ggio Vega died fast.

Fast enough that the same thought was still turning in their heads as consciousness slipped away: these two weren't emissaries from Aizen.

The fight had been clean.

Mid-conversation, Suzumebachi's tip found a gap in the carapace below its left shoulder blade and sliced straight down along the rib line, carving a deep gouge into hard bone.

The saber-toothed tiger Hollow's left foreleg buckled. Its massive body lurched sideways; it swung its head, fangs driving for a counterstrike, but Soi Fon had already used the momentum of the first cut to pivot around to the outside of its right foreleg.

The second strike was horizontal, Suzumebachi crossed perpendicular to the first, sweeping across the same section of breastplate, blade tip carving at a perfectly symmetrical angle. A clean cross etched into bone.

Two Hōmonka overlapped at the intersection. The two-hit kill triggered.

All four limbs gave out at once. The massive body crashed to the ground, and the purplish-black Hōmonka bloomed across its chest and spread.

Seijūrō's opponent had relied on its giant pincers far more than he'd expected. He locked its joints at close range with a Bakudō, then drove a Hadō into its cranial shell at point-blank range.

One after the other. Over almost simultaneously.

No screaming. No struggling. Just two massive bodies dropping onto the quartz sand, their Reiatsu unraveling like kites with cut strings beneath the cold moon of Hueco Mundo's endless night.

"Now that's what a proper Hollow looks like." Seijūrō crouched beside the crab Hollow's cranial shell, drew his Asauchi, and rested the tip against the hole the Hadō had punched through it. "Run into a few more Vasto Lorde who want to make friends like that one earlier, and I'd start thinking I was dreaming."

He didn't stand. He stayed crouched, tilting his head back to look up at Soi Fon.

"No modification traces in either of their reishi circuits. They evolved to this level naturally. Their actual goal was probably just to figure out whether we belonged to that side, because in their minds, Shinigami who could appear on the outer edge of Baraggan's territory that quickly were either a Gotei 13 expeditionary force or his people. An expeditionary force wouldn't send two people to die. So they leaned toward the latter."

He stood and pulled the blade free from the cranial shell. The saber-toothed tiger Hollow, undone by the two-hit kill, had already dissolved into a massive Hōmonka and vanished.

Soi Fon sheathed Suzumebachi. "According to those two, the mastermind subdued Baraggan and took Las Noches."

"Yes."

Seijūrō tucked the portable instrument back into his sleeve. "But Baraggan doesn't genuinely submit. He was the King of Hueco Mundo. Now he's just forced to work under someone else."

He scanned the desert. Still quiet. Nothing but wind.

"So. What's next?"

Soi Fon looked at him. "We have most of the intelligence. Baraggan's relationship with that man is basically clear. Do we pull back now — bring the reishi samples and core nuclei back to Soul Society, cross-reference the records, identify one of the culprits — or do we push forward and dig out the others?"

Seijūrō closed his eyes.

"We push forward." His voice was steady. "The deaths of his two capable subordinates will reach Baraggan soon. He won't put it on the mastermind's tab, he'll come himself. He hates that man, but he's also afraid of him. Having two confidants killed at the edge of his own territory by unknown Shinigami, at a time like this, that's a humiliation he can't swallow. From everything those two just described, Baraggan is an arrogant creature. He won't sit quietly in Las Noches. He'll come. We don't need a direct confrontation. We just need to push at the edges, not ask him who that person is, just make him say, in his own words, who put him in this position."

Soi Fon looked at him. A beat of silence. Then she reached out and helped him to his feet.

She tossed him the canteen, let him drink, and turned toward the deep interior of Baraggan's territory to work out her next Shunpo landing points.

"Then we keep moving. Stay ready to fight, Grand Kidō Chief." Her voice was flat and certain. "Those two were just the vanguard. What's coming next is the former King of Hueco Mundo."

---

Las Noches.

Baraggan Louisenbairn sat on his throne of bones.

A lavish crown on his head. A deep-purple royal robe draped from his shoulders, its hem cascading down the skeletal steps and spreading across the floor, the lingering silhouette of a dynasty long rotted yet refusing to collapse.

His right hand gripped a colossal double-bladed battleaxe, its blades etched with the ancient runes of Hueco Mundo. His left hand rested lazily on the armrest, skeletal knuckles tapping a slow, unhurried rhythm. Purplish-red Reiatsu rose from him like solid flame, silent and total, blanketing all of Las Noches, pressing the distant Gillian herds flat to the ground. The very air around him was being eaten away, emitting faint sounds like cracking stone.

A massive elephant Hollow knelt below the throne, trunk hanging to the ground, half a mask on its head. Its voice was low and careful.

"Your Majesty. The Reiatsu of Findorr Calius and Ggio Vega has vanished."

Baraggan said nothing.

The knuckles on the armrest kept tapping. Slow and even. Like a blunt instrument working its way down to the bone.

Findorr. Ggio. Veterans he had personally chosen from his own legion, who had fought through countless battles under the King of Hueco Mundo. Now their Reiatsu had been erased at the edge of his territory, like two grains of quartz sand ground underfoot by someone who hadn't even bothered to look down.

"First that bastard named Aizen."

His voice was dry and low, scraping out through the gaps between skeletal teeth, rolling through the empty throne room. "He walked into my Las Noches with those two lackeys and used that Zanpakutō to put me on my knees at the steps of my own throne. And now unknown Shinigami trespass into my territory and kill two of my men. Do they truly believe I am no longer the King of Hueco Mundo?"

His fingers snapped shut.

A pulse of purplish-red Reiatsu detonated outward from his body and swept across the vaulted ceiling of Las Noches. Every hanging quartz lamp, every talisman, shook and buzzed at once.

Threaded through that Reiatsu was his power, his alone. Several Hollows near the throne who hadn't retreated in time quietly folded and dropped. Their reishi circuits shriveled. Their chests turned to ash.

The elephant Hollow stayed where it was, still kneeling, without moving back an inch, though cold sweat had broken out across its brow.

Baraggan rose from the throne. His deep-purple robe dragged a long shadow behind him as he lifted the colossal battleaxe one-handed and settled it across his shoulder. In the hollow darkness of his eye sockets, two small points of purplish-red light burned cold.

"The rest of you stay. I want to see for myself which ant thinks it can run loose in my domain."

---

Soul Society. Squad 6 Barracks.

Squad members moved quickly through the corridors with their document folders, footsteps deliberately light, heads down, not one of them risking a glance toward the central courtyard.

Byakuya Kuchiki stood beneath the eaves. The silver-white silk of his scarf drifted across his face in the morning breeze. The kenseikan held his black hair in place, and the hem of his white captain's haori did not move at all.

His face held nothing. But every squad member who passed him felt it anyway, that Reiatsu, cold down to the bone. Not anger. Something quieter than anger, and worse.

A few members murmured to each other at the corner. Lieutenant Renji Abarai looked at them once. They stopped talking and dispersed.

Everyone knew: do not provoke Captain Kuchiki right now.

First, his teacher had gone to Hueco Mundo and not come back. Then his adoptive sister had gone alone to the World of the Living on assignment, and gone silent.

---

Grand Kidō Chief's Office.

Emiri Tsunayashiro sat at the desk, brush in hand, a stack of barrier patrol reports in front of her, even thicker than usual.

Her folding fan sat on the corner of the desk. She worked through one report after another until the inkstone ran dry, then set the brush down, opened the fan, and held it over the lower half of her face. Only those peach-blossom eyes showed above the edge.

"Things have been wrong lately."

She was talking to herself. The words came out soft, and in the empty office they sat there with nowhere to go.

"All those trips to Hueco Mundo, nothing. Not once. And then the one time it matters most — just days after departure — the connection between Hueco Mundo and Soul Society hits a fluctuation that happens once a century. Time dilation between both sides. Over there, maybe a few days have passed. Here, it's already been months. The personnel we sent can't go back in to provide support. Even routine Senkaimon dispatches have been suspended."

She folded the fan shut. Her fingers moved slowly along the ribs.

"Other things have happened during this time, too. Rukia pulled herself back together and went alone to the World of the Living for a routine assignment. Then she ran into trouble. It feels like the Kidō Chief's departure for Hueco Mundo, the timing of it, accelerated someone else's plans."

She looked up at Marechiyo Ōmaeda, who was sorting documents by the door, and called his name. She told him to arrange it: Squad 2 and the Kidō Corps needed to stay in closer contact for the foreseeable future.

"I feel like something is about to happen."

She said it quietly. The folding fan was already closed, its spine resting against the stack of unreviewed barrier patrol reports beside her hand.

➤ Next: Locked in Deadlock