When Soi Fon woke up, the first thing she saw was the ceiling of the Squad Two barracks.

Those familiar beams. Afternoon sunlight filtering through the paper doors. The shadow of the old pine in the courtyard swaying against the shōji screen. She could have walked every inch of it with her eyes closed.

She sat up sharply, the blanket sliding from her shoulders. She was wearing a clean standard uniform. The burn on her right arm had been freshly wrapped, bandaged in the exact method she always used herself.

Something was wrong.

A moment ago she had been at the supply depot in Hueco Mundo, leaning against a quartz pillar, with Seijūrō right beside her.

She threw off the covers and stood, stepped barefoot onto the wooden corridor, and pushed open the door.

Same hallway. Stone flagstones, gray-tiled eaves, the crisp clatter of shinai drifting from the training grounds in the distance. Everything looked like an ordinary day, as if she'd only woken from an ill-timed afternoon nap.

Marechiyo Ōmaeda stood at the far end of the corridor with his back to her, a stack of documents in his arms, his broad frame casting a squat shadow in the afternoon light.

Soi Fon walked over, tone clipped the way it was when she was assigning duties. "Ōmaeda. This is Squad Two. How long was I asleep? What's happened these past few days? What's Kidōin's status?"

Ōmaeda turned around, ran his eyes over her from head to toe with an arrogance she had never seen on his face, and rolled them.

"Huh? How dare you speak to Lieutenant Ōmaeda like that?"

She froze. She was already calculating exactly where to plant his face into the flagstones when a hand appeared from the side, black armguard of the Stealth Force, and closed around her shoulder. The grip was light, but the angle was precise. Five fingers seated exactly in the hollow between her acromion and clavicle, forcing her half a step sideways on reflex. Textbook Stealth Force joint-lock.

"Now, now, let's calm down. Today's a special day, after all. If you kill the mood, the Captain is going to be upset, you know."

Kisuke Urahara stood beside her in the black shinobi attire of the Stealth Force.

"Kisuke Urahara? Captain? Which Captain?"

He didn't answer. He just pressed a finger to his lips. And then, from the far end of the courtyard, came the master of ceremonies' clear announcement:

"Please welcome the groom and the bride!"

The two large doors behind her swung slowly open.

Blinding white light poured in through the gap. The space around her filled all at once with people, captains, lieutenants, Stealth Force operatives, Shin'ō Academy students, all cheering, all applauding. She turned as if carried by a tide.

Yoruichi Shihōin walked in along the red carpet.

She wore a sharp, tailored men's suit. The deep black fabric caught the light in microscopic threads of silver. Her shirt collar was open, no tie. Short hair swept back, a few loose strands across her forehead, and at the corner of her mouth, the exact smile she always wore when she praised Soi Fon after training.

Soi Fon's lips moved. Only a faint breath came out. Then the music changed, not the wedding march, something stranger. The door on the opposite side opened.

Seijūrō walked in carrying a bouquet of white flowers, a pure white wedding gown draping from his shoulders to his ankles. The hem was studded with pearls and Reishi crystals that caught the light like scattered stars. His pace was measured. His posture was as dignified as when he reviewed documents. Soi Fon stared at him with the blankest expression she had ever worn in her life.

Byakuya Kuchiki stood at the officiant's podium. A silver Ginpakukazahana scarf drifted across his cheek from a breeze that came from nowhere. He read the vows in his usual calm, cold tone. "Yoruichi Shihōin. Do you take Seijūrō Shihōin as your husband? Whether he is one day elevated to an elder of the Kidō Corps or remains merely Grand Kidō Chief. Whether he layers his barriers with ten more counter-surveillance spells or a hundred. To love him, honor him, and help him review his paperwork until the end of time?"

Yoruichi nodded. "I do."

Soi Fon's expression cracked open. Shihōin, Seijūrō?!

Byakuya turned to the other side. "Seijūrō Shihōin. In sickness and in health. Whether she still carries her Stealth Force codename or not. Whether she sneaks out in the dead of night to investigate enemy operations or not. Will you love her, honor her, until she has chased down the very last soul disappearance case of her lifetime?"

Seijūrō didn't answer. He only turned his head. Past the rain of flower petals, past the ribbons and the cheering guests, those calm eyes found Soi Fon with exact precision. It wasn't a plea. It wasn't relief. It was sorrow and disappointment braided together. The feeling hit her like a stinger straight through the back.

"I do." His voice was barely audible. Only she heard it. Byakuya closed the vow book. "If there are no objections, the groom may now kiss—"

"I OBJECT!"

Soi Fon shoved through the operatives blocking her path. She didn't care whose mask she ripped off, didn't care whose foot she stepped on. She sent Ōmaeda flying with one punch and roared toward the stage: "I object! His surname is Kidōin, not Shihōin!" Byakuya shook his head. On the far side of the stage, Emiri Tsunayashiro doubled over laughing, hiding her face behind a fan.

Yoruichi just shrugged, then took Seijūrō by the chin and leaned in.

Then a Cero punched straight down through the center of the ceiling.

Soi Fon knew that sound. Not from any file she'd read, from having one scream past her shoulder on a battlefield, close enough to graze skin. That sensation of Reiatsu compressed past its limit and then tearing through space. That piercing sonic crack that ached all the way to the roots of her teeth.

She snapped her head up. Through the hole blown in the ceiling, she saw Hollows everywhere. Some hung inverted from the broken edges of the corridor. Others spread skeletal wings and dove into the crowd. Ceros erupted from their jaws in every color, blackish-green, crimson, bone-pale, all of it crashing down on the chaos below. The crowd fractured and ran. Guests screamed behind stone pillars. The red carpet was torn apart.

Then she saw Yoruichi let go. She simply released the arm she'd hooked through Seijūrō's and ran. Alone. Without looking back at him once.

Seijūrō was left beside the collapsed podium. Splinters had torn long gashes through the bridal gown. The bouquet lay scattered across the ground. He tried to rise and was knocked sideways by the stampeding crowd. His arms were stepped on. His train was ripped further. He went down onto the cold stone floor, and there was no one left to stand in front of him.

Soi Fon shoved through everyone in her way. She ran toward him, toward the figure struggling in the wreckage of the dress, but her feet felt like they were sinking into a swamp. No matter how hard she pushed, she couldn't move fast enough.

And then she saw her.

Mahiru Tokito stepped out of the crowd, bent down, and lifted Seijūrō into a bridal carry with no apparent effort. Her gaze was fixed on the pale, frail face in her arms, greedy and unblinking. Her hair was longer than in the old photographs in the Soul Society archive. Her fingers moved slowly from his ribs to the back of his neck. Then she pulled him fully into her arms, lowered her head, and said something in his ear. She disappeared behind the torn cloth draping beyond the altar, laughing loud.

"—Stop!"

Soi Fon's hand shot toward the vanishing figure. Her fingers closed on empty air.

She sat bolt upright and reached for the Suzumebachi at her hip, and found her right arm wrapped in bandages, her body covered by the plain fabric Tier Harribel had left behind. Someone was crouched beside her. Not Seijūrō. Lilynette. Lilynette lurched backward in fright and nearly toppled off the rocks, half a piece of dry ration flying out of her hand. "Whoa, whoa, whoa—what are you doing?! You can't just jump up like that, you nearly stopped my heart!"

She pressed a hand to her chest. The look on her face was genuine.

"...What are you doing here." Soi Fon's voice came out hoarse and tight.

"I've been here the whole time! I was sitting right beside you while you slept—Little Star told me to watch you! He said your right arm was hurt, and that if you woke up and found nobody around, you'd probably draw your blade and cut down every Hollow within fifty miles."

Lilynette picked up the dry ration with full self-righteousness, blew the quartz sand off it, and kept going. "And then you just kept dreaming—frowning, grinding your teeth—and then you suddenly yelled 'I object,' and then 'Stop.' What were you dreaming about? You were so loud."

Soi Fon's face went red. Not just her face, her ears, her neck, all the way down, a flush that spread fast. She grabbed the plain fabric and yanked it up over her face. "Nothing. I didn't dream about anything."

"Liar! Your voice cracked when you yelled 'I object,' I heard it—and you yelled 'Stop' too! Did you dream someone was stealing something from you? We've seen Starrk have dreams, he always shouts weird stuff, what did you dream about?!"

Before Soi Fon could pull the fabric all the way over her head, a blackish-green Cero sliced across the sky overhead. Then another, crimson. Then one pale as bone. Three Ceros weaving and crisscrossing, painting the night sky above the quartz deadwood forest in a chaotic wash of color.

Soi Fon tracked the trajectories and found Seijūrō. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with Coyote Starrk in front of a half-collapsed quartz cliff face. Starrk had his right hand raised, a golden Cero hovering above his palm. The Reiatsu coming off it was unstable, like he'd deliberately compressed it to a threshold and was refusing to let it go.

He appeared to be listening carefully to what Seijūrō was saying. Kidōin was using his Asauchi scabbard to trace curved nodal arcs in the air. Starrk studied them and nodded.

Soi Fon pulled the fabric back up over herself, rolled over in the sound of Ceros tearing through the air, and closed her eyes. Whether she was resting or sulking was hard to say.

The conversation wasn't finished.

Starrk had asked why every Cero he fired leaked more Reiatsu than intended, whether it was a problem with how much force he used. Seijūrō answered immediately.

"It's not a force problem. It's your Reiatsu leaking. When it surges outward from your body, it goes without any compression at all, it expands straight out, taking the outermost layer of your entire body with it. So before your Cero can even form, your own leaking Reiatsu disperses it. What you need is an internal circulation loop inside the core before the Cero fires. Let the Reishi cycle once inside before it releases outward, an internal spin. You don't need to accumulate more Reiatsu. You just stop the Reishi from scattering before it can go anywhere."

He paused, still drawing with the scabbard in the sand, several intersecting circles. "One of your Ceros just now was nearly twice as fast as the ones before it. Not because you compressed anything extra into it. You unintentionally drew your leaking Reishi back into the core, which recycled the energy you were wasting. Right now, every Cero you fire is single-use. But if you let it circulate inside the core before firing, it'll be more stable. And Starrk, that question you asked earlier, about controlling Reiatsu to seep outward slowly? Try locking the Cero nodes first, then releasing them in stages."

"Locking them? You mean compress the focal point to critical mass, pull out part of the Reishi, and let it release on its own?"

"Not pull it out. Narrow the spacing between nodes. The smaller the spacing, the faster the Reishi spins, and the tighter the internal structure. Tight nodes are much harder to tear apart when you fire." Seijūrō threaded the circles together with the scabbard and tapped each intersection point.

Starrk stared at those intersections and said nothing for a long moment. Then the golden Cero in his palm began to slowly rotate. The Reishi that had been spilling outward along the node edges was suddenly pushed back by a contained, inward force. The Reiatsu coming off the Cero steadied. Its brightness dropped, and it began to shift, dark on the outside, bright at the core. The power hadn't shrunk. The light had been drawn inward.

He looked down at what his palm was holding, and something very faint moved through his half-lidded gray-blue eyes. Then he gave a lazy yawn and tossed the stabilized Cero upward. It streaked across the sky above the quartz deadwood forest and burst open into a silent rain of dark light, the wasteland below flashing in and out of shadow.

He repeated it several more times. By the end, the Cero in his palm was as stable as a precision-cut Reishi crystal. Its edges shed nothing. It just hovered above his fingertips in slow, quiet rotation.

He had been making adjustments since before, tightening the node spacing over and over, each iteration more precise than the last. He didn't need the scabbard guiding him anymore. He simply ran through the sequence again, more practiced each time, and didn't speak for a long while.

"I always thought what I wanted was companions. Someone who wouldn't be crushed by me. Someone who could stay beside me and talk to me like a normal person. I called that a friend. Now I have that. But I don't know how to define it. Before, I just stayed alone, and my Reiatsu kept everything away. Now I've pulled it back in, and I don't know what comes next. Outside of fighting, what are friends supposed to do?"

He tossed the Cero gently and caught it, watching the ink-blue light on his fingertips that no longer sprayed outward. His voice was slow, like he was turning over a question that had been sitting untouched for far too long.

Seijūrō planted the battered Asauchi in the sand and sat back against the quartz pillar.

The burn on his right arm still ached faintly, but his fingers moved. He took the water jug Starrk handed him and drank a little. He didn't answer right away. He looked at the shadows the distant quartz deadwood forest threw across the ground, as if finding the right words. Then he set the jug on his knee.

"Friends keep each other in mind. Not through deliberate effort, not by telling yourself every morning, 'I should take a blade for him today,' or 'I should buy him a meal.' It's when you're doing something and you suddenly think of them, and you just do something for them along the way. Like the way you're controlling your Reiatsu right now, pulling it back to a range where Soi Fon and I can stand beside you without worrying about being crushed. No promise was made. You simply chose to, and you did it. That's choosing to change for someone else. And friendship goes both ways."

He glanced at Starrk. "You did this for me. I'll do something for you somewhere else. Not a transaction. Not a contract. We're both willing to do things for each other as they come up. Enough of those, and it becomes a habit that never needs to be said out loud."

"Sounds like a lot of trouble." Starrk blinked. "But not too much trouble. That's fine." He folded the ink-blue Cero back into his palm and leaned against the pillar again, like he was letting something settle. After a moment, he tilted his head toward Seijūrō. "Not everyone can be a friend, though. Right?"

"Right. Some people only want to use your strength. Others want to swallow you before you crush them. That's not friendship, that's leverage. But even something built purely on leverage can become friendship, given enough time together."

He paused. Something in his expression shifted, like he was reaching back for something old. "The friends who make it past that stage, what's left between them isn't utility. It's time. Long enough to know when the other one will slack off. When they'll dig their heels in. When they're clearly at the end of their rope but still pretending they're fine. That kind of understanding doesn't need a contract."

Starrk opened his palm again and let the ink-blue Cero bounce lazily at his fingertips, rolling it slowly across his finger pads. He stayed quiet for a long time. Then he said: "Before, I didn't have a choice. Anyone who came near me died. I can control it now. But I don't know who would want to get close to a Vasto Lorde that crushed so many of its own kind."

"You're standing in this supply depot right now. No crushed pillars. No Hollows running. No hand on a sword hilt from Soi Fon. You did all of that yourself. Your Reiatsu isn't a wall between you and the world anymore, you can choose who comes near you. You can choose who becomes a friend."

"So do I count as yours? Seriously."

Seijūrō looked down. The corner of his mouth curved. Then he raised the tattered sleeve of his right arm.

"When Soi Fon and I were fighting Baraggan Louisenbairn, you held back the Gillians outside for us. Why did you do that?"

Starrk tilted his head slightly. "Because you were still in there."

"Same for me," Seijūrō said. "The answer was already there. You don't need to hear it from me. What you can control now isn't just Ceros and Reiatsu. In a place where you never had a choice before, you made one."

Starrk was quiet for a long time.

Then he tossed the ink-blue Cero upward. It crossed the sky above the quartz deadwood forest and burst open again into a silent rain of light. This time the light fell without breaking anything. It settled onto the quartz pillars above their heads. It fell on Soi Fon's shoulders. It fell on Lilynette's head.

He looked down at his open palm. The only thing there was no longer just the residue of something killed. Then, very quietly, almost imperceptibly, he smiled.

"So this is what it feels like. Not bad."

➤ Next: Two Farewells, Two Departures

Chapter 60 - Two Farewells, Two Departures

Seijūrō stood before the Senkaimon he and Soi Fon had set up when they first arrived in Hueco Mundo.

The Kidō runes carved into the stone gate frame still circulated in slow loops, but the interior was empty. No faint blue light curtain. Just dead, silent darkness.

He recalibrated the coordinates and pushed his Reiatsu through the frame again. The runes flared briefly, then went dark. Still nothing. He pulled his hand back and turned to face Soi Fon, voice calm, each word pressed down with deliberate weight.

"Someone on the Soul Society side has unilaterally locked down the Senkaimon. It isn't broken — our positioning was cut off, the Reishi coordinates are being reverse-blocked. They know exactly which route we'd take back, and they have enough clearance to manipulate the Senkaimon's dispatch system. If we force our way through now, we'll be randomly dumped into the Dangai void. No way out, no way back."

"This is exile."

Soi Fon's voice was hoarse and cold. "To lock down the Grand Kidō Chief's Senkaimon from the Soul Society side, their clearance has to be at least captain-level. And they know the Kidō Corps' barrier dispatch system inside and out."

"We can't go back directly. Not right now. But we can travel from Hueco Mundo to the World of the Living and use the passage between there and Soul Society to get home. Since the Senkaimon on the Soul Society side has been reverse-locked, we can reverse the method Hollows use to invade the World of the Living and punch through a Garganta ourselves. The Hollows that move between Rukongai and the World of the Living do exactly this — they tear open Garganta repeatedly and cross over from Hueco Mundo. All we need is one Hollow that's made that trip before. Make it open a Garganta, temporarily disrupt the local Reishi density balance, and we follow its path through."

Seijūrō finished and raised his head. His gaze moved past the broken hilt of his Asauchi, which still gave off a faint glow beside the gate frame, and came to rest on Coyote Starrk leaning against a quartz pillar nearby.

Starrk listened without speaking for a moment. Then he swept a small patch of quartz sand aside with one foot, letting the charred deadwood Lilynette had burned with a Cero roll into a gap between the pillars. He spoke in his usual unhurried drawl.

"I've never done anything like that on purpose. Invading the World of the Living is Hollow instinct — we don't have that instinct. I've been in Hueco Mundo as long as I can remember, and most of that time I was just sleeping. Never once thought about crossing over to devour souls." He paused. "Still, your method has a simpler version. We don't need to tear anything open ourselves. There are plenty of Hollows around here that have snuck off to the World of the Living and made it back. Grab one, rough it up, and make it spit out the coordinates it used."

He pulled his cloak around himself, blinked his grayish-blue eyes, and added, "As for the grabbing part."

"I'll do it! I'll do it!"

Lilynette burst out from behind his cloak, still holding the aiming stone she'd been using for Cero practice. The eye visible beneath her half-mask gleamed as she stared at Seijūrō. She threw the stone onto the sand and clapped the quartz dust off her hands. "Just watch! I'll come back with one that's been to the World of the Living loads of times! I know every lazy Hollow in this desert!" She took off sprinting straight out of the quartz deadwood forest.

She was back before long, dragging a Hollow she had beaten senseless.

She dropped it on the ground, planted her foot on its tail, and announced with complete conviction, "It told me it's super tough — went to the World of the Living to steal souls and made it back alive! This is the one!"

While they waited out the Hollow's interrogation, Soi Fon leaned against a stone pillar and kept talking.

"3 people. Captain-level strength. Young males. All with very powerful Reiatsu. 2 of them acted as lieutenants, and the strongest one was the ringleader. Based on what Baraggan said, and what his two confidants Findorr and Ggio let slip, all three moved through Las Noches like they owned it. When they put down the former King of Hueco Mundo, they didn't use Kidō or anything wide-range. The strongest one just drew his blade. Didn't even fully release his Shikai."

"So their personalities: one extraordinarily confident, running the whole operation from start to finish, preferring psychological pressure over brute force. One who barely speaks but is always exactly where it matters. And the third — stays in the background, watches, says little, but every time he opens his mouth he lands it on someone's most sensitive nerve." Seijūrō went quiet for a moment, slowly replaying those fragmented, unsettling descriptions in his mind. His brow drew tighter.

"First, rule out Genryūsai Yamamoto and Retsu Unohana. Not their style. Rule out old Ginrei Kuchiki, Shunsui Kyōraku, and Jūshirō Ukitake, wrong age, wrong build, or completely wrong temperament."

Soi Fon scratched through the corresponding marks in the sand one by one as she spoke.

"But Baraggan said the strongest one had immense Reiatsu and could work some kind of illusion on the mind, something even he couldn't see through. Which means their appearance could itself be part of the illusion. Age, gender, facial scars, how they talk, none of those external details are reliable filters. Trait filtering only works on the two lieutenants. Not on the core figure."

Seijūrō gripped his knee with one hand, fingers pressing deep into the fabric.

"If we limit trait filtering strictly to the two lieutenants and look for young male lieutenants who fit, the suspect pool shrinks to Kaname Tōsen and a few people in his immediate circle. Tōsen was the only survivor of the Hollowfication incident, either he was impossibly lucky, or he was complicit from the beginning. Among those closest to him, the one who never reveals his Shikai in public, always covers his face, and whose fighting style nobody has ever fully seen, Sajin Komamura is the most suspicious. He never shows his Shikai. He wears that helmet every day. Nobody knows what's underneath. If the mastermind can fake an appearance, Komamura doesn't even need to fake one. The helmet was always the perfect disguise."

Soi Fon crossed out the remaining marks.

"But Komamura doesn't have the personality for something this scale. Whoever is pulling the strings behind all of this has to meet several conditions at once. First, they have sufficient clearance to enter and exit the Kidō Corps' barrier system, they were able to leave encrypted formulas so deep that even Mahiru Tokito could only be discarded as a lost piece. Second, they understand Hollow Reishi structure at a deep level. Every modification experiment run in Hueco Mundo was clean and precise, not a single wasted step across the entire evolutionary chain from Gillian to Adjuchas. Third, they've been embedded inside the Gotei 13 for a long time. After Kisuke Urahara was exiled, they quietly absorbed all the data he left behind at the Research and Development Bureau. But they've never once let on how much they know. They deliberately keep themselves buried behind a harmless everyday image."

Seijūrō laid out the analysis in one unbroken breath. Then his gaze shifted, and something pained and lost moved through his eyes.

"Fourth." He stopped for a moment. "He isn't just using Hueco Mundo as a laboratory. He's using the experiments to test his own theories, the upper limit of a Shinigami's power, the evolutionary path of Hollows, the boundary between soul and Reishi. He doesn't want to become the Hollow King. He doesn't want to destroy Soul Society. He wants to break through the wall. Fifth, he needs an identity that no one suspects. Gentle enough. Harmless enough. The kind of person that, when everything falls apart, everyone instinctively rules out first."

"You mean this person is someone right next to us?" Soi Fon frowned and pressed. "Who?"

Seijūrō didn't answer.

He closed his eyes, fingers resting on the battered hilt of the Asauchi at his waist.

The first face that came to him was someone who always raised his hand in the Shin'ō Academy classroom with a gentle smile, but Seijūrō never said the name out loud. He had never once placed that name beside the word "butcher" in his own mind. Not for lack of evidence. Because it was too close.

In the silence, Lilynette came back dragging the Hollow she'd worked over until it was black and blue.

The Hollow sprawled flat on the ground, its mask split with several deep cracks. Lilynette had one foot on its tail and one hand on her hip. "I asked around the whole area. This was the only one that had been to the World of the Living more than once and was actually proud of it."

Seijūrō crouched down and pressed the tip of the Asauchi against the edge of the Hollow's mask. His tone was calm, but every word came down like something dropped from a great height.

"Open the Garganta. Take us along the path you used to reach the World of the Living. If you try to leave us stranded in the Dangai, "

He didn't finish. The Hollow frantically clawed several arcs into the ground and squeezed out a string of garbled sounds. A long, narrow black rift slowly tore open in front of the ruins of the quartz deadwood forest, a crushing difference in Reiatsu bleeding from its edges, pulling nearby sand grains inward with every pulse.

Lilynette was about to throw herself at the Garganta when Starrk caught her by the back of the collar.

He set her down at a safe distance, then looked up at Seijūrō. "The two of us have only just started getting our Reiatsu leakage under control. Out here in this wasteland, Adjuchas-class Hollows can at least survive near us. But humans in the World of the Living, if our Reiatsu sweeps over them, they die. We can't go."

His voice still carried that lazy ease. But his grayish-blue eyes didn't flinch.

Seijūrō nodded. He extended his hand. Starrk looked down at it.

He hesitated for a moment. Then, carefully, he placed his right hand over the back of Seijūrō's. His fingertips barely made contact, as if he were afraid of breaking something. But the hand stayed. Neither of them said a word.

Across the sand, Lilynette crouched quietly on top of the half-dead Hollow, watching. She reached into her hands and slipped the quartz shard she'd been using for target practice into Soi Fon's equipment pouch without a sound.

Soi Fon happened to look down to check if the buckle on her waist pouch was fastened, and found herself staring directly at Lilynette, who was still frozen mid-slip.

"Before, there was nothing here," Seijūrō said, looking at the Hollow hole in his chest. "From now on, more people will know this place isn't empty."

The Garganta slowly closed above the quartz deadwood forest. The last trace of faint blue Reishi light peeled away from the edges of the rift and dissolved beneath the cold, eternal moon of Hueco Mundo.

Lilynette stood where the Garganta had been, up on her toes, staring for a long time into the nothing that was left. Then she lowered her heels and kicked a piece of quartz debris across the sand.

Starrk looked down at his open palm. He withdrew his right hand and pressed it against the edge of the Hollow hole in his chest, that space with no heartbeat, which had just been knocked upon.

Lilynette looked up at his hand resting there. After a moment, she reached out and tugged at his cloak sleeve. "Starrk."

"Yeah."

"Will we see them again?"

Starrk looked down at her. He moved his hand away from his chest and rubbed the top of her head. Lilynette shrank half an inch under the pressure but didn't pull away.

"We will."

---

Meanwhile, World of the Living. Karakura Town.

Time flowed differently here. A great deal of it had already passed.

In the underground space beneath a secluded shop, a man in a dark green coat and a green-and-white striped bucket hat crouched before a Senkaimon, making final adjustments.

His hands were steady. The wrench moved back and forth across the seal clamp, tightening with each pass. He pushed the temporarily added multi-target teleportation runes into the edge of the gate frame in one go, and the whole structure let out a low, resonant hum in the dim light.

He tucked the wrench behind his waist, stood up, and dusted Reishi powder from his palms.

"Coordinates locked, Reishi conversion rate calibrated. The auxiliary formula won't hold long, you'll need to move fast."

A boy stood before the Senkaimon with an enormous Zanpakutō resting on his shoulder. His short orange hair stood out sharply against the faint blue light of the gate, and his brown eyes caught the shifting Reishi glow from the frame.

He glanced back. The Quincy pushed his glasses up. The muscular giant gave a single, silent nod. The girl gripped her backpack straps tight. The black cat perched on her shoulder rolled its neck.

He tightened his grip on the Zanpakutō. His voice wasn't loud, but every word had the weight of something decided long ago and confirmed again and again until there was nothing left to doubt.

"Let's go! We're bringing Rukia home!"

He stepped through first. A massive surge of Reishi erupted from beneath his feet and swept outward in every direction, swallowing him and the companions behind him into the depths of the Dangai.

➤ Next: Volume 4: Hidden Hollow Arc