The Espada had been summoned for one reason: to await the return of Ulquiorra Cifer and Yammy Llargo from the World of the Living and hear their report.

That was the intelligence Szayelaporro had passed to Seijūrō.

Beneath his mask, he frowned.

The 4th Espada and the 10th. Aizen had sent both of them to the World of the Living, was he tracking Ichigo Kurosaki's movements, or collecting data for the Hōgyoku's next stage of development?

Either way, this information had to reach Soul Society as soon as possible.

He was still turning it over in his head when the three women in front of him stopped without warning. He walked straight into Mila Rose's back.

The muscle there was solid. It pressed into the bridge of his nose and sent a sharp ache straight up his face.

He had pulled back his Reiatsu sensing, standard practice, both to pass as an Arrancar and to avoid Aizen picking up on anything. The other reason was simpler: Hueco Mundo's reishi was a mess. Soul Society had a clean, stable reishi environment. Here it was like stirred-up silt, every Hollow's Reiatsu frequency tangled with every other, and underneath all of it, the colossal Reiatsu bleeding out from the depths of Las Noches. Maintaining precise reishi sensing in that kind of interference took a level of concentration he couldn't afford to spend right now.

He looked past the three women.

An Arrancar was pinned to the trunk of a quartz tree. His hands were bound behind him with Hollow tendons, his clothes shredded by wind and sand, his face smeared with dried purple blood.

He was still alive. His lips moved. Small, broken sounds of pain filtered through the wind.

"Baraggan's men." Cyan Sung-Sun's voice was barely above a whisper. Beneath her long trailing sleeves, her fingers tightened.

"Those bastards."

Apache pulled her hands from her pockets and walked toward the quartz tree without looking back. "Hey, Estrella, get over here."

Seijūrō followed.

Apache raised one hand. A single Bala, precisely placed, snapped the tendon binding. The Arrancar dropped from the tree, and Seijūrō stepped forward and caught him.

The moment his hands made contact, several black cubes tumbled out of the Arrancar's clothing, fist-sized, ink-black, no surface sheen at all.

Apache's expression changed instantly.

She lunged. Her shoulder drove into his chest and knocked him clean off his feet. The two of them hit the ground and rolled several paces.

The cubes landed.

Black walls erupted from all directions, sealing off the exact spot where they had been standing, floor to ceiling, not a single gap.

The surface was smooth as polished glass.

Caja Negación. Szayelaporro had mentioned this.

A substance created by Sōsuke Aizen. It sealed a spiritual body inside an alternate dimension. How long the seal held depended on the imprisoned person's Reiatsu, those with weaker Reiatsu would never escape. Those with Reiatsu on the level of an Espada could break free in a few hours.

Aizen used it to punish the Espada. The Espada used it to execute their Fracción.

Seijūrō could have cleared the walls with Shunpo without breaking a sweat.

But Hollows used Sonído. The moment he used Shunpo, everything was over.

Apache pushed herself off his chest and hauled him up in one motion, both hands locked around his sides, and shouted at Cyan Sung-Sun and Mila Rose: "What are you standing there for? Get in here!"

They hadn't been inside the black zone. But the moment they heard Apache's voice, they moved, no hesitation.

Cyan Sung-Sun tore a strip from her trailing sleeve and wrapped it around the Hollow Hole on Mila Rose's abdomen.

"Hey, Estrella. Wherever your Hollow Hole is — keep it covered."

Apache set him down. The three of them placed themselves around him: Apache facing forward, Cyan Sung-Sun on the left, Mila Rose on the right. Their eyes moved across every inch of the black walls. Muscles tight, waiting.

"Ha. Told you. Easiest thing in the world."

A figure stepped out from deeper within the walls. Then a second. A third. A fourth.

Two heavyset, two lean.

Ggio Vega was clapping slowly.

On the ground, the bound Arrancar dragged his head up and stretched one arm toward Ggio with everything he had left.

"Lord Ggio... I brought them here, just like you said. Please, the promise you made..."

His voice was barely a rasp. A drowning man's last reach for something solid.

Ggio tilted his head. His golden eyes blinked. Then he smacked his forehead, like something had just come back to him.

"Ahhh, right, right. You did well. I'll go release that snake Hollow of yours the moment I'm back. You have my word."

He drew his Zanpakutō and walked toward the Arrancar. Unhurried. Almost cheerful.

"S-snake Hollow?" The Arrancar's arm froze in the air. "But Molit is... is a bird Hollow..."

"Ah? Is that right?" Ggio stopped and tilted his head, a flicker of mild impatience crossing his face. "I forgot."

He leveled his palm at the Arrancar's head.

"I mean, who's going to remember what someone looks like after they've already been ground to dust?"

"You, "

A single Bala.

The Arrancar's head exploded. Purple blood and fragments of bone scattered across the ground.

Ggio flicked his wrist clean and walked back to where he'd been standing.

His expression hadn't moved once.

"Just like you lot. What right do the weak have to negotiate?"

He tilted his head and looked at Apache. His golden eyes held no malice. No anger. Only pure, entirely casual contempt, the kind that doesn't even need to try.

Apache's shoulders were shaking. "Why do you have a Caja Negación?"

"Why?" Ggio shrugged. "Lord Baraggan gave them to us."

He said it like he was commenting on the weather.

Caja Negación.

Seijūrō turned the word over in his mind.

That was why Cyan Sung-Sun had torn off her sleeve without thinking, the piece she valued most, and used it to bind Mila Rose. Of the three, Mila Rose wore the least. The Hollow Hole on her abdomen was completely exposed.

If a Caja Negación went through a Hollow Hole, the result didn't bear thinking about.

"Estrella." Apache's voice dropped low. She didn't turn around. "From here on, you stay right behind us. If — I mean if — any one of the three of us gets a Caja Negación used on us, you follow us in immediately."

"Huh?" Seijūrō almost thought he'd misheard.

"Well, well." Ggio's smirk didn't shift. "Here I thought you were just muscle with nothing behind it. Turns out you can actually think ahead."

Apache's call was right. If one of them got sealed inside, Seijūrō would be left outside, and outside, without Harribel's formal permission, he wasn't her Fracción. Not officially. Which meant killing him carried zero consequences for anyone.

That was also why Apache had kept him within arm's reach from the start.

"All the Espada are with Lord Aizen right now. No one's going to interfere." Ggio held his Zanpakutō out in front of him, the blade catching cold light off the black walls. "I can't wait to see the look on that bitch Harribel's face when she finds the three of you without your heads."

"Watch your mouth, you little bastard!"

Mila Rose moved first. Her Zanpakutō swept across in a single arc as the release command left her lips.

"Chew them apart, Leona!"

Her hair erupted outward, a golden cascade that fell past her waist, and her weapon became a massive black broadsword, dark gold patterns rippling along the flat of the blade.

"Strangle her, Escolopendra."

Cyan Sung-Sun's lower body became a great serpent. Her coils spread across the ground while her upper half stayed human, the torn trailing sleeves drifting in the still air to reveal slender fingers tipped with cold white light.

"Toss her, Cierva."

Apache's mask split into two enormous stag antlers, the horn at her crown unchanged, her body clad in deerskin with a black band at her waist. Deep red markings ran from the corners of both eyes. Her pupils settled back to their natural dark crimson.

Across from them, Baraggan's four Fracción drew their Zanpakutō and released.

"We break this wall!" Apache's voice cut through the space. "Break it and Lord Aizen and Lady Harribel will sense the fight, move!"

The broadsword and the serpent's tail struck the same point on the black wall at the same moment.

Leona's edge and Escolopendra's tip hit the dark surface together. Fissures spread outward from the impact point like cracking ice.

Then the wall repaired itself.

Fast, faster than the cracks could spread. The reishi at each fracture point rewove itself, sealed the gaps, and the surface was smooth again within seconds.

Mila Rose set her jaw and drove another slash into the same spot. A shallow mark. Gone just as quickly.

"The hell is this thing, "

Apache lunged for the wall, blade in hand. Ggio's Zanpakutō caught her across the path and drove her back. She had no choice but to turn and block.

CLANG. Metal screamed against metal in the confined black space.

And behind Ggio, the four Fracción finished their releases and closed in from all four sides.

➤ Next: Hakookuri — The Fight Begins

Chapter 69 - Hakookuri — The Fight Begins

There are two ways to use a Caja Negación.

Szayelaporro's files spelled it out clearly, the first method is to toss it out and let it deploy, forming a barrier similar to Kurohitsugi. Neither side can perceive through the walls, though the barrier can be broken by combining efforts from within.

The second is to stuff a Caja Negación directly into a Hollow Hole. Whoever gets stuffed inside is imprisoned in the Dangai.

On the journey from Soul Society to Hueco Mundo, if someone falls off the paved Reishi pathway, that's exactly the kind of space they'd plummet into.

Even an Espada would need to expend real effort to break out. Anyone with weak Reiatsu would be trapped there forever, until they crumbled into Reishi dust.

Right now, Apache stood in front of Seijūrō with her arms crossed, bracing against Ggio Vega's slash. The shriek of metal on metal bounced back and forth off the inner black walls of the Caja Negación.

Cyan Sung-Sun's serpent tail swept low across the ground, driving back Findorr Calius as he tried to circle around from the flank.

Mila Rose's massive black sword cleaved toward Choe Neng Poww head-on. The blade landed across his Resurrección-swollen body — hundreds of times his original size, and left nothing but a faint white scratch across the surface of his hide.

Post-Resurrección, Choe Neng Poww stood about as tall as Sajin Komamura's Myō'ō. His bulk blotted out the dim light filtering down from the top of the Caja Negación, and the shadow he cast swallowed the entire battlefield.

Three people, four directions, and one low-Reiatsu lackey to protect. Holding on this long had already pushed them to their limit.

Apache gritted her teeth.

Her peripheral vision swept to her left arm. Beneath the deerskin wrapping of her Resurrección form, the muscle was trembling faintly. She'd burned through more than half her Reiatsu.

She had a backup plan: sacrifice one arm to summon Ayon.

The Quimera Parca's power was more than enough to tear these four pieces of trash apart, Caja Negación walls and all.

Her arm would grow back. Mila Rose and Cyan Sung-Sun could barely dodge in time. But that useless lackey who couldn't even use Sonído, he'd never make it.

Estrella would be ash before Ayon's roar finished echoing.

So that plan stayed in reserve. It wasn't time yet.

Seijūrō's mind was running fast. Apache and the others were at an absolute disadvantage. If he didn't step in, their defeat was a matter of time.

But the moment he got serious, Kidō and Shunpo would expose him as a Shinigami. Everything he'd built up until now would be gone.

He needed to turn this fight around without using a single Shinigami technique.

His gaze moved past Mila Rose's shoulder and settled on the giant called Choe Neng Poww.

Post-Resurrección, the man had swollen to hundreds of times his original size. He stood in the center of the battlefield like a moving building, each footfall sending a tremor through the ground.

But that scale cut both ways. The blind spot directly beneath his lowered head was enormous. Anything small moving at ground level would register to him about as well as an ant crossing a floor.

Now.

The instant Ggio Vega and Findorr launched their attacks simultaneously, Seijūrō flickered out of position.

Not Shunpo. Just the most basic physical movement, lowering his center of gravity, pulling his Reiatsu in tight, using the dead angle created by the clash to slide silently into the blind zone beneath Choe Neng Poww's feet.

He grabbed hold of the rough exoskeleton and climbed, fingers hooking into the gaps between bone seams.

Choe Neng Poww was completely locked onto Mila Rose's black sword. He had no idea an ant had just crawled onto him.

Apache blocked a slash from Ggio Vega and strained to check on the others, wanting to confirm the useless lackey was still where she'd left him.

He wasn't.

Her chest seized. Her eyes swept the whole battlefield, Mila Rose's black sword was still swinging, Cyan Sung-Sun's tail was still coiling, Choe Neng Poww was still lumbering forward, but the lackey was gone.

Across from her, Ggio Vega caught her look and clocked it too. His next strike came half a beat late.

Everyone paused at once, their eyes combing every corner inside the broad-area Caja Negación.

Ggio Vega's plan was simple: find the guy, kill him in front of all three of them, make Harribel's Fracción watch the person they'd been protecting get torn apart. That would be a lot more satisfying than just killing them outright.

Then he saw the silhouette on Choe Neng Poww's shoulder.

Apache saw it too. She threw her head back and shouted, "Estrella! What are you doing up there?! Run!"

Ggio Vega was already moving, excitement buzzing through him as he kicked off and the light of Sonído burst beneath his feet.

Cyan Sung-Sun and Mila Rose both broke toward him to cover the gap, but Findorr and Nirgge were ready for it. Their attacks drove in from the sides, forcing both women back to their original positions before they could close the distance.

Seijūrō stood on Choe Neng Poww's shoulder and watched those golden eyes behind the sabertooth mask getting closer. He crouched low, acting like he was about to leap off.

From everyone's perspective, he looked clumsy and panicked, a rookie Arrancar who'd gotten himself into something way over his head.

But in the instant he bent down, his gaze locked onto the small, unremarkable black void beneath Ggio's armpit.

To anyone watching, it looked like the useless lackey barely dodged an attack and, in the chaos, pulled out a Caja Negación from somewhere he'd apparently stolen it.

Ggio Vega's expression went rigid.

He looked down. The Hollow Hole beneath his armpit was contracting at a wrong frequency, and something vast was pulling from inside, a suction that dragged his entire body inward.

He lifted his head to shout. The sound never made it out. Darkness took him whole.

And not just him.

In the same instant, Caja Negación sealed the Hollow Holes of the others, Choe Neng Poww, Findorr Calius, Nirgge Parduoc.

Four people. Four Caja Negación. Activated within fractions of a second of each other.

A violent surge of dark Reishi tore through the space, and the black walls of the Caja Negación crumbled inward. Sand and dust drifted slowly through the air.

On the white desert, only Apache, Mila Rose, and Cyan Sung-Sun remained, staring at each other. They were still frozen in their combat stances, Apache's arms still crossed in front of her, locked in the same position she'd held while trading blows with Ggio Vega a moment ago, but the opponent in front of her was gone.

The branches of the quartz trees swayed gently in the wind. Moonlight fell quiet and unbroken across the sand.

"Where did they go?"

Apache looked around, dazed. "Where's Estrella?"

This was Seijūrō's first time inside a space like this.

No east, no west, no north, no south. No way to tell up from down. All around him was pure, unbroken darkness.

In the distance, a few luminous ribbons of the Dangai drifted in slow motion, like lightning that had been frozen mid-strike.

The four of them were like ants flushed down a drain, tumbling and colliding inside the churning Reishi current, suspended at scattered points throughout the void.

Ggio Vega steadied himself. His golden eyes still gave off a faint glow in the dark. He turned his head and fixed a hard stare on the others.

"Why the hell did you follow me in here?!"

Findorr Calius sounded more confused than angry. "I didn't follow you. I was dragged in."

The others said the same. None of them had stepped into this dimensional space willingly.

Then a figure came walking through the void toward them.

With each step, an extremely thin foothold of Reishi condensed beneath his feet. Faint blue light blinked into existence in sequence across the darkness, then slowly faded after he moved past.

Steady pace. Every stride landing on exactly the same rhythm.

Ggio Vega stared at the approaching silhouette.

"You little—"

The Arrancar with the pathetic Reiatsu he'd been mocking all day.

But this person's posture was nothing like that slippery lackey from before. Shoulders relaxed. Hands hanging loose at his sides. Like he was taking a walk through his own backyard.

"Have you ever heard of Hakōkuri?" His voice wasn't loud. The tone was even.

"The hell is that?" Ggio Vega asked before he could stop himself.

"A Kidō technique developed by the former Vice Kidō Chief — Hachigen Ushōda. It lets you place small objects inside a rectangular barrier and transmit them across short distances into a target space."

As Seijūrō spoke, a golden rectangular prism materialized in his hand, its light soft and steady, rotating slowly in the void.

The next instant, that same golden prism appeared in front of Ggio Vega out of nothing. Tens of yards between them. No Reishi trail connecting the two points.

"That's how I just stole the Caja Negación off your bodies and stuffed them into your Hollow Holes."

Ggio Vega went still.

The man standing in front of him was something like Aizen.

The dark gray half-mask came off. Beneath it was a calm, unhurried face. The short black hair was gone, in its place, dark hair that had lengthened into loose strands drifting in the void. Deep in his pupils, something that had been held down for a long time was burning.

"You know what? I'm furious right now. I haven't run into a single Espada this whole time. I spent half the day wandering Las Noches and got nothing out of it. Every useful piece of intel I have came from Szayelaporro. By any measure, I've accomplished absolutely nothing."

He tucked the mask inside his robes.

Ggio Vega opened his mouth to sneer.

Then he felt it.

Reiatsu crashed down like a mountain range collapsing, pouring in from overhead, flooding the void, shaking it to its foundations. The faint blue Reishi footholds shattered underfoot. The distant Dangai light ribbons buckled and warped under the pressure.

Ggio Vega's knees buckled against his will. His spine felt like something invisible was sitting on it, pressing him down inch by inch.

He clenched his jaw and tried to lift his head. The Reiatsu didn't give him a millimeter.

The others were pinned the same way. Findorr Calius was already on his knees in the void, both hands braced against an invisible Reishi surface, his shoulders shaking hard.

Seijūrō stood there and looked down at the four Fracción who couldn't raise their heads.

The Reiatsu carried nothing extra. No anger, no contempt. Just pure, objective suppression.

Then he gave a light wave of his hand, and the Caja Negación scattered around the space gathered toward his palm as if pulled by invisible thread.

"W-Wait—" Ggio Vega choked out, his voice stripped of its edge. He didn't get to finish.

"You said it yourself." Seijūrō's tone was the same calm he'd use to state something that had already been proven a hundred times over.

"The weak have no right to negotiate terms."

He didn't give them time to react.

Findorr Calius felt the density of that Reiatsu before the other three did.

He tried to run, Sonído, the light flaring beneath his feet, and it was crushed out before it could ignite. He was nailed in place, unable to move.

His fingers raked uselessly against the void. His fingernails split. Purple blood seeped from between them and hung in the darkness, congealing into small, perfect beads.

Nirgge Parduoc's mouth opened and closed like a fish that had been thrown onto land.

The bulk his Resurrección had given him was nothing but dead weight now. His bones groaned under the pressure. The cartilage in his joints crackled with a dense, fine splintering sound. His colossal body had started to collapse inward from the edges.

Ggio Vega's mind went back to the scorpion Hollow beneath his foot, the slow grind of his ankle as he'd twisted it. He heard his own casual voice saying the weak have no right to negotiate terms. He saw the moment that Arrancar's head had come apart under a Bala.

Now he was the scorpion Hollow.

Seijūrō looked at the four Fracción who couldn't lift their faces under his Reiatsu and gave his hand a small, unhurried wave.

The Reiatsu compressed.

Not a Kidō incantation. Not a drawn blade. Just the Reiatsu that already blanketed the entire space, pulling inward, from all directions, from above and below, crushing in simultaneously from every angle.

The bodies of all four Fracción detonated at once.

No screams. No last struggles. Only the dense, sharp crack of shattering bone and the dull, heavy thud of flesh compressed into nothing.

Purple Reishi blood bloomed in the void and was swallowed by the darkness before it could spread.

The last thing Ggio Vega saw was the Shinigami, no name given, no victory declaration, just that figure looking down at him through the void, nothing at all behind those eyes.

Then Ggio Vega's consciousness was ground into Reishi dust along with everything else.

Four slow-dissolving clusters of Reishi remnants hung in the dark.

The Arrancar who called himself Docente Estrella straightened his collar, pressed the dark gray half-mask back into place, and turned toward the exit.

Start to finish, he hadn't drawn his blade once. Hadn't chanted a single Hadō. He'd only released his Reiatsu.

On the white desert, Apache was sobbing like a child.

Tears rolled down from the edges of her crimson eyeliner, cutting through the dust on her face in dark tracks.

She was on her knees in the sand, both hands braced on her thighs, shoulders heaving with each ragged sob.

Mila Rose stood beside her with a hand on her back. Her black sword had reverted to its Zanpakutō form and was back at her hip.

"He looked like dead weight the whole time." Her voice was low. "But in the end, he's the one who saved us."

Cyan Sung-Sun had already torn off her other sleeve and was handing it to Apache as a makeshift handkerchief.

Apache took it, blew her nose hard, and kept crying. "My lackey is gone — waaaah! This is so humiliating — he went down with those scumbags! How am I supposed to face Lady Harribel now? If it were Lady Harribel, she would never have let someone she was protecting die right in front of her!"

Mila Rose opened her mouth, she'd been about to say that Estrella might still have a chance.

She didn't say it.

The duration of a Caja Negación seal depended on the Reiatsu of whoever was trapped inside.

Estrella's Reiatsu was weak. Not even Adjuchas-level. Someone like that, sealed inside a Caja Negación, would probably never come out.

Even if he'd survived the four Fracción, he'd be stuck in that dimensional space until he died.

She kept that to herself and rested her hand on Apache's shoulder.

Several hundred kilometers away, high in the sky, a black seam split the air from nowhere, cracking open like a fracture in glass.

Seijūrō Kidōin stepped out through the fissure. The dark gray half-mask was back in place. The dark red lightning pattern along the edge of his right eye caught the faint light of the crescent moon.

His cuffs still carried a trace of ash from the Dangai. He looked completely unbothered.

He hummed something low under his breath and walked along the ridge of a sand dune, heading in the opposite direction from the battlefield.

Szayelaporro had sent word: Ulquiorra Cifer and Yammy Llargo had returned.

The Espada assembly would be wrapping up soon.

➤ Next: Side Story: The Deer