Kenpachi Zaraki stood on the shattered quartz tiles, golden Reiatsu erupting from his body and crushing the roof beneath his feet into a massive depression.

Pure, undisguised battle lust blazed in his eyes.

The sleeves of his Shihakushō had been scorched to tatters by Ceros during the earlier exchanges, baring his arms and the crisscrossing old scars across them — every one embedded in his skin like a medal.

He didn't use Shunpo. He kicked off the roof with sheer leg strength and launched himself at Starrk like a cannonball.

His Zanpakutō trailed a golden afterimage as the blade sliced through the air, sweeping straight at Starrk's front with enough force to flatten a sand dune.

Starrk raised his right hand and lightly pulled the trigger.

A cerulean Cero surged from the muzzle, aimed straight at Zaraki's face.

Zaraki tilted his head. The Cero grazed his ear and singed several strands of hair to ash, but his forward momentum didn't drop at all.

A second Cero immediately blasted from the gun in Starrk's left hand, sealing every avenue of evasion on that side.

Zaraki brought his blade down and split the Cero clean in half. Cerulean light detonated on both sides of his body, shaking the remaining quartz tiles across the dome until they rattled.

The shockwave hadn't cleared before Starrk's third Cero pierced through the smoke, its trajectory lower than the first two. He was aiming for Zaraki's knees.

Zaraki stomped hard with his right foot and launched himself skyward. The Cero skimmed the soles of his feet and struck the quartz pillar behind him.

The pillar disintegrated in the explosion. Debris rained down like a sudden storm.

Zaraki used the momentum to flip in midair and slashed down at Starrk's neck.

Starrk's toes tapped lightly against the air. Sonído yanked him out of range in an instant.

Zaraki's blade cut nothing. It carved into the dome instead, splitting a fissure several dozen yards long across the entire rooftop.

Starrk didn't pause.

His right-hand pistol traced an arc through the air and fired the fourth Cero into the quartz plating beneath Zaraki's feet.

The roof buckled in the explosion. Zaraki's center of gravity shifted on the collapsing surface.

In that same instant, the fifth Cero from Starrk's left-hand pistol was already in his face.

Still off-balance, Zaraki barely twisted aside. The Cero grazed his ribs and scorched a charred gash through the flank of his Shihakushō.

He glanced down at the wound and grinned.

Then he charged again. His Reiatsu climbed faster than before — every injury sent it spiking higher.

Starrk watched all of this from midair, calm and unhurried.

His twin pistols fired in alternation, maintaining a suppression barrage while he turned Zaraki's attack patterns over in his mind.

This Shinigami fought nothing like anyone he had ever faced. No defense. No evasion. He used his own body to eat damage and buy himself a closer angle of attack, and every single swing carried murderous intent aimed squarely at ending the fight.

His swordsmanship had no form at all. Pure instinct. That reaction speed wasn't calculated — it was carved into his bones.

Every wound he took, his speed and power went up another notch.

Pain didn't slow him down. It made him more alive.

Zaraki charged again.

This time Starrk didn't step back. He stepped forward, pressed his right-hand pistol against Zaraki's abdomen, and fired a Cero at point-blank range.

Cerulean light detonated against Zaraki's stomach and shoved him back several steps. A massive charred burn spread across his abdomen, his skin still venting thin wisps of smoke. He didn't even glance at the damage. The excitement on his face deepened.

"Yes! Just like that! Keep going!"

Starrk used the opening to pull distance and opened up with rapid bursts from his left-hand pistol.

A dense net of cerulean firepower wove itself across the space between them.

Zaraki carved through it slash by slash, forcing a path through the barrage by sheer force. He raised his blade high and drove it straight at Starrk again.

Starrk watched him close the distance step by step through that rain of cerulean light. Watched the blade draw closer and closer.

He holstered his right-hand pistol at his waist. His left hand kept up the suppression. He spread the five fingers of his right hand and closed them loosely around empty air.

Zaraki split the Cero in front of him and was about to surge forward when he felt something wrong in the Reiatsu at his back. The fragments he'd cleaved apart hadn't dissipated. They were pulling back together in the air, each piece drawn by invisible threads, converging at terrifying speed toward a single point behind him.

A supercharged orb of Cero light coalesced behind Zaraki's back.

Several times the volume of an ordinary Cero. The cerulean brilliance was so blinding it swallowed the moonlight whole.

Zaraki tried to turn. Starrk's left-hand pistol had already locked off every avenue of escape from the front.

Starrk pulled the trigger. The frontal barrage and the supercharged Cero at his back erupted at the same moment.

Cerulean light hammered Zaraki from both directions simultaneously and detonated outward with him at the center.

The light sheared away more than half of Las Noches's top floor.

Quartz fragments cascaded down like a torrential rain. Even the corridors deep inside Las Noches shuddered violently under the shockwave. The blast radiated outward with the dome as its center, and Shinigami and Arrancar locked in battle kilometers away all felt the tremor.

That cerulean beam soared skyward from the direction of Las Noches, drawing a straight line through the night sky before it vanished at the edge of the stars.

Kilometers away, Yammy Llargo swatted Byakuya's Senbonzakura aside with a single open-handed blow.

He was about to roar at the sky when that cerulean beam filled his entire vision.

His mouth hung open. The roar died in his throat.

That was Starrk's Cero. Not the casual, half-hearted kind he usually threw around — the real thing, fired in dead earnest.

The density. The velocity. Both far beyond anything Starrk normally produced. Even Yammy felt a chill crawl down his spine.

He looked down at the Espada brand on his shoulder, the "0," then back up at the cerulean trail still burning through the sky. He clicked his tongue in irritation and put his fist through a nearby quartz trunk, reducing it to powder.

Further away still, Soi Fon stopped mid-movement.

She'd been teaming up with Rōjūrō Ōtoribashi against Ulquiorra Cifer. Now she turned her head toward Las Noches.

That cerulean light was clearly visible even from this distance. The aftershock tremors were still faintly perceptible in the air.

That strike was no ordinary Cero. It was something else entirely.

"An attack of that caliber..." she murmured.

Rōjūrō lowered his conducting baton. His long golden waves shifted in the wind and went still.

The dust settled slowly.

Kenpachi Zaraki knelt on one knee at the edge of the dome. His right shoulder had been torn open to the bone; blood welled from it and ran down his charred arm, dripping onto the shattered quartz tiles. The wound on his left leg was just as bad, the calf muscle shredded, flesh split wide open.

He lifted his head. Used his sword to prop himself up. And stood.

Ramrod straight.

"Now that's more like it." He grinned, showing a row of uneven teeth. Then he charged.

Starrk hovered in midair, grip tightening on his twin pistols. He watched Zaraki rise from the wreckage. Watched him sprint on a left leg that was barely held together, blood still spraying from the wound on his shoulder, not a single thought spared for any of it. Starrk said nothing. He crossed both pistols over his chest.

"Lilynette, come back. Time to go all out."

"Got it!"

Both pistols shattered at the same instant.

The barrels dissolved into countless motes of Reishi light, weaving together with the threads wrapped around the grips. The motes swirled around his body, expanding, dispersing, pulling back together, and finally took shape as countless independent cerulean wolves.

Each one was larger than the figures the Ceros had formed before. Their outlines were sharper. Reishi flame burned in their eyes.

They no longer existed as extensions of the twin pistols. With Lilynette's will as their core, they hovered freely around Starrk.

"Hunt him down, Los Lobos."

The cerulean wolves fell on Zaraki from every direction like a breaking storm.

Zaraki hacked through two that lunged from the front. He shouldered a third on his left and sent it flying. He spun and cut the one attacking from behind clean in half.

But the pack kept coming. Diving from overhead. Tearing from below. Flanking from both sides. Each one moving on its own trajectory, each one with its own combat consciousness.

Starrk wasn't controlling them. Lilynette was commanding over a hundred wolves at once.

Zaraki swung wildly inside the pack like a caged animal.

He got faster. So fast the afterimages couldn't keep up.

His Zanpakutō cut golden arcs through the air without stop, trailing through the cerulean wolf pack in a spectacle that was both savage and strangely magnificent.

Every slash crushed at least one wolf. But for every one destroyed, Lilynette reconverged another in the distance.

The numbers never dropped.

Starrk descended slowly onto the crown of a surviving stone pillar.

He watched the Shinigami below swing his blade through the pack in a frenzy, and he opened the five fingers of his right hand.

Reishi condensed in his palm. Slowly lengthened. Solidified into a blade nearly equal in length to the Zanpakutō in Zaraki's hands.

The blade was semi-translucent, cerulean Reishi pulsing through its interior like veins.

He closed his hand around the hilt, leaped from the pillar, and walked toward Zaraki.

Zaraki had just pulverized two wolves when he looked up and saw Starrk coming at him with a blade in hand.

His eyes lit up instantly. The excitement on his face nearly spilled over.

"So you do have a sword!" He laughed and swung.

Starrk brought his blade across to parry. The two weapons met, and the impact, metal against Reishi, cracked across the dome.

Starrk's swordsmanship had none of Zaraki's feral savagery, but it was extraordinarily precise. Every stroke landed at the angle most difficult for Zaraki to counter. Every parry shed the bulk of Zaraki's force in the most economical way possible.

Each strike Zaraki threw, Starrk neutralized it with minimum effort.

And the wolves didn't stop.

While they traded blows in close range, Lilynette kept directing the pack to strike from Zaraki's blind spots without pause. Zaraki blocked Starrk's horizontal slash and a wolf sank its teeth into his back. He spun to destroy it and Starrk's blade was already tracing across his chest. He twisted to dodge and two wolves lunged from his left and right at the same time.

The coordination between Starrk and the pack was seamless. The moment Starrk pinned Zaraki's attention, the wolves hit from the sharpest angles. The moment the wolves disrupted Zaraki's rhythm, Starrk's blade appeared at his most exposed point.

The wounds accumulated. The old injury on his left leg worsened under the jaws of the pack. His right shoulder was opened again by Starrk's blade, deep enough to show bone at the shoulder blade.

His Shihakushō was nearly gone. His upper body was bare. Every inch of his arms, chest, back, and legs was covered in burns and lacerations. But the curve at the corner of his mouth never changed. Every wound he took, his Reiatsu pushed higher.

Each swing heavier than the last. Each swing faster than the last.

Starrk felt it. Every time his Reishi blade met Zaraki's Zanpakutō, the impact numbed his hand to the bone.

He began to give ground, shifting from close-quarters brawling to a mid-range mobile fight. Left hand condensing Reishi Ceros, right hand using the blade for short lunges, working in concert with the wolves to form a three-pronged pressure from every angle.

Zaraki was being driven into a corner.

Alone against Starrk's blade, Starrk's Ceros, and Lilynette's wolves — no defense, no evasion, only attack, attack, attack.

He shattered wolf after wolf. Blocked Cero after Cero. Clashed head-on with the Reishi blade more times than could be counted.

His stamina bled away. His Reiatsu scraped the ceiling of its limit over and over. But he didn't fall.

Starrk drove his Reishi blade into the ground and opened both hands wide, Reishi rearranging itself around his body.

The wolf pack contracted in that same instant, folding back inward, fusing with the Reishi blade and Starrk's own spiritual pressure, weaving into a single unified mass.

When it reconverged, countless cerulean pinpricks of Cero light surrounded him.

Every mote was a primed Cero. Every mote was aimed at Zaraki.

Reishi crystallized directly in the air around his body into firing nodes, above his head and beneath his feet, from his front and his back. Every conceivable angle was covered.

"This one might sting a little," Starrk said, perfectly calm.

Zaraki looked at the cerulean storm waiting to break over him.

He laughed.

He gripped his Zanpakutō with both hands. The golden Reiatsu across the blade detonated, wrapping his entire body in golden fire.

He charged headlong into the storm. His blade split the first Cero. The second. The third. He went faster and faster, cleaving apart more and more.

But the Ceros came from everywhere at once. He split dozens from the front and dozens from his left slammed into him. The Ceros from behind and above followed in the same breath.

The speed of his swings couldn't match the density of total omnidirectional coverage.

His blade was still cutting through them. But the Ceros had already covered every inch of his body.

The Zanpakutō tore free from his grip, spun through the air, and buried itself in a distant sand dune.

The residual force of the Cero storm hit him square in the chest. It blasted him backward, punched him through the stone wall on Las Noches's flank, and slammed him down into the white sand below. Dust and sand erupted skyward.

Starrk descended slowly not far in front of him. The cerulean motes around his body had not yet fully dispersed.

He looked at Kenpachi Zaraki lying in the crater in the sand and drew the last of the Ceros back into his palm.

Zaraki tried to get up. He pressed his arms against the ground and pushed. Got halfway there and his arms gave out. His chest hit the sand with a heavy impact.

He kept staring forward. His body simply wouldn't answer anymore.

The curve at the corner of his lips was still there. That pure, undisguised excitement, the same one that had been there from the very first moment. It never faded.

Not even at the end.

Starrk turned and walked back toward Las Noches.

Far behind him, Zaraki's notched Zanpakutō stood alone in the sand dune, its blade catching the moonlight in a faint, quiet gleam.

➤ Next: Swapping Opponents

Chapter 89 - Swapping Opponents

Starrk reached the entrance of Las Noches and found Orihime Inoue kneeling on the sand.

Her hands were stretched out flat, two streams of golden healing light pouring from her palms at once. Kensei Muguruma lay on her left. Grimmjow sat on her right.

The light of Sōten Kisshun wrapped both of them inside the same warm arc. Kensei's short white hair drifted faintly in the glow, his rolled-back eyes slowly coming back into focus, the rise and fall of his chest growing steadier.

The wound carved across Grimmjow's right shoulder by Getsuga Tenshō was closing at a speed you could watch. Every last trace of Pantera's Resurrección had melted away, leaving nothing but that shredded white uniform hanging off his frame.

Ichigo Kurosaki stood beside Orihime, Tensa Zangetsu already sheathed at his back.

His wounds had healed completely. The desert's evening wind stirred his orange hair.

When he saw Starrk coming, his fingers instinctively closed around his hilt. Then he let go. He couldn't feel any killing intent from Starrk at all.

"Ah, thanks a lot, little girl. You're really gentle." Starrk's tone was the same lazy drawl it always was. His half-open eyes drifted from Orihime to Kensei to Grimmjow. "Healing your enemies, first time I've ever seen anything like that."

"Where's Kenpachi?" Ichigo kept his eyes on him.

Grimmjow sat with his back against the stone wall of Las Noches, legs out in front of him.

He turned his head toward Starrk. There was no fear in those sky-blue eyes. No anger either. Just something buried deep, a smoldering bitterness that hadn't finished dying out.

"Grimmjow." Starrk looked down at him, voice soft, like someone trying to talk a stubborn kid out of a tantrum. "You've already lost. Don't go making things harder for everyone else."

Then he turned to Ichigo, raising a hand to scratch the back of his head. His already-messy brown curls went further to ruin. "Same goes for the Soul Reapers. I didn't take that battle-maniac's life, though there were a few moments where I came close to not being able to stop myself. With healing ability like that girl's, he'll be back on his feet before long. I hope after you patch him up, you can get him to actually stay in the rear. That guy is exhausting. He fights like he wants to die. Start to finish. Fighting you Soul Reapers really wears you out."

Grimmjow turned his head with a sharp "Tsk."

His fingers pressed into his knees, nails biting into skin, leaving several deep crimson crescent marks.

"Unless I fight to the death, otherwise—"

Starrk looked at him without a word. Just that half-lidded gaze, and something in it, faint, almost imperceptible, that came very close to helplessness.

Grimmjow seemed to buckle under the weight of that silence. He swallowed the rest of his sentence whole. The frustration in his eyes didn't go anywhere. He just forced it back down his throat.

"Yeah, yeah, fine. Kurosaki — you win this time. Next time, just you wait."

"I'll be waiting, Grimmjow. No matter how many times it takes—"

Ichigo drove Tensa Zangetsu into the ground. "I will protect my comrades."

"That's not what this is about! Who said anything about your comrades? It's the fight! The fight that belongs to just the two of us, "

Grimmjow cut himself off. His eyes widened slightly. "Comrades? You don't mean that Caja Negación locked inside Las Noches. That Soul Reaper Lord Aizen sealed up?"

"Yeah, he's my— huh?"

Starrk was already gone.

The fading echo of Sonído hung at the entrance of Las Noches. He reappeared deep inside the hall.

The Caja Negación that had been hovering at the center of the hall, pulsing like a heartbeat, was no longer there.

Just empty stone floor. And cold white moonlight falling through the cracks in the dome above.

He stood still for a moment, eyes moving across the space. Then he saw it, a massive hole punched through the left wall, edges jagged and rough. Blasted from the outside.

He walked to the edge of the opening. His half-open eyes narrowed. The traces of Reishi at the hole were almost too faint to register.

"Strange. I don't sense any Soul Reaper presence." He slid his hands back into his sleeves and gazed out at the white desert stretching to the horizon. "The ones who moved the Caja Negación, they weren't Soul Reapers. They were Arrancar?"

Several kilometers outside Las Noches.

Across the white desert, a figure was struggling to haul the massive Caja Negación through the dunes.

The black cube was several times his size. It swayed on his shoulder with every labored step, the eerie blue Hōgyoku patterns running across its surface catching the moonlight in cold, shifting gleams.

Dondochakka carried one side, his round body nearly being pressed straight into the sand. His two short legs punched deep prints into the ground with every step. He wheezed with every breath, sweat running down his forehead in tracks.

Pesche sat on top of the Caja Negación, hammering at its surface with a gleaming blade. The tip struck the black cube and sent up showers of sparks. Each impact jolted his arms badly.

Not a single scratch on the surface.

"It's no use. I can't leave a mark on it at all." Pesche stopped and wiped his forehead, long face heavy with frustration. "The Hōgyoku seal Lord Aizen put on this thing is too solid. I can't chisel through it. Haven't even managed a white scratch."

"If only Lady Nel were here," Dondochakka wheezed, his round body trembling under the weight. "She'd definitely be able to open it."

"Shut up, Dondochakka."

Pesche's voice went flat and serious. His long, slender fingers tapped twice against the surface of the Caja Negación. "Everything we're doing right now is completely on our own. Lady Nel has no part in any of this. That way, even if we're caught, Lady Nel hasn't betrayed Lord Aizen, and she won't be punished. Understood? No matter what happens, Lady Nel does not get dragged into this."

Dondochakka went quiet. Then he gave a firm nod, lowered his head, and kept walking. His footprints sank deeper with every step.

"Are you two playing games with me?"

The voice came from right beside them. Calm. Flat. Like cold air seeping through a crack in the void.

Pesche and Dondochakka both went rigid.

They looked.

Ulquiorra Cifer stood on a dune not far away. The gnarled quartz trunks behind him cast warped shadows across the sand.

"L-Lord Ulquiorra!"

Pesche's voice shook.

His long frame locked in place, the fingers holding his Zanpakutō trembling.

"Dondochakka. Don't waste your energy."

Pesche rose slowly and jumped down from the Caja Negación.

He took a breath. His fingers steadied. His voice steadied with them. "With Lord Ulquiorra here, there's no way we can keep moving."

Dondochakka let the massive Caja Negación drop. It hit the sand with a heavy thud and kicked up a cloud of dust. He straightened up, rubbed his aching lower back, then looked at Ulquiorra and let out a short laugh.

"Who would've thought. I really thought this was going to be a big success."

"Return it to where you took it from." Ulquiorra's tone was flat. No rise, no fall. Just a command that wasn't going to be argued with. "For Nelliel's sake, I won't touch you."

Pesche and Dondochakka looked at each other.

Then they both stepped forward, putting themselves between Ulquiorra and the Caja Negación.

Pesche raised his Zanpakutō, blade held upright in front of him, its reflection cutting across his long face.

Dondochakka drew his broad, heavy Zanpakutō and held it across his chest. The blade caught the moonlight in a dull gleam, then shifted, reshaping into a massive oval hammer.

Their Reiatsu flared at the same moment.

It barely registered. There was nothing threatening about it.

They knew they were throwing themselves at a wall. They knew Ulquiorra was the Fourth Espada. They knew how this ended from the moment they took that step.

They took it anyway.

"What are you doing?" Ulquiorra's green eyes narrowed slightly.

"I am Pesche Guatiche." Pesche held his Zanpakutō straight before him. "Former Fracción to the Fifth Espada, Lady Nelliel. Arrancar No. 41. My Zanpakutō is Ultima."

"Dondochakka Birstanne." Dondochakka held the heavy hammer across his chest. "Former Fracción to the Fifth Espada, Lady Nelliel. Arrancar No. 42. My Zanpakutō is Heavy Hammer."

Their voices came together above the white desert. Every word landed like a nail driven into iron.

"We hereby officially declare our betrayal of Lady Nelliel. Our betrayal of the Espada. Our betrayal of Lord Aizen. We swear to free Estrella."

Ulquiorra's green eyes stayed perfectly still. But the dark green tear-track beneath his left eye deepened slightly as the corner twitched.

"Why go this far?"

"To repay a debt!" Pesche and Dondochakka answered together, voices ringing out across the white desert.

"Pointless." Ulquiorra pulled his right hand from his pocket. "Trash, swayed by a moment's emotion."

A pinpoint of black light kindled at the tip of his index finger. A Cero condensed there, its density climbing in an instant, enough to swallow both of them whole.

His gaze passed over their shoulders, dropping to the Caja Negación lying quietly in the sand. Then it came back to them. He leveled his index finger.

"The only inconvenience now is that Nelliel will pester me about the two of you for ages afterward."

Pesche and Dondochakka did not move.

They gripped their weapons and held the line in front of the Caja Negación, in front of that black seal they hadn't managed to scratch even once.

They had known from the beginning they couldn't beat him.

"Turn to ash," Ulquiorra said.

The black Cero fired from his fingertip. Ink-dark light swallowed their vision whole.

They did not close their eyes.

A pale blue Cero came in from the side at an angle, striking the black beam dead-on.

The two Ceros detonated in midair. The Reiatsu shockwave hurled the surrounding sand outward in every direction. The quartz trunks shuddered and groaned.

Pesche and Dondochakka were thrown back by the blast, tumbling across the sand several times before coming to rest. Neither of them was seriously hurt.

Ulquiorra lowered his right hand and slowly turned his head.

Coyote Starrk stood on a nearby dune, thin smoke still curling from the barrel of the pistol in his left hand. His right hand was still tucked in his sleeve. His double-breasted white coat snapped and whipped in the Reiatsu-driven wind, his messy brown curls blown flat behind him.

"Move aside." A thin edge of impatience had crept into Ulquiorra's voice.

"No." Starrk holstered the left gun. His tone was loose, unhurried.

"My duty is to guard the Caja Negación. I must eliminate any threat to the seal."

"I know. Your duty is to guard the Caja Negación. No argument there."

Starrk walked down the dune at an easy pace and stopped in front of Pesche and Dondochakka.

A flicker of Sonído, and in the same motion he reached down and closed a hand around each of them, lifting Pesche and Dondochakka clean off the sand.

Neither of them had time to react. They hung in the air, feet dangling, staring at each other.

Starrk held them both up and turned to face Ulquiorra. His half-open eyes held nothing hostile, just the pure, uncomplicated weariness of someone who really did not want to be fighting right now.

"It was just a game. A bet. These two lost, and the punishment was hauling the Caja Negación around outside in circles. See, they weren't transporting it. They were serving a penalty. So strictly speaking, they haven't betrayed Lord Aizen at all. They're just honoring a wager. Right."

Ulquiorra's left eye twitched. "You—"

"Besides."

Starrk tilted his head slightly, a faint trace of slyness passing through his eyes. "If you're really trying to stop someone from opening the Caja Negación, the orange-haired kid is obviously the more pressing problem, isn't he?"

Ulquiorra's expression sharpened.

Behind him, a black crescent slash tore through the air and came down hard at his back.

He stepped sideways. Getsuga Tenshō grazed the edge of his white uniform and sheared the entire top off a dune nearby.

Ichigo Kurosaki stood on a dune behind him, Tensa Zangetsu leveled across his front. He was breathing hard, he'd clearly sprinted every step of the way here.

"What happened to the people you were fighting?" Ichigo kept his eyes fixed on Ulquiorra's back, voice low and guarded.

"I noticed something was off, shook them, and came straight here." Ulquiorra turned around. His green eyes tracked back and forth between Ichigo and Starrk.

Pesche picked himself up off the sand, brushing himself off, long face creased with confusion.

"Lord Starrk, why would you—"

"Because Lilynette said you guys are pretty entertaining, and if you all die there won't be anyone left to play dodgeball with her."

Lilynette's voice burst out of the gun immediately, bright and sharp and thoroughly unimpressed: "You clearly felt that something happened to those two and sped up to get here! Don't you dare use me as your excuse!"

Starrk expressionlessly tapped the butt of the gun against his own head.

A pained yelp came from inside the gun, followed by even louder complaints.

He slid the gun back into its holster, the same motion you'd use to stuff a chattering little animal back into its nest. His face kept its lazy expression. But the tips of his ears had gone a faint, unmistakable pink.

"Anyway."

He cleared his throat and tucked both hands back into his sleeves, tone settling back to its usual ease. "It's also because of Nelliel. She was the first friend I made after joining Lord Aizen. And you two as well. So, forget it. Drop those thoughts."

He turned to face forward.

Ichigo and Ulquiorra were already at each other, the black edge of Tensa Zangetsu and the pale green arc of Luz de la Luna crashing together in the air above the dunes.

From what he could sense, the two Soul Reapers who had been fighting Ulquiorra were closing in fast. A minute, maybe two, before they reached this stretch of desert.

"Can't be helped. Guess we're swapping opponents." Starrk scratched the back of his head, something quietly resigned in his voice. "I just hope those two are as easy to deal with as the orange-haired kid."

He touched the tip of his foot to the sand and was gone, crossing the distance toward Soi Fon and Rōjūrō in a single blur.

➤ Next: What Is Science