BLEACH: After the End Arc

By Saori Runa Dempsey

Chapter 3

Pit of the Spirit Eater

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“What the hell is that!?”

Sitting cross legged and wholly unbothered, Ninomiya’s cavalier attitude to the situation was starting to finally piss Tatsuki off. “That, Tatsuki-chan, is one of the many banes that exist around Rukongai called a Spirit Eater. They feed off reiryoku like humans on food. The more spirit power a soul possesses, the bigger and more of a pain it is to get away from. Since Kurosaki-kun there is drained to near empty, it isn’t so bad, but making sure not to get eaten is still going to be a pain for him. Once activated, you either have to defeat it, which no one currently knows how to do, or get out of its reach, which no one has been able to do aside from shinigami. Nibantai usually sends a small unit to patrol along the ridge here daily, but you can see how big it is. They can’t be everywhere at once, no matter how skilled they are at hoho."

“Kurosaki is no better then a normal soul right now,” Ishida said, his mind whirling as he considered options and came up empty. “Either of us going down there is just liable to open up another of those mouths, correct?”

She nodded, dark indigo eyes following the trail of dust Ichigo was kicking up as he kept running…and running…and running…

“He’ll run out of room to run, eventually.” From a normal person’s stand point, Tatsuki had to conclude he was screwed, unless Ishida knew a way that she didn’t. Given the amount she didn’t know about Soul Society and the mechanics surrounding it, there probably was.

“I’m no shinigami,” Ninomiya mused out loud, “but I’ve had a theory about reiryoku restoration for a while now. As humans, we have pressure points that give us bursts of energy, like a booster. Energy itself and pressure points are useless here, considering our bodies are made up of millions of reishi, spirit particles, and possess no nerves to speak of. But if you take that theory and apply it to shinigami…”

Being the smart, informed, person he was (she was not bitter, Tatsuki consoled herself thinking), Ishida caught on to wherever she was going. “We may be able to increase the amount of reishi he absorbs and get his reiryoku back to normal faster with the right pressure point.”

“You are smart, Quincy-kun.”

Tatsuki wasn’t entirely clear on the particulars that they were talking about, but even she had an idea of what they were getting at. “So do it before he gets eaten!”

“Problem is we have no idea what that point would be,” she pointed out, and Tatsuki’s shoulders drooped. “Unless…” She glanced at Ishida, who took one look at her expression and shook his head.

“Kurosaki’s a pain in my ass, but even I have gone beyond wanting him dead…again.”

The most un-holiest of expressions was on Ninomiya’s face as she looked back to the dust and sighed theatrically, “Of course. If Quincy-kun isn’t confident enough in his own abilities, that idea is potentially lethal…”

Tatsuki couldn’t say she and Ishida were particularly close, but even she knew that jibe wasn’t going to settle well with him…which was probably the girl’s goal all along. Were all shinigami as cavalier as she was?

With a large tick on his forehead, Ishida raised his bow, his teeth gnashed together in obvious peevishness. She’d never seen the ‘Quincy’ techniques in action, though she’d seen Ishida’s bow briefly when they arrived. He’d been trying to get a feel for just how much of his Quincy abilities were still in tact now that they were in Soul Society. From what she could gather, they apparently hadn’t diminished at all.

“You sure you can hit him from so far away, and without visual?”

The look he sent Ninomiya for that was nothing short of condescending. “I. Don’t. Miss.” And he let the arrows fly, hundreds of them soaring into the air so high Tatsuki could no longer see them.

I hope this works…

Of all the things Toshirou expected to find upon his arrival at the 4th division barracks, the scene that greeted him certainly wasn’t it.

All of Seireitei had felt Kurosaki’s flare up – that was a give in. Death had not cured him of being unable to control his monstrous reiatsu one bit. What was peculiar was the high volume of non-shinigami patients being tended to by Unohana-taichou’s subordinates as well, stressing the yonbantai’s barracks to its limits.

“What in the hell did you do, Kurosaki?” he breathed, amazed. He shouldn’t have been, but he’d never seen this high of an inpatient volume outside of the Winter War. “This is half of Rukongai in here!”

“All of 68th district and half of the 69th and 67th as well,” Ninomiya corrected, stopped only when one of the 4th division shinigami tending to her moved her arm in a way that made it make a sound Toshirou did not want to hear again. “That hurts!”

“You two are idiots,” Tatsuki sighed in annoyance, glaring at her and Ishida, who looked like he’d stuck his hands into a fire.

Through it all, Ichigo was the one who scowled at them all, arms held out from his sides as Unohana and her lieutenant circled around him, quietly contemplating how to get him out of his latest predicament. “You shot me with arrows!” To Tatsuki, he scowled, “You let them! I know you’re mad at me for keeping silent about the whole shinigami life, Tatsuki, but this mad?”

That explained why he had thousands of reishi-charged arrows in him…sort of.

Through it all, Kuchiki Rukia stood in a corner, looking torn between concern (the image of Kurosaki as a living pin cushion had to be fairly disconcerting for someone who cared about him as much as she obviously did) and outright amusement. She bowed as he acknowledged her with a nod, hoping she, at least, could give him a straight answer. “Kuchiki. Mind telling me what happened?”

“Ichigo fell into the Devil’s Pit out in the North Alley’s 68th district. Ninomiya, it seems, had an idea to speed up Ichigo’s reishi intake in the hopes of speeding up the recovery of his shinigami powers, and thus save him from the Spirit Eater, but…” She coughed, motioning towards the spectacle that was Kurosaki. “Now we can’t seem to completely stop it and it seems Ishida’s Quincy arrows aren’t as…normal as they once were. Unohana-taichou doesn’t think it’s safe to remove them quite yet until we’re sure of the effects.”

He wanted to be shocked…surprised even. All Toshirou felt, however, was a bone-tired exasperation that spoke of just how long he’d been dealing with Kurosaki and how sadly used to these peculiar situations of his he was getting. It was like Matsumoto and her constant presence in his life as soon as he entered the academy all over again. He’d just gotten so used to it her constant squeals and asphyxiating hugs that they ceased being annoying. Now it was Kurosaki and his…unique troubles.

Just wonderful.

“We can’t leave me like this!” Ichigo exclaimed, trying to move but halted by a single clearing of Unohana’s throat when he attempted to do so.

At least he was learning.

“Of course we won’t,” she placated calmly, “but I would be foolish to remove them without knowing the extent of the damage, if any, that these arrows will do to your soul, Kurosaki-san. While I understand Quincy arrows have been known to lose their shape upon hitting their target, these are more like solid, projectile zanpakutou wounds. As these are completely made of spiritual energy, however, it makes their removal a little more…difficult.”

“Supposing they are like a projectile form of a zanpakutou, how would they normally be treated?” Ishida asked with a slight twitch in his lip. Bad as he might have felt, it was obvious he could see the humor in it as well.

It was Isane who answered him, her head twisted at an odd angle as she observed one of the arrows that had gone in at a particularly unusual angle under his arm. “Generally it’s a zanpakutou’s shikai form that manifests in such a way, so the shinigami who caused it would seal his zanpakutou and the projectiles would disappear with it…at which point we would begin repairing the soul and any damage it sustained accordingly. But…”

“What if this is a zanpakutou’s shikai form?” Rukia asked. “We know Ishida is strong enough spiritually to probably possess a zanpakutou…what if his own natural powers as a Quincy are…merging with his abilities?”

Both Unohana and Isane seemed to seriously consider this, looking from Ichigo to Ishida who looked pretty appalled at the irony of that possibility. Considering it, even Toshirou had to agree it was possible. A Quincy was a normal soul with a high amount of spiritual power, generally. As humans, they’d manifested it to degrees no human should’ve been capable of, but once they die, who was to say they couldn’t be strong enough to possess a zanpakutou? Perhaps their bows were even a reflection of its future form.

“Do you hear a voice?” he demanded, and Ishida shook his head.

“Nothing.” To his credit, he really did try and see if there was a voice or something trying to communicate with him, like zanpakutou’s were known to do, but it would be their luck that his would be stubbornly quiet if anything. “Just a constant buzzing. I’ve been hearing it since I stepped through that senkaimon.”

They all looked at each other before Toshirou looked back at him and said flatly, “That’s likely your zanpakutou trying to speak to you. Due to your Quincy abilities, you probably used his shikai abilities without ever realizing it, tapping into his power without ever hearing his name – you never needed to. But if you can learn his name, and his shikai release, we may be able to fix Kurosaki back to normal here.”

“Wait.” Slow as he might be on the uptake sometimes, Kurosaki seemed to be processing this fairly quickly. “So you’re saying I’m stuck like this until Ishida can hear his own zanpakutou’s name?!”

Only he seemed to have enough nerve to nod at this point. “Correct.”

A wave of reiatsu so heavy he knocked out most of the other patients poured out from him enough that even Ninomiya clutched her head and kicked at him with an irritable, “Knock it off! Gah, my head feels like it’s going to split open!”

“Kurosaki-san.” That was Unohana, quiet but firm in her unspoken words.

The pressure toned down drastically like a faucet you couldn’t quite shut all the way in a heartbeat. He opened his mouth, closed it, pointed at Ishida, and then dropped it to the floor again before simply tilting his head back so he could smack it against the wall.

“How the hell am I going to sleep like this…?”

Toshirou merely snorted. That was the least of his worries at the moment.

A/N: Am I mean? Maybe just a little. Ichigo is just too much fun to torment. XD!

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