Bleach Cfyow Read Online – CHAPTER THREE – Part 3
The number of newly created skull soldiers eventually exceeded the rate at which the enemy Quincy could destroy them with her explosions. By the time she realized what was happening, a mass of troops unafraid of death had surrounded the clay-red Quincy.
“I…I don’t like these guys…they’re not scared of dying…”
In Bambietta’s half-broken mind, past fears came back to life. “Why? Why is this happening…?”
It was the fear she had felt when the canine-faced captain Komamura, who had sacrificed his own heart to become an undead soldier, approached her.
Bambietta mostly fought because she didn’t want to die. In the Vandenreich, the death that awaited the defeated was called “execution.” That was exactly why she continued to fight. She saw fighting as a way to forever escape death, so she couldn’t understand someone who threw their life away for the sake of a fight.
When she had fought Komamura, she’d been seized by a fear she had never experienced before. The Soul Reaper had said, “I did not throw my life away, I simply staked it on this match.”
In that moment, Bambietta had genuinely felt the terror of facing a true god of death. But now, the skull faces swarming her were even more foreign to her.
They weren’t staking their lives on anything or throwing their lives away. They were simply soldiers acting as though they had no life to begin with. As though their own deaths were merely part of a system, the horde of skulls accepted their unnatural deaths as they came for her.
They were neither Hollows nor beasts. It was as though an enormous swarm of insects had formed a colony to bring Bambietta into their own cycle of death. That would strike terror into Bambietta, the living corpse. The horror, which had been fundamentally engraved into her soul and brain, temporarily activated the scarred girl’s psyche, but only to give rise to the voice of fear. “No…nooo…no, no, I’m scared, I’m scared…”
The hundreds or thousands of teeming skulls overcame the unending explosions and rose from beyond the flames. The swarm of skulls used the corpses and living bodies of other skulls as footholds in order to form into a gigantic tentacle that attempted to swallow Bambietta as she fluttered through the air.
The face of the girl who had forgotten she was already dead contorted and trembled like that of a child.
“Lil…Candy…Meni…Gigi…! Help…help…everyone…!”
The gigantic wave of skull soldiers tried to engulf her but then abruptly vanished, following a white, sinister undulation.
“!”
Rudobon and the others watching the panoramic view from a distance were taken by surprise at the progression of events.
“Wh…what was that just now…”
Loly watched with cold sweat dripping down her cheek as the petite Quincy flew toward them from the ruins. The Quincy’s mouth began to contort, and a gigantic maw that seemed like it could take a bite from the sky gaped open.
Nearly a thousand skull soldiers were swallowed in a single bite. There were no hints of where such a mass could have disappeared to. Nothing remained under the night sky save the forms that appeared to be Quincies.
“Uh…wah…L-Lil…?” The image of Liltotto chewing on something and swallowing lightly was reflected in the quaking zombie’s eyes.
“Yuck… Well, they were tasteless to begin with. What’s this?” Lil appraised the meal she had just consumed with dissatisfaction.
Gigi popped up behind her and grabbed Bambietta’s head in both her hands. “Seriously, what are we going to do with you?! You’re really so useless, Bambi! Whaaat was that? You don’t want your reward? If you didn’t want it, you should have just stayed asleep. That wouldn’t have been a problem for me.”
“Oh…n-no, it’s not like that…sorry…sorry, Gigi…” Bambietta was once again close to tears as Gigi looked on in ecstasy.
Lil watched them with cold eyes and said to Gigi in an indifferent tone, “It’s hard to believe you when you tell everybody you’re not a sadist.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
Lil shrugged at Gigi, who was looking at her with genuine puzzlement, then once again turned her eyes toward the enemy. “Ah well, there’s tons cropping back up. Are they goblins or something?”
“Hey, are you all right? Didn’t you say that eating Hollows gives you heartburn?”
“I’m kind of stuck digesting them at this point, aren’t I?” Lil had used her Glutton ability to greedily consume her enemies with her grotesquely transformed mouth in order to absorb their reishi, but it absolutely wasn’t an easy process. Hollow reishi was poison to Quincies. Absorbing it was normally akin to suicide. Had Lil not been a Schrift-holder, she would have likely been
immobilized.
Lil continued to battle the sensation eating away at her gut as she digested her unusual meal, but she kept even a hint of it from showing on her face as she spoke to Gigi and Bambi. “I think I can do that two or three more times, but those guys seriously had no flavor or nutritional value at all. That filthy garbage pile did nothing to satiate my hunger.”
She turned to look at the Arrancar, whose lower body had turned into an arbor and who was still creating skull soldiers with his branches. “Guess I should hurry up and eat something tastier. Though he looks pretty unappetizing too.”
“Ngh…!” Feeling a threat approaching, Rudobon groaned. The three Quincies were prancing through the air with Hirenkyaku, charging straight for him, including the Quincy who had just eaten his skull soldiers.
Rudobon tried to send the skull soldiers charging at her, but the Quincy who had set off the explosions had already released reishi to keep him in check.
Weaving through the troops that had been stopped by the force of the bombs, the petite Quincy came at him. As soon as Rudobon saw her, he created a flesh wall from the skull soldiers to defend himself.
“That’s some pretty unattractive skin you’re covering yourself up with.” The Quincy’s face expressionlessly contorted like slime, oozing straight to the side. Her nibble, meant to consume skin and innards whole, made quick work of the wall of soldiers. However—
“There’s nothing in here!”
The wall had been a distraction, and Rudobon and the others who had sheltered inside had already moved somewhere else.
Loly leapt behind the Quincy, shouting her zanpaku-to’s incantation, “Poison, Escolopendra!”
A gigantic zanpaku-to in the shape of a centipede wrapped itself around Loly, and she brandished part of it like a blade.
“Huh!”
The Quincy barely dodged it, and the sand it struck instead started to melt like slush.
“Melt!” Loly yelled as she tried to strike the Quincy again, but the centipede- like appendage disappeared midair!
“Wha…?”
“That was pointlessly spicy. But I guess it was all right.”
“Y-you! My Resurrección, you…!” It had been eaten. Loly paled as she
realized that her zanpaku-to, where she had sealed away a vast portion of her power, had been consumed. Although far from fatal, she felt the terror of losing part of herself.
But the truly terrifying part happened next.
“Hmm.” The Quincy scattered arrows around herself, piercing the skull swarm and the branches birthing the next wave of soldiers. Both branches and soldiers instantly dissolved, just like the sand had a moment ago.
“My poison?!”
“Looks like I managed to digest it. Guess my stomach acid was just stronger,” Lil nonchalantly muttered as she watched the enemy army melt away. The Glutton didn’t just eat her opponents. Her secondary power allowed her to instinctively know how to use the characteristic abilities of whatever she had ingested until it was fully digested.
Although she had once eaten a man named PePe, his powers hadn’t seemed likely to work on Yhwach, so she likely hadn’t used his specialties when she faced the king in battle. Then again, as she’d told Gigi, “Like I would ever use that super disgusting guy’s power.” So she could have just eaten PePe in order to get revenge and replenish her reishi.
“So…where are you hiding?”
I don’t want to rush things like Bambi did, but maybe I’ll scatter around the poison I stole and smoke them out? No, I should kill the one who might be able to counter the poison first.
Lil turned her bow on another Arrancar, the pigtailed one she had just stolen the poison abilities from.
“Eep!” Loly had never checked to see if she was impervious to her own poison. She had heard that Barragan, the former king of Hueco Mundo, had been killed by his own curse. She immediately went pale and tried to run away.
But part of Loly’s body, her Resurrección, had been eaten, and she lost her balance and fell.
“Loly!”
Loly opened her eyes wide and yelled at Menoly, who was running toward her, “You idiot! You need to run—”
Before they could finish speaking, a poison arrow flew from the Quincy’s bow. But before it could hit its target, a huge gush of water washed the poison arrow toward the surrounding skull soldiers.
“Huh…?”
“No way…”
When they saw a surge of water flying through the desert air, Loly and Menoly clung to each other as they guessed what had happened. They had been protected by a water barrier.
Rudobon, who had reappeared at some point, bowed his head deeply as he apologized. “Ah, I never would have thought you would make an appearance here. I must extend an apology for troubling you and necessitating your intervention—”
As though to interrupt his apology, the newly arrived Arrancar said, “There’s no need for you to apologize. I should be the one apologizing for getting here so late.”
Tier Halibel, an Arrancar whose mouth was obscured by a mask full of shark- like teeth and further hidden by a long collar, manipulated the stream of flowing water with her zanpaku-to. She flipped the weapon as she turned her eyes to the Quincy who hovered in midair.
“Isn’t your king dead? Why are you stirring up trouble in our territory?” “Ha! Who cares why they’re here? They picked a fight, so we just got to finish it.” Another Arrancar had appeared behind her and spoke as a fiendish
smile spread across his face.
Loly and Menoly, who had once almost been killed by this new Arrancar, shrieked.
“Guh! Grimmjow!” “Eep!”
Grimmjow just looked at the two in puzzlement. “Huh? You look familiar…” But he didn’t seem particularly interested in them and immediately turned away.
“I came here thinkin’ I’d finally felt some flashy spiritual pressure, and what do I find? Were you trying to leave me out of the fun? That’s gutsy of you, Rudobon!”
“I asked you to help me suppress the Quincies many times…”
Rudobon seemed confused, and Grimmjow answered without seeming the least bit guilty. “I’m not interested in the weaklings. But these guys seem pretty perky.”
Although he wasn’t as indiscriminate as he used to be, Grimmjow was still the stereotypical battle-crazed barbarian.
As if in remonstration, an Arrancar behind him said, “You can’t just jump them, Grimmjow. You need to figure out your opponent’s goals and abilities first.”
“Huh? Stay out of this, Nelliel. They won’t have goals or whatever once we
wipe out every last one of them!”
“And who was it that almost died at the hands of a Quincy in the Soul Society?”
“Why, you little…!” Grimmjow turned to shoot an annoyed look at Nelliel at those provoking words.
In the desert, where stillness spread like oblivion, a flashy explosion was more than enough to attract the attention of the incredibly important Arrancars.
Rudobon’s thoughts were choked with tears, and he hid his intense emotional reaction in the presence of these formidable Arrancars, who were top of the class even among the elite.
Menoly was simply relieved. “We’re saved!”
Loly gritted her teeth in frustration and irritation at her own uselessness and the jealousy she felt toward the powerful Arrancars.
After the miraculous arrival of the three incredibly powerful Arrancars, the battle seemed likely to become all the more intense. But there was something no one had noticed yet. The residents of Hueco Mundo weren’t the only ones who had been drawn to the desert turmoil.
“Uh-oh, looks like we have quite the menacing group over there.” Gigi spoke from even further back than Lil, who was keeping a cautious distance from the mass of water.
“Isn’t that the prisoner who was in the Silbern fortress?”
“Yeah, that’s the Arrancar boss Yhwach captured personally. We can’t let our guard down around her.”
Lil started giving out simple instructions as she estimated the abilities of the newly arrived Arrancars. “Gigi, can you get your blood into that water—”
She was interrupted midsentence by a sudden zwoosh, and a chill assaulted her and Gigi’s spines.
What is this? What is this creepy spiritual pressure?
Lil turned to look at the three Arrancars, but it didn’t seem to be their pressure. In fact, the Arrancars seemed to have felt the same thing and had turned cautious eyes toward the Quincies.
As they searched for the source of the spiritual pressure, the likes of which they’d never experienced before but that still felt somehow familiar, something suddenly appeared in the sky.
A small gate, similar to a Garganta, had opened high in the night sky. The small form that leapt from the gate disseminated the strange spiritual
pressure as it dropped to the ground with such terrific force that a dust cloud rose several hundred meters high. The impact formed a crater far larger than the ones created by the Quincies’s earlier attacks, and at its center swirled the dense mass of spiritual pressure.
“What…? Is this spiritual pressure…?”
“It’s strange. It smells like Soul Reaper and Hollows,” Grimmjow responded in answer to Nelliel.
It smells a bit like that masked blond guy who got in the way of my fight with Kurosaki. Grimmjow didn’t know his name, but the pressure resembled that of Shinji Hirako, a Visored he had once run into. Grimmjow turned cautious eyes toward the spiritual pressure that was even more ominous than the Visored’s.
Halibel, who had been silent, spoke up. “It reminds me of Apache and the others’ Quimera Parca.”
The Quimera Parca. Although they still hadn’t arrived, Halibel’s three subordinates could each sacrifice one of their limbs to create that fiendish beast.
“You mean Ayon? It does smell like that for sure.”
The ominous spiritual pressure was a mixture of countless components, all mingled together. What kind of monster had just appeared in the middle of the desert?
The Arrancars stayed on guard, but eventually the dust settled. “Ouch, ow ow… Sand is hard when you land on it. I’ve sure learned
something new!” A voice rang out, breaking through the tense air, and a child in black clothing reminiscent of a shihakusho stepped from the crater.
The beautiful, neutral face that seemed to belong to neither a boy nor girl looked around at the gathering of Arrancars and nodded in satisfaction. But when the child looked at the three Quincies, they seemed puzzled.
“Huh? Quincies? I don’t have instructions for dealing with Quincies. What should I do?” They stood muttering to themself before turning back to the Arrancars.
“Well, first I need to do what Lord Tokinada asked.” The child, who seemed not the slightest bit nervous, stuck out like a sore thumb. Though it must have seemed humorous to an onlooker, not a single one of them laughed or allowed their guard to break. To be calm in a situation like this was in itself abnormal, not to mention that the sinister spiritual pressure they had just sensed was unmistakably coming from the child in front of them.
“Stop right there. Who are you?” Halibel, zanpaku-to at the ready, asked the child.
Rudobon had been busy creating countless new soldiers. Even surrounded by a horde of several thousand skull soldiers, the child smiled innocently and answered. “Right! I’m Hikone! My name is Hikone Ubuginu!”
The child Hikone was not at all perturbed to be facing the hostile Arrancars.
Watching the Arrancars, Lil said, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. That kid’s eyes aren’t smiling at all.”
The child had an aura similar to one of Gigi’s zombies. Lil, still expressionless, continued. “And I feel the presence of a familiar scumbag. What’s going on here?”
Hikone quietly bowed to the confused group and explained their goals, “Um so, I have a gift for all the Arrancars from Lord Tokinada.”
“Tokinada…?” The Arrancars were even more confused now that a name they didn’t recognize in the slightest had been brought up.
“I heard there isn’t a king here anymore, not since somebody named Mr. Barragan and someone named Mr. Aizen disappeared.” Hikone’s bright tone while saying this turn-ed some of the Arrancars’ confusion into hostility.
Hikone simply continued, seemingly oblivious to the change in mood. “So Lord Tokinada said he’d let me become king of Hueco Mundo! Isn’t that great? I’ll work super hard to become a great king!” Hikone bobbed their head in a bow. The skull soldiers’ blades danced, aiming at Hikone’s back.
“How boundlessly disrespectful. To even dare presume becoming Lord Aizen’s substitute is absurd.” Though Rudobon’s voice was calm, a tempestuous wave of emotion flooded him as he took Hikone’s words to be an insult against Aizen.
Hikone didn’t even try to evade the skull soldiers’ attacks and simply took the blows all over their body. The skull soldiers’ broken swords danced through the air with the sound of harsh collisions.
“Is that Hierro?” Nelliel yelled in surprise. Why would a Soul Reaper child have the hardened skin peculiar to Arrancars?
In the face of Nelliel’s doubt, Hikone just looked happily at the Arrancars and said, “Lord Tokinada said no one would accept my claim. Never doubt Lord Tokinada. It happened just like he said it would.” Then Hikone drew the zanpaku-to that rested at their hip.
At the appearance of that blade, the Arrancars felt the temperature around them drop. It had a presensce undoubtedly different from that of the zanpaku-to carried by normal Soul Reapers or used by Arrancars.
Before the Arrancars could ascertain the nature of the malaise that hit them,
Hikone sonorously sang out the instructions given by one Lord Tokinada. “In which case, until you bend your will and accept me as king, I’m supposed to give you a beating!”
Before the child had even finished speaking, Hikone gripped the zanpaku-to and spoke the name of the blade with a smile. “Revolve around the stars, Ikomikidomoe!”
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