A few days later, the clandestine little beach trip ca to an end.
There was no shortage of work waiting back in a Seireitei that was only beginning to rebuild — developing the vast new hell territories, reconstructing districts scarred by the war, realigning the personnel rosters of every division…
Second Division. The Captain's courtyard.
Pushing open the gate and taking in the familiar corridors and garden, Rukia and Momo Hinamori drew a deep breath at the sa mont, identical smiles of quiet contentnt spreading across their faces. Finally — ho.
[Heh heh heh… from here on out, it'll just be and Teacher Soifon…] Momo thought happily, then slid a sideways glance toward Rukia beside her, her expression growing increntally complicated.
Mm… except for this one inconvenient obstacle.
Almost simultaneously, Rukia had turned to look at her, harboring precisely the sa thought.
With the outside threats — Captain Unohana, Senior Rangiku, Senior Isane — no longer in the picture, it was ti to turn attention to internal rivalries. Their eyes t in midair, and for one instant, it was as though a shower of crackling sparks had burst between them.
— What are you looking at?
— What's it to you?
Soifon was walking ahead, completely oblivious to the charged atmosphere brewing between her two students at her back.
She pushed open the door to the captain's office. What greeted her was a desk stacked with neatly arranged docunt files — every one categorized, labeled, and clearly sorted by soone who had handled things in her absence.
While Soifon had been off slacking, Marechiyo Ōmaeda had evidently been carrying the whole division on his back. Bless the Ōmaeda family and their contributions.
She crossed to the wide captain's chair, and for once didn't imdiately drop into it to deal with paperwork. Instead, she let herself fall backward, her whole body sinking into the soft cushioned backrest, then lifted her feet and gave the floor the faintest tap with her toes.
The office chair began to carry her in a slow, lazy rotation.
Sunlight poured through the window, pooling in warm patches of gold across the floor. From sowhere in the distance ca the muffled cadence of squad mbers running drills. Everything felt peacefully, perfectly still.
Soifon leaned back in her chair, watching the clear sky outside the window, and let out a soft sigh.
"Peace is a wonderful thing…" she murmured.
Then her eyes drifted upward on their own.
From the eaves just outside the window ca a man's voice, unhurried and laced with a lazy smile.
"Much as I'd hate to interrupt Captain Soifon's rare mont of leisure…"
"…the old man's orders have co down to , and I'm in no position to refuse them."
As the words faded, a figure slipped lightly in through the open window on the side of the office. Shunsui Kyōraku adjusted the brim of his straw hat with one hand and gave Soifon an apologetic smile.
"Captain Soifon, I'm afraid I'll need to ask you to take a team out and begin developing the hell territories."
"Every captain aside from myself, the old man, and Ukitake has been deployed…"
Soifon didn't budge from her chair. She didn't even bother lifting her eyelids. She simply reached over, picked up a stack of reports from the side of the desk — not particularly thick — and dropped them flat over her own face with a decisive smack.
"Does it have to be ?" ca her muffled voice from beneath the papers.
Kyōraku was just drawing breath to respond —
"Bang!" The office door was shoved open with a crash.
"Absolutely! No problem at all!"
"We'll set out with Teacher Soifon right away!"
Momo Hinamori and Rukia shouted in unison, their voices so loud and their enthusiasm so staggering that even Kyōraku blinked.
Kids these days are really that eager to get ahead?
No — wait. If they were so eager to make progress, then why had they seed so utterly unenthusiastic back when the captaincy elections were happening?!
Momo and Rukia exchanged a glance, a brief flash of shared understanding flickering between them.
— Leave Seireitei — this place crawling with rivals — and wouldn't that count as a private outing of sorts?
Sure, the other one was still annoyingly in the way, but it was better than staying here in this [dangerous] place!
Still, since these were Soifon's two students who had spoken up, they likely represented Soifon's wishes to so degree, didn't they?
Thinking this, Kyōraku smiled pleasantly and sent a pulse of Spiritual Pressure outward through the window as a signal. "Then I'll have the equipnt brought in. Thank you, Captain Soifon and you two—"
Beneath the stack of papers, Soifon's face twitched.
She ripped the docunts off her face, sprang up from the chair, and marched in long strides to stand before her two students, who were still lost in their little fantasy.
Both hands shot out simultaneously, and she pinched a cheek of each of them with surgical precision.
"You two —" Soifon ground out through her teeth, every word bitten off clean, "Are. Really. Asking. For. It. Aren't. You."
Momo and Rukia's faces were squashed into shapes, their lips pushed out, producing muffled sounds of protest.
The next second, the sharp crack of impact rang out from the captain's office.
Two yelps of pain followed. Outside, the birds perched on the eaves scattered in a panic, beating their wings as they fled into the distance.
Outside the gate of the Second Division, Kyōraku quietly pulled his hat down over his face and turned to leave.
…
Scene shift.
Soifon, Rukia, and Momo Hinamori — all three fully equipped — stood at the border where Seireitei t the hell territories.
Beneath their feet: the grassland at Soul Society's edge, still shot through with patches of green and the vitality of spirit particles. Less than a hundred ters ahead: the crimson earth of hell, reeking faintly of sulfur and phosphorous.
This had once been the most cursed of places. Now, with the Soul King's purification, the miasma had largely dispersed — yet the land, eroded for ages, still bore not a single blade of grass, its red soil exhaling a dead, hollow stillness.
Two entirely different landscapes and auras t here in stark contrast, yet wove together in an uncanny fusion, forming a winding boundary line that stretched away into the distance.
Even now, the marks of two worlds forced together by the Soul King's hand were plain to see.
Soifon stood at the border, a colossal case strapped to her back — taller than she was — packed full of recovery agents specially formulated by Mayuri Kurotsuchi, designed to accelerate the soil's purification and restoration.
Rukia and Momo carried the sa enormous cases, flanking her left and right.
"Let's move."
Soifon stepped forward first, crossing into the crimson earth. The sensation underfoot shifted instantly from the yielding softness of grass to the coarse resistance of hardpacked dirt.
Rukia and Momo set aside their banter, composing themselves with serious expressions, and moved to follow — then Rukia suddenly called out to the figure ahead.
"Teacher Soifon, we haven't put on the hazmat suits Captain Mayuri prepared for us yet!"
When Soifon turned back, Rukia even held up her hazmat suit and gave it a wave, urging her to co back and put it on.
"Hazmat suits…" Soifon paused. "Why would we need those? Didn't I say — the hell miasma has already been completely purified by the Soul King?"
"…The Soul King…?!"
"Teacher Soifon, that's not sothing the rest of us would just… know about…"
Without thinking, Soifon had just let slip a rather significant piece of information. Sothing at the classification level of the Soul King — was that really sothing people at their level should be hearing?
The two of them didn't know. All they knew was that their latest sche had co to nothing — any hope of getting their hands on Soifon while pretending to help her into a hazmat suit was now firmly off the table.
The truth was, the seated officer sent ahead to survey the site had such deeply ingrained preconceptions about hell that he'd assud this blighted wasteland was still saturated with heavy concentrations of phosphorous gas. He'd scooped up one spoonful of miasma-tainted red soil, taken it back, and called it a day.
Soil that had been eroded by miasma for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, did naturally retain certain characteristics of that corruption — and it was presumably on this basis that Mayuri Kurotsuchi had thrown himself into overti developing the hazmat suits.
Still…
With her powerful spirit body, Soifon gazed far into the distance, hundreds of kiloters away, where she could just make out the flags of the Twelfth Division. It seed Mayuri Kurotsuchi's expedition had beaten them here.
She could only hope the seated officer who had turned in that scooped-up sample wouldn't find himself Mayuri's next experintal subject out of sheer spite.
After all, this land-clearing mission was full of unknown risks. Just reaching this border required crossing the entirety of Soul Society — a distance equivalent to traversing an entire planet. Without the strength of a Vice-Captain or above, there was simply no way to haul equipnt through a journey that long, given the unpredictable things one might encounter along the way.
Half a day later, through the three of them working in efficient concert, they had already pushed several dozen kiloters into the hell territories.
Looking back, the soil they had sprayed with agents was already undergoing a slow but visible transformation — the dark red of the earth seed to have lightened slightly.
In the cracks of the fractured ground, the custom seeds Mayuri Kurotsuchi had prepared were beginning to push their way up, tender green shoots dotting what had once been barren wasteland.
"Teacher Soifon, shall we take a break?"
Momo's voice ca from behind her.
She shook several bento boxes in her hand and tilted her chin toward a large boulder nearby.
Rukia had already hopped up onto the rock first, pulling a camping blanket out of her pack and spreading it flat.
Soifon checked the sky, estimated their progress, and gave a nod. She unshouldered her case, walked over to the camping blanket, and sat down.
Rukia opened one of the bento boxes. Inside sat rows of rice balls, neatly arranged if a little rough around the edges — clearly not the work of the Kuchiki household's chefs.
"Try one!" she offered triumphantly, holding a rice ball out to Soifon. "Momo and I made them this morning!"
Taking the rice ball, Soifon looked them both over and asked with mild suspicion, "No computer parts inside, right?"
In response, Momo picked up a rice ball and took an enormous bite, establishing her innocence beyond doubt.
The three of them ate their rice balls and savored the rare rest, and even the wind blowing across the hell borderlands seed a little less sharp than before.
Then, out of nowhere, Rukia spoke up mid-conversation:
"Speaking of which, Teacher Soifon…"
"The night before last, when you and Senior Isane went to get ingredients… did sothing happen that you wouldn't want anyone to know about?"
Soifon's chewing slowed by exactly a fraction of a second.
"I noticed that when you two ca back, Senior Isane's way of walking was a little… strange."
Rukia's tone was the very picture of innocence, but the amusent in her eyes was nearly overflowing.
The mont she finished, Momo beside her began nodding vigorously, expression deadly serious:
"Yes, yes! I noticed too!"
"When Senior Isane sat down, her movents seed a bit slower than usual, and her cheeks were flushed the whole ti!"
As people with firsthand experience of the matter — physically speaking — they knew all too well that this was exactly the kind of bodily aftermath that followed a first intimate encounter. If anything, they were deeply impressed by Isane Kotetsu's constitution: the woman had sohow still been capable of walking normally.
As expected of the Fourth Division's Vice-Captain. Whatever it took — putting patients through whatever she had — to have mastered dicine to that level of proficiency.
"Ahem, ahem!"
"Nothing happened."
"We just… went to find so at for the grill. And chatted a bit."
Soifon was abruptly choked by her rice ball. She reflexively grabbed the teacup beside her, brought it to her lips, and began the tactical operation of drinking tea — using the cup to hide the way her gaze had suddenly gone evasive.
"Oh, ohh…" Momo drew the syllables out deliberately. "So that's how Teacher Soifon is, huh — pretending nothing happened, acting like she doesn't know anyone, that's her most practiced skill."
…
Seizing the instant Soifon was caught off guard, Momo and Rukia moved with perfect coordination — each flinging a Bakudō at the other — and in the sa breath both countered with a mutual-cancellation technique, neutralizing each other's binding spells in one stroke.
Perhaps aside from Yoruichi Shihōin, the two individuals in Soul Society most fluent in that particular move were these two, who had been fighting each other internally on a daily basis.
"You scheming little—!" ×2
Having had their plots seen through at the sa mont, they glared at each other and laughed — and then, by unspoken agreent, both turned at exactly the sa ti.
A dual soft warmth pulled Soifon back from the prickling guilt in her chest.
Coming back to herself, she found two pairs of eyes inches from her own, and felt the warmth of their breath falling against her face.
A three-way kiss was still, objectively, extrely strange.
After that brief, glancing contact, silence fell. Soifon stuffed the remaining half of her rice ball whole into her mouth, drained the last of her tea in one long swallow, brushed her hands together, and jumped down from the boulder.
"All right! Break's over!"
"Move out, move out — we've still got more than half a case of agents to spray! Stop dawdling!"
With that, she hoisted the enormous case onto her back and strode forward without looking back.
Behind her, Momo and Rukia looked at each other.
Then, simultaneously, each raised a hand and flashed a V for victory.
WIN~ WIN~
The tactic of fake-arguing and then ambush-kissing Teacher Soifon worked just as well as ever.
They tidied up the camping blanket and the odds and ends on the boulder, planted the Second Division's flag and a survey beacon into the rock — and then set off after her.
Far ahead, on the crimson earth, a strange bulge was moving rapidly closer.
It looked as though a colossal earth-dragon were tunneling beneath the surface, the soil on either side splitting open in its wake, leaving a deep trench carved into the ground.
"Hostile contact?!"
"Battle positions!"
Rukia and Momo snapped to attention, hands flying on reflex to the Zanpakutō at their hips, Spiritual Pressure rising from their bodies in a surge.
But before they had fully drawn their blades —
"Wait."
"It's not an enemy."
Soifon's voice ca out calm and even. At the sa mont, her hands ca down on the hilts of both their swords, pressing them still.
An instant later, the swelling mound of earth erupted with a thunderous crack, dirt flying in all directions, and an enormous white form burst up from underground.
Bawabawa shook the soil from its body with a deep, contented grunt — and atop its head stood a figure in vivid green.
"Lady Soifon——!!!"
Nelliel leapt from Bawabawa's head like a green cannonball and launched herself straight into Soifon's arms.
Fortunately, Soifon had seen it coming. She caught the hurtling figure without staggering.
Nelliel wrapped both arms around her waist, buried her entire face against Soifon's chest, and drew a long, deep breath. Then she let out a sound of pure contentnt.
"That's Lady Soifon's sll——!"
She nuzzled and inhaled, an utterly epic lung-filling mont, completely ignoring the two sets of eyes beside them that were practically shooting flas.
"I thought I'd sensed wrong, but it really is you, Lady Soifon!"
"Oh, and speaking of — there's been this incredibly vast stretch of land that appeared near Hueco Mundo out of nowhere recently! Are you here exploring it too, Lady Soifon?"
"Running into Lady Soifon in a place like this — I'm so glad!"
Nelliel lifted her head, her smile radiant, gazing up at Soifon with unguarded openness.
At her words, Soifon stilled — then reached out and gripped Nelliel's shoulders, gently pushing her back a little, holding her gaze with a serious expression.
"Nel. You're saying this land has also connected with Hueco Mundo?"
Nelliel blinked at the gravity in Soifon's voice, then tilted her head, looked up thoughtfully at the sky, and considered carefully.
"Mm… not exactly." She shook her head. "It's more that I felt a large new landmass appear sowhere very close to Hueco Mundo, so I opened a Garganta and ca to look."
Soifon exhaled with relief. Good — a Garganta was still needed to cross between them; they weren't simply fused together.
That ant, at least for now, there would be no direct confrontation between Shinigami and Hollows. The order of both worlds could still be maintained.
She released Nelliel's shoulders and turned back to her two students.
"I'm going to continue ahead with Nelliel to explore further."
"You two — report this back to the Captain-Commander."
The two of them let out matching wails of despair. "——?!"
"But, Teacher——"
"No buts."
Soifon cut them off and had already turned toward Bawabawa. "That's an order."
Nelliel gave the two of them a cheerful wave, beaming brightly, and bounded after Soifon to climb up onto Bawabawa's head.
"We're off then! Bye-bye!"
Then Bawabawa's massive body angled downward and dove into the earth. The rumbling tremor of its passage rolled through the ground beneath their feet, carrying Soifon and Nelliel away into the distance.
"Every single ti…"
The two looked at each other, faces long with misery, shouldered their enormous cases, and turned to trudge back in the direction of Seireitei.
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Samsara Ga: Starting in The Long Dark with My Waifus
🎯 100 Powerstones = 1 Bonus Chapter for everyone
User Comments
0 comments from readers