Chapitre 477: To Shatter Fate by Spriggy13 (BleachxRWBY)
Latest Update:July 8, 2023
Summary: At the very end of the Thousand-Year-Blood-War, a final, spiteful Quincy spell cast on the precipice of defeat opens a rift between worlds. A rift far deeper than any garganta. Ichigo Kurosaki is thrust into a new reality; one where the fate of the very planet itself is the violently contested alimony of the messiest divorce in eternity... (TYBW manga spoilers)
Link: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/14177169/1/To-Shatter-Fate
Word Count:182k
Chapters:20
605 Chapter 1: RIFT & STRAWBERRY
"The path... has now closed."
"Ichigo..."
"The path to a world... without fear."
"The world of the living... Soul Society... Hueco Mundo..."
"They belong together as one..."
"They should have been brought together... so that life and death may mingle as one..."
"But now... that path exists no longer..."
Yhwach's six pupils focused as he leaned forth and spoke directly into his ear.
"This fate is all thanks to you...
...Ichigo."
The shadows of Yhwach's reiryoku billowed like a great cloud of black ink underwater. It was fitting; with the vast reiatsu still so dense on the battlefield, the air itself was heavier than that of the pressure of the deep sea.
"How disappointing... because of you... life and death will not lose their form..."
"All living things will be fated to continue to live their lives in fear of death..."
"...For all eternity."
Ichigo looked down upon the god he had slain with brown eyes drawn tight, and a resigned frown. It was a face of pity.
"Yhwach... the fear of death was your motivation for this war? Don't give me that crap... you doomed yourself to your own death by starting it in the first place. A thousand years of war, of genocide on both ends... for this? Was it worth it? Aren't you immortal anyway?"
Ichigo gazed up to the sky, towards where he knew the frozen Royal Palace resided with most of his closest friends within its walls light years away. The clouds had burst from the cataclysmic battle, and sunbeams now shone down upon the ruins of the Soul Society after days of an overcast sky.
The grounds he stood in were uneven, with ancient trees uprooted and the land having been ripped apart by the final battle that had concluded mere minutes prior. The final battle to close a thousand years of blood warfare. The surrounding buildings of the Seireitei were jarred at random elevations, all facing directions they hadn't only ten days ago. Ten days that, to the surviving members of the thirteen Court Guard squads, felt like eons ago.
Across the shattered stone square in the Seireitei, with an arm severed and a hole bigger than his head in his chest, shuffled Aizen. He was not smiling. Walking towards the Quincy Emperor's rapidly diffusing body, he sought to get his own point in before Yhwach was dead. Permanently, this time.
"Sōsuke...Aizen..." Yhwach rasped.
"Yhwach... the world that you desired to create... May indeed have been devoid of fear." the ex-captain began. "But... in a world without the fear of death... men could not face that fear and seek out hope. Certainly, they could keep walking onward by merely living... but that would be very different from walking onward whilst conquering their own fears. Stagnation is its own form of death, is it not? One far worse than the kind granted by shinigami." he added. "Tell me, did you not use the fear of death to drive you to create the Lictreich, and the Wandenreich? Are their successes not enough to prove the power of courage to drive oneself forth in the face of fear, or even because of it?"
Ichigo whistled as he turned his head, his spiritual adrenaline dying down even as he remained in bankai, pulling his tattered shihakushō up himself as he glanced backwards over his shoulder.
Even so, he kept only half his attention on Aizen as he faced Yhwach at all times as he continued to decay. It was hard now, to tell where his black soul king reiryoku ended and his spilled blood began. Maybe they had fused, and so were one and the same, and he was just the one to cut it open. It wasn't his area of expertise; biology books never touched the subject of what would happen to one's constitution should they absorb the essence of the mutilated corpse of god himself.
"Did you just come up with that on the spot? How'd you manage that?"
Aizen smirked, "One tends to pick up a talent for improvisation after centuries of continuous method acting."
As smug as ever, it seemed. Ichigo couldn't even muster the will to care to ask what Aizen of all people was doing out and about, but judging by the black seals he was wearing, covering his body like a bandaged carapace, he was probably still held by the Gotei 13. This was Aizen, after all. If he broke out on his own terms he probably wouldn't be restrained at all by now.
"You know, I wouldn't stand right next to him if I were you." he mused.
"We need to make sure he's dead, though. Uryū got knocked out so if he revives himself again we won't have that silver arrow to rely on." Ichigo replied, as he levelled the scabbard-less Tensa-Zangetsu at the neck of the fallen king.
"Sensible." Aizen levelled his head, his brown eye glinting purple. "Ichigo...after you... tie up this end, I must consult with you about the vacant seat of the Soul King."
"The Soul King? You mean that body in the crystal?" Some king that was. Was that thing really what ran Soul Society all this time?
"Yes. As you are my experiment, I cannot allow Squad Zero's contingency plan to come to fruition." he began. "Without a linchpin, the artificially separated spiritual planes will collapse back together. Reality will return to how it was primordially, before what your kind would refer to as the big bang. It will be as Yhwach sought to do, only even more chaotically without him to control it. Although there are alternatives, their primary emergency plan most likely involves substituting one of us. Do not trust the Court Guard. It is a despicable fate, especially for my prized specimen. I must warn you, we transcendent beings are the only ones who can fill the seat-"
Aizen stilled, then frowned.
His reiatsu shifted and became far more uniform, organised even. When he 'spoke' next, it wasn't verbally or audible in any way. Aizen communicated his thoughts through reiatsu, directly to the deputy soul reaper hybrid far faster than sound could ever be.
"We'll convene later, I insist you finish Yhwach off immediately. He's dying, thanks to the stil-silver, but he remains just barely lucid. He appears to be pretending to already be dead in case you did not notice." Aizen motioned with his uncovered eye, signalling what was likely about to be a last-ditch effort on Yhwach's part. The ex-captain was already raising a finger forth for hado number #99: Goryūtenmetsu; there was no time for the incantation.
Ichigo did not even spare a thought as he reacted.
He immediately swung to decapitate Yhwach with both hands, lining the blade of Zangetsu with a pitch-black flaring getsuga tinged with white. As the reality-severing blade exploded forth many, many times faster than light, cleaving through blut vene and the Soul King's reishi alike, it slashed straight through the most powerful being in all realms, spiritual and physical. Black-red blood splashed out along his blade, and over his face and mouth.
It was instantaneous. It was brutal. It was ruthless. It was necessary.
It was not enough.
As the most powerful being in all the spiritual planes, bifurcation from a transcendent bankai (with an ability not even his eyes could discern), sped up his death, but did not forcibly bring it upon Yhwach immediately.
All six blood-red pupils of the Emperor of the Wandenreich focused upon Ichigo.
Regicide would have to wait precious seconds more.
The fallen king spoke.
"You may have severed the thread of fate for this world at large, and chosen to persist in this doomed reality you have perpetuated, but I can take solace in the knowledge that I saw a future without you in this world come to pass."
Black ink-like reishi soaked into reality itself around Ichigo, as electric yellow eyes as large as his chest opened up all around him, peering at him, into him, through him. He roared as he exploded outwards in power, the air bursting into static around the entire square of the Seireitei, pushing out against a boundless encasing nothingness.
"You should be thankful. Through oblivion, I am bequeathing salvation from a fate far worse than death, which the shinigami had in store for you. All for their false order." Yhwach scorned. "Why do you think I gave my father a mercy killing, hmm? I will grant you peace."
The page of reality stirred, its ink began to swirl and run. For the last time in eternity, using the last of the primordial Soul King's reiatsu down to the last spirit particle, The Almighty was activated.
"Begone, Ichigo Kurosaki. My son... Lost in the dark..."
And Ichigo Kurosaki was gone.
Ichigo Kurosaki disappeared in black reiatsu, having followed through on his swing that cut through reality itself and had actually opened thin gargantas down the line of his blow's arc. It was incredibly impressive, even to Aizen now, and a cut above the mere mountains they had destroyed with each swing the last time they had fought after transcending. The lilac dragons of the forbidden Goryūtenmetsu converged on the target, faster than mortal minds could fathom after manifesting from the power of the very leylines themselves. With a flash and roar of thunderous power, an explosion of vibrant pinks and electric violets blossomed from the centre of its ground zero.
Aizen cleared the swell of surging smoke miles high with a snap of his fingers, and his eyes (well, eye) widened in surprise for the first time in two years, since he was caught off guard by Kisuke Urahara's sealing kidō.
Ichigo had disappeared, enveloped by Yhwach's visible spiritual energy. Yet Yhwach was... doing a dead-on impression of his father, down to the missing body parts. -Clearly the hybrid's handiwork but without the regicider present. The raw opaque reiryoku of the Soul King manifested by the Quincy Emperor had dissipated completely, and Aizen was privately rather proud that he could even sense the spiritual pressure of one who had fused with the Soul King himself. It was proof that he was within the same realm of power, and it was also proof now that he could not sense any similar energy that Yhwach's power, where it would have persisted for decades after his death previously, now had been extinguished completely. It meant he had spent it all on one last Quincy spell.
Yhwach's six red pupils faded to a blank white in both eyes; he was dead before his body hit the cracked stone ground with a wet squelch, not unlike the sound of a boot into partially molten ice. As the rest of the deposed body of the Quincy King hit the floor, Aizen switched focus. He scanned around, spying the unconscious form of Uryū Ishida on the floor, but kept looking. That was not what he was searching for.
Ah. No chair. A shame, it was rather comfortable.
The second thing that had Aizen surveying all around was the complete absence of Ichigo. With Yhwach dead, the only one in the world that could be able to sense Ichigo's inconceivable spiritual pressure would have been him. The gap between them was now far closer than it had been when they clashed in Karakura Town. And yet Aizen could not sense his fellow transcendent being anywhere. Not on this spiritual plane, anyway.
Could he have gone to another spiritual realm?
No, he wouldn't have opened a senkaimon with such a violent slash, and if he had entered a garganta it would still be open, as even the narrow collateral gargantas a few hundred meters away from the deputy soul reaper's swing were slow to close up even now. As hard as they were to make out, Yhwach's final words were both the most ominous and the most likely implication. Yhwach used all that remained of himself to see Ichigo gone. As hard as it was to tell with six pupils, it was pretty clear what his focus was on in that last instant. Aizen didn't doubt for a moment that Kurosaki survived, logically if he had taken on Yhwach at his best then he should have endured a brink-of-death lunge like that candidly. That meant the most likely result was that Ichigo had been sent... somewhere else.
This was most vexing, but simultaneously quite entertaining. The only potential problem from this could be if he was indicted for Ichigo vanishing, but with Yhwach's still-warm corpse right there that was neither very likely nor logical.
As Uryū Ishida began to stir languidly on the ground, Aizen brought a seal-wrapped hand to the bridge of his nose.
"Over twenty years of experimentation, gone in the blink of an eye. As amusing as it would be to take credit, I better not be blamed for this."
Shadows. Ichigo was engulfed by them as he fell on and on.
He reached to touch his face, to rub at his eyes; but couldn't see his hands, let alone anything else. A void.
Was this a garganta? No, he'd travelled through them before. There was no chaotic texture here, it was all a uniform, encompassing sightless shadowscape that felt powdery to his spiritual nerves.
-And yet it was similar in a very primordial way. The feeling of slipping through a gap in space itself was not lost on the veteran dimension hopper.
He wasn't in the garganta. He was falling somewhere deeper than the garganta.
He needed to... he needed to stop himself from falling any further. Between spiritual planes, there is no solid ground, only a chaos of reishi. He forced Urahara's words to the forefront of his mind, and pulled with all he could from the space approaching his feet.
It wasn't enough. The glowing blue platform, far more uniform than it once would have been, shattered all the same from his momentum as he crashed through it. Dammit. His head was throbbing, and his open wounds burned from the sudden jolt. He had to solve these problems first. Ichigo shut his brown eyes, breathed deeply, and when he opened them again, his left eye's sclera was as dark as the shadowscape around him, and the iris within was an electric yellow ring. Horns budded on his temples, before emerging into two angular points facing forward. His skin paled to ashen-white, and a black stripe bled down from over the left side of his face to the hollow hole now in his chest. Two horns? He could feel them either side of his head. Never mind, thoughts later. New plan.
He pulled the long blade of Tensa-Zangetsu perpendicular to his waist, he needed to turn easier for the cut he was about to attempt. This would be his first attempt at opening his own garganta, but since when were trials by fire new for him? He didn't hesitate, wait, or ruminate on how to open a garganta. Zangetsu had told him how all of his hollow techniques worked years ago, it had just taken until that last trip to the Kurosaki Clinic for Ichigo to truly understand: Instinct.
He twisted as he fell through the void, and reached out, on instinct, to cut that which cannot be seen. His curved zanpakutō found purchase in the darkness. He was falling sideways now, and spun whilst making a vertical swing underneath him in one full rotation. A line was scored across space itself, and perpendicular lines jutted out from it like zip teeth as a crude garganta was messily torn open for a route back to reality. A reality, anyway.
Ichigo took a deep breath and fell through the throat of the void before he could let out the sigh of relief he held.
- –—{}—– -
It was a good thing he did not let out that sigh. Exiting the garganta, Ichigo was engulfed by a midnight abyss of stygian water.
He could only see out of his left eye. The right could have been covered and it wouldn't have made any difference. It was a good thing that spiritual beings were far less susceptible to conventional temperature extremes, otherwise the 2°C saltwater would have shocked him to the bone. Expertise from his oddly extensive experience when it came to underwater environments allowed him to quickly deduce which way was up and orient himself without panicking. Was this the ocean? Where was he?
Gathering reishi beneath his feet to stand took slightly longer than expected, which allowed Ichigo to make the unpleasant discovery that his wounds were bleeding out a sanguine stream into the water around him from what he could see with his left eye. He had a suspicion it was just as bad on his unhollowfied side. The issue was, however, that he had hardly any energy left, and Yhwach had drained him of his hybrid reiatsu in Wharwelt; - so instant regeneration was out the window unless he really wanted to push it. It would be awhile before he could recharge. The transformation he was in right now was the barest he could do for appearances, just to raise his affinity as much as possible before attempting a garganta.
It was best to break the surface of the sea first, then return to the Soul Society and wait for Orihime.
Loathe as he was to admit it, he also wanted to hear what Aizen had to say, namely his warning about the Zero Squad's intentions. Even Yhwach had taunted him with that... he needed to know. Aizen's entire reason for his treachery revolved around the Soul King, after all. And yet... after all the battles in Hueco Mundo and Karakura Town, when he first laid eyes on that figure in the jewel, a part of Ichigo understood why Aizen referred to the Reiō as a thing. Could that even be called a king? Why was he in the crystal? Where were his limbs?
Ichigo shivered, and not from the temperature in the aquatic depths he found himself in.
It wasn't the time. He had to return to the Seireitei, and meet everyone there in the aftermath. If he wanted to speak with Aizen, he could do it there afterwards, before he was imprisoned back in the Muken. His friends and family came first, before his own apprehensions.
The fact that reishi was slow to gather at his feet was a sign that this was the living world, at least. He bent his knees, then pushed off the gathered spirit platform in a rudimentary hirenkyaku. He was too strained to use the more internally based shunpo or sonído for now. Ichigo shot off into the dark depths, fast enough that he left behind a gap in the water that collapsed with a thunderous clap.
- –—{}—– -
Ichigo eyed the surface at the very edge of his vision after some time gliding through the caliginous ocean. He had travelled for about twenty minutes in almost perfect darkness, at a shallow angle upwards before he noticed something. Thank goodness for his spirit lungs. He had seen the odd fish or two with his left eye, and even passed a resting Sunfish. At over two meters tall with an ethereal white body frosted brown towards the front, he stared at it whilst he passed.
He almost wished he had his phone right now. If he remembered the few marine documentaries he watched correctly, that meant he was out in the open ocean... and therefore possibly thousands of miles from any land. Actually wait, he really did wish he had his phone right now.
He sighed and ran his hand through his orange hair, naturally avoiding his sharp horns on instinct as if he'd had them all his life. That could be an hour's trip in his current battle-worn state. He couldn't open a senkaimon, because without a Hell Butterfly he didn't want to risk the repaired cleaner bending time and turning up days late from the dangai, and he really didn't want to try another garganta just yet; considering where he turned up with his first one. Ichigo was lost in his thoughts when something stirred in the saline gloom beneath him. From the tenebrous depths came a colossal shape, following his pungent blood cloud.
Spiked, elongated, with the width of a car and the length of a runway, a monstrous tentacle with barbs in the place of suckers emerged from the inky blackness like a lovecraftian leviathan. Ichigo could only see it thanks to his left eye, but in the dark depths the tentacles black shape melded with its void-like surroundings quite well even then. A black tentacle? A hollow then? But no, that wasn't the case, there's no reiryoku within it, but even animals should possess souls?
With a sound like a skyscraper collapsing, the gargantuan appendage careened towards him. Looking closer, the black tentacle's spiky protrusions seemed to be bone-white, and the outside of the tentacle was armoured with the same bone-like biomatter. With one motion, Ichigo slung Tensa-Zangetsu along its cloth tail, swinging it horizontally at range like he had seen his inner hollow do so many times over. It cleaved through the tentacle, lopping it off like a cucumber cut in half, and everything behind it, for at least a kilometer. Was it overkill? Probably. But Ichigo was hesitant to skip out of bankai just yet, after it had been broken so many times over by Yhwach. He would take his time with Zangetsu.
Gazing back down, Ichigo wasn't fazed at all by the emergence of five more barbed tentacles from the depths. What giant squid-creature only had one tentacle, after all? What actually surprised Ichigo was the complete lack of any presence the creature as a whole had. He couldn't sense it at all.
This... thing couldn't be transcendent could it? He could cut it so easily...
He eyed the tree-sized bone tips of the tentacles as they rushed towards him.
It was time for a test. If it could sense him to the point where it would try and attack him, then logically it would have some degree of influence over the spiritual. He drew upon three months straight of underwater combat experience to minimise the fluid displacement whilst still getting to flex himself. Standing straight and tall with his sword held high towards the distant surface, Ichigo tilted his head down to the point that his fringe covered his eyes whilst his horns were level. He focused on every trace of reiatsu for hundreds of miles around, and held his left hand out whilst focusing on condensing the signals he was receiving. It was then that the tentacles struck. Out of the five tree-sized points, all plated with the same bone-like armour that covered their backs and made up the barbs, four shattered on impact with his hierro.
The viscous black gunk that oozed out of the cracks in the tips floated about in the water. The fifth was caught by Ichigo's right hand, who grinned as he felt the texture.
It's undeniably similar to a hollow's mask, but not identical. As he grasped it, spirit ribbons emerged from around his feet. His own was deep red, but had a solid blue lining to it on the edges. His Quincy half? Glancing up at the rest of the threads, Ichigo's hypothesis was confirmed when not a single white thread trailed in the direction of the now-defunct tentacles. No spiritual presence, at all. Might as well get this over with. Without a further thought, Ichigo swung his right arm down, towards where he could see the crippled appendages led with his left eye, even if he couldn't see the actual main body in the abyssal waters.
Such was the strength of his swing, that even as deep down in the twilight zone as he was, up on the surface white-capped tidal waves swelled and collapsed in on themselves almost a thousand meters above in the opposite direction of his swing. There was no point in unnecessarily risking a named attack in bankai in the living world; he wasn't an idiot. The force of the swing of his sword alone was more than enough.
Ichigo smirked in satisfaction, noticing how the severed tentacles began to diffuse and writing it off as another oddity to bring up to Urahara later. Right now, he was glowing in the buzz of a smashing victory; and not just a victory, but a stomping. The hybrid was well past accepting that he enjoyed fighting at this point, and the acceptance of both spirits as himself during the forging of True Zangetsu in the Royal Palace meant accepting that he found absolutely styling on an opponent hollow-style the most fun of all. Maybe that was why he liked Tekken so much. Or was that just because it was fun to piss off Tatsuki?
For now, he basked in this easy win. It felt good to win so definitively after the last nine days of constant struggle and strife. Yhwach had sandbagged him so hard that he didn't get a chance to appreciate his newfound strength. Or should he say his regained strength? He was at the same level as when he had stepped out of the dangai two years ago. It felt good to not have to worry about losing his power now though. Even better was the realisation that all of the white ribbons were pointing the same way.
Land. Land is that way. Looks like he wasn't thousands of miles offshore after all. Oddly, some of the white ribbons were lined with a deep emerald green. Fullbringers? Though he hadn't searched for their kind before with ribbons, it would match the colour of bringer-light.
It didn't matter. He'd find out soon enough anyway.
And with the boom of a collapsing water bubble, Ichigo was off again.
- –—{}—– -
A carrot-topped head broke through the choppy water, followed by arms which generated invisible grips to pull the rest up with.
Ichigo emerged, taking a deep breath and inhaling the salty air. He flared his spiritual pressure, vaporising all the saltwater, which steamed off of him... leaving the sea salt behind.
"Dammit." It was all flaky and felt like a crusty powder. He had an idea of how to get it all off, though. It would even be en route to where he was heading. His destination being the top of the massively sheer cliff face of an island that he could sense was inhabited. Loud seabirds circled around it, and some looked like they had built nests there in the cliffs too. He didn't recognise any, so he probably wasn't in Japan anymore... which was a problem. He'd heard of the existence of East and West Branches of the Soul Society, and the one he knew all these years had been the Eastern one. Well, to be fair, nobody told him it was the Eastern one specifically but it was pretty clear. It was the one linked to Karakura Town, after all.
Maybe he could talk to the Western Branch if that was where he was. Even discounting how he was pretty sure spiritual beings just magically understood all languages, his English skills were good enough that his teachers told him he could become a professional translator if he went for it. They were surprised by his proficiency in Spanish too, but he never explained where he picked it all up from... it was probably one of the better things he took away from his escapades in Hueco Mundo.
Actually wait a minute...where the hell were the West Branch for the last month!?
Ichigo furrowed his brows as he reflected on all the casualties, the losses of the last fortnight. His hands clenched. Why didn't they do anything at all? Was it a lack of communication? If he was in their territory, he'd make sure to lodge a formal complaint, loud and clear. In fact, weren't the Quincies originally Germanic-centred or something? Not to mention the Royal Palace and the Zero Squad were all part of the Central Branch, between the two others. The moment it got invaded by Yhwach personally with his Schutzstaffel should have been their business as much as the East's. Freaking cowards. Were they just a bunch of weaklings or somethin- oh man he was literally steaming again. Calm, calm, before he choked a seagull or something. Kinda sounded like Zangetsu at the end there. He could confront them about it if he was actually in the Western Branch after all, if not then he'd make sure to bring it up with Shunsui later. Maybe it was that damn bureaucracy getting in the way again. Hopefully the new Captain Commander would be less backwards now.
First things first, anyway. He had to return to the Soul Society. Ichigo looked up, tensed his calves just above the shifting cerulean waves and jumped, leaving only a ripple in the rough water. The hybrid leapt forth, using only the strength of his legs alone in sonído to flicker from the ocean's surface several hundred meters into the air. Being in his spiritual form, the sonic boom he made was only audible to one seated figure on the cliff's precipice. As Ichigo soared through the sea air, the salt that clung to him was left behind in a powdery trail. The long bandage of Tensa-Zangetsu trailed behind him like a ribbon. He reached the apex of his jump, looking down and choosing a landing spot where something near the grassy edge caught his attention. He pitched forward, flipped head over heels and landed, his arms out above his shoulders whilst his left foot touched down first lightly on a mossy crag. The grass was spongey beneath his bare feet, which he only realised now still had a cut on it from a trap set by the Almighty. Still too early- The sonído must've opened it again, as he left droplets of blood on the morning dew. There was a faint mist around the area, which caught the low sun's light and shone silver. Towards the centre of the island, a coniferous forest obscured any further.
"Hwah!"
Ichigo turned around to face what got him to choose this landing spot. The figure that caught his attention was a startled adult woman, with shoulder-length reddish-to-black hair, in a dark-grey full-sleeved dress that had a corset-like front. It kinda looked like the laces that crossed on his old school shoes, actually. She had knee-high slate grey boots that looked far more practical than aesthetic, and over the top of it all was a white cloak with a red lining underneath, fastened with a silver brooch in the shape of a rose.
She was also sitting on her own gravestone.
A spirit.
"Hey, I'm just passing through. Don't mind me, Miss...?" he glanced at her grave.
The stone was flat, and the words on it were in English.
Thus kindly I scatter. Summer Rose.
Link: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/14177169/1/To-Shatter-Fate
État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone