Capítulo 3: Chapter 04 - Looking for Answers
Time passed for Itachi who had finally decided to slow down his pace after the fact that he'll likely be here for centuries hammered itself into his head after conversing with the locals of the small settlements he came across every once in a while.
Seeing children and teenagers of more than fifty years scattered around everywhere, and adults with age usually ranging from a century and upward, the oldest he's seen being over 300, Itachi had to accept that he had nowhere to hurry to and slowed his wandering to a casual pace, sometimes even staying a few weeks to a month on one spot before moving onwards.
After his discovery of the sword, Itachi refrained from using it as much as he could. He would have thrown it away except that he had no other weapon on him. Limited by his choices once more.
He had no idea if the sword was a cursed weapon, or one that bonded with its wielder by consuming their energy just like Kisame's Samehada. With his lack of knowledge and lack of his eyes, he limited how much he wielded the blade and cut the flow of energy from his body to the sword just to see how it would react but nothing happened. Not even when he practically left the sword in his sheath for over a month.
Right now, Itachi sat on the bank of a river with one hand over his left eye as he stared at his reflection.
His appearance was the same, similarly was his body mass and muscle structure identical to his body when he was still alive.
Apart from his eye that should be gone after using Izanami, everything was just as it used to be, except for his inability to open the sharingan.
With the absence of chakra, he had long surmised that this new energy was the reason why he couldn't use any ninjutsu or his dojutsu.
Itachi was smart, terrifyingly so, but trying to use an entirely new and foreign form of energy as a substitute for chakra to cast ninjutsu was something out of his area of expertise. This was more of Orochimaru's field than his.
Simply put, chakra was the energy of the world - life energy - but right now he was dead. He had once thought this energy was yin based due to him being dead but that too turned out to be wrong.
He looked at the sword by his side with a slight frown on his face.
Honestly, he considered stopping his pointless wandering and integrate back into society but he had heard numerous times of settlements and villages being attacked by hollows who feed on souls, and though most of these attacks were promptly taken care of by the Shinigamis stationed in different posts throughout the Rukongai, sometimes the Shinigamis arrive late to find a destroyed village.
If not for that constant worry, he'd have settled down months ago, which was why he kept trying to remove the veil covering his eyes as he was severely limited without access to it and his jutsus.
"I really hope that I'm not being too paranoid about this." He said and strapped the sword to his waist before throwing his cloak over his body.
"Maybe I can use the sword as a crutch in learning how to use this new flow. The sword seems to run on it, so hopefully…"
…..
"I'd advice you turn back, man. Heard those damned Shinigamis are chasing down a Hollow." Itachi came across a small group of people, all of whom told him the same thing.
"Can you point me in the general direction?" He asked the man who was now giving him a weird look.
"Ya deaf, man? You shouldn't be asking for general directions to the eye of a disaster." The man said, almost shouting at the end of it as he saw how itachi's face remained inexpressive even after everything he told him.
"You don't have to worry about me, but I'll appreciate it if you point me in the general direction." Itachi politely asked.
"Stray off the path to your left at the crossroad up ahead and continue on. You'll come across it in an hour or two depending on how fast you travel. Knock yourself out, man."
The man left in a hurry to catch up with his group up ahead.
'Let's see if there is any importance to this sword.' He flickered towards the direction the man described and it only took him a few minutes to pick up the trace of a battle.
He followed the trails and got to where the battle was most likely fought before the hollow escaped.
Unlike the first battle he saw, this one was a lot more different because he could feel how densely this place was filled with the energy he was having problems with.
'Obviously they can harness it, but this feels somehow different. An element or attribute perhaps?' He pondered as he studied all the irregularities scattered everywhere around the place.
'Explosions and sword marks, but mostly explosions.'
The site was filled with blast marks and craters of different proportions. Some places were molten glass, some places looked like something small and very heavy was dropped there. Some looked as if someone sliced open the ground.
The scene before him was eerily similar to that of where shinobis fought.
'Different abilities. Not a single projectile weapon. Different attributes and elemental discharges.' He disappeared from the place after he committed the details of the battlefield to memory.
As far as he knew after inquiring from a lot of locals, all Shinigamis carried swords. Every single one of them.
It is simply stupid and inefficient for different divisions, if not all of them, of any military to use only one type of weapon, but since the Shinigamis do, it means the sword is a lot more than a crutch than Itachi initially thought it was, and more like the basis of their strength.
'But why only swords? Even those two from months ago used swords, albeit with different shapes and aesthetics.'
An answer started taking shape in Itachi's head as he trailed the prints the Shinigamis left behind, and noted another thing of importance.
'The few footprints barely visible are too far apart and not uniform. They are fast.'
The conclusion so far: this group was far stronger than the ones Itachi had met months ago.
Capítulo 4: Chapter 05 - Finding Some Answers
"Ikkaku, there's still one missing. It's reiatsu spiked a few kilometers east from here." Someone called out to the angry bald man, Ikkaku, who furiously stomped on the ground.
"Damn it! Why are these things so slippery today? We have to kill them fast or else Captain Zaraki will cut off our ears. Lead the way, Yumichika." Ikkaku said to his friend with urgency.
Not wasting anymore time, the rest of Squad 11 followed after Yumichika towards the last place the Hollow's reiatsu was registered.
This time around, they were hunting down four Hollows and while it was a relatively easy thing with their numbers and strength, this group of Hollows immediately turned tail as soon as they saw one of theirs almost being killed. Well the Hollow did die, but the thing was that the other Hollows ran away before they even killed the one they left behind.
"Oh, I'll personally kill that slippery bastard." Ikkaku grinned menacingly as they got nearer and he could feel the Hollow's faint reiatsu.
Yumichika, who was beside him, frowned a little. "Just try and keep an eye on him this time. We are chasing this one for the second time because you taunted it instead of instantly killing it."
The group of Shinigamis behind them laughed at Ikkaku's slip up, angering the bald man even further.
"Ahhhhh! Come here you bastard!" Ikkaku lost it and rushed forward as soon as he locked in on the Hollow's reiatsu. "Die!"
...
Itachi silently followed the group of Shinigamis from a good distance behind after getting their general direction.
He had been able to watch how they fight and so far, only three people stood out from this group.
The bald one, Ikkaku, was most likely the strongest with how he carried the greatest momentum and how he seemed to be higher ranked than the others who called him the 3rd Seat.
The second would be the one with the colorful feathers on his eyelashes, Yumichika, the 5th Seat.
From what Itachi saw, he didn't do much but his speed and reflexes didn't lose that much to Ikkaku with how relatively calm he looked during the whole fight.
The last person, Makizo, wasn't that much impressive strength-wise but what drew Itachi's attention to him was his sword, or rather what it became after the man chanted a few words.
While it still remained a sword, it was no longer a katana. It was now a normal longsword with one of its edges being red, and it released an explosion every time the sword's red edge struck something.
As they hunted the last Hollow, the group maintained a circle around Ikkaku and the Hollow where Itachi could comprehensively note the man's abilities.
His durability was very noticeable given how he got hit a few times and shrugged it off with only a few bruises as he slowly tortured the Hollow to death.
He could clearly have killed the Hollow much quicker but it seemed like he wanted to enjoy the battle while also torturing the monster.
"That's the last of them, Ikkaku. We should get going or else the Captain might just storm out to find us for taking so long, thinking it's a strong Hollow." With Yumichika's reminder stopped Ikkaku's fit and without wasting any more time, they left.
After they left, Itachi left too with more thoughts and questions about the sword on his hip.
He had only picked it up because he figured it'd be better to have a weapon on hand than not, not knowing that it would turn out to be something more.
His questions of the sword's nature was the reason he refrained from using it and letting his energy seep into it. His ignorance and cautiousness regarding this strange afterlife made him naturally skeptical and extremely analytical of everything he saw.
...
After meeting Ikkaku and his group, Itachi decided to be a little experimental with the sword and once more started letting the flow inside his body move into the sword.
Two weeks had passed since that day and though there were no changes with the sword, Itachi didn't worry. He'd expected it'll most likely take a long time before any changes showed on the sword.
As he was basically free everyday and rarely trained, except when his thoughts started acting up, most of his time was spent meditating, not because he wanted to but he realized that it made his flow travel into the sword in the best way possible.
Most times when he meditated, his thoughts were centered around the sword and the effects of the change it had on the user.
If he classified the sword's transformation as an advanced technique, that means that each transformation possibly gives a qualitative increase to one or more of the user's aspects, but the increase is relative to the user.
The reason why he considered it relative to the user was because even though the man named Makizo's sword changed and he obviously got a little stronger, he still felt that bald man and the one with the feathers on his eyelashes could still beat him.
So if Ikkaku were to use the same technique and his sword changed, he'd be vastly stronger than Makizo.
'Is it some type of strength multiplier?' He thought. The Sharingan also acted as a strength multiplier of sorts, at least that was one of its basic attributes.
He still had a lot of questions about the sword since he was basically going in blind and he had no idea if there was something else needed to influence the sword to change. He doubted just sharing his flow with the sword was everything he needed to do.
Not to mention that it might take months or Sage forbids, a few years, because as far as he knew each of those Shinigamis he saw were probably more than a hundred years old.
"I'll have to find a viable alternative in the meantime." He said as he looked at the sword. Or course he'll continue looking for a way to unlock his eyes, not just waiting for the sword to show a sign, any sign in particular.
Right now, not being with his eyes while he knew they were there slightly irritated Itachi. He was a seasoned fighter, with or without the Sharingan, but he knew just how limited he was without it.
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