When the Reiokyu had been recreated, Yhwach had thrown her into his own dungeons, and she had eventually come to the palace as a prisoner. Now that Yhwach was gone, no one knew whether he had kept her captive as an example to the other Arrancars or in order to remold her into a vanguard for the Quincies. The only certainty was that she was still alive and had been freed when Nelliel, Ichigo Kurosaki, and the rest of his gang had gone to see her.
Though Nelliel had rescued Halibel, the new king of Hueco Mundo, she had mixed feelings about the current situation. They had been Aizen’s followers, and they had first come to the Reiokyu to stand before him here where he had so longed to be. Even as she dealt with her own uncertainty, Nelliel asked Grimmjow, who was hostile toward the Soul Reapers, “You’re going to pick a fight with people who’ve already been worn down by Quincies? That’s the kind of fight you like?”
“Tch. You’re so naive . You think these Soul Reapers’ll actually turn a blind eye to us? I’m not gonna let them stab us in the back on our way out.”
The good-natured, bald old man sporting a black beard answered him. “I’ll always look the other way when it comes to you. I would even be happy to escort you all the way back to Hueco Mundo.”
“Hnngh? Who’re you? You’re really underestimating us.”
The wounded Arrancars were no threat, and Grimmjow assumed that was what the high priest meant. A murderous urge radiated from his whole body as he glared at the bald old man.
“The opposite, the opposite! You’re much, much more powerful than any old Hollow. If we carelessly purify or eradicate you the way things currently stand, the balance between the three worlds would collapse.”
Grimmjow was briefly silent but soon tsked as though reaching some internal understanding and held back his animosity. He probably preferred to settle things with Ichigo Kurosaki as soon as possible rather than waste time fooling around here.
Nelliel guessed his priorities and considered springing a surprise attack on him at the right moment in order to shut him up so she could drag him back to Hueco Mundo. But Halibel, who was borrowing her shoulder, suddenly spoke up. “Is that what you’re calling the Reio?”
Her words were a whisper, almost as though she were speaking to herself. Her gaze was focused beyond the Soul Reapers at the thing enshrined at the center of the palace. “Is that the foundation of the Soul Society?”
“Hm. So Miss Arrancar, do you object to it too?” the bald man asked while stroking his beard.
Halibel slowly shook her head. “I’m just a defeated soldier right now. I have no right to comment. But I understand why our late king hated that thing.”
Halibel removed herself from Nelliel’s shoulder and turned her back on the Soul Reapers. “We’ve caused trouble for you. We will repay our debt.”
“Oh, no worries. The best way for you to repay us is by staying in Hueco Mundo and not causing any more problems. And if you’re going to thank anyone, you should thank Ichigo Kurosaki,” Kyoraku said as he started to escort the Arrancars out. The women turned to leave the palace.
Grimmjow had interpreted Halibel’s comment about debt differently. “Oh, right...! I need to repay that Kurosaki guy.”
“You want to finish things with Ichigo while he’s wounded?” Nelliel accused. The two continued bickering and squabbling as they left, just as they had been when they arrived.
“Ah well, everyone seems to want a piece of Ichigo— Oh?” Kyoraku noticed that the high priest, who had been standing next to him, was heading out of the Greater Palace.
“Where are you going, your eminence?”
“Just going to give Squad Zero a wake-up call.”
Squad Zero. The five members, including the high priest, were said to be as powerful as the entire Thirteen Court Guard Companies put together. They were the elite special royal guard. Each member of Squad Zero was a pioneer who had developed something fundamental to Soul Reaper operations, such as zanpaku-to or shihakusho. They were paragons who had, fittingly, nurtured Soul Reaper history from its starting point of zero.
But Kyoraku had heard that Yhwach and his subordinates had killed all of Squad Zero, minus the high priest, before he made his way to the palace, and so the phrase “wake-up call” left him puzzled. The high priest immediately offered an answer to his confusion.
“We didn’t convert our bones to Ôken for the fun of it. Our spiritual powers have more or less fused with the spiritual pulse flowing from our Zero Riden. As long as one of us survives, the others will revive enough to at least walk when they are called for.”
“So you would have been in quite a dire situation if Ichigo hadn’t won, your eminence?”
Yhwach had at one point remade the Reiokyu into the Wahr Welt—the castle of the true world. Had Yhwach now been alive and well, even the vestiges of the Reiokyu would have vanished and the entire Squad Zero, minus the high priest, would have perished.
“Squad Zero won’t die so easily. I won’t allow it. That’s their fate. And I need Oh-Eetsu and the others to get back to work.” The high priest had spoken in an aloof manner just as Kyoraku normally did, but he paused for a moment to stroke his beard several times while looking up at the sky above the palace.
“That whippersnapper has been up to no good while we’ve been fighting.”
≡
The Reiokyu Hoohden (Phoenix Palace),
half an hour later
“Oh, this has got me beat.” Oh-Etsu Nimaiya had just been brought back from the edge of life and death by the high priest Hyosube. He was holding his head, slumped at the bottom of an ocean even deeper than the subterranean level of the Hoohden—or at least, he was where the ocean would normally have extended across his Zero Riden.
Through the lenses of his glasses, he observed a demolished iron door and the wreckage of sacred ropes and shredded fabric cords. A very specific zanpaku-to was usually sealed away behind that door. But the seal had been ruthlessly destroyed, and there was no sign of said zanpaku-to anywhere.
Taking in the destruction from where she stood next to Oh-Etsu, Mera Hiuchigashima, a zanpaku-to and part of Nimaiya’s elite guard, heaved a long sigh. “That’s what happens when you let yourself get beat without thinking it through, sir. Seriously.”
Normally the sword storehouse rested far from reach deep below the ocean waves, but making Ichigo Kurosaki’s zanpaku-to had caused massive evaporation, exposing a significant stretch of the seabed.
“I know it was an emergency, but this sitch went sideways in all the wrong ways,” Oh-Etsu said, looking around as he righted his glasses.
Tokie Tonokawa and Nonomi Nomino, also part of Oh-Etsu’s guard, were tending to the numerous injured men collapsed all around who had been guarding the sword storehouse.
“That bone-dry ocean was like an open invite to walk right in. Plus me and Sayafushi were out.” Oh-Etsu narrowed his eyes, the quiet rage shimmering in them a far different emotion than what had shone forth when he had faced Yhwach. “But what really gets me is that some sleazebag looters showed up during a bona fide Soul Society emergency!”
There was something odd about the wounds the zanpaku-to had suffered. These were among the strongest of the humanized zanpaku-to, and yet areas of their bodies had been frozen, and some were burned or were twitching as though they had been electrocuted, while others seemed to have been poisoned or riddled with holes. A few of their limbs even seemed to have been crushed by blunt weapons.
Mera tsked at the many unique wounds, each distinctive to a different zanpaku-to. “Seriously, how many people were involved here? If they had that many fighters, they could have at least pitched in during the war.”
One of the zanpaku-to who had regained consciousness shook his head at Mera’s words. “It wasn’t...”
“Hey, are you all right? It wasn’t what?”
“It was just one person… The surprise attack... It was all one person...”
Mera was even more bewildered at the other zanpaku-to’s words. That wasn’t possible, not with all the varied wounds they had.
Oh-Etsu’s reaction, however, was entirely different. He narrowed his eyes behind his tinted glasses and spread his hands wide, nodding as though convinced of something. “I see, I see. Well, well, well. Yup, I get it, so that’s how it is!”
“You’re weirding me out in a whole lotta ways, so could you stop talking to yourself, sir?”
“That’s harsh, Mera. Well, that heart-to-heart just helped me pin down the culprit.”
Oh-Etsu remained in silent thought as he plucked a shred of binding cloth from the scraps that littered the ground. The cloth looked as if it had been bitten through, and it brought to mind a very specific person. “I wouldn’t let a nobody handle one of my swords, but Ikomikidomoe isn’t a sword that can be handled by a nobody in the first place.”
As he muttered the name of the missing zanpaku-to, Oh-Etsu looked into the empty air with the heartache and outrage of an offended swordsmith but also with a good deal of wariness. “So who are you going to get to wield that sword for you, aristo?”
≡
Then, just as the great battle ended, the Reiokyu’s borders were once again sealed. The deadened air resonated with the echoes of combat and the unchanging authority imposed by the Reio, and a great many warnings signaling disaster remained in the atmosphere. Or rather, countless sins continuously suggesting the dawn of a new age in the Soul Society drifted among the pronounced reishi.