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A Guiding Arrow In The Dark (Quincy SI) Chapter 1
🕑 Added 2023-05-13 09:31:01 +0000 UTC-x-
CHAPTER 1
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Soul Society, Bleach
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Being Reborn in a fantasy world should have been fun. It was supposed to be a life of adventure and mystery and romance, even more so if you were familiar with the setting in question from before.
But no, instead, the last twenty-three years of Irene's life had been hell. As an Echt Quincy that was born in the shadows of Soul Society, Irene’s entire life had been decided for her the moment she was born.
The monsters who had the audacity to call themselves her parents were the greatest source of pain and suffering in this ‘bright’ new life of hers. Years of torture and ‘discipline’ disguised as ‘training’ had long since beaten out any lingering love and attachment she might have felt for them. And while she might have forgiven them if it was just some sort of anime ‘harsh love’ training montage, no, she wouldn't because the sadistic bastards were just abusive assholes who looked for an excuse to cause pain to anyone they could reasonably get away with. Including their own daughter.
In the end, she couldn’t argue that their methods weren’t effective though. She threw everything she had into her effort to grow stronger - to the point where they would never be able to dictate her life anymore.
And while she succeeded, she was also a bit too late; for they had already married her off to an even bigger asshole who also happened to be her fucking cousin. All to preserve that vaunted bloodline of hers.
The only reason she hadn’t snapped yet was because he hadn’t forced himself on her. Not because he didn’t want to, oh no, he didn’t because he was too much of a pussy to make the attempt on someone who could manhandle him like the weasel he was - considering that her spiritual pressure eclipsed his own by several orders of magnitude, the reason was obvious.
While she was no super-hybrid protagonist who had every power in the universe under her belt, she still had ‘potential’ in spades, having achieved the vaunted level of Spiritual Power that was the measuring stick of Captain class Soul Reapers, even if it took her well over a decade to do so.
With their ‘marriage’ in shambles, her ‘husband’ focused his… attentions on the servants instead. Well, she wasn’t going just to sit there and watch while he tried to re-enact Game of Thrones on his lonesome. If anything, it just further strengthened her resolve to leave this life behind.
Not that she needed an incentive of course, she had something called ‘survival instincts’, and she was determined to not be in the neighborhood when Yhwach kicked off the Thousand Year Blood War. She didn’t spend her entire life cultivating her body and soul just for Grand-daddy dearest to take all her power for himself. Nope. Nada. Nein.
She refused to let it all be for nothing. But even if she betrayed the Quincies - where would she go? The Soul Reapers were arguably worse, and wouldn’t hesitate to off her as soon as it was convenient, and she didn’t want to test her chances with Aizen or the Fullbringers. Joining the peanut gallery that was the ‘main cast’ of the show was just asking for trouble. In the end, she was alone in this, and that overlooked the fact that she didn’t want to be anywhere on the same planet when Yhwach decided that he wanted all his ‘borrowed’ power back using the Auswählen.
“Fuck the War.” She mumbled. If her plan succeeded, then she wouldn’t have to worry about Soul Reapers or Quincies or Hollows anymore. She would be… Free.
As such, she even prepared a… politely worded letter to her parents and a ‘divorce notice’ for her ‘husband’ in advance to be delivered to them long after she was gone.
Irene shook her head and tied her relatively short hair into a ponytail - she wasn’t taking any chances today. She stretched her limbs and looked out the window of her temporary hideout. It was the most remote spot she could find that still had a clear unobstructed view of Sōkyoku Hill.
The plan was relatively simple, all things considered, and had as few moving parts and variables as humanly possible. There was no plan B, no second chances or retries. She was betting everything she had - everything she was, and everything she could ever be, on this one, single shot. If she messed it up, that was it for her.
She had obsessively practiced archery her entire life, all for this one moment, and she wasn’t going to let it pass her by.
Irene had been staking out this spot the moment she had realized that Kuchiki Rukia had lost her Shinigami powers after being dispatched to Karakura town, kicking off the ‘plot’ of what was once a story on the pages of her favorite manga.
Her keen eyes picked apart every minute detail as the ‘Protagonists’ battled their way to the execution hill against all odds to save their friend. She watched as a ‘perfectly ordinary’ human teenager beat the shit out of one of the captains of the Gotei Thirteen Court Guard Squads, a man who could decimate entire armies of soul eating monsters on his lonesome.
And then she saw Sosuke Aizen descend on the battlefield like an angel of death, absolutely humiliating everyone in the area and generally just asserting his dominance like the gigachad he was.
Unfortunately for him, Irene was here to piss on his parade.
She carefully raised the meticulously wrapped arrow from the table and delicately fingered the sticker that would undo the sealing. The Moment Aizen Removed the Hogyoku from Rukia Kuchiki’s body, the arrow was already notched, the wrapping all but disintegrating under she speed at which she had torn it off, revealing a single, pale arrow.
It was a ghastly thing, stark white and uniform, with a grainy texture that betrayed its origin; it was made of bone dust. Her own bone dust to be precise. She had spent years abusing all the miraculous healing the Quincies could offer to carefully remove bits of herself every now and then, only to grind them all to dust in order to create a perfect receptacle that would gleefully accept all the Reishi she could throw at it without anything being lost in transition.
Irene had been charging the thing up for years on end, and by this time, it contained more condensed spiritual energy than the entirety of the Gotei 13 combined, much like the Sōkyoku itself - if quite a bit weaker. But it was never intended to be a weapon of brute force in the first place.
Everyone in Soul Society could feel the immense spiritual pressure released by her arrow the instant she unsealed it, but they couldn’t do anything about it. Their collective efforts were far too little, too late.
Before anyone could even realize what was going on, she released the grotesque arrow of condensed bone and soul, and let it fly. It erupted from her bow with such force that the recoil pulverized her entire arm, and distorted the very space around it as it honed in onto its target.
Even Aizen, unimaginably powerful as he was, couldn’t dodge it.
But that wasn’t the point now was it? Aizen was never the target. No, the real target was the pretty little orb that he clutched in his hand… or at least it used to be.
Now, the indestructible wish granting device flew out of the Seireitei at speeds several times that of sound… through the same gaping hole in the wards that she had punched through with her Millennium Arrow - which deserved the name for ruining so many thousand year plans - and into a suspicious patch of shadow that just so happened to be there in the same calculated spot she had spent years trying to figure out.
Yes, the Sekkiseki barrier should have blocked anything spiritual from going in or out, but human bone was all too mundane of a material for it to counter, especially at the speeds it was moving at and the force it carried behind it.
And before so much a foot could be moved in its general direction, she had already left it all behind, a warped, bleeding arrow clutched in a pulverized hand, held together more by strings of reishi and mental fortitude than anything else, and the most dangerous device on the planet in the other.
And with another step, she was already falling through the shadows, landing onto the fringes of the Shatten Beraihi; the shadow world.
The last thing she heard as she left Soul Society behind was an inhuman roar of rage so profound she could hardly fathom it, and the literal, soul crushing spiritual pressure of a monster beyond anything she had ever known drowning out the world in his terrifying aura.
And then the shadows closed and she was alone.
In the end, all that effort had paid off. She had won.
Against, Aizen, against Yhwach, against this stupid fucking world that was out for her head. A decade of effort had culminated in this one moment, where she stood victorious against the fate itself. And with that realization, she felt as if the weight of the sky had been lifted from her shoulders.
Irene had never felt so free in her entire life.
But then she steeled herself. It was not the time to relax. Not yet, anyways, when she was still at her most vulnerable.
The first thing she did was slam the Hogyoku into her chest, fusing it with her very being and proceeded to immediately jump off the edge of the Wandenreich city, and into the yawning void between worlds below.
And as she gazed at the floating city as it grew smaller and smaller, she uttered her final words of goodbye.
“This is Sternritter N; the Navigation, and I’m handing in my resignation. I had a terrible time here, and I hope I never return. I’m going to fuck off now.” She said, before slowly closing her eyes.
After a few minutes of free-fall, the air began to thin more and more until she was choking in vacuum, held alive only by the immortality granted to her by the Hogyoku. Her sense of time started to fray, and she slowly lost track of everything as space and time started to distort.
And then her mind was filled with static and she fell off the 'edges' of the world.
Her one last thought was that she wished to arrive in a world she could thrive in.
There was no future left for her in the world she left behind, so she gambled everything on this one hope. Maybe it was genius, maybe it was just a foolish, suicidal dream.
She had thought that ‘If I had ended up in a world I thought was fiction, Doesn’t that mean that the other 'fictional' worlds were real too? And couldn’t the Hogyoku grant any wish by evolving its user to survive and reach it?’
Maybe this was all a mistake and she was about to die, but she was content with that too; She had already died once, and she was fine with passing on on her own terms.
She just wished things were different.
And Unbeknownst to her, the Hogyoku Shone.
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