A Guiding Arrow In The Dark (Quincy SI) Chapter 1 (Patreon)

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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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