An Arcanist in Karakura Town 61 (Patreon)

An Arcanist in Karakura Town

Chapter 61

-VB-

It happened right when I was about to change Sora’s diapers. 

My entire home shook with whatever just struck Hide’s impenetrable shield. That was … rare. 

I quickly changed the diapers, believing that the shield will hold, and stepped out of the house portion of the warehouse and into the warehouse proper. 

“Tatsuki?” I spoke up when I saw her looking at some of my not-computer computer screens that showed the outside world. 

“It’s those Quincies again,” she grunted irritably. She turned to look at me. “How are you going to stop them this time?” she asked me. 

“... I don’t think I will stop them, per se,” I hummed. 

She blinked. “You aren’t?” she asked. “Then how are we suppose to go out to get groceries?”

“You mean aside from the fact that I can open interdimensional portals to other Japans that have more goods at lower prices for the same Yen you use here?” I asked her with a smirk.

Her eyebrows rose up. “You would let us visit other worlds?” she asked me in surprise. “You’ve always kept a tight leash on that technology, so I assumed…”

“I finally got the last of the kinks worked out,” I told her with a smile. “Before, I couldn’t open a portal reliably back to the universe I wanted, so it would have been easy to get stranded.”

“Oh. That might be a problem.”

“Yup! But I got it fixed now. What used to be just one-shot portal to bumfuck nowhere are now reliable portals. Or even dimension breakers.”

She paused and then gave me a stink eye. 

“I’m not sure if I like the sound of that. ‘Dimension breakers.’”

I giggled. 

Her frowns intensified. 

“Alan…”

I grinned. “So. Before I start. Let me explain a few things.”

“Okay?”

The barrier shook again. 

Whatever they just hit us with, it was another strong one comparable to a nuclear bomb. I glanced at the image. 

Yup. Even if the attack had been mostly spiritual, it was still powerful enough to wipe out Karakura Town’s warehouse district. There was not a single building standing here aside from my warehouse, and whoever was around at this time was either dust in the wind or crushed underneath the rubble of destruction that was still smoking and dusting from how recent the destruction had been. 

“These Quincies actually hide their main base of operation in-between dimensions,” I told her as even Orihime came out of the house at this point. “Come here, Hime,” I said to her as I directly summoned Hidemasa. My Servant looked surprised by the summon and looked at me. 

“It’s been a while, Master.”

“Yup,” I hummed. Hide’s been over Japan recently. Something about hot spring adventures…

Our home shook again from the impact, and Hide actually stumbled. “So that’s what it was about,” he muttered. “I thought I was suffering heatstroke.”

“You? A Servant getting a heatstroke?” I asked him incredulously. 

He shrugged. 

Well… he’s probably hiding something because that was a stupid lie, but as long as it wasn’t anything dangerous to me and my girls - and my babies - I didn’t care. He was living his second life, and I wasn’t going to interfere. 

“Is it the Shinigamis or Hollows?” he asked me.

“Quincies.”

He looked at me. “You made a third enemy?” he asked me incredulously. “Master, you have a knack for pissing people off.”

“Oi, they attacked me out of nowhere,” I snapped at him indignantly. “I’m the victim here, not them!” 

“So you say. So you say. Normally, the perpetrators don’t drop attacks powerful enough to level cities if they haven’t been harmed.”

“All I did was send their first offending party to another dimension to be eaten by sleeping gods! Maybe they shouldn’t randomly attack someone and put them to siege for weeks!” 

He nodded. “That is fair point in this day and age, but such attacks were common when I was first alive.”

“Ugh,” I muttered. “Whatever,” I said before getting to work.

“And what are you doing?” Tatsuki asked me warily. 

“Well, since the Quincies outside want to play, I’m going to play with them, too. See, I know that they are hiding from the Shinigamis and Hollows. Those two might hate each other because that is their part in the natural cycle of souls, but they hate the Quincies more because they end souls instead of moving them along the soul cycle,” I explained again, this time for Hidemasa’s sake. “So if they want to send a shit ton of their strongmen here to try and fuck me up, why don’t I fuck them up in return? Why don’t I force them out of hiding?” I grinned. 

I’ve been preparing for this, and while this was certainly not the only one and was the tamest of my preparations, I was still itching to use it, you know? 

In the far corner of the warehouse, one of my devices lit up and spun to life. 

“And … dimension collapse,” I giggled.

The dimension collapser, a spherical device that targeted a specific location across multiple dimensions, had a very simple function. It forced a cascade effect to take place by anchoring multiple layers of dimensions, soul and physical. This caused a lot of stress because dimensions weren’t fixed things but fluid planes of existence. You can’t just anchor them to each other when it didn’t happen naturally! 

But what happens if I do?

One of two things happens.

One, the anchor can’t hold it all together and explosively breaks. This causes that location across all dimensions to experience the explosion of ripping fabrics of reality. These fabrics of reality eventually heal in time measured in seconds, but such a tear was enough to mix things up across the targeted dimensions and force objects and people to dimensionally “shift” from their original place to a random dimension. Oh, and because the dimensions in that location remained unstable of hours on end, they can’t use other dimensional travel methods because it literally doesn’t work. 

Or two, the anchor can hold it all together and causes an unnatural collapse event where everything in that dimension temporarily collapse into a single interactable, hybrid dimension where everything exists simultaneously. This collapse isn’t stable and eventually violently bounces back in a similar manner as the first scenario. 

And this was the tamest of my preparations. 

And then I targeted the source of all Quincy powers that my dimensionally sensitive sensors could find. 

Then without any preamble, I hit send.

… Wait, where was the new spiritual nexus? That’s where shit was going to go down for people.