An Arcanist in Karakura Town 28: The Last Research (Patreon)

An Arcanist in Karakura Town
Chapter 28: The Last Research

-VB-

I caught an intruder.

It wasn’t any of the Visored or Urahara’s crew or Ichigo’s friends. No, this was a completely different person and his intention had been very clear.

If the nondescript throw away knives weren’t any indication, then it was the fact that he carried poison with him.

A hostile.

What really made this situation complicated was the fact that this man had a zanpakuto on him.

He might have gotten away with sneaking around my place if he went around sneaking around properly. But he didn’t. He probably thought that my warehouse was no different from regular material world buildings and expected to phase right through.

He didn’t know about the bounded field and promptly got himself concussed and knocked out.

Grumbling, I grabbed him by him by the back of his ninja-suit (whatever passed for it in the Soul Society) and dragged him into the warehouse.

-VB-

2nd Division 7th Seat Sugo Yuma blearily woke up.

Then his eyes shot open when he couldn’t move.

He found himself struggling mid-air. He looked down and found some kind of rope made out of light holding him in place within a barred cage. He pulled his head up and looked around.

He wished he hadn’t.

Surrounding him were Hollows in similar cages.

“Hey.”

He looked at the Hollow who’d just greeted him as if he was an old friend.

“I don’t know what you did, but man, you fucked up,” the Hollow cackled.

That sounded more like a Hollow, sneering and deriding the shinigamis everywhere.

“Well, you better enjoy what little time you have left, because I heard the mad scientist over there that you were going to enjoy his tender mercies first for whatever reason. Thank you for that, by the way. I don’t like being ground to dust.”

Chatty.

Wait, what was that about being ground to dust?

Mad scientist?

He looked around frantically and found the only human in this … warehouse.

It was the same warehouse he had been tasked to infiltrate to learn of its inhabitants.

Standing in front of some kind of dimly lit altar, the man had blonde hair like Matsumoto-fukutaicho but thin like Ukitake-taicho.

The similarities to the two widely-known “good” shinigamis ended there, because Yuma saw a glimpse of this man’s eyes and knew he was before another Kurotsuchi-taicho.

“W-What are you doing experimenting on shinigamis and hollows?!” he demanded boldly to offset his own nervousness.

The man paused for a second and turned to look.

And when the man’s reiatsu came, it wasn’t the normally crushing power he expected from taichos or other powerful shinigamis and hollows. What he felt was a sickening scent of murderers and evil-doers. It wrapped around him, analyzing him like a butcher poked at a slab of meat.

Yuma intensified his struggle. He wasn’t going to die here! Not to a mad scientist like this beast!

“Struggling won’t save you,” the man replied without even blinking before he touched the altar, causing it to dim out and deactivate. “The rope siphons your own power to reinforce its toughness and strength. The more you, a purely spiritual being, struggle, the more that rope gets stronger at your expense.”

Then he pulled out a needle.

“By the way, thank you for volunteering to be my subject,” he said nonchalantly as he approached Yuma.

“I didn’t volunteer for anything!” he shouted frantically as the man grew closer.

“An attempt at home invasion is the same thing. Now, try to relax and not let the tip get broken inside of you. I hear that it can be rather painful to get it back out.”

Then the needle was sinking into Yuma’s neck, and he screamed as everything began to burn.

“Souls obviously have poisons that work on them,” the man said, though it was muffled by whatever poison he’d injected Yuma with. Yuma hung there, gasping and gagging as his veins  bulged and heart drummed inside his head and chest. “But what exactly is poison to your kin? I’ve tested this thoroughly with the Hollows. Say hi to Jamie over there. His regeneration was a great contribution to my researches.”

Yuma sobbed as the pain got too much. He wanted to pass out but he couldn’t.

“What I’ve injected you with was merely something like a spiritual surfactant, if you will. It also works on Hollows, did you know?”

As the pain regressed, Yuma gasped again for air… only, his breath caught as he saw what the man was holding.

It was his Amaya, his zanpakuto.

“What are you…?”

“What happens when a shinigami whose soul is very close to being dissolved has their zanpakuto … let’s say petrified?”

Directly underneath where the mad scientist, this criminal, was holding out his zanpakuto was a circle with some kind of scripts carved into the very concrete of this warehouse’s foundation.

As the man placed the zanpakuto at the center of the circle, it lit up in an ominous red.

“Stop it! Stop it!”

“Test subjects don’t get choices, shinigami.”

And then-.

Yuma felt his very soul start to burn. He couldn’t even breath as he watched his zanpakuto turn a brittle grey and cracks began to form all along its length.

When it snapped in half…

Yuma’s eyes rolled over in his head and he fainted.

The last thing he heard before he fainted were cold and contemplative words.

“Making note to self, spiritual particles in PQ-33 formation works fantastically to cause spiritual bond disruption. Now, how to spray my enemies with this… At least this makes the process somewhat discriminatory.”