I reached out my fingers, pushing them through Suzumi’s long black hair as she began to wake from the deep sleep that she’d been enchanted into by her mother.

“Good morning, sleepyhead.” I intoned sweetly, a genuine happiness bubbling to the surface as I gazed over her gently awakening face. She groaned unhappily, a staple of her wakeup process, making me chuckle and pinch her slightly chubby cheek lightly.

She lifted a lazy hand, swatting my own away from her cheek as she sighed and righted herself from her side of our bed.

“How’d I get home?” Suzumi whispered sleepily and I myself got out of bed, brushing off some invisible dust from my jeans.

“Your mother called me and got me to carry you home.” She turned to me with a raised eyebrow.

“I didn’t know that my mum had your number.”

“She didn’t, she had Jinta’s.” She scrunched up her face in a mixture of embarrassment and consternation.

“Of course she did. I hate that she knew about the whole spiritual stuff before I did.” I laughed, giving her a wry shrug.

“What’s worse, we tried to withhold it from her, which is just about the most hilariously useless thing we could have done.” She groaned louder, though the smile on her face gave away her own amusement.

“Maybe,” she said quietly, “I’m just not sure that I like that she’s in just as much danger as we are.”

“Is she really, though? She’s just spiritually sensitive. She might be in more danger than the average citizen, but if she’s lived this long, and through that apocalypse that everyone keeps talking about, then I think she’ll be just fine.” Suzumi frowned, but it was broken by a yawn.

“I guess so,” she said, her words coming out warped because of the yawn, “still, I don’t like it. Everyone is saying that bad things are on the horizon and having her be anywhere near it gives me the heebie jeebies.”

“You could ask her to move out of Karakura?” I questioned somewhat hopefully, though it earned me a particularly dry look.

“Who and what army?” I couldn’t help but chuckle at the silly response, making my girlfriend roll her eyes gratuitously.

“Anyway!” I said as I rose from my spot next to Suzumi, already fully dressed, “Tessai probably convinced Kisuke to give us a day of reprieve, and if we wait much longer, Kisuke would probably end up exploding or something.” I felt around for their ribbons as I waited for Suzumi’s response, which was yet another groan as she stumbled from bed and quickly got changed into something more modest.

The two partners were currently down in the Study Room, which only took a few minutes for us to leisurely make our way down to. When we finally reached the end of the long flight of stairs, and entered into the impressively large underground area, even more impressive that I could now see its full area with both my regular eyesight and my more advanced spiritual senses.

“What a surprise!” A theatrical voice called, making Suzumi and I habitually roll our eyes, “The two spiritual anomalies have awoken at last?” We both turned and gave Kisuke a dry gaze, Suzumi’s being significantly better than my own attempt.

“Whatever you say, Kisuke.” I said, looking around for where the second red ribbon was that I’d seen down here. “Where’d Tessai go off to?”

“No need to worry, he’ll be back in just a moment.” Kisuke said, adjusting his white and green striped hat while pointedly ignoring the question entirely. “I think it’s more important to go over some of your recent exploits. The both of you.”

I sighed and prepared a hand to count off of a mental list.

“Alright so,” I began heavily, “first; the silver ribbon blade came from the silver light I told you about after I built my soul back up again, secondly; no I haven’t been able to resummon it, I can’t even feel it anymore, thirdly; yes my soul is ‘complete’, fourthly; yes, Grayhom and I can think simultaneously now, fifth; I can now see other people souls and theorise with them as a basis instinctively.” I stopped at my pinkie finger on my right hand, looking at the number of fingers pensively before quickly adding.

“Oh, and I have what I’d consider full spiritual sense now, probably.” I said, closing out with the thumb on my left hand, presenting them to Kisuke with eyebrow raised. The man himself looked a little taken aback but nodded slowly.

“That was… concise. All of that we could see coming in some sense, though that silver ribbon sword and it’s capabilities are a giant mystery it seems?” He half stated, half asked, but I disappointed the man with a nod. With a tsk, the man crossed his arms and furrowed his brow in consternation. I could just about hear the Rube Goldberg machine that was Kisuke Urahara’s mind making a cacophony of sounds as he thought.

I found myself liking the new Kisuke, which was almost alien to the adversarial position that he’d taken within my new life. He’d been horrible to me in many ways, mostly directly after our initial meeting, but soon after that he’d slowly just become a nuisance and a bit of a jerk. Now? He was almost nice, trusting me with my own determinations of my new abilities instead of trying to cut it out of me with threats and dangerous gazes.

“Well, I can only imagine that’ll change soon.” The man looked up from the ground, breaking himself from his thoughts and instead looking around the wide room idly before returning to Suzumi’s own gaze.

“So, you’re quite the special one now.” He said, a mixture of discomfort and interest emblazoned across his face. “The first being unbound by the Chains of Fate. You can even still be considered living. Quite the accomplishment.” Suzumi snorted derisively, though it lacked genuine heat.

“It better have been, I almost died and became a Hollow.” Kisuke shrugged nonchalantly, almost flippant in the face of the remark.

“Such are the risks. Besides, Tessai and I weren’t unaware of the possibility that you’d have a powerful Hollow component to your soul. We do know about your mother, and that she’d had an encounter with a Hollow many years ago. Technically that gives you every right to be a Fullbringer as well.” I quirked an eyebrow.

“Fullbringer?” I asked and Kisuke waved a hand.

“The long and the short of it is that Fullbringers are people whose mother was attacked by a Hollow at some point before their birth. Hollow spiritual energy actually lingers around in human bodies for a few decades, and when a child is born the formation of their spiritual self and soul is influenced by the energy. They get some wacky powers out of the deal.” I turned to Suzumi with a questioning eye, though Kisuke cut in before Suzumi could deny having said ‘wacky powers’.

“All Fullbringers have mothers that’ve been attacked by Hollows, but not all of those children are Fullbringers. Especially not when your mother has a lot of spiritual energy to deal with the leftover energy. Otherwise Uyu would also be a Fullbringer.”

“But Suzumi does have some of that energy?” I asked curiously, getting a little glare from Suzumi who was about to ask the same thing.

“Her mother was young when it happened, and likely wasn’t strong enough to actually deal with the energy at that point. The longer you leave the energy, the more entrenched it becomes, and before long it’s almost as much a part of you as anything else in your body. Thus, Suzumi has a more powerful than average Hollow component to her being. Something that wouldn’t have been an issue if she’d only grown to be slightly more powerful than her mother.”

We all nodded with that, Kisuke actually doing a good job at answering our questions in non-frustrating sessions of trying to pull blood from a stone.

“So, what would’ve happened if she’d hollowfied? Properly, I mean.” I asked quietly, almost hesitant to ask. Kisuke nodded slowly, thinking as he did so.

“Well, you forget that Tessai is just about the most powerful Kidō user aside from possibly Ichibe—though, that man could barely make a new kidō structure to save his life.” Kisuke looked like he was just about ready to spit, though he shrugged it off after a moment of seething, “He would have put her in a nice little barrier, then have waited for me to come around and start easing her back into dominance, though I’m afraid that it’d result in her being the closest equivalent to being a Visard, just even more Hollow.”

“How much Hollow?” The woman herself asked.

“Fifty-fifty?” The man said, wry grin in place. Suzumi scowled, though I placed a hand on her shoulder that seemed to calm her a little.

“Well, we know that they are there now, we can deal with it as we go along.” I said placatingly, and after a moment she nodded her head silently. I breathed out heavily, just short of a sigh, and looked to Suzumi more closely.

“Have you found anything new about your Soul Freedom?” I probed lightly, though her expression of consternation didn’t give me high hopes.

“Nothing much yet. I feel… better, though.” I looked to Kisuke covertly, finding his grey eyes. He gave it a moment of thought and nodded. Well, at least I got some confirmation that everything was fine. I had actually done a fair amount of the repair work myself, when I’d been inside Suzumi’s soul. Truthfully, I understood very little about what I’d actually done, and even Grayhom had been somewhat surprised by the sudden boost in our abilities to not only edit another’s soul, but to also understand it so clearly.

Now, while I had a good instinctive grasp over it, I couldn’t even remotely come close to how I’d basically entirely restructured parts of Suzumi’s soul to work without a Chain of Fate. The method that Tessai had used to actually work with the soul was pretty good, but it was crude. Without me there, things would have gone pretty wrong for Suzumi, though it was potentially a viable option of someone with a powerful enough soul and free of any major impurities. Otherwise, I’d have to be there to actually complete the procedure.

“Where is Tessai, I thought he’d–” I heard Kisuke mutter before there was a sudden thump as a rush of wind buffeted against my body with a force that would have easily blown me back a few metres not so long ago.

Standing where the source of the displaced air had come from, was the tall form of Tessai, except now he was holding someone else while he wore a hard expression.

“Kisuke!” He bellowed, though he failed to come up with anything else as he fell to one knee, managing to gently place the form he was holding to the ground as he did so. We all rushed over the few metres that separated us, though Kisuke held us back with a wave of his hand.

He quickly knelt over the woman that Tessai had brought into the Study Room with him. He placed a hand over her body and in a moment, there was a grand flash of green before a light cough rung out. Kisuke lifted the woman up, revealing a full view of a strikingly familiar woman, one we’d never met but knew all the same.

A woman with long black hair with a distinctive fringe that fell between her eyes laid there, coughing wetly as little sputters of blood came to her lips. However, it was her face that sent a collective shockwave through Suzumi and I’s bodies. Her eyes drooped downwards, almost as if she were constantly sad, her lips pulled downwards in a permanent frown.

It was Uyu’s face.

“Ururu, what happened?” Kisuke called after a minute, though it was even more time before she managed to respond.

“Uyu, Jinta…” She coughed again, but Tessai’s powerful voice rung out in her stead.

“They were taken.”

“By whom?” Kisuke asked immediately, his eyes burning with spiritual power, enough that I could see them glow through my natural vision.

“Hollows. Too many of them.” Tessai answered, grunting with a little pain, “They were coming for Hueco Mundo.”

“Hollows following orders?” Kisuke recoiled, almost disbelieving.

“Something capable of controlling them, maybe. I don’t know–” A lightbulb went off in my head at that moment. Understanding dawned with a silver glow.

“Phantom.” I said, my voice cutting through the clamour.

“What about him?” Suzumi stated quickly, urging me forwards underneath the powerful eyes of all present.

“Phantom is losing stability, and its a really powerful Hollow. I’d bet anything that some Hollow from Hueco Mundo is looking to take advantage of the power a self-destructing soul, waiting till the moment where the main identity of the Hollow is destroyed and eat it. And who is to deny him a little snack along the way?”

The harrowing declaration resounded in the massive space, rebounding off the walls and returning to my ear easily, despite the usual lack of an echo.

“Well shit.” Kisuke said, worry etched into his face, “That’s not good.”