It was several hours later until we finally could relax a bit.

I had spent some of the time patching up Ganju, but the majority of our efforts had been on Ichigo. He was better off than expected really. Despite several deep gashes in his torso none of the damage went as deep as his internal organs, even so between all the blood loss and lacerations Hanataro had spent hours just getting him healed enough that he wouldn’t die if we left him alone too long.

Even then I spent most of the time as an aide rather than helping directly. Turns out, rather obviously, two healing methods using completely different power sources didn’t mix well, so we had to choose which one to use.

And while my healing spells were just as good, I personally was less qualified as a medic so Hanataro took the job as Ichigo’s healer.

Not that Ichigo seemed to care about getting healed up. The second he regained consciousness he tried to limp back out to continue deeper into the Seireitei. Luckily for him Ganju knocked him out before he got too far, saying that it was better he did it than leaving it to me. I wasn’t sure if I should have been insulted or not. After all, I wasn’t really going to hit Ichigo with a frying pan to stop him from being an idiot.

Didn’t stop me from getting a few worried glances from the other two every once and awhile though.

Seriously, no one could take a joke.

Once that bit of drama was out of the way, everyone settled pretty quickly. Ichigo was still out for the count, Ganju had fallen asleep against a wall, Hanataro was focusing on healing Ichigo completely, and I was drilling Hanataro for information on the Seireitei.

He was incredibly helpful in pointing out the locations of interesting locations that weren’t shown on the maps I had picked up. As it stood, I now knew the locations of nearly all the Squad barracks, hidden routes mostly used as shortcuts by Squad Four, and most importantly where the Captain’s offices where. Specifically the office of Squad Five.

I felt a little bad tricking Hanataro into telling me these things since I phrased it that I wanted to know so we wouldn’t go anywhere near them if we could help it, just to turn around and use this to break into one of the offices the first chance I got.

The kid was far too earnest, by far.

But this gave me the perfect chance to derail Aizen’s distraction plot if I could snatch the letter he left behind before anyone looked at it.

Out of the many plots Aizen had going on during the execution, the one that always bothered me the most was the breaking of his lieutenant. It was cruel, unnecessary, and something I wasn’t going to let happen.

So I decided this would be the moment I stopped trying to allow canon to proceed while dancing around the edges and started doing things for myself. Afterall just because I recognized the setting didn’t mean things would play out the same way. Things were already moving in different directions just by me being here. The third seat of Squad Two never made an appearance as far as I could tell, so it wasn’t like things would change from that point on.

This was me just finally accepting that. Kinda.

Annoying fact about knowing the future, or at least a possible future, you tend to grab onto that future and use it as the guideline for all your current behaviors.

Breaking off into unknown territory was far more frightening. So much so that I think I was delaying this moment subconsciously. Even if I was clearly more powerful than Ichigo at the moment, I had taken great pains to move stealthily for no real reason other than avoiding high level Soul Reapers. But I had already planned to fight three captain level opponents just by helping with this little rescue mission.

So, time to stop putting this off and actually commit.

I stood up and made my way over to Hanataro, who was still laboring to heal Ichigo. This would be the best time to break off since Ganju had passed out a few hours ago.

“Hey Hanataro,” I called out to get his attention. “I’ll be going out on my own. Just let the others know when they wake up.”

Clearly tired from hours of healing, Hanataro blearily blinked at me before actually realizing what I said.

“Wait, going out on your own? Why?”

“Simple, we are probably going to draw a lot of attention for taking down a lieutenant. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are guards in place waiting for us tomorrow.” I lied through my teeth. “So I’m going to go make sure any enemy attention is on me while you all continue to the tower.”

“But what if you need help? Or if you run into another Lieutenant?” He asked.

“I can take care of myself just fine,” I chided him. “And I could get away from a lieutenant just fine if needed.”

I started walking away from the group, calling back over my shoulder, “Don’t worry, I’ll meet up with you at the tower. Take care!” before making my way back to the surface.

Some time later I found myself hiding outside the Squad Five barracks. Dawn had come and gone meaning all the high level officers should be off to their duties. Of course that probably meant that Lieutenant Momo Hinamori had found Aizen’s “dead” body and was in jail. Not ideal since I wanted to spare her the breakdown, but not something I was in a position to change. Especially since fighting the entire squad to get access to the captain’s rooms wasn’t a realistic option.

The barracks was hopefully pretty empty by now, all the normal Soul Reapers were off looking for our group, and the officers should be coordinating the reports coming in and trying to keep the other daily tasks needed to run the squads operating as normal even with a bunch of highly destructive people running around causing issues.

So it was simple for me to make my way up to the upper floor of the barracks right outside the officer’s area without being spotted. I ducked in and out of a few of the rooms on the way trying to determine which one was Aizen’s, until I finally found the rooms I was looking for.

The large brushwork ‘five’ easily identified the owner of the room since I hadn’t seen anything like it in any of the other much smaller rooms. The high quality, if simple, furniture had some fancy writing implements and a few documents laying about but much of the...living room?...sure why not, living room was pretty barren actually.

Outside of a few bookcases, a short legged table, and a desk there wasn’t anything else in the room. Not surprising, since Aizen liked to play the humble, helpful, dependable captain. I figured his bedroom was much the same, but had absolutely no desire to go through his stuff so I moved to the table and started going through the papers there.

The letter in question was sitting out in the open, so that was easily snatched up.

Mission accomplished.

Poking around the other papers on the table didn’t turn up anything really interesting. Though it turned out Aizen did poetry when he wasn’t murdering and/or experimenting on people.

Hidden depths, whaddya know?

I turned and walked towards the door intent on just meeting back up with Ichigo’s group when the bedroom door suddenly opened and a diminutive figure rushed out and bowed in my direction.

“I’m very sorry Captain Aizen, I didn’t mean to fall asleep!” the small figure, who I now recognized as Lieutenant Hinamori, rapidly said.

She quickly glanced up at me before a confused look appeared on her face. “You aren’t Captain Aizen…”

Between the sudden appearance of a person who definitely shouldn’t still be here -seriously all the other soul reapers have been up for almost two hours now- and the personal disappointment she actually managed to catch me completely by surprise, I kinda froze up.

“Um...yeah?”

Brilliant Alex, just brilliant.

The Lieutenant slowly straightened up, “You’re one of the Ryoka, aren’t you.”

For whatever reason, my brain was still rebooting, “Well, I’ve been known to hang out with some of them.” I slowly started backing up towards the door. I doubted I was going to be allowed to just walk away, but having a headstart to choose a battleground before she caught me wasn’t a bad idea.

Cautious eyes followed the movement reminding me despite fans liking to joke about how useless a lieutenant Hinamori was, she was still one of the more powerful members of the Seireitei and would have needed to face down several powerful hollows over her career.

Just as I reached the door she saw the letter still gripped in my hand. The cautious look morphed into a harder, angry one. “You broke in here to steal Captain Aizen’s documents?!” She accused, “Give that back!”

By this point I finally recovered from her sudden intrusion. I gave the smaller girl a smirk. “I went through all the effort of getting it in the first place,” I taunted “If you want it back, i guess you will need to take it.”

With that remark, I spun on my heel and rushed out the door, pouring on as much speed as I could. The enraged shriek behind me told me everything I needed to know about if I was being pursued or not.

A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed that I was indeed being chased by a now very angry lieutenant. Also I needed to dodge.

A sphere of red flame streaked through the air and only narrowly missed me. I mentally cursed of course Hinamori would use Kido, it was what she was supposedly most talented at after all.

A quickly traced throwing dagger was fairly effortlessly deflected but did distract her from finishing another Kido, but all that meant was Hinamori responded with a weaker spell than what she had been casting earlier.

Two streaks of fiery blue light exploded on the path in front of me causing the walls to collapse and blocking off the route. In response I quickly leaped up to roof-level.

Which put me on top of a fairly large warehouse with a nice flat roof. Good enough place as any I supposed. With a lieutenant chasing after me throwing fireballs the whole way I was only going to attract more attention. This was out of the way enough that no one should interfere.

Turning back to face my pursuer, I saw her land on the roof, sword already released, and glare at me.

“A little eager, aren’t we?” I called out. “You haven’t even introduced yourself and you’re ready to go all out. That's poor manners, little miss lieutenant.”

If anything her glare intensified.

“Return Captain Aisen’s documents and surrender. You can’t escape.”

Well she’s confident. It might have been impressive if she didn’t look like a twelve year old with a fancy sword.

I told her as much, adding “and you seem way less of a fighter than the red-head we ran into, so forgive me for not quivering in fear.”

Probably the wrong thing to bring up based on how she was now trying to kill me with her eyes. “You were the one who hurt Abarai-kun?! You’re going to pay for that.” She growled, before launching a series of fireballs at me.

I was a little taken aback that she attacked after coming to that conclusion. Yeah it was wrong, but if you decide the person in front of you nearly killed a lieutenant stronger than you and was seeming fine the next day, you would think attacking head on was a bad idea.

Of course then I remembered in the canon timeline Hinamori decided attacking two different captains head on was a good idea and her actions didn’t surprise me as much.

Sidestepping the fireballs, I traced my twin swords and rushed forward quickly closing the distance between us. More fireballs streaked towards me but I was fast enough to dodge them without anything worse than a near miss.

Both my swords came down in a twin strike to her shoulder that was clumsily blocked by the angry lieutenant and she was flung backwards. Odd, I shouldn’t have been able to push her back that easily.

“You need to better than that to beat me, miss lieutenant!” I called, if she was going to fight angry than I was going to use that to my advantage.

Though I wondered how much I needed that advantage. I had a very small pool of opponents to compare to Hinamori, but the squad two officer from the other day seemed to be a stronger opponent in every way except Kido. A frown made its way onto my face when I thought that.

I know Hinamori wasn’t shown to be as combat proficient as far as lieutenants go, but surely she should at least be on the same level as a third seat officer from another squad?

A growl pulled me out of my thoughts as Hinamori charged me instead of continuing to attack from a distance.

A strike going at my neck was blocked caught by crossing both of my swords and Hinamori twisted her balde in a way that locked all three blades together.

“Are you not taking me seriously or something?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at her. “Cause I think I win in physical stre-”

I was interrupted by a bright red fireball erupting from the base of her blade and exploding in my face that sending me skidding across the rooftop.

As soon as I got some traction on the roof I flipped myself back onto my feet and flung myself off to a side just as even more fireballs crashed into my previous position.

Note to self, even weaker Lieutenants are dangerous if you let your guard down.

Hinamori stopped attacking after seeing me recover from her surprise attack. It looked like she had finally calmed down and was thinking again rather than attacking out of blind anger.

“I’m being very serious, Ryoka.” She said, still sounding angry enough. “First all of you run around the Seireitei and hurt all those people, then you injure Abarai-kun to that point and we can’t even help him because of his captain, and then you break in to steal from Captain Aizen?! All you people do is hurt people.”

Hinamori seemed to tremble with fury.

“I don’t want to fight… but if it’s to stop people like you, I’ll fight with everything I have!”

… well then. Turns out Hinamori is a magical girl when she isn’t being super obsessive about Aizen.

Not… not really sure how to deal with that, honestly. Especially since I seem to have been cast as the villain at the moment.

I cocked my head to one side while I considered that. A group of superstrong invaders attacking the Seireitei for seemingly no reason, each one they are aware of strong enough to beat elite defenders at every encounter, and one of the most powerful of them is defeated when he confronts the invaders.

Then by pure chance a kind hearted young girl discovers one of the invaders stealing from one of the highest ranked leaders and is forced to fight to recover what was stolen.

Yeah, that seems kinda like the setup to a magical girl plot.

So I’m the villain now. Yay.

At least black looks good on me.