It was moments like this that made me relatively grateful I was so poor at sensing Reiatsu. While I was able to get the broadest strokes of presences once they were strong enough, they still didn’t get more accurate than ‘there is a lot of it’ and ‘its that-ish way’. Hinamori on the other hand looked like someone dropped the sky on her. She was sweating like crazy and looked ready to faint from just the effort of standing up.

Moments later the presence cut out and Hinamori collapsed in relief. From the way she just glared at me while remaining on her knees, I assumed that the sudden pressure from what I was suspecting was Ichigo and Zaraki knocked out what little energy she had left.

Good thing too, since I doubted I had time to continue this fight for much longer before someone came to investigate.

I cautiously approached the fallen Lieutenant dismissing both the copy of her weapon and my kusarigama, whose chain had actually been shattered in the explosion. I stopped a few feet away from her and just kinda stood there.

Hinamori continued staring angrily at me from the ground, still lacking the energy to move. I gave her a hesitant smile.

This is awkward.

“So, uhh… sorry this is ending like this, but I think I need to go pickup a teammate, um, better luck next time?”

“Captain Aizen will stop you.” She declared. I didn’t really have anything to say to that so I simply knocked her out and placed a stronger version of the sleeping curse on her. That way she would remain unconscious for the next five days or so unless someone managed to disrupt the spell or shock her out of it.

I figured leaving the lieutenant to bleed to death in a warehouse wouldn’t win me any points with the Seireitei so I also hit her with a quick healing spell. Not nearly enough to fix her up, but it stopped any bleeding and made it so her burns looked a few days old rather than just inflicted.

Basic first aid, magical edition.

Now that the lieutenant had been dealt with, I began speeding towards my best guess of Ichigo’s location. I was praying that this wasn’t the time I found out that I butterflied something that made everything worse for us, because this was the second of three instances where Ichigo was a hair away from death.

Thankfully once I had gotten past the stairs we were at yesterday, it was very easy to spot the trail of destruction caused by the duel between Ichigo and the squad 11 captain. The skyline with a clearly missing building gave me a good place to start and the surrounding rubble created a trail that led me right to the ending place of the fight pretty easily.

I sprinted around the corner and felt everything crash to a halt as I got an eyeful of a very naked Yoruichi pasting something over one of the many cuts on Ichigo’s torso.

“About time you got here! Hurry up and grab him, we need to get him to a safe house now.” She snapped.

“Uhhh…”

“Alexandria!”

“R-right! Coming…”

-o-

A while later after a frantic rush through the streets, ducking in and out of random buildings, jumping rooftops, and me being left behind for several minutes while Yoruichi flew off with Ichigo on a giant skeletal wing until she came back for me, I found myself leaning with my back to the wall and eyes firmly closed while Yoruichi tended to the wounded teen.

“I wouldn’t have thought you were this shy, Alexandria. Especially since you spent months around Kisuke with little problem.” Yoruichi called over.

I cracked an eyelid, nope still very naked. “I can joke about it, sure. But casual nudity is a little out of my comfort zone.”

“Your surprisingly innocent, you know that?” she scoffed, “Anyways, who got you all ruffled? I know you didn’t run into a captain, so clearly one of the lieutenants out there gave you a better show than you expected.”

I let out a long sigh, “Yeah, Aizen’s lieutenant. She caught me going through his stuff and was surprisingly crafty. Really likes fireballs by the way.”

“Why were you going through Aizen’s stuff?”

“Wanted to see if I could raid his underwear drawer and scatter them all over the place.” I deadpanned.

I could practically feel the disbelieving glare coming from the assassin. But I let the silence stretch for a little bit before relenting.

“Fine, I went to raid his paperwork. I found a letter he wrote to try and set up some other captain as his murderer. So he probably faked his death by now and is hiding out somewhere until the execution.”

“...”

“What?”

“Why the hell would Aizen try framing a Captain for his murder when we are running around? Let me see that letter.”

Yoruichi snached the letter out of my hand while I shifted into a more comfortable position.

“Well, we have been going out of our way to be non-lethal so it’s kinda weird for us to just off a captain. But more likely, however Aizen faked his death wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny if the rest of the squads aren’t focused on something else. We are distracting, sure. But we haven’t disrupted enough of the other squads for them to ignore the death of a Captain for us.” I theorized while she read Aizen’s letter.

Yoruichi hummed in thought, “Its possible,” she conceded, “though most likely he’s using some throwaway plans to in an effort to remove a few more officer-level Shinigami before he reveals himself.”

Eyes still closed, I tilted my head in her direction, “what do you mean?”

“Oh for…” there was a flash of blue light and a much deeper voice continued, “There, better?”

Cracking an eye again I saw Yoruichi went back to her cat form. After giving her a smile and a nod, she continued.

“Aizen’s ultimate goal is to get his hands on the Hogyoku.” she reminded me, “while I’m sure he feels confident to escape from three or even four captains, he would probably take precautions so nothing goes wrong with actually acquiring it in the first place.

In this case, we can probably conclude his lieutenant isn’t part of his main group and was to be sacrificed being sent against Captain Hitsugiya. If by some miracle she takes him out, the squads are down a captain. Otherwise they still need to investigate and Lieutenant Hinamori is either already dead or imprisoned.

In either case, squad five is out both its senior officers and certain duties will need to be handled by other squads and they will need to investigate the assault so even more manpower is tied up.”

Yoruichi started to pace around the room.

“You said his lieutenant caught you?” I nodded. “How badly did you put her down? If she recovers quickly enough, Aizen might try to goad her into attacking someone again.”

I gave her a quick summary. Nothing more serious than one decent sword wound and some burns, if it wasn’t for the curse Hinamori would probably have been fine in a few days.

You would think people would be more appreciative of Squad Four with recovery times like that but nope, Soul Reapers were stupid like that.

“Okay, good news is you probably stopped Aizen from any more attempts to use his lieutenant as a sacrificial pawn. Bad news is Aizen’s plan was still partially successful.”

I grimaced as I thought that through, “Cause now squad five is out its captain and lieutenant just like he wanted, dammit.”

Yoruichi just nodded, “That’s how it is dealing with Aizen. Even if his plan fails it still advances his interests somehow. Don’t feel too down though, at least you managed to preserve some of the Goteijūsantai’s fighting force from whatever Aizen hoped to accomplish in the future.”

I lowered my head into my hands and let out a long groan, “Why couldn’t this just be a simple rescue mission? Just go in, beat up the bad guys, and leave. Is that too much to ask for?”

Yoruichi put a consoling paw on my knee then went back to monitoring Ichigo.

I sighed and pulled out my idea’s notebook. I had some thoughts about that AI I wanted to jot down.

-o-

Hours later I was unsure whether to be grateful Ichigo’s seemingly inextinguishable vitality allowed him to recover so quickly from near fatal wounds, or curse that he wouldn’t stay down long enough to actually heal.

Everything started off nice enough, Ichigo woke up with little issue. Though he did surprise the both of us he was up so soon. Yoruichi decided she had enough of playing housepet and decided to kill Ichigo by reverting back to her human form right in front of him. My unimpressed glare was completely ignored by the cat-girl, who proceeded to flaunt her physique in an attempt to fluster me again while pretending to explain how she managed to transport Ichigo in his wounded state.

It was...partially successful, since my face felt like it was on fire when I dragged her into the side room, more of a storage closet really, to find her clothes. Her loudly complaining I wasn’t this forceful the last time she reverted to her original form while I did my best to stuff her into an outfit certainly didn’t help. Despite that, I could plainly see the amusement in her eyes as she went about getting dressed, taking longer than strictly necessary just to squeeze a bit more enjoyment out of the whole event.

I think Ichigo was ready to pass out from the images Yoruichi implied before I got angry and told her to get back to explaining her little flying artifact she was so proud of. Which she did, fully dressed even!

Until another massive spiritual presence flooded the Seireitei, then everything just went crazy.

Ichigo promptly ‘stole’ the wing artifact off of Yoruichi and then rushed out to confront what was probably yet another Captain level opponent stating he needed to go rescue his friends, ignoring the two stronger healthy combatants in the room. I just stared accusingly at Yoruichi for allowing it in the first place.

“What? He wouldn’t stay put anyway.” Yoruichi said, “Now he gets a look at what a proper Captain feels like, not one restricting himself for a better fight.” She quickly packed up a few things before handing me a folded piece of paper. “I’ll go make sure he doesn’t get in over his head and meet you at this location. Don’t play too long!” She said, then vanished with a Shunpo.

I stared at the empty space she used to be, -Don’t play too long? What is that supposed to mean?- before I went to finish packing up my personal items.

Just as the last of my notes were packed away I heard someone land on the area outside of our little hideout, which instantly put me on edge. The hideout Yoruichi picked out was literally a hole in the wall. A repurposed cave that was used for storage on the far side of Sokyoku hill that was almost completely hidden from view by foliage near the entrance.

If someone was poking around I was either damn unlucky and they needed something in storage, or someone spotted us when we were rushing to get Ichigo to a place to heal up and sent people to investigate.

Since I doubted anyone would actually need anything in this place, I was certain I was about to have some very hostile visitors. With all of my stuff out of the way, I quickly traced my swords i and got ready for my guest to arrive.

There wasn’t a door to the storage area I was in. Only a wooden gate that had remained open since Ichigo’s sudden exit, so there was no dramatic entrance from the Soul Reaper.

Instead she just calmly walked through the entrance, sword drawn but curiously not released.

“You are very hard to find, miss Ryoka.” The Soul Reaper said lightly. “I believe we were interrupted last time. Hopefully we can continue where we left off?”

I raised my swords in a crossed-guard looking for any sudden movements.

“Hi Natsumi. Sure, I have some time to spare.”