One moment Kaito was staring into the terrifyingly calm eyes of a faux-Aizen and the very next he and his brother were submerged in a world of agony and now, his lungs expanded with a force that felt like inhaling liquid starlight.
GASP.
The intake of breath was so sharp, so laden with a sudden overwhelming pressure, that the physics of the room couldn't hold him. To his own senses, his body simply ceased to be in one spot. There was no sensation of running or jumping but just a blur of green static.
BOOM.
The sound of his own body impacting the wall reached his ears a split second after his back collided with the far wall. The reinforced concrete was immediately pulverized under his body's strength and speed. He felt the structure cave in behind him, rebar snapping like dry twigs as he was buried waist-deep in a crater of debris.
'Argh, what the hell…' Kaito's thoughts were a mess. He scrambled to re-orient himself, bracing for the agony of shattered ribs or a punctured lung. But as he pushed himself out of the settling dust, the panic spiked for a different reason.
He didn't feel a thing, not the pain or even the sensation of hitting the wall with force. All he felt was the sensation of his body meeting a surface.
"Where the hell am I?"
The words left his lips, but he was shocked as the sound that followed nearly made him jump out of his skin. It wasn't the voice of a twenty-something college student that had just died a final destination death. It sounded like a cold, melodic baritone that was layered with a haunting, hollow resonance that seemed to vibrate the very air in the room.
He looked down at his hands and noticed that they were pale, not really deathly pale but still pale with black finger nails. His attire had shifted from a hoodie to a sleek, high-collared white jacket that felt more like a second skin than fabric. And there, resting against his left hip, was the weight of a katana.
His breath hitched and with a trembling hand, he reached and gripped the hilt and drew the blade. The steel was immaculate, reflecting a face that wasn't his own. It was a porcelain-white skin face, with green tear-streaks, and the fragment of a bone-white mask resting atop his head like a broken crown.
Ulquiorra Cifer.
The realization hit him harder than the wall he had just collided with. This wasn't a hallucination, he could feel a reservoir of energy inside him so vast it felt like an ocean compressed into a single point. It was "full" in a way human life never was and there was a cold, heavy, and absolute presence to it that solidified his existence in reality.
But beneath that power, he felt a strange, metaphysical friction. It was a phantom weight pressing down on his soul that felt almost like a seal that felt like a heavy door bolted shut.
'Resurrección,' his instincts whispered. The knowledge didn't come from a book or a memory; it was a primal, predatory understanding of his very nature. His true form, Murciélago, was there, locked behind a mental barrier he wasn't yet ready to cross without checking what he can do.
Kaito reached up, his fingers tracing the smooth, hard edge of the mask fragment before sliding down to the zipper of his jacket. He pulled it down a few inches. His breath was suddenly caught in his throat as his fingers dipped into the empty space, a perfectly smooth, circular hole right where his chest should have been… well not all of his chest but still.
'It's real, all of it.'
He needed to move away from here and first things first was to test this... this body. He gripped the katana, the first time he had ever held a real sword in his life and decided to gave it a tentative, experimental swing toward the empty center of the room. He didn't put his back into it; he just wanted to feel the weight of the steel.
Suddenly with that little action, the very air screamed.
A localized shockwave exploded from the edge of the blade. The floorboards vanished, carved into a deep, jagged trench that raced across the room. The force didn't stop at the floor; it climbed the opposite wall, slicing through the plaster and brick all the way to the ceiling in a clean, vertical line of destruction.
Kaito froze, the sword still extended in his hand and his eyes opened wide at the destruction he'd caused.
'I barely even tapped the air…' he thought, his hand shaking slightly as he looked at the ruin he'd caused with a simple flick of the wrist. 'If this is what a "test" does, what happens when I actually try?'
He looked around the room, the silence now deafening.
The metallic click of the katana settling back into its scabbard echoed like a gunshot in the cramped space. Kaito exhaled a breath he didn't realize he was holding.
"Oh, shit..."
The words were a low, resonant hum 'Ren?' He pushed the panic aside and finally took in his surroundings. This wasn't a room in Las Noches. The air was thick with the scent of damp earth and mineral salt. He was standing in a narrow, subterranean passageway from the looks of it and the ground was a mix of rock and thick, viscous mud that should have ruined his pristine white boots, yet they seemed to repel the grime effortlessly.
He was in a cave.
"Where the hell is that idiot?" Ulquiorra muttered.
He looked around for a while before he closed his eyes and decided to try something and focused for a few second. He didn't have to try hard. Almost immediately, a "ping" resonated in the center of his consciousness. It wasn't a sound or a visual, but a metaphysical tug that felt like a searing heat located deep within the tunnels to his north. It felt like a wildfire in a blizzard.
'Energy sensing,' he realized, his mind quickly adapting to the logic of his new form. 'Pesquisa.'
He knew that heat. It was aggressive, loud, and borderline obnoxious. It was Ren. He could feel his brother grappling with the same disorientation, a chaotic flare of blue energy that signaled his brother was very much alive or as alive as two soul-eating monsters could be now.
Ulquiorra shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his white jacket and began to walk. His gait was smooth and effortless with the kind of unnatural grace a human cannot achieve. Despite the absolute pitch-blackness of the cavern, the world appeared to him in a sharp, high-contrast clarity. His glowing green eyes pierced through the gloom, turning the shadows into a dull gray landscape. To him, it was as bright as an overcast day.
'We really should have just stayed at the party,' he thought bitterly, the memory of the rain and the logs flickering in his mind like a bad movie. A few more hours of cheap beer and bad music beats being a hollowed-out ghost in a hole in the ground.
The deeper he went, the more the silence of the cave began to peel away. There was a new sound that was more like screeching. The dry, rhythmic sound of something heavy and chitinous dragging across the stone floor.
The air felt weird to his senses like it didn't feel "natural." It tasted of old blood and stagnant energy. 'Now, how do I know that?' There was no sign of intelligent life or voices.
Ulquiorra slowed his pace as his senses, sharpened to an impossible degree, and then suddenly his senses spiked.
Skreeeeee...
A sudden, creepy sound slithered into his ears. It wasn't coming from the tunnel ahead. It was coming from directly behind the wall to his right. It felt like a scratching, clicking noise as if something was burrowing through the very rock to get to him.
He stopped, his hands still in his pockets, and turned his head slightly toward the stone. His expression remained a mask of nihilistic indifference, but his green pupils narrowed.
"I'm not in the mood," he told the wall with his voice echoing with a terrifying, hollow chill.
Suddenly from the shadows a pair of glowing, malevolent red eyes pierced the gloom. Ulquiorra didn't flinch but he was surprised by what he saw. He watched as a hulking creature that was all muscle, crimson skin, and 'Are this tusks.' dragged itself from the shadows. It stood nearly eight feet tall, horns curling from its forehead like twisted obsidian.
'An Oni?' Ulquiorra thought, his expression remaining as flat as a sheet of glass. 'Wow, that looks straight out of folklore mum used to tell us.'
The demon brandished a massive, iron-spiked club, its breath sounding like the rasping of a rusted saw. It let out a guttural shriek and charged, its singular intent was to crush him into paste. In a clear way it wound up for a brutal, downward swing.
Ulquiorra didn't move at all. He didn't even take his hands out of his pockets. Instead, he simply exhaled and decided to try something new, letting a fraction of his spiritual pressure slip the leash.
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