Another Bleach post. A bit of exposition is required for this one. Mid-tournament post, Fi and another guy versus an arrancar with the attitude and the appearance of a (vicious) little girl. With this guise of hers, the arrancar managed to single the guy out and crippled him by pretending to be a little kid in trouble. Fianna was not very happy about finding one of her friends with a massive gaping hole in his chest. Post opens up in the middle of her dive-bombing into a pseudo-explosion.
Oh, and Zantetsuken = Fi's sword. They all have fancy names in this 'verse.
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In spite of dropping down to earth like a lead weight, the rapidly approaching ground seemed to be the least of Fianna’s worries. Glacial optics were focused all too intently upon the cloud of flames, daring the petit figure that lurked beneath their cover to leap from her burning asylum and reveal her form in the hopes that she could strike her back down to the ground in the same second.
The blade that lashed out at her trim stomach muscles was slapped off course by an equally sharp, equally vicious steel fang, a parry formed by a blend of pure luck, sprinkled with reflexes that had expected aggression from something so perfectly dastardly. If there had been time to spare, a window of opportunity which could have been leapt through, the shinigami would have aimed to swipe her blade once more at the figure – or perhaps, if the spare time was particularly sparse in nature, she would have settled for swinging the blade back, not to slice, but to impede, to plant the steel cap that adorned the tip of Zantetsuken’s hilt into the stomach of the girl and hammer the breath out of her petit lungs.
But time was not sparse for Fianna – it was virtually nonexistent. Opportunity’s hypothetical window had been boarded shut and there was no time to pry it open. It was not striking their foe that she was concerned with; it was the ground, the hastily-approaching, extremely solid and unrelenting ground. She had once concentrated upon the flames, and even took the time to focus on her target when she reared her deceptive head, but the time to worry about the ground was at hand, for if she failed to act, she would soon be incapable of doing anything – worrying included.
Even though instinct was no more than the whipping boy to her resilience, the natural impulse that craved self preservation still existed, and when faced with the unyielding thought of death at the hands of something other than combat, the impulse concluded that the time to reveal itself was imminent.
It sprinted down the web of nerves spun through her sword arm, burrowed into the cables of flesh that ensnared the bone, and commanded it in no more than a fraction of a second to shift. Her blade’s point had been aimed downward, threatening the explosion with a silent growl, before charging into the turbulent ribbons of flame. They did not part politely. Instead, they recoiled at the influx of substance, of a sudden draft of air, but before they could cling greedily to the imposter, she had dropped out of their clasp.
As soon as Zantetsuken fell through the flames, he punctured the ground. The brunt of the fall accompanied him, leaving the pearl-haired warrior with the chance to relinquish her grip upon the blade, to hurl her form into a roll across the singed ground to break her hasty fall. Gloved hands and adamant heels were the brakes that halted the sharp slide across the ground, until the legs that formed much of her body swiftly sprang her back in the direction she had tumbled from. The fiery canopy was soon regarded as a double-edged sword, the smouldering sheet of cover that it offered to the woman who crouched out of its reach deemed a hindrance and not a help.
An automatic gasp of air was promptly discharged from her lips before it could blister her mouth, but the breath was ignored as her fingers coiled themselves around the richly coloured hilt of Zantetsuken, and the strength of her arm uprooted him from the ground. Eyes like boat lights skimmed across the ground in search of her foe, and surely enough, beneath the blazing blanket a dainty pair of feet landed upon the ground, a red rag to an infuriated bull, given their distance from another familiar figure.
The woman lunged, a predator for a split second, to aim a swipe at the creature’s unsuspecting shins, which fell out of reach with the help of a well-timed leap, leaving Fianna to cleave through the air, to turn what might have become an inelegant and unsteady stagger for an inexperienced death god into an immaculate series of tumbles sans the use of her palms, until her colourless form was carried out of the blaze in a monochrome blur. The first clean breath of air was as sweet to her lungs as the finest confectionary would have been to her tongue.
But not five seconds after her feet struck the ground for the final time in her routine did a forceful bolt of sound ricochet through her skull and command her torso to twist around. Her eyes should have been captured by the vision of her companion’s pitch black blade hanging in the air, a banner of desperation he brandished before his attacker, but so morbid, so accustomed to carnage was Fianna that she could not focus upon the obvious. She found her eyes gravitating towards the hole in his torso, the appalling wound that she continued to wish was her own upon sight. Slender fingers throttled Zantetsuken at the mere thought of the trap that the creature, who had the audacity to tell them, not claim, that the act of protecting their home was punishable by death – had ensnared him with. She had preyed upon his benevolence. Fianna would have preferred it if the thing had simply preyed upon her.
It was only after she found herself observing a portion of that reprehensible thing’s uniform through the cavity that Fianna realised that she was not examining the wound, but peering through it.
It was a ghastly tragedy; It was also a makeshift window.
And windows could be leapt through.
Before the charcoal-coloured blade could carve through the creature’s skin, she moved. The bat of an eyelid passed at a snail’s pace compared to the almost immediate step that closed the distance between her and her foe, but not entirely.
Aki Nai still stood between Fianna and their attacker. There was no ambush from behind. There was no desperate shove to knock him out of the woman’s path so that she might reach her target without bringing him further harm, as was probably expected of her at that point. In any other scenario, the pearl-haired shinigami’s choice to end her swift steps behind her comrade would have been seen as nothing short of a complete waste of her effort. If she had the time to mull over the thought – which she did not – Fianna would have imagined that the creature would have shared the same sentiment.
That would have, of course, been before she felt something cold and dreadfully sharp perforating her torso, somewhere around the region where her heart resided. The complication with confronting Fianna, was that her determination fuelled her creativity. Desperation tinted her vision, transformed every little thing into an option, a chance with which to gain the upper hand. Even wounds could be distorted into weapons; into opportunities.
This was why her weapon of choice could be found passing through the chasm in man’s chest before it vanished into its intended target. An unsympathetic twist of the hand that guided the blade drove it further up and through the immature, feminine body, to impale on a diagonal, to skewer and pin her in her place.
The eyes that peered down at the girl over the man’s shoulder were glacial not just in colour, but also in spirit. They were not windows into her soul, but bright mirrors that reflected the sunlight in their glossy films. They failed to speak the words that she would sooner choke upon, but in the absence of expression upon her alabaster features, a distinct lack of remorse shone like the worn face of the sun.
If insidious little Aya felt no guilt over preying upon a man’s compassion, then Fianna would feel no guilt in preying upon a child’s misconceptions.
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