[Bleachfic] Eraser
Feb. 13th, 2005 01:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonsheenSoi Fong, of 2nd Division and the Penalty Corps. This was supposed to be lesbian ninja action. But I sort of forgot the lesbian part of it. So it just became plain ol' ninja action instead because I do, in fact, have a horrible love for looking into various shinigami and what they do on the job. And if any shinigami must've had a very interesting career, it would've been Soi Fong. In short: Here, have a missionfic.
The hollow had a wide body, large and bowl-shaped. The many appendages along its underside identified it as a parasitic class. Its codename was Eraser and it was over six years old—a respectable age for a hungry spirit, it had fed well in those years. Recently it was believed to have killed a middle-ranked shinigami of the 6th division, and despite the immediate arrival of back up in this particular case the hollow had quite neatly escaped. The ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this particular escape was unknown. This was why the message had gone to the Secret Operations division and this was why Soi Fong was treading tree tops in the human world, trailing alongside the path of a wide dirt road.
It was a well-worn route for travelers. It was also one of the locations this particular hollow was marked down as favoring. Others included a small village to the west, an immigration checkpoint to the south, and a bridge to the south-west, along with scattered attacks in the woods slightly to the north. All of such attacks had had the same results. Either the shinigami assigned to the area had arrived too late to catch anything or they had caught a glimpse and subsequently lost the culprit in the pursuit. It masked its spiritual signature horribly well: simply vanishing, the reports said. Still, the hollow had assumed territorial habits and Soi Fong after rolling out the maps and charts and following the lines had determined, based on this and based on the fact parasitic hollows were of a girth and density generally not ideal for inter-world travel, that it must’ve had a lair.
It was a matter of combing the suspected area. The shinigami had been killed east to the other locations. The body had been found on that very road. Soi Fong cut over it in a bound. The humans—those that walked foolishly in the time near dusk, were blind to her shadow as she lofted over them and landed in the trees on the opposite side. The leaves shook only softly as she slid through the uneven path laid in front her by the branches. She didn’t have to press in very deeply before she found the remnants of a smaller footpath choked by underbrush, marked by the battered head of a small stone statue barely clearing the vegetation. Soi Fong dropped down to inspect it. She stayed in a crouch, her hands on her knees and her heels raised and taut. She brushed away some of the moss with the very tips of her fingers. Otherwise she did not move.
(Walk softly, Shaolin. her mother had had to scold her once-- just once, and never again.)
It was a jizou. Not long after she came across the barest remains of steps. Cracked and grey, sunken into the earth—this she crouched close to as well, and found on the third step up dark stains spattering the stone. These stains grew darker and more frequent the farther she followed them.
It had been a small shrine. Perhaps it had belonged to a smaller deity, once. Kami still frequented the countryside in a fair abundance, though of late their numbers had begun to drop rather disturbingly. Soi Fong could not help but admit it was perhaps a bit to the shinigami’s advantage. It meant less crossing of guarded territory and general diplomatic hassles. It was fair to say this place would pose no such difficulties, however. There was little left of the taste of a god in the air. It reeked of cold, and ache, and slaughter. Here, the stones were completely dark.
The wood had had a fair amount of time to fester. The roof had been practically stripped away by age or perhaps by human looters. Soi Fong would not have been surprised were that the case, though it seemed unlikely a human would have the sense to find this place again after it was thoroughly lost.
She was not required to engage this hollow. She was required to make a note of its location, return with a squadron, and then engage the hollow: identification of its abilities being the primary goal, elimination being only secondary. This was protocol, and Soi Fong was vaguely annoyed by it.
Nevertheless she was cautious in her entry of the shrine. She did not do it by the doors—which were still standing. Instead she hopped atop the roof and found a good gap among the many present to squeeze through. She kept her belly close to the ceiling. Moving in a slow crawl, nothing creaked with her passage. She was light, and it was easy to worm her way down farther in silence. Nothing stirred beneath her, even when she transferred herself to one of the walls. The air got no thicker. It maintained the same temperature. It had obviously been haunted recently, up until even a day ago. It was not currently occupied in such a capacity. Soi Fong saw fit to drop to her toes, straightening and giving the place a cool once over.
It did not take long.
A moment later she flew from the shrine. A moment after that there was no sign a woman had ever visited this forgotten place in any manner at all.
It was a well known but little spoken fact that the 4th Division in fact, specialized in two things in the management of Seireitei—they were medical division and they were the keepers of the dead.
She’d been a young one, this officer. The third seat couldn’t help but comment on it. His assistant, a quiet black haired girl with plaited hair little older than the one on the table had agreed with a stiff look he’d taken for obvious frailness of heart and had attempted to send her out. She’d politely refused. Now she was arranging the funeral clothes of the body. He was making notes of the various injuries that had needed to be healed, post-mortem. It did nothing, really, but it made things more presentable. The assistant was doing a fine enough job of it, although on occasion she made a curious pause, her hands hovering over the face or the chest, her lips tight.
The 3rd seat smiled understandingly. “Ah, I know it must not be an easy sight for you--”
His assistant looked as though she would have said something had the door not flown open. In stormed a young officer dressed in the uniform of the Secret Operations, identifiable as female by her build and the hair that fluttered almost wildly behind her. Her features were otherwise obscured by her mask—save her eyes, which were dark and icy. Her expression was nothing but determined as her gaze fixed. She stormed forward, ignoring the protests of the 3rd seat as she came to the foot of the table and, to the assistant, demanded imperiously:
“Is this the body of Kaneda Reiko? Of the 6th Division?”
The officer barely waited for the affirmative before leaping upon the table. She produced from behind her a short knife which, with a cruel grace and little warning, she plunged straight into the dead woman’s breast.
The 3rd seat nearly fainted dead away. The assistant stepped back.
The knife clinked. The form lurching with a sudden renewed life, a strong flail Secret Operations officer merely set her foot against to keep from being thrown. She drove the blade in to the hilt. There was a screech, a loathsome sound, and for a moment the corpse’s eyes were open and glaring upward in a pale, glazed hatred. The mouth gaping, hands flexing, all in a mere second before the corpse fell back into limp disarray. The hollow emerged cleanly, unfolding in a perverse, rippling birth. The body of it thin and translucent, save the mask, which was solid white and shaped like a dish: also cracked and broken, with the knife buried right between the long slits of its eyes.
There were bodies in the shrine, Soi Fong explained in her report. She needn’t have said more: hollows preferred the spiritual flesh, as opposed to the corporeal, and Eraser was already known by general shape to be a parasite. It simply hadn’t occurred to anyone that it might’ve been able to cloak itself so thoroughly within the discarded bodies of its victims, or that it may have chosen to play dead, ignored by the investigating shinigami and waiting until after their confused retreats to creep back to its lair.
The oversight was an embarrassment, in Soi Fong’s opinion. One that would not be repeated; the data was added immediately to Eraser’s (now non-active) profile, and more importantly added to the general index of hollow attributes. The renewed volumes would be circulated in less than a week.
The incident itself had never happened officially, of course. It would not do for it to be known Seireitei security was breached in such a manner. Soi Fong expected no less. Much of her life was very much off the record after all and she prided herself for this fact. She gave her report, was commended curtly, bowed, and departed. The kimono she wore off duty for the rest of the evening was of a cloth heavier than the material of her preferred uniform. She treated herself to a long bath and an hour of combing the tangles out of her hair. She wrote a few short words in the small bound book she kept under her futon, alongside a particularly sleek dagger with carved handle that had been a gift from her mother upon her entry into the division, seven years ago. She slept steadily, though not soundly. She never slept soundly.
The next morning the Captain-General requested her presence by name.
The hollow had a wide body, large and bowl-shaped. The many appendages along its underside identified it as a parasitic class. Its codename was Eraser and it was over six years old—a respectable age for a hungry spirit, it had fed well in those years. Recently it was believed to have killed a middle-ranked shinigami of the 6th division, and despite the immediate arrival of back up in this particular case the hollow had quite neatly escaped. The ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this particular escape was unknown. This was why the message had gone to the Secret Operations division and this was why Soi Fong was treading tree tops in the human world, trailing alongside the path of a wide dirt road.
It was a well-worn route for travelers. It was also one of the locations this particular hollow was marked down as favoring. Others included a small village to the west, an immigration checkpoint to the south, and a bridge to the south-west, along with scattered attacks in the woods slightly to the north. All of such attacks had had the same results. Either the shinigami assigned to the area had arrived too late to catch anything or they had caught a glimpse and subsequently lost the culprit in the pursuit. It masked its spiritual signature horribly well: simply vanishing, the reports said. Still, the hollow had assumed territorial habits and Soi Fong after rolling out the maps and charts and following the lines had determined, based on this and based on the fact parasitic hollows were of a girth and density generally not ideal for inter-world travel, that it must’ve had a lair.
It was a matter of combing the suspected area. The shinigami had been killed east to the other locations. The body had been found on that very road. Soi Fong cut over it in a bound. The humans—those that walked foolishly in the time near dusk, were blind to her shadow as she lofted over them and landed in the trees on the opposite side. The leaves shook only softly as she slid through the uneven path laid in front her by the branches. She didn’t have to press in very deeply before she found the remnants of a smaller footpath choked by underbrush, marked by the battered head of a small stone statue barely clearing the vegetation. Soi Fong dropped down to inspect it. She stayed in a crouch, her hands on her knees and her heels raised and taut. She brushed away some of the moss with the very tips of her fingers. Otherwise she did not move.
(Walk softly, Shaolin. her mother had had to scold her once-- just once, and never again.)
It was a jizou. Not long after she came across the barest remains of steps. Cracked and grey, sunken into the earth—this she crouched close to as well, and found on the third step up dark stains spattering the stone. These stains grew darker and more frequent the farther she followed them.
It had been a small shrine. Perhaps it had belonged to a smaller deity, once. Kami still frequented the countryside in a fair abundance, though of late their numbers had begun to drop rather disturbingly. Soi Fong could not help but admit it was perhaps a bit to the shinigami’s advantage. It meant less crossing of guarded territory and general diplomatic hassles. It was fair to say this place would pose no such difficulties, however. There was little left of the taste of a god in the air. It reeked of cold, and ache, and slaughter. Here, the stones were completely dark.
The wood had had a fair amount of time to fester. The roof had been practically stripped away by age or perhaps by human looters. Soi Fong would not have been surprised were that the case, though it seemed unlikely a human would have the sense to find this place again after it was thoroughly lost.
She was not required to engage this hollow. She was required to make a note of its location, return with a squadron, and then engage the hollow: identification of its abilities being the primary goal, elimination being only secondary. This was protocol, and Soi Fong was vaguely annoyed by it.
Nevertheless she was cautious in her entry of the shrine. She did not do it by the doors—which were still standing. Instead she hopped atop the roof and found a good gap among the many present to squeeze through. She kept her belly close to the ceiling. Moving in a slow crawl, nothing creaked with her passage. She was light, and it was easy to worm her way down farther in silence. Nothing stirred beneath her, even when she transferred herself to one of the walls. The air got no thicker. It maintained the same temperature. It had obviously been haunted recently, up until even a day ago. It was not currently occupied in such a capacity. Soi Fong saw fit to drop to her toes, straightening and giving the place a cool once over.
It did not take long.
A moment later she flew from the shrine. A moment after that there was no sign a woman had ever visited this forgotten place in any manner at all.
It was a well known but little spoken fact that the 4th Division in fact, specialized in two things in the management of Seireitei—they were medical division and they were the keepers of the dead.
She’d been a young one, this officer. The third seat couldn’t help but comment on it. His assistant, a quiet black haired girl with plaited hair little older than the one on the table had agreed with a stiff look he’d taken for obvious frailness of heart and had attempted to send her out. She’d politely refused. Now she was arranging the funeral clothes of the body. He was making notes of the various injuries that had needed to be healed, post-mortem. It did nothing, really, but it made things more presentable. The assistant was doing a fine enough job of it, although on occasion she made a curious pause, her hands hovering over the face or the chest, her lips tight.
The 3rd seat smiled understandingly. “Ah, I know it must not be an easy sight for you--”
His assistant looked as though she would have said something had the door not flown open. In stormed a young officer dressed in the uniform of the Secret Operations, identifiable as female by her build and the hair that fluttered almost wildly behind her. Her features were otherwise obscured by her mask—save her eyes, which were dark and icy. Her expression was nothing but determined as her gaze fixed. She stormed forward, ignoring the protests of the 3rd seat as she came to the foot of the table and, to the assistant, demanded imperiously:
“Is this the body of Kaneda Reiko? Of the 6th Division?”
The officer barely waited for the affirmative before leaping upon the table. She produced from behind her a short knife which, with a cruel grace and little warning, she plunged straight into the dead woman’s breast.
The 3rd seat nearly fainted dead away. The assistant stepped back.
The knife clinked. The form lurching with a sudden renewed life, a strong flail Secret Operations officer merely set her foot against to keep from being thrown. She drove the blade in to the hilt. There was a screech, a loathsome sound, and for a moment the corpse’s eyes were open and glaring upward in a pale, glazed hatred. The mouth gaping, hands flexing, all in a mere second before the corpse fell back into limp disarray. The hollow emerged cleanly, unfolding in a perverse, rippling birth. The body of it thin and translucent, save the mask, which was solid white and shaped like a dish: also cracked and broken, with the knife buried right between the long slits of its eyes.
There were bodies in the shrine, Soi Fong explained in her report. She needn’t have said more: hollows preferred the spiritual flesh, as opposed to the corporeal, and Eraser was already known by general shape to be a parasite. It simply hadn’t occurred to anyone that it might’ve been able to cloak itself so thoroughly within the discarded bodies of its victims, or that it may have chosen to play dead, ignored by the investigating shinigami and waiting until after their confused retreats to creep back to its lair.
The oversight was an embarrassment, in Soi Fong’s opinion. One that would not be repeated; the data was added immediately to Eraser’s (now non-active) profile, and more importantly added to the general index of hollow attributes. The renewed volumes would be circulated in less than a week.
The incident itself had never happened officially, of course. It would not do for it to be known Seireitei security was breached in such a manner. Soi Fong expected no less. Much of her life was very much off the record after all and she prided herself for this fact. She gave her report, was commended curtly, bowed, and departed. The kimono she wore off duty for the rest of the evening was of a cloth heavier than the material of her preferred uniform. She treated herself to a long bath and an hour of combing the tangles out of her hair. She wrote a few short words in the small bound book she kept under her futon, alongside a particularly sleek dagger with carved handle that had been a gift from her mother upon her entry into the division, seven years ago. She slept steadily, though not soundly. She never slept soundly.
The next morning the Captain-General requested her presence by name.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 08:13 am (UTC)Besides which, it's a pretty neat story on its own. I liked the Hollow you came up with for it--crafty bugger, that.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 02:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-17 09:41 pm (UTC)