Post by Akio Naito on Aug 17, 2024 14:05:46 GMT -5
The screw that bore Col's severed arm continued to fly circles around where Akio had fallen, tracing out a circle with the arrancar's dripping blood. In the center of the circle, with a deep breath followed by a hiss of pain through clenched teeth, Akio indulged in a few seconds of reminiscence as a tragic scene from his past overlaid itself on the present. What were these called again, Nietzschean flat circles? The whole thing felt almost scripted, and for some fraction of a second he considered the unrealistic possibility that Kitai could have planned this matchup just to reenact the worst moment of Akio's life before reminding himself that nobody would actually have done that, especially not someone he'd never even met. Was that the partial release influencing his thoughts again? He was in no condition to tell anymore.
That windy spring day so many years ago was not so different from the present. The Akio of back then had been casually ignoring one of the shapeless blurs his only friend called hollows, though at the time he'd mulled over the possibility that it was it a shinigami traveling without their body. Both had been mere distortions akin to heat shimmers to him back in those days. That the quincy by Akio's side had tapped him on the arm and said they should leave before the spirit took interest in them was what told him it was a hollow. While the presence of shinigami was never pleasant for Tsukisawa, those never inspired this kind of fear in his companion. Out of habit, he had casually condensed a mass of reishi in one of his hands and squeezed it as he took the first step towards the far side of the park; that was what had initially drawn the quincy to Akio in the first place, effortless reishi manipulation that had allowed him to routinely battle fullbringers on an even level, despite a total inability to see purely spiritual beings. It had captured the hollow's attention on that night as well and left him suffering from hollow poisoning before he'd realized that it had stabbed him in the back with a hoof. Sure, he had survived that, but that was the night that Akio was emptied out to become the irritatingly bland husk he'd been since then. And now? Now that he'd finally started to recover, it had happened all over again.
Back in the present day, Akio's mismatched eyes welled with tears as he resolved to sharpen his released self's worst traits into a sort of dying curse. The unreleased Akio would have been fine if he'd lost in a one-on-one match with his personal skills against either of the opponents he had been given here. That version of him understood that arrancar were gods in the same way shinigami were; he would have written off competing with the spider as an impossible task and accepted his loss quietly. And if he'd fought the quincy, he'd have accepted it all the more; it wouldn't have made sense for his imitation to beat the real thing. Well, if he were using his release normally, the additional passions it flooded his heart with would have inspired him to lash out with excessive force now that he knew this battle was a lost cause, but even so, any anger he felt would have been centered on himself and not the opponent. Where those extremes met under the armlet's influence, he had enough of the released failed tyrant to lash out and enough of the sealed depressive retail worker to know he should focus on making this fight easier for his partner.
Silently, with no incantation, no bodily motions, and naught but a faint silent prayer, a colorless field of reishi began to emanate from Akio's cross and rapidly expanded into a hundred-meter sphere that swallowed a considerable amount of the arena. Perceptible more as a sudden absence than something being created. If Col came into contact with the sphere, the arrancar would notice a sense of stagnation and sudden absence as its surface flowed intangibly through their body, bypassing their hierro and seeping into their soul, where it would wash away half the maximum duration of their primera etapa as though something about his essential predatory nature had gone missing, followed some small moment later by a repeat of the sensation as the durations of every technique they were using lost half of their duration just as easily, and then once more as any techniques that would have lasted indefinitely like hierro were suddenly bound to a ticking clock, doomed to fade away in a mere five posts before the spider would be required to pay any activation costs once more before being able to use them again. They would find that the sphere had the same effect on any further techniques used while inside of it.
There was a drawback to manifesting such a massive and indiscriminate domain technique without warning his partner, but it couldn't be helped. While Akio had only intended to catch Col in the massive radius, Holika and Ghost would both find that they had to evade the oncoming wave of unnatural stagnation, lest they suffer its effects as well. Holika would experience the washing away of power similarly to Col if she proved unable to avoid the massive sphere, though in her case it would be something similar to the sudden lightness of a sin being forgiven, as though some small measure of her inner hellfire had abruptly gone out without a trace of smoke or embers as her primera etapa lost half of its duration, though her segunda and other higher releases would remain untouched so long as she didn't use them within the field emanating from Akio's cross. The experience would be different for Ghost if he had been caught in the expanding domain, a sensation as though his quincy blood had become less pure, as if the Emperor's presence was suddenly more distant, as the vandenreich quincy's active properties were bound to a five-post duration before they'd deactivate on their own. Both the denizen of hell and the denizen of silbern would also find their techniques suffering the same fate as the arrancar's would, should that come to pass. That was the indiscriminate technique known as stille, and it was a silent declaration that nothing was permanent and there would never be an immortal emperor in this mundane universe.
Even as the sphere had been expanding, Akio clutched his bow tightly in one hand as it collapsed back into a small bow and pointed it in what his energy senses told him was the hostile quincy's direction as he released another wirbelsturm of the highest class he could; he'd expected a normal arrow or two would have come his way while he was down, but the extreme speed of Glänzendes Blutgras had allowed the first explosion to make it past the barrier. Even weakened by the partial defense, the blast flung Akio away from Ghost and sent him skidding across the floor in Col's direction with the massive bubble of negation moving alongside him, still centered on the quincy cross worn around his wrist. The Arrancar's severed arm would do the same with its orbit around the small bow.
A moment after the explosion, Akio landed with his leg bent at an unnatural angle. He barely noticed, still wrapped up in the greater pain that filled his physical veins and spiritual reiatsu channels. The cross suspended inside Akio's bow drank in as much energy as it could with his release active before the distinctive strands of ransotengai condensed from reishi, puppeting his damaged body into a standing position. Sorrow, fear, frustration, resignation—all of those feelings slowly sank into a dull swamp of pain just from the forced movements. The war garb of a heavenly puppet allowed him to move as though he weren't severely wounded in ways that very well may kill him before the arrancar's toxic reiatsu did, but it did nothing for the suffering he felt and it certainly hadn't prevented further damage from the strain of his actions. And besides that, he had slashed its duration with stille, not to mention his long-term hirenkyaku and bow properties, which meant he needed to finish the next part quickly.
Holding his own arm straight to the side, Akio took over, guiding the orbiting screw that still held Col's arm, and brought it over to touch his bow. The moment the arrow made contact, he deconstructed it, absorbed the traces of his own spiritual pressure he had used in the initial construction, and left what remained of the arrancar's arm to finally fall to the floor. Before it had hit the ground, the desperate young man had reached into a pocket, grabbed twelve of his remaining ginto, and hurled all of them high in the air, vaugely in the spider's direction. “Hear this-” Panting for breath between words, he spoke his final incantation of the match like a dying prayer. “-thunder, and-” He was relying on absolute mastery of ginto to prime every tube with only a single incantation. “-rejoice!”
That had been when the dying quincy allowed his bow to collapse into a mist of reishi, dropped his prolonged hirenkyaku, and switched to the single-step version of the very same movement technique; the motion launched Akio at ten times his speed, and the massive sphere of stagnant particles moved with him at that same speed, using himself as a hundred-meter-wide projectile. He only needed to get his body within fifty meters of Col to sheer half of the duration off of their zanpakuto; he aimed to get within nine. The quality of his ransotengai puppetry declined severely mid-step; even with the ability to ignore injury, he still didn't have the stamina to manipulate his body properly. Only the reishi strings had kept him from collapsing to the floor a second time as the thrown silver tubes unsealed in unison, then fired blocks of reishi directly downwards with immense force, shattering the floor like cuboid meteors. None of the decending hammers would hit the former Escudo if he simply stood still; that was because Akio had never intended to aim them. The scattershot spellcraft had only been meant to cut off escape routes to get his opponent to hesitate long enough to catch them in the sphere.
And when he came to a stop, he simply fell over, and the sphere rapidly ceased to exist.
{2625/5000}
{-800} — {Stille —"Impermanence"}
{-700} — {Class one arrow}
{+200} — {Quincy Cross}
{-150} — {Ransotengai}
{+35} — {Strudel — Retrieval}
{-50} — {Hirenkyaku}
{-300} — {Twelve Hammers}
That windy spring day so many years ago was not so different from the present. The Akio of back then had been casually ignoring one of the shapeless blurs his only friend called hollows, though at the time he'd mulled over the possibility that it was it a shinigami traveling without their body. Both had been mere distortions akin to heat shimmers to him back in those days. That the quincy by Akio's side had tapped him on the arm and said they should leave before the spirit took interest in them was what told him it was a hollow. While the presence of shinigami was never pleasant for Tsukisawa, those never inspired this kind of fear in his companion. Out of habit, he had casually condensed a mass of reishi in one of his hands and squeezed it as he took the first step towards the far side of the park; that was what had initially drawn the quincy to Akio in the first place, effortless reishi manipulation that had allowed him to routinely battle fullbringers on an even level, despite a total inability to see purely spiritual beings. It had captured the hollow's attention on that night as well and left him suffering from hollow poisoning before he'd realized that it had stabbed him in the back with a hoof. Sure, he had survived that, but that was the night that Akio was emptied out to become the irritatingly bland husk he'd been since then. And now? Now that he'd finally started to recover, it had happened all over again.
Back in the present day, Akio's mismatched eyes welled with tears as he resolved to sharpen his released self's worst traits into a sort of dying curse. The unreleased Akio would have been fine if he'd lost in a one-on-one match with his personal skills against either of the opponents he had been given here. That version of him understood that arrancar were gods in the same way shinigami were; he would have written off competing with the spider as an impossible task and accepted his loss quietly. And if he'd fought the quincy, he'd have accepted it all the more; it wouldn't have made sense for his imitation to beat the real thing. Well, if he were using his release normally, the additional passions it flooded his heart with would have inspired him to lash out with excessive force now that he knew this battle was a lost cause, but even so, any anger he felt would have been centered on himself and not the opponent. Where those extremes met under the armlet's influence, he had enough of the released failed tyrant to lash out and enough of the sealed depressive retail worker to know he should focus on making this fight easier for his partner.
Silently, with no incantation, no bodily motions, and naught but a faint silent prayer, a colorless field of reishi began to emanate from Akio's cross and rapidly expanded into a hundred-meter sphere that swallowed a considerable amount of the arena. Perceptible more as a sudden absence than something being created. If Col came into contact with the sphere, the arrancar would notice a sense of stagnation and sudden absence as its surface flowed intangibly through their body, bypassing their hierro and seeping into their soul, where it would wash away half the maximum duration of their primera etapa as though something about his essential predatory nature had gone missing, followed some small moment later by a repeat of the sensation as the durations of every technique they were using lost half of their duration just as easily, and then once more as any techniques that would have lasted indefinitely like hierro were suddenly bound to a ticking clock, doomed to fade away in a mere five posts before the spider would be required to pay any activation costs once more before being able to use them again. They would find that the sphere had the same effect on any further techniques used while inside of it.
There was a drawback to manifesting such a massive and indiscriminate domain technique without warning his partner, but it couldn't be helped. While Akio had only intended to catch Col in the massive radius, Holika and Ghost would both find that they had to evade the oncoming wave of unnatural stagnation, lest they suffer its effects as well. Holika would experience the washing away of power similarly to Col if she proved unable to avoid the massive sphere, though in her case it would be something similar to the sudden lightness of a sin being forgiven, as though some small measure of her inner hellfire had abruptly gone out without a trace of smoke or embers as her primera etapa lost half of its duration, though her segunda and other higher releases would remain untouched so long as she didn't use them within the field emanating from Akio's cross. The experience would be different for Ghost if he had been caught in the expanding domain, a sensation as though his quincy blood had become less pure, as if the Emperor's presence was suddenly more distant, as the vandenreich quincy's active properties were bound to a five-post duration before they'd deactivate on their own. Both the denizen of hell and the denizen of silbern would also find their techniques suffering the same fate as the arrancar's would, should that come to pass. That was the indiscriminate technique known as stille, and it was a silent declaration that nothing was permanent and there would never be an immortal emperor in this mundane universe.
Even as the sphere had been expanding, Akio clutched his bow tightly in one hand as it collapsed back into a small bow and pointed it in what his energy senses told him was the hostile quincy's direction as he released another wirbelsturm of the highest class he could; he'd expected a normal arrow or two would have come his way while he was down, but the extreme speed of Glänzendes Blutgras had allowed the first explosion to make it past the barrier. Even weakened by the partial defense, the blast flung Akio away from Ghost and sent him skidding across the floor in Col's direction with the massive bubble of negation moving alongside him, still centered on the quincy cross worn around his wrist. The Arrancar's severed arm would do the same with its orbit around the small bow.
A moment after the explosion, Akio landed with his leg bent at an unnatural angle. He barely noticed, still wrapped up in the greater pain that filled his physical veins and spiritual reiatsu channels. The cross suspended inside Akio's bow drank in as much energy as it could with his release active before the distinctive strands of ransotengai condensed from reishi, puppeting his damaged body into a standing position. Sorrow, fear, frustration, resignation—all of those feelings slowly sank into a dull swamp of pain just from the forced movements. The war garb of a heavenly puppet allowed him to move as though he weren't severely wounded in ways that very well may kill him before the arrancar's toxic reiatsu did, but it did nothing for the suffering he felt and it certainly hadn't prevented further damage from the strain of his actions. And besides that, he had slashed its duration with stille, not to mention his long-term hirenkyaku and bow properties, which meant he needed to finish the next part quickly.
Holding his own arm straight to the side, Akio took over, guiding the orbiting screw that still held Col's arm, and brought it over to touch his bow. The moment the arrow made contact, he deconstructed it, absorbed the traces of his own spiritual pressure he had used in the initial construction, and left what remained of the arrancar's arm to finally fall to the floor. Before it had hit the ground, the desperate young man had reached into a pocket, grabbed twelve of his remaining ginto, and hurled all of them high in the air, vaugely in the spider's direction. “Hear this-” Panting for breath between words, he spoke his final incantation of the match like a dying prayer. “-thunder, and-” He was relying on absolute mastery of ginto to prime every tube with only a single incantation. “-rejoice!”
That had been when the dying quincy allowed his bow to collapse into a mist of reishi, dropped his prolonged hirenkyaku, and switched to the single-step version of the very same movement technique; the motion launched Akio at ten times his speed, and the massive sphere of stagnant particles moved with him at that same speed, using himself as a hundred-meter-wide projectile. He only needed to get his body within fifty meters of Col to sheer half of the duration off of their zanpakuto; he aimed to get within nine. The quality of his ransotengai puppetry declined severely mid-step; even with the ability to ignore injury, he still didn't have the stamina to manipulate his body properly. Only the reishi strings had kept him from collapsing to the floor a second time as the thrown silver tubes unsealed in unison, then fired blocks of reishi directly downwards with immense force, shattering the floor like cuboid meteors. None of the decending hammers would hit the former Escudo if he simply stood still; that was because Akio had never intended to aim them. The scattershot spellcraft had only been meant to cut off escape routes to get his opponent to hesitate long enough to catch them in the sphere.
And when he came to a stop, he simply fell over, and the sphere rapidly ceased to exist.
Akio Naito said:
■■ Reiatsu ■■{2625/5000}
{-800} — {Stille —"Impermanence"}
{-700} — {Class one arrow}
{+200} — {Quincy Cross}
{-150} — {Ransotengai}
{+35} — {Strudel — Retrieval}
{-50} — {Hirenkyaku}
{-300} — {Twelve Hammers}
