Bleach: Heal The Soul

Chapter 6: Near Death, Twice

Along the way to where Rukia was being held, I started to feel hungry. Looking for a nearby storage room, I was hoping to find something to eat as I recalled another comment Urahara once said. It was over dinner while I was still in my spirit form as I forgot to return to my body. He first asked if I was hungry before I had the chance to change, and I found it strange that I was. It was a different kind of hunger, he informed, not a sign of becoming a Hollow, but a sign that I needed to recover spiritual energy. The hungrier I was, the more I needed to eat, the more potential spiritual energy I had.

Despite not using much since pouring what I could into the cannonball, I went from peckish to starving by each passing hour. I started to follow the smell of someone grilling outside without thinking and, after rounding a corner, saw a man wearing sunglasses. It was almost the middle of the night and this man had the gall to be was wearing sunglasses. I almost forgot about my hunger from that. 

And his haircut was kind of out of date, which isn't a thing I normally keep track of, but in combination with that thin sad excuse of a mustache, he reminded me of some low-budget, cheesy military action movie character. If I didn't see the lieutenant's badge on his arm, I wouldn't have taken the encounter seriously. My stomach growled, however, reducing the seriousness further.

"Something you want?" He said without looking at me, fanning fire under the assortment of meat on the bucket grill. "If you want some then that's too bad, I'm not sharing."

On one hand, I shouldn't fight him, but on the other, I'm starving, "I will fight you for that food."

He laughed and stretched as he stood up, "Young Soul Reapers these days, no respect for their superiors." He drew his short sword from inside his robes, "Let's make this quick, I don't want-"

I Flash Stepped as I drew my sword and struck him twice, once with the back of my blade, the other with my sheath. Then for good measure, behind him, I used Sho to launch him away. He didn't expect any of that from me, and so found himself on the ground, unconscious. Meanwhile, I had something to eat now. It's always important to have one's guard up at all times in case something bad comes up.

If only I had followed those words myself. While I was enjoying my victory meal, I neglected to realize there was someone heading my way. The release of spiritual pressure caused me to pause in mid-bite as I slowly turned to see where it was coming from. Walking over, with an eye patch covering his right eye, long black hair that spiked out of his head, with bells I could hear with each step he made. He was tall and wore the robe of a Captain that had its sleeves torn off.

"What do we have here?" He looked at the man on the ground, then to me, "It seems you were right."

"I told you," A little girl with short pink hair popped up over his shoulder, "If we kept looking at night we'd find someone!"

"Yeah, yeah," He continued, "So, what Squad are you in, and how did you defeat a Lieutenant?"

"Squad... Two?" I knew Four was the wrong answer, so I kind of threw a guess out of fear but tried to hide it. "I was hungry... so I knocked him out. Wasn't even a fight."

He started laughing, "A member of the Punishment Force, beating up a Lieutenant for his food?" He continued to laugh. "Next you're going to tell me the old man-" I Flash Stepped with the food in my mouth, running like a dog that caught its food and didn't want to be someone else's prey. "Hey! Get back here!"

"No thanks!" I said with a mouth full of food, so my words weren't clear.

With him chasing me, I eventually realized I was running toward the Repentance Cell. Not wanting him to figure out what my goal was, I made a beeline for another direction. At some point, the spiritual pressure started to drop and I assumed, after running a bit more, that he had given up for now. So correcting my course I ran back in the right direction without Flash Step the rest of the way, to a staircase that went up toward the area she was.