Chapter Twelve

Fullbringers.

Since ancient times, they were those born at the nexus of human and Hollow relations. Those who knew the truth of the Fullbringers’ birth were few. The Fullbringers themselves had been granted their powers, which they absurdly did not know the significance of, through a circumstance they had no control over—as a result of their parents being attacked by Hollows. There were even some who overindulged in their powers, believing them to be useful. However, what they knew was only the surface.

The ones who continued to use their powers just as they desired, without knowing their significance, would eventually begin to destroy themselves. Those who didn’t indulge their desires still had powers that others did not and eventually became so unstable that most ended up trying to hide from the world.

Specifically, the unique power they possessed of using their Fullbring to manipulate any object they had an attachment to could seem like just the kind of power that would be bestowed upon them by god. That, or the power could be thought of as a god in and of itself. It was no exaggeration to say that they seemed able to rearrange parts of the world’s state of being itself. It was almost as though they had the privilege to shout their objections against the system someone else had created.

They had attachments to what was around them. In other words, the Fullbringers’ characteristic power was something that simultaneously caused them to rise above the physical world and the chain that kept them connected to the world they ended up floating above.

So what became of those who lacked attachment?

A Fullbringer who had not a shred of sentiment, who refused to have connection, affection, or hate for the world, for anything around them, or even their lives themselves—Where would such a Fullbringer land?

Aura Michibane was one answer to such a question.

She was a rare second generation Fullbringer. Though her father had been a Fullbringer, her mother had been a normal human. She was the realization of the feelings between her Fullbringer father and human mother. They had been tied by love through hardships that common people did not know, and they were each other’s destiny, but her merely human mother had been attacked by a Hollow. Her Fullbringer father had made full use of his powers to force the Hollow to withdraw, but Aura’s mother had sustained a deep wound during the incident. Though she delivered the baby safely, in exchange, the wound had taken her life.

Maybe the Hollow was attracted because I’m a Fullbringer and my blood was mixed in her? It was a question that had tormented Aura’s father, and he continued to search for a way to erase that power from himself even after Aura was born. It was possible that it wouldn’t just be him. He was afraid even Aura would be rejected by the world.

Then, when a decade or so had passed, Aura’s father turned a gleeful expression to Aura, who had grown rapidly, and spoke to her.

“Rejoice. You and I might be released from our curse. There’s this Deputy Soul Reaper named Kugo Ginjo and he’s gathering people. I don’t know what a Deputy Soul Reaper is supposed to be, but we can trust this man, as he claims that he can absorb our Hollow power from us. First, we’ll check if it works on me. If nothing bad happens, then after that…

“Aura, you’ll be able to live a normal life.”

Listening to him with hope and joy, and also a fragment of unease, Aura thought:

I wonder what normal is. Why would I want that? Isn’t Hollow power the basis of the Fullbring power my dad taught me? Why would I give that to someone else? Do I have to erase it? If I do that, I won’t have anything else. What does it mean to live normally?

Does that mean I’m not “normal” now, Dad?

Aura, who had been confined to a basement by her own father, suddenly had these thoughts.

Aura’s father might have been broken by his wife’s death. Though he had confined his own daughter underground, it wasn’t as though he had been violent to her or neglected her upbringing. She was someone he needed to protect, and the offspring that his beloved wife had given a part of her life to. In other words, she was something that gave his life meaning. He had to protect her—from Hollows, from inquisitive human eyes, from the world that treated them like blasphemy itself.

For Aura, who had been raised in a water tank room in the basement of their house, the world consisted only of that space and her father. Aura’s father, believing that knowing about the world would only bring her unhappiness, wouldn’t even give Aura a single book. He didn’t teach her about television, of course, or that there was anything beyond the room. He only taught her the basics of how to read and write, the laws of physics, and about her Fullbring, so she could protect herself against a Hollow.

To her, that was the entire world.

Though it was unobstructed, the world did not spread any further than that for her.

A world where she could not even identify the passage of time.

A colorless world.

A world without freedom.

A world where she could not know hope or despair, or the difference between them.

The one and only thing that moved her was her father’s cooking. Though she had memories of her father’s meals being delicious, before it could become the cornerstone of a Fullbring through attachment, her father went to see the man named Ginjo.

And he had never come back.

Even Aura, with her meager knowledge, quickly understood that something abnormal had occurred. However, she wasn’t able to determine what to do in that situation.

They say that starvation is one of the particularly painful types of human suffering. To Aura, who had never experienced any scarcity of food to eat, even while she was confined, the pain she experienced then for the first time was more than enough to break her immature mind.

The reason she didn’t break completely was likely because of the blessing of her father teaching her the basics of her Fullbring, or possibly because of the grace of the certain skills that had always been within her as a Fullbringer. Regardless of which it was, before she reached the point of no return, she was able to escape the situation.

When she had reached the limits of starvation, she raised her hands to the tanklike walls of the room she was in and brought out its soul using her Fullbringer powers, enslaving it, and then, in the next moment the wall that had been restraining her—the reinforced glass of the tank—turned into sand and disappeared in front of her.

She stepped out into the outside world on uncertain legs from her room in the basement. Still not realizing she was in the inside world of the house, she used her Fullbring to destroy all seven locks that had been placed on the door and kept walking. The first part of the world she grabbed was a food item from the kitchen. Realizing it was one of the components of the meals her father had made for her, she gobbled it down on instinct and then immediately spat it out because of its rancid taste. Ironically, it was her own body that ended up rejecting the one and only part of the world that she had an attachment to. Had that one moment not transpired, she would have awakened to food being the attachment for her characteristic power and likely would have been able to live out her life as a “normal” Fullbringer.

She might have met the man named Kugo Ginjo. She might have fought Ichigo Kurosaki or found true salvation. However, that did not happen.

Nothing ever made its way into the girl’s world that was a tether she could attach to. Perhaps, though they had a twisted relationship, her father might have been her tether, but he had disappeared from her world as well.

When she actually left the house for the world outside and collapsed on the ground, she was lucky to have been found by a passerby and was put directly into the care of the police. When they found evidence of her having been confined in the house, society was up in arms about the abomination of a man who would lock up his own daughter. But even that uproar immediately quieted, and the girl named Aura was forgotten by the world.

Not wanting to give her the name of the father who had kept her imprisoned, she was taken in by the Michibane family on her mother’s side and lived her life as “Aura Michibane” thereafter.

≡

Several years had passed since then, and she had blended into society. Then again, it wasn’t quite correct to say that she blended in. She had erased herself completely and lived like a weed on the side of the road.

She was very beautiful, and it wouldn’t have been unusual for her to have attracted the attention of both men and women. Considering that she hadn’t drawn looks despite that, it was possible her Fullbring might have also had an influence on her surroundings.

She didn’t intend to hide from the world. It was just that she was unable to hold any interest in it and had settled into it in that manner almost naturally.

When it came to her father, the one and only person she had trusted, others had continuously vilified him, telling her he was a “bad person” and saying “Forget that man.” Based on the information that she had gathered since then in open society, she also realized that her father had indeed been abnormal. She came to that realization as she was growing up, but Aura no longer cared about it. To her, that cramped water tank room had been the first true world, where she had never come to find an attachment. She could only view this supposedly stimulating new world beyond it as just an extension of the water tank.

Though broadly speaking, there was nothing that she had an attachment to in order to mature her Fullbring, when someone asked Aura whether she had attachments, she had this single reply:

“What’s most important to me is the Fullbring that my dad taught me. That was what saved my life. Because of it, I can keep living. I need nothing else. I don’t care about my father. But the Fullbring that my dad taught me is everything to me.”

Then the one asking the question nodded in satisfaction as he said, “I see. I see. So that’s the upbringing you needed. It’s pretty funny.”

That man, whose face wore a vulgar smile, was something different from the humans surrounding her; she had realized that immediately. One day, it had suddenly appeared in front of her. No one else could see it. It was something similar to the white monsters that occasionally tried to attack her. The man, who was dressed in an odd manner, as though he had come from another era, observed her appraisingly as he spoke. “So you could even hunt a huge Hollow at that age. I find it so very intriguing that you were able to do so using only basic Fullbringer abilities.”

As he spoke, the man kicked the wreckage of the white monsters Aura had just dealt with a moment ago, which were scattered around him.

“Who are you? Are you not a human?”

“Oh, me? How rude of me. I’m what you people would call a god. I’m something called a Soul Reaper—a god of death. Did your father not tell you about those?”

Soul Reaper.

Memories came up inside her. The absolute entities that ruled over death she had read about in books on the outside were not what came to mind. Instead, she thought about the last words her father left her with:

“There’s this Deputy Soul Reaper named Kugo Ginjo, and he’s gathering people.”

“Ginjo?”

Aura muttered the name, and the man who had called himself a Soul Reaper laughed mockingly.

“Ha ha ha ha ha! So that’s what you think! So close! So very close! I wonder if it would have been better if I had been. For both you and Kugo Ginjo.”

“Who…are you?”

In response to Aura, who asked that with no hint of emotion and simply had suspicion in her words, the man’s mouth twisted in delight all the more as he sang out his own name. “My name is Tokinada—Tokinada Tsunayashiro.”

“Tokinada…?”

“That’s impertinent for such a human. You may add ‘lord’ to my name. It’s Lord Tokinada to you. Though I’m under house arrest, the living world has been so interesting lately that I just ended up slipping out and coming here. Well, it’s good evidence to show that the main family does not pay attention to me.”

Aura didn’t pay any particular attention to the man who had started talking about things she didn’t understand at all and that she hadn’t even asked about, but right after that, the matter he talked about did firmly end up drawing Aura’s attention. “Oh, right, right. This isn’t about my name and circumstances so much as who I am.”

Still wearing a friendly smile, the man calmly told her the truth.

“That’s a simple matter. I’m related to the family that gave the order to kill your father.”

“Huh?”

Aura’s face, which had been like a mask until then, crumbled noticeably.

As though he were enjoying her reaction, the Soul Reaper named Tokinada continued, “Officially, your parents’ whereabouts are unknown, but they’re actually dead. You could show me some gratitude for saving you a hopeless search. I’d even enjoy it if you cried and yelled. It’d give me a brief amount of amusement if you were to cry out that I’m an enemy of your parents and if you tried to kill me. Would you like to try your hand at seeing whether kido or Fullbring is more powerful?”

“I don’t understand. Your family killed my dad? Why?”

“Hm? Right, the reason, the reason… If I could say there was no reason, I could have further denigrated your father’s memory, but I suppose I’ll tell you the truth.”

Tokinada slowly walked around Aura as he observed the fluctuations in her spiritual pressure. Although he saw bewilderment, he did not sense any turmoil from emotions like anger or grief. Staring at her as though he were ogling some rare beast, Tokinada answered her question. “It was to retrieve something—something that was originally our property has fused to your father’s and your konpaku.”

“What?”

“Well, does it matter what it is? What’s important to you right now? One of the members of the hateful family that is your enemy, that stole the world in your cramped fish tank, is in front of your eyes right now.”

When Aura heard those words, she narrowed her eyes.

“You know…about my past?”

“Yes, naturally. I was watching. There was likely some factor hiding on your mother’s side as well. Two generations and Fullbringers at the same time is exceedingly rare. I took the opportunity to observe. So, what will you do? If you want a duel, I’ll accept. Of course, I’ll defend myself.”

“I don’t need that. To be honest, I’m not interested.”

When Aura swiftly shook her head, Tokinada laughed.

“Ha ha ha, of course, of course. That is your personality, isn’t it? In the past when I tried this tactic on a man who was the exact opposite of you, who had wallowed in sentimentality, I used a more elaborate scheme. Yes, the memory of that man glaring at me with unseeing eyes still makes me giddy even now. Though it seems you couldn’t even begin to comprehend how that feels.”

In speaking about someone who wasn’t even present, Tokinada seemed to intend to make a fool of Aura. Responding without anger or fear, Aura indifferently asked about her own fate. “Are you going to kill me too?”

“Yes, eventually. Depending on the situation, I might just overlook you.”

“Eventually?”

While she of course felt no emotion toward the man in front of her eyes who had just declared he would kill her, Aura could not gauge what the man’s motivations were and was bewildered. Perhaps that bewilderment itself was something like the only emotion that Aura allowed herself. Tokinada did not lie about his goals as he described them to her. He declared his intentions in the knowledge that he would revel in the results, regardless of her reaction. “That factor that resides in you would be much more entertaining if it were operating independently than if I were to retrieve it as a part of you. Furthermore, you seem like you’d make a useful pawn.”

“A pawn. You want me to be that for you? For what purpose?”

“You have no attachment to this world, right? In that case, why not remake the world anew? If we create a new world, you might even be able to find an attachment there.”

Aura, who couldn’t comprehend the world at that time, didn’t know whether or not he was all talk. Like the snake that had originally tempted mankind, Tokinada used words like threads to entangle her little by little.

“Though the heart and left arm ended up returning to the Quincies…the thing inside you is also rather unique. I would certainly like you to become my pawn. I’ll give you whatever you desire—to the extent I am able, that is.”

“There isn’t anything I want right now.”

“In that case, you can think it over until that time eventually comes. Also, if you are to become my pawn, then work on your manners. Even a fake smile will do. A faint smile from you could likely seduce men and women alike.”

He spoke crudely, but she ignored him and asked insistently, “What’s inside of me?”

In response to that question, the man grinned and informed Aura of a fact.

“It’s an organ of something called the Reio, the thing which we call his Saketsu.”