Position Defense Battle / The First Glimpse of Power

Afterward, Yoruichi and Xuanxin began organizing the students to build a defensive position where they stood, and had the students skilled in Kaidō begin treating the wounded.

Seeing the natural air of command about the two of them, the teachers who had still been scrambling to keep up felt reassured. They decided to leave everything to the pair and focus on investigating the problem with the Senkaimon.

Once the camp had settled down a little, Kisuke Urahara came over to join the investigation. But when he reached the Senkaimon, he sniffed and suddenly caught a strange smell.

He then walked over to Yoruichi and whispered, "Yoruichi, you have a good nose. Take a good sniff. Is there a strange smell in the air around here?"

Yoruichi's anger had not yet fully subsided. Without hesitation, she raised a long leg and kicked Kisuke Urahara into a nearby tree trunk with a bang.

"Get lost! I'm a cat, not a hound! And you think I'll sniff just because you tell me to? Do you think you're Xuanxin?" Yoruichi glared at the blond as he slid down the tree.

Nearby, Xuanxin, who was directing the construction of the defenses, seemed to hear his name. He looked up and glanced around in confusion, but when he found nothing, he lowered his head and resumed directing the work.

Despite her scolding, Yoruichi followed the faint smell to the bushes beside the Senkaimon.

Sure enough, concealed by the weeds, Yoruichi found the remains of several glass medicine bottles that had been thrown aside.

Meanwhile, Kisuke Urahara found signs of recent use along the edge of the Senkaimon's Reishi control console.

Looking at the glass bottles, which gave off a strange lingering purple-black scent, Kisuke Urahara's expression darkened.

"Xuanxin!" Kisuke Urahara jerked his head up and called to the white-haired youth in the distance.

"Xuanxin, can you take some people and capture a Hollow alive? An ordinary one will do, but it has to be alive!"

Xuanxin did not know what Kisuke Urahara had found, but he nodded and stood up. After handing his work over to Yoruichi, he took several senior students to capture a Hollow.

The senior students had been somewhat afraid, but when they saw the third-year junior walking ahead of them, the fear in their hearts subsided.

The group then hurried after Xuanxin and plunged into the forest.

"Bang!"

In less than the time it took an incense stick to burn, Xuanxin returned with a Hollow whose limbs had been cut off and flung it down hard in front of Kisuke Urahara as though he were carrying a chick.

The senior students following Xuanxin no longer looked at him with the slightest trace of their former disdain. In its place was a fervent respect.

Indeed, the ease with which Xuanxin had handled himself among the monsters was enough to win over these proud prospective Soul Reapers.

Ignoring everyone's shock, Kisuke Urahara solemnly held the piece of glass stained with the drug's residue close to the half-dead Hollow.

The instant it came close, the dying Hollow's eyes turned a vivid scarlet!

As if it had gone mad, it ignored the agony of its severed limbs and writhed wildly on the ground, struggling to swallow the piece of glass!

Seeing this, Kisuke Urahara stood up and said, his gaze icy:

"Just as I thought. This should be some kind of highly concentrated 'bait drug.' The Hollows in the World of the Living... were drawn here by this."

The other party had gone to such great lengths to set this deadly trap, obviously intending to use the terrifying tide of Hollows to kill every one of them!

Chapter 23: Position Defense Battle

Hearing Kisuke Urahara's chilling conclusion, the already oppressive atmosphere in front of the Senkaimon grew even heavier.

Yoruichi grew even angrier and declared that once she returned to Soul Society, she would make the mastermind behind this pay.

Xuanxin, on the other hand, remained much calmer.

Looking at the sun slowly sinking from the sky, Xuanxin said evenly:

"That can wait. Since there's bait here too, it's only a matter of time before the Hollow tide comes. We have to hold out until the Senkaimon is repaired or help arrives from Soul Society."

With that, he took his Zanpakuto and returned to the half-built defensive position.

As time passed, several more groups of students escaped the Hollow tide and returned. But by the time the sun had fully set, not a single teacher had come back.

It seemed that most of the teachers had bought the students time to escape with their own lives.

Watching his busy classmates, Xuanxin silently took a deep breath. Yoruichi walked over just then and asked with concern, "What's wrong? Are you too tired? Why don't you rest for a while? I'll keep an eye on things here for you."

A natural smile appeared on Xuanxin's face. He nodded slightly at Yoruichi's concern and was about to agree when a clearer roar suddenly sounded from the distant forest.

As the sun vanished completely from the sky, figures with red eyes crawled out of the forest one after another.

A student keeping watch at the front saw them and hurriedly shouted, "Xuanxin! Quick! Quick! The Hollow tide is coming, and there are a lot of them!"

Hearing the shout, Xuanxin's expression hardened, and he sprang onto the small mound at the center of the position.

Sure enough, the Hollows were crawling toward the Senkaimon, every one of them red-eyed. Xuanxin frowned at the dark mass of monsters, not because of their numbers, but because...

These Hollows were all ordinary Hollows, and that was highly abnormal. After all, there were enough of them to fuse into a Gillian, yet there was not even a trace of a higher-level Hollow. It was very abnormal.

But the urgency of the battle left Xuanxin no time to think further, for the black tsunami had already begun its charge.

Standing on the mound, Xuanxin raised Shingon in his right hand and shouted to the position, "Kidō squad, target the Hollow horde! Begin the Sōkatsui incantation!"

As Xuanxin's resolute voice reached them, and with the teachers leading them, their panic vanished. Soon, they began chanting in perfect unison.

"O sovereign! Mask of flesh and blood, all things, flutter of wings, that which bears the name of man! Truth and temperance, upon this sinless wall of dreams, unleash but slightly the wrath of your claws!"

"Hadō #33: Sōkatsui!"

"Rumble!"

Great spheres of explosive blue flame plunged into the heart of the monster horde like a brilliant meteor shower! As the "meteors" fell, waves of force swept through the monsters.

The blast instantly shattered large numbers of ordinary Hollows at the front. After that successful strike, Xuanxin gave the monsters no chance to recover and continued issuing orders calmly:

"Good! Kidō squad, recover your Reiatsu and prepare for the next incantation! Everyone else, prepare Shakkahō, target directly ahead. Begin the incantation!"

The same suppressive fire sequence was perfectly repeated.

Under a barrage of Sōkatsui and Shakkahō, the first wave of the attack was almost entirely repelled. Only a scattered few "lucky ones" made it near the position.

However, what awaited those lucky ones was the elite squad led by Yoruichi.

"Yoruichi! Clear out every Hollow that reaches the position! Don't let a single one through!" Xuanxin shouted to Yoruichi from the mound.

"Don't worry! Not one will get past us. Leave it to me!"

Yoruichi licked her lips and flashed a wild smile. Then she led several elite fighters straight out of the position, cutting the Hollows that had made it nearby to pieces.

The first assault was completely crushed, giving the defenders a brief respite.

Looking at the scorched ground and the gradually disappearing corpses outside the position, the students who had still lacked confidence finally felt it flare up in their eyes again!

"We... we held them off?!"

"That's great! Maybe we really can survive!"

Sure enough, after that perfect suppression of the first wave, the students' morale soared to unprecedented heights.

Xuanxin smiled faintly as he watched spirits rise within the position. Deep down, however, he did not relax, because he knew this was only the beginning.

Over the next several hours, the second, third, and fourth waves... The same formation poured out of the depths of the forest again and again, relentlessly crashing against the fragile defenses.

Clearly, this was a long and difficult battle.

As time passed, the students' Reiatsu began to run low. The Kidō squad's chanting grew weaker and weaker, and more and more gaps inevitably appeared in the net of fire.

To plug those gaps, Yoruichi could only charge out more frequently to face the growing number of Hollows reaching the front of the position.

Gradually, everyone sustained injuries. Even Xuanxin, who remained at his post directing the battle, had soaked his uniform through with sweat.

The number of wounded also began to rise, forcing Xuanxin to come down from the mound and join Yoruichi's assault squad to deal with the crisis on the line. The Kidō squad was handed back to the teachers to lead.

At last, they struggled through to midnight.

Just as everyone was nearing the limits of their physical endurance and willpower, an ear-splitting roar of Reishi suddenly erupted from the Senkaimon, which had remained silent all this time!

Immediately afterward, a faint but steady spiritual light lit up the Senkaimon's enormous wooden torii gate!

"The Senkaimon is fixed! The Reishi coordinates are being reset! The gate is about to open! Help is on the way!"

Amid intense fluctuations of Reiatsu, Kisuke Urahara's excited shout quickly spread across the entire front line.

The news was like a shot of adrenaline to every student in the position. A powerful surge of energy seemed to spring from nowhere in their drained bodies, and roars rang out from the defensive line, resounding through the night sky once more!

But at that moment, Xuanxin noticed something unusual on the battlefield.

As the night deepened, the number of Hollows charging out of the forest began to visibly decrease.

Seeing the pressure on the defensive line drop sharply, the teacher stopped organizing large-scale coordinated Kidō barrages to conserve as much of everyone's remaining Reiatsu as possible. Instead, the teacher ordered everyone to fall back behind the barrier and form their own groups to defend.

At the front, Xuanxin's frown deepened. He calmly watched the Hollows emerging from the forest.

He noticed that although their eyes were still clouded with confusion, their charges had long since lost the frenzy they had shown earlier that night!

Their steps toward the position had even grown unsteady, and they kept looking back.

It did not look like a charge. It looked more like... they were fleeing for their lives!

Yoruichi, who had remained at Xuanxin's side, noticed it too. She rested an arm on his shoulder and said between breaths:

"I'm exhausted... Has the drug worn off? Doesn't that mean we're safe?"

But there was not a trace of joy on Xuanxin's face. Instead, he grew even more serious and turned his head slightly.

"Yoruichi, if the drug really has worn off, why are they still rushing toward us for all they're worth?"

At those words, Yoruichi's expression froze.

An indescribable chill shot wildly up her spine to the crown of her head!

"Could it be..."

Thud. Thud.

The sound of something heavy trampling the earth suddenly came from afar.

Then the trees at the edge of the forest began to fall one by one, and a white mask with a long nose slowly emerged from the depths of the woods. It was...

A newly born Gillian!

Chapter 24: The First Glimpse of Power

When the somewhat comical white mask appeared before everyone, the entire battlefield fell silent. No one laughed, because everyone knew it was not a clown's mask. It was the mark of a Gillian.

A Gillian was formed when hundreds of ordinary Hollows devoured one another and fused. When an ordinary Hollow became a Gillian, it proved that it had acquired the ability to evolve by devouring Hollows of the same level.

While everyone was still in shock, Xuanxin grabbed Yoruichi and ran toward the position, shouting as he ran:

"Everyone, what are you standing around for?! Waiting to die?! Everyone, get ready to fight! Tighten the defensive perimeter! All medical personnel, take anyone who can't move to the Senkaimon first! Kidō squad, begin chanting!!"

Xuanxin's roar came from the front, snapping the stunned teachers out of their daze.

Though the teachers of the Shin'ō Academy had not fought in a long time, they did have past combat experience. One of them continued shouting:

"Quick! Follow Fujiwara Genshin's plan! First squad, cover the wounded! Second squad, pull back immediately and rebuild the Reishi barrier!"

"Kidō squad! Get up, all of you! Begin the Shakkahō incantation!"

With Xuanxin and the surviving teachers desperately organizing everyone, the defenses, which had already fallen into disarray, were miraculously rebuilt in short order. Although the position was smaller, it was still more than sufficient.

Now, all their forces were concentrated in front of the Senkaimon, waiting for the final battle.

When Xuanxin and Yoruichi reached the position, the Kidō squad happened to finish chanting Shakkahō. Seeing the two return safely, everyone took aim at their target: the Gillian directly in front of the position.

"Hadō #31: Shakkahō—prepare to fire!!!"