"Who exactly are you?"
"Why can you, a Soul Reaper, use Quincy and Fullbring abilities?"
Uryu Ishida felt his throat tighten. After thinking for a long time, he looked at Araki with an incomparably serious expression and asked.
"Yeah? Who exactly am I?"
"Uryu Ishida and Kurosaki Ichigo, I think you should both know perfectly well who I am! This isn't our first meeting, is it?!"
Araki stood where he was, his expression blank as he calmly addressed Ichigo and Uryu. Though his words were phrased as a question, his tone was far too flat, making it sound more like a statement to everyone present—as if he wasn't asking Ichigo and Uryu at all, but simply stating a fact.
"What are you talking about?! I don't understand!"
Ichigo's eyes widened, his large eyes filled with confusion...
Yes, it seemed Ichigo's ears had run out of credit again! At that moment, he seemed to have fallen into a deaf state once more, completely failing to understand what Araki had just said.
"This isn't our first meeting?"
"Could it be that I met this Soul Reaper commander-in-chief at some point in the past? But I forgot? When could it have been..."
"Come to think of it, for some reason, this Soul Reaper commander-in-chief gives me an inexplicable sense of familiarity, as though he were an important member of my family..."
Uryu, however, understood Araki's words. His brows furrowed as he sank into thought, seemingly already forming a guess about Araki.
"Huh? Kurosaki, Ishida, have you two been to the Soul Society before and met Captain-Commander Araki?!"
As for Orihime Inoue, one of the few women present with normal hearing and normal comprehension, she looked at Ichigo and Uryu and asked.
"What kind of joke is that?! How could I have ever been