The rain in Karakura Town fell in thin, persistent sheets, turning the neon signs along the riverbank into smears of blurred color. Seventh Seat Kaito Kageyama stood atop a telephone pole, his black shihakushō soaked through, his asauchi held in a white-knuckled grip. Below, in a deserted playground, a Hollow hunched over the fading spirit of an old man.
This Hollow was ordinary. That's what the reports would say. A Class-3 Spiritual Threat. Its mask was a single, weeping face, no extra limbs, no special abilities, just hunger and grief given form. It was the kind of Hollow Kaito had faced two dozen times since his promotion. Routine. Textbook. It hadn't noticed him yet. Kaito had only been promoted three months ago. He wasn't exceptional. His reiatsu was average. His kido was passable. His zanpakutō hadn't spoken its name to him, and some days he wondered if it ever would. In another century, he might make Sixth Seat. Maybe. He was, in every way that mattered to the Gotei 13, replaceable.
He dropped without a sound.
The Hollow turned just as his blade took its mask from temple to jaw. A clean cut. No flourish. The mask splintered with a sound like cracking ice, and the Hollow dissolved, not into screaming faces or swirling agony, but into pale, harmless reishi particles that drifted upward like ash on the rain. No drama. No fanfare. Just another soul cleansed, another line on the evening's report.
The old man's spirit blinked up at him, confused but unburdened. Kaito gave a small, tired nod.
"Your suffering is over," he said, his voice flat with routine. He flipped his asauchi, holding it by the blade, and pressed the end of the hilt, the tsuba, to the old man's forehead. A soft blue light emanated from the point of contact. The old man's form softened, dissolved, and reformed into a delicate, glowing hell butterfly that fluttered once before vanishing toward the Senkaimon. Another soul guided. Another duty fulfilled.
He turned, sheathing his blade, and took two steps toward the Senkaimon he'd left open a block away, a faint shimmer in the air only he could see, when the air tightened.
It wasn't a sound. It was a pressure, a sudden, violent compression of reality itself. The rain stopped in mid-air. The neon glow of the konbini across the river stretched thin, like taffy. Kaito's body locked up, his reiryoku flaring in alarm. His asauchi vibrated in his grip.
What,
Then came the hook.
It wasn't physical. It was spiritual, a barbed, cosmic filament that punched through the fabric of worlds and snagged him. Not his body. His soul. He felt it pierce his reiryoku pathways, cold and wrong, a sensation so violently alien it stole his breath.
No,
He tried to slash at the air, to sever the connection, but his arms wouldn't move. The world around him, the wet asphalt, the silent playground, the drifting spirit of the old man, began to tear. Reality peeled back like burned film, revealing not the void of Hueco Mundo, not the clean lines of the Dangai, but a raging, blood-red horizon, the shriek of machinery, the smell of sulfur and molten rock.
Where,
The hook yanked.
And then came the pain.
Kaito's spiritual form began to dissolve into reishi, but something was interrupting the process. Instead of flowing freely, his soul was being forcibly woven into matter. It wasn't a transition, it was an invasion.
He felt matter, dense, heavy, foreign, welding itself onto the fabric of his soul. It was like being dipped in molten lead while still alive. Every particle of his being screamed as physical reality seared itself into his spiritual essence. His reiryoku pathways, once flowing and clear, were clogged, rerouted, branded with something thick and choking. Tiny, glowing organisms, midi-chlorians, burrowed into his newly forming cellular structure, a violent symbiosis forced upon a soul that had never known biology.
He wasn't being pulled into a body.
A body was being built around him in real-time.
Bone crackled into existence along spiritual contours. Muscles knit over ethereal sinew. Nerves fired for the first time, carrying signals of agony so profound his consciousness nearly shattered. He felt his soul being anchored, pinned down, trapped, suffocated under the weight of his own new flesh.
STOP,
The scream was silent, spiritual, unheard. The ritual didn't care. Plagueis's will was a press, stamping him into a form he was never meant to wear.
He was being made real.
And it was torture.
He awoke in chains.
Not spiritual bindings. Physical ones. Thick, durasteel cuffs bit into newly formed wrists. The sensory overload was catastrophic. The heat of the room. The grit of the obsidian slab against his back. The thump of a heart in his chest, a heart that hadn't existed twenty minutes ago. He gasped, and lungs he didn't know how to use burned with sulfurous air.
His shihakushō was gone. He wore only a simple gray tunic, damp with sweat and something else, cauterized spiritual residue. He could feel every thread of the fabric. Every draft in the room. It was too much. He was a ghost shoved into a machine, and every sensation was a loud, painful error.
He was in a lab.
A high-ceilinged chamber, carved into the heart of a volcanic rock face. Through a vast transparisteel window, a river of magma glowed orange, casting hellish light across banks of humming consoles, holodisplays flickering with Sith runic sequences, and surgical tables lined with instruments that looked less like tools and more like torture devices.
And in the center of the room, watching him, stood a Muun.
Tall, slender, with a gaunt, pallid face and eyes like chips of obsidian. He wore dark robes, elegant and severe. His presence in the Force was a void, a calculated, hungry absence. Darth Plagueis.
Kaito's mind raced, but it was sluggish, trapped in the feedback loop of a alien nervous system. His reiryoku was there, but accessing it was like trying to breathe through mud.
Plagueis stepped closer, a datapad in his long fingers.
"Fascinating," the Muun said, his voice a dry, rasping whisper that seemed to crawl into Kaito's new, physical ears. "The midi-chlorian count is stabilizing. A soul without a source has been, gifted one. Or inflicted with one. Semantics. You are a successful failure."
Kaito strained against the cuffs. They held. He tried to summon his reiryoku, to flash-step, to break the metal, but his energy scattered, diffusing into the thick, oppressive atmosphere of this place. The very air resisted him.
"What, are you?" Kaito's voice was a ragged, unfamiliar thing. It sounded wrong coming from a throat that shouldn't exist.
"I am the weaver," Plagueis said, almost idly. "You were a thread from another pattern. I needed a consciousness that could persist beyond cellular decay. You were, proximate. Useful."
Proximate. Useful. The words echoed in Kaito's raw mind. He was just a resource. A component. The dehumanization, the desoulization, was absolute.
Plagueis lifted a slender device. A needle, glowing with a sickly violet light. "Now, let us see how your hybrid system reacts to concentrated dark side energy."
He moved to inject it into Kaito's arm.
That's when Kaito felt it, a faint, trembling resonance. Not with the Force. With the rock. The obsidian slab he was chained to was infused with something, not alive, but potent. Volcanic. Planetary energy. This world was alive with pain, and its song vibrated through the fresh, agonizing connection between his soul and the planet's crust.
He had one chance.
As the needle descended, Kaito didn't pull away. He pushed, not with physical strength, but with a desperate, screaming pulse of raw reiryoku through the pain, through the foreign flesh, into the obsidian. He didn't try to break it. He tried to make it remember it was once liquid. Once fire.
The slab didn't shatter. It liquefied. For a split second, the obsidian beneath him turned molten. The chains, fused to it, fell loose.
Kaito moved, not with shunpo grace, but with a pained, convulsive spasm. He rolled off the table as Plagueis's needle struck empty air, sizzling against the hot stone.
Alarms blared. Red light flooded the chamber.
Plagueis did not shout. He didn't even move from where he stood. He merely closed his outstretched hand into a fist.
The Force closed around Kaito like a vice made of invisible durasteel. It lifted him off his feet, crushing the air from his new, unfamiliar lungs. He hung suspended in mid-air, three feet from the floor, limbs pinned, gasping.
"Resilient," Plagueis noted, his voice still calm, almost appreciative. "But unrefined. Your power is instinctual. Untrained. You break what you should bend."
Kaito struggled, but it was useless. He tried to summon reiryoku, to push back against the crushing pressure, but his energy scattered, raw, undirected, useless. He was a child swinging a stick at a tidal wave.
Plagueis stepped closer, the needle still glowing in his hand. "Let us continue."
The needle sank into Kaito's arm.
The pain was different this time, not the searing agony of incarnation, but a cold, invasive corruption. Dark side energy flooded his pathways, clashing violently with his reiryoku. It felt like frost spreading through his veins, like his soul was being dyed black from the inside out. He screamed, a raw, physical sound that tore from his throat.
Plagueis watched the readings on his datapad, unmoved. "Fascinating. Your spiritual energy resists assimilation. It does not convert, it, quarantines. A built-in immune response to metaphysical infection. Noted."
He withdrew the needle. Kaito hung limp in the air, shuddering, sweat and something darker, a thin, oily residue, beading on his skin. He had failed. Utterly.
Plagueis motioned with his free hand. Two heavy restraining clamps descended from the ceiling, locking around Kaito's wrists and hauling him upright against a new slab, this one cold, metallic, and humming with a low energy field. It dampened his reiryoku further, making the air around him feel thick, numb.
"Sedation and full-spectrum scan," Plagueis ordered, not to droids, but to the air. The room's AI responded with a soft chime.
Then, a different chime, sharp, insistent. A priority comm.
Plagueis's eyes flicked to a discreet holoprojector embedded in the console. The sigil that flashed was one Kaito did not recognize, but Plagueis's demeanor shifted instantly. Annoyance, then calculation.
He turned away from Kaito as if he were already forgotten. "Remain. I will return shortly."
He gestured, and two security droids glided silently from recesses in the wall. They were sleek, black, armed with stun batons and built-in blasters. Their photoreceptors glowed a steady, patient red. They took up positions on either side of the slab, utterly still, utterly focused.
Plagueis did not look back. He swept from the lab, the door sealing behind him with a heavy thud. The only sounds left were the hum of machinery, the hiss of vents, and Kaito's own ragged breathing.
He was alone. With two droids. And a sinking, cold realization: He was not important enough for Plagueis to stay. He was a side project. A curiosity. His captivity was now automated.
The scan began, a pale blue light passing over his body from head to toe. He could feel it probing, mapping, trying to quantify his soul. The droids watched, unmoving.
Kaito tested the clamps. Solid. The energy field made his reiryoku feel distant, muffled. He couldn't flash-step. He couldn't break metal. But he wasn't fighting Plagueis now. He was fighting machines.
And machines had patterns.
He watched the droids. Their movements were minimal, efficient. Every thirty seconds, one would tilt its head slightly, scanning him. The other would pivot just enough to monitor the door. A rhythm. A loop.
The scan beam reached his chest. His midi-chlorians, those foreign, forced symbiotes, reacted, causing the beam to flicker. One droid shifted, adjusting a setting on the console beside it.
There. A opening. Three seconds where both droids were focused on the console, not on him.
Kaito didn't have kido. He didn't have strength. But he had will. And a soul, even dampened, was not nothing.
He focused not on breaking the clamps, but on the energy field itself. It was meant to suppress spiritual energy. But what if he didn't push against it? What if he, let it fill him?
It was a desperate, stupid idea. But it was all he had.
He opened his reiryoku pathways, just a crack, and let the suppression field flood in.
The pain was instant and electric, a violent, numbing shock that locked his muscles. But it also overloaded the field's local emitter. The humming stuttered. The clamps flickered.
For one second, they were just metal.
Kaito threw his weight forward, not against the clamps, but against the slab they were attached to. It was bolted to the floor, but the floor was the same volcanic rock as before, and it was still singing with planetary pain.
He didn't have enough power to break it. But he didn't need to.
He channeled all his pain, all his disorientation, all his foreignness into a single, focused spiritual shriek, not an attack, but a resonance. A tuning fork struck against the wrong note.
The rock beneath the slab's bolts cracked. Just enough.
The slab tilted. The clamps, now unanchored, groaned and gave way.
Kaito fell forward, collapsing to the floor as the two droids snapped back to attention, stun batons activating with a snap-hiss.
He had no weapon. No plan. Just floor, and two killers.
So he used the floor.
He rolled toward the nearest droid, not attacking it, but sweeping its legs. It was fast, but it was programmed for combat, not for a prisoner throwing himself at its feet. It staggered.
The second droid fired. A stun blast grazed Kaito's shoulder, locking the muscles there in a cramp of agony. He cried out, but didn't stop. He grabbed the first droid's leg and used it as a lever to swing himself behind the console.
The droids repositioned, flanking him. He was cornered.
His eyes fell on the console, still active, still scanning. And on it, a large, red button beneath a Sith rune he didn't understand. Emergency containment purge.
He didn't know what it did. He didn't care.
He slammed his fist down on it.
The room screamed. Alarms howled. The transparisteel window suddenly polarized to black, and vents in the ceiling hissed open, flooding the room with a freezing, inert gas. A quarantine protocol.
The droids froze mid-stride, their systems scrambling to adapt.
In that second of confusion, Kaito's eyes darted. His gear—his shihakushō, his asauchi—was on a rack against the far wall, hastily discarded. He lunged, his body protesting, and snatched the sword. The familiar weight in his hand was an anchor in the chaos. He slung the bundled uniform over his shoulder.
He didn't go for the door, it was sealed under lockdown. He went for the only other exit he could see: a narrow maintenance hatch beneath the console, barely large enough for a humanoid.
He tore it open and dropped into darkness, sliding down a steep, hot shaft into the bowels of the facility.
Above, he heard the droids reorienting, their heavy steps moving toward the hatch. But they were too large to follow.
He was in a service tunnel, pipes throbbing with heat, the air thick with the smell of oil and sulfur. In the distance, the low thrum of engines. A hangar.
He ran, stumbling, clutching his frozen shoulder, the dark side poison still pulsing in his arm like a second, hateful heartbeat.
He didn't escape clean. He escaped small, desperate, and lucky. Not because he was strong. Because he was beneath notice.
He could feel it with every ragged, learned breath, his soul was anchored. Trapped in flesh. Midi-chlorians hummed in his blood, a foreign choir in a temple of pain. The dark side injection still pulsed in his arm like a frozen poison. He had not beaten his captor. He had slipped through the fingers of his guards. He was only free because Plagueis had been called to something more important.
But he was moving.
He found the hangar, a cavernous space where a single, beat-up freighter was preparing for launch, its ramp still down. Crew were loading crates, shouting about seismic activity. No one saw the ragged figure in a gray tunic slip aboard, hiding behind a stack of cargo containers.
As the ship lifted off, shaking violently as it broke atmosphere, Kaito Kageyama, Seventh Seat of the Gotei 13, a soul sewn into a stranger's skin, a failed experiment who escaped through a maintenance hatch, curled into a dark corner, clutching arms that felt too solid, breathing air that smelled of fuel and foreign stars.
The last thing he felt before unconsciousness took him was not fear.
It was a single, clear, burning thought:
I am not supposed to be here.
And I survived because I was not worth chasing.