Chapter Text
HELLO AO3! If you couldn't tell I'm relatively new to this site but I'm absolutely loving it. I've had some friends recommend some fics already so I'm slowly getting used to the format used here. But if you think I sound new to this, oh I definitely am lol. Recently I've been absolutely obsessed with Bleach since Thousand Year Blood War came out. So this has been a VERY long time coming since I've been going back and forth on how I wanted to build an OC. And since I've gotten back into reading, there's been one story that is quite possibly one of the best bleach fics. If you haven't read it, Reincarnated into the World of Bleach by onetim3 is definitely a top favorite. And full credit where it's due, it was this story that finally gave me the inspiration and motivation to finally get this going. This is gonna be a more OC-focused story and their perspective of the events of canon, plus there'll be time skips since Shinigami live for so long I'm not going to go through every year of their lives. I may be a little rusty, but I hope you enjoy my attempt at a bleach fic!
-This is new- Thoughts
-This is new- Zanpakuto speaking
The smell of ash in the Rukongai was always heavy, but this was different. This was the suffocating, chemical stench of a localized vacuum—the bitter scent of burned cedar tangled with the sharp, physical sting of ozone.
A young boy, looking to be around twelve-years-old, Reiji sat perfectly frozen in the center of a smoking, jagged crater that had been a home only an hour before. Gray dust coated his hair and the tattered fabric of his robes, but he didn't dare move a muscle. Don't breathe, he thought, his chest aching with a terrifying, hollow pressure. If you breathe too fast, it'll come back. He squeezed his eyes shut, hands gripping his own scalp, and bit down on his bottom lip until the metallic taste of blood seeped into his mouth. He was counting his heartbeat, desperately forcing his breathing into a slow, artificial rhythm. He had to remain silent. He had to be still. If his chest heaved too quickly, if a single sob slipped past his teeth, he knew the roaring, catastrophic noise inside his soul would wake up again.
Looking back through the smoke, the warning signs had always been there—he had just been too blind, too desperate to be normal, to see them. For the first few years, it had been a joke. Blankets would cling to him too tightly in the winter, and touching a doorknob would crackle with a spark a little too loud, prompting his adoptive mother to laugh and blame it on the dry northern winds of Kagarashi. But as his body grew, a strange, invisible weight had begun to settle over their home.
He remembered the subtle, unexplainable sickness that had slowly crept over his family over the last year. His siblings would wake up complaining of severe headaches and tight chests, and his mother's hands had grown perpetually cold, as if the very warmth was being pulled out of them whenever he sat too close. It was me, a horrifying realization whispered in the dark caverns of his mind. They were withering just by being near me, and I didn't know. Then, just a month ago, the first true omen had struck. Angry at a local merchant who had cheated his brother, Reiji had slammed his fist against a wooden fence post in the yard. It hadn't split the wood. Instead, a single, lightless thread of ink-black electricity had hissed from his knuckles, soundlessly dissolving a perfect, charred hole straight through the cedar beam before leaving the surrounding air utterly dead and freezing to the touch. He had hidden the mark under a stack of firewood, terrified of what it meant, praying he wasn't carrying some kind of dark curse.
He didn't know anything about souls. He didn't know about power. He was just a child, and the countdown had already hit zero.
It had been an accident—a nightmare about his parents dying years ago that had caused the sickness inside him to finally tear itself open while he slept. The black lightning hadn't boomed with thunder; it had expanded outward in a terrifying, heavy silence, flattening the walls of the house and dissolving the sanctuary into soot. His adoptive parents and siblings had survived, but their faces in the dark had permanently shattered him. They hadn't checked to see if he was burning. They had backed away in unadulterated horror, screaming that he was a demon, a cursed abomination, before fleeing into the northern wastes and leaving him entirely alone. 'Demon,' the word echoed in his ears, sharper than any physical blade. They didn't even check if I was alive. The memory of their terror clutched at his throat, a psychological chokehold that threatened to shatter his control.
Crack.
A tiny, involuntary spark of light-absorbing purple electricity snapped across his wrist, and Reiji flinched, his entire body trembling as he squeezed his eyes tighter, begging the storm to stay dead.
A sudden, sharp whistling sound sliced through the heavy, ionized air, immediately followed by a heavy thud that shook the loose soot around his boots.
He didn't move, keeping his chin pressed tightly against his knees, but his vision caught the flash of a vibrant, tattered red scarf cutting through the bleak gray scenery. Standing at the rim of the crater, looking down at him with an unbothered, hands-on-hips grin, was a girl, looking to be in her mid to late teens. Long, wild golden-brown hair flared out around her shoulders like a lion's mane, and her fierce amber eyes completely ignored the suffocating static pressure that surrounded him.
"Hey. You still alive down there, kid?" She called out, her voice loud, booming, and entirely devoid of the terror his family had just screamed into the night.
Reiji flinched, a sharp spark of light-absorbing black lightning snapping across his collarbone in response to his sudden panic. "Go away," he rasped, his teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached. "Don't touch me. I'm a monster... I ruined their house. They looked at me and they ran... I make too much noise."
The girl didn't back down. Instead, she slid down the crumbling incline of the crater, her straw sandals kicking up clouds of ash as she marched directly into his personal bubble. She didn't flinch when the stray black sparks bit at the fabric of her tattered clothes. She simply sat right next to him, reached out a calloused hand, slapped it on top of his messy hair, and leaned her full, athletic physical weight against him.
"They're fools," she said flatly, her boisterous tone grounding him like a physical anchor. "In the Rukongai, power isn't a curse, kid. It's the only thing that keeps you breathing. If they ran away because you're strong, that's their loss." She nudged his shoulder with her elbow, her sharp amber eyes peering down at him. "So, what's your name, brat? You got one, or did you leave that in the ashes too?"
The young boy bit his lip, pulling his head deeper into his knees. He didn't answer. He couldn't. To speak the name Reiji Ichinose felt like a second betrayal—a defilement of the quiet peace his adoptive family had wanted, and the ghost of the perfect brother, Maki, they had tried to replace. He remained stubbornly, desperately silent.
She stared at him for a long beat, then let out a sharp, amused huff. "Fine. Keep your secrets. But I'm not calling you 'kid' for the next fifty years. Look at you—you're sitting in a smoldering hole, and the air around you is violently warping and boiling from your own pressure. You look like a walking sun-stroke down here. A literal heat haze. From now on, your name is Kagero."
The silence that followed her declaration was absolute, a sudden, ringing vacuum where even the crackle of Reiji's leaking sparks seemed to choke and die.
Reiji didn't move. His face remained buried against his knees, his shoulders trembling so violently that the loose gray ash beneath his sandals vibrated in tiny, rhythmic ripples. He could feel this immense, grounding heat coming off of her like the golden glow of the sun, pressing right through his tattered, soot-covered robes, a stark and terrifying contrast to the freezing, light-absorbing void he had been nursing inside his chest. Why isn't she running? his mind panicked. She's too close. She's going to burn. To a boy who had just been screamed at, labeled a demon, and abandoned by the only people who had ever offered him a home, her heavy, casual touch felt like a physical assault on his isolation. It was too loud. She was too bright.
"Kagero..." he repeated, the new name tasting rough and foreign on his bleeding lip. He slowly tilted his head upward, his dark eyes wide, bloodshot, and completely fractured with panic as he looked at the older girl leaning on him like a common fence post. "You don't understand. If you stay near me... it'll happen again. The noise. The thunder. It will burn you, just like it burned their house."
She merely let out a sharp, bark-like laugh that bounced off the crater's crumbling wooden walls. She put her hand on his head and in his hair again, but this time she dug her fingers in, giving his head a firm, intentional shake that forced him to look directly into her fierce, unblinking amber eyes.
"Let it try," she said, her mischievous grin stretching wide across her face, radiating an untouchable, street-hardened confidence that completely rewrote the gravity of the ruins. "I'm Kōga Sarutobi. I've wrestled rogue Hollows in District 80 and slept through winter storms in the northern wastes. If your little spark thinks it can scare me off, it's going to have to try a hell of a lot harder than this. Now get up, kid. Sitting in the dirt isn't going to fix your roof, and I'm starving." As she was talking, she slowly got up and stepped in front of him, turning around and offering her hand.
Reiji stared at her extended, calloused hand for a long, agonizing beat. His fingers twitched around his legs, slowly losing their iron grip, his mind screaming at him to run, to hide, to protect this stranger from the calamity locked inside himself. She's completely insane, he realized, watching the sunlight catch her wild hair. But... she isn't looking at me like I'm a monster. As he looked at her fearless smile, something shifted behind his eyes. The raw, hysterical terror of the boy named Reiji began to retreat behind a new, defensive wall. If the world was going to look at his lightning and see a monster, then he would give them exactly what they expected—a shifting, unpredictable haze that nobody could ever truly touch.
He forced his lips to curve upward, stitching together the very first, fragile iteration of his expressive, deflective mask. It was a faint, slightly sarcastic smirk that hid the trembling of his jaw. Fine. If I have to be a mirage to protect people, then a mirage I'll be. He reached out, his small hand completely disappearing inside her grip as she effortlessly hauled him out of the ash.
"You're remarkably loud, Sarutobi-san," Reiji muttered, his voice finding a small, wry spark of life as he brushed the soot from his knees. "But I suppose... a heat haze is better than a screaming storm."
Ten Years Later
The years that followed were not a story of a hero and her ward; they were a lesson in absolute, unrefined survival.
The outer districts of the Rukongai did not care about a child's trauma, nor did they show mercy to a girl carrying a sword she picked up from some drunkard she'd beaten senseless for trying to pick a fight with them. If they wanted to eat, they had to fight. If they wanted a roof, they had to take it. Kōga Sarutobi became the blunt instrument that cleared their path, a whirlwind of high-speed athletic movements and hot, golden spiritual energy that cracked the skulls of anyone foolish enough to eye them as prey. She was a force of pure momentum, a living shield that ensured the world never got close enough to trigger Kagero's panic.
But while Kōga handled the violence, it was Kagero who kept them alive.
Living on the streets forced his fragile, defensive mask to harden into an impenetrable armor of casual, quick-talking charm. He learned to fast-talk merchant syndicates, pickpocket distracted ruffians, and use sharp, self-deprecating wit to manipulate the fragile egos of the district's gang leaders. He became the brilliant, analytical mind behind Kōga's raw muscle. He calculated their escape routes, managed their meager funds, and memorized every alleyway in the northern wastes.
Most importantly, he spent those ten years practicing the art of the cage.
Without a teacher or some way to help contain it, he had to rely entirely on his own desperate willpower to keep "the noise" chained down. He developed a permanent, subconscious habit of rolling a smooth, heavy piece of volcanic grounding stone between his palms whenever his skin began to tingle with static. He learned to constantly rest his fingers against his left wrist, silently counting his own pulse to force his breathing into a strict, artificial rhythm before a stray spark could leak. Sixty beats a minute. Keep it rhythmic. Keep it flat. Don't let up for a second.
He barely aged physically over that decade—advancing from a lanky twelve-year-old -looking child to a slightly sharper, slender thirteen-year-old-looking teenager—but his mind became a clockwork maze of perfect emotional regulation. He treated his own soul like a loaded bomb, and Kōga was the only person in the entire world permitted to hear the ticking.
By the time Kōga decided it was finally time to march into the Seireitei and take the Shin'ō Academy exam, they weren't just street orphans anymore. They were the Twin Stars of the lower districts—the roaring, golden sun and the quiet, shifting heat haze. When Kōga packed her meager belongings into a single cloth bundle and turned her back on the outer districts, she did not walk away on a whim. She went with a fierce, burning purpose. For ten years, she had watched Kagero's unstable spiritual pressure grow more volatile by the day. She realized that if he remained an unregistered rogue soul in the lawless outer districts, a roaming patrol or the Stealth Force would eventually detect his "noise" and have him captured or execute him as a dangerous anomaly. She was stepping behind the Seireitei's boundaries first to build a political shield—to climb their military ranks and ensure that by the day he was finally forced to follow, she would have enough rank to protect him.
But on the morning she left, right at the border of District 62 Kagarashi, she didn't let him hide behind his defensive, sarcastic smirk. She yanked his lanky frame into a rough, bone-crushing headlock and looked him dead in the eye with absolute intensity.
"Listen to me, Little Zero," she barked, her voice grounding him like an iron anchor. "Three years. That's all I need to fast-track through their stupid school. While I'm gone, whenever that thunder in your chest starts screaming and you feel like you're about to lose your grip, you check your pulse and you count to ten. By the time you hit ten, you remember that I am still standing in your storm, and I am coming back for you. Don't you dare let this place swallow you before I get back."
She vanished past the borders, and the silence that settled over Kagero was deafening. Those three years apart became an exhausting game of psychological warfare against his own soul. He isolated himself in an abandoned shrine near the edge of the district, waking at the exact same minute every dawn, counting his pulse every hour on the hour, and rolling volcanic grounding stones between his palms until his skin felt raw.
Yet, he was never truly alone for long. The Academy strictly forbade cadets from leaving the Seireitei boundaries, but Kōga completely ignored the rules. Once every few months, using her unmatched athletic speed and street-honed movement steps, she would secretly slip past the high-density spiritual barriers and perimeter guard squads at night. She would sprint all the way back to his isolated shrine, violently barge into his quiet room to drop a smuggled bag of Seireitei rice or a fresh grounding stone into his lap, and drag him into a brutal headlock just to break his poker face. Those high-risk, midnight drop-ins were the only reason his mental blocks didn't disintegrate. She proved to him every single time that her promise was unbreakable.
By the end of the third year, Kagero stood before the small, cracked mirror of the shrine, smoothing down the front of his clean, unadorned Rukongai robes. He studied his reflection, analyzing the thin, sharp physical features of a street-healed feral teenager. He was incredibly slender and lanky, looking barely thirteen years old due to the crawl of his aging soul. Good, he thought, a cold, bitter comfort settling into his chest. The smaller and younger I look, the less they'll expect. A child doesn't look like a threat. His skin was pale from years of hiding indoors, and his hair was a messy, untamed mop of ink-black that carried deep, rich midnight-blue undertones. To keep the long strands out of his face during the fast agility of his street days, he had woven the front sections into two neat, shoulder-length braids—a practical survival trick that hung loosely over his jawline. He raised his bare forearms, studying the tight, crude loops of standard gray cloth bandages he had wound from his elbows down to his wrists to act as a makeshift grounding mesh. They were already frayed and singed by the micro-static humming beneath his skin. Just hold it together, he pleaded silently, tightening a knot with his teeth. Just three miles to the gate. Don't slip on the road. He slipped his heavy grounding stones into his pockets, checked his pulse one last time to force his heartbeat into perfect, absolute calm, and picked up his small travel bundle. He wasn't walking toward the Seireitei gates to become a hero; he was going to turn himself into a ghost, blend into the background of the Academy, and use every bit of suppression he had learned to keep the storm chained forever.
The massive architecture of the southern gateway rose up against the horizon like a grand, imposing fortress, serving as a stark and beautiful barrier dividing the military capital from the dirt and chaos of the Rukongai. At the base of the grand checkpoint sat the entrance to the Shin'ō Academy.
Kagero blended into the throng of incoming cadets with the practiced ease of a ghost. He kept his head lowered just enough to avoid eye contact, a faint, perfectly practiced polite smile stitched onto his face. Around him, the children of lesser noble houses marched proudly, their pristine white robes immaculate, their voices carrying the sharp, arrogant ring of privilege. Look at them, completely blind to the world, he thought, maintaining his slouched, unnoticeable posture. They think a fancy crest makes them gods. They can have the spotlight. I'll stay in the dark.
In his pockets, his fingers methodically rolled his small jade grounding stone, discharging the tiny micro-sparks of static before they could touch the air.
One, two, three... he counted his pulse against his wrist, forcing his lungs to take slow, uniform breaths. He was doing perfectly. Nobody was looking at him. The gate guards were busy checking the paperwork of some noble branch family member. If he could just pass through the archway, claim his dormitory bed, and keep his grades exactly in the middle of the pack for six years, he would survive.
"Hey! Little Zero!"
The boisterous, earth-shaking shout shattered the air, cutting right through the polite murmur of the crowd.
Kagero's thumb slipped off his grounding stone. His pulse spiked violently, and a sharp, terrifying hiss rattled the deep caverns of his mind. No, no, no, not here! his mind screamed, his fake smile freezing into a rigid mask of absolute dread.
Marching straight through the crowd of scattering, offended noble cadets was a newly graduated Soul Reaper. She wore the stark black-and-white Shihakusho of the Gotei 13, her long, wild golden-brown hair as untamed as ever, and a tattered crimson scarf trailed behind her like a streak of fire as she stepped with hyper-aggressive speed.
It was Kōga Sarutobi.
Before Kagero could even think about using his stealth steps to vanish into the crowd, Kōga closed the distance. She lunged forward, throwing a heavy, muscular arm around his neck and dragging his head downward into a brutal, suffocating headlock right in front of the entire freshman class.
"Look at you! You actually made it!" she laughed, her booming voice completely ruining his six years of carefully planned anonymity. She ruffled his neatly brushed black hair with a calloused fist until it stood completely on end. "I've been leaning against this wall for two hours waiting for your skinny ass to show up. You're still counting your pulse, aren't you? I can feel the static tingling my sleeve from here."
"Sarutobi-san... please..." Kagero hissed through his teeth, his face turning bright red as he desperately clawed at her forearm to break her grip. His expressive mask had completely shattered, replaced by the panicked, frantic expression of a brother whose peace had just been violently detonated. She has absolutely zero concept of boundaries, he groaned internally, his fingers digging into her iron sleeve. My entire strategy, blown apart in five seconds. "Let go of me... everyone is staring. You are entirely violating the dignity of an official officer."
"Oh, let 'em stare," Kōga scoffed, flashing a massive, predatory grin at a group of whispering noble cadets, who instantly scrambled away from her fierce amber eyes. She finally loosened her grip enough to rest her full physical weight on his shoulder like a literal armrest, completely unbothered by the tiny, frantic purple sparks snapping across his collarbone. "I told you I'd carve out a place for us, didn't I? I'm officially the 7th seat officer in Squad 11 now. So don't you worry about a damn thing, Kagero. You just focus on your classes, and if any of these high-and-mighty snobs give you trouble, you tell me. I'll bury 'em under the training field."
Kagero smoothed down his ruined hair, letting out a long, slow, and utterly defeated sigh that carried the weight of a twenty-year sentence. He looked at her blazing, golden presence, then down at the grounding stone in his palm, and for the first time in three years, the cold, suffocating pressure in his chest settled into a familiar, reassuring warmth.
His sharp, deflective smirk slowly returned to his lips—not as a shield against her, but as an acceptance of the beautiful, chaotic storm he had just walked back into.
"You haven't changed at all, Kōga-nee," Kagero muttered, adjusting his small travel bundle as they walked together through the massive gates of the Academy. "The Seireitei was peaceful for three years. I apologize to the Soul Society for what is about to happen to their walls."
The testing courtyard of the Shin'ō Academy was a sea of raw nerves and high-class vanity. In the center stood a massive, monolithic Reishi pillar—an ancient stone designed to gauge an applicant's raw spiritual capacity. If a cadet possessed strong Reiryoku, the stone would glow with a clean, vibrant blue light.
Kagero stood in the middle of the long queue, his expressive, sarcastic smile firmly pinned to his face as he watched a noble student from a minor Kasumiōji branch make the pillar flare with an impressive, bright radiance. The crowd clapped politely, and the proctors—mid-level, unseated Shinigami—nodded with clinical approval.
Kagero took a slow, uniform breath, his fingers restlessly rolling the volcanic grounding stone inside his pocket. One, two, three... he counted his pulse against his wrist. Just give the stone a single, miserable drop, he instructed himself, his jaw locked in intense focus. A passing grade is a passing grade. Don't be flashy. He had a perfect plan. He was going to feed a tiny, microscopic droplet of his energy into the pillar—just enough to pass with a safe, bottom-tier, utterly forgettable grade. He would blend into the background, and nobody would ever look twice.
"Next applicant. Shintani Kagero," the proctor called out, glancing down at a clipboard.
Kagero stepped forward, keeping his shoulders slightly slumped to minimize his slender frame. He offered the proctors a slightly sheepish, dim-witted grin as he approached the monolithic stone. He raised his right hand, took one last breath to stabilize his heartbeat, and pressed his palm flat against the Reishi-dense surface.
He intended to give it a drop. But the ancient pillar wasn't a standard, passive testing block. Built from hyper-concentrated spiritual particles, the stone acted like a high-density sponge, specifically designed to draw out the designated amount. The moment Kagero's skin touched the surface, the unrefined, predatory void of his Black Lightning instinctively reacted to the foreign energy. The pillar didn't just draw his power; it aggressively sucked it out.
Kagero's eyes went wide. His mental blocks slipped for a single, catastrophic millisecond.
CRACK.
It wasn't a flash of light. It was a silent, light-absorbing ripple of dense, oily-purple and solid black static that shot from his palm directly into the monolith.
The testing pillar didn't glow. In a fraction of a second, the massive stone violently fractured, its ancient Reishi foundations visibly rotting, dissolving, and unraveling into a cloud of useless grey ash as Kagero's Reiatsu completely devoured its structural energy.
Then came the drop. The temperature in the grand courtyard plummeted into a freezing, winter chill. A heavy, suffocating vacuum violently expanded in a fifty-meter circle around Kagero, instantly choking the oxygen out of the air.
Dozens of applicants dropped to their knees, clutching their throats as they gasped for breath in the dead air. The proctors felt their knees buckle under a sudden, primal weight of absolute, evolutionary terror. Their hands flew instinctively to the hilts of their swords, their eyes darting around the courtyard in absolute panic as if a high-class Menos had just ripped through the sky.
Kagero stood frozen, his hand still hovering over the pile of dissolved stone ash, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped animal. This is it, he thought, a cold, numbing despair paralyzing his limbs. The alarms will sound. The Stealth Force will drop from the roofs. I'm going to be executed before I ever step into a classroom. He had failed. The seals had blown. Within seconds, his life would end right here on the pavement.
WHACK.
A heavy, stinging slap collided with the back of Kagero's head, violently breaking his panic and slamming his heartbeat back down into a manageable rhythm. The crushing vacuum dissolved instantly, and the oxygen rushed back into the courtyard with a sharp, ringing gasp.
"Bwahaha! Man, you guys really need to upgrade your budget!" Kōga's loud, boisterous voice boomed across the silent, terrified courtyard. She stepped right into the center of the disaster zone, her tattered red scarf fluttering as she slung a muscular arm around Kagero's neck, dragging him into a familiar headlock, his eyes wide with both utter confusion and newfound terror. She flashed a massive, predatory grin at the trembling proctors. "My little brother's grip is just a bit too rough for your cheap stone! You should have seen the houses he used to break back in District 62! Right, Kagero?"
The proctors blinked, sweating profusely as they looked at the new high-ranking 7th Seat, then at the shattered pile of ash, and finally at the lanky, young boy who was now laughing sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head like a total klutz.
"Y-Yes," the lead proctor stammered, clearing his throat and trying to reclaim his shattered dignity as his hands trembled over his clipboard. "A... structural failure in the testing apparatus. Applicant Shintani... passes by default. Move along."
Ten minutes later, Kagero sat on the edge of a wooden bench in the quiet orientation hall, a fresh, clean white cadet robe folded neatly across his lap. Kōga had already been called away by a Squad 11 runner, leaving him alone with his thoughts in the waiting room.
He looked down at himself, studying his completely transformed silhouette. The worn, tattered Rukongai robes were gone, replaced by the crisp, pristine stark-white fabric of his fresh Academy uniform with blue hakama. Wrapped in the uniform, his slender adolescent frame appeared slightly more respectable, though his face-framing twin braids and deep brown eyes still gave him a deceptively soft, innocent allure. With his messy ink-black and midnight-blue hair brushed down, the visual camouflage was flawless. Perfect. I look like a harmless, eccentric little brat, he mused, testing a gentle, dumb-witted smile in the reflection. No one will look twice. No one will ever suspect anything. As long as I stay focused.
He looked at the fresh cloth bandages wound around his wrists, completely hidden beneath the wide white folds of his new cadet sleeves. He was holding down a monster with nothing but thread and willpower. Today was an absolute disaster, his jaw tightened, his fingers trembling as he felt his pulse. The stone had a stronger pull than I expected, but the energy chased after it. If a Captain had been standing there, I'd be in chains. I can't let anything shake my focus again.
He reached slowly into his pocket, his fingers tightly clutching his volcanic grounding stone. His palm was still tingling, but his heart rate was starting to slow down.
That had been too close. Way too close.
The expressive, slightly sarcastic smirk slowly returned to his features, crinkling the corners of his deep brown eyes and completely masking the flat, light-absorbing void that had just threatened to swallow the courtyard.
He had six years. Six years inside these white walls to perfect his cage. He would tank his swordsmanship grades. He would intentionally botch his Kidō chants. He would become the most mediocre, unremarkable, and forgettable student in the history of the Shin'ō Academy. He would play the fool, the charming class clown, and the harmless street kid—anything to ensure that those high-and-mighty Captains kept their eyes fixed elsewhere.
Kagero stood up, slipping the grounding stone deep into his sash, and threw the white cadet uniform over his shoulders.
The storm was still ticking inside his chest. But as long as he kept his fingers on his pulse, he would make sure the Seireitei never heard the noise.