Chapter 8: My Severe And Continuous Lapse

I woke up to the four faces belonging to Velvet's team and the ceiling behind them.

"Are you alright?" Yatsuhashi looked the most concerned. I couldn't fault him since I'd been knocked out without any Aura to absorb the damage. It might have even looked like I'd been killed for a moment.

"I think so?" I said as I picked myself up from the ground and noticed an imprint of my body had been left on the wall right next to me. I was feeling a little sore, but not really all that banged up. I must have hit my head just the wrong way to lose consciousness for a couple seconds.

"Damn, Yatsu. Have you been sneaking off to the gym when I wasn't looking? Where the hell'd you pull that from?" Coco asked.

"Nowhere, genius," Fox rolled his blank, blind eyes. "That's what happens when a person without Aura tries to block Fulcrum. Yatsu's strong, of that there's no doubt, but it's never seemed this impressive 'cause he only fights people whose Aura can spread out the effects of the gravity-dust enhancements built into his sword."

"Don't get smart with me," Coco demanded.

"Well, this has been really insightful and all, but I should probably get back to my workout," I said, stopping the argument before it could really take off. I looked at Yatsuhashi and said, "Relax, man. I'm fine. In fact, I should be thanking you for reminding me that I shouldn't be getting a big head just cause I'm a little strong. There's always another mountain or however the saying goes, you know?"

When he nodded, I said my goodbyes and returned to the gym.

There I continued working out like I planned until 4:00 PM. I took another hour to run a course back to Vale proper and returned to my apartment. After taking a shower and changing into a fresh set of comfy clothes, I crashed on the couch and reviewed my gains for the day.

4 Unique Coins between conning Ozpin and completing another unreasonable day of extreme overtraining. 16 Rare Coins between killing off Alpha Grimm to and from my trips to Beacon, completing a session of training and beating Coco on a technicality. 216 Uncommons from killing off normal Grimm. The Commons were no longer worth mentioning.

'Come to me my sweet!' I called for the Gacha Gods' blessings.

[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 65 | Alchemy x5 (Skill)]

[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 81 | Sprinting x3 (Skill)]

[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 25 | Spanish x2 (Skill)]

[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 63 | Driving x5 (Skill)]

[Results: Rarity — Rare 759 | 72 Hours, Do Or Die (Scenario)]

[Results: Rarity — Rare 500 | Ki Enhancement (Consumable)]

[Results: Rarity — Unique 2,222 | Magicka Pool (Ability)]

Yup, about what I expected. Skills, new and old, were always welcome. The Ki Enhancement gave me the equivalent of one more week of training. But everything else was nebulous in terms of how useful it might be.

I checked the time and it was only 6:37 PM.

Hmm… Decisions, decisions…

I didn't know whether I should bite the bullet and accept the "good" scenario I'd gotten. Its name suggested the event would probably last for only three days, but there was the chance that it might take longer. "Do or Die" also didn't exactly inspire optimistic thoughts either.

Then again, despite my misgivings with Turtle's Tutalage, the results were well worth the pain and suffering I'd experienced. What was eight months of misery when I could now fly and eat bullets for breakfast?

The Rarity of the new scenario wasn't as high as Turtle's Tutelage, but it was still a high rating for a Rare pull. Maybe I should just…

"Fuck it, we ball!" I accepted the scenario before I could reconsider.

Reality shifted and I found myself being restrained by a little girl. From my chest, there was a chain that was connected to… another copy of my body?

I didn't have time to ponder what the hell was going on before a tall man with cornrows slammed an axe on the chain severing it.

"Remember kiddos, you have at most three days before you turn Hollow and we have to put you down. The only way out is by becoming Shinigami," a different man with a striped green and white bucket hat said.

"Are you insane, Kisuke?! You just killed us!" A fellow compatriot receiving the same treatment as me shouted out in outrage.

"Quiet down, will you?" Kisuke gestured at him dismissively, "You won't be dead for long once you regain your powers back."

"If we get our powers back."

"It's the only way, Ichigo."

The large man with cornrows then proceeded to cast some kind of Japanese voodoo witchcraft to lock my arms behind me before dropping me and Ichigo into two different holes. Now, I don't know about Ichigo, but my hole was a couple thousand meters deep.

"Kisuke, you asshole, you better prey I don't get my hands on you after I get out of this damn hole!" I heard him shout, clearing my doubts as to whether he had been killed or not by his fall.

Ignoring Ichigo, I fidgeted around awkwardly to stand up without using my arms. When I managed to do that, I looked up through the hole and wondered what the point of this was.

With my Ki I could just— Nevermind.

I didn't have my Ki.

Welp, flying out of the hole was no longer an option and there weren't any footholds to use even if by some miracle I managed to break out of whatever curse was cast upon my arms. What the hell was I supposed to do?

"Hey, is there some technique or trick I'm supposed to be learning here or what?!" I called out.

"Are you daft? Find and summon your Reiryoku. Spiritual Power is the only way you stand a chance of contacting your Zanpakuto Spirit and gaining your Shinigami powers," a childish voice called back.

Well that was entirely unhelpful. I didn't have anything related to any of those unfamiliar words. Reiryoku? Spiritual Power? Zanpakuto Spirit? Shinigami? Three were presumably Japanese terms outside of my very limited vocabulary and the other was a power I didn't have.

Hmm… Maybe I should start squatting or something? Even if it's just bodyweight squats, enough should trigger the requirements for an Uncommon Gacha to at least give me a clue as to what I was supposed to be doing.

I started to do squats when mind-numbing pain paralyzed me in excruciating agony. My chest felt like I was being branded with a hot iron and the rest of my body was spasming like crazy. More concerningly, the end of the chain that had been cut had grown mouths and was starting to eat itself.

This lasted for a couple of minutes before the mouths receded back into the ends of the chain that still remained and gave me a moment's reprieve to finally move again.

[Congratulations! For enduring your First Encroachment, you have earned a Locked Rare Gacha Coin!]

I used the coin and felt better immediately afterwards.

[Results: Rarity — Rare 100 (Locked) | Spiritual Enhancement (Consumable)]

I waited a few seconds to see if another "Encroachment" would spontaneously trigger and lock me up again, but when nothing happened, I stood up and began to squat until another wave of pain hit me.

[Congratulations! For completing a set of 2,751 squats, you have earned a Locked Rare Gacha Coin!]

[Congratulations! For enduring your Second Encroachment, you have earned a Locked Rare Gacha Coin!]

Like with Turtle's Tutalge my Gacha rolls in this scenario were locked to only be positive, fixed and related to the trials and tribulations I faced which yielded two more Spiritual Enhancements.

The first one I took erased my pain again and the second one didn't really do anything as far as I could tell. Oh well, it was back to squatting for me until I underwent encroachment again and again.

I kept loading up on the Spiritual Enhancements until I finished my eighth encroachment. By then the chain was almost half the size it was initially, meaning about 36 hours had passed and I was no more tired, hungry, thirsty, or sleepy.

While I was ruminating on that, the childish voice from before called out to me, "You still alive, down there?! Feeling hungry, yet?!"

"Surprisingly, no! Why is that?!" I called back, yelling to make sure he heard me from however many miles away he might have been.

"Good! It's been about 70 hours at this point, which is when most people start to turn!"

"What?!" I wasn't even talking to him as I yelled out in shock.

70 hours?! I looked down at the chain and— Oh shit, here we go again.

The Ninth Encroachment felt worse than literally all the other ones stacked together. It made me face plant and not even react to the impact as I was too busy wondering where all the extra nerves must have spawned in my body for me to feel this amount of pain.

I felt the urge to vomit and a spray of paper-white ooze shot out of my mouth which ignored gravity to cover my face. I must have run out of oxygen as I felt my consciousness slip.

[Congratulations! For completing a set of 3,105 squats, you have earned a Locked Rare Gacha Coin!]

[Congratulations! For persisting past a Ninth Enchroment, you have earned a Locked Unique Gacha Coin!]

I was in a void of inky black nothingness. Apparently still conscious as I manage to use my Gacha Coins.

[Results: Rarity — Rare 999 (Locked) | Shikai Release Command (Ability)]

[Results: Rarity — Unique 3,333 (Locked) | Hollowfication (Ability)]

"Yoohoo," An innately annoying voice called out to me. I wasn't sure how it was possible for me to feel so much disdain and irritation from just a simple-sounding call.

Turning towards the source of the noise, I was met with the silhouette of a man with what looked like the exact same build as me. I had the feeling that even if he wasn't surrounded by a void of nothingness all around him, he still woundn't have any distinguishing features.

"What… What are you?" I asked.

"I'm your Zanpakuto Spirit, silly. However could you forget?" The silhouette pouted and the desire to smite him rose higher than anything else I'd ever wanted in life.

"Are you doing this to me?" I asked, irritated and confused.

"What do you mean? Doing what exactly?" It feigned ignorance and taunted me.

"Ugh, whatever," I pushed passed all the nonsense and asked, "So what do you want? Why are you here?"

"To answer your call for help of course!" It laughed, "We're going to die if you don't get Shinigami powers to prevent him from destroying this marvelous inner world of yours."

I turned to where the silhouette pointed and found an amorphous blob of white ooze rapidly shifting, expanding and contracting erratically.

I looked back at the silhouette and asked, "Ok… How do we do that?"

"Just call out my name and summon my physical form to stabilize the corruption of your Inner Hollow."

"That's what that thing is?" My eyes widened when the silhouette gave me a serious nod in response. "I have a better idea, in that case," I said as I approached the ooze.

"If you touch that, it's probably going to kill you, ya know?" The silhouette said cheerfully as it stood back and watched.

"Nope," I said in response and reached out to let the white ooze begin to ensnare me.

"Oh goodie! My master's already more insane than I am," I heard the silhouette say from within a cocoon of the white ooze.

It tried to dominate my will and consume my Soul but Hollowfication allowed me to subsume it instead. The primordial ooze was but a being of pure instinct so it didn't know when to quit and continued to pump me full of its power, in turn weakening it until only I remained with a bone mask as a relic of its former existence; kind of like a Grimm.

[Congratulations! For defeating your Inner Hollow, you have earned a Locked Epic Gacha Coin!]

Hell fucking yeah!

I used my most rare pull yet immediately to see if the hype was worth the squeeze. Wrong quote, but whatever.

[Results: Rarity — Epic 66,666 (Locked) | Saint & Sinner (Ability)]

That was… Something, I guess. From what I knew innately about the Ability, Saint and Sinner supposedly balanced the ratio of Shinigami and Hollow spiritual energies in my soul to make them synergize and become exponentially greater than the sum of their parts. The issue was two-fold.

First and foremost, I just got the faintest inkling of both Shinigami and Hollow energies. Secondly, I didn't have a clue as to how I was supposed to use them. At least with Ki, just having it amplified the state of my physical body. With Reiryoku — spiritual power/energies — that wasn't the case.

"You've really outdone yourself, master. Devouring a Hollow as a pure soul? I would have thought it inconceivable had I not seen you do it firsthand," the silhouette said from where it had been watching. "And to think you didn't even need my help… What am I chopped liver?" At some point, it had gotten its hands on a throwing knife and started using it to draw crude illustrations in the blackness of the surrounding void.

"What the— How are you even doing that? How can I even tell what it is you're drawing? Everything including you is nothingness!" I said in exasperation.

"Why, I'm glad you finally noticed!" The silhouette stood up from its crouched position and skipped over to me.

"So, are you finally going to call my name and get us back to the world of the living or what?"

"Is that really all it'll take to get out of here?" I asked while looking around.

"Sure is, my man," it flashed me a thumbs up.

"Alright, I'll bite," I sighed. "What's your name?"

"Come on, master," it started pouting again, trying to be cute or something; it failed decisively. "You should already know it. Also, don't you know it's rude to ask that of a Zanpakuto Spirit, kind of like asking a girl her weight?"

"This mother… Ugh," I really really hated this thing. But that was fine, it didn't matter. I just had to figure out its stupid riddle and— nevermind. It literally told me it was my Zanpakuto Spirit. The answer lied in the Shikai Release Command Ability.

"End The Madness, Katayoki."

The void of my inner world collapsed and I found myself back in the real world. Not in the hole I'd been abandoned in, but my room back on Remnant.