Snippet #2409178

Setsu was not going to loll around all day. Although she was given a day without obligations that she would have ducked anyway, she could not avoid those she owed herself. The events of the night before had rejuvenated the sense of urgency that used to keep her awake at night as a child – she needed to become stronger. She needed power, strength dimensions ahead of the forest Hollows, even beyond that of the captain who had saved her. They say rage is mankind’s best motivator, but sheer unadulterated envy had always served Setsu well enough.

After her game with Hoshi, Setsu took a meditative position in a corner of her friend’s room, sword resting in her lap. The accursed blade did not cooperate, apparently offended for being used as a glorified metal peg to pin down a Hollow. Setsu couldn’t reasonably blame it for that, but she did anyway. Scrap-metal chunk of recalcitrance, she cursed.

It had always struck her as odd that, among her friends, none had managed to achieve shikai in the six years spent at the academy. It would not be odd for Akira, and maybe Jin, to keep theirs a secret, but Setsu liked to think her friends would offer aid and insight rather than gloat behind her back. Great talent matures slowly, she told herself. Taiki bansei. The old proverb was probably the first thing she’d engrave on her skin if she ever felt like joining the tattoo faction alongside Ryuu and Jin, and if there was even a sliver of truth in the saying, she was with formidable friends indeed.

Setsu glanced at her red-haired friend, blissfully asleep and half-buried in a pile of expensive feather-filled cloth. Her tattoo ran from wrist to shoulder, its head peeking out just above those ostentatious mounds of chest-flesh of hers, heaving with a quickened breath. Setsu glared and felt like hating her friend a teensy bit.

Setsu stepped out of the room onto the porch – Ryuu might wake up at the targeted bloodlust. Her friend was a great deal more astute than people gave her credit for, and she deserved the sleep. Outside, Setsu walked around in the garden, appreciating the plant life solely for their merit of warding the scorching sun. Though, there was a single plant she took a liking to; a bale of straw, tied with rope around the heavy trunk of a great oak. A striking post. The handiwork of a less pacifist member of the Fourth, Setsu mused.

The tree was padded at eye level for punch height. Just to be contrary, Setsu used it for high kick practice for the remainder of the afternoon. Leaves fluttered down with each kick the trunk endured, and Setsu tried kicking those too. The exercise quickly became a game, and when dinnertime rolled around, the skin of her feet and legs was pleasantly aflame with honest exertion. Setsu’s pale skin gave peaches and plums a run for their money when it came to predisposition to bruising, but if these turned out particularly bad, perhaps Hoshi would be able to do something about them.

After dinner, as Setsu was about to challenge her friend in another game, Akira stormed into the room with a refreshing disregard for privacy and a rather less refreshing mien. Flustered anxiety was an odd look on the normally calm man.

Akira swiftly recounted what he'd overheard, but in Setsu’s eyes, it did little to explain or justify his evident distress. A lieutenant couldn’t find Shihiro, and therefore something must have happened to him? Since when were lieutenants some kind of infallible creature? The mere suggestion of it annoyed Setsu, considering how at least one lieutenant was widely rumored to have attained their station through nepotism. Before that, Seireitei was mind-bogglingly big if you stopped a moment to think about it. North to South, East to West, moving from one gate to the opposite side would take Setsu upward of two weeks at a walking pace. Plenty of space to get lost.

“Or,” Setsu stated in reply to Hoshi and Ryuu, “Shihiro is still in Seireitei somewhere, and the lieutenant just missed him. Even I know places where lieutenant-class shinigami would be hard-pressed to track me.”

The sewers, for example, Setsu thought. She would never deign to go down into the sewers herself, but that should be equally true for the lieutenant of the Eighth. Shihiro was probably nowhere near the sewers though – the fact that the giant might not even fit aside, he had no more reason to be there than he had for the human world, or Fugai forest, or the Fourth Division’s female baths.

Though one of her close friends was allegedly missing, Setsu was not worried overmuch - Shihiro possessed a single, paramount virtue that, in fact, vindicated most of their very friendship. The bastard was darned difficult to kill.