Learning is fun~

Maths aside – although maths was never put aside, it seemed present everywhere, like some sort of ghost of equations past - there was something else that she really needed to work on. The technique that she had used to obliterate Caanan was a very interesting one, in the fact that it took out a guy so incredibly overpowered and blasted the holy heck out of some forty foot of solid subterranean earth behind him, after blowing through the reinforced steel wall. She had learned a lot about her techniques after being detached from the memory-supressing field of the neuro-hood but nothing yet about her Zanpaktou. She felt as if she needed to learn that herself. Nothing would come to her if she didn’t go to it. However, that train of thought didn’t help her right now with what she was planning to do. Old Mirja seemed content with these cobbled-together techniques, but New Mirja was here to smash pens and pineapples together and see what fit. One pair of techniques subjected to this, would be her Silent Scream and her Wolf God Fist. The two worked very well, but not together, however smashing them together might reveal something interesting. Or it could destroy the earth and all life on it, that was the gamble she was going for. Wolf God Fist was destructive enough, so giving it a high-five with another technique could turn out to be the worst idea since Mirja flirted with a Hollow.

First, she activated her Silent Scream, and felt the roar of Reiatsu through her. Every part of her reacted suddenly and beautifully, flaring power in her body and making her feel more alive, more solid. The sudden rush of the once-ordered Reiatsu was a buzz, but then it was deactivated as she realized that would get her nowhere fast. With that technique she couldn’t do anything else while it was active, and she needed to do else or it would just be a time with Silent Scream and friends looking onwards as if someone was playing a single player and making their friends suffer through the torture of watching them play it. Mirja looked out to the town for a few moments, and then left in a hyper-sonic blast of speed. There was something about Karakura town these days. A feel of sadness and loss she couldn’t quite place, and this feeling wasn’t going to do any good when it came to try and focus on new techniques, instead she travelled to her Tundra home, and took solace in the several hour trip and then peace of the tundra as snow whistled around. Not hard enough to be called a blizzard, but whistling none the less. Cold as well, Mirja could feel it kiss her cheeks and if she was a normal girl, then insulated bodysuit or no, she would be shivering her ass off right about now. In a manner that would be very funny for Mirja to watch, and entirely not funny for the person who was shivering. Of course, it was never fun to be the person shivering.

But she was not a normal person. Far from it, and so she headed out, deep into the wasteland between the Dome Cities and smaller settlements, and even her own log cabins. This stretch of land was entirely untamed. Too much snow and ice, it was a vicious, violent place that had buried all but subtle hints of civilization, and explorers could never handle the weather and the beasts long enough to make any discoveries worth a dam. That, made it the perfect place for Mirja to rest. And by rest she meant beat the crap out of the special Yeti Hollows that loved this place and the strange, wolf-like creatures that had evolved over the several hundreds of years of making this desolate landscape their home. She was sure that this place had gotten worse over the years, since the start of World War Three, and the decline of the world since then, nature took back what it owned with a vicious, harsh vengeance that left only the strong alive. And Mirja was included in that number.

What the snow and the ice and the monsters had to do with thinking about mashing powers together, she didn’t really know, but it was a soothing kind of danger to her. Speed, Fighting, and Danger. Three things that brought her mind into a calm state. Each with its own subtle nuance. And then she heard it. The snarl in the distance. The snow was blown harder here, stripping visibility to barely ten foot in front of you. And the creatures knew this. Circling her and snarling, she could hear them gather in their masses. Hollow and Living alike, they co-existed to hunt, sharing what prey they could catch. But today there would be no prey, only death. Mirja stood in the middle of the circle, counting a number approaching a hundred, and the howl of the wolf – rivalled closely by the howl of the wind – was gathering more every second. Soon they would come, and soon Mirja would begin. Not until they brought themselves to her, however, she was not going to be the one to start this fight. Maybe that was stubborn for a girl who hunted hollows all her life, but she was a stubborn girl, and had decided not to start anything, so she would not start anything, it was simple as that. More beasts arrived, and then it began.

The shuffle of quickly moving creatures was the only warning before a canine-beast burst into view, claws sharp and teeth bared as it lunged for her, but that view was distorted somewhat when Mirja punched it’s jaw off, the body part skittering across the snowy field and melting the sub-zero snow with the warm blood. The one death opened the floor gates, and Mirja was inundated with the monsters. Countering feral rage with martial precision, Mirja carved her attackers up, breaking their bones, shattering their organs, and cleansing Hollows so they could return to the cycle. But there was always more. These creatures seemed too stupid to understand that Mirja was going to kill them all, and so there was a never ending wave of arrivals. She grabbed one of the incoming wolves and spun him to use as a deadly weapon against another, and then slammed her foot into the face of the Hollow trying to bring his large hands down on her head. Her mind was solely on the battle, and tainted by the earlier thought of not using her Silent Scream because she needed to work on the other technique that was locked off because of it, she didn’t do anything in that vein, even though it would have made the fight a lot either to weather.

They swarmed her and caught shots of luck and rage. Their claws failed to penetrate her bodysuit, but they still hurt, and the powerful jaws that locked around her legs clamped hard and staggered her. She needed more, as a high leaping wolf racked his claws across her face and a pair of the larger Yeti-Hollows rammed her as if in coordination to take down this mighty creature. As soon as she was off her feet she was mobbed by an endless tide of fur and fang.

She wouldn’t go out like this. She couldn’t go out like this. It was something she refused with every fibre of her being. Her will, her drive to carry on was too strong, and her head screamed in mindless response to the unending claws and teeth that bit at her. Such was the volume that her face, neigh-impregnable to most assailants, was beginning to get warn down. Layer by layer skin was scrapped off by ceaseless claws, and blood was leaking out of the cuts. Soon, her heart joined in with this screaming, the desire to fight on, and hard. And then it stopped. Not the screaming, but her very heart. Suddenly all the clawing and snarling and the surroundings were nothing compared to the pain in her chest. It had just stopped. Given up on her, and her dreams. That was fine. Everything abandoned her eventually. The world turned grey and she closed her eyes, the sound of snarls drowning out as she drifted away.

But then she was thrust back into the situation with a heart that seemed to be trying to either beat in sync with eight different hearts at once, or just burst itself from the sheer activity. She could feel each of the incredibly fast beats were a force to be reckoned with, pushing her body into a state of hyperactivity. She rose in a whirlwind of thrashing legs and punching fists, obliterating the enemy as she connected with them, and spilling such quantities of blood that the ground had become even more dangerous. Deep crevices in the snow were being melted by the blood, and as the newly invigorated Mirja acted, they grew deeper as the horde grew thinner. Still she was clawed, bitten, and brought down, but she pushed beyond it.

Pushed beyond everything to deliver power and fury to all that came before her. The horde eventually became less of a horde, more of a straggle of dead and dying monsters, banished hollows, and general despondency. And then there were none. Her hair matted with so much blood she looked to be red-headed rather than white, her eyes ragged and her body groping for something else to crush, something else to destroy, tear, maim and kill. But then, just like that, it stopped. As the minute passed, so did the fire in Mirja’s body, and with that her very ability to stand. She hadn’t collapsed in the snow like a milksop in what felt like forever. But here she was, face down in melted blood-snow, unable to do much more than mewl pathetically. The pathetic mewling continued for some time before she decided she had had enough mewling and forced herself to stand, every part of her body feeling like badly made jelly, promising to give out at any moment and plant her face first in the snow again. The wind had become so much stronger, and she had a fight on the scale of the one she had just finished to even more through it. Each step was a herculean effort, each moment a lunge forward rather than any stable walk. She became more stable as it went on, her body adapting to the exhaustion and pulling out reserves to put the steel back in her legs, even whatever she had done couldn’t burn everything that was Mirja’s energy. It was, she liked to think, practically infinite. But not infinite enough to survive using that technique twice in a row. Soon she would decide what it was. But right now, she was just trudging.

The Tundra never seemed so vast to her, who was used to being gone before a place realized she was there. It was something that went on for a good while in Mirja’s opinion, but right now there was nothing but Tundra, like the entire world was one giant snowy wasteland and she would never reach her destination before dying. It wouldn’t be a terrible place to die, after all, she loved the Tundra and all the little animals that bounced around it. The cute white bunnies the most. They made excellent strew when she caught them and put them in the pot. However, death by Tundra was not her fate, as she saw her Log Cabin in the distance, this was nearly over. Stumbling forwards until she hit the wooden door, she opened it, and then found her bed and flopped without any ceremony. Hearing the supports and the wooden beams crack and splinter, she knew she’d need a new bed in the morning, but right now so long as it wasn’t outside, it was comfortable enough for her to sleep in. A few more minutes and even outside would have been comfortable enough, but she made it.