Training in The Deep (Tier/Santa)

The Menos forest. The deepest parts of Hueco Mundo, dark and eerie, the massive quartz trees that spanned it's depths, leading to a stony floor and the sand being supported up above through a bit of sandstone. A place of hiding for the gillian, the silent giants of Hueco Mundo, powerful in their own right to say the least if not for their size then the numbers they usually roved in like orca pods.

It was in these depths, amongst this massive chasm between the trees, that Santa found herself looking around. This wasn't the first time she'd been here, but she was a little surprised when of all places Tier had taken her down here. All the same, she followed closely behind the blonde arrancar that she had rapidly come to grow fond of, the woman who had taken up the task of helping mold the unmatured arrancar: Tier Harribel.

"A whole lot of bad memories down here..." She murmured quietly. Every menos, almost without exception, had experienced it, even if they didn't remember it. The Gillian stage. The portion of a hollow's life when they fight just to keep their sanity, struggling against so many other souls, sometimes with one reigning supreme, other times with them being crushed together to form something between the others. Though it was arguable that even those singular minds that rose up still had parts of themselves that meshed with the masses. Her own experience had been short, but still unpleasant. Having spend most of the time blind, her Gillian stage had been completely enclosed within the period where she had still been blind.

She shivered thinking back, and she moved just a bit closer to the other, shorter woman as they walked along that massive quartz branch.

The woman's words made her pause for a moment and nod slowly. Clinging to the past? She wasn't sure how she felt about that all things considered, she didn't HAVE much of a past to cling to. She closed her eyes and thought back to those times, before her attention shifted back to the woman, that expression turning soft and warm while Tier's back was turned. No she had a whole lot more going on in the present to cling to.

However, she raised her brows slightly when the woman spoke about being her first target. Both Santa's brows raised in surprise at that. "A....are you sure?" She asked, clearly a bit thrown off by this turn of events. But all the same.... she supposed it made sense. She swallowed audibly and peeled her zanpaku'to from it's sheath, watching the woman carefully. "Right..... here I come then." She declared firmly, her mind already spinning a little. What should she do? Try to set something up? Just attack? N-no surely the woman would rebuke her for being too predictable! Wh-what would Tier do? She didn't know, the woman seemed so..... placid, almost robotic at times.

She had been standing in place for several seconds at this point, trying to think up a strategy as she slowly circled the woman, never letting Tier leave her s-"AHH!" She hit the slant of the branch they had been standing on and suddenly TUMBLED! Arms suddenly erupting from the branch, catching her and keeping her from falling straight to the floor of the forest below! She had been so focused on her planning that she'd almost walked right off the edge.

Santa blinked, glancing up as Tier spoke to her about her performance, her face a bit red with embarrassment as she felt the sting of those words. Not that Tier was being exceptionally cruel, just hearing the analysis was stinging. "I usually don't think when I fight at all." She admitted with a murmur, sighing a bit to herself. Showing her capabilities.... hm.

The hand spooked her. The gesture was so unexpected that it startled Santa when she felt that grip on her forearm, her face lighting up again as she was hauled up and onto the branch and onto her feet, a sheepish smile on her face. "Ahah, maybe falling isn't so bad." She joked sheepishly as she watched the woman take a few steps and move away from her. Attack.... right. She paused, trying to apply the woman's advice. Don't over thing.... hm. Her capabilities....

She ..... relaxed. There was no surge of energy. There was no extra output. After all, the energy was always around her, she simply allowed it to perform it's function. Hands suddenly were growing beneath the woman, bone and muscle formed claws reached up to grasp the woman's calves, in the same moment that Santa bolted forward, having intended for her garden to drag the woman to the ground, or try to. But it ...simply clung to her. All the same, the blade would streak in a horizontal slash. It was rough, crude, but as she swung: several skeletal frames, hastily grown frorms lunged up from the ground with needles and blades of bone protruding from their limbs as they attempted to lunge at Tier from all around her.

Instinct. Experience. It was all that she had. It was simply the product of three thousand years of sheer experience. Trial and error, and thus learned patterns that simply worked well. A simple system and one that had enough time that it might be mistaken for sudden, rapid strategy as she initiated the sudden pincer attack on the woman. Focusing on trying to land a hit.

The way she fought would seem familiar. It was something seen so often in hueco mundo: Desperation. Something Santa seemed oddly adept at tapping into.

Don’t think.

It wasn’t exactly what Tier had told her to do. But its what she’d taken away from her words. Her mind blanked, and she wasn’t fighting Tier in that moment. She was just fighting.

That clean, vicious slash was taken in stride. Not an ounce of surprise. No hesitation. She stabbed herself, clean through her own hollow hole, just barely nicking her back on the other side, memories of a beast behind her. And in that instant she healed, aggressively. Flesh bursting from her back as her instincts snapped to the Oni on the cathedral. The one who insisted on calling herself a demon, who had taught her how to fly.

Wings tore from her back as her regeneration ran rampant, leathery blades that snagged the air, and caused her to slam into the tree, sliding along the bark, the friction ripping her fingertips and nails off, promptly regenerating into curved bony claws.

The clean cut was precise. Efficient. But left the hands on tier’s legs. They werent attached to santa, they just grew, and being severed from the wrists and forearms did nothing to stop them from tightening their grip, claws tryinf to dig in as there was a low VREEEEN. A cero charged in the palm pressed up against tier’s calf at point blank. A desperate act that would hurt a normal being. But Santa was built for it.

In the same instant that Cero charged, Santa appeared directly infront of Tier, the THOOM of a sonido sounding off as she slashed down at the woman’s face.

Shallowly. Only enough to rip that collar that was covering her mask. Instinctively, she wasn’t intent on killing strikes. And in that rigor of thoughtlessness, her subconscious spilled free, intent on revealing that sweet mask!

Santa slammed into the tree when she missed Tier, claws digging into the tree as she stopped. She could sense her hand, but Tier was moving too fast for her to react in time. VWOOM! The burst of reiatsu erupted explosively, that burst of energy shredding and burning the hand away from the woman's leg as Santa was also caught in the blast slightly, stunned briefly so that she fell, only to slam her wings into the tree, ripping the tips off before blades grew into the ends, digging in and slowing her to a stop as she was left panting a bit, the scuffs and light burns on her face and shoulders fading rapidly, leaving her with her top blown open slightly, the shoulders burned away to leave the skin bared. Her eyes darted around until her pesquisa pinged and her attention darted down to where Tier was.

Sword. Dodge.
Cero. Blocked.

She was panting, narrowing her eyes before she crouched, and then the tree sproudted. A massive surge of her garden growing out from around her. Not only there but the entire area was suddenly growing. The ground beneath Tier's feet, the entire surface of the tree, all of it was suddenly growing, hands once again surging from the floor to try and latch onto the woman. Of course, unlike before, there was no nearby surfaces to leap onto. The natural inclination would be to leap up and form reishi platforms.

But this was completely unrestrained growth. Even in the event that Tier formed such platforms, the garden would begin growing out of it, reaching around from underneath to latch onto her. Significantly slower than the espada, but unrelenting. In the span of moments, entire upper torsos littered the area, eyes formning in empty sockets, locking onto Tier as Santa hid inside of her garden as it grew, panting.

Even if her garden didn't expend enormous amounts of energy, the cero had. With her lack of experience, that one cero had already wiped her, she definitely wouldn't be able to fire another one. That manic rush now gone as her own fatigue forced her back into a normal mindset and out of that combat trance. Taking a moment to put her head together. The garden stilling slightly as she did, the hordes of limbs and upper bodies stilling as they paused, even their growth halted for a moment, many of them panting just as Santa was. As tremendous and aggressive as the garden was, it was intimately connected to Santa, which had it's own interesting quirks. Like sharing her exhaustion.