Where There's A Hole... [Private]

Hannah would raise an eyebrow at the man as he claimed the Plus had lasted centuries. It probably wasn't impossible with some extreme interference or Kido, but on your own? Encroachment would take you before you saw the first decade even if you were a monk. Then again, if you were a monk you'd not be chained anywhere in the first place.

"Did he tell you it's been centuries? Pluses don't last long. The chain of fate that binds them to what they are obsessed with slowly corrodes over time. Attacks from Hollows and extreme emotions speeds this up, but even then it only lasts a few years at the absolute most. There is no way he spent centuries as a Plus"

Huh?

Wait, was there a chance Kyūken lied to him about the time that had passed? I mean… who would expect such a stubborn Plus to remember how many years had gone by? Then again, his demeanor, his appearance, his weaponry and his actual identity… no, wait, he couldn’t have lied. “It… no, it doesn’t make any sense – this sword, this is his,” Mura elaborated, torn between disbelief and astonishment as he held up Harukami in front of Hannah. It was… a strange artifact. A jian, or a double-edged sword, or just a tsurugi. Not even a conventional katana, which were all single-edged. Even its worn-out hilt and guard spoke of a time long, long ago.

“His chain was wrapped around it when we first met… and it’s been like that until j-just now,” he revealed to her, trying to tie together the importance of the Chain of Fate, “He’d always had it… maybe he was content, as long as his sword was by his side…” Kyūken was a tenacious, proud bastard to the letter – that sword meant more to him than his own life. Maybe because it was just left in the deserted areas of Tibet’s mountains, he got to stay with it for so many years…

Kyūken was not an ordinary Plus, that was certain. “I-I don’t know that much about pluses, but I can’t believe he’d just lie about it… then again, I don’t even know what to believe anymore…”

"He doesn't need to have lied" Hannah would reply, walking up to the man and giving him a gentle smile. "When you are a Plus, before you are sent to the Soul Society, you have no biological imperatives. And thus, your sense of time is completely destroyed. You have no way to know how long, since you can't even interact with the world enough to scratch a tally mark of something like that.

So it stands that it is possible it felt centuries for him. But don't worry, it wasn't" she would then reach out, and touch the sword. Ninety percent chance it was just a sword, but ten percent chance that something special might exist.

Huh… so that was how Pluses worked. Time lagging stuff? I mean, it made sense… like, was Kyūken special? A loudmouth like him? No way.

“Honestly… wouldn’t it be the opposite, most of the time? Having a long time pass, but only feels like… I don’t know, a few days maybe?” Mura shared his insight with the person who was, unknown to him, several centuries older mayhaps, perhaps, “… I don’t even care anymore… is he still there? He turned and everything, and I couldn’t recognize him anymore. Do Hollows just stay that way… forever?”

"It is possible. It effects everyone differently. But you still have a human mentality, so a long time is still a long time. Not being able to sleep makes the same amount of time stretch out many times over"

She'd then turn back to where the Garganta was, and shake her head.

"No, he is not there. A Hollow is consumed by their negativity, and driven insane by it. There is a moment of lucidity when you damage the mask, but that just makes everything worse because now they have to come to grips with everything they have done. And then the mask grows back and they are mindless once more"

She didn't tell him about the very scant hope of him becoming an Arrancar. False hope was cruel.

He really was gone… swallowed up by his own negative impulses, tucked up behind a white mask. There went the proud swordsman – up in smoke, gone, unrecognizable, and irreversible. And he fell to his knees, dreadful. “… Damn it…” he cursed in his raspy breath, clenching his fist. In his ignorant eyes, he pretty much gave birth to a demon. Who knew where that bastard would go now? Who would he harm, murder, eat? And would it all be… on Mura’s conscience?

Would that… monster… take another man’s arm in fury?

“Is there a way to track him down? Or something…” Mura’s voice sounded a bit shaky, as if he was slowly just losing hope in even his own questions. Just asking for the sake of asking for SOMETHING.

Hannah was silent for a few seconds, and then the air grew heavy. Everything, grew heavy. It was like Mura's bones were creaking under the weight of just standing up, and his lungs had to exert such effort that he was left breathless in a few moments.

"Are you honestly suggesting" Hannah would ask, her voice cool, and calm. "That you go to another dimension filled with effectively unlimited monsters of varying strengths, to run around looking for one Hollow you marginally accelerated the growth of? Is your ego truly that grand?"

… Mura’s eyes widened. What on earth did this terrible feeling in his gut have to do with ego? What did cursing his own ignorance, the sheer lack of maturity in his actions prior, have to do with ego? Did she think he was just planning to throw his life away at that world, Hueco Mundo? He’d been there before – with Veralia, and he knew that it was a wasteland. An eternal canyon, a desert realm, where only the dead walk.

“…” He didn’t even know what to reply with at first. Genuinely, he felt insulted – not at all what he needed right now. What was so fucking simple about this incident? Was this woman right in the head? Obviously, beyond Mura’s human mind and comprehension, some otherworldly spirit would see this event very differently from how he saw it – that was inevitable. And yet, in his ignorance of this woman’s identity, it really came off as-

“What the fuck are you even on about…?” he churned out in bewilderment, “… Who are you? You seem awfully knowledgeable about Hollows… guess this isn’t the first time you see a ghost transform into one? Is this shit that common?”

Well, he didn't seem to immediately jump, so Hannah would reign in her reiatsu so it was not crushing the life out of him anymore.

"Everything is common when you are as old as I am. I am Hannah Chiza, I am two hundred and thirty years old. For the last one hundred and eighty years, it has been my job to hunt Hollows and allow Plus to pass on from this world to the next. Keeping people safe is my calling, even if it is safe from themselves. So, to answer; it is possible to go to their world. It is not possible to survive there on your own without great and exceeding strength. Certainly, you'd at least need the ability to not get punted about by a single Dune Hollow"

… She was old. Mura found it easier to believe now that he’d met Medeia prior. Some people really just grew that damn old, all thanks to the power of their own spirits. This spiritual prowess that kept growing in the human world… just how much were things to change?

But she also stated that it was her job to allow Pluses to pass on to the other world, and to hunt down Hollows like the one they’d just chased away. Was she…?

“Wait… are you a Shinigami?” Mura couldn’t confirm it for himself just by looking at her, for she looked oddly human despite the possibility that she could be from a completely different world. But he knew about Shinigamis… many Japanese people did.