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A body crashed through trees violently but it spun its body and skidded a short trail on the ground before coming to a stop.

Itachi’s breaths were getting a bit labored considering how long he has spent fighting against an army of Hollows.

He tried calling for backup but like he half-expected, the call didn’t go through and his mind told him that this was the ambush he was cautious about.

There were dozens of Hollows chasing him; from the unending number of normal Hollows to a sizable amount of over the 100 ft tall Gillians and more than a handful of Adjuchas.

The current scene looked like a herd of Elephants trying to stomp on an ant. He had a hard time dealing with the unending barrage of Cero as it were, not adding the unique ability of the Adjuchas.

‘How can this many Hollows get into Soul Society without the Shinigami knowing?’

It was unthinkable for something like this that could be construed as a small-sized invasion.

‘Did they lie about the surveillance in the Rukongai?’ He had thought so but that didn’t make sense. Lying to him would mean they were actively trying to hide something from him and he knew he wasn’t that much of a problem for them so that seemed uselessly excessive.

Hastily molding his Reiatsu, he spat out a torrent of flames towards the nearest group of Hollows but he doubted the fire killed a lot of them.

Circling through his ninjutsu and Kidō repertoire, he managed to keep his distance from them while also trying to escape.

He couldn’t put them all inside an illusion as it won’t be concentrated enough especially since Hollows were creatures of chaotically flowing Reiatsu, making it even harder to keep them in an illusion compared to the average Shinigami.

Throwing up another shield, his sword danced with practiced precision as it cut through some of the Hollows that had crashed against the shield.

Unfortunately for him, the Hollows were the only ones getting hurt at every turn. With how quickly they swarmed anywhere he stopped at as soon as he did, not giving him any reprieve to press another attack until they doled out theirs.

The intensity of the one-sided battle got fiercer with every Hollow Itachi managed to kill that he wondered if their numbers were even going down.

Forcefully calming his breaths, Itachi ignored the hot pain in his lungs as the large gulps of air were filtered out slowly. His focus was on the nearest Hollow and any incoming Cero.

“Rarghh-”

A Hollow’s shout was cut short as a vertical line separated its facial mask and reduced it to dust and specks of Reishi. He blocked another Hollow’s tail wipe with his hands and fired off a Kidō that put a second hole in the Hollow’s body.

He had barely retrieved his blade before a volley of Ceros was blasted in in direction from the tall black spooky Gillians and he only escaped being singed with a well timed Substitution jutsu which game him another chance to touch a Hollow’s mask with his palm and release a stream of lightning that disintegrated the Hollow’s head.

His last attack had left him open and the price of that was a punch from a spiked clawed Hollow that left a deep bleeding wound in his side.

‘Curses.’ He cursed in his head but only let a loaned wince rest upon his face as he pushed himself up. ‘They are getting smaller, I can see it now.’ He motivated himself.

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Even if large illusions for a rowdy crowd were inadvisable, the basic abilities of his sword showed its worth during this fight.

Simple things like hiding the trajectory of his sword or lengthening it earned him the little room he had to organize himself a dive into the fray again.

He wasn’t stupid. Of course not.

The first Hollow, Drummerbone, had been turned into a Hollow bait upon its death which meant that someone must have planned it in the event of a likely situation occurring.

‘It’s unlikely that it’s the Soul Society trying to kill me because this method is too convoluted and it’s not a certainty that it’ll kill me. Too much theatrics for someone not considered a threat.’ He contemplated his situation even as he dodged and hacked away at the now thinning herd of Hollows.

‘It’s almost too clear that someone is working with Hollows, highly likely that they are part of the Soul Society; Shinigami, Captain, or from one of the Noble Families. If so, then was the bait for me, or for anyone who killed that specific Hollow?’

Itachi was quick to realize that the momentum the Hollows had chased after him forced him to withdraw from his former location and scope out where they came from.

If that was planned too or not, he had no idea.

He heard the reverberating sound of a Hollow’s high-speed movement to his side and a small crank of his neck gave him view of a Hollow he quickly put under genjutsu as it was the only one near.

Changing strategy, Itachi started kiting them as he started running in a circular manner. With the slow Gillians at the back, also being the ones firing most of the Cero, Itachi made a beeline for them while cleaving through any of the weaker Hollows that came near him.

He was hit, flung to the side, blasted and almost stepped on, leaving him bruised and injured, but he did his best and closed the distance between him and the huge Menos and also pushing away any of the Adjuchas that came near him.

He used ‘Kukaku’, a Bakudō spell, as a platform that he jumped off of and sailed towards the group of dumb and idly standing Gillians.

“Hadō #4: Byakurai.”

He said the incantation and poured his Reiatsu through it, opening up a wide beam of lightning that destroyed the first Gillian and moved on to the next, destroying it too and moving up to a third which it also destroyed before it receded.

Using the falling body of one of the Gillians to break his steps, his hands blurred into a series of hand signs in a single moment which was followed by him sucking in a vacuum of air before releasing it as a great ball of fire.

“Fire style: Great Fireball jutsu.”

“Ye lord! Mask of blood and flesh, all creation, flutter of wings, ye who bears the name of Man! Inferno and pandemonium, the sea barrier surges, march on to the south!”

“Hadō #31: Shakkahō.”

Rather than a simple spell, Itachi went with the full incantation which bolstered up the power of the Kidō spell by a few folds and fired it at the falling fireball before swiftly disappearing from the vicinity.

Upon the spell impacting against the fireball, a red and orange explosion rocked the entire landscape, uprooting rocks and trees and turning the geography to a barren land of boiled glassy sand.

Staring at the destruction he caused, Itachi's only concern was that it took care of most of the Hollows, especially the Adjuchas which were the primary source of his problems.

Stabbing a stray Hollow through his mask, Itachi disappeared, backtracking to the general area where he had fought Drummerbone.

“WRARGHHH!”

His sword whipped forward in a curve and stabbed through the Hollows neck before slicing down and through the Hollow hole on his chest.

While the other Hollows tried to close the distance between them and Itachi, Itachi had taken the time to gather his breaths and made a clone that transformed into a crow to scour the nearby areas and see what it could read from the heavy footprints scattered on every corner.

“I still can’t reach them.” He muttered with a frown as he looked at the communication device he had snagged from the ground after his Shadow clone was destroyed.

With the crow trying to pick up a trail, Itachi could now fully commit his focus on killing the herd of Hollows, or what remained of them.

After over three hours of careful kiting and hit-and-run tactics, Itachi finally purified all the Hollows as the Shinigami called it.

He looked worse for wear with some rather telling injuries. Even if he was asked how he survived a parade of dozens of Adjuchas, Itachi’s honest answer would be patience and that he had no idea.

Maybe it was because of whatever bait called them but they were all rabid and just tried to get a bite of him more than anything else.

Looking at the device in his hands as he sat against a tree, Itachi wondered if this was really the life he wanted to live in his death.

Of course, being a Shinigami felt way different than being a ninja but the thing was that he was still repeating what he did back in the Elemental Nations.

Right now, he was a member of the 2nd Division in all but name and Yoruichi was named as his charge, and at the end of it all, here he was at another impossible mission.

“Truly, change is hard.”

There was something ironic in those words considering that they came from an illusion master.