The celebration… didn't last.
Just as relief began to spread - like the air had finally found its way back into everyone's lungs - and Nel took a few steps toward Ichigo, already tugging the small Inoue closer with a look that said heal him, hell chose that exact moment to remind everyone it was still there.
From inside that thick cloud of smoke, a body tore through like a fired bullet.
Nnoitra.
Even with his skin coated in dust and scorched black where the blast had kissed him, he came in wearing that crooked smile, spinning his gourd-shaped scythe through the air. The metal drew a brutal arc and dropped straight for Nel's neck.
Sparks burst.
Nel lifted an arm and… simply stopped the blade.
No strain. No theatrics. Like she was holding a door open for someone.
The dull, locked sound of metal biting metal rang through the hall, and for a heartbeat it felt like the entire world stopped breathing.
Nnoitra narrowed his eyes, irritated he couldn't force it down even an inch.
"Don't go thinking the Ten Espada now are on the same level as the ones from when you were around, Nelliel…"
His voice dripped with contempt. When he yanked the scythe back, the smile on his face sharpened into open mockery.
"Don't forget how many years you've been out of Las Noches."
Nel didn't answer right away. She just stared at him, unreadable.
And that was when the image… drained.
Color bled out of the scene as if someone had pulled a gray filter over the world. The transition hit like a chokehold - one of those silences that doesn't feel peaceful, only inevitable, because you can sense the story forcing you to look back whether you want to or not.
Just like it had when Rukia fought the Ninth Espada: time paused, and the past opened its teeth.
Long before Sosuke Aizen ruled Hueco Mundo - back when that era felt distant enough to belong to another age - Nel wasn't the fragile little figure in torn green rags that viewers had met first.
She was dressed in white.
A pristine knight's uniform, clean-lined and structured, immaculate in a way that made the space around her feel smaller. It didn't flaunt her body the way that shabby cloak in her child form did, but in some ways it was worse: the white fabric clung close enough to her skin to emphasize everything with cold elegance. She didn't have to show off to command respect. She simply existed, and the world adjusted.
On his knees before her, pride crushed and throat packed with fury, was Nnoitra - younger, weaker, only the Eighth Espada back then.
"Why didn't you kill me?!" he shouted, voice cracking with rage, as if mercy was the greatest humiliation imaginable. "Nelliel!"
Nel glanced at him from the corner of her eye. No prominent scar yet. A calm face. Eyes that looked almost sad - almost - but never soft.
"I refuse," she said, gentle as breath and sharp as steel. "We stopped being human, became Hollows… and then became Arrancars and recovered our reason."
She took a slow step, as if the ground itself made room for her.
"If you have reason, you need a reason to fight. And you need a reason to take a life." Her gaze held him with controlled disdain - not personal, not emotional, more like a judge tired of seeing the same ugly scene replayed. "I don't have a reason to kill you."
The words slapped Nnoitra harder than any strike.
"I do!" he snarled, practically foaming. "I hate you! I can't stand you!"
Nel was silent for a second, and that second weighed more than the whole battle.
"Then you're just an animal," she said without raising her voice. "Not even a warrior." There was no pleasure in it, no cruelty - only certainty. "And I won't carry the weight of an animal's life when it doesn't even understand what battle is."
She turned her back on him.
No hesitation. No glance over her shoulder. Like shutting a door and deciding the noise on the other side wasn't worth hearing.
The scene shifted.
Leorio's subordinate - the one who followed him with an almost sick devotion - watched from a distance, too confused not to ask. Why fixate on Nel with that kind of obsession? Why not another Espada?
Nnoitra answered with his eyes narrowed and his jaw set.
"Because I can't stand her."
The sentence came out like poison.
"That's it?" the subordinate pressed, still expecting tragedy, betrayal, something deeper than pure spite.
Nnoitra spat the truth - raw, ugly, pathetic.
"She's female," he said like the word itself was an insult. "And yet on the battlefield… her strength stands above any male."
And that was it.
That was the reason.
When that explanation landed, the reaction was almost universal: a giant question mark hovering over every viewer's head.
Seriously? That's all?
No revenge for someone killed. No betrayal. No broken vow. Just wounded pride and jealousy dressed up as hatred.
The past kept rolling forward, merciless. And as the memories advanced, the audience learned what came next: Leorio, unable to swallow his own inferiority, teamed up with the Ninth Espada - a perverse, smiling scientist named Szayelaporro - and attacked Nel from behind.
A filthy hit.
The kind that doesn't win… but destroys.
Nel's mask shattered. The fragment shrank. Her power collapsed. Her memory went out like a candle smothered by cold fingers.
And then Nnoitra did what cowards always do the moment they finally manage to hurt someone greater than themselves.
He threw her out of Las Noches.
Like trash.
Like he could erase his shame by removing the proof it ever existed.
The only thing that kept Nel from vanishing entirely were three subordinates - absurdly loyal. They found her. They cared for her. They protected that confused child who didn't even remember who she was.
Until fate put her in Ichigo's path.
…
…
After that episode, the audience's feeling turned bitter in a way that was almost disappointing: not every character in Bleach was magnetic, and it became painfully obvious the moment you put someone like Nel beside people like Nnoitra and Szayelaporro.
They weren't complicated.
They were just… vile.
The kind of filth that exists only to prove the world is unfair.
And in the second half of that week's update, when Nel finally drew her Zanpakutō and released her Resurrection - taking on the Antelope Knight form, majestic, vicious, and beautiful in a way that actually hurt to look at - there was no room left for doubt.
It was a massacre.
Every movement was a lesson. Every strike, a sentence. Nnoitra couldn't even keep up. The gap in power was humiliating, absolute.
And still… at the end, when he was broken, coughing blood and trembling, Nel raised her gun-lance and took a slow breath.
"Don't worry," she murmured, as if speaking more to herself than to him. "I'm not going to kill you."
The aim slid from his heart to his abdomen - an intentional choice: wound him, stop him, end it. No execution.
Except the universe loves spitting in the face of anyone who tries to be just.
At the exact moment everything could have ended, Nel's body made a dry, sudden sound - like a balloon losing all its air.
Pfft.
Smoke.
And as if her strength had been ripped out by force, she snapped back into her child form.
The audience's blood pressure rose on instinct. That physical, infuriating feeling that tells you the story is about to mess with you and you're powerless to stop it.
And it did.
Leorio, barely able to stand, found energy for the worst of it. With a savage kick, he sent little Nel flying - like cruelty was the only way he could pay back the humiliation.
The fight turned again.
For the third time.
People who'd been cheering seconds earlier, waiting for Nel to finally finish her enemy, wanted to reach through the screen, grab Alex by the collar, and shake him like he was personally responsible for their suffering.
This was on purpose, wasn't it?
Nnoitra bared a psychotic grin and lifted his figure-eight blade. The shadow of that weapon swallowed Ichigo's body, sprawled on the floor, too battered to even lift an arm.
"What a shame…" Nnoitra said, savoring every syllable. "Nelliel was your last hope."
He tilted his head, eyes shining with ugly satisfaction.
"Now… die."
And elsewhere in the chaos, Joe Sullivan and Renji Abarai were at their limit too, facing Szayelaporro. Exhausted, with no answer for that bizarre ability, trapped in a game they couldn't understand and couldn't break.
In another dim hall of Las Noches, someone had beaten the Ninth Espada… only to fall into the hands of the Seventh. The message was clear: there was no way out.
The whole group… was finished.
The weight of the crisis pressed down on viewers' chests - the kind of tension that makes you forget you're sitting down, that makes your hand clench by itself, that makes your heartbeat go wrong.
Leorio's blade came down.
And just before it could cut Ichigo in half -
BOOOOM.
A new spiritual pressure exploded through the air, ripping across the hall like thunder. Something raw, violent, direct. A force that didn't ask permission.
The massive blade was stopped in midair.
And between Leorio's shock and Ichigo's disbelief, a rough, cocky voice - alive in a way that felt almost offensive - rang out from far too close.
"Yo… why do you look half-dead, Ichigo?"
The jagged Zanpakutō. The way he moved like danger was a joke.
Kenpachi Zaraki.
The scene cut to the other battlefields.
Szayelaporro and Zommari both turned at the same time, sensing something behind them.
"Who are you?" they asked, nearly in sync.
The answer came first in a strange, theatrical voice - high and unsettling, the kind that made you laugh and shiver at once.
"Hehehe… who am I?" A pause. "Does it matter?"
Then another voice joined it, cold as steel, landing like a final verdict.
"The only title that matters…"
"…is your enemy."
The framing revealed them.
Mayuri Kurotsuchi, captain of the Twelfth Division.
Jasper Quin, captain of the Sixth.
And it still wasn't over.
Behind Ichigo, a mature, calm female voice - soft enough to soothe the air itself - spoke like it was the most natural thing in the world to step into war and impose order.
"Leave your injuries… to us."
Retsu Unohana, captain of the Fourth.
Four captains.
Arriving at the same time.
And when the music rose - hot-blooded, explosive, the kind that makes you want to leap off the couch - the audience felt their blood ignite. After so many reversals, the tension had been so intense it felt like people were on the verge of cardiac arrest… and yet nobody could stop shouting.
That kind of hype doesn't fit inside a chest. It has to come out.
Except at the peak -
The image froze.
And like a cruel provocation, the words appeared at the bottom in that same classic style everyone had learned to love and hate in equal measure.
To Be Continued.
The reaction was immediate.
A chorus of profanity in every language imaginable. Here, every kind of curse. Across the ocean, a storm of "motherf***er" and its many creative cousins.
Right now?!
And while an army of furious fans turned into professional haters under Alex's official posts, on the other side of the world, another production was moving toward its own boiling point.
Death Note, Part One, was already deep into the second half of filming.
The scene that day was heavy.
Christian Bale played the elite FBI agent investigating Light Yagami - played here by Alex.
In a New York subway station, the doors still trembled on their rails as the agent collapsed near the entrance, falling sideways with his hands clamped to his chest, his face cracked open by shock, despair, and a fear that seemed bigger than death itself.
Bale was flawless. The pain, the panic, the disbelief - so real it made everyone watching feel uncomfortable.
But outside the frame, nobody could take their eyes off Alex.
Because in that moment… he wasn't Alex.
He was Light Yagami.
Standing on the other side of the subway doors, holding a thick envelope - the list of FBI agents' names - he angled his face with calm, almost boredom, watching a man whose fate had already been written.
His stare… wasn't human.
There was no mercy.
No sympathy.
None of that natural discomfort you expect from someone watching another person die.
There was something else.
A dark glint. A silent pleasure. As if someone else's death was music and he was listening to the best part.
It was the expression of a judge from hell.
Someone who writes names in a book the way someone writes a grocery list - no guilt, no weight - only the certainty that he's right… and the thrill of power.
The silence on set grew so thick it felt like smoke.
Until the assistant director finally signaled the cut.
"Cut."
And for a second, nobody breathed.
Then the first applause broke loose.
Ray Parker was the first to snap out of it, clapping hard like he needed to shatter the trance.
A heartbeat later, the rest of the crew came back to themselves like people waking from a nightmare - applauding, shouting, slamming their palms together with everything they had, like they were trying to drive that feeling out of the room.
Because that scene…
That look…
It stayed on your skin.
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