#thoughts you have while driving through a tornado/flood warning in perilously low visibility. for ever and ever and ever

[bleachbleachbleach]

On the battlefield, the sense that serves as your first language will always be reiatsu. If you have them, vision and audition are key, too, but they are the harmonies, that which augments. You feel the pressure first and foremost, edges brimming over where reiryoku within becomes that pressure without. It would be easier if it were pressure like a headache, isolated in space and pulsing, but the pressure comes from everywhere at once—where you enemy is or has been, and if you are very skilled, where they intend to be. (If you don’t beat them there.) A million tiny pressures, streaking and fraying. The only time you can feel your own reiatsu is when the battlefield is so turned upside down it is no longer certain whose is whose. When you get lost in the cacophony.

Part of the reason the Academy teaches the crisp, hard binary of Hollows and otherwise, energy and blight, is because in real life, in the midst of that cacophony, it is so hard to tell the difference sometimes the only thing that saves you is falling back on your certainty: Know evil as an absolute, and purify it. (That it is so hard to tell the difference should not be taken as an insinuation that no difference exists. Perish the thought.)

Imagine fighting side-by-side, or trying to. Have you ever? Only those with incredible control and attunement to each other would attempt it: Reiatsu roostertailing from your adversaries and partners alike, pressure raining down so hard these giant things you know to be there blink out of existence, lose their edges, become everywhere and nowhere. And of course, bodies in flight, pressure fighting pressure, is a dance in itself. You’re used to it, the pressure, the fluctuations that make the reishi beneath your feet resonate and roll. But get enough bodies in motion and that can snap around on anyone at the wrong place, the wrong time, and all the while you never having touched each other.

Take care, shinigami.