Chapter 201: Wind & Snowbound
Ichigo and Di Roy face off
as Chad reflects on how he was very nearly killed just there. Ichigo tells him to go, so he runs off, feeling rather dejected because he knows Ichigo’s left him behind. Ichigo readies for battle as Rukia arrives and tells him to let her handle it. and yes, that does mean her powers are back. Also, Ichigo is attacked by an evil bunny rabbit Rukia’s gigai, which has a soul candy thing in it. Rukia and Di Roy fight a bit, and Rukia uses her shikai for the first time in the series. she says an attack name, and a white circle appears on the ground. it starts to freeze the ground, so Di Roy takes to the air, bragging that the air is where he truly shines. at this point, a massive pillar of ice appears and traps Di Roy, and then shatters, taking the unfortunate Arrancar with it.
Chapter 202: Mala Suerte!
Chappy is one crazy little bunny. After we confirm that Rukia did indeed just kill Di Roy, Chappy gushes about Rukia’s sword and Byakuya, and then breaks Ichigo’s arm. But no time for that, Grimmjow just showed up! The other arrancar notice Di Roy’s death, and tell us that he was a failure of an arrancar. Keigo, meanwhile, is freaked out by the sounds of battle and doesn’t know whether or not to believe what’s he’s seen. He then has the misfortune to run right into Ikkaku, who seems to be losing his fight. Ikkaku then takes the opportunity to force Keigo to let him stay at his house. The housing arrangement settled, he asks the arrancar’s name, but doesn’t get any more than the number. Ikkaku is disappointed, saying that for them, telling your opponent your name is a simple courtesy, because then if you die, you’ll at least know the name of the one who killed you. And as such, he introduces himself.
We have ‘wind’; Di Roy’s presumably air based powers, facing off against ‘snowbound’, Rukia’s ice making powers. ‘Mala Suerte’ means ‘bad luck’, which refers to the assertion that Ikkaku has bad luck in the choice of opponent. If you remember anything about Ikkaku’s character, however, you’ll remember that he’s enough of a Blood Knight that he probably doesn’t think of fighting a strong opponent as bad luck. And incidentally, yes, Ikkaku, Yumichika and Renji (who was trained under the 11th division) all introduced themselves before starting a fight with somebody new in their past appearances. And, backtracking a bit, we’ve hit it now, Chad’s absolute lowest moment. I mean, to be within a hairs-breath of getting killed by a remarkably weak arrancar who was killed easily shortly thereafter? Ouch. I honestly don’t know what’s happened to Chad’s power at this point, he was able to at least survive for a little bit against Yammy, who’s significantly stronger than Di Roy, but now it seems like there’s really nothing setting him apart from the normals expect the fact that he has a funny-looking arm. The poor guy’s not only back to being utterly unable to help against the supernatural monsters, but now that he has no one to fight with, he’s back to being a big pacifist brute who just lets people beat him up, since he’s unable to attack unless he has someone else to look out for. He’s feeling downed and useless now, just like Orihime.
