BEWARE OF UNMARKED SPOILERS BELOW!
Walk Two Lifetimes
- Being betrayed by someone you have helped and cared for, in the exchange for two months worth of drugs.
- In what state Akiyama keeps his prisoners - locked in a windowless, cold stone room with several operating tables in the center of the room, bathed in an overwhelming stench of fecal matter, urine, sweat, and blood, and chained to the wall just far enough from each other to not being able to touch each others while being drugged through their food with a drug that caused them to lose their ability to control or use their reiatsu as well as makes it difficult to think clearly.
- And then there are the experiments. Endurance tests, seeing how much pain the captives can take before they scream, testing their responses to different drugs, testing how fast they heal from a cut... But the one experiment described in more detail is the one Hisana was forced to watch, when Eiji had been doped up on drugs that makes everything a lot more intense - colours, sounds, pain - which during the type of tests mentioned previously made everything a blur of unbearable agony.
- Hisanas nightmare in chapter 16, which starts out being about Akiyama with a gaping hole in his chest - edges covered in dried blood and maggots writhing around inside, before he turns into Tatsuya, who draws his knife, his face rotting away into a skeleton before he brings it down on her.
- The experimental airborne toxin that was accidentally released in the Twelfth by chapter 26 that causes skin to peel off by the strips.
- Rukias first meeting with Gin. A superior officer appearing to threaten you, imply that the trouble he would get into for following through with it isn't enough to disencourage him, all the while playing his continued threats to her off as jokes.Gin: Rukongai girl like you should know better. I’d watch that tongue of yours if I were you—ya might just end up losin’ it otherwise.
Rukia: Y-You wouldn’t… You’ll…you’ll get in trouble.
Gin: Oh no, not that. Anythin’ but that.- Rukias second meeting with Gin as well. In which he tells her that she's doing nothing but holding Hisana back and doesn't deserve to be called her sister, that if she doesn't reach the point she can no longer be used against Hisana he will kill her, and threatens Hisanas life to prove how helpless Rukia is.Gin: Relax. I have no intention of harming her. She’d be no fun to me broken. So fragile.
Rukia: She’s not weak.
Gin: Never said she was. You can be the strongest person in the world, and still be fragile. With a person like Hisana, if ya wanna break them, ya don’t face them head on. It’s like breaking tempered glass. You find their weak points, apply just a bit of pressure, and— (grip around Hisanas throat tightens for the briefest of moments) —you wait for them to shatter. Luckily, a soul is more flexible than glass. They’re malleable, susceptible to change. To toughen them, all you have to do find the weak spots in a person’s life and remove them. Either by ironing them out so that they’re as strong as the rest of the soul or, if need be, by cutting them out entirely. Either way, any weaknesses should be eliminated. Don’t you agree, Rukia-chan?
Rukia: I—
Gin: I’m glad to see we understand each other. Don’t keep me waiting too long, Rukia-chan. I won’t be patient forever.
- Rukias second meeting with Gin as well. In which he tells her that she's doing nothing but holding Hisana back and doesn't deserve to be called her sister, that if she doesn't reach the point she can no longer be used against Hisana he will kill her, and threatens Hisanas life to prove how helpless Rukia is.
- Kurotsuchis treatment of the Twelfth Division Shinigami, including infecting half a dozen Shinigami with a highly contagious, airborne disease because they weren't wearing proper protection gear and then suggesting cutting their losses and burning the bodies alive.
- Hisanas death. Not that she is killed by Gin by being stabbed in the back, but rather what Aizen does to her dying body - feeding her to Experiment 96, Aaroniero Arruruerie, Khimaira. Hisana is still aware enough to witness her own mind crumbling into pieces, an agony brought on by someone reaching into her brain and scooping out chunks of identity — memories, personality, everything that made her who she was.
- Also the way Aizen frames Kaien for her death, with brutally violent footage of Hisana being torn apart by one of her closest friends, the floor of where the Visored being contained appearing slick with blood with bits of viscera scattered everywhere and Hisanas head discarded in the corner of Kaiens cell.
- Hisana when she is angry and done with playing nice during her hostile takeover of Khimairas body. Not only for her completely redecorating the mindscape to look like how hers did, and killing everything and anything in the mindscape with her, or even that she stops Khimaira from waking up. It is telling that her laught is described as sounding like abandoned warehouses and decaying graveyards and reminding Khimaira of the surprising heaviness of a corpse and the whistling of wind through the trees during winter. She proceeds to burn Khimaira alive with the caveat that Khimaira can't feel anything of it, watching them scream and writhe until there is almost nothing left of them before eating them.
- Even worse from Khimairas perspective. They once ate a shinigami that they eventually forgot about, who survived in their mindscape by eating everything else Khimaira had eaten and as she grew stronger she instigates a hostile takeover of their brain, only she does so in such a subtle and insidious manner that they doesn’t even notice until she drags them into a nightmare they can't wake up from and promptly consumes their consciousness.
