"Rebuild… Las Noches!?"
That was going too far.
Every Arrancar Hollow present was at least of Adjuchas class.
And she herself was a Vasto Lorde.
She stood at the very pinnacle of Hueco Mundo.
Making her go build houses was naked humiliation.
Cole's expression turned a little strange.
"If you lot don't rebuild Las Noches, are you planning to make me do it myself?"
Although he had absorbed countless buildings from Seireitei, he had never actually rebuilt anything.
Only then did Harribel remember that the boy before her was human.
When it came to Hueco Mundo's internal affairs, he knew next to nothing.
Suppressing her irritation, she coldly explained to Cole,
"As long as a Hollow reaches Adjuchas class, they can forcibly dominate lower Hollows and make them work for us. We can hand the rebuilding over to them. We don't need to lift a finger."
Hearing her explanation, Cole immediately understood.
At the same time, he could not help but sigh over Hueco Mundo's law of the jungle.
For upper-class Hollows, they were the absolute rulers of Hueco Mundo and could drive the lower Hollows however they pleased.
And that dominion existed almost at the level of the soul itself.
Even if an upper-class Hollow ordered a lower Hollow to die, the lower Hollow would obey by instinct.
"No wonder they accepted me as their ruler so easily… so this is the rule of Hueco Mundo."
A flash of realization passed through Cole's mind.
Every Arrancar here had evolved step by step from small, trash-class Hollows.
So this rule had already sunk into their very bones.
As long as he had overwhelming strength, they would obey him the same way they once obeyed Aizen.
Thinking that, the corner of Cole's mouth curled up as if he had thought of something interesting.
He stepped forward.
The blue reiatsu around him instantly turned black and red.
Violent and terrifying, as if it contained all the darkness in the world, it erupted outward in a form more evil than any of the Arrancar present.
The Arrancar, who were already struggling to breathe, went even paler as they felt this pressure.
Some of the weaker ones were knocked out cold on the spot.
"Again with this power… Clearly human, clearly a Shinigami, yet each of them ends up with our Hollow forms…"
Harribel glared at Cole, annoyed.
Her own race's power was being so easily obtained by people of other races.
It was hard not to feel unhappy about that.
Yet she had no choice but to admit that the reiatsu Cole released after Hollowfying was far stronger than hers—
The difference between cloud and mud.
Cole, however, paid no attention to her thoughts.
In this state, he extended the range of his reiatsu down through the white sand, into the Forest of Menos on Hueco Mundo's second layer.
Down there, the gigantic Gillians, each like a towering mountain, trembled under the black-red pressure.
Trash-class Hollows dropped to their knees outright,
As if they had seen the king of all Hollows.
Seeing this, Cole slowly exhaled.
Then, for the first time, he exercised the right of a top-class Hollow and spoke coldly:
"I command you—come to me."
Ordinary trash-class Hollows and Gillians had no intellect and could not understand human language.
But Cole's words sank straight into the level of the soul, making them understand.
One after another, thousands upon thousands of Hollows began to move.
They formed an immense column, surging out of the Forest of Menos like a vast tide.
Normally, if so many Hollows gathered together, it would inevitably trigger a bout of mutual slaughter, birthing even higher-class Hollows from the carnage.
But under Cole's command, this many Hollows moving together actually remained peaceful.
Instead, they walked side by side in relative harmony.
Of course, there were still a few unlucky small Hollows that got stepped to death by lumbering Gillians, but those were only isolated accidents.
Grimmjow had already given up on attacking Cole.
Reluctantly cancelling his Panther King form, he snorted,
"Calling the Hollows from the Forest of Menos from here… aren't you being a bit too arrogant? How could they possibly hear you?"
The other Arrancar Hollows thought the same.
Even Aizen, when he wanted to conscript Hollows from the Forest of Menos, had to go there himself.
So what gave this human the right to be so arrogant?
Starrk and Harribel, however, remained silent.
Having witnessed that sky-piercing reiatsu of Cole's, they felt that his spiritual pressure really might be able to reach the Forest of Menos.
The atmosphere at the scene froze into a strange stalemate.
Cold sweat trickled more heavily down the foreheads of the weaker Arrancar Hollows, and they collapsed one after another.
But before losing consciousness, each of them had felt sheer terror at Cole's reiatsu.
Their original greed toward humans, their hatred toward Shinigami—
In that instant, it all turned to dust.
What replaced it was pure, overwhelming awe.
Time ticked by.
Unohana had also recovered some of her strength.
Trying her best to stop her legs from trembling, she glared at Cole in annoyance.
"What are you still doing here? Weren't you going to rebuild Las Noches? Or did you stay just to bully me?!"
Cole chuckled, lightly supporting Unohana by the waist as he pointed toward the end of the white desert.
"Gentle mama, don't be so impatient. Give it a few more minutes and you'll see something truly spectacular."
Unohana did not register a single word after that.
Just hearing the way Cole addressed her made her heart jolt and her whole body go soft.
Her gaze turned watery with shyness.
"Cole, don't call me that… I really can't take it. My whole body feels… itchy…"
She had lived for over a thousand years.
In such a long span of time, she had basically experienced every kind of thing.
Only the matter of children remained a complete blank in her life.
The way Cole addressed her stirred up the greatest sense of taboo and shame in her heart.
Especially with so many Arrancar Hollows around.
Just imagining them hearing it made Unohana want to slaughter them all to silence them.
Little did she know that the Arrancar present did not understand the conversation at all.
Lilynette tugged lightly at Starrk's sleeve and whispered,
"Starrk, I heard humans are born from a female and a male reproducing. So… does that mean that woman is Cole's mama?"
Starrk looked just as lost.
"Maybe. But isn't Cole a human? How does he have a Shinigami mama?"
Sung-Sun blinked and looked curiously at Harribel.
"Harribel, we Hollows are born from fallen souls… so how are humans born? How do they reproduce?"
A faint flush rose on Harribel's cheeks.
She had no idea how to answer that.
Apacci frowned in confusion.
"If that woman Shinigami is Cole's mama, why is he being so rude to the one who created him?"
When it came to matters between males and females, the Arrancar here had a hard time understanding anything.
Before gaining Arrancar bodies, they had not even had reproductive organs, let alone reproductive instincts.
Even after gaining those bodies, they did not share the myriad desires humans felt about reproduction.
To Arrancar, all that business between human men and women was a complete blind spot.
On the other side, Unohana listened to the Arrancar talking and felt as if she'd reached the peak of shame.
Her soft body trembled again.
Her legs, which had finally stopped shaking, started quivering once more.
She had no choice but to cling to Cole just to stay standing.
Cole couldn't help but laugh.
He could tell that his "trashy Hana-nee" was already at the edge of pleasure.
With a wicked smile, he leaned close and breathed softly into Unohana's ear.
"Hana-nee, if you lose it now, everyone's going to notice, you know."
Unohana bit down on her lower lip, fighting desperately against the desire in her body.
The feeling was excruciating.
She could only look up at Cole with a pitiful, pleading gaze.
Cole smiled and was just about to say something more when his eyes suddenly lit up, fixing on the far end of the white desert.
"They're here."
Hearing his voice, the Arrancar all turned to look in that direction.
"What's here—?"
One glance was all it took.
The dozens of Arrancar Hollows present all felt their pupils contract violently as they stared at the distant scene in shock.
"That's… the Hollows from the Forest of Menos!!"
"How can there be so many!?"
"Just how many are there… This is basically a Hollow tide…"
"Gillians… and those regular Hollows…"
"Did all of these Hollows sense Cole's summons and leave the Forest of Menos because of it?"
"His reiatsu actually spread all the way to the Forest of Menos… and he used it to dominate this many lower-class Hollows…"
"…"
The Arrancar were so shocked that they were almost speechless.
They could also command lower Hollows, but the numbers were never this high.
If an Adjuchas-class Hollow could really command this many Gillians, they could simply summon a Hollow tide, devour them all, and complete their own evolution.
In reality, an Adjuchas could not control more than twenty Gillians.
Even a Vasto Lorde could only command a few hundred at most, never reaching a thousand.
Yet the Gillians before them now seemed endless—
Numbering in the tens of thousands, stretched out as far as the eye could see like a range of black mountains, marching forward like a natural disaster descending on the world.
Unohana was shaken as well.
"So many Menos…"
With her current strength, she could easily cut down Gillians.
But when the ants swarmed, even an elephant could be eaten alive.
Faced with this endless Hollow frenzy, she still felt a faint sense of powerlessness.
At this scale—
They could wage a small-scale war against the entire Soul Society.
As the Hollow tide drew closer, the Arrancar felt the ground under their feet trembling.
Loose stones bounced and rattled on the surface.
With a single command from Cole, all the Gillians that had walked out from the Forest of Menos halted at the same time and fixed their gazes on him.
Some instinct deep in their souls told them that this was their king.
Even if he wanted to devour them, under this near-absolute domination, they would not dare resist in the slightest.
But Cole had no intention of devouring Gillians.
Staring at the Hollow tide, he felt a bit of a headache instead.
"Hey, Harribel, how do we get these Hollows to do construction work? I remember they don't really have any intelligence, right?"
If they recklessly let this many Hollows into the ruins of Las Noches, they would probably stomp the rubble into dust.
Forget rebuilding—
Even just cleaning up would become a huge hassle.
"Don't call me Tia. Call me Harribel."
Grinding her teeth, Harribel took a deep breath and replied in a low voice,
"Leave the rest to us. You and your mama can go for now. We'll rebuild Las Noches."
Even she did not notice that, though she still sounded annoyed at Cole, there was now a hint of respect in her tone.
Cole could not help feeling a bit sentimental.
Hueco Mundo really was a great place.
As long as you had power, you received respect.
If he got a little stronger, these Hollows might very well start treating him as a god.
With that thought, he hurled the golden staff in his hand.
It landed at the very center of Las Noches and burst forth with dazzling golden light.
As Cole's voice echoed across the desert, the golden staff began to grow taller and thicker at a speed visible to the naked eye.
In the end, it pierced the sky,
As if it were connecting straight to the moon hanging overhead.
The Arrancar were once again scared out of their wits.
On one hand, they were stunned by the sheer scale of the golden staff;
on the other, they were shocked by Cole's strength.
A zanpakuto of that size—
Even if he did not swing it and simply dropped it straight down, it could probably crush several Arrancar Hollows to death.
This guy's power was terrifying.
Cole waved at them cheerfully.
"When you rebuild Las Noches, leave a spot in the center for my zanpakuto. The rest is up to you."
The domain of the Ruyi Jingu Bang easily covered all of Las Noches.
Standing upright above Hueco Mundo, its sea-calming, suppressive power would extend over the rebuilt fortress, silently pinning it in place.
If any Hollow tried to cause trouble in the future, he would not even need to personally act.
With just a thought, he could use that "divine pillar" to crush the offender.
The Arrancar, not knowing his exact thoughts, could only feel an indescribable terror from the golden pillar itself—
As if that towering column might come crashing down to kill them at any moment.
Because of that, their attitude toward Cole became even more respectful.
"Yes, Lord Cole!"
The Arrancar Hollows spoke with reverence as they saw Cole off.
Even Espada like Yammy, Nnoitra, and Lilynette were among them.
That felt quite satisfying to Cole.
From the moment he appeared until now, not even half an hour had passed, and he had already made so many Hollows submit.
(End of Chapter)
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