“What is going on?”
A dim alleyway in Karakura Town.
A big, heavyset young man stood surrounded by a group of punks.
Every one of them had a different hair color.
Every one of them was dressed to look tough, and every one of them was holding some kind of weapon.
The young man’s name was Lucas Hale, and right now he was completely lost.
If he remembered correctly, a second ago he had been at his desk, staying up late to write.
How had he ended up here?
Before he could work it out, a baseball bat came swinging at his head.
His hand went up on reflex, faster than he thought he could move, and closed around the bat.
“Damn it, how is this guy so strong?”
The punk on the other end tried to wrench it free.
Lucas’s hand did not budge.
The bat might as well have grown into his palm.
He stared at the scene in front of him, baffled.
He had thrown his hand up, yes, but he had also braced himself to get hurt.
He had not expected to catch it that easily.
The kid opposite him was red in the face from straining.
Whatever this was, it was not an act.
“Whoosh!”
Something whistled behind him.
He ducked aside on instinct, and a steel bar slammed into the ground right beside him.
At the sharp clang of metal, Lucas stopped caring about anything else.
He swung the arm holding the bat backward, hard.
The punk on the other end was still clutching it, and got carried along and thrown off his feet.
“Bang!”
A dull thud as the two punks collided and went flying at once, tumbling away across the pavement.
The alley fell silent.
The rest of them stared with wide, disbelieving eyes.
They could not imagine the strength it took to do that.
Then they watched him pick the steel bar up off the ground, one weapon in each hand now.
They looked down at their own.
They scattered.
The two who had gone rolling had stopped moving.
Out cold.
Their friends were too busy running for their lives to bother with them.
Lucas paid none of it any attention.
He was still wondering why he was here.
Why he had been surrounded.
Where this strength had come from.
Then the memories came flooding in.
When they settled, he finally understood.
“So I’ve transmigrated. And my memories only just came back.”
That fit.
He really had been staying up to write, night after night, until his body gave out.
He had been reborn as an infant, still in the womb.
The body had not finished developing, so his memories stayed sealed.
Until now.
What surprised him was who he had become.
He had transmigrated into a very familiar character.
Sado Yasutora, from Bleach.
That explained the terrifying strength.
Among all the Fullbringers, Chad was the only one whose Fullbring carrier was his own body.
Everyone else keyed theirs to an external object.
Even in the manga, before Chad ever awakened his Fullbring, his physical durability was absurd.
He once took an I-beam falling from several stories up.
An actual I-beam.
The piece that hit him had to weigh a hundred or two hundred kilos, and dropped from that height, the impact should have been lethal.
Chad took it head-on and came away with a bloody scalp.
Later, he pulled a utility pole out of the ground to smash a Hollow.
That was strength measured in tons.
Next to a normal human, Chad was simply a monster.
Right now, though, Lucas felt relieved more than anything.
Lucky those punks had run off fast.
Lucky he had not put much force behind that swing.
A little more and none of them would have survived.
The manga never described much of the human world, but this was a real world now.
He had no interest in causing trouble over a few street punks.
He checked the two unconscious ones again.
Just knocked out, nothing serious.
Then he left them there to sleep it off in the cold.
Honestly, he had not expected any punk to dare come after him.
Being transmigrated as a fetus had probably done it, but his personality was completely different from the Chad of the manga.
He had been raised by the same grandfather, taught the same things.
But this version would not stand there and take a beating without hitting back.
He would not go picking fights.
If someone came looking for one, he would not go easy either.
Which was exactly why the punks in Karakura Town had long since seen what he could do and stopped bothering him.
Today’s crowd were newcomers.
They had heard the name and wanted to make theirs by stepping on him.
He was not a punk himself, but among them his reputation was loud.
There was even a rumor going around that whoever beat him got to be boss of the lot.
Rumors stayed rumors.
Anyone who had actually seen how terrifying he was did not come knocking.
Only the newcomers, too green to know better.
Back at his place, Lucas looked at himself in the mirror.
Still a big man, but not quite the Chad of the manga.
His skin was not as dark as the original’s.
His face was a little softer, too.
In loose clothes, most people would just see an oversized student.
“Chad. This identity is going to be awkward.”
He felt a bit helpless about it.
Never mind that the Chad in the manga seemingly made it to the end.
Every time was a brush with death, and it always felt like the plot itself stepped in to save him.
Otherwise, with that combat power, the Soul Society, Hueco Mundo, the Thousand-Year Blood War, any one of them could have killed him.
At that strength he handled side characters fine.
Against a slightly serious minor boss, he was completely out of his depth.
“Worst case, I lie low in the human world.”
He had no intention of going out to court death.
Especially not before he knew whether he even had a cheat.