Aura Michibane

Aura is a strikingly lovely young woman whose short black hair falls longer on the left. She favors a black business suit finished with a white scarf and a golden lapel pin shaped like an X across the chest.

Shaped by a sheltered, loveless childhood, Aura regards the world with a cool detachment and moves through it with measured, deliberate calm. At first she follows Tokinada without question, but once she comes to see Hikone Ubuginu as her own child, a maternal tenderness awakens in her, and she ultimately gives her life for their sake.

Aura is born to a human mother and a Fullbringer father; while she was still unborn, a Hollow attacked her mother, and though her father drove it off, the wounds claimed the woman during childbirth. Convinced his powers had lured the creature, her father shut Aura away in a basement for the whole of her early life, teaching her only the basics of reading, writing, and physics along with enough control of her Fullbring to defend herself. After bringing word that the Substitute Shinigami Kūgo Ginjō was rounding up Fullbringers to strip away their powers, he left and never returned. Starving and alone, Aura first manifested her abilities to tear through the walls and escape, was found by police, and was later taken in by her mother's relatives, the Michibane family, though she stayed emotionally adrift, forming no attachments.

Her path crosses that of Tokinada Tsunayashiro, the very Shinigami who had killed her father on his clan's orders and who reveals that she carries the Soul King's Saketsu within her. Indifferent and unwilling to resist, Aura throws in with him, stealing Urahara's Tenkai Ketchū prototype, gathering followers into the XCUTION cult through staged miracles, and raising a vast floating fortress in the Valley of Screams. On his instructions she assembles a body for a coming king out of countless corpses, the being who becomes Hikone Ubuginu.

In the novel's events she seals off Karakura Town with Yukio Hans Vorarlberna and clashes with Kisuke Urahara and Shūhei Hisagi, who deduce that she has no specific Fullbring at all, only the generic powers of her kind amplified to extreme heights. As raising Hikone stirs a genuine love in her, Aura turns on Tokinada to spare the child, restraining him and refusing to release his blade even as he drains her strength with Ruri'iro Kujaku. When he commands Hikone to kill her, Hisagi shields her, and Aura throws herself in front of a lunging Ikomikidomoe, losing much of her midsection. Spending the last of her power to steer the collapsing palace into a Garganta bound for Hueco Mundo, she dissolves into mist. Her greatly weakened soul is later recovered there by Nelliel, healed by Roka Paramia, and welcomed among Tier Harribel's Arrancar, where she looks ahead to reuniting with Hikone.