Seele Schneider

Written with characters meaning That Which Slits the Soul and paired with a German name that reads as Soul Cutter, the Seele Schneider is a distinctive armament of the Quincy. Uryū Ishida points to it as the one Quincy weapon that carries an actual blade. At rest it looks like a thin, silvery instrument, but once activated it throws out a glowing blue cutting edge.

The weapon behaves somewhat like a chainsaw: spirit particles race around the rim of its blade at a staggering rate, cycling roughly three million times each second. Those vibrations do more than sever, they slacken the bonds holding a target's Reishi together, leaving the loosened particles far easier to seize. That feeds directly into the Quincy fighting style, which turns on collecting ambient spirit energy and wielding it. Its second faculty, Anhäufer, or Gatherer, drinks in an opponent's released attacks during a fight, so the more Reiatsu an enemy pours out, the stronger its wielder grows.

In melee it cuts chiefly through Reiatsu-based impacts, and it can inflict greater harm on a physically powerful foe when they strike with force, since a spiritual high-speed blow undoes a physical one. Even so, its truest role is as an arrow rather than a sword. Fired, it once dropped a former Espada with a single shot, piercing her soul chain and stripping away her abilities; a slightly higher aim would have proven fatal. Five of the blades can be arranged into a pentagon for the technique Sprenger, where they stockpile Reishi and a Gintō's liquid Reiryoku detonates the sealed area.

Both Uryū Ishida and his father Ryūken Ishida employ the Seele Schneider. In the film Bleach: The Hell Verse, Uryū uses one for a move named Geldschrank, firing a single blade that halts in midair and encases the target in a dense Reishi barrier before a hurled Gintō collapses it into an enormous explosion.