047. Back to Back ~ Tearing Sky

After Rukia knees Kon aside and rushes up the stairs, she finds Ichigo and Uryu standing spine to spine within a ring of Hollows. Uryu balks at cooperating with a Shinigami until Ichigo covers his blind side, and though the Quincy insists he only fires to save himself, Ichigo counters that sheer survival is reason enough to work together. Pressed on why he bothers with Hollows at all, Ichigo admits he never loved the work but took it up after one of the creatures killed his mother and left his father and sisters grieving. He cannot save everyone, he says, yet refuses to guard only those within his reach.

He warns that Uryu's reckless duel still endangers the town and that a reckoning will follow, then proposes they team up so he can settle the score afterward. Uryu grazes Ichigo's cheek with an arrow, calls him talkative, and concedes they cannot duel unless both survive. Their truce barely forms before the praying Hollows part and an immense Menos Grande rips a Kumon open above them, at which point Ururu, Urahara, Tessai, and Jinta blast in to back Ichigo up.

Ichigo and Uryu commit to fighting back-to-back. Ichigo reveals that his mother was killed by a Hollow, the source of his resolve to protect others. A giant Menos Grande opens a Kumon in the sky. Urahara and his crew arrive to help clear the lesser Hollows.

Adapted within Episode 14, Back to Back, a Fight to the Death!, the chapter belongs to Volume 6's Agent of the Shinigami arc. It brings the series' first appearance of a Menos Grande, later classified as a Gillian.