Wind & Snowbound

Di Roy wrenches free of Ichigo's grip as a shaken Sado realizes the halted strike still broke his skin and would have killed him. Ichigo orders him to stand aside; Sado protests that Shun'o and Ayame mended his arm, but the memory of Yammy crushing his Fullbring makes him yield and jog off, brushing past a confused Rukia and quietly wondering whether Ichigo no longer trusts him to guard his back. Reaching Ichigo, Rukia tells him to step back as well, then astonishes him by popping a Chappy soul candy into her mouth and expelling herself from Kisuke's old gigai into her true Shinigami form.

She explains that the borrowed gigai had bottled up her powers, and that discarding it and living amid the dense spirit particles of Soul Society let her reclaim her energy with ease. Her gigai, now piloted by the bouncy Chappy, keeps parroting her order for Ichigo to retreat, to his irritation.

Di Roy lunges and drives Rukia down the block, then hurls her skyward, but she rebounds off a telephone post to strike back. When he refuses to trade names, boasting that he never learns the names of those he kills, Rukia tells him to at least remember her sword and releases her Shikai, Sode no Shirayuki, turning the blade snow white. She invokes Some no mai, Tsukishiro, ringing them both in a freezing circle. Di Roy tears his foot loose and leaps up crowing that the sky is his and that her blade only ices the ground, lifting the wrap over his eye to charge a Cero. Instead he finds himself sealed in a towering pillar of ice, and Rukia calmly corrects him that her sword's domain is everything inside the circle as the column shatters to fragments behind her.

Featured in Volume 23, MALA SUERTE!, of the Arrancar arc, and adapted into Episode 117, Rukia's Battle Commences! The Freezing White Blade. The chapter marks the debut of Rukia's Shikai, Sode no Shirayuki, and her first on-panel win since regaining her powers, dispatching Di Roy Rinker.