Spoilers for Bleach: The Thousand-Year Blood War Episode 4The return of Bleach has (unsurprisingly) turned out to be a bad omen for many characters, and the most recent episode has revealed that it won't take a thousand years to take down the Soul Society--in fact, Bleach's new villains the Quincy Wandenreich have nearly managed it in just a few minutes.
The Quincy invasion isn't the first time that the Soul Society has been breached by outsiders in Bleach's history. The first big Soul Society arc, of course, saw Ichigo and his friends break in to save Rukia, and even though they were only a handful of people, they still managed to cause a lot of havoc within the Seireitei. Hollows, particularly those under the control of Bleach's big villain Sosuke Aizen, have also managed to push through into that realm, and if one counts the anime's many filler arcs, other creatures like the Bounts have invaded as well. While the Soul Society is supposed to be a fairly safe place, it's not impenetrable, by any means.
While many of these invasions were fairly small-scale and attempted to avoid detection, the Quincy's attack had no such aims, instead opting to appear in as flashy a manner as possible. Giant pillars of flaming blue spirit energy sprung up in 16 locations across the Seireitei, and a small number of Quincy emerged from each. Despite their numbers, the Quincy attacked without mercy and had wiped out over a thousand Soul Reapers within the first seven minutes. Even some named characters are among these casualties, including Izuru Kira, a fairly major character from the original series who was killed just as quickly as the lower-ranked Soul Reapers. Although many of Bleach's Soul Reaper Captains were present and immediately joined the fight, they had previously been warned not to use their Bankai ability, which severely limited their effectiveness in battle. The few who did attempt to use their Bankai immediately saw the ability stolen and essentially became powerless to continue the fight.
The Soul Society's Defenses Are Useless Against the Quincy
With so many incursion points and such brutal battles going on, it's clear that the Quincy have some major advantage over the Soul Society, although exactly what that is hasn't been made known in the anime yet. While the Quincy attack force has been shown to have a presence in Hueco Mundo as well, and even sent some to the world of the living, it appears that they aren't actually based out of any of these places, but rather some otherwise unknown location that can access all of these realms with relative ease. Figuring out where they are and how they're getting in is going to be an essential first step, or else these attacks will just continue until the entire Soul Society has been wiped out. Fortunately, Bleach's Soul Reapers do have some great minds on their side, so it's not time to declare defeat quite yet.
If the purpose of these early episodes of Bleach: The Thousand-Year Blood War is to establish what a threat the Quincy Wandenreich poses, then this episode has surely cemented that idea in the minds of fans.
Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War's latest episode is streaming now on Hulu!