Ichigo is dueling this guy from his class, who is a member of some group that fights Hollows, but kills instead of exorcising them. The group is called the Quincys. I can't remember his classmate's name, so, since he apparently is the last of them, I'll just call him the Quincy until his name hits something sticky in my head. Anyway, since Quincys fight Hollows, and Shinigami fight Hollows, guess what this dude chose for the rules of the duel? He broke this coin/tablet-ish thingy, which attracts Hollows to the area. Whoever kills more Hollows within twenty-four hours wins. Ichigo naturally is rather--angry--about this type of duel, since Hollows are indiscriminate about damage. So the Quincy is standing on a bridge, calmly shooting Hollows out of the air with this extremely cool bow that looks like it's made of blue fire and materializes from the trademark Quincy cross bracelet, and Ichigo is rushing around trying to find his family so he can protect them. Chad, whose reiatsu (the English is spirit energy, which sounds relatively dumb) is high and thus attractive to Hollows, has bumped into Karin, whose reiatsu is almost as high as Ichigo's, and seems to have KO'ed a Hollow while protecting her. Chad is cool. He and Karin are pretty funny together. She calls him "mister giant guy" and stuff like that, and he calls her "Ichigo's little sister". There's this really funny bit, after the fight--he's just asked whether she's okay, and she says that the only one who isn't all right is him, and he says that that's okay then (he has this creed, only marginally less irritating than Sanji's, that doesn't allow him to fight on his own behalf, only others') and she gets mad, because in her view, it's not okay that anyone be hurt, and she starts kicking him and calling him names. And while she goes pelting off to get her dad, who runs a clinic, he says, "I can tell she's related to Ichigo. She kicks....just like him." Chad is very cool, and he's also incredibly handsome, and gets great grades, and he's unstoppable. I still like Zoro better, though. They're both nearly indestructible. Chad is extremely fortunate in this, since he never does anything about damage, he just takes it. If he can run, he will, but he can't, he just stands there and takes it.
Anyway, apparently Quincys don't like Shinigami because when a Hollow is exorcised, as the Shinigami do, the soul of the person who became a Hollow is able to find peace unless the were originally evil, in which case they go to hell. The Quincys disapprove of such merciful treatment; they do not take into account that any soul that finds peace didn't want to be a Hollow in the first place, and had nothing to do with the atrocoties committed as a Hollow. Vengeance, they say. Unkind. But apparently, haven't yet heard how, this policy led to their downfall and near-extinction. Indeed, the Shinigami were under the impression that the Quincy clan was extinct.