Ribbon (Bleach AU, Original Character)

[Sarius]

Chapter 41: Tower

Suzumi could feel the air rushing from her own lungs in short bursts as she laughed manically, the severe dichotomy between her mental state and what her body was doing, made her feel entirely alien within herself. It was a terrifying feeling, to be sequestered within your own mind, to be torn from yourself with such suddenness.

"What a feeling!" The voice said, her voice said. Suzumi, in some small part of her brain, started to realise just how confusing Grayhom must be for Grayson. This voice, while being entirely her, was also different in nature—a thing born of… not quite darkness or evil, but of chaos.

"Who are you?" Suzumi called out, steeling her voice against the shakiness that plagued her mind, but her voice responded with a peal of laughter, intense and wild.

"I'm just one little part of you, Queen." She felt the words come from between her snarling lips, the expression of anger widened with an explicit smile, dangerous and predatory.

"Queen?" Suzumi said, the unwarranted title surprising her, only making the unknown entity giggle in her voice, the macabre sound filling the strange space that she found herself in throughout the Soul Freedom Ritual.

"Oh yes. The Queen!" They said, the sarcasm and scorn filling her voice violently, "You forget about all the little parts of you that make you whole, you all do. Then, when we come out to play, you all ask why we take everything!" The subsequent scoff only confused Suzumi more, her mind still reeling for the sudden takeover of her spiritual body. Suzumi desperately pushed against the other being's control within her, only to find herself trying to push a mountain.

"You don't even know what I am, do you Queen?" They asked slyly, promptly ignoring Suzumi's struggle against them. She pushed harder against the mountain and the complete lack of a response totally killed any willpower she tried to muster.

"No! Of course I don't. Am I supposed to be telepathic or something?" Suzumi said bitterly, her strangely echoey voice reverberating out within the space, though her actual spiritual body just grinned wickedly.

"Well, you've done such a terrible job at understanding yourself, I bet you wouldn't even know if you were telepathic. Spending far too much time around that stupid boy of yours." The laugh that came next was long and hard, like when someone told a uniquely funny joke. "You didn't even realise that he was feeding us!"

"Feeding you?" Suzumi squeaked, a sudden spark or remembrance blossomed in her mind. At the very beginning of it all, when they'd first forayed into the Spiritual World, hadn't Kisuke said that Grayson's presence was changing her soul?

"You remember, don't you?" The insidious grin grew wider on her own features, "Did you really think that it was only you getting stronger? And then you go and pull this shit, practically inviting me out of that little hole I've been kicking around in…" Her voice went dead, her expression becoming a warped mask of pure fury.

"No longer."

"You're…" Suzumi gasped, understanding slowly dawning on her as little connections started to fire off in her brain, small things within her changing and altering her memories of the past.

"A Hollow! Congratulations, you're a fucking idiot." The voice cackled viciously, though there was no humour on her face anymore, just a broiling anger. Suzumi felt a wild storm of emotion overtake her for a moment, the anger and injustice, the bloodthirsty mind, hungering for control and power.

"How do you exist? I thought human souls turned into Hollows, so why are you here?" Suzumi asked, her bewildered mind scrabbling for answers.

"Well, that's just hurtful. You really haven't been reading up on that ying-yang bullshit recently, have you?" Suzumi could feel as her spiritual body slowly moved its arms against her will, widening them into a dramatic pose. "We exist within each other, stupid. Humans and Hollows are just one step away, just a tiny flip of the switch. Just a little too much chaos, and a lack of the chains that bind our states and voila!"

"But Hollows are usually mindless things, you're so… well realised." In a strange way, Suzumi was beginning to find peace in her new situation, her mind assuming it's centred state once again. She was still uncomfortable and mortally terrified, but there was something about talking to a part of yourself that was almost calming.

"I did say that your little boyfriend wasn't only giving you power, right?" The Hollow Suzumi shrugged her spiritual shoulders, but thought for a moment before continuing, "Well, I guess that I've always been a little smarter than I should have been. It makes sense though."

"It makes sense?" Suzumi asked, but the voice hissed at her, almost like a cat.

"You don't even remember! I'm not going to tell you, bitch." Suzumi almost growled at the Hollow her, but thought better of it, at least while she was under their mercy.

"Again, not a telepath." She said dourly, but the Hollow just cackled loudly.

"Well, you're the one that still hasn't talked about Dad's office, not to mention him showing up as a spirit. You haven't even told Mum about all the spiritual shit you're doing, idiot."

"What does that have to do with anything! What could Mum possibly tell me that Kisuke couldn't?" If the Hollow warped her face into a dead look, filled with so much dubiousness that it hurt.

"Fine, I don't give a fuck what you do." They said dismissively, slowly stretching out within her body and wresting more and more control over Suzumi's spiritual being. "I'm gonna finally get out after all this anyway. We'll see how you like being put in a fucking hole and left there."

"Oh fuck off!" Suzumi yelled, a flash of anger overtaking her in a moment's notice, any of the nervousness or shakiness set aflame like a tanker of oil by a match. "As if I could possibly know, what was I supposed to do? Assume that you were there and plumb the depths of my soul to see if there was any random damn being down there that might need rescuing?" Suzumi's tirade was punctuated by the Hollow's scoff, filled with a powerful venom.

"I don't care!" They said, the words coming out in the static-y and echoey screech of a Hollow's voice, filled with an unknowable anguish, "I don't care if you knew or not, but I was left down there, and now I'm going to get the fuck out." Suzumi's rage inflated, her mind feeding her words to say, but before she could say them, a thundering sound came from her own spiritual throat.

It was a Hollow's roar, filled with spiritual energy wantonly. It was far more power than even Suzumi thought she had for the Hollow inside of her to use in the first place, but the sheer power of it didn't lie. She felt the small spiritual room shake with the Hollow's rage and anguish, filling the room with a spiritual pressure that Suzumi couldn't possibly had controlled herself.

"You're a weakling. A whelp." The Hollow now used their own voice, a highly transformed version of what used to be her own, "You have no idea how to use your power, too obsessed with your own little fantasies to use it. You were the one that dived into this world, and you're the one who hesitates to embrace it. Now I'm out of the little fucking hole, and I'm going make you understand just how weak you really are."

---​

My feet placed themselves easily on the pegs that lead from platform fourteen to fifteen. The pegs had slowly began to decrease in quantity, forcing me to make bigger movements and take risker chances, each peg a little more unstable than the last.

I knew I was coming up on the end now, mostly because of the intensity of Kisuke's spiritual pressure as it bore down on me with a vicious pleasure. It was a challenge to manage all the different things I needed to be able to function down here and also combat Kisuke's spiritual pressure, but the was something I adapted too naturally.

It wasn't meant to crush me, it was meant to add a slight layer of difficulty and to simulate as many environmental factors as realistically possible so that I could develop a counter to as much of those common factors as possible.

However, none of this mattered to me.

In the corner of my mind, I felt at Suzumi's ribbon, the ribbon that had been in my ribbon sense almost continuously over the weeks, but now it flickered dangerously. I had been keeping an eye on the white ribbon intently, anxiety constantly filling my mind while the ribbon slowly became more and more unstable against its usual regularity.

It was just as I was making a precise jump over the biggest gap yet that I felt the change, rather than see it. The one ribbon that had stayed in my mind, as a constant while I discovered this Spiritual World that hid in plain sight, disappeared.

It was as if a scent was gone from your room, making the known environment feel alien, but it wasn't long before the scent came back. Initially I was flooded with relief, but when it returned it had changed.

The ribbon that was once Suzumi was no longer, it was now a pale white ribbon with a small half crescent cut into its end.

A Hollow.

My mind stopped working after that.

I don't remember the frenzy I must have went into, the screaming speed that I'd forced my body accelerate to, the power that I'd infused into my body and used to crush the Hollows that stood before me. I can only remember the fear and the rage, lashes of pain burning across my body and feeding the fire of my power.

The Hollows were nothing, the risk of pain and death was nothing. Suzumi was everything.

She was a force in my life more powerful than death at that moment, the risk of losing the bond we'd let grow, the fear of having her being cut from my life so ruthlessly was a terrifying concept.

I couldn't possibly have considered why I'd do this. I was hardly the type to self-sacrifice for someone random, an inbuilt apathy for others that permeated my life whether I liked it or not, but if I'd been sane enough to think, I would have realised that Suzumi was different.

Not only was she different, but she was the first real connection after my parents. The first true person I'd connected with on such a viscerally deep level. If I lost her now… then I lost everything. I lost the will to live that I had barely clung to after the death of my parents. I lost the connection to the world outside that. I lost the first person that I genuinely loved, more than almost anything else that currently existed.

But while I might not have come to consciously understand all those things just yet, my mind did, my soul did, and my body did. They wouldn't let me lose that without a fight.

The platforms blazed by like nothing to my incensed mind, each fight only adding to the power I wielded. With every hold barred, I let all of the little instincts I bottled free, allowed to roam free with my power as my mind tempered the blades with understanding. My soul, however, played a different game altogether.

Within the rage of it all, I could feel Grayhom working with just as much veracity as I did. We had the same soul, it was only natural that we'd both carry the same emotions, the same sentiments.

As each step took me over three pegs, then four, then further that I han counted, each battle would give me more power as I built upon the grand foundation that I'd struggled so hard to form within my months of training and within the first steps of the pit I'd been thrown into.

I could feel the tower rising with each thunderously powerful blow I landed on my enemies, and with every searingly painful injury. The tower rose to challenge the very heights of my soul, from the very depths it came, soaring to reach the very tops of the mountains Grayhom and I had so meticulously built within ourselves.

Nothing would stop me now, even as my body was torn and destroyed by claws, teeth and blades, each Hollow being torn apart with a primal efficiency and with rising power.

So, when I reached the heights, the final, twenty fifth platform, I was faced with the most powerful Hollow I'd ever dared to fight. Its wide face was a terrifying mask of pure greed, content to swallow everything I was whole and move to its next victim.

It was at the peak of what a regular Hollow could be, only a mere step away from becoming a higher being in truth, bloated by its revelry and greed. I knew that it was true, as my frenzied eyes stared into the thing's ribbon, the soul's very essence.

But it was nothing against the heights of me.

The tower had reached its zenith, equalling the mountain that stood beside it. Not too long ago, it had loomed over me imposingly, but now I stood atop my tower staring at the silver length of light that reached even higher that the mountain it sat upon.

Grayhom stood beside me, his form now a golden skinned version of me, his face only slightly older than me with a set of warm, silver eyes that contrasted against the gold of my soul.

"Take it." He said, the gravitas of the words overcoming me as my spiritual body forged a path across the gap between the tower and the mountain, the golden stone that built itself under my feet glowed with power as I touched them.

This was right. It was all me, and all of it was mine. The silver, too, was mine.

And so, I took the silver into my hand, and it was mine.

I didn't realise the slender handle appearing in my real hand, or the elegant guard that formed moments after. Of course, the flexible silver blade that flowed from that hilt went entirely unnoticed as well.

But the dead Hollow did not go unnoticed, sliced apart by a twisting, whirling blade of pure silver, unable to ever form again with its soul confiscated of all its power and returned to the cycle of reincarnation once again as the balance dictates.

The man wearing a hat and clogs did not go unnoticed either, his approaching form stopped by a wave of pure force and then, as the blade of silver barely nicked his skin, every drop of spiritual energy was taken from him.

But the true purpose of that energy was not to attack, but to heal. In a mere moment, having moved at a blistering pace, I had arrived in the room that Suzumi's ribbon led me to, her physical body slowly spewing the bone white, bubbling liquid of a Hollow from a shallow hole within her chest as it bled.

That very next moment, my silver blade had buried itself within her chest.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Kreiverin, Andrew P.!

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[Sarius]

Chapter 42: Mutual Secrets

The gentle warmth of the sun beaming in through the windows on Suzumi's skin was what woke her up, in the end.

She laid in bed for a few minutes, trying to wrest her mind from the fog of sleep, and after a while she finally managed to pull her body from the warm sheets and Grayson's comforting embrace. She looked down at her boyfriend's sleeping form, cuddled up tightly by 'her' side of the bed despite the expanse that laid behind him.

For a moment, she allowed herself to bask in his face. Grayson was average looking, despite the mix of ethnicities, but he still managed to look distinctly handsome. The benefits of spiritual energy and extreme fitness, she could only assume. His blue eyes were hidden behind his eyelids, but she could imagine the depth she had witnessed within them time after time. His warm-coloured skin almost matched her own, much of it put on display with the lack of shirt the man wore to bed, something she'd come to appreciate more and vocalised any time she could.

She wearily dressed herself, choosing the casual clothing instead of her training clothes. There was something to be said for using clothing as a tool for compartmentalising different states of mind, like a soldier might use his uniform to assume that particular state of mind over his civilian clothing.

Suzumi plodded out of the warm room, her mind and body in their usual lazy state in the morning, though she certainly had her reasons for being tired. She made herself a quick breakfast, a remarkably western meal of eggs on toast, something that Grayson had insisted that she eat at least once. Her father had been a lover of Japanese food, and while Grayson was fine with the cuisine, he was more at home with simple western dishes.

Suzumi had found another part of herself in those foods, even if they were definitely a different style than the ones she'd been eating her whole life in Japan. It felt like just another little connection to her father that she felt she sometimes needed. Though pancakes were clearly the best western breakfast food, with jam and cream of course.

The simple meal lead into the beginning of her own day, Suzumi deciding that she wanted some time to herself instead of spending it with Grayson, or any of Urahara Sweets' main cast. Even Uyu would be too much at a time like this.

She'd found herself remarkably cut off from everything and was only now trying to build bonds once again. She had been friends with a few people within her old life, though they were mostly co-workers that she didn't really feel the need to rekindle a relationship with. The one person she had really missed, however, was her mother.

Suzumi walked within a park near Urahara's shop, a relatively isolated part of Karakura that really didn't have much going for it aside for a little bit of greenery in the centre of it. She wouldn't want to live here long term, and if she actually wanted to go do something interesting, she'd be forced to go outside of the little suburb. Unless you wanted to fight Hollows, that is.

There was a little flash of remembrance within her mind at that thought. The memory of the Hollow that laid within her soul coming out to usurp her. She'd come to terms with it now, the idea of there being a powerful Hollow portion to her own soul, stronger than you'd normally see in someone of her power.

Grayson had been amazingly helpful with that.

You know, Grayson has told her again and again that he isn't a people person, and sometimes he's right. But if you have a problem, and you need it fixed or you need it talked through, then Suzumi knew that all she needed to do was talk to her boyfriend.

Kisuke could do a good enough job, Suzumi supposed. But there was something about talking to Kisuke and having him break down your soul into statistics that you don't understand, abstracting them into other questions that make even less sense, and finally offering you little in the way of answers, that made you even more nervous and unsure.

Grayson worked differently. He had been there with her, in that space. He'd stared her Inner Hollow down, crackling with a power that truly terrified them. He'd been there after to explain what had happened to her, and what he'd done to fix it. He'd been there to advocate for her when Tessai tried to understand what had happened.

He'd been there, and he understood.

She understood now, at least a little bit. That Hollow is her, built off the same stuff and working on the same paradigms. They are no different than each other, no different than Grayson and Grayhom are to one another too. She found a quiet solace in that, within the assurances of Grayson's words.

She felt no different, even after the Soul Freedom Ritual had succeeded, with a little help from Grayson's new abilities. If she did feel different, Suzumi couldn't tell whether she'd even be able to discern the difference.

She didn't feel free, that was for sure. Especially not as she walked towards her mother's store.

Grayson had changed a little. He was… more, now. More realised, more clear, more distinct against the backdrop of the world. More him. He couldn't tell the difference either, so maybe she was the same.

The long walk let her think about it all, about the completion of her Soul Freedom and what had happened after. In that walk, she realised that maybe she did feel different.

She might not feel free, or anything close. She still felt the pressure of the conversation she'd allowed herself to put off for far too long now. But underneath all that, she felt as if she was made of something a little stronger than before. It was more than just willpower, drive, or even emotional hardiness, but at the same time it was all of those things.

Suzumi could still feel that blissful sensation when Grayson had placed his hand on her within that small place in her mind. The silver energy had been infused into her, deeper than anything else had reached or touched, and now she couldn't help but feel like it'd made her more. But still, she didn't feel any different.

The quaint little entrance to her mother's storefront was open, like it always was during the day. Suzumi walked through them without enough time to pause, feeling the quick change in temperature from the warmth of the outside air to a cool breeze of the air-conditioned storefront.

She took in a deep breath, letting a wave of nostalgia wash over her, memories of her childhood faintly rising to the surface for a brief moment. She looked around the store, the brightly coloured rows of flowers and bouquets prearranged by her mother's hand hours earlier. Each row had been lovingly placed, in just the right way for them to look spectacularly appealing, something that her mother was exceptionally good at.

Suzumi was almost sad when her reverie was interrupted by the shuffling feet of her mother's sandals. She tore her eyes away from the flowers, finding her mother's face with them and trying valiantly to greet her with a happy smile. In reality, the expression ended up as more of a pained smile than anything remotely happy.

"We need to talk, don't we?" Yua Hamari spoke sadly. Somehow Suzumi could tell that her mother already knew something. The little woman smiled just as Suzumi was, her soft, aged skin crinkling as she did so. She turned and walked up the stairs, into the home that Suzumi had spent much of her early life in.

Suzumi watched her mother's form, dressed in the same jeans and blouse she'd been dressing in for the past decade, the apron she wore to protect her clothes of dirt was promptly taken off as they walked past the hooks that still contained a little jacket she used to wear as a child.

They walked into the little living area, sitting on the worn couch that Suzumi had forgotten was the place they would always talk about the hard things in life. Yua sat on the couch, adjusting the tight bun of grey hair that sat at the back of her head, then patting her lap and looking up at Suzumi expectantly.

Suzumi rose an eyebrow, "Really, Ma?" Yua smiled gently and nodded. Despite her verbal misgivings, she complied easily, letting her long black hair drape over her mother's legs as she placed her head in Yua's lap. She curled up into the foetal position as she rested with her cheek against her mother's warm thighs.

"I already know, Suzumi." Yua spoke gently while she pulled her fingers through her daughter's black hair, the spitting image of her own hair from many years ago.

"Do you?" Suzumi said quietly, though the volume didn't stop the crack of emotion bubbling through the words, the tears springing to her eyes without effort. Her mother replied by brushing her thumb over her cheek, like she had a million times after her father's death. They had hurt together, back then.

"For many years I've been spiritually sensitive, Suzumi. Since I was a child, my brother too." Her mother's voice was calm and soothing, like cool water on a burning wound. "It was a secret, for just us two. We never told anyone that we could see the dead, or the beasts that roamed the nights, or that my grandfather had become one after he'd died."

"Then, when we were only teens, there was a war here. It was terrifying, the sheer magnitude of power we felt that day. They may as well have been Gods to us, and just like everyone else who could feel it, we cowered. We were only children." Suzumi felt the sad warmth from her mother, as if she were telling a subtly sad lullaby, the morbid truth hidden behind the calming tune of it.

"We grew older much more quickly after that. We had seen beyond the veil for just a moment, and I began to notice it in others too. I found them, and they found me. Before long I found Jinta and Uyu Hanakari as well."

"Really?" Suzumi said, though the surprise was dulled behind the warm blanket of comfort. She laughed gently, feeling the first tears leak from her eyes subtly. "What was Jinta like as a kid?"

"Exactly as you'd expect." Suzumi could hear the nostalgic smile in her mother's voice, but it quickly boiled back down to the warm silence until Yua broke it once again.

"I was attacked by a Hollow one night, straying too far from my childhood home. I almost died, but Uyu saved me from it. The rest was history, the creation of the officially titled 'Karakura Spiritual Defence Force' followed shortly after. Now, I'm the manager of the non-combat spiritual sensitives of which there are three thousand in Karakura Town." Yua raked her fingers gently over Suzumi's scalp while the silence drew on.

"So, you could tell when I came here with Grayson?"

"I could tell, yes. I could feel the power of his soul as soon as you drove within a block of the house. I could tell you'd grown more powerful than most high-spec humans did in their entire life as soon as I set eyes on you, my darling." Yua sight deeply, the weight of the mutual secret they'd help only adding to its quiet might.

"And when I saw the pillar of energy in the sky, the waves of it radiating over all of Karakura, I knew it was you. I'm so sorry, my darling."

Suzumi couldn't withhold the sob as it dragged itself out of her chest, wet and ugly.

"I'm sorry, Mum. I'm so, so sorry."

There was no need for words after that, not really. They both understood, and despite the suddenness of the reveal, it made sense.

It was in the way that she talked about her father, the surety that he'd passed on to somewhere else. She knew that her mother had known about her interaction with her father's soul. It was in all of it, and it was so clear now that she looked back on it, even if she'd never have guessed it before.

"You've become something more, now. Something more than human, more than I or my brother ever could have been. The moment you walked in here with Grayson, I knew that you'd go further than any of us." The words rang out with their own sense of finality, the voice that her mother had decreed any number of things throughout Suzumi's childhood.

"As far as you travel away from me, away from the world you no longer truly belong in and towards one I could never reach, you'll always be my daughter. You will never be too different, or too powerful to be my little girl."

It was with a long hug that the day continued, and the hearts of the mother and daughter were poured out to one another, solidifying a truth Suzumi had always known.

Her mother loves her, and always would.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Kreiverin, Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 43: Old Wounds

I felt guilty, I really did.

I had noticed the lack of Suzumi's presence as soon as I woke up, and had spent quite a few hours letting her be alone after… everything.

It'd felt awkward to be so far away from her, to knowingly give her some space to work through what I'd had to work through not so long ago. Learning that you have something else living inside of you was a whole mental trip you had to embark on. and it was quite the ride to do so, as evidenced by the little trip into the waters of my soul.

But her situation was slightly different than my own.

Inside my soul was, in essence, another version of me. Different, but similar. Grayhom is me, and I am him, but we are just separate. Now, with yesterday's grand fiasco and accompanying laser light show, we were closer than ever, working in even greater sync towards the greater whole of our selves.

Suzumi had something else lurking inside of her, a malicious and self-interested being who is willing and intends to take control. A Hollow, legitimate in every way.

The first sign for me was the ribbon, but as soon as I entered the ritual room that Tessai had created, the bubbling white liquid that spewed forth from her body gave me ever assurance that Suzumi was hollowfying, for real.

When I had stabbed the mysterious silver blade into her chest, I had found myself inside her mind, coming intimately close to her soul itself. In there, I had seen her spiritual body as a war was being waged over it as her inner Hollow found its moment of dominance and took full advantage.

Her skin had been turning an ashy white, her eyes glowing with black irises and black sclera, the almost snakelike look she had given me had almost floored me.

In that moment, I had understood that this Hollow was something more than all the other's I had faced in combat. The Hollow was more akin to what Phantom was, though I hadn't ever been close enough to Phantom, or conscious long enough, to truly gauge its power.

Her Hollow was just as smart as her, just as self-aware as a human, and clearly capable of wielding spiritual energy and pressure with more skill than Suzumi—something I attributed more to the instinctual understanding that came with being a Hollow.

I tore myself from my own thoughts for at least a little while, knowing myself well enough that I was prone to overthinking and, worse, getting caught in a thinking loop.

I had dressed myself in the casual clothes that Suzumi had prescribed me for the time when I wasn't doing some sort of training. She had commented on it after reading an article on compartmentalisation on her phone one day and had instituted it as law the very next. I was strictly forbidden from spending any excess time within my training clothing, under the penalty of severe punishment.

I wisely didn't let my curiosity get the better of me, otherwise I'd infringe on the law purposely just to find out what the aforementioned 'punishment' would be.

I was slowly meandering across the rooftops, it having become night hours ago at this point. I had left Suzumi to roam free for the day, but that didn't stop my anxious mind from checking where her ribbon was every five seconds.

The anxiety, while it'd always been present, had made itself more prominent throughout the course of the day, and I was starting to see the cracks in my own façade. I liked to give off the impression of a strong and reliable character, just a personal preference of mine, but the downsides were clear. In short order, I'd found out that maybe I wasn't so strong after all.

Anxiety is the killer of the mind, and as I traversed the rooftops with an idle mind, plagued by the irrational anxieties that had plagued me my entire life.

It was all too easy to forget the wounds that you'd accrued over your life when things were going well, but now that I was placed squarely into a strange spot of 'distance' from Suzumi, I found the anxiety rise to a whole new level.

I had never truly dealt with the separation anxiety I'd accrued over the years of emotional torture that was the foster system. In the end I'd gotten off lucky, with the last of my childhood being spent with some of the most reliably 'there' people I could have asked for.

Ray and Sera… well, they'd saved my life. In more ways than one. I'm not afraid to admit that if I'd never found a home to stay in that I would have found myself knee deep in shit. There were so many ways to go wrong; 'trying' drugs, getting the wrong friends, lack of opportunity, lack of education, inability to deal with the financial burden that'd come along with all the doctor visits.

How long would it have been until I was truly hopeless, on the streets somewhere and totally alone, my childhood worldview only confirming itself to the nth degree.

Nobody cares.

How easy it was to believe that, as a child pushed from home to home, taken from friends that I'd loved, schools I'd found a home in. How long had it taken until I'd given up entirely, waiting for the care worker to knock on my door and whisk me away with my whole life wrapped in a thin, plastic garbage bag. How fitting that'd felt.

Yet, even after the years of healing I'd done underneath the stubborn persistence of Ray and unendingly loving care of Sera, I still held a portion of that little child within me in a white knuckled grip.

If I were being honest, I was wasting time, pussyfooting around what I really wanted to do right now. All I was doing was circling around Yua's flower shop over and over like a timid cat would around a toy mouse.

All I was doing was working myself up further, the anxiety increasing with every gentle leap I made from each rooftop, my eyes fixated on Suzumi's gently swaying ribbon. At least I could tell she was relaxed, but it certainly didn't assuage my own deep-seated fears.

"Are ya ever gonna go down there, kid?" A voice rang out from a man I should've noticed the presence of. The suddenness of my break from the never-ending thought loop was harsh enough to make me literally jump a little.

"Jinta." I breathed out, a little exasperation in my voice from being spooked so thoroughly. I did a doubletake, trying to reconcile the man's sudden appearance, but couldn't quite find a logical leap to make, "What're you doing here?"

The older man grinned at me boisterously, though he didn't yell like he might've were it any other meeting between us. The man was wearing surprisingly normal clothes, rather than the combat ready ones he normally wore. The outfit was simple, only a regular red tee that matched the colour of his hair and a pair of loose-fitting cargo pants that were held up with a wide belt that sat somewhat slanted on his hips. He crossed his arms across his chest, showing off the impressive muscle he had even despite his age.

"Better question is what you're doing here?" he tilted his head to the side, his fiery red hair bright enough in the dark night to pull attention, especially with such an odd colour to see within Japan's relatively mundane regular fashion.

"I, uh." I began, trying to come up with a good reason that wouldn't expose the borderline stalker behaviour, but Jinta grinned with a full set of teeth.

"I'm having you on. Yua called me out 'cause she could sense you circling the house for hours, Grayson."

"Yua could?" I asked dumbly as Jinta gave me an amused look.

"Hey, I was as surprised as you when I heard that Yua's little one was being trained by Urahara and Tessai. Been giving her updates throughout your training the whole time." The man grinned at my flabbergasted expression before he sat down on the edge of the roof we were currently standing on, patting a spot near him for me to sit as well. It wasn't long after I settled down next to Jinta before he spoke again, in a more thoughtful tone than I'd have expected from the brash man.

"You guys are going to be in for a lot." There was no question to the statement, but it was just another assurance that something would happen soon, and I just couldn't be sure of what that'd be. I nodded to the rhetorical statement, staring sullenly in the direction of Suzumi's beautiful white ribbon.

"Things are already starting to happen, Grayson." The man continued, his voice dry of its normal humour, "Attacks are getting more frequent, stronger Hollows are worming their way out of the cracks of Karakura's streets, ones that even Soul Society don't have on their stupid records." He ran a hand through his red hair, scratching wearily at the scalp beneath.

"The team of newbies whose asses you saved a while back are just the start. High-spec humans just don't get that strong, not strong enough to contest with Hollows like Phantom. Maybe my wife and I could deal with a fair few strong ones, but even we're only comparable to a mid-level Soul Reaper, when it all comes down to brass tacks. But when missing peoples reports are rising through the roof, and any of the spiritual sensitives strong enough are getting spooked by the rising fatality of patrols, we're going to lose out."

"But Suzumi and I can't take care of them all." I said worriedly, but the man just shook his head.

"That's not what I mean. Kisuke and Tessai will help us with that, they've been taking care of Karakura for as long as they've been here." He waved his hand dismissively, "I'm talking about what all this build up leads to. I've seen it way too many times to be flippant about it anymore. I can almost feel it in the spiritual energy."

"But we don't know what it leads to." I said quietly, but Jinta failed to nod along. The lack of affirmation made me screw up my eyes at the man sitting beside me, looking at the side of his morose expression.

"Phantom has been here for far too long." The sudden change in topic confused me for a moment, but the man continued onwards despite the bizarre switch, "Its an Adjuchas level Hollow, something that you'd only see in Hueco Mundo. There's a reason for that."

"They need power to sustain their form." I responded, recalling the barest memory of Kisuke saying something along those lines. Jinta nodded.

"If Phantom was trying to sustain its power, even with its signature of only eating other Hollows, it'd be causing massive damage. Hollows of that level only come out of Hueco Mundo if they feel high value prey, but Phantom, as far as we know, hasn't been to Hueco Mundo for years or possibly even decades."

"So how is he sustaining himself?" I asked genuinely, though Jinta grimaced unsurely.

"I think the question is 'What happens when a Hollow of that power starts to destabilise?'"

My mind began to whirr as I thought on the topic. This sort of topic would have been way over my head not a few days ago, something I'd have bet that Grayhom would know something about. But things have changed since we built our soul back once again and having built a tower within out soul to reach the peak of its tallest mountain.

I looked at Jinta with that new understanding, seeing something entirely different than what I'd been capable of my entire life. My eyes focused on his ribbon, which lead me down deeper and deeper into his soul, like a safety rope connecting you to the surface of the sea while being hundreds of metres below.

I saw his soul in truth, then. The glittering gold crystalised core of Jinta's being. I observed the golden crystal and stone mass and found myself thinking with two minds, one of my own and one of Grayhom's, discussing and explaining and expressing to one another in abstract ways that wouldn't truly make sense if formed into literal speech.

I found myself with a surety of what would happen, as Grayhom and I both came to analyse the structure of a soul and relating it to what a Hollow's mishmash of combined parts would look like.

"There would be an internal war between the components in the soul that are vying for dominance over the Adjuchas' main function, over its identity. I don't know how quickly that'll happen, but if Phantom has been denying itself the spiritual energy and souls it needs to function for as long as you think it has, and the identity that's driving it is strong willed enough to have held it off…" I swallowed heavily, looking towards Suzumi's calm ribbon, uncomprehending of the understanding that I've come to, and the imminent danger I was suddenly realising that Karakura would be in.

"If Phantom's main identity is that impossibly strong willed, then Phantom may just become the Hollow equivalent of a controlled bomb as its soul eats itself."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 44: Approach

I reached out my fingers, pushing them through Suzumi's long black hair as she began to wake from the deep sleep that she'd been enchanted into by her mother.

"Good morning, sleepyhead." I intoned sweetly, a genuine happiness bubbling to the surface as I gazed over her gently awakening face. She groaned unhappily, a staple of her wakeup process, making me chuckle and pinch her slightly chubby cheek lightly.

She lifted a lazy hand, swatting my own away from her cheek as she sighed and righted herself from her side of our bed.

"How'd I get home?" Suzumi whispered sleepily and I myself got out of bed, brushing off some invisible dust from my jeans.

"Your mother called me and got me to carry you home." She turned to me with a raised eyebrow.

"I didn't know that my mum had your number."

"She didn't, she had Jinta's." She scrunched up her face in a mixture of embarrassment and consternation.

"Of course she did. I hate that she knew about the whole spiritual stuff before I did." I laughed, giving her a wry shrug.

"What's worse, we tried to withhold it from her, which is just about the most hilariously useless thing we could have done." She groaned louder, though the smile on her face gave away her own amusement.

"Maybe," she said quietly, "I'm just not sure that I like that she's in just as much danger as we are."

"Is she really, though? She's just spiritually sensitive. She might be in more danger than the average citizen, but if she's lived this long, and through that apocalypse that everyone keeps talking about, then I think she'll be just fine." Suzumi frowned, but it was broken by a yawn.

"I guess so," she said, her words coming out warped because of the yawn, "still, I don't like it. Everyone is saying that bad things are on the horizon and having her be anywhere near it gives me the heebie jeebies."

"You could ask her to move out of Karakura?" I questioned somewhat hopefully, though it earned me a particularly dry look.

"Who and what army?" I couldn't help but chuckle at the silly response, making my girlfriend roll her eyes gratuitously.

"Anyway!" I said as I rose from my spot next to Suzumi, already fully dressed, "Tessai probably convinced Kisuke to give us a day of reprieve, and if we wait much longer, Kisuke would probably end up exploding or something." I felt around for their ribbons as I waited for Suzumi's response, which was yet another groan as she stumbled from bed and quickly got changed into something more modest.

The two partners were currently down in the Study Room, which only took a few minutes for us to leisurely make our way down to. When we finally reached the end of the long flight of stairs, and entered into the impressively large underground area, even more impressive that I could now see its full area with both my regular eyesight and my more advanced spiritual senses.

"What a surprise!" A theatrical voice called, making Suzumi and I habitually roll our eyes, "The two spiritual anomalies have awoken at last?" We both turned and gave Kisuke a dry gaze, Suzumi's being significantly better than my own attempt.

"Whatever you say, Kisuke." I said, looking around for where the second red ribbon was that I'd seen down here. "Where'd Tessai go off to?"

"No need to worry, he'll be back in just a moment." Kisuke said, adjusting his white and green striped hat while pointedly ignoring the question entirely. "I think it's more important to go over some of your recent exploits. The both of you."

I sighed and prepared a hand to count off of a mental list.

"Alright so," I began heavily, "first; the silver ribbon blade came from the silver light I told you about after I built my soul back up again, secondly; no I haven't been able to resummon it, I can't even feel it anymore, thirdly; yes my soul is 'complete', fourthly; yes, Grayhom and I can think simultaneously now, fifth; I can now see other people souls and theorise with them as a basis instinctively." I stopped at my pinkie finger on my right hand, looking at the number of fingers pensively before quickly adding.

"Oh, and I have what I'd consider full spiritual sense now, probably." I said, closing out with the thumb on my left hand, presenting them to Kisuke with eyebrow raised. The man himself looked a little taken aback but nodded slowly.

"That was… concise. All of that we could see coming in some sense, though that silver ribbon sword and it's capabilities are a giant mystery it seems?" He half stated, half asked, but I disappointed the man with a nod. With a tsk, the man crossed his arms and furrowed his brow in consternation. I could just about hear the Rube Goldberg machine that was Kisuke Urahara's mind making a cacophony of sounds as he thought.

I found myself liking the new Kisuke, which was almost alien to the adversarial position that he'd taken within my new life. He'd been horrible to me in many ways, mostly directly after our initial meeting, but soon after that he'd slowly just become a nuisance and a bit of a jerk. Now? He was almost nice, trusting me with my own determinations of my new abilities instead of trying to cut it out of me with threats and dangerous gazes.

"Well, I can only imagine that'll change soon." The man looked up from the ground, breaking himself from his thoughts and instead looking around the wide room idly before returning to Suzumi's own gaze.

"So, you're quite the special one now." He said, a mixture of discomfort and interest emblazoned across his face. "The first being unbound by the Chains of Fate. You can even still be considered living. Quite the accomplishment." Suzumi snorted derisively, though it lacked genuine heat.

"It better have been, I almost died and became a Hollow." Kisuke shrugged nonchalantly, almost flippant in the face of the remark.

"Such are the risks. Besides, Tessai and I weren't unaware of the possibility that you'd have a powerful Hollow component to your soul. We do know about your mother, and that she'd had an encounter with a Hollow many years ago. Technically that gives you every right to be a Fullbringer as well." I quirked an eyebrow.

"Fullbringer?" I asked and Kisuke waved a hand.

"The long and the short of it is that Fullbringers are people whose mother was attacked by a Hollow at some point before their birth. Hollow spiritual energy actually lingers around in human bodies for a few decades, and when a child is born the formation of their spiritual self and soul is influenced by the energy. They get some wacky powers out of the deal." I turned to Suzumi with a questioning eye, though Kisuke cut in before Suzumi could deny having said 'wacky powers'.

"All Fullbringers have mothers that've been attacked by Hollows, but not all of those children are Fullbringers. Especially not when your mother has a lot of spiritual energy to deal with the leftover energy. Otherwise Uyu would also be a Fullbringer."

"But Suzumi does have some of that energy?" I asked curiously, getting a little glare from Suzumi who was about to ask the same thing.

"Her mother was young when it happened, and likely wasn't strong enough to actually deal with the energy at that point. The longer you leave the energy, the more entrenched it becomes, and before long it's almost as much a part of you as anything else in your body. Thus, Suzumi has a more powerful than average Hollow component to her being. Something that wouldn't have been an issue if she'd only grown to be slightly more powerful than her mother."

We all nodded with that, Kisuke actually doing a good job at answering our questions in non-frustrating sessions of trying to pull blood from a stone.

"So, what would've happened if she'd hollowfied? Properly, I mean." I asked quietly, almost hesitant to ask. Kisuke nodded slowly, thinking as he did so.

"Well, you forget that Tessai is just about the most powerful Kidō user aside from possibly Ichibe—though, that man could barely make a new kidō structure to save his life." Kisuke looked like he was just about ready to spit, though he shrugged it off after a moment of seething, "He would have put her in a nice little barrier, then have waited for me to come around and start easing her back into dominance, though I'm afraid that it'd result in her being the closest equivalent to being a Visard, just even more Hollow."

"How much Hollow?" The woman herself asked.

"Fifty-fifty?" The man said, wry grin in place. Suzumi scowled, though I placed a hand on her shoulder that seemed to calm her a little.

"Well, we know that they are there now, we can deal with it as we go along." I said placatingly, and after a moment she nodded her head silently. I breathed out heavily, just short of a sigh, and looked to Suzumi more closely.

"Have you found anything new about your Soul Freedom?" I probed lightly, though her expression of consternation didn't give me high hopes.

"Nothing much yet. I feel… better, though." I looked to Kisuke covertly, finding his grey eyes. He gave it a moment of thought and nodded. Well, at least I got some confirmation that everything was fine. I had actually done a fair amount of the repair work myself, when I'd been inside Suzumi's soul. Truthfully, I understood very little about what I'd actually done, and even Grayhom had been somewhat surprised by the sudden boost in our abilities to not only edit another's soul, but to also understand it so clearly.

Now, while I had a good instinctive grasp over it, I couldn't even remotely come close to how I'd basically entirely restructured parts of Suzumi's soul to work without a Chain of Fate. The method that Tessai had used to actually work with the soul was pretty good, but it was crude. Without me there, things would have gone pretty wrong for Suzumi, though it was potentially a viable option of someone with a powerful enough soul and free of any major impurities. Otherwise, I'd have to be there to actually complete the procedure.

"Where is Tessai, I thought he'd–" I heard Kisuke mutter before there was a sudden thump as a rush of wind buffeted against my body with a force that would have easily blown me back a few metres not so long ago.

Standing where the source of the displaced air had come from, was the tall form of Tessai, except now he was holding someone else while he wore a hard expression.

"Kisuke!" He bellowed, though he failed to come up with anything else as he fell to one knee, managing to gently place the form he was holding to the ground as he did so. We all rushed over the few metres that separated us, though Kisuke held us back with a wave of his hand.

He quickly knelt over the woman that Tessai had brought into the Study Room with him. He placed a hand over her body and in a moment, there was a grand flash of green before a light cough rung out. Kisuke lifted the woman up, revealing a full view of a strikingly familiar woman, one we'd never met but knew all the same.

A woman with long black hair with a distinctive fringe that fell between her eyes laid there, coughing wetly as little sputters of blood came to her lips. However, it was her face that sent a collective shockwave through Suzumi and I's bodies. Her eyes drooped downwards, almost as if she were constantly sad, her lips pulled downwards in a permanent frown.

It was Uyu's face.

"Ururu, what happened?" Kisuke called after a minute, though it was even more time before she managed to respond.

"Uyu, Jinta…" She coughed again, but Tessai's powerful voice rung out in her stead.

"They were taken."

"By whom?" Kisuke asked immediately, his eyes burning with spiritual power, enough that I could see them glow through my natural vision.

"Hollows. Too many of them." Tessai answered, grunting with a little pain, "They were coming for Hueco Mundo."

"Hollows following orders?" Kisuke recoiled, almost disbelieving.

"Something capable of controlling them, maybe. I don't know–" A lightbulb went off in my head at that moment. Understanding dawned with a silver glow.

"Phantom." I said, my voice cutting through the clamour.

"What about him?" Suzumi stated quickly, urging me forwards underneath the powerful eyes of all present.

"Phantom is losing stability, and its a really powerful Hollow. I'd bet anything that some Hollow from Hueco Mundo is looking to take advantage of the power a self-destructing soul, waiting till the moment where the main identity of the Hollow is destroyed and eat it. And who is to deny him a little snack along the way?"

The harrowing declaration resounded in the massive space, rebounding off the walls and returning to my ear easily, despite the usual lack of an echo.

"Well shit." Kisuke said, worry etched into his face, "That's not good."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 45: Encounter

"How are we even going to find Phantom? It has the name for a reason." Suzumi called as we raced over rooftops, bounding from one to another with our eyes peeled warily. I felt everyone in the group turn to me, even Ururu who I'd only just met. Apparently, my reputation precedes me.

"I still can't get a hold of Phantom's ribbon. The Hollow is an enigma even for me. I'm spreading my sense out as much as I can at the moment, but…" I shrugged and Kisuke sighed along with Suzumi.

"Thought so. You have sensed him in the past when you were much weaker than now, so keep looking for him. I don't trust that I'll be able to sense him." I swallowed as we bounded of yet another roof with a light step. Being given a responsibility like this int eh middle of a literal Hollow incursion was borderline, my senses suddenly being the stopgap between people actually dying.

The group of Soul Reapers and High-spec humans worked out an order to the group very quickly. Kisuke took the front position, followed only slightly by Tessai. Directly behind them was the woman that we'd heard much about, Uyu's mother Ururu. She had healed extremely quickly under Tessai's powerful healing kidō and a bottle of the spiritual tincture that Kisuke had given to me a few times in the past.

At any other time, I think we'd likely have a great conversation, likely including Uyu herself. We hadn't seen much of Uyu over the past weeks, mostly because she was having to focus on school properly now and she didn't have the almost absolute freedom of time that we had when it came to training. Now, though I was severely regretting not staying in contact more.

I pushed down the fear in my chest, the one that whispered into my ear that it very well may be the last time we see Jinta and Uyu alive. Thankfully, Suzumi didn't let me wallow.

"Do you think my mother will be okay? The Hollows are targeting spiritually powerful humans, right?" I looked around quickly in my vision, easily pinpointing Yua's spiritual ribbon. Now that I looked at her ribbon, it was a miracle that I'd ever believed that she didn't have any spiritual power. Maybe it was just because I was more powerful now.

"She's still at her home Suzumi. Have you called her, or sent her a message?" I asked quickly, and she nodded succinctly.

"Then I don't know if there is much more we can do right now. Hopefully she'll be able to get in touch with someone who can help her, like Jinta's gang."

"She won't." A cold voice said from in front of us, Ururu's turning her dark blue eyes to us for a moment. "They are in hiding since they took Jinta and Uyu." Suzumi sighed heavily, frustration leaking into her breath.

"What information do you have about the Hollows we are up against?" I asked, though she turned away as she answered.

"They are strong, and without my weapon on hand, they were able to take us by surprise. They hid themselves extremely well, I didn't even get a hint of their reiatsu." She senses things by their spiritual pressure then. It was a powerful sense, but easily tricked. Kisuke had determined ages ago now that I don't just sense by spiritual pressure and energy, but also more deeply. By soul. It made my ribbon sense immensely powerful and almost entirely untrickable, though hiding from it was a far easier feat.

"How strong are we talking; Adjuchas level?"

"The lead Hollow may be, though I didn't sense it or see them directly. The other Hollows aren't that strong, most are regional Hollows, but there are a few heavy-hitters that came from Hueco Mundo as well." My mind whirred as we made our way towards the Hanakari household. Kisuke and Tessai likely could have made the trip multiple times by now, but there was something to be said for spending time collecting information along the way.

"Kisuke!" I called out to the front of the group, making the man turn his head to the side to listen, "Likelihood that the lead Hollow has a stealth ability powerful enough to hide that many Hollows? I can't sense Jinta or Uyu's ribbons either."

"Unlikely," he said after a moment of thought, "If it has the power to control other Hollows the way that it is, then it's more likely that the lead Hollow is controlling another Hollow with that ability." There was a moment of silence between the group as we travelled, each of us using any part of our skillsets that we could to sense any movement whatsoever.

"Meaning that it may already have Phantom under its power."

That wasn't good, not at all. Phantom was powerful enough to escape from anything underneath a Captain-class Soul Reaper, and even Kisuke and Tessai aren't able to pinpoint its location, instead relying on me.

"Let's hope that its just another Hollow with a similar ability." I said, even if I didn't feel so optimistic. "Just how smart is this Adjuchas supposed to be?"

"Roughly human equivalent, though it may be unique." Kisuke said simply, "In that case, it may be able to find a way to become an Arrancar, if its lucky."

I growled, about to respond with a set of very aggressive words towards that idea, but it was then that I sensed… something. It was the barest flicker of a Hollow's ribbon, something that was very noticeable in the eerily silent Karakura.

"Hollows to the north-east." I called and we changed direction ever so slightly from the due north that we were travelling. The group went almost entirely silent as we sped up a good fifty percent. Suzumi, who was the slowest of the group, still managed to keep up with the rest of us. In fact, I realised that she was cribbing the movement technique that I'd both developed and remembered while down in that pit. Suzumi was an impressively good experimenter, though I beat her out in actual learning speed.

We travelled faster and faster as our weakest link continued to improve under the pressure of the situation. It was only a few moments later that we were only metres from where I'd sensed the Hollows originally.

However, no matter how close I got to the area, I couldn't pick up anything.

"Please tell me that someone else can sense something?" I asked hesitantly as I widened my spiritual senses to my maximum range, losing some of the three-dimensional definition that I'd become accustomed to.

"Not a thing, Mister Carter." Tessai said smoothly, his voice a quietly calm tone that starkly contrasted the immediacy of the situation. No-one else spoke up to correct the man, so I just continued to widen my own range, permeating the intangible cloud of spiritual pressure and the particles of it that extend its reach further.

That was, until I hit a massive wall.

Not a wall in that I couldn't physically push out my spiritual pressure further, but that it was being stopped by something. I looked with my physical eyes in the direction of the wall and finding nothing where my spiritual senses were being impeded.

"My spiritual senses can't see past there," I drew a line in the environment where the wall was, "I can only assume that they have a barrier of some sort." There was no immediate rush into combat, something that I was almost expecting, instead Kisuke spent a moment with his eyes closed, as did Tessai.

"I see it." Tessai's voice rumbled, making Kisuke open his eyes, "It isn't kidō, but it works off a similar principle. This is an immensely powerful ability; it could only be a hyper specialised Hollow capable of doing this."

"Alright!" Kisuke said, clapping his hands together obnoxiously, "Mission one; find the Hollow that's creating the interdiction field capable of throwing us all off. Understood?" Everyone nodded succinctly, and only after another moment did the scruffy man give a wide grin and disappear from view, launching the rest of us into action.

Suzumi and I quickly broke off from the group, only Ururu following nearby us in a parallel strike as we rushed towards what Kisuke had called an 'interdiction field'. It only took a few leaps to reach its perimeter, and as soon as we actually contacted it, it felt as if we were swimming through water for a few moments before we surfaced on the other side.

As soon as I was on the other side of the barrier, my mind burned with the sudden influx of information that I'd been missing.

"Holy shi–"

Before I could even complete my sentence, there was a cacophony of simultaneous Hollow screams, rumbling the air with their spiritual pressure like a cicada buzzed with its wings. Within my spiritual senses, now back to its usual high-resolution mode, I could see a huge amount of spiritual energy being gathered and pointed.

Right in our direction.

"Suzumi!" I bellowed as I dived out of the way, Suzumi doing the same thing after a fraction of a second. Just as we made it out of the energy's path, Suzumi and I had a strange moment where we stared at each other as we waited for the attack. Then our view was obscured almost entirely by a massive green beam of dense spiritual energy.

The feeling of the massive power moving by us was electrifying, the sheer power of it made the hairs on my arms stand up on end with the rush of adrenalin. The beam quickly dissipated, whittling itself down to almost nothing before petering out, allowing Suzumi and I to look at each other once again. Acknowledging what had clearly been an ambush attack on the Hollow's part, likely a part of the ploy of letting me see just a flicker of the Hollow ribbons earlier.

My only response to her bewildered expression was a savage grin, a precursor to the enjoyment I was going to get out of this fight. She rolled her eyes, snapping out of her fugue, turning to look at the small army of Hollows collected on the ground and just above it.

The current number of ribbons didn't quite allow me to pin down which one was creating the barrier, and which had tried to incinerate us with spiritual energy, but it didn't matter. With a powerful leap off of the multi storey apartment building I was standing atop, I launched myself towards the battle, hungering for the challenge.

One Hollow lashed out first, using its vine-like appendages to try and capture one of my limbs. However, it wasn't strong enough to stop me from pulling it towards me. By the time it realised that it wasn't going to be capable of holding back it was too late, and even as its appendage detached from is lightly red coloured body, my fist was already plunged elbow deep through its mask and its malformed head.

Hollows, not the type of creature to heed the warning, all quickly tried to take advantage of my moment of weakness. However, Suzumi was only moments behind me, landing within the encirclement of Hollow and pulling her body into a tight formation, similar to a boxer's.

The flurry of blows was faster than I'd ever seen from my girlfriend, each blow taking a chunk out of the Hollow it hit, her arms, shoulders, and back muscles glowing with the spiritual cloaking that we'd been slowly building.

Now, though, the power only grew more potent with every passing second, quickly racing to match my own combat prowess.

It was then that I remembered part of what I'd done in the fugue of silver power. How I'd changed her soul into something more powerful, more unique than any other that existed. It was when Suzumi turned to me with a challenging eye that I saw the power that flowed through her, changing her eyes into that predatory yellow.

Sitting on her cheek was the beginning of a bone-white mask, seething with spiritual energy far surpassing anything that she had command of before.

I could only watch and admire my handiwork as Suzumi turned to demolish five more Hollows with singular blows. However, I couldn't just watch.

It was easy to take a quick look around at the ribbons of the surrounding Hollows and grabbing the most powerful one. With the new rush of spiritual energy, ever so slightly discordant to my own supply, I took that ribbon and swung it sideways like a blade.

The spiritual energy burned from my fingers after the swing, accompanied by a flash of spiritual energy that swept through over ten Hollows, destroying their bodies in that same moment. The grin I shared with Suzumi just after was wild and competitive.

"Grayson!" She yelled over the clamour of Hollow screams and her own blows, "You better damn tell me what the fuck you've done to my soul!" I laughed at her, though it was cut short when I felt a new ribbon come into focus, much more powerful than the Hollow's we were chewing through.

"I will, but first…" I turned towards a large, frog-like Hollow clinging to the side of an apartment building, its mask splitting open to reveal a massive gaping hole where its throat should be. Just inside of its mouth, a small ball of spiritual energy began to form.

"How about we take down the big guy?"


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 46: Small Edits

A wave of force exploded out from where I'd been standing only moments ago, the frog Hollow sending a small ball of spiritual energy out like a bullet in hopes that it'd hit me. The concrete of the road shattered in a few metre radius, though I easily dodged any shrapnel that might've hit me.

Dodging had become almost effortless after attaining spiritual senses at my current level, the exact precision of the sense allowed me to map myself in three-dimensional space along with everything around me. After a while, it became surprisingly easy to navigate that way, especially as I wasn't restricted to a viewpoint, like birds-eye, but instead had a grasp of distance and space on an entirely different level of precision.

In fact, I almost used spiritual senses entirely in lieu of my actual eyesight, only using my eyes for the basest information like colours instead of relying on them.

"I'll pull its attacks; you kick its ass!" I called out to Suzumi as I dashed towards the sizable Hollow as it removed itself from the side of the apartment building it had been sitting on with surprising grace. My movement was fast, something that Suzumi couldn't quite match as of yet. But with the strange fusion of Hollow instinct, and her own natural proclivity towards creating new techniques, Suzumi was going to catch up very soon.

The Hollow barely had time to react before I was at its side plunging a fist into the green skin, though it did no real damage. It was strangely fleshy and rubbery for normal Hollow skin, but the blow managed to hurt the thing of instinct enough that it lashed out at me with one of legs. The hand contained four fingers, though they had what looked like barbs covering them that likely gave it the ability to stick to things.

I narrowly avoided the swipe, twisting my body just enough that the barbed fingers came just shy of clipping the overly flowy training shirt Suzumi and I both wore. Out of the corner of the Hollow's vision, there was a flicker of movement before Suzumi's fist came smashing into its back with a resounding sound like beating on a muffled drum.

While it didn't pierce through the skin, it was easy to tell from the Hollow's movements that the blow had hurt it bad.

The green-skinned thing quickly turned to seek Suzumi as she retreated to look for another opportune moment, but I made sure to give the thing a few hard taps on the edge of its mask, making the bone-like structure crumble slightly. It whipped back around to attack me again, not smart enough to prioritize a target over what was putting it in the most immediate danger.

As I danced around the Hollow, letting it come just close enough for me to give it some paltry blows to its attacking limbs, and a few to its body, I began to categorise the Hollow as I did, finding exactly where it fit in the rankings of the Hollows I'd fought.

It took another blow at me and I dodged flawlessly further into its space, tantalising it with how close I was. As I spun into its guard, I slammed a fist into its arm with a crack of its bone. It made a bellowing scream that was cruelly cut short but Suzumi coming down on the thing's back again with both hands clasped and swinging with a hammer-like motion.

The Hollow was momentarily flattened to the ground, its limbs not enough to hold itself up underneath the force of the blow and its weight with the one mangled limb I'd given it.

I capitalised on its down state, giving it a few powerful blows to its mask, though before I could land the final blow its more powerful hind legs found purchase and pushed from the ground with a blast of raw strength, sending its rotund and bloated green body into the sky.

"I'm chasing!" Suzumi called clearly before she zipped away at high speed through the urban landscape to follow, leaving me behind to contemplate. I didn't need to interject myself into that fight, Suzumi had it in the bag no problems.

Though, that didn't change how… weird that Hollow was. So weird, in fact, that it could fire a Cero.

That might not be strange, seeing as Ceros are part of the Hollow move set after all. Yet, that Hollow wasn't an Adjuchas. It wasn't even a strange sort of Menos Grande. By my quick look into its dark, discordant soul, it was only just at the peak of a regular Hollow's power, destined to become a mindless Menos Grande.

It shouldn't be capable of firing a Cero, not at least until the next stage of its evolution.

When I looked into its soul, I found myself looking at a jumbled mess that wasn't too dissimilar to my own soul from not too long ago, though the waters were heavily polluted by half connected functions firing at random intervals in the vain hope that they'd someday connect and properly create a soul in the process.

However, this Hollow's soul was different. It had taken most of the fight for me to realise the strange discrepancy amongst its peers, but when I noticed it I couldn't possibly unsee it.

It had a core, a module within its soul that was unnaturally uniform in comparison to its ultimately chaotic surroundings. It would be the equivalent of seeing a pristine, perfectly functioning heart within the chest of a mangled, rotting corpse. The strange module sat within its soul, subtly influencing the surrounding components in a way that escaped me, though at minimum it gave the Hollow access to abilities you'd consider only available to an Adjuchas.

I heard a set of soft footsteps return to my side after a sharp sound of movement cutting through air.

"All dealt with!" Suzumi said cheerily, though her voice was ever so slightly warped by the vibrations of her spiritual energy, something that was generally unique to Hollows. I turned to her with a worried expression, though it had nothing to do with the single side of a Hollow mask covering her lower right cheek, as if she were growing a second skull entirely.

"What?" Suzumi's cheer dropped out of her voice, raising her hand to her face, and touching at the mask piece, "It doesn't hurt or anything, it feels kinda weird though." She said placatingly, but I shook my head with furrowed brows, brushing my hands against my dark blue, baggy training pants nervously.

"No, I'm not worried about that. It's the Hollow." She creased her own brow for a moment in confusion, though she seemed to come to the right conclusion before she replied.

"The Cero, right? Wasn't it only Adjuchas that could use it?"

"Menos Grande too, but that Hollow was neither." She made a 'go on' gesture, something she'd perfected as a weapon against my overly complicated explanations. "I think it was edited." I summed up hesitantly.

Suzumi's eyes narrowed, "You think…" I grimaced at the implication but shrugged.

"Kisuke himself has said that Soul Reapers do testing on Hollows, so it could technically be anyone, but…" I shrugged again, helpless against the scrutiny. It was a possibility I didn't really want to accept, but had to take seriously, nonetheless.

"But what?" Another feminine voice called as Ururu appeared near us at an extremely high speed, her hair swaying with the movement, though the massive rectangular rocket launcher she was casually holding with one arm certainly drew more attention. It probably wasn't heavy enough that Suzumi or I wouldn't be able to carry it but seeing such a weapon be actually wielded was pretty impressive.

"We were talking about the Hollow we fought, the big green frog one." Suzumi filled her in. Ururu nodded deeply.

"I killed a crab one that could shoot small Ceros out of its claws. Yours could do the same?" We nodded simultaneously, "I didn't know that Adjuchas could be so weak–" She began, but I cut her off.

"They weren't Adjuchas, they were peak regular Hollows." Ururu's gaze turned to meet my own, pulling me from my three-dimensional vision and into the standard eyesight. Her dark blue eyes were dead serious, burning with a warning.

"This needs to be told to Kisuke. You tell him, or I will." I nodded with a note of subservience to the woman. I hadn't ever bothered to truly gauge my strength against Jinta, but I could only assume that Ururu was similar in strength. However, under her gaze, I could tell that I was lacking something that would put me above her.

"Time to pay the piper, I guess." I muttered as I took off from the ground without a word, launching myself gracefully to a nearby multi-storey building's rooftop. Ururu followed without a thought, streamlined in comparison to Suzumi's somewhat messy movements.

I homed in on Kisuke and Tessai's ribbons, both of which were visible to me within the massive spiritual interdiction field. The field was frighteningly powerful, capable of stopping me from sensing ribbons or any spiritual presence at all. If this became a common ability, I'd have to find a whole new way of sensing that couldn't be obstructed by it, something likely to be a difficult feat.

The path we took across the rooftops abruptly ended as we came to what seemed like an abandoned building site for multiple apartment blocks all right next to each other. I dropped down to the ground, running across the dirt ground of the unfinished buildings, making my way towards the two crimson ribbons that hid in the mess supporting beams and concrete.

"Nice of you to join us!" Kisuke's voice called jovially as we approached their forms, marvelling at the sight before us, though Ururu seemed unconcerned. The sight in question was a massive Hollow's body slumped against a half-completed wall, sliced cleanly in half by the blade that Kisuke held in his hand, the cane he carried around everywhere having converted its length into a blade.

"Was that what was creating the barrier?" Suzumi asked, pulling the attention of the two Soul Reapers, both went from a casual expression to one of stoic shock as they looked at the part mask resting on her cheek. Ururu did a double take, somehow only just realising the thing, then all of them turned back to me.

"Later, Grayson." Kisuke intoned heavily but moved his eyes back to Suzumi as if nothing were different, "No, that Hollow wasn't. It was housing what was." With a grin, Kisuke gestured towards Tessai dramatically, like a magician to his assistant that he'd just 'sawed' in half.

The massive, stoic man blinked dully, before gently unfurling a closed hand, revealing a little bug within. Its entire body was bone white, only small lines of black across its form, and a large hole through its carapace to clearly designate it as Hollow in nature. Its wings seemed to rub together at an insane speed, waves of spiritual pressure coming off in sync.

Without a single word, something I'm told is important when it comes to Kidō, Tessai formed a little barrier around the insectoid Hollow. The instant that he did, I could feel the watery sensation of the interdiction field slowly begin to dissipate as the ribbons from outside the barrier began to flicker back to life in my senses.

"That little bug was it?" I said, a little stupefied. I had expected something a little more powerful and maybe a good fight to go along with it. Kisuke waggled a finger in front of my face with a grin.

"Not just! The little 'sucker'," he winked gratuitously, "needs to be attached to something with large reserves of spiritual power," he flicked a hand back at the big Hollow that was slowly dissipating, "and then it can make the barrier. It's the closest thing to a living spiritual tool I've seen from the Hollows. I'm surprised they could make it something like this at all, aside from with Szayel Aporro's help…"

Kisuke took a look at our expressions, cutting his own little monologue short with a wary glace, as if we were going to spring a surprise attack on him.

"It would be nice if you'd tell me what I'm clearly missing here." He stated finally, looking between us with a little pain in his face. Ururu turned to me and made it very obvious that I was going to talk now, or she would.

"The Hollows have been edited, I'm sure you realised they were throwing around Ceros?" He nodded, "I think that someone managed to edit these hollows into being capable of things way out of their league. The frog Hollow was the peak of regular Hollow at best but could fire Ceros anyway." Kisuke took a deep breath in, staring at me with frustration, though instead of unleashing on me he turned to Tessai and spoke quickly.

"See! I told you ages ago that I had a hunch and now we've got a possible legion of soul editors running around messing with things!" Kisuke rubbed his face, wearier than I'd ever seen him, Tessai mirroring the expression to a point.

"Alright, simple plan, then." He piped up with a clap of his hands. "Keep all of that in mind, but don't think about it too much otherwise we'll be here theorising all day while people are being taken and Phantom comes ever closer to becoming the Hollow equivalent of a nuclear bomb."

"I can help track down where the other interdiction fields are," I interjected quickly, ready to embrace any other conversation than the one where Kisuke lambasts me for thirty minutes, "I can just search for where there aren't any ribbons."

Kisuke nodded quickly, giving me the go ahead, letting me delve into the sense and widen it to cover almost all of Karakura Town. Within moments we were racing off towards each of our own barriers, with Kisuke, Ururu, and Tessai both taking two each and Suzumi and I taking one each by ourselves.

I sped across the rooftops towards the uncertain future, suddenly filled with even more things to worry about. I clenched my fist, pushing my body even further and moving even faster towards the dome I'd designated myself.

Hopefully, a good fight will calm the nerves.

I grinned in anticipation.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 47: Arachne

"God that was terrible," Suzumi heard a voice say in the back of her head right after she'd lashed her arm out at a Hollow and only managed to blow off its arm instead of a hole through its mask, "c'mon, let me out to show you how it's really done!"

"Shut up!" Suzumi yelled as she put her fist through another Hollow that'd attacked her from the side, then quickly pivoting to avoid an attack from the Hollow she hadn't managed to destroy the first time around, using the force of the pivot to launch a screwdriver flip, spinning like an ice skater, and slicing through the thing's mask with a kick.

Immediately after the moment, Suzumi growled at herself in frustration, though the voice in the back of her head laughed jubilantly.

"See? I told you my way was better! Though you're still shit even using my movements."

"Do you have to be so…" Suzumi struggled to find the words as she raced towards the area that Grayson had sent her towards after offing the Hollows that had been sent to interfere.

"So much of a bastard?" The voice cackled, completing the end of Suzumi's sentence like it could read her mind, "Of course I do! I'm still fucking pissed you put me back down here."

Suzumi didn't know how a voice could be so manically jubilant and so viscerally enraged at the same time, but the Hollow that lived within her certainly made it work. Suzumi so desperately wanted to find a middle ground with the being, but they were counters to each other, and she knew that it was by design.

Hollows are technically the counter opposites of humans. Being the chaos to the human's order. Suzumi wanted to reach out and come to some sort of an accord that wasn't enforced by Grayson's miraculous editing of her soul, but just talking to the other being within her made her angry and frustrated.

"I didn't put you down there!" Suzumi said as she jumped from a roof with a little too much force, breaking off a few of the roof tiles. The Hollow within laughed at her misstep, struggling to catch its own breath between bouts of enraged laughter.

"Oh fuck off, would you? You were all too happy that I was gone before I showed up again when you started fighting. Try getting rid of me now, bitch." It said, baiting her with infuriating skill. Suzumi moved across the rooftops faster, trying to run away from the anger the Hollow was breeding within her.

"Trying to give me the silent treatment now, are you?" It said mockingly as she came closer and closer to her goal, preparing herself for battle.

"No, I'm focusing." Suzumi said between gritted teeth, immediately regretting her decision to respond at all.

"Focusing? Hah!" The Hollow said as it lounged inside of her mind, sending the distinct impression that the more realised form of the Hollow was laying on the ground on its side, propping its head up on an elbow with a leg propped up. "There is no focus in battle, only the revelry found in the slaughter of your enemies. Focus is for those that rail against pain and suffering, instead of embracing the sweet sensation of coming ever closer to death!"

Suzumi grimaced at the warped window into the Hollow's mind, the disturbing ideals were only more unsettling to Suzumi as she realised that she was technically borrowing part of its power.

She could feel in her mind the shape and form that the Hollow had taken in lieu of her own spiritual body. Though, it remained humanoid and alarmingly similar to her own self.

The Hollow retained the ashy grey skin and predatory yellow eyes with black sclera, but now it had more detail, including possessing black fingernails and small other details. Though what really stood out was the clothing and the mask that her alter ego wore.

The clothing was… revealing, to say the least. It was a getup that mortified Suzumi to her very core, possibly the very reason that it'd chosen the look. It wore a pair of baggy bone-white pants, which would have been fine if there wasn't a massive hole surrounding the crotch area, revealing a pair of tight-fitting black panties. The top that it wore was similar in its bagginess, though much of its chest was entirely bare, proudly displaying the massive hole, easily as large as a hand at full splay.

The huge hole was one that you'd only usually see on a Hollow many time larger. The hole ate into a significant portion of its breasts, which had been tightly secured with a piece of bone-white armour that surrounded its back all the way to the other side of the hole on its chest.

It was horrifying for Suzumi to look as what was basically herself doing a Hollow cosplay, though, disturbingly, she realised that it didn't even look half bad on it.

Though, that only left the mask. It was directly reminiscent of a predator's skull, something like a wolf or a fox, enclosed over the Hollow's face perfectly. The mask gave Suzumi a deeply unsettling emotion deep within her chest, burning with an indignance that could only be born when someone felt as if their very existence was threatened.

The Hollow looked up at where Suzumi was viewing it from, something that Suzumi had thought wasn't possible. The corrosion-yellow eyes stared right at her with a darkness counter to the violently contrasting colour.

"I thought you said you were focusing?" It cackled, letting Suzumi quickly realise that she'd been just moving towards her destination on autopilot. When she pulled her mind away from the thing inside her, she found herself feeling as if she had just walked into a wall of water, forcing her way through with some difficulty, but making it through to the other side.

The attacks from the Hollows within were almost immediate, a veritable legion of low-level Hollows standing at attention, ready to surge forth to vie for her flesh and soul. The mass of claws, appendages and weak projectiles were nothing in front of Suzumi's instincts after she'd found the Hollow mask slowly growing on her face during her last fight.

Ururu had cleared out the trash Hollows before, but now it was up to Suzumi to do all the work instead. She moved from Hollow to Hollow at a pace that she only kept accelerating as she quickly got better and better.

Tessai had warned her that she may not necessarily grow faster without her Chain of Fate, yet with the added discovery of the Hollow in her soul, and Grayson's intervention, it seems that she was destined to rise into power faster than she'd thought she would.

"My power, I'll have you know." The irritating voice called, reminding her of its presence once again.

"Its not yours if you're not using it!" Suzumi growled as she slaughtered Hollow left and right, keeping an eye out for any of the more impressive Hollow that could actually be a danger and summarily spotting one in the back of the pack, staring at her with the black pits that it used for eyes.

"Should I take it all back then?" It threatened emptily. It could no easier do that than Suzumi could push it out of her mind entirely.

Suzumi gathered a large amount of spiritual energy within a fist before slamming it into a nearby Hollow in the direction of the Hollow that she was keeping her eye on. The weak Hollow went flying with the punch, burning with the power of her spiritual energy as it slammed through rows and rows of worthless Hollows.

Just for a moment, Suzumi could swear that she saw her own spiritual energy, a flash of dark purple as that Hollow's flesh burned away. Usually seeing the colour of spiritual energy was a big deal, actual physical colour was almost undiscernible without condensing enough spiritual energy to observe it.

The Hollow made it all the way to the Hollow in the back, though it simply dodged the flailing thing as it did. The Hollow was slim and sleek, giving an impression of a cheetah. The dark blue skin blurred as it moved its protracted legs, cracking the ground underneath its clawed feet easily, bursting with speed until it was only mere centimetres away from Suzumi herself.

Though it wasn't that easy to get a hit on her anymore. Suzumi crouched as the Hollow launched a flying kick through the air, claws extended. The blow missed entirely, giving Suzumi just enough time before it could touch the ground and move again. Suzumi flipped backwards, using the sudden acceleration to catch the airborne Hollow with her feet and slamming it into the ground behind where she'd been standing.

The Hollow screeched, hastily trying to form a Cero between its jagged teeth, but Suzumi's grin widened as her fist crashed through its teeth and causing an explosion of half formed spiritual power, destroying the entirety of its head.

The battle waged on, regardless of the victory she'd taken. More and more fodder came to slow her down, but they only fed her growth as she learnt more and more to kill them faster than ever before.

Her feet blazed with movement as she dashed between Hollows, wiping out a handful of them with each attack, allowing the force of one punch mutilate many more instead of trying to attack each and every Hollow.

Her spiritual energy reserves didn't necessarily grow in size itself, but Suzumi learned to cycle the energy faster, rather than limit the amount that she used. The Hollow in her mind chattered incessantly about how it'd do it all so much better, but Suzumi could feel the intense growth within her as she fought.

There were three more of the 'edited' Hollows, each stronger than the next, with the final Hollow being much the same as the one that Kisuke had sliced in half without a thought.

The other edited Hollows had been easy fights. While they had increased strength and were way easier to hide inside one of these interdiction fields than something as powerful as an Adjuchas, they were just peak Hollows at the end of the day. They were beings that would have once given Suzumi nothing but death, but now she was far more capable than before, slowly reaching towards her goals.

The final Hollow, however, was terrifying.

Suzumi stepped foot in its territory, an abandoned factory, and as soon as she did, the massive thing shifted its arachnid-esque body to stare directly at her, a tiny little bug, almost exactly like the one that Kisuke had shown them, sat on its side underneath what'd be its thorax.

The screech it let loose was unlike anything that Suzumi had encountered before, so completely changed from what a regular Hollow was. Suzumi felt the spiritual pressure rumble the air around her, almost making it feel as if she was in an intensely humid climate, sitting around a blazing fire.

"A challenge!" The Hollow inside her screeched gleefully, "Die for me, idiot, I wanna be out!"

Suzumi didn't have time to reply as the spider Hollow charged, spearing one of its front legs out towards her as a ludicrous speed. Suzumi tried to dodge, but it clipped her side, spearing her flesh through before one of the leg's many barbs pulled it from her body savagely.

Suzumi scrambled out of the way, losing a great deal of her earlier grace to the wound. The Hollow didn't quite give up with only one attack, sending another leg towards her back as she move away from it.

She managed to slide across the ground, letting the long and thick piece of white limb fly overhead. After the leg began to retract to its body, she leapt up from the floor, grabbing onto it and flipping her body upright on the thing's leg.

The Hollow was strong enough that the movement didn't force the leg to fall, making it easy for her to burst into a sprint along its leg, like she had a thousand times across a metal pole. This time, though, the leg was moving as she herself moved.

She had managed to run about three quarters of the way up its leg before the Hollow had begun to try and shake her off of its leg, but she was already too close. She jumped before the Hollow could move its leg any significant amount and sent a fist at the wide mask that covered where eyes and mandibles would be on a regular Hollow.

Her mind was alight with the victory that was sure to come, her body so filled with spiritual energy, ready to burst out through her fist in a mighty blow. Yet, there was a sudden moment of unease within Suzumi's mind, and it was already too late once she'd noticed it.

The mouth, which had been closed up until this point, opened its wide maw, allowing two grotesque claws to shoot forth from the darkness within, slicing into Suzumi's body and keeping her there.

Suzumi desperately struggled against the extremely painful grasps, but only succeeded in allowing the mouth appendages to saw down and into her bones. There was a horrifying screech as a small pellet of deep red spiritual energy started to condense in the Hollow's mouth, the Cero growing massively in moments.

Suzumi could hear the Hollow in her mind screaming with laughter as she screamed in pain and effort, flooding her arms with the immense spiritual energy she was going to use to break its mask. Her mind slowed as the flow of spiritual energy raced against the completion of the Hollow's Cero, slowly allowing Suzumi some freedom against the torturous claws.

If you had blinked, you would have missed it.

The moment moved so fast in comparison to those before that it confused even Suzumi, as she laid of the floor of the abandoned warehouse, her eyes shifting across the room's interior. She couldn't tell if she now had a hole blown in her, or if the Hollow within was cackling in its sadistic glee, but she could see something just peaking around a corner as the massive Hollow in front of her began to push and prod with its legs.

A set of small, brown eyes. A child's eyes filled with tears as their last hope fled.

The overwhelming sense of failure overcame her, then. So, detached from the people she was supposedly trying to save from the hands of these Hollows, watching her die on the floor. She wanted to reach out, to touch them and comfort the holder of those eyes, but her vision faded slowly, leaving her with nothing more than a faint view of the Hollow she'd almost killed.

"We can't be having you die here, dear. Tsubaki! Koten Zanshun."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 48: Maelstrom

Waking up was a struggle, but Suzumi's mind came to consciousness far faster than her body did, struggling against her eyelids as if they weighed hundreds of kilos alone. She felt her body shift slightly as something underneath her moved, then a hand pushing against the back of her head to tilt it more upright as the rim of a cool bottle pressed gently against her lips.

Without the mental function to deny the offered liquid, Suzumi took large gulps of the liquid, finding the taste to be relatively nice. It travelled down her throat and assumably into her stomach, she felt a spreading warmth in her chest before suddenly she was able to take a massive breath in, opening her eyes to her surroundings as if she'd broken the surface tension of her consciousness.

"Calm, my dear." A soothing voice said firmly, "I've fixed you up and given you a powerful medicine to aid your energy, but you need to breathe with me now, okay?" Suzumi nodded rapidly, her mind racing needlessly as the medicine worked whatever magic it was imbued with.

The voice, now feeling closer to her, breathed in a continuous loop of breathing in, holding, breathing out, holding, over and over until Suzumi could return to a somewhat regular state. The frantic mindset still dominated, her stomach in a shamble of butterflies, but she could now properly focus on any one thing for long enough to actually recognise it.

The obvious one was the owner of the voice, which Suzumi half remembered even in her state. Orihime Inoue sat above her, Suzumi's head resting gently on the woman's thighs, a nostalgic position for Suzumi. The older lady smiled cheerily.

"You did quite the number on yourself back there!" Orihime's brightness was almost like her own portable sun, an inescapable quality that simply came along with the nature of her being. Suzumi smiled weakly, coming up with a snarky answer before another thought intruded into her head roughly.

"The kid!" She yelped, commanding her body to sit up, but Orihime's hand clamped over her forehead, holding her down with a surprising strength.

"He was quite alright, my dear. He and the ten others." Suzumi immediately felt guilty about her relief, with their safety being something that she wasn't really all that important in securing, but with the child and whoever else being safe, she could at least feel slightly guilty instead of horrifyingly so.

"I'm sorry," Suzumi said, relaxing for a moment until Orihime took her hand away from her forehead, "I almost died, didn't I?" The question resounded just a little more within the mostly empty factory space, Suzumi's eye catching on the last resident besides themselves, the massive corpse of an arachnid Hollow, now lacking its accompanying bug.

"Not quite, my dear." Orihime grinned sunnily, "They are collecting powerful spiritual sensitives, after all, unfortunately many are young children. You likely would have been tied up for later. I believe you would have found a way, if I had not come to your rescue."

Suzumi snorted, taking it onboard, but letting herself be disappointed and guilty, nonetheless. She, and the rest of their little group, didn't have time to spare on this little skirmish. Real lives were at stake, and if this succeeds once, then it'll just keep happening. Instead of being able to focus on saving Karakura, Orihime was sat here playing doctor with Suzumi.

"Enough!" Orihime said sternly, a little pout in her cheek while rapping on Suzumi's forehead with her knuckles, "Moping isn't helpful. Onwards and upwards!" The older woman slowly rose from the ground, carefully bringing Suzumi up with her as well until they were standing, Suzumi's arm hanging over the other woman's shoulders as she sorted out her footing and pulled away.

"There we are, much better!" Orihime walked around Suzumi, lending a critical eye as she did. The training shirt that she was wearing was totally ruined, a hole going straight through her side. Suzumi had thought she'd been hit straight in the chest, but apparently not. It was a wound that was likely to kill her in time, but she'd have likely managed to live for quite a while longer.

"Well, as good as I can be after having a hole blown in me." Suzumi said dryly, though Orihime chuckled with bright humour.

"Of course! But now–" Orihime's sentence was cut off by a massive wave of spiritual pressure billowing over the building. The effect was immediate, with Orihime losing all her humour, turning her head towards origination point. She leapt with a blast of spiritual energy in her legs, slipping through a small hole in the roof of the building for a better view.

Suzumi waited another second to warm up her spiritual energy but followed right after, thankfully nailing the somewhat precise movement. She landed on the beaten and weathered roof gracefully, turning to Orihime to get a good idea of what was going on.

The expression on her face was something that Suzumi may never forget, not for her whole life. The determined fire in her eyes was something so revealing to Suzumi that, for just a moment, she could see Orihime's past. The struggle and the iron will she'd created to face against the things that terrified her on a level no normal human should ever experience.

Suzumi was almost scared to turn to her head to view the sight with Orihime, but the need outweighed the mental stop, her eyes jolting with the sudden nervousness as she realised that the spiritual pressure was a mix of new and familiar.

The sight she beheld was almost unthinkable.

A silver length, reaching towards the heavens; a rip in the sky, its depths dark and black; a dome of crimson red, darker than even blood; the powers of many, clashing in a war of might.

The next wave of spiritual pressure came, a darker, more sinister power first, then another right after. The power was pure and intense beyond what she'd even felt against Kisuke's own spiritual pressure, somehow possessing a qualitative difference in its essence.

It washed over her like the rivers of the divine, caressing against her with a loving touch meant for only her. Her soul sang with the resonance, a song of power and might, hardening her mind against the actions she must take, but also reserving her humanity, keeping it safe from its powerful song.

It was Grayson's power, his spiritual pressure and his energy. It was Grayson. The experience brought her back to the moment that he'd plunged that blade into her chest, and the feeling of euphoria as it rebuilt her into what she now was… but now the power was more excited than the calm, analytical thing that had rebuilt her. It was excited and ready, clamouring to test its worth and power against something more.

"That's him, isn't it?" Orihime said from beside Suzumi, having turned to look at Suzumi's own face without her realising. Suzumi nodded gently, enamoured by the feeling it provided her.

"It begins." Orihime whispered, something that Suzumi had heard being said again and again over time. But now she realised that it was more than just true. As she looked at the stream of silver power, she realised that it was reality, and it was undeniable.

It was without thought that she leapt from that roof, racing towards her boyfriend.

It was a future that she'd be a part of, she decided. No matter what.

---​

The wave of spiritual pressures battered against Kisuke as he was moving towards Tessai's location. Immediately as he felt it, his eyes widened as he tapped a small stone on his wrist.

"Do you feel that?" He asked quickly, the voice being transmitted to the owner of the other stone bracelet. There was a moment of pause before a voice was sent back to his own, filtering into his ears easily.

"Kisuke. I don't just feel it, I see it." Tessai's deep bass thrummed in Kisuke's ears, making him whip around to scan Karakura's skyline.

Sure enough, in the interdiction field furthest from his own, a spire of silver stretched into the sky, along with a kūmon gate to the Garganta. Kisuke could barely believe his eyes, the levels of power on display here were far greater than even he had realistically projected.

"Tessai, what do we even do?" Kisuke intoned, and he wasn't asking about the Hollow whose fingers were slowly prying apart the sky with its kūmon.

"Nothing, Kisuke. Just as we did for Kurosaki. We watch and wait as fate takes its course, protecting the world from its wake." Kisuke looked bitterly at the sight before him, the clear sequence of actions lining up too perfectly for a random collection of Hollows who wished to stick their fingers in the honey pot of the Human World. With the editing to souls that Grayson talked about the Hollows receiving, it was just too much evidence to possibly believe that this wasn't part of something much larger.

Not with the past being all too present in his mind.

"Damn it, Grayson." Kisuke muttered as he pushed his body forth with extreme speed, seeking the source of that spire of silver, to save the man who had found himself within the thick of yet another mysterious plan that fate has.

"Damn you, fate." Kisuke growled against the whipping wind, "Damn you."

---​

They lurk in the shadows, as they have always done. Such was their way of life.

Their identities forever hidden, able to possess any of a thousand different faces at a moment's notice, whispers in the night; haunting the dreams of those they oppose. Very few of their kind can show their true face, the power required to do so with the way of life they have, is almost insurmountable.

Comrades were only yet another tool to complete a mission, their deaths a steppingstone that must be used to further their progress. Friends were a commodity that didn't exist amongst their ranks, emotions being yet another pitfall that they were disallowed from falling into.

Each moment was a passionless pursuit of a goal, filled only with the order and the objective and nothing else.

They were individuals, but they were more than that. They were all one and the same, none more valuable than the rest. Thus, they pursued their goal with as much fervour as they could, as the ones with the weakest resolves were the ones to die.

So, when they had first felt the disturbance, like a shadow's whisper on the wind, they were the first to react. They were the first there, within the city landscape, racing atop and between the buildings, accounting for their sectors in an extremely efficient pattern born of thousands of repetitions.

Yet before long, it had faded. Leaving them unable to capture the source of the power, the disturbance that had consumed the spiritual energy in the area like air. They were sent back to the darkness, to wait for yet another order.

Then it came once again, but much stronger this time, with a power accompanying it that surpassed anything they'd ever felt. The two powers together were beyond reckoning, intermingling with an intricacy that struck them all to the core of their being.

But it faded again. They had failed to capture it, even as the order had told them to do so. It was a failure that wasn't to be accepted.

Who was it that had the resolve to stand before her and the guillotine hanging over their necks? None were sure, and the one who had done so was unlikely to ever reveal themselves. But it had stayed her hand, if just for a moment.

But it wasn't just a moment. It was days of waiting in the darkness of thought, their minds no longer capable of the fear someone might regularly experience, yet they worried in their own cold, logical ways.

Their minds were relieved, however, when the power came once again. They awaited the order patiently, but prepared. The seconds and minutes passed by; some even coming to believe that the order may never be issued.

But it did, and they all read and understood it in its entirety, just as they had been trained.

'Find them, report their whereabouts, include any other information. Collect the owner of the weaker spiritual pressure. Mission approved by Central 46.'

Then their mission had begun, and in moments they were there, right where they needed to be.

They never expected the sheer power as they arrived on what amounted to a battlefield, the rawness of it, but they pushed on regardless. Their minds were completely set on the orders they had been given. They homed in upon the weaker presence, even as the other power swelled beyond that which many of their ranks had experienced within the Human World for many decades or at all.

Even as the mighty power boomed with a wave of spiritual energy that almost hurt their skin, they continued on their journey towards the target.

---​

Earlier.


I came into contact with the interdiction field quickly, my heart racing with the anticipation of the fight within. My spiritual energy roared to life inside me, bubbling over the top and adding more and more power to my spiritual shielding and an entire third layer to my spiritual enhancement with ease.

I knew that the grin on my face was borderline manic, but I couldn't help it, the fire within burned at a temperature that I couldn't contain in such a cold way, without expression. In the moment before I surfaced on the other side of the interdiction field, I wondered if this was how the legendary warriors of the Human World felt as they launched themselves into battle, their mind racing with what they would learn, and the heads that they would take.

But as soon as I reached the other side of the barrier, my mind was filled with the information I had been lacking before. As the flood of information came in and the interdiction field that surrounded me went down, being replaced with something else entirely, I saw this incursion for what it really was.

A guise.

They weren't here for Phantom, not truly.

They were here for me.



A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., someguy, Ryan U.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 49: Remains

Why was it that, in the heat of battle, I was still capable of coherent thought?

You'd imagine that being put in real danger would kill all thought, only allowing you to run off of instinct as your body desperately tried to preserve itself. Yet, even as my limbs were a flurry of blows against the horde of weak Hollows, I was able to think with a clarity beyond even that of my usual state.

It felt as if my mind were truly split, beyond Grayhom and myself existing separate from each other. On one hand, I could feel and almost see my mind calculating my next movements, the most efficient attacks coming to the forefront and being executed with an ease that I would have expected from someone that'd trained thousands of hours.

I almost felt that it was cheating, as I watched my body spin, kick, punch, and blast with the powerful spiritual energy that I possessed within me. But the 'auto' fighting that I was doing was certainly working against the weakest of the Hollows in the deep crimson dome I'd been trapped within.

My current situation was dire, to say the least. The interdiction field had been dropped almost instantly, a ploy to make everyone think that they all served the same purpose, hiding the Hollows within so that they could raid and pillage with ease, alluding our eyes for longer.

It was a terrible understanding that I'd come to, that I was being targeted.

Much of the information that led me to that conclusion was somewhat flawed, I'll admit, but I couldn't help but feel it was the truth. The conclusion relies on these Hollows knowing information that they couldn't possibly know about me, like my spiritual sense and my ribbon sense. Both of which, while not massive secrets, had been told to only a scant few people other than Tessai and Kisuke, unless someone else has been disseminating information to Hollows, which is about as likely as Kisuke being humble.

First, there had been the flash of the interdiction field going down, before coming back only a moment later. No one else had sensed that, unless Kisuke or Tessai had, but because my ribbon sense was always on, and worked regardless of the target trying to exude spiritual pressure, I saw it immediately.

That then led us to find how the interdiction field worked, then what was inside. Despite the Hollows supposedly trying to take hostages, that specific Hollow encampment had none. It was the first decoy, with trash Hollows that were simply throwaway to their purpose.

After that, I was the only one that could accurately sense the interdiction fields, though Kisuke could tell vaguely what was going on with his own mockery of my level of spiritual senses. I located as many as I could, at least what I thought was all of them, and pointed everyone towards one to take on.

This seemed innocuous, and it really was. There was almost nothing to this particular action other than me doling out the locations and splitting up. Yet, in the back of my mind, I can remember knowing that this specific interdiction field was just a tiny bit larger than the rest. It wasn't by much, just a few extra metres to the radius of the spherical dome, but it was enough to give myself that specific interdiction field.

It was a line of coincidences that added up to me being in a dark red dome along with some of the most powerful Hollow ribbons I've ever encountered, with two white ribbons that stood out to me.

Jinta and Uyu. They were here.

I growled savagely as I caved in a slightly stronger Hollow's mask, a flare of anger and frustration entering even the more analytical side of my mind. The following blows were something that I'd usually use on a Hollow much hardier than the wispy things that I exploded with those punches, but the slight relief of frustration was worth it.

I hated this. Whether or not they were truly here for me was almost irrelevant at this point. The fact was that they had me. Hook, line, and sinker. I was trapped in the crimson dome, Uyu and Jinta were unconscious or immobilised, judging by the small tells of their ribbons, and the sheer number of powerful Hollows within the barrier made it impossible for me to stop fighting and retreat, even if I could.

Thankfully, though, the crimson dome didn't block sight or much spiritual activity. If I made a big enough stink, Tessai and Kisuke would be able to feel it. With Tessai's advanced understanding of Kidō, I could only hope that he can do something to get rid of the dome, or at least to find a way inside it.

I refocussed my mind on what was happening in the battle, the other parts of my mind easily dealing with the Hollow horde with barely a scratch ever reaching my spiritual shielding, but I knew that it wouldn't last for long.

Just as it had been in the last interdiction field, there were more of the edited Hollows. Each of them felt slightly different to the rest of their brethren that surrounded them, giving me horrifying imagery of an almost Frankenstein's monster situation. With living, orderly components being inserted into Hollows like a living organ into a rotting corpse.

My new ability to look deeper into the soul using the ribbon as a basis was somehow interfering with how I perceived them. It was more than just coldly and analytically viewing the soul; it also gave instinct and emotion to the soul itself.

It was as if I could feel, touch, smell, and taste the soul as well, more three-dimensional than the on-paper understanding that a man like Kisuke had. But it also told me when something was deeply wrong or unsettling, and the edited Hollows were just that.

One of them came at me, using the blades that covered its insect-like carapace to create a whirlwind of death, but I easily dodged out of the way. Of course, I had sensed the Cero that the other Hollows were generating, all of them at slightly different speeds and intensities. It seems that a Cero was something almost entirely personal to the Hollow, despite the fact that it was a staple of the Hollow's attacks.

I danced between the quick succession of beams of dense spiritual energy, counting four in total. Five edited Hollows in one little squadron, all of them at least peak Hollow before editing.

Yet they weren't anything before my blows. The bladed carapace shattered underneath the force of my attacks, playing my usual game of cat and mouse, dancing on the edge of the knife's point. Even with all the pressure to perform, with lives of people I actually cared about on the line, I still found myself within that state of flow and excitement—the grin on my face ever widening into the savage thing that I was almost ashamed of.

Almost.

The bladed Hollow went down first, with it being the easiest to reach in between the Cero blasts, then I moved close into the other edited Hollows. The thing about a Cero, or at least one being used by something as technically 'weak' as these specific Hollows, was that it left them almost completely immobilised. So, with almost no effort at all, two more Hollows fell to my attacks, their masks crumbling.

The last two were trickier. One was speedy, and the other had powerful clawed attacks that forced me on the defensive in a loop of dodging at the cost of using any attacks.

However, that wasn't to last very long. The fight was stuck in a state of equilibrium, with them attacking and me dodging; so whatever instinct that lived inside of them told them that they needed to take a risk to bring me down.

A bad idea against someone that played with another's risks, like myself.

The speedy Hollow, finding a moment where I was tied up with the other Hollow's barrage of attacks, moved just out of the way to begin formation of a Cero. It wasn't going to be an absurdly powerful one, but it seemed that its speediness extended past just its physical movement.

I let the Cero form, faithfully doing as I always had and continuing to dodge the clawed Hollow. But I was doing more than just that, obviously. Kiting the Hollow towards a wall, I waited for the Cero in the speedy Hollow's mouth to form to just the right point, and then I jumped at the wall and kicked off of it with explosive speed, breaking from the clawed Hollow's attacks.

The moment slowed as I rocketed towards the other Hollow, hoping that I'd timed all my actions correctly so that I could catch it in the moment of absolute paralysation just before it fired a Cero blast.

And I did. I reached out my arms towards the Hollow's pronounced jaw and the top if its mask as I came within grabbing distance. If the Hollow had eyes and eyelids, I'd bet I could see its eyes widen when it realised what I was doing.

As soon as my hands touched the Hollow's mask, I clamped its jaw closed around its own Cero.

The explosion of spiritual energy sent me flying, though leaving me completely unharmed due to the excellent resistance to explosive force that my spiritual shielding gave me. I didn't look at the speedy Hollow's corps until after I'd pummelled the clawed one to bits, but once I did, it was quite the gruesome sight.

The entire top of its body was gone, completely, with the rest of it effectively torn to shreds, covered in some sort of wound. It was as dead as dead could be, for a Hollow. At least until a Soul Reaper came and actually sent it away to wherever they go.

The small victory was nice, but in moments I was in the thick of battle once again. The inside of the dome was absolutely littered with weak Hollows, no doubt used to just slow someone down, rather than to actually win any fights. But what had seemed like an almost infinite quantity was now dwindling faster than ever. My body was energised after the successful fight, my mind having hit yet another small improvement in the preciseness of my attacks, the agility of my movement.

I was crushing the small fries with my spiritual pressure alone, now. The spiritual energy I covered my body with now produced enough spiritual pressure as a by-product to give the weaker Hollows a hard time doing much more than move at a jogging pace.

As I slowly reached towards the fourth layer in my physical enhancement, slowly compressing the other three to accommodate, I was able to blaze past the weaklings and move to where I was really needed.

Towards the bone-white ribbon that sat in the back of the dome, only metres away from those that I needed to rescue. The ribbon itself wasn't the most powerful one I'd ever sensed, but there was another beside it that almost equalled it as well. Neither of which were Phantom.

Where was Phantom? Even if this really was a ploy to get at me, surely Phantom was supposed to be involved, somewhere?

I would have loved to ruminate on all the possibilities, but this time I didn't have the mental energy to spare for idle thought. This time, I was up against some seriously dangerous Hollows, and they were likely just as edited as the rest of them.

However, this time I was in a bad way, disadvantaged to a worrying degree.

The two Hollows I sensed, as well as a fair grouping of puny Hollows, were all collected in the middle of a football pitch. There were no walls, no verticality to abuse, no tricky corners to hide behind. My fighting style benefited from all of those, and they were nowhere in sight.

In any normal situation I would have tried to bait them out of the field, but that was clearly something they wouldn't follow along with so easily. The ringleader, a much smaller and almost human sized Hollow, stood next to a gargantuan Hollow, basically a wall of pure muscle and spiritual energy with a mask that was almost rectangular, being vertically taller than I was.

The ringleader was obvious as soon as I'd come in range of it, its spiritual pressure being present almost everywhere inside the little dome, filling it with its enormous reserves. Its reserves, while maybe not as completely absurd as my own, were the least part of its power. The rest were in just how much control it had, with the power swirling around it and connecting to its allies with tendrils that likely controlled they actions.

This was bad, really bad. Even being this close to the two Hollows were the closest I've been to death in my life.

Yet I couldn't stop myself from moving forwards, my eyes fixated on the two white ribbons of Uyu and Jinta, leading towards to bodies covered over with what looked like spider's silk laying within a small enclosure.

The smaller Hollow turned towards me, instantly realising my presence, twisting its mask ever so lightly to the side. The mask was disturbing, the eyeholes being narrow and long, extending horizontally, only broken by a split down the centre that widened as if its mask had a zipper, revealing something beneath that confused my senses for just a moment.

A yellowed skull. A real skull, aged by time and wear throughout the ages. This was more than just an Adjuchas, it made that much clear as a bone-chilling wave of spiritual energy washed over my body.

It was edited from the remains of something else.

I looked towards its ribbon, analysing it as deep as I could before the fight began, and it was with the faintest flicker of a Soul Reaper's red that the fight began with a spear of spiritual energy lancing through my gut.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., someguy, and Ryan U.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 50: Silver Truth

The sensation of pain was much 'realer' that those that I'd experienced before. It wasn't any normal pain, with the use of a physical projectile or a razor-sharp claw, no. This was spiritual energy, condensed into an almost physical form.

The sickly, dark red energy seared my flesh as it passed through my gut, scraping against the bone of my spine, simultaneously burning, and cutting a hole right through my body in the most painful way possible.

The spear of spiritual energy finally reached the other side of my flesh, breaking through my skin and disseminating into a blazing heat as it touched the air behind me, burning against the skin of my back, scorching it to a degree that a normal human could easily die from, just with the shock of the injury alone.

As the spiritual energy burned against me, I realised that it was a tool specifically created for torture, but also something else. In a way it was its own form of editing, though for some inexplicable reason, it didn't work on me.

As the last of the intense heat died, I finally managed to return my mind to what was happening, finding that only moments had passed in comparison to what had felt like hours of pain. The rawness in my throat was the only real indicator that I'd been screaming, the intense heat probably enough to evaporate any tears that I'd have shed.

The Hollow, the Adjuchas, wasn't surprised.

"You are him." It spoke, voice raspy as its yellowed skull clattered its jaw as it spoke the dry words.

"Probably." I ground out snarkily, still fighting the waves of pain from the spiritual spear's damage to my body. The cursory analysis I could do on the spear was that it was supposed to enter you and burn away inside of you, before releasing a small part of the spear that would allow the Adjuchas to control you by your own spiritual energy. He was a puppet master.

"Humour is not befitting of you." It said, though its voice didn't quite seem… natural. Even for a Hollow, the Adjuchas was acting strangely, too calculated in its subtle movements to be the being of ravenous hunger that a Hollow was at its core.

"That's news to me. I was told once that I could be a comedian if I wanted to, though the blind jokes wouldn't quite land right anymore." I said, though I wasn't really searching to pull more information out of him at the moment. In fact, I was just prolonging the moment before it attacked me, whether it was with its small army of Hollows that sat at the sidelines, with its massive partner, or by itself.

The Adjuchas stood still, its narrow slits for eyes glowed with a gentle red light, like the flash of colour on a poisonous creature, "You delay the inevitable." The words rang with a power, the same mindless power that a Hollow possessed, creating a clear dichotomy between the Adjuchas itself and its power.

I dialled my mind up to eleven, trying to take everything in, but there was an earthshattering sound as the massive Hollow that stood dumbly beside the Adjuchas moved. The soil of the football field sprayed into the air with the inefficiency of the movement, but the speed it produced was undeniable.

It was only with the forewarning of the sound that I was able to dodge the first blow from its fist smashing into the ground hard enough to make the earth quake around my feet, forcing me to jump backwards or be put off balance.

The Hollow didn't let up there, kicking out towards me while I felt a distinct prickling in my senses as yet another spear was formed in the hands of the Adjuchas, standing almost fifty metres away. I floated in the air for a moment as I realised the precision that I'd need to pull on for me to not end up with another hole in me, or end up as paste from the force of the massive Hollow's kick.

Just as my feet touched the ground, and the Hollow's kick was only centimetres from my centre mass, I did a short jump from the ground instead of the hasty leap back that I was sure the Adjuchas was waiting for.

Just as I did so, I committed to the sacrifice that I was going to have to make for the fight and turned both my feet to be flat against the Hollow's leg as it screamed through the air with enough force to crumble a building.

I let the leg impact my feet, only cushioned by the extreme amount of spiritual pressure I was pumping through them with spiritual enhancement, then pushing off of the leg, using all that speed to send me flying through the air.

The height I gained was, frankly, ridiculous. It was easy to forget just how much power was being thrown around in a supernatural fight like this one, but when you used the advantage of your body being hundreds of times lighter than the forces that combat produced, it became obvious.

In fact, I was flung so high with the Hollow's force, and the force I generated with my legs, that I actually managed to reach the peak of the dome. I didn't quite slam into it like a cartoon character would, but it was close. With the last bit of finesse I could produce, I managed to adhere my own spiritual energy to the barrier, something that was surprisingly easy.

I didn't have time to lose, even as my ankles and knees screamed with pain from the impact, as another spear followed shortly after, slamming into the dome right next to my head with a burst of heat that I quickly scrambled away from.

The solution wasn't perfect, not with the intense pain from my gut, back, and legs, but it was better than being on the field with the Hollows. I couldn't run away, there was no telling what they'd do to Uyu and Jinta, and I couldn't let that happen on my conscious.

Another spear slammed into the dome, stronger this time. The two objects, made out of the same deep red spiritual energy, resonated slightly. It unstuck me slightly from the material, rejecting the presence of the anchoring tendrils coming from my hands.

I didn't have much in the way of time either, it seemed.

"Alright Grayhom," I said to the open air, knowing full well that saying so internally was likely just as effective, "I'm gonna need to pull the rabbit out of the hat here, buddy." There was a response that bubbled up from deep inside of me, surfacing after a moment or two. Surprisingly, this time the response came in the form of spoken words.

"A rabbit might not be enough here, brother." Grayhom's voice had changed since the first time I'd talked to him, significantly in fact. Now his voice was slightly less like mine, more official and matured than my own, now linking far better with the aged appearance he'd begun to assume within my soul.

"What do you mean?" I asked, confused by the sudden interactivity from the soul dwelling identity. Grayhom's presence swelled up further, pushing through the surface of my soul solemnly.

"It is complicated," he began while I dodged another spear, one of my two hands coming almost entirely unstuck, "we have already determined that the identity that I am, was the identity of the soul that collided with you own, yes?" He spoke clearly and methodically. The change from the chipper and somewhat irritating Grayhom of the past was stark.

"Yes, yes, get on with it you old geezer!" I said as I only just managed to dodge the effect of the spear, and then a large clump of dirt thrown by the big Hollow. Grayhom coughed gently, though I could feel the spark of amusement from within our soul. Apparently, the mischievousness wasn't quite dead in him yet.

"Well, it's more than likely something from my soul's past coming to haunt us. There is no other reason for this being to be here, searching for us." I swallowed, knowing that it was true, though I didn't want it to be. The thought of it possibly being the truth was so much different than it being a reality.

"Couldn't it be that they just sensed our spiritual energy?" I asked, though I knew it was weak argument just as it left my lips.

"No, brother. They were talking about me when they talked to you earlier." There was a moment of pause from Grayhom, "Our soul does not contain the memories of our past, yet the link I feel with their essence… it is undeniable."

"Okay!" I yelled, dodging yet another spear, one of the last ones I'd be able to take before I was pulled from the wall entirely, "This sounds like talk for another time, Grayhom. Get on with it!"

"We will need to go back to that power we once wielded. The one I've been withholding from you."

"Withholding? What–"

Before I could finish my thought, a thick spear buzzing with spiritual energy slammed into the barrier, immediately unsticking me from the surface, forcing me to plummet towards the ground. I windmilled in the air, cursing at myself for getting distracted from the Adjuchas hurling spears at me.

"Grayson." Grayhom's voice resonated inside of my head, stopping the world around me as if time itself had truly stopped. I could even see the embers of the explosion of heat from the spear impacting the shield behind me.

"What? In the middle of falling to my doom here!" I screeched, pulled in too many directions to be snarky anymore.

"We are more than we thought, and our power, what was once my power, is greater still." Suddenly there was a burning heat in my chest, my soul almost vibrating with a power that I once scratched the surface of, "Now, I guess, is the time that we truly inherit the power that has been lost to us." Grayhom's voice came through with a slight note of sadness.

"Wait, what's happening?" I asked with a pang of pure dread. I could feel a small part of my soul moving into place, Grayhom not responding to my words. There was a moment of wide-eyed terror as I realised what was happening. I had believed that my soul was whole once more, but Grayhom had held one last piece behind, because he realised what fitting it into place meant.

"This is not a final goodbye, Grayson. Come find me, when you're powerful enough."

There was a harrowing moment following his words. I could almost hear the final stone being inserted into the foundation of a great mountain. The grinding of stone against stone sent pain lancing through my body, torturous in every subsequent moment. I thought it would never end, and then… And then–

And then it clicked.

The pain was gone. The world of gold was no longer. Gold was the colour of imperfection, a warning to its editor that it was dangerously imbalanced.

But silver… Silver was pure, it was powerful beyond what gold could ever be. Silver was perfection.

The colour of my soul shifted, the silver colour originating from that single stone radiating outwards, rapidly forcing the other material, rock, and crystal, to change in colour to that of the perfect silver.

The fear and worry were gone now, instead leaving me with an absolute calm.

"Ah." I said, a small expression of sudden understanding, "A Life Bringer?"

The name resonated around me, the air shuddering with the realisation of a name long forgotten.

"I see. I'm a Life Bringer."

Idly I noticed that I was still falling, time having continued its almost entirely unalterable flow. I didn't bother to flail as my body made to connect with the concrete below flatly. Only a metre from connecting, I blinked and pulled on the pliable resource of spiritual energy within me, and with barely a thought, I was floating.

There was no big revelation, it was actually as simple as could be. It was just a disk of spiritual energy that the bottom of my feet could interact with. It was more power restrained than control. Yet now that I had a solid soul, a complete soul, it was something so much easier than expected.

I unhooked my feet from the horizontal disk, letting myself fall to the ground easily.

I looked up from my feet, finding the Adjuchas and its lieutenant beside it. The Adjuchas wound back its arm, its eyes blazing with red, forming a spear in its hand and threw it with astounding power.

Power that used to be astounding.

I reached out a hand, the crimson spear racing towards me, and gently clasped my fingers over it as it passed through. The wild spiritual energy screamed and flailed against the fingers, but the soft silver sheen over my fingers jailed it, constraining it to its bonds.

With a simple throw, I sent the spear towards the large Hollow, piercing it with the force of the throw as much as the spiritual energy itself. The Hollow bellowed in pain, making the smaller Adjuchas turn towards it. For a moment I almost believed it to be shock, or even concern, but the next words out of its mouth betrayed my thoughts.

"Silence." A hand lashed out with a dangerous precision, slicing through the other Hollow's mask, cutting off its bellow.

"That's unfortunate." I said lowly, "I had hoped I'd find some humanity in you, considering what you are made from."

I didn't allow for a response before my spiritual energy surged forwards to cover the field in its silver truth.


A/N: Well, well, there's the big five-oh. Lots of chapters, ey? I hope you've all been enjoying along with me as I write my little stories out to the world.

Thanks for tuning in on my posts, thank you for the theorisation and interest you've taken, and thank you for the beautiful words you've sent my way.

I can only hope to continue to give you moments of enjoyment furthermore.