There was a resounding boom as Uyu’s fist met the Hollow’s, both seemingly equal in force. I didn’t let the opportunity go to waste, and I slunk forward quickly, trying to keep myself as inconspicuous as possible. I finessed my way underneath the gargantuan arm and planted a fist solidly in its side.

The Hollow screeched again, more anger than pain and lashed out with its tail like appendage, forcing me to take a few steps back while Suzumi approached from a different angle, leaping towards the thing and planting a bone shattering blow directly into its collarbone. Though, unfortunately, aside from a screech of pain, it didn’t seem to impair the Hollow at all, taking a swipe at Suzumi as she also danced just out of its reach.

So far so good.

Now that I had actually touched the Hollow, I could kind of make out its spiritual energy, or maybe its signature, but I still couldn’t visualize a ribbon, which meant that I couldn’t just steal its ribbon and summarily beat it to death. Maybe that would’ve been too easy.

The Hollow lumbered forwards, using its fists to rush towards us, the thumping against the solid concrete able to be felt through the sandals that came with the new uniform.

“Go in!” I yelled, mostly to Uyu, who still had the largest amount of pure firepower of us but had to give her gauntlet some time to power up to full. Luckily, she had been hanging back and recharging since that first punch.

She leapt again, seeking to punch the Hollow in its face, but the Hollow leaned on one arm and swiped, hand open, trying to slap the little girl away, but I was ready for that.

With quick and precise movements, I positioned myself behind the swinging hand and jumped to grab the Hollow’s fingers, using all my weight plus a good deal of enhancement to my muscles using spiritual energy. I managed to wrestle the thing’s hand to the ground, allowing me to straddle its wrist and let Uyu’s fist fly into the Hollow’s face.

The fist that was swinging towards me, trying to get me to release its other hand from my hold, suddenly redirected towards it’s face as it screamed bloody murder.

“I-I got it!” Uyu cheered, but I wasn’t so quick to celebrate. There was a pitter patter of what almost sounded like shattered ceramics on the ground, but all was soon drowned out as an overwhelming scream rang out, the world suddenly becoming heavier with the spiritual pressure the this was releasing.

“It was toying with us!” I screamed as I unhanded the straining wrist, just before it was going to break free and send me flying.

“What do we do?” Suzumi yelled back as the Hollow used its tail for the first time. It shot out like a bullet, catching the Uyu in the chest as she tried to retreat behind us. Suzumi, only seeing the blur of Uyu’s form as she flew past into a brick wall, immediately turned to make sure that Uyu was alright.

However, as Suzumi did so, I saw one of the Hollow’s fists rocketing towards Suzumi, hoping to catch her off guard while she worried more about Uyu than herself.

“Suzumi, eye on the Hollow!” I yelled at her, trying to be as commanding as possible. I raced towards the incoming fist and, using as much force as I could muster on short notice, slammed my fist into its wrist. With a sickening crack, whatever it was that held the thing together broke, and with a scream it pulled its injured hand back, leaning mostly on its other arm.

“You little–” Suzumi began but was interrupted with the Hollow screeching out it’s pain, the air around us becoming even denser than before, forcing Suzumi to readjust her footing to stay stable.

Seeing its chance, the Hollow’s tail lashed forwards again, it’s clawed end seeking her flesh. However, Suzumi was a smart cookie.

Knowing that the Hollow was more animalistic than anything, she made sure to emphasise her moment of weakness as she ‘stumbled’ forward. Really, she’d put herself at the perfect angle to enhance her leg muscles and effectively kick against the ground, making the ground shatter slightly underneath he forces, launching herself forward, grabbing onto the Hollow’s tail and dashing underneath it’s torso.

When she reached the other side, with a scream of exertion and enhancing herself to such a degree that I could see her ribbon glow with power, she pulled on the tail with all her might, forcing the Hollow to strike at the ground, planting its fingers into the earth to hold back against the might of Suzumi.

Of course, I wasn’t going to let my sorta-girlfriend’s awesome moment fail. Running forwards to where the Hollow’s hand was planted, I took a deep breath in, making sure that my hand was entirely coated in spiritual energy and enhancing my right arm with as much as I could spare, I brought my fist down on the Hollow’s other wrist.

This time, it didn’t simply break, it tore. My hand passed through the strange flesh of the Hollow, its skin giving a token resistance to the force of my fist, then travelling through the strange not-flesh and, with a small bang, reaching the other side. Thankfully, my fist did more damage than just allowing me to sink my arm deep into the Hollow and having me be flung around, but it created a wide hole that didn’t quite sever the arm from the hand.

Though, Suzumi’s forceful pulling did the job for me, as the flesh stretched past it’s limits and eventually tore apart. The Hollow then went flying overhead, and in less than a second, slammed bodily into the concrete on the other side of Suzumi, a stilted screech the only thing that it could muster.

I was panting with the exertion of the past few moments now, and I’m sure that Suzumi was doing similarly, but I had greater things to worry about.

“Uyu! Are you alright?” I yelled, making sure to not take my eye away from the hollow, who, unable to stand on its arms anymore, could only resort to flailing with its tail, which Suzumi was only semi-successfully pinning down, exhausted by her earlier heroics.

“J-just fine!” I head as a dark shape flew overhead. With a single glance I could see both Uyu’s ribbon and her gauntlet glowing with a powerful white energy. I couldn’t help myself and grinned madly.

With a massive boom, and the sound of shattering ceramic, the fight was over, the weight in the air died as the Hollow’s mask shattered in its death, though the body stayed there, fully formed. Tessai had told me that Soul Reapers were capable of purifying the soul and sending to Soul Society or Hell, depending on the crimes of the soul, but I guess just breaking its mask with brute force won’t necessarily purify it and may just disable it depending on the Hollow.

Quickly recovering from the fight, I made my way towards the Hollow’s body, tentative at first, making sure that there wasn’t going to be any surprises. But after a long moment of waiting, the body didn’t do so much as twitch.

I reached out my hand, placing it on the body of the Hollow and feeling its unnaturally cool skin, just below a comfortable temperature to touch but not so much that you’d pull your hand away. The spiritual energy of it was still all there, keeping the Hollow’s body corporeal, but I was having difficulty making sense of the thing’s ribbon.

It was there, it definitely had one, but I just couldn’t get it all together. It was different with human souls and Soul Reaper souls, they were basically the same, just varying levels of powerful, but this thing was alien in its essence. An inversion.

“An inversion!” I mumbled excitedly as I looked towards the hole in the Hollow’s chest, and then looked towards the destroyed mask, one large piece of the thing’s mask still whole. It was a part of the mask’s mouth and tusk, laying on the ground. I couldn’t see what was underneath the Hollow’s mask. But it just seemed like incomplete spiritual energy, not really anything other than a fountain of black spiritual energy, unformed and taking on a similar guise to blood. Interesting.

I walked over to the largest share of the mask and picked it up. I could hear Uyu and Suzumi talking in the background, mostly Suzumi fussing over the smaller girl, but I ignored them for a moment just allowing myself to think about the mask shard in my hand.

“What are you looking for?” Kisuke’s voice questioned lightly from beside me, but I didn’t respond, my mind only just registering the man’s voice in the first place, but other things taking priority.

As I held the mask, the convoluted mass of spiritual energy started to align itself, able to be traced back further, like untangling a mess of yarn. I picked apart the stings from each other, slowly learning more and more about what it was that the Hollow actually was, not just was it had become.

I already knew that it was once a human soul, but now it was painfully obvious. After their death, the clock begun to tick away. The soul’s unsettled grief and pain slowly compounded, warping the mind of the soul, no corporeal body to keep the soul’s mind healthy and regulated.

Then, when the chain begins to die, and the soul inevitably succumbs to it, the heart of their soul, everything that was once that allowed them to feel, to love, to empathise and dream is torn from them, and warped horribly.

The worst part is that they are the same, deep down. Nothing has changed but their heart, the ultimate corruption of how they feel. Their mind is the same, still loves the same people, still feels the same emotions, but their heart tells them the opposite.

Rage at those that they love, feelings of betrayal, grief in excess. It clouds their minds, slowly corrupting it as well. Only the most mentally strong could possibly stand against that force, and even still, it threatens to strip away everything that you once were, forcing the newly formed hollow to sacrifice parts of itself to its now corrupted heart.

The mask.

And now, it made sense. Not total sense, but enough. I could see the thing’s ribbon now, a thick, extremely pale white affair with a gaping hole in its tip, the edge of the hole was lined in a pure darkness.

“Grayson?” Kisuke’s voice prodded, no worry inherent in his voice, but a quiet curiosity that the man seemed to hold with him everywhere.

“I can see the ribbons of Hollows now.” I said plainly. The man’s ribbon nodded thoughtfully.

“I had assumed that you’d be able to do as such at some point. I was readying myself to teach you the difference in Hollow spiritual signatures, but it seemed that you are ahead of me.” He chuckled to himself before tapping his cane against the concrete underneath out feet, “How about you give it a whirl? See if you can pick out any nearby Hollows.”

I nodded and closed my eyes. I hadn’t encountered difficulty in trying to sense someone’s ribbon before, but I also have to keep in mind that I had never encountered a living Hollow before today and I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by humans. Sensing human souls and derivatives of, like Soul Reapers, was hardly difficult.

Now, however, as I spread out the range of what I was sensing, I could only get faint ideas of locations and forms. It was far less precise, but the closer the Hollow was, the better idea I got of its ribbon.

“Wait, I’ve got something weird.” I said, as I felt a strange jolt in my mind. I searched around for it within the mess of strange and garbled ribbons in front of me, but no matter how far I pushed my senses out the feeling didn’t subside. I was missing something.

I could feel my face pull itself into a look of consternation as I drew in my range again, focusing my sensing strength into a closer and closer area around me. Soon enough it was only a kilometre or two, then nine-hundred metres, seven-hundred, four hundred. Now it was like I was having the worst migraine of my life, but I pushed further. There was something here, and I needed to know what it was.

I pulled the range in further, three-hundred, two-hundred, now my mind was on fire, as if my hair was alight and was eating away at my flesh with reckless abandon.

“Grayson!” Kisuke yelled, “Stop! You’re hurting yourself.” Kisuke’s voice rang out, but I didn’t register it. One-hundred and fifty, one-hundred…

Then I could see it. While my mind was exploding with a pain far surpassing anything I had ever felt before, I could see the ribbon I had been seeking.

It was thin, only the width of a few fingers in contrast to the usual three or four. It’s pale white was qualitatively different than that of the meagre Hollow we had just fought, a totally different shade altogether.

The shade of bone white screamed of desolation, death and an empty hunger. My eyes trailed up its long length as it reached the neat little hole in its end, out of the small hole a long black strip of blood leaked, pulsing slowly but ever determined.

My body began to shake violently as I fell to my knees. I could feel the blood rushing out of my nose, forcing me to cough violently, blood splattering my clothes and the ground below me. I heard a chorus of worried voices and Suzumi’s shrill scream.

But when I looked up, I could see it. Standing there upon the rooftop. Watching, waiting.

“T-there.” I stammered out, pointing weakly towards the roof before my mind swam, and with a brutal spike of pain, my world went dark.