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.