“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.”