The silver energy bubbled forth from my reserves, bloating even further as it pushed of my body through multiple points around my body. The energy then reacted quickly with the outside world, creating a suffocating amount of spiritual pressure, dominating my surrounding area.

With just that last stone that Grayhom had placed, somehow sealing himself away inside my soul, spiritual energy was as natural to me as breathing. It was the air that coursed through my lungs, the fire that sat in my heart, and the power that now laid at my fingertips.

Of course, the Adjuchas was not so easy to beat. If it were so simple, that I could just overpower the being with barely any effort on my part, then this wouldn’t have been something that Grayhom would have bothered sacrificing his own connection to me for.

The Adjuchas stood in a smaller bubble of its own burning red spiritual pressure, easily weathering the storm of my energy, qualitatively different from its own. It must realise that its energy was inferior to mine, that it was shaky and indistinct in comparison to the almost metallic spiritual energy that I was capable of forming.

“We knew that you had survived.” It intoned, its voice overlaying harshly with other, less human, noises. I stared at it as my spiritual energy continued to bloat further, the presence of it in the atmosphere creating a heat haze effect and making the with whip at the baggy sleeves of my training shirt.

“Did you?” I asked, staring at the form of the Hollow, though its structure was clearer now, “Or was it the one who created you from the discarded parts of a Soul Reaper who knew?” The being, drawing close to being contradictory in its nature, tilted its head sideways, almost human in its expression.

“Yet you only tell us more of what we want to know.” The Hollow’s voice warped and changed slightly, its skeletal jaw clattering as it tried to keep up with its own words, “Yet you do not know us, do you?”

“Not yet,” I said warningly, grinding my teeth with a slight anger that was dulled with the presence of the calming silver energy, “but I will. I will find out who you are, and what you’re doing, for a friend who gave up his freedom for me. If only for a moment in time.”

The words poured from me easily, as if I were so used to such a formal pattern of speech, rather than the informal conversational tone I normally took. As the Adjuchas did its best rendition of a grin, opening its jaw wide, I swear I felt a hand against the skin of my own.

There was no voice, nothing to distinguish the presence from anything other than a trick of the senses, a brush from the wind maybe. But I knew that it was Grayhom, pushing me ever nearer to the direction I was meant to walk towards. So, I followed the sensation, letting the Adjuchas speak whatever words it had in retort.

There were no fancy hand movements, nor any incantation or phrase. One moment there was nothing in my hand, and then the next I grabbed hold of something from deep within me, dragging it from beneath the surface like a fish from the depths.

Except this was no mere fish. It was an ancient serpent.

With one pull, the spiritual energy that coalesced around me in a disorganised fog snapped into the order it was meant to be in, that it was designed to be in. I pulled the ribbon from within my chest, detaching the silver thing from my soul and bringing it into existence with a burst of light.

The silver blade in my hand was long, straight yet flexible. It shone with a brilliant light that was undeniably connected to my own spiritual energy, burning with the same lustre. I flicked it gently, making the blade shiver slightly, worming like you’d imagine a length of cloth would.

I raised my eyes back to the Adjuchas, who had already begun to retreat backwards, a spear of a different sort already appearing in its hands. But I didn’t let it run so easily.

With just a flick of the straight handle, an elegantly thin piece of etched silver metal, the long blade leapt from my standing position, screaming through the thick air, and piercing towards the Hollow’s mask.

The Adjuchas, a new type of spear having formed in its hands, rose the long, black shaft of its weapon, and batted the seeking blade away hastily. I flicked my hand again, the action as natural as could be, retracting the blade back to its neutral position.

“A mockery of a Zanpakutō.” I intoned darkly, looking at the black spear in its hands, held comfortably like it had trained with the weapon for decades. It was unpleasant to even look at, a piece of a soul having been ripped from one being and haphazardly formed into whatever creature this was.

“It was not required to have a full Zanpakutō, nor its full spirit.” The Hollow intoned, the voice distorting and echoing as it held the blackened Zanpakutō. The spear looked like it might have once been a beautiful thing, but now it was just a corroded mess of iron.

“You find it so easy to defile a soul?” I said, a primal distaste souring my palate, as if I was watching an ancient law being broken.

“Things change.” The Hollow said mysteriously, the voice most prominent was a gruff man’s tone, the Hollow’s grip tightening around the shaft of its spear. The voice of the Soul Reaper that once was, screaming out through the torture.

There was nothing else to be said.

My spiritual energy snapped ramrod straight as I came to my conclusion, like a judge laying a sentence before their subject. This being was a violation of even the soul of the Hollow that may have once been a natural being, forced into the complete state of disaster it existed in. It was to be put down, the pieces of the being separated so that it might once again find the other parts of their respective souls.

“Fall before my purifying blade, being of untamed chaos and sick torture. Find absolution in the quiet darkness.”

The ground shattered below my feet as I moved, the dirt almost flowing away from my feet like water with the force. The clash was almost immediate, the collision of our two spiritual energies shuddering the air around us with sound and excess force.

My blade curled over top of the spear’s haft, the squared off tip of the blade managing only to scratch against the outer layer of the Hollow’s carapace, though it forced me back with a thrust of its spear, threatening my soul with its tainted blade.

Even as I stepped back, I let my blade loose on the Hollow, making it flicker with the speed of my attacks and forcing the Hollow to defend continually, unable to pursue its quarry. My spiritual energy surrounding my burned brighter in the sky, a spire of pure silver energy radiating like a beacon.

I knew that those outside could see the energy, and as it continued to slowly build and grow, only adding more to my power with every moment I was subsumed in this state of soul perfection, I could only hope that those outside would know to come.

I opened my senses further, letting my eyesight fall away and be subsumed entirely by the spiritual senses that were so much more powerful. Holding the silver blade in my hand, I could see the trails through the air of where I could send it, following complex courses through the air to reach its targets.

The blade flickered and danced as I stood still within the centre of a vortex of highspeed attacks. Every now and then I tried to make a serious attempt on the Adjuchas, though was always fended off by the Hollow’s quick movements, the Soul Reaper inside being forced to perform the actions that they’d spent their entire life on.

The Zanpakutō’s name would be forever lost to time, and even looking at it was like looking at a desecrated corpse whose face was still stretched into a scream of pain from how they had been killed. It was no longer capable of much more than taking a facsimile of its form, adding only a little power in comparison to what it might’ve once been capable of.

Yet, something was off.

I continually battered against the Hollow, slowly gaining power as it stayed entirely stagnant and unchanging. It wouldn’t be long till I would be capable of defeating it as it stood, maybe a few more bouts would be all that it would take. It was possible that Grayhom’s ace in the hole, completing my soul, wasn’t accounted for but that seems ridiculous.

It was too late when I noticed it, when I noticed the reason that the Adjuchas had slain its only true ally, with all the rest of the Hollows incapable of approaching our fight.

Underlying the commotion of our fight, the intensity of the spiritual pressure and energy being thrown into attack after attack, there laid a tiny pulse of energy. It wasn’t much, but it was pure, closer to my own energy than anything else. However, the important part was that it was specific.

It wasn’t an attack, or anything of the sort. It was a signal; it was a lure.

I didn’t even have the time to chastise myself for the massive oversight as I felt a strange pulling sensation, followed by the sound of shattering glass resonating through the air. I whipped my head towards the sudden appearance of an opening in space, something that looked like pure void to all of my senses, despite hurriedly checking every way I could.

The ribbon sense was the one that gave me the information I wanted, watching as a thick ribbon practically spilled from the hole in space as if it were a waterfall.

“You have become distracted.” The distorted voice rang from beside me as the Adjuchas’ spear thrust into my side, slicing yet another hole besides the one already in my stomach. I growled with the pain, feeling its spear desperately trying to leak the chaos of its own malformed soul into my own, but the perfect purity of my own was too dominant.

I struggled desperately against the taint, the air around me almost boiling with the spiritual pressure of the energy I was using to burn it away. The Hollow screeched with a dark laughter, filled with the chaos of the real Hollow that laid beneath the copious editing done to it. We stood, locked together as our energies warred within me, my own silver energy purging the Hollow’s rotten energy as it was pumped into me through the desecrated Zanpakutō.

I was stuck, unable to do anything but fend of the Hollow’s attempts at controlling me with its full corruption, and the Hollow incapable of even doing so much as moved the spear’s blade deeper inside of my body without breaking the iron focus, we fought with.

This was no longer a battle, and maybe it was never intended to be. It was only a stalling tactic with an extremely low chance of success, a trap that I was likely to walk into and be stuck in. The Adjuchas was powerful, but not powerful enough in combat to match the power of myself, as a newly dubbed Life Bringer.

If it had worked together with the massive peak Hollow companion, whose soul was being burnt after its death to call whatever possessed that massive ribbon beyond the hole in space, the likelihood of their attack succeeding on me would have gone up slightly. But not enough.

No, this was a being created to halt me, or be able to lock down a soul far more powerful than its own. The desecrated Zanpakutō that was capable of inserting spiritual energy into a body like a needle, the soul of a Hollow with the ability to control like a puppet master, and the tortured sections of a Soul Reaper, deformed and rotting to create the taint, the sludge of a decomposing soul.

I raged against the toxic energy, but I couldn’t win so easily, even as I knew my spiritual pressure was slowly eating away at the form of the Adjuchas that braved its intensity. It was taking too long, leaving me unable to do so much as even look at the massive ribbon I could still vaguely feel in the back of my mind.

They, whoever they were, are trying to stop me from doing something. But there was nothing I could do but wait for one of us to falter, and it certainly wasn’t going to be me. I burned the energy back, slowly overpowering it to where I would soon be destroying the energy the moment it was pushed into me, the only way to give me a single moment to react and free myself.

It simply took too long, the method simple and sure-fire, but as inescapable as could be, with the only solution being having more power to utilise. It was at the height of my anxiety, of the fear that desperately clamoured inside of me, that there was a sudden…

BANG.

I reeled back, the sudden rush of air and spiritual energy assaulting my mind like a flashbang in the darkness. I was free, I realised, freed from the Hollow’s trapping corruption. My senses extended outwards again reflexively, like a bird spreading its wings, and I sensed the perpetrators int eh sudden change, both of which stood battered and slowly being crushed under my and the Hollow’s spiritual pressure.

“Thought–” The man standing before me coughed roughly, his voice gravelly from whatever had left dark bruises around his throat, “Thought you might’ve needed some help, kid.”

Two very familiar ribbons stood in front of me, both of their arms still outstretched where they’d simultaneously clobbered the Hollow. Jinta and Uyu stood tiredly, their bodies beaten and bruised physically and spiritually. I opened my mouth to speak, but the seething spiritual pressure of the Adjuchas desperately reached out for my own, a last bid effort to trap me again as its spear sliced through my spiritual energy.

“G-Grayson!” Uyu’s weak voice screamed out, cracking with the sudden terror, but the scream had come too late.

I flicked my hand, the power I had built during my forced bondage whipping out with my blade. The thin ribbon of silver metal spiralled out from the elegant hilt of the sword, occluding the Hollow’s spear and body with the metal before I gave the handle a brief tug.

The bladed spiral tightened around the Hollow’s form, wrapping it like a mummy in bandages, and a moment later black blood leaked out of the small seams, the Hollow’s lifeblood leaving its body and putting it to rest. I would have to come back to separate its constituent parts and return them to the cycle, much like a Soul Reaper could, but there were more important things to do.

I turned my attention to the massive ribbon, now even more prominent than before, the origin point of it being ever so close to coming into the Human World from the void that it resided in. For just a moment I was confused, the Hollow only ranking as a Menos Grande. But it was the next moment that I recognised its Frankenstein design, the horrible truth that laid inside of its soul, and the remnants of the evil mind that had created it.

I turned to the father and daughter duo, as the Adjuchas’ crimson barrier fell, who I now realised seemed entirely unaffected by the spiritual pressure billowing out of me, even glowing with their own little silver aura, bolstering their own power.

“We have to go.” I urged solemnly, “Now.”