I felt the slight exhalation of breath on my neck, the Hollow’s mouth almost shaking with the exertion it took for it to not close around my flesh and bone.

“Easy now.” I said calmly, even as I pointed my silver blade right at its chest, the horizontal edge of it almost pressing against the shawl-like armour it was wrapped in. “Eating me would be a very difficult meal.”

The Hollow didn’t respond, or even react in any way. It stood there, its mask split open as it bared its horrifying maw to the world, a war waging within itself.

“Does it hurt?” I asked, almost curious, “Abstaining from human souls for so long? It must.” There was a twitch of movement, but the Hollow remained still otherwise.

Phantom was strong, extremely so. He would be a much more difficult and dangerous fight than the Frankenstein’s Adjuchas I fought before. Phantom was qualitatively, and quantitatively superior, without a doubt. Why that is could be for almost any reason, at least to the average eye.

But to mine, Phantom was like an art piece, degrading after ages of being left in a humid cellar. It was edited, yes, but with more curiosity and genuine interest than the others. It was older, almost ancient in comparison, being at least a few decades old.

But it didn’t quite make sense. Phantom’s existence broke the mould instead of enforcing it.

Being that old likely rivalled my own age, at least. I’m sure that Kisuke or someone had mentioned how long Phantom had been around, but I can’t remember how long exactly. But if Phantom had been around that long, and it was edited since then, that could only mean that Phantom pre-dated the current skirmish.

Why was it here? Who edited it? What did they edit? All questions I needed to find an answer to, and fast.

“Were you human once, Phantom?” I asked gently, feeling the Hollow twitch again slightly, “Do you remember those times, or are they just blurs to you now? A mirage of memory, lost in the storming of your soul.”

I let the words hang for a moment before I began to turn myself towards it, my sword staying faithfully in place, prepared to lash out and try to bisect the powerful Adjuchas level Hollow. It flinched multiple times, each time only just managing to restrain itself from trying to take a chunk out of my body, and the soul that laid beneath.

“I’ve heard some stories of you.” I continued, recalling snippets that Jinta had once recounted to me, “You’ve only been seen a handful of times, but it was always eating a Hollow. One even swore that you had done it to save them.” The Hollow was absolutely still, almost completely dead in its movements, but the slight quivering of its jaw was enough to give away its internal struggle.

“Did you?” I took a moment of thoughtful pause, “Did you do it to save them? Or were you just hungry and it was convenient?”

There was a light whistle of air as the Hollow moved. Without spiritual senses, my eyes wouldn’t even be able to perceive the movements at all. In fact, I just closed them altogether, my mind occupied with the Hollow that blurred with brutal speed.

Sonido, Kisuke had called it. Extremely powerful Sonido, with its only rivals being Kisuke or Tessai themselves.

The Hollow’s arm zipped out, its black hand reaching for my face with the elongated, white nails at the ends of its fingers.

It was fast, far faster than me for sure. I didn’t even come as contest to its raw speed, but I didn’t need raw speed, not when my blade only rested centimetres from its chest. I let the silver blade stab through the white shawl, breaking it and plunging into the dark flesh below.

And then the scenery took a drastic shift, you could say.

“Bro?” A little voice called out from his side, jolting him away from his thoughts.

“Yeah?” He replied, though he grimaced with just how droll his voice sounded, something he’d struggled with from childhood. It was easy to pick on a kid that sounded permanently depressed, apparently.

“What was Mum like?” The little voice asked, and he looked down at the little boy he was holding hands with as they walked. This was a common question, something that the boy asked almost every time they spent a silent moment together. He felt a spear of pain slice through his body with the question, like every time it was asked, but only a smile came to his face. One as warm as he could manage.

“She would sometimes help out at the vet down the road, you know?” He said, as if the little boy hadn’t heard it a million times. “She would help with cleaning and taking care of the animals as they got better.”

“Like a nurse?” The boy asked, a new question, one he hadn’t asked before.

“Yeah, like a nurse, just for dogs and cats instead of people.” He looked down at his little brother as his chubby face scrunched in thought. Their mother had always told him that he had looked much the same as his brother when he himself was a child. He couldn’t possibly disagree more, though. Maybe in general face structure, but his little brother was so much more expressive than he was.

You could just about see every distinct emotion on his little brother’s face, each pulling on his facial muscles in a way that he’d never quite been able to reproduce. At rest, his own face just looked… dead, for a lack of a better word. It was an unemotional mask for someone who’d always been told that he was full of emotions, yet again by his mother.

He hadn’t agreed with her back then either.

“Was Mum always a nurse?” The high-pitched voice chimed again, drawing a grimace out of his older brother.

“No, not always.” He said, but the answer wasn’t enough to placate the voraciously curious mind of his younger brother.

“What did she do?”

Nothing. It was an answer that wouldn’t satisfy his little brother, but it was true. She had enough money that she had the privilege to just simply do nothing at all. Now, it was all that let them live, away from the family around them that would be all too happy to ‘take them under their wings’, though they too only wanted the money.

“Well…” The older brother said painfully, trying to fight back the bitter pain of the memories from when she’d once taught him how investment worked, just because he’d asked her how it worked. He swallowed deeply and sighed, finally finding the words.

“Do you remember when I said that Mum left Dad?” The child nodded seriously, more seriously than he should be at his age, but a necessity for how they lived. “Well, when Mum did that, she made sure that she got some money that was hers. Because Dad is rich, she got a lot of money.”

The situation was so much more complicated than that, but his little brother seemed to follow along with the idea of it.

“So, Mum took Dad’s money?” He grimaced at the little boy, trying not to let his lip quiver with the emotions that bubbled to the surface, even some particularly horrible ones that he had desperately pushed down into the depths of his mind.

“No, kiddo.” He said gently, trying not to snap at his brother, “She was allowed to have that money, even if Dad didn’t want her to have it.”

The little boy at his side stopped, pulling back on his arm as he tried to continue walking. With a sigh, he turned his dead neutral face towards his younger brother, trying to don a smile for him but failing horribly. The little boy looked into his eyes with his one, piercingly bright ones, as if they could see right through his mind and into his soul.

“Sora?” The little boy asked gently, “Hug?”

The older brother, Sora, looked down and sighed ruefully, a tiny but genuine smile coming to his face. He sat in a low crouch, pulling the small boy’s form into his own warmly, letting the memories slowly seep back below the surface of his mind and returning to the deepest recesses, biding their time till the next time they decide to show themselves.

Sora pulled away from his little brother with that same small smile, an expression so slight that only his mother and his brother had ever been able to recognise it when he wore it. He looked up at his brother, and jolted backwards, almost falling over in the panic.

“Sora?” The little boy said, though his voice was horribly distorted, disfigured almost beyond recognition, “I’m hungry.”

A bone white mask covered his brother’s face, a blank visage that was almost featureless aside from its teardrop design, the mask coming to a point at the chin, and two narrow slits for eyes with large, squared teeth perfectly closed.

“Sora?” The boy said again, though the boy who’s form he’d been hugging only moments earlier was melting away with a spindly, black being slowly escaping its restraints. Sora stood up, moving back more and more as he fled from the horrifying creature, then turning as he burst into a sprint down the street they’d been walking on.

Wait. What street? There was no street, there was nothing outside him and his little brother. His little brother… whose name he can’t remember. Where did he live? Who was his brother?

Sora continued to run across a surface he couldn’t see or comprehend, desperately running from a threat that he found himself more and more unsure of. Before long, he looked back from where he’d been running to find…

Nothing.

There was nothing. It was all just a bur of black and white, the surroundings forming and unforming in front of his eyes, any distinctive feature melting before his eyes and becoming something entirely different.

Then, with an abrupt suddenness, he was elsewhere.

A hospital, his body laid down in an uncomfortable bed as he tried not to move his arm, an IV sitting in forearm, pumping in a clear liquid. He looked around the room, trying to find any other occupants, but after a moment Sora found himself relaxing slightly.

No, there weren’t any occupants. It was the middle of the day; his little brother was at school and the nurses were dealing with the patients who were really paying attention to the seriously sick patients.

The seriously sick patients…

Sora broke through it again, finding himself outside of the memory itself, throwing it into disarray, even as the major set pieces remained unchanged. The bed, the IV, the door. There was a momentary pang of dread that just as the door opened, revealing a doctor, the same one that had done some testing on him a few hours prior to the memory.

Sora didn’t need to see the man’s mouth move to know what he’d said, and even back then he didn’t even need to hear the man speak to know that it was bad.

That was how Sora had died. To an inherited illness from his father that he’d never known about and had caught too late to do anything to fix.

Death hadn’t been so bad, he remembered. It wasn’t painful, or all that unpleasant, just…

Slow.

It’d slowed him down to being nothing more than an old man in a young body, his mind no longer moving fast enough to have a conversation, not fast enough to even count the days as they slowly killed him. Maybe it hadn’t even been too long, or maybe his death had taken years.

Even when he’d died, it was still slow, frustratingly, horrifically slow.

He didn’t want to die, or to waste away into nothing, his being reformatted to become someone else’s basis for existence. He wanted to stay, even in his addled state, with his mind moving so slowly that it had become painful to even comprehend existing at all.

But he would. For his brother.

For Kouki.

He stayed, despite the greatest pain he’d ever experienced, the horror of it as he felt himself change, unable to understand what was happening to him. But he did, he chained himself here and suffered despite it.

Only to awaken with a sharp mind, one hellbent on consuming it all.

He had become the monster, he realised. He’d stayed alive at the cost of himself.

So, he stood stalwart. Using everything to stop the urges, even as more voices were added, all of them raving and ranting, desiring more and more. But he resisted them, he stood above them, using every modicum of his willpower to stop their desires from becoming reality.

There was no concrete understanding, no memories formed, just an eternal nightmare he was trapped in.

Until a silver blade had cut through the darkness, and pulled him to the front, establishing Sora as the being itself.

He had more control, but minutely. Power, he had in droves, but control was something he continued to battle with unerringly, his every mental faculty forcing itself to focus on stopping the horrors he knew that he was capable of.

He was failing.

He was hungry.

He needed to eat.

He desperately needed to eat.

And, just as he contemplated finally giving in, finally succumbing to the ever-screaming voices—of which there were thousands—a silver blade broke through into his mind.

Its silver radiance was different than the last one which had been so much duller. This was a different being altogether.

Sora looked up towards the silver blade as light burned from it, penetrating deeper into himself.

Whether it was here to end him, or to liberate him… Sora was content with either. He did what he felt he was right, finally accepting the fate he should have, so long ago. He closed his eyes to his fate, dreaming wearily of better times.