Preface

Hello all, I actually was planning on putting this up on Monday according to schedule, but I was making edits to my other story, Gaming Guardian, and decided that I may as well update this while I'm at it. Don't worry, I'm not going to use this as an excuse to not update on Monday. It just means my update schedule gets moved up two weeks.

Anyway, if you like this story, please check out the others. If you need to get in contact with me, please PM me directly through this site or through my Pat Reon. I read the reviews, but I don't always reply to them.

Best,

Sorre

Chapter 4: Adjuchas

"Yo, and how are my adorable subordinates doing this evening," came the lazy drawl of the Eighth Division Captain, Shunsui Kyoraku. The man, as usual, was lying on his side with a saucer of clear sake in hand. The rest of the bottle was, predictably, within easy reach. He glanced over through a gap in his straw hat and gave them a friendly wave.

"You could at least pretend to be working, captain," came the irritated groan of their Lieutenant, Lisa Yadomaru. She was a short woman with glasses, somewhat plain, with ash-black hair tied in a ponytail. She was slaving away at the paperwork her captain was too lazy to do, again.

Beside her, an equally stern woman sat with a pile of her own. Their Third Seat, Nanao Ise, nodded and threw a reproachful glare towards the pink-clad captain. Unfortunately, as a recently promoted third seat, she wasn't quite brave enough to nag her captain into motion. She was, hower, content to take out her irritation on the two lower ranked officers. "Report, 17th Seat Johan, 19th Seat Manami. You are early; why did you see fit to abandon your posts?" she barked. Someone had to take their job seriously after all.

The two junior officers knelt. "Ma'am, as ordered, we were on a year long patrol mission to the human world, a city known as Cape Town," Johan began. "There, we noticed something strange roughly four months ago. The town is one the largest city on the continent as the humans use it as a trading post. Due to the more… aggressive methods employed by European traders, there is no shortage of negative emotion and regret. As a result, there were many hollows."

"Were?" their lieutenant asked. Nearby, even their captain put down his drink, his eyes taking on a clarity that was typically present only before the Captain Commander. The last time hollows went missing en masse, they had a war against the Quincy. Peace was fine, but any form of abnormality warranted caution to the highest degree.

"Yes, ma'am," Manami continued where her partner left off. "Roughly four months ago, we were chatting and noticed an unusual absence of hollows. Looking back, the phenomenon seems to have begun as far back as five or six months previously. Then, a week ago, we found the cause: an intelligent hollow that preys on other hollows."

Shunsui's reiatsu filled the air, bringing the two weakest officers to the ground. "Ah, crap, sorry about that, you two," he apologized. "I forget myself sometimes. I could've sworn you said an intelligent hollow was hunting other hollows for a sec."

"T-that's right, sir," Johan stuttered out and collapsed as the agitated captain's power filled the room again.

A sandal struck the man's cheek and bounced back into Lisa's hand. She caught it with expert ease, the proof of her experience at handling her eccentric superior. "Chill out, captain. Scaring the rookies isn't going to make this any better," she said. "Now, Johan, tell me everything."

And so, they did. They spoke about how they saw two men about to rape a girl. They told them how the girl was spiritually aware and how Manami wanted to give her a quick death rather than allow her to suffer such an experience. They talked about how a hollow, some sort of insect, intervened and killed the two assailants while leaving the girl alive, how the hollow blocked Manami's sword and made sure the human was safe before retreating through a garganta.

Shunsui sat up and massaged the bridge of his nose, clearly nursing a headache. "And as he left, you lost a philosophical debate… to a hollow? And after ensuring that he was not returning, you came here as soon as you could?"

"Y-yes, and," Manami began but was cut off a moment later.

"I wouldn't say he's wrong though," Shunsui sighed. "Alright, listen up. Everything you've said today is now top-secret. I'll take this up with Yama-ji and see what he thinks of it. There will likely be a special bounty placed on the hollow. I want you to write up a report on it with everything you can remember."

Two rapid nods later, the officers were dismissed and Lisa and Nanao were trying to go back to their paperwork, with little success. Their captain took a single sip of his sake before sighing again and tossing the cup aside. "Captain," Lisa said, "what do you make of the hollow?"

"Honestly, I have no idea. Could it be possible to cooperate with some of the smarter hollow?"

Lisa gave an unladylike snort. "With all due respect, captain, it was probably just looking for the easiest way to eat without drawing attention. I wouldn't trust a hollow as far as I could throw one."

X

Cameron rammed his head into a quartz tree for the twelfth time. "Stupid, stupid, stupid," he muttered, "You just had to reveal yourself. She would've forgotten about it all as soon as she arrived in Soul Society and you just had to play the damn hero." Truth be told, he wasn't afraid of Soul Society's response, they weren't going to attack Hueco Mundo just for him after all, even if they did somehow make a garganta of their own. No, he was afraid the incident would reach the ears of the captains, and Aizen by extension. He'd have to evolve as quickly as he could and once he made adjuchas, he could hopefully lay low.

X

Anathi found herself desperately running for her life. If someone were to point out the similarities between this event and the one five years prior, she'd scowl and stab them. She couldn't help but wish that the spirits of her ancestors would come help her again though. Demon or not, monster or not, it had helped her freely when the pale one would only grant her a quick death.

'But if you died, you wouldn't be going through this,' a pessimistic voice sniped in her mind. Now, she found herself running for her life, not from rapists and murderers, but from slavers, pale men that wanted to take her across the sea into lands unknown. She was forced to a rapid stop as more men came out from behind the trees. "You're quite famous around here, you know. Anathi the Seer, they call you. They say you can speak to the dead and see the future," one of the slavers said with a jeer. His face would have been handsome if not for the ugly scar on his lip. He spat at the ground between her feet. "You're supposed to be wise and beautiful, some sort of fortune teller, the Darling of the Desert, they call you. Bullshit," he spat again. This time, she saw it was some sort of plant that darkened his teeth a putrid yellow. "All you fucking heathens are good for is picking cotton."

"No, I do not see the future, pale one. If I did, perhaps I would have chosen to die at her blade," she said bitterly. "I simply see the past more clearly than the rest."

The men bound her hands with rope that chafed and dragged her like a dog to the ocean. There, she was forced to board a ship with two hundred other slaves. Some of them, she could remember had sought her advice. One had even asked her to bless his newborn daughter that he might grow up to be as beautiful and wise as her. With a heavy heart filled with regret, she sailed for the land that would be called Brazil.

X

It had been thirty years since he had been forced to withdraw to Hueco Mundo. Sometimes, he still wondered what became of that little girl, the one who could see spirits, the one who showed him that there was a bit of humanity still inside. Then, he would be forced into yet another life or death battle and thoughts of the girl would flee his mind. The inattentive hollow was a dead hollow and Cameron Gold had in intention of dying so soon. Today, or tonight, it was hard to tell in Menos Forest, he was back where it all began: Red's territory.

He had grown extremely proficient at reiatsu manipulation, to the point where he could cloak while moving forward. He couldn't move very quickly while doing it, but he could move. It also took him only a split second to stray from the visual spectrum. The miniature wings that covered his hollow hole on his back, the same that would allow a dragonfly to soar, had grown larger. If that wasn't proof of his impending evolution, he didn't know what was.

He didn't really know what made him return to Red's territory. He had been extremely cautious after the last incident, but something drew him here. He wanted Red to be his final kill as a base hollow. Perhaps he was a sucker for the dramatic. Perhaps he wanted revenge for his temporary exile into the human world. Perhaps he was just a poetic idiot. He didn't know, but it didn't really matter. What he did know was that Red would be coming by this way in a few minutes, as he always did when running from one end of his territory to another.

Sure enough, the ocelot-like hollow with a spiked tail dashed through the trees. With a mighty jump, Cameron lept from his hiding place just below his prey and let loose his spear-tipped jaw. It sank into Red's stomach with a dull thud. Cameron drew it in and fell with Red pinned below him with his six arms.

"Y-you!" Red gasped as he struggled to escape. Cameron only chuckled and held on tighter. He twisted his labium and soaked in the pained groan of his opponent.

"Me," he shrugged, "Don't take this personally, Red, I just want to evolve like you."

"You were weaker than me," he coughed, "H-how are you stronger?"

Cameron hummed. "Well, I'm an ambush predator, as you well know. I also wasn't that much weaker than you, only weak enough that fighting you directly would be a bad idea. Besides, you take reiatsu to be more important than it really is," he said. The clearing was filled with a powerful pressure as Cameron unleashed his hold on his reiryoku. "See, it's possible for someone to permanently seal their own power, especially if that someone excels at ambush hunting. Then, it won't show up as reiatsu. After all, reiatsu is only externally manifested reishi. You told me I wasn't as good at sensing others as I was at hiding, and you were right. But as it turns out, you're not that great at sensing either.

"You know what else? The reason I'm stronger now isn't because I'm special, it's because you're weak. You've always been afraid, Red. I remember what you told me about the hollow called Cerberus. You've always been too afraid to accept the power already in your grasp, but I'm not. I've been testing myself through one battle after another and getting stronger. All the while, you've done nothing but run from one end of your territory to the next, playing at being a king when really, you're just too weak that no one wants to bother killing you."

Red gave a berserk roar. He knew he was dead, there was no way having twin daggers in your chest cavity wasn't fatal, especially not for a hollow that had no real regeneration ability. No, there was no way he'd survive, but he wouldn't let his death be meaningless. He mustered all the strength he had and lashed his tail at his killer's throat. He was rewarded with a dull squelch as the spike impaled itself into a hastily raised leg.

"Fuck!" Cameron swore as he brought another leg down on Red's tail, spearing it into the earth with his claws. He pulled out his mandibles and speared them through Red's mask, killing him instantly. 'You're a fucking idiot, Cameron!' he berated himself even as he began to consume his last meal. 'You had him! You could have killed him, but noooo. You had to monologue like a third rate Bond villain!'

Even as he ate, his armored plates thickened and he gained mass disproportionate with the food he was consuming. Cameron lost himself to the frenzy and when he came to, he found he was now about a third of the height of the tallest trees. That is, he was a third of the height of the ceiling of Menos Forest. He frowned behind his mask. 'Other gillian were bigger,' Cameron thought, 'a lot bigger.'

He had met some gillian in Menos forest. He did not like them much. Truth be told, they were "higher beings" only in that they had much greater reserves of reiryoku. Most were dumb and slow. He would have tried to eat one, but that would inevitably gain the fury of the entire mob and he wasn't about to risk a rain of cero if he could help it. He wasn't sure what to think. Unlike other gillian, he was only half their size.

Over the course of two months, he quickly found the limits of his abilities. Just as he was half their size, he was twice as fast. He also found that he retained many of the abilities he had as a base hollow. The only thing that didn't translate over was the perfect spherical vision. Instead, his mask was more normal and his eyes only saw through the front, like everyone else. It was rather disorienting, he had grown to appreciate his compound eyes and was somewhat sad to see them go. His mask was similar to most gillian in that it reminded him of a knock off pinocchio, but unlike others, he had clear mandibles for a mouth rather than lips.

For better or worse, he also found that the signature skill of all hollow, the cero, came far easier to him than it did for most gillian. Most took several seconds to charge, but he managed to fire one off every two seconds or so. That part of the forest remained a wasteland as a result of his testing.

X

"Let's see," he muttered to himself. He had begun testing out his cero as soon as he found a relatively abandoned stretch of forest. He started by killing every base hollow he could and made sure there weren't any adjuchas nearby that might take an interest in him. Like every other gillian, the cero was more an exercise in instinctive awareness than it was any refined skill. He wanted destruction and something inside him already knew how. He drew upon the energy within himself and, about ten seconds later, he had a crimson orb just before his mask. With a mental flick, the cero fired and decimated a large quartz tree. "How do I go about making this faster?"

He tried a number of ways to make it charge more quickly. He tried to cancel the charge half way, but as expected, the blast was proportionately weaker and just wouldn't be very useful against anything but base hollows. He tried a few meditation techniques he'd heard about, but immediately felt silly once he realized that most involved breathing and as a spirit, he didn't need to breathe in the first place.

"Think, Cameron, there's got to be a better way than this. What is a cero? It's Spanish for "zero." Yes, but what is it? It's a beam of negative energy so why is it called "cero?" Was Kubo an idiot? Yes, he probably just thought it sounded cool. ARGGGGHHHHH!" he yelled in frustration. "How am I supposed to survive the clusterfuck that is Aizen if I can't even have a reliable laser?"

Then, he promptly ran his head into another tree, denting the quartz. "Of course! I'm such a fucking idiot! You make lasers more powerful by concentrating them on one point. A laser by definition is a concentrated beam of light!" Sure, a cero wasn't light, but the principle was the same, right? Right.

That was how he got to where he was. Instead of charging the cero fully, he used his superior control gained from years of cloaking to compress it to ridiculous levels. By size alone, the beam's radius would only be about two or three feet wide, but that beam could cut through several of the thickest quartz trees in the forest. He then, on a whim, tried to draw in reiryoku directly from the air. He knew Kubo portrayed it as a strictly Quincy skill, but he had to try. The thought of developing a spiritual equivalent to senjutsu was too good to pass up. In the end, he couldn't quite make it happen. What he did manage was a brief infusion of air into his cero, creating something resembling a slipstream using the reiryoku particles already in the air. He wasn't absorbing them into himself. Instead, he was compacting them along with his own reiryoku to make his cero "heavier."

X

Twelve years after becoming a gillian, Cameron finally ascended to an adjuchas. The process was rather anticlimactic if he were being honest. He'd look back on his time as a gillian with surprising fondness. His small size, mobile cloaking, and relatively high agility made him the perfect predator, too insignificant to be noticed by stronger adjuchas and too talented to fall prey to the more average dangers of Menos Forest. He occupied that sweet spot between anonymity and apex predator and he loved it. One of his favorite tactics was to cloak, approach a herd of gillian, then hide. He'd then shoot his focused cero through a few gillian and immediately cloak again, sparking a feeding frenzy that would inevitably result in a handful of injured, but well-fed gillian. He would then strike down the leftovers, the best-fed, choicest morsels for himself.

He became an adjuchas in much the same manner. Normally, the gap between the different evolutionary stages of hollows was so wide that it was virtually impossible for a lesser hollow to feed on a greater hollow. An adjuchas, even a weak one, was better in every way. It was stronger, faster, and had larger reiryoku reserves as a result of the exponential increase in souls needed for ascension. Most important of all, an adjuchas had far more experience. Simply the fact that it was an adjuchas was proof that whatever its survival strategy, it was effective.

The only way to beat one was to take it off guard and the best way to do that was to attack while it was eating. So, that what he did. Cameron orchestrated the largest gathering of gillian he could make by creating a feast for lesser hollows. Effectively, by forcing so many base hollows to enter a feeding frenzy, he caused one or two to evolve. By injuring those and letting them cry out, he caused a larger feeding frenzy of gillian. Eventually, he drew in an adjuchas that wanted a quick snack. As it went for the final kill, Cameron charged as concentrated a cero as he could and punched a football sized hole through its mask. Adjuchas or not, it wasn't going to recover from that. He had learned his lesson from Red. He would not give a single opportunity for retaliation. There was no boasting. There was no showboating. As much as he wanted to indulge in a plan well executed, he knew better now.

Author's Note

No, I'm not done with Anathi. Yes, the Commander now knows about Cameron, though only as a hollow of interest. Yes, Aizen now knows about him, though he isn't considered strong enough to warrant interest, especially not when a certain time manipulating vasto lorde is so much stronger.

As for his unique cero, yes, I know how impossible it is for anything other than a Quincy to directly manipulate reiryoku in the air. Yes, it's going to be something of a unique skill of his. Bear with me because I do have a plan for this.

So, here's the timeline:

- Anathi is saved by Cameron sometime in the early 1700s.
- One week after the incident, Manami and Johan report to Shunsui, creating a dossier on the "intelligent hollow."
- 5 years later, Anathi is sold as a slave.
- 30 years after that (35 since the incident), Cameron kills Red and becomes a gillian.
- 12 years after becoming a gillian, he becomes an adjuchas.

Next chapter will pick up 47 years after the end of chapter 2.

As always, constructive feedback is appreciated.

Pat reon Sorre