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Once a Gillian receives the call of the Forest of Menos, no obstacle can halt their advance, that is the iron law of Hueco Mundo.
The massive footprints Wayne had been following, paired with a faint thread of Reiatsu, told the story in the wreckage left along the route.
Whatever had passed through here had torn through several Hollow gathering grounds without slowing down.
The footprints kept going, which meant the Gillian was still moving.
Whether it was Yammy, Nel, or just some other Hollow Beast, Wayne had to catch up and find out.
In the ruins of those gathering grounds, he came across Hollow Beasts that had survived with grievous wounds, barely clinging to life.
From them he took sustenance, and something more valuable: information.
One was a wounded Aberrant Hollow, roughly three meters tall, with the ability to conceal itself in shadow.
So long as it stayed within shade, it could hide its form completely.
For Wayne, though, its Reiatsu — thrown into chaos by its injuries — became its fatal tell.
In a single exchange, he knocked it out of the shadows and interrogated it.
The story it told: a solitary Gillian had passed through the area several days ago.
The High Hollows here saw an opportunity and swarmed it.
It did not go as planned.
The Gillian was exceptionally powerful.
A near-unbroken stream of Cero tore apart their assault lines, and then came the soul consumption, relentless, terrifying.
Countless mid- and low-level Hollow Beasts were devoured entirely.
Only a handful of wounded High Hollows managed to flee.
The Aberrant Hollow before Wayne was one of them.
“You’re saying the Gillian didn’t actively pursue any of you High Hollows that ran?” Wayne pressed the bone blade he had recently grown against the Aberrant Hollow’s Hollow Mask.
“What did it look like?
No awareness at all?” “It wore a jester’s mask — pointed nose, no expression whatsoever.
Nothing behind it.” The Aberrant Hollow had no capacity to resist.
All it could do was tell the truth and hope Wayne let it live.
“Lost consciousness, huh…” A doubt stirred in Wayne’s mind.
“Can I…
can I go now…” the Aberrant Hollow trembled.
Pff.
Wayne raised his hand and finished it off with a single swipe.
He tore off its Hollow Mask, stuffed it into his mouth, and resumed sprinting along the trail of footprints.
As he ran, he turned the matter over in his mind.
If what that High Hollow had said was true, he might have already broken the natural course of the Soul Reaper world, or at the very least, knocked Hueco Mundo off its proper trajectory.
Both Nel and Yammy had the potential to reach Vasto Lorde.
But now, one of the two had lost consciousness at the Gillian stage, which made a second advancement at least one tier harder to achieve.
Or maybe the Gillian he had been chasing all this time was neither Nel nor Yammy.
Either way, whichever answer it turned out to be was bad news.
Still, clinging to that slim thread of hope, Wayne kept up his relentless pursuit.
He moved fast.
At this pace, he should close the gap within two days.
As a Hollow, as long as his Reiryoku held, he could move day and night without rest, fatigue simply did not apply to him.
Sleep and dormancy were only necessary for healing wounds and replenishing Reiryoku.
For now, he had no time for either.
With odds of less than one in three, he had to press on without pause.
Time lost its meaning.
In the dim expanse of Hueco Mundo, Wayne ran without stopping.
When he needed to recover Reiryoku, he found a spot and rested briefly.
When hunger struck, he hunted down the nearest Hollow Beast to fill his stomach.
At that pace, guided by the faint lingering trace of Reiatsu, he finally caught up, at some point during those days of pursuit, with the target he had been chasing.
A Menos Grande, indistinguishable from any other Gillian, shambling forward without a trace of awareness.
Wuuuu-aooooo-aooooo…
“Finally caught up, have I?” The howl distinctive to a Gillian rose from the other side of a hill.
The moment Wayne heard it, he pulled himself to a dead stop.
A Gillian was different from a High Hollow.
That qualitative leap changed even the scent of its Reiatsu, which was precisely why tracking it by footprints and a familiar Reiatsu signature alone was such a long shot to begin with.
“Can’t go forward to confirm yet.
Not until I know whether it still has awareness.” Wayne stood still, thinking it through.
“I need to assess the danger first.
If it’s truly gone unconscious and locks onto me, everything I’ve worked for goes up in smoke.” He had no fear of a Gillian in a straight fight.
But his current condition was far from ideal.
The prolonged journey had consumed a substantial portion of his Reiryoku.
“Recover first.
Then observe.” He suppressed his Reiatsu, slowed his steps, and crested the hill.
On the other side, a massive figure moved at a slow, lumbering pace, advancing step by step in a direction even it seemed unaware of.
Wayne confirmed this was the Gillian he had been searching for, then quickened his pace and sprinted to its left, hoping to circle around to its front and get a look at its face.
He could not be detected.
If this Gillian had truly lost consciousness and its violent instincts had taken over, then whether it turned out to be Nel or Yammy, it would not pass up the meal right in front of it.
He circled to the left side and looked up.
The mask on the Gillian’s face was a pointed-nosed, witch-like jester’s mask.
The mark of lost consciousness.
“Tsk…
Has it really lost awareness?
Or have I been wrong this whole time and followed the wrong one?” Wayne’s heart sank.
Given the strength of both Yammy and Nel, neither should have lost consciousness at this stage.
Unless his own presence had altered the course of the story.
Think about it, without him, Nel and Yammy might never have crossed paths during the High Hollow stage.
That great battle between them would never have happened.
And if that battle had never happened, perhaps neither of them would have lost consciousness at all.
“Whatever the case, I’ll keep following.
Right or wrong, I can’t just leave this alone.” He masked his Reiatsu and fell into step behind the Gillian, keeping his distance, not too close, not too far.
Wuuuu-aooooo…
That grating cry rang in Wayne’s ears again.
The mindless howling unsettled him, because the more it cried out like that, the less he knew what to do.
“With my current ability, killing it outright would be no problem.
But the question is — who is this Hollow?” His feelings were complicated.
Killing it would solve everything, but if this Gillian was Nel, he couldn’t kill her, he would need to help her advance, because only then would her consciousness return.
But if it was Yammy, an Adjuchas-level Yammy would crush Wayne on the spot without breaking a sweat.
Faced with this life-or-death gamble, he couldn’t make up his mind.
He could only silently trail behind, matching the Gillian’s slow, lumbering pace.
Wuuu-aooo…
A roar from the distance broke through his thoughts.
Looking out, he saw another Gillian advancing toward the first with the same lumbering stride, and that same witch-like jester mask marked it as equally unconscious.
When two enemies meet, a fight was inevitable.
Wayne put some distance between himself and the imminent collision and crouched behind a sand dune, watching.
“Two Gillians meeting will come to blows.
I’ll observe before deciding whether to intervene.” Both Nel and Yammy had the potential to eventually reach Vasto Lorde.
If either of them fell here, there was no point continuing the pursuit.
So he told himself this was a test of their worth, and he settled in to watch.
The gap closed to less than five hundred meters.
The two Hollows finally met.
Twin roars erupted simultaneously and sent a tremor rippling through the surrounding air.
An instant later, two blasts of Cero, the signature power of Menos Grande, burst from their mouths and slammed into each other.
The resulting explosion was enormous.
Where the Ceros collided, the dead trees and shattered rocks nearby were pulverized to dust.
“Tsk, tsk.
As expected of Menos Grande.
Even now that my Reiatsu is no lower than theirs, unleashing an attack on that scale is a pipe dream.
Advancement really does make all the difference.” Wayne clicked his tongue from the sideline, but he wasn’t idle.
While the two Hollows were locked in their Cero exchange, he sprang to his feet and charged toward the Gillian he had been following.
Before it could notice, he snapped off a fragment of his bone blade and drove it into the edge of the Gillian’s black cloak.
Then he sprinted away at full speed.
“Phew…
that way I won’t lose track of it.” Running clear of the battlefield, Wayne reflected on what he had just done.
The point was to anchor a thread of his own Reiryoku to the Menos Grande he had been tracking.
In a battle at this level, he couldn’t expect to weave through the battlefield freely every time.
Now, even if he got injured and was forced back, he wouldn’t lose sight of his target.
With that tracking measure in place, Wayne retreated to a safe distance and turned his attention to the fight.
Roar after furious roar poured from both Gillians, each cry accompanied by dark-red Cero carrying tremendous destructive force.
From the start of the fight to now, each had fired three blasts.
For a Gillian-level Menos Grande, five Cero in a single battle should be the upper limit.
Anything beyond that meant either naturally superior Reiryoku, or a Hollow close enough to Adjuchas that its reserves had grown considerably.
The Gillian Wayne had been tracking clearly belonged to the former category.
After its third Cero, the speed at which it gathered energy for the fourth visibly slowed.
The Gillian across from it was exactly the same.
“Two evenly matched Gillians.” The pupils behind Wayne’s Hollow Mask narrowed slightly.
“Then there’s no point watching any further.” He began building up his Reiryoku.
The moment the fifth Cero was fired, he lunged forward in a single bound.
Before the smoke from the explosion had cleared, he launched himself into the air, Shadow Step into Shattering Slash, and brought it crashing down onto the other Gillian’s Hollow Mask.
Old strength spent, new strength not yet drawn, that Gillian was at its most vulnerable.
Wayne’s long-prepared strike landed clean.
The Hollow Mask shattered with a thunderous crack.
The will-o’-wisp pupils went dark.
Its towering body, tens of meters tall, crashed to the ground.
The Hollow Mask vanished in the very instant of its fall.
Wuuu-wuuu…
Aooooo-aooooo!
Seeing its enemy go down, the Gillian Wayne had been following let out a furious roar, then continued onward.
As it passed the fallen body, it crouched down and, mouthful by mouthful, swallowed the still-Reiryoku-laden corpse into its stomach.
“Mm…
I’ll just keep following for now.” Two hundred meters away, Wayne held two cracked fragments of Hollow Mask in his hand and chewed them slowly, piece by piece.
“I hope you’re really Nel.” ➤ Next: Forest of Menos [FULL STORY ACCESS] Unlock (100+ Chapters) ahead of the public release!