“Huu…
hah…
huu…” He had no idea how long he’d been running.
All Ace Wayne knew was that he’d finally hit empty, collapsing behind a massive boulder and gasping for breath.
He couldn’t manage another step.
“Huu…
huu…
I can’t believe it.
I’ve only been here such a short time and I’m already this badly hurt.” He kept working to steady his breathing.
“Good thing that big brute was stupid — otherwise I might’ve actually died back there.” He’d been running long enough to lose all sense of direction.
He had no idea where he was.
I need to find somewhere to recover.
Fast.
His wounds were serious, but he couldn’t just stop and rest yet.
Battered as he was, he still had to drag himself somewhere with enough cover to hide, because in unfamiliar territory, with no backup and no shelter, even a Hollow one rank above him could probably put him down without much effort.
Once his breathing had steadied, Wayne forced himself up and started moving again.
Calling it a search for shelter was generous.
The whole way, he crept with extreme caution, because nobody ever knew what might be waiting just beyond the next dune.
Nearly an hour later, he found it, a shallow depression tucked out of the wind.
He spent a moment scanning the surroundings.
No other Hollows nearby.
He used his less-injured left hand to scoop out a patch of sheltered sand, looked around one more time to confirm there was nothing dangerous, then lay down into the pit and pulled the sand over himself.
Fortunately, the sand of Hueco Mundo was composed of Reishi, breathing wasn’t a concern.
There was an old claim that Hueco Mundo’s sand was formed from the remains of dead Hollows.
Whether that was true or not, no one really knew.
My body is too badly hurt.
I don’t know how much it’ll recover while I’m dormant.
Lying buried in the sand, the exhaustion he’d been forcing back finally broke free all at once.
Every Hollow could regenerate, that much was true.
But regeneration and fast regeneration were different things entirely.
Only a small fraction of high-level Hollows ever mastered High-Speed Regeneration, let alone Ultra-Rapid Regeneration.
For a weak creature at Wayne’s current level, all he could do was lean on his meager reserves of Reiryoku and wait for his body to slowly knit itself back together.
He let out a slow breath, stopped overthinking, and let the darkness take him.
How long he slept, he couldn’t say.
“…ROAR!” Whether it had been a long time or barely minutes, the answer didn’t matter, because a crack of thunder split the silence and blasted him awake.
His eyes snapped open.
He launched himself out of the sand in a single motion and immediately locked onto the source of the sound.
To his left and ahead, a buffalo-shaped Beast Hollow nearly two meters tall was pawing the ground, horns aimed squarely at him.
Wayne didn’t panic.
He assessed.
Beast Hollow.
Buffalo form.
Two sharp bone horns leveled at him, muscular frame standing noticeably taller than his own.
Judging by its rage, it had either caught his scent or sensed the Reiatsu he’d been leaking during dormancy.
And going by the intensity of that Reiatsu, this was a High-Class Common Hollow.
The most likely read: it had detected that Wayne’s Reiatsu was weaker than its own and decided to make a meal of him.
Or maybe Wayne had simply taken over its territory while it was out hunting.
He leaped right and repositioned on steadier ground, putting distance between himself and the buffalo Hollow while quickly taking stock of his injuries.
His right arm’s bones had largely recovered.
The five Bone Blades, though, weren’t fully grown back, the ones at the ring finger and pinky positions had only returned as short stubs, while the shattered thumb Bone Blade had been restored.
Index and middle finger were still intact.
All in all, his right arm was back to a good portion of its fighting strength.
This dormancy had lasted a while.
He wasn’t at peak, but it was more than enough to deal with the dull-witted bull in front of him.
“You want to eat me?” A thin smile.
“I doubt you have what it takes.” He dropped his center of gravity and focused.
By Reiatsu alone, the buffalo Hollow had a considerable edge over him, its speed and strength probably matched.
But Wayne was confident a beast running purely on instinct and appetite, without a shred of intelligence, wouldn’t pose too great a threat.
Not without an overwhelming difference in raw power.
Because intelligence had a way of bridging gaps in speed and strength, of bringing down enemies many times stronger than yourself.
“MOO!” Rage in that bellow, and then it charged.
Fast.
Far faster than any maddened bull from a bullfighting ring.
But that kind of speed still couldn’t escape Wayne’s eyes.
He was no ordinary matador, he was a Humanoid Hollow, and he had a mind.
He sidestepped right.
The charge blew past him.
He turned and dropped to one knee at the beast’s flank, watching its every move.
It wheeled around and came again.
Same result, Wayne slipped the attack cleanly, and the buffalo Hollow bellowed in frustration.
Third charge.
Noticeably slower than the first two.
Tired already?
The thought crossed his mind, but he killed it fast.
Sure, a bigger body burned more stamina and Reiryoku per sprint, but this was only the third exchange.
There was no way it was running low on Reiatsu already.
Something was off.
Wayne settled his nerves and tracked every detail of the buffalo Hollow’s approach.
The instant it was about to slam into him, he flickered aside, let it miss, then immediately planted his feet and pushed off again without thinking.
His instincts had been right.
This time the beast didn’t just barrel straight through, after missing, it caught itself, raised its front hooves, and stomped down hard toward exactly where Wayne had landed.
But Wayne had already seen it coming.
His second dodge cleared it cleanly, and the buffalo Hollow threw its head back and howled in fury.
There it is.
Wayne seized the moment.
He drove hard off the ground and charged forward, left fist slamming squarely into the beast’s head.
THUD!
Bone on bone — a dull crack shot through with the sound of something splitting.
He pulled back immediately at full speed.
By the time he planted his feet, there was a solid stretch of distance between him and the buffalo Hollow.
Pain traveled up his nerves and landed in his brain.
His left hand was completely numb.
He raised it and looked: the keratin layer across his knuckles was shattered.
He glanced back at the buffalo Hollow.
A single shallow fracture in its head plating.
“I got careless.” Wayne frowned.
“I forgot — it’s a Hollow, not an actual water buffalo.
Its skull is far harder.” “ROAR!” Damage to the Hollow Mask hit the buffalo Beast Hollow hard, but right now, the biggest impact was on its temper.
Rage consumed it completely.
It threw itself at Wayne with zero restraint, and the fight reset to exactly where it had started.
“Moo…” Then the buffalo Beast Hollow stopped.
It stood there pawing the ground, breath heavy and labored, sending sand swirling up from beneath its hooves.
“Finally.” A cold smile tugged at the corner of Wayne’s mouth.
He straightened up, extended his left hand, and crooked his fingers.
Come on, then.
“MOO!” That did it.
The Beast Hollow snapped, lost the last shred of its reason, and burst forward, faster than any charge that had come before.
Wayne shifted into position the moment he saw it go.
The instant the buffalo Hollow closed in, he flashed left, poured every bit of his Reiryoku into his right claw, and slashed across its flank.
The beast’s own momentum worked against it, the claw parted the hide and drove straight through into the body beneath.
Two enormous gashes tore open.
Crimson sprayed in an instant.
The outcome was decided.
Wayne turned and walked toward the buffalo Beast Hollow already lying on the ground, barely clinging to life.
It let out a few low whimpers.
Begging, maybe.
The world of Hollows had no mercy.
Only the right the strong held over the weak, if your power was sufficient, you decided whether those beneath you lived or died.
Wayne had already made his decision.
He raised his right claw and drew it across its throat.
Blood sprayed.
The buffalo Beast Hollow stopped breathing.
Before its Reishi could scatter, Wayne tore off the Hollow Mask, crushed it, and swallowed it whole.
Then he left, found a section of weathered rock face, raked a gash into it with his claws, and dug out a hollow just large enough to fit inside.
He crawled in, breathed out slowly, and let himself begin digesting the spoils.
A few days?
A few hours?
No way to know.
When Wayne woke, the area was as quiet as a held breath.
He crawled out and released his Reiatsu to sweep the surroundings.
Nothing.
Not even a flicker of fluctuation.
The vicinity was clear.
The buffalo Beast Hollow’s Hollow Mask had been fully digested.
Wayne’s body had recovered to its prior state, and then some.
That made sense.
The Reiryoku inside him had nearly doubled.
Beyond what had been spent on his own recovery, everything else had been absorbed.
His Reiryoku had surged, and he was confident: he’d crossed out of Mid-Class Common Hollow and stepped into High-Class Common Hollow.
The changes were visible.
His overall frame was noticeably larger than before.
His right claw had bone spikes growing over the knuckle joints now, and the Bone Blades were sharper, the bone plating had extended from his forearm up to his upper arm.
It wouldn’t be long before it kept spreading.
He checked himself over, then got moving.
He took a rough bearing on his position.
The path he’d come from was behind him, everything else, the full 180 degrees ahead, was open.
That was the unexplored territory.
That was where he was going.
He climbed up a higher stretch of rock face and looked out into the distance.
At the edge of his vision, he spotted a pale region that looked like a thicket of white grass.
Closer up, he knew, it would be a bleached forest.
“Low-level prey can’t satisfy me anymore.” He gazed toward it.
“Time to go deeper — there are bigger things in there waiting to be hunted.” Mind made up, Wayne dropped from the rock face and broke into a run toward the distant trees.