“No need to worry.”
Lorde smiled slightly.
“Soon…
you will become just like them.”
As the words fell, Morrison suddenly froze, staring down at the Chain of Karma on his chest.
The chain was wriggling.
The chain, which should have been lifeless, seemed to have taken on a will of its own.
Crunch, crunch—it seemed to come alive all at once, sprouting countless tiny mouths lined with sharp teeth, gnawing at itself greedily, madly, the sound grinding against the ears.
The final erosion.
It came more violently than ever before.
“Aaaaaah—”
“Don’t…
don’t!”
“Stop it!
Stop it, aaaaah!”
Morrison’s face twisted in terror as he screamed hysterically.
The chains growing from his chest had turned into ravenous little demons, tearing at the very chain that symbolized his life.
Over the past few days, Morrison had watched countless subordinates transform into monsters—white-masked, hollow-chested horrors—once their chains were fully consumed.
“Save me!
Please, save me!”
“Aaaaah—you’re a demon!”
Morrison screamed in agony, his eyes burning with hatred.
“Ugh, aaaaah…”
His body curled in on itself as a black hole tore open where the chain met his chest.
Streams of white liquid gushed from his ears, nose, throat, mouth, and eyes, spreading over his face like a mask.
“Oh?”
Lorde watched with interest but made no move to stop it.
“Even as he falls, his soul remains intact,” he said, sounding surprised.
Normally, when a Plus fell into Hollowhood, the soul would shatter first, then reassemble elsewhere, and only afterward would the white mask and the hole in the chest appear.
But Morrison’s transformation was reversed.
The mask and the hole had appeared first, while his soul remained whole.
That meant he was still resisting.
He still had a sliver of hope—to find his own zanpakutō within his inner world and become a Soul Reaper, reversing the process before it consumed him entirely.
“Not bad,” Lorde said, nodding, satisfied.
A superior test subject, at last.
Why not stop him?
Because there was no need to.
“Aaaaah…”
Morrison kept screaming as the white liquid swallowed his soul, the mask sharpening with every passing second.
Boom—
A violent sound rose from the bottom of the pit, kicking up a howling wind. This story is hosted at g.com.
Lorde stood calmly, gazing into the smoke ahead.
“Let’s see…
what you’ve become.”
Buzz!
The reishi in the air surged, boiling like water on the verge of overflow.
Whoosh~
The dust scattered, and there stood Morrison—wearing a Soul Reaper’s uniform identical to Lorde’s, a standard zanpakutō in hand.
Lorde’s eyes lifted slightly, a faint smile touching his lips.
“He actually became a Soul Reaper?”
The uniform.
The blade.
Both marked him unmistakably as a true Soul Reaper—proof that Morrison had survived the Hollowfication.
“So…
this is power.”
After a moment of stunned silence, Morrison felt strength surge through him and let out a furious roar.
“I’m going to kill you!”
Bang!
With a single stomp, the ground cracked beneath him, and he shot forward like a cannonball.
“Die, demon!”
He brought his blade down with the full weight of his fury, driven by nothing but the sweetness of revenge.
The blade struck—not Lorde, but an empty outer garment left hanging in the air.
Shunpo: Utsusemi.
An advanced Soul Reaper technique—shedding an outer robe to dodge an attack, not unlike a ninja’s substitution trick.
“He’s gone?”
Morrison spun around, startled to find Lorde already standing behind him.
“Die!”
He turned and swung with everything he had.
Ding~
The blade stopped cold, caught effortlessly between two of Lorde’s fingers.
“That’s…
impossible.”
Morrison couldn’t believe it.
He threw his whole strength into the strike, and still the blade wouldn’t budge an inch.
“No need to be surprised,” Lorde said calmly, still holding the blade between two fingers, smile unwavering.
“The gap between us is far greater than you think.”
A battle between Soul Reapers is, in truth, a battle of spiritual pressure.
Morrison, a rookie who had only just become a Soul Reaper, could barely reach level ten.
How could he possibly stand against someone whose spiritual pressure sat at level six—among the elite?
“I don’t believe it!”
It’s not possible!”
“Aaaaah—”
Veins bulged across his body as he wrenched the blade free with sheer desperation and swung wildly.
“Die!
Die!”
But Morrison had never known real combat.
His swordsmanship was chaotic, worse than a street thug’s.
Lost entirely to rage, he stood no chance of landing a hit.
“Let’s end this,” Lorde said, sounding faintly bored.
He’d hoped Morrison might manage to release his zanpakutō properly.
Apparently, this was as far as he could go.
“Scatter…
Senbonzakura.”
Lorde turned his zanpakutō upside down and let it fall from his grip.
As it dropped, the blade dissolved into a storm of cherry blossom petals, pink and endless, swirling around him like an ocean.
“What…
is that?”
Morrison’s gaze went distant, drawn in by the beauty of the falling blossoms.
“So beautiful…” he murmured, not realizing that beauty this striking rarely came without danger.
Because Senbonzakura wasn’t just beautiful—each petal was a blade, and there were millions of them.
“Fall.”
Lorde raised his hand and slowly closed his fingers.
Whoosh!
The pink tide surged forward and swallowed Morrison whole in an instant, the blossoms grinding through flesh and bone like a thousand blades acting as one.
A moment later, the storm withdrew, the petals reforming into a single blade.
Morrison stood there, covered head to toe in deep gashes—a man made entirely of blood.
“Morrison, I want to thank you,” Lorde said quietly, watching him fade.
“Because you became a Soul Reaper, you’ve given me a soul of considerable quality.”
“So…
this was all your doing.”
Morrison’s eyes glazed over, his voice barely a whisper.
Yes.
All of it, arranged from the start.
Whether Morrison ended up a Hollow or a Soul Reaper had never mattered to Lorde—the outcome had been decided long before it began.
Every ounce of struggle, every desperate effort, had been nothing more than entertainment.
“Tell me!” Morrison gathered the last of his strength and screamed at the man still smiling before him.
“What…
am I?!”
“A tool,” Lorde said, his eyes flat and unreadable.
“And as a tool…
you passed.”