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Taylor screamed and tried to wipe the bugs and filth from her skin, only to stop when she realized she wasn't in the locker anymore. She was somewhere else, somewhere dark.
"Why this one, my Lord?" A voice asked. "She has no more spirit energy than any other ordinary human."
Taylor looked around, but still, she saw nothing but darkness. "Hello?" she nervously asked.
"Mere chance," another voice responded to the first. "With Soul Society still overwhelmed with souls and hollows from the destruction of Kyushu, I can freely conduct my experiments here, on the other side of the world. She was simply the first human I found on the verge of death whom one of the invaders linked to."
"Any why are you so interested in the invaders, hmm?" A third voice asked. This was one was low and sly and the sound of it made Taylor shudder.
"They are an anomaly," the second voice, who seemed to be the one in charge, replied. "The invaders clearly grant powers through the body instead of the soul, as the souls of dead parahumans lose their powers. So, what will happen if I grant a living parahuman access to spiritual powers? I intend to find out."
"Who are you?" Taylor demanded. Clearly, whoever these people were, they wanted to do something to her. With them talking about souls, they must be crazy capes, like Myrddin. "What do you want from me."
"So that's why you were digging into the hollowfication files again," the second voice said with a sly tone.
"Indeed," the leader responded. "The process will be different on a mortal as opposed to Shinigami, but the Hogyoku will allow the process to succeed. It will alter her, but I can wipe her memories and pass her off as one of the ones they call Case 53s."
Taylor's heart beat faster and faster. She had to get away, right now! Picking a direction at random, she started to run, only to be stopped by a hand grabbing her shoulder and holding her back. She struggled, but the grip was like steel and nothing she did could break it.
Light finally flooded the area, revealing Taylor to be standing on sand. Around her, smooth, white walls rose into the air, forming an octagonal pit. Two men wearing white stood at the top of the pit. One had dark skin and dreadlocks and wore a blindfold over his eyes while the other was pale, with short, gray hair, closed eyes, and a smile on his face that offered no comfort.
Taylor twisted around to see the one grabbing her. He was an Asian man also wearing white. He had brown hair with one strand hanging between his eyes. While he had a slight smile on his face, there was no warmth to be found in his expression.
"W-who are you?" Taylor barely managed to ask.
"I am Aizen Sosuke," the man said, his voice marking him as the leader. "Though soon, you won't remember I said that." He reached into his pocket and pulled out something. It looked like a tiny, blue bead, but something about it drew Taylor's gaze. It felt like the thing was staring into her. The glow of the bead overtook Taylor, and soon she knew nothing at all.
A girl wandered through unfamiliar streets in the dark of the night. She didn't know who or where she was, all she knew was hunger. Around her, creatures buzzed, scurried, and slid and she knew where each and every one of them was. She saw what they saw and felt what they felt. In a way, it was like she was everywhere withing several blocks all at the same time.
There were other creatures around too, ones she didn't share senses with. Each one was unique, a hulking monster with a skull-like mask for a face, and all of them avoided her as soon as they sensed her, like prey fleeing from a predator. She could catch them, she knew. Easily. But should she? Would it ease her hunger? She didn't know, so she kept wandering.
The crunch of breaking glass alerted the girl. She looked down to see she had stepped on some. There was glass all over this part of the street. It seemed like someone had broken a window and nobody had bothered to fix it. In fact, this whole street seemed run down, like nobody cared enough to repair anything.
The girl bent down and picked up one of the pieces of glass in one clawed hand. Looking at it, she could almost see her reflection. Almost, but not quite, it remained out of reach, just like her memories. Just like her understanding of who she was.
The sound of an explosion shattered the stillness of the night and made the girl whip her head in the direction of the sound. Smaller explosions followed the first and the girl cocked her head. She had no goal, no idea what to do, so why not investigate.
In the blink of an eye, she was on top of a building. With a few more applications of a techniques she somehow knew was called Sonido, the girl arrived on a rooftop overlooking the action. However, even before she reached the roof, she could already see what was happening through the countless eyes she controlled.
Below her, the street was at war. Humans with guns fired at each other, both side hiding behind cars and peeking out to unload another set of shots. Around them, other people fought, not with weapons, but with powers.
On one side, a man whose skin and hair was white as a sheet fought with a man in a demon mask who was duplicating himself over and over again, with each duplicate crumbling into ash within a few seconds. The duplicating man was detonating bombs that tore the white man to shreds, but in the span of seconds, his body was restored and he rose again. Further down the street, a group of people were riding a pair of monsters. The girl didn't recognize the creatures. They were quadrupeds of considerable size, with thick, bony plates for skin and giant, slavering jaws. As the girl watched, one of the riders, a girl wearing a purple outfit and black mask, turned and looked directly at her.
Unknown element observing Lisa-self.
Lisa paused as her power informed her of something unexpected. Turning, she looked behind her and saw something. Perched on a rooftop and watching the fight was a cape. At least, she must be a cape, who else would be out at this time of night watching a cape fight? The girl was a skinny thing dressed in rags and yet she didn't seem bothered by the cold of a winter night. That was the least strange thing about her though. Over her face was what looked like a mask made of bone that covered her mouth and chin and extended upwards to cover the nose and one eye while leaving the other eye clear. The mask looked almost insectile, with serrated mandibles closed over the mouth and a large, empty hole filled with blackness where the covered eye should be. Black hair, shoulder-length and curly, poured from her head, its dark color contrasting with the paleness of her skin and the stark white of the mask. Her right arm was also covered in the same bony plates, forming a segmented limb that ended in a three- fingered, clawed hand. The only thing she had on besides the rags was a sword sheathed on her back.
"She must be a Case-53," Lisa thought to herself.
Not Case-53. Not a cape. Nature unknown. Error, no data.
Tattletale's eyes widened. What just happened? Her power gave an error message? She didn't even know it could do that. What the hell was this girl?
A moth fluttered over to Lisa and hovered in front of her, looking her in the eyes.
Not natural insect behavior. Moth is controlled by the unknown element. Unknown element is observing you. Unknown element is a parahuman. Unknown element is not a parahuman. Error. Error.
"Tattletale, we have to go! Lung could get here any minute!"
Lisa winced as Grue's voice deepened her growing headache. Just as she was about to leave, an idea popped into her head.
"Hey," she said to the moth. "I don't know who you are, but we could use your help. If you help us get away, I'll owe you a big favor." At the prompting of her power, she added "I might be able to help you find the answers you're looking for."
The masked girl straightened up, then looked at Lisa and gave a nod. What happened next was surprising even to her.
The girl had something new. A goal, something to reach. She would find the answers she was seeking, even if she didn't quite understand the questions yet. Her one human-like hand reached up and shifted the rags she wore, revealing more plates of bone going down her side, these ones spotted with holes.
With a flex of intention, bugs gathered, swarms filing down the alleyways and approaching the battlefield. They aided each other in ways they never would have in nature. Flying insects worked together to carry cockroaches, centipedes, and spiders while larger and faster flightless bugs acted as living transports from their smaller and slower comrades. In mere seconds, an army amassed, ready to strike, but waiting for the command.
The largest flying bugs assembled around the girl and, following her mental command, flew, crawled, and scuttled into the holes in her body. Once inside her, they were disassembled and reconstructed, like larvae pupating and waiting to hatch.
Her preparations were ready. The army surged forward, surrounding the shooters on both sides with a living fog of writing limbs and biting mandibles. Bugs crawled into the guns, jamming the mechanisms with their bodies, while others bit, stung, crawled into airways, and attacked eyes.
At the same time, the girl opened her mouth and unleashed a howl that chilled everyone present to the bone. The sound activated a primal instinct hiding deep within the genetic lineage. The fear of being hunted, of being prey.
The shooters fell at once, dropping their weapons and trying to blindly flee or falling to the ground and trying in vain to defend themselves from the swarm. Only the two with powers remained untouched and both of them whipped their heads around to see the girl drop from the roof and land on the street in front of them.
"What the fuck are you?" the pale man demanded.
The girl did not answer, she simply moved.
In less than the blink of an eye, she moved down the street to stand before the two fighters. Her body twisted, one leg raised, and she struck the pale man in the head with a roundhouse kick. To her surprise, his head tore clean off of his shoulders and bounced off of a nearby building. She thought they would be tougher, like-
… like who? Who had she fought before? And why were they so tough that she had come to think attacks capable of such damage were normal?
The demon-masked duplicator acted as the pale man's body slumped to the ground. Another copy of him appeared behind the girl and a thrust a combat knife at her neck. On instinct, one that must have been instilled by many battles she could not remember, she focused the energy within her body to her skin, reinforcing it until it war hard as steel. The man's knife glanced off of her Hierro and she turned to strike. She held her strength back, for some reason she didn't want to kill the man, but it didn't matter. His body crumbled to ash as she struck.
"Hey," the voice of the girl in purple said, talking to her from several streets away through her swarm. "Oni Lee needs line of sight to teleport."
Ah. That made things easier.
The swarm flew in from the sidelines, flying over the pale man, whose body had just flickered and regrown his head. The duplicator, Oni Lee apparently, realized what she was doing and began to replicate himself en masse, each copy detonating the explosives he wore. Countless insects were immolated or had their insides pulped by the pressure wave, but there were always more, and no matter how many times Oni Lee exploded, the swarm closed in on him.
The girl could sense something as he made his copies. Each duplicate acted as a human would, but only one, always the most recent to appear, had something that the girl could sense. A spark of life, an aura.
A soul.
The first set of bugs reached Oni Lee's true body and when he duplicated himself, they came along with him. It was over at that point. The swarm crawled under his mask and attacked, gorging themselves on ocular tissue and vitreous humor. For the first time in the whole fight, Oni Lee uttered a sound, a scream of pain and horror.
The girl turned around and thrust her hand clear through the chest of the pale man, who had taken the opportunity to try to sneak attack her.
"You can't kill me, you fucking bitch," the pale man spat before he fell dead. In mere moments, he rose again, hale and whole and ready to keep fighting.
The girl struck him down again with ease. As she waited for him to revive, she pondered what he said. She could defeat him with ease, but clearly he had the advantage in a battle of attrition. A foe who could never die would eventually wear her down. Should she leave? Find a way to trap him? Or was there another way?
The pale man revived again and continued to scream. "Do you have any fucking idea who you're messing with, freak? I'm Alabaster! I'm Empire 88! We will kill everyone you fucking love and make you watch!"
The girl reacted, not to Alabaster's screaming, but to something new that entered the range of her swarm. A man,, though clearly one with powers. His body was growing and changing, metallic scales growing over skin, limbs lengthening, muscles bulging, body heating up. He was moving faster and faster as he changed. It would be mere seconds before he arrived.
The girl grabbed a piece of rebar that had been unearthed by an explosion and drove it through Alabaster's stomach and into the concrete below. Twisting the top end over prevented him from pulling himself free. She left him to scream impotently and turned to face the growing man as he stormed onto the street.
The man glanced to the side as he emerged from an alleyway, taking in the sight of Oni Lee crawling away while whimpering in pain. He looked back at the girl and snarled "'oo did 'dis?"
The girl cocked her head in confusion. It took a second to realize that his jaw was growing and distorting his speech. Odd. She had an unusual jaw too and yet she could talk normally.
…actually, could she? She hadn't tried speaking, yet something made her think she could. Might as well try.
"Yes," Her voice was surprisingly human despite her mandibles, low and feminine.
The growing man's (was this perhaps the Lung the others were fleeing from?) eyes narrowed. "Den oo die."
The man moved fast, faster than the girl could have expected. One large hand wrapped around the girl's leg and she found herself being thrown through the air. With a crash, she slammed into a wall and crashed through it, coming to a stop in a pile of cinderblocks.
That actually hurt. The girl realized she had stupidly assumed this foe would be as weak as the first two. That would not be a mistake she made again.
The girl's mandibles parted and she uttered a phrase known to her by some kind of instinct. "Las Moscas."
The bugs she had absorbed earlier had finished their gestation and had been waiting to be released. With a mental command, the emerged, crawling out of her body. They still looked like bugs, but were clearly not natural, each one an amalgamation of different arthropod traits. Wasps with the fangs of dobsonflies, centipedes with scorpion stingers and claws held aloft by moth wings, spiders that were all abdomen and spinneret carried into position by acid-spitting ants. A cavalcade of insectoid terrors that flew and skittered toward the changing man.
Though, he was not much of a man anymore. He towered over any human and his features were those of a dragon. Lung meant dragon, didn't it? That must make this foe Lung.
The girl's Moscas were not alone. The rest of the swarm converged on him, aiming for his eyes, the inside of his mouth, his groin. Anywhere soft enough to bite and sting. Unfortunately, Lung had burst into flames and most of the bugs were incinerated. Not her Moscas, though. Their Hierro kept them intact.
As the Moscas bit and stung Lung, the girl reached behind her back and drew her sword.Hmm. Just calling it 'heer sword' felt off. Like it should have a name, but one that was blocked off to her. She could ponder that later, though. Instead, she charged forward as Moscas flew upwards, trying to block Lung's vision. The blade swung and one of Lung's clawed feet was cut from his body.
Lung roared in pain and fell to one knee, but he was not finished yet. A burst of flame shot from his body, melting several Moscas and forcing the girl to jump backwards with a flash of Sonido to get to safety. From her new vantage point, she could see the foot beginning to grow back, but that was not all. With a sickening crunching sound, two mighty wings burst from Lung's back and he took flight. There was nothing human left in his appearance now. He was a dragon, massive and filled with rage.
Hmm. Perhaps she could work with this. She had an ability that she hadn't used yet. She couldn't, for the buildings around her were filled with living souls, all terrified and hiding. Aiming this ability at any of the building would kill so many people and she knew she didn't want that, just not why. With Lung in the air though, she could attack just him. Unfortunately, she needed a second to charge up, and Lung was unlikely to give her that. She would have to force it.
The swarm moved between her and Lung, not trying to attack him, but tightly packed to block his vision. Flying Moscas flew around Lung spitting caustic venom at his eyes while the spider Moscas crawled or were carried into place. Lung wasted no time in hurling fireballs, downward, each one incinerating a chunk of the swarm, but the damage to his eyes at least kept him from aiming well.
The spider Moscas took aim and shot out strands of sticky thread that spanned the street, forming a web around Lung. The girl commanded the Moscas to donate all of their energy to the threads, sacrificing themselves to restrain Lung for a moment.
The girl opened her mouth, mandibles stretching as wide as they could, and began focusing her energy into a sphere that grew in front of her gaping maw. Above her, Lung thrashed. The web held, but the walls the strands were attached to crumbled. As they broke, the elastic threads pulled pieces of rubble in and stuck them to Lung.
With a roar that shook the city, Lung released flame from his body in an expanding sphere. The remaining Moscas burned and the girl flinched in pain as the flames bombarded her. Even through her Hierro, her skin blackened and burned. Still, she held on, remaining unflinching through the pain as her attack continued to charge.
Just as she though the pain would overtake her, her move finished charging. Finally, she released it, throwing almost all of her energy into one final move.
"Cero!"
A colossal beam of pure energy, colored a deep green, spewed forth from her mouth, slamming into Lung like a truck. The remaining webs and the rubble were incinerated in an instant as Lung was carried far into the sky.
The Cero faded and the girl watched Lung fall into the distance, his form shrinking. She didn't know if he was alive or not, but he was gone. That was enough for her.
"What the fuck did you do?" Alabaster asked from his still-pinned position. The girl turned to look at him. She had forgotten about him while fighting Lung. What to do now?
Lung had killed her swarm with the final attack, so she was down to her eyes and other senses. She saw the skull-masked predators, hollows, gathering in the alley, though all gave her a wide berth. Around her, ghosts rose from the scorched remains of the gang members who had not gotten away in time and the predators inched in closer, only kept away by the girl's presence.
Yes, that was what she needed. The hollows hunted ghosts and she hunted hollows. And right now, she was so very hungry. Still, most of these people probably didn't deserve to be eaten. One of them, however…
"Hey, what are you doing, you fucking-" Alabaster's voice was cut off as the girl plunged her hand into his chest. This time, instead of waiting for him to revive, she grabbed hold and pulled Alabaster's soul out of his body.
"What? What the fuck did you do to me?" The ghost demanded, looking down at himself and his lifeless body. Unlike how he appeared in life, his ghost had normal skin and hair color and the soul chain dangling from his chest.
The girl pulled him in close by his soul chain and even though he was taller, she still felt like she towered over him. "They hunt," she said. "You run."
Alabaster's ghost saw the hungry hollows around her and his eyes widened in fear. The girl tossed him across the street. He quickly rose to his feet and ran, the hollows hot on his heels.
Sirens approached the scene, but the girl ignored them. Instead, she took to the rooftops with Sonido, following the hollows as they hunted. She needed to rest and feed to heal. Then, she would search for the purple-suited girl and find the answers, and the questions, she was looking for.