Chapter 017: The Second Hollow
"Alright, everyone. Our assignment is reconnaissance and reporting. Based on the breakdown Omaeda-senpai gave us, that's where we keep our focus from here on out..."
The one running the unit was a sixth-year student.
He clearly had some standing among his peers -- more than half the group was following his lead without question.
Matsushita Yusuke had no particular interest in being in charge of anything, so he fell in line without comment.
Whatever the group was doing, he'd do too.
"No time to waste. Based on the zone we've been assigned, let's start gathering information."
The sixth-year pressed his palms together and gave two light claps, more of a signal than anything else, his expression easy and relaxed.
"At our level, locating signs of Hollow activity and reporting it back should be more than enough to make a solid impression."
The people clustered around him responded immediately.
"Seriously? That's all it takes to score points?!"
"Trust Matsui-senpai, he's got a standing offer from Squad 9 already!"
"I can't believe we got grouped with Matsui-senpai. We're so lucky!"
Matsushita Yusuke took all of this in from slightly off to the side, his mind still catching up.
Impression points. What exactly was that supposed to mean?
He spent about half a minute actually working through it.
Then it clicked.
It was the aggregate impression that the captains and vice-captains of the Gotei 13 formed of individual students over time. Whether they remembered your name. Whether you'd managed to actually exchange a few words with someone significant during a mission.
None of it was any kind of official scoring system. It was entirely student-invented. A way of framing informal contact with the Gotei 13 as something that might improve their chances of getting picked up by a specific squad.
Whether it actually influenced anything on the other end was, honestly, probably not worth thinking too hard about.
Once he'd worked through the logic, Matsushita Yusuke's expression settled into something close to sympathy.
A little sad, really.
For someone like Ichigo Kurosaki, none of this applied. Ichigo existed at a level where the normal path had never been relevant. But for an ordinary soul -- just getting accepted and becoming a Shinigami was already a serious achievement. Advancing past that through effort and raw ability was in an entirely different category of difficulty.
The pressure these students were operating under wasn't abstract. It was structural and constant.
Which explained why they acted the way they did. The fixation made sense once you understood how little margin they were working with.
Matsushita Yusuke let out a quiet internal sigh.
Rough situation for all of them.
"Matsushita-kun, this zone is yours. That work for you?"
His name. He came back to himself, nodded.
"Works for me."
"Good. Then according to the current plan we can go ahead and--"
He never finished.
BOOM.
A heavy impact, somewhere close. The whole group turned.
Several figures were scrambling across the rooftops nearby, shouting at full volume in every direction.
"We've got eyes on the target! Forward team is buying time -- we need backup! Support, we need support!"
Things had moved faster than expected.
Matsui registered immediately that the reconnaissance assignment had just become irrelevant. His follow-up order came almost before he'd consciously formed it.
"Move up!"
No impression points from recon anymore.
But showing up actively was still something. And in a deployment where Yoruichi Shihoin was personally present -- a Gotei 13 captain, out here in person -- a little visibility still mattered.
"Yoruichi-sama is leading this one herself. Do you know how rare that is? Most of the time you'd be lucky to get a seated officer, never mind a vice-captain. Getting seen by someone at her level is a real opportunity!"
With that framing in place, the group -- already itching to move -- pushed forward with noticeably more urgency.
No time to wait around.
Everyone surged ahead. Matsushita Yusuke moved with them, but something had snagged his attention, and his brow pulled together.
Wait.
Normally these rotations ran with seated officers. So why was Yoruichi Shihoin here personally?
What was the actual reason for that?
He didn't know her well enough to map her motives. But someone who'd been alive for centuries didn't fill in a routine student supervision slot because their schedule happened to be free. There was a reason. He was fairly sure he could guess at the shape of it.
The thought hadn't finished forming before the voice at the front cut through.
"Almost there! Just ahead!"
Matsushita Yusuke snapped his attention forward.
In a stretch of rubble -- the collapsed frame of what had been a building -- six Academy students had surrounded a massive figure and were pressing in from multiple angles, keeping it busy.
Matsushita Yusuke found a spot off to the side, held roughly twenty meters of distance, and took a moment to actually look at it.
A Hollow.
The word had come up constantly in class, in the handout, in every conversation about the job. The original story was full of them. But this was the first time Matsushita Yusuke had genuinely seen one in front of him.
The body was long and tapered, vaguely tadpole-shaped.
No legs. A narrow, trailing lower half instead, dense and asymmetrical. The upper body was layered with visible muscle -- four arms, each one built for force, and every swing carrying enough weight behind it that you knew immediately what getting hit would feel like.
The head was flat and broad, roughly half a person's width across. The features had been compressed into a sunken plane in the middle of that flat surface, pushed aside to make room for the jaw: long, forward-projecting, crocodilian.
He'd prepared himself mentally. He'd still needed a moment when he actually saw it.
This thing looked at people and thought: food.
"Kido support from the back! Zanjutsu up front, focus on stalling! Hold until the other units converge, then we push!"
An older student somewhere nearby had taken charge. Matsui, not to be outdone, was already pushing his own unit forward.
"If we let them get ahead of us there's nothing left for us to do! Everyone in!"
The situation got noisy fast.
Matsushita Yusuke stayed exactly where he was.
Matsui noticed and half-turned, voice sharpening.
"What are you doing? You're throwing away your shot here!"
"No, I just think... something's off."
Matsushita Yusuke's brow stayed furrowed. His right hand settled on the hilt of his blade, his left loosely at his side.
"What's off?!"
"A Hollow this size shouldn't be getting pushed back this easily..."
Six meters of body mass. That amount of reach and weight, and two students with two blades were making it retreat?
It felt wrong. It felt like something choosing to give ground. Like a predator doing exactly what it needed to do to pull the prey closer.
"What are you even talking about?! Get over here, we need to--"
He didn't finish.
Matsui was launched sideways through the air like he'd been hit by something invisible.
The ground split open.
From the crack in the earth, a shape tore itself upward, already roaring -- and in the same instant its jaws opened wide, snapping at the students scattered through the air above it.
The second Hollow.
It had been underneath them the whole time.
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