Chapter 1766 - cg

NEPolaboSixth Street Slayer

PrologueThe Belobog processing plant sat on the edge of the Outer Ring like a rusted tooth in a dead man's mouth. New Eridu's abandoned industrial district smelled like regret and rust from stories of collapsed steel and faded signage, and the air carried the faint tinge of Ether that always meant you were too close to a Hollow for comfort.

Every single bit a place where hope came to die and then got repo'd for non-payment.

Nicole Demara loved it.

She had a rule about commissions that paid too well: take the money, bring Anby, and park the car facing the exit.

The Hollow two klicks northeast had been "behaving strangely," according to the briefing, which in Nicole's experience meant someone was about to have a very bad night. Not her, ideally. She had rent due.

"This place sucks," Billy said.

"Thank you, Billy."

"I'm just saying. If you wanted creepy, there's a haunted ramen shop on Sixth Street that at least has food."

Nicole ignored Billy. She did this often. "Okay, team," she announced, gesturing grandly at the skeletal husk of the Belobog processing plant enthusiastically. She was about to make a lot of money or die trying. "We're here for a Type-7 Ether Compressor Belobog wants back badly enough to pay us four times the standard retrieval rate. That means we smile, we grab, we leave. Simple."

"Nothing's ever simple with you, Nicole," Anby said flatly, taking a bite of her burger. She chewed. Swallowed. "Remember the last time you said 'simple'? We ended up in a Hollow with no Proxy and Billy almost got eaten by a giant Ethereal."

"I handled it!" Billy Kid protested, flexing his mechanical arms. "It was just... enthusiastic. About eating me. Very enthusiastic. I felt seen, honestly."

Nekomiya Mana, who had been silent since they'd parked the car, finally spoke. Her ears were flat against her skull, and her tail was bristling like a bottlebrush that had seen some things. "Something's wrong."

Nicole waved a dismissive hand. "Neko, babe, everything's always wrong with you. You're like a cat that's seen a ghost. Actually, you are a cat that's seen a ghost. Multiple ghosts. Probably."

"No." Nekomiya hissed urgently. "I've been in Hollows. I've been in worse places. This isn't that. This is... different. The Hollow nearby—it's shrinking. Ethereals are retreating. That doesn't happen."

Billy squinted at the distant purple glow on the horizon. "Huh. She's right. Usually those things are like... aggressive real estate. They just keep expanding… not… not contracting. That's like a landlord lowering rent."

"It's not natural," Nekomiya insisted.

"Neither is Billy," Anby observed.

"Hurtful," Billy said, clutching his chest plate. "Accurate. But hurtful."

Nicole clapped her hands together. "Look, I don't care if the Hollow's throwing a retirement party. We have a job. We have bills. We have a Bangboo that needs premium oil and I can't keep feeding it the cheap stuff, it gets gassy."

Amillion, the Cunning Hares' Bangboo, beeped in offended agreement from the back of the car.

"Are we all agreed?" Nicole pocketed her phone and slung out her briefcase. "Billy, guns up. Anby, point. Nekomiya, if you bolt, I'm docking your cut."

"You still owe me money from the last job."

"I owe you money from several jobs. That's why you keep coming back. I'm reliable debt."

They went in through a collapsed wall. Nekomiya scowled the whole way.

⦕⦖

​

Inside the processing plant, rusted conveyor belts hung from the ceiling like dead snakes. Flickering emergency lights cast strobing shadows across walls that were covered in suspicious reddish-brown stains and claw marks.

Billy whistled. "Wow. Belobog really let themselves go."

"They evacuated years ago, after the Hollow expanded," Anby said, scanning the room. "No one's been here since."

"Except the Ethereals," Nekomiya said quietly.

She was right. The first thing they saw when they pushed through the collapsed wall was the Ethereals.

Ethereal fragments.

The Ethereal bodies started six meters past the threshold.

Nicole stopped counting at twelve. There were more, but the twelfth one was embedded inches into a steel support beam and her brain needed a moment to process the physics of that. Dozens of them. Ethereal corpses scattered across the floor, black crystals smashed and not disappearing. Most looked as if they were crushed and then stomped on the ground. One Ethereal had been folded around a pipe. Another had been driven into the floor hard enough to crack the concrete foundation. There was a conveyor belt that had been ripped from its housing and used as a blunt instrument, based on the greenish smear along its length.

Billy's jaw dropped. Metaphorically. "Okay. Whoa. Who did this?"

Nicole's confident stride faltered. She pulled out her briefcase—her precious, beloved briefcase, the one she'd sold her soul for, the one that had cost her more dennies than she wanted to admit—and held it like a shield.

Anby knelt beside one of the bodies, her burger forgotten for once. Her fingers traced the damage. "...No bullets. No blade marks. No burn patterns. This was done with..." She paused. "Bare hands."

"Bare hands," Billy repeated. "To an Ethereal. You can't punch an Ethereal. They don't have… well they don't have punchable biology."

"Apparently someone didn't get that memo," said Nekomiya. She was trembling slightly. "The smell. It's still here. It's inside."

"Inside what?" Nicole asked.

"Inside the building."

From deeper in the plant, they heard a sound.

A rocky, tearing sound, like a mountain tearing itself off. Or a tractor-sized Ethereal having its core gripped and crushed.

Then a resounding crash, ringing hollowly through the empty building that shook dust from the ceiling.

Nicole's hand signals were, in theory, tactical and professional. In practice, they looked like she was trying to swat an aggressive fly. But her squad moved forward anyway, Billy with his twin pistols drawn, Anby with her electric blade gleaming pale blue light, Nekomiya with her claws extended and her tail bristling so hard it looked like the bottlebrush was trying to achieve liftoff.

They crept through a corridor lined with broken machinery, past more Ethereal corpses. The bodies got thicker the deeper they went. Whoever—or whatever—had done this had not bothered with clean kills or harvesting the core for a quick loot.

"I'm starting to think that prototype might not be worth it," Billy whispered.

"Shut up and keep moving," hissed Nicole.

They reached the main processing floor. It was a massive cavern of rusted steel and broken conveyor belts, a grand museum of industrial decay. Overhead lights flickered in arrhythmic pulses, casting strobing shadows across the space like a rave thrown by a dying power plant, as it was one.

And there, standing in the center of the room, surrounded by another dozen Ethereal broken pieces, was a figure draped in heavy armor.

Green. Ancient in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with use. Brutally-marked. It looked like it had been forged in the heart of a black hole and then polished with the tears of its enemies. It was covered in scratches and dents, and some older dents that looked like plasma rounds. Every dent and scorch mark was a story Nicole did not want to hear.

No markings, no insignia, no logos. Nothing that identified him as belonging to any Faction, corporation, any military, any anything that existed in this world of Hollow.

His helmet revealed nothing. The visor glowed a faint, steady orange, like a furnace banked low.

He was holding an Ethereal by the throat, one hand.

One large hand. He looked like a bear in armor. Perhaps one of the heavily armored Belobog? If so, he was missing the fur, and he should at least look a little bit cuddlier according to Nicole, not made of 110% kill.

The Ethereal thrashed in his grip, its crystalline body cracking. It was a big one, one that usually took a full squad of Agents to bring down. It was howling, a high-pitched screech, its arms slamming onto the helmet, Ether sparking off the armor in green flashes that accomplished nothing until its arms broke.

The figure held it close, inspecting it, like it was a mildly interesting bug he'd found on his windshield.

Then he squeezed.

The Ethereal shattered. Dust and Ether particles rained down like black crystalline snow.

He stood there for a moment, breathing. Silent. Unmoving. Then its visor found them.

The Cunning Hares froze.

Nobody moved. Nicole's hand was on her briefcase. Anby had her blade half-drawn. Nekomiya's every hair was standing on end, tail puffed, ears pinned, balanced on the balls of her feet which meant her instincts were screaming at her to nope run run run.

Billy lowered his guns slowly as he squinted at the figure's armor. At the way it moved. At the faint, barely-audible hum of mechanical whirring beneath the surface.

"Wait," he breathed. "Wait wait wait. Is that... is that a cyborg?"

He holstered his pistols. Grinned audibly. Walked forward.

"Billy, no—" Nicole started.

"Billy, stop—" Anby said.

"Billy, you idiot—" Nekomiya hissed.

Billy ignored them all. "No, look. Look at the joints. That's built-in." Billy took a step forward. "He's one of us." Billy approached the figure with his arms out, palms open.

"Hey," he said jovially. He was approaching the single most dangerous thing Nicole had ever seen, like a man approaching a wolf Thiren for a pet: with unearned confidence and catastrophic optimism. "Hey, buddy. It's cool. I get it. You're one of us, right?"

The figure didn't move. The visor tracked Billy like a turret tracking on a target.

"I mean, look at you. Look at me." Billy gestured at his own frame and his dapper red jacket. "We're both chrome. Both shooty. Both... y'know. Mechy."

The visor stared.

"So I get it," Billy continued, undeterred. "The whole 'don't talk, just kill' thing. That's a vibe. I respect it. I do. But we don't have to be strangers. We're brothers, man. I know what it's like. The upgrades. The weekly maintenance. How people look at you like you're hardware instead of a person. I've been there. We're metal brothers. A brotherhood of steel."

The visor stared.

Billy waited.

The visor stared.

The fluorescent lights buzzed. Above, a pipe dripped.

"Okay," Billy deflated slightly. "Tough crowd. That's fine. That's cool. I can respect a silent type. No pressure. But when you wanna talk, I'm right here. I know a great place for oil changes. Trust me."

He extended a hand for a fist bump.

The visor looked at the hand. Looked at Billy. The visor held for four full seconds, which was three seconds longer than he'd looked at anything else in the room.

Then he turned and walked toward the far wall.

Billy's hand hung in the air, abandoned and alone.

"...Tough crowd," Billy repeated, his voice cracking slightly.

The figure reached a broken section of wall where he paused. Bent down. On the floor, half-buried in debris, sat a piece of equipment roughly the size of a microwave: brushed steel casing, Belobog logo stamped on the side, power couplings trailing dead cables. The Type-7 Ether Compressor.

Nicole held her breath as he examined it for a moment, turning it over in his gauntleted hand. The visor glowed. His helmet tilted slightly. He seemed to be... studying it.

Then he tossed it aside like it was a piece of trash. Nicole almost wanted to shoot him.

The cylinder clattered across the floor and Nicole crossed the processing floor at a speed that suggested either bravery or an extremely pressing rent situation, scooping the compressor off the ground, and clutched it to her chest like a child recovering a fumbled toy.

"Um," she said. "That's... that's actually what we're here for. You don't want it, right?"

The figure (Agent? Mute Cyborg?) didn't respond. He stepped through the broken wall and disappeared into the darkness beyond.

Silence, for a while, before the cracking noises came back again.

Billy lowered his fistbump with exaggerated slowness. Anby sheathed her blade. Nekomiya relaxed barely, like a cat that had decided the vacuum cleaner wasn't going to eat her tail after all.

Once she was certain he was out of the earshot, Nicole exhaled longly, "What the hell was that?"

"Dunno," Billy admitted. "But he's definitely a cyborg. I'm telling you. I felt a connection."

"He didn't even look at you," Nicole pointed out.

"Yes he did. He stared at me for a solid five seconds. That's connection. A spark."

"He was deciding whether to kill you."

"That's the strongest bond two men can have," Billy insisted.

Anby shook her head. "He wasn't a cyborg. His armor, though… his armor seems human, but I've never seen anything like it. No power source I could identify either. It wasn't... local."

Nekomiya was staring at the hole in the wall. "He killed Ethereals like they were nothing. Like they were annoying. I've never seen anyone move like that."

Then Nicole clapped her hands together. "Okay. Enough existential dread. We got the part. We're getting paid. We don't know who that guy is or who he works for. This place stinks. Let's go."

The ride back to New Eridu was quieter than usual. Even Billy, who could talk through a nuclear apocalypse, was subdued. Nicole drove. Anby rode shotgun, watching the mirrors. Nekomiya sat in the back with her knees pulled up, staring out the window at the Outer Ring's dead landscape scrolling past.

Billy sat next to her, still processing.

They drove past the distant purple glow of the Hollow, shrinking now. Nekomiya had been right. It was definitely shrinking, and none of them knew why.

"Maybe he's doing it," Anby said finally. "The... guy. The cyborg. Or whatever he is."

"Maybe," said Nicole. She was counting the compressor, making sure it was still there. "But that's not our problem. Our problem is getting paid and not dying. In that order."

"We should tell someone," Nekomiya said. "Wise and Belle. They might know something."

Nicole sighed. She hated involving the Proxies unless she absolutely had to… they were expensive, and she still owed them money from the last job. And the job before that. And the job before that.

But Nekomiya was right.

"Yeah," she admitted. "Yeah. Yeah, okay. We'll swing by Random Play and see if they've heard anything about... a walking tank in ancient armor who punches Ethereals to death."

"Metal brother," Billy corrected.

"Not your brother."

"He's my brother now, Boss. Sorry. I don't make the rules."

Nicole let that one sit. There wasn't a response that would help, and she'd learned years ago that arguing with Billy about bonds, brotherhood, or the emotional significance of eye contact was like arguing with a brick.

Nicole glanced in the rearview mirror.

There was nothing there.

Just the empty road, the dark sky, and the distant, fading glow of a Hollow that was slowly, inexplicably, shrinking. Surely no behemoth in steel following her little car.

Nekomiya said nothing. She was still watching the road.

Billy stared at the ceiling. "Brother," he sighed reverently.

CHAPTER ONE: THE BREACH(From the Journal of Captain Zhu Yuan, Criminal Investigation Special Response Team)

The breach happened at 19:47.

Zhu Yuan's comms crackled with static, followed quickly by a line she'd learned to dread of the emergency broadcast system.

"ATTENTION. HOLLOW BREACH DETECTED. SECTOR 7-C. COMMERCIAL DISTRICT. ALL UNITS RESPOND. CIVILIAN EVACUATION IN PROGRESS. REPEAT. HOLLOW BREACH DETECTED."

She floored it.

The CISRT transport screeched through intersections, siren wailing. Zhu Yuan checked her weapon—a custom "Suppressor K22," modified for Ether-piercing rounds—and ran the tactical assessment in her head. Sector 7-C. Commercial district. That meant civilians. That meant priority one.

"Time to arrival, Officer Liang?" she asked, her voice calm.

"Three minutes, Captain," Officer Liang replied.

"Casualty reports?"

"Fragmented. Initial reports indicate a Notorious-class Ethereal. Codename: Hati. Threat level, red. We're the first responders."

Notorious-class. She'd faced them before. She'd lost people to them before. The load of her 100% case closure rate pressed around her neck.

"Standard deployment," she ordered. "Perimeter containment. Civilian extraction. Don't engage until we have a clear shot."

"Understood, Captain."

She checked her uniform. Immaculate. Perfect. If she was going to die tonight, she'd do it with her collar straight and her buttons aligned.

⦕⦖

​

The Hati had killed Officer Liang in the first thirty seconds.

Zhu Yuan had watched it happen. She'd been two steps away, close enough to hear the sound his body armor made when the crystal jaw closed around his torso: a crunch like someone stepping on a bag of chips, if the bag were ceramic plates and the foot weighed four metric tons.

She'd fired six rounds into the Hati's left eye socket during that half-second. Grouped tight. Center mass of the ocular cavity. Every round hit. Every round bounced off the crystal surface and accomplished exactly as much as throwing gravel at a freight train.

"Fall back to secondary positions," she said into her comms. Her voice was level. It was always level. There was no version of Zhu Yuan that let her voice crack during a tactical engagement, and tonight was no exception. "Concentrate fire on the joint. Standard Notorious protocol."

Standard Notorious protocol assumed you had time, backup, and at least two functional armored vehicles. She had none of these things. The first APC was on its roof, wheels still spinning. The second was wrapped around a lamppost, having been used by the Hati as a chew toy. Her team was down to nine from twelve. One dead, two incapacitated.

The Hati circled the kill zone with a patient loping gait, seeing no reason to hurry. It was toying with them. Four meters at the shoulder. Crystal fur that caught the emergency lights and scattered them into green prismatic sprays. Its remaining eye, the one she hadn't put six useless rounds into, was a solid orb of black Ether that tracked her squad's movements with an intelligence she found personally offensive.

Ethereals were not supposed to be smart. This one was playing with them.

"Backup ETA?" she asked.

"Dispatch reports all available units are engaged at the Sixth Street breach," Officer Chen said from behind the barricade to her left. His voice was not level. "Earliest response is forty minutes."

Forty minutes. The Hati was destroying a barricade position every ninety seconds. Nine officers, six viable positions. Forty minutes was twenty-six barricade rotations. They would run out of cover in nine.

"Understood," she said.

She didn't say what she understood, which was that more of her team was going to die here. She understood it as clearly as she understood ballistics tables and departmental hierarchy. It was a fact. She would manage it.

"Maintain rotational fire. Keep it circling. Do not let it focus on a single position."

The Hati lunged. Officer Wei's barricade disintegrated. Wei rolled clear, barely, the crystal jaws snapping shut on the space where his head had been. Zhu Yuan put four rounds into the creature's hindquarter joint, aiming for the gap. The rounds sparked. One chipped a fragment loose. The Hati didn't notice.

She was reloading when the sky broke.

A sound from above, distant at first, then rapidly not distant: the tearing roar of displaced air, getting louder, getting closer, getting here.

Zhu Yuan, and every officers there, including the Hati, looked up. Her eyes squinted, catalogued, processed, and failed to make sense of what she was seeing.

Humanoid. Male. Dark green armor. No insignia. No markings. No parachute. No flight capabilities. FALLING. Coming in at the angle of a cruise missile and roughly the same velocity.

It hit the Hati.

The impact was the loudest thing Zhu Yuan had ever heard. Louder than the breach alarm. Louder than the armored vehicles being destroyed. A concussive boom that started in her chest and worked outward through her skeleton and hammered her eyes. The Hati, four meters of Notorious-grade Ethereal, buckled. Its legs splayed. Its spine cratered inward around the point of impact: a man. Standing on its back. Boots planted on its shoulders.

The Hati howled. The sound cracked windows for three blocks in every direction. Zhu Yuan felt her teeth vibrate and clutched her ears.

The man in the armor grabbed the Hati's upper jaw. Both hands. Fingers locking into the crystal ridge of its maw.

And pulled.

Zhu Yuan had seen Notorious engagements before. She'd participated in eleven. She'd led five. She had an understanding of what was possible against a Notorious-grade Ethereal and what wasn't: this. Every part of this. A single combatant, no visible weaponry, no Bangboo support, no squad coordination, riding the back of a Hati and attempting to pry its jaw open with his bare hands.

The Hati thrashed violently. Rolled. Tried to throw him. Four metric tons of crystal predator bucking and writhing against a grip that did not budge. The man's boots dug into its shoulders. His arms didn't shake. His stance didn't shift. He was as fixed as mountain.

He pulled harder.

Something in the Hati's jaw cracked. A sound like a tree trunk splitting. Crystal splintered outward from the stress point, fracture lines racing through the skull. The creature thrashed harder. Panic. Zhu Yuan recognized panic. She'd seen it in human targets, in lesser Ethereals. She had never seen it in a Notorious.

"Hold fire," she said. Her team had stopped anyway. Every officer, from behind every remaining barricade position, was watching. Some had lowered their weapons. One, she would later discover, had forgotten he was holding his.

The man ripped the jaw off, tearing it free from the skull with a sound like tearing sheet metal. Crystal fragments sprayed in a wide arc. The Hati screamed, half its face gone, and collapsed forward. The man rode it down into the asphalt. He didn't let go. He shifted his grip to the remaining skull, drew back one fist, and brought it down.

Once. The crystal cracked.

Twice. The cracks radiated outward.

Three times. Fault lines spread through the entire body and the pavement under it.

The fourth hit shattered it.

The entire crystalline structure failed at once, Ether remains dissolving upward in a green cascade that the man's armor absorbed. Drank. The plating seemed to pull the Ether inward the way a sponge pulled water, and Zhu Yuan noticed how the the visor flared brighter for a moment before settling back to its banked glow.

The man stood in the crater where the Notorious had been. Fist still clenched. Green crystal fragments falling around him like luminous snow.

​Still wordless, he straightened as he stared at her team. A slow sweep of the visor across the barricade positions: assessing, cataloging, dismissing. The same sweep a commander did when entering an unfamiliar theater. Counting casualties. Noting force disposition. He'd done this before. Many, many times.

Zhu Yuan holstered her pistols and walked toward him. Her team watched. No one stopped her. No one dared. Zhu Yuan walking toward a problem with that set to her jaw was one of the few universal constants in the CISRT department.

She stopped three meters away from this hulking giant. Close enough to see the damage on the armor. Every scratch, every dent, every scorch mark, every… bullet holes?

The visor stared down at her. He was nearly two full heads taller and a body wider. Four times denser with arms the size of her waist. Up close, the faint hum of the suit was audible, a low frequency she felt more than heard, like standing next to a generator.

​Flynn eyed the police officer.

"I believe that this would be an excellent time to introduce ourselves, Slayer."

Flynn cracked his neck. Rolled his shoulders. Stared at the woman with the perfect posture and the expression of someone whose filing system had just been invalidated by reality.

'Sure. Tell her I come in peace, and I want bigger guns than what she's holding.'

"I shall phrase it with slightly more diplomatic nuance."

"I am Captain Zhu Yuan," she said, clipped. "Criminal Investigation Special Response Team. New Eridu Public Security." She paused. The words she was about to say were absurd, and she said them anyway, because procedure was procedure regardless of context. "You are operating in a restricted engagement zone without authorization. I need to see identification."

A beat of silence. Two.

Then a voice came from the armor, surprisingly smooth.

"Good evening, Captain Zhu Yuan. I am VEGA, an autonomous AI system integrated into The Slayer's combat platform. The Slayer appreciates your concern regarding jurisdictional protocol, and I wish to assure you that his intervention was motivated solely by a desire to preserve the lives of your team. He means no disrespect to your authority."

The visor hadn't moved. The man hadn't moved. The man did not strike her to be this polite.

"He simply does not recognize it," VEGA added, with the faintest inflection of apology.

Zhu Yuan stared at the visor, seeing only her face in the reflection. She looked tiny.

Behind her, the emergency lights strobed. Somewhere, Officer Chen was trying to figure out how to file a report on an unidentified combatant who had ridden a Notorious Ethereal like a mechanical bull and won, and he was failing, and he would continue to fail, because the forms were not built for this.

None of them were built for this.

"Identification," she said again.

The man in the green armor stared at her. Tilted his head. The visor's glow caught the emergency lights and threw back nothing. Then he turned and walked into the collapsing Hollow. By the time Zhu Yuan thought to follow, there was nothing left to follow into.

The Hollow breach sealed behind him and died.

She stood in the crater. Around her, her team was beginning to move gingerly, checking the wounded. Calling for medical. The routine of aftermath, comforting in its familiarity.

Zhu Yuan stared at the depression in the asphalt where the Hati had been. The jaw was still resting on the ground. Then her eyes assessed the crater marks from the man's boots, four inches deep in solid pavement.

She took out her phone. Opened a new incident report. Stared at the blank field marked SUBJECT IDENTIFICATION for eleven seconds.

She typed: Unknown.

Then she deleted it.

She typed: Unclassifiable individual. Affiliation: Unknown. Threat Level: Undetermined. Killed a Notorious-class Ethereal in under 7 seconds. Status: Active.

She stared at that for a while, too. Then she pocketed the phone, turned to her team, and began the work of putting the world back in order.

It wouldn't go back. She knew that already. But procedure was procedure, and Zhu Yuan was good at procedure, even when the subject of the procedure had just torn a Notorious Ethereal apart with his bare hands and walked into a Hollow like it was a shortcut home.

...

...

What the hell was she supposed to do to against that?

...

...

Jane.

Yes, Jane could handle this one.

Spoiler: Zhu Yuan, The Next Day

⦕⦖

​

New Eridu had never seen anything like it.

The Hollows had always been a fact of life. A constant threat, a resource to be exploited. They expanded, they consumed, they corrupted. That was the way of things. That was the natural order.

They would learn to fear it.

They would learn to need it.

For against all the evil that Hell can conjure…against all the wickedness that mankind can produce…

Spoiler: meemLast edited: Jun 29, 2026 Like ReplyReport Reactions:Sir Khakington IV, naturaljunior, Alinur and 314 othersDanzyDanzJun 22, 2026Add bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks Chapter 2: The Hollow Walker View contentDanzyDanzcondemned dxd shitposterJun 23, 2026Add bookmark#20Chapter 2: The Hollow WalkerThe first Bangboo arrived forty minutes after the Hati died.

It came rushing in, neh-nehing all the way as its single round eye aperture wide and locked on the figure moving through the ruins of Sector 7-D's submerged zone. The footage it captured in those first six minutes would later be clipped, compressed, posted, reposted, screenshotted, zoomed, inverted for color analysis, and debated across every active thread on the Inter-Knot for the next seventy-two hours straight.

The figure was in the third Hollow by then.

Hollows hated rude visitors. They especially despised visitors that arrived by punching through the dimensional membrane at a sprint and immediately started using the Hollow's local defense as stress-relief. Ethereals were territorial. Territorial things attacked intruders. Attacked things died.

It was, VEGA would later note in his field log, a highly efficient system once you understood the incentive structure. The Doom Slayer understood it perfectly. He'd been running this exact system since before New Eridu was a blueprint.

By hour two, he'd cleared four sub-Hollows.

By hour four, six.

By hour six, nine.

And a half, technically, because the one in the subsurface drainage network under the old commercial district was more of a sub of a sub-Hollow. A small and irritating thing that he'd compressed to nothing in under eight minutes and that VEGA had classified as "a minor infestation" with the blandness of an AI describing a drain clog.

The Bangboos had multiplied by then. Word spread the way word spread in New Eridu, which was fast, filthy, and completely uncontrollable. By hour three there were eleven of them maintaining a loose orbital pattern around his current zone of Ethereal slaying, camera eyes wide, bumping gently into each other as they jostled for angles.

The Hollow Raiders came next, drawn by the footage and the professional curiosity of people who made their living in spaces that killed everyone else.

They lasted approximately one Hollow.

Not because he killed them. He didn't. He walked past them, through them, around them, over debris they couldn't clear, up walls they couldn't climb, through crystalline Ethereal bodies that hit the floor in pieces while they were still fumbling with their equipment. One team from a mid-tier agency called Vermillion Gate had come in properly armed, decked with six members, two Bangboos of their own and a Proxy feeding them navigation data in real-time.

They'd entered behind him. They'd watched him for four minutes. Then their leader, a veteran who'd logged over three hundred hours of Hollow time, had looked at the rest of her team and said: "We go around."

They went around.

The Sons of Calydon went anyway.

Pulchra Fellini had been inside enough Hollows to know they didn't do that. They grew. They festered. They sat on the landscape like tumors and dared you to cut them out, and even then they grew back. That was the whole problem with Hollows. That was, in a very real sense, the entire reason anybody paid her to go inside them.

The Hollow was shrinking. That was a first for her to see live. She could feel it in her joints. The constant pressure of the Ether easing up, like riding up a mountain.

"Hey, Pully." Burnice White nudged her with an elbow. "Your ears are flat."

"My ears are fine."

"Your ears go flat when something's about to eat us."

Pulchra didn't answer. She signaled the rest of the crew forward. Three Sons of Calydon Raiders, a recording Bangboo, and Burnice, who had invited herself on what was supposed to be a routine extraction run because she was, in her words, "bored enough to commit a felony, so this is her being responsible."

The Ethereals were fleeing.

That was the second wrong thing. Pulchra had hunted inside Hollows for the better part of a decade. She'd fought Ethereals that were territorial, aggressive, mindlessly violent, and, on one memorable occasion, creatively spiteful. She had never seen them run. They poured past the crew in a crystal stampede, ignoring the spectators entirely, scrambling toward the boundaries like rats evacuating a ship that had already hit the reef.

Burnice watched one barrel past her close enough to ruffle her hair. "That's new."

"Move up," Pulchra said.

They followed the trail. It wasn't hard. Ethereal remains littered the dimensional corridor like road debris after a pileup. Shattered crystal. Dissolved Ether residue hanging in the air, too thick to be natural decay. Craters in the landscape where something had collided with something else hard enough to leave dents in the fabric of the dimension itself.

Then the sounds started.

Shotgun blasts. Two, rapid, the report bouncing off dimensional walls and arriving from six directions at once. A high, thin whine that Pulchra's hunting instincts filed under "rail weapon" before her brain caught up. Something spinning, metallic, chewing through resistance. Then under all of it, a sound she couldn't categorize: a grinding, crunching noise, like gravel being fed through an industrial meat processor.

"Is that a gun?" Burnice asked. Other people flinched at sounds like that. Burnice grinned.

"Multiple guns."

"What's the crunchy one?"

Pulchra didn't have an answer. They rounded the corridor into a chamber the size of an aircraft hangar, and the answer presented itself.

The green figure from the breach footage. She'd seen the civilian clips on the Inter-Knot two hours ago, shaky and overexposed, consisting 40% dark sky and 50% thumb. She'd dismissed most of the detail as compression artifacts and panic. She'd been wrong about that. The footage hadn't done him justice. The footage hadn't been physically capable of doing him justice, because what he was doing in this chamber exceeded the dynamic range of any recording equipment Pulchra had ever encountered.

He was holding a weapon that looked like it had been excavated from a plague pit and retrofitted by someone who hated everything alive. Its barrel assembly housed a set of rotating tumblers packed with charred, blackened skulls. Skulls. Those looked like human skulls.

Scorched bone, riddled with carved markings that hurt to look at, feeding through the tumblers and spraying out the business end as a fan of jagged shards. The angry, blazing red shards hit a cluster of Ethereals and turned them into a fine crystal mist, and he swept the weapon across the chamber like he was hosing down a driveway. He ran dry. The gun's tumblers spun empty for a a second before he dropped it, pulled a shotgun from somewhere on his back, and put the barrel against an Ethereal's center mass from close enough that the muzzle flash lit up the inside of its crystal body before the body ceased to exist.

Burnice was the first to say it. "Is that a gun that shoots SKULLS?"

It was. The weapon was on the ground, discarded while the figure switched to the shotgun, but Pulchra got a good look at it before he picked it back up. Scorched, blackened, curse-marked skulls, crushed and scattered as bone shards through spinning tumblers. The weapon looked like it had been pulled out of a mass grave and weaponized. She had seen a lot of weapons. She thought her Gunblades were neat. She had never seen anything that looked like it had been built to hurt things that were already dead.

A third one flanked from his left. He threw his shield. The shield had a circular saw blade bolted to its rim. She was going to need a minute with that one and knew Burnice would suggest it to Caesar later. It bisected the Ethereal at what would have been the waist before arcing back to his arm. A boomerang designed by a war criminal.

Four seconds. He was already moving to the next group. Then a buzzing shriek. Something spinning, metallic, cutting through multiple targets. A flail, chain whipping through the air, wrapping around an Ethereal's torso and crushing it into paste before the figure yanked it back. The chain rattled wetly. The paste hit the ground with a sound that Pulchra would remember for a long time.

Pulchra's crew had stopped. They weren't the only ones. Two other Raider squads had set up at safe distances along the chamber's perimeter, gear stowed, Bangboo deployed, red recording lights steady. Nobody was extracting resources. Nobody was fighting. All were watching the green monolith of anger issues making every place he treaded his consecrated killing floor.

One of the veterans, a crew chief Pulchra recognized from the Outer Ring runs, had a camp chair out.

"How long?" Pulchra asked him.

"Six hours. Give or take."

"Six hours straight?"

"Straight. No breaks, no rotation, no resupply." The crew chief jerked his chin toward the carnage. "Watch the ammo. Watch what happens when he kills one."

Pulchra watched. The man crushed an Ethereal with a spiked mace that had no right to exist outside of a museum dedicated to cruelty, and as it shattered, the Ether that poured from its remains streamed toward his armor and his weapons like furballs to menacing vacuum cleaners, and the skull gun's tumblers clicked full again.

He farmed them.

Pulchra didn't know what to say.

Burnice had her phone out, recording over the Bangboo's head, leaning so far forward that one of the Raiders had a hand on the back of her jacket to keep her from toppling into the kill zone. "Get the skull thing again! Get the skull thing, get the skull thing!"

The man finished the cluster. Pulled something from his belt. Revved it.

It was a chainsaw. One with a short bar, designed for close quarter work. He revved it once again for luck, maybe, walked to the far wall of the chamber, and punched through the dimensional boundary with his fist. The wall cracked, buckled, and tore open like cardboard. On the other side: another Hollow. Fresh Ethereals. Fresh corruption. The chainsaw screamed into them.

The Hollow he'd left behind was already collapsing. Folding inward at the edges. Dying.

The crew chief folded his camp chair. "I'm going to go tell everyone I've ever met about this."

Pulchra stood at the breach point for a long time after her crew started pulling back. The Bladeguns in her hands felt like toys. She'd spent her career believing she understood what strength looked like, and in six hours a man she'd never heard of had redrawn the entire scale.

Burnice had to be physically dragged out. She wanted to follow him through the Fissure. She wanted to be nearer. She wanted to ask him where he got the skull gun. Then she watched, just in time, as the small shoulder-mounted turret belches flames, and Pulchra knew it was over for her.

"He's perfect..." Burnice sighed dreamily in the corridor, still being dragged by her collar. "He's perfect and I want to be his friend and serve him a Burnice Special is! LET'S INVITE HIM-MFF!"

[INTER-KNOT FORUM: BREACH LIVE COVERAGE / MEGATHREAD 7 (previous 6 full)]

HollowNet_Admin: Thread 7. Same rules. No doxxing the feeds. Stop posting your fanart. This is a NEWS thread.

Proxy_66: new bangboo feed from inside the hollow cluster. this one's HD. [link]

RiftRunner99: ain't no way

MORS_Actual: twelve year hollow vet here. just closed my laptop and opened it again to make sure i wasn't having a stroke

GunBunny_NE: okay so I've been frame-stepping the new feed. those are kinetic firearms. not Ether-based. physical ammunition. but his ammo count resets after every kill??? Wtf? watch the shotgun. he fires, target dies, shells just APPEAR in the tube.

Proxy_66: it's the ether. the kills compress ambient ether into ammunition. he's running the hollow like a feedlot

AnonymousSquirrel: can we talk about the skull gun

RiftRunner99: PLSTALK ABOUT THE SKULL GUN

GunBunny_NE: I've been trying. I don't know where to start. The tumblers are loaded with what appear to be charred, scored skulls of non-human origin. The gun crushes them and fires the fragments as a wide-spread pattern. Basically it's a shotgun crossed with a bone grinder. I want to say it's a modified flechette system but that doesn't cover the part where the ammunition is SKULLS

MORS_Actual: freeze frame at 2:14. zoom the skull. those aren't scratches. those are CARVINGS. ritualistic. i've seen ether-inscribed artifacts. this aint ether

AnonymousSquirrel: where is he getting the skulls

RiftRunner99: WHERE IS HE GETTING THE SKULLS

MORS_Actual: made a deal with satan?

DimStability_Watch: Hollow boundary data. the cluster's been contracting since he entered. I overlaid HIA records for this hollow against current readings. [image] he's compressed it by 60% in six hours. HIA's best suppression team reduces a hollow this size by 10% in three weeks.

Proxy_66: someone do the math on when it's completely gone

DimStability_Watch: eight hours. maybe nine. for a hollow that's been active for two years.

GunBunny_NE: I wrote a full breakdown of his visible arsenal. combat shotgun (modified, ether-reactive). grapple-shotgun (double barrel, sawed, wrist-mounted grapple hook on the front??). the skull weapon (designation pending, I refuse to name this unholy gun). a flail with a spiked head the size of a watermelon. a shield with a CIRCULAR SAW on the edge. a mace with spikes that glow when they hit something. a chainsaw (short bar, one-handed operation). rail spike weapon of unknown manufacture. I've been doing firearms analysis for fifteen years. none of this matches any known manufacturing tradition on the planet. I have no idea what I'm looking at.

AnonymousSquirrel: so we're just not going to talk about the grapple hook shotgun

HollowFan_Lurker: i've watched him launched himself to a tepes forty times. i swear the tepeslooked surprised

MORS_Actual: he can't be thiren. wrong build, wrong armor. can't be human. no human survives six hours of hollow exposure let alone fights through it at that pace. can't be an IC, the movement is organic and adaptive. so what is he?

SpaceTimeSommelier: Alien

GunlobbyistHK: An alien. That's your best theory.

SpaceTimeSommelier: Did I stutter?

MORS_Actual: bruh

SpaceTimeSommelier: How do you explain the armor? If it's not from underground and it's not from any faction, the only place left is UP.

GunlobbyistHK: We have a whole underground. There's ancient stuff down there too.

SpaceTimeSommelier: Space is bigger. It's got more space. It's in the name. SPACE. You cannot argue with that logic.

GunlobbyistHK: ...True. You win.

SpaceTimeSommelier: He's my Space Man. I love him. He came from the stars and I will find him.

HollowRoofrat: He's not yours.

SpaceTimeSommelier: Don't take this away from me.

RiftRunner99: hollow walker

SpaceTimeSommelier: ?

RiftRunner99: he walks into hollows. the hollows die. he walks out and into another one. he's walking them to death. hollow walker.

AnonymousSquirrel: hollow walker.

DimStability_Watch: hollow walker.

SpaceTimeSommelier: SPACE MAN

NE_Breaking [VERIFIED]: Breaking: Mainstream coverage has picked up the Bangboo feeds. Global outlets. "UNIDENTIFIED COMBATANT COLLAPSES HOLLOW IN RECORD TIME." International scientific bodies requesting data. Multiple governments have made formal inquiries.

HollowFan_Lurker: we're all watching the same guy walk into hell for fun and we gave him a name before the news did. i love this website

[Thread Title: THE SKULLCRUSHER THREAD — SKULLS ONLY — NO OTHER TOPICS]

Posted by: GainsGobblerGunther

Timestamp: 01:14

"This is a thread about the Skullcrusher (pending approval from Green Guy). Please keep all skullcrusher-related discussion here. All other Green Guy content goes in the main thread. Thank you. This is important."

[847 replies in 4 hours. Moderation gave up at reply 312.]

One user, buried deep in a thread that had long since devolved into arguments about teleportation physics, kept insisting it was the Doom Slayer. He provided screenshots, frame-by-frame comparisons, detailed breakdowns of the armor's design features matched against something called "DOOM 64." A game pre-Fall way way before The Fall. The user was mocked relentlessly. Downvoted into oblivion. Told to go outside. No one took him seriously.

By midnight, the Inter-Knot had collectively agreed on three things: something existed, it didn't like Ethereals, and nobody knew what the hell it was and why it was so angry to the monsters.

Senior Commissioner Severian Lowell watched the Bangboo feeds for the fourth time and wished, briefly, that he smoked. The briefing room was full. Section heads from PubSec's four operational divisions, Qingyi standing at attention against the far wall running her own analysis on a tablet, two data analysts who looked like they'd forgotten what sleep was.

The footage played on the main screen, dominating the front, stabilized and enhanced, clear enough to see the individual skull fragments spraying from the weapon's bizarre nozzle.

"His combat style is adaptive," Qingyi said without looking up. "Zero wasted motion. Weapon transitions average point-three seconds. He's selecting loadout by threat density, not proximity. Greater threats get the heavier ordinance regardless of distance."

"Duration?" Severian asked.

"Six hours, forty-one minutes at last update. Continuous engagement. No pauses."

"Ether exposure effects?"

"None detectable. His armor is absorbing ambient Ether at a rate our instruments weren't designed to measure. We had to recalibrate twice." She paused. "The absorption rate is increasing. The suit processes Ether more efficiently the longer he's immersed."

The room was doing that thing rooms did when everyone in them wanted to talk and yet nobody knew what to say. Severian let it sit. Sometimes, silence produced better results than a prompt.

"We need to contain him," said Section Three's chief. "Before someone else does."

Severian didn't raise his voice. "How? He just collapsed nine Hollows in six hours with no determinate help from a Proxy. Name the cell that can contain that."

Nobody named the cell.

"I'm sending Zhu Yuan," Severian said. "She's had direct contact. She spoke with the AI. She's the closest we have to a relationship with this entity."

"Sending her to do what, exactly?"

"Investigate. Make contact. Find out what he is." Severian looked at the screen, where the green figure was putting a chainsaw through an Ethereal the size of a delivery truck. "I want answers before the Mayor's office calls again."

In the Defense Force barracks common room, Trigger sat with her chin in her hand and listened.

She couldn't see the footage clearly. That was okay. Her eyes had been destroyed years ago by Ether corruption, leaving her with nothing but indistinct shapes and the faint glow of Ether signatures. But she could read the telemetry data Seed was pulling from the Bangboo feeds, and the numbers told the story just fine.

Right now, Seed was pulling telemetry from the Bangboo feeds: movement speed, engagement cadence, force output estimates, aggression that didn't seem to ever end. The numbers scrolled through her awareness in a continuous feed, and the numbers kept breaking. Too high. Every reading, too high.

"His average engagement speed exceeds Obol Squad's by a factor of three," she said.

Soldier 11, seated beside her, had her eyes on the screen. Composed, alert, ready to go wherever the shooting was. Same as always. "If we could deploy him to Hollow Zero, the war changes overnight."

"You're assuming he takes orders."

Soldier 11 considered this. "Some people fight better without them."

On the command channel, their CO was already drafting a contact proposal for Defense Force brass. Seed tried to map the figure's movement speed against its predictive models. The models broke. Seed recalibrated. The models broke again.

Trigger tilted her head. The numbers kept climbing.

Zhao of TOPS pulled up the footage on her office monitor, paused it on a frame of the weapon that shot red lights, and said, quietly: "What were you fighting before this?"

She didn't care about the combat. She'd spent her career auditing corporations, not commanding soldiers. But she knew what weapons looked like because she'd reviewed procurement contracts for every major arms manufacturer in New Eridu's jurisdiction, and this weapon looked like it had been designed to kill things that were already a bitch to kill. The skulls had markings, and whatever those skulls had belonged to, they hadn't gone down easy.

Zhao drafted a compliance memo. "Guidelines for Corporate Engagement with Unregistered Anomalous Combatants." She was going to need it. Every company under the TOPS umbrella would be scrambling to make first contact. Belobog's Grace for the technology. Defense contractors for the weapons. Biotech firms for whatever he was and if his blood could be the answer to Ether immunity.

Someone was going to do something stupid and expensive. Possibly catastrophic. Someone always did.

Zhao looked at the frozen frame of the green titan one more time, then started typing faster. The regulations would be ready by morning.

Grace Howard had been sitting at her workstation for nine hours and she had forgotten about three of them. The rest of R&D had gone home. Koleda had left at midnight after telling Grace to sleep. Koleda told her this at least once per shift. It had zero effect. The extraction team leads had called in twice about scheduling disruptions. Grace hadn't picked up. The Hollow cluster's collapse was wrecking their quarterly projections, yes, but Grace couldn't bring herself to care about quarterly projections right now.

The eighth mini sub-Hollow had flatlined thirteen minutes ago. Ceased to exist. Ether readings: zero. Dimensional stability: nominal. Gone. She'd triple-checked the data because the first two readings looked like sensor failure.

The seventh Hollow was already contracting.

Grace pulled up the timeline she'd been building since she first noticed the anomalous readings. Seven hours of continuous engagement. Eight Hollows collapsed. One in progress. No water breaks in between.

A Bangboo feed from inside the eight Hollow caught it: the green figure walking through a corridor of fleeing Ethereals, shotgun up, the dimensional space folding inward behind him. He fired twice. Two Ethereals disintegrated. The suit drank their Ether. He kept walking.

She ran the kill rate per minute and plotted the Ether absorption curve, checking his movement speed against her earlier readings, and the curve was still climbing.

Six hours in and the curve was still climbing. The suit was processing Ether more efficiently the longer he fought. The suit was optimizing itself in real time, getting better at converting the energy the more enemies the man killed, healing and sustaining him, as if violence and destruction was his bread and butter in the most literal sense.

Grace traced the slope of the absorption curve with her fingernail.

She thought about her parents. She didn't usually think about them at work. Normally, she was good about that. But they'd died in a Hollow fourteen years ago, and she'd spent every year since trying to understand the science behind the things that killed them… and here was a man whose armor drank the same energy that had swallowed her family like it was fuel.

​"What are you?" she said to the empty lab.

The data didn't answer. She pulled up the curve again and kept watching.

Ramiel watched from a private terminal in a location she had no intention of disclosing to anyone, and stopped smiling.

She had been alive for over a century. She had pushed the Dark Wall back thirty-seven kilometers by herself. She had been, for a long time, the yardstick every other yardstick got measured against.

She watched the figure punch through a dimensional wall with one fist. Watched the Hollow collapse behind him like a sail losing wind. Watched the skull weapon do its gruesome work. Watched him transition into a fresh Hollow without pausing, without slowing, without any indication that six hours of continuous combat had registered as taxing.

She closed the feed. Opened it again. Closed it. He was still there. Her eyes didn't lie.

Whatever games she'd been playing in New Eridu, the board just got a new piece, and she didn't know where it came from. That bothered her. Very little bothered Ramiel.

She opened the feed a third time. Leaned closer to the screen than she had in decades.

The other viewers saw armor. Ramiel saw more. She'd always seen more. A century of life and power had given her eyes that read Ether the way most people read street signs, and what she saw on that armor made her sit utterly still and disgruntled.

The suit was drinking Ether from the kills. Everyone could see that much. But underneath, in the layer only someone like her could perceive, the absorbed energy was being converted into something different. Something that flared red, running through channels in the plating that pulsed with brief, angular runes. They flared for a fraction of a second with each kill and vanished. She rewound the feed. Froze it. The runes were everywhere. On his chest plate, his gauntlets, the back of his helmet. Symbols she'd never encountered in a hundred and twelve years of studying every known script, every Ether notation, every arcane system humanity had cataloged.

They weren't Ether runes. They were something from before Ether had a name.

"Eternal" used to be a word she applied to herself. A comfortable hyperbole. Something you said when you'd outlived everyone who remembered your birthday and it stopped mattering. "Infernal" was a myth. A story told long, long ago, before the Ether. When it used to be Nether.

She stared at the frozen runes on her screen. At the armor that converted one of the fundamental forces of her world into fuel for something she couldn't identify.

She was less comfortable with both words now.

SpoilerShe was less sure now.

Zhu Yuan had not slept.

Her desk at CISRT headquarters held a single case file. Thinnest she'd ever opened.

Subject: unknown.

Species: unknown.

Origin: unknown.

Affiliation: unknown.

The only concrete data was the Hati engagement she'd witnessed personally and a brief exchange with his AI. The man himself hadn't said a word. He'd looked at her, turned around, and walked into a collapsing Hollow.

She was on her eighth query. The databases kept returning nothing with a consistency that felt personal.

Severian's summons came at 0200. She straightened her uniform, confirmed it was immaculate because it was always immaculate, and walked to the briefing room.

Qingyi gave her the data. Severian gave her the assignment. Investigate. Make contact. Determine if the subject was a threat or an asset. Report back.

"You're the only officer with direct contact experience," Severian said. "He talked to you."

"His AI talked to me. The subject didn't say a word."

"His AI is more than anyone else has gotten."

She accepted the assignment with perfect posture, betraying no visible reaction.

Inside, she was figuring out how to investigate him. She'd tried to arrest him and he'd treated her like weather.

"You won't be going alone," Severian added. "PubSec is assigning you a consulting specialist. Undercover capability, information networks, contacts in spaces your badge can't reach."

Zhu Yuan knew before he said the name.

Jane Doe was already in the briefing room. Feet up on the conference table, eating pork buns out of a convenience store bag, rat ears twitching at something on her phone. Her tail hung off the armrest, completely limp. Jane could fall asleep in a burning building and complain about the alarm clock.

Jane looked up. "Hey."

"Jane."

"So." Jane held up her phone. The Bangboo feed was playing, tiny and bright. "You met this guy already. What's he like up close?"

"Large."

"Helpful." Jane took a bite of her pork bun. "I've been watching the feeds since hour two. He's good. Like, scary good. Switches guns faster than I switch covers." She licked sauce off her thumb. "We're really doing this? Walking up to him and asking for his name?"

"That's the assignment."

Jane chuckled lightly. "Amazing... Love it. No concerns."

Zhu Yuan held the silence. Jane let her. The tail flicked once. Amused. It was the same dynamic they'd had for years: Zhu Yuan's stiff order against Jane's flexible chaos, her uniform against Jane's hoodie, her pants against Jane's shredded tights, her case files against Jane's six years undercover in the Mountain Lion gang without a single blown cover.

Zhu Yuan respected her results. She found her methods professionally maddening. Both of these things were true and neither of them was going to change.

"When do we move?" Jane asked.

"When he comes out."

"If he comes out."

"He'll come out." Zhu Yuan stared at the footage still playing on the briefing room screen. The green figure walking through fleeing Ethereals, racking a shotgun that glowed faintly green and black with absorbed Ether, before searing red as it spat out bullets. "The Hollows will run out before he does."

Jane studied her for a moment. Took another bite. "You said you talked to him. At the Hati site. What'd he do?"

"Looked at me. Walked into the Hollow. It closed behind him."

"No words? Nothing?"

"His AI gave me a polite speech. The man himself didn't make a sound."

Jane's ears perked forward. "A guy who kills an Ethereal barehanded and doesn't even bother with a one-liner?" She grinned around her pork bun. "A man of action and... rather disturbing mystery, hmm? I like him already."

Spoiler: JaneZhu Yuan didn't like him one bit. She was, if she had to be honest, a little bit more than a little bit intimidated.

"I want to see what's underneath all that," Jane mused, her hands returning to her default 'mouse idle' state in front of her chest.

Zhu Yuan didn't reply. She was picturing there was another armor underneath all that. She almost preferred it that way as dawn came to New Eridu while she wasn't looking.

The city woke to headlines, to forum threads still burning, to footage that had already been viewed forty million times and ramping up. The Hollow crisis had a new variable, and the variable was still accelerating. By then, the feed had reached fourteen languages. Zenless Forum aggregators were running real-time compilations. The Defense Force public affairs office was issuing a statement, then retracting it, then issuing a different statement that also said nothing, then retracting that too. Belobog's stock moved four points on pure speculation. PubSec released a formal notice stating they had "no comment at this time," which told anyone who could read corporate-speak that they absolutely had a comment but were waiting to see how it landed.

And somewhere, far, far away, The Exaltists had gone dreadfully quiet.

The cult that had spent years spreading Hollows, celebrating corruption, and whispering prophecies of the Creator's return, had fallen silent, and this was not the silent of strategic retreat or the quiet of regrouping. The quiet of people who had just realized they'd made a single catastrophic mistake.

They had found the sarcophagus two years ago. They had believed it was a gift. They had woken something they couldn't control. They had opened a door they couldn't close. And now The Hellwalker waded through their Hollows as if they were his, and they could do nothing but hide, wait, and pray to a Creator who had chosen silence.

​Spoiler: yeemLast edited: Jun 29, 2026 Like ReplyReport Reactions:Sir Khakington IV, Alinur, Gundamshinobi and 298 othersDanzyDanzJun 23, 2026Add bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks Chapter 3: A New Lead, An Old Name New View contentDanzyDanzcondemned dxd shitposterJun 25, 2026NewAdd bookmark#68INTER-KNOT FORUM: DEAD END HOLLOW / LOCKOUT MEGATHREADPosted by: RiftRunner99

Timestamp: 03:55

"This is BULLSHIT. PubSec just locked the outer access. PUBSEC. They put TAPE over the entrance. TAPE. This is a Hollow breach site. There's a guy inside who punches holes in reality. And they've got TAPE. They're treating it like a CONSTRUCTION SITE."

HollowNet_Admin: Thread approved. Keep it civil or I'm locking it.

RiftRunner99: CIVIL? I've been standing in the rain for an hour. There's a Bangboo feed from inside that's showing WHO KNOWS WHAT and I'm watching a black and yellow line of adhesive stop me from seeing it in person.

GunBunny_NE: who's inside with him?

MORS_Actual: That Zhu Yuan chick. And some blonde rookie who looks like she's about to cry.

GunBunny_NE: the party pooper and her anxiety intern. Great. history is happening on the other side of that tape and I'm sitting out here watching a bangboo lick a battery.

Proxy_66: I've got a contact in NEPS. The rookie's name is Anne Carver, transferred in two weeks ago. She lost like five pens on her first Hollow entry.

GunBunny_NE: okay that's actually kinda adorable. shame she's gonna die in there with no pens.

HollowFan_Lurker: She's probably some kind of super-commando in disguise. That's how it works in the stories. The anxious rookie is always the deadliest.

RiftRunner99: I don't care if she's the Hollow Queen's secret daughter. I care that I can't get in.

AnonymousSquirrel: Someone chew the tape. No balls.

GunBunny_NE: y dont u?

AnonymousSquirrel: can't. i have no balls.

GunBunny_NE: pics or it didn't happen

AnonymousSquirrel: [link]

GunBunny_NE: mods can we ban this guy

Chapter 3: A New Lead, An Old NameDead End Hollow.

The Companion Hollow to Crete Hollow.

It had been a metro station converted to a refuge shelter once. Forty thousand people used to live here, back when "here" meant something other than a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that a sadist had assembled while drunk. Now it was an abandoned transit hub that had forgotten it was supposed to be underground.

Escalators led to ceilings. Turnstiles faced walls. The emergency lights flickered with the enthusiasm of a bureaucrat on a Friday afternoon, doing the bare minimum required to avoid being fired.

Zhu Yuan's mapping equipment had given up completely and was now just displaying a loading icon that had been spinning since the last twenty minutes. A machine that had seen too much and wanted to be put out of its misery.

She was reasonably certain they had passed the same collapsed ticket booth three times. Either that, or Dead End Hollow had a thing for symmetry and a sick sense of humor. The Ether-stained air wrapped around her, thick enough to taste, making her uniform cling uncomfortably to her skin.

She stopped at the top of a stairwell that descended into a corridor that appeared to be on the ceiling of the platform below. Technically impossible but the Hollow didn't seem to care about technicalities.

"Anne," she said. Her voice came out flat, professional, exactly the voice she'd used when she'd told Officer Liang's mother that her son had died doing his duty. She didn't think about that. She was good at not thinking about things. It was a skill she'd developed alongside marksmanship and paperwork, and it had served her equally well in all three disciplines.

Behind her, the nervous blonde rookie known as Anne Carver scrambled to catch up. Her notebook was clutched to her chest like a religious artifact that might start levitating at any moment. Her pen was tucked behind her ear in a way that was almost aggressively human. Her eyes were wide. Her shoulders were hunched.

She was absolutely not Jane Doe. She had never been Jane Doe. She had definitely not spent six years undercover in the Mountain Lion gang and could absolutely not kill Zhu Yuan with a paperclip if she felt like it. Anyone who suggested otherwise would be subjected to a stern look and, if they persisted, a lengthy interrogation about their sourcing.

"The mapping equipment is recalibrating, Captain," Anne squeaked, her voice pitched slightly higher than necessary. "Every thirty seconds. It's been doing this since we entered."

Zhu Yuan stopped walking. Turned. Stared at Anne Carver and her nervous posture, the trembling hands, the wide purple eyes that darted around like a rabbit expecting to be eaten at any moment. The woman had been a nervous wreck since they'd entered the Hollow. She'd dropped her pen twice. She'd written something in her notebook, crossed it out, and written it again in a slightly different font. It was a performance so meticulous and flawlessly executed that Zhu Yuan had to remind herself the person she was looking at was not, in fact, a nervous rookie.

Jane had a talent she respected professionally and found personally disturbing. Zhu Yuan had once watched Jane talk her way out of a criminal syndicate's execution pit by becoming a real estate agent who was also an accountant who was also apparently the syndicate leader's long-lost cousin. She still didn't understand how it worked.

"Status," Zhu Yuan said, because she wasn't going to let a good performance distract her from the mission. Also, because she liked hearing Jane's creative excuses.

"The loading icon is still spinning, Captain." Anne held up the device with both hands, as if presenting evidence to a jury. "It's been spinning for twenty-three minutes. I think it's given up. I think we should give up too. This place is creepy and I want to go home."

Zhu Yuan considered this as the loading icon continued to spin and the Hollow continued to be creepy. She didn't want to go home. She wanted to find the Slayer and ask him several pointed questions, and if he didn't answer, she wanted to figure out what happened when you arrested someone who could punch a Notorious-class Ethereal to death.

"How do you do that?" she asked first, because the Hollow was quiet and the question had been lodged in her throat since they'd parked the car.

Anne blinked. "Do what, Captain?"

"Be someone else. Completely. Like you're changing clothes." Zhu Yuan gestured vaguely at Anne's entire existence.

Anne— Jane tilted her head. "You'd be surprised what you can do when the alternative is being dead." Then, with Anne Carver's shoulders, Anne Carver's nervous twitch: "Also, I practice in the mirror. A lot. It's weird but it works. People see what they expect to see. You expect to see a nervous rookie, so you see a nervous rookie. It's not magic, Captain. Please don't fire me."

Zhu Yuan considered this. She practiced in the mirror too, but for different reasons. Mostly, she practiced her posture and her "I am a police officer and you are in trouble" face. She practiced being an ideal picture of herself, the Captain who never faltered. Never in her life had she ever practiced to be someone else she wasn't.

The idea alone made her skin crawl, the way wearing someone else's skin probably would, if she ever did that. Like erasing yourself and letting a stranger take over.

She didn't say this. She didn't want to offend Jane. So Zhu Yuan adjusted her collar again and kept walking.

"Check your corners."

"Yes, Captain!"

Behind them, the tunnel they'd come through groaned and rearranged itself into a corridor that led somewhere else. Probably. Maybe. Their mapping equipment continued to spin its loading icon. Carrot was outdated by twenty minutes.

She glanced around. The walls were covered in faded advertisements for products that no longer existed, companies that had been swallowed by the Hollow years ago. A poster for something called "Ether-Cola", their cartoon mascots partially eaten by time and Ether. One poster showed a smiling character whose face had been half-consumed by corrosion. The effect was less nostalgia and more existential dread, like looking at a photograph of a dead relative and realizing you couldn't get their voice right.

Zhu Yuan kept her hand on her sidearm, the middle ground of relaxed and drawn.

Dead End Hollow was, she reflected, a perfect place where you could lose yourself and never find your way back. A perfect place to be anyone. Exactly the kind of place where someone like Jane Doe—Anne Carver, she corrected herself, because if she was going to do this she was going to do it properly—could disappear into a role so completely that even she might forget which one was real.

The thought was not comforting.

"Left or right?" Anne asked, peering at the fork in the tunnel ahead.

Zhu Yuan stared at her mapping equipment. The loading icon spun. She looked at the tunnel. Both paths looked identical. Both looked like they led to the same place, which was probably nowhere.

"Left," she said.

"You sure?"

"No."

"...Okay," Anne said, and took the right fork.

Zhu Yuan followed her. Because when you worked with Jane Doe, you followed her lead even when she was pretending to be someone else, because hidden beneath all the nervous fumbling and the dropped pens, was a survival instinct that had kept her alive in places far worse than this.

…Still silent.

"There's no Ethereal activity," Zhu Yuan said. "None. The spawn maps show dead zones spreading from the areas he's passed through."

Anne Carver's pen scratched against paper. The woman could probably write upside down in seven languages, but right now she was doing a very good impression of someone who was struggling to spell her own name. "...Every Hollow he entered goes quiet, Captain."

"Yes."

Anne looked up from her notebook, her expression professionally lost. "That's not how Hollows work, Captain."

"I am aware."

The corridor opened into the platform proper. Or what had once been a platform. Now it was a cavern of broken concrete and twisted metal, train tracks floating a few inches above the ground like they'd decided gravity was beneath them. The ceiling was either ten feet high or a hundred, depending on which direction you chose to look at it. The single emergency lamp flickered with the enthusiasm of a dying insect.

Zhu Yuan stopped at the edge, listening. Heard nothing unusual other than the faint Ether in the air. White noise, at this point.

Twenty minutes in and they hadn't encountered a single Ethereal.

She didn't like it. Hollows were never this sparse. Every Hollow she'd ever entered had ambient Ethereal activity within the first two minutes. Something skittering. Something watching, waiting for her to drop her guard to punch her face off or shoot her with a beam of concentrated malice.

She was halfway across the platform when the silence finally broken by a scratching sound. From somewhere above.

She looked up. The ceiling was a hundred feet high again.

Something moved in the shadows. A lot of somethings.

Her hand found her sidearm.

"Contact!"

Anne was already behind her, notebook forgotten, something glinting in her hand that wasn't a pen.

The first Ethereal dropped from the ceiling.

Followed by thirty more.

Zhu Yuan didn't count them, but her brain processed the cascade of black and green crystal bodies pouring from the ceiling and mentally labeled it under "bad" without needing an exact number.

The first one landed three meters to her left, its legs already coiling for a leap. She put a round through its spherical core before it finished landing. The K22 barked once, a sound she'd heard ten thousand times. The Tyrfing dissolved into a cloud of Ether particles that dissipated before they hit the ground.

The third one was already on top of her. Zhu Yuan twisted, avoiding the claws by centimeters, and brought the K22 up into its jaw. The barrel pressed against crystal. She fired. The Ethereal's head came apart, and she was already moving past it, boots finding purchase on a turnstile that had no business being in the middle of the platform.

"Cover!" she shouted, because procedure demanded it. Anne Carver was already behind a pillar, making sounds that were probably meant to be terrified. She was also tracking the swarm's movement patterns with eyes that had gone sharp and still, cataloguing formations, counting clusters.

The K22 barked. An Ethereal dropped. Another one took its place. Zhu Yuan fired again. She kicked off a wall, fired twice in mid-air, landed on an Ethereal's shoulder, put a round through its core at contact range, and vaulted off the dissolving body. The movement was muscle memory. She didn't think about it. She couldn't think about it. Thinking was for after, when she was filing the report and her heart had stopped trying to punch out her ribs.

The swarm kept coming.

An Blastcrawler skittered past her, close enough that she could hear the tink tink tink of its spindly legs, and it didn't even explode.

"...They're fleeing," she whispered, and the words came out flat, almost calm. The fact was so absurd that the brain didn't bother to wrap an emotion around it.

She'd never seen Ethereals flee. They were territorial. Aggressive. Mindlessly violent. They didn't run from anything.

"They're running from something!"

Anne Carver's voice came from behind the pillar, high and terrified and absolutely fake. "You don't say!"

Zhu Yuan leapt onto a train cart and kept firing as the swarm flowed around her. The K22 kicked against her palm in familiar rhythms. The swarm was dense enough that missing was harder than hitting.

At the far distance, Ethereals at the rear of the stampede were being thrown into walls, torn apart, used as clubs against each other. Crystal shattering like a hundred chandeliers falling down all at once. The sound was deafening, a symphony of destruction that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

A Hoplitae flew past Zhu Yuan's head and embedded in the ceiling, its bulky hands limp.

She traced its trajectory, and spotted where the swarm split around a point of impact.

Green armor. Moving forward with the unstoppable momentum of a freight train that had never learned the concept of brakes.

He grabbed an Ethereal by its arm, tore the arm off, and beat another Ethereal to death with it. He caught a crystal body mid-flight, crushed it one-handed, picked up a piece of the wreckage, and drove it through the next one like a stake.

The Slayer came through the last of them, standing in the corridor, fist closed around the remnants of something that used to be an Ethereal. Ether dust drifted off his gauntlets. The corridor behind him was empty. The corridor ahead of him had two PubSec officers, one standing and one crouched behind a pillar, and zero remaining targets.

He stared at them.

He holstered a weapon that had been halfway out. The motion was slow, like a person putting down a fork when told dinner was cancelled. As if he was disappointed to see them, maybe. Or just the pragmatism of someone who'd learned that sometimes killing had to wait.

His visor settled on her. Held.

"Captain Zhu Yuan." The voice came from the armor. VEGA, the AI she'd spoken to once before, on a night that felt like a lifetime ago. "The Slayer recognizes you. He would prefer that you were not here."

Me too, she didn't say. That didn't sound professional.

Anne squeaked and hid behind her. Zhu Yuan lowered her K22. Holstering it would be premature.

"Duly noted," she said. "But we're not leaving."

The visor stared. He was deciding something. What, she didn't know. He was rather difficult to read.

"The Slayer doesn't understand your persistence." VEGA's voice was calm, almost curious. "He has not harmed you and has no intention of harming you. He has no interest in your authority, your jurisdiction, or your investigation. He is here for the threats. Nothing else."

"I have questions," Zhu Yuan said.

"The Slayer is not interested in questions."

"Too bad." Zhu Yuan stepped forward. Her boots crunched on the crystal fragments that littered the platform, each step a tiny reminder of what had just happened. What he had just done. What he could do to her if he decided she was a threat. "I'm not interested in being turned away."

SpoilerThe Slayer grabbed her shoulders, turned her around before her brain caught up with the shock, and walked the other way.

"H-Hey!" she sputtered, swiveling, ignoring Jane's disguise-breaking smirk. "Get back here! I'm talking to you! Th-That was... That was disrespectful! STOP!"

⦕⦖

​

They followed him through Dead End Hollow like lost children trailing a parent who had somewhere more important to be. The Slayer didn't wait or slow down for them. He didn't acknowledge their existence beyond the occasional glance that said, I know you're there and I have chosen to ignore you.

He walked through corridors that bent in directions Zhu Yuan's training never covered because the corridor was bending and there wasn't a manual for that.

At one point he stepped through a wall that looked solid and solidly continuous, a wall you'd break your nose on if you tried to walk through it, and came out two floors up. The wall rippled behind him like water settling after a bomb had been dropped.

Zhu Yuan stared at the wall. She searched for a door. There wasn't one. She pressed her finger against it for a seam. There wasn't one. She looked for anything that would explain how a supposedly seven footed humanoid being had just walked through solid concrete with no evident Fissure.

She found the stairs instead. They were three corridors back and had definitely not been there when she'd passed through. She took them.

Anne, meanwhile, found a "shortcut" that she "stumbled into" by accident, the shortcut being a maintenance hatch that shouldn't have been there, and a brief moment where gravity tried to remember which direction was down. Anne emerged from the other side looking mildly disheveled and utterly apologetic.

"Sorry, Captain, I think I took a wrong turn."

"Don't apologize," Zhu Yuan said. She'd learned long ago that pointing out Jane Doe's impossible luck was like pointing out the sun was bright. Technically correct. Entirely unproductive. She assumed it was a Rat Thiren thing. "Just keep up."

They emerged into a clearing. An open plaza, maybe an old transit hub. Collapsed ticket booths leaned against each other like drunks at a bar. Dead escalators went nowhere and had the decency to admit it. Overhead signage flickered in a language that predated New Eridu, with characters that looked like they'd been carved by a civilization that had forgotten how to write before it forgot how to exist.

But the non-Euclidian space-bending effects here had calmed down, at least. The floor was flat. The walls didn't try to be floors. The space felt almost stable, as if the Hollow had stopped screaming and was now just muttering to itself, rocking back and forth in the corner of a white room..

Zhu Yuan's mapping equipment, which had been spinning its loading icon like a hamster on a wheel, finally gave up and displayed a single word: UNKNOWN.

Helpful.

They found him sitting on top of a large shipping container in the center of the clearing. The container was rusted and battered, its letters and meaning long since eaten by Ether and neglect.

His weapons were laid out in front of him in a precise arrangement. The combat shotgun. The skull weapon—up close, even at this distance, it looked worse. A rifle that was documented to shoot blue pulses. A… cannonball launcher. A cudgel that looked like it had been carved from a rib of something big. Something that looked like it had been pulled from the chest of a creature that had been buried in a place that had no right to exist. A mace with spikes that caught the emergency light and threw it back in angry red glints.

Melee weapons that had once been very large and very angry before someone, possibly The Slayer's backers, had decided it would make good cutlery.

It was, she found, oddly domestic.

If you ignored the brutalistic weapons.

And the armor.

Or The Slayer, in general.

Zhu Yuan catalogued each one. She didn't know what most of them were. She'd seen a lot of weapons in her career and reviewed a lot of manifests. She'd confiscated a lot more of contraband.

These didn't match anything in any database she'd ever seen.

The Slayer was sitting cross-legged on a rusted metal box, surrounded by instruments of violence that would have made a war criminal blush, and he was maintaining them, checking mechanisms, cleared residue, tested actions. His fingers were thick and heavily gloved, definitely not a set of hands she'd associate with delicate work, and yet he handled his weapons like a watchmaker handling a pocket watch.

This was routine for him. Routine. This is his downtime. This is what he does between killing. The thought should have been reassuring. It wasn't.

"Right," Anne Carver whispered from beside her. "He's just... tidying up. Like a serial killer with OCD. That's fine. That's normal. I'm fine. I'm really not." Anne's voice cracked perfectly. "Captain… I don't think I'm cut out for this job. I think I'm going to go home and become a florist. Flowers don't have skulls in them. Usually."

Zhu Yuan ignored her and approached the container, stopping at a professional distance. Close enough to assert authority, far enough to avoid being in immediate grabbing range. She'd learned that distance the hard way. The scar on her ribs still itched when it rained.

"I am Captain Zhu Yuan," she said, her voice carrying the exact cadence she'd used in a thousand briefings. "Criminal Investigation Special Response Team. New Eridu Public Security. This is Junior Staff Anne Carver. We are conducting an investigation into your activities in this sector and determine whether you pose a threat to public safety."

She knew he wouldn't give it. She was building a paper trail. When he eventually left and she had to file a report on the single most unclassifiable event in PubSec history, she could at least say she'd followed procedure. She'd asked. He'd refused. She'd documented it.

The Slayer worked on the skull gun now, his gauntleted fingers moving smoothly. It was as if he'd rebuilt this weapon a thousand times and could do it blindfolded.

"I'm also here," Zhu Yuan continued, because if he wasn't going to respond, she was going to keep talking until he either acknowledged her or killed her, and she'd prefer the former, "to request identification. We have no record of you in any system. No affiliation. No organization. No faction. You're a complete unknown."

The Slayer's hands paused. The visor lifted. It looked at her for a long moment, enough that made her skin prickle even though she couldn't see his eyes.

Then it went back to the skull gun.

"Captain Zhu Yuan." VEGA's voice came from the armor. "The Slayer is aware of your presence and aware of your purpose. He does not wish to be uncooperative, but he cannot provide the information you seek."

"And I'm going to keep asking them until I get answers. How long have you been operating?"

The Slayer's hands didn't stop. The cloth moved along the barrel in smooth, practiced strokes.

"Seven hours," VEGA said. "Total engagement time. Six Hollow clusters eliminated. The current progress rate is variable."

"That's not what I asked, V.E.G.A."

"Indeed."

"What is he?"

"The Slayer."

Zhu Yuan kept her look in check. "For how long."

"Longer than seven hours, Captain. The timeframe you're asking for is not one I can quantify in terms you would find meaningful."

That was either hyperbole or a statement of fact. Given what she'd seen, she was leaning toward the latter.

"Where did he come from?"

"The Slayer's origin is not relevant to his current mission."

"It's relevant to me."

"I understand. I am not obligated to satisfy your curiosity."

Zhu Yuan scowled. People gave her answers. It was what happened when you were Captain Zhu Yuan, when your file was a monument to successful resolutions, when everyone in New Eridu knew that you didn't leave cases open.

This case had been open since the moment she'd watched him ride a Notorious Hati into the pavement, and he was making it very clear that he didn't care.

"The suit," she tried anyway. "What is it? It's drawing in Etheric energy from the Ethereals. Perhaps even the Hollow itself."

"The suit is the Slayer's primary combat platform. It is not Standard Issue from any manufacturing tradition you would recognize."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that if I attempted to explain the metallurgical composition or energy conversion methodology to you, you would find the explanation actively distressing."

Anne Carver, who had been taking notes with the frantic energy of someone trying to record every word before she died, looked up from her notebook. "Distressing how?"

"It would challenge your understanding of physics and, depending on your temperament, potentially your sanity." VEGA's voice modulation didn't change, which made the statement somehow worse. "Be advised I am not being hyperbolic. The Slayer's suit contains technologies that are not compatible with the current theoretical frameworks of this dimension."

Zhu Yuan stared at the visor. "This dimension?"

"Yes."

Anne Carver stopped writing. "...There are… other dimensions?"

"Yes."

The Slayer continued cleaning his weapons.

"The weapons," Zhu Yuan said finally. "Are those from 'other dimensions' too?"

"If you are asking about the weapon with the skulls, I can confirm that it is exactly what it appears to be."

"Did he make it?"

"That is classified."

"Classified by whom?"

"The Slayer's internal protocols do not permit disclosure of that information."

"And whose internal protocols are those?"

"The Slayer's own."

Zhu Yuan stared at the visor. She could see her own reflection in it, distorted by the curve of the glass. She looked tiny. Then the green armor. The scratches and the faint gouges. None of which seemed a result of his past nine Sub-Companion Hollows dungeon delving.

"What happened to him?"