NOVEL WEB 15 – Explaining Things
Hisashi took a deep breath, this was going to be a long conversation. He needed to explain it to her though. She had saw down cross legged in front of him and had crossed her arms looking up at him questioningly. He folded his legs underneath him sitting down too. Is this seize? Oh well.
"So I was killed back then by something like what I am now." he started.
"Wait does that mean if those two before killed us we would have also become like you?" she interrupted him. She is usually a polite girl, but she feels comfortable enough with her brother to interrupt him without feeling like she is being rude. He might have spoiled her a little too much back then and curiosity must have gotten the best of her.
"Uhm... my situation was a little unusual compared to a regular attack. Normally they just eat people making themselves stronger and the people they eat are gone forever. That's also the reason why I was gone for so long, because I was asleep while I transformed which is also unusual. I slept for 10 years while I transformed." he answered.
"Woah...so what are you?" she asked eager to sate her curiosity.
"I'm now something called a Hollow. It's essentially a corrupted soul. Normally when you become one you turn into a mindless beast enslaved to his hunger for souls with little to know consciousness like the other two you saw. In return they become very powerful though. If you see anything like me just run." he told her sternly. "You can recognise a Hollow mainly by two features, one is the white mask" he pointed his blade towards his mask before lowering it to the hole on his thorax "the other is the hole somewhere on their body, most commonly where their heart would normally be."
She got up and carefully touched the edges of the hole that travelled all the way from the front to the back of his thorax.
"It's... it's really a hole." she said utterly flabbergasted. "Doesn't that hurt?" she asked in worry.
"No, it's normal." he reassured her.
"So why were you invisible before?" she asked the question that had been bugging her.
"It's not that I was invisible, you were just incapable of seeing or hearing me just like most other humans." he cleared up for her.
"Ah, so that's why mom and dad couldn't see you! But why can I see you now then?" she was completely immersed in the conversation now.
"Well...that's my fault I guess. I uhm..." he was feeling quite awkward now that he had to explain himself.
"I spent so much time near you that my spirit power managed to stimulated yours. Then when you experienced what you believed to be a life or death situation when you were first attacked and I showed up this awakened your spiritual sight albeit a very weakened form of it. Then as I spent more time with you your spirit power and spiritual sight continued to be stimulated slowly improving them over the months since then. I didn't know it had progressed this far though." he explained.
She nodded her head seriously when she heard this. Her experiences over the past year or so were starting to make a lot more sense now.
"So what now?" she asks him.
"Well...you may think the world is far more dangerous than you thought after your experience these months and today. However I promise you, you are underestimating it by a huge factor." he responded.
"First off there aren't only Hollow like what you've met so far. There are also Shinigami."
"Like in the stories?" she asked excitedly.
"Well sort of, but not quite. Shinigami are originally human souls that have strengthened their spirit power granting them.. well super powers I guess would be close enough. They look like regular humans, wear black hakama and haori. They usually wield a sword of some kind too and some can make it transform to power up. Kind of like a magical girls. They are responsible for guiding regular souls called Pluses to soul society and they exterminate Hollow like me." he explains.
"Hollow and Shinigami are the biggest two factions, then there are a bunch of smaller factions of humans and souls with a variety of superpowers quite unpredictable from one another. Some quite weak, but others even more dangerous than the Hollow and Shinigami" he doesn't want to go into too much detail and have her constantly be worrying about things if he starts bringing people like Aizen and Ywach into the picture. He can bear this burden himself for now. Just being able to talk to someone else let alone a family member is a huge help and makes him feel better than he has since he died. The second one that is.
"Wait aren't the Shinigami the good guy?" she asks.
"Only comparatively. Their main tasks are exterminating hollow and guiding souls to Soul Society. Though this in general makes them better than most groups as a whole you have to keep in mind they are just more powerful human souls. They still have all the flaws present in humans. Are humans the good guys?" he asks her.
"I guess you have a point. So Hollow almost guaranteed bad guy. Shinigami probably good guy, but no guarantees so still be very careful." she managed to recap it quite succinctly.
"Err... yeah I guess that covers the most important part of what I wanted to say." he responds sheepishly.
They end up forgetting about the time as they talk all night about various things including what happened with the family after he died, what she had been up to and of course what he had been up to since him return. They didn't notice how long they had been talking until they noticed the sun started rising again.
"Let's take you back home, it's been a long night the coast should be clear now and you need to get some rest." he told her.
