Chapter 368: The Eerie Giant Hand
Harumasa's grim deduction hung over the group, casting a heavy, suffocating pall over their already tense mood. As Hollow Special Operations Section 6 pressed deeper into the cavernous ruins, the environmental anomalies grew impossible to ignore. A nauseating, metallic odor—the signature stench of highly volatile Ether compounds—thickened the dead air, clinging to the back of their throats with every breath. Jagged clusters of purple-black crystallized Ether jutted from the surrounding walls and the cracked pavement, pulsing with a faint, sickly luminescence.
It didn't take long for them to stumble upon the source of the overwhelming stench.
"Look over there." Soukaku pointed her heavy weapon toward a relatively open clearing ahead. The space appeared to be the decaying remains of an old logistical transfer station.
Scattered haphazardly across the station's rusted floor were at least a dozen standard-issue Ether fuel storage tanks. Without exception, every single one had been subjected to extreme, violent destruction. The thick metal casings were either torn wide open by massive, jagged punctures or caved in entirely by devastating blunt-force impacts. The highly concentrated liquid Ether fuel they once held had long since bled out, painting the ground in dark, corrosive purple streaks and saturating the immediate atmosphere with that eye-watering, pungent reek.
Judging by the sharp, unoxidized edges of the torn metal and the wet sheen of the chemical puddles, these acts of sabotage had occurred no more than four hours ago.
Even more alarming were the precise, surgical incisions visible on a few of the intact tank valves—clean, deliberate cuts that could only have been made by human tools.
Yanagi's tone was absolute, leaving no room for debate. "Bringer did this." She crouched gracefully beside one of the ruined containers, running a gloved fingertip along the edge of a perfectly straight gash. "These are the marks of professional cutting tools, applied with a very clear, malicious purpose. He deliberately sabotaged these storage devices to flood this sector of the Hollow with high-concentration Ether. But the real question is..."
She let the sentence trail off, though the unspoken reality hung heavily among the squad. Under this oppressive level of Ether concentration, prolonged exposure was an absolute death sentence for any ordinary human. The aggressive Ether corrosion would rapidly invade a living organism, aggressively rewriting and destroying cellular structures, dragging the victim into the irreversible nightmare of Etherealization.
Since Bringer had deliberately chosen to hole up in this toxic sector, he either possessed some extraordinary, high-grade protective gear, or...
"Could he have already turned into an Ethereal?" Soukaku whispered, her voice dropping an octave as she unconsciously tightened her grip on her massive weapon, her knuckles turning white.
Yanagi rose to her feet, her expression darkening. "We'll find out once we reach the target coordinates. But until then, keep your guard up. An Ether environment this saturated is a breeding ground. It might give birth to unmatched Ethereal mutations."
Her grim premonition materialized almost immediately.
As Section 6 carved their way deeper into the Hollow, the sheer volume of Ethereals swarming them refused to thin out. Worse, their combat types and tactical coordination began to escalate drastically. The mindless, lower-tier Apeca and Satyr variants were swiftly replaced by far more lethal threats: Dullahans and Thanatos.
The Dullahans, while aggressive and imposing melee combatants, were straightforward enough for the elite squad to dismantle with coordinated strikes.
The Thanatos, however, were the true apex predators of the Hollow. These Ethereals boasted slender, unnervingly twisted humanoid silhouettes and wielded massive longbows condensed entirely from crackling Ether energy. They didn't just rain down precise, devastating sniper fire from a distance; they possessed the maddening ability to instantly teleport directly behind their targets. A sudden flicker of purple light was often the only warning before a Thanatos delivered a vicious, point-blank slash, a tactic that had made them a waking nightmare for countless Hollow Investigators.
Section 6 was forced into a grueling gauntlet, systematically dismantling wave after wave of Dullahan and Thanatos strike teams. A few heavily mutated energy-storage and ion-body variants joined the fray, soaking up damage and severely bogging down their advance.
Harumasa exhaled a sharp breath, lowering his bow for a fraction of a second to wipe a bead of sweat from his brow. "These guys... they're way more persistent than the usual trash. Their coordination is actually structured."
Yanagi's grip on her naginata tightened. "The Ether concentration is simply too high. The activated environment is supercharging them." She glanced at her wrist-mounted detector; the environmental activity index was already violently spiking against the red alert line.
But an even more bizarre and deeply unsettling anomaly awaited them when they were roughly three spatial rifts away from Bringer's supposed coordinates.
The squad was handling through a sprawling, cavernous sector choked with the colossal, rusting wreckage of abandoned industrial machinery. Soukaku had taken the vanguard position, her senses dialed to the maximum as she scouted the path ahead.
The surrounding environment was completely, unnervingly silent. Even the ambient, low-frequency hum that usually echoed from the depths of the Hollow had been swallowed up, leaving nothing but the microscopic, glass-like crackling of Ether crystals actively growing on the metal debris.
Without a single warning sign, the smooth alloy casing of a discarded generator to Soukaku's immediate left began to distort. The solid metal rippled outward like a stone dropped into a calm pond. From the center of those metallic waves, a gigantic, bloodshot eye snapped open.
The unblinking pupil, roughly the size of a car tire, swiveled with mechanical precision and locked mercilessly onto Soukaku.
The very fabric of space surrounding the eye began to violently twist and warp, tearing open a swirling, vortex-like rift.
A split second later, the nightmare revealed its true form. A monstrous, grotesque hand—massive enough to crush a fully grown adult like a fragile toy—erupted from the swirling rift. Its five thick, heavily corded fingers splayed wide as it plunged downward, aiming a devastating, crushing blow directly at Soukaku. The sheer speed of the strike tore through the air, producing a chilling, low-pitched shriek.
"Soukaku, watch out!" Yanagi's sharp warning rang out the exact millisecond the giant hand breached the rift.
Pure, unadulterated combat instinct, forged through countless life-and-death operations, took over. Soukaku didn't even waste a fraction of a second looking back; she threw her entire body weight forward, executing a desperate, explosive combat roll.
The monstrous hand clipped the very edge of her jacket, slamming into the metal floor with a deafening BOOM!
The impact was catastrophic. The reinforced alloy plating buckled instantly, leaving a massive, cratered indentation in the shape of a palm, with jagged spiderweb cracks radiating outward from the epicenter of the strike.
"What the hell is that?!" Harumasa had already pivoted on his heel, drawing his bowstring back to his cheek in a fluid blur of motion. He locked onto the target, but before he could release the crackling Ether arrow, the giant hand executed an impossible maneuver. Having missed its prey, it rapidly retracted, melting back into the spatial rift and dragging that horrifying, unblinking eye along with it.
The rippling metal surface instantly smoothed out, returning to its cold, undisturbed state as if the entire terrifying sequence had been nothing more than a shared hallucination.
But the pulverized, concave palm print crushed into the floor plating, coupled with the lingering, static-like ripples of spatial disturbance in the air, offered obvious proof of the attack.
Section 6 immediately collapsed into a tight, back-to-back defensive formation. Weapons raised, they nervously tracked their eyes over every single surface, shadow, and piece of debris surrounding them.
The suffocating, deadly silence stretched on for ten agonizing seconds.
Then, on the rusted, broken shell of a shipping container directly behind Harumasa, a second eye tore open without a sound.
This time, Harumasa's reaction speed was terrifying. The instant the massive pupil dilated, his fingers slipped from the bowstring. The Ether arrow shrieked through the air in a blinding flash of light.
Yet, the projectile merely punched a clean, smoking hole through the rusted metal wall. The eye, and the spatial rift anchoring it, had simply flickered out of existence a microsecond before the arrow could connect.
Immediately, the air directly above Yanagi's head warped, and the colossal hand plunged downward like a falling meteor.
Yanagi sidestepped with razor-thin precision, the violent displacement of air from the crushing strike whipping her hair wildly around her face.
Pivoting on her lead foot, she swung her naginata in a vicious, upward backhand arc. The glowing blade cleaved perfectly through the space the hand had occupied, but it only sliced through the rapidly collapsing spatial ripples, biting into empty air.
Over the grueling span of the next few minutes, this maddening, unpredictable ambush played out four more times.
The strikes were entirely erratic, defying all logic and physics. Sometimes the eye would manifest on a vertical wall, sometimes the rift would tear open in the empty air above them, and once, the hand even erupted from the seemingly solid floor directly beneath their boots.
The monstrous entity showed no preference, simply lashing out at whichever squad member happened to be closest to its manifestation point.
The raw physical power behind the giant hand was staggering; a single direct hit would easily shatter the bones of an unprotected Investigator. Yet, its combat logic was infuriatingly simple and cowardly: a blindingly fast ambush followed by an instantaneous retreat. It absolutely refused to engage in a sustained, head-on clash.
"Sister Yanagi, what in the world is this thing?!" Soukaku panted heavily, having just executed another desperate backward leap to evade a sweeping backhand strike from the side. Her voice was a volatile mix of deep confusion and mounting, explosive annoyance. "Is it even an Ethereal? Why does it just keep doing these cheap, sneaky attacks? We can't even land a hit on it! It's so frustrating!"
Yanagi kept her naginata raised in a high guard, her sharp, calculating gaze sweeping over every inch of the cavernous space, hunting for the slightest distortion in the air. "There is absolutely no record of a biological entity like this in the Hollow database. But judging from the extreme Ether reaction it gives off and its high-level spatial manipulation..." She narrowed her eyes. "It is highly likely a supreme-tier Ethereal, one that has either violently mutated or been newly birthed by this extreme environment."
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