The high-end B-rank filled the gallery entrance when it came through.

The ambient light at the doorway went out. The warmth evacuated the space around the Hollow’s form as it passed the threshold, the absence it carried restructuring the air in a wider radius than anything that had preceded it through the tear. Its mass was substantial: the accumulated weight of something that had deteriorated slowly and completely, the form dense with compressed wrongness in a way the C-ranks and the B-rank had not been. It moved, and the gallery floor registered the displacement, the hardwood transmitting a low vibration through the room.

It filled the entrance and turned toward the center of the gallery, toward Evelyn.

She went to it.

She didn’t brace for impact. She simply walked toward the obliterating mass, her stiletto heels clicking a steady, unbothered rhythm against the hardwood.

The Hollow occupied the entrance space. She moved into it.

She got inside it before the mass could be applied.

She stepped inside the Hollow’s committed movement before the mass could become weight, closing to a range where the thing’s size gave it no leverage. Her knuckles drove into the mid-thoracic gap, the failure point she’d sighted from the north window, the place where the corruption had eaten deepest. Her heel hit the hardwood and locked. The force went through.

The contact site caved inward. A void geometry unspooled from the strike, not spreading so much as claiming, the Hollow’s mass surrendering to it in a racing, silent consumption. For a half-breath the B-rank’s anatomy hung in negative: the warped ribs, the fused spine, a perfect dark X-ray of its corruption. Then the whole architecture shattered. The form collapsed into a surge of black static that devoured itself to nothing before a flake could touch the gallery floor.

Not finished. Located.

The Hollow turned its full mass toward her. The gallery space worked against her now: the Hollow occupied the entrance, which meant her movement options on the west side of the gallery were narrowed. The north wall collection was behind her. The south wall collection was to her left. The Hollow was in front of her, and it was large enough that its positioning restricted the geometry she had been using through the C-rank and B-rank exchanges. She managed both constraints simultaneously: the fight’s geometry and the geography of what she was protecting.

The Hollow lunged. Evelyn didn’t evade; she stepped directly into the attack, offering her left shoulder. The Hollow’s massive, misshapen hand clamped down, intending to crush the joint. Before the grip could fully lock, Evelyn snapped her elbow upward from the inside, utilizing the Hollow’s own crushing momentum against it. The joint shattered against her bones with the sound of a snapping timber. Without dropping her momentum, she drove the heel of her right palm directly upward into the exposed failure point beneath its ribs.

Both failure points burned slow, the B-rank’s dense mass pushing back. Her hands read the fight at each site like a mechanic listening through a wrench, not pain, just the gritty structural information of material refusing to yield, the Hollow’s form telling her exactly how hard it was still holding on.

She worked the failure points in sequence.

Her heels clicked on the hardwood as she repositioned. It was the metronome of the fight, the only sound she made that wasn’t contact.

Each exchange was a move in a sequence she had already seen end. The Hollow responded to her as a threat, driving mass toward her, adjusting its approach based on where she had been, attempting grapples and repositions, and applying its substantial weight against her smaller frame.

She held the close range through all of it. The corrupted mass, the face of something that had been human and had moved comprehensively past that. The sensation of dense, corrupted cartilage turning to ash beneath her knuckles while the remaining muscle still tried to crush her.

The Hollow’s final movement drove her toward the north wall.

The Hollow launched its entire remaining mass at her in a desperate, sweeping arc. Evelyn dropped her center of gravity, pivoting on her stiletto heel to let the devastating momentum carry the Hollow past her rather than through her. The redirection wasn’t entirely clean. The sheer kinetic wake dragged her backward. Her heel slammed against the wooden baseboard, locking her stance. The Hollow’s massive, dissolving shoulder slammed to a halt exactly one inch from the gilded frame on the north wall. The displaced air fluttered the canvas. Evelyn didn’t blink.

She placed both hands at the primary failure point, the mid-thoracic site that had been widening since the first exchange, and she held what she was holding and applied the rest of the force she had been accumulating through every exchange since the Hollow came through the tear.

The dissolution reached the Hollow’s core mass.

The propagation accelerated as the form lost critical density, the spread outrunning the resistance as the core failed, the void advancing through the remaining structure faster than the structure could fight it. The high-end B-rank came apart from the inside out, the form losing its architecture completely in the space between one second and the next.

She stepped back.

The Hollow finished dissolving two feet from the north wall collection.

Evelyn turned toward the Gate now.

All through the floor work, her Shade hadn’t been crushing like it had at the academy. It had been holding the door open, a structural anchor jammed into the Gate’s threshold. Now she turned that weight inward.

The enormous stillness pressed inward from the gallery side of the differential. Years of held-door pressure, everything accumulated behind the Shade, shifted against the tear from the inside, not fighting the expansion, just occupying the space the expansion needed. The Gate’s resistance folded. It closed without equalization, without a shockwave. The closure was a barometric shift, a pressure change felt in the jaw rather than heard.

The room’s sounds returned one at a time: the ventilation hummed on, then the distant avenue traffic, then footsteps, a visitor two rooms over who would never know what they’d been standing near.

The gallery was quiet and intact.

Evelyn stood in the center of the gallery floor. The gold chain at her collarbone caught the returning warmth of the gallery lights above the turtleneck’s edge.

She raised her hands into the soft gallery light. She checked the seams of her skin and the alignment of her knuckles, examining them with the exact same clinical detachment she had used to inspect the artwork. Finding no blood, no bruising, and no ash, she lowered them.

She crossed to the east wall.

"Thank you," Evelyn said once she walked back up to Ash.

Ash was so engrossed by the painting he had not heard a single word Evelyn said.

"Huh. Did you say something?" Ash said at last.

Evelyn returned to look at the canvas herself. "How many brush strokes do you think the artist used to create this work?"

"They didn’t use any." Ash responded. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Evelyn glanced into his eyes.

"It was painted with their hands."

Evelyn turned fully to only have Ash in her vision. She noticed a single strand of her hair had landed onto his shirt’s collar. Evelyn leaned in and picked it up, along with her coat Ash was still holding.

"You’re a terrible liar," Evelyn said, walking away.

"I am?" Ash asked.

"You said you weren’t trying to make this easier or harder for me," her voice called out from the exit of the gallery.