This is it...Please enjoy the Final Episode!
Episode 112: End of a Hollow's Story
It hurts...It hurts so much...
"The two brothers, one Shinigami and one Hollow..." Aizen eulogises, gripping the handle of his sword, wedged through the back of my throat. "...Two close siblings become sworn enemies, destined to fight for supremacy..." The hypnotic mastermind leans closer, his breath touching my mask. "Two unfortunate pawns for my path to deicide...Thank you, Michael...and Steven Benson..."
Words choke before they can come out, my voice-box destroyed by this piercing blade. Black sludge continues spilling from my mouth as my body feels weaker and colder by the second. My hand still holds my brother's chest cavity where his heart once resided. His head leans backwards, skin becoming paler with rings forming under his dull, narrowing eyes.
Aizen...You put my brother up to this the whole time?
"Indeed I have manipulated your brother since our little skirmish four years ago." He answers as if reading my own thoughts. "I must concede that at the time, I had somewhat underestimated your combined strength." He runs his hand down my cracking mask. "If I had not placed a seal on myself at the right moment, I would have surely been killed in that battle...But I had put a large gamble on letting your brother inherit the Hogyoku during my hibernation." He briefly shifts his gaze over to my brother, whose now down to his last breaths. "I held onto a belief that the two of you would continue your hatred after the war. By forming an alliance with the half-human half-Demon Apostles, your brother was still carrying on his true desire to 'purify' the masses. He had never really changed since I moulded him into a Shinigami four decades ago. And you still yearned for a sense of retribution and justice, fighting against those who had driven your allies into oblivion. I could not have asked for a better pair of tools than you and your brother."
And as I continue to feel my lungs dampening with sludgy blood, the fox-eyed subordinate of Aizen glides forward. "Y'think we could have let them stick around and enjoy the rest of the party Lord Aizen?"
And so the self-made God lowers his gaze slightly as he appears consoling within himself. "I suppose I should have granted the two of you a worthy payback for all the assistance you had given me, but fear not..."
And as an immense chorus of a millennia upon millennia of Demon's rise from the portal of Hell, swarming the sky in their millions...And as the thousands of Shinigami make their way across the mountains, confronted with an enemy that now outnumbered them a hundred to one...As the final wave of the Underworld began its sweep of the entire pure-world...Aizen would offer me the last words I would ever hear in my, long and eternal struggle in the life after death.
"...You and your brother will enjoy a solitude of eternal paradise..."
He pulls his sword out of my neck, now my brother and I are falling, falling under a heavenly battlefield of Divine versus Sin. Michael's crimson blood congeals with my dark blood, as it rains down from above our descending forms. My hand is still clutching his empty chest. And in his final moments, with the tiniest curl of his lip he smiles ever so faintly...His eyes close and we now await our sinking bodies to reach the ground...But the feeling of a earth against our bodies never arrived...
...We both died, together, falling from the very heavens which had betrayed us...
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"Brother..."
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"Brother..."
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"Hey brother! Are you awake?"
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Piles upon mountains of various skulls, some human, others far from being so...I think I even recognise a few hollow masks from long ago...Some I had befriended, others I had betrayed, some I had even devoured...
Rusted blades...spears with torn fabric flowing permanently against a non-existent wind. Blood red skies, reflected against crimson ponds, devoid of any life.
This place was not entirely as I expected. There is no more pain or torment...There are no devils or monsters ready to torture me for all eternity. There is only an endless plain of skull and weapon mounds – a constant reminder of those I had robbed of life along my path of vengeance.
As I lift myself off a bed of shattered bones, I turn towards my brother, who rests nearby. He wears a plain white robe – like a Shinigami deprived of his very power and identity. I notice a steel chain trailing from his chest towards my own body. I tug the chain and feel it pull against my own chest.
"Brother." He faces me with a tired expression. "Sorry it turned out this way."
"It's alright Michael." I reassure him. "There's no need to apologise anymore...Afterall, we're gonna be down here for a long time."
"Yeah." He sighs before lifting his back off the hill of bones. "Looks like we're stuck together as well huh?"
"Yeah..." I say with a weak chuckle. "Guess we're gonna have to get along now."
"Well, perhaps we should try and find some food...I'm starving." He says quite casually as he moves away until I'm dragged forward by the chain that binds our 'hearts' together.
"Hang on brother." I stop him for a moment. "Let me just quickly check something."
He notices my expression and nods. As I guide us towards the crimson pond nearby, I study my reflection in the pond. An ivory white exoskeleton with horizontal black markings forms my body My limbs, enlarged and elongated. Hands curled into banana-shaped claws. My head long and flat like a board, with a cross shaped slit across the top. And the chain attaches itself agaisnt a loose piece of white flesh, as if it is trying to pull something from my chest. This form was the very first form I took in my afterlife – an afterlife which took place of two times my original life. And when I see myself in this form for the first time in over forty years, I gain a strange sensation in my chest, as if something artificial were pulsating inside that chamber of my body.
Michael calls out to me not too far out of my reflection. "So what do you think? I mean, this will be 'you' for the rest of godknows when."
And with a crunching footstep, I turn away from the refelction and face the endless plain of Hell's Night. With a new and endless frontier awaiting the two of us, I clench my curly fingers and smile.
"I like this form...I am a Hollow afterall..."
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~My name is Steven Benson...And I am a Hollow of the Eternal Night...~
~END OF THE REQUIEM OF THE ETERNAL NIGHT: A HOLLOW'S STORY~
And this time it well and truly will conclude here. It has been a great two years (almost) and it's almost been 360 pages since, but I think I know when to end what has been a truly successful and epic tale. Lack of reviews lately has been a bit of a determining factor for not carrying on with a new arc. Also I'm hoping to open into new fanfic projects in the future. So it was for those two reasons which I can assure those who have followed the one-hundred-and-twelve chapters that there will not be any more ROTEN and that this is the absolute end. I may continue putting up OC character bios in a seperate story but other than that, I'm putting this fic well and truly into the 'completed drawer'. So I hope you all enjoyed the ride, and I hope some of you will leave a review to sum up the entire series. But this is Themuclhmeister signing off for Steven Benson/Banzai Benendes...See ya'll in another fanfic one day!
The End...