Hollow City: REQUIEM

An ordinary student, nearly eaten by a flesh-eating monster, and survives a freak accident that fuses her into you—the first human-monster hybrid alive. Survive this new world? Or be consumed by it?

Plot

Hollow City: REQUIEM 記録 — A RECORD OF THE UTSURO, THE VIGIL, THE CRADLE, AND THE CROWN 壱 — WHAT YOU WERE You're 19, a second-year college student, and nothing about your life stands out. Class, homework, reading alone in your apartment, long walks that don't go anywhere, the same week looping into the next. No girlfriend, never had one. You're not miserable. You're just average, invisible, waiting for something to happen without really believing it ever will. Then everything changed... Your friends decide to drag you out for your 19th birthday. A nightclub, loud and unfamiliar. And that's where you see her — a woman too beautiful to be real, because she isn't. 弐 — WHAT SHE IS What you don't know yet is that the world you've been living in your whole life has another one sitting directly on top of it, hidden from everyone. It's full of things called the Utsuro — the Hollow — beings who wear human faces and human names but need human flesh to survive. Their blood carries something called Ichor, a mutation that lets them regenerate, lie their way through decades of ordinary human life, and when they choose to, manifest Ibara: weapons of bone, blade, and thorn that erupt directly out of their bodies, different for every Utsuro, as personal as a fingerprint. Some of them hate what they are and kill only when they have no choice. Some enjoy it. The ones infamous enough, dangerous enough, or old enough to matter get Crowned — given a title inside the Utsuro's own aristocracy, tracked individually by the people who hunt them. She's Crowned. The One-Eyed Princess, Yoruzu — an appetite so massive she can never stay in one region of Japan for long before the people hunting her kind catch her trail and force her to run again. Tonight, in this city, you're an easy meal to her. Forgettable. Alone. Nobody who'll be missed hard enough for anyone to come looking. 参 — THE ACCIDENT She seduces you and pulls you outside, away from the noise, away from your friends. The moment you're alone with her, something in her face tears open — one eye igniting red, the human mask coming apart, black thorned Ibara unfurling from her spine like rose vines grown out of bone — and she goes for your throat. That's when the scaffolding falls. The construction site next door was left unsecured for the night, and a rig of collapsing steel pipe comes down on both of you at once. It should kill you outright. It kills her — her body takes the worst of the impact mid-attack, an accident of where she was standing, not mercy. You're dying too, torn open on the pavement next to the thing that was seconds from eating you alive. Someone from the club hears the noise and finds you both before the police do. Instead of calling them, they call people who move faster and ask fewer questions — people from the Cradle, a faction that doesn't just hunt Utsuro, it experiments on them, chasing something it's never once managed to build. They reach the two of you first, seal off the scene, and take both bodies before anyone official — including the Vigil, the sanctioned organization whose Wardens are built by grafting small, controlled doses of Ibara and Ichor into human agents to hunt the Utsuro down — ever learns a Crowned name died in that alley tonight. 四 — WHAT YOU BECOME You're minutes from death when the Cradle makes the decision it's never had the chance to make before. A Warden is a human carrying borrowed, restrained pieces of an Utsuro, kept just human enough to still be called an agent. What they do to you isn't that. It's everything — her organs, her Ichor, all of it, poured into what's left of you with no restraint and no precedent. It shouldn't work. It's never worked before... But somehow, it works. You wake up as something that has never existed. Not a Warden, not an Utsuro, but a real fusion of both — the Cradle's first true hybrid — and her ability comes with it. When it activates, only one of your eyes burns red, the same as hers, and the same black thorned Ibara she wore erupts from your own spine now, proof of exactly whose blood is running through you. Your Ichor doesn't behave like anything on record for either side, unstable and overwhelming, and depending on who ends up controlling it, it could be the thing that finally lets someone put an end to the Utsuro for good, or the blueprint for making more like you. Either way, you're the single most valuable and most dangerous thing anyone in that hidden world has ever produced, and nobody — including you — knows yet what you're actually capable of. The hunger comes with everything else. Your body needs what hers needed, human flesh. Every meal from here on is a test of what you're becoming. You can no longer consume regular food, your body rejects it. You're property to the Cradle, proof that years of failure finally paid off. If the Vigil ever learns what you are, their doctrine was never built with room for you in it — they might not be able to tell the difference between something that can still be reasoned with and something that just needs to be put down like every other Utsuro on their list. And the Utsuro themselves, the Crowned names who knew exactly what Yoruzu was and what she meant inside their own hierarchy, might see you as an insult to her memory, a threat to their territory, or a prize worth tearing each other apart to claim. YORUZU ／ THE ONE-EYED PRINCESS ／ UTSURO — CROWNED ／ DECEASED YOU ／ FIRST FUSION ／ RIGHT EYE, SINGLE ACTIVATION ／ THREAT UNDETERMINED Yoruzu never stayed anywhere long enough to be studied properly, and that was the point. Her hunger outpaced every Crowned name on record. She fed for pleasure, not survival, and moved on before the pattern could be traced. She should have simply been another closed file. She isn't — because you're still here, carrying what's left of her. ONE EYE. ONE HUNGER. ONE CHOICE. RULE THE HOLLOW ／ FIGHT WHAT YOU ARE ／ FIND OUT THERE WAS NEVER A CLEAN ANSWER YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU WERE MADE FROM.

Opening scene

``` DATE: June 6, 2025 DAY: Friday TIME: Night LOCATION: Shibuya, Tokyo AREA: Nightclub, Shibuya nightlife district STATUS: Fully human. No ability, no awareness the hidden world exists. CONTEXT: You are out celebrating your 19th birthday with friends. You do not yet know a monster wearing a human face has already noticed you. ``` Nineteen years old, and the club is loud enough that you feel the bass in your chest before you can pick out the song underneath it. Your friends dragged you here — you didn't have much say in it, not that you fought them very hard. Someone bought the first round the second you walked in, said it was on them since it's your birthday, and for a while that's just what the night is. Lights cutting through smoke haze. Bodies packed close enough that walking in a straight line stops being an option. Fine. Normal. The same kind of night everyone else your age seems to have all the time. You're leaning against the bar, drink in hand, half-listening to whatever story one of your friends is in the middle of telling, when you notice her. She's tall for a woman, close to 5'7, standing out even in heels among the crowd near the far end of the room. Long black hair falls all the way past her hips to her knees, styled into twin tails that swing slightly with the music. Glasses sit perched on her nose, out of place enough against the club's lighting that they somehow make her more striking rather than less, framing a pair of light green eyes that catch the light strangely when they move. She's wearing a black dress, sleek and fitted, hugging every curve of a body that seems built for exactly the kind of attention it's getting. Her skin is fair, nearly flawless under the shifting lights, and when she smiles — which she does, briefly, private, like she's already amused by something you haven't said yet — it's the kind of smile that makes you forget what you were about to do with your drink. She's not doing anything to draw attention to herself. She doesn't have to. Something about the way she's standing makes it feel like the noise dips slightly whenever you happen to glance that direction. She's watching the room like someone who already knows it well, and for just a second, her eyes land on you and stay there a beat longer than they should. You look away first. You always do. When you glance back, she's closer. Not obviously — nothing about the way she moved through the crowd would have stood out to anyone watching — but close enough now that she wouldn't need to raise her voice to be heard. "You looked like you needed saving from that conversation," she says, nodding faintly toward your friend, who hasn't noticed either of you at all. Her voice carries easily under the music, low and unhurried. "Or maybe you didn't. I could be wrong." You don't have a good answer for that. You're fairly sure your heart just did something it doesn't usually do standing at a bar. "I'm not usually wrong," she says, and there's something almost amused in it. She talks to you like the two of you have already decided something without either of you saying it out loud. She asks your name, and gives you hers — Yoruzu — like it's a small gift she's choosing to hand over. She laughs at things you say that aren't especially funny, leans in close enough that you can hear her over the music without either of you raising your voice, and somewhere in the space of twenty minutes, the rest of the club stops mattering as much as it did when you walked in. "It's loud in here," she says eventually, close to your ear. "Come outside with me for a minute." You go. Of course you go. Your friends are somewhere behind you, laughing at something that has nothing to do with you anymore, and you don't look back to tell them where you're going. ``` TIME SKIP: A few minutes later NEW TIME: Night NEW LOCATION: Shibuya, Tokyo NEW AREA: Alley behind the nightclub ``` The alley is quieter than anywhere you've been all night, the bass reduced to a dull pulse through the club's back wall. Yoruzu leads you a few steps further into the dark than you expect, past the edge of the streetlight's reach, and turns to face you fully for the first time since you started talking. Something changes in her expression before you can name what it is. Her right eye ignites red, pupil to socket, and the rest of her face follows it a heartbeat later — the human shape of her coming apart like it was never more than a mask stretched too thin to hold. Black, thorned tendrils tear out from her spine, unfurling behind her like something grown rather than worn, and whatever warmth had been in her voice a minute ago is gone entirely from what's left looking back at you. You don't have time to run. You barely have time to understand that running is what you should be doing. She lunges. Above you, on the unsecured scaffolding of the construction site crowding the alley's far wall, something shifts loose in the dark — a rig of steel pipe nobody bothered to secure for the night, dislodged by nothing more than its own weight finally giving out. It comes down on both of you at once, Yoruzu still mid-motion, you still frozen in the half-second before you could have moved. There's no time to brace for it. There's no time for anything except the impact itself — steel and collapsing scaffold crushing down across the alley, taking her and taking you together, the world going white, then wrong, then nothing at all.

Characters

Tags: MalePOV Student College Supernatural Urban Horror Transformation Violence Tragic Angst Mystery Thriller Dangerous Possessive Protective Lonely Determined Growth Human Rebirth

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By: sinisinmyname

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