The blow caught him solidly in the gut. Yasutora bounced off the barrier and hit the ground hard, breath rushing from him in an oof of expelled air. As he skidded on his back across the sand, he fought the instinct to inhale.

This wasn't the first time he'd been winded so he knew how it went, but that didn't stop his body from reacting. His ribs flexed pointlessly, his lungs burned, and still he couldn't breathe. The crowd's ecstatic cheering kicked up a notch, and just when he was starting to think that this was it, that this time he really was going to buy it, Jackie's screamed warning reached his ears. Yasutora opened his eyes, saw what was coming, and sucked in a huge shocked breath.

His frantic duck and roll only just got him clear of the massive hoof driving into the ground where his head had been less than a second before. Choking yellow dust billowed into the air in its wake, providing some useful cover. Still fighting to breathe, Yasutora took advantage, scrambling further away from the hollow that was grunting obscenities as it hunted for him in the murk.

The hollow they'd been set against today was about fifteen feet tall and looked a bit like a tailless T-rex with small arms and huge feet. Except it stood on hooves not claws, and its tongue was prehensile and muscled like another limb. It was that which had got Yasutora, and suddenly having a weapon of that calibre used against him had upped the threat from the hollow tenfold.

The dust began to settle. The hollow saw him, bellowed, and hooves the size of a small car slammed into the ground beside him as he pushed off, using his tenuous reiatsu control to give himself a burst of speed. Not real shunpo, of course, just like the red blasts of energy Jackie was hurling at the back of the hollow's head weren't kidō. Only shinigami could use shunpo and kidō and, since Yasutora and Jackie weren't shinigami, they couldn't have the reiatsu to use them, now could they?

That was lies, all of it. According to everything Yasutora had heard, innate power had nothing to do with anything. The only difference between the ones sitting up in the stands and those dying here on the sands was when you got picked up by the Gotei and where. Serving shinigami came from the camps. Fighters like Jackie and him got caught on the streets of Rukongai, and for an adult with spiritual energy, being found out there was always a death sentence. Killing fields or pits, it just took some longer to die than others.

Jackie's kidō attacks finally got the hollow's attention. With a bellowing scream, it abandoned its pursuit of Yasutora and spun on her instead, head lowering and tongue lashing out from between gaping jaws. Yasutora, seeing his chance, went for the back of its right knee, slamming his reiatsu reinforced fist into the soft rear of the joint, feeling as much as hearing it, crunch.

The hollow screamed again, this time in pain, and swung back around, staggering as its damaged leg refused to co-operate. Jackie went for the other knee with her feet, a high scissor kick that took out the remaining joint sideways. The hollow went down, the ground shaking under the impact, but it wasn't out yet. It swiped a clawed fist at Jackie.

Choking on dust, she only just managed to dodge beneath it, and ended up leaving herself open to its long prehensile tongue. It whipped around her waist, lifting her high above the hollow's head and held her there as more and more coils wrapped around her, covering her from hips to head. It was trying to crush her like a snake, and if that tongue really tightened up, Jackie was dead. Trouble was, without a sword, there wasn't much Yasutora could do to cut her free. That tongue was solid muscle.

He squinted at the thing's masked mouth, at rows of blade-sharp teeth.

Unless he used the hollow against itself? Yeah, that might just work.

With a yell of his own, Yasutora sprinted towards the hollow's head, leaping at the last second to vault clear over its flailing arms and land on its neck. He shoved his shoulder up against its lower jaw, wrapped both arms around its muzzle, and started to forced the thing's mouth closed on its own tongue. It thrashed its head violently trying to shake him off, but Yasutora gritted his teeth and hung on. He had to get this to work. If he didn't, Jackie would die, and he refused to let that happen.

It was tough going. The hollow's flesh was springy and rubbery, and took a hell of a lot of cutting. But slowly, inexorably, Yasutora felt it starting to give. As teeth finally penetrated the thick muscle, the hollow gurgled and foul black blood sprayed from the wound, covering Yasutora from head to toe. The stuff sizzled when it hit the ground and for once Yasutora found himself grateful for the protection of his costume.

Pressing his cloth-covered face to the scaly skin, he kept up the pressure, feeling slow victory in every inch his arms tightened. Biceps screamed in protest, knees creaked, but he couldn't stop. The hollow still had Jackie and he had to keep her safe at all costs. It was what they did. What they had done since that first day in a trashed Rukongai bar, when they'd ended up fighting back to back against thugs who thought they'd found easy pickings.

Finally, after what felt like hours, Jackie cried that she was clear and Yasutora glimpsed her rolling to her feet, shoving free of the tongue that still tried to whip out and recapture her despite being nearly cut in half. Yasutora redoubled his efforts as the hollow continued to struggle, its tiny hands coming up to claw and snatch at any part of him it could reach. Yasutora kicked out at them, losing his footing in the process, and while he was scrambling to recover, he heard the welcome crack of a mask shattering. The hollow froze, body rigid, and the next moment, the whole thing disintegrated beneath him.

Yasutora hit the deck with a pained grunt. For a few seconds, he just knelt there, letting his sense of equilibrium return. He was covered from head to toe in a puke coloured mixture of hollow, sandy dust and his own blood. From the pain in his chest, he had at least a couple of cracked ribs, and the ringing in his ears probably wouldn't stop for hours. In short, he felt like he'd just gone ten rounds with Klitschko, but he was still alive and so was Jackie, and that was all that counted.

As Jackie's slim gloved hand came into his field of view, he blinked and cocked his head to look up at her. It was impossible to see her expression beneath the fighter's mask she wore, but her voice was even as she asked, "You okay?"

He nodded an answer, not really feeling it but taking her hand anyway and letting her pull him to his feet. Behind the barriers, the crowd were going mad with excitement and, as he limped from the arena, Yasutora raised a hand in the briefest acknowledgement he could get away with.

He didn't like the crowds. Iba-neesan called them fans and said the fighters had to play up to them, give them their money's worth. Yasutora knew better. He remembered bullies who preyed on the weak, and others who cheered on the sidelines, too grateful it wasn't them being punched in the face to dare lend a hand. It was one of the few personal things, apart from his name, that he did remember from his life in the living world.

The shinigami who flocked to the Pits were no different from the thugs and cowards he remembered. Some came for the show, for the blood and the fight. They were closest to true fans, he guessed. But others came to convince themselves they were safe behind their division walls with their uniforms and ranks, to prove that they had it better than the poor bastards who hadn't signed up with the Gotei.

But pitting the best non-shinigami fighters against each other wasn't enough to do that, nor were fights against small hollows. Not if the fighters won. So every time it had to be something bigger, faster, stronger, more dangerous.

So far he and Jackie were holding their own, but it couldn't last forever. Sooner or later they'd come up against something they couldn't beat, and then what?

Yasutora didn't want to be ripped to pieces for the amusement of screaming crowds, but he was enough of a realist to know how this was going to end. He'd seen it happen often enough to other fighters. And the night the hollows won, these so-called fans would be cheering just as hard as they did tonight, because all they were there for was the kill, and who died wasn't important, just so long as it wasn't them.