Once he steadied his footing, Ace Vayne took the first step and charged. His target was the Aberrant Hollow thrashing wildly at his flank. The sonic attacks weren't particularly powerful, but they were fast and relentless — he decided to take it out first.

He redirected his Reiatsu and his speed surged. But even as he closed in, the Aberrant Hollow frantically opened its mouth and spat out a Sonic Blast.

Ace didn't dodge. He crossed both arms in front of his body, took the hit head-on, and kept charging.

The Aberrant Hollow panicked. It spat out a second Sonic Blast and shot backward at speed, trying to kite him and grind him down.

The gap had already closed. Ace wasn't eating that second hit directly — he leaped high, cleared the Sonic Blast, then dove down and raked a claw across the Aberrant Hollow.

THUD!

Every Tentacle it had raised to block was severed in one stroke. Four deep gashes opened across its face. Blood came gurgling out. It was done fighting.

Second Hollow down. Ace turned his gaze to the two Humanoid Hollows.

If all four had launched a full combined assault earlier and managed to wound him, those two might still have had some kind of chance — but Ace had only taken a single Sonic Blast head-on, his injuries barely amounting to anything. They had no way to match him and they knew it.

On instinct, both let out a howl toward the sky and turned to run.

Hunter and prey swapped roles in an instant. Ace drove his Reiatsu to its peak and caught up within a single breath, not giving them even a sliver of a chance to escape.

Maybe it was the pressure of his Reiatsu at full force — they grew flustered mid-retreat, their speed dropping off sharply. Ace ran them down with ease.

Raise a hand. Cut them down. One fluid motion.

Fewer than five exchanges. All four Hollows swept up.

After the fight, Ace quickly stripped all four Hollow Masks and retreated far from the area, leaving behind four broken corpses that dissolved slowly into Reishi and scattered through the forest.

He jogged to another section of the forest, did a quick sweep, and confirmed it was clear. Then he used the sharp edge of his right claw to scramble up a large tree, settled onto one of the higher branches, took out the four Hollow Masks, and stuffed them into his mouth one by one.

Four dense currents of Reishi flowed into his body. Through digestion they spread and were stored throughout his entire frame. None of the four Ordinary Hollows had been especially strong individually, but numbers compensated — the four streams of Reishi not only replenished what he had burned over these past days but added a considerable measure of strength, pushing the day he would break through from Ordinary Hollow to Elite-class Hollow Beast one step closer.

"Phew... This spot's not bad. I'll set up my base here."

Digestion complete, Ace shook himself off and headed back to where the fight had taken place. That was the entry point he had come through, and four enemies had shown up there all at once — more Hollows would be passing through that same area. After clearing the first wave, he returned to turn it into his hunting ground.

Back in the forest, the dispersal of those four Hollows' Reishi — combined with the burst of power Ace had just put out — had driven off anything nearby with even a sliver of lower-level intelligence. Only a few Beast Hollows and a single newly evolved low-rank Ordinary Hollow remained wandering the area.

He made quick work of the stragglers, stripped their Hollow Masks, and popped them into his mouth one by one. Small prey was still prey, and right now Ace needed every bit of strength he could get.

As for eating only the Masks and not the bodies — by his own reckoning, the Reiryoku packed into a Hollow Mask accounted for nearly eighty percent of the whole creature's strength. Spending the enormous time it would take to devour an entire body just for whatever scraps of Reiryoku remained simply wasn't worth it.

Area cleared, Ace moved toward the forest's outer edge. At the tree line he raised his right claw, channeled Reiryoku into it, and chopped down several weathered trees that weren't especially tall, cutting open an entrance into the forest.

He hauled the felled trunks back to the site of the earlier battle. Using the Bone Blade on his right hand, he lopped off the leafy crowns, kept the trunks, and sharpened each one to a point, forming a massive spike.

Then he climbed the large dead trees nearby and wedged the spikes into the branches of the tall surrounding trees, fashioning the most basic kind of trap.

These worked by free fall — the weight of the timber plus the impact of the sharpened point.

Against Ordinary Hollows with poor natural defenses, that force was nearly lethal. Against Elite-class Hollows, it could still inflict real damage. There was always the chance of being dodged, but for High-level Hollows these were nothing more than decoration, useful perhaps only for slowing movement by a fraction of a second when they hit the ground.

Still, in a forest this size, that already made them a serious hunting weapon. Unless Ace was truly unlucky enough to run into something here matching the Totem Giant Hollow he had once faced — or worse — there was virtually no Hollow in this stretch of forest capable of killing him.

He built roughly seventeen or eighteen Giant Wooden Spike Traps in total, spreading them across the various corners of the small forest. Then he gathered the smaller branches, stacked them in interlocking layers to form crude wooden mats, dug pits roughly 4 to 5 meters deep, covered them with the mats, and packed sand and dirt over the top, forming a set of modest Pitfall Traps.

Between the spike traps in the trees and the pits below, even if seven or eight Ordinary Hollows around his own level came at him at once, he could walk away clean — and take them all down in the process.

He had no idea how long it took. But when it was done, the entire area had become a trap zone. The reason he had chopped down trees at the forest's edge was to open a gap — a funnel that would channel any Hollow wandering in to feed straight into it.

At their current level, mindless Hollows had no concept of traps. Even those with some degree of intelligence, so long as they hadn't crossed the Elite-class threshold, would still blunder right into them. Only top-tier Elite Hollows and High-level Hollows would be immune to the lure.

But the zone didn't rely on traps alone. Inside it waited something else: a top-rank Ordinary Hollow with a superior mind.

All Ace had to do now was catch a mid-rank Ordinary Hollow, wound it, and pen it at the center of the trap zone as bait. Then sit back and let prey come to him.

➤ Next: Invading Enemy — The Fight Begins