"Hold my coat and guard the canvas," Evelyn ordered Ash.

She crossed the gallery floor to the east wall in four steps and stopped with her back to the canvas she had stood in front of for four minutes, facing the entrance.

The gallery door tore off its frame.

A C-rank Hollow propelled itself through the gap with the speed of something that had shed every constraint a living body carried: no hesitation, no anticipation of impact, just forward motion with nothing behind it that could be called intent. Evelyn was already inside its trajectory. The Hollow arrived where she had been standing. She was three feet to its left, her left hand already at the structural junction between its shoulder mass and what would have been its neck.

She didn’t wind up. The kinetic force originated entirely from the pivot of her hip, snapping through the rigid line of her torso. The heavy wool of her turtleneck warped suddenly as the heel of her right palm drove upward at the failure point before the Hollow had fully oriented.

The sound was a muffled, airless compression, like a fist driven into a vacuum. For a microsecond, the kinetic shockwave rippled through the Hollow’s semi-solid mass, warping the air around the impact site. Then, the shoulder mass lost coherence, shattering inward under the pressure.

The failure spread outward from her grip like frost tracking its way across cold glass, one edge branching and then another, the Hollow’s form losing its architecture from the inside out.

She didn’t watch it finish. She was already reading the Gate.

Two more C-ranks came through the tear in the time it took the first to finish dissolving.

She took the one whose trajectory would carry it toward the sculpture installation in the center room, not because the center room Hollow was more dangerous, but because the sculpture installation had no replacement. The other she left to its approach, her position on the gallery floor already being the position she needed for the second exchange once the first was handled. She was not reacting to two threats. She had already seen how this sequence ended and was running through it.

The heel of her boot clicked on the hardwood floor as she repositioned.

She was inside the first C-rank’s reach before the reach completed, her forearm already through the Hollow’s extended guard, her palm at the sternum failure point, the placement exact.

The close range registered the wrongness of proximity to something this far from human, the cold that the Hollow’s form generated where warmth should have been. She held the strike through the initial resistance, pressure sustained through the Hollow’s reflexive attempt to maintain coherence.

The dissolution propagated from her knuckles outward through the Hollow’s chest mass, spreading in the same fractured pattern, but slower. The C-rank’s density fought back, the edges of the spreading void glowing with a sickly outline. She held the strike, her forearm locked, forcing the dissolution through the resistance. The Hollow’s chest mass flaked away into absolute nothingness, bleeding dark, ash-like particles that vanished before they hit the hardwood floor.

She held it until the spread reached the core. Her hand came away clean because Hollows didn’t bleed. She flexed the fingers once, checking the knuckle that had borne the sustained contact, found it adequate, and moved.

The second C-rank had deviated from its original trajectory. It was moving toward the east wall.

Toward the canvas.

In one movement she closed the distance before the Hollow reached the wall. She took hold of where the shoulder would be in a living body and redirected. Not a throw, not a deflection. A single adjustment of ninety degrees and the Hollow’s momentum turned against the gallery floor near the entrance where nothing of consequence was positioned.

Evelyn applied more deliberate force to this one than to the others. The dissolution at the contact site spread with the force she put into it. She held through the finish and then stepped back before she checked the Gate.

A B-rank Hollow came through the tear.

It was denser than the C-ranks and slower. The C-ranks had been absent and emptied of whatever had once animated them. The B-rank still had something of the shape of a person in its mass.

It moved through the gallery entrance, and the ambient warmth at the doorway went out. The Hollow’s absence restructured the air around it in a wider radius than the C-ranks had managed.

Evelyn let it move first.

The B-rank swung toward her, the reach extending past where a shoulder joint should allow, the arc carrying more mass than the C-rank strikes had. She was past the reach before it extended. Inside the swing’s radius, too close for the reach to have purchase, her heel braced against the hardwood floor.

She ran three exchanges without committing a finishing strike. She read the corruption through each exchange and mapped where the structural integrity had failed most. B-rank Hollows had more of these than C-ranks, their longer decay leaving more failed sites.

She mapped them through each palm.

The B-rank tried to close a grip around her. She redirected the grab toward the floor using the Hollow’s own force turned against its momentum and drove it downward. She used the recovery window to position herself near the gallery’s side entrance, away from the south wall collection.

Then she committed.

Both hands on what functioned as the collarbone region, her fingers at the structural failure point she had been mapping since the first exchange. The placement had been this exact from the beginning.

The dissolution started at the grip points and spread. Slower than the C-ranks, the B-rank’s density stopped the propagation every time it reached a region of higher mass. She held on through the resistance. The pressure required to sustain the spread through that resistance was more than the C-ranks had required.

She continued holding until the spread reached the Hollow’s core mass.

She stepped back. Rolled one shoulder once, checking the joint, finding it adequate.

The Gate had not closed yet.

The air in the gallery tightened, a different pressure at the tear’s threshold, a denser signature working its way through the differential from the other side. More mass. More accumulated wrongness.

Evelyn positioned herself at the center of the gallery floor, equally distant from all the remaining works on every wall. Her hands went loose at her sides, if only for a moment.

The late afternoon light from the north window had shifted toward early evening while they had been in the gallery, and the light it produced now was a different temperature, grayer, and the gold chain at her collarbone caught it differently than it had an hour ago, with less warmth in the reflection and more of the cold gleam of metal in fading light.

She checked the chain with two fingers, finding it undisturbed.

She looked at the Gate.

The tear had not widened. She had been managing the expansion pressure throughout the fight. The suppression was passive and continuous. The tear was exactly the width it had opened to. Nothing had come through in the window between the B-rank’s dissolution and now.

Something significantly larger than the B-rank was working its way through.

Evelyn stood in the center of the gallery and watched the Gate, waiting for what else was going to come through it.