Sora Inoue

While alive, Sora cut a tall and slender figure, wearing his brown hair to about chin length and dressing in a blue suit.

His Hollow shape, Acidwire, is an enormous serpent-like creature patterned after a naga. Shoulder-length black hair frames a skull mask with slim yellow eyes, behind which his old human face still lies. Most of the muscular body runs dark brown, though the arms deepen to red, and a jagged sawtooth band traces the small of his back all the way down a tail that ends in solid black. The hollow hole sits high on his chest, close to the collarbones.

From the moment Orihime was born, Sora doted on her, treating her almost as his own child and standing between her and their abusive parents. At eighteen he took her and left so he could raise her himself. After his death he found comfort in her daily prayers, but grew resentful once she made friends with Tatsuki Arisawa and Ichigo Kurosaki and began speaking to him about them rather than for him. That jealousy and loneliness festered until it dragged him into Hollowfication.

As Acidwire, his devotion survives but curdles under the corruption. He wants to carry Orihime away so they can be together again, at first pleading his case before resorting to force, and he turns violent whenever she resists, blaming her friends for separating them. Only when she embraces him mid-attack and Ichigo reveals she has worn his gift every day since his death does he recover his senses and choose to move on.

Sora was fifteen when his sister arrived, and the pair endured a drunken father and a mother who sold herself, both of whom beat their children. Fearing for Orihime's life, he ran off with her at eighteen and brought her up alone. Years later, at twenty-seven, the two quarreled over a set of hairpins he had bought her, and he left for work the next morning without a word. That same day a car accident left him fatally injured, and he died at the Kurosaki Clinic. Three years of listening to her prayers, and then her stories about her friends, slowly hollowed him into Acidwire.

Returning as the Hollow, he assaulted Ichigo, tore Orihime's soul from her body, and battered both Ichigo and Tatsuki, leaning on brute tail strength, tough scales, flight, and a spray of corrosive acid. His rampage ended when Orihime's embrace broke through to him. Realizing she had only ever tried to share her happiness, Sora used Ichigo's blade to cleanse himself, said his goodbyes as his human self, and faded into the sky.