Shrieker

During his human years, Shrieker carried a coarse, flattened face marked by a gap between crooked teeth, a stubby nose, and narrow eyes, topped by cropped light brown hair above a collared blue and black shirt.

His Hollow shape towers over an ordinary person by several times, built like an ape that tends to crouch on all four limbs. Dark shaggy fur collars his neck and shoulders and traces twin curves toward his chest, while broad black wings sprout from his hands. The narrow, upright mask bears bared teeth ringed by flamelike streaks, a skeletal nose, a rounded chin, and a notched brow, and his split tongue loops into a ring. A hollow opening sits at the center of his torso.

Shrieker takes open pride in the terror he once caused, boasting of the eight lives he ended and the fame it earned him on television. Even as a monster he speaks admiringly of how Yūichi Shibata's mother fought to shield her child, a memory he finds beautiful rather than tragic, and he had meant to murder the boy too before his own death cut the plan short.

His cruelty only sharpened after transformation. He treats the hunt for Yūichi as a game, savoring the deaths of everyone who tries to defend the child and repeatedly luring the boy onward with lies about saving his mother. In combat he is smug and fond of tormenting anyone who cannot touch him, hiding the true reach of his Targets until his foes assume he is finished. Genuine danger exposes his cowardice: cornered by Ichigo, he cuts away his own leg to flee and pleads for mercy as he is dragged toward Hell.

Roughly five years before crossing paths with Ichigo, Shrieker roamed Japan as a knife-wielding killer whose eighth and final victim was Yūichi's mother. After stabbing her repeatedly on the veranda of her home, he moved to finish her toddler, but the child clung to his laces and toppled him over a railing to his death. He rose again as a Hollow, blaming the boy for killing him, and tore Yūichi's soul loose to imprison it within a parakeet. He vowed to restore the mother if Yūichi could survive three months of pursuit, an offer he never intended to honor, and over the following years he devoured two Shinigami sent to grant the boy passage.

The trail eventually reached Yasutora Sado, who took the parakeet into his care and became Shrieker's next target. The Hollow's assaults drew Rukia Kuchiki and Ichigo into the affair. In battle he commands swarming creatures he calls his Targets, extensions of his own body that fire clinging leeches; by vibrating his forked tongue he can detonate those leeches like small bombs, and his wings let him strike from the air. He seizes Yūichi hostage to freeze his enemies, yet Ichigo outmaneuvers him, forces the leeches back into his mouth, and tears out his tongue. Rather than being cleansed, his human crimes condemn him, and the gates of Hell open to swallow him.