"Don't worry, I have a way."
He said it calmly, but Kairos's mind was already working through the real reason behind Ho-Oh's loss of faith energy.
According to Marshadow, both it and Ho-Oh had come from another world, one where trainers were extraordinarily powerful, some even capable of standing alongside Legendary Pokemon.
What kind of event could bring a Legendary Pokemon, once worshipped by countless people, crashing down from its pedestal? What could drive it from that world entirely, forcing it to flee to this one? What was that other world actually like? And those trainers who could hold their own beside Legendary Pokemon, what kind of people were they?
Kairos couldn't help feeling genuinely curious about that unknown world.
Still, it was too early to get lost in any of that. The problem right in front of him came first.
That said, having Ho-Oh act was one option. Another was seeing whether the seal could be reinforced further, locking Spiritomb away for good so it could never break free. That was worth looking into as well.
But he would need to check with Will before knowing if that was even possible.
After all, the Ghost World lineage had been guarding that seal for generations and would understand it better than anyone. It probably wasn't a simple fix either. If it were, they would have done it long ago, and things wouldn't have dragged on this far.
Kairos gave a small shake of his head and pushed those thoughts aside.
He looked at Marshadow, and something that had been nagging at him for a while finally surfaced.
"Marshadow, I have another question."
His voice dropped slightly.
Marshadow had been buzzing with excitement over Ho-Oh's situation, but snapped back to attention.
"What is it? Go ahead."
Instead of answering, Kairos reached up and unzipped his jacket, exposing his chest.
A grey-black brand was clearly visible there, radiating a faint, unsettling aura from the skin around it.
Giratina's mark.
"Giratina put this on me." Kairos pointed to it, his brow creasing. "He said it was to protect me, that he'd step in at a critical moment. But it doesn't feel that simple."
"From what I've heard, in about a month this brand is going to drag me into the Distortion World. I wanted to ask if you know any way to remove it."
Marshadow followed his gesture and looked at the grey-black mark. The moment its eyes landed on it, the whole creature went still. Not just startled, actually frozen, like it had just seen something that scared the life out of it.
Whatever composure it had managed to hold onto collapsed instantly. Its expression said one thing: we are finished.
"You... you said this is..."
Marshadow stumbled over the words, voice pitching upward.
"The brand left by that guy?"
Its body, which had been hovering casually in the air, went rigid.
"How did this happen? Once someone gets branded with that thing, basically nobody gets out of it."
Kairos's brow lifted slightly.
But instead of the panic Marshadow had clearly been expecting, he just asked a calm, measured question.
"Nobody gets out? Are you saying this has happened to other people before?"
That was not what he had anticipated.
This had happened before?
Marshadow drew a slow breath.
"In his world... our world, I mean. Yes."
It waved its hands, trying to convey the scale of it.
"Apparently, some exceptionally powerful trainers caught Giratina's eye. He decided they had exceptional talent, or that they met some kind of requirement he had, and he would just... forcibly pull them into the Distortion World."
Marshadow paused and glanced sideways at Kairos, as if checking to see how he was holding up.
Seeing that Kairos looked completely unrattled, it gathered a little more nerve and kept going.
"Those people went in and never came back out. At least, I've never heard of anyone actually returning from that place."
Kairos nodded and said nothing.
His mind drifted back to the moment he had stumbled into the Distortion World by accident.
That grey, suffocating place, warped by twisted gravity. Within that eerie, crumbling city, he had seen figures moving through the streets. They wore all kinds of clothing, some that looked like it belonged to ancient warriors, others that looked like modern trainers. But without exception, their faces were blank. Completely featureless.
The situation had been too urgent for him to look closely. He had caught only a fleeting glimpse.
Looking back now, those faceless figures, unsettling as they were, had seemed to move with a kind of routine, like people just going about their day in a city they had always lived in.
If those were the trainers Giratina had pulled in, what had become of them? Were they still alive in any real sense? Or had they been hollowed out into something mechanical, just going through the motions without a thought?
Those questions weren't ones he could answer by guessing.
Kairos pulled his attention back and looked at Marshadow, whose expression had settled into something deeply worried.
"What happened to those people afterward? What did they become inside the Distortion World?"
Marshadow blinked, then shook its head in rapid, emphatic arcs.
"How would I know? Who in their right mind would go somewhere like that?"
It seemed genuinely put out by the question.
"All I know is they never came back. That's the whole point. Once you go in, you're basically gone from this world."
Then something seemed to click into place, and the full weight of the situation landed on Marshadow all at once.
It spun in the air twice, fast and agitated.
"We're done. We are completely done."
It muttered it under its breath, voice thick with frustration.
Kairos watched it, puzzled. "Why are you panicking? Yeah, he has his sights on me, but there's still a month. That's better than being dragged in right now, isn't it?"
Marshadow wasn't listening. It looked like it was in actual pain.
The regret eating at it was overwhelming.
It hadn't had a choice at the time, but how had it not been more careful?
After all this time drifting through this world with nothing to show for it, it had finally, finally run into a human who carried one of Ho-Oh's feathers. Not just that, but one who had looked it dead in the eye and said, with full conviction, that he could help restore Ho-Oh's faith energy.
This was a real chance. The first one in a very long time.
Ho-Oh had been missing for so long, and Marshadow had been getting absolutely nowhere on its own. Now there was actual hope. And the only hope it had was someone Giratina had already marked.
If Kairos got pulled into the Distortion World in a month, who was going to restore Ho-Oh's faith energy? Would it really have to go back to wandering around with no plan and no end in sight?
And if something happened to Kairos in there, wouldn't even this last chance disappear with him?
The more Marshadow thought about it, the angrier it got.
"That rotten dragon, I'll go right now and..."
It stopped mid-sentence.
Right. With the strength it had right now, there probably wasn't much it could actually do.
Kairos just shrugged.
"Alright, settle down. I know this brand is serious trouble, which is why I'm asking if you know any way to deal with it."
Marshadow huffed and clawed at the air over its head, working to calm itself down enough to actually think.
"A solution... a solution..."
It muttered to itself, then its eyes lit up.
"That's it! Ho-Oh's feather!"
Marshadow shot right up to Kairos's face, urgent and intense.
"You said you had one of Ho-Oh's feathers, right? Get it out, now!"
"Ho-Oh's power has an incredibly strong purifying effect, especially against something as dark as this. If we use the feather's power, it can absolutely drive out whatever that awful thing Giratina left behind. Once the brand is removed, even just once, he won't have any hold over you anymore!"
It stared at Kairos with barely contained anticipation, already picturing that hated mark dissolving in a blaze of golden light.
Kairos, however, did not reach into his pocket and pull out a sacred feather the way Marshadow was expecting.
He just stood there and spread his hands.
"I can't."
"What?"
Marshadow froze, certain it had misheard.
"What do you mean you can't?"
Kairos let out a sigh, pointing to his chest, then gesturing toward the distant wall of black mist.
"Giratina took the feather."
"He hasn't given it back."
The air seemed to freeze solid.
Marshadow's expression locked up, going from eager to completely stupefied.
Its face flushed a deep, furious red.
"He... he what?!"
It shrieked, its voice shooting up several notes and echoing through the empty ruins.
"That is Ho-Oh's feather! A one-of-a-kind treasure, a symbol of Ho-Oh itself! And he actually had the nerve to just steal it?!"
It flailed its fists furiously at the air, as if Giratina were standing right in front of it.
"I'll go, I'll go right now and..."
It looked ready to charge off and confront Giratina on the spot.
But barely two meters out, something like a bucket of cold water hit it. It stopped dead.
That small figure hung frozen in midair, then turned back around. Slowly. Very slowly.
It looked at Kairos. Then at the terrifying black mist in the distance. Then its voice shrank to something flat and hollow.
"...I'll go and have a word with him."
Its shoulders caved in. It clearly remembered exactly how strong Giratina was.
With Ho-Oh nowhere around, charging in alone would probably mean getting swatted aside before it even got a word out. Maybe getting pulled into the Distortion World too, for that matter.
That grudge was going to have to wait.
Marshadow drifted back, deflated, shaking its head.
"It's over. It's all completely over."
"Without the feather, your only real option is to track down other items with purifying or cleansing properties."
"But items like that are incredibly rare. Way rarer than anything that just boosts combat strength."
Then something seemed to strike it, and its eyes brightened again.
"Wait, you have a lot of things, don't you?"
It pointed toward the trainers nearby, who were still buzzing with excitement over their rewards.
"Since you can somehow produce all those incredible items, maybe you actually have something that could get rid of a brand?"
Kairos was quiet for a moment, then shook his head.
"I don't."
Aside from the one item he had obtained earlier, there was genuinely nothing else along those lines.
But right now he just wanted to find out whether any other options existed at all.
Marshadow deflated completely.
"Really nothing?"
"Really nothing."
Kairos spread his hands, a trace of resignation in his voice. "Obviously. If I had something like that, I'd have used it already. Why would I be standing here asking you? I'm not exactly eager to visit the Distortion World."
Marshadow had nothing to say to that.
It opened its mouth, tried to find some response, and then sank listlessly to the ground.
It started pacing back and forth, clutching its head, muttering about what they were supposed to do now. The panic it was showing looked even worse than when it had found out Spiritomb was about to break through the seal.
At least back then there had still been Ho-Oh as a last resort.
If Kairos was gone, that was truly the end of everything.
Watching Marshadow spiral, Kairos reached his conclusion.
For getting rid of the brand, Marshadow was no help.
He was going to have to fall back on the straightforward path: track down those two SS-rank resources the item required.
Still, what Marshadow had said wasn't entirely useless. It had at least confirmed one thing: once the brand was gone, that was it. No further complications.
Just then, another question surfaced.
"Actually, Marshadow."
Kairos cut through its muttering.
"Do you know why he pulls people in?"
Marshadow stopped pacing and looked up blankly. "Huh?"
Kairos pointed to his chest, his expression turning more serious.
"I mean Giratina. He's the master of the Distortion World, absurdly powerful. And yet he goes to all the trouble of marking people and dragging them into his world..."
"Why? It can't just be some weird hobby where he collects people."
This had been bothering him ever since he found out about the brand.
If the goal was simply to eliminate a threat, with Giratina's power it would be far easier to just strike the person down on the spot. Why go through the trouble of bringing them back and keeping them around?
That clearly didn't add up.
Marshadow stared at him for a second, then broke into a look of sudden understanding.
"Oh! That's what you're asking!"
It rose back into the air, its expression shifting into something complicated, with a flicker of contempt underneath it.
"It's for faith energy. Obviously."
"Faith energy?"
Kairos was genuinely surprised.
"He needs that too?"
Marshadow nodded, something like old, tired memory crossing its face, as if it were pulling up events from a long time ago.
"Back in the day, there were quite a few people who believed in Giratina."
It spoke slowly.
"He was never like Ho-Oh. He never went out of his way to help anyone or show any kind of warmth. But because of how overwhelmingly powerful he was, with dominion over destruction and inversion, people feared him. And fear, for something like Giratina, was close enough to reverence."