Actually, there are quite a few stories about him scattered through ancient legends. Some people, looking for shelter or hoping to tap into a certain kind of power, would worship him and pray to him...
At that point, Marshadow curled its lip, its expression thick with disdain.
"Though compared to how Ho-Oh is loved and revered across the whole world, this guy doesn't even come close. Who knows what those people were thinking, actually bowing down to someone like him."
Kairos didn't interrupt. He just listened.
That was genuinely interesting, though. So even among Legendary Pokemon, there was competition.
"But what does any of that have to do with him dragging people inside?"
Kairos pressed forward.
"If people worship him, he shouldn't be short on faith energy. So why resort to forcing people in?"
Marshadow let out a sigh and kept going.
"Don't rush me. Just hear me out."
"Later, things changed. Some of the people who worshipped Giratina started vanishing without a trace."
"At first, everyone assumed they'd gone on some kind of pilgrimage, or that Giratina had called them. But as more and more people disappeared, the unease started to spread."
"Then, finally, one of them came back."
Marshadow dropped its voice, leaning in like it was sharing a secret.
"The person had nearly lost their mind. Completely unhinged. It took a lot of work just to get a coherent story out of them."
"They said they'd almost been pulled into some godforsaken place, where reality twisted in on itself and gravity meant nothing. They'd fought with everything they had just to get out, and barely made it."
Kairos felt something stir in his chest. "The Distortion World?"
"Exactly. The Distortion World."
Marshadow nodded.
"After that, word got around. People didn't just revere Giratina anymore. They feared him. Nobody dared worship him casually after that, too scared they'd wake up one day and just... disappear."
"So his following dried up more and more."
It spread its hands.
"Now, I only heard all of this secondhand, but I'm sure of it: he pulls people into the Distortion World and keeps them there specifically to harvest their faith energy."
"Because he's the king of that place. Inside it, he has total control. Once someone gets dragged in, he can use some method to forcibly drain power from them."
"And since those people have no way out, they have no choice but to keep feeding him, until... until they turn into those hollow, empty shells with nothing left behind their eyes, I suppose."
Kairos raised an eyebrow.
"That actually works?"
It sounded like exploiting a loophole in a video game. Since he couldn't get faith energy through honest means, he just locked the players inside the server and farmed them indefinitely.
Marshadow rolled its eyes.
"What do you mean, 'a loophole'? I don't know what that means, but do you think everyone is as warm and generous as Ho-Oh? That guy has a twisted personality to begin with. To get his power back, or to serve whatever other purpose he has, there's nothing he won't do."
"Anyway, you have to find a solution, and fast."
Marshadow's tone sharpened.
"If Giratina actually drags you in, there's nothing I can do to save you. I can barely hold my own in that world, let alone go in after you."
Kairos nodded, his expression steady.
"Alright. I get it."
He already had a rough plan forming.
The best option he had right now for removing the mark was still the Eraser.
If he put all the points from this Ghost World mission into draws...
With enough luck, he could pull one SS-rank Dragon-type resource and one SS-rank Ghost-type resource.
Though that wasn't exactly guaranteed.
He rarely even saw S-rank resources. Getting one S-rank out of a draw was already a good run.
SS-rank... he honestly had no idea what that even looked like. Not in the two worlds he'd unlocked so far. Not once.
He glanced over at Marshadow and asked, keeping his voice casual.
"By the way, you've been with Ho-Oh a long time. Do you have anything useful on you?"
"Something Dragon-type or Ghost-type, maybe?"
The second Marshadow heard that, it stepped back with both hands pressed to its chest, immediately on guard.
"What are you after? I already told you everything I know, and now you're trying to shake me down?"
It scowled and said irritably, "I've been stuck in the Ghost World so long that anything good I had was used up ages ago. Do you have any idea what it takes to hold this place together? I've been fighting off crazed Ghost-type Pokemon every single day, and I've got nothing left in reserve."
Kairos felt a flicker of disappointment and started to look away.
But then Marshadow stopped, like something had just surfaced in its memory, and began hesitantly patting around on itself.
After a moment, it carefully pulled from somewhere around its chest a small orb of black light. No bigger than a fist. Jet black all the way through, with something that looked like swirling liquid shifting inside it. It gave off an aura that was deeply unsettling and cold in a way that reached straight into the bones.
Even standing several feet away, Kairos could feel the cold radiating off it.
"This one... I do have this."
Marshadow stared at the orb in its hand with visible reluctance. Whatever it was, Marshadow clearly prized it.
"I found this in some ancient ruin a long time ago. It's a Ghost-type item."
It held the orb out toward Kairos so he could get a better look.
The surface of the black orb kept shifting. One moment it looked like an eye. The next, a wide-open mouth. Whatever its true form was, it wouldn't stay still long enough to be pinned down.
The system chimed in his head.
[SS-rank Ghost-type Item Detected: Phantasm Light]
[Detailed information will become available after acquisition.]
SS-rank.
Kairos's eyes lit up immediately.
He'd just been wondering where he was going to find an SS-rank Ghost-type resource, and here Marshadow had one sitting on its person the whole time.
He had no idea what Phantasm Light actually did, but at that rarity, it was guaranteed to be something serious.
"So... any chance you'd be willing to give that to me?"
He rubbed his hands together.
Marshadow caught his expression and immediately pulled its hand back, looking wary.
"What do you think?"
It thought for a moment, then glanced at the mark on Kairos's chest, eyes flickering with something calculating.
"But... if you really can help Ho-Oh recover his faith energy and lead me back to him..."
"It's not completely out of the question. You're suffering on Ho-Oh's behalf, and as someone who follows him, helping you out is the right call."
Kairos nodded without a second's hesitation.
"No problem. Deal."
As long as he could get that SS-rank resource, this was a fair trade. Helping Ho-Oh restore his faith energy was already part of the plan. All this did was give him one more reason to see it through.
So now the only thing he was missing was the Dragon-type resource.
One SS-rank Dragon-type resource. That was all he needed. Then he could activate the Eraser before Giratina pulled him anywhere, and put this whole threat to rest.
Kairos looked at the black orb in Marshadow's hands and quietly ran the numbers in his head.
Dragon-type... Dragon-type...
Dragon-type Pokemon weren't exactly everywhere in this world, but they weren't absent either. Tracking down resources, though, that was going to be a headache.
His mind jumped straight to the Second World. He wondered if Gouging Fire had anything...
He cut that thought off and shook his head, shifting his gaze toward the distance.
The battle was still going, and it had only gotten more intense.
As word about the game spread, more and more Trainers had flooded into the area.
What had once been the grim, unsettling Ghost World ruins had somehow become, against all odds, kind of lively.
The Ghost-type Pokemon warped by the black fog had become targets worth chasing down in the eyes of these Trainers, dangling in-game rewards and all. They'd charged in with plenty of enthusiasm, and without Kairos having to organize a single thing, they'd naturally split into small clearing teams on their own.
The results spoke for themselves.
The black fog, once so thick it had seemed permanent, had noticeably thinned under the relentless pressure.
On Marshadow's end, *it* had gotten most of what *it* came for.
So. What now?
Now that the Ghost World had a game attached to it, these Trainers would grind day and night just to see what they could earn.
The number of fog-warped Pokemon would drop fast, and Spiritomb's chances of breaking through its seal would be pushed back significantly. That was good news.
As for Giratina's mark...
Kairos glanced down at his chest.
One month.
Logically, the right move was to head back immediately: work on building a game through the system to help Ho-Oh rebuild his faith energy, collect the SS-rank Ghost-type item Marshadow had promised, and at the same time search the Second World or somewhere else for an SS-rank Dragon-type resource.
Once he had both, he could activate the Eraser and close the book on this.
It was a solid plan.
But.
Something kept nagging at him.
It started with the mark on his chest.
The more he thought about it, the more two things stood out that he just couldn't account for.
The first was a question he kept circling back to.
If Giratina truly wanted to pull him into the Distortion World, he had the raw power to just do it. So why go through the extra step of branding him with a mark and then sitting on it for a whole month?
That made no sense.
It was like an all-powerful being trying to grab an ordinary person: you'd just reach out and take them. Would you really need to hand them a notice and set a date first?
You could stretch the logic if you tried hard enough. Maybe Giratina wasn't in the best shape right now. Forcing a passage open to pull him in and then send him back must have taken a lot out of him, and maybe he needed time to recover. Or maybe Giratina genuinely needed him to handle Spiritomb, since Spiritomb getting loose would be a problem for everyone.
But the second point was where the logic completely fell apart for him, no matter how he looked at it.
Suppose Marshadow was right. Suppose Giratina was pulling people into the Distortion World, trapping them, and draining their faith energy like squeezing juice from fruit.
If that was the case, with all that power at his disposal, why not just grab more people?
Faith energy was faith energy. Pulling in a few hundred or a few thousand ordinary people at random would add up to far more in total than a handful of talented individuals, wouldn't it?
And yet, from everything Marshadow had just described, Giratina only had eyes for Trainers with real ability and strength.
That was strange.
Surely this guy didn't actually have some kind of obsessive collector's streak, where he'd only accept rare pieces and nothing else?
The more Kairos turned it over, the more certain he became that something here wasn't what it looked like.
If this was purely about power, Giratina's behavior was too inconsistent.
There had to be some detail nobody was seeing, or some kind of misunderstanding sitting at the center of all this.
And if he didn't get to the bottom of it, then even if he pulled together the resources, wiped out the mark, and walked away thinking it was done... the next time he crossed paths with Giratina, it would all still be unresolved.
Besides, Ho-Oh's feather was still in Giratina's hands.
If he could get that back too, it would save him the trouble of hunting down an SS-rank Dragon-type resource, which meant getting one more piece for the Eraser on top of everything else.
That settled it.
Kairos got to his feet and brushed himself off.
Next to him, Marshadow had been happily lost in thoughts of finally finding its way back to Ho-Oh. When it saw Kairos stand up all at once, it blinked, a little thrown.
"What is it? Are you heading back?"
Kairos looked at it, his expression serious.
"Marshadow, I need to confirm one thing first."
"This conversation we just had. Is there any chance Giratina could have heard it?"
Marshadow blinked, then waved a hand without a trace of doubt.
"Relax. He can't."
"The mark does have a tracking effect, but that guy can't be in great shape right now. Forcing a passage open to pull you in and then send you back must have taken a lot out of him."
It gestured around them, then pointed to itself.
"Besides, I've had my senses tuned to pick up any trace of him ever since that happened. If he were listening in, I'd have felt it."
"So no, he didn't hear a word of what we just said."
Then something seemed to click for it, and in an instant Marshadow was right up in Kairos's face, staring at him with sharp suspicion.
"Hey. Why are you asking that?"
"You're not thinking about switching sides, are you?"
Its voice jumped up a pitch.
"We just made a deal! You're supposed to help Ho-Oh recover his faith energy! You can't just walk out on that now!"
Kairos looked at Marshadow's utterly alarmed face and rapped it on the head.
"Calm down."
He dropped his hand.
"I'm not going over to anyone's side. I just think something about all this seems off."
"Off? What's off?"
Marshadow rubbed its head and glared at him.
"And for what it's worth, even if you wanted to go crawl to that guy right now, you'd still have to deal with the consequences. Once you're inside his territory, walking back out isn't exactly a simple thing."
Kairos didn't argue. He just nodded.
"I know."
He paused.
"That's exactly why I want to go find Giratina myself. On my own terms. For another conversation."
Marshadow nodded along.
"Oh, is that so..."
Then it froze.
"Hold on. What did you just say?!"