Marshadow froze in place, eyes wide with disbelief.
It hovered in midair, looking Kairos up and down like he'd completely lost his mind.
"What did you just say?"
The words came out almost strangled, its voice cracking on the last syllable.
"You want to go see him on your own? Did those fogs earlier fry your brain or something?"
It jabbed a finger at the black mark on Kairos's chest.
"Look, I'm no fan of the guy, but that's Giratina we're talking about. Ruler of the Reverse World. Right now, even the Phoenix King would have to watch himself in a face-to-face with that thing. And you want to just walk straight up to it?"
Marshadow genuinely could not wrap its head around this.
From everything it knew about humans, the instinct was supposed to be: mark hasn't activated yet, find somewhere to hide, figure out how to run as far and as fast as possible.
So how had things gotten to the point where Kairos was actually planning to go voluntarily?
It was like spotting a Legendary Pokemon blocking the road ahead and, instead of turning and sprinting, walking up and asking if it wanted a fight.
Kairos watched Marshadow's agitated reaction and felt none of the panic rub off on him. He stayed calm, reached up to straighten his collar, and explained at his own pace.
"Settle down and hear me out first."
"Think about it. This mark is already on me, which means it's basically a tracking device. It doesn't matter where I run. The moment Giratina wants to find me, it can yank me over whenever it feels like it. There's no escaping that. I never had the upper hand to begin with."
Marshadow opened its mouth to argue, but Kairos kept going without giving it the chance.
"Besides, you said it yourself: Giratina isn't in great shape right now. Pulling me into the Reverse World last time and then sending me back out cost it real energy. On top of that, you were here keeping watch, so it has no idea what we just talked about."
Kairos paused, something sharpening behind his eyes.
"It didn't do anything to me last time. It won't this time either."
He tapped the mark on his chest with one finger.
"When I got pulled into the Reverse World before, it took the Phoenix King's feather. But I doubt it even knows that feather can remove its own mark. If I go back, I might be able to get it returned."
He turned the idea over as he spoke.
If things went that cleanly, he wouldn't need to exhaust himself hunting down SS-rank Dragon-type resources. The feather would come back, and that would free up two SS-plus resource slots and one Purifier on top of it. Any way he looked at it, he came out ahead.
Marshadow listened, mouth hanging open, and said nothing for a long moment.
It still thought the whole plan was completely insane. But the more it sat with the logic...
Okay. Maybe there was actually something to it.
Even so. The nerve on this guy.
"You..."
Marshadow stared at him for a long stretch, expression hard to read.
"You really are something else."
It let out a slow breath and drifted lightly in the air, apparently giving up on talking him out of it.
"Fine. You've made up your mind, so there's nothing I can do about it."
"And honestly, the mark's on you. Even if I said no, you'd still go."
Its voice softened, something close to worry slipping in underneath.
"Just be careful, alright? If anything feels off, get out immediately."
"You have to come back. You hear me?"
With that, Marshadow's form began to blur. It seemed almost afraid to keep looking at him, like it didn't want to see something it couldn't take back. It dissolved into a streak of light and vanished.
Kairos looked at the spot where it had disappeared and gave a quiet nod.
"Don't worry."
He said it softly, to no one in particular, then turned and walked away without hesitation.
All around the Ghost World ruins, the battle was still going. Trainers calling out to their Pokemon, the sounds of fighting coming from every direction.
Kairos skirted the heaviest skirmishes and made his way toward a quieter corner, following the broken walls until he found a relatively secluded stretch where no one was around. A few Ghost-type Pokemon drifted in the distance, too far off to notice him.
He leaned against the wall and took a slow, steady breath.
A new problem had come up.
He'd decided to seek out Giratina on his own terms. But how, exactly, was he supposed to make contact? Was he supposed to stand there and shout into the sky, "Hey, Giratina, let's talk"?
That would just be embarrassing.
He looked down at the black mark on his chest.
If this thing worked as a tracking device, maybe it could also work as some kind of line to Giratina directly. Last time, when Giratina had pulled him in, it had seemed to do it through the connection formed by this very mark.
If he actively stimulated the mark himself, would that trigger the same thing?
He thought it over and concluded that this was probably his only real option.
He tried calling out in his head a couple of times.
Nothing.
He stopped second-guessing himself. He reached out and pressed his hand directly against the black mark on his chest.
The surface was ice cold, the kind of cold that didn't feel like it would ever let up.
He pressed his fingers against it and focused his mind entirely on one intention: entering the Reverse World.
The next instant, everything shifted.
Before Kairos could react, the ground beneath him lurched with a violent tremor. A black fissure tore open right under his feet, and that familiar, gut-dropping surge of dread poured out from the crack.
Then, without any warning, a massive claw made entirely of black energy shot up from beneath the earth. It seized him with a force that left no room to resist.
The world went dark. A crushing weightlessness hit him all at once, the ground gone, everything spinning.
The ruins blurred and fell away. Warping light and chaotic gravity took their place.
That feeling again.
It seemed he was back inside.
He wasn't sure how much time passed.
The dizziness finally faded.
Kairos opened his eyes slowly and let them adjust.
In front of him lay the same bizarre, kaleidoscopic Reverse World: geometric lines running in every direction, architecture inverted and wrong in ways that shouldn't have been possible.
But something was different this time.
When he had been pulled in before, Giratina had appeared almost immediately.
This time though, he looked around.
Nothing.
No towering silhouette. No suffocating pressure bearing down on him from all sides.
The area was eerily quiet. Only the floating geometric structures in the distance were moving, rotating slowly, giving off a low, steady hum.
"Not here?"
Kairos raised an eyebrow.
That wasn't what he had expected.
Had Giratina not noticed him arrive? Or had it actually stepped away for something?
He didn't do anything reckless. He stayed where he was and scanned the area for a while. Once he was reasonably sure there was no immediate danger nearby, he started moving.
Last time he had been pulled in, his entire focus had been on Giratina. The sheer pressure coming off the thing had left him no room to take in anything else. He hadn't actually gotten a real look at this world.
Now, taking it in properly, he could see it was far more complex than he had imagined.
Those enormous structures that had looked hazy and distant last time, like something half-real, were now fully visible against the warped sky. Still. Inverted. Undeniably there.
They looked like a city.
A vast city, suspended upside down in the air.
A thought crossed his mind: Giratina was nowhere to be found, so why not head over and take a closer look? There might be something useful to find. Maybe the people supposedly being held there could tell him something.
His mind made up, he started walking toward it.
The closer he got, the sharper the details came into focus.
Then something strange happened.
When he was still a fair distance away, he felt a peculiar shift in the gravitational field around him. The ground beneath his feet simply disappeared, replaced by a sudden, complete weightlessness.
Then the world flipped.
The city that had been suspended above him was now directly beneath his feet. And Kairos himself, pulled along by some invisible force, rotated a full hundred and eighty degrees along with his own sense of perspective.
The sensation was unlike anything he could easily describe. Like walking along normally when suddenly the direction of gravity reverses, and yet your body registers it not as wrong but as correct, like this was how it was always supposed to be.
Once his orientation settled, Kairos finally got a clear look at the city in front of him.
He stopped walking entirely.
This was nothing like the barren wasteland he had glimpsed from a distance last time. It didn't match anything Marshadow had described as a miserable, forsaken place.
The city in front of him was remarkably well-developed. More than that, it was, if he was being honest, genuinely pleasant to look at.
It had a strong medieval feel to it.
Tall spires stretched upward, thick stone walls stood solid on all sides, and wide streets ran between buildings of all different styles. European-style castles. Elegant townhouses. Open plazas with room to breathe.
Light poured through every corner of the city, something that looked and felt like sunlight, casting a warm gold across everything. Trees lined the streets. Fountains sprayed clean water that caught the light as it arced through the air.
Peaceful. Thriving. In every sense of both words.
Kairos stood there with a faintly stunned look on his face.
Since when did the Reverse World get into city planning?
If someone had told him this was some upscale European residential development, he would have believed them without blinking.
That wasn't even the strangest part. What surprised him more were the people on the streets.
From a distance last time, their figures had been blurry and unsettling, radiating something that made him uneasy just looking at them.
Up close, though, with gravity sorted out and his vision clear, he could finally make out what they actually looked like.
Not puppets under someone else's control. Not monsters of any kind.
They looked like regular people.
Old figures in long robes. Men in full armor. Women in elaborate dress. Others in plain, simple clothing. Some walked the streets casually. Others sat on benches near the plazas, deep in conversation. A few laughed and played near the fountains.
Every face was relaxed. Many were smiling.
This looked absolutely nothing like a place where people had been dragged in against their will and bled for faith energy.
It looked like a resort town.
Kairos actually rubbed his eyes, half-convinced he was seeing things.
Then his attention caught on the figures moving alongside the people.
Pokemon.
Almost every single person had at least one Pokemon with them.
And these were not ordinary Pokemon.
He still couldn't assess exact levels at a glance, but with the experience he had built up and the instincts sharpened by his ability enhancements, he could get a rough read on strength just from the aura. When he did, it genuinely caught him off guard.
Not a single one below Elite Four level. Every Pokemon he could see seemed to treat Champion rank as a baseline.
He wasn't imagining it.
The old man by the roadside was hand-feeding an Arcanine, and the aura rolling off that Arcanine was rock-solid and immovable. The pressure it put out was beyond anything he had felt from Elite Four-level Pokemon before. That was a full Champion-rank powerhouse, no question.
Further ahead, a middle-aged man was playing chess with an Alakazam, the Pokemon using its psychic ability to move the pieces, its metallic sheen rippling as waves of formidable strength rolled off it.
And then...
Kairos's gaze drifted to a corner in the distance and his eyes narrowed slightly.
A small group of people stood there, and the aura coming off the Pokemon at their sides hit him like a wall. He recognized that pressure. That was beyond Champion rank. That was the aura of Legendaries.
Only a handful, and it seemed deliberately kept quiet, but he would never mistake it for anything else.
He even caught a Mythical Pokemon tearing past him like a bolt of lightning before it was already gone.
A Zeraora, body crackling with electricity, moving so fast it left afterimages hanging in the air behind it.
He barely had time to register what it was doing before it disappeared down a street in the distance.
It looked like it was delivering a crate of milk.
A Mythical Pokemon doing milk runs.
Kairos raised an eyebrow slowly.
Was the lineup here seriously this stacked? Legendaries just wandering around, Champion-levels on every corner like it was nothing?
Marshadow had told him Giratina pulled people in to control them and harvest their faith energy.
But the strength and circumstances of these people looked nothing like that. Not even close.
And the people here, any one of them, back out in the wider world would be sitting at the absolute top of the food chain.
He had to wonder: did Giratina have some kind of obsessive streak? Was it out here building its own personal Avengers?
At the exact moment Kairos was standing there with a head full of questions, the people nearby noticed the unfamiliar stranger who had appeared out of nowhere.
The busy street went quiet in an instant.
Heads turned, one after another, every pair of eyes coming to rest on Kairos.
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~ Push the story forward with your Power Stones