The live broadcast chat scrolled rapidly as the six figures materialized:
"If my memory serves me right, those six are Qingque's absolute favorites, aren't they?"
"Spot on. Especially Meowth. She mentioned it looked just like the Fortune Cat from celestial tiles, so she slapped an Everstone on it and refused to let it evolve."
"Wait, does the battle system have mind-reading algorithms now? Tracking a player's private preferences is downright spooky."
"You're reading too much into it. It is probably just backend telemetry like friendship levels and deployment frequency."
"Makes sense, but if breaking Arceus's divine defense requires a genuine bond, isn't she in trouble? Someone like Guinaifen might pull it off... but does Qingque even know what a bond feels like?"
"Uh... when you put it like that, good point."
The viewers had grown familiar with the game's hidden mechanics, and Arceus's solemn challenge had made the requirement clear.
Yet an unbreakable bond was not something anyone could conjure out of thin air.
Qingque understood her own mindset better than anyone. The concept of walking alongside a companion and forging an unshakable connection sounded wonderful on paper. She had watched the championship matches and the festival contests with genuine admiration, cheering whenever a Trainer and their partner broke through their limits.
Deep down, however, she knew she was not built for that kind of dedication.
She had never approached her team with the heart of a grand champion. To her, the game was a comfortable pastime, an enjoyable diversion that occasionally helped her pocket some extra credits on the side.
"Well, everyone, you see how it is," Qingque sighed, offering a self-deprecating shrug toward the camera. "I don't think I'm clearing this hurdle today."
She gave an apologetic nod to the viewers who had sent the starships, explaining that it was not for lack of trying, but simply a mountain she had no way of climbing.
"Give it everything you have anyway, Chief Que! Watching Arceus knock you around is peak entertainment!"
"Haha, true enough! Just getting an audience with the creator god is worth the price of admission."
"Let us see what a failed attempt looks like first, then we can compare it to Guinaifen's clear later."
"Thank you, Chief Que, for providing the control group failure!"
Even knowing the odds were stacked against her, reading the stream of playful mockery sparked a sudden, prickly annoyance in her chest.
She took a slow breath and let it settle.
For a diviner of the commission, maintaining emotional composure was the foundation of the craft. If your mind wavered while interpreting the jade tiles, the reading would inevitably drift and lead to catastrophic errors.
Mastering that calm was the hardest part of the discipline. Alongside her sharp intuition, it was Qingque's unflappable temperament that had caught Fu Xuan's eye in the first place, prompting the Master Diviner to keep grooming her for greater responsibilities. Otherwise, Fu Xuan would have long stopped hovering over her desk.
Setting her jaw, Qingque directed Garchomp to open the engagement.
The absolute, nullifying ward that had swallowed her attacks earlier had dissipated, but Garchomp's physical strikes still felt like throwing pebbles against a mountain.
Arceus countered with elemental precision, shifting its output to target defensive type weaknesses. The moves carried the overwhelming kinetic weight of an ancient calamity, turning any direct hit into an immediate knockout.
Fortunately, the attack speed remained within mortal reaction thresholds. Arceus stayed rooted at the center of the celestial chessboard, allowing Garchomp to weave through the incoming beams through disciplined evasive maneuvers.
"Wait... is he bending the rules again?"
A cold sweat broke out across Qingque's collar.
The deity's offensive arcs emanated from the hovering stone slabs. Each plate corresponded to an elemental Path. As the seconds ticked past, more slabs drifted forward into active firing orbits.
Did that mean that as the phase dragged on, a challenger would have to weave through eighteen simultaneous, overlapping bombardments?
She was already struggling to track three vectors at once. Dodging eighteen was a statistical impossibility.
"Fine, play dirty then..."
Qingque had intended to tough it out just to prove her chat wrong, but watching the mechanics ramp up into an insurmountable wall extinguished her stubborn spark.
Faced with a triangular pincer of beams that sealed off every escape vector, Garchomp had nowhere left to dodge. The converging energy struck dead center, wiping out its remaining stamina in a blinding flash.
Garchomp is unable to battle.
The next second, the mighty dragon dissolved into scattering particles of light, blown away like dust in the solar wind.
Before Qingque could select her next companion, an unbidden memory surged into her mind.
"Look at that, a Gible! The apex dragon of Sinnoh! You are coming with me! Garchomp is far too stylish to pass up, and Gible is adorable..."
Vivid scenes of meeting, traveling, leveling, and sharing camp meals with Garchomp flickered through her consciousness like a speeding film reel, culminating in the moment they had stepped onto the dais together.
Then, the memories fractured.
The warm recollections shattered like brittle glass, dissolving into nothingness just like the dragon had. An icy, hollow ache seized Qingque's chest, leaving her with the suffocating certainty that Garchomp had been erased forever.
"In this sanctum, failure demands your life."
Arceus's golden pupils flared into a cold, piercing crimson. The surrounding gravity plummeted, and an oppressive, suffocating dread clamped down upon the arena like an iron vise.
The live chat noticed the sudden shift immediately:
"What just happened? Why did Chief Que suddenly freeze up like a statue?"
"And why did Arceus go completely red?! Did she trigger a rage mechanic by letting Garchomp fall?"
"That must be an enrage timer, right?!"
"I thought the creator was supposed to be a benevolent guardian of life, why is it threatening total annihilation over a lost round?! Talk about temperamental!"
"Chief Que, say something!"
"Julian... you really went this far..."
Connecting the vivid emotional phantom with the deity's crimson glare, Qingque grasped the developer's trick in an instant. This was a psychological trap designed to force players past their casual comfort zones.
That sudden phantom ache had not been her own organic memory slipping away. It was a precise, synthetic stimulus fed through the neural cradle of the virtual console directly into the sensory processing centers of the brain.
Such basic neural suggestions were easy to spot for anyone with training, serving normally as safety feedback loops within consumer gear.
Yet Julian had deliberately inverted it.
Anyone who spent weeks journeying alongside a companion naturally formed an attachment. Mortals could bond with simple house pets; bonding with intelligent, expressive companions like Pokémon was inevitable.
The system was warning her that dropping a round meant losing those partners permanently. No Trainer with a heart could accept watching their companions vanish into the void.
Players might not have spent fortunes on microtransactions, but they had poured genuine time, care, and emotional warmth into their partners. Threatening to strip those memories away struck far harder than emptying their bank accounts.
Any seasoned gamer could see through the illusion, recognizing it as a dramatic narrative bluff.
Yet nobody dared to call the bluff.
Judging by the studio's public image and Julian's cheerful persona, deleting player data was unthinkable.
Yet that was only the outward mask. How well did anyone truly know the person behind the screen?
What if his intense passion for his creations had curdled into an elitist demand to weed out half-hearted players? What if the developer truly intended to punish those who treated his world like a cheap carnival?
More importantly, Julian was a confirmed Pathstrider of Elation.
Qingque knew his temperament well enough to believe this was merely a dramatic theatrical threat. Yet when faced with the cold crimson gaze of the creator god, she found herself completely unwilling to test the odds.
Who could say how far someone walking Aha's Path might go if they felt like playing a cosmic joke?
Glancing at her feed, Qingque noticed the viewers hadn't seen the memory sequence at all; the stream broadcast had cropped out the subjective sensory feed entirely.
That confirmed her diagnosis: this was pure intimidation.
And just as she had feared, she did not dare gamble with the life of her team.
30+ chapters are available now and daily updates!
@patreon.com/AgentTwilight