The light was faint, but in a place swallowed entirely by black mist, even a dim glow was hard to miss.
Kairos moved a little closer and studied the glowing lines carefully.
These murals really were part of the legendary ruins, preserved by some special force that kept the mist from eating away at them, physically and energetically both.
That settled something in him.
At the very least, it meant whatever civilization or power had once existed here had been capable of standing against the soul-devouring fog, capable enough to ignore even its densest concentrations without much trouble.
If it had been done before, maybe there was a way to do it again.
While he was still examining the murals, Marshadow, who had been leading them forward, suddenly stopped.
It turned back to look at the two of them, and its expression had gone unusually serious.
"The path ends here."
It drew a slow breath and pointed toward the pitch-black void ahead.
"Once we step out, we're in the core of the Ghost World. Both of you, listen. Get your breathing under control now. The moment we're outside, no matter what you see, hold your breath. Don't go gasping for air."
Will blinked, caught off guard, and asked without thinking.
"Hold our breath? Why?"
Marshadow shot him a look.
"Isn't it obvious. The air out there is saturated with high-concentration mist. Start breathing deeply and your brain will shut down on the spot. I have a barrier up, but the moment we step out, the initial impact is at its peak and the barrier might waver. Watch yourselves. Though given your combined strength, something like that shouldn't take you down."
Kairos heard that and immediately took several long, slow breaths of the relatively cleaner air around them, let it out steadily, then held the last one in.
Will saw him do it and didn't waste a second following suit.
Once they were both ready, Marshadow gave a short nod.
"Ready? Let's go."
The words had barely left its mouth before it swept one hand forward and launched all three of them out through the end of the passage.
Black mist surged up on all sides. In that instant, Kairos felt his vision tilt, as if he had been squeezed through a narrow tube and suddenly hurled out into open ocean.
Then the impact hit.
The soul-devouring fog was everywhere at once, savage and absolute. It crashed toward them like a wall of ravenous mouths, screaming as it surged forward, desperate to swallow them whole. The density was far beyond anything they had felt at the end of the tunnel.
The green barrier Marshadow had conjured shuddered violently, letting out a grinding shriek that set teeth on edge, as though it would shatter completely at any second.
Will's focus sharpened and he moved on instinct, hand already reaching for the Poke Ball at his waist. He was ready to release his Gengar to help shoulder some of the pressure, because at this level of impact, Marshadow alone might genuinely not hold.
But just as he was about to act, Marshadow raised one hand and the light coming off it suddenly dimmed.
The bright green barrier dropped in an instant, turning a color that was almost transparent grey.
Then something extraordinary happened.
The soul-devouring fog that had been crashing toward them in a frenzy suddenly stopped, as if it had lost its target entirely. It hung suspended in the air just outside the barrier, drifting in slow circles, searching for something it couldn't find.
Then, like a tide going out, the roiling fog slowly pulled back, as if the three of them had simply ceased to exist.
Will stood frozen.
He stayed in his ready stance without moving, and it took him a long moment to process what he had just seen.
What had that been?
Why had the fog just left?
Marshadow let out a long breath and wiped at a nonexistent sheen of sweat on its forehead.
"Phew. That was a little close."
It glanced back at the two of them, still staring, and its tone carried a note of exasperation.
"Sorry about that. I was a little rusty coming out. The barrier's energy fluctuated more than it should have. If it had taken one more second and the fog locked onto our position, all three of us would have had a real problem on our hands."
It paused, looked between Kairos and Will, and waved a hand.
"Alright, we're safe now. Ask whatever you want, but keep your voices down. Sound carries out to the fog as well, and I can't dampen that as easily."
Will finally came back to himself.
He could feel the dim barrier still wrapped around them, and he was full of questions.
Was this even the same barrier as before?
It looked like the same underlying structure, but the feeling it gave off was completely different. The first one had been brute-force defense, a wall taking hits head-on. This one felt more like total concealment, a complete severance from the surrounding space.
And pulling on his experience, he could tell the energy signature was strange. It was clearly Ghost-type energy, something to do with shadows, but unlike any Ghost-type technique he had ever encountered.
Years back, during his few ventures to the fringes of the core zone, Will had already tried having his Gengar use its abilities to shroud him and block the soul-devouring fog from detecting him. It had never worked. The fog seemed sharply sensitive to Ghost-type energy. The moment you wrapped yourself in it, you lit up like a flare in the dark and instantly became a target.
So how had Marshadow pulled this off?
It had clearly used Ghost-type energy too. Why did the fog seem completely blind to them?
He was just drawing breath to ask when Marshadow spoke first, as though it had already known the question was coming.
"Alright, I know what you want to ask. Listen."
Marshadow drifted in the air, hands clasped behind its back, carrying the air of someone with very deep, very private knowledge.
"This is a specialized application of energy, not a conventional defense. Simply put, it's about making yourself disappear into the air rather than planting yourself in front of it. The technique involves a working understanding of space and dimensions. You can't learn it yet. When you reach the point where you can touch that threshold, I'll teach you then."
Will stared.
How had it known what he was going to ask?
He hadn't even opened his mouth.
Marshadow looked at his thoroughly baffled expression and rolled its eyes.
"You had the whole question written all over your face. I'd have to be an idiot not to see it. That look of 'how is that even possible' and 'why can't I do it' was practically stamped on your forehead."
Will felt heat rise to his face and covered it with a couple of awkward coughs.
Since he had been read so easily, he didn't have the nerve to push further. For a technique at that level, even getting a single pointer was already more than he could have asked for. Pressing past that would just be ungrateful.
It was at that moment that Kairos spoke up.
He hadn't been paying much attention to either of them. He raised one hand and pointed in a specific direction.
"So that's where the seal is?"
Will turned to look.
One glance was enough to burn itself into his memory for the rest of his life.
What lay there could no longer be called a sky. It was a sea of deep crimson.
The space overhead was entirely swallowed by a strange blood-red light. Not the warm glow of sunlight, but the vivid red of freshly spilled blood, carrying with it something deeply wrong.
Beneath that scarlet sky, countless masses of black fog had taken on solid form, wheeling and screaming through the air. They had condensed into all manner of shapes: enormous beasts, twisted distorted faces, nameless writhing tendrils. They churned wildly overhead, and from them rose a deep resonant roar that wasn't particularly loud but bored straight into the mind and raised every hair.
At the center of all that black fog was a single enormous dark vortex.
It rotated slowly, and the pressure radiating off it made breathing feel impossible.
One look was all it took for Will's chest to clench as if an invisible hand had seized it. The terror of that pressure brought despair with it, a suffocating weight pressing down from all sides.
The shadow at his feet began to tremble.
His Gengar, sheltering inside it, had clearly felt that dreadful force as well. It pulled back into the shadow, its red eyes filled with fear, fixed on the vortex and not daring to move.
Even for someone at Will's level, an Elite Four caliber trainer, the pressure was almost too much to bear.
Will stumbled back a step, his expression tight with fear.
Cold sweat broke across his forehead and slid down his face.
This kind of power...
This was completely beyond anything a trainer at their level could stand against.
Without the barrier, he thought the pressure alone might have put him on his knees.
Will's whole body was trembling faintly, the instinctive terror of a living creature faced with something operating on an entirely different plane.
It took him a long while to barely steady himself, and he stood there drawing ragged breaths, feeling like something dredged up from the bottom of a lake.
The seal at the heart of the Ghost World had already deteriorated this far?
Whatever was imprisoned there, even this thin bleed of its aura was already terrifying to this degree. If the seal actually shattered, the entire Ghost World and everything beyond it would be consumed.
The more Will thought about it, the more certain he was that something had to be done. For the first time, he had a real gut-level understanding of what the Ghost World lineage had been holding back all this time.
He turned to look at Kairos, wanting to see how the young man was holding up.
After all, Kairos had been so calm before. Maybe he had some idea.
What he found stopped him cold.
Kairos had no reaction to the pressure whatsoever.
He looked completely relaxed, and if anything wore a faint expression of mild boredom. He stood there with both hands in his pockets, eyes slightly narrowed.
Will's stomach dropped.
Could it be that the pressure had hit on such a level that it had knocked Kairos into a kind of shock, leaving him unable to react at all?
He was still a young man, after all. He had probably never faced anything like this before.
People really did sometimes go completely still when terror reached a certain pitch, losing all capacity to respond.
Will was quietly feeling sorry for him, thinking the kid had it rough for his age already having to face something like this, when Kairos suddenly raised one hand.
"Haaah..."
It was a full, committed yawn. Kairos even stretched both arms up over his head, looking completely unbothered.
Will's eye twitched.
This was someone who had been scared stiff?
This looked more like someone who was just tired.
Kairos finished his yawn, dropped his gaze, and looked down at his own shadow, which was still trembling faintly beneath him.
"Hey, Gengar, you in there?"
He gave it a light tap with his foot, like someone nudging a friend who had dozed off.
A rustling came from the shadow. After a moment, Gengar carefully peeked out with half its face, red eyes still carrying traces of fright, staring fixedly at the vortex and not daring to move much. Clearly the earlier moment had rattled it pretty thoroughly.
Kairos looked at how shaken it still was and laughed quietly.
"Alright, stop playing dead. How does this compare to what you saw before? I let you experience that footage, remember."
That footage?
Gengar blinked, then worked out who Kairos meant.
It tilted its head and started thinking back.
When they had been working on the game together, Kairos had let it sit through several sequences of footage.
When those figures had appeared, the pressure they gave off...
Gengar felt something surge through it even now just thinking about it, like its blood had come to a boil, like the entire world was about to be set alight. That had been pure destruction: absolute, overwhelming, leaving no room for resistance whatsoever.
Compared to that...
Gengar looked once more at the distant vortex bleeding its crimson light and churning black fog.
This one was frightening, sure. Eerie in a way that made something deep down want to pull back. But in terms of raw power, it genuinely didn't stack up. When those legendary Pokemon had shown up in that footage, the world-ending momentum, the reality-warping force of them, that was what real terror looked like. This, for all its dramatic presentation, blood-red sky and screaming fog and everything, somehow felt like a lot of noise without the teeth to back it up.
Gengar thought it over, then shook its head with firm conviction.
"Geng."
Not even close.
If any one of those few had shown up here, the whole mass of fog would have been ash long before now, with no chance to be swirling around putting on a show like this.
Kairos saw the head shake and nodded.
"That's what I figured."
He tilted his chin, looking satisfied.
"So there's really no reason to be that scared, is there. You've seen the real thing. Puts things in perspective."
Will stood there beside them, listening to this back-and-forth between one person and one ghost, and felt his mind go completely blank.
His thoughts had stopped entirely. He could not make sense of any of what was unfolding in front of him.
These two, this one person and one ghost, was something seriously wrong with them?
Faced with pressure like this, faced with a legendary-grade seal, they were having this conversation?
And calling it not that scary?
Sir, were you being serious right now?
The force that had almost made him black out a moment ago was what they were calling "not even close"?
Then what exactly were these figures they were talking about?
As that thought surfaced, Will suddenly remembered something.
Hadn't Marshadow mentioned "that lord" at some point?
Could it be that whoever Kairos was referring to was...?