The dark figure resembling Giratina gave them no time to react. Its form flickered — and it lunged.
Its speed was terrifying. In the blink of an eye it was on top of them, dragging a gust of foul, metallic wind in its wake.
Kairos barely registered the movement before the creature's claws came crashing down. The red barrier around Marshadow shuddered violently, cracking sounds splitting the air with each blow.
"Not good!"
Will stumbled back half a step, face drained.
He had never seen anything like this. Not once in his entire career as a Trainer.
Marshadow knew it could not falter. It threw everything into holding its ground, fully aware that if the barrier broke, all three of them were finished.
It let out a fierce cry. The green light radiating from its body surged, and the red flame that had nearly been extinguished roared back — fiercer than before.
Then something emerged from within that flame. A shimmering silhouette, blazing with rainbow light, wings outstretched. The image was unmistakable.
Ho-Oh, the Rainbow Pokémon.
Only a silhouette, yet the divine pressure it carried was absolute. The black mist surrounding them recoiled as if meeting its natural enemy, scattering in every direction.
A piercing cry echoed through the entire space.
The silhouette of Ho-Oh beat its wings and flung itself at the dark figure. The collision erupted in a blinding flash.
A shrill, agonized scream followed — and the dark figure dissolved into wisps of black smoke that faded into the air.
---
Will exhaled.
But before the relief could settle, the enormous coffin lurched with a violent tremor. The sound that followed was deeper and louder than anything before it — like a massive beast roused from an age-long sleep.
A wave of black energy ten times more powerful poured out of the coffin.
It gathered rapidly, congealing into a far larger dark silhouette. More solid than the last. The aura rolling off it was wilder, more savage. The blood-red eyes burning within it held nothing but the desire to destroy.
Marshadow's expression shifted in an instant.
They could not fight this. What came before had been a probe. This was the killing blow.
The power ahead was so overwhelming that Marshadow could not even form the thought of resistance.
Run.
Without hesitation, Marshadow held nothing back. It poured every ounce of energy into the barrier, seized Kairos and Will, and sprinted back the way they had come.
The massive dark silhouette let out a roar and gave chase. It did not attack directly — it opened its jaws and unleashed a torrent of black energy waves.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The barrier flickered wildly under the barrage, threatening to collapse with every hit. Each impact sent violent dizziness crashing through Kairos. Will had it worse — held in one of Marshadow's hands, he was thrown about with every lurching stride, his face the color of ash.
He had never been this helpless in his life. A Champion-level powerhouse, carted along for the ride. If word of this got out — but pride was the last thing on his mind. Survival came first.
---
The ground around them began to rumble.
Kairos forced himself through the dizziness and looked. His heart seized.
The solid ground was splitting apart, enormous fissures tearing open one after another across the surface. From those cracks, countless dark shapes came crawling out.
Ghost-type Pokémon. Every single one of them. A dense, swarming mass — Gengar, Cursola, Sinistcha, Mismagius — all bearing that same eerie red gleam in their eyes, all cloaked in a thin film of shadow.
The aura rolling off them was even denser than the silhouette bearing down from behind.
Every last one of them, Champion-level.
Kairos understood immediately. The Ghost-types that had vanished earlier had not vanished at all. They had been hiding underground.
Under normal circumstances, even Will would have struggled to escape a coordinated assault from a pack this size. But these creatures were mindless — stripped of reason, reduced to killing machines. The moment they surfaced, they flung themselves at Marshadow, swarming to block the path ahead.
Get out of the way!
Marshadow bellowed, and the barrier pulsed outward in a sudden explosive expansion, crashing through the mass of Ghost-types. The weaker ones burst into puffs of white smoke on contact. The stronger ones were sent tumbling, unable to hold it back.
Will had recovered enough to act. Battered as he was, his hands had not been idle. He released his Gengar from its Poké Ball. With Gengar providing cover, the pressure on Marshadow eased — just enough.
They broke through the encirclement and kept running.
---
The massive dark silhouette was still in pursuit, but strangely, it halted the moment it reached a certain point. The frenzied Ghost-types did the same — every one of them freezing in place as if they had struck an invisible wall, not a single one crossing that line.
Marshadow carried them for a good distance more before finally slowing to a stop. It set Kairos and Will down, then doubled over with deep, heaving breaths. The green light surrounding its body had dimmed considerably.
Will simply dropped to the ground and lay there, drinking in the air. After a long moment he managed to lift his head and stare back at the region still swallowed by black mist.
"So… they can't come out, it seems?"
The silhouette had been right behind them, yet it stopped as though it had struck something solid. Whatever was in that mist, something was keeping it contained.
Whether that was good news, Will had no idea.
---
Kairos remained standing. He stared into the dark, his mind working quickly.
The mist, the coffin, the Ghost-types — it was all connected. The mist had flowed back into the coffin, and whatever was sealed inside had gone berserk. That meant the mist could control or influence it. Which left two questions.
One: was what was sealed in the coffin actually Giratina?
Two: which came first — had the mist created this situation, or had the coffin produced the mist, which then took control of the Ghost-types?
Both answers would determine everything they did next. And for one of them, he thought he might already know.
He turned toward Marshadow, intending to ask. It knew this place better than either of them.
He never got the chance to speak.
---
The ground beneath his feet split apart without warning.
A tremendous suction force erupted from the crack — and then an enormous jet-black claw came surging up from below. It was massive, bristling with rows of jagged backward-curving spines that caught the dim light like blades. It punched straight through Marshadow's freshly restored barrier as though it were not there at all.
Then it closed around Kairos.
Fast.
Neither Marshadow nor Will processed what had happened in time. By the moment their minds caught up, Kairos was already locked tight in the grip of that claw.
"Kairos!"
Will lunged forward. Marshadow was faster — it fired a burst of black energy directly at the claw while Will's Gengar launched Shadow Balls from the other side, both of them attacking without pause.
The claw did not move. Not even a twitch. No matter how fiercely they attacked, they could not leave a scratch on it.
Then the claw wrenched downward.
An irresistible force tore through Kairos. His balance vanished. He did not manage a shout — his vision went black, and he was hauled down into the earth.
The ground sealed shut above him with a heavy sound, as though nothing had happened at all.
Kairos was gone.
---
Marshadow stood frozen, staring at the spot where he had disappeared.
This was the person it had promised to protect. The person it had sworn to help restore Ho-Oh's faith in the world. And he had been snatched away right in front of its eyes.
What had that claw been? Why had the barrier done nothing against it? Marshadow had attacked with everything it had and made no difference at all.
Will stood beside it with his mouth open, equally dumbfounded.
This place. First the coffin. Then the silhouette. Now something dragging people underground. What was hiding in the Ghost World?
He and Marshadow exchanged a glance. Neither of them had a single word.
---
From Kairos' perspective:
All he had felt was that colossal, unyielding force — and then nothing. His vision went dark. His body was thrown into chaos, spinning and lurching through absolute blackness, weightless and directionless.
He could not tell how long it lasted. It might have been an instant. It might have been much longer.
Then the turbulence faded.
Kairos opened his eyes.
This was not the depths of the earth. This was not some dark cavern.
The sky above him was warped, soaked in a deep reddish-purple. The clouds did not drift as vapor — they hung in the air as jagged, broken shards, clinking and grinding against one another in the silence. There was no ground beneath him.
Instead, an endless expanse of floating geometric forms drifted through the void. Square monoliths. Triangular spires. Spiraling columns. Each one slowly rotating, each one suspended in empty space.
Each one upside down.
Kairos stood very still, taking in the impossible geometry around him — the wrongness of every surface and angle, the sky that felt like a floor and the void that felt like neither.
words surfaced in his mind. Slow, certain, and cold.
The Reverse World.
۞۞۞۞
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