The line went quiet for a few seconds, as if the representative were pulling up records, before a polite but puzzled voice came through.
"Sir, are you sure about this one? This Dragonite, well, how do I put it... its combat potential is pretty average, you could even say it's on the low end.
Its only real strength is its flight speed, and it has quite the appetite. If you're set on buying, I'd recommend taking a look at some of our other..."
Before the rep could finish, the Dragonite at his side seemed to understand every word. Its ears, which had been perked straight up, drooped instantly, and its thick tail sagged to the ground — the whole creature looked utterly dejected, as though it had just suffered the greatest injustice imaginable.
It had always known it wasn't a battle-type dragon. Being looked down on was nothing new. What it hadn't expected was to get talked down to in the middle of someone trying to buy it. Kairos glanced over at it and spoke into the phone.
"No need to look at anything else. I'll take this one."
The rep on the other end paused, then quickly changed their tune.
"Of course, sir, if you're sure. This Dragonite is priced at one million, five hundred thousand."
One million, five hundred thousand.
In this world, that wasn't cheap for a non-combat Dragonite, but it wasn't outrageous either. Raising one with exceptional flight speed came with its own costs.
"Card."
Kairos didn't hesitate. The transfer went through instantly.
The moment his phone buzzed with the confirmation, the Dragonite's ears shot straight up and its tail began swinging with enough force to cut through the air.
The way it looked at Kairos shifted completely, eyes filled with joy and gratitude, as if it were gazing at a long-term meal ticket.
A second later, it came charging over, threw out both stubby forelimbs, and hoisted Kairos clean off the ground.
"Rooaar!"
Kairos's vision blurred as he was lifted into the air.
A wave of dizziness hit him, and he sighed.
"Alright, alright, put me down. I get vertigo."
The Dragonite finally caught on and carefully set him back on the ground, scratching its head with an apologetic look, clearly terrified that it had nearly dropped its new boss.
Kairos steadied himself and straightened his clothes.
"Come on, let's head back to Cerulean City, to the same spot you picked me up last time."
The Dragonite obediently crouched down and let him climb onto its back.
"Rooaar!"
With a single thunderous cry, the Dragonite spread its wings and launched them both skyward. Now with nothing holding it back, it pushed its speed to the absolute limit. The landscape below blurred into streaks of indistinct color.
---
Cerulean City. The villa district.
Kairos stood at his front door, took one look at the perfectly intact entrance, and let out a quiet breath of relief.
He pushed the door open, and a breath of clean air washed over him.
The living room was spotless, nothing like the mess he might have imagined. The Omanyte was hovering just above its tank in the center of the room, apparently in the middle of a nap.
At the sound of the door, it stirred. The moment it spotted Kairos, it let out a cheerful cry and darted over, circling him several times as if scolding him for being gone so long.
Kairos reached out and patted its smooth little head.
"Sorry. Got held up with some things. You didn't go hungry these past few days, did you?"
The Omanyte shook its head and gestured toward the kitchen.
Kairos looked over. The automatic feeder still had about half its food left. Apparently, even though the Omanyte had only recently hatched, this little one had a solid instinct for finding its next meal.
"Come here, let me introduce you to a new friend."
He stepped aside to reveal the Dragonite standing in the doorway. Its enormous frame nearly blocked the entire entrance.
It looked at the Omanyte inside and gave a friendly wave of its claw.
The Omanyte eyed the big creature curiously, unafraid, and swam over to nuzzle against its leg.
Kairos then brought out Gengar and Chandelure.
"This is Gengar, and this is Chandelure. Consider yourselves family from here on out."
Gengar immediately floated up to perch on the Dragonite's head and started pulling faces. Chandelure drifted quietly in the air, its blue flames flickering in what passed for a greeting.
The Dragonite looked around at its new housemates and gave a simple, contented grin. It had a feeling this new home was going to work out just fine.
Kairos watched the scene unfold and felt the corner of his mouth curl upward.
He hadn't become a trainer in the traditional sense. But this, somehow, felt just as good.
---
A few minutes later, after tidying up a bit, Kairos dropped onto the living room couch.
He raised his hand, and the pale blue system interface spread open before him.
The event had performed even better than expected.
The rolling data on the screen showed that players had cleared tens of thousands of infected wild Ghost-type Pokémon through the game. The rare-item reward pool had been nearly half depleted because of it.
That stung a little, but one look at the emotion points column, which had shot up dramatically, left him feeling more than satisfied.
Ten to twenty thousand emotion points.
That was no small amount.
The players' emotional responses had clearly been intense, especially among ordinary people encountering that many Ghost-type Pokémon for the first time.
The novelty and the thrill of battle had translated into solid returns, which in turn fed back as excitement and satisfaction, naturally generating more emotion points.
On top of that, the average skill level of the players was quite high, and stronger individuals tended to contribute proportionally more points.
Kairos swiped through the resource panel and closed it, then pulled the invitation card from his bag.
The one bound to Mewtwo.
As the card activated, a semi-transparent screen materialized, showing a shaky, fast-moving image. It was Mewtwo's perspective, constantly shifting at high speed.
He had been keeping an eye on it over these past couple of days.
The scene showed the same barren, rocky terrain as before.
Mewtwo hovered in midair, wreathed in a halo of violet psychic energy, locked in fierce combat with Regirock.
Even through the screen, the terrifying pulse of energy came through clearly.
Regirock's fist came crashing down with world-ending force and was stopped effortlessly by Mewtwo's telekinesis. A moment later, a devastating Psystrike slammed into the Titan's chest.
Kairos studied Mewtwo's aura carefully.
It was noticeably stronger than before.
Just as he had predicted, Mewtwo was still in its early growth phase, carrying limitless potential within it.
It seemed to be forging itself through relentless combat, climbing another rung with every battle it survived.
Well, of course. This was Mewtwo — one of the strongest in existence. Regirock was barely a warm-up.
Kairos nodded to himself and was just about to close the interface — maybe rest for a bit, check whether there was anything edible in the kitchen.
Then the pale blue system interface flashed violently and turned a blinding, blood-red.
A sharp, urgent alarm blared directly inside his mind.
[WARNING: Ghost World energy index has dropped off a cliff!]
[WARNING: Massive high-energy readings detected. Several game modules have been suspended.]
Kairos went rigid.
Can't a person catch a break?
Before he could even react, the communicator on his wrist erupted into frantic vibrations.
It was Will.
He pressed the answer key, and Will's voice came through, strained and trembling with urgency.
"Kairos! Something's happened in the Ghost World! The seal is collapsing. It looks like it's trying to force its way out!"
Kairos's brow furrowed. No wasted words.
"What's the situation, specifically?"
"Not great, honestly. The mist had been thinning out, but now it's all black fog, worse than it was before."
"Spiritomb must have realized things weren't going its way. The Pokémon numbers have spiked and their strength has gone up massively. The people we have here just can't hold the line!"
Will's voice was layered beneath a backdrop of explosions and Pokémon cries. The situation had clearly reached the edge of collapse.
"Got it. I'm on my way."
He ended the call and was on his feet instantly.
He pulled up the map and saw the red markers scattered across it, each one pulsing at energy levels far beyond what they had been before and far more densely packed.
It was exactly as Will had described. Spiritomb was making its last desperate push, which also meant this whole situation had reached its endgame far sooner than expected.
There was no question. He had to get back to the Ghost World.
Good thing he had the Dragonite now.
Kairos didn't hesitate. He walked straight out to the villa's open lot and called the Dragonite over with a wave.
"Let's go."
The Dragonite flew out of the living room and had barely touched down before it was already reaching for the energy cubes out of sheer habit, ready for a snack.
Then it caught Kairos's expression, serious and set, and snapped out of it immediately, the usual easy-going look vanishing from its face. It seemed to understand that things were urgent.
"Dragonite, we're heading back to Saffron City. Maximum speed. As fast as you can fly."
He was already swinging himself onto the Dragonite's back as he spoke.
The Dragonite glanced back at him, hesitating slightly.
It was greedy, but it wasn't slow. From experience, it knew that the air pressure and force generated at its true top speed was more than most ordinary trainers could handle. People had passed out before. And that was on the mild end of things.
It let out a low, uncertain rumble and shook its head.
Kairos clapped it on the shoulder.
"Don't worry. My body isn't that fragile. It's different from most. Stop stalling. Let's go."
The Dragonite still had its doubts.
But it raised its head anyway, let out a long cry, and spread its wings wide.
"Rooaar!"
A deafening crack split the air, and it was gone, a streak of light shooting upward with Kairos on its back.
The world blurred on either side of them, scenery dissolving into indistinct lines.
The wind hit like a wall, howling across his face, but just as Kairos had said, the physical conditioning he had received through Cynthia and the others had left him with something beyond ordinary human resilience.
At this speed, the pressure barely registered, nothing more than a stiff breeze against his skin.
Kairos lay low against the Dragonite's back and closed his eyes.
The wind roared in his ears while his mind ran at full speed.
This wasn't how he had expected things to play out.
He hadn't anticipated Spiritomb moving to break through the seal by force at this point.
Still, if it was forcing the break, its condition couldn't possibly be good. The strain of shattering the seal on top of the power it had already lost meant Spiritomb was almost certainly compromised right now.
Dealing with a weakened Spiritomb was still a problem that needed solving, but it was a far more manageable one than before.
When it came down to it, between Ho-Oh and Giratina, either one could step in to handle a weakened Spiritomb and it should be well within reach.
The real question was whether the Ghost World's defensive line could hold until one of those two showed up.
And then there were the players.
He had built the combat assistance module specifically for the game, designed to match players against Spiritomb's fog-infected Ghost-type Pokémon and feed them tactical recommendations based on collected data.
But now that Spiritomb was throwing everything it had into one final push and the fog was spreading and intensifying across a massive area, the wild Ghost-types' power levels had almost certainly undergone a qualitative shift.
The old system no longer had any meaningful reference point for the current threat level.
If players went in using the same strategies as before, they were going to get destroyed.
Kairos opened a connection to the system backend and started making changes manually.
[Modify mission parameters.]
[Cancel all solo hunting assignments.]
[Force-enable team coordination mode. All players converge on designated safe zones. Solo engagement with mission targets is prohibited.]
Once that was done, he let out a slow breath.
It would cost some players their points, but safety came first.
The whole point of Ghost World Hunter GO had always been to solve the Ghost World problem with minimal casualties. That hadn't changed.
"Dragonite, faster!"
He gave the Dragonite a firm pat.
Feeling the urgency in it, the Dragonite let out another long cry and pushed every last bit of its power into forward momentum, going all out.
Meanwhile, a certain small brain was quietly turning things over.
This human.
Actually this tough.
...Seriously??
---
Saffron City.
The once-bustling city had been thrown into chaos. Most ordinary people couldn't see what was happening in the Ghost World, but the oppressive atmosphere and the sudden gusts of wind whipping through the streets made it obvious that something was deeply wrong.
Kairos touched down at the edge of the city and made straight for the Ghost World entrance.
He hadn't even gotten close before he saw that the area around the portal was already packed.
A large crowd had gathered, workers and trainers mixed together, along with a number of reporters who had rushed over upon hearing the news. The noise of competing voices rose and fell like a pot coming to a boil.
"What's going on in there? What's happening?"
"Don't ask me. Word is it's bad. Several search and rescue teams went in a while back and haven't been heard from since. A complete communications blackout."
"Yeah, the portal's one-way right now. Anyone who goes in loses contact."
"This is bad. This is really bad."
Kairos listened to the crowd without letting any of it show on his face.
As long as he could get inside, that was all that mattered.
He walked directly toward the barrier line.
A sharp-eyed worker spotted him and hurried over, one hand outstretched to stop him.
"Sir! Stop right there! That area is dangerous!"
The worker's voice was fast and urgent.
"The energy readings inside the Ghost World are extremely unstable. Several groups went in just a little while ago and none of them has come back out.
Communications are completely cut off. No one knows what's going on in there right now. For your own safety, please do not enter, and please step back immediately!"
People nearby turned to look, some alarmed, others calling out warnings of their own.
Kairos didn't slow down. He stepped around the worker and, under a sea of stunned stares, walked straight into the portal.
"Hey! You there! Are you out of your mind?!"
The worker's desperate shout rang out behind him, but Kairos was already gone, swallowed by the light of the portal.