Passing through the portal, he arrived in the Ghost World once again.
The sight before him made him frown.
The entire sky was consumed by an unsettling dark crimson, and the black fog had grown so thick he could barely make out his surroundings.
In the distance, from the direction of the core zone, violent explosions of energy rang out in rapid succession, each one accompanied by a trembling of the ground beneath his feet.
The situation on the outer perimeter was far worse than what he had felt from within the core zone last time, and that alone said everything about how bad things had gotten.
"Let's go. To the core zone."
Kairos muttered under his breath and climbed onto Dragonite.
Though Dragonite was clearly unsettled by the oppressive aura hanging over everything, it spread its wings obediently and carried Kairos racing toward the heart of the storm.
Along the way, Kairos spotted a great many people, mostly players from Ghost World Hunter GO.
But none of them carried the excitement or swagger they'd had while they were hunting before. Their faces were pale as they sprinted desperately, with swarms of Pokémon hot on their heels, eyes blazing red and bodies wreathed entirely in black energy. Mismagius, Gengar, Banette...
The species hadn't changed, but their auras had become something altogether terrifying.
"Help! What is wrong with this quest?! These things are way above Level One difficulty!"
"The system told me to regroup, but I can't find which way to go!"
"My game interface is a mess. Everything's garbled! It's saying I can't continue the challenge anymore..."
Cries of panic filled the air from every direction.
Kairos gave a small nod.
Just as he'd suspected, the support system had completely broken down.
These empowered Ghost-type Pokémon were at least twice as strong as they had been before. Ordinary players stood no chance against them.
It was a good thing he had force-modified the quest parameters earlier, switching the players' objectives to fleeing and regrouping. Otherwise, things would have been far worse by now. Still, this was no long-term solution.
"Roar!"
While Kairos was still thinking, Dragonite suddenly let out a sharp, warning cry.
A massive Mismagius burst from the black fog and lunged straight at him, claws outstretched. Dark curse energy coiled around its talons, and its entire form seemed to flicker at the edges, half-real, half-phantom.
Kairos glanced at it once.
"Gengar."
Gengar slipped out from beneath Kairos's feet without a sound and vanished from sight in an instant.
A heartbeat later, the Mismagius let out a shriek as though struck by something heavy and plummeted from midair, crashing down into the black fog below.
Gengar reappeared on Kairos's shoulder, looking faintly surprised at itself.
My strength has grown quite a bit. That one... my former self would have had real trouble with it.
Kairos, meanwhile, was gauging the distance ahead.
They were getting close.
Even up here in the sky, the suffocating pressure bearing down on him made it difficult to breathe.
The core zone was just ahead.
He could only wonder what it looked like now.
Half a minute later, Dragonite's massive body lurched to a halt in midair before descending, carrying Kairos down behind a cluster of rocks that offered decent cover.
Kairos swung off its back, gave it a pat on the head, and recalled it into its Poké Ball.
Dragonite seemed to sense the suffocating dread radiating from just ahead. It gave a low growl and retreated into the ball without protest.
With Dragonite put away, Kairos peered out from behind the rocks toward the front line of the battle.
The situation there was, to put it plainly, not good.
What had once been a reasonably intact defensive line was now riddled with gaps, and the screams of trainers and Pokémon alike rang out from every corner. At the very center of that line, two figures stood out above the rest.
One was Cynthia, dressed in her black coat, her presence as sharp and commanding as ever. The other was Caitlin, composed and graceful even now.
In the midst of the chaos, the two of them stood like beacons in a storm, holding their ground in front of the ordinary trainers and directing the tattered defense as best they could.
As Champions, they were the backbone everyone else leaned on, and no one could have filled that role better.
Kairos didn't head straight for them. Instead, he kept low and circled the battlefield, watching and assessing.
As he moved, fragments of conversation from the trainers nearby drifted into earshot.
The group was a mixed one: League elites, bounty hunters, and even some players who had gotten into this through his game.
Battered as they were, most of them still had a flicker of hope in their eyes when they looked toward the two figures holding the line.
"Damn, what is even happening in this place? I heard the exit vanished, and on top of that, all our communications are being jammed."
A young trainer in a green vest spoke while wrapping up a Machop's wounds, his voice laced with helplessness.
Beside him, a middle-aged bounty hunter with thick stubble spit on the ground and turned a few Poké Balls over in his hand.
"Save it. You saw what happened. We can't get out. We're trapped in here, plain and simple."
"Then what do we do? The black fog just keeps getting thicker, and there's no end to the Ghost-types coming out of it!"
"Relax. You see who's over there? That's Cynthia, Champion of Sinnoh, and Caitlin, one of the Unova Elite Four.
With those two holding the line, even if the sky falls, they'll be the ones holding it up. All we have to do is defend this little patch of ground and we should at least make it out alive."
"True enough. We've earned decent rewards from this run. It was worth the risk... I just hope everyone gets through okay."
Kairos paused for just a moment at that.
For ordinary people, Cynthia was the symbol of absolute strength. But a disaster of this magnitude was something even she couldn't simply shoulder alone, and the same would be true of anyone.
His gaze moved through the crowd and settled on Cynthia and Caitlin.
Cynthia had just directed Garchomp to repel a wave of Ghost-type attackers. She turned, expression grim, and looked toward Caitlin. Caitlin's hands were wreathed in psychic light, clearly sustaining a large-scale defensive barrier, and fine beads of sweat had already formed on her temples.
"Have you made contact?" Cynthia's voice was crisp and cold, though anyone listening closely could catch the faint edge of urgency beneath it.
Caitlin shook her head, her face pale.
"No. The spatial distortion is too severe. I tried reaching out to Kairos through my psychic link earlier, but I couldn't get the signal through."
No reinforcements could get in from outside, and they couldn't get out either.
Cynthia's brow furrowed as she stared into the surging black fog ahead.
"Then we hold on our own. If we lose this position, when the Ghost World collapses entirely, the real world will..."
Watching the exchange, Kairos let out a quiet sigh.
Spiritomb's counterattack. He hadn't anticipated it coming this soon. By the original timeline, more players should have joined by now, not left them with only these two as the primary fighting force.
He stopped deliberating and quickened his pace, slipping into the shadows of a collapsed ruin nearby.
It was a blind spot in the battlefield, shielded on all sides by massive broken pillars that blocked any line of sight completely.
No sooner had he steadied himself than a familiar voice reached him from the darkness at his side.
"You finally made it."
Kairos turned. Will was leaning against a chunk of rubble, covered in blood, clearly hurt badly.
Marshadow hovered at his shoulder, its expression tight with worry.
Will looked up at Kairos, and despite the injuries written across his face, managed a tired smile.
"Honestly? Really glad to see you right now."
Kairos skipped the pleasantries and got straight to the point.
"What's the situation? Marshadow, have you been able to reach Ho-Oh?"
Before Will could even get a word in, Marshadow drifted over, spreading both of its translucent little hands in a gesture of helplessness.
"Don't even get me started. I can faintly sense that Lord Ho-Oh is out there, but its current state... it's not responding to me at all, let alone fighting alongside us. My guess is that Lord Ho-Oh has been trapped somewhere, or it's caught up dealing with something. I can feel it struggling, but that's all."
Marshadow's voice was heavy with frustration. As Ho-Oh's attendant, it understood Ho-Oh's condition better than anyone. If even it couldn't make contact, then Ho-Oh was well and truly out of reach for now.
Kairos's frown deepened.
Ho-Oh was off the table. What about the other one?
He looked down at the Giratina mark on the back of his hand and pressed his fingers against it.
But this time, it didn't open a passage to the Reverse World the way it had before.
One second passed. Then two. Then three.
The mark on his hand showed no reaction whatsoever. It sat there like a dead tattoo, perfectly still against his skin, without so much as a flicker of light.
Kairos's heart sank.
Nothing.
How could this be?
This was serious. The two biggest cards he had been counting on to turn the tide, Ho-Oh and Giratina, were both out of reach now.
Had something happened to Giratina again?
Kairos lowered his hand and fell into thought.
This wasn't the time to panic. If he couldn't count on either of them, then for now, he would have to work with what he had left.
He looked over at Will.
Will was in rough shape, but when their eyes met, he gave a somewhat rueful twist of his lips.
"My strength has actually gone up quite a bit lately. Whether it's enough... we'll see."
He raised a hand, and the Gengar that was slightly larger than usual materialized in the air beside him.
The moment it appeared, the temperature around them dropped noticeably.
Kairos reached out with his senses for a moment and was genuinely surprised.
This Gengar's aura had grown substantially. It had crossed into what could only be called the Legendary tier, though pinpointing exactly where within that tier it sat was beyond him.
It seemed Will had funneled most of the rewards he had earned through the game into sharpening his ace Pokémon.
Will caught Kairos's expression and let out a satisfied laugh.
"Not bad, right? I poured a mountain of reward items into him. These past couple of days, I've been grinding quests nonstop. He's still nowhere close to those two out there, but I figure he'll be useful."
Kairos gave a nod, though his eyes stayed on Will himself.
No. Clearly not enough.
If Will was already taking injuries from the frenzied Pokémon under Spiritomb's influence, he wouldn't stand a real chance against Spiritomb itself.
Just then, the ground lurched violently beneath them.
Not a mild tremor, but the kind of shaking that felt like something deep within the earth was clawing its way toward the surface. Enormous cracks tore through the battlefield in an instant, sending shards of stone flying in every direction.
"It's coming!"
Will's face snapped tight as he shouted the warning.
At the very center of the battlefield, the black fog-shrouded ground suddenly caved inward, forming a massive vortex. At its center, dark violet energy swirled together in a frenzy, and a shrill, piercing wail rose from the depths, enough to set every nerve on edge.
Then, from within the vortex, an enormous Pokémon rose slowly into view: a figure as tall as a building, ancient and utterly wrong in the way it moved.
Countless deep violet phantoms clung to its body, each one twisting in silent agony, as though giving voice to centuries of accumulated resentment.
Heavy chains were wrapped around its form, and the face that stared out was bleached white, utterly blank, save for two hollow eyes fixed straight ahead.
Spiritomb.
The mass of grudges sealed away for countless years had at last torn free from its imprisonment and descended into the world.
The moment it appeared, a crushing pressure swept across the entire battlefield like a wave.
Several of the ordinary trainers nearest to it were simply knocked unconscious by the force of that aura alone.
Will gave Spiritomb no time to breathe after breaking free from its seal. He launched forward, cutting into the battlefield.
"Shadow Ball!"
Behind him, Gengar threw open its jaws, condensing a sphere of pure darkness in its mouth, and hurled it toward Spiritomb with devastating force. With Gengar's newfound strength, the ground beneath the Shadow Ball's path cracked and split in its wake.
Spiritomb didn't even flinch. It glanced at the incoming energy with something close to indifference.
The phantom-like aura flowing off its body surged outward, enveloping the Shadow Ball, swallowing it whole, and the attack simply ceased to exist.
Will's brow furrowed sharply. The full weight of what they were dealing with was beginning to sink in.
But there was no time to dwell on it in the middle of a battle.
"Gengar, keep going!"
A hoarse, distorted voice (one that seemed to speak directly into every mind at once) rose from somewhere that couldn't quite be pinpointed.
There were no light effects. No explosion.
Gengar suddenly let out a piercing, agonized cry, and the energy it had been building vanished in an instant.
Its body seized up as though gripped by an invisible hand, the purple sheen of its skin shuddering violently as something was slowly and forcibly drawn out from within.
As a Gym Leader who specialized in Ghost-types, Will recognized the technique immediately. Curse.
But Curse wasn't supposed to work on other Ghost-types like Gengar.
"Damn it... this thing..."
Will's face went white. He tried to call Gengar back, but it was already too late.
Spiritomb raised one enormous spectral hand and swept it lazily to the side.
The impact hit like a thunderclap.
Gengar was hurled through the air like a ragdoll and smashed into a ruined structure far across the battlefield, disappearing into the rubble, its fate unknown.
A sharp intake of breath rippled through everyone present.
From the moment the battle had begun, the quicker-thinking trainers had been directing their Pokémon to attack without hesitation.
Not a single technique had left so much as a scratch on Spiritomb.
And Will was the Ghost World's own realm guardian, one of the most powerful trainers there was. His ace partner Gengar couldn't even survive a single hit from Spiritomb.
What exactly were they up against?
Spiritomb didn't slow down. Whether it had been agitated by the attacks or whether it simply lived for destruction, it raised its head and turned its hollow gaze toward the outer perimeter, where the assembled trainer coalition stood trembling.
It opened its mouth and let out a shriek that cut straight to the bone.
Torrents of black fog exploded outward from its body, taking the form of countless ghostly tendrils that reached hungrily for the trainers below.
"Run!"
Someone screamed it (no one could say who), and what remained of the defensive line collapsed in an instant.