Cynthia struggled to lift her head, pushing her disheveled hair out of her face to peer up at the violet figure hovering in the air above.
The moment she saw it, her entire body went rigid.
She was the Champion of Sinnoh, a veteran trainer who had crossed paths with more Pokémon than most people could name, and yet she had never laid eyes on this creature before. Even so, looking at it stirred something deep and unsettling inside her, like a memory she'd never actually had.
That's it.
Emerald.
She had once caught a glimpse of something in Emerald, a shadow radiating a pressure so suffocating it had nearly stopped her cold.
She hadn't known what it was at the time. She'd asked around afterward and eventually learned it was called Mewtwo, some kind of legendary Pokémon with power that defied easy description.
She just never imagined it was real. Not here. Not standing right in front of her.
"That's... Mewtwo?"
Her voice came out unsteady, threaded with disbelief she couldn't quite shake.
Caitlin had gone completely silent beside her. She could feel the psychic energy rolling off the creature in waves, an invisible weight so suffocating it felt like it might crack something inside her. Her hands were trembling and she couldn't make them stop.
She had no idea what a Mewtwo was, but she was psychic herself, and this was the first time in her life she had ever felt genuinely small. How could anything put out psychic energy like that?
Spiritomb had noticed the new arrival too. Those hollow eyes, which had held nothing but a hunger for destruction, now lit up with something sharp and livid.
It let out a grating shriek and snapped its focus entirely onto the newcomer.
The ghostly tendrils that had been tearing the ground apart converged into a single writhing mass, reshaping into black chains of dark energy that launched themselves at Mewtwo from every direction.
There was a bigger threat now. It needed to deal with that first.
Mewtwo didn't move.
It stayed exactly where it was, arms folded, not even bothering to look up properly. It gave the incoming chains a single cold glance, like it was noticing a minor inconvenience.
A quiet scoff escaped it. The sound of something that had already made up its mind.
Then a thin violet barrier flickered into existence in front of it. Almost translucent, almost delicate-looking, and completely, utterly unbreakable.
The black energy chains hit it one after another. Each one was strong enough to take out an Elite Four trainer without breaking a sweat, and every single one dissolved against that barrier like it had run into solid steel, leaving behind nothing but a dull thud and a few scattered motes of fading light.
Blocked. Not even with a raised hand. It hadn't moved at all.
Everyone still conscious enough to watch stood completely frozen.
Will had one hand pressed to his chest, his jaw hanging open, barely remembering to breathe.
Just how strong was this thing?
Then Mewtwo finally moved.
It lowered its folded arms slowly, and something like impatience crossed those violet eyes.
"A worthy opponent?"
"Disappointing."
Its voice arrived directly inside the minds of everyone present. Cold. Flat. Utterly without warmth.
The words had barely settled when Mewtwo was gone from where it had been standing.
It reappeared directly above Spiritomb an instant later.
No buildup. No flash of light. It simply extended its right hand, palm down, and closed its fingers into a deliberate fist.
Psyforce.
The impact was staggering.
A torrent of psychic energy crashed down from above, bearing straight into Spiritomb's enormous body with everything it had.
The creature that had seemed completely unstoppable just moments ago, the one that had brought down a Champion and left Elite Four trainers helpless, now looked like something being squeezed in a fist. It had no room to push back at all.
That massive body was driven straight into the ground by sheer psychic force, hitting with a brutality that cracked the earth in every direction and sent debris flying.
Mewtwo wasn't done. It pressed its palm down further, grinding Spiritomb into the ground again and again.
Spiritomb howled. Its ghostly vapors thrashed wildly as it tried to break free. It opened its maw, a strange violet energy beginning to collect inside as it tried to build up something powerful enough to break Mewtwo's concentration.
Against an ordinary psychic Pokémon, that might have worked.
Not here.
Mewtwo's eyes narrowed slightly. A perfectly placed psychic strike punched straight through Spiritomb's defenses and detonated at its core.
The light in Spiritomb's maw went out instantly.
That burst of force exploded inside its consciousness, cutting off the attack before it could take shape and leaving the creature momentarily paralyzed.
This was the difference that pure, overwhelming power made. There was no back-and-forth here, no clever maneuvering. When the gap was this wide, technique stopped mattering entirely.
Mewtwo kept the Psyforce locked on, wrenching Spiritomb up off the ground before hurling it into the distance with crushing force.
The entire Ghost World shook on impact, like something had just knocked it off its foundations.
From start to finish, Spiritomb hadn't managed a single counterattack.
The sheer spectacle of it left everyone on the battlefield standing in stunned silence.
The trainers who had swung from hope to despair and back again now stared up at that violet figure with blank, hollowed-out expressions.
Another one of these things had just appeared out of nowhere?
On the bright side, it was going after Spiritomb.
On the not-so-bright side, there was no guarantee it was actually on their side. What if it finished with Spiritomb and then turned on them?
Hidden in the shadows nearby, Kairos finally let out a quiet breath.
But the relief wasn't because Mewtwo had Spiritomb pinned down. It was because Mewtwo hadn't spotted him yet.
"Marshadow, Mewtwo can't even find you. That's genuinely impressive."
He gave Marshadow a real thumbs-up.
Marshadow, for its part, was completely lost.
Mewtwo? The one you keep calling "Dreamer"?
So that thing actually IS something you called over?!
Then it hit all at once, and Marshadow went stiff.
"Wait. You two don't have some kind of problem with each other, do you?"
Kairos rolled his eyes.
"No. Relax."
"Then why did you drag me into hiding?! That does nothing for me!"
Marshadow grabbed Kairos by the shoulders and started shaking him furiously.
This was not a joke. The energy coming off that thing had nearly made Marshadow feel like it was looking at Ho-Oh itself.
If they had somehow ended up on the wrong side of something like that, it was over.
Kairos swayed under the shaking, but his eyes never left the battlefield.
This was exactly what he'd been hoping to see.
After the past few days of training, it looked like Mewtwo's power had climbed several times over.
Even so, getting caught right now was completely out of the question.
Mewtwo wasn't in a great mood. Spiritomb probably hadn't been much of a challenge for it at all. Better to stay put and let things play out on their own.
Out in the settling dust, Spiritomb dragged itself upright.
It looked wrecked. Most of its spectral vapor had been torn away, and the solid shell of its body was riddled with fractures, dark violet energy bleeding out from every crack.
It looked up at the figure hovering overhead, and for the first time, something real and cold settled into its eyes.
Fear.
It wanted to run.
For all its hunger for destruction, Spiritomb wasn't reckless. It knew it had picked a fight it had no business picking.
It began to shrink, trying to slip down into the dark mist below and disappear.
Mewtwo watched it try to run with complete disinterest. A flicker of impatience passed through its gaze.
"Stay."
Before the word had even finished, Mewtwo's hands came together with a sharp clap.
A blinding white beam erupted from its palms, cutting through the air at terrifying speed, and hit Spiritomb squarely in the back without any wasted motion.
Hyper Beam.
The explosion tore across the sky.
Spiritomb didn't even have time to make a sound. Its body came apart on impact, scattering into countless black fragments that dissolved into nothing.
All that was left was a single dark Ghost-type energy core, which tumbled to the ground and lay there with a faint, guttering light, like something that had been completely emptied out.
It was over.
Less than a minute, start to finish.
The crisis that had thrown the entire Ghost World into chaos, that had left a Champion and a group of Elite Four trainers completely without options, had been wrapped up without any real effort by a single Pokémon that had appeared out of nowhere.
Mewtwo slowly pulled its Hyper Beam back, not sparing a glance for the core on the ground. It turned, those violet eyes moving in a slow, deliberate sweep across the battlefield, as though searching for whoever had sent it the signal in the first place.
Its gaze paused on the shadows where Kairos was hiding.
That alone was enough to push Marshadow to its limit. It poured everything it had into holding the disguise, pushing harder than it ever had.
In the shadows, Kairos's jaw tightened.
Even with the cover between them, he could feel that gaze, like it was cutting straight through the space itself and landing directly on him.
The good news was that Mewtwo ultimately didn't find him.
The bad news was that Mewtwo didn't do what Kairos had expected and simply leave.
Just as a violet light began to gather around its body and it looked like it was about to vanish, it stopped.
It hung there in the air, those deep violet eyes narrowing slowly, and the weight coming off it, already heavy, suddenly became something else entirely. Something heavier and more deliberate than anything it had put out during the fight.
"Just this?"
The voice hit the inside of every person's mind like a stone dropped into still water.
There was no emotion in it, and yet the contempt came through perfectly clearly, along with something that was almost, but not quite, irritation.
Complete silence.
Cynthia, Caitlin, Will, and every trainer still standing froze where they were, wide-eyed, like they'd just been told something that rewrote the rules.
This Pokémon had spoken.
Not out loud. Directly into their heads, through telepathy, without asking permission or giving any warning.
The shock of that landed harder than the Hyper Beam had.
Mewtwo didn't register their reactions. It turned slowly, that sharp gaze moving across the battlefield again. This time it wasn't wandering. It was deliberate, pressing down on every person present like it was looking for something specific underneath the surface.
"You called me out here for this?"
Its voice carried across the ruined wasteland, edged with the quiet frustration of something that felt like its time had been wasted.
"Whoever summoned me. Come out."
That simple sentence sent a chill straight down the spine of everyone within range.
Will dragged a hand across his forehead.
"So it's... looking for someone? It's saying someone here called it?"
Cynthia's heart was hammering. She looked around, running through every possibility she could think of, and kept hitting dead ends. Aside from their own group, there was no sign of any outsider anywhere in the Ghost World.
Which meant whoever had summoned Mewtwo was somewhere in this crowd.
"No one?"
No answer came. The cold in Mewtwo's eyes went a little deeper. It raised one hand, violet energy crackling at its fingertips, the space around it beginning to warp and bend under the weight of what it was pulling together.
"You used me, and you don't even have the nerve to show yourself..."
Its voice rang out low and even, hitting something deep in every person who heard it.
It hovered there, hand raised, a blazing sphere of white psychic energy condensing in its palm like it was building toward something. Then, the very next instant, the sphere simply faded, as quietly as if it had never existed.
It didn't attack. It didn't leave, either. It stayed where it was, scanning its surroundings, the restless energy in those violet eyes slowly pulling back, replaced by something that looked more like focused thought.
From the moment that strange game interface had appeared in its field of vision, it had been trying to find the source. It hadn't been made by Team Rocket. It didn't match any psychic signature it had ever come across.
And then there had been that moment of being pulled, of feeling its own body respond to someone else's will, just briefly, just enough to be certain. That had told it everything it needed to know: there was a person behind all of this.
But who?
Someone who could reach across the space between worlds, exert their will over it, and build an entire constructed reality like this so-called "game world"... the implications of that made Mewtwo feel something it didn't experience often. A careful edge of wariness, and something that was close to genuine curiosity.
Was that person here right now?
The thought sharpened Mewtwo's focus instantly.
Its psychic power surged outward from where it stood, spreading in every direction like a net being cast wide and fine, scanning every living presence in the area with meticulous care.
But it came up empty.
A moment later, Mewtwo was simply gone, leaving behind nothing but the echo of the pressure it had carried, the only proof that any of it had actually happened.
Just like that, it was over.
In as fast as it had arrived.
Only once Mewtwo had completely vanished did Kairos let out a long, slow breath.
"That was way too close."
If Mewtwo had found him, there was no good version of how that conversation would have gone.
Marshadow dropped straight out of the air.
It was finished.
Keeping that thing from sensing either of them had taken every last bit of power Marshadow had. It had been running on nothing but willpower for the last few minutes, with barely enough left to keep itself upright.
"Finally."
Marshadow murmured, wiping at its forehead out of pure habit.
Then its eyes rolled back, and it went out cold.
Completely, utterly spent. That was all it had.
~~~
https://p-atreon.com/lost_magus
(Just remove the hyphen to access Patreon normally.)