As Mewtwo departed, the battlefield fell into a momentary silence before erupting into a thunderous roar of shocked voices.
Cynthia clutched her injured chest and struggled to her feet with Caitlin's support.
She stared in the direction Mewtwo had vanished, her expression an unreadable tangle of emotions.
Confusion, relief, and a trace of bewilderment.
"Was that... the real Mewtwo?" Cynthia murmured to herself.
But why was it here? Who had summoned it?
Caitlin was equally at a loss. The strange presence she had sensed moments ago had vanished entirely, as if it had never existed. "That energy wave just now..." she frowned. "What was that all about? I definitely felt something calling out, but the presence was unfamiliar. I couldn't tell who it was."
Will, ignoring the pain from his wounds, forced himself upright and stared at the sky where Mewtwo had disappeared, his expression complicated. So it was over, just like that?
The thing the Ghost World had fought against for a thousand years had, in this single moment, been completely and utterly erased?
The crowd around them buzzed with chatter:
"What the heck was that thing? It was insane!"
"Who cares? We're alive!"
"Didn't someone say they called it here? Who was it? Oh man, we seriously owe them one..."
Everyone looked around at each other, searching for whoever might have been their savior. But all they could see were ruins and injured trainers scattered across the ground. There was no suspicious figure anywhere in sight.
No one noticed that in an unremarkable patch of shadow at the edge of the battlefield, a swirl of dark mist quietly dissolved.
Kairos smoothed out the slightly disheveled hem of his coat and silently slipped back into the rear of the crowd.
He made no move to retrieve the core that Spiritomb had dropped, nor did he go to greet Cynthia or the others.
Right now, he was nothing more than an ordinary trainer who had barely survived the disaster.
"Well, that was a close call."
He couldn't help but feel a mild headache coming on.
From Mewtwo's attitude, it seemed like the legendary Pokémon hadn't been particularly satisfied with the opponent Kairos had found for it.
That said, Mewtwo's power had genuinely exceeded his expectations by a considerable margin. That part, at least, had been a real surprise.
If something came up again, maybe he could call on Mewtwo once more, but unless it was absolutely necessary, he'd better not do it lightly. Otherwise, his credibility with it would be shot.
The dust above the Ghost World ruins had not yet fully settled, and the survivors' relief at having escaped with their lives had barely begun to take hold, the scent of scorched air still lingering around them.
Yet that fragile calm lasted less than half a minute.
Without warning, the entire Ghost World space lurched violently.
The tremor was even more intense than the moment Mewtwo and Spiritomb had first appeared.
Before anyone could process what was happening, the white figure that had only just disappeared reappeared in midair without a single warning.
Mewtwo had come back.
It hovered low in the sky, the violet aura surrounding its body blazing more brilliantly than before. The searching frustration that had burned in its pale purple eyes was gone, replaced by something close to feverish, battle-hungry elation.
Its head tilted slightly upward, its gaze locked with burning intensity on some unknown point deep within the Ghost World, as if it had detected a presence there that filled it with overwhelming excitement.
The moment Marshadow spotted Mewtwo's return, it immediately began channeling its own power again to keep the two of them concealed.
"Why... why is it back?!"
Will's expression shifted instantly.
Cynthia's pupils contracted sharply as she stared up at Mewtwo.
What did the legendary Pokémon want?
Surely Spiritomb hadn't been enough of a warm-up for it. Was it planning to reduce this entire place to nothing?
Just as everyone was plunging into fresh waves of panic over Mewtwo's return, Kairos, who had been blending into the crowd and playing the part of an injured bystander, suddenly went pale.
A searing pain flared from his chest without any warning.
He hissed sharply through his teeth and pressed a hand instinctively over his sternum. Through the fabric of his shirt, he could feel it clearly: the mark Giratina had left on him was burning hot, like a brand fresh from the fire pressed against his skin.
It was the seal Giratina had placed on him.
He jerked his head up, his gaze cutting through layer after layer of ruins and dark mist to fix on the most turbulent, most unfathomable region deep within the Ghost World.
"Finally waking up, are you..."
As for the source of all that commotion moments ago, Kairos had already formed a theory. It had to have been Giratina.
But why now?
Could it be that Mewtwo's Hyper Beam earlier had been loud enough, and the explosive energy from Spiritomb's shattered core had been enough of a jolt to wake it?
In the next instant, the sky cracked open.
Not as a figure of speech. Literally, physically cracked open.
The already dim and oppressive sky of the Ghost World split apart in a massive fracture, like the surface of a shattered mirror.
The fissure glowed with an eerie blue-violet light, and the space surrounding it collapsed entirely in that moment. Gravity itself seemed to cease functioning as chunks of stone and crumbling debris began rising into the air in defiance of all natural law.
With it came a phantom cityscape that spread across the entire sky, a vast, towering inverted architecture wreathed in deep black luminance, rendered upside down.
The Reverse World.
Then a pressure, several times more terrifying than anything Mewtwo had exuded, came pouring through that fracture in an unstoppable torrent.
If Mewtwo's aura had been a razor-sharp sword, this presence was an entire mountain, crushing down on everyone until they could barely draw breath.
"What... what is THAT?!"
Caitlin felt as though her mind had gone completely numb. Just moments ago, comparing her own psychic ability to Mewtwo had already been difficult to accept. Now, completely out of nowhere, another overwhelmingly powerful existence had appeared, one that made it impossible to breathe. What was even going on?
Accompanied by a sound that set every tooth on edge, a colossal golden claw thrust itself through the tear in space, seized the edge of the fracture, and wrenched it apart.
The rumbling deepened.
The sky seemed to be torn open by a pair of invisible hands, and an immense silhouette, so enormous it left everyone breathless, descended slowly from the swirling, distorted vortex.
It had six golden tendrils that fanned out like wings. Along its flanks grew a pair of thick, powerful claws colored in red and black. A tail trailed behind it, radiating a palpable aura of destruction. Its head was crowned in golden armor, and a pair of crimson eyes stared down at the land below with cold, absolute indifference, as if gazing upon some inconsequential corner of existence.
The sovereign of the Reverse World. The Renegade Pokémon: Giratina.
The very instant it appeared, the entire Ghost World was transformed beyond recognition.
The previously gray and oppressive sky was swallowed whole by that eerie blue-violet radiance. The world around them seemed to invert into a distorted mirror image of itself, countless geometric shards of fractured space drifting, spinning, and colliding through the air.
Every trainer present, Cynthia included, had forgotten everything else entirely.
In that moment, even they found it difficult to judge whether Mewtwo's pressure or this new arrival's was greater.
No, wait. There was no question. This one was stronger. Overwhelmingly so.
Giratina swept those crimson eyes across the scene, and finally, its gaze came to rest on the purple figure not far away.
Mewtwo.
Another existence that carried the aura of legend.
Two legendary Pokémon. In the shattered sky above the Ghost World, their gazes met.
The air seemed to freeze solid.
Powerful.
Mewtwo made that judgment in an instant.
The reason it had not left earlier was precisely because it had sensed this terrifying presence stirring awake. It had been searching for a worthy opponent, for a powerful being that could give it a real battle, one that would push it to evolve further.
And now, that target was right in front of it.
Blazing hot blood began to flow.
There were no words exchanged. No testing the waters.
Mewtwo's figure vanished from where it stood, moving so fast that even an afterimage couldn't keep up. In the next second, it had already appeared before Giratina, and in that slender hand that contained the power of destruction, a ball of white light several times more radiant than anything it had shown before was already forming.
Psystrike.
The explosion of energy detonated in midair and swallowed Giratina's enormous body whole.
But just as everyone braced for the towering new arrival to take serious damage, two points of red light flickered to life within the smoke and dust.
A low, resonant roar, filled with absolute authority, tore through the cloud. In the next heartbeat, a thick beam of red-black energy fired like a laser and slammed directly into Mewtwo's Psystrike, scattering it apart.
Dragon Pulse.
The two forces collided in midair, triggering a violent chain reaction. The floating fragments of fractured space nearby shattered like glass under the shockwave.
Giratina emerged from the smoke entirely unharmed, its six golden tendrils moving like six rampaging dragons, each one crackling with the terrifying force to rend the fabric of space itself, lashing out toward Mewtwo with full power.
Its presence was incomparably greater than Spiritomb had been, by an order of magnitude that was difficult to even measure.
A flash of true gravity passed through Mewtwo's eyes. It had not expected this creature to deflect its attack so effortlessly.
It held back no longer. The violet radiance across its entire body surged and expanded into a massive energy shield, which it used to take Giratina's strike head-on.
The impact landed with a dense, bone-deep thud that made every heart in the crowd shudder.
Mewtwo's seemingly slight frame was sent hurtling backward several hundred meters before it managed to stop.
But Giratina wasn't finished.
It gave Mewtwo no room to recover. Its jaws opened wide, and the space around it instantly began to cave inward. Hundreds of black energy spheres gathered within its maw, then fell from the sky toward Mewtwo's position like a storm of black rain.
Shadow Ball.
Each individual sphere had enough force to level a building. And right now, there were hundreds upon hundreds of them raining down at once.
Mewtwo shot upward from the wreckage, attempting to use its speed to evade.
But the sky itself began to fracture in that same moment. Countless deep violet spatial rifts opened from nothing, cutting off Mewtwo's escape routes, or materializing directly in the path it was forced to take.
Mewtwo failed to dodge one of the spatial shards. In the next instant, its body locked up for a fraction of a second, caught in what appeared to be a brief paralysis from passing through the rift. It was only a moment, but against a barrage of hundreds of Shadow Balls, a single moment was more than enough to be fatal.
The explosions rang out one after another.
The deep black energy crashed down onto its body, throwing up an enormous cloud of smoke and debris.
When the dust cleared, Mewtwo was no longer where it had been. Its silhouette reappeared higher in the sky, clearly having escaped through Teleport, but by now it was covered in wounds from head to foot.
In just a few brief exchanges, Mewtwo had clearly fallen to the defensive, retreating ground with every passing second.
"This is bad..."
Cynthia stared up at the sky, the color draining from her face. That suffocating sense of despair settled over her again.
If Mewtwo had been their savior moments ago, then now, the battle between these two legendary beings was nothing short of another catastrophe.
Every collision between them sent space shockwaves rippling outward, and the ground kept splitting apart further and further. The only reason no one had already been killed by the aftershocks was that the fighting was happening at enough of a distance.
"Is this... what a battle between gods looks like?"
Caitlin whispered, her eyes filled with an indecipherable light.
A fight of this scale was something no human being could intervene in. Even watching it felt like an unearned privilege.
Just as everyone had sunk into bottomless terror, convinced the Ghost World was on the verge of total annihilation, a patch of shadow at the edge of the battlefield stirred.
A mass of inky darkness spread outward like ripples on water, and then a figure in a black trench coat stepped slowly out of the shadows.
Kairos drew a long, steady breath. He could feel the mark on his chest still burning. He knew he couldn't keep hiding.
If he didn't intervene soon, these two would tear the entire Ghost World apart down to its foundations.
Besides, Giratina was his allied partner, and Mewtwo was effectively his own. There was no point to this fight whatsoever. It had to be stopped.
"No choice. I'm going to have to bite the bullet."
He sighed inwardly, straightened his collar, and then did something that made everyone's jaw drop.
In full view of the crowd, a figure whose face was completely obscured by a shroud of mist around his head stepped forward without summoning a single Pokémon, without any form of protection, and charged headlong into the center of the battlefield.
"What the hell is that person doing?!"
The first person to notice screamed out loud.
Cynthia caught sight of it too, and the words left her mouth before she could even think.
"Come back! It's too dangerous!!"
Every pair of eyes locked onto this apparently suicidal figure.
With Marshadow running interference in the shadows, Kairos weaved nimbly through the falling debris and waves of residual energy, sprinting at full speed until, impossibly, he actually made it to the contested ground between the two battling legendaries.
Then he stopped.
Facing Giratina on his left, whose maw was already gathering a devastating beam of energy, and Mewtwo on his right, whose body blazed with the power of Psystrike, Kairos slowly spread both arms wide.
"Stop!"
His voice, carried by the force of his psychic power, rang out clearly across every corner of the battlefield.
Giratina's motion stuttered to a halt. A flicker of puzzlement passed through those crimson eyes.
Mewtwo's brow furrowed. It could not understand where this feeble human had come from, or how he dared to interrupt its battle.
"He's out of his mind..."
Will pressed a hand to his forehead, feeling as though his entire worldview was on the verge of collapse.
Because from that voice, he had already figured out who it was.
That was Kairos.
He knew Kairos had his share of tricks, but this was pushing it way beyond anything reasonable.