A massive fire tornado howled through the corridor, enveloping every last black mist creature that had spawned within it.
The scorching flames seared their bodies relentlessly, wringing from them wave after wave of agonized screams.
Bolstered by the high-tier item bonus, their HP bars bled away like water rushing through a broken dam.
"Now! Flamethrower!"
With one final burst of flame, every creature in the corridor dissolved into nothing.
Yancy stared at the walls as they returned to stillness, and drew a slow, deep breath.
It seemed the secrets buried in this tower ran far deeper than she had imagined.
She turned her gaze toward the stairway ahead leading to the second floor, and pressed on.
The moment the heavy bronze gate slammed shut behind her, the scene before Yancy transformed completely. What greeted her eyes was genuinely unsettling.
"Is this... actually a path?"
She stared at the screen and couldn't help but suck in a sharp breath.
What should have been solid stone steps now appeared fractured and warped, suspended over an infinite void.
There was no ground beneath them, only an abyss of black mist that swallowed all depth. The remaining steps continued to crumble and fall into the fog below, vanishing without even an echo.
[Holy crap, this map design is kind of hellish.]
[You die if you fall, right? You have to die. There's no way you don't die.]
[Streamer, be careful. Just looking at this is worse than my vertigo.]
Yancy swallowed hard and carefully guided Volcarona onto the first floating stone.
At that moment, the screen suddenly flickered with a violent flash.
The dim surroundings shifted without warning, and the air around them seemed to freeze into a cold, dead grey. To her astonishment, Yancy saw strange visions beginning to strobe through the black mist: glimpses of a future world.
A frozen sea. An abandoned city. A withered forest. Against these apocalyptic backdrops, the faint silhouettes of Pokemon drifted through the air, some wailing, some running, all of them blurred and indistinct, like photographs left out until the colors faded away.
"What... is that?" Yancy's voice tightened.
Before she could get a closer look, the silhouettes, until then perfectly still, suddenly lurched into motion.
The black mist seemed to come alive, wrapping around them, and in an instant the figures took shape: savage shadow Pokemon, faces twisted with menace, lunging straight at Yancy.
"Watch out!"
Her instinct was to command Volcarona to use Fire Blast, but the flames passed right through the shadows and simply disappeared. No HP bar.
"They can't be defeated?!" Yancy's scalp went cold. "What kind of insane difficulty is this? I can only take hits, I can't even fight back?"
There was nothing to do but hammer the keyboard furiously as Volcarona, those brilliant crimson wings reduced to instruments of desperate evasion, darted left and right through a gauntlet of near misses.
As Yancy steered her team in a frantic sprint across the crumbling steps, Blastoise, silent until now, suddenly froze.
"What's wrong, Blastoise? Don't stop!"
Blastoise didn't respond right away. When its voice came through the team channel, there was a tremor in it. "That shadow... that stance... that's the captain of the 'Thunder Wing' rescue team. The legendary Raikou..."
"And over there, that's the 'Blitz Squad's' Zeraora..."
Blastoise turned, taking in the dark shapes that surged toward them from every direction. Its voice was hollow with disbelief and grief. "They... they're all members of the greatest rescue teams from the last several decades..."
"Why have they become like this? Why are they attacking us?"
[Wait, those silhouettes are legendary rescue team members?]
[Screenwriters, come out. That's a knife you hid deep.]
[Heroes fallen to this. Trapped here, locked in endless battle even as shadows. That's brutal.]
As Yancy studied those snarling dark shapes, the fear inside her began to give way to something else entirely: a deep and burning need to understand.
"Whatever they've become," Yancy said through gritted teeth, guiding Volcarona into a sideways bank to narrowly avoid a shadow Tyranitar's charge, "we have to survive. We carry everyone's hope, and we keep moving."
"Go!"
They barely made it through the second floor's death chase. When the screen brightened again, Yancy felt as though she had stepped out of a battlefield and into a cathedral. This was the third floor.
The chaos and noise of what came before were nowhere to be found. The stillness here was almost eerie. Soft light fell from some unseen source above, and the walls were no longer lava or black mist but vast crystalline surfaces that gleamed like mirrors.
An ethereal, quietly melancholic BGM drifted through the air, something close to an elegy.
Yancy guided her team forward slowly, her gaze drawn to the crystal walls.
"Look!"
Images were reflected in them.
The moment they first met: a little Squirtle arriving at the shore, watching a Larvesta with curious eyes.
The first dungeon they cleared together: both of them flopped flat on the ground from exhaustion, laughing like they had never laughed before.
The moment Wartortle evolved into Blastoise: arms wrapped around Yancy, spinning her in dizzy circles.
Every small moment from the road they had traveled together was preserved inside those crystals.
Blastoise looked at the images and, for the first time in a long while, the tension left its face. A smile spread across it, quiet and completely genuine. "Ha, I really was so weak back then. I couldn't even aim Water Gun straight..."
Dragonite drifted over and stood beside it, saying nothing, only watching, but a fond, faraway light had crept into its eyes.
Then, without warning, everything changed.
The soft light twisted. The crystal walls flooded black in an instant. An invisible force plunged into all of them at once.
"Ahhh!!"
Dragonite clutched its head and let out a raw, anguished shriek. Its massive body curled in on itself, the scales along its hide fanning open with the intensity of its pain.
"Get away! All of you, GET AWAY!!"
Dragonite's gaze turned murky and wild. It had been dragged back into the past, into its deepest nightmare: hunted relentlessly by greedy trainers and poachers who coveted its rare dragon scales.
"Those are my scales! It hurts... why are you chasing me... I just wanted somewhere to sleep..."
"No one wants to be my friend... they all call me a monster..."
Loneliness, fury, helplessness, all of it rose up like a tide and swallowed it whole.
Blastoise was in no better shape.
It had retreated into its shell, trembling violently.
"I can't do it... I'm not good enough..."
"Don't look at me... I'm too weak..."
"Don't leave me behind... please..."
Every trace of the fear it had once lived inside, the crippling self-doubt of a Pokemon that used to run from everything, that was dismissed and left trailing behind the team, surged back to the surface in full force.
Black mist crept up around their ankles and began to climb, and it looked as though it would swallow them completely.
"Dragonite! Blastoise!"
Watching her teammates' condition, Yancy felt her chest seize with panic.
She hammered the keyboard, trying to use items, trying to call out to them, but every input returned the same single word: Invalid.
"Snap out of it! It's an illusion!"
At that exact moment, a light flashed across the crystal wall.
A new memory.
Dragonair being pulled back from the edge of death by Yancy. Yancy reaching out and pressing a berry into its hand, smiling.
"I don't know what you've been through, but from now on we're partners. Nobody gets to push you around anymore."
Wartortle on the verge of fleeing from a powerful enemy, and Yancy stepping in front of it. "Don't be scared. We go together. You've got this."
The images kept coming.
Side by side through battle after battle, breaking out of impossible situations again and again.
Holding each other up, standing guard over one another in the middle of a storm.
Surrounded by countless Pokemon, the two of them being called heroes.
"Partner..."
Dragonite's eyes snapped open. The cloudiness drained out of them and was replaced by a steadiness it had never shown before.
"I'm not a monster. I'm Dragonite, of the rescue team. And I have partners to protect."
Boom.
A surge of golden light erupted from inside Dragonite, and the black mist binding its body shattered in an instant.
Across from it, Blastoise poked its head out of its shell. It looked at those memories and the tears came, but the corner of its mouth pulled into a stubborn arc.
"I'm not the coward who only knew how to run anymore..."
Blastoise took a deep breath. Both cannons snapped open, and brilliant blue water blazed through the darkness coiling around it.
"Because the captain needs me. Everyone is waiting for me!"
Breakthrough.
Both Pokemon broke free of their inner demons at the same moment and returned to Yancy's side.
"Captain, we're alright!" Dragonite said in a low voice, and there was strength in it.
"Sorry for worrying you. We can keep going now!" Blastoise wiped its tears away, its eyes resolute.
[I'm crying. That got me.]
[This is what bonds are made of. That scene was so good, I've got chills all over.]
[Real partners, saving each other. That's what this is.]
Yancy looked at the two figures on screen, watching her teammates' faces clear, light coming back into their eyes, and felt her own eyes go damp.
She breathed in, pushed down the wave of emotion rising in her chest, and said, "Alright. Then let's go tear this rotten tower down, together."
Passing through the far end of the third floor, the space opened up.
This was the transitional platform before the top level.
By now the black mist had reached its peak density, thick enough that you could barely see your own hand in front of you.
Even through the screen, Yancy could feel the suffocating weight of it pressing down on everything.
Overhead, a deep, distorted rumbling rolled down from the tower's peak, and the whole world trembled faintly with each pulse, as if something terrible was waking up.
The team came to a stop in a relatively sheltered corner to rest and recover.
Yancy checked the status window, confirmed that everyone's HP and condition were at full, and hesitated for a moment before clicking on the microphone.
"So..." Yancy's voice came out quieter than usual. "What's up ahead should be the final battle. Honestly, I don't know what's going to happen. It might be really hard. It might even..."
Dragonite cut her off.
"We've made it this far. There's nothing left to say."
"That's right!" Blastoise thumped its chest. "We're the strongest rescue team out there! If we can't handle this, how do we ever face all the little ones who look up to us?"
Yancy blinked, and then she laughed.
Right. What was there to be afraid of?
"Let's go!"
A simple exchange, but in it they had given something of themselves to each other.
The team, ready for the final battle, walked forward toward the last door.
In the stream, the mood had been pressed to its lowest point. The stream had gone almost silent. Every viewer sat motionless in front of their screen, and no one typed a word.
BOOM!!
The final door flew open. A wave of heat and black wind hit them head-on.
The top of the tower was a vast circular arena, and at its center, that colossal figure shrouded in black mist and chaotic winds filled the entire screen the instant it came into view.
It was a Pokemon that looked as though it had been forged from steel, its entire body radiating a cold spectral blue, the twin wings on its back that looked capable of cleaving through space itself.
[Holy--!! Is that the final boss? Who is this??]
[The God of Time... why is it called that?]
[I feel like my legs are turning to water just from this pressure, and I'm not even there.]
Blastoise stared at the figure, its pupils contracting sharply.
"That is... the legendary God of Time, Dialga. What is it doing here? And it looks completely out of control."
As if to confirm Blastoise's words, Dialga let out a roar that shook the whole arena to its bones.
ROAAARRR!!
The scene around them fractured into something unrecognizable.
Time went haywire in its vicinity. Countless shards of time looped, reversed, and accelerated through the air at once.
The tower's crystal walls shattered and then rebuilt themselves in repeating cycles. The entire world seemed to be coming apart under the weight of its rage.
The battle music crashed in at full intensity. Dialga swung a massive claw and bore down on them with the force of total annihilation.
The battle began.
Yancy didn't have time to think. Her fingers were already flying across the keyboard.
"Dragonite, use Extreme Speed to dodge! Blastoise, charge Flash Cannon!"
But the brutality of what followed far exceeded anything Yancy had prepared herself for.
Dialga's damage output was beyond comprehension.
Dragonite reacted with all the speed it had and used Extreme Speed, but Dialga's claw seemed to have read its trajectory. With a single glancing blow, Dragonite's thick HP bar cratered — minus 480.
"What the hell! That damage?!"
Yancy cried out: "Dragonite, fall back and use a potion, now!"
But that wasn't even the most terrifying part.
The most terrifying part was Dialga's control over time itself.
Yancy had just coordinated Blastoise and Volcarona into a combined assault that stripped away a full quarter of Dialga's HP, when the clock markings on its body began to rotate counterclockwise.
[Skill: Temporal Reversal!]
The screen rewound in an eerie instant. Every point of HP Dialga had lost snapped back to full. The Flash Cannon Blastoise had just fired flew backward through the air and returned to the barrel.
"Are you kidding me?! It healed back to full?!" Yancy's voice broke with disbelief.
[How are you supposed to beat this? This is completely broken!]
[Streamer, watch out, it's about to use Time Stop. I read the guide and the wind-up is super short!]
[The black mist is regenerating its health! Focus the black mist core, quick!]
Just as the chat warned, the black mist swirling around Dialga was actively repairing its body.