Kairos's warning had barely landed when those armored protrusions vibrated in unison, sending an ultrasonic wave rippling outward at a frequency almost too high for human ears to catch. Mewtwo had only just pushed itself up off the ground when that wave drove straight into its skull.
Its pupils snapped shut. Its whole body began to shake violently, as though every last bit of strength had been stripped clean out of it, and those eyes that had always remained so composed now showed pain and confusion for the first time.
Mewtwo clutched its head and let out a piercing shriek. It had lost control of its own body, unable to pull together even the most basic psychic energy. Armored Mewtwo didn't waste a second.
The armor on its right arm cracked open again, and a pale energy blade hummed to life. This time, Mewtwo had no way to dodge.
The blade drove straight through Mewtwo's chest.
Armored Mewtwo grabbed Mewtwo by the throat, hoisted it into the air, and followed up with a devastating left hook straight into its midsection. The impact hit like a thunderclap.
Mewtwo's body bent at an impossible angle, and blood sprayed from its mouth.
The sonic waves kept washing in. Mewtwo's limbs went limp and dangled uselessly. It had nothing left, not even the strength to struggle. Its consciousness was being torn apart by the searing pain and the chaos crashing through its mind, and its psychic power had gone completely dark.
Armored Mewtwo threw Mewtwo to the ground and planted a metal foot on its chest, staring down at the barely-alive original pinned beneath it. Not a flicker of anything showed in those cold electronic eyes.
The red light at Armored Mewtwo's chest began to gather with furious intensity, visible to the naked eye as energy converged toward a single point, compressing the air around it until space itself warped and bent.
It was charging. Building up a Hyper Beam to end the fight.
The sheer force of that energy surge reached even the Champions watching from a distance. Cynthia, standing closest, instinctively took a step back.
From the shadows, Kairos watched it all unfold, his expression tight.
He was out of time.
He reached into his pocket and closed his fingers around the cold, smooth surface of the stone inside.
At the exact moment Armored Mewtwo's Hyper Beam was about to fire, Kairos hurled the Mega Stone into the air.
Marshadow understood immediately. Its shadow force wrapped around the stone in an instant, and in a blind spot outside everyone's line of sight, the stone cut through the night sky like a meteor, arcing with perfect precision toward Mewtwo.
"Mewtwo, catch!"
Mewtwo heard the call and reached up on pure instinct, closing its fingers around the stone at the very last moment.
The second it made contact, its grip locked tight.
A vast, long-absent resonance surged from deep inside the stone, powerful enough to shatter any chain. It poured up through Mewtwo's arm and flooded through its entire body, merging perfectly with its own energy.
In that moment, a pillar of violet light erupted from where Mewtwo stood and shot straight into the sky.
The force of it was overwhelming. It scattered the Hyper Beam Armored Mewtwo had been charging, while rubble and wreckage across a wide radius were sent flying through the air.
Everyone froze, staring in speechless disbelief at what was happening inside that pillar of light.
Mewtwo's shape was changing, becoming sleeker, sharper, more severe.
Long tendrils extended from its head, stretching all the way behind it.
Visible spirals of psychic energy coiled around its body. Space itself began to warp faintly in the air nearby.
It opened its eyes.
Mega Mewtwo Y.
The transformed Mewtwo rose slowly into the sky. The psychic pressure radiating off it alone was enough to wipe every Champion's mind blank. Armored Mewtwo's metal frame began to groan under that pressure, its armor plates creaking and straining, cracks already spreading across the surface in several places.
But the program running it from the inside still pushed it forward. Its systems screamed with warning alerts, red lights blazing nonstop. The light in its mechanical eyes burned brighter than ever. It didn't fall back. It reactivated its thrusters, its protrusions rose again, the sonic wave returned.
It swung its metal fist.
But this time, the sonic wave had no effect at all.
Mega Mewtwo Y didn't even bother to move.
It simply raised one finger, almost casually.
A dull thud rang out as Armored Mewtwo's fist was stopped dead by an invisible wall of psychic force, frozen a single centimeter from Mewtwo's body, unable to advance another millimeter.
The metal fingers began to buckle under the pressure, letting out a sharp, wrenching sound.
Armored Mewtwo's internal systems pushed its output to the absolute limit, but no matter how hard it strained, it could not move.
Something close to contempt crossed Mewtwo's eyes.
The finger flicked.
The explosion was deafening.
A terrifying psychic shockwave launched Armored Mewtwo like a cannonball, sending it crashing through two abandoned buildings. Brick, concrete, and twisted steel flew in every direction. Then it punched through the face of a cliff, and the entire mountain shook, sending rocks cascading down its sides.
One strike. That was it. The Armored Mewtwo sat embedded deep in the rockface, its chest armor shattered beyond recognition, the light gone from its eyes. It didn't move again.
Dead silence fell over the entire scene.
Not even the sound of breathing.
The spectators who had been so moved by the film just minutes before stood completely speechless. They looked at the distant cliff face, half erased. They looked at the godlike figure hovering in the air above them. Their minds had gone blank.
Lance slowly lowered the hand he had been reaching toward a Poké Ball and let out a long, slow breath. His back was soaked in cold sweat. Cynthia didn't say anything either. She just stared at Mega Mewtwo Y, the shock on her face impossible to hide.
She had always believed her understanding of legendary Pokémon ran deep. Today she had learned that everything she had ever seen was barely scratching the surface.
That radiance from a moment ago was the radiance of Mega Evolution.
Could legendary Pokémon Mega Evolve?
Steven stood at the back of the crowd, lips pressed tight, his fingers unconsciously tracing the metal badge pinned to his chest. He didn't say a word.
Mega Mewtwo turned its head slowly. Its gaze swept past the crowd below, all of them still stunned and staring, and settled on the direction of the shadows where Kairos stood. The distance was too great and the darkness too thick for anyone else to make it out, but Kairos knew it was looking at him.
A moment later, Mewtwo became a streak of violet light, cut across the night sky, and disappeared over the horizon.
It had gone off to keep searching for its place in the world.
---
In the shadows, Kairos exhaled slowly, watching the last trace of violet light dissolve above the horizon. Tonight had gotten a little out of hand.
Then again, thinking back on it, what had just played out in front of the entire League on a live broadcast — a one-sided display of overwhelming power followed by what could only be called a miracle — had probably upended how the entire Pokémon world understood things.
Those people had just finished watching Mewtwo in the film, then turned around and witnessed a Mega Evolution with their own eyes in real life. The impact of that was beyond words.
The emotion points had to be going through the roof right now.
He didn't stick around. Cloaked by Marshadow's cover, he slipped out of the plaza without a sound and disappeared into the night.
---
Back at his villa in Cerulean, Kairos watched the numbers climbing steadily on the screen in front of him and finally felt the tension ease out of his chest.
Emotion points from across all three worlds had been climbing without stopping, the movie alone accounting for a large chunk. His current total had already hit 450,000 — a staggering figure.
At the same time, a system notification appeared marking a completed task.
[Task Complete: Release a Live-Action Pokémon Film
Reward: 50,000 Emotion Points credited.]
Combined, it came to exactly 500,000.
He opened the system shop immediately, eyes going straight to the special module that had remained locked and grayed out for so long.
[Ultimate Special Module: The Border Between Virtual and Reality
Price: 500,000 Emotion Points]
He finally had enough. Kairos didn't hesitate for a single second. He tapped purchase.
A flash of golden light rippled across the panel, and the last of the special modules unlocked.
Lines of golden text began to appear one after another, flickering like flames.
[Ultimate Special Module: The Border Between Virtual and Reality — Unlocked]
He read each line slowly, and for the first time in a long while, he felt something settle in his chest.
[Effect One: Pokémon obtained in-game can be directly converted into real, living individuals in the physical world. Every Pokémon a player encounters in the game is a real Pokémon.]
[Effect Two: Any growth a Pokémon achieves in the virtual world carries over directly into reality. Levels gained in the game, moves learned, and bonds built all become real attributes in the physical world.]
[Effect Three: Players enter the game as consciousness alone, their physical bodies ceasing to exist in the real world during that time. Danger encountered in the virtual world will not result in true death, only a temporary inability to log in.]
[Effect Four: Within this virtual world, you hold a level of authority that is exceedingly high. You may freely manipulate and alter anything within it.]
Kairos took a long breath after reading through all four effects.
From the moment he had first seen this module, he had already been working toward one final goal.
He had been waiting for this day for a very long time.
Alright. Time to get started.
Three days passed in what felt like an instant.
He threw every resource he had accumulated into it, and, with the system's help, an enormous game world of almost unimaginable scale began to take shape within lines of code.
"Pokémon: Genesis."
Then came the promotional trailer.
He needed this announcement to hit like a bomb, to make people across all three worlds understand that they were watching the beginning of something new.
The trailer opened on a formless, swirling void, then cut to a rush of interwoven images: mountains soaring into the clouds, oceans dropping away into lightless depths, Pokémon soaring through open skies and racing across vast stretches of land.
Every frame looked as real as footage shot in the physical world.
At the very end, a single line of text appeared, slow and deliberate.
"Pokémon: Genesis."
It was followed by a narration that carried real weight, a voice that seemed to reach directly into the listener's mind.
"A world without limits. Every player together. Enter as consciousness. Between the game and reality, there will be no border. Everything you experience will be real."
When it was finished, Kairos hit the release button and sent the trailer out to the First World, the Second World, and the Third World all at once.
---
The First World. The Paldea region.
Iono was sitting at her desk, scrolling through the Emerald Forum on her phone and getting ready to start her streaming session for the day.
Then her screen went dark. A moment later, the familiar game release icon popped up.
Her eyes lit up instantly.
"A new game!" she called out, too excited to wait even a second, and pulled up the trailer right away.
In the Hoenn region, meanwhile, Steven was standing in the middle of a quarry with a freshly unearthed rare ore in his hand.
His phone had gotten the notification too.
He opened the trailer. He read the tagline.
Enter as consciousness.
Steven's brow furrowed slightly. He was a practical person, and he had always been skeptical of anything that sounded remotely like science fiction. How exactly was consciousness supposed to enter a game? That kind of technology didn't exist anywhere within the League, not even now.
But then he thought about the film he had seen just days before. That earth-shaking battle. And everything Kairos's studio had ever put out.
He took a breath and selected the option to enter.
In the Sinnoh region, Cynthia was sitting in her living room, still turning the events of the past two days over in her head.
Then she saw the trailer too.
She watched it from start to finish, and when the words appeared — "Between the game and reality there will be no border, everything you experience will be real" — something shifted behind her eyes.
She stared at that final line and went quiet.
An extraordinary possibility — one that should have been impossible — began to take shape in her mind.
A moment later, she selected the option to enter the game, determined to find out whether what she was thinking could actually be true.
---
The Second World.
In a world that had once been sealed away underground, people had returned to living on the surface. Sunlight fell across their shoulders. Ancient Pokémon worked alongside them to rebuild their cities, and life everywhere was pushing up through the cracks.
And now, in front of their eyes, a game notification appeared.
[New Game Available: Pokémon: Genesis
Select to Enter.]
The same notification they had come to know so well.
Not a single person hesitated. Every last one of them pressed join without a second thought.
It was Kairos's games, and his arrival, that had changed what had once been a life defined by despair.
Those games had given them something to hold onto. They had given them the will to stand up against the dark.
And now, if there was a new game and a new possibility waiting for them, what was there to think twice about?
---
The Third World.
Ever since the Pokémon game had burst onto the scene, its massive playerbase had been having the time of their lives.
Some had been grinding away with bloodshot eyes just to catch the Pokémon they had their hearts set on. Others had been crushed in Gym battles and were blowing off steam with some very colorful language.
Now, right in the middle of their sessions, players found their screens flash. The familiar game interface vanished, replaced by an incredibly striking video.
A vast world. Pokémon so lifelike they felt real. And that final line.
Everyone went still.
The chat channels exploded.
Everyone was debating whether the trailer could possibly be genuine, but whether it was or not, countless players were already hitting the button to enter.
---
The First World.
[Players Currently Online: 453,402 and climbing.]
The number on the screen in front of Kairos was still rising, climbing at a pace he could watch with his own eyes.
He took a slow breath, gave Gengar and Chandelure a pat, then turned to look at Dragonite and Omastar.
"Everyone ready?"
"We're going somewhere completely different. Let's go."
"Geh-hey."
"Roooo."
Marshadow was shouting at him from nearby.
"Hey! Where do you think you're going? What happened to helping Lord Ho-Oh restore the faith you promised?"
Kairos smiled.
"Relax."
"I'm actually taking you to see him right now."
Marshadow stared at him.
Kairos snapped his fingers, and he and his Pokémon were already gone, vanished from the air without a trace.
~~~
more chapters soon