Pokémon [COMPLETE] The Worldslayers

[Sike Saner]

Chapter 15 – Extraction​

“Left at the next junction,” Kiat called out over the sound of several heavy bodies making their way through metal-floored halls. “Then left again, and up the ramp and to the right.”

It was, perhaps, fortunate that they all had Kiat there to remind them of the course to take. Syr didn’t trust his own memory of the map he’d been shown, of the glowing line that had illustrated the way to the weapon. There was simply too much on his mind to keep that picture clear. Had it been entirely up to him to get where they were going, they’d have been lost.

He hoped that one of the others recalled the route better than he did. If so, they’d be able to call Kiat out on any contradictions. If not… in that case, all they could do was hope these two deranics really were on their side and not trying to lead them off course.

The smog filling the halls had begun thinning shortly after he and his party had headed further into the deranic base with Kiat and Zaltaphi in tow. By this point, the air was clear once more. Maybe the deranics had actually run out of the toxic smoke, Syr had considered, though he’d been reluctant to get his hopes up on the matter. Or maybe there was equipment housed in the deeper reaches of the base that would be harmed by it.

Either way, Karo had dropped the block field, allowing them all to move faster and breathe fresher air. Syr was grateful, in a vicarious way, that the nosepass was getting a chance to rest the part of himself that was responsible for that technique. Karo would probably have to raise that shield many times more before all was said and done, and the party was down to their last couple of leppas.

Down a long corridor. Around a bend, and then another soon after. Another long, straight path opened up before them, with a well-lit ramp extending up out of sight.

“Incoming!” Demi shouted, briefly giving off a lime green glow as she activated a safeguard.

She was already running ahead as she spoke, forcing Kiat and Zaltaphi to hug her shoulders all the tighter to avoid being shaken off. Syr hastened to catch up with her, ignoring the way the narrow tubes running across the floor bumped harshly into his belly as he rushed over them.

A foul smell filled the air as they drew closer to the ramp. Dirty green smoke came rolling down from the floor above, swirling wildly as bodies pushed through it. Demi fired twin psybeams into the cloud, and a pair of koffing dropped heavily to the floor. A reflux tore through the air overhead and took down another, which rolled to a stop at Demi’s feet, looking half-charred.

“Keep moving!” Ren shouted.

Demi pressed on, blasting anyone who got in her way. Syr followed, holding his breath as he wound his way alongside Karo, anxious to get past the koffing Acheron had struck. He bumped face-first into something as he reached the top of the ramp and almost reflexively extended his fangs in a bite attack. They met tough, leathery hide and an acrid flavor. With a sharp jerk of his head, he flung the koffing away, hearing them collide with an unseen wall.

Two more beams of rainbow light seared past, and he found himself stumbling over one of their victims. As he rolled onto his side, he saw the smog beginning to clear again, fanned off behind them by Acheron’s large hands. He blew out a stale breath and sucked in the clean air gratefully, hearing some of the others doing likewise.

Syr looked ahead and behind for more assailants. He could just make out several koffing strewn at the foot of the ramp, none of which were moving—or burning, he noted with gratitude. All alive, and none in any fit state to harass them further anytime soon.

Moments passed, and no one else approached them from any direction. But he doubted the reprieve would last forever. This hadn’t been the first time they’d been accosted by the deranics’ servants since they’d set off to destroy the very thing that was controlling them. He doubted it would be the last.

“The transmitter,” he said, half-panting. “We’ve gotta get there…” The sooner they could get through to the koffing and weezing, the fewer they might have to fight. And the fewer they had to take down—the fewer chances for them to fall and never get up, bursting into flames where they lay—the better.

“We’ll get there,” Demi said.

“At this rate, we’ll reach it soon,” Kiat informed everyone.

The news might’ve been more comforting, coming from someone Syr trusted a little more. “Can anyone confirm that?” he asked.

“Yes,” Acheron said.

“Good,” Syr said, “that’s good…” And, unspoken, Thank you.

Still, when Kiat finally indicated that they should stop, it didn’t feel soon enough for Syr’s liking. Every moment in which the koffing and weezing were still under deranic control was a moment too long, a moment added to more than a decade’s worth.

“It’s there,” Kiat said, nodding toward the wall to their left. There was no door there, at least not of any sort that most of them could use. The only way in—or the only intended way—was beyond a circular hatch less than a foot wide, which was set in the wall near floor level and accessible via a tube too narrow for Ren and the pokémon to pass through.

Acheron lifted a hand that was surrounded by the telltale swirl of a reflux beam in the making. Syr expected this wall to give them as much trouble as the one outside had done, only to find the metal blackening before his eyes within seconds of the black beam hitting home.

The kwazai cut the attack as short he could. The moment he had, his sister lunged for the wall and tore it open. Shaking metal flakes from her hands, she stepped aside slightly, revealing a small space with a narrow steel cone at its center. There were three luminous bands near the pointed end, all glowing a cool shade of blue.

“Is it shielded?” Ren asked.

“Ordinarily,” Kiat said. “But you depleted the power allotted to the shields when you broke in. If they haven’t managed to build it back up yet, the transmitter will be exposed.”

“Ren? Let me try something,” Syr said. Maybe I can spare Acheron a reflux.

Seeming to cotton on, the human stepped out of his way. Syr let an acid attack well up inside him, then ducked his head and spat the dark fluid out at the transmitter. There was a hissing sound as it struck, and he thought he could see tiny bubbles fizzing on its surface. He was certain that he smelled the dissolving metal.

“Looks exposed to me,” Demi said.

“I got this one,” Karo said. “Put me down and give me some space.” Once Acheron complied, the nosepass backed up to the wall opposite the transmitter. Then he rammed himself directly into the small space, meeting the cone nose-first with a loud crashing sound.

He backed out of the hole in the wall. The transmitter was snapped almost cleanly in half and no longer emitting light.

“So that’s step one dealt with, then?” Demi said.

“Yes,” Kiat responded. “The signal will have stopped. It may now be possible to—”

A long, high-pitched note rang out.

“Now they sound the alarm,” Karo remarked.

“No...” Kiat breathed.

The siren dwindled, only to rise again. Down, up. Down, up. The lights, already rather soft, dimmed further.

“It’s happening,” Kiat said. “It’s happening!”

“Oh God, no, no…” Was there time to get to the weapon? Was there time to destroy it, or at least disable it? Syr couldn’t believe there was. Couldn’t think straight all of a sudden. He threw a wild, pleading glance around; it was met by a surge of red light. The sensation of strong arms hoisting him up by the middle followed, and their owner went hurtling forward.

The thundering footsteps rattled in Syr’s skull, stoking a headache that pounded in time with his heart. They reached the next ramp as the siren faded once more, and this time it didn’t sound again. This time, a soft and vaguely familiar voice filled the air, a deranic voice speaking deranic words.

“They’re killing us,” Kiat said, all but sobbing now. Zaltaphi really was sobbing, unable to speak at all through hitching breaths. “They’re killing us all...”

All the while, the twins never stopped for even an instant. They ran faster, harder than Syr had ever seen them go, panting like wild beasts as they fought to close the remaining distance. He felt Acheron’s heart hammering so hard he thought it might explode against his head.

“My children,” the voice over the loudspeakers said, in the language of the koffing and weezing this time, “we are in terrible danger. Our psychic enemies have come at last. They are attacking our minds… but we are strong. You are strong. You have served us so well. Together, we have the power to save us all.

“The earth will open up to you. Come down and go into the nest below. There is a place within it for each of you. Together, we will be free of their evil forever.”

“They won’t listen,” Syr said, desperately hoping it to be true. The transmitter was destroyed—but was that really enough? Would the deranics’ words break through the confusion and sway them even without the signal to control them?

“We can’t count on that,” Ren said from a short distance ahead. His voice was brittle, shaking. He sounded like he might be in tears.

Syr was crying at that point. Demi and her deranic and human cargo were a blue blur ahead of him. Syr blinked rapidly, shaking his head and swallowing his tears to the best of his ability. His vision cleared just as the kwazai staggered to a halt before a wall in their path. Numerous tubes snaked into this one; he saw a couple of deranics rush through them into the unseen room beyond.

His stomach dropped as Acheron fell to his knees. Syr tumbled out of his long arms and onto the floor, rolling to a stop next to Ren and the two deranics. The human was back on his own feet, scrambling to get the supplies that the twins needed out of a pack that was nearly empty at this point.

Once treated, Acheron rose again. His sister stepped away from the wall, no longer needing its support. Both were still trembling, however, if only very slightly—they were afraid, Syr realized. As powerful as they were, they were still afraid.

Of course they were. Of course, when for all anyone knew they were already too late. The weapon could be powering up right now, could fire any second—

Dark energy cut through the air and his train of thought in one roaring instant: a pair of reflux beams merged into one, burning the barrier to pitch blackness in seconds. No longer held back by her passengers, Demi turned a pair of shoulders to the darkened metal and rammed into the wall and the now-crumbling tubes alongside her brother as both kwazai put up their safeguards.

And then… there it was. Resembling nothing so much as an enormous berry or seedpod, the weapon loomed beneath a ceiling open to the dark, toxic clouds above. The dark gases seeped into the space below, only to be caught by powerful vents just inside and sucked out of sight. From outside, in tens and dozens, koffing and weezing were falling into the room, hurriedly taking their places in the pits that marred the weapon’s metal skin.

Still listening to the deranics. Still obeying their instructions. There just hadn’t been enough time to get through to them before all hell broke loose.

Syr could only hope now that there would be time later.

Colorful light strobed across the weapon’s surface as Demi leapt forward, firing psybeams from all four hands. She ran in a circle around it, dodging bursts of darts from the deranics’ chest-mounted launchers and jets of sludge from the koffing and weezing to the best of her ability as she poured the mind-addling energy into their ranks and the weapon’s occupants alike. Acheron and Syr kept on the move, as well, the former concentrating his fire upon the vast seedpod itself, the latter just desperately trying to hit whatever he could in the midst of all the flying attacks.

The arbok flung himself out of the way of another volley, clenching his jaws tight to keep the acid attack he was gathering inside himself from bursting out prematurely. He righted himself and let the corrosive fluid erupt from his throat, splattering a deranic and earning a horrible, piercing scream in return.

Syr dove and lunged across his own tail as another of the deranics retaliated. He saw Karo near the door, free from the ball, while Ren, Kiat, and Zaltaphi huddled close to him. There were three deranics in front of them, firing darts in vain against a block field.

He rushed toward their assailants while the trio’s backs were turned and began peppering them with poison sting shots. One of them took the brunt of it and went down at once, wailing in pain, but the other two swiftly turned toward their attacker, only to hit the floor in a daze as Demi rushed past and caught them both with a single, sweeping psybeam.

Meanwhile Karo took advantage of the moment and charged up a zap cannon. He dropped the block field just long enough to let the electric orb fly into the ring of consoles surrounding the weapon—

—only for it to sizzle harmlessly against a force field.

“No!” Syr cried hoarsely. The shields were back up. His eyes darted toward the weapon and found Acheron’s dark blasts being foiled in the exact same way as Karo’s attack had been.

There was a jabbing pain at Syr’s side, at which he yelped and automatically lashed his tail in the likely direction of his assailant, feeling it smack hard into something small. He looked and saw a deranic lying on the floor several feet away.

A roar of frustration seized his attention. Acheron was pouring everything he had into the weapon’s shield, even as his legs buckled beneath him. Syr followed suit, spraying burst after burst of needles charged with poison-type energy. He heard another zap cannon launch and explode against the barrier.

It had to come down Had to. The holes dotting the seedpod were filling with light, every single one, regardless of whether or not their occupants were still conscious. The weapon was beginning to hum loudly as it slowly rose toward the open ceiling.

He thought he heard Ren cry out, but there was too much noise to be sure. A moment later, “Fall back!” Karo shouted, his much louder voice overcoming the din. “Over here, over here!”

The arbok complied immediately. Demi strode alongside him, supporting a shaking Acheron. Both had several darts stuck in their skin like burs; Syr could only hope that their safeguards would protect them from whatever poisons might have been injected, just as he could only hope his typing would protect him from the pair of darts he’d caught himself.

He wrapped his body around Karo and the three people the nosepass was already guarding, having to make a conscious effort not to squeeze too tightly in his terror. “Bring it up, bring it up!” he begged Karo as the two kwazai joined them. Maybe… maybe the field could protect them. It was too much to hope, had to be. Too much to ask of Karo. But it felt like all he had left at this point.

Something flew through the air and struck the floor in front of him. It split open with a burst of sparks like tiny, golden stars, releasing a specter made of white, lightless fire.

Syr stared at the creature with wide eyes. No…

The instant the nullshade was free, they let loose a dull gray shockwave. It didn’t touch Syr or the rest of his party—Karo had raised the block field again—but it knocked down the pack of approaching deranics, leaving them motionless on the floor. The nullshade then threw a confused glance about for a fleeting moment before their empty black eyes fell upon Ren.

“You!” they cried, their face contorted with hatred. A gray beam exploded from their hand into the force field and lingered there. The nullshade’s attack hissed and whined against it, and for a terrifying moment Syr thought he could feel some sort of burning energy beginning to seep in.

Then it cut off abruptly, while the nullshade cried out in pain. They turned in an instant to face their assailant; Syr followed their line of sight and saw that a weezing had broken free from the weapon, both mouths dripping with sludge.

With a scream of rage, the nullshade retaliated. Syr involuntarily averted his gaze, his eyes streaming with tears as he screwed them shut. The nullshade might actually have the power to bring down the shield and destroy that weapon… but they might very well destroy most if not all of Faurur’s people in the process.

Please, please don’t kill them all, please…

Shouts and cries and roars of pain and anguish filled the air. Something exploded on the far side of the room, followed by something else, all too near. There was a sizzling sound, followed by a heavy crash just inches away that made Syr scream and fall back against a sweat-drenched kwazai.

“Hey, it’s working!” Karo shouted. “They’re destroying that thing!”

With a monumental effort, Syr forced himself to open his eyes, to try and confirm that at least some part of their mission wasn’t going wrong. Through the tears and the smoke, it was hard to see anything at all apart from the occasional burst of light as another piece of equipment fell victim to the enraged specter and the hordes of koffing and weezing now fighting for their lives.

Then another light, soft and seafoam green, swelled into his vision.

“What…” The light, Syr realized with confusion, was coming from himself. Everyone else within Karo’s block field was emitting that glow, as well. “What’s happening now?”

“It…” Demi began, sounding winded. “It feels like we’re—”

Everything went green. There was a split-second of deafening noise, followed by dead silence and darkness and the sensation of being nowhere and nothing at all.

A very shrill tone broke the silence, stabbing deep into ears that felt like they were stuffed with cotton. The darkness gave way to a dull red glow. It was then that Syr dared to believe that he still existed.

Groaning in pain, he opened his eyes. The residual light from the bright flash drained out, and he realized immediately that he’d been transported somewhere else. He, along with Ren, the gym leader’s pokémon, and the two deranics, were now in a much larger space, whose gray walls were studded with bright, luminous, green and purple crystals. There was no sign of the koffing and weezing, no deranics apart from Kiat and Zaltaphi.

There was, however, a large crowd composed of strange, red-and-green, almost humanoid-looking beings surveying Syr and the others from all sides.

 

[Sike Saner]

Chapter advisory: Contains blood.

_____

Chapter 16 – As Below, So Above​

There was something strange in orbit over the world Babs and Jen called home. Something that most definitely did not belong there.

It had looked for all the world like a meteor of some sort, a big lump of rock hanging over the planet. But it had simply popped into existence in a way that ordinary celestial objects didn’t.

Babs had called for the deoxys to stop the thing at once. Whether natural or not, its size alone gave it the potential to wreak terrible destruction simply by falling out of orbit. The deoxys had appeared to do nothing at all in response to her demands apart from speaking in their incomprehensible manner, even as Jen had raised his own pleas and Babs had conjured her dark blades.

Then one of the deoxys had seized Jen, completely without warning, and had used him to tell her that they believed the meteor to be another vessel of their own kind.

“We are trying to communicate with them,” Jen’s puppeteer had said. “We have yet to receive a response.”

The deoxys had kept trying, allowing some time between attempts for an answer to make it through the dimensional shortcut they used to carry their messages. At first Babs had thought they were wasting their time, that the craft—if that was what it actually was—was dead in the water, so to speak. But then it had undergone a dramatic transformation. It had expanded, its shell breaking free in a burst of tiny, shattered stone fragments, and taken on a polyhedral shape. Countless tentacles had sprouted from its red-and-gray surface, waving languidly in the airless void.

Once transformed, the thing had moved. Almost too fast for her eyes to track, it had crossed half a continent, coming to an unnaturally clean stop over a landmass whose shape looked worryingly familiar, even with the view zoomed out.

It had stopped, and then it had opened fire.

A spear of white-hot light. And then another. A third. A fourth. And by this point Babs was sure, sickeningly sure, that the meteor was indeed a ship, its every action fully intentional, and that it had just rained death over part of southwestern Hoenn.

Babs hadn’t gone with her trainer, all those days ago. But she’d been there when he and the rest of his team had plotted their course. She’d known where they were headed. And now she had just seen that area blasted into a deep, dark crater.

She screamed in anguish and frustration. The deoxys around her could have stopped this. Surely they could have stopped it. Why had they wasted their time trying to talk to the thing? Her dark blades reformed in an instant and slashed through the viewscreen, spraying her with dark fluid as it tore like the flesh it was.

No sooner than she’d destroyed the screen, dome-headed deoxys rose from the floor, their broad arms ensnaring her, regenerating faster than she could cut them away. They pulled her down, pinned flat on her back with her limbs and tongue restrained. Another, heavier body hit the deck at her side; she couldn’t turn her head, but she could just make out the form of Jen lying there, no longer surrounded by the blue light that indicated deoxys control.

Then everything gave a monstrous lurch, and for what might have been a single moment or a million on end, nothing her eyes showed her made any sense at all. She then recognized the ceiling above her, same as it had been—but also the many floors above, and an even greater number below her.

Every deoxys occupying the vessel that carried her.

Herself, and Jen, and every last nerve and vein and fiber of muscle that comprised them.

The core of the ship, of a vast deoxys looking every bit as much like an ordinary meteor as the craft on the screen had looked, and the very thoughts and processes darting through it in tiny arcs and flashes.

Too much. All too much. Her own mind went dark, beaten down under the waves of information by their sheer volume.

Eventually she became aware of something touching her face. Propping her up. The off-white lighting of the room she’d last seen on the other side of the rift pressed into her eyes. A groan escaped her, while choking, retching noises sounded at her side.

“Oh gods,” Jen sputtered once he was done being sick, “what… what just…?”

“I don’t…” Her brain was still putting itself back together, it seemed. She shook her head. “Some kind of…”

It was then that she noticed the viewscreen in front of her. A beat later, she remembered destroying it. The ship had grown a new one.

“Whoa, wait, what the hell is that?” Jen asked, sounding very much alarmed despite how hoarse he still sounded, pointing at the now much larger, much closer deoxys-craft on the screen.

“It’s…” Oh God. He doesn’t know. Jen had been in use as an interpreter while the “meteor” had transformed and carried out the orbital strike. He had no clue that down there, in the part of the world that might well have contained his father… her trainer, her friends… there might be nothing left alive.

But he must have managed to tear his gaze off the writhing mass that hung over the world and looked past it to the planet below. He must have seen the shoreline and recognized it and put the pieces together, because his eyes grew wide, their light unsteady, and for a moment he swayed as if he might collapse.

Babs felt a thick knot form in her throat. She swallowed against it; it remained firmly in place. Inhaling a shaky breath, she lay an arm across Jen’s shoulders. One of the blades sprouting from them nicked her hand. She didn’t care.

There’d never been any guarantee that Ren and the others would survive their mission. Deranics aside, there was still the threat of the Red Hand’s virus catching up with him after all. She’d tried, with only partial success, to maintain some tiny measure of hope, even against the straining impatience that she couldn’t help but feel with so much empty distance between herself and the answer to whether or not her loved ones were all right.

Now most of that distance was gone. But she was certain that any chance for a good outcome had vanished, as well.

* * *​

One moment, Ren had been in the heart of the deranic base, hunkered down alongside four pokémon and a pair of wormlike aliens behind a shield while reality itself seemed to be blowing apart at the seams.

The next, they were out of the fray and surrounded by more deoxys than he would have ever expected to see in his entire lifetime, let alone all in one place.

Rescued? Possibly. But he wasn’t about to assume that meant they were safe.

One of the deoxys drifted free from the crowd. As they approached, spreading their tentacles wide in what looked like an attempt at a welcoming gesture, they emitted a series of bizarre sounds that seemed to buzz and scrape at the inside of his head. He winced, gritting his teeth.

“Wow. That’s, uh, one heck of an accent there,” Karo said.

“We can’t understand you,” Demi told the deoxys.

She sounded so tired, Ren noted. He glanced her way and saw her nearly doubled over as she continued to support her brother’s weight. Acheron, meanwhile, looked like he was on the verge of passing out.

Ren’s arm twitched slightly, old habits compelling it to pull medicine from the pack, but he tamped down the urge. There were too many eyes upon him. Too many eyes, and no way to be certain what their owners would do if they saw him make that move.

The deoxys paused in their approach, tilting their head to the side. They resumed moving just as quickly, finally coming to a stop directly in front of Ren.

“Don’t touch him,” Demi warned, her voice thin but menacing all the same.

The deoxys gave another quirk of their head. They spoke up again, more droning, more static, more crawling and clawing in Ren’s head…

“—never harm children of the elements unless it’s absolutely necessary. The five of you are safe here.”

Ren held the deoxys in a wild stare, his mouth hanging open behind his air filter. Their voice sounded exactly the same as it had from the start. But it made sense now, same as every other pokémon’s voice had ever since he’d emerged from that tube.

More changes. Still coming, even now.

What the hell is happening to me? he wondered yet again.

He licked his lips. Swallowed uncomfortably against a dry throat. “Safe,” he echoed. “Why should we believe that?” He was trembling as he spoke; he clenched his fists as if that would hold him together. “Why did you bring us here? How did you find us?”

“We detected a sudden surge of non-elemental life,” the deoxys said. “Power and intellect much greater than any mere, harmless animal would possess. We thought a surviving pocket of humanity might’ve detected our approach and was attempting some sort of counterattack.”

“It’s them,” said a very small, fearful voice, familiar yet not. “The killers…”

Zaltaphi, Ren realized with a detached sort of surprise. Another language, suddenly intelligible, and possibly not even a pokémon language this time.

“We also detected the presence of one of our own kind,” the deoxys went on, seemingly disregarding the deranic’s interjection for the time being, “along with a great deal of other elemental creatures. We would have loved to have saved more of you, but…” They sounded genuinely sorrowful somehow. Their eyes lowered to the floor, their tentacles knitting together in front of them.

Most of the deoxys’s words failed to take root properly, crowded out by the rest. The fact that Zaltaphi had called their kind killers, and the deoxys’s own words corroborated that accusation. The claim that there was a deoxys among those they’d pulled from the deranic base.

The implications of that claim.

“We can only hope they’ll find peace and fortune in the next life,” the deoxys said somberly. Their eyes lifted from the floor and fixed on the pair of deranics wrapped around Demi’s shoulders. “Just as we must hope for the two of you.”

They extended a tentacle toward the deranics, who shrunk back in plain terror. The tentacle brushed against an invisible barrier.

“Leave them alone,” Ren said, cold sweat running down his temples. The tremor was still there, but its source had transformed. He still feared these creatures. He’d read all about them, knew what even a single one was capable of—and here were many. But now… now he hated them. Hated them for all that they’d done and for the fact that there was almost certainly not a damn thing he could do to stop them from doing more.

The deoxys peered at him in silence for a moment, their face as inscrutable as their voice had once been. There was a faint shuffling sound, almost like footsteps across sand—and the deoxys dropped into the floor as if it were liquid.

Green-and-red tentacles shot up from under Karo’s feet. They dragged him under faster than even Demi could react.

The nosepass rose up from the floor in front of Ren with the deoxys looming behind him. Blue light surrounded his body and shone brightly from the dark recesses where his eyes were.

Dark blurs shot toward the others from both sides. Ren saw Demi’s hands fling out to intercept the one hurtling her way, but her senses were no match for that speed, especially in her current state. In an instant, she’d taken on a blue aura of her own, the work of a speed-deoxys at her side. Another speed-deoxys had taken hold of Syr.

“Let them go!” Ren shouted.

“They won’t be harmed,” the deoxys in front of him said, speaking through Karo in the nosepass’s own language. “Even now, we’re healing their injuries.”

Refusing to believe them, Ren stole a quick look for himself. The darts embedded in Demi’s skin were falling out, the wounds they left behind closing swiftly. The same was happening to Syr.

Acheron suddenly dropped to the floor, no longer supported by his sister; Ren flinched at the sound of the heavy impact. No aura shone around the unconscious kwazai. He had no puppeteer.

“We cannot extend our power to your dark-type friend,” one of the speed-deoxys said, using Syr’s voice.

A strangled cry sounded to Ren’s left. He turned his head in an instant. Demi had pulled Kiat and Zaltaphi off her shoulders and was now holding them by their necks. Their tails were wrapped tight around her arms, their tongues lolling out and trying to pry her fingers from their throats… but it was all in vain. She snapped the deranics’ necks with faint, sickening pops, then let the two of them fall limply to the floor.

Ren stared at them in shock for a moment. If Demi knew she’d been used to murder innocent people in cold blood, without having any say in the matter… A sickening, vicarious fury pooled in his stomach.

“You shouldn’t be troubled by the extermination of such wretched creatures,” the other speed-forme deoxys said through Demi. “Despite your appearance, I know you’re not one of them. You’re not an aberration.”

“And while that is an impressive transformation,” Karo’s controller said, “it’s time to let it go. You’re among your own kind again. You can be yourself once more.”

Ren said nothing. Didn’t want to acknowledge the deoxys’s words. Didn’t want to believe them. I’m not one of you. I am not one of you!

Yet he understood pokémon, as if he were one of their own.

Yet he had been trapped in a capture ball, however briefly.

Yet he had developed psychic abilities, even if it had taken decades to happen.

Something, something, had caused the deoxys to sense the presence of their own kind in the deranic base.

He wanted to throw up. Damn it all, he was not one of them!

But maybe… if he let them believe he was…

The idea of playing along with them when all he wanted to do was will them all to hell did nothing to calm his heart or settle his stomach. But it was the only way, the only course of action he could conceive of to buy himself and the pokémon who’d joined him on this mission some time. The only way they might ever be free of this horrible place and these horrible people.

He hung his head. “I don’t know how,” he said morosely. “After all this time… I don’t know how anymore. But… I do know that if I can’t put my friend in here—” He gestured carefully toward one of the dusk balls at his belt. “—he could die.” Best to let Acheron rest for now, he reckoned, lest the kwazai do something that might get him killed.

“Then yes,” said the deoxys puppeting Syr, “please do.”

Slower than he liked, still none too keen on making overly sudden movements with the eyes of so many powerful beings trained upon him, Ren recalled Acheron. His hand brushed the other unoccupied capture balls at his side as he reattached the kwazai’s dusk ball, lingering for a moment upon Demi’s, and an idea crossed his mind. He gave Karo’s controller a questioning look.

“The others are fine as they are,” they said.

They don’t trust me, Ren noted. Not entirely. Even if they believed he was one of their kind, he wasn’t really one of their number. He was just some castaway they’d picked up, one who’d already expressed disapproval of their behavior.

“You’ve spent too long among them,” the normal-deoxys went on. “But I can help you find yourself again.”

A real deoxys would agree to it, Ren suspected. But actually acting on that suspicion proved very difficult. His throat seemed paralyzed, unwilling to let him actually answer one way or another.

The deoxys didn’t allow it, either.

In an instant, the blue aura surrounding Karo was gone. The nosepass toppled over and stayed down. His former controller’s tentacles lashed out and seized Ren. They wrapped themselves around his arms, two to each, and then the tips pierced the skin.

Ren gasped, more in shock than anything else. The pain came in, stinging deep, when he began struggling in spite of himself. Large hands descended upon his shoulders and clasped around his ribcage, while a thick tail wrapped itself about his legs, holding him still.

Something stirred inside him. His stomach heaved, and a foul taste filled his mouth. There was a sudden, hideous pain just below his sternum, a tearing pain that forced the breath right out of him. When it came back, he screamed, crying out in agony as tears flooded his eyes and something warm poured out over his abdomen.

“It’s all right.” Demi’s voice. “The pain won’t last.”

It didn’t. Already, it was beginning to recede. The deoxys was healing him… or he was healing himself. He didn’t know. He didn’t want to think about it.

But even though the pain was nearly gone, something wasn’t right. Something was there, below his heart, radiating a gentle but distinctly foreign warmth.

The floor next to the normal-deoxys rippled. Another one emerged fluidly from its surface.

“The craft that has been trying to contact us has drawn nearer,” they said. “They demand to know why we’ve fired upon the planet.”

The words were perfectly clear—Ren understood all deoxys now, not only the one who’d first spoken to him. But their ramifications took a moment to sink in properly, raising a cloud of questions in their wake. Craft? What… what kind of craft? A spacecraft? Who…?

Murmurs arose from the crowd of deoxys onlookers, their voices too soft for Ren to make out their words.

“Those sorts… they’re incapable of understanding our mission,” Syr’s controller said bitterly. “There’s only one message worth sending them…”

* * *​

“Maybe they hadn’t made it that far yet.”

Jen, still trying to reassure himself. He didn’t sound as though he believed his own words, nor did he look the part. His head was lowered; it was clear he could no longer stand to look upon the screen any longer. His arms hung limp at his sides.

Meanwhile Babs stared at the ship on the screen as if it were the ugliest thing she’d ever laid eyes upon.

“Come on,” she muttered. “Stop talking. Start shooting.”

The ship she stood aboard was a deoxys. Surely they were capable of fighting, same as any deoxys was. Surely they could pay the other craft back in kind for what they’d done to the planet below—for what they’d done to her closest friends.

She wanted to get her hands on those murderers herself. Seeing them burn from afar wasn’t the same as feeling her conjured blades severing tentacles and shattering crystalline cores. But it would have to suffice.

The screen filled with blinding white light. Jen shrieked in pain, and Babs flung an arm up to shield her eyes. No sooner than she’d done that, the entire room quaked, threatening to throw her off balance.

“We’ve been hit!” Jen cried.

Babs widened her stance, bracing herself in case of another tremor. “Fight back!” she shouted at the deoxys who shared the room with her—only to find them all disappearing into the walls and floor. “Hey! Get back here, damn it!”

An ominous rumbling and creaking reverberated throughout the room, followed by a sound like crashing thunder and a jolt that flung her onto her back despite her efforts.

“Gh!” she cried out as her head hit the floor, bending her crests back. She sprung to her feet once more, cursing at the way the sudden motion took her head from sore to screaming. Her eyes found the viewscreen again and saw chunks and flakes of rock shrinking into the distance, as well as green-and-red tentacles flexing in and out of view. A number of them merged together, forming long, scimitar-shaped claws pointed directly at the enemy craft.

“I think they’re taking your advice,” Jen said.

“About damn time,” said Babs.

* * *​

I’m awake…

It almost sounded like one of Ren’s own thoughts. The mental voice was like his own, but there was a sort of distance to it. It was almost as if he were being spoken to, silently, by a copy of himself.

What… we’re awake?

The pain was gone, but the normal-deoxys’s tentacles were still buried in his arm, still trying to coax him out of a human shape. He couldn’t feel himself transforming at this point, but here was his brain apparently talking to itself. Speaking independently. Something was being done to him.

I can’t see… why? Human? Human! Why can’t I see?

…Can’t you hear me?

He could, in a manner of speaking. But he couldn’t respond now, silently or otherwise. His entire body refused to heed his commands now, limp and powerless. His head had fallen to his chest; if it hadn’t been for the pokémon holding him tight, he would’ve crumpled to the floor.

“This shouldn’t be taking so long,” the deoxys controlling Syr said.

“The core has reformed, but the flesh is unchanging,” Demi’s controller noted aloud. “The human brain persists, but why?”

The deoxys in front of Ren kept silent, seemingly too absorbed in their work to respond. Their tentacles bristled, creating a faint tugging sensation in their patient’s arms.

The floor gave a jolt that nearly flung Ren up out of Syr’s grip. Demi stumbled where she stood, nearly toppling over onto the deoxys behind her. The sudden motion yanked the embedded tentacles out of Ren’s arms, causing the deoxys who’d been working on him to cry out in several discordant tones at once.

We’re under attack!

Ren tried to lift his head to see what was happening and found it responding to his wishes again. The normal-deoxys before him was shuddering, staring at the damaged tips of their tentacles as they swiftly mended.

“We’ll come back to you,” they promised, and then everything went black.

In near-unison, Ren, Syr, and Demi collapsed in a loose, unconscious heap. Ren’s pack fell open, its contents tumbling out over the arbok’s side and clattering against the floor and the nearby nosepass, as the deoxys filling the room slipped away through its metallic gray flesh.

* * *​

It was a direct hit. So were the two that followed. Babs might’ve cheered if it weren’t for the fact that none of the attacks appeared to do any actual damage to the enemy craft. The thing was shielded.

She’d expected that much. But she snarled and swore and punched the screen all the same.

“They can’t keep it up forever…” Jen said, almost inaudible. Talking to himself again, Babs assumed.

“You’re right,” she responded all the same. “They can’t. No shield lasts indefinitely. As long as they keep pounding at—”

Babs broke off, covering her eyes once more. The room lurched again, hard. Another impact came right on its heels. She’d anticipated this sort of thing, but the jolts still nearly brought her down.

She spat out another curse. Hopefully their own shields would outlast the enemy’s.

Their own ship was changing position. The view of the other deoxys-craft was rotating, the curved arms no longer bearing on them. The enemy ship’s mass of tentacles, waving in the nothingness like something aquatic, all flexed toward them, following their movement as if watching them. Some of them formed a new set of scimitar-claws while the previous set unraveled themselves. Points of light formed at their tips.

Babs and Jen’s ship was quicker on the draw. A piercing ray cut the darkness, and a multitude of tentacles floated free from the opposing craft, severed. One of the enemy’s shots went wild, flying toward nothing for a short distance before petering out. The other three found their mark, and the last made the floor leap up beneath Jen and Babs and sent a sound like a thunderclap throughout the room.

The lights flickered and almost cut out completely. They stabilized quickly enough, but they were dimmer now.

“Oh gods, I think the ship’s hurt,” Jen said. His eyes were practically strobing with fear. “The shields, they’re—”

“Down. Yeah,” Babs said tersely. Her heart was hammering, stoking nausea. The image on the viewscreen wavered. The screen itself rippled as if it wanted to lose its shape. “But so are theirs.”

She tried to sound more hopeful than she felt. It helped, if only somewhat, that their last shot had inflicted actual damage upon the other deoxys-craft. But for all she knew, that was only a flesh wound. Maybe the enemy had landed a vital hit, and she and Jen wouldn’t know it until they found themselves suddenly unable to breathe.

Come on, she willed the ship, watching as the view of the enemy shifted once more and the claws of their own ship charged up for another attack. There are a lot of people counting on you.

* * *​

The floor was shaking. It took Karo a moment to realize that he wasn’t dreaming, wasn’t imagining it. His eyes opened to flashing lights and the sight of a spent max revive crystal lying just inches from his face. Beyond it, his trainer was lying draped over Syr, with Demi a tangle of limbs beside them and two small, yellow shapes half-buried beneath her.

“Hey! Hey!” he called out to them. No reactions from anyone. He tried to stand, levering himself up on one arm—which folded right back underneath him as everything dipped sharply to the left. His friends went sliding. So did he.

Karo tried to focus on them as hard as he could despite the way the wall-crystals flashed and flared. He could feel the strain behind his eyes. Multiple targets. Not impossible to lock onto that many, but definitely not easy. He buzzed in frustration as the tension built further. Then a sharp, white outline suddenly surrounded his insensible allies, and everything else seemed to slow and desaturate for a moment. The lock-on was successful.

He cast a block field out like a net. It caught, and the five beings within it came to a less-than-gentle halt.

Five. Where was Acheron?

The floor beneath Karo leveled out. He took the opportunity to finally right himself, getting back to his feet with a grunt, and immediately set about scanning the scene for the missing kwazai. There was no sign of him. No sign of any deoxys, either. He, along with most of his allies and the two deranics, were all alone in the vast room.

He waddled his way over to the others—slower, so much slower than he wished he could. The floor still rattled ominously beneath him. Geez, what’s going on here? he wondered. Once he finally caught up to his friends, he expanded the shield to include himself, reinforcing it and making sure to cover the floor as well, making the pile of unconscious bodies shift slightly as the force field slid underneath them. Nothing’s gonna touch you. Nothing—

An almighty blaze of light ripped across his vision, momentarily blinding him. In its wake, an endless black expanse opened overhead and soon surrounded him. He felt his feet leave the floor of his conjured bubble, felt his back leave the wall he’d created behind him—he was floating. A weightless, hard-edged rock, trapped in a bubble with soft-bodied creatures whom he was utterly helpless to avoid crushing against the invisible walls.

Karo swore internally, at a loss for what to do. He felt himself bump into the block field again—and an idea hit him. With an effort, he conjured a second block field, just a small band across himself that pulled him flush against the barrier at his back. He could only hope it would hold. His head was already killing him.

Ren floated free of Syr’s already-loose coils and bumped gently into Karo’s forehead. His trainer’s shirt was covered in blood, fresh and revoltingly damp. But Ren was still alive, still breathing. At least a couple of the others were. Karo could hear them. He’d managed to trap some air along with them.

But it wouldn’t last forever, much as he dearly wanted to believe otherwise. And sooner or later, his stamina would give out, and the force field with it.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice cracking, and not solely from the strain of maintaining the blocks. “I tried…”

* * *​

“We got ‘em…”

Babs stared wide-eyed at the screen, scarcely daring to believe what it showed her. But it was true. The Red Hand’s spacecraft was torn wide open, the vast deoxys-ship’s orbit slowly beginning to decay. Another volley of searing beams shredded the wounded vessel into smaller chunks, some with still-flailing tentacles.

“Oh my god, we got ‘em!” she said, with more confidence this time.

More shots were fired, breaking the destroyed ship down further and further until nothing remained but clouds of dust. Some of the sweeping rays caught free-floating deoxys in their path, disintegrating their bodies and leaving behind small, violet spheres that glittered in the light reflected from the bright disc of the planet.

“So… I guess it’s over, then.” Jen sounded relieved but not satisfied.

Babs understood all too well. On a grander scale, this might have been a tremendous victory. There was no telling how many lives they had just saved.

On a personal level, it still felt an awful lot like a loss.

As she watched another swath of enemy deoxys get reduced to their crystalline cores, she spotted an odd shape among the debris, something blue and gray and purple that almost looked like…

No. Not almost.

“Dad?” Jen extended a clawed hand toward the screen as if he could pluck the impossible sight out to safety. “Oh gods, Dad! How? How did he get out there?” he demanded, panicked.

That question could wait. The people out there couldn’t. Maybe it was already too late for them. But she could see how closely clustered they were, when she figured there ought to be nothing stopping them from drifting apart. Karo had wrapped them all up in one of those block-shields he’d learned to make. If those unseen walls were thick enough, and there was enough air in that thing…

“Hey! Hey!” she shouted to any deoxys who might be listening. “I know at least one of you can hear me. There’s people out there! People who aren’t deoxys! You gotta get ‘em on board right now! Hurry!”

Holding her breath, biting her tongue, she watched the screen for signs that someone had indeed heard her. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw her friends take on a familiar seafoam glow and then vanish altogether.

Don’t you die on me, the greninja willed the new arrivals. Don’t you dare.

 

[Sike Saner]

Chapter 17 – The Future​

Syr awoke to nearly featureless, uniformly gray surroundings. The walls had a faintly metallic property to them, and the floor beneath his face was fairly soft and slightly rubbery.

His mind, upon catching up with his last waking moments, provided a picture of dozens of humanoid, oppressively psychic beings dotting walls like these, and he startled awake with a yelp.

Instinctively coiling, Syr looked around. The room was much smaller than the one he’d remembered; it couldn’t have held even a quarter of the creatures he’d seen before being knocked out. At the moment, it appeared to hold no one at all other than himself.

No longer being surrounded by psychics was a relief, however distant. But he couldn’t trust that none of them were watching him remotely. Overhead, there was something small and round that emitted light. For all he knew, they could see him through it, or sense him in some stranger way.

More troubling still, none of his allies were present. These creatures had managed to pry him away from the others despite Karo’s force field surrounding them—they’d slipped right under it, he recalled. Slipped right under and taken its maker. He hadn’t been able to stop them. Neither had the kwazai.

Maybe the others were being held alone, same as he was. Or maybe their captors had decided that the other pokémon, at least, were too dangerous to leave alive.

The tightness left his coils as a feeling of defeat spread throughout him like cold water. He could scream. He could thrash. He could fight… but what was that going to accomplish against an enemy that outnumbered him many times over?

There was a noise at his side, faint but undeniable. Motion and light followed. All his tension returned at once, and he swung about in an instant, hood flared and fangs forward, to face—

“Jen?” The initial shock at the sight of the cryonide in the arched doorway faded quickly, replaced by dawning horror: They got him, too. “Oh, God… how?” Tears brimmed in his eyes as he moved toward his son. “How did they find you?”

“It was the tube,” Jen said. “The one downstairs. It brought me and Babs up here.”

Syr’s brow furrowed as he absorbed that. It sounded as though that tube was, in fact, some sort of transporter. Something meant to bring Ren here. He’d escaped somehow… only for the psychics to find him anyway.

“Are you feeling okay?” Jen asked him. “They said they helped you recover, but…” He shook his head. “When I saw you out there, I was really scared that… that that was it. That I wouldn’t even get to say goodbye…”

Nothing hurt at the moment. Syr didn’t feel sick in the least. The deranics’ darts were no longer stuck in his skin. “I’m fine,” he said, wishing he sounded the part, for Jen’s sake. “But… what do you mean, ‘out there’? Where was I? Where were you?”

“You were outside this ship.” Jen waved a hand, indicating some unseen point beyond the far wall. “Out in space. You were on the other ship, and when these guys destroyed it, you guys came flying from the wreckage.”

For a moment, Syr just gawked at him. “That… is a lot to take in,” he admitted. “Ships? We’re on a ship?” he asked, at which Jen nodded. “And this isn’t the one we were on…” He looked up, scanning the ceiling, his gaze encompassing the unseen masters of the vessel he apparently occupied. “These people rescued us?”

“Yeah,” Jen said. “I think Ren might know more about the whole situation,” he added. “He can actually understand the deoxys.”

Syr blinked in surprise. “…Huh,” he said. Someone whom humans could understand, but pokémon couldn’t. He’d never met anyone like that before—except he had, he recalled. The creatures who’d surrounded him before he’d awoken here. Ren had spoken as though he understood them, when all Syr had heard from the beings was noise.

Unintelligible beings, aboard a ship whose interior was similar to this one’s. Both deoxys ships, he supposed. A new thread of worry uncurled within him: had he, along with his friends and family, gotten caught up in the middle of some sort of deoxys war?

He shuddered. “Yeah, I think I need to go talk to Ren about all this. I’m still not entirely convinced we’re safe here.”

“I wasn’t either, at first,” Jen said. “But these are the good guys.”

I hope you’re right, Syr thought, partly for his own sake but mostly for Jen’s. God knew he’d never wanted him to get wrapped up in all this. Jen was supposed to be waiting back at home, waiting for his father to return…

…Or not. Maybe now, at least, Jen would no longer have to wonder if Syr would make it back alive.

Maybe. Hopefully.

“Come on,” Jen said, backing up further into the hallway outside the room. “His room’s this way.”

Out of the room, into a corridor that appeared to be made of the exact same material. Jen moved with apparent confidence through the ship, which made Syr wonder just how long the cryonide had been here. When had he and Babs gotten that tube working?

For that matter, “How long was I unconscious?”

“I don’t know,” Jen said. “Not exactly, anyway. But not too long. Maybe a couple of hours. The deoxys work pretty fast, huh?”

One of said creatures breezed by as they hung a right. Syr felt a chill run down his back. “…I guess so,” he said.

Jen stopped at a blank, gray wall, no different from any of the others Syr had seen. The cryonide prodded it a couple of times in succession, and an entrance to a large room opened to them, the doorway’s edges rippling in a disconcertingly organic manner.

There was Ren, reclining on a long platform that was nothing more than a raised section of the floor extending from the far wall. His pokémon flanked the makeshift bed: the twins to one side, Karo and Babs to another.

“Hey, look who finally decided to come join us!” Karo said.

“Yeah,” Syr said automatically as he and Jen entered the room. He took in his new surroundings more thoroughly, seeing a group of people who all looked at least a little tired but apparently unharmed. The latter certainly hadn’t been the case when he’d last seen most of them. Both kwazai stood tall again, with not a single dart on their persons. No blood. No sweat. No filth.

Almost no filth. Ren had shed his shirt and hoodie, as well as his shoes and socks, but he was still wearing the same pants he’d worn all this time, and they most definitely needed a wash.

Deciding it was neither polite nor a priority to bring that up, “I’m glad everyone’s okay,” Syr said instead.

Ren averted his gaze. Demi growled faintly to herself.

“What? Who’s…” Syr began. But then he realized who was missing. “Those deranics,” he said. “Are they… here? On the ship?”

Ren shook his head. “No,” he answered. “Well… technically they are,” he amended, “but…” He sighed. “The Red Hand wouldn’t let them live.”

There had been a time when Syr would’ve never imagined himself mourning any deranic. But there he was, feeling something sink inside him at the news. Looking back, those two really had been on his side. They’d done nothing but help his party and their mission, and now…

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “They deserved better than this,” he said softly. Meeting Ren’s gaze once more, “The Red Hand… You mean the other ship?” he asked “The other deoxys?”

“Right,” Ren said. “They couldn’t abide by the deranics. By any intelligent species that wasn’t affiliated with any element—even if some part of its population was.” His jaw tightened. A deep frown line formed between his naked brows. “That’s why they murdered my people.”

“The killers will come to this world soon...”

“Our psychic enemies have come at last.”

Syr had figured the enemy deranics and their servants must have been lying, or at the very least misled about who had actually destroyed humanity. But in the end, the deoxys, the psychic enemies they’d spoken of, had arrived just as they’d predicted. And here was Ren, who’d certainly been as skeptical of the deranics’ claims as he’d been—if not moreso—attesting to their innocence in the matter.

But not innocent altogether. Regardless of their motivation, the deranic leadership had still tried to destroy the world, and in fact, they had nearly succeeded. If it hadn’t been for the nullshade…

His heart froze in his chest. Oh God, the nullshade. The last he’d seen of them was a nightmare, a scene of indiscriminate destruction, koffing and weezing fighting the specter in vain…

“Ren?” Syr spoke up, even more quietly than before. “What happened to the koffing and the weezing back at the base? Do you know?”

Another guilty aversion of those dark brown eyes. Syr felt a cold hand lay itself very gingerly upon his back.

“Ren had the deoxys scan the area in case the nullshade was still kicking around there,” Babs said. “The first scan… didn’t find anything. No signs of life whatsoever.”

Syr had guessed that answer before she could speak it. It dropped on him like a stone all the same. He slumped over and felt the tears start up again.

“However,” Babs continued, “the second scan picked up several koffing and a single weezing poking around the site about an hour later.”

“The ones from the forest,” Acheron said, “coming back home only to find a smoking crater.”

Almost cautiously, Syr lifted his head. “So… there were some survivors after all?”

“Not many,” Ren said. “Not enough. I know how important this was to you, and I know why.” His gaze dropped to his hands, which were folded in his lap. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come down to using that thing. I’d seriously considered leaving that ball back home. It’s a good thing I didn’t; I’m not saying otherwise. But, all the same… I’m sorry, Syr. I really am.”

The tears fell. Syr tried to respond, but his breath hitched hard in his chest. “I know,” he managed at last. “And… you’re right. We had to destroy that weapon.” A nasty little possibility crossed his mind. “…It was destroyed, right?”

“Thoroughly,” Acheron assured him.

“That’s… that’s good, yeah.” Syr sniffed loudly, doubling upon himself for a moment to wipe at his eyes with the end of his tail. “But wait… what about the Red Hand?” The misguided deranics were no longer a threat, but if there was still another force out there bent on wiping entire species off the face of reality…

“Gone,” Ren said. “The deoxys here made certain of it. They probed the surviving cores, confirmed that the Red Hand didn’t have any other ships anywhere. They were a single, small band of extremists, and now, well… now they’re nothing.”

“Small band or not, they ended a lot of lives,” Demi said. Both pairs of arms were folded, the ends of her tail curled inward. “How many worlds did you say they hit?” she asked Ren.

“Hundreds,” Ren said. “I don’t remember the exact number. Ours was the last.”

“Yeah, but give him the good news,” Karo said, sounding eager.

Good news? “I could definitely use some more of that,” Syr said.

Ren took a deep breath and released it. “It’s… tentative. But the deoxys said that they might be able to create a new human population using my genetic material. Might,” he stressed. “They’re hoping to do the same for the deranics, using Kiat and Zaltaphi’s.”

Syr’s eyes went wide. “They can do that?”

“They can try,” Ren responded. “The deoxys are profoundly gifted geneticists, but even so, they have so little to work with that there are no guarantees. Even if they’re successful, it’s going to take them a long time to produce the next generation.”

“Hopefully, by that time, the world’ll be ready for humans again,” Jen said.

“Hopefully,” Ren agreed. “If nothing else, well. They’ll have the deoxys on their side, at least. And if this world ultimately proves to be too hostile, the deoxys will try to find them another. But hopefully it won’t come to that.”

Syr nodded in understanding. Being driven out of one’s home wasn’t a fate he wished on anyone.

“Anyway… even if the new batch of humans could be finished tonight, the deoxys still need to get the planet scrubbed of the Red Hand’s virus,” Ren went on. “They’ll be making a vaccine, as well, but they’d rather be safe than sorry.”

That made sense, Syr thought. Losing a species to extinction once was bad enough. It would be all the more tragic for them to slip away again after being given another chance.

But wait… “You’re immune to the plague, right? Couldn’t they just give the new humans whatever you’ve got that made you that way?”

Ren frowned. “I’d prefer if they didn’t,” he said. He looked down again as he spoke, tracing a somewhat large, irregular scar over his upper abdomen. The scar, Syr noted, looked fairly fresh. “The deoxys agree with me, given the circumstances. And I think the new humans would, too.”

A troubled look came over Syr’s face. “What was making you immune, then?” he asked, almost afraid of the answer.

Ren was silent for a moment. “There was a deoxys in me,” he finally answered. The hand hovering over the scar trembled. “They’d been there for a long time, even before the Extinction. A traveling scientist of sorts, according to the core probe. They abducted me when I was young and performed some kind of experiment that went wrong. Most of their physical form was destroyed. The rest… merged with me, somehow.”

“Apparently that thing took him over from time to time,” Babs said, and she didn’t sound pleased about it. “Always while he was alone. I guess, on some level, they knew better than to show themself around us.” She smacked a fist into her open palm for emphasis. “That’s how they built that tube. They worked on it while they were in charge, and when they weren’t? He was none the wiser, and the same goes for the rest of us.”

“The tube was sending a beacon for other deoxys to come and collect us,” Ren explained. “It was also working with what little of their physical self was left. It was turning me into a deoxys,” he said, with a wild, fearful look in his eyes. “It would’ve taken… who knows how long on its own, but other deoxys could speed up the process. And they did, on the Red Hand ship.”

“The scar…” Syr said aloud without meaning to.

“Their core,” Ren said. “It emerged on its own.” He shuddered hard. “After the deoxys brought us in here, they took it out before it could inflict any more changes. But some of the changes… they’ll be here forever. I can still understand pokémon—including the deoxys. I could understand the deranics’ language there at the end, too—maybe I could also understand human languages that I couldn’t before; who knows? And I’m still a psychic-type.”

“But you’re also still human,” Acheron said. “And always will be.”

Ren gave a very faint smile. “Yeah. That’s true.” He sighed again. “Anyway… here’s the thing: I might still be immune to the plague. Maybe. But the deoxys really don’t want to chance it. I don’t want to chance it, either. So I’m staying here, at least until the vaccine’s ready.”

“And we’re staying with him,” Demi said. The rest of Ren’s pokémon nodded or made noises of assent.

Syr felt a twinge of disappointment at her words, which surprised him just a little. It wasn’t as though they would definitely never see one another again, after all. He supposed that on some level, he’d been taking for granted that if they lived through all this, they’d all be coming home together.

That train of thought, in turn, led him to wonder if he could go home whenever he was ready. Which, truthfully, was right then and there. Maybe the deoxys here were on the level. Maybe this place really was safe… but he felt uncomfortable here all the same.

Too many psychics, he supposed. Just too many. Maybe under other circumstances, he could get used to it more easily, just as Jen had apparently done. But after all he’d been through, it just seemed like too much to ask of himself.

What was more, he missed Convergence. He needed to see those familiar sights again, to feel the grass underneath him. Only then, he imagined, could he really begin to feel like this whole ordeal was truly over.

Still… if the others needed his support at the moment, he couldn’t exactly bail on them in good conscience. He considered how to word the question; then, “Should I stay, too?” he asked.

“Only if you want to,” Ren said. “I can’t imagine this is a particularly comfortable environment for you.”

“It’s not,” Syr admitted. “But I’m willing to stay if you need me.”

“Nah, we’ll be fine,” Karo assured him. “You go on ahead. Someone’s gotta see to it that nobody else scribbles any more crap on the walls,” he added with a crackle of electricity around his nose.

“Wait, though,” Jen spoke up. “They transported you guys in from outside. When they transported us, they had to wait and recharge before they could send anyone back.” He put a claw to his chin. “Then again, they brought us over from a much longer distance. Maybe they’re already recharged.”

“I can find out for you whenever you’re ready,” Ren said. “Just say the word.”

Syr took a deep breath. “Okay. I think I’m ready to go home now.” He turned toward Jen. “How about you?”

“Yeah,” Jen said.

“All right, then.” Ren swung his legs over the side of the platform and carefully stood up. “Come on. Let’s go flag someone down.”

“We’ll come with,” Demi said. She was on the other side of the bed in a single stride, whereupon she laid a hand on Ren’s shoulder. The two of them left the room, and Syr and Jen went after them. The rest of Ren’s pokémon brought up the rear.

It didn’t take long to find a deoxys to question; one of them was just a few yards away from the door. From the looks of things, they were just milling about, as if waiting for them to emerge, or maybe debating whether or not to come in themself.

The deoxys approached them with seeming eagerness. They spoke very quietly, wringing the tips of their tentacles.

“They want to know if we’re leaving,” Ren said. “Specifically you,” he said, with a point and glance over his shoulder at Jen, “and Babs.”

“Huh,” Babs said. “Well, I’m not, but the kid is.”

The deoxys looked down for a moment, their upper tentacles lowering to their sides. Their head lifted once more, and they spoke again.

“They hope you’ll come back again someday,” Ren said. “They enjoyed getting to know you two.”

“…Okay, admittedly, I still kind of suck at telling these guys apart. But I think… we know you, don’t we? You’re the one we met at the start,” Babs guessed.

The deoxys actually gave a nod before elaborating in their own language.

“And the one you spoke to after your meeting with the curator,” Ren translated.

“I guess you think this makes us friends, huh,” Babs said. “Well, you know what? Maybe it does. But don’t go thinking this means the rules have changed, all right?”

The deoxys steepled their tentacles and responded.

“They understand,” Ren said. He looked to the deoxys. “All right, then. Two of us need to go back down. Is that possible, or do they need to wait a while?”

Another nod. The deoxys must have realized what an ambiguous response that was; they provided vocal clarification a beat later.

“You’re good to go,” Ren confirmed.

Syr felt a wave of relief wash over him. It was finally happening. He was going home, alive and well… and, in a sense, successful.

“Oh, uh, one more thing,” Jen said. “Could you just put us back in the room? I don’t think either of us would fit in the tube.”

The deoxys nodded again. They moved ahead a short distance, then made a beckoning motion. Everyone else followed through the winding, rising, falling halls, until finally the deoxys compelled another wall to open.

The room they revealed wasn’t terribly large, just an ovoid space with a single light source overhead. There didn’t seem to be anything special about it. “Here? Really?” Syr wondered aloud.

“Yeah,” Jen said. “This is where me and Babs appeared after the tube activated.”

Syr leaned forward, flicking his tongue out to investigate the space further. It didn’t smell any more noteworthy than it looked. “So this is it, huh.” He turned to face the others. “I guess I should say goodbye, then. Goodbye… and thanks.”

He looked to each of them in turn. “Thanks for looking out for me. For saving my life—several times over.” He shook his head in astonishment. God, I came way too close…

“Hey, don’t mention it,” Karo said. “I wasn’t about to let you kick the bucket when home was right there within sight. Granted, it was like hundreds of miles below us, but still.”

“We all wanted you to be all right,” Demi said. “We wanted that for all of us. And I guess we succeeded… more or less.”

Syr could feel his eyes watering again. “I don’t think any of us could’ve done this alone,” he said. “I know I couldn’t have.”

“And we might’ve never gone on this mission without you,” Ren said. “And if we never had, my people and the deranics’ might’ve never gotten a second chance at life—even if it is just a small chance. So… thank you, Syr.” The human’s eyes had gone misty, as well. “Thank you.”

At that, Syr well and truly began crying, moved beyond words. Next thing he knew, he was caught up in a group hug. Though the tears kept flowing, he smiled earnestly.

Eventually, the embrace ended. Everyone moved mindfully out of the way, allowing Syr and Jen to enter the ovoid room together.

Syr turned one last time to take in the sight of the rest of his friends, seeing smiling faces, some streaked with tears. He smiled again. “I hope we’ll see each other again someday,” he said. “Until then… goodbye, friends,” he said.

“And good luck with the new people,” Jen added.

The others gave their own farewells in return. Then the wall reformed between those who would leave and those who would stay, and the room filled with seafoam light.

* * *​

Evening was falling over the cemetery. Syr crossed the field of stones and placards on his own; Jen had stayed behind, watching over the house that was, for the time being, theirs alone.

When Syr reached the grave that Faurur, Esaax, and Drasigon shared, he noticed a few small stones lying in the grass before the bronze plate. Those hadn’t been there before; the plot had been pristine the last time he’d visited. He wondered if he ought to nudge them aside, but ultimately decided against it. Taking anything away from those three didn’t seem right somehow, even if the stones had just wound up there randomly.

It took a moment for Syr to find his voice. “Hi, Faurur,” he said once he had. “Hi, Esaax. Hi, Drasigon.

“Well… I’m back.” He shifted uneasily. “I… we… did what I said we were gonna do. Or… we tried.” He closed his eyes in shame, bowing his head. “Most of them… didn’t make it.” Tears carved warm paths down his snout. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. This isn’t the way I wanted things to turn out…”

Syr realized he was on the verge of sobbing. He inhaled deeply, trying to steady himself. It took a few tries before he managed. He had to hold himself together the best that he could. There was, after all, more to the message he’d come to deliver than just the bad news. And it was clear that Faurur and the others weren’t the only ones who needed to hear it again.

“Anyway…” he resumed, “the ones who did make it… well… they’re free now. They’re free. The deranics are gone.”

He felt a slight pang of guilt as soon as the words were out of his mouth. They might not be gone for good. But, as he reminded himself, any deranics who might be brought to life aboard that deoxys ship would not be the same ones who had enslaved her people. They’d have a chance to do good, just as Kiat and Zaltaphi had done.

“The bad ones are, anyway,” Syr amended. “The ones who enslaved your people are all gone. So are the people who destroyed humanity,” he added. “And maybe… maybe someday, humans will live in this world again. They won’t be the same humans, but still… it’s something, right?

“And, you know… in a way, it’s all thanks to you, Faurur,” he said. “I probably would’ve never known about the deranics if it wasn’t for you. I probably would never have gone back there again,” he admitted. “So thanks,” he said, and for the first time since entering the cemetery, he smiled.

A yawn escaped him, catching him off guard and embarrassing him slightly. All the time since he’d last slept, and the sheer amount and magnitude of what he’d done since, seemed to have caught up to his body at last.

“Guess I’d better be on my way,” Syr said. “You guys take care of each other, all right? Goodbye, for now.”

With that, he turned around and headed back toward the bus stop to await his ride home. Now, at last, it truly felt as though the mission was over. Though he hadn’t quite lived up to the letter of his promise, it was getting a little easier, at least, to believe that he’d fulfilled its spirit.

FIN​

 

[Negrek]

Coming to the end of this one was a surprise! For some reason I thought there were around twenty-five chapters—quite a bit to go yet! Not sure I’m emotionally ready for this to be over, heh.

On the whole I thought it ended up being a satisfying ending, though. A bit happier than I was expecting, to be honest, given your past work. I mean, nobody from the main team even died??? Absolutely wild. :P

Which is not at all to say that the optimistic end was unsatisfying! The characters have absolutely earned their rest and a bit of peace. I loved the final scene with Syr in the graveyard; a very fitting way to wrap everything up and of course a nice return to where this story began. Perhaps now that the Ted Hand have been defeated and new humans are on the horizon, the characters can truly start moving on with their lives. (Maybe not Ren. I imagine he’s got a loooot of secret-deoxys-related trauma to process yet, heh.)

Speaking of, I pretty much knew what was up with Ren by the time we got the reveal. I think you built it up well! And used it to get one last moment of body horror in there, too. Always appreciated. ;) Glad you got to bring out the null shade-nuke in the end, too. Despite specifically making a note of it earlier and reminding myself not to forget about it, I’d forgotten about it by the time it came up.

In the end, I liked that the villains here weren’t the deranics or the de as a whole, but rather extreme groups within each species. It feels more genuine than Entire Species Evil sorts of scenarios. I only wish we’d gotten to see a little more of the alien political stuff! Or just more of the aliens in general, especially the deranics. Obviously Syr and company didn’t have much time to get to know them, being too busy invading their base and destroying the weapon before it could be set off, but after hearing so much about them, I’d have loved to learn a bit more about them!

I feel like we got to learn a lot more about the deoxys, and it was great! Love how organic all their tech feels (well, is), and all the weirdness their malleability and hyper regeneration lets them get up to. The space battle at the end was fun, nicely showed off their strangeness. Their ships are just Pokémon that battle each other. Good times.

It’s wild to look back at how long I’ve been following your fics. All the way since The Origin of Storms! I know you aren’t interested in further writing, but I’m glad you shared these stories with us, even if there won’t be more! Especially big props for returning to finish Worldslayers after so long away! I’m really glad you didn’t leave the characters hanging and that we ultimately got some answers about the human plague and the deranics. I’ve always enjoyed this series’ tendency to lean into the sci-fi and xeno aspects of the Pokémon franchise—it’s a fresh, invigorating take on the series, and one that’s truly your own. It’s one that’s been on my mind a great deal and had a big influence on my writing as well. So thanks again for sharing your stories with us, and being such a kind, positive member of the fic community for all these years. Good luck, wherever the future takes you!

 

[Sike Saner]

Negrek: Yep, no major character deaths this time! I guess ultimately it's for the same reasons there were some in previous installments: that's just the way things turned out, heh. (On sort of a side note, part of me would've liked the deranic duo to survive. Sadly it just seemed too unlikely for the RH to have suffered a couple of aberrant (read: typeless) people to live.)

I think I always intended the graveyard bookend scenes and was glad to pull them off as such. Good to know they had a nice effect!

Ren's absolutely gonna be haunted by thoughts of what tf and when tf and how tf for a long time. And by imagined scenarios of his little "passenger" doing/having done horrible things behind the wheel. And by memories of the flesh, so to speak. Having a deoxys core suddenly erupt in the middle of you really hurts!

(And yeah, the body horror there was probably inevitable. :B )

Glad the antagonists went over well! Yeah, I was absolutely not gonna go "x species is just Like This, no exceptions" route with the deranics or anyone else. I guess I've never really been the biggest fan of Always Chaotic Evil and similar tropes, heh. I recall having gremlin OCs as a kid that were pretty okay folks. Plus, giving a species multiple "factions", as it were, puts more toys in the box, so to speak. More fun that way!

Getting to do Weird Deoxys Shit was one of my favorite aspects of writing this story, definitely. Especially the transport and archive form(e)s. Those were fun to come up with.

(Imagine being a trainer and just. Sending out an actual frickin' STARSHIP. Would that even be tournament legal?)

I am so, so grateful for your support over all these years (like over a decade and a half I think, gosh DAMN), holy shit. For real, writing these stories hasn't always been the easiest process, but knowing that there were people such as you who believed in them really helped me push through. Thanks so much for everything, up to and including the latest read and reply!