I hit the earth.
It wasn't the bone-shattering impact of rock, but a heavy, dull thud against a floating island of inverted stone. I lay there, gasping, waiting for the embrace of death to take me. My lungs burned, demanding the influx of oxygen in my next breath.
But it didn't come.
I looked up—or was it down?
Above me, upside-down waterfalls flowed endlessly into the mouth of a sky that was also a floor. Pillars of ancient, weathered stone drifted aimlessly through a sea of thick, toxic-looking clouds that swirled like oil on water. There was no sun; this world was illuminated by a pale, sickly gray light that seemed to come from the very void itself.
I tried to move. A jagged, white-hot fire flared in my side and my vision began to dance with stars, a constellation of agony born from three of my snapped ribs. I waited for the dull throb that usually followed a sharp break—the body's natural response to numb itself—but it never came. The pain stayed sharp, piercing and fresh. It remained exactly as it was the moment they broke, a screaming pain that refused to subside.
I looked at my tunic. The blood from the fall was wet and warm, glistening in the gloom like liquid ruby. I waited for it to soak into the fabric, to turn brown and crusty as it dried against my skin. It didn't. It stayed bright. It stayed wet. Its heat remained, refusing to dissipate. It continued to pour.
I then realized—time didn't flow here. It pooled like stagnant water.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
For what felt like two subjective weeks, I wandered this dimension. In a world with a sun, I would have been dead within three days. Here, the lack of biological necessity was a different kind of execution.
The hunger was the first thing to distort. My stomach didn't growl or cramp, it simply hollowed out into a cold, screaming vacuum that never bottomed out. I didn't get hungry in the way a man craves a meal. I became a vessel of pure, unadulterated craving. My throat stayed parched, the skin of my tongue feeling like sandpaper, yet no matter how many times I swallowed, the dryness remained at its peak.
Then came the sleep—or the lack of it. My mind was a fraying rope. Without the rhythm of a heartbeat or the setting of a sun, my consciousness began to peel away in layers. I was exhausted to the marrow of my bones, a leaden weight pulling at my eyelids, but the "reset" of sleep was forbidden.
I was existing in a permanent state of the "third hour of the morning"—that blurred, hallucinatory edge of sleep deprivation where the shadows start to twitch and the logic of the world begins to dissolve. My thoughts became sluggish, looping in recursive circles, trapped in a waking coma where my tired brain couldn't even find the solace of a dream.
I was a biological error in a realm where life had no dominion. I was a clock with its gears jammed, ticking uselessly against the silence.
Kishin was my only constant. He floated beside me, his spectral eye a dim, protective lantern in the gloom. His steel hilt was the only cold, solid reality I could touch—a tether to a world where things still died, where things still changed.
The rest of my Pokémon slept, exhausted and unaware, sealed in their Poké Balls after their fight with the gods.
And I wasn't alone.
For days, I felt a gaze like a physical weight pressing on the back of my neck. A massive, serpentine shadow would flicker at the edge of my vision—a mass of gold, red, and shifting wings that blotted out the fractured horizon. It didn't attack; it stalked. It watched me from the depths of the spatial clouds, a silent deity assessing the stray spark in its abyssal kingdom.
I felt its curiosity—a vibration in my very soul that made the Red Chain fragment resting at my chest pulse with a frantic, rhythmic light, as if trying to warn me that something was there.
The shadow wasn't just a shape anymore.
It was a constant pulse in the back of my mind. Every time I turned, the gold-and-obsidian mass was gone, leaving only the oily swirl of clouds in its wake.
I began to talk to Kishin—not out of strategy, but to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was the rasping of my own dry throat. I reminisced with him about the smell of the Obsidian Fieldlands, the scent of crushed berries and damp earth. Of our numerous expeditions with Akari.
But the longer I spoke, the more the words felt thin. The pale light of this place was bleaching my memories, turning the vibrant colors of my home into the same sickly gray as the pillars around me.
The silence finally shattered when the ruler of the void stopped hiding.
The void didn't just part—it curdled, twisting and folding in on itself like a dying star. Reality itself began to unspool, threads of gold and obsidian weaving together, reverberating with an eldritch echo. It was a psychic pressure so immense I felt the capillaries in my eyes start to pop, staining my vision a hazy, cosmic purple. Then, the stitch in space became a tear.
Something emerged.
It didn't fly—it unfurled from the geometry of the void, its six inky wings spreading like tattered silk across a horizon that shouldn't exist. It was a mass of warping gold and shifting shadow, a god of the discarded and the forgotten. Its "face" was a mask of gold, and its eyes were pools of ancient, indifferent malice.
"STRONG STYLE—SPECTRA—"
I reached for Kishin's hilt, my fingers numb and sluggish, the weeks of sleeplessness making my grip feel like it belonged to a stranger. But before I could draw a breath to finish the command, the world turned cold.
In a split second, three of its blood-tipped tendrils fused into a single shadowy claw—sharper than the fangs of any Alpha, as solid as the roots of Mt. Coronet—and erupted from the darkness.
It didn't just strike me. It plunged through the center of my chest, pinning me to the inverted stone beneath my boots. I felt the claw pierce my heart with a clinical, terrifying precision. The cold was absolute, a frost that turned my blood to slush and transformed my erupting scream into a choke of frozen mist.