With Giratina covering them, as long as they could wear Spiritomb down to a certain point, one final strike would finish the job.
But that thought brought Kairos's gaze drifting upward to where Giratina floated overhead.
He studied it for a moment, something thoughtful moving behind his eyes.
By all accounts, Giratina inside the Reverse World should have been in its Origin Forme, its most fundamental and powerful state, the one with six wings and that strange, unsettling body shape.
But every single time Kairos had seen it, from the very first to right now, it had always been in its ordinary four-limbed form. He had noticed this early on and assumed it was simply a personal preference.
Later, after learning more about Giratina's situation, he figured out the real reason.
Reaching out with his senses, he could feel it clearly now. The power radiating off Giratina was considerable, but underneath that surface strength was a quiet, persistent weakness. It looked imposing, but its foundation had not fully healed.
The Reverse World's fragmentation, combined with the constant effort Giratina poured into keeping that entire city alive and intact, had eaten through a significant portion of its strength.
At this point, its power was probably well below its peak, possibly not even enough to sustain the Origin Forme.
If that was the case...
Kairos turned it over for a moment, then spoke.
"Can I ask you something? Do you not need the power of faith at all, or do you just not care to pursue it?"
The difference mattered.
Not needing it would mean its energy was entirely self-sustaining, requiring nothing from outside.
Not caring would mean it found the whole process bothersome, or simply beneath it.
He had been thinking about this for a while. If even a legendary Pokemon of Ho-Oh's caliber depended on the power of faith to maintain its strength, then Giratina, standing at the same tier, should be no different. And his gut told him Giratina fell into the second category.
Its temperament, combined with the Reverse World feeding it a steady supply of energy, had made it too indifferent to bother.
Its personality certainly seemed to fit that read.
Sure enough, after a brief pause, Giratina's voice rose slowly in his mind.
"You humans... are, for the most part, strange creatures."
There was a faint note of disdain woven through the words.
"Selfish. Greedy. Hollow. Arrogant."
"Drawing power from humans, even in the form of faith, is an extraordinarily filthy thing to do."
Giratina left it there, but Kairos already understood.
In its eyes, humans as a species were riddled with flaws and ugly impulses. Which, now that he thought about it, explained why Giratina liked to drag people it was fond of into the Reverse World. From its perspective, that genuinely counted as rescuing something rare and worthwhile from a sea of disappointments.
That entire Reverse World was basically a private collection.
A showcase built around the select few humans it had actually deemed worth keeping.
Kairos exhaled quietly.
This one had some very deep-seated issues with humanity.
That aside, he moved on to the point.
"Even so, you need power right now. With the power of faith behind you, your recovery would be a lot faster."
He did not push back against its view of humans. He just went straight to what was real. Facts were more useful than arguments, and right now, the facts were simple: it was weakened, and it needed strength.
Giratina went quiet.
Clearly it did not consider drawing faith from humans any kind of easy undertaking, let alone something it had any desire to pursue. But it did not refuse outright either, which meant Kairos's words had actually landed.
He pressed on while he had the opening.
"In that case, let me handle it for you. You won't have to do a thing, just wait. What do you say?"
Another silence, longer this time.
Eventually Giratina's voice returned, carrying a faint thread of suspicion alongside something that sounded almost like cautious curiosity.
"Can you actually manage that?"
Kairos nodded, his tone easy and certain.
"Yeah. I can."
He was already planning to gather the power of faith for Ho-Oh anyway. Doing the same for Giratina on the side was nothing more than building goodwill, and the upside was clear: if Giratina recovered its strength, the Reverse World stayed stable and the people inside remained safe.
It also gave him far more to work with when the time came to deal with Spiritomb.
Three problems, one solution.
And the method? That was obvious.
The game.
Giratina was quiet again, its golden eyes seeming to weigh something carefully.
Then its deep voice settled back into Kairos's mind.
"If it is so, I will return the favor."
From that alone, Kairos could tell the power of faith genuinely would do something for it. As a legendary Pokemon, it stood at the same level as Ho-Oh. It had simply never gone after faith before, partly due to its own nature and partly because the Reverse World had been covering that need all along.
A thought occurred to him. If Giratina reclaimed all the fragments of the Reverse World and then received the power of faith on top of that, would it end up surpassing Ho-Oh altogether?
Not an impossible idea.
He shook his head and let it go. The raw power of these legendaries was not really his concern. What mattered was that Giratina would hold up its end of the deal when the time came to face Spiritomb.
While he was at it, he wondered idly when his own Gengar and Chandelure would ever break through into legendary-tier strength and become fighters at that level.
Looking at where the Champions in this world stood, none of them seemed to have gotten there yet. He doubted it was something that could be reached through training alone or any conventional route.
Getting items from the system to push them there was still the more realistic path.
That thought left him a little frustrated. The system felt almost deliberately designed to mess with him. So many items that could strengthen Pokemon came loaded with restrictions, just like those Rare Candies before, usable only by players, not by him. If not for that, he probably would have become the strongest trainer in this world already.
Oh well. One step at a time.
While his thoughts drifted, Giratina spoke again.
"The matter is settled. I will send you back."
Kairos nodded.
"Thanks."
In the next instant, that familiar massive black claw appeared again. His vision blurred, that same weightless sensation swept through him, and when he opened his eyes, he was back in the Ghost World, standing in the same corner where he had first crossed into the Reverse World.
The surroundings were familiar: faint mist drifting through the air, the quiet atmosphere of the Ghost World all around him.
But compared to before, the mist had thinned out noticeably. Kairos rolled his shoulders to shake off the stiffness and pulled up his panel out of habit to check the map.
The fog that had once blanketed the map had pulled back considerably, and visibility had opened up. The reason was easy to see: golden dots representing players had multiplied across the map.
Every one of them was running missions handed out by the game, tracking down and catching Ghost-type Pokemon that had been infected by Spiritomb's miasma. Each catch weakened the miasma's hold and kept those Pokemon from being re-infected and causing more damage.
The captured Pokemon were being placed under the temporary care of the Ghost World lineage, to be released back into the Ghost World once everything was resolved. In its own way, it was doing them a favor.
The Ghost World as a whole looked like it was about to buckle under the foot traffic.
It reminded him of a major tourist attraction on a packed holiday weekend, trainers and Pokemon around every corner and spilling into every stretch of open ground.
On top of that, two streams of notifications were scrolling continuously across his vision.
"Accumulated emotion points received from Ghost World players: 3,421!"
"Accumulated emotion points received from Reverse World players: 1,300!"
The numbers were climbing fast. As he watched the figures tick upward, something caught his attention.
There were fewer than a hundred people in the Reverse World, yet over a thousand points had come in within such a short window.
It lined up with what the system had described. Stronger players yielded significantly more points per person. High-quality players, in the system's terms.
He could only hope that the new worlds he opened up with the Dimensional Communicator going forward would have trainers of a higher average caliber. The points would stack up a lot faster that way.
Speaking of which, now that the Ghost World had gotten this lively, he might as well push things a little further.
Kairos opened the system inventory and set the gold, silver, jewels, and resource items he had just received from the people in the Reverse World as additional mission rewards for Ghost World Hunter Go.
Most of those things were the wrong type for him anyway, so it made more sense to put them to work as incentives and get players moving through the Ghost World more aggressively.
That said, while sorting through the rewards, he used the system prompts to pull out any high-grade resources connected to Ghost-type Pokemon and set those aside. Items obtained outside the system came with no restrictions forcing him to hand them over to players. He was keeping those.
Once he had sorted through everything carefully, three items were left sitting in front of him.
All three were Ghost-type related, and each one gave off an unmistakable sense of quality.
The first was the Grudge Shroud, a worn grey cloth covered in unsettling dark patterns.
According to the system, when equipped by a Pokemon below Champion rank, it boosted Ghost-type move power by fifty percent and gave a chance to inflict a Cursed status on the opponent, temporarily locking out two of their randomly selected moves.
The second was the Gazing Eye, a levitating purple eyeball with a slowly rotating cross-shaped pupil. Its effect worked similarly to a Life Orb, sharply increasing Special Attack but draining a small amount of stamina after each move.
The third was the Void Feather, a semi-transparent black feather that radiated a bone-deep chill. Its effect made a Ghost-type Pokemon's presence even harder to pin down or touch, abstract as that sounded. Like the other two, it was S-rank.
Kairos looked at the three items and felt the corner of his mouth pull up.
All three were exceptional. In a gacha pull, landing any one of them would count as hitting the jackpot.
He was just about to call out Gengar and Chandelure to figure out the best way to split them up when his hand paused and he tucked all three away.
A dark silhouette had appeared at his side without a sound.
Marshadow.
It always showed up like that, no footsteps, no warning, just suddenly there.
"Hey. I just picked up something good on you. I could feel it."
Marshadow's large eyes were fixed on him, its nose twitching a couple of times as though catching a trace left in the air.
Kairos shrugged.
"No idea what you're talking about. You're imagining things."
Marshadow stared at him.
It had clearly sensed a very distinct energy signature, and that kind of feeling did not lie. Something good was definitely on him.
This guy...
"Fine. But honestly?" Marshadow let out a short breath. "You actually came back alive again. Color me surprised."
Kairos shrugged again.
"While I'm at it, I found out a few things on that trip."
He gave Marshadow a rundown of what had happened in the Reverse World, leaving out the part about agreeing to help Giratina recover its power of faith and only mentioning that he had reached some kind of agreement with it.
Marshadow listened with its eyes getting progressively wider, its expression landing somewhere between stunned and completely unconvinced.
"Are you sure you weren't hit with some kind of illusion? Because the way you're describing this..."
Kairos said nothing. He held out Ho-Oh's feather.
"Not even a little. Here."
Having the feather in hand was its own safety net. Even if Giratina turned out to be playing him, he could use the feather to break the mark before being pulled back into the Reverse World. He was not entirely without options.
Marshadow stared at the feather, its quiet, sacred aura radiating outward, and finally some of the skepticism left its face, though a trace of disbelief held on. Still, it found itself agreeing completely with what Kairos said next.
"But if that one is on your side, then the Ghost World is going to be fine."
The words had barely left its mouth when something seemed to occur to Marshadow, and its expression shifted.
"Hold on. You said it'll help take on Spiritomb?"
Kairos nodded.
"That's right. And honestly, it makes complete sense. Spiritomb essentially wrecked its home and left it stuck in a forced sleep. It wanting to settle that personally is more than fair."
Marshadow looked put out and pursed its lips.
"Tch. I was looking forward to seeing Ho-Oh show up. With that many people around to witness it, it definitely would have pulled in a huge amount of faith..."
As it talked, its expression shifted into something increasingly distant, its two small claws drifting up to cup its face, nearly getting lost in the daydream before it caught itself and cleared its throat.
"Ahem. Well, fine. It's not like we can reach Ho-Oh right now anyway. We'll have to wait."
"But speaking of which, now that the Ghost World situation looks like it's under control, when are you actually going to follow through on what we agreed? Helping Ho-Oh recover the power of faith?"
Kairos thought for a second.
"Right now."
Marshadow went still.
"Right now? What are you going to do?"
It had only brought it up as a reminder, not wanting Kairos to forget. There was no real urgency behind it, since gathering the power of faith was no small task and Marshadow knew that.
But Kairos looked completely relaxed about it.
Even knowing Kairos was not the type to say things he did not mean, Marshadow felt uneasy.
Could he actually pull that off?
~~~
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