ASTRA
I. Handfuls of Dust
The most horrific thing about the monster is how closely it resembles a human.
It has enough features to make it unrecognizable if she doesn't look too closely: the coarse mass of static-filled yellow fur that casts its silhouette into harsh, disjointed shadows; the knife-like claws on both of its oversized feet; the way that its tail, banded in shocks of gold and black, lashes wildly behind it with a mind of its own. But she is looking too closely, so she can't help but see herself in the skewered electabuzz's hunched shoulders and its defiantly curled fists and its narrowed eyes—
all the better to see you with
—Astra can't help it. She looks away. Her blade yanks upward and then outward, ripping back out of the creature's chest. It slumps to the ground, electricity fizzling weakly between its horns. She looks back when she hears the thud. It isn't a strange sight to her any more, but it hasn't gotten any easier in the passing years. Astra steps heavily over the electabuzz's body and walks toward the smoking settlement, feeling the rich rumble of ozone around her. She keeps the sword drawn warily, even as the electabuzz's blood sizzles away on its surface.
Asi is thirstier than normal; before today, the blade hadn't tasted flesh in weeks. Astra can feel its weight on her arm, can hear its parched growls almost like a heartbeat deeply in synch with her own. She's started to understand the ebb and flow of the sword better. Enough to know that when it gets to this point, where the dark blue of its tassel is wrapped so tightly around her forearm that she can barely feel her own blood in her fingertips, she needs to give Asi something soon. If she doesn't, it will start to pull the blood from the only place it can find, until it sucks her dry.
That's what happened to the last wielder. Astra's lasted longer than most.
Soon, she almost whispers back to the blade, but she licks her chapped lips against the blistering wind instead. They both know that soon is never soon enough, and that even now, it craves more.
There's a rumble of thunder in the distance, one comes not from the cloudless desert sky above, but from the ruined houses below. She starts running, past the limp body of a jolteon, past the corpse of a middle-aged man that's been smeared across fifteen feet of sandstone. Past the charred rubble of what was once a town, past the broken road, past the furrows that looked like they'd been smitten from the heavens. Astra can almost pity them. But the people of Phenac were foolish, trying to keep a settlement this far out in the wastes. Pyrite, and the scant protection that it still offers, is a good hundred miles west of here. An altogether human arrogance led them to believe that it'd be safe to teeter this far out into the dark and think they'd come out unscathed, as if the outlands of Orre didn't have teeth and claws and the power to bend nature to its heel.
The thunder rumbles again. Closer, this time. Astra can feel the electricity rising in the air, tingling all the way up Asi's hilt, around the tassel that binds them together, and up to the hairs on the back of her neck, standing sharply at attention. Whatever's down there is stronger, much stronger, than what she's been picking up here.
Asi, thirsty as ever, tugs her down towards it.
She hears the clash before she sees it, feels the reverberations of a collision emanating so loudly that she can feel the echoes tingling up her bones even after the sound fades. There's a drawn-out shriek, not quite like anything she's ever heard before—this one is long, drawn out, some strange mix of the bass undertones of a charizard interwoven with the keening trill of an electabuzz.
And then she hears a sound that sends chills down her spine, one that makes her more afraid than any of the bloodied monsters she's seen today. She's seen a dozen villages burn in the past year, but she's never heard a sound like this here, never expected it, never told herself what she'd think when she finally—
Hears the defiant, countering scream of a human.
Here's the thing about humans, the lesson Astra learned the hard way. They might never have gotten the blessings the way that pokémon did, may never have been given teeth and claws and sheer power. But what they did get was far worse, far more deadly, far more beneficial in keeping them alive in this hellscape.
She sees the girl first, a tiny wisp of a thing, probably no more than thirteen. She's got the same gaunt body that all the survivors do; hunger's carved her features sharply into her face. Her face is smeared with a thin patina of ash and blood.
Astra sees the bird unfurl second. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of affair: one second, the girl is raising her arm skyward, where it glints unnaturally in the desert sun, and the next second, there's a huge explosion of metal as a huge, robotic bird sprouts out of the joint where her elbow might've been. It's a huge, hulking thing, easily dwarfing the girl beside it. Looks almost like a skarmory, minus the organic bits.
She sees the electivire third, mentally thanks her time with Cipher for giving her a name for this monstrosity. Where the electabuzz was lean and wiry, this one's hulking and oversized. Tangles of fur bristle with static. Fists the size of car tires are slowly flexing and unflexing in the face of its new foe.
When the gods parceled out their gifts and saw fit to place defanged, slow bipeds on the same earth as a fifty-foot aquatic dragon capable of levelling mountains, they gave the bipeds only tenacity. And somehow that proved enough. Kick a pidgey out of the nest and it'll fly away. Defeat an arcanine for the right to rule the pack and it'll stay down and lick its wounds, keep its head low for the new alpha. But humans, well. Kick it out of its nest and it'll build a new, bigger one. There was never a defeat, no matter how many times you pushed them down, until every last one of them was dead.
This was why places like Orre would never truly settle, not as long as humanity remembered that they'd once had a foothold. It didn't matter if the pokémon had suddenly mutated into uncontrollable killing machines that could reject pokéballs. It didn't matter if these monstrous shadow pokémons were more powerful, more vicious, than their tamed counterparts, and filled the biological niche that Orre had once lacked—that of apex predators. It didn't matter if shadow pokémon had received the one gift that their creators could give, and that they had the same desire to defend and destroy. All that mattered was that humanity had tenacity still, and they had the memory of a time they'd been pushed back.
"Shyena!" the girl is screaming, pointing the mechanical pokémon toward the real one like it's some sort of farce of what they used to call battling. Not like she's old enough to remember.
Astra weighs her options. Electivire tails sell for a fair amount in the Under. Something about the capacitance. But she isn't sure there's a price high enough that'll make her fight the kid for it. The bird looks vicious.
Asi has different thoughts. It wants all three of them, and it tugs at her arm insistently. She grits her teeth. Time to feed, then.
The electivire catches sight of her first; she's approaching the girl and the bird from behind. She sees the comprehension dawn across its face as it's about to wind up a solid punch at the bird's midsection. Instead, it aims its blow downward, slamming one electrified fist into the ground. A spray of earth and dirt rises up, spitting into Astra's eyes and making her pause her assault.
The bird has no such qualms, soaring easily over the makeshift barricade and clipping the electivire between the eyes. The electric pokémon screeches in pain, but then its twin tails lash upward and wrap tightly around the bird's wings.
Astra knows what's coming next. She shields her face. Not to avoid looking at it, but to avoid-
Blue arcs of electricity course between the electivire and the bird, so bright. She can hear the girl shriek in pain from behind her, but Astra's already moving. There won't be a better opening. She surges forward, steel-toed boots making heavy impact on the ground, and then she lets Asi guide her hand toward the electivire's heart. Distracted as the electivire is with its first target, it doesn't notice her until it's too late, and Asi's already buried halfway up the hilt in its chest.
The electivire responds by raising its arm and punching her in the ribs. She flies back, ripping Asi with her, and blood begins to spurt freely from where she'd hit it, watering the parched earth.
Asi drinks deep, too. She feels its strength growing, understands what will happen now that it's gotten a taste of an opponent.
She finds herself staring at the hilt of the sword as the blood slowly drains across the surface, frantically trying to make sure that it focuses on that and not the thin crimson trickle that's leaking out from where the electivire threw her into the rock. Astra's mind goes in a million directions at once, sends her images of the girl kneeling frantically at the side of her bird, trying to repair the sizzling hole in its midsection. Flashes over to the hulking yellow monster pounding its fists across its chest, spurting electrical sparks across its own body. Reminds her of the study Cipher had once done on pokémon with the ability to absorb electrical energy and convert it into kinetic energy—
Oh.
Then the electivire is running at her on all fours, fingers gouging great holes into the ground. She isn't sure if it's her vision that's causing the tremors or the weight of the pokémon barreling towards her. Blearily, she points Asi forward, but the blade is suddenly so, so heavy in her hands.
Up. She has to get up.
The bird is suddenly back, screeching across the sky like an arrow, and it bodily tackles the electivire to the ground. It isn't enough to knock it entirely off course—stopping it would be like jumping in front of a train—but it's enough to send them both skidding into the dirt beside her, enough to jolt Astra out of her half-concussed state. She scrambles to her feet. Limps to the pair of downed fighters on the ground. Raises Asi high, and then lets it plunge back into the electivire's neck, tracing out a crimson smile across its throat.
She collapses to the ground, breathing heavily. She can feel Asi chuckling beside her, and she lets the blade drink deep.
Behind her, the girl screams. Short footsteps announce her arrival, and then she's shoving Astra out of the way, hands threading into the electivire's matted fur. At first, her words are so frantic that Astra can't even understand them, but even when the girl slows down, they don't make any sense: "I didn't think you were going to kill it!"
Astra's so stunned she doesn't even bother responding for a second. She looks between the weapons both she and the girl have fashioned for themselves—Asi, with its unquenchable thirst and eversharp blade; the bird, with its huge wings and sharpened talons. The thing is still a threat, and the girl is an idiot if she thinks it's anything less.
"What were you going to do?" Astra asks at last. Her voice is cracked with disuse.
The girl's still got her head bowed, trying to staunch the electivire's wound even as it drains into the thirsty earth around her. Splashes of hot, red blood lace around her wrists like a tattoo. "I… I thought we could hit it hard enough and… and convince it to stop being so violent."
They're both heavily concussed. That's the only reason Astra could be hearing this bullshit the way she is. She makes a point to look at the cratered settlement around her. It wasn't very big—probably twenty or thirty people before it was destroyed—but that wasn't the aftermath of something that could be convinced.
Astra sighs. "Where are your parents, girl?"
The girl stiffens. One hand points toward a pile of rubble.
Of course. Astra doesn't have time for this. She heaves herself over to the electivire's feet, where its twin tails snake out. The blood hasn't stained them yet, but if she doesn't harvest them soon, they'll get soaked, and the smell will be permanent. Which, she's been told, ruins the price. "Then let me teach you something that they didn't," she says darkly. She decapitates the tails with a swift slash from Asi. "You don't save things that can kill you. You can't."
The girl doesn't look up. One bloodied hand is leaving streaked fingerprints across the hull of her metallic bird. "I don't believe that."
Once upon a time, Orre had believed in heroes. There'd been plucky kids and brave adventures and everything in between. Astra had watched the news; she remembered what it was like. But it'd all been hopeless in the end—humanity had inadvertently been creating their own worst nightmare. In patiently believing that pokémon would help them gain greater power, in trusting in something stronger than themselves, they'd all collectively sealed their fates.
That's how they'd lost the first time. When the plucky heroes thought that their beloved companions could be saved, rather than slain. And then they'd all lost.
Astra bends down and picks up the electivire's tails with her free hand. Pretends not to be off-put by the way that the bird's wings are twitching insistently, as if it's still powering itself back on. "You will, soon."
The girl looks up this time, and fixes Astra with eyes that are too resolute to understand the truths everyone in Orre already knows, too black to be fully human. "I don't," she repeats, "believe in that."
Astra sees it written all over the girl's eyes, all across her face and her unnaturally-bright hair—shocks of gold and black—and the realization washes over her like a cold blast of wind. She shivers despite the searing heat. Looks over at the twitching hull of the bird. Connects the dots.
After people realized that pokémon weren't enough to stop shadow pokémon, they tried something stupider, something far more desperate.
Someone, somewhere, had realized that if they couldn't safely give resolve to creatures with power, like pokémon, they could try giving the power to the things with tenacity instead.
"You're one of them, aren't you?" Astra asks heavily. "A morph, right?" She should've known back when she'd heard the thunder; electivire rarely go for ranged attacks.
The girl seems to make some sort of understanding deep inside of herself, and then she nods.
This time, it isn't Asi who lunges forward when the blade aims for the throat. It's Astra.
She doesn't close her eyes this time. It's the least she can do, facing this monster that so closely resembles a girl.
But she can't save the things that can kill her.