Chapter 45 - Gone

Shadow Sneak fared much better than teleportation for inertia compensation, so we did not end up tumbling to the ground in a heap when Zachary's jellicent pushed us out of the shadows and into a dim cavern. Ben fell to his knees, visibly weakened by the fight and rapid teleports he'd pulled off, while his trainer stonily recalled the bloated ghost which had brought us there.

Both of them were so occupied with being worn out that they missed out on me thinking hard. Just one word, really, and I felt the distant tug of his consciousness against mine.

So I just needed to buy time, and I would have the truth. But why was I getting the feeling that I had missed something?

It took him all of eight seconds to appear, and he did so quietly enough.

"NiceGuy?" Armando the hypno asked warily, as he eyed Zachary and Ben across the room from me. "Could you kindly let us know what is the matter here before we end up fighting?"

"Yes, that would be good," Ben hissed, his eyes glowing red. "And now."

I pointed at Zachary, Armando's gaze following my gesture. "He says he had to choose between me and him; I want to know what he's going on about."

Armando sniffed and twirled his pendulum slowly. "You do realise he has a bloody gardevoir here? What kind of gardevoir allows its trainer's mind to be probed in their presence, pray tell?"

"Exactly," I nodded, grinning despite myself. "Zachary owes me one fuck of a huge explanation, and I'm sure Ben won't hold it against me.

"So you're going to probe his memories for the truth, and Ben gets to keep his trainer safe. Am pretty sure you've already got the backup on standby, so he'll have to choose between saving his trainer and killing me if Zachary refuses. Nice angle we have here, don't we?"

Zachary, to his credit, merely leaned back against the cavern wall, looking defeated. "Ben, just keep an eye on the hypno."

With a nod to Ben, Armando stepped up to Zachary, pendulum swinging in a gentle arc at eye level. Ben straightened up, standing barely an arm's length away from his trainer. As Armando's eyes started glowing with a pulsating blue light, I thought I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, but decided to ignore it - backup would be after Zachary before they went for me, in any case.

Still, something felt off about the whole thing. It seemed... too easy, as though Armando had agreed too fast, or something. What was it?

"Done," Armando announced, drawing my attention back to him as he stepped away from Zachary. "Here is the truth you sought."

Fragmented images seemed to appear and disappear in the empty space between us, showing me a mosaic of the memories which had made Zachary do what he had done. I saw Ben holding Adrian in mid-air as the insane slowking told Zachary just what he'd told me.

"You will have to choose between your life and the boy's," Adrian rumbled, eyes rolling about in their sockets, "for his fate is singular, and yours is with an inverse. The time will come when he is poised to fly free, when you will then make the choice to bind your conscience with chains of guilt."

Before I could even bat an eyelid at the mad psychic's flowery language, slow clapping from somewhere at the edges of the cavern snapped us all out of our reverie.

"Well done indeed, Armando. Well done," said a chillingly familiar voice. "Now, don't move too suddenly, you lot, or things might get more than a little messy around these parts."

None other than Doctor Esther stepped out of the shadows, flanked by a scolipede and a gengar. Zachary and Ben shrank back against the wall, and his empoleon was out in a flash.

And that was when everything finally came together with horrifying clarity. How I had known Armando before leaving Canalave and why the poisonous pokemon near port control were always so well-behaved, among other things.

"You!" Zachary beat me to it. "I always suspected you were a trainer, doc, but I must say you've surprised me."

Doctor Esther shrugged. "It pays to keep a low profile when you're in my position, Harding. And don't think I didn't notice you sending this sweet, polite assistant of yours to read my personnel file."

He frowned, pulling me behind him and his team. "You're a doctor. Why would you need to keep a low profile?"

"Well, yes, that part of my work needs no secrecy," she nodded, gesturing to her gengar, who slipped away through a wall. "But to everyone in Canalave, I am merely the military's chief medical officer.

"The officers in Intelligence or those who outrank them, though, they address me as Game Master Kulare."

My blood ran cold on hearing that title. The Game Masters were deep-rooted Intelligence agents, all of which had advanced martial arts training and teams of League-worthy pokemon at their disposal. Most had been recruited from the remnants of the Fuschia gym as well as isolated ranger units, but most of the newer ones were complete mysteries and fit into society perfectly.

Just like Doctor Esther had back at Canalave.

I snapped out of my little daze while she was still going on, "- now, if you'll just recall your teams and wait quietly till Loren gets back with my backup, I promise I'll pull some strings and arrange fast deaths for the two of you."

Zachary turned back to look at me, grimaced, and winked. As he turned back to face her, Ben spoke to me.

"Darren's going to rush the scolipede, and Zachary's going to break her neck. Get Silas out, keep Newton in. Armando can't hear us, I'll deal with him."

Before I could register even half of that, Zachary and his empoleon charged forward. Armando's head jerked downwards seemingly of its own accord and slammed into the ground, while Ben flew towards him, eyes glowing like hot coals. I barely remembered Ben's instructions to release Silas until a tangled mess of battered empoleon and bleeding scolipede hurtled past me.

There was a flash of light - extremely bright for a pokeball release - as Silas emerged, and when he had, I saw why. Two pokemon had been released, and only one of them had been mine.

Doctor Esther lay unmoving on the ground, her head turned at an unnatural angle from her body. But next to her corpse was a seething, pulsating mass of tentacles that had already ensnared Zachary like an anemone. More and more tentacles seemed to be growing out of the mass - already nearly six feet tall - almost completely covering Zachary.

I was familiar enough with the species, given they'd been deployed widely all over Sinnoh as daytime street police after the terrorist attacks. With a nervous system so scattered that nothing next to complete dismemberment of its - heavily concealed - body core could kill it, heightened speed as well as aggression in sunlight, concealed venom glands in its primary vines, lacking any significant perception of pain, and possessing hundreds of prehensile vines rivaling the tensile strength of bridge suspension cables, it was considered one of the deadliest ambush hunters ever to evolve in Sinnoh's rainforests. Unwittingly or otherwise, the last pokemon Doctor Esther had released was definitely a monstrous one.

But even those tangrowth stationed at street corners paled in comparison to the behemoth whose compacted vines were now piling up like a pot about to boil over. If that thing got him too close to its primary vines, he was done for.

"Silas, Aurora Beam the tangrowth!" I ordered, even as the gigantic pile of vines collapsed in under its own weight, spreading out across almost the entire cavern like a living, moving, grasping wave that rapidly swept all of us off our feet. The cavern floor, easily large enough to accommodate a small convoy of trucks, was buried in vines in mere seconds. "Quickly!"

He complied, firing away at broad dispersal, the weakened beam still being enough to send some of the smaller vines curling in on themselves and backing off. With a rumbling groan, the tangrowth swung more of its vines in our direction. Ben and Armando were nowhere to be seen, and Zachary's empoleon looked closer to a kindergartner's penguin drawing than a pokemon. The scolipede was... plastered all over one of the cavern walls.

At the edge of my vision, I saw it still had Zachary trussed up and was slowly reeling him in. Ambush hunter, lack of sunlight, cavern. Thank the gods!

"Get the vines near Zachary!" I bellowed, struggling to keep the snake-like vines from securing their rubbery grip on me. "Silas!"

"Can't see him!" he cried. "Too much movement!"

I swore, realising that Silas' echolocation was mostly useless thanks to the tangrowth's explosion of vines, even as my left arm got pinned behind me by even more of them. With no choice left, I gave Silas the only other order I could think of. "Mist! Maximum chill!"

His outer shells opened just slightly, and a few vines tried to snake into the opening. Seconds later, they hastily retreated, tendrils of white mist creeping out after them. It didn't take long for Silas to churn out enough mist to look like an overturned flask of liquid nitrogen, effectively ridding himself of any vines within a two-meter radius.

The vines around me had already trapped both of my arms, and were methodically binding me up. "A little this way, if you can!"

Silas' response was great given how unpredictable mist attacks could be. The smaller vines, already stretched tight around me, snapped cleanly, whereas the larger ones sluggishly attempted to unwind themselves. Even as I freed my left arm, I stretched my a neck to see where Zachary was, and what I saw nearly made my heart stop.

The tangrowth already had its primary vines out, and had even bared some space between the smaller vines holding him to make room for the larger vines. That in itself was a tangrowth's typical poisoning stance, but it was the primary vines themselves which shocked me.

Stretching out to the cavern ceiling and as thick as telephone poles, it was a wonder that the tangrowth had managed to conceal them for that long. Coiling and undulating like overgrown worms, they gracefully arched downwards, seeking the only source of heat available in the morass of vines beneath them: Zachary.

"Keep misting!" I screamed at Silas, half-stumbling over whatever vines were still holding feebly onto me. "Zachary! Zachary!"

He was conscious, that much was clear from where I was. Silas' mist was beating back the veritable sea of vines, but too slowly to make a difference by this point. The retreating vines revealed Armando's corpse, his face flayed open and his broken ribs protruding out of a bleeding mess that had once been his chest. Not far from his corpse was a very much alive yet equally as immobilised Ben, who was trying with visible strain to telekinetically free himself.

Time seemed to slow down as the tangrowth delicately, almost lovingly stung Zachary with its primary vines, surprisingly gentle for appendages their size. Once per vine. As each snapped back from his body, I saw the faint, purple sheen of fresh venom at their tips. Zachary's eyes went wide as saucers, visibly reddening within seconds.

"Icicle Spear!" I shrieked, and thanks to their impressive size, even Silas couldn't miss those two primary vines.

His aim couldn't have been better or luckier. One icicle went low and must have hit close to the body core, since the tangrowth began spasming, while of the remaining four icicles, three tore cleanly through one of the gargantuan vines and one skewered the other at an angle. The mutilated vine collapsed outright, gushing pools of yellowish sap that smelled like anti-freeze.

"Again! And don't hit Zachary!"

Silas only managed three icicles this time, but they were enough. He'd aimed a little lower, and all three stuck fast like needles in a pincushion. Instantly, every vine in the cavern went limp.

As if on cue, we received more company.

A gengar - likely Doctor Esther's - Shadow Sneaked into the cavern with a commando. The two of them hesitated upon seeing the dead tangrowth, which caused the commando to trigger his emergency beacon and release, of all things, a pikachu.

"Get the cloyster!"

I didn't hesitate in releasing Newton. "Silas, get the commando, Newton, get the pikachu! Ben, the vegetable is dead so get the gengar!"

"Gengar? Fucking hell!" he coughed, turning away from his trainer's limp form for a moment.

While the three pokemon on my side were handling the opposition, I scuttled over to Zachary. With some effort, I got the remaining vines off him. The puncture wounds on Zachary's chest were already turning an ugly shade of purple, the skin around them raised and weeping.

It had stung him on his chest.

I had seen it happening, but I hadn't processed the thought, so to speak. Now it hit home. The tangrowth had stung Zachary in the chest. Using venom that developed as a form of slow, external digestive enzyme. 'Flesh-eating bacteria going for the marathon instead of the sprint', as my teachers said. Made sense, given tangrowth had slow metabolisms and didn't mind making a single catch last weeks.

We had time, but perhaps just within half an hour at most.

"Surrender-"

What was probably the commando's attempt at asking us to surrender - a newbie, by the sounds of it - ended instead with the sound of Silas clamping shut over him hard enough to fracture his armour. I turned around to see Ben up to his elbows in the flailing gengar's eye sockets, looking completely wild, Newton happily taunting the apparently clueless pikachu into throwing more electric attacks at him, and Silas ejecting what resembled two parts of a commando suit from between his outer shells.

I couldn't help but sigh and roll my eyes a little. They must have been really desperate for commandos.

"Gotcha, cunt!" Ben snarled, viciously jabbing both his arms forward till they were buried to the shoulder in the gengar's face, his chest spike impaling the squealing ghost cleanly between the eyes and his claws somehow not coming out of the gengar's back. Wispy, purple smoke started billowing out of the gengar's mouth, before it finally lost cohesion and dissolved into a mass of acidic-smelling slime. "Motherfucking amateurs. The tangrowth was better than the rest of them."

Before I could say anything, a metallic voice spoke up, "I most certainly agree, my good man!"

Wearily, all of us turned to regard the new arrival to the scene. Or, as it turned out, new arrivals.

They were a trio of machine-like digimon, all with the same basic form. A metal sphere for a body, cables and pipes forming arms as well as legs, and round eyes in the exact same positions for all three of them.

They did have distinct appearances, though. The simplest had a grey sphere for its body, red shoes for feet, and what appeared to be boxing gloves as hands. The most mechanical-looking of the trio had a copper body, something resembling a welder's mask over its eyes, a wicked-looking set of claws over its right hand, and what seemed to be a modified gatling gun in place of a left hand.

As for the third, it was clearly their leader. It had a golden body, polished leather shoes, white-gloved hands, a royal blue cape, and even a tiny crown on top of its spherical body, cocked at a jaunty angle.

"What now?" I snapped. "Newton, keep the rat busy. Silas and Ben, to me!"

"No need for further unpleasantries," tutted the crowned digimon. "Please, allow me to introduce myself. I am Princemamemon, Lord of the Mamemon, and these are my associates, Lady Mamemon as well as Sir Metalmamemon. We are pleased to make your acquaintance."

"Thanks for the pleasure, Your Highness," Ben's voice could have caused diabetes, it could have, "but we have a poisoned human to deal with, and we are getting out of here. Are you going to let us leave, or not?"

Princemamemon took a few steps back, and his 'associates' stepped between us. "I am afraid duty forces me to stand in your path. Know, however, that had circumstances differed, we of the Mamemon clans would have offered you any assistance we could."

He frowned. "Lady, Sir, disable them."

Exhausted as we were, the pokemon barely managed to put up any resistance when Mamemon pounced on Ben and knocked him out, and Metalmamemon tried to claw open Silas' shell. Seeing that Newton had managed to trap that annoying pikachu with a Mud Slap, I decided to cut our losses. Returning Newton, I commenced our retreat.

Ben never had a pokeball, to my knowledge, so I threw Zachary over my left shoulder, and went for a running tackle at Mamemon. Hitting her felt like ramming a brick wall, but she did roll over in surprise, allowing me to throw Ben over my other shoulder.

"Silas, freeze it!"

Metalmamemon frantically backpedalled, his visor clouded with frost. He used his blades to try and scrape the frost off, only to receive more ice to his face.

I got behind Silas, keeping my voice lowered. "Check the fields. Any gaps we can use to teleport out of here?"

"Just a minute, a little occupied...," he muttered, "yes, but it's to nowhere, and it might be a one-way teleport to that place."

"Ocean?"

"Near enough."

"Get us there!"

The cavern appeared to fold in half as Silas slipped us into one of the gaps between the teleportation-jamming fields. All I saw of the cavern before it vanished was the pikachu working itself free, pouncing after us, and a grim-faced Princemamemon firing a miniature missile in our direction.

Unfortunately for the pikachu, it jumped right into the missile's trajectory.

xxx

It was sunset. We had started the day with an armada and a blockade of Sootopolis. For a while, seemed to be that we would be ending the day with the destruction of Sootopolis.

Those millions of deaths felt... Heavy.

But it was the last death I saw that day which felt the worst. And it should have, given that it was entire my fault.

In my haste and desperation to flee from the Mamemon trio, I had forgotten one of the most fundamental rules of teleportation: do not teleport animals - humans included - under the influence of localised medication or toxins.

When I got Silas to teleport us out of that cave, the teleportation process basically ensured that every particle of tangrowth venom in Zachary's body was evenly dispersed. The human body has eleven functional systems, and so that same venom went into all eleven in the blink of an eye. Death was instantaneous, and his whole body had turned a sickly shade of greenish-grey when we'd arrived at our destination.

Ben didn't blame me, and that was the worst part, somehow. He cried, naturally enough for a gardevoir, but did little other than to embrace me and remind me that Zachary had always wanted a burial at sea.

Silas had brought us to a small, wooded island not too distant from Pacifidlog - I could see it in the distance - and so we'd built a little raft, and loaded on Zachary's body with a decent load of dried grasses and other flammable bits you'd find about an island.

"I'm sorry, Ben," I said, as Ben stepped up onto the raft. "He- he chose me, right? Whatever it meant, I'm going to make it count. You can count on that."

For the first time since he'd seen his trainer's corpse, Ben had a small smile to offer. "I know you will."

The raft pushed off, easily navigating the currents without oars nor a tiller thanks to Ben. When he'd reached a decent distance from the shore, all it took was a Will-O-Wisp to set the makeshift pyre alight, and before long, all I could see was Ben's shadowy outline hovering above the water next to the fire.

"Classic funeral for the general, eh?" Silas remarked quietly.

"He was a good man, in his own way," was all I could bring myself to say.

Newton butted my hip with his head. "So what do we do now?"

I watched as Ben encased the entire fire in what looked like a sphere of greenish light, before gently sending it beneath the waves.

"I wish I could answer that, Newton.

"I really do."