The call came in around midnight, just as Steven was finishing the review of his plans for tomorrow. The ringing didn't startle him, because he'd been expecting it—his whole body had been clenched like a fist for the past week waiting for it to come in. He didn't want to answer it. But then, there were plenty of things in his life that he didn't want to do. He picked it up anyway.
On the screen, Wallace's face was pasty and free of its usual makeup, his seafoam-green hair hung loose down his back, and exhaustion radiated off every inch of him. Being the Champion aged you prematurely, and even without that, neither Steven nor Wallace were as young as they'd used to be. Through the fatigue, Wallace's eyes shone, sharp and full of judgment.
"I am once again going to try and make you see reason. Don't do this."
A lifetime of media training was the only thing that kept Steven from audibly sighing as he turned back to his papers. "What am I doing, Wallace?"
"Don't. You were Champion before me; you know how easy it is for me to keep tabs on you. You're moving ahead with your plan, and I'm telling you now, the best-case scenario is that you'll die in the process."
"Your objection has been noted, just as it has been every other time we've had this conversation," Steven said. "Going forward, can you please refrain from using my old informant network to spy on me? That's gauche even by your standards."
Wallace's voice hardened, dropping in pitch. "Steven. Listen to me, I'm begging you. It's not just about the sacrilege—this is foolish—"
"Is it? Tell me, why is it sacrilegious and foolish when I do it, but not when you do it?"
"Don't start this argument again. I don't do what you're attempting to do. It's not the same."
"You do. Just because you dress it up in costumes and chants and call it a sacred ritual, that doesn't make it different. The only difference is that my plan is actually going to work."
"You are trifling with forces that mankind was never meant to understand—"
"Which, again, you do all the time—"
"It's not the same!" At last, Steven looked back at the phone. Wallace had been on the cover of more magazines than any other Hoenn gym leader or champion combined. But if the press got a look at what his face was doing right now, they'd never invite him in for a glamour shot again. Rage, pleading, and despair all mixed into one twisted expression as he repeated, "You cannot do this!"
"Why? Because I don't have the right blood, so I can't be trusted?"
"Don't." The word was hushed and low. Dangerous.
Steven was no psychic, but in this moment, he could see two paths laid out in front of him that led to two different futures. There was a future where he apologized and recanted and hung up the phone. Wallace still wouldn't be happy, but it would earn them perhaps another month of uneasy armistice, and maybe someday Steven could bring him around. Then, there was the future where Steven dug in, defended his position, and declared his casus belli. In this future, there would be no more calls, no more conversations, no more pleading; whatever shreds of a relationship he and Wallace still had would be gone. The clear answer here was peace; in the past, Steven had always chosen peace. But today…. Perhaps it was the late hour, or the promise of tangible progress, or the knowledge that he might well die tomorrow, but today was different. Whatever the reason, today, Steven chose war.
"How much is it worth to you, Wallace, to be special? For your clan to be the only ones who're allowed to do what you do?"
Wallace's expression tightened. "Steven." His name was a breath, a plea, a prayer—but the prayer fell on deaf ears. These words had been bubbling on Steven's tongue since the day of the Calamity, and now that they'd broken free, there was no stopping them.
"Is it worth Hoenn's future? Was it worth the lives of everyone in Sootopolis?"
"Don't do this. Stop."
"How many people died? Not even in all of Hoenn, just in the city. Your city. Your people. Your clan. Do you care about them at all?"
"Of course I care!" Wallace yanked the phone closer to his face, camera focusing in on eyes that bulged in righteous fury; Steven could see white all the way around the irises. "I will mourn them every day for the rest of my life! You know I will!"
"Then prove it. What have you done to honor them? As Champion, what have you done to make sure something like the Calamity never happens again?"
"You are going to cause another Calamity, Steven! You are the menace you're seeking to stop!"
Steven took in a long, slow breath. He remembered the first week after the Calamity, as he and Wallace sifted through the remains of a fallen city. By day they pulled away stone slabs and dug through rubble and lined up the dead, and by night he held Wallace in his arms, listening to his sobs and to the pounding of unnatural rain on the roof of the temporary shelter. He'd had to hold Wallace each night in order to prevent him from running out alone into the darkness, continuing the excavation with bare and bloody hands. They had both sworn, back then, that this would never happen again; that next time, they would stop disaster before it struck. Pretty words, but words weren't the same as action. As far as Steven could tell, he was the only one that had held to their promise.
"If either of us holds responsibility for a future Calamity, it'll be you. Think about how that'll feel then, with two failures under your belt. Think about it, and then try to see things my way." With that, he disconnected the call and shut off his phone, banishing Wallace out of his study and back to Ever Grande City.
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Yes, the plan was foolish. Not the plan; the plan was as solid as it had ever been. But this part of the plan was the fever dream of a madman named Jin. One of Jin's aides had called Steven just under a week ago, frantic, explaining that Jin had announced his intention to delve down through the final floors of New Mauville by himself. The workers they'd hired for the job weren't moving quickly enough for his liking, and he was fed up with waiting. Going in alone was a suicide mission, but Jin simply did not care. It had taken all of Steven's leverage and persuasion to stop him from charging in that very day and getting himself killed. He'd talked him into waiting a little longer, forming a plan, and letting Steven come with him.
Space folded, and Steven was standing in the top floor of New Mauville, alongside Aleister—the Alakazam who had served his father before his father's retirement and now served him. The only floor that had been built above ground, it had been meant to act as a visitor center and showroom for curious tourists. Of course, the project had never been finished. The planned plaques and displays had never been made, and today this floor served as a base camp for excavation workers. Benches were lined haphazardly throughout the open space, lockers for protective gear and personal effects were pushed against the walls, and tables took up what space was left, piled with computers and surveyor's gear and fast-food wrappers. At the center of it all was Jin, sitting on a bench with two sets of steel-toed boots, respirators, hard hats, and white protective suits beside him. He arched an eyebrow at Steven—
"Don't even start. I'm right on time."
"Nobody saw you coming here, did they?"
"I teleported, Jin. Nobody knows I'm here except you, Aleister, and Halcyon." He nodded to Aleister. "Make sure the area's secure."
"Sir." The Alakazam bowed his head and blinked away to the wall. His eyes glowed a pale pink as he began a psychic patrol. Steven, satisfied, went over to take a seat on a bench opposite Jin.
The man looked terrible. If Wallace was exhausted, then Jin was the walking dead. The bags under his eyes were even darker and deeper than the last time they'd spoken, and his rumpled shirt seemed to hang off his shoulders. Steven had hoped Jin would get some rest in the weeks since the… accident, given that his stream of challengers had slowed, but Jin was like a Boltund; if he didn't have a job to keep him occupied every second of the day, he would burst. Already he'd grown antsy with the silence between him and had begun untying his shoes. Steven began doing the same, but was interrupted by a flash of light. He looked up.
"S-supposition. All urge is blind save when there is knowl-l-l-lege, and all knowledge is vain save when there is work." Voxel, Jin's Porygon-Z, hovered in front of Steven, limbs spinning on their axes as its form guttered like a digital candle.
"I hope you brought a box for that thing," Steven said. "It's going to get more broken the further down we go."
"I'm not an idiot, Steven," Jin replied—his favorite refrain. "And I had our programmers work on a dampening function. It should help offset some of the feedback." He winced, then, and raised his hands to massage his forehead and temples. Steven frowned.
"If you're not feeling well, we can—"
"I'm as 'well' as I ever feel. You knew I was an invalid when you brought me on; don't complain about it now."
With Voxel watching and Aleister surveying, Steven and Jin returned to the task of donning polyethylene suits and half-mask respirators. The gear had nothing to do with what they were searching for; it was meant to protect against the mundane hazards of fiberglass, radon, silica, and spores. If Steven's theory about what lay at the bottom of New Mauville was correct, then humans wouldn't need any equipment to protect themselves from it. If his theory was wrong, then there was no equipment in existence that would save them. Finally, when he'd finished suiting up, Steven picked up the three Pokéballs he'd brought with him and dropped them to the ground.
The first to emerge was Halcyon, Steven's pride and joy, the Metagross who had carried him along every step of his journey from company president's son to champion of the region. Moments later came Clarion Prima and Clarion Secunda, a pair of Metang that were Steven and Halcyon's pet project. Among Metagross, Halcyon was unique, not just for their diamond-white color but for their sheer size, cleverness, and strength. They were quite possibly the most powerful Metagross on the planet, and Clarion was a quest to replicate their success. Four Beldum, seeded and watched over by Halcyon themselves to ensure their neural pathways grew in identical patterns, guided into becoming the strongest versions of themselves they could be… Metagross rarely bothered to create new Beldum, much less raise them; a parent Metagross sheparding four Beldum the way to the Metagross stage was something that, to Steven's extensive knowledge, had never been done before. He was fascinated by the possibilities. What would it mean, if you could have two Metagross that were perfect copies of one another? What new potential could it unlock? Could it even reveal a fourth stage in the Beldum line that had never been seen by human eyes?
And beyond that, Halcyon had needed something to keep themselves busy while Steven spent day after day locked up in the office.
"We're ready," Steven said, his voice buzzing through the respirator's speech diaphragm. Halcyon responded with a mental series of rising and falling dashes and dots, custom quaternary code slowed down so that Steven could understand it. Acknowledged. Halcyon, too large to maneuver around the lower floors, would wait here and maintain a link to Clarion. If a distress signal was sent or contact was lost for longer than three minutes, Devon would be contacted with instructions for a rescue mission. Not that it would do much besides offer the rest of Hoenn some closure—if something went drastically wrong, Steven and Jin would be long dead by the time anyone could reach them.
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How best to describe New Mauville? It wasn't just an inverted skyscraper. It had been conceived as an entire underground city. People had meant to live here, to sleep and shop and socialize and work without ever seeing the sun. A depressing proposition, but one which had been offset by its novelty. The upper levels of New Mauville were nearly the size of a city block, though the floors narrowed the deeper one got, just as a skyscraper became thinner as it grew taller. And this meant that the first two stories under the visitor's center, New Mauville's primary utility layer, weren't just a basement—they were an entire complex. Not two separate floors, but a single double-high space with two-story buildings nestled inside it. There were entire networks of generators and transmission stations, communication hubs, facilities to process and distribute groundwater and rainwater, and air handlers to exchange the old air from below with new air from above. All were dormant now, of course, except for the few pieces that had been kept in service all this time to prevent the whole structure from collapsing, and those that the Devon engineers had jury-rigged back to life to support the excavators. Out of all the floors, this one had been the most complete when construction had stopped, and it had best weathered the passage of time and the earthquakes of the Calamity. It was simple enough to pass through it and into the next layer.
The commercial zone, a fifteen-story-high atrium lined with high rises that ran from floor to ceiling, had been meant to hold hotels, offices, restaurants, shops, and even a park and a stadium and a Pokémon Center. Tourists would have been able to explore and residents would have been able to work, mingle, and relax among the towering steel structures, with the ceiling so high above them that they'd be able to forget they were underground at all. But the glorious concepts of the planners and architects had never been realized, and instead of a lavish cityscape, the zone was an overgrown steel jungle. The bones and muscles and sinew of the structures were there, steel having been erected and concrete poured and pipes and ducts run before the project fell apart, but the final layer was missing. Walls were absent, ceilings stood bare, and electrical cables ran everywhere like tangled artificial vines. The only illumination came from the harsh construction spotlights, and the only sounds were the steady drip of unseen water and a high-pitched buzz from ultrasonic repellents. Based on the amount of guano on every horizontal surface, these floors had been home to a massive Zubat colony before the workers had cleared them out.
They'd entered using the main stairway, which was fully open on one side and would eventually have been enclosed in glass to serve as a multi-tiered observation deck. Voxel took the lead, head spinning as it scanned. "Analysis: All hazardous particulate and gas levels within acceptable bounds. Potentially hostile lifeforms minimal. No interference detected. Proclamation: L-l-l-look upon my Works, ye Mighty, and de-spair!"
"Stick to data only, Vox." It was a familiar and useless command; no matter how many times Jin tried to redirect it, Voxel would be back to spouting nonsense five minutes later. A pretty harmless quirk, as far as Porygon-Z went, but an annoying one.
They wound their way down floor after floor. Jin followed Voxel, Steven followed Jin, and Aleister followed Steven, spoon raised as he contained them all in a protective psychic barrier. Clarion Prima and Secunda flanked the group on either side, performing their own scans and beaming updates to Halcyon. But these levels were easy, cleared out and reinforced by endless teams of workers over the past two months, and danger was minimal. The problems wouldn't begin until further down.
Under the commercial zone was another mechanical layer, followed by a shopping center-slash-mall. The stores here would have been more practical than the ones above, selling groceries, clothes, electronics, and Pokémon goods. They were geared towards residents instead of tourists, meant to serve those who lived in the next area—another fifteen-story atrium that comprised the first residential zone. It was almost identical to the commercial zone, except that the high-rises here were all condos, with shops only being placed on the "street level" at the bottom. The pumps, air handlers, and generators that served this area had been harder to restore, leaving the air thick with dust and the concrete steps damp with condensation. Support beams were rusted and cracked, and the open rooms and wide balconies gleamed with the beady eyes of Nincada and the metal casings of Magnemite.
"Mauville's lucky this project was never completed," Jin groused between heavy breaths as they mounted yet another flight of stairs. "Imagine an entire city trying to evacuate out of here during the Calamity. Hoenn's building codes are abysmal."
"Well, in all fairness, the codes weren't meant to hold up to ancient titans awakening from their slumber." Steven had the compulsive patriotic need to defend Hoennian construction to Jin, despite them both witnessing firsthand how it had failed. "I don't think Kanto would have fared much better."
"Kanto doesn't let continent-shattering monsters sleep under its population centers."
"Maybe you just haven't discovered them yet. Besides, most of this damage is from abandonment, not the earthquakes—"
Aleister raised one hand, and bothJin and Steven both stopped in their tracks. "Sirs, I'm sorry to interrupt, but there is something emanating from below. Its power can be felt from here."
Jin spun to face Voxel. "Voxel, readings."
"Analyzing." Voxel deformed briefly into shapeless color and light, then reappeared. "Response: I k-k-keep the subject of my in-n-nquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning—"
"Data only, Voxel."
"R-recalibrating… Response: Radon at upper bounds of acceptable levels. Carbon dioxide levels elevated, but acceptable. Potentially hostile lifeforms present, but currently dormant. Interference detected; energy signature consistent with readings taken from previous expeditions. Clearer signal required for database match. Caution: Interference lowering scan accuracy by estimated ten point five percent. Supposition: No phenomenon is a r-real phenomenon until it is an obs-s-s-served phenomenon."
Jin sighed. "We're on the right track, then, but I suppose we knew that already."
"We should set up a relay link," Steven said. "Keep Quadra for now, but Terbium or Lutetia—"
Jin was already digging around in his knapsack. He pulled out a Pokéball, and from it released Terbium, one of the gym's Metagross. They were massive and terrifyingly powerful, like any Metagross was, but Steven's prideful streak and expert eye couldn't help but pick out the parts that made them inferior to Halcyon. They were only half their size, their steel was a base color and studded with impurities, their faceplate listed slightly to the right, and the union of four slightly-differently-sized Beldum gave them a lopsided gait. Imperfect as they were, though, they would do for the task at hand.
"Link up," Steven said. Terbium and Clarion made eye contact for the briefest of moments, communicating faster than any human could ever hope to follow, and then it was done.
"Relay established," Secunda said. "Signal integrity strong," added Prima.
"Good," Steven said. "Let's keep going."
Leaving Terbium on the landing, they continued on. They reached the bottom without any incidents and passed through another utility floor, then a second mall. The floors had narrowed significantly by now, meaning that this mall's floorplan was more like an oversized department store than a full-size shopping center. It served the same purpose as the mall above, but it catered to New Mauville's second, and final, residential zone, which was immediately below it.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Only eight stories to the first residential zone's fifteen, residential zone two's lower ceiling and closer walls gave it a cramped, claustrophobic feeling. These buildings weren't the spacious condos of the zone above, but tiny apartments, mainly in studio and one-bedroom configurations. Yet despite this zone having half the volume of residential zone one, it had been meant to house twice as many people. Even in Mauville Holdings' city of the future, the divide between upper and lower class had been clearly laid out. The decay wrought by broken pumps and failed seals was readily apparent here, even with only their headlamps and the construction lights to see by—entire floors of the apartment buildings had not only cracked, but collapsed entirely, their remnants lying in crumbled heaps on the sagging structures below. Water ran in rivulets along every surface and collected in stagnant pools at the bottom, and dust and spores hung so heavily in the air that Steven could see particles gathering on Aleister's barrier—
All at once, Voxel spasmed, Clarion both flinched and dropped several feet, and Aleister lifted a hand to his head. "Sirs. It's significantly stronger here."
Jin gave a long exhale through his respirator. "Voxel, give me another reading."
"S-s-s-sup-p-p-o—" Voxel lost its form entirely for a moment, core plummeting towards the ground before springing back with misaligned limbs and inverted colors. When it spoke again, it had reverted to its stock robotic voice: "WARNING. Interference critical. Normal function compromised."
"What's causing the interference?" The Porygon-Z didn't answer. Its limbs and head flickered out to twice their normal length, then snapped back like rubber bands. "Vox. Give me a reading on the interference. Data only."
"Analyzing." Its head and limbs jerked back and forth, the movement growing faster and faster as it continued to speak. "Readings. Readings suggest a waveform consistent. Consistent with. Infinity energy. WARNING. Interference critical. Spatial function collapse imminent. Proclamation: From these same p-p-p-principles, I now dem-m-m-monstrate the frame of the System of the World. WARNING. Interference critical. Spatial function collapse imminent—"
"Vox, terminate function." Voxel didn't need telling twice. Its holographic body disappeared, and once again, its core fell. Jin caught it before it hit the ground, then knelt down and slipped off his pack again. From inside, he withdrew a lead-lined box and dropped Voxel's core inside it. "I was hoping it'd last at least until we got to the factory floors," he muttered bitterly. "Our programmers aren't worth the money we pay them."
Steven laughed in disbelief. "Were you even paying attention? Infinity energy, Jin. That's the first positive reading we've been able to get—"
"Voxel's been compromised by interference for the past nineteen floors, possibly longer than that. I'll save my celebration for when we see the proof with our own eyes."
"Right." They had another twenty-odd floors to get down, and these were the ones that would pose the greatest difficulty. "Let's go back up and send out Quadra and Lutetia. I don't think the balls will work for much longer."
No excavator had made it past the forty-sixth floor. The stairways there had collapsed there past the point of repair, and attempts to find an alternate route through the city had been stopped due to safety concerns. Every floor and beam down here was likely to crumble at a touch, and the air was too noxious for unprotected humans and most organic Pokémon to breathe for more than a few minutes at a time. They'd tried sending inorganic and artificial Pokémon to carve a way forward, but the powerful interference resulted in Porygon glitching and bricking and Beldum and Metang dropping comatose to the ground. Metagross had fared better, but they were so rare and so expensive that nobody had been willing to lose one by sending it past the point it could be retrieved. Meanwhile, Magnemite and Magneton had gone absolutely feral, shocking everything around them before racing deeper into the structure—which meant that in addition to everything else, these floors now had a burgeoning and extremely territorial Magnemite colony. At one point, out of sheer desperation, Jin had had workers try bringing down his personal Magnezone and Klinklang, and Steven was frankly shocked that the resulting chaos hadn't ended up in a lawsuit. Finally, they'd tried sending down ghosts to simply phase through the floors and map out a way forward, but the few that had agreed had gotten lost, broken contact, and reappeared days later on the surrounding route, unable to describe what they'd seen.
The sane plan forward, the one that had been slowly proceeding, was to abandon their current approach, drill a new shaft alongside New Mauville, tunnel in, and either fix the damage from the outside or bypass these floors completely. The insane plan, the one Jin had dragged Steven into, was to hope that Aleister could shield them all from bad air and potential hostile Pokémon, that Clarion, Quadra, and the gym Metagross would succeed in keeping their minds where others had failed, and that they would all stay alive long enough to brute force a way down without bringing all of New Mauville collapsing down on top of them.
It wasn't a very good plan. But it was better than the one Jin had come up with by himself.
Even in the better-shielded mechanical zone, it took Jin three tries to get Quadra's ball to open—another sign that they were dealing with infinity energy, Steven thought. Quadra was larger than Lutetia and Terbium, but severely lopsided; in forming them, Jin had gone for the most powerful Beldum he could find, rather than focusing on symmetry. Their shape and size left them just barely able to squeeze through the elevator shaft down, though, so at least in this case, they had an advantage over Halcyon. Quadra was levitating, but also dug their claws into the concrete for support, in case a burst of energy grounded them unexpectedly. Jin, Steven, and Aleister took their place on either edge of Quadra's upturned body, with the help of Aleister stabilizing them psychically, and they began the trip down.
The air prickled as they descended—not from infinity energy, but from electricity. Watchful feral Magneton and their children, Magnemite formed from cannibalized girders and wires, eyed their approach with suspicion. They were communicating with each other in electromagnetic bursts, deciding whether these interlopers would pose a greater threat to the hive if attacked or if left alone. They must have adapted to the constant interference, because even as Quadra staggered from unseen forces and braced themselves against the shaft, none of the Magnemite or Magneton wavered. Magnemite were like Rattata in that way, able to adjust to literally any condition.
The elevator shaft got them to the bottom of the zone, but no further. A nearby apartment had collapsed over the hole to the lower section, burying it in yards of rubble that Quadra had to clamber over. When they reached stable ground, such as it was, Quadra knelt and they dismounted. Now that there was no risk of landing on Jin and Steven's heads if they fell, Lutetia and Clarion began their own descent. Steven looked around, half his attention on the Magnemite and Magneton and half on the surrounding conditions. The water on the ground was maybe two inches deep; bad news if the colony decided to attack.
"Quadra, scan the floor. See where we can punch through without compromising the structure." Quadra rumbled and pushed themselves upright. They had never been graceful, but now they moved like a shambling hulk, lifting their body in starts and stops. Back in the shaft, Clarion both faltered and tumbled down several feet before catching themselves again.
"Signal lost." "Interference critical." Dammit.
"Lutetia, get to the bottom and set up a relay." Unfortunately, the Metagross interpreted Steven's words in the most direct way possible. They unlatched from the wall and let themselves fall the last few stories, landing on the rubble heap with an explosive crash. And that was enough to tip the scales of the Magnemite colony's analysis from "possible threat" to "active danger."
Three separate thunderbolts lanced through the air and exploded against Aleister's barrier. Steven and Jin swore in unison and drew back closer to the Alakazam.
"Aleister, focus on the barrier! Clarion, drop the link and provide support!"
"Quadra, Lutetia, cancel all other tasks and engage offense!"
Aleister's barrier shone and hardened, closing ranks around the two humans and himself. Clarion took their place on either side, rapidly weaving a light screen and a reflect to serve as an outer wall. As they did, Quadra and Lutetia advanced. They grabbed loose chunks of concrete with their minds, flinging them in glowing orange streaks towards the aggressors. Half the Magneton and many of the Magnemite responded with more thunderbolts, while the rest fired flechette bursts against the psychic barrier.
"Aleister, can you teleport us away?" Steven called over the din. Aleister grimaced.
"Negative. The energy field is interfering with my capabilities."
"All right." More and more Magnemite were pouring out of the apartments—how were there this many? "Get ready to—"
An enormous crash, dwarfing the one Lutetia had made, erupted from the building beside them. A cloud of smoke poured over the barrier, and when it cleared, Steven and Jin both stared. The Pokémon wasn't a Magnemite, and it wasn't a Magneton—it was almost like a Magnezone, but it was twice the size, and wrong. Its magnets had grown and shifted so that two of them cradled the auxiliary Magnemite in its side, and the third was bigger than the entire rest of its body and mounted underneath it like a railgun. A cloud of Magnemite circled clumsily around it, caught in its electromagnetic orbit. It stared down at them, and there was the unmistakable whine of coils being energized.
"Move!" The word had barely left Steven's mouth before Aleister grabbed them and flung them away. Either his control was impaired more severely than Steven had expected or he simply hadn't had time to make them land gracefully, because Steven bounced and skidded across the floor before colliding with a girder at speeds just shy of bone-breaking. The ground detonated, flinging chunks of concrete and rebar into the air and filling the world with dust. Without Aleister's barrier, the dust invaded Steven's eyes and blinded him. He staggered to his feet, nearly falling again as his ribs sang with pain, and shouted "Everyone, sound off if you can hear me!"
"Acknowledged." "Affirmative." "I can hear you, sir." Two sets of untranslatable beeps from Lutetia and Quadra, followed by new beams of orange light firing at the Magnezone. That left Jin—shit.
"Clarion, reestablish the link and send a distress call! Quadra and Lutetia, stay on offense! Aleister, to me!" He blinked his eyes furiously as the dust began to settle, and Aleister's half-obscured form appeared before him. "Where's Jin? Can you find him?"
"This way, sir." Aleister guided him a short way over the uneven ground, and there was Jin, lying against a concrete support wall with his respirator cracked and an arm twisting the wrong way.
"We can get down," he wheezed, as Steven dropped down next to him and Aleister erected another barrier to push the fouled air away. "That explosion—had to have made a hole in the ground. We can get down through it."
"We have to survive first. Is your arm broken?"
Jin shifted, as though he was going to demonstrate the state of his arm by moving it around, but the blood drained further from his face and he fell still again with a gasp. "Yes."
"Okay," Steven breathed. "Clarion! Distress call status!"
"No link established." "Interference critical." Then in… a minute and a half, maybe, Halcyon would send out the call. They wouldn't make it that long, much less the hour or more it would take for anyone to reach them. Out on the battlefield, the air split with a massive thunderbolt and a roar of thunder. The sonic force alone pushed back the smoking, melting forms of Lutetia and Quadra. They tried to regain their footing, but staggered like newborn colts. Another blast of electricity sent Lutetia to their knees. This thing was taking on two high-level Metagross and winning.
Another breath. Calm. Steven knew what he had to do, and it would only work if his mind was clear. He pulled back the cuff of his white protective suit, revealing a bracelet slotted with two stones—a key stone and an Alakazite. Jin caught sight of them, and his eyes widened.
"Steven. You can't."
"It's the only way we're getting out of this alive." He removed the Alakazite from the bracelet and tossed it to Aleister, who caught it in one hand.
"But if what we're dealing with is really infinity energy—you can't, it's insane—"
Steven laughed. His head was clear now, and the danger felt far away. "Jin. After today, you've lost any right to call me insane." He lifted the bracelet and smiled. "Hold your breath."
Mega evolution with Aleister was normally a tricky thing. In truth, Steven had achieved it only a few times. Aleister's bond was with his father, not him, and Steven's bond was with Halcyon, not Aleister. Even for a trainer of his caliber, overcoming that was a significant hurdle. Now, though, when Steven shut his eyes, the connection rushed through him like a torrent, stronger even than it ever had been with Halcyon. It grabbed his essence and pulled with such force that it took everything he had to hold on to part of it for himself. The familiar whoosh and surge of infinity energy assaulted his ears, and bright light blossomed beyond his eyelids. When he opened his eyes again, Aleister had changed.
Normally, after a transformation, Aleister would shrink, his body cannibalizing his muscle to form neurons and psionic receptors. But unless Steven's eyes were deceiving him, he appeared to have grown an inch this time instead. His white beard flowed out from him like a robe, and the red gem in his forehead gleamed with terrible light. He turned to Steven and nodded, and the sheer power radiating out from him made Steven stumble back.
"Go. I don't know how long I can hold this." The mega bond strengthened their psychic link so much that speaking the words out loud would have been useless. Aleister didn't respond; to do so might have shattered Steven's fragile brain. Instead he turned back to the Magnezone and lifted his hands. The spoons that amplified his power shimmered into being above him, and the air around them began to warp. The Magnezone, seeing the new threat, spun and ripped an entire support beam from a nearby structure to launch at him, but Aleister directed it away with a flick of his hand. As he did so, he built his counterattack. The fabric of space itself bent as Aleister channeled his aura outward into a psionic orb. It grew and grew, pulsing with white light like a newborn star, until finally Aleister pointed one finger forward and set it free.
The focus blast collided and burst with a shockwave that ripped through the air. It would have torn through the unstable buildings, had Aleister not glanced up and erected light screen barriers with a thought. The Magnezone smashed into the concrete floor in a cacophony of distressed beeps and warping metal, raising another dust cloud. From within it, there was a flash of rainbow light, and then everything was still.
The battle was done, but—Steven couldn't drop the connection. It was being reinforced, still, by the ambient energy, like steel armor around a cable. And each second that ticked by was pulling more and more of himself out of him—it wouldn't stop until he was gone. Gasping, he dropped to his knees and fumbled with the bracelet that held his key stone. Removing it was the only way he knew to sever the link by force. Aleister, uncaring god that he was in this form, simply watched the fumbling of Steven's fingers with a detached stare. He was processing information that had never been witnessed in recorded history, and each passing second for him was a second closer to enlightenment. At last, Steven managed to undo the clasp and fling the bracelet away. This ought to have broken the connection in the blink of an eye, but somehow, several further agonizing moments passed before light at last engulfed Aleister and he returned to his normal self.
"Sir. Are you all right?" Steven was drowning. A rush of air and a flash of pink light told him the barrier was back up, so he ripped off his respirator to take unobstructed gasps of air. But there was no oxygen in it, or so it seemed, because with each breath he slipped closer and closer to the edge of oblivion. "I apologize for the actions of my other self," Aleister was saying. "He does not understand the loyalty that I have to you."
"Shit," Steven thought he said, though it might have just been another ragged exhale. "Okay, just…"
Sustaining a mega evolution was normally like running a marathon, bringing him to his limit and punching through, flooding him with the endorphins that came from crossing the threshold of human possibility. There was no runner's high this time; there was only a horrible, aching emptiness from the parts of him that had been ripped out and the knowledge that he'd been moments away from dying. Minutes or hours later, he finally pushed himself off the ground again, wiping a trail of spittle from his mouth. "Clarion. Tell me you've managed to reestablish the link."
"Link established." "Signal integrity moderate."
"Did you send the distress call?"
"Confirmed." "Rescue teams inbound."
"Okay." He looked back at Jin, who still hadn't said a word, content just to stare at him in mixed horror and awe. "Do you want to wait for them?"
"I can keep going," Jin said, though not before a long pause. "Just need something to tie up my arm. What about you?"
"I'll be fine," Steven said. "We've made it this far—we might as well go the rest of the way."
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Under residential zone two was one more mechanical layer, followed by an industrial zone. New Mauville, in its quest for self-sufficiency, had planned to install small factories and machine shops across eight floors to fabricate small batches of glass, concrete, steel, and wire. There were even plans for hydroponic facilities, though these would have largely been for novelty and scientific interest—you couldn't feed an entire city from a small farm underground. Finally, there were the support levels. Here, all the water that drained from the levels above was collected and treated before being pumped back to circulate again, and all the waste that came with it was incinerated. All of these floors were degraded past the point of recognition, forcing them to push aside heaps of moldering steel and concrete to proceed. The water ran past their knees in places, slowing their progress further, and the only illumination came from their headlamps and Aleister's flash. Clarion and Quadra finally gave out for good on the sixty-third floor, robbing them of their help as well. But they were close—so close. So they kept going.
A glance at New Mauville's floor plans would reveal the sixty-fifth through sixty-ninth floors as a second part of the final support zone—more pumps and tanks, redundant systems to handle unexpected volumes of water and waste that slipped through the primary systems above. And, yes, those systems did exist. But closer scrutiny, an engineer's eye, would reveal that there were parts which didn't make sense. Something about the center of those floors was odd—walls had been built where walls had no purpose being, and the equipment that was supposed to be inside them served no clear function. To most, it was an oddity. To Steven, it pointed towards the final piece of the puzzle.
"When did Mauville Holdings manage to develop manage to develop a mega evolution stone for Magnezone?" Jin muttered for the tenth time. He was apparently keeping his mind off of his broken arm by revisiting the same thoughts over and over.
"I still don't think they did," Steven said. "It could have been a fluke of having that many Magnemite clustered around that much infinity energy."
"But mega evolution without a stone or a human partner—it's unheard of."
"What we're doing is unheard of. We're bound to run into some new discoveries along the way."
Aleister swept a cluster of debris and several gallons of water from the floor—clumsily, since the ambient energy had gone back to hindering him instead of helping him—and revealed a service hatch down to the final floor. The metal had warped around the lock and the hatch itself, but with some jarring, it popped open. Steven climbed the ladder down, while Aleister lowered Jin, who couldn't climb with one arm in a sling. All was silent here except for the constant rush of water. All was black except their lights reflecting off the walls and the water-covered floor.
"There it is," Steven said. A double-wide door in one of the incongruous walls, normal from the outside, built like the entrance to a bank vault on the inside. There was no keyhole; the keypad mounted beside it offered the only way of getting in. The fact that it was dead would have made the walls impassable, if not for the cracks made by the ravages of water and time. "Aleister, can you take this down safely?"
"Structural engineering is not my specialty. But yes, it should be possible."
"Do it."
There was the crack of breaking concrete, the screaming of twisted metal. It wasn't just steel pulling apart this time, but lead—the walls were lined with lead. Steven and Jin stood side by side, holding their breath, until at last the final layer peeled away. They peered in, and—
Crystalline stone caught the beams of their headlamps and fired them back, turning the thin lines of illumination into iridescent floodlights. Steven lurched back, blinded by the spots seared into his eyes. "Turn your light off," he said to Jin, reaching up to do the same to his own. His voice and hands were shaking with mixed excitement and shock. "Aleister, make the smallest light you can and send it in."
Aleister's flash dimmed to the size of a candle. Steven could barely see it—and yet, when it entered the central room, the shaft lit up like the beacon of a lighthouse. Mixed white light and refracted rainbows danced across the walls, obscuring the every spot of water damage and mold with their sheer brilliance. Beside Steven, Jin began to laugh, and Steven thought that he might break down too. This was it; this was what they had come for. The thing that would secure Hoenn's future. It was more beautiful than he could have ever imagined.
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The idea behind New Mauville had never made sense. Yes, Mauville's overcrowding was a looming problem, but not one that couldn't have been solved by conventional means. The amount of permitting and engineering and time and expense it had taken to drill sixty-nine stories underground could have gotten Greater Mauville Holdings a dozen traditional skyscrapers along the city's edge. And even if the true goal had been innovation, why pick such a terrible spot to do it? The land to the west of Mauville had better, more workable soil, and wasn't at constant risk of falling into the sea. The only two possible answers were that everyone involved in the project had been completely incompetent, or that there had been other factors at play. Steven had long suspected the second.
What, then, had been the true aim of New Mauville? Greater Mauville Holdings dealt in two businesses—buildings and energy. Devon had outcompeted them at every turn when it came to energy, their stranglehold on infinity power generation forcing Greater Mauville Holdings into the smaller, less profitable niches of bioelectricity and natural resource generation. Greater Mauville Holdings had been desperate to break into infinity energy production, and everyone knew it, but Devon had already scooped up most of the meteonite in Hoenn. You couldn't have infinity energy without meteonite.
Back up a bit. What was meteonite? In the days before humans and Pokémon, a rock from another world had broken apart over their planet, depositing its shattered corpse in pieces around the globe. The rock was an unnatural alien crystal that couldn't be formed from any element known to man; it had been dubbed "meteonite" by an uncreative scientist, and the name had stuck. Meteonite was fantastic in every sense of the word, defying all laws of physics. Any energy it absorbed would be radiated back stronger than before, twofold or a hundredfold depending on the size and quality of the sample. Infinity energy in particular saw it as a perfect conduit, and so it was meteonite that made infinity power generation and mega evolution possible. But those were the feats of small fragments of the stone; its power fractured as it divided into smaller and smaller pieces, and no scientist had yet found a way to reconstitute fragments into a whole. True miracles required a large sample to be found and extracted intact.
The ultimate weapon of Kalos. The dynamax arenas of Galar. Hoenn had never found a piece large and pure enough to accomplish something on that level—until Greater Mauville Holdings had. They'd kept it a secret, building an entire city around it to mask it from Devon's prying eyes. It had been their ultimate trump card, their last gamble, the thing that would finally put them on the world stage. All they'd had to do was complete New Mauville, and they would have had the perfect laboratory to do whatever they pleased.
But the project had run out of money, and Greater Mauville Holdings had gone bankrupt soon after. They had been left with an expensive hole in the ground and a secret they needed to keep at any cost. Now, their loss was Devon's gain, and Steven was going to do what they had never been able to. He was going to make a miracle.