The horrifying, unnatural roar that erupted from Koffing's throat did not sound like a Pokémon anymore. It was a deafening, metallic shriek from the absolute depths of hell—a banshee's wail that howled through the tight cavern pass, shaking the stone walls to their foundations and rattling the loose gravel on the floor.
His eyes had turned entirely milk-white, the pupils vanishing into a blind, milky void of pure, unadulterated madness.
Inside the shattered reality of the creature once called Poopie, everything had just been violently atomized. Within the span of sixty suffocating seconds, his entire universe did not just crack—it ceased to exist. Humans possessed complex coping mechanisms, fragile logic, and spoken words to lean on when grief struck their lives. But a creature like him was fundamentally anchored to his bonds. To him, Odin was his master, his tactical foundation, and the literal lifeline keeping his feral instincts at bay through the resonance of their shared poison blood. Angel was his undisputed goddess, his absolute love, and the gentle, radiant light that kept him sane—the only person in Kanto who would pull a toxic, floating chemical nuke tightly against her bare chest and treat him like an adorable, drooling puppy dog.
And he had lost them both. Back-to-back. Right in front of his eyes.
He had felt the exact microsecond Odin's lifeline went pitch-black beneath the mountain, and before his brain could even process that first nightmare, the blood of his goddess was already spraying across his purple skin. He had been completely, utterly helpless. He couldn't shield her, he couldn't tank the hit, and his strength had meant absolutely nothing when the steel blade sliced through her throat.
A world without Odin and Angel was no world at all. It was an empty, meaningless, and freezing void. When a creature driven by that level of pure, unconditional devotion loses every single thing he was born to protect, survival ceases to be a goal. Why live? Why breathe the thin cave air when the light of his universe had just been snuffed out in the dirt?
There was no reason left to hold back. The only logical baseline left in his broken mind was a primal, catastrophic urge to drag the entire world down into the abyss with him. If his world was dead, then he would burn this entire mountain, this entire World, and every living soul that drew breath inside it until nothing remained but ash, dissolved bone, and toxic leftovers.
That cocky, familiar echo of Odin's voice dropping the word "Kill" inside his head was the final, total release of a monster's restraint. The innocent, attention-loving puppy cloud was dead. In its place hovered a mindless, apocalyptic engine of pure, unhinged vengeance.
The wild, level 36 Golbat hovered a few feet away in the twilight, its crimson wings flapping with high-speed athletic grace as it bared its fangs, entirely proud of its lethal execution. It believed it was the apex predator of these lower veins, completely blind to the reality that it had just unlocked a demon.
Koffing's milk-white eyes locked onto the flitting bat, and the ambient air inside the middle tunnel instantly filled with a thick, suffocating pressure that turned the natural mineral light a bruised, violent purple. He didn't wait for a command. He didn't look back at the bleeding body on the ground. Moving on pure, Koffing violently lunged forward, his vents erupting into a furious, continuous hiss as the slaughterhouse of Mount Moon officially opened its deepest gates.
The high-speed wild Golbat didn't even have time to adjust its leathery wings before the atmosphere inside the stone corridor completely imploded. It had relied on its superior speed attributes to blindside a defenseless girl, but against the unhinged, apocalyptic pressure of a berserk demon, its reflexes were rendered completely useless.
Koffing's milk-white eyes flared in the dim twilight. He didn't wait for a human voice to guide his movement. As the agonizing, deafening banshee shriek tore from his jaws, a violent grid of jagged yellow electricity began crackling furiously across his purple pores. The air hissed with the raw scent of ozone. The sheer volume of his primal rage acted as a direct catalyst, channeling a catastrophic, maximum-output Thunderbolt straight through the dark air.
CRACK-BOOM!
The blinding lightning strike detonated dead-center against Golbat's chest with a sickening, flesh-searing pop. The raw voltage ripped violently through its muscular wing joints, completely frying its nervous system in an instant. The bat let out a strangled, high-pitched screech as the severe paralysis locked up its limbs, instantly cutting its legendary speed in half. It flapped erratically, its equilibrium totally shattered as it plummeted hard against the rugged cave floor, bouncing across the sharp stones like a broken toy.
But Koffing wasn't looking for a clean victory. He wanted absolute, torturous retribution.
Before the paralyzed bat could even attempt to drag its broken body away, Koffing dropped from the ceiling like a falling anvil, utilizing his Levitate ability to add pure gravitational momentum to his mass. He drove his full weight down into a brutal, bone-shattering Body Slam directly onto Golbat's right wing.
CRUNCH!
The sound of thin bones snapping and cartilage splintering echoed sharply down the hollow cavern walls. Golbat shrieked in agonizing pain, a fresh spray of dark blood erupting from its open beak as Koffing's iron-hard body pinned it mercilessly into the dirt path. Koffing shifted his weight, grinding his round form deliberately into the open fracture, deliberately prolonging the torture.
"Gol... ! Go-o-ol... !" the wild creature gurgled, its eyes bulging in pure primal terror as it looked into the featureless, milky void of Koffing's blind stare. It tried to retaliate in a blind panic, its long tongue lashing out to trigger a desperate Mean Look and a frantic, close-range Bite, its fangs scraping uselessly against Koffing's reinforced hide.
Koffing didn't even flinch at the physical retaliation. The pain of the bites was nothing compared to the bleeding, catastrophic void left in his chest. Driven by a maddening desire to burn this entire world and everyone inside it down to the absolute ground, a terrifying new elemental core ignited deep within his chemical gas chambers. The methane and toxic gases inside his body violently combusted, turning his internal temperature into a literal furnace.
Out of sheer, unadulterated madness and the will to destroy, Koffing instinctively learned Flamethrower.
He didn't unleash it as a clean stream. He opened his wide, drooling jaws and clamped them tightly over Golbat's remaining left wing, locking the screaming bat in an inescapable close-quarters vice grip. Then, he let the furnace erupt.
A roaring, blinding torrent of pure, incandescent orange fire exploded directly from his mouth at point blank-range.
WHOOSH-BURN!
The spectacular blaze lit up the dim middle tunnels like an inferno. The extreme, unhinged heat didn't just singe—it began slowly, painfully melting the leathery membrane of Golbat's wings straight off its skeletal structure. The wild bat went completely frantic, its body convulsing violently in the dirt as it was literally burned alive. The sickening smell of roasting meat and bubbling flesh filled the tight air, the continuous stream of the Flamethrower slowly searing through its torso, blackening its skin, and cooking its internal organs from the outside in.
Koffing held the flame locked down for what felt like an eternity, ignoring the thrashing, ignoring the gurgling pleas, and ignoring the absolute horror of the execution. He poured every single ounce of his grief, his sorrow, and his burning hatred for this world straight into the fire, watching the bright blue skin of the assassin turn into a smoking, charred, and brittle husk.
The frantic thrashing slowly began to lose its velocity. Golbat's agonizing screeches dwindled into a weak, wet wheeze as its vocal cords were completely scorched into ash. Its body went entirely rigid under the continuous, point-blank roasting, the final remnants of its life force getting systematically incinerated until its limbs crumbled into charcoal.
Koffing finally closed his jaws, cutting off the flame as a thick, heavy cloud of black smoke drifted up toward the cavern ceiling. Below him lay the ruined assassin—completely charcoaled, lifeless, and reduced to a smoking, unrecognizable mountain of black ash and melted bone. The retribution was absolute. The debt was paid in blood and fire.
With the absolute execution of the level 36 predator finalized, a massive, dense influx of raw, high-tier experience surged smoothly through Koffing's physical matrix. His purple skin hummed with a heavier, noticeably darker aura of absolute destruction as his physical power naturally erupted, shattering his previous limitations to surge straight to level 34.
But there was no victory lap. There was no joy. His milk-white eyes remained completely wide and vacant as he hovered over the smoldering ashes of his enemy. He slowly turned his head back toward the quiet, pristine white clothes of his fallen goddess lying cold on the dirt floor, his vents letting out a long, trembling, and broken hiss into the silent dark.
The sight of Angel's unmoving body on the stone floor violently shattered what was left of Koffing's frayed mind. A flash of raw, visual post-traumatic stress surged behind his milky gaze, plunging him straight into a suffocating, hyper-detailed hallucination of the last sixty seconds. In his mind, he was trapped in a loop—watching her pale, delicate arms stretch out toward him in desperate begging, hearing her broken voice weep for him not to leave her, and feeling the wet, warm splatter of her dark blood hitting his face as the blade cut her throat.
The phantom weight of her blood on his skin drove him over the absolute edge of sanity. Koffing opened his jaws and let out another massive, deafening roar, but this time his feral instincts warped the sound. He laced the move Taunt straight into the fabric of his howling wail, unleashing a wave of psychological hostility that rippled outward through every open vein and crevice of Mount Moon. He wasn't trying to survive. He was inviting Armageddon. He was daring every living thing under the mountain to come and kill him.
Up on the rocky ridge, Emily watched the madness unfold in a state of pure panic. "Kadabra! Light screen—no, Reflect! Use a full psychic barrier around us right now!" she hissed frantically, her hands gripping her Poké belt as her heart hammered against her ribs.
Normally, a generic psychic wall could never block a status move like Taunt. But because they were positioned far away on a high ledge, and because Koffing's unhinged howl was a scattered area-of-effect wave rather than a focused, single-target strike, Kadabra's glowing telepathic shield successfully deflected the mental rage before it could corrupt her or her Murkrow.
Shaking off the immediate crisis, Emily's analytical mind began frantically calculating the wreckage below. Her chest tightened. She had just lost her lead to finding Odin—the golden ticket she needed to escape her own private survival nightmare was gone. And now, this monster of a Koffing had gone completely berserk.
"It won't be long," she thought, her eyes wide as she traced the smoke rising from the charred ashes of the Golbat. "The noise alone will draw someone in. Some trainer is going to stumble into this bloodbath, panic, and report it straight to the League. The second the authorities catch wind of a serial-killer Pokémon executing trainers and wild predators in the middle levels, they'll slap a massive, high-grade bounty on his head."
She knew the ecosystem rules inside out. Once that bounty went live, every elite mercenary, seasoned bounty hunter, and high-tier trainer in Kanto would flood these caverns. Some would hunt him for the raw cash, some for the prestige of putting down an underworld demon, and others for the safety of the routes. This entire section of Mount Moon was about to transform into a high-fatality battlefield.
Every single logical protocol in her brain screamed at her to disengage. It wasn't safe.
"Just leave... command Kadabra to use Teleport and dip out right now," her mind whispered. But as she stared down at the solitary, purple nuke howling over a corpse, a thick lump formed in her throat. She couldn't bring herself to trigger the warp. The sheer, overwhelming tragedy of the scene pinned her to the stone. It was the raw, unfiltered manifestation of the cruelty of this world—a reality she herself had tasted far too many times.
Her gray-purple eyes drifted down to the pale princess lying in the dirt. "Should I at least try to recover her body before I teleport?" she debated, her jaw tightening. "No... why should I show a single ounce of remorse for this psycho bitch? She was a ruthless monster from the beginning to the end."
But then, her hunter intuition flared. She squinted through the dim mineral light, analyzing the physical metrics of the wound.
"Wait... what if she isn't dead yet? What if by some miracle she's still breathing?"
The thought hit her like a lightning strike, her brain immediately running the data. The white girl's head was still fully intact, meaning the Golbat's wing-blade hadn't sliced deep enough to sever the spine or the carotid artery. More importantly, while there was a pool of blood on the floor, it hadn't spurted out like a high-pressure fountain during the initial cut. There was a genuine biological chance she was merely bleeding out and unconscious.
"If she can be saved... she's my only roadmap back to Odin," Emily calculated rapidly. "But will she talk? If I rescue her, she might stay silent. Can I torture the information out of her? No... that's a rookie mistake. If she's Odin's lover or a high-ranking family member, using physical torture will completely ruin any chance of leverage with him. The only viable path is to play the role of a savior—a fellow friend who wishes Odin well, aligning myself with her grief."
It was a brilliant, high-stakes tactical play, but it carried one impossible hurdle.
"The monster guarding her," Emily realized, her sweat dropping onto the rocks. "No one... absolutely nobody is getting within ten feet of that girl while that demon is hovering over her body."
Suddenly, a low, ominous rumbling began vibrating straight through the bedrock of the middle levels. The cavern walls groaned as the echoing sounds of hundreds of heavy, frantic footsteps began closing in from every connecting tunnel. The Taunt had landed. Every single wild Pokémon within a two-kilometer radius had just lost their minds to the insult, their feral rage driving them to stampede toward the exact source of the roar.
The wave was coming straight for Koffing.
Even though his mind had plunged into a bottomless abyss of feral insanity, his deeply drilled battle knowledge remained completely hardwired into his core. Sensing the impending avalanche of hostility before a single claw even broke through the shadows, Koffing's instincts flared. He utilized the brief, agonizing window to deeply inhale the methane-heavy cave air three times back-to-back, triggering a rapid succession of maxed-out Stockpile cycles. His purple skin swelled to twice its normal size, his pores sealing as his outer hide hardened into solid, iron-like plates. He became a floating, armored fortress before the fight even officially kicked off.
Then, the tunnel mouths literally exploded outward as the vanguard shock troops of Wave 1 broke through the dark crevices.
The air was instantly blacked out by a frantic, screeching cloud of wild Zubat and Golbat, their leathery wings colliding and tearing in the tight space as they swarmed forward on pure, maddening rage. Below them, the stone floor groaned under a rolling boulder avalanche of Geodude, Graveler, Sandshrew, Sandslash, Machop, and an incredibly hostile, red-eyed wild Primeape. Most were lower-level pre-evolutions sitting in the mid-20s, but the apex leaders like the fully evolved Golbats, Gravelers, and the Primeape were pushing hard at levels 28 and 29.
Koffing didn't wait for them to close the spacing. Fight smart, not hard. His milk-white eyes tracked the incoming vanguard, and his sharp instincts immediately registered that the ground troops on the cavern floor couldn't touch his floating body due to his active Levitate ability. He ignored the rolling rocks entirely, pivoting his focus straight toward the ceiling.
Before the airborne swarm could even breach the center lane, a violent grid of jagged yellow electricity began crackling furiously across his purple skin. The heavy smell of ozone became blinding. Moving with high-velocity precision, Koffing began relentlessly spamming a continuous, maximum-output chain of Thunderbolt attacks straight into the dark sky.
CRACK-BOOM! CRACK-BOOM!
The blinding yellow lightning arcs detonated across the cave ceiling in deafening, explosive bursts. Because the Flying-types were naturally weak to electricity, the voltage ripped violently through their wing joints, frying their nervous systems instantly. Dozens of Zubats and Golbats were blasted right out of the air, their seared bodies popping and dropping like heavy stones, raining down onto the jagged rocks below in smoking, broken heaps.
But the remaining ground forces—realizing they couldn't reach him with traditional ground-type moves—instantly pivoted to their secondary movepools. Gravelers and Sandslashes began aggressively hurling a relentless barrage of non-ground attacks, ripping rocks from the wall to trigger heavy Rock Slides, while Machop and Primeape launched a flurry of high-speed Swift stars and physical martial arts leaps, trying frantically to crush Koffing's frame.
Koffing didn't flinch. The physical rocks and swift stars slammed violently against his hide, but because his armor was already fully maxed out by his pre-battle setup, the massive kinetic force simply bounced uselessly off his steel-like defense without leaving a single scratch.
With his defense completely unbothered, Koffing descended directly into the center of the ground horde, transforming the narrow stone corridor into a literal, animalistic horror movie. He didn't just use clean moves anymore; he was a savage, cannibalistic beast driven by a maddening desire to tear the world apart. He opened his drooling jaws and unleashed his newly learned Flamethrower, creating a swirling, roaring vortex of blinding orange fire that swept across the lane, converting the narrow pass into a literal furnace of melting rock.
Moving with terrifying, unhinged ferocity, Koffing lunged straight through the flames. He slammed his heavy frame into a level 28 Graveler with a brutal Body Slam, shattering the creature's stone shell with a sickening crunch. Before the wild Pokémon could even drop, Koffing opened his fangs wide and sank them deep into its flesh, literally biting chunks of rock and meat straight out of the screaming target, tearing them away in bloody, jagged shreds as his internal furnace roasted them alive from the outside in. He was a feral monster, completely unchecked, ripping limbs apart, breaking bones with continuous Take Downs, and spraying corrosive Sludge Bombs to melt faces into sizzling mush. The path became a horrific, cooking graveyard of charred meat, shattered bones, and smoldering, half-eaten carcasses rotting in the twilight.
Right in the middle of this catastrophic bloodbath, Angel's eyes faintly fluttered open.
A sharp, agonizing spike of pain shot through her neck, but it was nothing compared to the suffocating wave of emotion that hit her brain. Her unique soul link with her companion was wide open. Even though she was too weak to lift her torso off the cold dirt, she could completely, viscerally feel everything. She felt the crushing weight of his unhinged rage, the bottomless depth of his agonizing loneliness, and the terrifying, broken sadness tearing his core apart.
She looked through the smoke, her glazed snowflake pupils contracting in absolute horror as she witnessed the reality of what she had caused. Her Poopie—her gentle, attention-loving puppy cloud who used to beg for scratches on a grocery store bench—had become a demon. He was committing a localized genocide, an unhinged, animalistic mass murder that was turning Mount Moon into a literal slaughterhouse. And it was all because of her. It was because he thought she was gone.
She forced her trembling, bleeding fingers to dug into the dirt, trying with every ounce of her remaining willpower to stretch her arm out toward his floating, blood-slicked frame. She wanted to pull him back from the dark. She wanted to tell him she was still here.
She forced her broken, messed-up vocal cords to contract, trying frantically to scream his name through her blocked, blood-filled throat. But her voice was completely gone, destroyed by the Golbat's blade. All she could produce was a quiet, barely audible, and gurgling whisper that broke against her lips.
"St..sto..stop..it.. po-..Poopie.. tha..that's.. en-enough... co-come... ba..back.. to.. me-"
The sentence was so quiet, so weak, and so utterly broken that it was instantly swallowed by the chaos of the cavern. It got completely muted out between the roaring flames of the Flamethrower, the deafening arcing of the Thunderbolts, and the agonizing death screeches of the wild horde getting ripped apart. Koffing never heard her. He was too deep in his own madness, his jaws tearing into a wild Sandshrew as the blood splattered across his white eyes. Angel could only lie there, helplessly weeping as she watched her favorite companion lose himself further and further into the absolute darkness of a monster.
Suddenly, a massive, dense influx of high-tier experience erupted smoothly through Koffing's physical structure. He had systematically slaughtered almost the entirety of the vanguard, and his strength violently shattered his baseline limitations, surging straight to level 35 mid-battle.
Right before Angel's eyes, a bright, blinding white evolution light exploded outward from his body, enveloping his massive, inflated purple frame in a brilliant shroud of metamorphosis. Angel stared into the blinding glare, her remaining physical energy completely expiring as the light in her own eyes began to flicker out. She couldn't hold on to consciousness for a single frame longer. She never got to see the final shape of his evolution, her mind slipping back into the dark abyss as she choked out one last, heartbreaking mental plea to the universe.
"Forgive me..."
Her hand dropped limply back onto the dirt. The lights went out completely.
In the center of the lane, the blinding white evolution light shattered outward like glass. The single, round entity had fractured, emerging from the cocoon as the twin-headed, asymmetrical horror of Weezing. His vents were thick with black ash, his milk-white eyes remained completely devoid of pupils, and his internal chemical furnace completely detonated. Driven by his apocalyptic desire to destroy every living soul that drew breath, Weezing instinctively learned Heat Wave the exact microsecond his evolution finalized.
He didn't wait. He unleashed the elemental storm in a single, catastrophic burst.
WHOOSH-BOOM!
An absolute sea of searing, super-heated air blasted outward in a 360-degree wave, completely filling the entire crossroads. The extreme temperature didn't just burn—it vaporized the remaining vanguard troops of Wave 1 in a single, devastating frame. The surviving Machopes and Sandslashes were instantly turned into charred, brittle statues of black ash before they could even let out a gurgle. The explosion left a massive, continuous sea of roaring orange fire completely surrounding his floating, double-headed body.
The first wave was officially dead. The entire crossroads had been converted into a smoldering, cooking graveyard of charred meat and melted stones.
Weezing hovered silently in the center of the inferno, his side vents hissing a toxic cloud into the black smoke, his milky gaze fixed dead on the paths ahead as the low, ominous rumbling of The second wave began echoing from the dark tunnels, preparing to breach the smoke.
○●○●○
The continuous sea of fire roared and crackled across the shattered stone pass, casting long, dancing crimson shadows against the cavern walls. Weezing floated dead-center in the middle of the inferno, his two asymmetrical heads shifting in total, silent synchronicity. His main face remained wide and vacant, those milk-white eyes staring blindly through the rising pillars of black smoke, while his smaller, secondary head let out a continuous, low-pitched rattle from its jaw.
Because he had already maxed out his defenses with a triple Stockpile way before any Pokémon had even arrived at the crossroads, his purple skin and body remained swollen to twice its normal size, hardened into solid diamond plates, making him more massive and seem more terrifying. He was a floating fortress, completely prepped to absorb an ungodly mountain of punishment as the dark smoke began to part.
Up on the rocky ridge, Emily's fingers dug so hard into the stone wall that her nails began to bleed. Her clinical composure wasn't just dead; it had been completely vaporized. Her eyes reflected the dancing orange flames below, her breath catching violently in her throat as she looked at the dual-headed abomination hovering over a smoking graveyard of charred vanguard meat.
"He evolved..." Emily's mind screamed, her knees shaking so violently she had to lean her entire weight against Kadabra's psychic barrier. "He must of hit level 35 mid-slaughter and forced an evolution into Weezing. Look at the sheer volume of that Heat Wave. He didn't just clear the vanguard; he incinerated them down to the bone. If that thing catches my psychic trace, Kadabra won't even have time to blink before we are turned into charcoal."
She looked down at Angel's limp, unmoving body lying just outside the direct radius of the flames. The girls white-haired was stained with cave dust and dark blood, her hand resting motionless on the dirt. Emily's intuition was running a frantic diagnostic. Angel had briefly opened her eyes, her lips moving in a voiceless gurgle before her lights went out completely.
"She's still breathing," Emily calculated, a thick lump forming in her throat as she fought back the overwhelming panic. "The cut wasn't clean enough to sever her vitals. She is bleeding out, but she is alive. The real problem right now is the environment. The fire is engulfing the entire crossroads, and the black smoke is getting thicker by the second. The oxygen levels are plummeting. Even if she doesn't bleed to death, she is going to suffocate in the dirt or get consumed by the flames if I don't move. I have to get down there. I have to steal her body before she dies. But how? How do I cross that sea of fire with that demon standing guard?"
Before her brain could formulate a single tactical answer, the cavern paths groaned once more.
HISS! CLAW! STOMP!
The secondary wave of the Taunt-corrupted stampede breached the perimeter, their frantic voices echoing sharply through the narrow tunnels. This group was far heavier, packed with higher combat muscle sitting squarely in the low-to-mid 30s. Following the hard thresholds of biological evolution, the smoke parted as a massive, fully transformed syndicate of local jungle and cavern predators flooded the lane. There were no lower-tier pre-evolutions lagging behind at these ranks; the assault was led by fully matured Arboks, Primeapes, Persians, Nidorinos, Nidorinas, and a secondary high-level Golbat, flanked by a massive, creeping vanguard of Paras and Parasect.
They didn't pause at the sight of the roaring fire. The psychic corruption of the Taunt had entirely stripped away their survival instincts. Driven by a maddening rage to destroy the floating demon, a level 33 wild Arbok led the charge, its massive, scaled body slithering straight through the continuous flames, its hood flared wide as its fangs dripped with a highly concentrated, bubbling purple venom. Behind it, a cluster of level 32 Parasects marched in unison, their giant, parasitic red mushrooms glowing as they began violently discharging thick, suffocating clouds of yellow Stun Spore and dark green Poison Powder to choke out the immediate air.
Noella's Vileplume had used utility powders to pressure Koffing earlier, and this wild horde was trying to replicate the exact same locking strategy.
But the wild horde was fighting textbook tactics against an unconventional monster. As the massive cloud of yellow Stun Spore enveloped his double-headed body, Weezing felt the heavy, paralyzing properties of the powder aggressively locking up his outer pores. He wasn't biologically immune to paralysis, but his hide absorbed the brunt of the shock, his health pool and sheer will tanking through the initial restriction.
Weezing's eyes flared through the spore clouds, his primal rage turning entirely animalistic. Working on pure madness, Weezing opened both of his wide, drooling mouths simultaneously, unleashing a devastating combination of Smokescreen and Poison Gas.
WHOOSH!
A massive, pitch-black cloud of dense, blinding smoke erupted from his vents, instantly merging with the existing spores and plunging the entire middle pass into an impenetrable, toxic void. The wild Mankeys and Meowths inside the fog immediately lost their line of sight, screaming in pure panic as the burning, concentrated Poison Gas forced its way into their lungs, suffocating them from the inside out.
"Ar-b-o-o-ok!" the wild snake leader screeched, relying on its thermal sensory organs to track Weezing's heat signature through the black void. The level 33 serpent launched itself through the smoke, its massive jaws opening wide to execute a high-speed Poison Fang strike, its venomous teeth clamping violently down onto Weezing's lower flank.
CLANG!
The physical strike hit with immense kinetic force, but against Weezing's iron-hard diamond defense, the fangs couldn't pierce the skin. The venom leaked uselessly down his smooth purple pores. Weezing didn't even hiss at the impact. Driven by pure vengeance, his main head pivoted downward, locking his sight onto the snake's neck.
He didn't fire an elemental move. He lunged forward with pure, animalistic savagery, his wide jaws clamping directly onto the Arbok's throat in an unbreakable vice grip.
CRUNCH!
Weezing literally bit a massive chunk of flesh straight out of the screaming serpent's neck, his fangs tearing the scaled hide away in a bloody, jagged shred. Arbok let out a wet, gurgling shriek as its dark blood erupted from the open wound, spraying violently across Weezing's featureless white eyes. But Weezing wasn't done. While the snake was thrashing in agonizing pain, his secondary head opened its jaws at point-blank range, unleashing a roaring Flamethrower straight into the open gash.
The incandescent fire flooded straight into the snake's interior structures, cooking its organs and burning it alive from the inside out. The massive snake collapsed onto the cracked stones, its body violently convulsing as its internal biology melted under the terrifying heat, reducing the apex predator into a smoking, charred heap of ash. Because the wild snake was a Poison-type, Weezing's venomous gas was useless against it, but his continuous blazing Flamethrowers, and body strikes were more than enough to completely crush it to death.
Across the lane, the wild Nidorinos and Primeape's tried to use the distraction to flank him, their claws flashing through the dark smoke to launch a volley of Fury Swipes and Karate Chops. But because Weezing was still riding that maximum pre-battle defense boost, their claws and strikes just bounced off his thick hide without leaving a single scratch. He absorbed their physical strikes completely unbothered.
Once the entire ground forces of the second wave were packed tightly into the narrow, smoke-choked corridor, Weezing unlocked his newly awakened elemental storm. A violent surge of yellow lightning began crackling furiously across his entire skin pores, and he unleashed a area-of-effect Thunderbolt chain straight through the black void. It wasn't really a Thunderbolt AOE but more like a fancy way of saying Spamming Thunderbolt.
CRACK-BOOM-BOOM!
The blinding electrical current arcs ripped violently through the smoke, bouncing from one flesh target to the next like a chain reaction. The level 31 Primeape's and level 32 Nidorinas let out strangled, agonizing screeches as the high voltage completely fried their nervous systems, their bodies locking up in severe paralysis before the raw kinetic heat literally scorched their fur off. They dropped to the floor in twitching, smoking heaps, entirely incapacitated.
The creeping Parasects tried to advance through the electrical smoke, their giant red mushrooms absorbing the stray current as they prepared to launch a close-range X-Scissor to slice him down. But Weezing was already hovering over them like a demon. He opened both jaws wide, channeling a roaring Heat Wave from his skin pores straight into their fungal shells.
The extreme heat instantly ignited the dry, organic material of the mushrooms. Because the lower-level Paras and Parasects under level 32 possessed a devastating four-times weakness to fire—with several carrying the Dry Skin ability that spiked the damage to a five-times multiplier—the first Heat Wave instantly vaporized them into blackened ash. For the level 33 and higher Parasects that barely stood alive through the initial inferno, Weezing immediately followed up with a secondary stream of fire from his vents, roasting them to the stone.
The Parasects went completely frantic, their bodies transforming into literal, walking torches as the fire seared through their carapaces, cooking them alive from the outside in. This second wave was infinitely more sad, painful, and horrific to watch compared to the first wave. During the first wave, Koffing was so heavily over-leveled that his attacks killed them almost instantly. But this second wave was packed with level 30+ evolved Pokémon with massive health pools and defensive stats, meaning they could take an absolute beating before dying.
What followed was pure horror. The narrow tunnels echoed continuously with the agonizing cries and wet screeches of wild beasts being slowly burned alive or suffocating to death from the poison. The path became a horrific graveyard filled with piles of smoldering, charred corpses and half-eaten bodies. Some mutilated, half-eaten wild Pokémon were still miraculously alive in the dirt, feebly crying and twitching in the ash, desperately trying to get away from the furnace.
Weezing floated above the carnage, his fangs dripping with the dark blood of his enemies, his eyes wide and vacant as he systematically crushed the remaining survivors with bone-shattering Take Downs and heavy Body Slams from his massive floating body. During this prolonged meat-grinder, Weezing surged massively in power. He leveled up twice over—once right in the middle of the chaotic bloodbath, and once more as the final carcass dissolved. By the time the ashes settled on the second wave, his physical level had erupted to a staggering Level 37.
But the extreme noise, the roaring flames, and the echoing screams had completely stripped away his camouflage. A large crowd of bypass travelers, seasoned hikers, and trainers had arrived at the outer edges of the crossroads, frozen in sheer terror. They didn't dare step onto the burning stone path. Instead, they instantly scrambled, pulling out their Pokégears to record the slaughter, snap pictures of the bloody crater, and make emergency red-alert calls directly to the League.
Weezing's face and location were officially being blasted online in real-time. The automated bounty system was clicking into gear, and red alerts would soon flash on the websites and Pokégears of every mercenary in Kanto. Calls would be made to local authorities like Gym Leaders. News of the danger would be broadcated at the radiotower, and will be available to hear on any Pokégear through the radio channel, or hear it through the TV. His fate was pretty much sealed.
But right at the tail end of the second wave, before the third wave could naturally gather its strength to breach the smoke, Emily spotted her microscopic window of hope.
A desperate, overconfident gang of bystander trainers who had just reported the incident decided they couldn't wait for the authorities. Driven by the allure of securing the immediate glory, massive cash bounties, and the legendary reputation of putting down an underworld demon on their own, the group stepped forward. They aggressively unclipped their premium Pokéballs, shouting commands as they prepared to launch a coordinated attack to gank the monster.
Emily's analytical mind locked onto the distraction instantly. If these fools could keep that demon stalled for even a handful of seconds, she could command Kadabra to execute a high-precision rescue heist. She could drop onto the dirt floor, grab Angel's bleeding body, and warp back out before the monster turned them all into charcoal. It was a suicidal gamble, but it was the only card she had left to play.
"Go! Tear that abomination to pieces!" the vanguard gang of trainers bellowed in unison, unleashing their heavy combat squads simultaneously into the smoking crater.
The stone path erupted into a chaotic battlefield as a massive wall of trained, experienced Pokémon materialized in the lane. Unlike the mindless, disorganized wild hordes from before, these creatures operated on collective brains and brawn, actively coordinating their movements under the direct tactical directives of their masters. It was a deadly, powerhouse roster: Lickitung, Piloswine, Magmar, Electabuzz, Jynx, Primeape, Steelix, Scyther, and Heracross. Each was a seasoned weapon. In any normal scenario, a lone wild Pokémon would have been instantly disassembled by such a crushing numbers disadvantage.
But this Weezing was a Diamond-Potential anomaly sitting at Level 37. While the trained squad was undeniably formidable, none of them possessed Platinum potential or higher; their genetic limits were a strict mix of Silver and Gold tiers. Furthermore, Weezing held a devastating level advantage over the entire field. The trained Jynx, Magmar, and Electabuzz were locked at level 30; the Heracross and Scyther sat at 32; the Lickitung stood at 31; the Primeape reached 33; while the massive Steelix and Piloswine topped out the vanguard at level 34.
Weezing didn't offer them a single second to establish a tactical grid. Hardwired with flawless combat knowledge, his vacant gaze instantly singled out the level 30 Jynx. Her Psychic-type movepool was his only type weakness on the type board; therefore, she had to die first.
Before the trainers could even complete their first defensive command, Weezing opened both jaws wide, unleashing a catastrophic Heat Wave from his skin pores followed immediately by a concentrated, high-velocity Flamethrower from his vents directed straight into Jynx's face.
The roaring wall of orange fire did double duty as the ultimate panic button and a devastating "get off me" move. The piercing blast completely engulfed the Psychic-type, vaporizing her flesh in a split second before she could launch a single counter. Simultaneously, the massive area-of-effect Heat Wave rolled violently across the entire vanguard lane, exploiting the severe fire weaknesses of scyther, Heracross, the ice-hided Piloswine, and the metallic frame of Steelix, sending their ranks into burning panic as the sudden inferno scorched their lines.
"Now! Kadabra, Teleport!" Emily shrieked from the high ridge.
She left her black Murkrow nested on the rocky peak to maintain their high-altitude coordination link, dropping straight into the abyss as a flash of psychic energy warped her onto the dirt floor. She materialized dead-center in the sea of fire, right at Angel's exact location.
Up close, the visual was devastating. The once pristine princess looked completely ruined—lying pale and defenseless in the dirt, her beautiful white hair stained with black ash and heavily soaked with the dark blood pooling around her neck. She looked completely fragile, harmless, and broken. If not for the critical leverage she held to find Odin, Emily would never have shown a single ounce of empathy or remorse for this girl.
Emily violently scooped the bleeding girl up into her arms, her chest heaving with panic. Just standing inside the direct radius of the inferno was an immediate death sentence; her skin was blistering from the ambient heat, the thick smoke choking her lungs as the oxygen levels plummeted. She was on a strict, death timer, and so was the unconscious girl in her arms.
"Hurry up! Hurry the fuck up, Kadabra!" Emily panickingly yelled out loud, her voice cracking with terror.
Because Kadabra had just used Teleport to bridge the gap from the ridge, his psychic reserves were temporarily wiped out. He couldn't instantly activate a secondary warp. A high-precision psychic warp wasn't a frictionless, spammable trick; his brain needed to sit perfectly still, closing his eyes to aggressively build, channel, and condense that raw mental energy back from scratch. To make it even harder, he was anchoring two entire human bodies, doubling the mass payload which required immense concentration and time. Emily began praying frantically to the universe, her eyes wide as she desperately begged that the monster wouldn't notice their psychic trace over the roar of the flames.
ROOOAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRR!
The entire middle level of Mount Moon suddenly froze dead in its tracks. The cavern walls shook violently, loose stones raining from the ceiling as a wave of pure terror paralyzed every single trainer and Pokémon on the battlefield.
That roar put every single howling shriek and wail from before to shame. It was a horrific, primeval manifestation of malice that immediately installed an inescapable primal fear straight into the core of every living soul in the cavern.
Emily's entire body went completely rigid, her blood turning to pure ice. She felt a cold sweat break across her forehead. "Why did he roar like that...?" her mind whispered in terror.
"Look behind you, Emily," her intuition screamed.
Paralyzed with a dread she had never known existed in her entire life, Emily and her Kadabra slowly, stiffly turned their heads to look over their shoulders.
What they saw was pure nightmare fuel.
Weezing had completely disengaged from the burning vanguard. He was staring directly at them from a few yards away. His wide eyes were completely bloodshot, thick red veins bulging across his lenses as the raw, suffocating killing intent leaking from his dual heads paralyzed the air. The murderous aura radiating from his purple body was heavy enough to suffocate a grown man, his vents hissing with a pure, concentrated bloodlust. The horrifying, vacant stare on his face dictated one reality: he had recognized them, and he was coming to commit murder.
Emily had navigated the cutthroat underworld of Team Rocket her entire life, but she had never truly known what real, primal fear felt like until this exact second. Under the bloodshot gaze of that monster, her composure didn't just break—it was utterly obliterated. Kadabra was no different, his golden skin trembling violently as his psychic spoon shook in his hand while he desperately concentrated on rebuilding his energy.
"Kadabra! Teleport! Hurry up! use Teleport right now!" Emily screamed in pure panic, her voice scrambling through the dark smoke as terror gripped her heart. The sheer horror of the looming execution was entirely consuming her sanity.
She turned her body completely, frantically yelling at her trembling Psychic-type, begging him with tears of raw terror welling in her eyes to please hurry up and complete the warp. Both Kadabra and Emily were openly fearing for their lives, their survival instincts screaming that they were completely out of options.
ROOOAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRR!
Another howling roar from the absolute depths of hell erupted from Weezing's mouths, the concussive shockwave physically locking the trainers and Emily's limbs in total paralysis.
Weezing didn't waste a single second. He launched his massive Body forward, charging straight across the burning dirt path toward Emily and Kadabra like a mad, feral bull of death.
"Please! Please hurry! Hurry up, Kadabra! I'm going to die! We are all going to fucking die!" Emily shrieked frantically, completely losing her mind to the panic as she began hitting and punching Kadabra's back with her free hand, desperately begging her Pokémon to trigger the line before the demon crushed them into mince.
Kadabra did his absolute best, his eyes wide with terror as he stared down the literal reaper charging straight at his face like a locomotive. He knew he couldn't take a single blow; his HP pools and physical defenses were completely non-existent. One Body Slam or Take Down from that monster, and his skull would be pulverized instantly.
Emily was completely losing her sanity, tightly clutching Angel's limp, bleeding body against her chest. In that second of terror, a dark, desperate thought flashed through her mind—she almost wanted to throw the white-haired girl straight into Weezing's open jaws as a bloody offering or a frantic apology, anything just to buy her Kadabra enough time to complete the Teleport.
It was a ruthless, terrifying race against time.
The looming shadow of death grew bigger and bigger by the millisecond, completely blocking out the ambient light of the flames as Weezing closed the distance with explosive, feral speed. Five yards. Two yards. One yard.
"This is it. It's over for me. I'm dead."
Weezing's wide, bloodshot jaws were exactly one inch away from Emily's face, the hot, toxic steam from his vents blasting straight into her eyes.
In that final microsecond, Emily's entire life flashed before her eyes in a slow-motion blur. She had seen death in the syndicate before, but she had never been this close to the edge of the abyss. True death stood right in front of her, and it carried the shape of a dual-headed, milk-white-eyed monster.
"I'm dead," she muttered under her breath, completely accepting her horrific demise in a state of paralyzing fear.
But right at that exact, microscopic fraction of a second—just as Weezing's massive jaws were about to violently close down and snap Emily's head clean off her shoulders—
FLASH!
A brilliant, explosive burst of pink psychic energy detonated across the dirt floor.
Emily, Kadabra, and the bleeding princess completely disappeared from the lane, vanishing into thin air as the psychic warp successfully finalized at the absolute last possible second. They succeeded.
A split second later, Emily crashed hard onto the cold stone of the high rocky ridge, landing right back beside her nested Murkrow. She lay gasping for air, her arms still tightly wrapped around Angel's unconscious body, her eyes completely wide, bloodshot, and filled with a lingering, paralyzing terror. She was a mere microsecond away from being eaten alive, her heart hammering so hard against her ribs it felt like it would explode.
And from the distance below, another deafening, furious roar from hell echoed sharply through the cavern walls. Weezing was completely beside himself with rage, his vacant white eyes wide with fury as he realized his goddess had been violently snatched away right from under his nose. With no targets left to vent his apocalyptic anger on, his bloodshot gaze slowly, mechanically turned back toward the trembling vanguard group of trainers and their powerhouses.
The reaper was hungry. Let the slaughter commence.