3 DAYS EARLIER—
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The roar of the underground river was a deafening, echoing wall of noise, slamming through the subterranean arteries deep beneath the mountain's bedrock.
"Odin! Odin, you piece of shit, answer me!" Lucy shrieked, her voice cracking over the rushing water.
The dim, eerie natural light filtering down through the upper stone fissures was barely enough to paint the churning foam in shades of a dull, ghostly grey. It was barely enough to see, but it was enough for Lucy to witness the worst fucking thing possible. A heavy, jagged rock had just cracked Odin straight across the temple, and his head rolled back limply.
"Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me! Odin!"
He was knocked the fuck out. Cold. Dead weight.
Beside them, Graveler's massive, rocky body was already shutting down. Graveler had absorbed an absolute metric shit-ton of catastrophic damage while acting as a living shield for them during the collapse, and his consciousness had finally flickered out. He was completely passed out.
Lucy frantically scanned the chaotic, swirling mess around her. Her giant Arbok was still fiercely fighting the torrent, her massive, scaly body wrapped in a tight, desperate knot around the Ekans egg incubator, keeping the fragile glass casing completely secured against her own flesh to ensure the unhatched snake stayed safe.
Lucy's own fingers were cramping, her knuckles white as she struggled to hold onto both her heavy tactical Pokébag and Odin's bag in her grip. But the logistics of the situation were turning into an absolute nightmare. Even though the unconscious Graveler had kept them locked in a tight, protective embrace to secure their safety, his passed-out arms were rapidly losing their strength. The massive stone fingers were slowly opening up, losing their muscle tension in the freezing current.
For Lucy, she could manage. She could wedge her boots or use her knees to clamp onto Graveler's rough hide despite having her hands full with the two large bags. The problem was the unconscious prick in her arms. Odin couldn't hold onto a damn thing right now. The second Graveler's grip completely loosened, Odin's lazy, deadweight body was going to slip right out of the stone embrace and be forcefully swept away into the black void of the aggressive river currents.
"Fuck! Fuck my life!" Lucy roared into the spray, her mind racing at a million miles an hour.
She had to make a choice right fucking now. She needed to ditch one of the bags to free up a hand, or they were both going to drown in this fucking gutter.
"Which one... which one..." she hissed, glaring down at the two bags.
Ultimately, she locked her eyes onto her own gear. She groaned, a deep, painful ache ripping through her chest as she prepared to make the sacrifice.
Fuck it, she thought, her internal monologue a storm of unhinged, foul-mouthed rage. I'm dropping my own shit. I'll just throw this whole fucking issue right back into his smug, punchable face later anyway! That arrogant fucker is rich as hell. He has so much goddamn money, I am going to force him to buy back every single piece of luxury gear I lose trying to save his miserable life! He's going to pay for every single cent, down to the fucking zipper!
"Goodbye, my sweet baby," Lucy whimpered painfully, letting go of her own bag.
She watched it get instantly swallowed by the grey, rushing torrent, her expensive Pokégear and personal belongings vanishing down the rapids forever.
With her hand finally free, she aggressively lunged forward, her long, slender fingers wrapping tightly around the collar of Odin's oversized black sweater just as Graveler's stone hands completely gave out. She squeezed his deadweight frame against her chest, her big tits pressing hard into his shoulder as she awkwardly used her other hand—the one still desperately clutching Odin's bag—to clamp onto a sharp, protruding ridge on Graveler's stone back.
"You better survive this, Odin," she snarled, coughing up a mouthful of freezing, mineral-heavy water as the current yanked them deeper into the mountain. "Because if you die after I just threw my entire life into the river for you, I will personally dig up your corpse and fuck you up all over again!"
The cold water smacked against Lucy's face, but the freezing chill was nothing compared to the ice-cold terror clawing at her chest. Despite the furious, foul-mouthed venom spitting out of her mouth, she was in an absolute, unadulterated panic for his fucking life. Her heart hammered wildly against her ribs as she looked down at Odin's pale, motionless face.
Don't you fucking dare die on me, she thought, her mind suddenly fracturing under the pressure, drifting back to the moments that had unfolded earlier today.
She remembered the way he had looked at her when he asked her to come with him to Vermilion City. She remembered the heavy, suffocating weight of her own voice when she gave him her answer. She had told him yes. She had promised him that she would be his forever—that her mind, her body, and her entire fucking soul belonged to him and him alone. He had dominated her completely, breaking down every single wall of her dominant side until she was entirely his.
And now look at them. They hadn't even managed to set foot outside the mountain toward Vermilion City, and here they were. Dying. Lost in the deep, wretched bowels of the earth. At least we are together, a dark, desperate piece of her mind whispered as the grey water rushed past. If this is the end, at least I'm holding him.
But her spiraling thoughts were instantly cut short by a flash of sheer, agonizing pain.
Because of the miserable, dim lighting filtering through the upper fissures, she never saw the massive granite boulder jutting out from the center of the riverbed.
CRACK.
The arm and hand she was using to anchor them to Graveler got caught squarely between the unforgiving rock and the crushing, multi-hundred-pound weight of the falling rock-type. The impact smashed straight through her flesh and bone.
"AHHHHHHHFFUCK!" Lucy screamed, a raw, agonizing shriek of pure torture tearing out of her throat and echoing off the cavern ceiling.
The white-hot agony caused her muscles to violently spasm, momentarily forcing her fingers to snap open. She completely lost her grip on both the rock ridge and Odin's heavy tactical Pokébag. The bag slipped instantly into the churning foam, vanishing into the rapids.
But Lucy didn't even look at it. Ignoring the blinding, sickening fire radiating up her shattered limb, she frantically lunged back forward with that exact same injured arm, her broken, bleeding fingers clawing into Graveler's rough stone hide to anchor them once more. She didn't give a single shit about the gear. She would rather every piece of wealth in the world be lost to the river than let Odin slip away.
She kept her good, uninjured arm wrapped like a vice around Odin's torso, pulling his deadweight frame flush against her chest. She had deliberately chosen to use her ruined, screaming arm to hold the massive weight of the Graveler because a terrifying realization had struck her: if she used her injured arm to hold Odin, and the pain caused her muscles to fail, she would let him go. If she dropped him into this black current, she would lose him forever. She would hate herself to death. She would never, ever be able to look at her own reflection or love herself again.
So, she bore the torture. She bit her lower lip so hard the copper taste of her own blood cut through the mineral water, her teeth sinking into her skin as she suffered silently, refusing to give in to the darkness for Odin's sake. If the current dragged them into a subterranean sump to drown, at least she would still be holding him. She wouldn't be alone. They would die or go missing together, locked in the same grave.
With that brutal determination hardening her resolve, she held him tenderly, shielding his head against her shoulder as the river tossed them violently down the jagged tunnel.
"Odin... please," she sobbed, her voice trembling, stripped of all her Elite Officer dominance as she whispered into his hair. "Odin, you prick, wake up... please come back to me. Just wake the fuck up and tell me what to do... tell me we're going to be fine."
She squeezed him tighter, the tears tracking down her muddy cheeks as the grey water splashed over them. "Argue back with me... please. Just call me a bitch, or a whore, or roast me... do fucking anything. Please, Odin... I'm so scared."
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The aggressive current showed absolutely no mercy, pulling their locked bodies down through the winding, jagged arteries of the mountain rock. Lucy completely lost track of time. In the suffocating, dim dark of the subterranean tunnels, the minutes stretched into what felt like agonizing hours. To survive it, she just kept talking. She kept pleading, crying, and begging the unconscious Odin to open his eyes, using the raw desperation of her voice to drown out the sickening, white-hot fire radiating from her crushed arm and the sheer, paralyzing fear tearing at her sanity.
Eventually, the violent roar of the river began to subside. The deep, churning torrents gradually smoothed out, growing increasingly shallow as the tunnel widened into a vast, silent cavern. The ghostly natural light from above began to brighten the space, cutting through the damp mist until, with a soft, hollow thud, their drifting mass gently collided against a large, flat rock on a shallow riverbank.
They were alive. They were safe for now.
A few feet away, her loyal Arbok slowly dragged her massive, scaly length out of the shallows. Against all odds, the high-level poison-type had kept her body perfectly coiled around the Ekans egg incubator, ensuring the fragile glass casing remained completely pristine and unbroken.
"Arbok..." Lucy wheezed, her breath coming in ragged, trembling gasps. "Get out of the water... put the egg down somewhere safe. Move."
The giant snake hissed softly in understanding, carefully slithering onto the dry silt of the riverbank to deposit the precious incubator.
Now, Lucy had to figure out how the fuck to get themselves out of the shallows. Her right arm was a completely mangled, useless mess of shattered bone and torn muscle, and she was too terrified to even attempt using it. Refusing to let go of Odin's torso with her good arm, she clumsily and awkwardly began fumbling around his waist with her left hand, trying to feel for his tactical Pokébelt. Her fingers trembled violently against the leather, blindly searching through the clips until her knuckles finally brushed against Graveler's Poké ball.
She yanked it off the belt and hit the button, aiming the red recall beam straight at the massive rock-type half-submerged in the current. With a sharp flash, the unconscious Graveler vanished back into the capsule, and the suffocating, crushing strain on Lucy's injured arm finally lessened.
But she was still stuck in the waist-deep water, her body freezing and her energy completely spent. There was no way she could drag Odin's heavy, six-foot-two deadweight frame up the muddy incline with just one working arm.
She looked up at her Arbok, her eyes tracking the snake's massive, muscular length, and her mind immediately formulated a solution.
"Arbok, over here! Help us up!" Lucy commanded.
The high-level predator slithered back toward the water's edge. Anchoring the front half of her massive body to a solid boulder on the bank, Arbok uncoiled her long, thick tail and stretched it out across the water like a lifeline. Lucy lunged forward, locking her good hand onto the rough, purple scales. With a powerful, fluid contraction, Arbok reeled them in closer to the shore, before completely wrapping the thickest part of her tail around both Lucy and Odin, effortlessly hauling their waterlogged bodies out of the river and depositing them onto the dry, solid ground.
"Thank you... thank you, my beautiful girl," Lucy sobbed, collapsing onto the silt.
The agonizing pain in her arm was making her dizzy, but she viciously forced the blackness out of her vision. Dragging herself over on her knees, she tenderly laid Odin down in a flat, comfortable position on the smooth earth. Her left hand shook uncontrollably as she pressed her fingers against the side of his neck, leaning her ear close to his chest to frantically check for any remaining signs of life—his breathing, his heartbeat, and his pulse.
Odin's chest barely rose. His breathing was pitifully shallow, a faint, ragged stutter that looked like it was about to clip out at any second. Lucy's fingers pressed hard against the freezing skin of his neck, her stomach dropping into a bottomless pit as she felt it—his heartbeat and pulse were dangerously weak, fluttering like a dying bird under his skin.
"No, no, no, you don't fucking get to do this to me!" Lucy panicked, her voice cracking as the reality of the situation hit her.
She had never performed CPR in her entire goddamn life. She had never been trained for first aid, and she had never read a manual on it. But right now, with her arm shattered and Odin slipping away, none of that bureaucratic protocol mattered. She threw her weight over his chest, using her one good hand to frantically pump down on his sternum, pressing her palm into the center of his chest with everything she had left.
"Breathe, you arrogant prick! Breathe!" she screamed, tears cutting clean lines through the dried mud on her face.
She leaned down, pinching his nose shut with her shaking fingers, and slammed her mouth over his. She forced her own breath into his lungs, doing mouth-to-mouth multiple times, pouring her own oxygen into his empty chest. In between the frantic, uncoordinated chest compressions, the raw desperation took over, and her mouth lingered against his, kissing him time to time out of pure, unadulterated terror of losing him. She realized he wasn't waking up. The hit straight to the temple of his head had done serious structural damage; his mind was entirely locked away. But as she sat back on her heels, gasping for air, she saw his chest finally start to move on its own with a steady, rhythmic cadence. He was in a coma, but he was alive. He was still breathing.
But for how long... she thought bitterly, her hand dropping onto her lap.
Wiping the blood and river water from her upper lip, she forced herself to stand up, her legs shaking like weeds as she did a quick scanning of their immediate surroundings.
To her surprise, the place they had washed up on wasn't entirely horrible. They were still somewhere incredibly deep inside the mountain cave system, but this specific cavern was wide open, stretching out into a massive, hollow amphitheater. Patches of vibrant green mountain grass grew between massive, jagged boulders that littered the floor. The entire area was remarkably well-lit, illuminated by a colossal, jagged crack splitting the ceiling hundreds of feet above. Looking up, she could see the newly arrived moon shining brightly through the gap, indicating that it was just past dusk and early into the evening.
There were no wild Pokémon to be seen anywhere around the clearing. But Lucy wasn't a rookie; she knew the silence was a lie. In a deep cave system like this, no monsters around just meant you had to be twice as careful about whatever alpha apex predator owned the territory.
"And lastly..." Lucy muttered, her voice echoing hollowly off the granite walls, "where the fuck exactly are we? And how the fuck do we get out of here?"
The reality of their isolation began to crush her. They were completely lost. She had no bag, no Pokégear to signal the Pewter City base, no food, and zero survival supplies. All she had was a mangled arm, a giant Arbok guarding an Ekans egg incubator, and an unconscious Odin who was completely dead to the world in a comatose state.
"Fuck me..." she groaned, her teeth grinding together as the blinding pain in her shattered arm flared up again. "I need to worry about food too. I need to feed myself, and I have to find a way to feed all the other Pokémon here if I have to pull them out to fight."
She looked down at her Pokébelt, her eyes tracking the heavy capsules locked onto the leather. Also... what the fuck am I supposed to do about Graveler?
Graveler was sitting inside his ball, entirely passed out after taking the brunt of the mountain collapse. He needed heavy physical healing, but without potions, full-restores, or a recovery machine, he was completely grounded. In this case, he might just have to rely on a Pokémon's natural healing factor, which was lightyears better than a fragile human's recovery time. But it still wasn't the favorable solution. If a wild predator caught them right now, a half-dead rock-type wasn't going to save her life.
"Fuck..." she whispered, dragging her good hand through her wet red auburn hair, staring into the moonlit dark. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."