"Everything that's happened has made one thing clear to me. We're still a very long way from creating anything that could genuinely be called a god."
"Rather than wasting our energy trying to recapture one unstable failure, we'd be better off doing something that actually matters."
A fierce, hungry light flickered in Giovanni's eyes.
"I can see a much bigger picture now."
"If Mewtwo can't reach that height, then we'll just build something stronger."
He swept a cold glance over the researchers trembling beside him.
"Are the research backups still intact?"
"Y-yes! They are!" one of the researchers answered with a frantic nod.
Mewtwo had destroyed the island, but the backups had already been uploaded to the network and were safe.
"Good."
Giovanni gave a dismissive wave of his hand.
"Pack everything up and get out. What we create next will not be a weapon. It will be a true god."
"There can be no more mistakes."
At that same moment, ten thousand meters above the earth, a streak of violet light was cutting through the cloud layers at tremendous speed.
Mewtwo paid no attention to the chaos it had left behind. All it wanted now was to fly higher, to fly farther.
It broke through the clouds and came out above them.
The air up here was thin and bitterly cold, yet the sunlight blazed down in full force, pouring over its body without anything to block it.
That feeling...
Mewtwo slowed to a stop, hovering in midair.
It closed its eyes and drew a long, deep breath.
No glass walls. No sharp smell of chemicals. Just the sound of the wind, and the warmth of the sun on its skin.
This was more real, and more beautiful, than any landscape it had ever seen inside the game.
So this was what freedom felt like.
Just then, a Pidgey wandered in by chance.
The sight of this violet creature radiating a terrifying aura sent the Pidgey into a panic. It tried to wheel around and escape, but the overwhelming pressure pinned it in place. All it could do was cry out in fear.
Mewtwo opened its eyes and looked down at the small creature shaking in front of it.
If this had been the moment of its birth, it would have simply attacked.
But things were different now.
It didn't strike. It just gave a gentle wave of its hand, and a soft, steady force cradled the Pidgey and sent it drifting away into the open air.
"Go on."
A single thought passed directly into the Pidgey's mind.
The Pidgey blinked, then, like something that had just been given a second chance at life, beat its wings as hard as it could and flew away.
Mewtwo watched it disappear into the distance, and its gaze hardened with fresh resolve.
It had its freedom now, but this was only the beginning.
It had decided it would become the strongest Pokemon in existence, and that meant it couldn't stop here.
Unbidden, images from the game began to surface in its mind. A green dragon that ruled the skies. A colossal beast that summoned raging flames. A presence that commanded the oceans.
Rayquaza. Groudon. Kyogre.
Those were their names, if it remembered right.
Their power filled Mewtwo with longing, and alongside it, something that felt a lot like excitement.
This world was far larger, and far more extraordinary, than it had ever imagined.
"Since I'm finally out here, I might as well make it worth it."
Mewtwo murmured softly to itself, and the violet light in its eyes blazed with sudden intensity.
It closed its eyes. Its vast psychic power radiated outward from its core in every direction, sweeping over city after city, forest after forest, sea after sea.
It was searching.
Searching for the most powerful presences in this world. Searching for those that could become true rivals, or the next stepping stone beneath its feet.
Before long, it found something.
Far in the distance, an overwhelming force that even Mewtwo found unsettling was lying completely dormant, still and silent, as though waiting for something.
The corner of Mewtwo's mouth curved slightly upward.
That was exactly what it had been looking for.
Its gaze locked onto a single direction.
A desolate desert, but buried deep within it, an extraordinarily ancient and extraordinarily powerful energy signature was hidden. That signature bore a striking resemblance to something Mewtwo had sensed inside the game.
"Right there."
Mewtwo's eyes snapped open.
The air shuddered, and in the next instant, the figure that had been hovering ten thousand meters above the earth was simply gone. Only a faint afterimage remained, slowly dissolving into nothing.
Destination: the desert.
The real challenge had begun.
Kairos sat in front of his computer. Out of habit, he opened the system interface before pulling his attention away from the screen.
Even though Mewtwo had finally broken out of that suffocating lab and won the freedom it had wanted, that didn't mean he could just wipe his hands of the whole thing.
This was Mewtwo, after all. A Pokemon that had only just awakened, whose mind hadn't fully developed yet, and that carried enough destructive power to cause a genuine catastrophe.
If it ended up going down the same dark road as in the original story, so bitter over humanity's betrayal that it started plotting to wipe out the human race and rebuild the world from scratch, then every investment he'd made would be gone for nothing.
He pulled up the player status panel.
The icon representing Mewtwo was pulsing with an intense red glow, a clear sign it was right in the middle of a fight.
Kairos's brow furrowed slightly. He swiped across the screen and switched to Mewtwo's first-person view.
What greeted him was a world of swirling yellow sand, gusts of wind pelting grit against a barrier with a sharp, crackling sound.
And standing completely unmoved in the middle of all that howling sandstorm was an enormous figure made entirely of solid rock.
Regirock?
Kairos raised an eyebrow.
The two of them were already deep into it.
Violet psychic tendrils coiling around Mewtwo's body lashed out in a frenzy, hammering again and again against Regirock's impenetrable stone form, each impact landing with a deafening crash. Regirock, for all its bulk, moved with startling speed, its massive rocky fists slicing through the air and slamming into the afterimages Mewtwo kept leaving behind, one strike after another.
Watching it all unfold, Kairos felt a flicker of puzzled amusement.
Mewtwo really couldn't sit still, could it? Barely out the door and it had already picked a fight with something this tough.
Though, thinking about it more, he figured this might actually be a good thing.
Better to have Mewtwo burning its energy on challenging opponents and finding something to work toward than to leave it alone with too much time to spiral into questions like "who am I" and "where do I come from." That kind of brooding could easily send it somewhere dangerous.
As long as it stayed busy fighting, it probably wouldn't have the time or the inclination to start working on plans to overthrow humanity.
At least for now, Mewtwo's drive to fight seemed genuine and straightforward. It just wanted to get stronger.
Staring at Regirock's absurdly tough shell on the screen, a thought suddenly crossed Kairos's mind. Should he try to recruit Regirock as a player too, while he had the chance?
It was one of the legendary Regi trio, after all. If he could get it into the game as well, the returns probably wouldn't be bad.
But he shook the idea off pretty quickly.
Forget it.
Regirock might be strong, but its intelligence was a real problem.
It was basically an automaton that followed commands. Getting it to understand narrative and emotion the way Mewtwo did would be an enormous uphill battle. Forcing it into the game would probably yield very little.
Not worth the trouble.
His gaze drifted back to the battle on screen, and a faintly amused look settled on his face.
He had noticed something interesting.
By all rights, as a Pokemon born from Mew's genes, Mewtwo should have sat at the very top tier among legendary Pokemon, at the very least a match for the likes of Rayquaza and the other heavy hitters.
And yet right now, it was visibly struggling against a single Regirock, the fight going back and forth with no clear advantage either way.
That pointed to one thing.
This world's Mewtwo wasn't as strong as he had assumed.
Or more precisely, it hadn't reached that level yet.
Kairos rubbed his chin, a rough picture forming in his head.
It made sense, really. Mewtwo had only just been born not long ago, and before that it had been locked up in Team Rocket's lab the entire time. Its body had been enhanced, sure, but it had almost no actual combat experience, and its power hadn't fully unlocked yet.
It was like handing a new player a top-tier loadout when they had no idea how to use any of it. Sitting on a mountain of raw stats without being able to turn any of them into real fighting ability. It needed time.
It needed battle after battle to learn its own body and figure out how to actually tap into what it was carrying.
That was fine, though. Given enough time, a Pokemon born with that kind of genetic foundation would eventually grow into something that shook the world.
When that day came, it would stand in the same tier as Rayquaza and the rest of the god-class legendaries, maybe even beyond them.
As long as it didn't fall somewhere along the way.
Kairos closed the battle view and stopped paying attention to the sandstorm on the other side of the screen.
When you decided to invest in something, you had to have the patience to wait for it to pay off.
He was just about to get up and grab a glass of water when the system interface pushed a golden notification box, pulsing urgently in the center of the screen.
"Notice: Cooldown for your item, Dimensional Transit Scroll, has ended!"
"Abnormal energy fluctuations detected in the current plane. Using the scroll now carries a very high probability of traveling to a Special World!"
"Use immediately?"
The calm in Kairos's eyes vanished the instant he read those words.
A Special World?
The system had mentioned this before. If he were to travel to a Special World, the emotional points he could earn would go up considerably.
He hadn't expected an opportunity like that to just land in his lap.
"Use it."
Kairos barely hesitated before confirming.
The moment he did, a familiar sensation of weightlessness washed over him. The world in front of his eyes began to warp and spin, then dissolved into a vast, blinding white light that swallowed everything.
"Transit successful."
"As this is a Special World, the method of crossing over has been adjusted. A special identity has been granted accordingly."
"Identity acquired: Employee of Starry Media, Zane."
When Kairos opened his eyes again, there was no familiar hum of a computer fan. In its place was a voice screaming at the top of its lungs.
"Would you care to explain yourself?! Are you out of your mind?!"
A fleshy, sweaty face shoved itself right up in front of him, close enough that he could feel the heat coming off it.
Kairos frowned slightly, instinctively leaned back, and let his eyes do a quick sweep of the room.
He was in an office that was reasonably well put together but currently a total mess. Stacks of sketches and documents piled up everywhere. The air thick with cigarette smoke and old coffee.
Across from him, a middle-aged man with a gut and a flushed red face had both hands planted on the desk, glaring at him in furious disbelief.
So this was the special identity.
A wave of memories hit him all at once, leaving him briefly dizzy as they settled in.
This was an entirely different world from the ones he had visited before.
No Pokemon. Just human civilization.
And the original owner of this body also went by the name Zane: a small-time director grinding away at an animation studio, someone with genuine ambition who had been worn down steadily by reality.
"Are you deaf?! Say something!"
The heavyset boss, seeing that Kairos still wasn't responding, got even more wound up. He grabbed a stack of sketches off the desk and threw them to the floor.
"I told you to study what made that show next door, 'Speed Girl,' a hit, and this is what you hand in. What is this supposed to be? Original content? Ha! What good is original content? You know what the market wants right now? Numbers! Hook moments! Nobody cares if you have soul! Nobody cares if you have vision!"
The boss jabbed a finger at Kairos's face, spittle flying.
"Let me be clear, Zane. This company is not a charity. We don't have the luxury of playing artist with you. If you keep being this stubborn and you refuse to take notes from what's already working out there, then get out. This place is too small for someone with your attitude!"
Kairos stared at the man raging in front of him while quietly sorting through the memories he had just inherited.
Those memories told him this boss's name was Dennis, and by every indication he was someone who cared about nothing but money and had zero interest in the actual quality of the work.
Which explained why the original owner of this body had suffered so much. From an animation standpoint, he was genuinely talented and full of original ideas, but without financial backing and without the right connections, there was only so much one person could do on their own.
Kairos bent down and quietly picked up the sketches from the floor, brushing the dust off them.
"Still think you're right?" Dennis let out a short, cold laugh at the silence. "Then walk out that door right now!"
"Enough."
Kairos looked up at him.
The room went still.
Without another word, ignoring the stunned look on Dennis's face, he tucked the sketches under his arm and walked out of the office.
By the time he got back to his apartment, the sky was completely dark.
The place was rough: barely three hundred square feet, with nothing inside but a bed, a desk, and a floor buried under crumpled paper, leaving almost no room to walk. The windows were old wood-framed things, drafty and loose, rattling every time the wind picked up.
Kairos dropped the sketches on the desk, sank back into the chair, and let out a long, slow breath.
A rough start. But at least the system had come with him.
He closed his eyes and reached inward for the system interface in his mind.
Sure enough, because this crossing had placed him in the role of traveler, the system had shifted in a few ways.
"Host has entered a Special World. Special Challenge activated."
"Current identity: struggling animation director."
"Restriction: Due to a conflict with this world's rules, the host may not produce games in this world."
"Only available path: The host must complete the system mission and spread Pokemon culture through the production of animation."