The Great Crater of Paldea was considerably larger than Lucien had anticipated.
Mist moved around them as they descended, and the deeper they went, the older everything felt. The ground had stopped being soft earth and become ancient brown rock, its surface covered in uneven cuts and grooves, as though something enormous had dragged itself across it over thousands of years.
The air was quiet except for the wind moving through the cliff faces and occasional low sounds from Pokémon somewhere in the dark beyond.
Calling it a crater was, as Lucien quickly realized, a significant understatement. It was more accurately a vast, layered descending labyrinth. Steep walls on every side, the rock showing different strata of brown and grey, its surface worn and cracked across immense spans of time.
A winding spiral path followed the cliff face downward, and stepping off it in the wrong place meant a fall into fog with no visible bottom.
One of the expedition members was sketching the terrain as they moved, mapping each new section as it appeared. They were not simply exploring, they were trying to understand the structure of the place.
The deeper terrain grew more varied. Sometimes the path narrowed to single-file, icy water dripping from the rock walls above, the sound amplified in the enclosed space.
Other times it opened onto vast underground platforms where the ground was covered not in earth but in fragments of crystal, their surfaces refracting light in rainbow patterns that lit the space in shifting, strange colors.
By late in the day, the light inside the crater had faded to almost nothing. The team stopped at a flat area against a cliff wall, relatively sheltered, and set up camp. A fire was built and lit, and the warmth it produced pushed back the dark and the cold to a bearable distance.
The Cyclizar and most of the team members settled in. Two kept watch.
Lucien looked at the Cyclizar for a moment. In Paldea, humans had been living alongside Cyclizar since ancient times, riding them for daily travel, the Pokémon willing partners not only because the work suited them but because the warmth of a human body on their backs helped them recover and kept away the cold.
A practical and genuine symbiosis, not unlike what he had been building elsewhere, arrived at independently.
He said nothing. He tended to his Pokémon and closed his eyes.
In the deep of the night, the fire had burned down and the camp was still. Wind moved through the mountain crevices in a low, continuous sound.
Then wings, nearly silent, and a cold surge of dark energy.
A small shadow came through the darkness with the precision of something that had located its target and decided on it. The Pokémon let out a sound that was more growl than cry, something primitive and territorial, and condensed a dark purple energy wave aimed at the figures beside the dying fire.
The night watch team members saw it first. "Captain, attack!"
Ars was on his feet before the shout finished. His Cyclizar beside him released a Dragon Breath to intercept. The attack was simply overpowered. Cyclizar was thrown into the cliff wall.
Ars gritted his teeth.
"Volcarona," Lucien said, from the side of the camp. "Your turn."
Volcarona emerged in white light, its wings already blazing, fire spreading outward from its body and dispersing the dark Ghost-type energy in the area around it. It rose into the air and faced Flutter Mane directly.
Flutter Mane hissed and lunged, fighting with the raw, direct aggression of something that had never needed to develop technique because nothing had ever survived long enough to teach it caution.
But Volcarona had been trained. It did not match Flutter Mane's ferocity; it simply moved faster and with more precision, a slight adjustment of the wings carrying it clear of each strike. Fire Spin erupted in a column of whirling flame that enclosed Flutter Mane completely.
Flutter Mane pushed against it, Magic-type energy and bursts of kinetic force, but Volcarona's flames continued to press inward, wearing it down.
"Volcarona, Fiery Dance."
Volcarona moved through the night air in a pattern that was less combat move and more something elemental: wings tracing arcs through the darkness, fire growing with each pass, the temperature around the camp rising dramatically.
Flutter Mane, trapped in the closing ring of heat, took the full intensity of it and could not hold.
It let out a sound that had lost all aggression and become something else, pulled backward by the damage, and then dissolved into a dark blur that vanished into the depths of the crater.
Volcarona landed beside Lucien, flames settling to a low, warm glow.
The camp members let out their collected breath.
"Lord Lucien, thank you."
"A small matter," Lucien said. "Inside this crater, we look out for each other. Rest while you can."
He stroked Volcarona's wing as it pressed against his hand, and let his gaze move outward into the dark of the crater.
He found himself thinking about Ars and the team. In another course of events, perhaps none of them had ever reached this depth.
Perhaps his presence had changed the equation, made the descent possible, and by doing so had led them into encounters they would not have survived otherwise. A familiar kind of consequence.
The fire was built up higher. The night watch resumed with considerably more attention. Ars sat back against the cliff wall, eyes open, his gaze settling on the vast dark of the abyss below.
If the middle layers held all of this, what lay in the depths?
The unknown depths held dangers and wonders in equal measure, and Ars understood this better than most. It did not stop him. If anything, the knowledge deepened the pull.
The next morning, light came down through the clouds above the crater in long, diffuse shafts. After a brief reorganization of supplies and equipment, the team set off again.
Ars led from the front, consulting the terrain map in his hand at intervals and passing instructions back in a low voice.
"Stay with the group. Don't leave the path. The terrain is more complex than any of our previous surveys suggested. Cliffs, fissures, and Tera Crystals are everywhere. If you get separated, finding the group again will be extremely difficult."
His voice was quiet but carried the particular weight of someone who had earned every word of caution through experience.
"Understood!" the group answered.
They moved down through layers of terrain that changed character with each level. The rock grew older looking, the formations stranger, the sounds from below less identifiable. Then, at a certain depth, the environment transformed entirely.
Enormous Tera Crystals rose from the floor like pillars, some reaching all the way to the ceiling, others standing free in the center of vast underground platforms, their surfaces catching what little light existed and scattering it in rainbow fragments across every wall.
The air hummed faintly with energy that was not quite describable as sound and not quite describable as anything else. The humidity and air pressure were completely different from the surface, the warmth and cold existing simultaneously in a way that felt wrong to breathe.
The team stopped and stared.
No exploration team had reached this area before. The sounds coming from below were strange enough to produce an instinctive response that had nothing to do with reason.
"Eyes open," Ars said. "Many dangerous Pokémon live at this level."
Not far away, several Paradox Pokémon moved among the crystals: shapes that resembled modern Pokémon but carried something additional, a wildness and a strangeness that modern Pokémon had lost over thousands of years of coexistence with humans. Scream Tail, Roaring Moon, Flutter Mane, Iron Thorns, all of them moving with the particular awareness of creatures that did not recognize intruders as anything other than threats.
Ars gestured for the team to hold position and spoke carefully.
"Do not provoke them. These Pokémon are stronger than anything we have encountered in the outside world and more sensitive to unfamiliar presence. Our objective is the bottom of the crater, not unnecessary conflict."
"Yes."
Lucien took in the Tera Crystals as they moved through carefully, their rainbow light filling the passages. A phenomenon unique to Paldea, similar in category to Mega Evolution in Kalos and Dynamax in Galar, but different in character.
The researchers who would eventually study Terastal had done their work in this very place. And somewhere below Area Zero, deeper than any of this, Terapagos lay dormant.
A low growl came from the crystal thicket ahead.
A pink shape emerged from the shadows. Scream Tail, the ancient Paradox form of Jigglypuff, its eyes clouded and ferocious, nothing of the modern Pokémon's gentleness remaining in it.
It looked at the group with the focused hostility of a creature that had never learned that humans were not simply prey or rivals.
The team went still. Nobody breathed loudly.
Ars raised one hand, fingers spread: wait. He began backing up slowly, keeping his eyes away from direct contact with the Pokémon's gaze.
"Don't meet its eyes. Move back slowly. The handbook mentions this type, strong territorial instinct, but it won't pursue if you don't enter its space."
Step by careful step, the group retreated. Scream Tail watched them from the border of its territory, growled once more, and then turned. Its large shape disappeared into the crystals.
A collective exhale.
"That is terrifying," a young team member said quietly, his hands damp.
Ars nodded. "That was one of the milder encounters we might have here. Others are considerably more aggressive. Some are solitary, some operate in groups. Our goal is to avoid all of them."
"You seem to know a great deal about them," Lucien said.
"The King has sent many exploration teams here over the years," Ars said. "Each team that came back recorded everything they encountered and passed it along to the next group. The records are detailed." He paused. "The teams that didn't come back obviously contributed less."
"Aren't you afraid?" Lucien asked.
Ars was quiet for a moment. "Yes," he said plainly. Then the particular light came into his eyes that belonged to people who do dangerous things for reasons they find entirely sufficient. "But if we find what's at the bottom, we will never want for anything again. Our families will live well. That is worth it."
Lucien said nothing. He thought about what actually waited at the bottom of Area Zero, and what Ars's treasure was more likely to be.
They rested briefly and pressed on, following the narrow passages through the crystal dust into deeper levels. More unimaginable formations, more Paradox Pokémon: Great Tusk, Iron Thorns, Iron Valiant, each one carrying the specific character of its category, primitive and ancient or cold and mechanical, all of them utterly territorial, hostile to outsiders, having formed across millennia in this sealed environment into something that had nothing in common with the Pokémon above.
Ars navigated them through with the care of someone who understood that one wrong step had real consequences. The team followed without complaint.
By late evening, they reached Area Zero.
No starlight reached this depth. The space was entirely dark except for the Tera Crystals, which cast their diffuse rainbow light across the cavern walls and gave the place the quality of somewhere that had never been meant for human eyes. Ars surveyed the terrain and selected a sheltered cave.
"We camp here tonight. Build shelter, light a fire, do not go anywhere alone. The cavern at night is ten times more dangerous than during the day."
...
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