The moment the Shadow Triad vanished, Touko White began to realize the nature of the trap she had just willingly walked into. Darkness loomed from every corner, trying to swallow the light of her Emboar's flames. She almost wished it would; blood lay across the granite no matter where she turned, setting her heart to racing. Cooling crimson, dark red, blotchy brown, the stuff was everywhere, etched into the floor like the sigils from the old TCG energy cards, all dark, fighting, fire emblems with no discernible pattern to their placement. Rising up the walls in vast whorls and smaller spirals stemming from the center, like raindrops from a storm, surrounding what she took to be an assortment of the legendaries in lieu of any eyes. A dark droplet splashed down just inches from her cap, dashing itself across her toes, and she resisted the urge to scream.

Instead she took a shallow breath and directed Emboar's flames higher despite knowing what likely awaited. The overbearing warthog snuffled and bunched up his shoulders, spewing a torrent of light that confirmed her regret; hung upon the unlit chandeliers were two unfamiliar women, one with pale pink hair, the other glossy blond. They were... she had to turn her face away, unwilling to commit their deaths to words. Yet still those words came. Burned, butchered, crucified. Her stomach roiled fit to unleash everything she had ever eaten and she knew she couldn't stay there any longer beneath their murdered corpses.

"Hurry," she exhaled the word and took a measured, controlled step through the lifeblood upon the floor, exacting every ounce of steadiness she had learned from the past six months afield with monsters. Unspoken, she feared the real monster waited ahead - a Zoroark born in, and craving, human flesh.

It took over an hour to ascend the halls and stairwells creeping to the top of the forsaken castle, and a good portion of that had been in full sprint just to outpace the death-wails of dying grunts pinned up in darkened rooms to each side of her path. She hadn't dared stop to look, or to try and relieve them of their agonies - the accursed melody they sang would be with her the rest of her life already, along with the visage burned into her memory of those two women. She had no desire to take any more into her nightmares.

Her partner kept apace with a steady thump of his hooves and none of the trouble that burdened her own lungs, leaving her gasping for breath by the time they had reached the final wing. The very end was illuminated by an ethereal light, unnaturally silent, and she recalled her starter with reluctance - she had no intention to give N warning. She had enough idea of how he would react.

The shadows swallowed her whole, but for the simmering glow from Emboar's pokéball over her right hip. She could practically feel the psychic malignance pervading the air and wrapping about her form. Hurry, she thought with a shiver, but do not let him hear. Oh Kami, don't let him hear.

Every footstep seemed to burden the silence, threatening it with a knife's edge. Her heart continued to race for the small eternity between that last stair-step and the illuminated hall beckoning her within. It only thumped harder in her chest by the time she was close enough to peer through the light.

And she froze clutching at the doorway.

N crouched in the middle of his throne room, idly swirling his fingers through the cold pool of Alder's blood like a child finger-painting a mural. The deceased-Champion was as gruesomely executed as had been the two women, and more, for the fact that he had been discarded in the gutted corpse of his beloved firebug, Volcarona. Those once magnificent wings it had borne lay shredded everywhere around them, discarded quills used to write with its master's blood for a short time. There was little flesh left to Alder himself, either, and what was she could not stand to look upon for long.

A shiver racked her spine, cold sweat dripping from her pores. This... this is what I have to face? Her foe was not a trainer, though by League definitions he was its current Champion and master of laws. How can a murderer control our region? How could Alder have lost? The faintest hope that the old man had been enough to put N down withered and died. Her legs threatened to buckle and she drew a shaky breath, holding tight to the edges of the door frame lest she collapse all together. Nothing had ever scared her half so bad as the time spent in this tortured hell, not even Celestial Tower filled with so many ghosts.

Celestial Tower had been heaven by comparison.

She managed to drag her eyes away from his form lest he feel her gaze and look up from his macabre art. The four Lampent lighting up N's gruesome play swung on silent, ethereal purple links chained into the ceiling. Behind his tattered golden throne her eyes kept creeping toward an imminent black darkness more portent than any other shadow, swallowing up the light of their ghostly flames without relent. There was something inherently... eldritch about it, on a scale grander than anything else taken in that night, that made her heart skip a beat once, twice.

Emboar's pokéball blazed hot against her hip with impatience. The sudden heat snapped her gaze down to the device and the faintest shine of red-yellow light as her starter urged her on.

I... her eyes tracked to the others hanging on her belt then, cool serenity radiating from Mienshao, slow stubbornness from Bouffalant, even Accelgor's usual implacable mood stirring toward frustration. She could feel the bug's eyes glaring at her, challenging her, and the same of Scrafty. Lilligant was the only member of her team who felt as scared as she, and the plant masked that behind a nervous smile. The feelings they felt rang clear in her mind, if not her heart - fight. Win.

Touko drew another shaky breath, afraid to speak the words that would draw his attention even so. This was so far beyond anything she had ever confronted... no feral had scared her this badly. Those, at least, she knew how to react to; they were expected to be wild, to be beasts intent on eating any human who neared, who fumbled, who failed to hold their own. A hundred years of trials and tribulations had taught mankind how to stand upon its own two legs again by taming the worst of that savageness and beating it back at its own game. All her life she had spent learning the lessons of her ancestors, in preparation for that constant struggle.

But how do you confront a psychopath? A murmur on the back of her mind flickered soft as light in response, a voice she hadn't heard for years and hadn't expected to remember ever again. Black? She thought.

You treat him like a legendary, Black's voice whispered faintly. You don't even the odds... you set them in your favor. You strike the first blow, no matter how vicious. Never relent. She breathed slowly, feeling some measure of strength seeping into her spine at that iron-hard tone. Never relent. "Never relent," she whispered in agreement, clenching her starter's pokéball all the harder.

Heat burned the underside of her palm, tempering the emotion through pain. Touko bared her teeth and threw herself forward, flung Emboar into the high, vaulted room amidst the swinging Lampent, and before the warthog had even finished solidifying from crimson poképower she had slung out Scrafty, and Bouffalant as well.

For all that N still reacted quicker.

One moment his eyes were flat, empty, the glassy-eyed glaze of a dead man mimicking the living. The next they went up like the twin wicks of a jaded flame, scorching, terrible to behold, a demonic specter returned from the grave. Something fey, something utterly zealous entrenched itself in his bloody features, shaping lips into a cold hard grin, cheekbones standing out.

And all he did was utter one sentence, broken into two words. "Zekrom," he uttered in laced amusement. "Play." His words hung upon the air as if time had frozen. She was able to recognize the name he had just spoken, an eternity condensed into an instant, before cold dread washed away her sudden, foolish pride.

It can't be...

Three pokémon made their moves.

The warthog came down hard upon the bloody tiles, shattering around his position for meters around and ruining N's bloody art, as he lowered his shoulder and flames erupted around his entire upper body. He charged forward with a bellow like never before, either ignoring the warnings the room had already left behind or else believing them false, and the temperature around them all rose to sweltering heights for scant moments. Bouffalant ducked his own brow and followed suit, crackling the rest of the tiles completely in his thunderous hooves. And Scrafty vanished in a whirl of shadows, leaping across the floor to perform Faint Attack.

N's cheeks twitched as they pulled back even further, and rapturous laughter erupted from his lips. With each exhalation of delight the glow of the Lampent faded. Then the pitch-black shadow pooled behind N's throne stirred, she could think of no better word that suited how the darkness moved on its own, and three movements put an end to her hope of killing the madman quickly.

Scrafty's shadow-cloaked rush was choked off and crushed into infinitesimally smaller specks by that larger shape, leaving nothing behind for her to mourn but his memory. The bull was skewered on a multitude of ebon lances, nearly a foot long and tipped with hooks, and then they pulled him apart into chunks of neatly cut tenderloin. And a wave of poisonous heat so vile it extinguished Emboar's flames instantaneously and halted him in his tracks preceded the sudden double-row of ivory incisors that broke the darkness and fell upon his upper body viciously.

Within the course of a single, eternally long moment, Touko White lost three of her best partners, and there wasn't a single thing she could do to stop it. Her fingers trembled as their empty pokéballs rolled back to her feet automatically, now open to reuse as their cache of information was purged to the pokédex.

Her gut roiled and she didn't even bother trying to fight the bile down. It splashed across her boots, crawled down to mix with the blood of man and monster alike. She could hardly breath between lurches, and even when her empty stomach clenched she still managed to dredge up a little acid that burned the back of her throat before it ended. She collapsed to her knees the next moment amidst the bile and blood as the tears spilled down her cheeks, hands clutching the empty pokéballs before her like a lifeline.

"N-no... no..."

N sighed happily. He uncoiled his legs from beneath him and rose to his full height. "Come out, come out, little Liligant," he sang in sing-song cheer. "Come pray for me, miss Mienshao." His footsteps trod right through the mess of human fluids and stopped as he crouched down before her, left hand passing down her cheek gently. Then he lifted it to his mouth and licked the saline clean, grin drawn taut once more.

She retched again and leaned away on her hands, began to crawl backwards, toward the shadowed hallway she should never have entered, let alone left.

He reached out like a Serperior and caught her about the ankle, yanking her up close again. I am going to die. She screamed silently. She clawed, kicked, fought as she had never fought in her life. I am going to die!

N twisted about and rose while she flailed, gripping her around the waist with his other hand so he could fling her toward his throne and that eldritch shadow shifting restlessly. Her belt came away and all the air exploded from her lungs as she collided with the golden chair, an unmistakable crack signifying her left arm giving way from the force behind the impact, and another, shriller wordless shriek tried to form in her throat.

N looked from her agonized features to the balls swaying ominously in his left hand and back again. Her eyes widened, narrowed with panic, flared wide again in denial. "Zekrom," he repeated with that same delirious mirth, "eat."

And the darkness surged forward to swallow the upper half of his arm, audible crunching as technology surrendered, howling as their final moments were filled with terror. It was over in a handful of beats. When the darkness withdrew N's arm was barren to the elbow with a whirlwind of crimson slits dancing over the flesh, but no sign remained of her belt or the remaining members of her party.

Never relent! Something in her broke as N began to stride toward her, and Black's image overlaid the Unova Champion. What do you think you're doing? Get up! Fight! Never relent!

I can't!

She screamed back.

Get up!

I can't! I can't move!

N wrapped his hand around her throat and squeezed tight as he drew her upright. "Goodbye, miss hopeful," he uttered pleasantly. "Dragon Breath," he concluded to the legendary hovering just behind her back.

GET UP, TOUKO WHITE, AND DIE ON YOUR FEET!

She could hear a set of lungs, deep as drums, drawing in an impossible amount of air. N's fingers loosened as he prepared to step back.

FIGHT!

She gasped for breath and drove one arm as hard as she could upward into his elbow. The same terrible snap echoed for the second time as bone collapsed to kinetic impact and for the first time that night N exhaled with no pleasure to his voice. She fell to her knees and managed to turn it into a tuck-and-roll, finding herself coming up beside Alder and Volcarona's corpses. The sight nearly robbed her of her sudden resolve. She trembled as the pain of her broken arm returned.

"Hah... hah... ah..." she threw herself away from them not a moment too soon, as another wave of vile heat and miasma devoured what was left of the once-Champion and his ally. A splash of it caught her left boot and eroded the sturdy leather down to her bare ankle.

Get up and fight him! Stand up and fight them! Black's voice had begun to warp, straining, growing heavier and less and less recognizable as a human tone. It was borderline growl, rumbling in her eardrums, and she felt her brittle resolve redouble from the intensity behind it. Die on your feet!

When she looked up again N was clutching his broken elbow against his stomach, leaning against the edge of his throne, as a pair of vermillion slits spread open far above his head. Ivory incisors flared wide around the shape of a mouth, a maw angling downward, and suddenly texture began to appear with sparks of lightning illuminating the behemoth beneath the shadows. Thick forearms, wide wings, a heavy torso and legs supporting a colossal tail.

The joy had slid from N's face. "Zekrom," he swore with no emotion coloring his tone, "eat."

Fight, Touko White!

She dragged herself upright as the legendary's form blurred back into pitch-black garb. It leaped, mouth spreading wide to swallow her whole, if it was merciful. She knew it would simply take a piece in response to its master's mood, and draw the agony out over precious seconds.

Will you fight? Black's voice asked. "I will," she answered just above a whisper.

Sapphire flame erupted from the pouch barely clinging to her left hip and engulfed the young trainer from toes to curly hair. Zekrom drew up short and roared practically in her face, knocking her back into the hall and nearly deafening her, but Touko struggled to her feet again, and this time the long forgotten White Stone resting in that pouch began to thrum as she stumbled forward limply.

Than we shall fight, Trainer, and prove them wrong!

The White Stone leaped before her and began to unwind from about itself, expanding, as the flames surrounding her body were drawn in and came to rest as a pair of glimmering blue eyes. White feathers-into-scales filled out a regal mane and head, flared wing-arms, a graceful waist and legs and narrow tail.

"Reshiram?" she whispered. The dragon acknowledged her with a lean of the head, eyes locked upon its other half. "Kill them, please!"

In answer, he growled equally as powerfully as Zekrom had, knocking the Lampent from their perches. The fire they provided was swallowed as Reshiram's tail began to burn like a furnace, drawing their power inward to heighten his own higher. The light emitted from the appendage flourished with a deep rumble, reminiscent of Emboar's bellowing before he would expel Flamethrower. Reshiram's blue eyes glowed brighter in time and a sudden wave of heat washed across the entire room, bathing them in the warmth of the sun. Sweat broke out across Touko's flesh and dampened her cloths in seconds, leaving her panting; she had to fall to one knee, breathing labored, one eye edging closed as well as the salty fluid glistened at the corners.

"R-Reshiram... ?" she asked between inhalations. The dragon hunched forward and roared violently, snapping her attention away from her own woes back upon their foes; N's face had blossomed into a rictus of agonized delight anew as the sweat dripped from his pours. But the madman did not hold her gaze for more than a second or two; it was Zekrom that enraptured her fully in the next moments.

The dark dragon's flesh was hard and rigid, its shadowy cloak stripped away. Ugly smoke wisped up from dozens of minor sear-marks dotting its pitch black scales. The room seemed immensely tiny in the presence of those two titans, one of light, the other malice.

Abruptly N shuddered and cried out, tone high as if riding an orgasmic bliss, "I have sampled your twain powers now, o' Reshiram Lightbringer, and I find yours lacking most; Zekrom," he paused to swallow dryly, and perhaps to gather some force of will, for his dragon's form began to bubble and ooze once more into ichory-blight, "devour your Other. Eat it whole!" And he exploded from the edge of his throne then, leaping across the distance between them even as she was still on her knee trying to process what was happening.

At the same instant Zekrom moved - and loomed up before Reshiram to drive its colossal claws into the paler dragon's chest. Its jaws, which had hewn through Emboar's upper body like a soft muscle, lurched for the throat.

Reshiram stumbled backward across the floor as it turned the head down, blocking the access to its throat in substitution for its face.

Stand tall and fight at my side, Touko White! Lend me your strength as I have given you mine! Pain suffused the growling voice of her dragon as it cried out for her aid. Touko flinched between the movements of rival trainer and legendary, scrambling to rise even as N finished crossing the distance and slammed his shoulder into her head. She reeled backwards, flailing, and he bore her down to her stomach to crouch over her lower back.

She gasped twice in quick succession as her broken arm was pressed hard into her ribs by the landing, the rent bone peaking up from the flesh that housed it in a splay of rich, vibrant blood her shirt began to soak in and spill across the floor in her struggle. He gave her no time for shock to set in or even, truly, for the pain to reach its crescendo; no, he reached down to gouge at her eyes, slippery though her flesh was, leaving a trail of bloody scratches down her forehead and her cheeks as she thrashed beneath him.

Reshiram's howl echoed off the walls in time with its trainer's agonized intake and silent exhalation in the next moments. What was done to one now became mirrored upon the other, for Zekrom's teeth sank deep into the cheekbone until they caught. A horrible sucking, slurping sound followed as shadow engulfed the upper body.

Fingers still locked inside of her socket, jelly oozing from between the knuckles, N dragged her shuddering head up to stare at the ghastly sight he had made, to take in her violent breathing and the blood and tears welling from her sole good eye to splash across the floor.

"Yes," he breathed out, and his voice had gone husky, giving the word a drawn out menace that she did not hear around the throb of red hot pain in the front of her skull. Every subtle twitch of his invasive digits sent a new tremor racking through her nerves. Speech had been robbed in the same instant as half her precious sight, leaving her mute - and unable to issue a single vocal command to the dragon depending on her as much as she was it.

Get it off of me, Touko begged silently, gradually losing all control over her mind, get it away from me! A mixture of salt and blood blinded her remaining vision, leaving the monster knelt over her but a dark blur as she stared up at him hazily. She hadn't been cut out to be a trainer, let alone a Champion, if this was what that title meant must be extracted as toll. To be beaten and bloodied and murdered. Numbness faded in and out across her ribcage, her broken arm, but it never came to her face and the hole he had made.

And then N leaned down and spread his mouth wide, tongue darting out to lap up what remained of her eye and the crimson soaking his knuckles. She shuddered in his grip, at once from the looming figure and again as the slimy muscle probed about her socket like a Zoroak rooting for grubs in the dirt.

GET AWAY FROM ME! Something else within her snapped by his further violation. If he could hold her naked soul in his hands, she knew, he would treat it no more gently. He would violate it as wholesomely as he had her living body, and leave nothing behind to remind the world who Touko White had been.

A faint tremor spread down her form as she rejected that with the last ounce of control she possessed.

She screamed in his face.

Her chest racked as she gathered her breath in shaking gasps, and then she expelled the noise with every ounce of denial and terror and sheer, simple outrage that her life should end as N's plaything. The strength of it made him flinch, head jerking back, arm jolted, as it rang in his ears. His grip relinquished its slick hold in her face against his desire and she collapsed down to the ground upon her bad arm again.

She barely hesitated before she lunged against his ankles. She could no longer feel what had become of the injury, and so she aimed for him with that side. A mistake, as it turned out, given the sudden encore of attention those dull nerves sang out, but not a fatal one; for the other trainer fell atop her again for a moment and he tried to break his fall with both his hands upon the bloodied stone floor. One hand went out beneath him; the other cracked violently and mimicked her wound, setting gleaming ivory shards leaden in crimson and pale white strips of flesh free. N's voice was a gasp as he cried out just one shrill note and lay briefly still.

Touko scrambled out from beneath him, rolling and tugging and lashing out with her heavy boots wherever she could to shove him aside. He rolled once and again to a stop, knees gathered beneath himself.

She had made it just scant feet before he turned and lunged after her, half a crouch giving him some greater speed. "Come back, Touko White," he breathed out in a broken-sing-song tone. His eyes had flared wide and kept flashing between his own pain and a terrible lust he had yet to sate.

"WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE?!" she screamed again, kicking back at his chest with everything she had. Yet another terrible crunch filled the heavy air as a portion of N's ribcage gave in beneath that blow.

His weight against her leg forced them down together and he landed side-by-side, practically close enough to kiss. More than close enough to take in that awful, haunted look in his gaze, and to see how even now he smiled like a damned man brought back from the brink of death. He rasped as he drew back a breath and thrust his arm out from beneath him, reaching for her. She rolled away shivering and felt her sudden well of strength abandon her, and then the agony and the tears overwhelmed her adrenaline rush.

Fire and shadow ruptured feet away, unheard and unnoticed. Zekrom's black form hung above Reshiram's crumpled body, the once pristine feather-scales riddled with holes as an acid might make, or the potent strength of Dragon Breath, but one blue eye blazed on in defiance and the maw was spread in a low, simmering growl. In contrast its other half turned a smouldering gaze upon the trainers - a smoulder that was weakening by the moment, fading, as N breathed his last, and its own jaws were clenched tight in brimming fury.

Stand, Touko White, her legendary echoed a sentiment that must have been shared by the dark dragon to its own partner. "I... I can't..." she uttered just above a whisper. Out of of fear, or panic, but truthfully exhausted beyond mortal boundaries. Her consciousness was slipping with blood loss.

You have done enough, then, and Reshiram struggled upright. The fire of its tail, that had all but gone out, reignited with a roar. Zekrom's own tail sparked weakly with electricity as the shadow evaporated in the returning heat, and a single pale bolt of lightning shot forth in retaliation, only to be drawn into the dragon of truth's body, sizzling and crackling until it dissipated. Zekrom snarled impotently just before its body exploded into a ball of ever-shrinking darkness, until at last it had hardened again into the Dark Stone.

Touko did not see the three men bedecked in black that had brought her to the castle as they appeared before the mouth of the throne room on silent feet. They studied the aftermath of the ruination wrought, first by Alder's challenge, then by her own

One of them flickered forward to collect the Dark Stone before it landed, and vanished. One of them flickered forward to kneel between Touko and N, and laid a hand upon his dead king before they vanished. The last of them glanced back into the hall, and to the growing noise of the approaching Gym Leaders. In his hand rested a readied Master Ball, and in his head the orders to capture the dragon that emerged victorious.

The man looked back and met Reshiram's scorching blue gaze. He flicked the orb low and let the tool roll to a clatter against Touko's hand, a parting gift for her success in defiance of his orders, in knowing what the dragon would do to the device if he tried to subdue it now, and he vanished just before Iris and Drayden stormed up the way with a horde of their partners racing close at hand.

End.