They ran.
Victini blazed on Sasuke's shoulder, its full-body fire cutting a cone of orange-white light through the forest's absolute darkness. Ninetales ran at Kiyomi's side, its Aurora Veil activating on instinct, a translucent curtain of ice-blue luminescence that surrounded the group in a soft, shifting glow and turned the ancient trees into pillars of frost-lit shadow as they passed. The combined light was enough to see by. Barely.
The forest floor was treacherous. Roots crossed the ground in networks that caught feet and turned ankles, hidden beneath centuries of leaf litter that compressed underfoot with a sound like wet paper. Gaps between roots dropped into hollows where water collected and things grew in the lightless humidity, mushrooms, pale worms, organisms that had never seen the sun and didn't miss it. Sasuke navigated by instinct and Victini's light, his body remembering the Crown Tundra's nighttime terrain drills, three years of running across surfaces that tried to kill you and learning to read the ground through your feet instead of your eyes.
The green flashes were closer now. Each one brighter than the last, visible through the gaps between tree trunks as sharp pulses of emerald light that painted the forest's interior in snapshots: a glimpse of bark, a frozen fern, the reflective glint of eyes belonging to creatures that had been watching from the dark and were now pressing deeper into the undergrowth, away from whatever was generating the light.
The white lights pursued in formation, organized, precise, the spacing consistent in a way that natural phenomena never achieved. Flashlights or headlamps or something more technological, moving with the coordinated purpose of a hunting party that had been trained to track.
They heard it before they saw it.
A cry. Not the vocalization of any Pokémon in Sasuke's experience, and his experience, after nine months of travel across two regions with a team that included a Dragon specialist, a medical encyclopedist, a Contest veteran, and an archaeologist, was considerable. This sound existed in its own category: musical but anguished, carrying a frequency that bypassed the auditory system and registered directly in the temporal lobe, in the part of the brain that processed time.
The cry made Sasuke feel, for a fraction of a second, that he was simultaneously five years old and ninety, as if the sound had compressed his entire lifespan into a single instant and then released it.
"Celebi," Kiyomi gasped, and the word was confirmation and alarm and reverence in three syllables.
They burst into the clearing.
The scene was a nightmare rendered in green light and violence.
The clearing was natural, another fairy ring, smaller than the Moss Clearing, perhaps thirty meters across. The impossible wildflowers were here too, but they were trampled, crushed by boots and claws, their impossible seasonal coexistence destroyed by the mundane reality of a fight that had been happening for longer than the group had been aware of it.
Celebi was at the clearing's center.
Small. The Time Travel Pokémon was small, barely half a meter tall, its body a pale luminous green, fairy-like in proportions with large, expressive eyes that dominated its face and wings that resembled translucent leaves more than any anatomical structure that conventional biology could explain. It was beautiful in the way that fundamental forces of nature are beautiful, not decoratively but essentially, its existence a statement about the universe's capacity for wonder.
It was wounded.
One wing was torn, not cleanly but violently, the translucent membrane shredded along a ragged line that wept golden energy instead of blood. The temporal energy that was Celebi's essence flickered erratically across its body, the green luminescence stuttering like a bulb with a damaged filament, each flicker accompanied by a micro-distortion of the air around the Pokémon, reality hiccupping, time stuttering, the fundamental fabric of chronology protesting the injury to one of its custodians.
Celebi teleported. A burst of green light, a displacement of three meters to the left, and landed badly, the torn wing unable to stabilize its arrival, the small body stumbling against the root of an ancient tree. It teleported again. Two meters backward. Weaker. Each jump shorter than the last, the temporal energy required for displacement consuming reserves that the wound was already draining.
Its eyes found them as they entered the clearing. Ancient eyes, eyes that had witnessed every timeline Ilex Forest had ever experienced, that carried the accumulated memory of ten thousand years viewed from every possible angle. Despite the small form, despite the fairy-like proportions, those eyes belonged to something older than the forest itself.
Help, the eyes said. Not in words. In the particular desperation that transcends species.
Surrounding Celebi, closing the net was Aether Foundation.
But not the Aether they'd faced before.
These weren't the white-uniformed grunts from the Ruins of Alph, the frustrated researchers and reluctant operatives who had fled when the Unown pulse overwhelmed their equipment. These operatives wore black. Head to foot, tactical-grade black, the uniform of people who existed in the operational space between corporate enforcement and military action. Their gear was combat-specific: reinforced body armor, communication headsets, equipment belts carrying items that had nothing to do with research and everything to do with containment and control.
Approximately thirty of them, arranged in a closing perimeter around the clearing. Professional. Disciplined. The formation maintained with the precision of personnel who trained for exactly this scenario and had executed it before.
Their Pokémon were worse than the operatives.
The creatures standing beside each black-clad figure were wrong. Not subtly, fundamentally, visibly, disturbingly wrong in a way that registered on instinct before analysis could explain it. Their eyes glowed dark purple, a uniform, unnatural violet that replaced whatever natural coloration the species normally displayed. Their movements were aggressive but mechanical, lacking the individuality that distinguished living creatures from automata. A Sneasel beside one operative stood with its claws extended, its body oriented toward Celebi, its expression carrying nothing, no personality, no awareness, no evidence of the cunning intelligence that Sneasel were known for. It was a weapon in the shape of a Pokémon.
Houndoom. Scizor. Ariados. Crobat. Dozens of species, each one displaying the same purple-eyed vacancy, the same puppet-like precision, the same absence of everything that made a Pokémon a partner rather than a tool.
Miyuki made a sound. Not a word, a sound, the involuntary vocalization of a healer confronted with suffering so systematic that it registered as medical horror. "They're in pain," she said, and the diagnosis was immediate and absolute. "The Dark Balls are overriding their consciousness, it's like their souls are locked away. They're aware. They can feel. But they can't act on anything except the commands."
Leading the pursuit, standing at the clearing's northern edge with the casual authority of someone who owned every piece of violence being conducted in his name, was a figure that commanded immediate, visceral dread.
He was tall. Taller than Sasuke, broader across the shoulders, built with the dense musculature of someone whose physical conditioning served purposes that went beyond fitness into the territory of preparation for inflicting harm. He wore armor that was a hybrid of eras, dark metal plating over tactical gear, the metal forged in a style that belonged to a century that hadn't used firearms, the tactical components belonging to the current decade. The combination should have looked absurd. It didn't. It looked like a man who had studied every method of violence available across history and had decided to carry the best of each.
His face was half-hidden behind a mask of dark iron that covered everything above the mouth. The mask was featureless, no eye holes visible, though he clearly saw through it, no ornamentation, no identifying marks. Just dark metal, shaped to the contours of a face that the mask refused to reveal. Below the iron edge: a mouth. Thin-lipped, set in a line that might have been neutral or might have been contemptuous, the distinction irrelevant because both expressions promised the same outcome.
Iron Mask.
The name surfaced in Sasuke's memory from the intelligence briefings that Itachi had provided during the Kanto journey, a figure mentioned in the margins of Aether Foundation's operational structure, referenced obliquely, never photographed, described only as "Danzo Shimura's second-in-command, the enforcer, the one who does the work Danzo's hands shouldn't touch."
Known in underground circles as something worse than a collector or an exploiter.
Known as a Pokémon killer.
Dozens of confirmed terminations, Pokémon that had resisted Aether's control, eliminated with the specific efficiency of someone who viewed conscious beings as equipment that had malfunctioned.
His voice, when he spoke, matched the mask: cold, precise, stripped of every inflection that might have suggested the presence of a human being behind the words.
"Corner it. Celebi's temporal displacement requires three seconds of concentration. Don't give it three seconds."
The operatives closed. Their Dark Ball Pokémon attacked in waves, Sneasel packs darting from multiple angles, Houndoom Flamethrower volleys cutting off escape routes, Scizor Bullet Punch creating walls of percussive force that drove Celebi backward into the narrowing perimeter. The attacks were coordinated with clinical precision, each wave timed to prevent the three-second window that temporal displacement required.
Celebi, cornered against the trunk of an ancient tree whose roots formed a natural alcove, released a pulse of temporal energy. The green light blazed outward in a sphere, and reality warped, the air around the clearing distorting, the trees bending in directions that had nothing to do with wind, time itself protesting the injury being done to one of its guardians. One operative, caught at the pulse's edge, aged. The effect was instantaneous and visible: his hair went gray, his skin lined, thirty years of life compressed into a half-second that turned a young man into an old one before the effect snapped back and he collapsed, restored but shaking.
A warning shot. From a Legendary Pokémon that was wounded and desperate and capable, even diminished, of bending the fundamental structure of reality.
Iron Mask was unfazed.
"Temporal tantrums won't save you," he said, addressing Celebi the way a butcher discusses livestock, with professional assessment, without regard for the subject's capacity to suffer. "Dark Balls are immune to psychic influence. Fire at will."
The next wave launched.
And Sasuke stepped into the clearing.
"That's enough."
Two words. Spoken at conversational volume. Carrying the specific authority of someone who had faced Legendary Pokémon and Gym Leaders and ancient prophecies and paramilitary organizations and had decided, over the course of a journey that had taken him across two regions and nine badges, that certain things were not negotiable.
Iron Mask turned. The dark iron face regarded Sasuke for three seconds, the assessment of a predator encountering something in its hunting ground that might be prey or might be competition, the distinction requiring observation.
"Sasuke Uchiha." The identification was immediate, unprompted, delivered with the flat certainty of someone who had memorized a file. "The Supernova who sealed my associate's operation at the Ruins of Alph. Danzo has a file on you. Detailed. Current."
"And I'm building one on him. Release that Celebi."
"Release it?" The thin mouth beneath the mask curved, not a smile, the absence of one, the space where a smile would go on a face that had decided smiles were inefficient. "I intend to do far worse than capture it. Celebi's temporal energy, properly harvested, could power the Iron Serpent for eternity. The time-energy density of a single Legendary Pokémon, extracted at maximum yield, would provide the Iron Serpent with an inexhaustible power source." He paused. "The harvesting process is, regrettably, fatal for the donor."
The clearing went cold. Not metaphorically, the temperature dropped, as if the forest itself had heard the word "fatal" applied to one of its sacred inhabitants and responded with atmospheric displeasure.
"You're going to kill it," Kasumi said. She had moved beside Sasuke, her voice carrying not the question but the accusation.
"I'm going to use it," Iron Mask corrected. "Death is an incidental consequence of maximum-yield extraction. The distinction matters to accountants. Not to me."
Sasuke's hand found Zekrom's Pokéball.
The battle erupted across the clearing in simultaneous detonations.
Zekrom materialized with the constrained thunder that the forest canopy forced, no sky-splitting roar, no atmospheric disturbance, just the massive black dragon appearing in the clearing's limited space with the barely contained power of a thunderstorm compressed into a room. Its electromagnetic field activated, the charged air around its body creating a perimeter of crackling energy that the nearest Dark Ball Pokémon flinched from.
Kasumi's Gardevoir moved with the telepathic speed of a Pokémon that had already read the tactical situation through its trainer's perception. A psychic barrier materialized around Celebi, a dome of telekinetic force that enclosed the wounded Legendary in a protective shell, buying the seconds that Iron Mask's strategy was designed to deny.
Miyuki sent Ryu skyward, the Salamence launching vertically, but the canopy intercepted at fifteen meters, the ancient branches too dense for the dragon to break through without risking structural collapse onto everyone below. Ryu adjusted, transitioning to a lateral patrol at canopy height, its Dragon Pulse providing aerial fire support through the gaps between trunks.
Kiyomi's Ninetales unleashed everything simultaneously. Aurora Veil first, the defensive screen spreading across the group's position, reducing incoming damage. Then Blizzard, a directed ice storm that carved the clearing into zones, walls of frost erupting between the group's position and the advancing Aether line, the temperature differential creating fog that obscured sight lines and forced the operatives to navigate by instrument rather than vision.
But Iron Mask's forces were numerous. And the Dark Ball Pokémon fought without self-preservation.
The corrupted creatures attacked through Ninetales's ice barriers with mechanical disregard for their own bodies. Sneasel slammed into frost walls and emerged bleeding, their claws still extended, their purple eyes still empty, the self-preservation instinct that every living creature possessed overridden by whatever the Dark Balls did to the consciousness trapped inside. Houndoom charged through Blizzard conditions that should have made Fire-types retreat, their fur singed with ice burns that they didn't react to, their Flamethrower attacks continuing on command despite injuries that any natural Pokémon would have stopped to assess.
They weren't fighting. They were being spent. Ammunition in the shape of living things.
Kiyomi's voice shook. "Those Pokéballs are completely different technology. They're not capturing Pokémon, they're enslaving them. Overwriting personality with pure combat drive and multiplying their aggression." She watched a Scizor charge Zekrom's electromagnetic field, take a shock that should have triggered every self-preservation instinct in its body, and continue attacking with its remaining functional arm. "It's the antithesis of everything, everything, we believe about partnership."
Iron Mask observed from the clearing's edge, his Tyranitar beside him, a massive specimen, the dark purple eyes burning with imposed malice, its body carrying the dense musculature of a pseudo-Legendary that had been pushed past its natural limits by the Dark Ball's aggression amplification. He hadn't committed his personal Pokémon yet. He was measuring.
"Engaging the Supernova directly is inefficient," he said to no one visible, possibly a communication device beneath the mask, possibly himself. "Maintain pressure. Exhaust his resources. The Celebi barrier will fall when the Gardevoir that maintains it tires."
He was right. The strategy was attrition, thirty operatives with expendable Dark Ball Pokémon against four trainers who cared about their partners' welfare. Sasuke's group would pull back before their Pokémon were seriously hurt. Iron Mask's forces would fight until they physically couldn't. The math was simple and terrible.
Zekrom's Bolt Strike cleared a section of the perimeter, three Dark Ball Pokémon thrown backward by the electrical impact, their bodies ragdolling through the undergrowth. But more filled the gap. Galarian Moltres materialized beside Zekrom, the Dark/Fire Legendary's Fiery Wrath sweeping the clearing's eastern quadrant in a wave of black-red energy that scattered a cluster of Houndoom. But the western quadrant pressed harder.
And Iron Mask released his Tyranitar.
The massive Dark/Rock-type didn't enter the battle, it entered the clearing the way an avalanche enters a valley, with the specific inevitability of something too large and too powerful to negotiate with. Stone Edge erupted beneath Ninetales's position, the ice fox dodging by millimeters, its Aurora Veil cracking under the seismic force. Crunch followed, aimed at Gardevoir's psychic barrier, the Dark-type attack eating at the telekinetic dome that protected Celebi.
Gardevoir strained. Kasumi felt it through the bond, the Embrace Pokémon pouring everything into the barrier, its psychic reserves depleting against the combined pressure of Tyranitar's Dark-type assault and the dozen other corrupted Pokémon battering the dome from every angle.
The barrier was failing.
Celebi watched.
From inside the protective dome, the Time Travel Pokémon watched the battle with ancient eyes that had seen violence before, had seen wars, had seen the Partnership and Dominion conflict that Kiyomi had translated, had seen every moment of cruelty and every moment of courage that Ilex Forest had witnessed across ten thousand years of existence.
It watched four young humans and their Pokémon fighting to protect it. Not for power. Not for the temporal energy that Iron Mask wanted to extract. Fighting because something was in pain and they had the ability to stand between the pain and its source.
Partnership. The word that the Ruins of Alph's inscriptions had used. The principle that the ancient civilization had built their culture around. The bond between human and Pokémon expressed not as command or control but as mutual choice, mutual protection, mutual sacrifice.
Celebi made a decision.
The green glow intensified. Not gradually, exponentially, the wounded Legendary pouring its remaining temporal energy into a single act, the small body blazing with emerald light that outshone Victini's fire and Ninetales's Aurora Veil and every other light source in the clearing until the forest itself was bathed in the specific green of time.
Time stopped.
Not metaphorically. Not "slowed" or "seemed to stop." Stopped. The Dark Ball Pokémon froze mid-attack, their purple eyes fixed in whatever direction they'd been facing. The operatives froze, standing, running, issuing commands, whatever position the cessation caught them in. Iron Mask froze, his thin mouth open on a command that would never be completed. Tyranitar froze, its massive body suspended in a Stone Edge launch position, the rocks hovering around its fists like satellites that had lost their orbits.
Only those within Gardevoir's psychic barrier were excluded from the temporal cessation. Sasuke, Kasumi, Miyuki, Kiyomi, their Pokémon, and Celebi, the small, wounded, ancient Pokémon that had just demonstrated why Legendary status wasn't a classification but a description of capability.
Celebi's voice entered their minds.
Not words. Celebi didn't communicate in language, it communicated in temporal impressions, feelings tagged with chronological context, emotions that carried timestamps. What they received was:
Gratitude. The warmth of being protected by strangers. The recognition of partnership in action.
Desperation. The wound, the fading energy, the hunters that had been pursuing it for days through a forest it had protected for millennia.
A plan. An image: green light consuming the clearing. A sensation: falling sideways, falling into memory, falling through the thin place where time grew permeable. A destination: not a place but a when. The past. Far enough that Iron Mask couldn't follow. Far enough that Celebi could heal. Far enough that the hunters would be stranded in a time where their technology didn't exist and their authority meant nothing.
And a warning: the displacement would be large. Uncontrolled. The temporal energy required to move this many living beings through time, friends and enemies alike, every person and Pokémon in the clearing, would exhaust Celebi's remaining reserves. There would be no return trip. Not immediately. Not until Celebi healed enough to generate the energy required for a second displacement.
Everyone in the clearing would go. Sasuke's group. Iron Mask's forces. Celebi itself.
Into the past.
Sasuke felt the pull. Like gravity but sideways, not downward but backward, into the direction that memory occupied, the axis that connected now to then. The sensation was physical and impossible and absolutely real, and it triggered in his body a response that no previous experience had prepared him for: the feeling of standing at the edge of a cliff that extended in a direction his inner ear couldn't name.
Time resumed.
Iron Mask's mouth completed its command: "NO! Contain the temporal field! Dark Balls, suppress—"
Too late.
Celebi released everything.
The green light didn't expand, it detonated. A sphere of temporal energy erupting from the small, wounded body at the speed of reality itself, consuming the clearing, the trees, the frozen operatives, the Dark Ball Pokémon, Iron Mask, Sasuke, the girls, every living thing within the displacement radius. The light was warm and cold simultaneously, the warmth of the past reaching forward, the cold of the present being left behind.
Sasuke felt the forest disappear. Felt the clearing dissolve. Felt the present, the modern world, the Pokémon League, the Mobile Home parked at the Moss Clearing, the GPS signal that was already dead, every anchor that connected him to the life he knew, recede like a shore viewed from a ship that was pulling away from the dock.
Kiyomi's hand found his in the green light. Kasumi's found Miyuki's. The four of them held on to each other as the only fixed points in a universe that was moving around them, their Pokémon pressing close, Victini's fire blazing against the temporal glow, Zekrom's electromagnetic pulse trying to stabilize something that electromagnetic pulses couldn't affect.
The clearing was gone.
The forest was gone.
The present was gone.
Green-white void. The space between moments. The corridor that Celebi traveled when it moved through time, experienced now by human senses that hadn't been built to perceive it and were improvising desperately.
Then: light. Natural light. Sunlight, warm, golden, carrying the specific quality of a morning in a world that hadn't invented the concerns that had been consuming them moments ago.
And the sound of birds. And the smell of flowers. And the sensation of solid ground beneath feet that had, for a duration that couldn't be measured because the concept of duration had been temporarily suspended, been standing on nothing.
They landed in a forest.
The same forest. Ilex. The trees were the same, or rather, they were the ancestors of the same, slightly smaller, slightly younger, the ten-thousand-year-old trunks reduced by however many years Celebi's displacement had carried them backward. The clearing existed. The fairy ring existed. The impossible wildflowers bloomed in every season simultaneously, just as they had, would, always.
But the Aether operatives were gone.
No, not gone. Scattered. The temporal displacement had deposited them elsewhere in the timeline, the same when but different where, distributed across the forest by the uncontrolled nature of the jump.
And Celebi was on the ground, its small body motionless, its green glow reduced to the faintest shimmer, the temporal energy that powered its existence nearly exhausted by the displacement that had saved it and stranded them all.
"Where are we?" Kasumi asked. Her voice was steady. The rest of her was not.
Kiyomi looked at the trees, at their diameter, their bark patterns, the specific characteristics that an archaeologist trained in dating organic structures could read the way other people read clocks.
"Not where," she said. "When."
She turned to them, and her golden eyes carried the specific expression of a woman who had spent her career studying the past and had just been delivered into it.
"Based on the tree growth... we're approximately twenty-five years in the past!"