Pokémon - A Thousand Year Life

The Last Good Fight I'll Ever Know

Part 2 of 4

This is a SUPER BUMBER CHAPTER for you all, kicking off the epic showdown between our characters and their brutal battle for survival within the Pits, where only one victor can be crowned victorious and earn the right to live to see another day. I have also extended the parts from 3 to 4. By the end of that, we will be crossing the three quarter mark of Esarosa's story, which means we still have a few chapters (and months) to go!

I might consider doing some bonus material and a re-edit of the story to clear up any mistakes and improve the writing, but only once it has been completed (likely 2018). ANYWAY, enough about that: let's get on with the show!

"Merle...?"

My breath fled from me, suddenly, and all at once. I felt weak and numb. The world blurred in to hazy shades of grey, like some twisted dreamscape pulled from the murky depths of my conscious mind. My head pounded, and my heart raced, but I could not divert my eyes from him. That beast.

His massive shadow stalked along the ground, stretching out towards me, grabbling in limbless agony as he shuffled nearer, his blazing gaze practically ripping me apart. I wanted to cry out to him, to tell him that his brother was alive, somewhere in the village, but my throat was too constricted by fear to produce any sound.

Merle was unlike anything I had ever witnessed, even after all my years spent wandering the forests and fields of this earth. He had a peculiar and malicious aura to him that made my hair stand on end, and a smell that reminded me of dead things rotting in the ground. Everything about him was an unnatural contradiction; his enormous size, his brute strength, his festering bodily wounds. He was a living nightmare, an embodiment of fear pulled from the darkest shadows of imagination. And yet, despite all of this, he was adored in the eyes of his younger brother, and that had to count for something... right?

"My great Arceus!" hissed Endest, staggering to his feet. He turned to me with a look of wordless abandon, his ruffled chest heaving.

"Try to stay calm..." I gulped, pushing down my own ballooning sense of panic until it settled as a tight ball in the pit of my stomach. "Just let... let me try and talk with him."

"You want to communicate with that monster?! You must be damn-near crazy!"

"Yeah..." I swallowed dryly. "I probably am..."

With a reluctant grunt, I urged myself to close the distance between our side of the arena, and his. It felt like walking through a tear in time, the continuity of space distorted to such an extent, that each second felt like a minute, and each minute morphed into an hour. It seemed like years had passed by the time I managed to push myself in to the very heart of the frost-bitten battlefield.

No more than twenty paw-widths away, Merle swaggered like a caged Pyroar, his wild eyes and shaggy coat trembling with barely-contained rage. His breath came out in hot, quick pants. His ivory teeth gleamed like rusty scimitars, their stained and ragged surface catching the faint twinkle of the early morning light.

"I recognise your scent." The booming voice that erupted from the throat of the beast was rough and gravelly, just as I remembered. "You... I chased you through the forest once, in a time not so long ago." He raised his large nose to the sky and sniffed, a thick, foamy glob of spittle lolling from the corner of his baggy lip. He turned to me, oversized muscles creaking as he stiffened his legs.

"You were there. You were there as I pursued my brother through the tangles of the undergrowth. You... you hid him from me! I lost his trail because of your smell. It covered his like a blanket, and shielded him from me!"