Pokemon: Reborn as a Pokemon

Chapter 330 330: 330. Dancer of the Dawn

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Although Kael's consciousness was growing dim, his awareness of the world around him remained surprisingly sharp, thanks to the natural resilience of his Pokémon body.

"So they just... left?"

From what he could sense, Talonflame had clearly been about to deliver the finishing blow a moment ago, yet at the last second it had pulled back.

Castform had done the same. Both of them had simply turned and fled without hesitation.

"Why?"

Kael was not naïve enough to believe they had suddenly decided to show mercy.

They were wild Pokémon. In the natural world, survival of the fittest was the law that governed everything.

Human ideas like respecting age, showing courtesy, or moral restraint meant nothing to creatures living in a brutal primeval forest where even surviving to the next day was never guaranteed.

He was weaker than they were. He had no way to escape. If defeat and death were the end waiting for him, Kael could accept that.

At least he had fought for it.

At least he had not gone down without trying.

As life slowly drained from his body and his mind weakened further, Kael slipped into that eerie silence that came with being close to death.

His thoughts began to drift.

Fragments of memory and flashes of old lives raced through his mind and vanished again.

Perhaps because this life had been so short, the familiar reel of memories people always described before death never truly came.

Instead, what settled over him was an almost unnerving calm.

Then suddenly.

As though something on a deeper, instinctive level had tugged at him, the stiffening muscles beneath his skin twitched and pulled.

Almost without thinking, Kael, still collapsed in a pool of blood, slowly turned his head toward the deeper core of Molten Season Forest, in the opposite direction from where Talonflame and Castform had fled.

"This is..."

A trace of understanding appeared in his fading blue eyes.

The clear blue sky in the distance had already been swallowed by a dim, filthy gray, like a huge stained rag draped over the world.

A strange, vast humming rolled through heaven and earth, as though some invisible beast of immense size were crouched at the edge of the horizon, murmuring in a low voice.

The earth beneath him had grown warm.

Almost hot.

It felt as though streams of heat were flowing and gathering beneath the ground.

This was nature's punishment. A judgment passed down upon creatures that had taken too much, too carelessly, from the world that sustained them.

Far off, the massive mountain range wrapped in dense forest suddenly began to tremble, as though some terrifying force were building inside it.

And then.

BOOM.

A roaring explosion tore through the world.

The disaster had arrived.

A vast cloud of black-gray rock ash erupted from the mouth of the volcano, moving with a speed that looked slow from a distance but was in truth terrifyingly fast, blotting out the sky as it surged upward into a towering, chaotic column.

Red-hot magma burst skyward with it, mixed with huge chunks of shattered rock and ash, falling back to earth like blazing meteors.

This eruption was nothing like the last one Kael had witnessed, the one triggered by the appearance of Groudon.

That time, the disaster had been brought on by an outside force.

But this.

This was a pure natural eruption, a true geological catastrophe with no external hand behind it.

Compared with the last one, it gave clearer warning signs and built more slowly.

But in exchange, its destructive power was several times greater.

Along with an earthquake violent enough to tear the land apart, burning magma mixed with black rock nearly melted into liquid was hurled from inside the mountain and scattered toward every corner of the deeper forest.

"Of course..."

"So it's this again."

Kael stared at the deadly ash cloud spreading toward him across the horizon and let out a bitter smile.

This kind of natural catastrophe was not new to him anymore.

And death following close behind it felt almost inevitable now.

That gray-black smoke spreading across the sky looked slow.

But it was moving far faster than this body of his could ever hope to outrun.

That was why Talonflame and Castform had dropped everything the instant they sensed the eruption coming and fled with all the speed they had.

One second too slow meant death.

And for Kael, the outcome was not really any different.

All that had changed was that death had been delayed a little longer.

Judging by the speed of the ash cloud with his own eyes, Kael estimated that within five minutes, the fine burning dust in the air would make breathing impossible, and he would eventually suffocate to death.

"What a miserable way to go..."

Honestly, compared to that kind of drawn-out and ugly death, Kael would have preferred Talonflame's Air Slash.

At least that would have been clean.

But now he was too badly injured to even stand, let alone hope for a kinder end.

So he waited.

Kael lay silently on the ground as it grew hotter and hotter beneath him, his blue eyes staring blankly at the spreading wall of ash in the distance.

Too much blood had been lost.

His mind was weakening.

Even the pain that had once felt like it was ripping him apart was slowly turning numb.

The sickle of death was descending, little by little.

And then, all at once, a strange light flickered in Kael's near-frozen gaze.

It was confusion.

Or perhaps.

Hope.

Not because he had suddenly found some way out of danger.

But because he had seen something strange.

There, in the sky already choked with ash and smoke, a blue glow had appeared without warning.

Like the first ray of dawn breaking through the night.

Soft, yet impossible to miss.

As though some fragile form of hope itself shimmered within it.

Kael's eyes widened. Summoning the last scraps of strength left in his body, he forced himself to look toward the source of that light.

Sobble's naturally superb vision chose that moment to prove its worth.

Even though the distance between them was immense, Kael could still make out the figure clearly.

Its body was covered in fine white plumage like fresh snow, and a gentle watery radiance shimmered along the texture of its feathers, a clear sign of the overflowing Water-type energy within it.

Its neck was long and elegant like a swan's, almost beautiful enough to seem unreal. Its golden beak remained shut, while its sharp black-and-white eyes held nothing but pride and aloof indifference, as though even this catastrophe, powerful enough to destroy most of Molten Season Forest, was beneath its concern.

Swanna.

A noble Pokémon of the Water and Flying types.

Because of the graceful dances it was said to perform at dawn, people sometimes called it the Dancer of the Dawn.

Kael barely had time to wonder why a Swanna would appear in a place so saturated with Fire-type energy before his attention was caught by another figure.

A slender human silhouette sat calmly upon its back.

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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter

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