The gray mist hung in the air like a physical barrier, a wall of fog that separated the world of the living from the world of the dead. Behind Red, Pallet Town waited in its unnatural silence—a town full of watchers and hunters disguised as neighbors. Ahead, Route 1 stretched out under a sky that seemed both too bright and too dark at the same time.
Red stepped across the boundary, his shoes sinking slightly into the softer soil of the route.
The sunlight here was vicious. Aggressive, even. It beat down on his exposed skin with an intensity that felt deliberately malicious, like it wanted to crack his flesh open and peel it back layer by layer. The air was thick with the scent of freshly cut grass—that clean, green smell that should have been pleasant and pastoral. But the fragrance was so concentrated, so overwhelming, that it became nauseating. And underneath that cloying sweetness, Red could detect something else. Something metallic and organic.
The smell of rust. Of old blood baked into soil under a merciless sun.
The grass itself was wrong.
It grew too tall—waist-high in some places, reaching up toward Red's chest in others. The stalks were thick and tough, swaying with every breath of wind that passed through the field. They made a constant whispering sound as they rubbed against each other. Shasha. Shasha. A soft, sibilant noise that could have been peaceful in another context.
But here, every rustle felt like a warning. Every movement in the grass could be something crawling. Something stalking. Something preparing to strike.
Red's hand remained pressed against his waist, fingers wrapped around one of the blood nest balls with enough force to make his knuckles turn bone-white. The cold sphere pulsed faintly against his palm—a reminder that he was carrying monsters of his own.
Zzzzt—
The static burst across his consciousness without warning.
[TRUE POKÉDEX: WARNING—Entering Beginner Hunting Grounds]
[Area: Route 1]
[Environmental Traits: High Camouflage Density. Visual Mimicry Prevalent. Every "Pidgey" in this zone could be a feathered razor. Every "Rattata" could be a plague vector with rodent teeth designed to strip flesh from bone. Trust nothing that appears harmless.]
[Current Status: LOCK-ON DETECTED.]
The last two words hit Red's mind like a hammer.
Lock-on. Something had already spotted him. Something was—
The grass to his left exploded outward.
"Goo—!"
The cry was sharp and clear, almost cheerful. The kind of sound that belonged in a children's cartoon.
A plump bird burst from the vegetation in a flurry of cream-colored feathers and flapping wings. It executed a graceful arc through the air before landing on a low-hanging branch about three meters directly in front of Red.
A Pidgey.
Red's breath caught in his throat.
In the games—in the real games, the ones from his old world—Pidgey was the most common regional bird. Weak. Harmless. The kind of Pokémon you fought in the first ten minutes of gameplay to grind experience points. Adorable little things with tiny beaks and fluffy feathers that existed primarily to make new trainers feel accomplished when they won their first battle.
But this thing perched on the branch before him was not that Pidgey.
It stared at Red's neck.
Not at his face. Not at his body as a whole. Specifically at the vulnerable stretch of skin above his collarbone, where major arteries ran close to the surface.
The creature's head tilted to one side with a smooth, mechanical precision. And Red saw its eyes clearly for the first time.
They should have been simple black dots—cute, round, innocent. Instead, the pupils were a murky gray-white, clouded like cataracts. But that wasn't the worst part. The surface of each eyeball was covered in what looked like a compound eye structure—hundreds of tiny hexagonal lenses that rotated independently of each other, each segment focusing on a different part of Red's body. The eyes moved like a fly's eyes, tracking multiple targets simultaneously.
Throat. Eyes. Wrists. Femoral arteries.
The creature was cataloging his weak points.
Red's gaze dropped to the Pidgey's beak, and his stomach dropped with it.
That wasn't keratin. It wasn't the hard, smooth material that bird beaks were supposed to be made from.
It was bone. A hollow, gray-white bone spur that protruded from the creature's face like a spike driven through its skull from the inside out. The tip was stained with dried residue—dark red, almost black. Old blood that had crusted and flaked but never been cleaned away.
"Goo..."
The Pidgey opened its mouth.
Red wished it hadn't.
There was no tongue inside. The cavity was filled instead with dense rows of backward-facing barbs, like the inside of a lamprey's mouth. They lined the throat in spiraling patterns, designed to grip and hold and prevent anything caught inside from escaping. Deep in that nightmare gullet, something pink and fleshy writhed and pulsed—some kind of organ that didn't belong in any bird Red had ever heard of.
[TRUE POKÉDEX: Analysis Complete—Target Identified as "Pidgey"]
[Species Classification: Mimic, Bone-Spur Variant]
[Behavioral Profile: Aerial predator specializing in precision strikes. Does not use "Sand Attack" or other defensive measures seen in documented Pidgey specimens. Hunting method: uses hollow bone beak to pierce soft tissue of prey, inject acidic digestive enzymes directly into body cavity, then extracts liquefied internal organs through the same puncture wound. Feeding apparatus functions as both weapon and straw.]
[Tactical Recommendation: The beak is its primary tool and its greatest weakness. Break it.]
Red's entire body locked up, muscles tensing so hard they trembled.
Could he run?
Two legs versus wings. The math didn't work. He'd make it maybe ten meters before that bone spike punched through the back of his skull.
Which meant there was only one option.
Fight.
The Pidgey moved first.
There was no buildup, no warning. One second it was perched on the branch, head tilted in that unsettling way. The next second it was airborne, wings tucked tight against its body as it shot forward like a missile. The air screamed as the creature cut through it, moving faster than anything that size should be able to move.
The sound of wind breaking filled Red's ears.
Too fast—
Red's body reacted on pure instinct. He threw himself sideways, tucking into a roll that sent him tumbling across the rough ground. Rocks and roots dug into his shoulders and back. His cap flew off and disappeared into the grass.
THUD.
The sound was meaty and wet and violent all at once.
Red's head whipped around. Behind him—exactly where he'd been standing half a second ago—the tree trunk now had a hole punched clean through it. The puncture was perfectly circular, about two inches in diameter, and it went all the way through the trunk and out the other side. Red could see daylight through the hole.
Wood chips were still falling. The edges of the wound were smoking faintly, white vapor rising from bark that had been flash-cooked by some kind of chemical reaction. Acid. The thing's beak was coated in acid.
If that had connected with his neck—if Red had been even a fraction of a second slower—his cervical spine would have been liquefied. His head would have just... fallen off.
"God—" Red choked out, scrambling to his feet. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely maintain his grip on the ground.
The Pidgey had already recovered from its miss. It circled once overhead, letting out a hissing screech that sounded more like steam escaping from a vent than any bird call Red had ever heard. As it banked for another pass, several sharp bone blades emerged from the leading edges of its wings—scalpel-thin protrusions that caught the sunlight and glinted like polished steel.
This time it was aiming for Red's face.
For his eyes specifically.
The shadow of the creature fell across Red's vision, growing larger by the millisecond. The bone beak was pointed directly at his left eye socket, angling for a clean penetration into his brain.
Death was diving at him from the sky, and Red had maybe one second to do something about it.
His trembling fingers found the blood nest ball at his waist. The sphere was cold and heavy and wrong, but it was the only weapon he had.
Fight fire with fire. Fight monsters with monsters.
Even if the thing inside this ball hated him just as much as the bird trying to kill him. Even if releasing it might be signing his own death warrant.
It didn't matter. He was dead either way.
"Come out—" Red's voice cracked as he screamed the words. "PIKACHU!"
He hurled the red sphere into the air with everything he had.
Pop.
The blood nest ball split open mid-flight.
But nothing gentle emerged. No cheerful beam of light. No friendly companion ready to defend its trainer.
Instead, a geyser of dark red mist exploded from the sphere's interior—thick and viscous, more like blood vapor than energy. The mist carried with it a sound: a low, sustained growl that vibrated at a frequency that made Red's teeth ache.
The yellow creature that materialized from that crimson fog hit the ground hard, landing on all fours with enough force to create four shallow impact craters in the soil.
Zzzzt— Zzzzt—
Electricity crackled across its body, but not the clean yellow sparks from the cartoons and anime. This was something darker, angrier. Dark red currents surged beneath the matted yellow fur, arcing between patches of skin that looked burned and raw. The electricity had a contaminated quality—like it was mixed with something toxic, something that shouldn't exist in nature.
These were the aftereffects of the blood nest ball's torture. The creature's rage made manifest as corrupted energy.
The Pidgey, which had been seconds away from planting its beak in Red's skull, pulled up sharply. Its compound eyes swiveled to focus on this new threat. The bird climbed higher into the air, putting distance between itself and the yellow creature below, its hunting instincts warring with its survival instincts.
Red gasped for air, his lungs burning. He stared at Pikachu's back—at the yellow fur matted with what might have been sweat or blood or something worse—and felt the tiniest spark of hope kindle in his chest.
Maybe it would protect him. Maybe some instinct of partnership or—
Pikachu slowly straightened its upper body, rising from its four-legged crouch.
It didn't look at the Pidgey circling overhead.
Instead, its neck rotated. Smoothly. Continuously. Far past the point where vertebrae should have stopped the motion. The head turned a full 180 degrees with mechanical precision until Pikachu was staring directly at Red behind it.
The face that looked back at him was warped—distorted from whatever had happened inside the blood nest ball's torture chamber. The cute disguise had been shredded by pain and rage, leaving something far more honest underneath.
Those eyes were voids. Empty black holes that pulled at Red's vision like gravity wells, promising nothing but oblivion.
And in those voids, there was no loyalty. No bond between trainer and partner. No willingness to protect or cooperate or fight alongside him.
There was only hatred.
Pure, concentrated, all-consuming hatred for the "jailer" who had locked it in that ball. For the human who had caused it agony.
"Bad..." The word came out of Pikachu's mouth in a wet, gurgling rasp—the sound of raw meat being ground together to approximate human speech. "Person..."
Its maw split open wider, revealing the spiral teeth underneath.
"Hurts... so... much..."
CRACK!
A bolt of golden electricity lashed out without warning, striking a rock near Pikachu's feet. The stone exploded into fragments, shrapnel peppering the grass in a ten-foot radius.
The creature's cheeks bulged as the electric sacs there swelled with building charge. Red could smell it now—the sickening odor of burning meat, of flesh cooked from the inside out by its own electrical output.
Pikachu grinned. The expression had nothing to do with happiness or friendliness. It was the grin of a torture victim finally free and face-to-face with its torturer.
It wanted to kill him.
The Pidgey circling overhead didn't matter. That was a minor annoyance, a problem that could wait. The weak, fragile human standing right there—the one who had trapped it, hurt it, locked it in that grinding prison—that was the primary target.
Red's survival instincts overrode everything else. His body moved before his conscious mind had even finished processing the threat.
He turned and ran.
Ran back toward Pallet Town, back toward the boundary, back toward anything that might offer cover or protection or a single extra second of life.
"PI—KA!"
The roar that followed him was nothing like the cute cry from the games. This was a shriek of pure rage, the sound of a predator that had been caged and starved and was finally being set loose on soft prey.
Heat washed across Red's back. The air behind him ionized, filling with the ozone smell that preceded lightning strikes. He could feel the electricity building, could sense the moment just before discharge when—
CRACK-BOOM!
The thunderbolt missed him by inches. Red felt the current pass close enough to make every hair on his body stand on end. The tips of his hair singed. The back of his jacket smoked faintly.
If he'd been even slightly slower—
"GOO!!!"
The Pidgey's scream cut through the air like a knife.
The bird had been watching this entire exchange with growing fury. This was its territory. This was its hunt. And this yellow interloper had just swooped in and tried to steal its prey right out from under it?
Unacceptable.
Whether it was territorial instinct, predatory pride, or simple rage at being ignored, the Pidgey made its decision. It tucked its wings tight against its body and dropped into a dive—not toward Red this time, but toward the electric rat that had dared to challenge it.
The bird became a missile of feathers and bone, plummeting toward the back of Pikachu's skull with its acid-coated beak leading the way. The sound of its descent was a high-pitched whistle that grew louder and shriller as it picked up speed, until it drowned out even the crackling of Pikachu's electricity.
Pikachu froze mid-step, its next attack on Red halted in its tracks.
Animal instinct overrode hatred. Survival trumped revenge.
The creature spun, abandoning its pursuit of the fleeing human. Its lightning-bolt tail whipped around with incredible speed, the appendage glowing white-hot as electricity surged through it. The tail moved like a steel cable, like a electrified whip designed to split flesh and shatter bone.
CRACK!
Bone beak met electrified tail.
The impact sent a shockwave through the air that Red felt in his chest even from twenty meters away.
Blood and feathers exploded outward from the collision point. Something wet and hot spattered across the grass.
Red used the distraction to put distance between himself and the fight. He dove behind a dense thicket of bushes, his body hitting the mud with a wet squelch. He didn't keep running toward Pallet Town. The gates there were sealed now—he'd heard them slam shut behind him. And the "neighbors" waiting in that town would be far worse than either of these monsters.
Instead, Red pressed himself flat into a shallow depression in the ground, mud soaking through his clothes. He held his breath and watched through gaps in the foliage as the two creatures tore into each other.
It was slaughter.
Pure, unrestrained violence with no rules and no mercy.
Pikachu's tail had been punctured by the Pidgey's beak. The lightning-bolt appendage now had a ragged hole punched through it, black blood streaming from the wound and hitting the grass with a hissing sound as it ate through the vegetation. White smoke rose where the blood landed, the chemical composition so toxic it burned through organic matter on contact.
The pain seemed to flip a switch in Pikachu's brain. Whatever remained of the cute electric mouse facade shattered completely.
"PI... KA...!"
The sound that came out of its throat wasn't the cheerful cry from the shows. It was a guttural roar, the kind of sound an apex predator makes when it's been wounded and enraged beyond reason.
Pikachu dropped to all fours and moved like an animal—like a yellow wolf spider skittering across the ground with unnatural agility. It zigzagged through the grass, changing direction seemingly at random, making itself an impossible target to hit.
The Pidgey dove again, trying to use its superior aerial position to strike from above. The bone blades on its wings extended fully, ready to slice through Pikachu's throat as it passed.
But the instant the bird committed to its attack vector, Pikachu's mouth split open.
All the way open. Far past where a jaw should be able to extend. The split ran from ear to ear, revealing the full horror of what lay inside—rows of spiral teeth, dripping gums, and a throat that looked like it descended into an abyss.
ZZZZT—BOOM!
A massive bolt of golden electricity erupted from Pikachu's gaping maw, so bright it hurt to look at directly. But this wasn't normal electricity. The current was contaminated with something else—black, oily substance that moved through the lightning like sludge through water. Some kind of toxin or corruption that shouldn't exist in nature.
The blast caught the Pidgey directly in the abdomen.
"GA—!!!"
The bird's scream was piercing, agonized, the cry of something being cooked alive from the inside. Its cream-colored feathers instantly blackened and crisped, falling away in charred clumps. Its body seized up, every muscle locking simultaneously as the electricity overloaded its nervous system.
The Pidgey fell.
Not a graceful descent. Not a controlled landing. It dropped like a stone, like something that had forgotten how wings worked, and hit the ground with a wet, meaty thud.
But it never actually made contact with the soil.
Because Pikachu was already there, having covered the distance in a single leap.
The creature's jaws clamped down on the Pidgey's neck before the bird even finished falling.
Crack.
The sound of bone breaking was crisp and clean, like stepping on a dry branch.
The Pidgey's hollow bone beak—its primary weapon, its feeding tube, the tool that had nearly killed Red—went limp. The bird's compound eyes glazed over. Its wings spasmed once, twice, then went still.
But Pikachu didn't stop.
Its claws dug into the Pidgey's chest, finding purchase between charred feathers and burned skin. With a violent wrench, it tore the bird's ribcage open. The sound was wet and crunching simultaneously—bones breaking, flesh tearing, organs rupturing.
Then Pikachu plunged its head into the cavity and began to feed.
Squelch. Rip. Crunch.
The sounds of eating filled the quiet morning air. Wet, organic sounds that no children's cartoon had ever prepared Red for. The sound of teeth finding meat. Of flesh being swallowed in chunks too large to properly chew. Of something ravenous and starving finally getting its first meal after god knows how long.
"Guji... guji... guji..."
Pikachu's entire face disappeared into the Pidgey's chest cavity. Its claws worked continuously, pulling apart ribs, scooping out organs, tearing away anything that got in the way of the good meat deeper inside.
Red's hand clamped over his mouth, desperately holding back the vomit trying to force its way up his throat.
His eyes watered. His stomach heaved and churned. But he didn't look away.
He couldn't look away.
Because this was what his "partner" actually was. This was the truth underneath the cute yellow exterior. A predator. A killer. A thing that ate other living creatures while they were still warm, that fed with the desperate hunger of something that had been tortured and starved.
And the worst part—the part that made Red's skin crawl and his breath come in short, panicked gasps—was the knowledge sitting cold and heavy in his gut.
When Pikachu finished with the Pidgey, it would remember.
It would remember who had put it in that ball. Who had caused the pain. Who had pressed the button that activated the torture device.
And then it would come looking for him.
Throw Some Powerstones For
Next BONUS CHAPTER at 200 powerstones