Scyther's Story (Death is not to be feared), NaNoWriMo 2006

[Dragonfree]

Dragonfree productions presents...

With motivation from NaNoWriMo 2006...


Scyther's Story
or
Death is not to be feared


So yay. :D Yeah, this is my NaNo. It never became 50,000 words (finished it before midnight, though - it just wasn't material enough for more than 31,026 words), but what the heck. I love it to bits anyway.

It is composed of forty numbered but untitled "chapters", but as those "chapters" tend to be awfully short (the shortest is about half a page), are not really proper chapters in that they do not always contain a story of their own, and posting them one at a time would take ages, I will not do that. The story is also divided into seven "parts", each of which constitutes a number of chapters, and they are both longer and much more suitable units for posting in general, so it is those that I will be posting.

It is a backstory of Scyther from The Quest for the Legends, but you don't need to read The Quest for the Legends before reading this (although it contains spoilers, and in fact spoilers for chapters that have not yet been written in the IALCOTN version, so if that's all you've read, you'll still get spoiled), nor do you need to read this before reading The Quest for the Legends.

However, there are some notes to make.

First off, please note that this is NaNoWriMo, the epitome of rushed writing. I do edit the parts before posting them, but they are not to be expected to be awfully well-written nonetheless.

Secondly, this fic often hardly describes Pokémon at all. Unfortunately this includes a couple of fake Pokémon as well. I will probably try to insert a little when I edit those parts, but to go into any extensive detail would wreck the style, sorry.

Thirdly, it is not entirely consistent with The Quest for the Legends version ILCOE. This is most prominent near the end where it is actually telling events from that fic from a different point of view and there are notable differences in what happens, but there are also minor insignificant ones before that point. You do not need to point them out unless there is something that falls into neither category which I appear to have missed. It should, on the other hand, be entirely consistent with the one-shot/extra Guilty, and, once I write the relevant chapters of that version, the IALCOTN.

Fourthly, this is an entirely character-driven work. It does not really have a continuous plot structure, and leaves a whole bunch of things unexplained. Those are up for The Quest for the Legends to tie up.

Fifthly and lastly, this fic is rated R (or, if you prefer Fiction Ratings, M) for containing various things that could disturb sheltered children such as violence, blood, gore, disturbing imagery, self-mutilation, suicidal thoughts, extremely vague sexual implications, consumption of alcoholic drinks, and the F-word.

Now, time for the actual fic. Moving on to Part I. Sorry about the rather abrupt ending.




PART I: INNOCENCE

I

The young parents were clearly not much troubled by caring for their egg, as they were fast asleep when it began to make quiet clicking sounds.

The egg wobbled slightly, the sounds growing louder. A small crack formed in its surface, bright white light shining through it.

The father, sleeping close by, opened one reptilian eye.

“Wake up, Silver,” he muttered and lightly prodded the female by his side. “The egg is hatching.”

The male crawled to his clawed feet, watching the egg. There was no visible affection in his expression, though perhaps there was a hint of fondness in the depths of his black eyes.

“Sharp?” the female asked, a rift finally opening between her eyelids. “The egg... what?”

Her gaze traveled slowly over to the oval shape that was now rolling on the ground. Quickly she stood up to watch her egg by the side of her mate.

The eggshell was green with fine streaks of yellow, although the colors were difficult to see in the dusk and tinted by the red glow of the approaching sunrise. Grass blades coated with morning dew stuck to the shell here and there as the egg rolled over and hit a small rock in the grass.

Cracks spread rapidly around the egg’s surface, each one opening a way out for the blinding light within. Silver shielded her eyes with the curved blade on her arm, which was perhaps just as well because now the eggshell exploded, hurling sharp pieces in all directions and leaving a small glowing white shape sitting on the ground instead.

Sharp brushed a shard of shell off his rounded shoulder, his face still showing only calm dutifulness as the white light of the small body on the ground faded away to reveal its true colors.

“Welcome to the world, young Descith,” the father muttered, a hint of a smile crossing his face for a second.

“He looks adorable,” the mother said softly, betraying more emotion than her mate. “Come, little one. Try to get up,” she added encouragingly to her newborn son.

The small creature looked up at her with large, attentive eyes. The small Descith had a head similar to that of his parents, but much bigger in proportion to his body. He looked hesitantly at his nearly cone-shaped feet and at the useless arms, already with the precise curved shape of the adults’ scythes, but the blade itself missing.

He shifted around in an unsuccessful attempt to rise to his feet. He opened his mouth and let out a miserable wail.

“Go on,” Silver said softly. “Stand up.”

The hatchling looked at his arms, one at a time, and carefully poked the grass with them. Discovering its solidness with curiosity, he managed to push himself a little upwards.

It took a few attempts, but eventually he managed to stand up.

The Descith swayed unsteadily on his feet, his sense of balance still underdeveloped for the precision of the biped. After keeping himself upright for a few seconds, he collapsed forwards, shrieking with fear and instinctively moving his arms in front of him to absorb the fall.

His eyes opened again after being squeezed shut in preparation for impact. The impact had never come.

His deformed arms sank into the ground precisely where they gave him balance.

Catching on, the little Descith yanked both of his undeveloped scythes out of the soil. He took a deep breath and let himself fall again – and again, sharp instincts saw to that his arms came down in precisely the right place.

He smiled widely at his new discovery, laughing childishly as he let himself fall again.

“He’ll never learn to walk like this,” Sharp said, amused in spite of himself. His mate just chuckled.

“He acts just like you,” she said adoringly.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

They watched their son experiment with letting himself fall backwards. His arms automatically took the fall, always. It didn’t matter what he did. The instinct was extraordinarily powerful.

This seemed to eventually take the fun out of it for him and the young Descith began to attempt to stay steady on his feet, using his arms for slight support.

It would be a while before he managed that. It always was. And indeed, his story started out in such a way that it could have been any Scyther’s story.

But this was only one particular Scyther, and his story, though beginning like any other, was decidedly unique.

But no one in the swarm would know until many years later.

II

“A new member of our swarm was hatched this morning,” announced the Leader to the swarm late in the evening. Every eye was fixed on his illuminated form, except, ironically enough, those of the subject of his speech, which were darting curiously between the different members of the swarm, oblivious to the importance of the ritual that their owner was now unknowingly taking part in.

The Leader looked at the small Descith sitting on the flat rock below him. He hated performing the acceptance ritual. To devote such attention and in fact weaken himself to someone who did not recognize him as Leader – indeed, someone to whom the concept of a Leader in itself was decidedly alien – caused his sense of potential threat to tingle uncomfortably.

But it was a necessary evil, and after all, if no new members were taken into the swarm, he would have no swarm to be Leader over, which would, for obvious reasons, completely defeat the point. And more importantly, the ritual was tradition, and breaking it would be sacrilege. Such said the Code.

He looked back up and continued. “Let this young Descith be a member of our swarm to the day of his eventual return to the soil. Let him grow and flourish, become a Scyther and develop scythes and wings as the rest of us. Let him follow the Code and respect his duties. Let him be honored tonight!”

He raised his right scythe to the soft joint on his left arm and made a clean, sharp cut across it.

“By the blood of the Leader…” he began, feeling only a light trickle as dark Scyther blood dripped onto the hatchling’s head. The Descith twitched and shrieked in surprise, raising his right arm to his eyes to observe the blotch of bluish-black liquid on it.

“…the Father…” he continued, looking towards the Scyther standing by his left side. The father stretched his arm slowly outwards, and the Leader raised his scythe for a second cut. Sharp winced slightly as his blood trickled down on his son as well.

“…and the Fresh Prey,” the Leader finished as he looked to his right at the newborn’s mother and the struggling female Nidoran she was holding in her mouth. As the little rabbit eyed him raising his scythe again, she struggled even harder and let out a piercing scream, but he silenced it with a quick cut across her throat.

The Nidoran’s body went limp. Crimson blood was sprayed onto the rock, almost covering the squirming Descith, who was already beginning to lick the liquid off his exoskeleton. The little one was already gaining a taste for blood, the Leader thought.

Sometimes he daydreamed about the ability to cripple the young ones before they could challenge his leadership. But it was against the very most sacred section of the Code, the Moral Code. It explicitly stated the immorality of inflicting unnecessary torture on another being. And whenever he found himself in such thoughts, he became afraid.

Occasionally, when he was feeling more rebellious, he wondered just what it was that he was afraid of. Nobody knew what was going on inside his head and nobody ever would. He could think all the immoral thoughts he wanted, and the other Scyther would never know. While the implication was that a godly being of some sort had originally created the Code, there was no such being seeing to that the Code was followed in thought as well as action. He could as well, he realized. He could as well think it.

Sometimes, thanks to this rebellious train of thought, he became afraid that one day he would in fact be tempted to act upon it.

But that day was not today.

III

The young Descith sat in the grass. His parents were out hunting, although he did not know what it was they were doing. He did not know, either, that many species obsessively protected their young. It never crossed his instinct-driven mind to miss them while they were gone. Indeed, he would have felt discomfort if he had found himself alone, but evolution had never needed to give Scyther and Descith a parental bond when it came to protection.

No one attacked a Scyther swarm. That was just the way it was.

Therefore, he did not for a moment wonder whether or when his parents would be back. He simply looked around curiously, still taking the world in through his senses and experimenting with what his own body could do. For example, he had already discovered the undeveloped muscles connected to the knobs on his back that would one day become wings. Of course, he did not know that, either. He just knew he could contract some tiny muscles in his back, and that it didn’t seem to do anything so he quickly lost interest in it.

The buzz of a fly caught his attention. His eyes scanned the air with natural skill and found their tiny target a few meters off. He stood up carefully, something telling him he should not make any sound.

The young Pokémon’s eyes followed the fly as he became tenser with every passing moment: the fly was approaching. Using his arms for support, he stood deathly still except for his flickering eyes, following their target.

Just as the fly was at the closest point it would be, he pounced.

Had he been a fully-grown Scyther, the precision of his aim would have been enough to make his blade cut the fly in half. Instead, he clumsily missed it by an inch and it bonked into his forehead before flying frantically off.

He made a sad sound as he landed on his arms and legs on the ground, looking longingly at the fly. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to catch the fly. He just did. And in his young mind, he didn’t need any more logical reason than that before doing things.

He looked around again and saw a short tree. He wondered if he could get up into it.

Slowly and carefully, he made his way towards the tree, again using his arms for support. He looked it up and down as he arrived next to it, not sure how to get up it. He poked the tree with the tip of his arm to see if it was solid. It was.

He brought his foot onto the trunk, but hesitated. Something told him he would fall if he just tried to walk up it like he walked on the ground.

He walked around the tree, observing how the trunk also had another side that he couldn’t see from each particular point of view, no matter how he tried. When one bit came into view, another always disappeared off the other side. Strange.

After experimenting with this for a few minutes and realizing that this rule appeared impossible to trick, he noticed that there was a low branch only inches above his head. He poked the branch. It was solid too.

He raised his curved arm shape above the branch and pulled it back down so that it hooked onto the branch. He pulled it experimentally down a few times before coming to the conclusion that this might be the way up.

He whipped his other arm over the branch and began to try to pull himself up, but it was difficult and his arms were not curved enough. He tried it again a few more times with little further success.

“Scith,” he sighed in disappointment. It had no particular meaning at this time, neither to him nor to anybody else. It was simply a random sound that his vocal chords could handle.

But he was too stubborn to give up. After a couple of boring minutes, he turned back to the tree and examined the bark of it better. He prodded it harder than before with his scythe. It was somewhat soft.

He drew back and swung the sharp end of his undeveloped right scythe straight towards the tree trunk. It sank ever so slightly into the tree.

Happily, the little Descith hooked his left scythe onto the branch and began to scratch himself upwards with his clawed feet. At first he made no progress, but eventually he figured out how to get a good grip with his claws.

After an exhausting climb, he finally got onto the lowest branch. Hugging the tree to keep his balance, he rested for a short while to gather his breath. He looked up, and he looked down.

He felt very proud of himself.

It was only seconds before he eagerly resumed the climb up to the next branch, and to the next. At one point he nearly fell down, but narrowly pulled himself up again.

From the branch above him hung a sleeping green pupa, immobile as its inner body was going through the final steps of transformation into a beautiful Butterfree. Of course the young Descith had no idea that it was called a Metapod or that it was metamorphosing. In fact, he did not initially assume it was alive. He poked it curiously with his scythe and watched it with glee as it swung back and forth. He prodded it more powerfully to make it swing farther.

The Metapod, awoken from its sleep, opened its eyes sluggishly. Not that it could do anything about the situation it was in. It couldn’t. Except for hardening its shell.

Which, in an interesting twist, did turn out useful, since just then the Descith managed to cut it off the branch it was hanging from.

The cocoon dropped to the ground, bounced off it once and then rolled in a semicircle before finally coming to a halt.

The Descith was about ready to get down from the tree when he saw the cocoon begin to shake. Curiously, he watched it as it twitched for a few seconds and then suddenly ripped in the middle, revealing shining white light.

He flinched, but was still curious; he squinted at the cocoon from the safety of the tree as a dark, crumpled shape crawled out of it and spread its thin white wings for the first time. Its two fine black antennae quivered as the newly-evolved Butterfree flapped its wings experimentally, finally taking off with a high-pitched cry of “Fweeee!”

The young mantis watched, fascinated, as the Butterfree practiced its flight with a few circles and loops, and finally fluttered off over the plains.

The Descith watched it until it was too far away for him to see it. He looked sadly back at the tree he was standing in. He wanted to go down now.

But nature had already instilled in him a fear of heights.

He whimpered, clutching the tree trunk tightly with what would later become his scythes. The sight of the few meters down made him feel dizzy and discomforted. He turned his head quickly towards the trunk, where he couldn’t see the ground, and closed his eyes, unable to think of anything to do other than wait for someone else to save him.

IV

It was nearing sunset when his mother returned from the hunt, carrying a dead Pidgeotto in her mouth.

At first she did not regard the small green shape in the tree as anything out of the ordinary; in fact, the last time she had looked at that particular tree, there had been a Metapod hanging from one of the branches, and she just assumed that was it. The absence of her son did not seem worrisome. There were always guarding Scyther who would make sure that no hatchling would walk away on his own, and after all, no one ever attacked a Scyther swarm.

However, just while she was trying to cut the skin and feathers off her prey to make it easier to eat, she heard a quiet moan coming from the tree.

“Sciiiith…”

She stopped what she was doing, turning her eyes towards the direction of the sound.

“Sciiiiiith!”

She rose up and walked over to the tree. “Somebody there?”

The Descith looked quickly at his mother with big, scared eyes that begged her to help him down. She sighed and walked up to the tree, raising her scythes into the air so that her son could use them to climb down.

He hesitated at first, but then carefully turned away from the tree trunk, crouched down, hooked his arms around the branch he was on and let himself descend a little. He unhooked one of his premature scythes and placed it onto his mother’s scythe instead, reaching for the other one with his foot. Finally he let go and allowed his mother to gently put him down.

Unlike some other species’ babies, the young Descith did not need to be comforted. As soon as he was down from the tree and out of all danger, he did no longer need or particularly desire his mother’s company. But she stayed with him anyway, affectionately feeding him some of the softer bits of the Pidgeotto and attempting to make him realize some of the complicated principles of the Pokémon language.

It is, after all, beneficial to help furthering one’s genes, and while natural selection did not care whether one’s genes were furthered with the help of a parent, it did indeed care whether one’s own offspring survived. And thus, she felt more affectionate towards him than he would ever feel towards her in the Scyther’s family-less community and individualistic mindset.

She was what the norms of her kind would call ‘weak’. To love someone meant fear of death, the inevitable end to one’s time knowing them, and fear of death was the number one sin. Ideally, a Scyther was without social bonds, above them, and it would indeed have been frowned upon had, say, the Leader shown personal affection towards another being. But in the end, the Scyther were social creatures, and in spite of the unfortunate implications of their moral code, most of them formed bonds of family and friendship in some form anyway.

Such was simply the way of nature.

[Luиαrglοω]

I like it. It's simple, and yet awesome. I don't write fanfiction myself but I can tell that I like this. I've been to your website but I haven't read your other fanfic, but now I know I should :D Anyway... It's good! Do more! ^^

[Dragonfree]

Thanks. :D I'll probably be posting Part II tomorrow.

[Dragonfree]

Um, since I already proofread Part II, I guess I might as well post it now. Part II is the shortest part after Part VII both in word count and number of chapters, and in general it's not really my favorite, but meh.

This part contains references to my fanmade Pokémon naming conventions, and doesn't explain them in a lot of detail, so this is the basic idea for those curious or confused:

Pokémon don't have names as we know them, but nicknames of a sort given to them by other individuals who feel that they need a word to address them by. Thus, giving someone a name is generally a sign of respect and friendship. Because of the way Pokémon speech works, the names are always simply words (sometimes two or more stuck together) that the namer associates in some way with the namee. When they do have a name, they don't introduce themselves by that name or expect anyone other than that particular person to call them by it, except that in tight intimate groups of two or more, they like to all agree on using the same name for each member of the group, at least when more than two of them are together, to avoid confusion. Otherwise Pokémon are perfectly content with being referred to by the name of their species only, and that is how they address strangers.

Now, on to Part II.



PART II: FRIENDSHIP

V

The young Descith was a year old. He had now learned many things about the world. He could communicate with the other Scyther in the Pokémon language. He knew the difference between a Scyther and a Descith. And his scythes had begun to grow – they were still made of the same soft yellow stuff as his joints and would be until he evolved, but it was a start.

But he was still young, and this was the first time that he experienced an acceptance ritual at an old enough age to realize what was going on and what was being said.

The process had not been described to him. His parents had only told him that he would be seeing the acceptance ritual and that the same had been done to him when he was accepted into the swarm. He was both excited and curious, with little to even hint to him what he would be seeing.

The Leader walked up to the rock and all the Scyther and Descith fell silent.

“A new member of our swarm was hatched this morning,” the Leader said. He was illuminated by the pale moonlight so that he looked more intimidating than he was during the day. A short distance behind him loomed the forest of Ruxido, every tree seeming like a sturdy soldier in his personal army.

It was no wonder that times like these made the Scyther’s hearts fill with fearful respect and obedience towards their Leader.

While the Leader said his traditional speech of acceptance, the Descith that was its subject shrieked innocently, receiving disapproving glares from the swarm. The one-year-old didn’t yet fully understand the Code or why the newborn must be so quiet, but he imitated the adult Scyther anyway.

His expression betraying disgust for a fraction of a second, the Leader raised his left arm. “By the blood of the Leader, the Father and the Fresh Prey,” he finished as blood from two Scyther and a Rattata showered over the small Descith on the rock. He let out a piercing cry of fear, attempting to crawl away from the blood to more disapproving looks from the swarm.

He did not yet understand this either, neither the young one’s fearful reaction nor the adults’ disapproval, but what could he do but ignore it?

The ritual was finished awkwardly by forcing the newborn’s face into the puddle of blood, and then it was over.

The year-old Descith watching it would never know that this was what would later be one of his best friends.

His other best friend he would meet the next day.


VI

It was a rainy morning.

The Descith knew all about rain. He knew that it was the blood of the clouds. The clouds were a species of Pokémon that lived all of its life high up in the sky. Ordinarily they were white and shifted their shapes into various different ones depending on what they were thinking, but sometimes they died, and then they turned gray. And after they had turned gray, their blood rained down onto the ground to provide necessary water to the Pokémon down below in the endless circle of life.

Sometimes the clouds had great wars and so many of them died that the entire sky turned gray. And every morning, the clouds attacked the sun so that the sky turned red with the sun’s blood, but the sun climbed further up than the clouds ever went so that in the middle of the day they couldn’t reach her anymore. And when she descended in the evening, the clouds attacked her again, but then she buried deep underground where they could not reach her either.

One day the clouds would wear the sun down, she would be unable to climb or dig away from them in time, and they would shed all of her blood and kill her like any other Fire Pokémon.

And then there would be no more sunlight, and the moon would stay still in the sky at all times because he would no longer have to chase the sun always. Some of the older Scyther told of how once the moon had caught up with the sun and nearly extinguished her fire, but she had gotten away narrowly and the eternal race had continued.

And the sun had once had children with the moon, the stars. And the stars came out in the night because they wanted to distract the moon so that he wouldn’t catch the sun.

He knew this because that was what his parents had told him, and what their parents had told them, and what their parents had told them, and so on. And the Leader confirmed it.

It had to be true.

Of course, it wasn’t. Scyther’s wings weren’t built for high flight, and no Scyther had ever flown high enough to prove the worth of even the easiest to verify of these stories, namely the one about the clouds being Pokémon that became gray when they died. They would have realized that the clouds were just vapor.

But they could not fly that high, and as such they never felt any need to question those stories. What did it matter to them, anyway, whether they were true or not? As long as the sun rose in the morning and the clouds did rain, who cared whether all the specific details were true?

The funny thing was that they did not especially need those stories. Humans were curious creatures who could never be satisfied with a “We don’t know.” They needed something to believe, truth or not. But the Scyther were not that way, nor were any other Pokémon. They were perfectly content with knowing something could be relied on to happen, and didn’t need to know why it was.

It simply happened to be so that certain individuals had more of this tendency than others did.

The humans called it ‘creativity’. The Scyther called it ‘unnecessary wondering about trivial things’.

The only reason those stories began to be passed on was that some Scyther long ago, instead of speaking of these stories as the made-up speculation they were, decided to pretend they were fact in order to avoid being shunned.

And thus, the evolution of the species slowly ground to a halt, because they had grown intelligent enough to cheat natural selection for their own views, which mostly involved being the same as they had always been or pretending to be the same.

The older Descith that he was talking to was one of those who did unnecessary wondering about trivial things. His exoskeleton was a particularly light green, which had immediately caught the younger one’s attention. Having nothing else to do, they had engaged in conversation under a large tree that shielded them somewhat from the pouring rain, and currently the older one was managing to thoroughly confuse his conversational partner with his alien views.

“Why do you think it rains?” he had begun this topic, staring out at the falling raindrops.

“I know,” the younger Descith had said. “The clouds are Pokémon high up in the sky who turn gray when they die and then their blood…”

“I don’t think rain is the blood of the clouds,” the other had interrupted. “I don’t think they’re Pokémon at all. How do you know they are?”

The younger had looked at him in puzzlement. “All the Scyther say so, so it must be true.”

“But how do they know?” the older had countered. “Scyther can’t fly up there. Once I saw a flock of Pidgey flying, and they flew through a cloud. Like it wasn’t even solid.”

“The others are older and know it better than you,” the younger Descith had stubbornly said. The other had sighed and stopped talking about it. Now they were sitting in silence and watching the rainfall.

“You know how to evolve faster?” asked the older suddenly.

“How?”

“Mock duels.”

The younger Descith looked at the older. “You can’t do mock duels until you’ve already evolved and your scythes have hardened.”

“You can,” insisted the other one. “You just have to be careful not to break them. It won’t really be a problem for you, since they’re still so small. I’ll have to watch out, though.” He looked at his own scythes, about half the area that they would finally have, but still yellow and vulnerable.

“You want a mock duel with me?” the younger asked, puzzled. The older nodded.

“I’ve never done it before,” the younger Descith said hesitantly. “I don’t know how to…”

“You don’t need to know it,” the older interrupted with a smile. “It’s all there already.”

And with that, he stood up, motioning for the younger one to do the same, which he did.

It was all very sudden when he leapt menacingly at the other. He instinctively ducked and slashed away with his premature scythe.

“See?” the older one said. “It’s not too hard.”

“It isn’t,” the younger agreed, astonished. He suddenly leapt at the other Descith with his blades aloft, to have them blocked by the green edge of the older one’s left scythe. The older laughed and kicked him off.

“Can I make a name for you?” he asked.

The younger Descith looked at him in disbelief. To make a name for someone meant respect – something not too common for a one-year-old Descith to have.

“You can,” he replied in excitement. This would be his first real name. His parents only referred to him as Son.

“I call you…” The older Descith paused. “Razor.”

And the younger Descith grinned from ear to ear. “Can I make a name for you as well?”

“Of course,” the older replied, his eyes twinkling with glee.

“I call you…”

The newly-named Razor looked out at the rain and then at the other Descith.

“Stormblade,” he finished with conviction. “That is your name.”

Stormblade laughed. “Thank you.”

And then he leapt at Razor with raised scythes.


VII

Another year passed.

Stormblade and Razor continued to be friends. They dueled at every opportunity, excited to trigger each other’s evolution. Both of their scythes grew, Stormblade’s to full size and Razor’s to what Stormblade’s had been when they had first met.

And one day they met a tiny year-old Descith with a particularly dark armor.

This was the subject of some amused staring, as dark armor generally indicated that its owner was a female.

“What are you looking at?” asked the young Descith defensively, raising his scythes up in front of him. He had large, paranoid eyes, but a strangely powerful voice for his size.

“You,” Razor replied honestly.

“What is so interesting about me?” the little one asked coldly.

“Your armor is darker than average, isn’t it?” Stormblade answered.

“And so?” the little Descith asked stubbornly.

Stormblade laughed. “Should we settle this in a duel?”

Whatever reaction he expected, it was not what really happened, namely that the tiny little Descith growled and leapt straight at Stormblade with his barely-existent scythes ready to slash.

Stormblade recoiled in surprise, but quickly raised his own blades against the attack, throwing the much smaller Pokémon a few meters away in one swing. The newcomer took a few tumbles in the grass, but rose immediately back up and attacked Stormblade fiercely again.

Stormblade fought back with all his might, and indeed his size and age gave him the advantage. In the end, the small Descith lay in the grass, defeated, under Stormblade’s entire weight.

“Damn, you’re good,” Stormblade panted. “Can I give you a name?”

It was difficult to see which was more astonished, the beaten Descith or Razor.

“Y-yes, I suppose…” the Descith stammered, assuming this had to be some kind of trick, perhaps to give him an offensive name – uncommon, but not unknown – but not in any situation to say no.

“Shadowdart shall be your name,” Stormblade said with satisfaction, rising up and nodding. “This is Razor, and I am Stormblade.”

The only situation in which Pokémon ever introduced themselves and each other by name was when the one being spoken to was being invited into a tight-knit group of mutual respect, and the hesitant Shadowdart was well aware of this.

It would be difficult to make it into a joke from there on.

Shadowdart nodded and stood up. “Thank you.”

He looked between his two new apparent friends, and still did not understand it any more than Razor did.

“You have potential, kid…” Stormblade said faintly before his eyes rolled backwards into his head. Shadowdart stared wide-eyed at him, wondering if he had killed him or something, but then Stormblade’s body was taken over by a bright white glow.

“He’s evolving!” Razor gasped, and indeed he was. Stormblade’s pure white shape began to grow. His height doubled in just a few moments, more spikes appeared on his head, his upper body appeared to split in the middle and the halves to bulge apart, his leg joints morphing into round segments…

When the glow faded away, Stormblade was a full-grown Scyther with shiny, metallic scythes.

He grinned.

“You two are next.”

[AC Coda X]

Hmm... so this is the reason that TCoD hasn't been updated recently... I wondered whether I'd get to read it. Yep, it was worth the wait. Anyway, I'll review this in full a little later, I have a few other things I want to check up on now.

[Dragonfree]

Okay, here is Part III. It is considerably longer than both of those before it, but pales in comparison with what is to come, heh. It is one of my favorite parts, although it probably comes after Parts IV and V, and this is where the fic starts to get a lot darker. Warning: not for sensitive people.




PART III: FIRST PREY

VIII

Yet another year passed.

After a Descith evolved, he had to spend until the spring after his evolution learning the Code by attending special lessons with the Leader and all the other newly-evolved Scyther who had never killed. Stormblade was no exception.

The Leader was all the more fond of this ritual – if one could call a series of lessons a ritual – than of the acceptance ritual. This time he was not accepting potential threats into the swarm. On the contrary, he was taking all the potential threats and reducing them to obedient non-threats with months of beating laws into their heads, and he enjoyed it immensely.

“The Code,” he had warned on the first lesson of that year, “is sacred. Nothing, nothing is more important than the Code. Choosing between anything and the Code, you should not hesitate before choosing the latter. Should you ever break it, you will be banished from Scyther society forever, your blood will be tainted and you will be forever worthless. If you break it, the only thing that will save your honor is immediate suicide - the ultimate realization of the wrong that you have done, and showing that you do not, after all, fear your own death. But if you fail to do that –” he had here glared over the group at this point to emphasize it, “you are disgusting failures, and your eventual death – because yes, you will all die at one point, whether you accept it or not and whether you face it fearless or not – will be forever the end of you. No one will speak of you or remember you again, except perhaps in a negative context. This life you have is your only chance to make a name for yourselves, and the only purpose in it is to be immortal in the memory of generations to come. This is something you do not want to fail at, but if you did want it – the quickest way would be breaking the Code.”

The young Scyther had watched him in stunned silence, and he had looked at them with satisfaction. The more silently scared they became, the better.

And thus the lessons had continued throughout the year, and it was made perfectly clear to every growing Scyther through rigorous repetition and conditioning that to disrespect the Code, the ancient rules of the Scyther, was a horrible, horrible thing.

So now, after learning of its significance, Stormblade was preparing for his First Prey. It was, the Leader had told them, an essential ritual that would prove their Scytherhood and their respect for the first rule of the Moral Code. It would be the young Scyther’s first ever hunt, to be performed entirely on their own with two witnesses to follow.

And it would be their first kill.

The young Scyther had no reason to be nervous about it. No one told them it was a nerve-wrecking experience, and they would not tell anyone either after discovering the reality of it, for fear of being considered cowards.

None of them were aware of the irony of it all.


IX

While Stormblade went out for his First Prey, Razor and Shadowdart had yet another one of their mock duels. Razor’s initial lack of respect for the younger Descith had slowly dissolved – for the most part, anyway – throughout the year, and now their focus was to work on evolution.

The bad part was that Descith evolved through battling experience, almost always in the spring or early summer for unknown reasons most likely having to do with hormones. And their battling skills were quite pathetic for a very long time after their birth, majorly hindering their ability to trigger their evolution and slowing them down.

The average age for evolution was around three years as Stormblade had been, so Razor was anticipating his own evolution any moment. Shadowdart, however, feeling dully impatient, was day by day growing less enthusiastic about the mock fights.

“Come on,” Razor egged him on. “You need to try hard for your own evolution to happen as well.”

“I won’t evolve until in a year,” Shadowdart said emptily.

“Maybe you will,” Razor replied eagerly. “I heard that our Leader evolved in the middle of the winter.”

Shadowdart’s interest seemed to be awakened. “He did?”

“That’s what I heard.”

The younger Descith leapt at Razor with an eager growl. Razor quickly jumped out of the way and brought his own scythes down towards Shadowdart’s back, but he also dodged it with a quick roll and slashed across Razor’s face.

The older Descith growled in pain and retaliated with another slash which managed to hit Shadowdart right in the rift between the left and right parts of his upper body.

Shadowdart did not scream in pain often, but this time he did.

“I… are you okay?” Razor asked carefully, his eyes wide.

“Yes,” Shadowdart growled and dealt Razor a slash to the middle cleft as well.

Caught by surprise, Razor fell back into the grass. He couldn’t breathe. This was the Descith’s weak spot where any nasty cut would deal horrible pain. Evolution would expand the upper body to the sides at this rift, simultaneously strengthening the armor in it. Before evolution, however, the Descith were very vulnerable at that particular spot.

But as Razor lay there, the hormones of fighting tension flowing through his body pushed him over the edge that they had been attempting to reach for so long.

Shadowdart watched with incredulity as a white glow enveloped Razor.

“No!” he exclaimed, realizing that what he had meant as revenge had actually turned into a great favor.

But Razor was indeed evolving, and he felt exhilarated as his vision faded into pure white. His brain pumped out endorphins while his exoskeleton bulged out like an inflating balloon, which Razor had admittedly never seen or heard of in his life.

Shadowdart punched his scythes into the ground as Razor’s growth came to a halt, the white light faded off his body and where a Descith had stood a moment before there was now a full-grown Scyther in his place.

“Wow!” Razor said in astonishment, slightly surprised by his deepened voice. “Thanks, Shadowdart.”

But Shadowdart turned his back to him and walked away.

Razor sighed and sat down in the grass, hanging his head.

But only for a few minutes – he had a swarm and a Leader to tell about his evolution.


X

Stormblade returned later in the afternoon with a dead Pidgey. He was quick to find Razor again, but Shadowdart was nowhere to be seen anymore.

They were not much bothered by it. It had happened before. Their general conclusion was that Shadowdart was just a bit of a sore loser, which was nothing to worry about – not while he was still a Descith having mock duels, anyway.

“It was harder than I thought,” Stormblade admitted quietly to his newly-evolved friend, sitting under the very same tree as two years before when they had first discussed whether the clouds were really bleeding, although that particular fact had not yet crossed their minds. “I… I felt… I caught this Pikachu but… oh, it doesn’t matter,” he finished hopelessly. It was difficult to get any words around it without explicitly showing fear of death, one of the most horrible sins that a Scyther could commit.

And even though Stormblade was the type who wondered unnecessarily about trivial things like whether the clouds were really bleeding or whether the Code really made sense, he had learned enough now from his four-year life in a Scyther swarm to know that generally it was not a good idea to voice such thoughts out loud.

Razor didn’t ask, or even particularly wonder what it was that Stormblade had been trying to say. He would find out what it was like on his own in a year, after all.

“So there’s going to be a ritual this evening,” Stormblade said.

“I know.” Razor had witnessed the First Prey rituals before; every year had them and they had lost their novelty already. They had been going on for a few days that year, too. It would nonetheless be more interesting now, since now it was someone he knew who would be recognized as an adult.

In the evening, the Scyther gathered by that familiar rock in front of the Leader. All except Stormblade, who stood behind him, and two other Scyther by the Leader’s sides, who Razor knew were the witnesses. Razor couldn’t make out Stormblade’s features in the dark, but he knew it was him, and with that confidence he felt proud of his friend.

“Tonight,” the Leader announced, “we witness this Scyther join the ranks of the adults of our swarm. He has shown his ability to hunt and kill his prey without fear of death! Let him join the swarm with full privileges, be eligible for true duels of life and death, and hunt on his own!”

The Leader took a deep breath and swallowed. “Let him be able to challenge my Leadership, should he be more fit for it than I. Let him now honor the Code, since he now understands it, and be a valuable member of the swarm. Step forward, Scyther.”

Stormblade stepped forth, carrying his Pidgey in his mouth. He placed it on the rock.

“I offer the meat of my First Prey to our Leader,” he said, bowing his head in the Leader’s direction. The older Scyther bowed back, stepped up to the rock and tore a bit of raw flesh off the little bird’s body, swallowing it.

“To… to my friend Razor,” he continued. Razor had been half-expecting it and was thus not surprised when he stepped up to the rock himself, bowed to the Leader and Stormblade, and tore another piece of flesh from the Pidgey. It would not satisfy anyone’s hunger; it was just a ritualistic meal.

“And… if he is here… to Shadowdart,” Stormblade said quietly. Razor looked at him. To offer the meat of a First Prey to an unevolved Descith was rather unconventional, although it was not expressly forbidden.

Stormblade looked around the group of Scyther. For a few moments there was no movement, but then a small Descith stirred near the back and walked slowly up to the rock. Razor saw the Leader glance darkly at Stormblade, but he didn’t care; he just looked relieved as Shadowdart came up, ate a bit of the Pidgey’s flesh and nodded ever so slightly in his direction.

“Then,” said the Leader after a short silence, “he is accepted.”

All three of them bowed to the Leader and then walked down from the rock to blend in with the rest of the swarm again.


XI

Razor’s first lesson in Scytherhood was at the beginning of summer, when the wave of Descith evolutions that year finally ground to a halt.

He left Shadowdart’s training to Stormblade and walked to the rock, where the Leader was already standing and watching the nervous young Scyther gather around. He waited patiently for all of them to arrive without saying a word. Razor sat down quietly, not sure what to expect from this.

“So,” the Leader finally said as the last of the Scyther seemed to have settled down, “you’re becoming adults. With your evolution, you entered your adolescence. Right now you are in a very difficult stage of your lives, because you are physically capable of so many things that you weren’t before. You can duel. You can fly. You can mate. I understand that all of these things sound very exciting to you – mating especially so…” He stopped, silencing the nervous giggling that had ensued with a sharp glare. “But, unfortunately for you, that won’t happen for another year or so.”

The Leader looked nastily over the group. “You may feel like adults, but you’re not. You still have very many things to learn, and those things are what you will be learning here. Do not miss these lessons, unless you plan to postpone all your ‘fun’ to two years from now.”

He paused for some dramatic effect and looked over the group again. “Now, I hope that you are not such pathetic little worms that you don’t know what the Code is. You’ve all heard of it, right? You know what it is. However, I will still clarify it, because if one of you has forgotten, I think it would be best for my sanity never to find out.”

The Scyther looked up at him, but none said anything.

“The Code,” the Leader began, “is an ancient set of morals and laws passed down from Scyther to Scyther for generations that regulates how we should act, think and feel. Sometime in the murky past, the Scyther accessed these laws. We do not know where they came from, but they are sacred and more important than anything else.”

“But,” muttered a nervous Scyther in the back, “if we don’t know where it came from, then how do we know it’s sacred?”

The Leader glared at him. “This group is already not leaving me the slightest bit impressed. What does it matter where the Code came from? We know it is sacred because that is what we have always found it to be. What purpose is there in questioning it? Would it help anyone? The Code is right and all adult Scyther will be in agreement that all it says is absolutely justified. The Code is not to be questioned. Is that clear?”

“Yes…” the questioner muttered, clearly not satisfied with the answer. Razor was distinctly reminded of Stormblade, but said nothing.

“Now,” the Leader went on. “To other things. Death. To cease to exist forever. Think about it. Is it a frightening thought?” He paused to look around. “Is it a frightening thought?” he asked louder. None of the Scyther answered.

“Judging from your silence, it is,” the Leader continued. “It shouldn’t be. We are predators. We kill. We tear families and friends apart – families and friends generally being a large part of our prey’s social structure. It is a nasty thing to do, but we have to do it anyway to survive. That’s life. We can’t treat death like the ultimate evil. We’ll die one way or another, and so will our prey. Death is not to be feared. And thus we come to the Moral Code, the most important section of the entire Code! There are five rules of the Moral Code, and you must know all of them. The first, do you know what the first is?”

There were some quiet mutterings in the back.

“Apparently not,” the Leader said with clear disdain. “Well, I told you only seconds ago! Death is not to be feared, for it is the only thing that we all have in common. That’s the rule. Death will come to us all one day. It is inevitable, and exactly for that reason, we should not fear it. Fear is a natural reaction to uncertain things that you wish will not happen; but death is not one of those uncertain things. It is the greatest certainty of all. You should find comfort in the thought, and until you do, you are failures as Scyther. This is why you need the First Prey: to kill, to inflict death, without a nagging conscience or uncomfortably drifting to the thought that at one time you, too, will cease to breathe: you must face death to understand it and at the same time become officially recognized as individuals who can survive on their own. Your First Prey is the most important event in your lives after your birth and your death. I hope I am making clear just how vital this particular ritual is.”

The young Scyther looked nervously around.

“No, don’t look nervous!” the Leader snapped. “You are fearing your First Prey! You are fearing death! Stop it or you will all be doomed to die in shame!”

The pupils stared at him. Many of their eyes showed unquestionable fear.

The Leader shook his head. “Is there no end to how pathetic you can be? Go. This lesson is discontinued. I shall continue tomorrow when you have hopefully overcome these unnatural feelings and are ready to learn.”

The Scyther would not overcome the feelings. They would, however, learn to hide them.


XII

The lessons continued.

Razor always felt a little uneasy at them, but wasn’t sure why. It was just a tradition, after all. It happened to everyone. There was nothing he should be uneasy about, should there?

He still was.

For obvious reasons, he did not speak of that.

“So,” said the Leader sometimes, “how do you feel about your upcoming First Prey?”

The Scyther would roar in unison, “We look forward to it!”

With more power each time it happened.

And sure, Razor believed it. All the others looked forward to it; it took just a little effort to convince himself that he did as well. Why would he be any different?

“You have improved quite a lot since the first lesson,” the Leader announced one day. “I am very satisfied about that, because at that time I was afraid the next generation of Scyther would be composed of wimps and cowards. Things are looking better now. Now let me see if you remember the Moral Code! What is the first rule?”

“Death is not to be feared, for it is the only thing that we all have in common,” the Scyther chanted in unison.

They knew the rest by heart as well. Do not disgrace the swarm with your life if you are not worth it. If a Scyther is in danger, it is your duty to assist. Every individual to his own: do not manipulate or be manipulated, control or be controlled. Sharpen your scythes, for while death is inevitable, pain is unnecessary.

Their conditioning had been successful thus far. They really did cringe at the thought of breaking the Code now. But there was much work to be done. They were, after all, not supposed to cringe. They were supposed to feel the urge to slit their own throats.

“Stormblade is getting boring,” Shadowdart confessed to Razor one autumn day after the lesson. “He’s spending less and less time training with me, and more and more time hunting, sitting around or looking at females.” He cringed in disgust. “Why would anyone want to look at females?”

Razor chuckled. “You’ll find out when you evolve.”

“I want to evolve now,” Shadowdart said stubbornly.

“Fine,” Razor said and rolled his eyes. “One nice training session now, okay?”

And he swung his scythe.

Shadowdart was always alert and immediately jumped out of the way, slashing back at Razor. The disadvantage of evolution was that being bigger meant being an easier target. On the other hand, a Scyther’s exoskeleton was quite a bit stronger than a Descith’s, so Razor hardly felt Shadowdart’s frail, not-so-sharp premature scythes scratch across his torso.

“That was pretty pathetic, old friend,” he taunted, raising his scythe and slashing it at Shadowdart’s back. The Descith was thrown down onto the ground with his back bleeding, but rose quickly up again and countered by dashing behind Razor and slashing into his wing.

“Ow!” Razor groaned, instinctively kicking into Shadowdart’s body with his foot before turning swiftly around to slash. He drove his scythe at the Descith lying on the ground in front of him, but instead chopped into the ground as Shadowdart darted out of the way.

“Damn, you’re too small for this,” Razor grumbled, looking around for the Descith in the tall yellowing grass. Caught unawares, he yelped in surprise as Shadowdart leapt onto his back and brought his blunt premature blade to his throat.

“Gotcha.”

Razor sighed. “Yeah, yeah, all right, all right. Get off me.”

Shadowdart didn’t get off him. Razor felt a strange exhilarating heat on his back and glanced at the scythe threatening to cut his neck, discovering it was being enveloped in a white glow.

“Whoa, you’re evolving already!” he said in astonishment before realizing that the scythe was slowly expanding and sharpening.

“Get off me! Get off me!” he screeched in panic before finally managing to push Shadowdart’s arm away from his neck with his own scythes and throwing his evolving friend off his back. He watched Shadowdart lie in the grass, his shape growing rapidly as he gained his adult form.

“Congrats, mate,” he said and grinned as the glow faded away and left Shadowdart in his new body. “Too bad you still look like a girl,” he commented snidely, noticing Shadowdart’s still darker-than-usual color.

The only reply was a nasty glare.


XIII

It was no surprise that the Leader would not have Shadowdart catching his First Prey that spring. While he would most likely have been able to learn all the same things as the other Scyther that year, it would be against tradition to give him special lessons. He would have to be an adolescent Scyther, evolved but without the rights of an adult, for a year and a half.

“Cheer up,” Razor told him one winter day. It was snowing and yet again they found themselves under that same tree for shelter against the falling frozen cloud-blood while the ground was slowly covered with a blanket of white. “For now you’re no worse off than I am.”

“For now,” Shadowdart replied dully. “But your First Prey is coming up in the spring, and then I’ll be the only one who can’t mate and hunt and do everything.”

Razor couldn’t deny it. And as much as he’d have liked to think otherwise, he knew that Stormblade at the very least found adult life so exciting that they hardly talked anymore at all. Razor had no reason to believe he wouldn’t be the same.

“Well,” he finally said, “it’s only a year from then before you get to do everything with us again.”

Shadowdart shook his head, stood up and walked off into the snow, leaving only depressing footprints behind.

Razor just sighed.

He thought back to that day in the spring when he woke up one beautiful morning and realized that this was the day of his coming of age.

He got up and looked around. He knew how this was supposed to happen; they had all been lectured on that. However, he was the first Scyther scheduled to have his First Prey this spring, and this made him a little more nervous than otherwise.

“Oh, so you are up?” the Leader asked as he reached the rock overlooking the plains.

“Yes,” Razor just said.

“Good,” the Leader replied shortly. “I despise Scyther who don’t take their First Prey seriously enough to wake up in time for it. Now, we should name witnesses, shouldn’t we? Better get this over with.”

The Leader may have noticed the hints of nervousness in Razor’s posture or voice. In any case, the older Scyther repeatedly glanced suspiciously over his shoulder at his pupil as he walked aimlessly through the swarm with the soon-to-be adult on his heels. Finally stopping near a random sleeping Scyther, the Leader turned to Razor.

“You don’t know him, do you?”

Razor shook his head. The Leader touched the stranger with his clawed foot.

“I name you witness to this Scyther’s journey to adulthood,” he said with his powerful voice as the Scyther sleepily opened an eye. “Come with us.”

The Scyther yawned, but did not object. He stood up, blinked and greeted Razor briefly. It did not take them long to find a female witness to join in as well. Together the group of four walked back to the Leader’s rock.

“All is ready,” the Leader declared, standing on top of the rock. “Scyther, you may proceed to find your First Prey. Do not pay attention to the witnesses, but do not shake them off. May you face death bravely and be ready to perform your first kill.”

Razor nodded, feeling numb. After glancing nervously at the two expressionless witnesses, he dashed off deep into the forest, knowing they would follow.

It was a fine morning, but perhaps a little early; the nocturnal Pokémon were already asleep, but the diurnal ones were not quite awake yet. For a nerve-wrecking while, he wandered around without finding anything at all to kill. Occasionally he thought he heard a twig break or the rustling of some leaves, but as soon as he glanced in that direction, whatever had been there was gone.

Finally he saw a black shape move under a bush.

His heart beating fast, he crouched down, watching the bush intensely. What would it be like to kill it? Was he afraid of death?

He saw the shape move again. Something seemed to gleam momentarily in the morning sun. Razor peered at the shape. Now it moved again, out from underneath the bush…!

But just as he prepared to jump out, he realized it was just a Sneasel that darted across the forest floor. He sighed. He should have figured that a Ruxido-Sneasel would be the only creature around at this time of day. Not good prey at all – too skinny to be worthwhile, too agile to chase, and fellow predators in any case.

That was when he heard voices.

He stood deathly still as only a Scyther could, his sharp eyes darting around to locate the source of the sound. There it was again. It was a language he had never heard spoken before and did not entirely recognize, but had heard about and understood.

Human language.

In perfect silence maintained by his hunter’s instinct, Razor crept in the direction of the voices. He could see where they came from – it was the Ruxido road, an area that the Scyther generally kept away from because of the danger of being captured by the many human trainers who passed by there.

Coming closer, he could now see the humans that he had been hearing. There was a young boy with two girls by his side, chatting and laughing, blissfully oblivious of the danger they were in.

Humans tended to be overconfident in the universality of Pokémon not attacking human trainers.

Razor was struck with some doubt. Humans? He had never heard of any Scyther killing a human as his First Prey. For one thing the largest Pokémon he had witnessed any Scyther bring as his First Prey was a Nidorino, much smaller than even a human child. And for another, all of them had been Pokémon.

But what was there to say he couldn’t kill a human? The thought excited him in a strange way. Large First Prey meant more hunting talent, didn’t it?

He crept closer to the road. The humans were still talking, unaware of the Scyther watching them. He quickly picked out the boy as the easiest to take down (not least because according to what he had heard of humans, the females were more likely than the males to be struck with panic at the sight of a Scyther, meaning they would be less likely to attack him) and positioned himself behind a bush, waiting for the target to approach.

The humans were just in front of it when Razor leapt out of the bush with a piercing hunter’s cry.

The kids screamed, frozen in their footsteps for a fraction of a second before sprinting off as fast as they could.

Which was not very fast on a Scyther’s scale.

Razor chuckled at their pathetic running and zoomed after them, using his wings for additional speed. It was only seconds before he managed to knock the boy down to the ground. The girls looked over their shoulders with wide, fearful eyes before running away even faster, perhaps in some naïve hopes of being able to find help.

The boy crawled desperately to his feet, never ceasing to scream for help at the top of his lungs. Razor quickly leapt on top of him to hold him down to the ground, knocking the wind out of him in the process. Now Razor was starting to feel slight panic; he was realizing just how many things could so easily go wrong.

“No…” the boy panted weakly. “Gr-Growlithe, I choose…”

And he reached for a Pokéball with his hand, but Razor noticed it in time. He had no time to do anything but the first thing he could think of – which was, predictably, to slash in the direction of the human’s arm. Razor closed his eyes as he did it.

The boy screamed again, louder than before if anything. Razor opened his eyes. He had slashed roughly across the boy’s forearm below his wrist. He had not quite chopped it off, but through the oozing blood he could see that it was close. Of course, it looked rather ordinary to him. It just made him feel hungry.

A just over fist-sized ball rolled out of the boy’s limp hand and stopped by the roadside before it popped open on its own accord, releasing an orange, furry puppy. He yelped at the sight of his trainer lying in a pool of blood, first backing away but then growling nervously at Razor, unsure if it would do any good to unleash a Fire attack when it would most likely hit his trainer as well.

Finally the puppy went with jumping onto his trainer’s chest to defend him, sinking his small fangs into Razor’s arm, but the Scyther simply flung the Growlithe to the ground where he, with another yelp, fell unconscious.

He turned back to his prey.

“No… please, n-no…” the boy’s broken voice sobbed between irregular breaths. Razor looked at his face. The strange human features, smudged with tears and blood, were distorted into an expression of pure terror.

“P-please let me go…”

The horrified human opened his wide, tearful eyes and looked into Razor’s cold, empty ones.

“Please…” he whispered.

Razor felt his stomach coiling into a knot. The boy’s terror almost made him feel bad about killing him.

Almost.

He raised his scythe as the boy closed his eyes again with uncontrollable sobs. Razor looked at the boy one more time with a twinge of guilt before making the final sharp cut across his quivering throat.

[Dragonfree]

Yay for Part IV. It's one of my favorites, although after some consideration I think Part V must be considered my absolute favorite. Part IV is still nice, and it marks an important turning-point at the end as you'll see.

It's longer than Part III, too - seventeen pages, ten chapters. (Part III was thirteen pages and six chapters.) So reserve some time to read.

Warning: This is where the fic begins to contain mild sexuality and swearing.





PART IV: NIGHTMARE

XIV

A year later, it was finally time for Shadowdart to take the final step into adulthood.

“I’m going to see the Leader now,” Shadowdart told his friends as he walked past that familiar old tree. It was in full blossom, just like the wild flowers growing below it which Razor was currently practicing his accuracy by beheading. Cut petals were scattered all over the ground around him.

“If I were you,” Razor commented without looking up, “I’d have been there already. The Leader likes when you’re there on time.”

Shadowdart’s expression betrayed a hint of nervousness for a second. “I’m not that late – you guys were just up ridiculously early.”

Razor didn’t reply to that. “How many tries do you think you’ll need? Six? Seven?”

Shadowdart never responded well to taunts of that sort. He looked even more nervous for a second, but then replied with surprising confidence, “I’m going to match you. First creature I’ll find, I’m going to kill. Well, actually,” he added snidely, “I’m going to top you, because that creature is going to be edible.”

Razor shrugged. It was true; his human the previous year hadn’t tasted very good at all, although the swarm had seemed somewhat impressed by the size, and the Leader had actually looked proud when the witnesses testified that the human had been the first thing he had attacked.

“So what’re you planning to catch, anyway?” Stormblade asked casually. “I’m curious.”

“A Tauros,” Shadowdart said stubbornly, reminding Razor all too much of Shadowdart Descith self.

Stormblade chuckled. “Now… isn’t that aiming just a little bit high?”

“I’ll… I’ll show you, both of you,” Shadowdart just said before storming off in an attempt to look determined.

Stormblade sighed.

“Think he’ll actually do it?”

“Him? Not a chance. Hey, look at those females over there…”

He pointed with his scythe in the direction of two female Scyther talking some distance away from them. Stormblade peered at them.

“What about them?”

“See the one to the right? I’ve had my eye on her for a while. Look at those scythes!”

Stormblade glanced at her. “Yeah, she’s nice,” he agreed with a shrug. “Not the greatest around or anything, of course, but nice…”

“Well, she is one of the better ones, don’t you think?” Razor asked without taking his eyes off the female. His slitlike pupils had widened to circles.

Stormblade peered better at the female. “I guess so.”

“I actually mated with the other once a while back. Never really got to know her, though. Didn’t know they knew each other,” Razor said before he looked back at Stormblade. “Come on. Let’s go talk to them.”

The older Scyther rolled his eyes, but followed him anyway towards the two females. They looked uninterestedly up as the males approached.

“What do you want?” the one that Razor had his eye on asked shortly.

“Hello there, ladies,” Razor said, trying to sound attractive. Stormblade giggled behind him.

“So who are you? Newly-evolved freshman?” asked Razor’s target. “Sorry, but we’re off-bounds.”

“I had my First Prey a year ago,” Razor said defensively. “I was the one with the human,” he added for the opportunity to gloat a little.

A look of familiarity crossed the female’s face. “Ooh, that was you?” she asked with a giggle. “Most ridiculous First Prey the swarm has ever seen, wasn’t it, Sickle?”

The other female, the one she had addressed as Sickle, nodded with a smug grin.

“It was the biggest in a long while,” Razor countered, a little sore that Sickle hadn’t made any attempt to stand up for him.

“Ha! Size doesn’t matter!” the mysterious female answered with an emphasizing swing of her scythe. “It’s strength that matters. Humans are some of the most pathetic creatures around, you know.”

Sickle looked at Razor and then glanced unsurely at her friend. “To be fair, humans carry other Pokémon with them, and they might be strong.”

Razor didn’t jump up to catch this opportunity to redeem himself, mostly because knocking out a Growlithe wasn’t the most impressive thing a Scyther had ever done. He hadn’t even really had the heart to kill the puppy – well, at least to the point that he had had no longing to finish the job after the boy was done with, so he had left the Pokémon on the road. That wasn’t anything to be particularly proud of, and in the end, he didn’t want to lie. Not to her.

“What did you catch, anyway, since you’re so wonderful?” he asked instead, beginning to feel more competitive.

“Stantler,” she replied calmly.

His eyes widened. “A… a Stantler?” he asked, dumbfounded.

“Yeah, a Stantler,” she said with a short glance at him. “What about it? It was just a calf, but a Stantler all the same.”

“Oh,” Razor just said. Stantler were often hunted by Scyther, but very rarely as First Prey. He didn’t know exactly how small a calf it was that she had caught, but it couldn’t have been particularly much smaller than his human.

“Aww, the poor guy is devastated that he’s not as special anymore,” the female mocked, addressing Sickle. “Well, surprise for you. You’re not special. You’re a typical, pathetic, shallow, idiotic male.”

The insults bounced off him.

“Can I give you a name?” slipped suddenly out of him before he could stop himself. The female now looked at him, raising an eyebrow at the bizarre suggestion – arguments were generally not the time Scyther decided to give one another names – before folding her arms.

“Go ahead.”

“I call you…”

He had a name in mind already; no, he didn’t have it in mind – it was just the first word that crossed his mind when he looked at her and seemed only more appropriate now.

Beautiful, but dangerous, frightening; terrible but fascinating. Negative – which was always a dangerous thing when giving someone a name – but so very fitting he couldn’t resist.

“…Nightmare.”

She showed no particular reaction to the name in her expression – it was still the same one of disdain, mild amusement, superiority. Perhaps only because she found that it was still appropriate.

“Well, then I’ll have to give you a name as well, won’t I?” she said calmly but with poison dripping off every word. She thought for only a fraction of a second before proceeding in a low, malicious hiss:

“Scizor.”


XV

Shadowdart was not doing well enough at all.

He had been wandering around for a while and seen quite a few small Pokémon, but they had all disappeared before he had had the chance to even begin to approach them. And in spite of himself, he felt utterly miserable and, undeniably, scared and nervous as hell.

This fact only made him feel more useless and pathetic, which did not help.

A Raticate snuck across the ground a few meters off. Raticate were very common First Prey – there was nothing awe-inducing about catching them. He didn’t really want to have a try at it, what with his rash promises to catch a Tauros earlier. Razor and Stormblade would laugh at him.

Although to do it in one try was still a formidable feat, large prey or not, and the Leader would be happier with some tender Raticate flesh than with that disgusting, sinewy human of Razor’s.

He had just made the decision to catch it after all when he realized that it was already gone.

Shadowdart sighed, glancing at the witnesses lurking in the bushes behind him. He crept silently along the forest floor, searching for another opportunity.

And that was when he eyed the small, plain, white mammal wandering confusedly around a short distance ahead.

Immediately, he crouched down so it wouldn’t see him. Leta weren’t the largest prey around, but they were difficult to catch thanks to the powerful Letaligon always watching over their young, and to boot, their meat was excellent. He kind of wanted his mouth to water at the sight of it, but it didn’t. Looking at it alive didn’t make him hungry at all; it just made him squirm uncomfortably.

The Leta looked carefully around; its behavior gave him the feeling it was a female. He guessed she had fallen behind and lost the herd. Her mother would most likely come looking for her before long. He would have to attack soon.

Shadowdart approached her with great caution, taking care not to alert her of his presence. So far he appeared to have been successful: even when the Leta ran her large orange eyes past the bush he was hiding behind, she didn’t seem to become the slightest bit suspicious. Finally she decided to walk quietly off in a random direction – which, by a miraculous stroke of luck, was the direction of Shadowdart’s bush.

Instinct told the Scyther to hold his breath while his target proceeded cautiously straight towards him. He could almost feel the hormones burning in his blood, fine-tuning his senses for the hunt and filling him with tense exhilaration. He even managed to momentarily forget that just earlier he had been a nervous wreck as the prey drew closer and closer…

He leapt out at precisely the right moment, just when the Leta was closest, before she would have seen him and dashed off. The small mammal let out a terrified shriek, fatally frozen in fear during the last fraction of a second that she had to escape before Shadowdart struck her to the ground and held her down where she struggled desperately, still shrieking at the top of her lungs.

“Prepare to die,” Shadowdart hissed, drawing his blade and positioning it by the little Pokémon’s throat.

It stayed there.

Shadowdart would later tell himself that it was just the hypnotic power of the Leta’s eyes, but deep down he always knew it wasn’t true. The Leta was too scared to think about trying to hypnotize him. What happened was simply that the precise flow of hormones that had granted him the instinctual ability to catch her had ceased, and now he suddenly felt scared and alone, about to murder an innocent little Leta that was scared out of her life and didn’t want to die.

He looked at her and couldn’t help empathizing with her. He saw himself in her place with a bigger, stronger Scyther (in his mind it was Razor, although that was to him not the point) holding him helplessly down, preparing to slit his throat.

He cringed.

He couldn’t do it.

You’re a Scyther, he thought desperately to himself. You’re a predator! Get a grip already and just kill the stupid thing like your species has always done!

Poor little thing…

Shadowdart closed his eyes. The Leta’s scream was still piercing through his eardrums. He would just have to move his scythe a little bit… just a tiny little bit…

He opened his eyes hopelessly. With the edge of his left scythe that he was using to hold her down, he felt the Leta’s heart beating rapidly.

Do it.

He tried again, but his scythe just wouldn’t move, no matter what he told it. He felt increasingly awful with every passing moment. The witnesses were probably snickering behind him.

Just do it already, damn it!

But he couldn’t.


XVI

Only a Scyther could grasp the extent to which she had just insulted him.

“Take that back,” Razor growled as Stormblade hissed menacingly. Even Sickle seemed shocked, but Nightmare stood her ground with a nasty glare at Razor.

“Why? You’re very much like one, as far as I can see,” she said mockingly. “You call those scythes? And you have just this pathetic Scizorlike clumsiness. All you need is the red coloration…” She smiled, clearly enjoying this enormously. “Oh, but it looks like you’re growing kind of red in the face already, aren’t you? I’m witnessing an evolution! I feel so greatly honoured!”

“You… you…” Razor began, nonetheless at a loss of words to express his fury. “We’ll see who’s clumsy and pathetic!” he finally shouted. “I challenge you to a true duel, right here and now!”

The last word had barely left his lips when he realized what a dumb move that had been. A true duel ended in death, and given that her elegant movements, quick reactions and beautiful way of handling her scythes had been what had made her stand out to him in the first place, he had very little hope of winning.

But he couldn’t take back a challenge.

Nightmare’s face broke into a grin. “A true duel, with you? Hah! Somebody’s suicidal! Been breaking the Code, now, have you?”

He ignored the taunt. “We’ll see who gets killed.”

Stormblade looked nervously at him, his gaze spelling out “This is not a good idea.” Razor ignored him as well, despite knowing he was right.

“Well,” Nightmare said and folded her arms, “since you’re serious, I’m all yours. You two can be witnesses to the duel.”

Stormblade and Sickle exchanged nervous glances and stepped back in opposite directions, allowing them to watch the duel from two different angles.

“Position yourselves, then…” Stormblade began, his voice not as calm as it perhaps should have been. Razor and Nightmare each took a few steps back and crouched down to the ground, watching one another carefully.

They had learned all the procedures of a duel backwards and forwards in their lessons with the Leader, so despite this being Razor’s first true duel, he knew exactly what he was supposed to do. His many friendly duels with Stormblade helped as well for confidence – otherwise he would most likely have been a nervous wreck.

But he would hardly have been more of a nervous wreck than Shadowdart was at that very moment.


XVII

Shadowdart, indeed, was in a state of such extreme despair and panic that if there ever was a moment in his life during which he wanted to break down and cry, it was this one.

The Leta he had caught had already been struggling and screaming for what seemed like hours on end but was in fact closer to fifteen seconds, and he still had not been able to bring himself to kill her.

It would perhaps have been of comfort to him to know that in fact this happened to nearly every young Scyther who went out on his first hunt, which was why cases such as Razor, managing to kill the first creature they caught, were exceptional. But he did not know that, and assumed, like most other Scyther except those who wondered unnecessarily about trivial things like Stormblade and those who had been witnesses to the most extreme cases, that this was simply because prey could escape easily from the arms of such an inexperienced hunter. Of course there was a gap in the argument – namely that in fact a Scyther’s hunter instincts had a much bigger part to play in the ability to keep the prey once it had been caught than ever did experience – but none of them ever thought about that, and they saw no good reason to start wondering about it. Shadowdart, at the very least, did not, and thus it was his assumption that the fact he was troubled was something particularly dirty, something that was majorly wrong with him.

This, of course, did not help him gain the confidence to finish his task.

It was almost a relief when he was snapped out of his despair by the roar of a Letaligon. As a huge armored mammal sprinted towards him, he was all but overjoyed to have a good excuse to release the Leta. As the baby dashed behind her mother, the adult leapt at Shadowdart, ready to swing the metallic blade at the top of her head. The Scyther was quick to leap out of the way and make it clear to the Letaligon that he was not planning to attack them again; resentfully, she trotted off with her child.

Shadowdart glanced at the male witness waiting close by, closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. He had blown it on his first catch, all right. His only chance of outclassing Razor in those terms was lost.

But he could still beat Stormblade, who had according to rumour gotten his First Prey in three tries. He could get it in two. And he could get something much larger – a Pidgey was pretty pathetic after all! The thought cheered him up a little bit. He looked around and caught a glimpse of a Nidorina not too far off. He tried to concentrate, but his mind refused to stop worrying that it would only be the same.

He took a few more deep breaths.

Feeling slightly calmer, Shadowdart approached the Nidorina slowly, letting his armor blend in with the color of the thick foliage for camouflage. She was digging into the ground for food, far too concentrated on that instead of keeping an eye out for lurking predators. She was a woefully easy target.

He mentally prepared himself and jumped.

Within a bit of a second, the Nidorina was struggling on the ground with Shadowdart holding her still and fighting to get his blade up to the throat. They had been taught to kill their prey by slitting the throat, that supposedly being the ‘purest’ way to die, but it really made things more difficult. Finally he got his scythe into position, but hesitated for a moment.

That moment, he also unfortunately happened to lose some of his muscle power, and this allowed the Nidorina opportunity to squeeze out from underneath him and sprint into the nearest bush, disappearing.

Shadowdart sighed. He had failed again.


XVIII

Razor was the first to strike.

He knew that generally one didn’t want to be the first to strike, and striking too soon was a sign of rashness and immaturity, but she did not seem like the type to let herself be struck with such a label, and he was getting nervous and wanted to get the duel over with.

He dashed towards Nightmare, keeping his scythes in a defensive position anyway in case she counterattacked while he was still moving, and finally raised them for a slash as he was just reaching the female.

She jumped into the air, slashing gracefully at him so that he only barely managed to block it, and landed skillfully behind him. Razor quickly turned around with his scythes ready to block, which was just as well because another slash was already heading his way. The sound of clashing scythes got his blood pumping even faster than before. He concentrated, aimed and slashed, but was unsurprised when Nightmare effortlessly raised her own scythe to block it.

She spun around to attempt to slash him with both of her scythes, but he quickly blocked it with both of his as well. As he pushed her away, she pushed back.

They wrestled like this for a couple of seconds, neither gaining the upper hand, but then she unexpectedly kicked his leg, causing him to falter backwards. It took her only a fraction of a second to make use of this; she quickly pulled her own scythes back and then swung them powerfully towards the middle joint between his torso and abdomen. He was very nearly cut in half, but managed at the last moment to block it with the blunt edge of his left scythe before stepping backwards for a breathing break.

He quickly examined the deep cut on the green scythe edge. This was one of the hardest parts of a Scyther’s exoskeleton; to cut through it was a formidable feat in itself, but she seemed to have sliced into it as easily as a hot knife into butter. He had hardly felt any pain at all, but merely a sharp tingling sensation before noticing the blood.

She had no cuts at all yet. In fact, she didn’t look tired either. She had taken a couple of steps back as well, but had her arms folded and her expression mocking as before, her breathing stable and calm. It was clear that the situation did not look good for him at all so far.

“Giving up yet?” she taunted.

Razor pulled himself together, rose up and darted towards her in an attempt to catch her at least somewhat by surprise.

He watched, awestruck, as she jumped into the air with unnatural speed, dodging his slash, and swooped back down at him with the utmost precision before he had even managed to stop moving. It was only very narrowly that he managed to duck and block. She jumped gracefully backwards, landing steadily on her feet and ready to defend.

“Fine, you’re better than you look,” she admitted. “Not that that’s saying much.”

This time it was she who attacked, and unlike him, she did manage to take him by surprise: he was still taking in her words when she knocked headfirst into him, causing him to fall backwards onto the ground with her on top of him.

He desperately used the momentum to keep them rolling, hoping he would end up on top, but she had much the same intentions and a great deal more skill to carry them out with. Within seconds he was lying helplessly on the ground, unable to move, with her scythe tightly by his throat.

And he knew that this was it, that she would now kill him. It struck him again what a stupid idea it had been to challenge her, because it would either mean his own death, or having to kill the most beautiful, accurate and fast Scyther with the sharpest scythes in the world…

But what a perfect way to die, by the scythe of such a goddess.

He smiled and closed his eyes, waiting for death to sweep him away.


XIX

But death never came.

Razor opened his eyes after a few seconds. She was still there, exactly where she had been before, her scythe still only an inch from killing him, but she didn’t move it.

He looked into her eyes, not sure what the meaning of this was. It came to mind that it had to be some sort of a joke.

She looked back.

Her expression changed to one of bitter pity.

And slowly, right before his astonished eyes, she removed her scythe from his throat and stood up.

She looked at him with an inscrutable expression, then turned her head, closed her eyes and walked away. Her friend Sickle, after looking oddly at both of them, followed.

Razor stood up in astonishment.

Stormblade came over to him with a puzzled expression. “Why – why did she spare you?”

Razor shook his head, looking after her. “I don’t know…”

Stormblade looked at him and then away. “Then… well, you lost, so… you know the Code…”

Razor nodded absent-mindedly. He knew it only too well. To lose a true duel made your life worthless. He should not still be alive, and it was up to him to fix that.

“But why did she do it? There has to be some kind of a loophole in this. Some exception… something that changed the duel. Why else would she have…?”

Stormblade shook his head. “I doubt it…”

“The Leader will judge it tonight if I’m not already dead by then, won’t he?” Razor asked a little louder, finding to his horror that his voice was shaky.

Stormblade nodded. “I guess so.”

Razor could have told him how scared he was. Stormblade would have understood it and perhaps made him feel better. But Razor had no reason to believe that his fear was anything but unnatural, and so he kept quiet and pretended to be cool with his fate.

He was not.


XX

Shadowdart was getting consumed by despair.

Seven Pokémon he had caught now, only to have them escape thanks to his hesitation or some silly mistake. And the more Pokémon that escaped, the more desperate he got, and the more mistakes he made. He was beginning to have panicky thoughts of spending the whole day and whole night – which was the maximum technically allotted time for First Prey, although never as far as the oldest Scyther could remember had anyone needed it – but still failing, and being condemned to exile and starvation. He had even noticed now, to his horror, that even the precise balance system that ordinarily allowed a Scyther to stay still as a statue was failing him now, giving in to his terror: he was trembling, something that he was very grateful the judges were too far away to notice.

The day he had dreamt of for a year and a half was becoming a nightmare.

He looked around, taking a few fast, desperate breaths. All hope was leaving him; if he hadn’t managed to kill the first seven he caught, why would he manage the eighth? He eyed a Caterpie sitting on the trunk of a tree – some of the lousiest First Prey in existence, but what did it matter now that his reputation was just about unredeemable already? He didn’t bother to be cautious at all and just ran over with his scythes aloft. He cried out in some mix of frustration and despair, driving the blade carelessly into the tree trunk just above the Caterpie’s head.

He had missed.

As the little bug crawled, terrified, up the trunk and disappeared into the thick roof of leaves, Shadowdart jerked his scythe out of the tree and collapsed on the ground.

What was wrong with him? Why was he so pathetic and weak that he couldn’t even bring himself to aim properly before attacking a Caterpie?

He had a strange burning feeling in his eyes, but didn’t know why. He stared at the soil below him, then closed his eyes and breathed in the earthy smell to calm himself down.

Slowly, he rose back to his feet.

He knew there were most likely Metapod in the trees somewhere, but they were hardly edible and he would most likely be even worse off catching a Metapod than nothing at all.

He’d have to keep searching.

Shadowdart fixed his gaze in one direction and walked in it as quietly as he could, trying to exclude all his previous attempts from his mind. The forest was thick in these parts, allowing him easy cover from potential prey, but it also made it more difficult for him to find anything to catch.

He thought he heard something.

Staying as still as he could with the slight trembling, he listened for more. He heard it again. His eyes scanned the forest floor carefully, and finally he detected a movement in a shadow near the roots of a huge tree.

He crouched down, still trying to fill his mind with everything other than his previous failed attempts. He wondered what Stormblade and Razor were doing, what species of Pokémon it was that he had heard and seen, what time it was anyway, how the other Scyther who would be having their First Prey in the coming days would do, whether it would rain…

He saw movement again. Instinct fixed his eyes on it and caused his muscles to tense up. He focused his mind absolutely on the movement, preparing to strike…

A tiny purple rat Pokémon emerged from underneath the tree, looking quickly around.

He forcibly ejected all disappointment and the knowledge that Rattata were also pathetic First Prey out of his mind before he jumped.

The Rattata let out a piercing shriek, but he managed to bring his foot down on its tail just before it ran away. The little rat shrieked again in despair, scratching the ground in futile attempts to pull itself loose.

“It will all be over now…” Shadowdart whispered, turning the Rattata over and pinning it down with the blunt edge of his left scythe. He was still trembling, all right – but he would do it anyway.

He closed his eyes before silencing its cries of terror for good.


XXI

It was drawing close to sunset when Shadowdart returned with the dead Rattata in his mouth.

He was surprised to find both Stormblade and Razor still sitting under that familiar tree, saying nothing and staring emptily at the ground. They were equally surprised to find him trembling, down and miserable.

“Why are you so late?” asked Stormblade.

Shadowdart sat down in the grass beside them and shook his head. Stormblade hadn’t really needed to ask, however, because he already had an idea why it was.

“Shadowdart, how many tries did it take you?”

At first Shadowdart didn’t answer, but finally he opened his mouth.

“Nine,” he whispered.

Razor chuckled. Stormblade looked at him in surprise; he hadn’t made a single sound for hours.

The chuckling became hysterical, ironic, joyless laughter.

“Nine ****ing tries?” he finally chortled in the middle of it. “God, that is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard. It takes you nine tries to kill some tiny ****ing rodent? Go away. Cut up some grass field. Get the **** out of the tattered remains of my life before I snap and cut off your head.”

And he turned towards the tree, curled up in the fetal position and continued laughing hysterically.

Shadowdart looked at him for a second.

“Fine,” he whispered, stood up and walked away. Stormblade looked doubtfully between the two, but then walked after Shadowdart.

He glanced back at Razor. He was still chuckling uncontrollably.

Or perhaps crying.


XXII

“Tonight,” boomed the Leader’s mighty voice, “we witness a young Scyther’s journey into adulthood come to an end. He has faced death, conquered and inflicted it – though, as I understand it, with some difficulty…” He narrowed his eyes at Shadowdart, but made no more of it. “Let him join the swarm with full privileges, be eligible for true duels of life and death, and hunt on his own! Let him be able to challenge my Leadership, should he be more fit for it than I. Let him now honor the Code, since he now understands it, and be a valuable member of the swarm. Step forward, Scyther.”

Shadowdart stepped forward and looked nervously around before proceeding with his part.

“I… I offer the meat of my First Prey to our Leader,” he began with a casual nod in the Leader’s direction, placing the Rattata on the rock. The Leader nodded suspiciously back and tore a piece of flesh from the rodent.

“And to my only friend, Stormblade,” Shadowdart said quietly. He had been filled in on what had happened in the duel. Razor was not eligible for any honours such as to be offered the meat of a First Prey – although Shadowdart doubted he would have done it even then. If he had, it would only have been repayment because Razor had offered his to him.

Stormblade stepped up. His expression was still troubled, but he bowed respectfully to Shadowdart and ripped some meat off the Rattata’s corpse to eat.

“Then he is accepted,” the Leader said calmly, but with a hint of disdain. Shadowdart nodded towards him again, picked up the Rattata in his mouth and walked down into the swarm with Stormblade to finish eating it.

“Now let us turn to more serious matters,” the Leader said coolly. “I understand that a true duel took place today… I would like the Scyther involved to step up.”

His eyes scanned through the swarm for movement and found it. Razor walked slowly up to the rock and stopped to face the swarm by the Leader’s side, his face empty.

“Where is the other?” the Leader asked sharply.

“She has left the swarm,” said a voice that Razor recognized as that of Sickle.

“I see,” the Leader replied shortly. “Let us hope she had the decency to kill herself unlike this pathetic swarm member I am unfortunate enough to be standing beside.” He spat the last words, glaring at Razor with resentment. Razor didn’t respond.

“Well,” the Leader began, turning back to the swarm, “to clarify the details, as they were told to me…”

He glanced at Razor, but then looked at the swarm again.

“This Scyther and the one who has now left had a fair true duel this morning. When she had defeated him, however, she failed to do as tradition dictates and kill her opponent, out of cowardice.”

“She’s not a coward,” Razor muttered, but the Leader ignored him.

“And then, apparently, after she left him alive, he failed to carry out his fate on himself, also out of cowardice.”

Razor did not protest this time. He just looked away.

“So now,” the Leader said, a little louder, “he is – I hope – going to correct this stupid mistake before he reduces himself to anything more pathetic than he is already, hm?”

He looked at Razor with disdain. Razor looked expressionlessly back at him.

“I guess so,” he replied emptily.

Razor hesitantly raised his scythe. He stared at it for a second, then looked up to expose his neck and jerked it up to his throat.

“Well?” the Leader said impatiently. “Do I need to help you?”

“Oh, shut up,” Razor mouthed inaudibly. The words caused his throat to quiver just enough to touch the sharp blade very, very lightly, not enough to cut through the skin.

It was a horrible, creepy feeling.

Razor took a few deep breaths. The Leader considered assisting him with public suicide ‘help’. It seemed just too ironic.

He closed his eyes with another deep breath. His scythe didn’t want to move.

And a certain female crossed his mind…

“No,” he said and slowly lowered his scythe. “No,” he repeated and shook his head.

To the astonished looks of the Leader and the swarm, he turned towards the forest and dashed off towards nowhere in particular.

Incidentally, it was the same direction as Nightmare had dashed off in a couple of hours earlier.


XXIII

“Wait, Razor!” he heard a familiar voice shout behind him.

He stopped and turned sharply around. Stormblade was flying after him at great speed in order to catch up; Shadowdart was following doubtfully, but apparently he hadn’t known where Stormblade was off to when he decided to follow him, because as soon as he saw Razor, he turned back.

“Shadowdart, I’m sorry!” Razor shouted. “I didn’t mean that! I was just feeling like crap, okay?”

But Shadowdart either didn’t hear him or pretended not to; he walked slowly back towards the swarm.

“Razor,” Stormblade panted. “What… where are you going now?”

“After her,” Razor said, his voice shaking but this time with exhilaration. “I can smell her pheromones. I’ve picked up her trail. I’m going to follow her.”

Stormblade looked blankly at him. “Why?”

Razor’s eyes were shining as he looked back at his friend. “Because damn, she’s the fastest, most amazing Scyther with the sharpest scythes in the world, and I can’t live without her.”

Stormblade blinked. Then he chuckled.

“Ooh, Razor is in love.”

“Yes,” Razor replied excitedly. “Yes, I am.”

Stormblade looked sadly at his friend.

“Well, you can’t exactly return to the swarm from now, can you?”

“I don’t give a damn about the swarm!” Razor shouted, grinning widely.

Stormblade smiled. He couldn’t help it.

“Good luck, Razor,” he said softly. “Perhaps we’ll see each other again one day.”

“Take care of Shadowdart,” Razor answered. “It’s been great knowing you.”

“Goodbye, Razor.”

“Goodbye, Stormblade.”

And Razor turned around to follow the faint trail of feminine scent that was the only thing in the world that he cared about anymore.

[Dragonfree]

Whew, Part V. Just as my watch draws rapidly closer to eight AM. I don't know why I felt this urge to get this part out now, but I did.

This is my favorite part for various reasons - mostly because of the character development that takes place throughout it and because some of my favorite chapters are in this part. (I think my absolute favorite is chapter XXXIII, which is incidentally also that shortest one which is half a page.)

It is also, I might note, the longest part by far, and in fact the longest thing I've ever posted in one piece: it is neither more nor less than 34 pages (well, admittedly with page breaks after each chapter), and more than 11,000 words, i.e. it constitutes more than a third of the entire fic! I didn't think I'd ever beat chapter 32 of The Quest for the Legends in terms of length, but it looks like I have. So make yourself very comfortable before you start...

And now we are officially approaching the finale of the fic, as Part VI is after all kind of the last; Part VII is more of an epilogue.

So enjoy, Part V...



PART V: ROB

XXIV

It was late in the night and he was deathly tired when he finally caught up with her.

She was sleeping in the shadow of a tree near the southern edge of Ruxido. The subtle scent led him all the way to her – had it not been for that, he would not have seen her lying there.

It was a good hiding place, but the smell had given her away.

He approached her carefully without making any sound at all so she wouldn’t wake up, and then stopped only a couple of meters away from her.

He watched her sleep. She was curled up on the ground, tightly by the tree. Her breathing was calm and deep.

She was beautiful.

And – understandably, considering what he had been thinking and smelling all day – he wanted her so bad that he could die.

But something kept him from approaching her further or waking her. He walked to another tree close by and curled up on the ground himself, glancing at her one last time before closing his eyes for some much-needed sleep.

It was a beam of sunlight falling on his face that woke him up the next morning. He opened his eyes sleepily, at first not sure where he was. When he remembered, he rose quickly up and looked over to the other tree.

She was still there, still sleeping, still shielded from the sun by the shadow of the tree.

He was about to walk up to her – his plan didn’t go a lot further than that at the moment – when he faintly heard the sound of approaching footsteps on grass.

He quickly hid behind his tree, peeking past the side of the trunk to see.

It was a tall human boy with dark red, bushy hair and large eyes. He was walking casually towards the forest, completely oblivious to the fact that there were two Scyther just ahead of him.

Razor hid himself better.

The boy approached the approximate spot where Nightmare was still sleeping. Razor knew he should do something, attack the kid or wake her up, but somehow he was frozen in the same spot, unable to bring himself to do anything but watch. After all, what would she do if she now found out he had been following her? Perhaps she would just kill him…

The boy suddenly noticed the Scyther lying under the tree just by his side. He jumped, visibly afraid before he realized that she was asleep.

Razor watched him relax and look at her for a moment before picking a Pokéball from his belt.

“No…” Razor whispered. He wanted to jump out and kill the human before he could do what he was planning, but he was frozen in terror.

The human threw the ball carefully at the sleeping Scyther and then stepped away in case she broke out.

Nightmare’s form dissolved into translucent red light that was zapped into the ball within a second. The ball closed and began to wobble.

Break out of it! Break out of it! Razor thought desperately. You can break out of it and kill him!

He was wrong.

The ball stilled, the red glow on the button in the middle of it fading away, and a little ping indicated a successful capture.

No!

The boy picked up the ball. “Whahey, I caught a Scyther!” he exclaimed happily, attaching the Pokéball to his belt. He paused only momentarily before sprinting back towards where he had come from.

Razor followed him while dread built up in his mind.


XXV

There were two reasons why the Scyther despised, loathed, abhorred the idea of being captured by humans.

The first one was that to be caught was both defeat, which Scyther society never particularly approved of, and directly breaking the fourth law of the Moral Code: allowing oneself to be controlled. To be captured, therefore, was a sign of weakness.

The second one was that humans had discovered the species of Scizor, and for some bizarre and utterly absurd reason preferred it to its pre-evolved form.

Oh, how they loathed the Scizor.

Scyther cherished two things beyond everything else. The first was their speed – few Pokémon if any had their quick reflexes and speedy run. The other was their beautiful, curved scythes, sharper than razors, the mirrors of the soul.

The speed and the scythes were what made all the difference between victory and defeat in a duel, between being attractive and ugly, between a successful hunt and an empty stomach. They were the two things that made Scyther what they were.

To be caught meant to be evolved, and to be evolved meant to lose them both.

Few things were scarier to a Scyther than evolution.

This was why Razor was now deathly afraid: he felt certain that this was the fate that awaited his beloved Nightmare.

And a scary thought it was indeed.

He knew he should just kill the human before it was too late, but he was terrified that the human would notice him and catch him as well. He knew he was wrong to be afraid, but he was.

He followed the trainer as he entered a small, secluded Pokémon Center a short distance away, and found himself a large window on the side that he could look in through.

He saw the boy enter and walk straight to the machine in the corner. Razor felt his blood pumping violently through his veins. The human was really going to do it.

It crossed his mind for a second that the reason he was standing there watching but not doing anything about it was subconscious mind punishing him for breaking the Code by torture.

He watched the human place his bag on the floor and take out a shiny metallic coat – his stomach churned at the sight of this horrible item he had heard spoken of in horror stories as a Descith – before letting it touch Nightmare’s Pokéball. The Metal Coat was sucked into the ball as well.

“Oh, please, no!” Razor whispered desperately by the window as the boy placed the ball under a tube on one side of the machine he was standing by, and another ball under a tube on the other side.

The boy pressed a button.

The two balls were sucked into the tubes. The deed was being done. When the balls came out again, she would be a filthy, slow, pincered Scizor, and nothing could reverse the process.

It was this thought that finally gave him the power to do something. With a roar of blind hate and fury, Razor drove himself headfirst through the window and landed on the floor of the Pokémon Center in a shower of glass shards.

Panic arose immediately. The humans screamed at the sudden invasion as Razor slashed blindly at nothing in particular; a boy reached for a Pokéball but grabbed thin air as his Pokémon were being healed in the back room of the Pokémon Center. The Scyther flew across the floor towards the trainer by the trading machine, hardly even thinking about what he was doing. The claw on his foot accidentally struck a little kid on the way; he hardly noticed. He randomly slashed at the arm of a boy who was running away, but missed.

He was about to reach the cornered trainer by the machine when he eyed the screen. The silhouette of a Scizor was just disappearing off the screen on the right side, and the two Pokéballs dropped back into their original places through the tubes.

She had evolved.

All his power was suddenly drained away. Razor crumbled down to the floor in despair.

“I’ve got a gun! Stay back!” he heard a voice say. He looked up, finally feeling like himself again, and saw an old, paranoid-looking man with a long black object aimed at him.

He realized he’d better get out of there.

Razor quickly got up and flew out back towards the window he had come in through, but felt tiny burning pellets pierce into his back just as he was reaching it. He lost his balance of flight, crashing into the sharp glass shards left in the window frame before managing to crawl out.

He didn’t manage much more. As the horrified cries of “Why did you shoot at it? It was leaving!” and “Oh my God, he’s bleeding!” faded away, he managed to run a short distance towards the forest and just barely into it before he collapsed in a heap on the forest floor, unable to move.

His last conscious thought was that justice had found both of them after all: her a Scizor and him left to bleed to death far away from home.

Then his awareness drifted away and he was left alone and dying in a strange place, having lost all that was worth anything to him.

That was how a bearded man with wild blue eyes found him later that day.


XXVI

Razor blinked.

He couldn’t remember anything at first; it was all cloudy and disorganized.

Death…

Pain…

A female named Nightmare…

His surroundings were dark. He blinked again with difficulty. On second thought, there was some light there by the side.

A strange smell wafted through his nostrils.

He heard breathing.

Razor’s eyes jerked wide open and he turned his head towards the mysterious light source. It was a small candle on a dirty wooden table. Through the dim light he could just see the walls: he was trapped in a small room.

An adult human with a black beard and small, shining blue eyes was sitting on a chair by the table and watching him without saying a word.

Razor squeaked in surprise, rising immediately to his feet. His first reaction was to press his back against the wall, trying to stay as far away from the human as possible. He felt too weak to attack.

The human’s eyes moved along with him, but otherwise he was completely still and quiet.

Razor looked frantically around for a possible escape route, but lack of experience with buildings did not make the door he was pressing up against stand out as a way out. Anyway, although he did not know that, the door was locked, although he would probably have been able to slash it apart.

But he did not think of attempting to slash it apart. He was too scared and confused, and too busy keeping an eye on what the human would do.

Finally the man spoke, still sitting still in his chair.

“Hello, Scyther.”

“What is this place?” Razor asked. He was not sure if he was expecting an answer; the wise Scyther did not agree on whether humans could understand Pokémon language. The Leader had said he doubted it, but one of the most respected Scyther in the swarm, one who had been around more than any other member of the swarm, insisted that he had seen humans talk to their Pokémon.

Apparently he had been right and the Leader wrong, because the human gave a calm, unsurprised answer:

“This is a back room in the unofficial Gym of Alumine, run by me. You are here because I caught you a couple of days ago to be able to treat your wounds and nurse you back to health. I think I’ve succeeded.”

“Release me!” Razor shouted fearfully. “Let me go!”

“I’m afraid I caught you fair and square,” the human said simply. “And I’m afraid I caught you in a special Pokéball of my own creation that prevents you from ever getting too far away from it…”

“No!” Razor screamed. “Let me out! I don’t want this!”

He leapt towards the human, but in mid-air he felt himself disintegrate. In horror he watched his vision fade into red, and then to nothing.


XXVII

The next time he was properly aware of himself, he was in a much larger room, lit by the daylight shining through the many large windows on one wall. Although he did not yet know that, he was in the battle arena of the same Gym that he had been in before.

The human was standing in front of him.

“Don’t try anything, Scyther,” he began. “If you try to attack me now, I am ready to recall you back into the Pokéball you were in just earlier. I only want to help you. Understand?”

“Help me?” Razor replied and chuckled hollowly, curling up in a sitting position by the wall. “How do you think you can help me? You have no idea what I’ve been through. If there is anything being captured by a filthy human to be evolved does not do, it is help.”

“Evolved?” The human looked at him, mildly amused. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Trust me, I like your scythes the way they are. Every bit as much as you do.”

Razor looked up at him, for the first time genuinely surprised. The human’s expression did not change.

“But that is not what I took you here to discuss,” he just said. “I wanted to introduce you to my other Pokémon.”

“I’m not yours,” Razor said quietly.

The human shrugged indifferently. “Call it what you like.”

He took five Pokéballs off his belt with and dropped them on the floor.

“Come out.”

Five white shapes emerged on the floor before the light faded away and left their true colors showing. The first one that caught Razor’s eye was a brown, skeletal Pokémon with a flat head and, astonishingly, a pair of scythes very much like his own on his arms.

There was also a sand-colored pangolin with brown spikes layering his back and two oversized claws on each front paw; he had seen a couple before in the forest, and knew they were called Sandslash. The Sneasel he was also familiar with. The large blue bipedal alligator with the intimidating lower jaw, on the other hand, he had never seen before, nor the sleek tan feline that looked resentfully at him from the back. She had huge, protruding fangs that appeared to be splattered with blood and crimson markings reminiscent of the slash of some huge clawed Pokémon on her shoulders. Although all of them looked somewhat intimidating – not that a Scyther felt particularly intimidated – Razor couldn’t help feeling she was the most vicious-looking.

“Kabutops,” said the human, indicating the creature with the scythes. “Sandslash, Sneasel, Feraligatr, Fangcat. Guys, this is Scyther. He finally completes the team.”

Kabutops nodded, raised his right scythe up into a horizontal position and pointed it at Razor. He looked blankly at it.

“Kabutops, he doesn’t know how to shake hands,” the human said with a slight smile. Razor, of course, had no idea what he was referring to.

Kabutops lowered his scythe apologetically. “Sorry, I forgot.”

“Scyther, will you let me approach you?” the human asked hesitantly. “I just want to tell you he was trying to do. If you attack me, my Pokémon will defend me. Understand?”

He did not understand. He looked at the five Pokémon, especially the Fangcat who was growling protectively as to emphasize his words, and could not possibly imagine why they would defend him.

But he couldn’t feel motivated to take his chances with that.

“Yes,” he simply answered.

The human walked up to him slowly, uncomfortably close in fact. A Scyther generally liked to have plenty of empty space around himself. But he did not complain.

“When humans meet one another,” the human said calmly, kneeling down, “they do this thing called a handshake.”

He held his right hand forward. The hairy human arm was muscular and thick, as were the fingers. Razor didn’t like it; hands like the frail hand of the boy he had caught as First Prey looked pathetic and harmless, but this one did not.

“Now, what you do is to move your right scythe forward too. You don’t have fingers, but that’s all right. You just allow me to grab your scythe. Try it.”

Razor doubtfully held his scythe forward so that the end was close to the human’s outstretched hand. The human smiled and touched the green edge gently, watching him carefully all the while.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” he asked simply before suddenly grabbing hold of the scythe with his fingers.

Razor twitched. He felt vulnerable in this position, with one of his scythes held hostage by the human’s muscular hand. He could probably have jerked it away if he had needed it, of course, as the grip wasn’t very tight, but it was still very uncomfortable for a creature so accustomed to having free arm movement.

The human shook the scythe slightly up and down a few times. Then he released it, and Razor withdrew it as quickly as he could.

The human smiled. “You’ll get hang of it.” He stood up and looked at the other Pokémon. “Now, why don’t you Pokémon talk a little and get to know each other?” he said, turned around and began walking towards a small wooden door on the wall.

“Why do I need to know a ridiculous human greeting?” Razor couldn’t help asking.

The human turned back towards him, smiled and gave a cryptic answer:

“You don’t need to if you don’t want to, but neither did they.”

And with that, he exited the room, leaving Razor alone with the other Pokémon.


XXVIII

The Pokémon all seemed very used to this, but Razor was still confused.

Fangcat glared at him once and then walked slowly off to a corner of the room from which she observed the others darkly. None of the other Pokémon were at all surprised or bothered by this, either. They just kept looking at him, apparently waiting for him to say something.

“Who is that human?” Razor finally asked.

“Rob?” Kabutops said, seemingly slightly surprised by the question. “He’s … our trainer?”

Razor closed his eyes and laughed hollowly. “Why do you submit to him? Why do you let him enslave you? Why aren’t you breaking that window and running off? Did he catch you in these strange Pokéballs that keep you from going too far away, too?”

Kabutops looked positively puzzled at the suggestion. “Why would I want to leave? Rob is my best friend. There is nothing for me out there.”

As much as he’d have liked to protest, some little voice in Razor’s head couldn’t help pointing out that there was nothing for him out there either.

Razor sighed. “But to be under a human’s absolute control, being forced to fight your own kind for him? What sort of life is that?”

“We’re not under his absolute control!” Kabutops replied incredulously. “What can he do to force us to do anything we don’t want to? We’re the ones with scythes and claws and fangs.”

Razor looked blankly at him. This was a very strange concept indeed. He still could not imagine why a Pokémon would willingly do anything that a human told him – especially because it was directly against the teachings of the Code. He reminded himself that other Pokémon species didn’t have the Code, but the thought just seemed too absurd.

“Then why do you fight for him?” he finally asked.

“We enjoy it,” Kabutops simply said. “It’s fun! And myself, I like Rob’s compan