We didn’t leave the swamp.

  “Here,” Grey said as we neared the edge of the stone path that led through the mud. “This should cover the job that you came here for, and it should be enough for that dinner I promised you.”

  He held out a wad of cash for me to take.

  “Hold on, what?” I asked. “You're leaving?”

  Grey kept going as if I hadn't asked a question.

  “Head back to Lentimas,” he told me. “I’ll be staying here. I appreciate all of your help—you really went above and beyond—but helping these Ghost-types is something only I can do.”

  “No way,” came my immediate response as I tried to push back that all-too tempting stack of cash. “Payment is for after the job is over. Far as I'm concerned, this isn’t finished just yet!”

  To make the point that I wasn’t going to leave so easily, I crossed my arms, sending a sharp glare to Grey. That Golurk was still back at the Strange House, and for that Pokémon to be dedicated to its defense, something had to have been going on in the building. I wasn’t going to just let all of this be resolved without me, but Grey showed no reaction to my statement; he merely sent a glance to where Valiant was standing at my side.

  “Do you have any stealthy Pokémon?” he asked, voice flat.

  “Rotom and Liepard.”

  “But can you sneak?”

  “Just spent a few weeks in the Giant Chasm doing exactly that.”

  Grey blinked at me and then shook his head as if to push any unwanted thoughts out of his mind.

  “I'm trying to head out on my own because I want to sneak around that Golurk,” he said to me. “You showed me that there's someone—or something—giving it orders, and I plan to find out exactly what that is and why.”

  “By... sneaking in?” I asked.

  “Tell me,” Grey started, pushing past my question, “given how it's almost nighttime, can you see in the dark? Can you creep through a swamp with only Pokémon telling you where to go?”

  “I’ve done that with Liepard,” I responded.

  “But is walking through a swamp something your Liepard can do well?” Grey said, countering my statement. “Last I checked, cats aren’t fans of water—so just tell me, if you’re so insistent on sticking around, what do you have to offer?”

  Grey was doing his best to appear rude and standoffish, but I could tell he was just acting like that to emphasize the level of cautiousness he wanted to have. So far, all he’d seen me do was walk alongside an incredibly obvious Pokémon and then directly fight that Golurk. Rotom and Liepard might have been on my team, but I wasn’t exactly a person whose appearance screamed “stealth” to Grey.

  But even with the sheer size of my pack, any sounds of clanging metal that came from within it would be muffled due to its thick fabric. And, my coat barely made any noise when I moved. I could be stealthy if I tried.

  However, there was more to it than just that—Grey had asked me what I had to offer, and I fully planned to take him up on this opportunity to show him exactly that.

  “Rotom, my tablet?” I asked, and the Pokémon in my watch was plenty willing to play along with my smirk. He was looking forward to showing off what we could achieve as a team.

  Briefly, Rotom zipped into my backpack to possess that screened device, flying it over to deposit it into my hand. Then, he returned to the interior of that fabric monstrosity, digging through its contents to search for exactly what we needed.

  “You talked about sneaking around,” I said to Grey as I turned on my tablet. “But to sneak properly, you need to know where to go in this swamp.”

  “That’s simple. My Ghost-types will guide me,” Grey answered confidently.

  “Ah, but even if your Ghost-types guide you, can you see in the dark? Can you creep through a swamp with only Pokémon telling you where to go?”

  Grey opened his mouth, his eyes narrowing as I spoke his own words right back to him. However, he never spoke, instead going quiet when a certain humming came from the open flap of my backpack.

  “Low-power mode, Rotom!” I said, speaking just loud enough for him to hear me. “Sacrifice speed for stealth. Make sure to minimize all noise, and turn off every light that you can.”

  A sharp “Brrzt!” came from within my pack as Rotom gave his acknowledgement. Bursting out of the pack’s open top, a certain fan-like drone shot into the air—and behind it, three others.

  “Watch,” I said, moving next to Grey and holding out my tablet so he could see it. “Four images streaming the swamp from above. Rotom is possessing the leader drone to bring them into a tracking pattern, and now we can see a way larger area than what we can see from the ground.”

  “...My Pokémon can do that,” Grey mumbled.

  “Sure, but do you get updates in real time? And— it’s almost night, isn’t it? Well, watch this.”

  I slid open a menu just to flick a single option, and every visual turned a sharp shade of green. Previously, the growing night had made the images blurry, but now slight differences in the environment were rendered much more starkly.

  And I could already see something big moving nearby.

  “Wouldn’t have been smart to go that way,” I said, gesturing toward the direction Grey had looked to have wanted to leave in. “We’re in a swamp, so there’re swamp Pokémon here. You would have run into that Seismitoad lurking around.”

  Grey continued to watch the screen of my tablet with a silence that stemmed from either annoyance or him being impressed. With ease, Rotom was able to guide the drones back toward that haunted house. The rapidly fading light would have made the visuals difficult to see, but the night-vision mode made tracking the environment simple.

  Although the day’s light was rapidly fading away as the sun set below the horizon, as a Ghost-type, Rotom had no trouble seeing where he was going. Meanwhile, the other drones didn’t rely on visuals to determine where they were in relation to him. All of them were hardly making any noise, too. A low hum came from that hovering group, but it was nothing that stood out among all of the other various sounds of the swamp. For that reason, as the feeds moved to show the rectangular Strange House from above, the Golurk standing out front didn’t notice Rotom or the rest of the flying drones.

  “Nobody ever looks up,” I said under my breath.

  From where the drones displayed the manor, we could see the entire area around it from four different angles at once. Grey stared at the feeds until he suddenly pointed at the one where Rotom was showing the building’s back.

  “There,” Grey suddenly said. “That discoloration in the ground? Looks to be an old path. We should be able to use it to find a door or window that can let us slip in back there.”

  He waited for me to respond, still staring at the screen and its feed. For that reason, it took him several seconds before he realized that my silence was purposeful.

  When he looked up, he was met only with my smile.

  “So,” I said. “What do I have to offer, huh?”

  Grey turned around and let out a grumble.

  “...Thought only a Porygon could do something like that,” he said, shaking his head. “But... Fine. You can come with. Just return your Iron Valiant—its light will be too obvious. And, at least on the ground, I’ll still need you to follow my lead.”

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  It was Grey’s Gengar that led us back through the swamp. It tried to find the driest path possible while bringing us around any dangerous wild Pokémon that might have been nearby. The drones in the sky helped quite a bit, but in exchange, the only light we could risk was from the subtle glow of the tablet in my hands.

  “You did mention making a plan,” I said, following that Ghost specialist through the muck. “We’re pretty sure the Golurk is following some set of orders or has a specific task, but so what? What do we even do with that? Are we really just going to sneak into the manor to find out?”

  “...Yes,” Grey said after a few seconds. “Or we’ll do something similar. What I really need to do is to learn just why that Golurk is stopping everyone from entering so that I can actually talk to the Ghost-types here. My job is to make sure that the wild Pokémon know that the League isn’t trying to take over their home. If I can’t do this, they’ll think that the repairs are just attempts to damage the place, but they need to know that we want to help them—to improve and repair the Strange House to make sure that it lasts.”

  “But don’t Ghost-types like decrepit old manors?” I asked.

  In the darkness, I could see the barest hint of the corner of Grey’s mouth twist up.

  “They do, but there’s a difference between decrepit and actively falling apart,” he said. “The Strange House was built to withstand a dry environment. It won’t last with the stickiness of this swamp.”

  We could hear the resonating croaks of wild Seismitoad and Palpitoad in the distance around us. As this swamp was technically a newly formed environment, there were only two kinds of wild Pokémon that would migrate here:

  New places like these would have either strong Pokémon heading over to claim a new territory, or they would have Pokémon trying to be strong that had been pushed out after failing to claim territory elsewhere nearby.

  It was only once these places became more “settled” that the weaker Pokémon moved in. The rare few times that weaker Pokémon migrated first were when the new environment was already proven to be safe, or if the Pokémon arriving to claim the place arrived as a group.

  For that reason, my drones legitimately helped us avoid any potential dangers, and Grey’s Gengar helped to guide us on the specific path that we needed to take through the swamp. At times, that fully-evolved Ghost type would send shadows splitting off from it, and I couldn’t tell if that was some kind of power it had or if it was just commanding other Ghost types that Grey had brought with him.

  “...Hm,” Grey huffed after a short while of silence. “I guess that if we’re going to sneak into this place, I should probably tell you its history.”

  “It’d be nice to know what we’re looking for,” I said. “The sparknotes would be appreciated.”

  When Grey sent me a strange look after that, I quickly corrected my statement to just be, “Give me the quick overview.”

  “Basically, a rich family built this place as a vacation home, then decided to move in instead. Their daughter gets sick, they search for a solution, and the place is abandoned once... Well, you can probably guess.”

  Grimly, I nodded my head.

  “At least we only have to deal with Ghost-type Pokémon and not real ghosts,” I said.

  Grey replied with silence, allowing us to return to the near-quiet of the swamp. I couldn’t say I was the biggest fan of how our footsteps constantly squelched, but at least the help of Grey’s Gengar meant we never treaded on muck that saw us sink any deeper than a single inch at most.

  Slowly, we crept closer and closer to that old manor, using long, hanging treebranches as cover. The lack of light meant I could only see the building from how its rectangular shape blocked out the stars. We made sure to stay a distance away, helped by both Grey’s ghosts and the drones above, but at a certain point, I became able to see that Golurk from before.

  The dim glow of the runes on its body meant it was visible from even this far away.

  “...How long do you think it’ll be out there?” I asked in a whisper.

  “Until morning,” Grey answered, and there was a knowing confidence in his voice. “I’ve staked out this place a few times before. The Golurk will return inside once dawn comes.”

  Silent, I digested that statement. I wasn’t too pleased with Grey’s words.

  “Probably because the sun is a stimulus,” I said, mumbling out my thoughts. “The Golurk comes out to protect the place if anything tries to enter, but then it just stands there to be on guard. With it outside, other wild Pokémon would be scared off, but nothing else changes, really. The rising sun would be the only shift noticeable enough to serve as a signal to snap it out of its focus that’d have it move back inside.”

  It was almost a cycle. Things like this would happen to Valiant sometimes, too. For the more robotic-aligned Pokémon, it was easy to fall into a pattern—to rely on a repeating algorithm, in a way. Whenever I trained with my team, I would try to split my focus between everyone, but there were times in which Valiant would be practicing a certain strike on their own, and without realizing it, they could enter a cycle of repeatedly trying out that same attack in perfect imitation for hours on end.

  As I had described with the sun and the Golurk, it took a shock for a Pokémon like Valiant to break out of that ongoing loop. Grey quietly listened to my explanation as we continued to move through the swamp. The entire way around the house, I kept an eye on that Golurk for as long as I was able to.

  It never noticed us. It just silently stared ahead.

  Once we were past the side of the building, we took a sharp turn to bring ourselves toward the wall. To not alert any Ghost types within the building itself, we didn’t exactly press against the house’s exterior, but we did keep low and close.

  “There,” Grey whispered from ahead of me, speaking as soon as he passed the back edge of the manor. “I knew that looked like a path. There’s a door we can use back here.”

  “Guarded?” I asked.

  “No,” Grey said after a moment’s pause. “Looks like this doesn’t connect to the main path—whoever or whatever’s inside probably didn’t think anyone would enter from this angle. There’s only one Golurk defending the place, after all, and that might mean...”

  He went quiet.

  “They’re not great at strategy,” I pointed out as I caught up.

  “Yeah,” Grey said. “We might be dealing with just Pokémon here.”

  Rather than opening the door himself, Grey nodded at it, and red eyes slipped out from his shadow. They passed under a gap at the base of the door’s rotted wood, and then, only a few seconds later, the entire thing was consumed by darkness. With perfect silence, the pitch-black wood swung open, and the shadows reconstituted themselves into a Gengar that bowed, snickering at its own butler-like action.

  “Thank you, Gengar,” Grey said, stepping inside.

  “Thanks... Gengar?” I offered, heading in after him.

  The Gengar grinned at me as I walked past, but I couldn’t tell if that was due to its general mischievousness or if that was an actual smile at my thanks.

  We entered what seemed to be a small kitchen, one connected to the rest of the house. Cabinets had been flung open, showing that it had been ransacked long ago. However, as far as I could tell, there were no wild Pokémon nearby.

  “Before we go in, a warning,” Grey said, turning to look at me. “Stick close. Keep an eye out for anything the Pokémon here might want to protect. And no matter what, don’t catch that Golurk.”

  “Wait, why?” I asked.

  “Because,” Grey said, bringing his gaze over toward an open entrance that led to the rest of the house. I could see a hallway with boarded-up windows that lined a wall, and its other wall contained darkened doorways that led to other rooms. “Capture attempts can be seen as hostile. They represent you trying to take one of the Pokémon away. If we were still outside, it’d be different, but right now, we’re in their territory. The fewer aggressive moves we make, the better.”

  I grumbled.

  “...Got it,” I said unhappily. I couldn’t say I was a fan of leaving that Golurk behind, but it was probably better for me to not try anything—and it was even better for us to avoid actions that’d lead to a fight.

  Grey took the lead, and once more, his Gengar remained outside of his shadow to guide us. It was only after we moved out of the kitchen and into the rest of the house that I noticed something:

  I could no longer feel the swamp’s humidity. It was dry and cold in here, and there was a chill that was managing to creep past my jacket.

  Yet, I could taste the saltiness in the air, and I could still see plenty of places where ambient moisture had caused damage. The walls were littered with cracks, and almost all exposed sections of wood were rotting. At one point, it was bad enough that it looked like an entire portion of the wall was melting, sloughing off in waves that shifted toward the ground.

  The windows in this hallway were all boarded up, but openings between the planks let me catch glances into the swamp. I couldn’t hear anything, but I knew Rotom was still out there. My tablet was now in a side pocket in my backpack for easy access, but I wasn’t carrying it. I was trusting Rotom to stay on guard for us, making sure nothing we’d need to worry about would approach the house.

  “Do you think—”

  I froze when I realized I no longer saw Grey ahead of me. In fact, I couldn’t even see his Gengar. I felt my breath catch in my throat as I checked behind me just in case.

  There, I found that the kitchen we had just passed through was now entirely gone.

  Instead, it was as if an infinite hallway of doors and windows now stretched out in both directions.

  I was completely alone and in complete silence. My heart thundered in my chest, until—

  “This isn’t good.”

  Grey’s voice pierced through the veil.

  Before I knew it, his Gengar was suddenly right in front of me, and I jumped at the Ghost-type’s unexpected presence, causing it to pull away with a barely suppressed cackle. Looking around once more, I was back in the same place I had been in before—the much more well-defined hallway with Grey leading at the front.

  “Confuse Ray—an illusion,” Grey said, and I followed his gaze toward where a few blue glows suddenly disappeared into a side room connected to the hallway. “I didn’t expect the wild Litwick to find us so soon. They’re probably going to tell the other Pokémon that we’re here. Which means... we need to move quickly.”

  When he resumed walking, he moved with speed. As I followed him, he didn’t bother with as much stealth—but we were both still trying to move with as little noise as possible.

  He brought me to the far end of the hallway, where we stepped into a massive room that had to be the manor’s entrance. I could see the other side of the front doors that the Golurk stood ahead of, but immediately, Grey’s eyes locked onto an upper level joined to the ground floor via a grand staircase.

  Anything of value would be located up there, on the second floor, but the problem was that something else was already present.

  “Of course this wouldn’t be easy,” Grey grumbled.

  At the very top of that staircase was a girl, a child who couldn't have been old enough to start her journey. She stood with long, black hair and a simple white dress that hung past her knees. She remained perfectly motionless, save for one key detail:

  Her head followed us as we crept toward the center of the room.

  And her blank eyes resembled perfectly white spheres.

  “A ghost,” I whispered. “A real ghost.”

  On one hand, it was exciting to see something new. On the other hand, seeing a real ghost was downright terrifying, and the chill in the air had turned to a chest-deep, icy cold that was making me shiver more than I had shivered when facing the Legendary Kyurem.

  However, this was not a physical response. This was a wholly spiritual one.

  “No,” Grey said, his eyes still locked onto that figure at the top of the stairs. “The daughter who passed away was older. This isn’t a real ghost. Look at it again.”

  It took me a second to piece together just what he was talking about. Bringing my gaze up, I realized that shadows, like strings, connected to the girl from within a hovering darkness.

  No one ever looks up, I thought, silently chiding myself.

  This was not a real ghost but another illusion.

  “I get it now,” Grey said at my side. “I misunderstood those Litwick. They might have been working together, but they were working under the direction of their boss. And now that we alerted them... Hah. Yeah. Their master is here.”

  He cast his gaze directly at the ceiling, and I followed it to track the source of those shadowy marionette strings. The fake ghost girl now looked hazy, but what connected to it from above was totally and completely real.

  “Nick, the door,” Grey said as I stared at the mass of shadowy limbs.

  “Nick, pay attention,” Grey said as purple flames flickered into existence near the roof.

  “Nick!” Grey shouted, and I blinked, snapping myself out of it. “I'll handle the Chandelure, but I need you to watch our backs!”

  Chandelure was the final evolution of Litwick, and it was a haunted chandelier that glowed with unearthly flames. Right now, one sat there above the staircase, floating with a cross handle that controlled the shadowy puppet beneath it. Its yellow gaze was harsh as it stared down at us, the pair of intruders on its home’s main floor.

  Grey’s Gengar was already out beside him, ready to act in defense, but I turned away from that impending fight to instead face the entrance behind us.

  Already, the front doors’ handles were rattling. Something was doing its best to open them up, but it was fumbling as it struggled to manage the difference in size.

  Soon, however, a click rang out, and one of the doors pressed inwards to begin opening up. A massive hand pressed on the other half of the doorway to allow for that door to swing open to make as much room as possible.

  Our stealth attempt had failed already; from the other side, blocky eyes glowed as their gaze locked with my own.

  In response, I grabbed a Pokéball, and the Golurk took a step forward.

  “Looks like things aren’t going to be so easy,” I said, speaking to the Ultra Ball in my hand as the Golurk began to squeeze forward. “Well, Metang, I guess we’re gonna have that big battle I promised you sooner than I’d thought.”

  Pokémon mentioned in this chapter:

  Gengar

  / /

  Nick’s Team:

  Current Placement: Great Rank

  (Note: Low-level moves have been omitted.)

  Iron Valiant (Valiant) (Fairy / Fighting type, Genderless, Serious Nature, +-n/a)

  Abilities: Quark Drive

  Moves: Fury Cutter, Feint, Dazzling Gleam, Psycho Cut, Night Slash, Close Combat, Shadow Claw, Electric Terrain

  Rotom (Electric / Variable type, Genderless (Male), Quirky Nature, +-n/a)

  Available Forms*: Default (Ghost type), Fan (Flying type), Wash (Water type)

  Abilities: Levitate

  Moves: Charge, Thunder Wave, Discharge, Shadow Ball, Thunderbolt, Thunder, Electric Terrain, Variable*

  Variable Form Moves*: Air Slash (Fan), Hydro Pump (Wash)

  Liepard (Dark type, Male, Naughty Nature, +Atk/-SpD)

  Abilities: Limber, Prankster

  Moves: Assist, Snarl, Fake Out, Bite, Torment, Hone Claws, Slash, Taunt, Night Slash, Shadow Claw, Psycho Cut, Encore, Foul Play

  (Steel / Psychic type, Genderless (Male), Adamant Nature, +Atk/-SpA)

  Pokéball: Ultra Ball

  Abilities: Clear Body

  Moves: Take Down, Metal Claw, Confusion, Zen Headbutt, Magnet Rise, Iron Head

  enormous thank you to everyone reading! Your support keeps this story going.