Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Arceus's Wish | (Rebooted on Youtube!)

S I X

Fine. Come to me, then. Try. There is nothing you can do: Arceus is merely wasting what little energy I have yet to steal from him. You'll never make it in time: soon, both worlds will belong to me.

Kyle opened his eyes so wide that they hurt. He coughed and cried away blood, gasping desperately for oxygen.

"Thank goodness!" he heard three voices chorus, "he's alive!"

As Kyle's vision came into focus, Nila stepped forth. "You... you stopped breathing for quite a while, how do you feel?"

"Not... dead?" Kyle was unsure of how to describe his feelings, both emotionally and physically.

"What's important is that you are 'not dead'! Can you walk? That attack was a real shocker."

The attack. Kyle suddenly remembered what had happened to him before the whole vision. "What happened to the gengar? A-and the tentacool-" he asked, his eyes widening.

"I killed it." It was Dewey's voice. He stood not too far away, leaning against a tree in the now destroyed Pleada street. "I managed to kill the tentacool: it tried to attack again. As for the gengar..."

"We're not sure why, but after you got hit, we were able to attack it and it ran away." Josh waddled up next to his brother, who pat his head a few times. "The Pleada Rescue Team helped us, but they're mostly gone now: the rest of the parlor got pretty broken too..."

"Are you alright, son?" a decidueye stepped forth to examine him.

"...Who... are you?"

"Oliver Privy, chief of Pleada Rescue Team. You got hurt pretty badly, bleeding from the eyes and everything..." he pulled Kyle's eyelids apart to examine him, but found no trace of the blood that had been there moments earlier. "... strange. Well, you seem to be alright, certainly not in any clear life risk."

Kyle decided to push that to the back of his mind for the moment. He hauled himself up with difficulty: there was no longer any blood seeping out from underneath his eyeballs, and the feeling was returning to his limbs fast enough.

But that meant the pain was also soon returning.

Kyle moaned and collapsed, still suffering. At that, Fiona appeared from somewhere behind him and jumped to Dewey's other side.

"Kyle! Kyle, are you okay?" she squealed, her independent composure from before almost completely subdued to fear, "Your eyes! They were... they were bleeding!" her voice shook and her paws fidgeted back and forth in the dirt, "Then, you stopped breathing. I lost count past seventy seconds, and--"

"Fiona, shut it!" Josh snapped. "At the very least, give him some space to catch his breath...!"

"Whatever." she stepped away, Dewey followed discreetly. Josh huffed.

"We need to get you back home, and fast." Nila began, but Kyle did not catch it all.

"I'll accompany you myself, it's best if..." Privy's voice melted into the rest of the sounds around him.

He had already given in to soreness and exhaustion, as of custom.

*

To Kyle, sleeping and waking had happened too often in the past two days. He only wanted it to be the last time he closed his eyes for this long before his actual bed time. He could feel the scent of Nila and her house, and slowly opened his eyes to see just that, and to realize he was once again lying in his nest-bed.

"Hello," she said in a sweet voice, "sleep well?"

Kyle only realized he had had a thermometer inside of his mouth when the espeon stepped up to take it back and looked at it.