Chapter 202. Deep Within Mt. Moon
In the darkness, Natsume kept digging downward.
For a very deep stretch below, it was all soil mixed with stones, and occasionally Natsume could sense a few carapace fragments from Eternatus.
But that little bit clearly wasn't worth stopping for.
"Strange—why is this an underground space… groundwater?"
At this moment, psychokinesis was Natsume's eyes, and in an instant he probed the deepest part of the earth.
Unexpectedly, there was a vast space down there, and there seemed to be fluid within—likely groundwater.
Was this space carved out by groundwater erosion?
For a split second, Natsume felt he might be digging in the wrong direction.
After all, the direction where Eternatus was buried, according to Professor Oak, showed a high-energy reaction, and he hadn't sensed anything like that at all.
Just as he was about to change course, Natsume suddenly froze, then—as if steeling himself—drove straight for the groundwater cavern.
He had just remembered that the rock under Mt. Moon was solid igneous rock.
How could water flow possibly have scoured out a cavity this large?
Natsume instantly felt something was off.
"Crack!"
The hard rock wall shattered, and Natsume went into free fall, halting in midair the moment he touched the water's surface.
Water ran with a rustling hiss all around, and with droplets pattering down, Natsume's nerves tightened.
He unleashed his psychokinesis in full, exploring the surroundings, and in his mind this place turned bright as day.
The space here was enormous, and the underground river only occupied a small part.
What shocked Natsume most was the overall shape of this subterranean chamber.
Its shape was a perfectly regular cylinder, and the rock walls were unbelievably smooth, as if someone had used a cylindrical mold and, like slicing tofu, cut out this underground space.
"This definitely isn't naturally formed."
Muttering to himself, Natsume headed upstream, toward the river's source.
After a while, Natsume felt the temperature suddenly rise, and molten-like flow patterns began to appear in the surrounding rock.
It was as if, long ago, an ultra-high-temperature beam had pierced straight through this place.
As Natsume advanced, the temperature gradually returned to normal.
At last, Natsume noticed the area growing teeming with life; mosses began to appear on the cliff walls around him.
He stared at the tiny plants that had sprouted, and only after a long moment did he continue forward.
His pace was slow, and every inch of ground around him was swept again and again by psychokinesis.
Before long, Natsume discovered the small plants on the rock walls had vanished, replaced by what was directly over his head.
Natsume looked up, and a sweep of psychokinesis revealed that the entire dome was inlaid with tens of thousands of black hexagonal prisms.
They were like basalt katana blades that had been neatly cut by some shockwave, all pointing toward the cavern floor at an absolutely precise thirty-degree inclination.
He wrenched one prism free with psychokinesis, and when he tried to take it in his hand, it passed through like an illusion.
Natsume watched the prism fall, silently dropping into the underground river.
It didn't feel like stone to him, but rather… a Ghost-type Pokémon?
Sure enough, as Natsume continued forward, he came upon a marsh at the densest cluster of black prisms.
Black liquid kept dripping off the prisms and seeping into the river below.
The original river also came to an abrupt end here.
"Fire… Grass… Ghost… Poison?"
Natsume suddenly put it together.
He quickened his pace.
Past the section where the river had been dammed into a marsh, it didn't take long for the broad river to reappear.
Only this time, the air around him turned bitterly cold.
"Ice?"
Natsume slowly descended, stepping onto the frozen lake surface, a little stunned.
He recalled Professor Oak's words—Eternatus seemed to have suffered blows from every type.
Judging from his own discoveries, the target was very likely blown apart by a single attack that fused all types, and in the process bored straight through this place, creating the underground space.
Natsume raised his head and snapped his gaze toward the end of the underground waterway, hesitated no longer, and broke into full speed.
If his guess was right, heading upstream, he should find it at the very end of this subterranean corridor!
Natsume streaked past all kinds of bizarre cave topography, each reflecting a different Pokémon type.
Ahead, the underground river made a ninety-degree turn, and the current formed a stable whirlpool thirty meters across.
Natsume drew in his psychokinesis, shaping it into a protective barrier around him.
He descended to the water, stepped onto the surface, took out a searchlight, and aimed the beam at the nearby vortex.
The instant the searchlight swept the vortex's center, all the light twisted into an eerie purple—that was half a dragon's caudal vertebra stabbed through the rock strata, its surface sheathed in bubbling, metallic scales.
Following the spine that had been nailed into the bedrock, he looked upward, where a shattered thoracic cavity bloomed like a flower of death.
Nearly every rib was driven deep into the igneous rock in a radial pattern, and at the tip of each bone spur extended a dark-red crystal cluster up to a hundred meters long—like a bloodfall frozen for tens of thousands of years.
So it wasn't just taken out by that attack—it was nailed to this spot!
Expression unchanged, Natsume swiftly called out his Rotom Phone.
"Rotom, get ready to record!"
Natsume rubbed his hands in excitement, ready to loot the body.
However, the Rotom Phone didn't respond as usual.
Puzzled, Natsume turned his head—then watched in surprise as his own phone began to transform.
A cringe-inducing crackle sounded, and with Natsume allowing it to proceed, the phone finally reshaped itself into a small spider-shaped robot.
At the same moment, Rotom was violently ejected.
Deprived of its levitation, the little spider robot plopped straight into the water.
A second later, Natsume fished it out.
"What is this?"
Pinching one of its spindly legs, Natsume turned to Rotom, baffled.
This was Rotom No. 2!
"Roto!"
Rotom shook its head; all it knew was that, the instant it emerged, it felt the phone develop self-awareness and expel it.
"I see…"
Natsume nodded, half understanding.
It seemed the thing that had caused the drilling rig's anomaly might also be nearby.
Natsume headed first toward Eternatus's remains.
Eternatus's skull still held a sky-roaring posture, its lower jaw dislocated from overextension, and fluorescent stalactite clusters had grown within its hollow eye sockets.
Most chilling of all was the five-meter-wide through-and-through wound in its chest, the rim scales bearing molten, reforged ripples.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk, who did you provoke this time?"
Shaking his head, Natsume swept the remains again and again with psychokinesis.
Nothing?
Natsume blinked.
Its Divinity had been shattered and fallen through the air across Kanto.
But at least that remaining half of the stone tablet should still be here, right?
Natsume scratched his head, suddenly missing center-parted.
If that guy were here, wherever he lay down to nap would definitely mean something.
Natsume drifted down and finally stepped onto the colossal remains of Eternatus.
He looked left and right and found nothing.
"Crack—"
A crisp sound came from underfoot.
"What's this?"
Natsume bent down and picked up a small, delicate object.
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