"Oh, sorry. It wasn't me, actually."
Izochi's voice was a pool of clear water—startlingly sincere. There was no shadow behind his eyes, no tightening of the jaw that betrayed a lie.
His face was an open book, scrubbed clean of the masks and machinations that usually filled this room. It was the apology of a child who had accidentally stepped on a flower.
Then, the air in the room died.
A smile split Izochi's face, widening until it broke into a laugh. It was a bright, melodic sound, yet it carried a subterranean chill that turned the marrow in their bones to ice.
The king was gone. The ruler had vanished. In his chair sat a boy, tilting his head with a playful, sheepish grin, as if his only sin were a broken window.
For the men watching, the "Innocence" was the most jagged blade of all. They looked at the Authority before them and saw a void wrapped in a human smile.
A primal terror, far sharper than any death threat, seized their throats. They saw the truth that Marco missed and Izochi ignored.
"Is this… it?" the old man wheezed.
The words barely escaped his lips, vibrating with the brittle resonance of a man watching his own executioner sharpen the axe.
The room didn't just feel dangerous; it felt wrong. The atmospheric pressure spiked, turning the oxygen into something thick and unbreathable, like leaden vapor.
Izochi stood and drifted toward the door, his gait rhythmic and casual, the same easy stroll he shared with Marco. He left behind a vacuum.
"This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't be, This can't…"
The murmur rippled through the nineteen men like a funeral dirge. Bodies that had once commanded armies now trembled with a rhythmic, uncontrollable palsy.
Though the boy was gone, his ghost remained, choking the room with tension. Their terror wasn't for the youth who had just departed, but for the monster he was destined to become.
"He is… Him."
A younger man, perhaps Marco's age, spoke with a voice that was a fragile glass of fear and awe.
"The Prophecy has a face. It is him."
He swallowed hard, his throat clicking in the silence.
"We have to sever the thread before he weaves the end of everything."
Beads of cold sweat tracked through the lines on their faces. It wasn't just their skin that crawled; it was as if their very souls were trying to flee their bodies, recoiling from a future they could finally see.
Outside, the sun was indifferent. Izochi walked with his peculiar lean, his head leading his body as if pulled by an invisible string, hands buried deep in the pockets of his new blue coat.
"I don't quite understand what you said,"
Izochi murmured to the empty air. He looked at the space in front of him as if addressing a ghost.
"But why must you do this here and there?"
His voice was swallowed by the breeze, leaving no echo. He stepped out under the vast, porcelain-blue sky, ignoring the call of the city's lights. He sought the grass. He sought the horizon.
A small, genuine crack of a smile appeared on his lips. His long black hair whipped in the sweet, biting wind.
Here, the air didn't taste of coal and ambition like the Capital; it was clean. Feather-light clouds drifted like pulled silk across the sun, casting soft shadows over the field.
Izochi, the boy who had just sentenced men to a living nightmare and offered a "sincere" apology—began to play.
He watched the clouds, his eyes widening as he shaped them into faces, animals and objects in his mind. He was a child lost in a daydream.
Only after the sun had shifted did he notice the silence at his side.
"Where did Marco go?"
On the far edge of the meadow, Marco leaned against a fence, the orange cherry of a cigarette glowing between his lips.
He exhaled a long, grey plume, watching the world through the shifting haze.
"A thousand yarks left,"
Marco muttered, tapping his pocket. The metallic clink was thin and depressing.
"A few more days of this and we'll be eating dirt. We need to head back."
His face was a mask of exhaustion, the heavy lines of a man who had seen too many "political games" and had no more energy to play them.
"But,…"
"Good, I finally found you!"
Marco turned. Izochi stood there, radiant, his hand raised in a cheerful wave.
"I was bored with your politics,"
Marco expressed.
"I have no interest in those things,"
Izochi let out a soft "Ooh" of surprise, his eyes sparkling.
"That's good. Neither do I."
Izochi said, his face twisting into a comical expression of distaste.
Miles away, in the heart of the Capital, the air was stale and heavy with the smell of old parchment and expensive silk. Seven figures sat in a vast, shadowed gallery.
"What is the consensus on the boy?"
The man in the center spoke. His royal robes were a cascade of deep crimson, the long train of his garment draped over the dais like a regal stain.
Behind him, a lady-in-waiting stood in rigid silence, her presence as still and decorative as the marble statues lining the hall.
To his right, a man past fifty sat with an arrogant slouch, his midsection straining against his waistcoat.
He looked at the high ceiling as if the life of a boy were a matter of minor bookkeeping.
"Kill him,"
The older man said flatly.
"Kill him before the clock runs out. We cannot allow the Prophecy to breathe."
The man at the center of attention turned his gaze toward a figure shrouded in a dark trench coat.
"He is under your banner, Mr. Horitoshi. What do you see?"
Horitoshi's voice was a flat line, neither warm nor cold, just a steady, chilling 'usual'.
"We observe,"
Horitoshi replied.
"If we strike too fast, we might trigger the very explosion we fear. Rushing leads to ruin. We wait."
"And his status in Alola?"
The question hung in the air, cold and clinical. In that room, they weren't talking about a person; they were deciding the fate of a puppet whose strings they hadn't yet learned to pull.