A flash of light illuminates the tunnels from behind Xenon as she runs, it seems like they had decided to stay behind and fight like idiots, or at least one of them had as she hears a second set of pounding footsteps behind her. Or maybe that was just the swarm rushing right over them to rip her apart. She didn't bother to look behind her and find out, either way she just needed to keep running faster, that's all she could do in the face of overwhelming death, she had too much experience running away from certain death, but that experience didn't matter, nothing in the past did, nothing mattered-
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Maybe she's still too oxygen deprived, she's panting and gasping like a newborn Blitzle taking its first steps as she blindly runs through the tunnels, she has no idea which way is out, only brief flashes of fire and dark energy keeping her from running face first into a rock wall. She didn't know these caves, the Durants did. There's two tunnels in front of her, one to the left and one to the right. Her first instinct is to move to the left, her life flashes before her eyes as she runs straight first into yet another stream of Durant ready to tear her limb from limb. Fuck. Shit. Is this really how's she's gonna go? Getting torn the fuck apart in an alternate dimension by a bunch of metal ants?
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...well, it's better than suffocating at least.
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Suddenly, a clawed hand grabs her from behind and throws her back. Promethium. The Cacturne. She had no idea how the fuck he found her in this darkness, but it doesn't matter. It lets out a chilling roar as it points down to the other tunnel, already fighting back the horde as it fires off an Energy Ball into the swarm trying to keep them back, her hand twitches towards his Pokeball to return him, but another defiant roar stops her. She needs to go, now. He's sacrificing his life to give her the gift of fire, pointing her to the light at the end of the tunnel and the freedom that awaits. It was his namesake after all.
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Would you consider her cold if I told you that she didn't even give it a second thought as she scrambled to her feet and abandoned her partner to his fate? That's simply how the Ultramodernist is. His sacrifice paves the way to the future, if the tables were turned and she needed to kill herself to cement her ideals than she would do it without hesitation. So as Xenon screams at the duo to follow her down through the tunnel, up to the surface, bursting out into the light and escaping the Durant colony, she doesn't mourn Promethium and his sacrifice. He takes down as many as he can before he activates the Destiny Bond, taking out just one more Durant before they tear his body asunder in a feral frenzy.
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CXWNFlXf
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+ Ultra Desert #2[break]
Gerald Kaiser Frank Caffey

[attr="class","pokeclass"]