Enter Tenor

The long lines of stinking, bitter medicine smeared across my bites and cuts almost gurgled under my fur. Some of the wounds melted back into my skin, fur that had been torn away quickly regrowing over them. Others wouldn’t so generously leave me. The world moved slower than Zane was carrying me, my eyes blurring as they tried to catch up to the movement I was feeling. Another Songbat droned on from deeper within the cave, its lullaby dangling in the back of my mind.

I let my head rest against the arm Zane wrapped around me. His heart was racing as his feet clapped against the wet floor. Long stone spears hung down from the ceiling, not stalactites, but precise carvings intricately sculpted out from the rock in the ceiling. I’d stopped here for a time during my own journey. Nidlord, then just a Nidrat, had his claws around my shin like a toddler. He kept trying to drag me forward while I studied this place. The carvings were almost a thousand years old, but nobody knew why the ancients made them.

This cavern split off into multiple smaller passages formed by the trickling creek that ran through the middle. I didn’t know if it had once broken into separate, smaller streams, or if these forks in the road were made by some other means. Unlike the primary cavern, these were almost perfectly cylindrical, maintaining a near-constant radius. A ribbed pattern of perfect circles wrapped the walls, and the offshoots moved in near-perfectly straight lines, only curving at very slow rates.

I hadn’t taken the time to really explore these before. I was more interested in the spear carvings, and in Jubilee City’s gym on the other side. Now, I was of no mind to spend any longer in this series of caves. Zane was more like Nyaro than me in terms of curiosity. Unflinching and quick-footed, yet somehow still afraid of his own shadow. He made a point of going deeper and deeper into one of the other paths. It went down into the Earth at a subtle decline, no more noticeable than 5 degrees. But when Zane turned around for just a moment, the creeping darkness above hid the place we’d come from. The hanging, electrical lights weren’t placed down here, and he had to guide us with a flashlight.

As the little spot of light washed over the edge of the wall, the stone looked slightly damp. Bits of gravel still shook loose from the ceiling far above with each step Zane took. This was carved more recently. If the other caves were hundreds of years old, this one could have been as young as a few days old. My ears flicked back slightly. There was a distant sound of clicking. An earthen metronome. Then, grinding, like a mortar. No, it was sharper than that, piercing, blending, yet deep and guttural.

Something groaned. This, Zane heard. He flicked his flashlight forward, and there was the end of a long, violet body. Its tail flailed up and down, as wide as the cave itself. This Capmon was nearly five meters wide, its body must have been a dozen times as long or more. A Vioworm. The hugest specimens were largely useless for trainers as they were simply too large to maintain. Smaller ones were staples of championship-winning teams, especially in other nations, for their power alone. They tunneled through deep caves hunting. I held my breath as I saw it, their tails could open and shut like a second smaller head, and they could reverse their direction in a heartbeat. They were blind, living in darkness like this, but their sense of hearing was almost unmatched.

Zane beamed as he saw it. Still holding me in one arm, he carefully put his flashlight in his mouth. His hand snatched an empty Capture Ball, and he flung it toward the Vioworm. The ball bounced harmlessly off the giant Capmon, not even opening to pull it in. Zane flinched, “Oh… Oops!” Its tail flung back and forth as the sound of it burrowing further into the rock suddenly stopped. The ends of the tail opened, dripping with pink mucous as it snatched the metal Capture Ball and smashed it between long, spear-shaped teeth. The metal screeched and crackled. I blinked. The carvings. The ancients made them to warn people that a Vioworm lived here. I never realized that.

The flashlight clattered against the ground, its light spinning in a circle as Zane sprinted back the way we came. At least, it was almost straight. There wasn’t anything to see. The flashlight disappeared, its metal casing screaming and crunching like the Capture Ball had. I sighed, it did distract the Vioworm for a moment. They were fast, much faster than a human could run.

I held my head down against the side of Zane’s arm. If I heard it getting too close, I could bite his wrist and jump down to distract it. I’d probably buy him about half a minute, then if he got to the Capmon hospital in Jubilee City, he could bring me back there. If it was going to catch him anyway, I wasn’t exactly able to run away from it. I couldn’t revive him, and he needed to be alive to resurrect me.

The ground shook with each step. Zane was panting. The tunnel thundered with each bit the worm oozed forward. Its breath smelled like a mix of carrion and rusted metal. Zane huffed as he kept running. The front of his shoe slammed into the slight slope of the ground, slipping in the wetness. He stumbled, barely managing to keep standing, but he dropped me on the ground.

I tried to pick myself up to keep running after him, but the bite in my leg stopped me from moving quickly. I surrounded myself in little sparks of electricity as the Vioworm came closer. I couldn’t knock it out, much less kill it. Zane spun around, freezing behind me. “No! Run!” I squealed.

He grabbed one of the Capture Balls from his side and loosed it, “Tenor! You go in!” The cave was suddenly filled with white light of a Capmon being summoned. There, beating its wings in the air just above me was the Songbat from earlier.

“Hey, what’s up?” His wide eyes squinted. They were adapted for total darkness much better than mine. “Uhh…” The songbat squeaked.

The sparks around me cracked forward, bouncing harmlessly off the Vioworm’s head. “Just get him to run!” I flicked my tail toward Zane.

“You want him to run, Kid?” He hummed, “Y’know, I bet I could do that, for ye.”

“Do that, then!” I pleaded. The tail flicked down over my head, widening as my stinging leg refused to carry me.

Tenor’s voice curled into a beautiful song. I blinked at it, my head rocking to the side. The end of the tail lowered over me, drenching my fur in viscous slime. It didn’t fully close as the song put me to sleep. I was listening to the lyrics. Its sense of hearing was so strong that it must have heard Tenor more clearly than I did.

There was a warm smell, and there was Fire there beside me. He grabbed a thick, juicy berry with a pair of chopsticks and carefully put it into my mouth. When I blinked awake, Zane was holding me again, back under one of the electric lights. Tenor flew casually overhead. “Whaddaya want from me now, Z?” He casually said to Zane, “I could take a little rodent out and, ehhh, clean up the trash, y’know?”

Zane nodded politely, “Can you just show us the way out of this cave?”

“You got it, Z.”