Beneath the Guardian

Chapter Thirty

Beneath the Guardian

Once they stopped asking what Heatran had protected the town from, the old records became much easier to read.

That irritated Gray more than he expected.

For nearly two weeks, he and Cynthia had worked from a premise neither of them had realized they were carrying. Heatran was called a guardian. A settlement had existed above Heatran's territory. Therefore, the settlement had understood Heatran as its guardian. It was a reasonable inference, supported by damaged translations and centuries of later retellings, and it had survived precisely because nothing in the surviving material had forced anyone to question it.

Now the assumption looked almost embarrassingly human.

The original texts distinguished consistently between the people who lived beneath the sky and the Pokémon who lived beneath stone. Heatran belonged to the latter group. When the old inscriptions spoke of it walking its territory, descending into the lower halls, or answering danger, the grammatical object—when one survived at all—was almost always something below the settlement.

The townspeople had revered Heatran.

They had also understood, apparently much better than modern historians, that Heatran was not theirs.

Gray spent three days in the temporary archive tent outside the excavation site going through every translated fragment again.

He hated doing translation work from photographs when the original material sat less than a hundred meters away, but the more fragile tablets could not be handled repeatedly. Cynthia worked beside him when Champion responsibilities allowed it, and Haruto rotated in whenever the older dialect became particularly ugly. Nia contributed archaeological context and frequently stopped Gray from assigning too much significance to a sentence merely because he liked what it implied.

The retranslation did not produce one miraculous lost paragraph explaining everything.

It produced patterns.

That was better.

The phrase guardian below appeared six times.

Guardian of those beneath appeared twice.

One damaged prayer referred to Heatran as the iron fire who walks where our feet may not.

A household record mentioned leaving offerings near a lower passage because the guardian crosses there when the little fires sleep.

Another fragment, previously translated as the guardian rose against the nightmare, was less directional than they had first believed. Cynthia spent half an hour comparing verb forms before replacing rose with went against.

Gray stared at the revision.

“So we added upward movement because that's what we expected.”

“Probably.”

“Excellent.”

“You sound pleased.”

“I enjoy finding out we're idiots.”

Haruto looked over from another table. “Speak for yourself.”

Gray did not bother.

The directional references that survived were overwhelmingly downward.

Heatran descended.

Heatran went beneath.

Heatran entered the lower halls.

During the crisis described as dreams becoming terror, Heatran did not charge upward toward the endangered town.

It went deeper.

That fact became difficult to ignore after the fourth independent text said essentially the same thing.

Cynthia sat back from the translation table late one afternoon and rubbed at her eyes. The portable lamps made the archive tent look warmer than it was, yellow light gathering across stacks of photographs and catalog boxes while rain tapped gently against the roof.

“It went down before the destruction.”

Gray looked at the sequence they had reconstructed.

“Seems like it.”

“And the dark figure followed.”

“According to two inscriptions.”

“Three if the shrine wall is describing the same sequence.”

“That's less certain.”

“Yes.”

Gray appreciated that she said it automatically.

He looked again.

First, abnormal sleep among those below.

Then dreams becoming terror.

Then Heatran descending.

Then the dream-shadow following.

Then Heatran's fury.

Then the town above breaking.

It still did not prove Darkrai had caused the sleep. Ancient people could misidentify cause just as efficiently as modern ones.

But it strongly suggested that whatever confrontation occurred had moved farther underground before the catastrophic eruption destroyed the settlement.

Gray tapped one photograph.

“This line.”

Cynthia leaned closer.

The surviving text was short.

The guardian went where the fires could not wake.

She read it again.

“That could be metaphorical.”

“Could.”

“Could describe death.”

“Could.”

“Could describe a geographic place.”

Gray nodded.

That possibility had bothered him since the morning.

Not when the fires could not wake.

Where.

The grammar was not perfect enough for certainty, but the locative construction was there.

A place associated with sleeping Fire-types.

Centuries ago.

Somewhere beneath Heatran's ordinary territory.

He did not say nursery.

He did not say eggs.

Not yet.

Cynthia looked toward the underground route map pinned to the tent wall.

“You're thinking about the northern passage.”

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

That was becoming a problem.

Roark found the void four days later.

Not a tunnel.

Not another chamber.

A void.

He called Gray from Oreburgh before sunrise.

Gray answered on the fourth ring because Blissey had positioned herself against his bedroom door during the night and getting past her quietly had proven impossible.

“What?”

Roark's voice came through too awake for five-thirty in the morning.

“I need you at the mine office.”

“Why?”

“We mapped something.”

Gray sat upright.

“How something?”

“Big.”

That woke him properly.

“How big?”

“Come here.”

The call ended.

Gray stared at the phone.

Then at Blissey.

Blissey stared back.

“You heard him.”

She did not move.

Gray pointed toward the door.

“Research.”

Still nothing.

Twenty-five minutes later, having eaten a piece of toast under supervision, Gray was on Aerodactyl heading north.

The morning air was cold enough to clear the rest of the sleep from him. Aerodactyl flew fast over the dark landscape, wings catching the first gray light while Sandgem disappeared behind them. Gray kept one hand on the harness and spent most of the flight trying not to invent possibilities.

Large underground voids were not unusual in a region with extensive cave systems.

Large was relative.

Roark used the word differently than most people.

That made it harder.

Cynthia arrived at the Oreburgh survey office less than ten minutes after Gray.

She had apparently been called too.

Roark was waiting inside with Byron, two mine surveyors, and a geological technician Gray had met only twice. An entire wall display showed a three-dimensional subsurface model of the region north of the known geothermal chambers.

Gray stopped in the doorway.

“Oh.”

Roark folded his arms.

“Yeah.”

The model showed the underground system they already knew in pale lines: lush cavern, snow junction, geothermal branch, beach route, deeper fossil habitat, mapped side passages, survey shafts, collapsed historical tunnels.

Below all of it was a dark volume.

Not a neat cave.

A tremendous irregular absence in the rock.

Gray stepped closer.

“How confident?”

“On existence? Very.”

“Shape?”

“Moderate.”

“Scale?”

Roark enlarged the model.

“Minimum dimensions based on current tomography are roughly nine hundred meters long, four hundred across at the widest reliable section, and somewhere between eighty and two hundred meters in vertical depth.”

Gray looked at him.

“That's not a chamber.”

“No.”

Cynthia moved beside the display.

“Cavern complex?”

“Probably.”

Gray studied the model.

The void began beneath the northern edge of Heatran's current territory and extended farther northeast than any known route.

“Why didn't we see it before?”

Byron answered.

“Depth. Crystal interference. Bad angles. Most previous scans were designed to map passages we already suspected existed.”

Roark pulled up the newest dataset.

“We changed the survey geometry after the ancient tunnel projections. Used surface seismic sources farther north, mine shafts to the west, and passive vibration measurements from Heatran's chamber.”

Gray glanced toward him.

“You used Heatran as a seismic source.”

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Roark smiled despite himself.

“Every time it walks, yes.”

That was irritatingly clever.

Cynthia stepped closer to the display.

“Does Heatran's northern route connect?”

Roark changed the overlay.

A known passage descended toward the upper edge of the void.

Then disappeared from the scan.

“Probably.”

“Probably?”

“There's a zone of horrible interference right here.”

White crystal concentrations.

Dense enough that the model became unreliable.

Gray recognized the pattern immediately.

The same formations interfered with teleportation deeper underground.

“So we lose the route before it reaches the void.”

“Exactly.”

Gray stared at the dark mass below.

A cavern nearly a kilometer long.

Possibly larger.

Directly beneath the region ancient texts repeatedly associated with sleeping Fire-types.

Heatran disappeared toward it every few days.

Gray's pulse accelerated.

He disliked that.

Excitement was useful until it convinced people to be stupid.

He turned toward Roark.

“No expedition.”

Roark blinked.

“I didn't suggest one.”

“I know.”

Cynthia glanced toward Gray.

“No crawler either.”

“Agreed.”

Roark nodded.

Nobody fought them.

That mattered.

Six months earlier, Gray might have been tempted to shove a camera into the unknown route and accept the consequences.

Heatran had corrected that instinct thoroughly.

The Legendary had allowed humans near large parts of its territory.

It had tolerated repeated observation.

It had also demonstrated that certain spaces mattered enough to justify immediate lethal violence.

A deeper cavern Heatran visited routinely was not something they entered until they understood more.

Gray looked toward the model again.

“We map around it.”

“That's the plan.”

“Passive only.”

Roark nodded.

“Surface tomography, old mine shafts, vibration sensors. Nothing past the northern passage.”

Cynthia added, “And cameras remain at the current boundary.”

“Already there.”

Good.

The void could wait.

Gray suspected it had been waiting considerably longer than any of them.

Heatran's movements changed before the mapping improved.

At first Gray thought it was coincidence.

The monitoring logs showed the Legendary spending more time away from the primary geothermal chamber. Over a ten-day period, Heatran entered the northern passage six times. Three absences exceeded four hours. One lasted almost nine.

That was the longest recorded.

The resident Pokémon behaved differently during those periods.

Salandit ranged farther across the central chamber.

Slugma occupied sections of warm stone they usually avoided while Heatran was present.

A Magmar with two Magby crossed an open stretch near the old observation shelf without the usual pause and watchfulness.

Heatran's presence shaped the ecosystem simply by existing within it.

Its absence did too.

Gray watched hours of compressed footage and became increasingly convinced that the deeper route was not peripheral territory.

It mattered.

The Quilava appeared again on the eleventh night.

Same individual, almost certainly.

The left rear flame pattern had a small irregular gap that made comparison possible.

It emerged at 3:07 a.m.

This time it barely made it beyond the passage mouth.

Its movements were slow and stiff. It stopped beside the wall, lowered itself to the stone, and remained there.

The thermal image showed normal surface heat for a Quilava in that environment.

No obvious fever.

No localized injury.

Its breathing was fast.

Then its eyes closed.

The reaction was immediate.

Its front limbs jerked.

Its back arched.

The flames along its body flared suddenly enough to wash out part of the thermal image.

The Pokémon woke with a sharp cry and scrambled upright.

Gray watched the clip in silence.

Marcus sat at the adjacent terminal.

Mira stood behind them.

Nobody called it a nightmare.

That word carried too much history now.

Gray replayed the sequence.

The Quilava remained awake for another minute, pacing in a small circle as though unwilling to settle again.

Then it looked back into the northern passage.

Heatran did not appear.

The Quilava eventually returned alone.

Gray stopped the video.

“Any similar sleep behavior from the other geothermal Pokémon?”

Marcus shook his head.

“Not on camera.”

“Fossil habitat?”

“No.”

“Beach?”

“No.”

“Snow chamber?”

“We've had normal sleep footage from Snorunt and Delibird. Nothing like that.”

Mira leaned toward the screen.

“Could still be illness.”

“Yes.”

“Individual neurological issue.”

“Yes.”

“Environmental exposure deeper in the route.”

“Yes.”

Gray looked at her.

She gave him a tired expression.

“You don't need to sound happy about having more possibilities.”

“I don't.”

“You do.”

He ignored that.

Cynthia arrived later and watched the footage twice.

On the third playback, she asked to see the previous appearance.

Marcus put them side by side.

The behavior was similar.

Fatigue.

Attempted rest.

Abrupt violent awakening.

Cynthia's expression became unreadable.

“Ancient texts.”

Gray nodded.

“I know.”

“Little fires that wouldn't wake.”

“This one wakes.”

“Violently.”

“Yes.”

“That difference may matter.”

“Probably does.”

They were nowhere near being able to call the behavior related.

Centuries separated the observations.

Species identity remained uncertain in the ancient records.

The ancient crisis might have involved something completely different.

Still, the parallel was unpleasant enough that Gray stopped dismissing it as coincidence.

He looked toward the dark entrance on the paused footage.

“What are you doing down there?”

Cynthia answered, “Apparently having a terrible time.”

Gray glanced toward her.

She looked serious.

So did he.

The first thermal anomaly came from a sensor that was not supposed to see the deeper cavern at all.

The instrument sat outside Heatran's northern route and measured broad environmental changes: air temperature, radiant heat, gas composition, pressure fluctuations. Most of its data was boring enough to be useful.

On a Tuesday afternoon, Mira found a repeating temperature pulse.

Not large.

Less than half a degree at the sensor.

It appeared whenever a particular pressure change moved air outward through the northern passage.

She spent most of the day assuming equipment error.

By evening she had ruled out the obvious causes.

Gray joined her in the lab.

“Explain.”

Mira brought up a graph.

“Air comes out of the deeper passage periodically.”

“Convection.”

“Probably. Larger cavern breathing through a narrow route.”

Gray nodded.

Normal cave behavior.

Temperature gradients moved air.

“What about it?”

She overlaid the thermal cycle.

“The outgoing air is warmer than expected.”

“Geothermal.”

“Yes, but not stable.”

She pointed toward the pattern.

Small peaks.

Tiny irregular fluctuations.

Gray leaned closer.

“That looks noisy.”

“It is.”

“Equipment?”

“No.”

“Heatran moving?”

“Sometimes. But the pattern continues when Heatran is visible in the main chamber.”

Gray frowned.

“What else creates irregular localized thermal output?”

Mira looked at him.

He understood before she answered.

Bodies.

Not one.

Many.

Maybe.

Gray sat down.

“Can we quantify?”

“Not with this sensor.”

“Can Roark improve the angle?”

“Already asked.”

Of course she had.

Two additional passive instruments were installed in old mine shafts over the next week, both well outside Heatran territory. They did not look into the cavern. They measured tiny temperature and pressure changes through fractures connected to the lower system.

The signal appeared there too.

Weak.

Distributed.

Alive-looking.

Gray hated that phrasing immediately and crossed it out of his notes.

The data resembled many independent heat sources in an enclosed space.

That was all they could say.

Cynthia reviewed the analysis from Sandgem.

“How many?”

Gray shook his head.

“We can't estimate reliably.”

“Ten?”

“Could be.”

“A hundred?”

“Could be.”

“A thousand?”

“Probably not from current energy output, but the uncertainty is awful.”

“So essentially useless.”

“Scientifically? Not useless. Emotionally? Extremely.”

She smiled faintly.

Then looked toward the subsurface model.

The void now had better boundaries.

Roark's team had found at least four internal shelves or ledges and indications of narrower passages branching away from the main space.

One branch extended beyond the mapped region entirely.

The cavern could be larger.

Gray looked at the volume calculation.

Big enough for an ecosystem.

More than big enough.

“What if it's another habitat?” Cynthia asked.

“Probably is.”

“You say that quickly.”

“We've found five already.”

“None under Heatran's personal supervision.”

That was true.

Gray looked toward the thermal graph.

“Could be Slugma.”

“Hundreds?”

“Could be.”

“Magmar?”

“Could be.”

“Something else?”

“Yes.”

She waited.

Gray sighed.

“You want me to say Fire-types.”

“I think the ancient texts already did.”

“That doesn't mean the population survived.”

“No.”

“And it doesn't mean the thermal signals are the same population.”

“No.”

“And—”

“Gray.”

He stopped.

Cynthia folded her arms.

“We can be cautious without pretending the possibility isn't obvious.”

Fair.

He looked back toward the model.

A hidden habitat.

Fire-type populations.

Heatran moving between them.

Ancient records describing those below.

Eggs in a protected chamber.

A Quilava repeatedly emerging exhausted from the deeper route.

Too many lines were beginning to converge.

That did not mean they had reached the answer.

It meant they had reached a place where the answer could hurt them if they approached carelessly.

The first direct evidence came by accident.

No camera entered the northern passage.

No crawler crossed the established boundary.

Nobody violated Rhea's restrictions.

A minor rockfall did it for them.

At 11:18 p.m., one of the fixed cameras recorded a distant rumble.

The view shook.

Dust spilled from the ceiling.

Several seconds later, a section of the passage wall collapsed inward about thirty meters beyond the monitored entrance.

Not catastrophically.

Enough to expose a narrow crack behind it.

Air moved through immediately.

Hot air.

The temperature sensor jumped nearly six degrees.

An alarm notified Marcus.

Marcus notified Gray.

Gray notified everyone else who mattered.

By midnight, the Sandgem lab was crowded.

Gray stood in front of the main screen with Cynthia on his left and Lyra near the back wall. Marcus controlled the feed. Mira watched environmental data from another station. Roark and Rhea appeared remotely.

The camera could not see through the crack directly.

Wrong angle.

That frustrated everyone for approximately thirty seconds.

Then Roark realized an existing thermal imaging unit could rotate farther than they had ever needed.

“Don't move the camera base,” Rhea said immediately.

Marcus looked toward the screen.

“I can rotate the head six degrees.”

“Only the head.”

Gray nodded.

“No light.”

Nobody needed to announce their presence to Heatran.

Marcus adjusted the camera.

Slowly.

The thermal image swept across stone.

Wall.

Passage.

Collapsed debris.

Then the new crack entered view.

At first, nothing.

Just heat.

A broad orange haze from warm air moving outward.

Marcus changed sensitivity.

The image sharpened.

The crack opened onto another section of passage several meters beyond.

Still not the cavern.

Gray felt disappointment and relief simultaneously.

Then something moved through the distant opening.

Small.

Four-legged.

Gone too quickly to identify.

“Back.”

Marcus replayed.

Cynthia leaned forward.

“Quilava?”

“Maybe.”

Gray watched again.

Could be.

Not enough resolution.

Another shape followed thirty seconds later.

This one stayed longer.

Shorter.

Rounder.

Thermal bloom near the head.

Fire-type, probably.

Species uncertain.

Then another.

Gray's heartbeat accelerated.

The camera had accidentally gained an oblique view farther down the route.

Not enough for a survey.

Enough to see movement.

Rhea spoke through the monitor.

“No adjustments beyond current position.”

“Agreed.”

They watched.

For forty minutes, almost nothing happened.

Then Heatran returned.

The Legendary entered the distant field of view from below.

Even reduced to a thermal silhouette through a crack in broken stone, it dwarfed everything around it.

Heat saturated the camera.

The image partially washed out.

Heatran stopped.

Gray's pulse jumped.

“Did it notice the collapse?”

“Probably,” Cynthia said.

Heatran turned its head toward the opening.

For several seconds it appeared to look directly toward the camera.

Nobody moved.

Nobody breathed much either.

Then Heatran continued upward.

It passed out of the distant view.

Three minutes later, the normal entrance camera caught it entering the main geothermal chamber.

The crack remained.

No aggression.

No investigation.

Good.

Rhea allowed monitoring to continue.

No one left.

At two in the morning, Lyra ordered food.

Gray actually ate without being told twice.

That worried her enough that she stared at him.

He ignored it.

The view through the crack remained mostly empty until 2:47.

Then the airflow changed.

Mira noticed first.

“Pressure drop.”

Gray turned.

“From where?”

“Deeper system.”

The thermal haze shifted.

Warm air began moving more strongly through the crack.

Marcus adjusted nothing.

The camera simply waited.

Then the distant passage brightened.

Not from flame.

From heat.

One point appeared.

Then another.

Then five.

Ten.

Gray moved closer to the screen.

“What is that?”

Mira stared at her sensor.

“Multiple thermal sources.”

The distant opening filled with small independent signatures.

Some moved.

Most did not.

Marcus decreased sensitivity.

More resolved.

Gray counted automatically.

Twelve.

Seventeen.

Twenty-three.

Too many overlapping to separate farther back.

Cynthia stood beside him.

“Those are Pokémon.”

“Probably.”

One shape shifted enough to reveal a tail.

A flame burned at its end.

Gray's mouth went dry.

The silhouette was too distant for certainty.

Larger than Quilava.

Bipedal.

Then it lowered itself out of view.

Another heat source flared nearby.

Then another.

No one spoke.

The narrow camera angle showed only a tiny slice of whatever lay beyond the route.

And even that slice contained more Pokémon than Gray had expected.

Marcus looked at the software.

“The thermal estimator is trying to separate bodies.”

“Can it?”

“Poorly.”

“How many?”

Marcus hesitated.

“Visible or inferred?”

“Both.”

“Visible distinct sources, twenty-eight. Inferred behind them...” He stared at the screen. “At least sixty.”

The room went quiet.

Roark spoke from the wall monitor.

“In that little angle?”

Marcus nodded.

“Yeah.”

Gray looked toward the cavern model.

Nine hundred meters.

Possibly more.

If sixty warm bodies occupied one narrow line of sight—

No.

Do not extrapolate.

Not yet.

The camera continued recording.

Some signatures moved slowly.

Others remained completely still.

Too still.

Gray watched one elongated heat source lying against the distant floor.

It had not changed position in twenty minutes.

Another rested beside it.

A smaller shape shifted once, then stopped.

Normal sleep could look exactly like this.

Gray knew that.

Pokémon slept.

Groups slept.

Nothing was wrong merely because a hidden habitat contained resting Pokémon at three in the morning.

Then one of them moved.

Violently.

A distant shape jerked hard enough to collide with another.

The second woke—or at least reacted—its heat signature rising as flame appeared.

The first thrashed again.

Gray leaned toward the monitor.

“Zoom?”

Rhea answered immediately.

“Digital only.”

Marcus enlarged the existing image.

Pixels blurred.

The movement remained visible.

The Pokémon on the ground kicked against the stone.

Its body arched.

Then stopped.

Gray felt cold despite the warm lab.

Cynthia's voice was quiet.

“That's the same kind of movement.”

“As the Quilava.”

“Yes.”

Another shape jerked farther back.

Then a third.

Not synchronized.

Separate.

Irregular.

The thermal field that had looked like a sleeping habitat began to look different.

Not peaceful.

Restless.

Mira whispered, “How many are asleep?”

Nobody answered.

They watched for another hour.

The visible Pokémon rarely stood.

A few shifted position.

One smaller Fire-type walked through the distant passage and disappeared.

Most remained down.

Several displayed abrupt bursts of movement during apparent sleep.

One awakened and paced.

Another did not appear to wake at all after thrashing.

Gray's notebook remained open on the table.

He had stopped writing.

That almost never happened.

At 4:06 a.m., the airflow weakened.

The distant thermal field dimmed behind the stone angle.

Not because the bodies vanished.

Because the changing convection reduced the line of sight through warm air enough that the camera lost contrast.

Slowly, dozens of signatures became smears.

Then shapes.

Then nothing useful.

The accidental window closed without the rock moving at all.

Marcus stared at the feed.

“We'll get another cycle.”

“Maybe,” Gray said.

His voice sounded strange to him.

Rhea remained silent on the monitor.

Roark had stopped asking geological questions.

Lyra stood behind Gray with both arms folded, watching the dark passage.

Cynthia looked toward the ancient translation displayed on the neighboring screen.

The guardian went where the fires could not wake.

Gray followed her gaze.

For centuries, those words had survived as a fragment of somebody else's catastrophe.

Now, beneath the same mountain, Heatran still descended through the same region.

Quilava still emerged from below exhausted and afraid to sleep.

A cavern large enough to hold an ecosystem lay beneath them.

And inside the tiny portion they had seen by accident, dozens of Fire-type Pokémon had been lying in the dark.

Gray finally picked up his notebook.

His hand hovered over the page.

“What do we call this?” Marcus asked quietly.

Gray looked at the screen.

He had no answer he trusted.

“Nothing yet.”

The floor sensor alarm sounded.

Every head in the room turned.

Mira looked down.

Not temperature.

Vibration.

A strong pulse had moved through the deeper cavern.

Then another.

Slow.

Heavy.

Gray looked immediately toward the main Heatran camera.

Heatran was still in the upper geothermal chamber.

Visible.

Resting beside the lava pool.

Whatever had caused the vibration was not Heatran.

Another pulse traveled through the rock.

Stronger.

Roark straightened on the monitor.

“What the hell was that?”

Mira changed displays.

The source localization appeared beneath the known system.

Deep.

Inside the enormous void.

Then every thermal sensor connected to the lower cavern spiked at once.

Not by six degrees.

Not by ten.

The graph climbed so sharply Mira initially thought the instrument had failed.

Air surged out of the northern passage.

The distant camera image flooded orange.

Dozens of heat signatures suddenly became visible again through the crack.

More than before.

Far more.

They covered the distant passage floor.

The ledges.

The deeper background.

Some large.

Some small.

Some overlapping so densely the software could no longer separate them.

Gray stared.

The estimator climbed.

Forty.

Seventy.

Ninety-six.

One hundred and fourteen.

Then it stopped providing a number and displayed COUNT UNRELIABLE.

Cynthia whispered something Gray did not hear.

Across the thermal field, dozens of bodies moved.

Not standing.

Not waking.

Jerking.

Twisting.

Flames flared in scattered bursts throughout the darkness until the hidden cavern looked, for one terrible moment, like a field of dying stars.

A sound reached the camera.

Very faint.

Too distorted by stone to identify at first.

Then another joined it.

And another.

Low cries carried upward through the passage.

Not roars.

Not battle calls.

Sleep sounds.

Distress.

Hundreds of meters below them, something enormous shifted again through the rock.

The entire sensor array trembled.

Heatran's head rose beside the lava pool.

Instantly.

The Legendary stood.

Every Slugma nearby recoiled.

Heatran turned toward the northern passage.

For one second it remained motionless, staring into the darkness.

Then it roared.

The microphones overloaded.

Heatran launched forward hard enough to crack the stone beneath its feet and vanished into the northern route at a speed Gray had never seen from it before.

On the secondary camera, the distant Fire-types continued to writhe in their sleep.

Gray stared after Heatran.

The ancient words were still glowing on the screen beside him.

The guardian went where the fires could not wake.

This time, nobody in the room mistook it for mythology.