((Whoops. Time to improvise, then.))

Team Double-Take!
Location: Fullmoon Highway...?
Spoiler:
@LKWayvern — "Tarnish", Darkrai, Yuko
With a wretched whine, the entire world shifted. The landscape transformed; the sky took onto itself the cloudy, crimson tint of the Wall, the dust storm disappeared altogether. The prairie grass returned to the roadsides of the Fullmoon Highway and Team Double-Take! was thusly left dazed and bewildered, just as battered, dirtied, and exhausted as before, and yet nothing seemed the same as it had been before. The road still stretched eternally towards the horizon but they swore the blocky shape of their safehaven had moved closer, clearly discernible against the Emerald Mountains' backdrop now, and as Noon, Jyde and Heckle, and Silvia all ogled where they'd ended up, they realized where the earth had split apart in the earlier assault was not directly under their feet. Of course, they also recognized the structures whose brain-melting scream had snapped them out of the most elaborate of trances.

"By gods." Noon's two able teammates whirled around to goggle her instead when the strongly-forbidden exclamation fell from her lips. The Girafarig ignored their shock, ignored everything, only stared ahead with the same vacancy as the three had sworn Cobalion exemplified, but now the Legend had disappeared before their eyes, along with everything they had thought they'd understood.

"What the hell is going on?" the Girafarig spat without any regret.

"What is that?" And they were all ogling something else, now, at the sound of Silvia's shout. Her outstretched, gesturing arm tilted their attention towards a most abominable creature, throwing up gravel as it launched itself over its own jagged enclosure. The thing was made of so many entangled, incoherent points and spikes. It was dotted with blood. It had hate-filled eyes. It looked like a feral Mighteyena had managed to become impaled on the branches of the world's most nihilistic tree. The horror was an unaccountable amalgam of everything conventionally dangerous and edgy. It had landed inches before the crumpled form of Milos, still whining; the collision with Kiki had inflamed his stomach wound. The pet Dodou herself seemed entranced with the homely creation, her beady eyes expanding as if it had induced some variant of hypnosis upon her. Her legs appeared to clam up and the little bird Pokemon showed no intention to leave her designated spot.

There was nothing else that could truly be said about the monstrosity, nothing that couldn't be communicated through simply experiencing its existence, so Noon could only offer up an obvious observation: "That's not Cobalion."

"You think it made up everything...? Made us experience all of that mess but, like, it was never real...?" Silvia clearly couldn't wrap her mind around the concept as even her own suggestion caused her to bring her digit-less hands up towards her head. It was as if the idea pained her.

"Probably." Noon's answer was simple. "Honestly, who cares?" And then she began escalating. "What's it matter, anyhow? This cluster**** could be a damn psychic, they could be a damn telepathic wizard, who cares? Nothing makes sense!" She threw up gravel and her teammates watched, entirely without understanding now, as even the Noon they knew had vanished. She was infuriated, she was foulmouthed, she was hopeless.

Silvia, truly, had lost her usual optimism as well. The odds, to her, and to the raging Noon as well, seemed insurmountable—stacked against them the moment they had aggravated a Legend when they could hardly coordinate a successful, collaborative assault—, not to mention entirely inexplicable. The Aipom turned away from the dour situation, her gaze flickering desperately between the minute gaps of the sharpened, raw shards of metal enclosing the tight area of which had earlier, they all recalled, been tens of feet wide. In the grassy landscape beyond, the same round bundle sat, its identity obscured by the cloth laid atop it, and Silvia reached out an arm, yearning for it, the only sense of familiarity left.

"And who the **** are you?" The Connect Orb came alive with a warped, ghastly image, one with floating white hair and blue eyes, the stranger's actual face black as night, filling the entire mirror-like surface of the contraption as they asked, "Which Corrupted?"

"Like I'd tell you! Like I know you!" Noon wanted to scream, demand for Delphox Yuko, but a sudden, sobering realization that Yuko might not be real either struck her at that moment and instead she yowled—"Aauuugh!"—her hind leg lashing out to send the sphere flying. It crashed against one of the erected metal formations and there was a splintering sound like broken glass.

"What the ****!" And she repeated the phrase so many times, so many times, until her vision began to fail her as it had before, until the words could no longer emerge from her throat as if the returned migraine was strangling her long neck. Noon could hardly breathe from the agony. Almost unwillingly, she staggered, and then her knees folded in upon themselves and the Girafarig began bawling from her kneeling, conceding position.

"...why do you flee like children?"

Their leader stepped forward. "We never ran." Hyde's voice was even, venomous. "And we never claimed to be 'warriors', either!"

"And we won't even think about fleeing now!" Jyde roared. "We'll demolish you without even knowing what or who you are! We'll destroy you, end your meaningless existence! If we're not warriors yet, we'll become ones today!"

"Stop!" Through her weeping, the Girafarig wailed. "Just stop! We can't fight them! We can't fight anymore!" Her neck drooped so that her head laid sobbing upon the uneven, graveled surface of the highway.

On the outskirts of the circle, the Connect Orb laid, dead and grey.