The creature starts slowly moving—and it's very definitely towards them.

"It's almost time."

"...wait, are we actually—is it actually—coming here—dude, have you considered dropping the mysterious mentor style?"

"You'll understand someday why I did this. Why I came here." He turns around and looks directly at Tōkan, for the first time tonight. "Why I'm here."

"Why—do you mean—" The water sphere is now fully visible, haloing Auron from behind, and something clicks in Tōkan's head. "Are—Auron, are you the giant monster, somehow—?"

The glasses and the high neck of his coat make it hard to see the small satisfied smile, but Tōkan has been around Auron for long enough to recognise those small tells. "You'll do fine. Hold onto that sword. You'll figure it out eventually."

Okay uh. Actually. Maybe. It was a terrible idea following Auron all the way here? Maybe Tōkan should, uh. Run?

But he can't. He can't, because now the monster is close enough that he can directly feel himself dragged by its gravity and worse of all he can feel it getting stronger.

He won't, actually, be able to run.

So he stands there, frozen, sword in hand, watching as the whatever-it-is—as Sin approaches, feeling his weight slowly get reduced to zero. And then it's negative, and he's being actively drawn towards the creature.

Auron seems immune to the effect, and just watches this happen, following the boy with his gaze, the small satisfied smile never leaving his face.

And the last thing Tōkan says is "Motherfucker" before he gets engulfed by the water and loses consciousness.

He wakes up, and honestly he had not been expecting to. Giant monster who has some weird relationship with his mentor slash father figure slash actual adoptive father shows up and destroys his country, but not before he's eaten by it. Also he noticed himself thinking about a bunch of things he hadn't thought of before that he really really would've expected of himself.

Zanarkand is nice and all but it's also terribly boring and when the most exciting thing he can do is be a blitzball player he really really really would've expected his younger self to have been at all curious about... anywhere that isn't Zanarkand.

Like here, probably. He thinks he's somewhere that isn't Zanarkand, and given that this somewhere seems to be "hanging onto the exposed parts of the partially submerged ruins of something with water in all directions" he should probably be focusing more on survival than figuring out what kind of freaky mental magic effect must have been keeping his whole damn country from wanting to leave its tiny tiny island.

Also, his sword is there. Convenient. He places it in a pocket that's bigger on the inside then tries to figure out what he should... do... to stay alive.

(These ruins are not Zanarkand. He did not get thrown into the future, he would recognise the architectural style.)

Half submerged ruins, in the middle of the night, the sky covered by dark menacing clouds that make it very hard to see. He pulls himself onto the landing provided by the little bit of stone that's not submerged and looks around.

It really is very hard to see anything but another convenient (?) feature of his environment might be the clouds. If this is a lightning storm...

It is! That's thunder, and it illuminates the area well enough that he manages to spot the main building of wherever he is, half of it being actually not submerged! And maybe he could use what little moonlight is filtered through the clouds to navigate but this is probably a reasonable situation in which to use the little flashlight attached to the hips of his shorts. Its battery is probably going to be something he'll want to save, but it should last long enough.

Also? It's fucking cold. Not having Zanarkand's constant weather and temperature control around sure makes being permanently shirtless somewhat more of a problem. A problem he never thought about before because, again, somehow he never thought of leaving Zanarkand.

(Would wearing a shirt be worse, if it's wet and cold and would stay wet and might risk hypothermia? He doesn't know.)

With the flashlight on, he dives into the water and starts swimming towards the main building. The water is also freezing, but the movement soon warms him up, and he practised underwater breathing so he doesn't need to come up for air and deal with the thermic shock. He can just stay submerged until he gets close enough to his destination. It's not the shortest of swims, but he's literally a high performing player of a sport that's played entirely underwater. This is very much something he's trained all his life for.

Eventually he gets to the building and swims back to the surface to better look for entrances. His flashlight is powerful enough that from this distance it illuminates most of it, and by following the architectural cues from the way it's shaped he has a guess for where the main entrance should be. And indeed, he dives back into the water and after a couple of false starts due to debris in his way finds the entrance. He swims through it and, as luck would have it, it seems like the "ground floor" of whatever this building used to be is elevated, with a flight of stairs leading from said entrance up and out of the water.

The mostly destroyed stairs are still sufficiently whole to lead him to the building's main chamber, which... is nothing like anything he's ever seen before. A circular room, its ceiling three stories up. The concept of stories makes sense here because it seems like there are side rooms with further stairs that lead up to more side rooms, all of them hanging over and looking into this open central chamber. The ceiling is not intact, but it's intact enough that the very center of the room has been completely spared from the rain.

It's a good place for a fire, if he can find the materials for it. Convenient, again. He hopes reality will continue to be convenient for him like that.

But before anything, he grabs shoes from within his bigger-on-the-inside bag, because walking barefoot around here is just begging to get him to cut himself on something and he does not want to deal with an actual wound in addition to being stranded in the middle of nowhere. He tries to shake his feet dry as well as he can, and wonders if the risk of hypothermia from wearing his sodden shorts is higher than the risk of tripping and falling naked onto sharp rocks as he puts his shoes on.

...also, while he's considering risks that Zanarkand would usually have protected him from, he grabs the sword again. This place might have fiends and even if he doesn't know how to use a sword it's better to have it than not. He'd rather have a gun but you can't win them all. This also decides the matter of the shorts—he does not want to be any more defenceless than he needs to be.

He really, really should've packed a shirt or something into his bag.

Tōkan walks through one of the side doors at random and starts exploring. His flashlight is definitely needed, here, as the moonlight has no way of getting to these side hallways and spiral stairs going up around the cylindrical building. He explores them methodically, trying to look for flint or maybe plants or old wooden furniture that isn't wet.

Except he's not sure what flint looks like or, more precisely, what properties a rock has to have to work as flint. He grabs some likely candidates, as well as some old and dried plants that he finds in vases. He doesn't grab all of them, mindful of any future people who might find themselves here somehow, and when he finds an old wooden dresser that he takes apart with his sword he only grabs half of the total wood there.

When he returns to the main room, still unmolested by any fiends, he starts trying to set a fire up: wood, thankfully dry, and the even drier leaves and branches that used to be decoration. Then he lays out every rock he found and starts testing them for ability to generate a spark.

His life turns out convenient again, and he gets a fire.

Tomorrow he will need to figure out how to feed himself. He has no idea how he'll do that but it's very unlikely he'll be able to do it tonight, while it's dark and stormy and cold and he can't properly see very far and gauge his options. And also he's just fucking exhausted, if his kaiju trip counted as sleep his body isn't acting like it and he'll have more success in the morning at quite literally anything he might think of trying.

So he strips naked, stretches his clothes out on the floor to dry, and then stretches himself out on the floor to dry. The sword is close to his hand in case he needs it, but he's starting to relax with the warmth from the fire chasing away his chills and worries.

He sleeps.

Tōkan doesn't sleep for very long.

He'll blame his failure to think about how the fire was definitely going to attract a fiend on the mental exhaustion. In hindsight, if anything was going to do it, it was that.

But he will only think about that later. What he thinks about now is that something woke him up, and he doesn't know what it was or if it was just a nightmare and an overactive imagination, but he reaches for the sword hilt a couple of inches away from his hand and tries to quietly look around for whatever it is his instincts are screaming at him about.

Then he rolls to his feet just in time to avoid being impaled by a fiend whose legs are blades. He doesn't have a lot of time to really pay attention to any other details of the fiend's anatomy, however, as it immediately leaps for him and he has to dodge again. He had ever seen a fiend before, Zanarkand used to make quite the spectacle when the occasional one appeared on its shores, but fighting one is entirely new and he is, uh, naked in more ways than one. Probably buying time and tiring the creature out is his best bet.

Fiend

...or not. He's not sure whether fiends actually get tired, and maybe he should be fighting? Maybe Auron knew something here.

Okay. Let's think about this. Uh, think about this while still dodging the fiend and trying not to get skewered.

A plan starts to form in his head. Or maybe this is best described as him noticing a pattern. He can run faster than the creature, despite its four limbs; it's sort of always teetering nearly off-balance, and it never really stops moving, as if it needs its momentum to stay up. However, its leaps are powerful enough to make up for it, and the only real way Tōkan has of avoiding a direct collision when the creature does that is by dodging, changing directions at the last second so it flies past him. And it's dextrous enough to be able to quickly regain its footing and go back on the offensive.

But not that quickly. Each time it leaps, it needs a few seconds to find its feet and resume chase.

Which looks like an opportunity.

He makes a sharp turn towards his clothes, lying on the floor next to the fire, and after he grabs them he immediately veers to the left and turns around to watch as the fiend flies past him. He stops running for a second to catch his breath, watching it, then says, "Come oooon, bet ya can't catch me!"

Sure. Taunting the monster is strategy, too.

It leaps, again, and this time Tōkan moves only a fraction of a second before predicted impact, but he leaves the clothes he'd been holding behind, in the air where the fiend will definitely collide with it and get itself into a tangled mess.

And it works. The momentum and the weird lack of coordination of the thing plus the shorts that are now on its face and entangled with its limbs give Tōkan enough of an opening to strike. He jumps with a "Hyaaaa!", holding the hilt of the sword with both hands, and strikes down onto the fiend.

(Rest in peace his shorts. There is no way they are surviving this encounter. It's a good thing his bigger-on-the-inside bag is not attached to them.)

The creature staggers back, and Tōkan presses the offensive, slashing this way and that, making sure to never allow it to regain its balance. It tries to block and slash at him, but he's finding in himself an intuition on how to avoid its parries and dodge its strikes.

Not all of them. He gets cut, a couple of times, shallow lines on one of his thighs and the side of his stomach, but he's definitely got the upper hand for now.

And then there's a fucking explosion somewhere behind him, and he jumps out of the way in surprise.

What now?

Now it seems like five people have blown through one of the walls of the building. All of them are wearing goggles or masks covering their eyes, as well as body suits that seem suitable for deep-sea diving.

Also, four of them have guns.

The girl in the lead—and the only one not holding any guns—examines the situation, and her eyes quickly lock onto the fiend that's trying to recover from Tōkan's assault. With a practised, fluid motion, she grabs two small disc-shaped devices from her belt and launches them in the direction of the fiend.

It tries to dodge, but the little discs seem to have their own propellers or, or something, and they course-correct mid-trajectory and attach themselves onto the creature.

And boom. The two localised (but powerful) explosions are enough to finish the fiend off, and it dissolves into flying wisps of light as it loses its ability to keep coherence.

"Shit," breathes Tōkan, letting himself lean against a large boulder he ended up next to. "Shit," he repeats, "thank you."

The four men spread around the room while the girl walks over to Tōkan, removing her goggles on the way. "You're welcome," she says simply. She stops a couple of feet away from Tōkan and folds her arms, examining him for a second before looking around at the mess.

Tōkan looks up again, still leaning against the boulder and holding onto his sword, and grins. "I would've probably managed, but," and he winces as he looks down at his freely-bleeding wounds. "Ow." He looks up at the girl again and says, "Where are my manners. I'm Tōkan."

"Nice to meet you, Tōkan. And sorry about this," she says, as she grabs a gun-like thing from within a metal backpack-like thing attached to her back. She doesn't give him time to react before she shoots, two small sticky things that remain attached to the gun by long, thin wires.

And as he realises he's about to be tased into unconsciousness he wonders how the hell his life got so weird.

When Tōkan wakes up again, the sky is still dark, but there are enough clouds that it could well be morning and he wouldn't be able to tell.

Also, his hands are bound behind his back and his feet are also bound together. He looks down at his wounds, or the place where they used to be, and sees only thin reddened skin there. These people probably gave him a Potion while he was unconscious, so they're... probably... not all that bad? He feels like knocking him unconscious was entirely unnecessary, though.

He seems to be... on a boat of some kind. The deck under him is hard metal, but his captors were kind enough to place a blanket between his bare skin and it. He looks up again, and sees two people holding guns watching him. The full-body suits are still present so he's not sure they're two of the people who found him but he thinks so.

Boat

One of them says something into a radio, and unless Tōkan hit his head really hard when he got tased he thinks that's a different language.

It had never occurred to him before that other languages might exist.

After a few seconds of a staring contest between the boy and his captors, a door into the ship proper opens and the girl from before walks out of it. She says something to the two men, and they lower their guns and relax their posture. Probably a commanding officer of some kind, even though she's visibly younger than they are.

She walks over to Tōkan and crouches down so she's eye level with him. "Sorry about that."

Also, now that she's up close, he can see that her pupils are shaped like spirals rather than the normal circular shape Tōkan is used to.