Chapter Text
The sun hung fat and golden over Besaid, and the water was perfect.
Tidus skimmed across the shallows, bare feet kicking up white foam, the familiar weight of his Brotherhood balanced easy in one hand. The blade caught the light as he spun — a lazy, practiced arc — and he grinned at nothing in particular. Just the habit of it. The muscle memory of a body that had spent years learning to move like water.
The Aurochs were running drills further up the beach. He could hear Wakka calling out formations, barking corrections, laughing too loud at his own jokes. The sound of it settled something in Tidus's chest. This. *This* was what coming back felt like — not some grand moment, not a speech or a ceremony, just an ordinary afternoon on Besaid with sand between his toes and the smell of salt in the air.
Yuna was somewhere over the Moonflow with the Gullwings, chasing down a sphere lead that Rikku had apparently declared "totally unmissable, no arguments." He'd gotten a short message through a sphere relay that morning. *Back in a few days. Don't do anything stupid.* He'd sent back a thumbs up. She'd probably worry about that.
He flipped Brotherhood into a reverse grip and dropped into a low stance, letting the training rhythm take over. Slash, pivot, recover. The sand shifted under his boots, teaching his feet to compensate without thinking about it. He'd kept the sword close even through the Eternal Calm — old habit, and not an entirely unnecessary one. Wild fiends still wandered the island's interior.
He was mid-swing when the ocean changed.
The sound came first — a deep, resonant groan from somewhere beneath the seafloor, like the island itself exhaling. The water pulled back from the shore in a long, sucking retreat, exposing wet sand and stranded reef fish flapping in the sudden air. The Aurochs stopped shouting. The beach went quiet.
Then the wave came.
It rose from the horizon in a single dark wall, too fast, too *wrong* — not the rolling build of a natural swell but something that surged upward all at once, as if something massive had breached beneath the surface. Dark shapes rode the crest down onto the beach. They landed hard, scattering sand and foam, and then they were moving — toward the players, toward the village path, toward everything.
"Get back!" Tidus was already running.
He hit the first creature before he'd fully processed what it looked like — something between a fiend and nothing he had a name for, armored in shadow, limbs too long. Brotherhood cut clean and it dissolved, but two more took its place, and four behind those. The Aurochs were scattering. Wakka was shouting somewhere behind him. Tidus kept moving, kept swinging, buying space between the creatures and the retreating players.
*Come on. There's too many — I need to—*
He never finished the thought.
No warning. No shimmer, no sound, no sensation of falling or fading. One moment his boots were planted in the wet sand, Brotherhood raised, the noise of the beach all around him.
The next moment, he was simply gone.
The creatures surged forward into the gap he'd left. The beach had no one to stop them.