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 Azym says is "Motherfucker." before he's engulfed by Sin 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.

To wit: 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's probably somewhere that isn't Zanarkand, hanging onto the exposed parts of the partially submerged ruins of something with water in all directions.

...yeah 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. That can probably wait.

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.

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.)

The flashlight does work.

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 thermal 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.

The guesses prove accurate enough, and after a couple of false starts due to debris in his way he will be able to find the entrance. Once he swims through it, 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.

Azym 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. And there are a lot of rooms for him to explore.

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.

He will remain invested by friends as he does so.

So 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.

Azym 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 friend with blades for legs, apparently!

Not that he has 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.

...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 Azym 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 Azym 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.

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