Live Wire

[Live Wire]

Dr. Matthews: How did you know what to do?

Theo: I didn't. I knew Annihilape's capabilities, and I knew what we had available and I knew how those things fit together tactically. But I've never planned a battle against something that could kill us before. The knowledge was there. I just had to trust it was right even though I couldn't remember where it came from or whether it had ever worked before.

---

Miyato came back with Ryuu at his side.

Not behind him. Not trailing at the old distance. Beside him, close enough that the space between them was a choice, and when Miyato stopped at the edge of the group Ryuu stopped too, which was not a thing Ryuu had done unprompted since Miyato received him three months ago.

Miyato looked at Theo.

"We've come to an understanding," he said. "A temporary one. Until we're out of this."

Theo looked at Ryuu.

Ryuu looked at the northern treeline with the attention of a Pokémon that had decided the situation was worth engaging with.

He updated Miyato on the plan quietly. Miyato listened. His jaw moved once but he didn't interrupt, and when Theo finished he nodded with the expression of someone who had understood and was choosing not to say everything he thought about it.

Victoria had been a ranger for six years and had planned operations under pressure before. She had coordinated responses to wild Pokémon incidents, route emergencies, and trainer rescues. She had worked with less.

She had not worked with a fourteen-year-old who had one badge and the tactical knowledge of someone three tiers above him and a red-haired boy from a lineage she had recognized from the moment she saw the cape, but had decided was not her business.

"Positions," she said.

Everyone moved.

The Drowzee spread to the perimeter as they had rehearsed, the ones who could withstand the proximity going to the closer positions, the rest to the outer ring. The Hypno took its place at the centre of the clearing, pendulum still, eyes closed, something that had committed to what came next. Staraptor dropped from the high root and landed at the front, wings settling, its eyes already on the northern treeline. Victoria moved to the front and center.

Gallade was far behind.

"When you're ready," she said.

The Hypno's eyes closed.

The barrier came down.

Victoria hit the beacon with her functional thumb. She heard Theo's click. She heard Miyato's. Three signals going out simultaneously into the open air, three confirmation lights blinking, three calls for support moving toward the ranger station.

The air in the clearing changed immediately.

Theo felt it the moment the barrier dropped.

Not physically. The air didn't shift, the temperature didn't change, but something in the pressure of the clearing released, and the forest came back in around them with the sounds and the weight he'd been tracking for days. His hand was on Zeus's Pokéball. Jupiter was on his shoulder, absolutely still, watching and waiting.

He knew what was coming.

Knowing didn't make him less afraid.

It just meant he understood exactly what they were about to face.

Then it appeared.

Not through the trees. It was simply there, at the northern edge of the clearing, arrived before anything that size should have been able to arrive.

Victoria had seen it from a distance before Gallade went down and had carried the image of it through everything since.

Seeing it again was different from remembering it.

It was enormous. Not Gyarados enormous, not a scale that removed it from the immediate world, but enormous in the way of something that occupied more space than its physical dimensions accounted for. The aura of it was ghastly in the old sense of the word, a presence that registered on the part of the nervous system that existed before language. The air around it pressed against the chest from the inside.

It opened its mouth.

The scream that came out was not a battle cry. It was the sound of something that had been in full rage for days and had found a target and intended to finish what it had been building toward since the barrier came down. Every Pokémon in the clearing responded before any of them had really thought about it. The Drowzee on the inner ring pressed back a fraction. Kiri made a sound against Miyato's neck. Zeus's ears went flat and came back up.

Miyato looked at Theo.

Theo was looking at the Annihilape.

The Hypno's communication moved through the clearing without sound, direction distributed through the psychic link to every Pokémon that could receive it, positions and angles arriving behind eyes rather than in ears. Victoria felt it land and watched her people respond.

"Ryuu."

Haze came off Ryuu in a slow rolling wave that crossed the clearing and washed over everything in it. The stat changes on the field cleared to nothing; the battlefield leveled before the engagement had properly started. Kiri followed without being told, Smokescreen crossing to the right, a second to the left, overlapping layers building until the Annihilape's sightlines were compromised and the clearing had become a different kind of space.

The Annihilape looked at the smoke and moved.

Staraptor was already crossing when the Annihilape committed, the Hypno's information keeping it ahead of the engagement, and Intimidate rolled out from the approach, and Annihilape's attack rose in response, Defiant converting the debuff the moment it landed. Then Ryuu pushed Haze again, and the boost vanished the moment it arrived.

Victoria watched the Annihilape process this.

The half-second of stillness. Something that hadn't been expected.

Staraptor kept moving. Not attacking. Drawing it. The Protect came up when Annihilape committed, and the blow deflected off the barrier. Staraptor banked sideways and the smoke covered while it repositioned, and the Hypno distributed the new position through the link before the Annihilape had finished tracking where Staraptor had gone.

Miyato watched from the far edge of the clearing with Kiri on his shoulder and Ryuu beside him and his jaw set. He was reading the Annihilape the way he had been reading it since it appeared. Looking for the thing that would make the plan not work. Finding several candidates and filing them in order of likelihood.

The Phantom Force started.

Victoria had been watching for it. The moment the Annihilape began to phase she called it through the Hypno's link and the Drowzee on the inner ring moved together. Not one at a time. All eleven of them, Disable coming off the coven simultaneously in a directed barrage at the fading form.

Disable did not work on opponents too strong for it.

However, there were eleven Drowzee.

The Disable held.

Annihilape came back into the visible world with the move locked out and what it did with that information was not adapt. It went further. The rage that had been past full for days found another gear.

Outrage.

Victoria braced.

The Dragon energy came off it in a wave that the smoke did nothing to slow. Outrage didn't need a target. It filled the space it found. Staraptor was already moving, reading the Hypno's directions and staying ahead of where the attack landed, and the Outrage swept through space twice. On the third pass, the Annihilape stopped swinging at where Staraptor had been and looked for where it was instead, but it couldn't find it in the smoke.


But Staraptor could not dodge everything.

The grab happened fast, faster than anything that size should have moved, and the slam into the ground sent debris flying through the air. Staraptor hit the earth and Victoria's chest pulled tight, the dread of watching something you'd raised go down hard.

Annihilape stood over it with Drain Punch, loading in its fist and the clearing understood what that meant before anyone could do anything.

Victoria looked at the Hypno.

The pendulum moved once. Side to side.

Not yet.

She raised Staraptor's Pokéball.

Then Mr Glutton moved.

He was the oldest Drowzee in the coven and the slowest, but the Grass Knot came from him at a speed that almost didn't matter. Annihilape's fist was descending when the move caught low and precise, binding the leg in the fraction of a second before the Drain Punch completed.

One half second.

The angle was everything. The leg gave and Annihilape went sideways, and the Drain Punch hit the ground instead of Staraptor. The earth took the impact and a section of the clearing floor did not survive the trade.

Staraptor wrenched free.

It got into the air and Victoria watched it and knew from the way the wings were working that it was done. Running on what was left. She looked at the Hypno.

The pendulum was still moving. Gallade behind the Haze line still preparing.

Not yet.

The Annihilape was on one knee, the momentum of the trip still resolving, and it was the stillest it had been since the barrier came down. Zeus and Jupiter had been holding at the far edge of the clearing, and this was what Theo had told them to wait for.

Two Thunder Waves crossed the clearing simultaneously.

They found the Annihilape on one knee, and the paralysis from both sources arrived at the same moment and settled into it before it could generate the movement needed to shake either off.

And then it pushed through it.

The Thunder Wave slowed it. It did not stop it. It crossed the remaining distance with its legs fighting its own nervous system and Rage Fist loading heavier than it had been at any point in the battle and the clearing understood what was coming.

Staraptor came off the root.
She had nothing left. Victoria had known that since the slam, and Staraptor knew it too.

Not struggling for lift this time. Wings tucked, body angled, diving directly at the Annihilape with everything she had left in her. It looked like Brave Bird. It looked like a decision.

Annihilape met the charge without moving. The Rage Fist came up and connected with Staraptor mid-dive, full force, every hit from the entire battle sitting in that one weapon.

Victoria had the Pokéball raised before the impact was completed.

The beam caught Staraptor before she hit the ground.

The clearing went very still.

Annihilape's ghostly aura raged wildly as Victoria recalled her partner. The paralysis still working in it. Rage Fist heavier than at the start of the fight, the compounding damage from every hit it had absorbed since this began sitting in that one weapon. It looked at the rest of the clearing.

At Zeus and Jupiter.

At Miyato and Kiri and Ryuu.

At the Drowzee on the inner ring.

At Theo.

Theo's hand was on his Pokéball.

Victoria said nothing.

Annihilape took one step.

"Attack!" Victoria called. "Everyone, now!"

The Drowzee on the inner ring hesitated.

One full second, twelve sets of eyes flickering between Victoria and the Annihilape, the plan running in all of them and the problem with this instruction running louder. Rage Fist. Every hit makes the next one worse. They had built the entire plan around not feeding it.

The Annihilape took another step.

"Now!" Victoria said.

They moved.

Twelve Drowzee, Confusion coming off the coven in a directed wave that hit the Annihilape from every angle simultaneously. The psychic energy from twelve working in concert was not nothing. Against a weaker opponent, it would have been significant.
The Annihilape walked through it. The Confusion wave crested and broke and Annihilape came out the other side still standing, Rage Fist heavier than it had been at any point in the battle.


Zeus stepped forward.

Jupiter stepped forward.

Miyato's hand found his Pokéball, fingers unsteady. He put the command through anyway. Kiri dropped from his shoulder, hit the ground, and looked up at the Annihilape without moving back.

Ryuu was already moving.

No instruction. No command. He moved to the front line beside Zeus and Jupiter and Kiri and stood there with the full committed attention he had withheld from everything since Miyato received him and had decided to partake for now.

Theo looked at Victoria.

Victoria was looking at the Hypno.

The pendulum had stopped.

The eyes were bright and steady and the communication that came through the psychic connection was not words. Just readiness, full, something that had built everything it had into one moment and was telling her the moment was here.

The Annihilape took one more step.

"Now," she said.

The Hypno did something.

She had built the plan around a capability that no Hypno on record could demonstrate. She had done this because the tactical logic was sound and because she had looked at this particular Hypno and formed an assessment that it was not like Hypno on record.

She was still surprised when it worked.

Gallade and Hypno appeared behind the Annihilape.

Not traversed. Not ran. There. Somewhere else and then here, in the space between moments.

Annihilape's reflexes were extraordinary.

It turned.

The paralysis from the Thunder Wave chose that moment to fire.

The window was small. Gallade had it and used it and Psycho Cut came off its hand with everything Sharpness did to slicing moves and everything that stacking behind the Haze line had built into it, Focus Energy and Swords Dance maxed and finding an Annihilape that had turned toward it but had not finished turning.

The super-effective hit connected.

Underneath the impact was a sharp, clean crack. Distinct from everything else the battle had produced. The sound that meant one thing and meant it clearly.

Victoria had been a ranger for six years. She had seen significant damage in battles that had gone beyond training. She had not seen a hit move something the size of Annihilape the way this one did.

The Psycho Cut carried Annihilape across the clearing and into the tree line with a force the strength differential between Gallade and an Elite rank Pokemon should not have permitted. Annihilape hit the trees. One of them did not stay standing.

The clearing was silent.

Then Miyato made a sound somewhere behind her.

Then someone else.

The recognition beginning to come through in stages —

The scream came from the trees before anyone had finished feeling relief.

A different scream.

Not the scream of something that had found a target. The scream of something that had absorbed a critical hit at full power, in a fight that had been feeding its Rage Fist since it began, and was still here. Still here and worse than before. The sound of something that had been pushed past what should have been its limit and had found that its limit was further out than anyone had accounted for.

Annihilape came out of the trees.

It came out faster than it went in.

The Disable had run its course while it was in the trees.

It was there, and then it wasn't.

Gallade had half a second to register what was happening and did not have half a second to respond to it.

The Rage Fist carried every hit from every Pokemon across the entire battle, the Confusion waves, the Psycho Cut, Grass Knot, Staraptor, all of it . in one weapon, and it found Gallade before Gallade could clear the space.

Gallade went down and formed a crater in the floor below as rocks and dust kicked up across the clearing

Victoria's hand was already on the Pokéball. She recalled it. No words. Just the motion of someone who understood that the calculation had just changed and was already looking for the next calculation.

The clearing understood what had just happened before anyone said it.

Then the Annihilape's aura unfurled.

Not a move. Not a status condition. Just the presence of it, fully unchecked now, broadcasting outward from something that had been fed and sustained and refused for days and had finally reached the other side of refusal.

The wrongness that had been in the air since it first appeared found a new register.

Every Pokémon in the clearing felt it simultaneously.

The Drowzee stopped moving. All twelve. They didn't run, didn't scatter. Just pressed back, eyes wide, the psychic link flooding with something that was not a plan.

Kiri made a sound as it stepped back to Miayato.

Ryuu's tail went still.

Zeus's ears were flat against his head.

Jupiter had moved back to Theo without noticing and was pressed against him.

Theo's hands were not still.

He was running exits and finding none.

He had built everything around Gallade. Every piece of the setup; the paralysis, Haze, Disable and Teleport, had been to create a window for Gallade. The window had worked. The hit had landed. The hit had even been a critical.

And it had gotten up.

No version of his knowledge bridged this gap. He knew type matchups and move mechanics and ability interactions and strategic frameworks and none of it answered what happened when everything correct had been done and the thing in front of you had simply decided that what was correct was not enough.

He looked at Annihilape standing in the clearing where Gallade had been.

Knowledge failed here. Strategy failed here. He understood now, with complete clarity, that understanding what something was capable of and having the tools to match it were two different things, and he had only ever had one of those.

The Hypno stepped forward.

Not fast. Not with any particular ceremony. One step, pendulum still, eyes open and bright. The communication that came through the link arrived in Victoria and Theo at the same moment.

Go. Take the trainers and the coven and go. I will buy what time I can.

"Wait--!" Victoria said.

The Hypno's eyes held hers for a moment
It teleported.

Not to escape. To the far side of the clearing, between the Annihilape and the tree line where the coven was. Placing itself. The Psychic came off it immediately, not the stacked precision of the battle plan, just the Hypno giving everything it had right now, full and immediate, psychic force finding the Annihilape with everything in it.

The Annihilape took it and came through it.

The Hypno teleported again. Repositioned. Refused to stand still, refused to give it a fixed target. Psychic again. The attack found the Annihilape mid-step and pushed it back and the Hypno was already somewhere else.

It was working.

For four exchanges, it was working.

On the fifth, the Annihilape had tracked the intervals.
The grip closed around Hypno's neck before the teleport could complete.

The Hypno couldn't move.

The clearing held. Nobody had anything left. The Drowzee were pressed against the perimeter. Theo and Miyato stood with their Pokémon in total stillness. The Annihilape stood in the center of what remained and the wrongness in the air had nowhere left to go.

Then a voice cut through the tree line.

"Air Slash!"

The compressed blade came off a Pidgeot's wings fast and clean and hit before anyone in the clearing had processed where the voice had come from. The Annihilape flinched. One sharp involuntary jerk, the grip opening for just a second.

Hypno dropped free and teleported.

Gone before it hit the ground.

A Ranger came through the canopy on his Pidgeot, already calling his next move, and behind him two Rangers broke through the tree line. One of them was on a Fearow, moving fast, and as the Fearow banked hard, the ranger stood in the saddle and jumped off.

The Fearow spun into Drill Peck.

The attack caught Annihilape square and the rotational force carried it backward, the great body tumbling across the clearing floor and into the root system at the far edge. Trees shuddered with the impact.

Everyone in the clearing was already staring.

Annihilape came back to its feet.

The scream it released was not a retreat. It was a declaration. It turned toward the rangers, Rage Fist loading, the full weight of everything it had absorbed across this battle sitting in that weapon, and it stepped forward.

The paralysis from the Thunder Waves fired.

Half a second. Its legs fighting its own nervous system.

"Hurricanes!" The lead Ranger called. "Both of you! Now!"

Two Pidgeots released simultaneously.

The wind that came off them was like a weather event. The Hurricanes hit the clearing from both angles and merged into something that nobody standing in it had words for. Theo's arm came up across his face before he knew he was doing it. Miyato turned his shoulder into it and bent forward. The Drowzee pressed against the earth. Even Victoria, on the ground with her arm already compromised, had to drive her functional hand into the soil.

The Annihilape went back.

Not stumbling. Flying. Both Hurricanes found it at the same moment and the combined force carried it into the tree line with a crack that reached the far edge of the clearing.

The wind died.

The clearing was still.

Then Annihilape came back out of the trees.

Slower. The legs carrying it differently. The presence still wrong, the rage still broadcasting, but the body had finally found the floor of what it could absorb.

It screamed once more.

The rangers tensed. Yusuke's Pidgeot's wings were already rising.

Annihilape's legs gave.

One knee. The other. Then the great body fell, and the presence diminished as it landed, the ghastly quality of the air around it reducing by degrees as the rage that had sustained it for days finally ran out of body to sustain.

Victoria threw the Ranger Ball.

It hit. Caught. The sequence completed, and the ball went still and the clearing was very still around it.

Then Victoria sat down because her arm had been in severe pain for the last three hours and the decisions she had been making about not addressing that were no longer holding.

One of the Rangers landed beside her. His Pidgeot folded its wings.

He looked at the Ranger Ball. At the Hypno and the Drowzee. At Staraptor's Pokéball on Victoria's belt. At Theo and Miyato.

"Victoria," he said. "What exactly happened here?"

"I'll brief you, Yusuke," she said. "Get me something for this arm first."

Yusuke was already signaling the other rangers.

Theo looked at the Ranger Ball in Victoria's hand.

"We almost had it," he said. Honest, not wounded.

Victoria looked at it too. "You almost had it," she agreed. She said it the way she said things that were simply true. "The plan was good. Execution was good. Annihilape just had more in it than any of us budgeted for." She glanced at him sideways. "Don't take it personally. There are things in the world that don't go down because you're clever at them. Sometimes you just need more firepower."

"The Hypno and Gallade—"

"Did what they could. So did you." She turned the ball over in her functional hand. "The abilities. The Phantom Force call. The Thunder Wave timing. That was good work. "A pause. "None of us died. That's a result, with what was in this clearing."

Theo said nothing.

"Where does a fourteen-year-old with one badge get that depth of knowledge?" she said.

He looked at his boots. "I don't know."

Victoria looked at him for a moment.

"Not my business," she said. "The more I know, the more I write in the report, and the report is already going to be a bother."

Miyato made a sound from behind them that might have been a laugh.

Victoria looked over her shoulder at him.

"Dragon Clan," she said.

Miyato went very still.

"The cape," Victoria said pleasantly. "I grew up in Mahogany Town. Spare me." She looked back at the tree line. "Not my business. Not going in the report. What is going in the report is that two trainers contributed significantly to the resolution of a serious wildlife incident and conducted themselves with more sense than most of the adults I work with." She paused. "You can quote me on that."

Theo looked at his boots.

"You're very direct," he said.

"Complaining about it?" Victoria said.

"No," he said.

"Good."

Yusuke crouched beside her and looked at her arm and his expression did something she appreciated him not saying out loud.

"The short version," she said, "is that there's an Annihilape in that ball that has been in a full rage state for days. My Pokémon needs medical attention immediately, and these two," she looked at Theo and Miyato, "need to be escorted back to the outpost and their sponsors contacted."

Yusuke looked at Theo.

Theo looked back.

Yusuke looked at Miyato.

Miyato was standing with Kiri on his shoulder and Ryuu beside him, very still, with the expression of someone who had spent everything they had and was running the calculation of what remained.

Yusuke looked at Victoria.

"You're going to need to brief me in detail," he said.

"I know," she said. "Arm first."

---

Miyato sat down.

Not gradually. He was standing and then he was on the floor of the clearing with his back against the great tree's root and his legs out in front of him and Kiri in his lap and the expression of someone whose body had made a decision without consulting him.

He was shaking. Not the fear-shaking from earlier. Something with a different quality, the full-body tremor of something that had been held under pressure for a long time and released.

His mouth was doing something that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite anything else.

"We did that," he said. To Kiri. To no one in particular. "We actually did that."

Theo looked at him.

Something happened that he had not expected.

It started in his chest and came up through him and arrived on his face before he had decided what to do with it. Not the controlled version. Not the corner of the mouth movement he had learned to manage. The real kind, coming out of him the way things came out when they had been kept somewhere too long. It lasted longer than he expected and had more in it than he could account for. When it finished, he was standing in the clearing with Miyato looking up at him from the floor. Zeus pressed against his left leg. Jupiter on his shoulder with the smug satisfaction of a Pokémon that had never doubted the outcome.

Miyato's not-quite-a-smile resolved into the real thing.

"Yeah," he said.

Theo looked at the clearing. At the great tree and the coven. At Victoria, being helped up by Yusuke.

His chest had a quality to it he recognised.

Not the anxiety from the dock. Not the noise he had been managing. The other thing. The thing that had been in the gym when it was right, at the table with the pancakes and the people who had made room without discussing it.

Not being alone in a thing.

He looked at Jupiter.

Jupiter looked back with the complete confidence of something that had never doubted the outcome.

Zeus pressed against his leg once.

Theo put his hand on Zeus's back and stood in the clearing, letting himself feel it.

All of it.

 

[Live Wire]

Dr. Matthews: What does safety feel like after a situation like that?

Theo: Strange. We reached the ranger outpost and I should have relaxed but I didn't for hours. My jaw stayed tight, my hand kept going to my Poké Balls even though nothing was wrong. It's like my body didn't believe we'd made it. I know what adrenaline does physiologically. I know the stress response cycle. Knowing didn't make it stop faster.

---

The ranger outpost was a single-storey building at the northern end of a cleared section off the maintained path, stone-and-wood construction with the look of something built to outlast the people who used it rather than impress them. A common room with a long table and mismatched chairs. A small kitchen area behind a counter. A corridor running to the back with bunk rooms for travellers, two beds each, wool blankets folded at the foot. A duty room where the on-call ranger was working through paperwork. A medical room where Victoria had been since they arrived.

Theo stood in the common room with his bag on the floor and Zeus, Jupiter and Kiri in various stages of introduction to the new space.

Jupiter located the kitchen area within forty seconds of entry, moved behind the counter, opened a lower cabinet, assessed the contents and closed it again with the expression of a Pokémon that had conducted a survey and formed preliminary conclusions. He then went back to Theo's side and looked at him.

"I know," Theo said.

Zeus had gone to the corridor and was moving along it methodically, nose working, the same perimeter assessment he had done on the route applied to the enclosed space with the same unhurried thoroughness.

Kiri was on Miyato's shoulder investigating the noticeboard with both fins extended toward the paper.

The on-duty ranger whose name was Pemba had been doing outpost overnight shifts for three years and had seen travellers arrive in various states, and had thought he had a comprehensive picture of what an eventful evening looked like.

He reconsidered this while watching a fifteen-year-old with a Horsea on his shoulder go through the outpost kitchen's supplies with the focused efficiency of someone conducting a professional assessment.

"You don't have to," Pemba said.

"I want to," Miyato said. He had found the dried goods shelf and was making decisions. "The rations you have here are —" He stopped. "They're functional," he said, charitably.

Pemba looked at the rations.

"Right," he said.

What came out of the outpost kitchen twenty minutes later used the same ingredients that Pemba had been preparing in various functional combinations for three years and produced results he had not previously associated with those ingredients. Miyato moved through the process with the particular ease he had when he was doing what he was best at.

The on-duty ranger ate his portion in silence.

Jupiter had positioned himself at the end of the table earliest and had communicated his requirements through his attention toward the section of the counter where the pancake mix lived. Miyato had found it and obliged without being asked, which Jupiter accepted with the grace of someone whose expectations had been confirmed rather than exceeded.

Zeus ate his dinner with the methodical quiet he brought to everything.

Kiri ate from Miyato's plate since she had decided this was the arrangement.

Ryuu accepted a small amount of food when Miyato put it on the floor near the door. He did not acknowledge him but the bowl was empty when Miyato checked it.

Miyato noted this and said nothing.

They were still at the table when Miyato set his cup down and looked at the surface of it for a moment.
"I should tell you something," he said.

Theo looked at him.

"I'm scared of bugs," Miyato said.

Theo waited.

Miyato turned his cup around in his hands. "That's — I mean, that's true. That's a real thing. But it wasn't — I didn't tell you because of that. I told you because —" He stopped. His jaw moved. "I should have told you earlier. About the clan."

Theo said nothing.

"The Dragon Clan of Blackthorn," Miyato said. He was looking at his cup. "The cape. The Dratini as a starter. I was — I wasn't trying to deceive you, I just —" He stopped again. "I'm not exactly what the name suggests and I didn't want to —" He looked up. "I'm sorry."

Theo looked at him.

"I know," he said.

Miyato went still.

"The cape and hair," Theo said.

"How long?"

"Since you said your name."

Miyato looked at him for a moment.

"And you didn't say anything," he said.

"You were getting to it," Theo said.

Miyato pressed his hands flat on the table. He looked at the cup again.

"I'm related to Lance," he said.

"I assumed," Theo said. "How?"

Miyato was quiet for a moment. "He's family," he said. It wasn't an evasion exactly. More like the boundary of what he was prepared to say right now.

Theo accepted it without pushing.

"I didn't know that this journey would be — I didn't know it would go like today went," Miyato said quietly. "I wasn't ready for it."

He said it the way people said things that were true and had other things behind them that they weren't saying. Theo heard the other things without being able to name them. He didn't try.

"No one is ready for an Annihilape in a forest" Theo said.

Miyato's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something adjacent.

"No," he agreed.

---

Theo's phone rang while Miyato was in the corridor bathroom.

He answered it and all four of them were already there.

"Theo." That was Kadan. Immediately. The tone of someone who had been waiting to ask and was not going to delay. "Are you injured?"

"No," Theo said.

"Your team," Kadan said.

"Fine.."

"And the situation is resolved."

"The Annihilape is captured. Victoria the ranger caught it."

"— THEO!" That was Kalea, who had apparently been exercising restraint and had run out of it. "Surge called us and said your beacon went off and we had no idea what was happening and I have been —"

"I'm fine," Theo said.

"You went OFF ROUTE. In unmanaged territory. With a wild Annihilape—"

"It's resolved," Theo said. "I'll tell you everything."

He told them everything.

He did not abbreviate it or manage it the way he would have managed it with strangers. He told them about the Gyarados, the kids, getting separated, the circles, the beacon failing, the Hypno and the coven, Victoria, the barrier, the plan. He told them about Miyato and what Miyato had contributed without going into who Miyato was.

The silence when he finished had the quality of four people processing simultaneously.

"The Gallade behind the haze line," Kadan said. His voice had a quality Theo hadn't heard from him directed at himself before. "The Swords Dance maintaining through the haze effect because of the positioning."

"Victoria planned it," Theo said.

"You gave her the pieces," Kadan said. "The abilities read. The Phantom Force identification. The Rage Fist warning. Without those the plan has nothing to build on." A pause. "What I taught you about ability interactions. You applied it under pressure against an Elite rank Pokemon."

Theo said nothing.

"I'm —" Kadan started. Stopped. Started again. "That's good, Theo. That's genuinely good."

Theo looked at the wall.

Dale's voice came in. "You know what they say about trainers whose beacons go off on day two of their first circuit."

"What," Theo said.

"They're electrically charged." A beat. "Get it. Because—"

"Dale," Kalea said.

"I'm just saying the journey has started."

Kalea said. "Who is this Miyato?"

"Someone I met on the route," Theo said. "He helped."

"He," Kalea said. "Is he—"

"Kalea," Kadan said.

"I'm just asking."

Theo looked at the ceiling.

"He's good at cooking," Theo said. "That's what I know."

---

He was at the table with the dimensional bag open when Miyato came back and stopped in the doorway.

Theo had the egg out.

It sat in his hands in the outpost light with the same warmth it always had, the iridescent markings catching the generator light differently than they caught daylight, and Miyato looked at it from the doorway with an expression Theo hadn't seen from him before.

"Can I?" Miyato said.

Theo held it out.

Miyato came to the table, sat and took the egg carefully in both hands and held it. He was quiet for a moment. His eyes were focused but in a way where he wasn't paying attention to something that wasn't sound or sight.

"Dragon energy," he said.

Theo looked at the egg.

"Dragon Clan," Miyato said. "We're sensitive to it. There's a signature—" He turned the egg slightly. "It's not a standard signature. It's not any dragon type I've encountered." He looked up at Theo. "What is it?"

"I don't know," Theo said. He meant it.

Miyato looked at the egg again.

"It's strong," he said. "For an egg." He turned it once more. "And it's mixed with something else. Something I can't identify either."

They both looked at it.

The egg was warm, and the markings caught the light and offered nothing further on the subject.

Theo took it back and settled it in the bag's compartment and closed the seal.

Neither of them said anything about it for a while.

Later, Theo was reading the PokéNav's route notes for the next section when Miyato came out of the bunk room and set something on the table with the quiet efficiency of someone completing a routine.

Several things.

A surprising number of things, given the size of the bag they had come out of. Small containers, a few larger ones, arranged in a specific order. Miyato sat down and began working through them with the focused calm he brought to cooking, which was to say the particular ease of someone doing something they were good at.

He was aware Theo was looking.

He did not look back for a moment.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing," Theo said.

"It's a routine," Miyato said. His ears had gone pink. "Dragon Clan culture places emphasis on—" He stopped. "I've had it since I was twelve," he said, which was more honest. "It's just a routine."

Theo looked at the array of products.

"What's the order for?" he said.

Miyato looked at him. "The order?"

"You laid them out in a specific sequence."

Miyato's expression did something. The pink was still there but underneath it something else, someone discovering that a person they'd assumed wasn't paying attention had been paying attention the whole time.

"There's an application order," he said. "You have to layer them correctly or they don't work." He looked at the products. "Most people ask what they are."

"I can see what they are," Theo replied.

He started explaining.

The conversation went on for a while. Theo asked questions that were curious and real. Miyato answered them, his ears pink for approximately the first four minutes, then not. By the time they moved on to something else the table had the comfortable quality of people who had found an unexpected shared rhythm.

Later that night, Theo pulled out the Pokédex Oak had sent. He'd been meaning to properly explore it since receiving it, but between training and the journey north, he hadn't had the chance.

The device was sleek. Deeper red than standard issue, with Oak's signature on the back. He opened it, started browsing through the database.

The information was... extensive.

He pulled up Electrike. Not just basic stats and typing, complete movepool breakdowns. Every move and TM compatibility. Habitat data across multiple regions. Breeding groups. Ability development timelines.

He switched to Dratini. Same thing. Migration patterns for wild populations. Historical data going back decades. Cross-references with other Dragon-types.

"Is that—" Miyato's voice cracked. "Is that an Oak Dex?"

Theo looked up. Miyato was staring at the device in his hands like Theo was casually holding a legendary Pokémon.

"Yeah. Oak sent it after watching my gym battle."

"That's—" Miyato's hands came up toward his face, stopped halfway. "Theo, that's—do you know what that IS?"

"A Pokédex. Oak gives them to starting trainers every year in Kanto. The professors do it in every region."

"No." Miyato sat down on his bed heavily. "No, that's not—that's not a regular Pokédex. That's the Oak Dex. The actual Oak Dex."

Theo looked at the device in his hands. Back to Miyato.

"There's a difference?"

"There's a HUGE difference!" Miyato's voice went up. "Oak gives out regular Pokédexes, yes, but the Oak Dex—the one you're holding—he only gives those to trainers he sees real potential in. Exceptional potential."

Miyato's hands were shaking slightly. "There are maybe thirty of them active worldwide. Maybe. The exact number isn't known because Oak doesn't announce it, but it's rumored he gives them to Champions and some Elite Four members who contribute to research."

Theo looked at the Pokédex again. It looked... normal to him.

"It's got complete data from all regions," Miyato continued, words tumbling out faster. "Not just Kanto. Every region. Full movepools including unreleased combinations. Real-time updates from Oak's research network. It connects directly to his lab. You can query him about Pokemon nobody else has documentation on."

He leaned forward. "I recognized it because I saw Lance's a little while back. Most people wouldn't know what they're looking at, but—Theo, that's not something regular trainers get. That is something potential champions carry."

Miyato paused, then continued. "The most famous Oak Dex holder—he completed the entire Kanto circuit in one year. Destroyed Team Rocket's operations. Won both the rookie tournament and the main tournament in the same season. Then he challenged the Elite Four and the Champion and won. Became Champion himself, though he only held the title for a very short time before—"

"You mean Red," Theo said.

"Yes, Red, no one knows where he is now," Miyato said softly. "He just... disappeared. Some people say he's still training somewhere. Others think he's doing research for Oak. No one's seen him in a while."

Mt. Silver, Theo thought. But he didn't say it out loud. Didn't know how he knew it or why the name of a mountain came to him with such certainty.

Theo looked at the device. The deep red casing. Oak's signature on the back.

He knew what a Pokédex was. Knew Oak was the foremost Pokémon researcher in Kanto, maybe the world. Knew the professors gave them out to catalog Pokémon for research purposes.

But he hadn't known there were two kinds. Hadn't known this one was special.

"I didn't realize," he said.

"Most people wouldn't," Miyato said. He was still staring at it. "Most people have never seen one."

Theo closed the Pokédex carefully. Oak had seen something in him. Something worth giving him a tool that apparently only Champions carried.

He didn't know if he deserved it.

But he'd make sure he earned it.

---

Victoria appeared in the doorway at half past nine.

Her arm was properly bandaged, the ranger station's medical supplies having done what they were there to do. Staraptor was behind her. She looked at the outpost common room with the expression of someone noting that things were as they should be.

"Still awake," she said.

"Yes," Theo said.

"Good." She produced two envelopes from her jacket and held them out. "Contribution to a resolved wildlife incident involving civilian trainers. Standard protocol. Sign the form inside and keep the rest."

Theo took his. Miyato took his.

Victoria looked at Jupiter.

Jupiter had pancake syrup on the side of his face and regarded her with complete dignity.

"Don't spend it all on pancakes," she said.

She looked at the room once more. At Ryuu near the door, still there, not inside but not outside either.

"Good instinct on the Haze sequencing," she said to Miyato. "That was yours."

Miyato's chin came up slightly.

"And you," she said, to Theo. "I've been a ranger for six years. What a bother you were to have in this situation."

Theo looked at her.

"An exceptionally useful bother," she said. "Get some sleep."

She left before it could become anything more than that.

Theo was almost asleep when something awoke him.

Not something. Jupiter.

He opened his eyes. Jupiter was sitting on the floor between the two beds with a paper cup from the outpost kitchen in front of him. The paper cup had been there when they came in. Jupiter had positioned himself in front of it at some point after the lights were lowered and was now looking at it with the most focused attention Theo had seen from him outside of a battle.

His cheeks were not sparking.

That was the thing. Jupiter's natural state involved electricity, the low ambient discharge that had been present since Theo first met him in the gym at three in the morning. Right now there was none. Whatever Jupiter was trying to do with the paper cup it was not electric in nature.

The cup did not move.

Jupiter's eyes tightened incrementally.

The cup remained stationary.

"What are you doing?" Theo said quietly.

Jupiter looked at him. Then back at the cup. Then at Theo again with the expression of a Pokémon, conveying that the situation was under control and did not require commentary.

Theo thought about the coven. About the moment they were leaving, the rangers moving through with their assessments and Victoria being helped to the outpost by Yusuke, and the Hypno standing at the edge of the great tree's root system.

It had not approached Theo.

It had approached Jupiter.

---

The Hypno had come to Jupiter directly, which was unusual enough that Theo had noticed and stayed close. The pendulum had slowed and the meaning had arrived not behind Theo's eyes but with the quality of something directed at Jupiter, not him, and Jupiter had gone still in the specific way he went still when something had his complete attention.

The Hypno had taken Jupiter to the side, literally, two meters from the group, and had done something that Theo could not fully see. Jupiter had sat and the Hypno's pendulum had moved and the communication between them had been directed and private in the way that the Hypno's communication with Theo had never been.

They had been like that for four minutes.

Jupiter had come back like he had been given new information and was in the process of storing it.

He had not told Theo anything about it.

Theo had not asked.

---

He watched Jupiter stare at the paper cup.

The cup sat there.

Jupiter's ears were slightly forward and his expression had the intensity of genuine effort, not the smug confidence he brought to things he already knew how to do. This was different. This was something at the edge of his reach, possibly past the edge, possibly not, and Jupiter was not the kind of Pokémon who accepted "possibly not" without investigation.

The cup moved.

Not much. A fraction of an inch, sideways, and Jupiter exhaled in the way of something that had spent significant effort on a small result and was assessing whether the result justified the effort.

He looked at Theo.

Theo looked at the cup. At Jupiter. At the cup again.

However, he was too tired to think of the implications.

"Okay," he said, very quietly.

Jupiter's cheeks sparked once with the satisfaction of a Pokemon that had been keeping something to itself and had now shown it to the right person at the right time.

He climbed up to his usual position near Theo's shoulder and closed his eyes and the paper cup sat on the floor in the dim room and did not move again.

Theo stared at the ceiling for a while.

Then he went to sleep.

---

Two figures entered Route 6 from the south at the Vermilion gate.

They came on foot. Trainer bags. The clothes of people who had left somewhere difficult and were moving toward somewhere quieter, which was what most people coming through that gate were wearing this season.

The ranger marker logged their entry the way it logged all entries. Two trainers, adult, heading north.

Neither of them looked at the marker as they passed it.

The taller one looked at the route ahead. Not reading a map. Not checking a PokéNav. Just looking north the way someone looked at a direction when the direction was the only information they had.

"Last confirmed here," they said.

"Weeks ago," the other said.

"Still the last confirmed."

The other looked at the route guide board. At the notation about the incident. At the distance marker to Saffron City.

"The circuit goes north from here,"

They started walking.

The route was quiet around them. The maintenance lights at their intervals. The grass dark on either side. The night sounds of things had returned to normal.

They were following a lead.

That was all it was.

But it was the best lead they had, and they were already on the road.

 

[Live Wire]

Dr. Matthews: How do you feel about having someone with you now?

Theo: Better than I expected. Worse in different ways. Miyato asks questions about things I know - Pokemon, battle theory, type matchups - and I can answer them immediately and completely. Then if he asks where I'm from or what my family was like and I have nothing. The gap between what I can explain and what I can't explain about myself gets more obvious when someone's there to notice it.

---

Miyato had been a stuttering mess since before the lights came on.

He dropped the spatula twice. Started explaining something about the dried seasoning stores and abandoned it halfway through. Set a bowl down in the wrong place, moved it, moved it back. Kiri kept watching him from his shoulder with the focused concern of a Pokémon who had taken note of a pattern and was monitoring it.

Even Ryuu, who normally conducted himself with the composed indifference of something with better places to be, turned from the doorway and hissed.

Miyato froze. Looked at Ryuu. Looked at the pan.

"I know," he said.

Ryuu looked at the ceiling.

Theo drank his tea and said nothing. Whatever Miyato was building toward, pressing on it would not help it arrive faster. Zeus ate methodically beside him. Jupiter was working through his pancakes with the focused reverence he brought to them, regardless of context or location.

What came off the stove was still better than anything the outpost had probably produced in years. Pemba came through for his shift handover, looked at the table, looked at Miyato, and left with his portion without comment, which was probably the right call.

Victoria appeared in the common room while they were still eating, arm in a proper sling, moving with the unhurried ease of someone who had decided the arm was not going to change her morning plans. She took in the room in the time it took to cross it, which was about two seconds; decided it was manageable and pulled out a chair.

"I am leaving today," she said, taking Miyato's tea without asking and drinking some.

Miyato blinked at the empty space where his cup had been.

"The Annihilape," she said. "Since you were involved, you should know. Evaluation first. If the rage state was situational, it goes to managed off-route territory. If it's embedded," she tipped her head slightly, " A strong trainer will handle it. Not my call." She put the cup back. "Either way, handled."

"What do you think?" Theo said.

"I think it went into the ball without fighting it." She turned the cup in her hand. "That means something, usually. But I've been wrong before." She said it with the complete equanimity of someone who had factored being wrong into her general worldview long ago. She produced her PokéNav and set it on the table. "Contact. Both of you."

Miyato fumbled his out. Theo took care of the exchange while Miyato was getting his operational. Victoria received both and put hers away and stood.

"What a bother," she said, pleasantly. "All of this over a Gyarados." Staraptor appeared behind her and pressed against her side, and she put her functional hand on its head. "Good luck on the circuit. Try not to end up off route again."

She left before it became a moment.

---

They set off at eight. The route had the feel of somewhere recovering from something; the bird sounds were thinner than they should have been but present, and the grassland was doing its ordinary morning things. Theo set his pace slightly below where he'd pushed on the first day, which was already better than the first day had been, but Miyato had no reference point for what correct pacing felt like and was moving with the energy of someone who had decided to outpace their own anxiety by walking fast enough.

Twenty minutes in, Theo said nothing but shortened his own stride and eventually Miyato matched it without noticing.

They walked. Ryuu moved alongside them closer than the old distance. The cape was still on Miyato, and Theo looked at it once at the first ranger marker.

"The cape," he said.

Miyato looked down at the border stitching.

"If you actually want people not to recognise the clan," Theo said.

Miyato was quiet. Then he took it off, folded it into his bag and kept walking. His posture had changed in a way that was not quite right. Not worse, exactly. Just different in the way someone who has removed something that was part of how they carried themselves and hasn't yet found the replacement.

At the forty-minute mark, MIyato started a sentence.

"If —" He stopped. Kiri adjusted on his shoulder. "The circuit," he said. "I wanted to ask if you were open to travelling together."

His hands had gone to his sides in the way they did when he was managing something and doing a middling job of it.

"I can cook," he said. "Every day. And there's Pokemon grooming that I know how to do properly, and logistically it makes more sense than two people covering the same —"

Theo laughed.

Miyato stopped.

"Yes," Theo said.

"You don't have to —"

"Miyato. Yes."

Miyato looked at the path ahead, and the tension in his shoulders went somewhere else. "Right," he said. Then, very quietly: "Good."

Kiri made a sound, and Miyato's hand came up to hold her without the rest of him acknowledging it.

Ryuu made his position clear before noon.

He had been watching Zeus since breakfast with the interest of someone who has decided on a course of action and is simply waiting for the correct moment. At some point in the mid-morning stretch he moved from beside Miyato, slithered across the path directly to Zeus, stopped two feet from him, and hissed.

Not aggression. The syntax of a challenge, delivered plainly.

Zeus looked at him. Then at Theo.

"Here?" Theo said.

Ryuu moved to the flat section without being asked. He positioned himself and faced Zeus across the open grass and the attention in his eyes had shifted from the watching he'd been doing all morning to something else entirely. He was in it now.

Zeus looked at him.

His ears came forward once and stayed there. He read the stance, the forward lean, the way Ryuu's whole body was pointed like something about to be released. The ear didn't move again. He already knew what was coming.

"Twister," Miyato said immediately. "Open with Twister, keep your distance—"

Ryuu drove forward.

Low and committed, all momentum, and Zeus broke right before Ryuu had covered the ground between them, Quick Attack carrying him sideways fast enough that the first lunge found nothing. Ryuu corrected without breaking pace, turning on his own axis and firing Dragon Breath at close range, a thick billow of dark force that Zeus ducked under by dropping flat, the breath passing over him, and Zeus came up on the other side already repositioning.

"Thunder Fang," Theo said. "Cut behind."

Zeus closed from the rear and the crackling bite found Ryuu at the base of the neck before Ryuu had tracked the new angle. Not a clean hit, Ryuu turned into it and took it on the side of his neck rather than centre but Ryuu registered it and turned on Zeus immediately and fired Dragon Breath again.

Zeus rolled under it.

The breath passed over him for the second time, and Theo was already reading the pattern. Ryuu was choosing close-range Dragon Breath every time he had range available. Not out of ignorance. Out of preference, the preference of something that had always won by pressing forward and had no interest in changing that.

"Twister! He doesn't have an effective reach if you stay back—"

Ryuu launched into Slam.

The full-body commit went forward hard and Zeus sidestepped it clean, the move carrying Ryuu two steps past where Zeus had been. Zeus pivoted and fired a Shock Wave into Ryuu's exposed side as he passed. the electric pulse connected before Ryuu had straightened and Ryuu took it without having braced, stepping sideways from the impact.

He turned back.

His eyes hadn't changed. He looked at Zeus the way something looks at a problem it has decided is worth solving regardless of the cost

Theo watched him and understood something. Miyato was right about the range. Ryuu's Twister spread wider than Zeus could cleanly sidestep through and the Dragon Breath at distance left no window to close in before the next one fired. At range this was a different fight. Ryuu wasn't giving him that fight and wasn't going to.

"Charge Beam," Theo said. "Hold where you are."

Zeus fired and Ryuu sent Dragon Breath to meet it and both moves crossed toward each other and collided in the air between them with a sharp crack and a wash of outward pressure. Both cancelled and the dissipation pushed heat in both directions and neither moved. The Charge Beam boost had settled into Zeus regardless of the cancel. It was doing its work.

"Ryuu—" Miyato again, and Ryuu was already moving.

He came in from a new angle this time, cutting wide before closing, and Zeus read the arc and broke to create the perpendicular but Ryuu had anticipated that and the Dragon Breath fired from just feet away on the new angle and Zeus couldn't fully clear it. The breath caught Zeus across the chest and drove him back before he found his footing.

He stood. Shook himself once.

The fur across his chest was darker where the breath had found him. Theo noted it and kept it. Zeus was favoring the right side slightly now, the stride not quite what it had been.

"Thunder Fang," Theo said. "Come in low."

Zeus closed and the crackling bite found Ryuu's flank this time. real contact with real damage and Ryuu pulled against it and broke the grip by force and answered immediately with Dragon Breath at almost no distance at all, point-blank, but Zeus was already clearing the area and the breath clipped his rear leg rather than hitting the center.

Zeus's ear moved once. He was recalculating. Ryuu was faster than he'd been giving credit for and the close-range exchanges were narrower than they should have been.

Theo felt it too.

"Charge Beam," he said. "Second one."

Zeus fired and Ryuu sent Dragon Breath again and the beams met in the air. This time the first boost was behind the Charge Beam and the Dragon Breath folded slightly before they cancelled, the point where they met had shifted toward Ryuu before the whole thing came apart. Not through. Not yet. But moving.

"He's building off of it," Miyato said quietly. He was talking to Ryuu. "Every time you feed him a target, he— Ryuu, please, Twister from back there and you reset everything he just—"

Ryuu dashed in .

He came in low under Zeus and got inside the escape window, and the coiling grip established before Zeus had time to avoid it, closing around Zeus's midsection with the full commitment of something that had been trying to do exactly this since the first exchange and had finally found the moment. The constriction began and Zeus was held.

Theo had the Ice Fang call ready.

He didn't use it.

He wanted to know something first. Ryuu had been ahead of everything Miyato asked from the start, doing the opposite of every instruction not out of malice but out of a complete and total certainty that he already knew better. And Miyato was right, the range work would have changed this battle. Zeus was too quick for Ryuu to reliably pin down, the Wrap had been luck as much as timing, and Miyato had seen that from the start. Theo wanted to know whether there was a wall Ryuu would hit that made him reconsider. Whether pressure and accumulated damage would make him take the advice that was actually correct.

Worth finding out.

"Bite," Theo said instead. "Break the grip."

Zeus bit into the coil itself before Theo had finished saying it.

Not a response to the command; the command had barely reached him. Zeus had already decided to find his own way out, teeth finding the tightest point of the hold and grinding in, trying to create leverage before anything else arrived. He'd felt the grip and made a calculation and acted on it without being told to and Theo felt something that wasn't quite surprise.

"Ice Fang," Theo said. "Same point. Dead on."

The cold came up the way it always came, reached for rather than made and Zeus had almost no room to aim it. The Wrap had him mostly locked, his head the only part of him with any real movement, and he drove the Ice Fang into the nearest point of the coil and let the frost spread from there outward through the grip. Ryuu felt it find him and the hold loosened and Zeus pushed his way out through the loosening and put distance between them fast.

Both of them reset.

Zeus's chest still showed the Dragon Breath from earlier. The stride was compensating slightly. He'd been in the hold long enough for it to register. He was still reading correctly, but the exchanges had stacked on him and his positioning was more deliberate now,each step placed more deliberately than before

Ryuu had taken Thunder Fang, Shock Wave, Charge Beam, and the Ice Fang through the grip. His scales showed it.

"Ryuu," Miyato said. He wasn't frustrated anymore. Something else had taken over. "I know you're not listening. But he's stacking that beam. The next one's going to come through. If you'd just—"

Ryuu used Twister.

Not from the range Miyato had been asking for. From too close, from the wrong position, not aimed with patience but fired with everything behind it, a grinding rotating column of wind that Zeus ran through the near edge of rather than around; the rotation catching him and pulling him sideways a step before he recovered. Not a full hit but solid enough.

Miyato's hands came down from where they'd been at his jacket pockets.

Then Ryuu was coming forward again and Theo saw where the battle was going.

"Thunder Wave," he said. "Low and wide."

Zeus fired flat along the grass and the arc spread outward and found Ryuu mid-stance before he'd released the Dragon Breath he was preparing, the paralysis settling into him and locking his nervous system. Ryuu went rigid.

Theo had known Shed Skin before he ever met Ryuu. He knew the ability. Watching it was different, the translucent layer peeling from the base of Ryuu's tail forward in a single unhurried motion, impossibly thin, carrying the paralysis out of him as it went, dissolving against the grass before it had fully separated. Ryuu stood clean on the other side of it and shook himself once.

He looked at Zeus.

There was more in his eyes than there had been at the start.

"Charge Beam," Theo said.

Zeus fired and Ryuu sent Dragon Breath to meet it and the two beams crossed toward each other, and this time the third Charge Beam had two boosts sitting behind it and when the Dragon Breath found it the breath didn't fold. The beam held and then moved forward and the Dragon Breath gave way along its own line and the Charge Beam came through and hit Ryuu in the chest.

Ryuu went tumbling backwards.

He caught himself.

He looked at the space where the beams had met and something settled in him, not resignation, just the acknowledgment of a new fact.

Miyato didn't say anything.

"Bite," Theo said. "Keep him moving. Don't let him reset."

Zeus kept breaking angles, teeth finding the rear as Ryuu passed and releasing and repositioning before Ryuu had turned. Dragon Breath fired and Zeus was already somewhere else and the breath hit grass. Ryuu launched into Slam and Zeus went under it the same way he'd gone under all of them, measured, every time, the footwork that Ryuu had been running into all afternoon without finding a consistent answer for.

Zeus landed from the dodge and looked at Theo.

One beat.

"Ice Fang," Theo said. "Drive through."

Zeus came in on the angle the Slam had left open, the one Ryuu kept creating every time he committed fully forward, the opening that had been there all battle and Ice Fang found Ryuu's side clean. The cold went through and the shiver it produced was visible all the way down and Ryuu went down on a slump

He stayed there.

His head was up.

Zeus stood where the Ice Fang had ended. His breathing was visible. He didn't press forward.

Theo said "enough," and it was over.

Miyato came to the edge of where the battle had been and stopped some feet short of Ryuu. He waited. Ryuu's head turned toward him and neither of them said anything.

Theo stood back with Zeus at his left and let the moment be what it was. What he'd watched was a Dratini absorb twenty exchanges of accumulated damage and keep pressing forward on pure decision. He'd also watched a Dratini with the kit to win a different version of this fight — the Twister, the Dragon Breath at range, the spread that Zeus couldn't fully avoid — spend all of it on the version of the fight he preferred instead.

The gap wasn't in the ability.

"Good battle," Miyato said quietly.

Miyato came toward Ryuu slowly. Crouched. Put his hand against Ryuu's side and Ryuu's head turned and looked at the hand and then at Miyato and then at the grass in front of him.

He didn't move away.

"You were supposed to stay back," Miyato said.

Ryuu looked at the grass.

"You're a Dragon type," Miyato said. "You have range. You have Twister. There was no reason to —"

Ryuu made a short sound.

Miyato stopped.

After a moment, he just kept his hand where it was and didn't say anything else and Ryuu allowed it and the field was quiet around them.

---

The trainer battles came through the afternoon, spread across the midsection of the route the way they always were on routes people traveled regularly. Three of them approached. Miyato sent Kiri for two and won one and lost one and Kiri took both outcomes with equal equanimity, returning to his shoulder each time having clearly enjoyed herself regardless of the result.

The third was a Gliscor.

Theo sent Zeus. Saw the Ground typing. Knew the electric moves were useless before the battle started. Worked around it with Bite and tried twice for Ice Fang under pressure and the Gliscor was faster than Zeus could account for and Acrobatics accumulated and Zeus went down.

He didn't talk about it until they were walking again, twenty minutes later, with the camp site ahead.

"Ground types," Miyato said.

"The Ice Fang," Theo said. "It almost landed both times."

"He was fast."

"He was." Theo looked at Zeus walking beside him. "The gap between almost and actually is where we are right now."

Miyato was quiet for a moment. "Kiri loses to things she shouldn't and wins against things I don't expect her to win against," he said. "I'm not sure how to account for that."

"She's reading the other Pokémon," Theo said.

Miyato looked at Kiri on his shoulder. Kiri looked back at him.

"Is that what she's doing?" he said.

They made camp at the flat section past the next ranger marker. Both of them put up tents.

Theo's was better than day one. Meaningfully. The lean was minor, the corners were close to level, it went up in a reasonable amount of time and stayed where he put it.

He stood back and looked at it. The relief was quiet and entirely his.

Miyato's tent held a structural philosophy that was difficult to identify. It stood, which was the charitable description. One side had decided on its angle that the other side had not been informed of, and both had committed to their respective positions.

"You can —" Theo started.

"It's fine," Miyato said.

He went inside with Kiri, and Ryuu followed, and that was that.

They ate Miyato's food, much better than anything the route should have produced from trail supplies, and the fire settled into its ordinary rhythm and the route was quiet around them in the way it was quiet when it was genuinely recovering rather than pretending to.

"The storm," Miyato said, after a while. His eyes were on the fire and he had the tone of someone who had been thinking about something and had decided to say it. "A few weeks ago. It was everywhere in the news. The energy readings from it apparently registered all the way in Blackthorn, which doesn't happen with ordinary storms."

"I was there," Theo said.

Miyato turned to look at him. "You were actually there? The Zapdos event?"

"Standing on the dock when it started," Theo said. "I didn't know what was happening at first, just that the sky had gone wrong and the harbour was empty and the storm was coming in from the water at a scale that didn't feel like weather anymore. Then Zapdos came through the cloud cover and everything got louder and brighter than it had any right to be." He looked at the fire. "Surge got his team out. The gym Pokemon. Everyone who was there did what they could but Zapdos at full force above a harbour is not something you counter, it's something you manage until it leaves."

"I heard Lance appeared," Miyato said.

"He did," Theo confirmed. "He came in on his Dragonite and the whole dynamic of the situation changed in about thirty seconds. That's the most honest way I can put it. Before he arrived it was controlled chaos. After he arrived it was something being handled by someone who knew how to handle it." He paused. "I was on the dock for most of it. Got close enough to understand exactly how outclassed everything around me was."

Miyato was quiet for a moment, turning this over. "That must have been terrifying," he said, not in the way people said things to fill silence but like he actually meant it.

"It was," Theo said. Then, because it was also true, "It was also something I'm glad I saw."

The fire shifted between them and Theo looked at it and then at Miyato.

"What's it like?" he said. "The Dragon Clan. Actually, like, day to day."

Something happened to Miyato's posture. Not much. Barely visible in the firelight. But the chin came up a degree and the quality of his voice shifted in the way it shifted when he was about to say something he considered legitimate.

"The records go back further than anyone knows," he said. "The Elders say the Clan was in Blackthorn before the city was. Before the routes." He looked at the fire and the chin was still up. "Every major Dragon type in Kanto, we have some relationship to. The knowledge is passed down. Training methods, bond techniques, lineage histories going back centuries." He paused. "There are things in the library that aren't in any League archive. First-generation records." He said it the way someone said things they believed deeply and had not been given many opportunities to say to someone who wasn't already inside the world those things came from. "Day to day it means something different than it sounds from the outside. It's early mornings with the dragons before anything else. It's sitting with the Elders learning things that aren't written down anywhere. It's understanding that the bond between a Dragon type and its trainer is—" He stopped. The chin came back down about halfway. "Different," he said, more quietly. "From what most trainers experience."

Theo looked at him. "Better?"

Miyato thought about Ryuu. "More demanding," he said. "And potentially more than that. But that part you have to earn."

Miyato stopped.

"Lance is my uncle," he said.

He said it the way someone said something they had decided to say and then had to live with having said. The chin came down. He looked at the fire. "That's why I understand it so deeply. Not because I'm particularly suited to it. Because I've watched it my whole life from a distance that had never quite closed.

Theo looked at him.

Miyato's chin had come up with the mention of Lance, the automatic pride of it surfacing before he could decide whether to show it. "Don't look at me like that," he said. "I know I don't exactly match the family profile at the moment."

"I wasn't thinking that," Theo said.

"You were a little."

"A little," Theo said

"Fair," Miyato said, without any particular heat behind it as he threw a stick into the fire.

The fire settled, and neither of them said anything for a moment, and it was the comfortable kind of nothing that had started to develop between them over the course of the route.

 

[Live Wire]

Dr. Matthews: What does it feel like when someone knows you but you don't know them?

Theo: Professor Oak sent me a Pokédex. He knows I exist - knows my name, knows my badge progress, knows enough about me to provide equipment and funding. I know who he is the way I know everything - perfect recall of his research, his position, his reputation. But I've never met him. Never heard his voice. The relationship only goes one direction and that feels backwards.

---

"Smokescreen," Miyato said.

The cloud spread wide before the opposing trainer had finished calling Poison Sting, the needles came through firing blind, most of them finding nothing, one catching Kiri's side before she had fully cleared the range. She took it and held her position. The smoke had settled thick around Nidoran now and it was shaking its head trying to find her.

"Dragon Breath," Miyato said. "Through it."

Kiri fired through the smoke and the breath found Nidoran while it was still clearing the cloud from its eyes. It staggered and fired Poison Sting at where the breath had come from, which was where Kiri had been half a second ago.

"Smokescreen—"

"Fury Attack, push through—"

The second smoke layer was building when Nidoran came forward without waiting for visibility, the multi-hit move firing into the cloud. The first strike found Kiri before the smoke had fully settled. The second landed before she had processed the first.

"Move—" Miyato started.

Kiri was already sideways. The third strike hit smoke and nothing. Miyato caught up to what she was doing and redirected.

"Dragon Breath!"

The breath fired point-blank while Nidoran was still coming out of the Fury Attack's forward lean, too committed to its direction to stop, and the hit landed with Nidoran's own momentum behind it. It staggered back and sat down from the force of it.

"Bubble," Miyato said.

The water move crossed fast from close range and Nidoran couldn't answer it and sat down again and didn't get back up.

The trainer recalled Nidoran and looked at Miyato.

"Good battle," she said. They shook hands, exchanged prize money, and she headed south.

Miyato stood in the path, looking at where the battle had been. Kiri climbed back up his arm to his shoulder and made the sound she made when she was pleased with herself.

"Easy and Clean," Theo said.

Miyato turned to look at him. His ears were slightly pink, and his hands were still not entirely right at his sides, but the feeling behind it had shifted.

"Good use of the smoke," Theo said.

Miyato looked at the path ahead. "The clan," he said. "Every youth has to watch the sparring sessions. From a young age. Not optional." He adjusted the strap of his bag. "Hours of it. Watching how battles move, how positioning works, and what happens when you commit too early. You absorb it even when you don't know you're absorbing it." He paused. "I've never actually done much of it myself. But I knew what the smoke was supposed to do."

Theo looked at Kiri, who was conducting a self-satisfied assessment of the route ahead and Ryuu.

Ryuu had been walking closest to the bag all morning.

Not beside Miyato. Beside the bag, specifically, in the position Zeus usually occupied on Theo's left, close enough that his scales occasionally brushed the canvas when Theo adjusted the strap. He hadn't been asked to be there. He had simply moved to that position at some point in the early morning and stayed. Once, during a rest stop, Theo had set the bag down on a flat rock, and Ryuu had moved to it immediately and pressed his nose against the section of canvas above the egg's compartment and held very still for a moment with his eyes closed and then moved away without acknowledging what he had done.

The egg had been shaking more than usual that morning. Small movements, more frequent than the baseline Nurse Joy had described, the shell shifting in its compartment in a way that was less like something testing the walls and more like something that had made up its mind about something and was working toward it.

Theo had felt it twice through the bag strap, and each time Ryuu had looked up at him before looking away.

"When we get to the Pokémon Center," Miyato said, "you should have the egg looked at. Properly. Just to be certain."

"It should be fine, right?" Theo said.

"Probably," Miyato said. "But the Pokémon Center will have diagnostic equipment that the dimensional bag's compartment doesn't have."

"When we get there," he agreed.

---

The route in its final stretch was the route at its most ordinary, the grassland doing what grassland did, the ranger markers at their intervals; nothing was wrong in the air. Ryuu moved beside Miyato in the way he had been moving since the outpost. not quite walking with them, not quite separate from them, occupying a position that was its own thing.

Miyato had attempted a short training session with Ryuu at the morning rest stop. He had called five commands. Ryuu had responded to one of them, which was Dragon Breath, and had done so in a direction and with a timing that was technically Dragon Breath but bore a different relationship to what Miyato had intended than the word listening usually implied. The other four commands Ryuu had received and processed and set aside in favour of what he had independently assessed as the correct action, which in three out of four cases was also correct, just not Miyato's correct.

Miyato had stood at the end of it with his hands on his hips.

"He responded to Dragon Breath," Theo had said.

"He did Dragon Breath at a target I wasn't pointing at," Miyato had said.

Theo had made a note: Ryuu is not disobedient in the way a Pokemon that doesn't care is disobedient. He's disobedient in the way of something that has a different read on the situation and acts on it. There's a gap between what Miyato calls and what Ryuu does but the gap isn't random. It has logic. He had underlined the last sentence and moved on.

Jupiter tried the paper cup exercise twice during a rest stop later and the cup moved both times, fractionally, and he sat back and looked at it with the expression of someone who had confirmed a hypothesis and was now considering the implications.

Theo wrote: consistent twice. Not reliable yet. But consistent.

He stared at the entry for a moment and then something arrived.

He had been thinking about the psychic potential since the Hypno identified it, had been contextualising it as unusual, as something specific to Jupiter's personality or the fairy energy affinity or some combination of both. He had been thinking about it in relation to Kantonian Raichu, which was what he had spent six weeks surrounded by at Surge's gym, Surge's own Raichu in the exhibition and the gym Raichus on the training floor and the general assumption baked into that environment that Raichu meant Kantonian Raichu.

He had not thought about Alolan Raichu.

Alolan Raichu. Electric and Psychic type. The variant developed differently due to Alola's environmental energy and, if the research notes he had somewhere in his knowledge were accurate, its diet and, specifically its consumption of sweet foods endemic to the islands. The psychic typing was not foreign to the evolutionary line in Alola. It was native to it. And if Jupiter was an Alolan-strain Pikachu, if the street Pokemon who had been breaking into an Alolan restaurant every night, for the Alolan fluffy pancakes specifically, if that preference was not just personality but origin...

Theo looked at Jupiter walking ahead of them and felt extremely stupid.

The pancakes. The latent psychic potential. The fact that the Hypno had sensed something that wasn't standard for the species and had immediately known what to do with it. All of it pointed in the same direction and Theo had not connected it because he had spent six weeks watching Kantonian Raichus at Surge's gym and had given himself tunnel vision without noticing.

He laughed.

Not the managed version. Just a short, genuine, directed entirely at himself.

Miyato looked at him.

"Nothing," Theo said. Then: "I missed something obvious."

He made a new note, longer this time, writing quickly, the training adjustment taking shape as he wrote it. More intense psychic work. Not electricity, not fairy type, psychic specifically sustained focus exercises, the kind the Hypno had started in the coven clearing but pointed in a more deliberate direction. He would need help with that. Sabrina was the obvious resource but even before the gym meeting there might be other psychics in Saffron, the city being what it was, and he noted that down too.

He looked at Zeus.

Zeus had been growing since they left Vermilion. Not dramatically, a fraction more height, the reaction time in route battles faster than the badge challenge by a margin that was now consistent enough to log. Theo had been watching it without concluding but the conclusion was arriving on its own. The pace of it was not slowing.

He wrote in the notebook: movepool. Ice Fang and Fire Fang still developing. Everything else the same as Vermilion. Saffron has resources, find out what's available.

He underlined it and added below: Sabrina or city psychics for Jupiter. Sooner rather than later.

Then he closed the notebook.

Then he looked at Jupiter who was walking ahead completely unbothered by any of this, cheeks sparking at the low ambient rate he always maintained, and thought about Alolan pancakes and Alolan Raichu and felt stupid again in the warm way of someone whose mistake had been completely understandable and also completely avoidable.

---

They saw Saffron before they reached it.

The scale of it was visible from the last elevated section of the route, the city stretching across the plain, and Theo stopped walking.

He did not intend to stop. His feet simply stopped and his eyes went to the city and what happened to his face happened before he could manage it.

Miyato walked three more paces and noticed the absence of footsteps beside him and turned around.

He looked at Theo.

Theo was looking at Saffron with both eyes wide and the expression of someone for whom a word like city had just been replaced by the actual thing, which was considerably larger than the word.

The Silph Co. building rose above everything else on the skyline, enormous and glass-faced, catching the afternoon light in a way that made it seem like a different category of structure from everything around it. The rest of the city spread outward from it in every direction, dense and layered, the streets visible from here as a grid of movement and colour that didn't stop.

"You're —" Miyato started.

Theo closed his mouth. Rearranged his expression into something closer to his normal register. Looked at Miyato.

"I'm fine," he said.

"You were gobsmacked," Miyato said.

"I was taking it in."

"You were gobsmacked," Miyato said again. "I've never seen you look like that about anything." He was looking at Theo with the attention of someone revising a model they had built. "I thought you were just — I thought that was how you were about everything."

Theo looked at the city again.

"I'm reserved," he said. "It doesn't mean nothing's happening," he thought about his therapist. About the sessions that had been asking him this exact question in various forms for weeks, about the distinction between managing something and not feeling it. "There's usually quite a lot happening. I just don't always —" He stopped. "I don't always show it."

Miyato was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at the city too.

"I've never been anywhere this big," he said.

Theo looked at him.

"Blackthorn," Miyato said. "My whole life. I've never been out of Blackthorn before this circuit." He said it plainly, without the chin going up. Just a fact.

"Vermilion," Theo said.

Miyato looked at him. "That's where you're from."

"That's where I started and stayed," Theo said, which was true in the way things could be true without being complete.

They looked at each other.

"Neither of us," Miyato said.

"Neither of us," Theo agreed.

Miyato started laughing first. It came out of him the way his anxiety usually came out of him, before he had decided to let it, and Theo's followed a beat later, and they stood at the edge of the route in front of Saffron City and laughed at themselves like people who had been pretending to know what they were doing and had just admitted simultaneously that they didn't.

Three trainers walking south past them glanced over and smiled and one of them said something to the others that made all three of them laugh too and kept walking.

The Pokémon Center was larger than any facility Theo had seen outside of a city. Two floors, a proper waiting area, a cafeteria, and and rooms for trainers to stay. Nurse Joy took the egg without comment and ran the diagnostics while Theo and Miyato waited in the consultation area.

The egg was healthy. The shaking was slightly more frequent than her baseline data for its stage, not alarming, she said, simply progressing. She handed it back and the egg sat in Theo's hands and shook once, a small deliberate movement, and both of them looked at it.

"It's doing something in there," Miyato said.

"Yes," Theo said.

He put it back in the compartment and sealed it.

The cafeteria had the institutional warmth of places that fed a lot of people efficiently and had been doing it long enough to have found their rhythm. Trays and the specific smell of hot food and the low noise of other trainers at other tables with their own conversations.

Theo and Miyato were halfway through their food when the chair across from them was occupied.

There was no approach. No footsteps. Just the chair empty and then the chair occupied, as though the interval between had been removed.

The woman sitting across from them had dark eyes and the particular quality of stillness that came from someone who did not need to perform attention because their attention was simply always fully present. She looked at Theo. She looked at Miyato.

"I know who both of you are," she said. "My name is Sabrina."

Miyato's fork stopped moving.

"I know of you through Anabel," she said to Theo. "And I know of you too," she looked at Miyato, "by other means."

Miyato's mouth opened. Closed. "I — you're — yes," he said. "Yes, I know who you are, obviously, the gym — the — I'm Miyato." He stopped. His ears had gone pink. "You already said you knew that. Sorry."

Sabrina looked at him without impatience. She simply waited until he had finished.

"I want you both to come to the gym," she said. "One week from today. I'll see both your challenges."

Theo looked at her.

"I don't normally make exceptions to the badge requirement," she said. "I'm making them now because I see something in both of you that I find worth the exception." She didn't elaborate on what. "One week."

She was gone.

The chair was empty.

The cafeteria continued around them with the complete indifference of a space that had seen stranger things than a psychic gym leader teleporting in and out over lunch.

Miyato looked at the space where she had been. Then at Theo.

"Did she just —"

"Yes," Theo said.

Miyato looked at his food.

"Right," he said.

The noticeboard was on the cafeteria wall and Theo noticed it on the way back from returning their trays.

A tournament at the old Fighting gym. All rookie trainers. Starting tomorrow morning, registration opens in person until then.

He read it twice. "Some of these trainers could have a lot of badges already," he complained. "That's a significant gap from zero."

Miyato looked at him.

"The circuit started two months ago," he said.

"Everyone on the circuit started at the same time," Miyato said, with the patient quality of someone explaining something that had an obvious logic to it. "Badge zero to three means everyone is two months in at most. The gap between one badge and three badges over two months is not the same as three years of training."

Theo processed this.

He laughed, once, at himself, the short, genuine kind. "A couple of weeks ago, he had not known what a circuit was. He had learned this world from scratch and was apparently still catching up to the obvious parts.

Miyato looked at him for a moment and then let it go in the way he was learning to let things go, which was without comment but not without noticing.

"Tomorrow morning then," Theo said. "Registration and then the tournament."

"And after," Miyato said, "we should actually see the city properly."

"Agreed."

They looked at the noticeboard a moment longer. Miyato's hands had gone to his sides in the way they went when something was running underneath his composure. He was reading the tournament details again with the expression of someone who had decided to do something and was in the process of committing to that decision in real time, which was different from having committed to it.

His fingers flexed once at his sides and he turned away from the board.

"Tomorrow," he said.

---

The room was quiet in the way rooms were quiet after full days.

Theo was on the bed with his notebook open and not writing in it. Zeus was at the foot of the bed. Jupiter had located the optimal position relative to the window and was in it. Kiri was somewhere on Miyato's side of the room making a small sound at intervals. Ryuu was at the door.

Theo had been looking at a blank page for several minutes.

"Grass Knot," he said.

Miyato looked up from his bag.

"At the start," Theo said. "If we'd opened with Grass Knot to limit its movement and Whirlwind to keep it from repositioning while Gallade stacked, we might have controlled the space better and lasted longer."

Miyato thought about it. "The forest floor was too uneven. Grass Knot works best on open ground. In the trees, with that much undergrowth, it might not have established cleanly." He paused. "Maybe. If it landed right."

"And Helping Hand for Gallade's Psycho Cut," Theo said. "Boost the output while he was building Swords Dance."

"Who runs it?" Miyato said. "We were using everything to keep Phantom Force locked down. Victoria's Staraptor was managing position. Kiri and Ryuu were on smoke duty." He exhaled. "There was no one left to run support."

"All-out offense from the start, then," Theo said. "Hit it hard before Rage Fist could build."

Miyato was quiet.

"Rage Fist gets stronger with every hit the user takes," Theo said. "So all-out offense feeds it. Every hit we land in that scenario is power we're handing back to it. By the time Gallade was ready to close it—"

"The Rage Fist would have been at a level none of us could absorb," Miyato said.

"Yes."

The same wall. They kept running into the same wall. The strategy had been right in principle, suppress, control, let Gallade build to the threshold. It had just required a Hypno coven and Victoria's Gallade and a combination of resources neither of them had brought. Their contribution had been real. It had not been enough on its own.

Theo looked at the blank page.

He had known every relevant fact about what they were fighting before they were fighting it. The Rage Fist accumulates under sustained combat. Vital Spirit locking out sleep options. The Phantom Force window and how to close it. All of it had built the plan and the plan had been correct and he had still stood in that forest watching the Annihilape come apart with Ghost energy and the only clear thought in his head in those final seconds had been that none of what he knew was going to matter if the Gallade didn't close it in time. The knowledge had drawn the map. He hadn't had the strength to walk it.

"We would have lost anyway," Miyato said. Not as a complaint. Just naming it.

Miyato's chin was down. He was looking at the floor between the two beds and something in his face was still processing what they'd been through in a way the days after hadn't fully resolved. He hadn't said the word freeze. He hadn't named what happened at the battle line when his thumb had been on the recall button and his body had chosen something else. He didn't need to. It was present in how he sat.

They drew blanks for a while longer and eventually stopped trying.

"Victoria's report said it came from deep off-route," Miyato said after a while. "Further in than the Pokémon that normally end up near the boundary. Probably enraged before it ever crossed onto the route. Whatever set it off started out there, not here." He paused. "The rangers have been doing better work lately keeping things back. It still happens though."

"What do you mean, keeping things back?" Theo said.

Miyato looked at him.

The look lasted a moment longer than it should have. Not suspicious exactly, more the expression of someone who had just heard a question they did not have a framework for receiving. The look of someone trying to work out whether the other person was serious.

"The wild encroachment," Miyato said slowly.

"I'm not—" Theo started. Then: "I was pretty sheltered growing up."

Miyato held the look for a beat beyond what the answer covered. Sheltered did not explain not knowing. This was not a recent development or a regional detail. This was the condition of the world for the last several years. You couldn't have it as background noise unless something had specifically prevented it from reaching you.

He didn't press it.

"Do you remember the Groudon and Kyogre battle?" Miyato said.

"Yes," Theo said.

Miyato nodded and kept going.

"The land expanded. The sea rose. Earthquakes went through every continent when the land mass shifted, not one event, weeks of them, the ground changing shape across the whole planet. Cities that were on stable ground found out the ground was not stable. Coastlines were destroyed by the tsunamis and then redrawn again when the land settled into its new shape. The world map had to be redrawn after it was done." He stopped. "Some things that were land became sea. Some things that were sea became land. Whole cities are gone. Not damaged. Gone. The damage from that battle has not been fully repaired and it has been years."

Theo said nothing.

"That's the baseline," Miyato said. "That's what the world is built on now." His voice had changed slightly on the last sentence. Not dramatic. Just the quiet register of someone stating a fact they had grown up inside.

"And the Pokemon territory expansion," Theo said.

"Yes." Miyato sat forward slightly. "Pokemon already occupied most of the planet before the battle. After it they had even more space. In the areas where human settlements had been destroyed and not rebuilt, and there are a lot of those, there was nothing to mark a boundary. Pokemon expanded into it." He paused. "Do you know what Alpha Pokemon are?"

"Yes," Theo said.

"Would be strange if you didn't," Miyato said. "They've been across every news channel for the last couple years." Something more careful came into his face. "Before the expansion, they were almost mythological. Extremely rare. Most trainers had never seen one and most researchers weren't certain the accounts were reliable." He looked at his hands. "The Blackthorn Elders knew. They had records going back centuries of Alphas in the deep wilds around the mountain, the territory nobody travels into. I grew up hearing those accounts and most people outside the clan thought they were folklore." He shook his head once. "After the battle they emerged everywhere the expanded land had pushed into. Territory with no settlements, no boundaries, nothing maintaining any constraint on what a Pokemon could become. Now they're not rare at all. They're just the reason nobody goes into the Wilds."

His jaw was tight.

"The Wilds," he said. "That's what the territory is called where they dominate. And it's not just the Alphas themselves. The Pokémon that live near them long enough start to change. More aggressive. More territorial. Less like the Pokemon near the routes." He looked at Theo. "The routes exist in the space between human settlements and the Wilds. They have been getting smaller since the battle. The Alphas clash with each other over territory and every time they push outward something gets displaced and moves toward the routes and the routes compress further." He stopped. "Routes that used to take days. Some of them are a few hours now. Some are gone."

"Can they be reasoned with?" Theo said.

Miyato's expression answered before he did.

"No," he said. "It's been tried. It doesn't work the way it works with wild Pokémon near human areas who have been around people long enough to understand what conflict with humans costs. Alphas don't have that understanding, and they don't want it." He leaned back against the headboard. "You can push the boundary back. You can't hold it permanently. When one is brought down, another rises eventually. The rangers are fighting a managed retreat and most of them know it."

The room held that for a moment.

"Does it get worse closer to Saffron?" Theo said.

"It varies from route to route," Miyato said. "Some have been hit harder than others. I don't know the specifics of every one between here and Celadon." He turned Kiri's Pokéball in his hand. "Kanto has better ranger coverage than most regions. The League funds it. That doesn't mean nothing comes through. It means less comes through and slower."

Theo looked at the ceiling.

"It sounds extremely risky," he said. "Sending young trainers out on routes in the middle of all of this."

Miyato laughed.

It wasn't a dismissive laugh. It had something in it that was genuine and slightly dark and a little tired around the edges.

"The regions need strong trainers and they need them fast," he said. "Rangers can't hold the boundaries alone. The gym system exists to produce people who can handle what's out there, and you can't wait until someone is already strong to start them. you give them the routes early and build them on the road." He looked at Theo. "The League protects the official routes as well as it can. Maintained paths, rangers on rotation, boundaries monitored. The best conditions they can provide." He paused. "It's not just trainers either. The League has been pushing for years for every civilian to be able to defend themselves. Not at a circuit level. Just enough. Because the world outside the city limits is not the same as it was."

Theo looked at Zeus at the foot of his bed.

He thought about the routes ahead of them. The maintained corridors between cities. The Wilds on either side pressing in at the rate they had been pressing since a battle between ancient things had redrawn the planet. He thought about the Annihilape in the forest and what it had taken to survive it.

He thought about eight badges.

"One at a time," Miyato said, as if following the thought without being told it.

Theo looked at him.

Miyato had picked up his bag and was unpacking the evening routine with the methodical precision he brought to it every night. The anxiety that had been in his face when he talked about the Alphas had settled back under the surface where it lived.

"That's the only way to think about it," Miyato said. "Otherwise it's too much."

---

Theo took Zeus and Jupiter and went to look at the rest of the center. He came back twenty minutes later with a bag from the food stall on the lower floor."

Theo knocked and opened the door when Miyato said, "Come in."

He stopped.

Miyato was sitting on his bed with a face mask on. The full routine. His skincare products arranged on the nightstand in their specific order, a white mask covering most of his face, a small towel on his shoulder.

Zeus, who had followed Theo, went very still.

His nose was working. His ears were forward. His eyes were fixed on the thing sitting on Miyato's bed that was wearing Miyato's clothes and had Miyato's posture but whose face had become something else entirely.

Jupiter appeared at Theo's shoulder and took one look and shifted into a defensive crouch.

Kiri, who was sitting on Miyato's pillow and had been watching the routine with the contentment of a Pokemon who was very used to this, made a sound that was clearly laughing. Her whole body moved with it.

Ryuu, from his position in the corner, looked at Miyato and then at Zeus and Jupiter and made a short sharp sound through his nose that was not nothing.

"It's a face mask," Miyato said.

Zeus took another moment to accept this.

Jupiter straightened slowly with the expression of a Pokemon deciding whether to acknowledge that anything had happened. He decided not to and went to investigate the nightstand instead.

Miyato's face, beneath the mask, had gone pink in the specific way it went pink when he was embarrassed and could not do anything about the colour because the mask was already on.

"It's a routine," he said, with the dignity he could manage in the circumstances.

"I know," Theo said.

"You don't have to look at me like that."

"I'm not looking at you like anything," Theo said.

Ryuu snorted again. It was the second reaction from Ryuu in two days that nobody had asked for. Miyato looked at him.

"Don't," Miyato said.

Ryuu looked at the wall.

 

[Live Wire]

Dr Matthews: What do you do when someone challenges who you are?

Theo: A trainer at the tournament looked at what I was carrying and decided he knew my whole story. He was wrong about what it meant.

Dr Matthews: What was he wrong about?

Theo: What I built. These past months. He didn't know about those.

Dr Matthews: And the part he wasn't wrong about?

Theo: ...

Dr Matthews: Take your time.

Theo: The knowledge. I can't source it. Can't tell anyone where it came from. When someone asks, I have nothing. "I've always known" is what someone lying would say.

---

The next morning, Miyato came out of the room in a new outfit he had apparently acquired somewhere, which meant he had gone out the previous evening after Theo had assumed he was doing his routine, and the outfit was good in the way his cooking was good, put together with an understanding of what worked that sat underneath the anxiety and the stuttering and operated independently of both.

He had the hat on. Different hat from the day before, better matched to the outfit, but covering the red hair completely. And sunglasses. Pushed up on the brim of the hat for now, not on his face yet but present.

He looked at Theo.

"Ready," he said.

Theo looked at the hat. At the sunglasses. At the outfit that had the quality of something worn with real intention underneath something worn to be less visible.

Registration wasn't until nine, and they were up at six and Miyato looked at the time on the PokéNav and looked at Theo across the shared room and said they had three hours.

The Pokémon Center rented bikes from a rack at the side entrance. Basic frames, well-used, nothing fast, the kind of bike that said we will get you there and not much else. They took two and pushed out into the Saffron morning, and the city was already doing what cities did at six in the morning, which was the version of itself that most people didn't see.

The Silph Co. building caught the early light on its upper floors and the glass of it sent that light in four directions at once. They stopped the bikes in front of it without agreeing to stop and looked up at it from the street and the scale of it from directly below was different from the scale of it on the skyline. It occupied the air above them the way structures usually didn't. The lobby visible through the ground floor glass was already staffed and lit.

"Vermilion doesn't have anything like this," Theo said.

"No," Miyato agreed.

Theo looked at the building. Vermilion was a working port city. The smell of it was salt and machinery and the sea, the streets following the logic of a harbour rather than a grid, the gym at the centre of things the way gyms usually were in smaller cities. Everything organic and slightly worn and built for use rather than impression. Saffron was deliberate in a way Vermilion wasn't. Wide streets, organized, glass-fronted, and expensive, the League infrastructure visible in how the whole city was laid out, the Silph building and the gym and the government buildings arranged around each other with the intention of people who had decided where power should live.

Miyato had stopped looking at the building and was looking at the space between it and everything else around it, the way a person looks when they're placing something they didn't expect to feel.

"Blackthorn is nothing like this," he said.

Theo looked at him.

"It's older than anything in this city," Miyato said. "Stone buildings that have been there for centuries. Cold even in summer because of the altitude. The clan's presence gives the air there weight to it. Dragon energy runs through everything, the stone, the mountain. You feel it before you see it." His chin had come up incrementally. "It has nothing in common with this place except that they're both cities. Everything else is different."

"Which do you prefer?" Theo said.

Miyato was quiet for a moment. Then he said, honestly, "I don't know yet. I've only ever had one to compare."

They rode further. Miyato was different on the bike than he was in rooms. Less contained. His hands on the handlebars were easy and he took the corners without slowing and looked at things directly instead of clocking the angles first. Theo noted this and didn't say anything about it.

Past the psychic gym at a distance, the building was simpler than Theo had expected, the simplicity somehow more unsettling than ostentation would have been.

Past a market district waking up, the smell of food from stalls that were just opening, and Miyato slowed the bike and looked and Theo slowed beside him and they looked for a moment and kept riding.

They didn't see the full city. The slice of it they covered was enough to understand that the full city would take considerably longer and somewhere around eight, they turned the bikes back toward the Pokémon Center.

---

The old gym was on the east side of the city, stone construction, older than everything around it, the street quieter on that side. They heard it before they saw it, the low collective noise of a lot of people in a contained space, the particular energy of an event that had filled beyond what the organizers had probably anticipated.

The queue at registration stretched back from the entrance, and they joined it. Miyato was scanning without looking like he was scanning. Two fixed cameras on the exterior of the building, one above the door and one mounted on the far corner. He noted them and did not look at them again.

Inside the main hall the Karate Master had clearly organised everything himself. Traditional fighting equipment pushed to the walls, a battle area marked out in the centre of the floor with clean tape lines, a corridor off to the left where they could see two healing machines and a row of chairs. The place had the feel of somewhere that had always been used for the same purpose and had been cleared out for this one specifically.

A noticeboard near the entrance had the bracket posted. Theo found their positions, noted who they had been paired with in the first round, and was reviewing it when he heard the announcer doing a preliminary address to the hall and learned from that address that they were looking at a one hundred and twenty-eight trainer bracket, single elimination, seven rounds, every match one versus one, matches called when the result was obvious enough to spare unnecessary injury. The hall produced a sound at the number that suggested several people had not expected competition at that scale.

He was still looking at the bracket when someone appeared at his shoulder.

The Pokédex was in his hand. He had taken it out to cross-reference his assigned opponent against his notes and had not put it away yet when the trainer appeared from the lobby crowd and looked at it.

The trainer was roughly Theo's age, maybe a year older. The clothes scratched a familiar itch he could not narrow down. Something about them felt familiar, but the feeling slipped away whenever he tried to grab hold of it. He had the expression of someone who had formed a conclusion very quickly and was confident enough in it not to second-guess it.

"That's an Oak Pokédex," he said.

Theo looked at him.

"Professor Oak gives those to specific trainers." The trainer's voice had an edge to it that had been there before he started speaking. "Selectively. Which means someone decided you were worth investing in before you'd done anything to prove it. And now you're standing in a bracket with trainers who built everything themselves."

"The Pokédex doesn't battle for me," Theo said.

"No, but it means someone made calls on your behalf. Opened doors. Told Oak you were worth it before you'd earned worth." He stepped slightly closer. "You know what I did to get here? Two months on the road. No sponsor. No equipment drops. No one's name is smoothing anything. Badge by badge by myself." His jaw was set. "And you walk in here with that and expect to stand in the same field."

"You don't know what I've done," Theo said. Something had shifted in his own voice and he was aware of it.

"I know what you were handed," the trainer said. "I know what that device costs in terms of who has to vouch for you." His thumb released the belt clip

"You don't know anything about me." Theo had stepped forward without deciding to and the distance between them had changed. His jaw was tight and the thing he usually kept under was closer to the surface than he was comfortable with. "You saw a device and built a whole story. You don't know what it took to get here or what I left behind to do it."

"Spare me," the trainer said. "Sponsored trainers always have a version of the story where they deserve everything they were given."

"Hey —" Miyato had appeared between them. His hands were up at chest height in the way of someone physically inserting themselves into a gap. "Okay, I think — this isn't — we're all here for the same thing so maybe we could just — the matches are going to start and —" He was looking between them with the expression of someone who very much wanted this to be over. "Can we just — sorry, I just think — can we not do this right now."

Neither of them moved.

Then something changed in the air of the lobby.

A man in a white gi had materialised nearby. Not walking over from somewhere. Simply present in the way of people who moved quietly and occupied space without requiring it. He was not large. He did not say anything. He looked like someone who had been practising martial arts in this building since before they were born and had precise views on the appropriate conduct of guests within it.

The trainer looked at him.

Looked at Theo.

Walked away through the crowd without another word.

Theo stepped back. His jaw was unclenched by degrees. Miyato's hands came down to his sides, and he exhaled through his nose. The practitioner looked at them for one more moment, then moved on, somewhere else.

Miyato looked at Theo.

"That was —" he started.

"I know," Theo said.

Miyato watched him go and was quiet for a moment before he said anything.

"He's not entirely wrong about the advantage," he said. "But he's wrong about what it means." He was still looking at where the trainer had been. "My clan gave me everything I started with. Ryuu. The training knowledge. Centuries of accumulated understanding about dragon types that no textbook has." He looked at Theo. "It still had to become mine. What you're given is just what you start with. The work after that belongs to you."

Theo looked at the Pokédex in his hand and put it in the bag and kept it there.

---

They watched the first round of the bracket section adjacent to theirs while waiting for their own matches. Miyato had found a position at the back of the viewing area with a sightline to the battle floor that kept both cameras behind him.

The announcer called John's name.

The figure that came to the battle area was wearing the full traditional bug catcher outfit. Green, slightly oversized, the net over one shoulder, the hat with the single upturned brim.

Theo blinked.

John.

The trainer from the lobby.

The name connected a second later than it should have. He hadn't actually known the guy's name when they argued. Just another angry trainer in a crowded registration hall.

Theo stared for a moment.

That was it.

The outfit.

It had been bothering him since the confrontation, without him understanding why. The green clothes, the net, the hat. Not just familiar. A bug catcher.

The realisation felt obvious now that he was looking directly at it. During the argument, he'd been too focused on the trainer himself to process what he was wearing.

The lobby around them produced a particular kind of noise at the sight of it, the quiet laugh of people who had made an assessment and found it comfortable.

John did not look at the crowd. He looked at the battle area.

His opponent sent a Machop. John sent Beedrill.

The Beedrill hit the field and the nature of the assessment shifted. It moved with the speed of something that had been waiting to move and the Poison Jab came before the Machop had settled and hit with the force of a Pokemon that had been trained past what the first impression of its trainer suggested. Twineedle followed and the Machop was working backwards from the moment the match started, and the announcer called it when the outcome was clear enough, which was quickly.

John recalled Beedrill and turned from the battle area and his eyes crossed the viewing section and found Theo and Miyato in the back and held there for a moment.

He snorted and walked out.

Miyato was quiet for a moment beside Theo, still looking at where John had gone.

"That Beedrill," he said.

"Yes," Theo said.

"I've never seen a Beedrill move like that." Miyato's hands had found the front pocket of his jacket again. "Bug types develop fast. It's one of the things the clan teaches, bug types mature quicker than almost anything else on the growth curve. They hit their ceiling early." He looked at Theo. "Which means John probably gets less dangerous the longer the circuit goes, not more."

"Maybe," Theo said.

Miyato looked at him. "You don't think so."

"I think bug trainers who know what they're doing understand that ceiling better than anyone," Theo said. "They work within it differently. Beedrill specifically, it's one of the most underestimated fully evolved Pokémon on the circuit. People see the typing and the fragility and stop looking." He watched the doorway John had walked through. "He hasn't stopped looking. You can tell from how he commands it."

Miyato was quiet for a moment and then said, honestly: "I don't want to face it."

"Neither do I," Theo said.

That sat between them for a moment without either of them doing anything about it.

"You got angry," Miyato said.

Theo looked at him.

"Back there. I've never seen you get angry." Miyato was choosing the words carefully in the way he did when he thought the words mattered. "You're always— you manage things. You always manage things. But that got past it."

Theo looked at the floor. The heat from the confrontation was still in him, sitting lower now but present. "He was speaking from complete ignorance," he said. "About what I built. About what it costs to get here. He looked at a device and decided he knew my whole story." The heat came back up slightly. "He has no idea what I went through to be standing in this building."

Miyato said nothing.

"He talks about scratch," Theo said. "About building from scratch. Like I was handed something and walked through a door." He stopped. Something else was in it now, underneath the anger, something that had less heat and more weight. "I've been doing this for six weeks," he said. "A while ago I didn't — I couldn't —"

He stopped again.

The past months were true. The dock, the gym, Anabel's training, the badge challenge, and the route were all true and his.

But the words were still sitting.

He pressed against the edge of why and it was right there, close enough to name, and he stopped. He knew what it was. Finishing the thought wasn't going to help anything and John was already through the door anyway.

Miyato was watching him.

Miyato's hands came out of his jacket pockets. He fell into step beside Theo without saying anything about it.

That says the same thing more than in Miyato's actual voice.

Theo looked at him.

He didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that would have been accurate without explaining more than he was prepared to explain.

He picked up his bag.

"We should find our matches," he said.

---

Miyato's hands were not entirely right when he walked to the battle area for Round 1. His posture was doing the managed thing, the jaw slightly too set, the breathing deliberate. He was looking at the camera position and then making himself not look at it and then looking at it again.

His opponent sent Geodude and Kiri came out of his ball at the same time.

He heard his opponent curse under his breath, no doubt about the horrible matchup.

"Bubble—"

"Get out of there—"

Both trainers called simultaneously but Geodude was too slow and the water move was already crossing, four-times-effective damage hitting before the Rock-type could clear range. Sturdy kept it standing. and its trainer immediately called "Rollout!" while Geodude was still processing the first hit.

The rolling attack came faster than Miyato expected, catching Kiri's left side while she was resetting from Bubble, but she fired again mid-recovery, the second water move landing on Geodude while it was still in Rollout momentum, and this time Sturdy had nothing left to give.

Quick. Clean. Miyato looked at Kiri for a moment after the match was called and Kiri looked outright jubilant.

---

Jupiter arrived at the battle area already with opinions. He looked at the Krabby across the floor and took a slow inventory of it: the shell, the claws, the way it was positioned and his cheeks sparked once. He had already decided how this was going to go.

"Fake Out," Theo said.

Jupiter crossed the space before Krabby had settled, speed carrying him in with no wind-up, and the flinch hit clean before Krabby's trainer had finished giving the first command. Krabby locked in place, unable to act, and the trainer's call landed on a Pokémon that couldn't execute it.

Theo read the matchup as it stood. Krabby was a close-range fighter; Vice Grip, Metal Claw, the physical toolkit of something built to grab and hold. Jupiter wanted range. The Charge Beam stacking wanted range. The whole strategy wanted Krabby kept at a distance it didn't want to be at.

"Charge Beam," Theo said. "Hold where you are."

The beam fired before Krabby's trainer had given the response call and it hit before Krabby had fully processed the flinch ending. Krabby took it and came forward instinctively and the boost settled into Jupiter alongside the damage. The trainer called "Bubble Beam, push him back" and the pressurised water crossed the space and Jupiter sidestepped it clean without losing his position, the water going past him and hitting the back wall.

"Metal Claw. Close it—"

Krabby came in hard and low, one claw leading, and Theo waited a beat.

"Iron Tail."

Jupiter's tail swung and the Steel-type strike met Metal Claw mid-approach, and both connected in the same moment, Jupiter taking the claw across his left side and Krabby taking the tail between the eyes. Krabby slid back a step. Jupiter rolled with the claw hit and reset his position.

The trainer's expression shifted. He called off the direct approach.

"Bubble, stay there—"

Krabby fired from just feet away, and it caught Jupiter across the chest before he had fully reset.

"Back off," Theo said. "Charge Beam."

Jupiter put distance between himself and Krabby and the second beam fired and Krabby's trainer called "Metal Claw, interrupt it—" but Krabby was closing from a standing start and the beam was already mid-flight and it hit before the claw arrived. The second boost stacked on the first. The output in Jupiter's system was different now.

Krabby landed Metal Claw half a second after the Charge Beam hit. It was a real strike, full contact, and Jupiter took it properly, stepping sideways from the force, and the trainer read that as an opening.

"Vice Grip, lock it down—"

Krabby went for the grab, claws open, and Jupiter was already moving, Quick Attack carrying him sideways before the grip could establish, and the Vice Grip closed on empty air. Krabby's momentum carried it through and Jupiter was behind it.

"Disarming Voice," Theo said.

The Fairy sound saturated the space from behind Krabby and it hit and hit fully and Krabby staggered forward from the impact and its trainer made a sound. He'd expected Jupiter to go for another Charge Beam. He'd been managing the range game. He hadn't planned for Jupiter to close behind the Vice Grip attempt.

"Mud Shot, pin it—"

Krabby fired from the new position, the ground move angled to cut off Jupiter's range management and force him into a fixed spot where the close game was unavoidable. Jupiter saw it coming and dropped flat and the shot went over him and he came back up in the same motion.

Theo saw the trainer open his mouth and didn't wait.

"Third Charge Beam," Theo said.

What came out of Jupiter was not the same move it had been at the start of the battle. Two accumulated boosts had built something in him and the output sat in a category that Krabby at close range had no practical answer to. It hit and Krabby sat down and did not get up.

Jupiter walked back to Theo's side with the expression of a Pokemon for whom this had been something to do rather than something to endure. His cheeks sparked at the low ambient rate of a Pokemon satisfied with the result and with no need to discuss it further.

The other trainer recalled Krabby and looked at Jupiter once before looking away.

---

The corridor between rounds had people managing their energy between efforts. Trainers in chairs with their Pokémon in their laps or beside them. The healing machines cycling through quietly. The bracket board visible through the doorway to the main hall.

Miyato sat in one of the chairs and looked at the Pokéball on his belt.

He took it out and held it for a moment and then released Ryuu in the small open section of corridor between the chairs and the wall.

Ryuu materialised and took in the corridor with the unhurried assessment he brought to new spaces and then looked at Miyato.

"The next round," Miyato said, keeping his voice level. "If you want to participate. It would be your choice."

Ryuu looked at the wall.

Then at the bracket board visible through the doorway.

Then at the bracket board through the doorway. His eyes stayed there a moment longer than the walls had held them.

Miyato watched him do this. His jaw moved once. He recalled Ryuu without comment and sat back in the chair with a long exhale

Theo was watching Jupiter from the chair beside him.

Jupiter had a pancake. The origin of this was unclear at there had not been a pancake in the corridor when they sat down. There was no food stall visible from where they were sitting. Still, Jupiter had a pancake and had placed it on the floor in front of him and was now sitting approximately thirty centimetres from it and looking at it with the concentrated attention he normally reserved for battles and payback.

Nothing was happening to the pancake.

Jupiter's brow furrowed fractionally.

Still nothing.

His cheeks were not sparking. Whatever he was using it was not electricity and it was not working at the level required to move a pancake, which was heavier than a paper cup and considerably more motivating.

The pancake sat on the floor and was a pancake.

Jupiter looked at it for another long moment and then picked it up with his hands and ate it with the composure of a Pokemon who had always intended to do it that way and whose other approach had simply been a preliminary assessment.

Miyato watched this.

"Is he trying to move it?" he said.

"Yes," Theo said.

"With his mind."

"Probably."

Miyato looked at Jupiter, who was finishing the pancake with dignity.

"Why does he have a pancake?" Miyato said.

"I genuinely don't know," Theo said.

---

He looked at Kiri before the match started and Kiri looked at the Jigglypuff and Miyato made the call before releasing her. Dragon Breath would do nothing to a Fairy type and he was not going to waste her energy or her time on a move that couldn't land.

He understood the math before the match began. Sing had accuracy that could be played around with; smoke could pull it down, give Kiri the margins she needed. Disarming Voice was different. Disarming Voice was a sound move, and sound didn't care about visual cover. It would find Kiri through anything Miyato put between them. Every time the Jigglypuff trainer called it, it was going to land. The question was whether Kiri could put enough Bubble damage together to win the exchange before the Disarming Voice damage won it first.

"Smokescreen."

Kiri laid the cover fast and the cloud spread between them before Jigglypuff had settled. The Jigglypuff trainer immediately called Sing. The sleep move went out into the smoke and found nothing. The smoke drop had done its job.

"Bubble—"

Kiri's water move landed through the smoke on Jigglypuff and Jigglypuff took it and answered with Disarming Voice before the Bubble had finished dissipating. The Fairy sound cut through the cloud the way sound always cut through visual cover, completely and without caring what was in the way, and it found Kiri regardless of the smoke Miyato had built. She took it and slid back.

"Smokescreen, keep it up—"

"Disarming Voice—"

A second smoke layer built and the trainer didn't bother with Sing this time, switching straight to Disarming Voice, and it found Kiri through the fresh smoke the same way it had found her through the first layer. Kiri fired Bubble through the impact and both moves crossed through the smoke simultaneously, both landing, both doing damage.

Miyato was doing the math and he didn't like it. The smoke was managing Sing. It was doing nothing about Disarming Voice. Kiri was going to take every Disarming Voice the trainer called. He could slow it, extend the match, keep Kiri landing Bubble through the exchanges, but the Fairy damage was stacking and he couldn't stop it, only manage around it.

"Bubble—"

"Disarming Voice, keep the pressure—"

Another exchange, water and sound crossing in both directions, and Kiri took the hit and fired back and her standing after the second Disarming Voice was less certain than it had been after the first. The damage was accumulating in her. Miyato could see it in how she held herself after each hit, the recovery slightly slower, the reset taking a breath longer than before.

Miyato doesn't need to know the trainer saw it, just that the Body Slam came.

"Body Slam, take it to her—"

Jigglypuff launched itself across the floor and Kiri had nowhere to go, the attack coming too fast and too committed to sidestep, and the full weight of it hit her and she went down hard and lay there.

Miyato's hand went toward the Pokéball.

Jigglypuff was already drawing breath for Disarming Voice. The trainer was calling it before the Body Slam had fully resolved, the finishing move, the one that never missed, the one that didn't need accuracy to be a problem.

Miyato looked at Kiri on the floor.

"Kiri."

He said just her name. Nothing else. No command attached to it because he didn't have a command for this. Just her name, the way he said it when she was on his shoulder and the world was fine, and it came out different now because the world was not fine and she was on the floor and Jigglypuff was drawing a breath that was going to end the match.

Kiri looked up at him.

Something passed between them that was not a plan.

Jigglypuff opened its mouth.

What came off Kiri was Bubble found at a pressure it had never found before, concentrated and forced through a gear that hadn't existed in any training session or any match before this one. It crossed the floor before Disarming Voice had fully formed and hit Jigglypuff with force that sat in a completely different category from anything Kiri had produced. Jigglypuff sat down hard. The half-formed Disarming Voice dissolved before it left the Jigglypuff's mouth.

The hall went quiet.

Miyato heard it go quiet before he understood why. The sound of a crowd pulling in its breath at once, something he'd never heard as a unified thing before, and underneath it nothing, no Disarming Voice forming, no follow-up call from the other trainer and then he understood.

Kiri was still standing.

She was staring at the space where Jigglypuff had been. Then at her own fins. The look on her face was one he didn't have a word for and he didn't try to find one.

The announcer said something. Miyato heard the word before he fully processed it. Bubble Beam.

Miyato recalled Kiri and stood at the battle line with the Pokéball in his hand and something in his chest that was large and didn't have a shape yet. He exhaled once through his nose. Then again.

His hands were not entirely steady when he walked back.

---

Zeus against Ponyta.

The Ponyta moved before Zeus had finished reading it, speed coming off it like heat off a road, and Zeus's first Bite found air as Ponyta was somewhere else before the attack arrived, the opponent's trainer saying nothing because the horse was already doing what it had been trained to do.

Ponyta was faster than anything Zeus had faced on the route. Bite needed proximity. Quick Attack needed proximity. Every physical move Zeus had needed him to close distance that Ponyta was not going to let him close.

"Charge Beam," Theo said. "Don't chase it. Range."

"Dodge and Ember!"

Zeus stopped trying to close and fired Charge Beam from where he was and hit Ponyta across the field before Ponyta had finished repositioning. The special attack boost settled into Zeus alongside the damage as Ponyta fired back.

"Charge Beam—"

"Flame Charge, keep speed—"

Both Pokémon moved, and Ponyta's fire-enhanced strike landed while Zeus was loading the second beam, both taking damage simultaneously, and Ponyta's speed boost stacked at the same moment Zeus's special attack boost did. The horse was faster now, but Zeus wasn't trying to match it, he was building something different.

Zeus felt different in the way Pokémon felt different when something was accumulating in them, the output changing in quality not just quantity.

"Fire Spin, close—"

"Hold position—"

Ponyta came in fast, fire already building for the trapping move, and Zeus held while Theo counted down the distance in his head. The moment Ponyta fully committed. too close to redirect, too fast to stop,

"Bite, now!"

Dark-type jaws finding the flank at the moment of closest approach, and Fire Spin went partial because the grip interrupted its establishment mid-formation. Ponyta's speed advantage stopped mattering when something was holding your flank.

The trainer made a sound.

"Break free," he said. "Ember."

Ponyta fought the grip and Zeus held it and the fire came from close range and Zeus took the Ember and did not release and Theo looked at the distance between them which was zero and said:

"Shock Wave."

Shock Wave never missed. At the range of zero it had nowhere to miss to, and the two Charge Beam boosts sitting in Zeus's system meant what came out of him was not what would have come out at the start of the battle. It hit Ponyta at point blank with the accumulated output of everything Zeus had been building since the first Charge Beam landed and Ponyta went from fighting the Bite to sitting down, and the transition between those two states was fast.

Zeus released the Bite.

He looked at the space Ponyta had occupied. His coat was singed in two places and he was breathing harder than the start of the fight and none of that was in his expression.

Theo looked at him. At the coat with the Ember marks. The way Zeus had held the Bite through the fire and waited and built something methodically across exchanges until it was enough.

John's voice was in there somewhere underneath it, you didn't earn that and Theo let it sit without answering it.

Zeus pressed briefly against his hand.

"Good," Theo said. "That's good."

---

"Five rounds left," he said.

"Yes," Theo said. He looked at John's section of the bracket. "He's going to keep winning."

Miyato's hands went back into his jacket pockets. "I don't want to face that Beedrill."

"Neither do I," Theo said. "So let's not lose before we have to."

Miyato adjusted the hat brim without touching it. The hall beyond the corridor was louder than round one, the crowd noise thicker, a different density to it. More people. Miyato had clocked the extra cameras when they'd passed the doorway and hadn't said anything but his posture had done the thing it did.

"The crowd's bigger," Miyato said.

"It'll keep getting bigger," Theo said. "Every round the bracket shrinks and whoever's still in it gets more visible."

Miyato's hands went deeper into his jacket pockets.

"Don't think about the final rounds," Theo said. "Think about round three."

"I am thinking about round three."

"You're thinking about the cameras in round three."

Miyato said nothing, which was its own answer.

Theo looked at him. "Kiri learned Bubble Beam mid-match," he said. "In the middle of a fight. Under pressure, one knee down, your trainer telling her she was okay." He waited for Miyato to look at him. "You know why she found it then and not in any training session?"

Miyato was quiet.

"Because she knew you believed she could," Theo said. "That's not a small thing. That's the whole thing."

Miyato looked at the Pokéball on his belt. His thumb moved across its surface. "I didn't say anything to her," he said. "I just said bubble. I didn't even know what I was asking for."

"She knew anyway," Theo said. "That's the point."

Miyato exhaled slowly. "You're not nervous at all."

"I didn't say that."

Miyato looked at him with the expression of someone recalibrating. Theo's hands were still. His posture was the same it always was. But Miyato had been next to him for a week now and he could see it, the thing pressing underneath the stillness, being held there by something practiced and deliberate.

"Okay," Miyato said, quieter.

"Five rounds," Theo said. "One at a time." He looked at the bracket. "Starting with whoever's standing between you and John's section."

Miyato followed his gaze to the bracket board.

"And the cameras," Miyato said.

"The cameras aren't battling you," Theo said. "Your opponent is."

Miyato looked at the board for another moment. Then something in his shoulders settled, fractionally, the way things settled when a decision had been made without quite being said out loud.

"One at a time," he said.

"One at a time," Theo said.