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Kael sat quietly on the grass, staring at the silver-gray touring car off to the side, now caked in mud and dented all over.
As if some of the irritation inside him had finally been vented, the anger in his eyes had eased quite a bit.
Beep... beep...
The shrill alarm pierced through the shattered glass and rang out across the wetlands, startling the nearby Pokémon and sending them scattering in every direction.
Unlike the others, Kael did not flee in panic.
He remained seated where he was, calm and still, as though the dramatic scene in front of him had nothing to do with him at all.
He knew perfectly well that in a place like this, a man-made park that only looked vast and open but was in truth watched by the park authorities in every corner like an invisible cage, there was no escape.
Rather than force the humans to send out a full search team, drag things into a tense chase, and get caught in the end anyway, it was easier to stay right here and accept whatever punishment was coming.
At least that would save him the trouble.
Kael understood that what he had done would have consequences.
But he did not regret it.
Those tourists had been unbearable.
Like a swarm of buzzing flies that refused to leave, hovering around his ears and ruining his peace no matter how many times he tried to ignore them.
Still, there was one thing that reassured him.
Thanks to his keen hearing, he could clearly make out the two heartbeats coming from inside the vehicle.
They were fast from shock, yes, but still strong and steady.
That meant the people inside had not suffered any injuries serious enough to threaten their lives.
That was enough.
He still did not know exactly what sort of punishment he was about to face. Still, based on everything he had observed over the past few days, Pokémon held a very high status in this human society, even if it was inside a virtual world.
Compared to the way ordinary animals in his past life were often treated as pets, tools, or food, Pokémon in this world, excluding the truly violent wild ones, were viewed more as equal partners.
In that kind of environment, as long as a Pokémon living in the park had not done anything too extreme, the punishment probably would not be especially severe.
And besides, it was not as though he had attacked a human without reason.
If this clueless tourist had not stubbornly refused to leave him alone, and if they had not driven the touring car straight at him in such an openly aggressive way, he never would have retaliated like this in the first place.
Looking at the silver touring car, now toppled in the grass with part of its shell twisted and broken under his attack, a miserable wreck compared with the polished vehicle it had been only moments ago, Kael's expression turned a little strange.
From one angle, the two people inside really had been spectacularly unlucky.
If they had come a little earlier, they probably would not have run into him at all. He had still been exploring the lake then.
If they had come a little later, the frustration in his chest might already have settled on its own.
And in that case, he might not even have bothered responding to their provocation.
But somehow they had chosen the exact moment when Kael was in the worst mood possible.
Honestly, later on, even he had to admit there was something almost impressive about their timing.
On another note, Kael had already expected the touring car to be fairly durable.
In a Pokémon marine park built like a safari reserve, any vehicle allowed to move freely among wild Pokémon obviously had to be strong enough to withstand attacks from ordinary Pokémon.
So when he swung his tail, he had not held back.
That strike had been roughly on the level of a normal combat hit for him.
What he had failed to consider was that this Sobble body of his was nothing like that of an ordinary Pokémon.
The stat enhancer he had received had pushed his natural physical talent to the absolute limit for a Sobble of his level, far beyond anything the Pokémon in this park could compare to.
On top of that, the cosmic DNA from Deoxys had granted him an outrageous boost in explosive speed.
Once those two factors combined, the power behind that strike had become overwhelming enough to completely break through the car's defenses and turn it into scrap.
And then there was the final thing.
The part that made Hannah and Aaron the unluckiest of all.
That seemingly ordinary tail strike had, somehow, triggered a critical hit.
Yes.
A critical hit, a concept that by all rights should only apply to living creatures, had somehow occurred against a lifeless machine.
If not for that, the custom-built touring car probably would not have looked nearly this pathetic.
Even Kael found that a little baffling.
But after thinking about it for a moment, he felt he had at least some idea why.
Because the world he was living in now, though it looked no different from reality on the surface, had already been revealed by the existence of players to be exactly what it was.
A virtual world built from data.
And in a place like that, where the laws of nature were created by code instead of reality, uncertainty was bound to be far greater. Strange things could happen.
With the badge and sniper trait both increasing his critical hit chance, perhaps something in that system had interacted with the world's programming unexpectedly and caused this result.
He did not dwell on it any further.
As far as Kael was concerned, landing a critical hit on an inanimate object was probably just a rare accident.
It was not worth worrying about.
What mattered more was figuring out how to handle the punishment that would soon be coming from the park authorities.
After thinking it over, Kael backed away a considerable distance.
After all, from a human point of view, a dangerous Pokémon that had just attacked a touring car was clearly a threat.
He did not want to create any more conflict with the park staff than necessary. He was still going to be living here for quite a while.
So in a delicate situation like this, where misunderstandings could easily happen, keeping a safe distance was important.
What Kael did not realize, however, was that to Hannah and Aaron inside the vehicle, this behavior only made him seem even more terrifying.
From their point of view, the Sobble that had just attacked with shocking ferocity had now trapped them inside the wrecked car with no way out.
And yet instead of pressing the attack, it had calmly withdrawn and was now simply sitting there, watching them with a composed, almost casual expression.
It felt less like the behavior of a normal creature and more like a deranged killer in a horror movie, someone whose actions were so detached and unnatural that they became impossible to predict.
In the aftermath of the attack, Kael's calmness was, to Hannah and Aaron, far more terrifying than if he had simply continued trying to kill them.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Aaron was trembling so violently that his clothes were soaked through with sweat.
Ignoring the pain in his muscles and skin from the crash, he hammered the emergency call button over and over with his right hand, as if pressing it harder might somehow force the rescue team to arrive faster.
For this kind of crisis, the sort of incident that might not happen even once in a year, Blue Crystal's rescue team responded quickly.
By Kael's estimate, only about ten minutes had passed before he heard sirens in the distance, rising closer and closer by the second.
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
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For early access to advanced chapters on P-atreon:
P-atreon/iamxeno
(Just remove the - hyphen to access normally)
Thank you so much for your support and for reading!