Chapter 332: Gathering Forces
Dragonite put distance between them and Silver Town quickly, banking north through low cloud cover until the town's lights were completely gone below the horizon. Ryan sat on its back with Ethan and Kris on either side of him, running through everything the infiltration had given him.
It wasn't nothing. The sentry rotation intervals, the warehouse location, the perimeter layering, the response time from the checkpoint to the holding area — all of it was mapped and stored. The chimera wave tactics were the variable that mattered most. Everything else was logistics.
Kris broke the silence first. "We fought Giovanni directly before they took us. There are four Pokémon in his lineup that operate on a completely different level from the rest of his forces." She ticked them off with the precision of someone who had been cataloguing the fight in her head ever since. "A Deoxys. The three-bird fusion. A Beedrill that can Mega Evolve. And a Cloyster."
Ethan nodded. "The rest of his conventional forces are strong — he has Ground-types and heavy hitters throughout — but those four aren't conventional. They move like Pokémon that have found their origin. Domain-level instincts, even if they haven't formally crossed the threshold."
Ryan was quiet for a moment.
Giovanni's Beedrill wasn't a surprise. In every version of the story Ryan had absorbed before coming to this world, Beedrill had been Giovanni's constant — his starter, his oldest partner, the one Pokémon that had been with him through everything that had built him into what he was. A Beedrill that had stayed at Giovanni's side through decades of that kind of history, and had been trained with the obsessive focus of a man who wanted to own the world — the Mega Evolution capability was almost an afterthought compared to what that bond would have produced in terms of raw battle experience.
The Cloyster made sense the same way. Veteran Pokémon with long histories alongside trainers of Giovanni's caliber developed something that went beyond stats.
The Deoxys was the variable that made Ryan reach into his backpack.
He wrapped his hand around the Master Ball and felt it immediately — a low, insistent vibration against his palm. Not a distress signal exactly. More like something straining toward a direction it couldn't reach.
Giovanni had acquired a Deoxys of his own. Ryan had known about his Deoxys — the one currently in the Master Ball — since the capture. He knew the history: two Deoxys, inseparable, and then the experiment, and then one of them was gone in a way that couldn't be undone regardless of who asked. His Deoxys had been carrying that loss since before Ryan had ever encountered it, and the hostility it directed at humans in general had always had that specific grief underneath it.
Now it could sense that Giovanni's Deoxys was near. And it wanted out.
Ryan held the Master Ball and spoke to it directly, keeping his voice low and even. "I hear you. And I'm not going to tell you your anger isn't valid, because it is. But I need you to think clearly for thirty seconds." He paused. "If you go at Team Rocket right now, at your current strength, what happens? You know what happens. You can't beat Florges in a straight match right now — that's not an insult, it's just where things are. Giovanni's Deoxys operates at a level above you at this moment, and behind it there are ten thousand chimera bombs waiting to turn a bad situation into an irreversible one. You'd be captured again inside of ten minutes. And then you'd be back in the research facility, and whatever chance you have to actually settle this is gone."
The vibration in the Master Ball slowed.
Ryan kept going. "You were strong. Past tense — because you've been refusing to train, and stagnation is regression when everyone around you is moving forward. Charizard would give you a real fight right now. That shouldn't be possible and it wouldn't be, if you'd been working instead of resisting." He set the Master Ball back in his bag carefully. "When this operation is over, I'll release you. You can do whatever you want after that — settle your debts, find your own path, leave if you want to leave. But between now and then, I need you functional. So decide."
The Master Ball was still.
Ryan took that as the closest thing to an agreement he was going to get from Deoxys and moved on.
Dragonite landed in a forest clearing well outside Team Rocket's patrol range. The three of them dropped to the ground, and Ryan recalled it.
Ethan looked around the tree line, then back at Ryan. "Team Rocket won't reach us here. But Kris and I — our Pokémon are still back there. Every Poké Ball was confiscated when they took us." He kept his voice level, but the weight underneath it was audible. "Whatever Giovanni's research team is doing with Raikou and Entei right now—"
"I know," Ryan said. "We can't get them back on a two-person extraction run. The chimera wave tactics are mindless but they work — there's no counter to unlimited attrition except matching numbers or overwhelming individual power, and right now we don't have the numbers positioned here." He pulled out his Pokégear. "Two days. When the main force arrives, we hit them properly. Until then—"
He called Ethan — the Johto branch contact, the one still outside the occupied zone.
The holographic display opened. "Hey. Ethan and Kris are out — I have them with me. Here's where we are." Ryan ran through the intelligence summary quickly: sentry positions, warehouse location, chimera wave density, the four priority targets in Giovanni's lineup. "For the main assault to work, I need League support. Specifically — I need Mew in this fight. Not optional."
On the other end of the call, Lance's expression shifted into the careful look of someone managing multiple obligations simultaneously. "Mew is an ally, not a subordinate. We have one remaining call on its cooperation. Using it here—"
"Use it," Ryan said flatly. "The chimera wave tactics work by volume. Without enough high-output Pokémon to match the numbers, anyone we send in gets worn down the same way Raikou and Entei were. Mew's capacity for creative application of moves makes it the single best counter to a swarm tactic I have access to. Bring it."
"And if we don't?"
"Then I extract my own people, secure my own assets, and leave the League's Johto problem to the League. I'm not running a charity operation against a Domain-level threat because the League wants to preserve its strategic reserves."
Lance was quiet for a moment. "That's a hard line."
"It's an accurate line. There's a difference." Ryan shifted his weight. "And while I have you — I'm going to tell you something that changes the calculus on all of this. Arceus confirmed it personally. Necrozma's next target is this world. Two to three years, maximum. That's the actual threat horizon. Giovanni is a serious problem, but he's a regional problem. What's coming after is not regional." He paused. "Every resource we burn protecting our individual positions instead of unifying right now is a resource we don't have when it actually matters. Stop conserving. Start consolidating. Every strong Trainer, every legendary Pokémon, every research asset — all of it needs to be pointed the same direction before that clock runs out."
The silence on Lance's end was different this time. Longer. More weight in it.
"...Is that confirmed."
"Arceus told me himself. It's confirmed."
"...Understood. I'll authorize the Mew call and begin the consolidation process. But Ryan — if this is wrong—"
"It's not. But if it were, we'd all find out together." Ryan closed the call.
He looked at Ethan and Kris. Both of them were watching him with expressions that said they'd absorbed the last thirty seconds of conversation and were still processing the Necrozma part.
Ryan pocketed the Pokégear. "Two days. Then we end this."
He led Ethan and Kris to the nearest town and spent the next hour at the Pokémon Center's transmission terminal, calling in Pokémon from the Guild's reserve roster for Ethan and Kris to use until their own teams could be recovered. Sending them into the main assault without Pokémon wasn't an option.
Three days after that, the Guild's main force began arriving.
Ryan stood at the edge of the staging forest and watched them come in — Guild members filtering in from multiple approach vectors, elite team units checking in, the peripheral support forces filling in the gaps. When the count stabilized, he had just under six hundred people positioned and ready.
He looked at the assembled force for a moment. Then he turned toward Silver Town.
"Move out."
(End of Chapter)
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