The sun had barely cleared the eastern treeline when Sieg left Slateport behind.
He wore his League trainer's jacket rather than anything that identified him more specifically, and moved at a pace that split the difference between efficiency and conservation. Umbreon kept to his left side, unhurried and watchful. Sandile moved at his feet in the loose, low posture it defaulted to in unfamiliar terrain, its sand-colored scales catching the morning light in a way that made it nearly invisible against the pale dirt of the path. Anyone not paying close attention would have missed it entirely.
What looks like nothing on a map has a way of humbling you on foot. The distance to the first marked location had been measured a few centimeters on the printed sheet he had collected from a copy shop near the Pokémon Center. What those centimeters translated to in actual terrain was something he discovered over the course of the next half hour, moving at a steady jog through increasingly dense woodland, the undergrowth thickening around the path as the city fell away behind him.
His body handled it without complaint. Physical conditioning had been a constant across both of his lives, not out of discipline exactly but out of the practical understanding that a trainer who could not keep pace with their own Pokémon in the field was a trainer operating at a disadvantage. He was not winded when the trees finally thinned and the lake appeared through the gap, catching the early light in a way that made it look perfectly, invitingly still.
He had released Honchkrow at the forest edge.
"Find the Absol. Sweep wide, stay high, report back."
Honchkrow had gone without ceremony, a black shape climbing sharply into the open sky above the canopy and banking toward the interior. Its aerial vantage and the sharp vision that came with its type made it the obvious choice for covering ground quickly, and the area was sparse enough in human activity that Sieg had no particular concern about it being seen.
He settled in to wait.
The lake was small and clean-looking, ringed by the kind of dense vegetation that accumulated around freshwater sources in undisturbed woodland. A few Magikarp turned lazily at the surface near the far edge, their orange scales visible even from a distance. Otherwise, the water was still.
Sieg kept back from the bank. Freshwater in the wild was never just freshwater. It was contested ground, the kind of resource that drew everything within range at predictable intervals, which meant being close to it made you visible to things that were watching for exactly the kind of movement he represented. He found a position with good sightlines in two directions, settled Umbreon beside him, and waited.
They came gradually, as they always did. First the small and cautious ones, emerging from the treeline in short, tentative movements, pausing to read the air before committing to the open ground near the water's edge. Then the bolder ones, reading the cautious ones' survival as permission. The accumulation of wild Pokémon around the lake over the next hour was quiet and unhurried, each one present on its own terms and aware of all the others, the social mathematics of a shared resource operating in the background of every interaction.
The Mightyena pack arrived and immediately changed those mathematics.
There were more than a dozen of them, moving with the coordinated ease of animals that had made this walk together enough times that it required no decision-making. They spread along the best section of the bank and drank, and the other Pokémon who had been using that section moved without being asked, too outnumbered to do anything about it. The alpha at the center of the group was notably larger than the rest, its markings deeper, its manner carrying the settled authority of something that had held its position long enough to stop thinking about challengers.
Sieg watched from the treeline and made a few assessments. The pack's levels ranged across a spread that suggested mixed ages. None of them was close to the upper threshold of what this kind of forest typically produced. Not his immediate interest.
The first bubble broke the surface near the center of the lake.
One of the smaller Pokémon at the water's edge noticed it. The instinct that had kept them alive this long did not require them to identify the source before it prompted action. They were gone in seconds, moving away from the bank with the specific urgency of animals that did not know what was coming but knew something was.
The Mightyena pack registered the shift half a beat later. The alpha's head came up. The nearest pack members stepped back from the water.
They were not fast enough.
The Whiscash came up through the surface in a single explosive motion, clearing the bank line entirely, and the Mightyena that had been standing closest to the water's edge had no time to process what it was looking at before it was already caught. The creature was enormous, deep blue across the back, pale yellow at the belly, its spongy blue lips wrapped around a jaw built for grip, twin yellow whiskers trailing back from the corners of its mouth, a W-shaped yellow marking above the eyes that gave it an expression of something between curiosity and contempt. The dorsal fin was light blue, spotted with three black markings, and it moved with the authority of something that had been the apex of this specific patch of water for long enough that the concept of threat had become largely theoretical.
It dragged the Mightyena toward the bank.
The rest of the pack scattered. The alpha hesitated for a fraction of a second in the way that leaders sometimes did when the cost calculation between loyalty and survival ran very close, then followed its pack into the treeline.
Sieg stepped out of cover.
He had already worked through most of what the creature represented in the seconds between its emergence and now. The lake's surface had looked clean because the predator living in it had an interest in it looking clean. The water was the lure. The real environment was what lay beneath, a muddy, heavily modified substrate that would have announced its nature immediately to anything with the experience to read it, which the creatures coming here for water generally did not have until it was too late. Dozens of wild Pokémon taken this way, by the evidence of the creature's level relative to what this forest should have been able to produce. The intelligence profile Sieg had been building in his head included the detail, delivered in the flat tone of the intelligence file's summary section, that the Whiscash had been responsible for the disappearance of several humans as well.
A predator that had learned humans were catchable. That had kept hunting them after the first time.
He noted this with the same calm he brought to information that required a calibrated response rather than an emotional reaction.
The Mightyena was still conscious but barely, dragged to the muddy shallows at the bank's edge. Whiscash had not finished. It registered Sieg's emergence from the treeline with one large, forward-facing eye, assessed the two-legged shape with the recognition of something that had seen this shape before and had a category for it, and did not change its behavior. If anything, its manner became slightly more deliberate, the way a creature does when it has identified something it considers a secondary target worth processing after the primary one was secured.
Sieg read it correctly.
"Sandile. Stomping Tantrum."
Sandile was already moving. It hit the ground hard with both feet and the shockwave radiated outward through the earth in a visible ring, the wavefront crossing the damp ground at the lake's edge and reaching Whiscash with enough force to make the creature's grip on the Mightyena loosen involuntarily.
Whiscash turned its full attention to Sandile.
For a moment, it was still, processing. Then it made what appeared to be a decision about the scale of the response required.
Its tail came down.
The impact was nothing like the controlled vibration Sandile's move had produced. The ground between the lake and the treeline did not just shake; it buckled. The shockwave radiated outward in all directions simultaneously, splitting the earth in visible lines, the force of it hitting Sandile before the dust had even registered. One hundred base power, channeled through a body that had spent years feeding on everything it could drag below the surface of a forest lake.
Earthquake.
Sieg felt it through his boots.
His eyes sharpened.
A wild Pokémon in a remote forest outside Slateport, sitting on a move that had just been the centerpiece prize at a tournament aboard the Chansey. The irony registered and was immediately set aside in favor of the considerably more pressing question of how Sandile was going to answer it.