Outrage. Power one-twenty. A move that gave everything available in a sustained, uncontrolled burst, hitting whatever was in range without discrimination, and left the user stumbling through its own confusion in the aftermath. On a fully grown Whiscash that had spent years accumulating levels through ambush predation, using it at full output, even Sandile's current conditioning was not close to sufficient for direct engagement.
Sieg had already moved to the next decision before the move finished identifying itself.
"Sandile, break distance. Sand Tomb, keep the pressure on."
Whiscash's eyes had gone fully red, and the thing behind them was no longer making assessments. It was simply generating force and expending it in all available directions, water and mud and ground-type energy firing outward in overlapping bursts that tore up the bank around it and sent chunks of the shoreline into the air. The Mightyena that had been caught by the lake's edge earlier was gone, dragged under during the confusion, and nothing that had been drinking at this water source twenty minutes ago was still within visual range.
Sandile stayed out of arm's reach and worked the Sand Tomb with patience that was unusual in a Pokémon its age, maintaining the vortex in a tight orbit around Whiscash and letting the move do what it was built to do. Not damage, primarily. Control. Whiscash threw move after move against the sand walls, and none of them made meaningful progress. Every gap that opened in the vortex drew shut again before anything could move through it, and the effort of fighting sand that kept returning was costing Whiscash something it could not get back.
Sieg watched from a distance and let the clock run.
This was not patience for its own sake. It was the correct application of resource asymmetry: Sandile maintaining Sand Tomb at this level cost a fraction of what Whiscash was spending fighting it, and Whiscash's Outrage state had a duration. Once the move burned itself out, the confusion that followed would compound the fatigue already accumulating. The arithmetic was straightforward.
He waited until the red in Whiscash's eyes had started to clear, until the wild, uncoordinated attacks had reduced in frequency and then in force, until the creature was doing something closer to standing still than to fighting.
"Sandile. Crunch."
Sandile covered the distance in a flat sprint and hit Whiscash with the full output of the Dark-type energy it had been conserving since the sand went up. The bite connected across the side of Whiscash's body, and it did not get back up.
Sieg already had the Pokéball in his hand.
He threw it from arm's reach. The capture sphere hit Whiscash center mass, drew it in on the first contact, and settled to the ground with a single light rock that required no follow-up. One shake. Locked. The button light went solid.
He picked it up, examined it briefly, and put it away.
"Crawdaunt. Perimeter, twenty meters. Nothing approaches the bank."
Crawdaunt materialized and moved to its position without needing the instruction repeated.
Sieg walked to the lake's edge and stood there for a moment, looking at the water. The surface was exactly as it had been when he arrived, clear, still, the kind of appearance that suggested a place that had simply been sitting here undisturbed. He already knew what was underneath it. Seeing it confirmed and the creature that maintained it sitting in a Pokéball at his belt was a different thing than knowing it abstractly.
He took out the Premier Ball he had been saving for this, swapped it to his off hand, and released Sharpedo with the other.
"Take this." He attached the underwater sensor to Sharpedo's dorsal fin, working the clips quickly. "Find the nest. Bring back anything worth keeping."
Sharpedo hit the water at an angle that left almost no surface disturbance and was gone.
The feed came through on his Pokédex after a lag of a few seconds, the camera adjusting to the turbid water as Sharpedo descended through the false clarity of the upper layer and into the actual environment below. The transition was abrupt, clean water above, and then a diffuse brown murk that thickened with depth, the composition of the lake floor completely different from what the surface implied. Whiscash had been working at this for years. What had once been a standard freshwater lakebed had been systematically converted into a layered silt trap, the bottom a genuine bog that anything dragged into it would have found extremely difficult to exit without assistance.
Sieg watched the feed with his face neutral.
The bones were not unexpected. There were a lot of them. Pokémon remains, accumulated in dense overlapping layers that told a straightforward story about what had been visiting this water source over however many years Whiscash had been operational here. Mixed in among them were shapes that were less ambiguous, proportions that did not belong to any Pokémon he could readily identify, arranged in the specific way that heavy objects arranged themselves when they had been deposited and then settled over time.
The animated shorts he had watched in his previous life had presented the wilderness as a place of cooperation and discovery. The bottom of this lake was the more honest version.
He watched the feed and did not editorialize on what he saw.
Sharpedo returned eight minutes later. The materials gathered from the nest were a mixed collection, primarily Poison-type and Water-type components of the kind that accumulated around extended predator territories, secretions, shed organic matter, and rare mineral deposits that formed in highly specific chemical environments. He ran a quick value assessment. Approximately twenty thousand Pokédollars, nothing spectacular but nothing negligible either.
He packed them into the dimensional ring and turned his attention toward the sky at the moment he heard the familiar rasp from above.
Honchkrow descended from the canopy in a banking spiral and landed on the nearest tree branch with the composed authority of a Pokémon returning from completed work. It gave him its report in the clipped, efficient communication they had developed across years of operating together.
The first location: no confirmed sighting. Signs of recent passage, indistinct, direction unclear.
Sieg absorbed this without visible reaction. Intelligence leads had accuracy rates, and he had not paid for certainty. He folded the expectation away and moved.
The second location produced nothing useful either.
Honchkrow swept the surrounding area while Sieg worked a systematic ground search through the terrain the intelligence map had marked, and Sandile handled the encounters they ran into along the way, lower-level wild Pokémon, nothing that offered meaningful training pressure, disposed of quickly and without incident. He found no sign of Absol in two hours of careful searching. The kind of Pokémon that appeared at the edge of disasters left traces that were specific and readable to someone who knew what to look for, and what he was finding was the absence of those traces.
Either the sighting had been old when it was reported, or Absol had already moved on, or the lead had not been as solid as the asking price implied.
He noted the outcome and moved to the map.
The third marked location was a mountain forest, rising steeply from the terrain he was currently standing in, visible through the treeline as a darker mass against the late afternoon sky. The intelligence notes attached to this location included a separate advisory: Geodude and Onix activity confirmed in the interior, both species known for Self-Destruct capability. Recommended precaution: bring a Pokémon with the Damp ability before entering.
Sieg had originally intended to leave this location for the following morning. The plan had accounted for the travel time and the reduced utility of searching mountain terrain after dark.
He looked at the sun's position above the western ridge.
Then he folded the map and started walking toward the forest.
The advisory was calibrated for a different category of trainer than the one he currently occupied. Geodude and Onix in an accessible mountain forest were threats to intermediate trainers, people with teams between levels fifteen and twenty-five, who might find themselves in a situation where Self-Destruct resolved the encounter in a direction they had not planned for. The precaution of bringing a Damp-ability Pokémon was sound advice for that group. For a trainer with an Elite-rank team, the same advisory was background noise.
The Pokémon capable of surviving at the surface level of mountain terrain, accessible to casual foot traffic, were by definition not the strongest examples of their species. The genuinely powerful ones found their way into the deep fissures and underground cave systems where the mineral deposits were richer, and the resource competition was among equally powerful peers. What remained in the upper forest was the population that had not yet made that transition, younger specimens, lower levels, the ones that the ecosystem's vertical hierarchy had not yet sorted into the depths.
None of it would present a meaningful problem for Sandile or Crawdaunt at current levels. This was a reasonable assessment rather than arrogance, built on direct experience of what these terrain types produced and a clear-eyed reading of his team's capabilities relative to what he was likely to find.
He adjusted course slightly to stay on the firmer ground at the forest's edge and kept moving.
The League, he reflected as he walked, did not warn beginning trainers away from environments like this. It encouraged them into exactly these kinds of places, framing wilderness training as the foundational experience of a Pokémon journey, something every aspiring trainer needed to undergo. The logic, examined without sentiment, was not difficult to reconstruct. Trainers who made it through developed field experience that the League found useful. The ones who didn't were subtracted from a population that the League had no particular emotional investment in. The wild did the filtering that formal selection processes were too visible to do, and the results fed back into the system as trained, experienced, self-selected talent that had already proven it could function in adverse conditions.
It was not a humane system. It was an efficient one, and the distinction between those two things was one the League appeared to have made a considered peace with a long time ago.
The mountain forest began at a line of dense undergrowth that the lower terrain's grasses gave way to abruptly, and Sieg crossed it without slowing.