When Jenny saw the three Pokemon being used as living time bombs, the reality of it hit her like a wall of ice. She had nothing to say.
This was a conspiracy, start to finish.
That was the nature of conspiracies — every piece had to be kept hidden, working through gaps in what the other side knew. The moment a single link came to light, the whole thing unraveled.
And right now, it had just come to light.
Jenny felt a sharp pull of dread.
Two hundred and forty-one Security Officers had been sent to Lune Town for this operation — elite squads drawn from cities all across the Norlandia Alliance. If Team Origin actually managed to wipe them all out here, the damage to the Alliance's reputation would be the least of the problems.[T/N: I have changed Original Team to Team Origin as it sounds better]
Larger cities like Sand River City might be able to absorb a loss like that and keep functioning. But smaller cities — Forest City included, where officers were already stretched thin — would be left with almost nothing. Without enough officers to maintain order, the Alliance would slowly lose its grip on those areas. And once that grip loosened, criminal organizations like Team Origin would move in without hesitation.
If Team Origin succeeded here, they would grow bolder. They would push into every region the Alliance couldn't cover in time, pulling resources and influence from those areas until they became something too large and too entrenched to uproot. A problem that had started small would become one the Alliance couldn't solve at all.
Jenny reached for her radio.
Nova caught her by the arm.
"Jenny, what are you doing!"
She didn't react to the outburst. Her voice stayed firm. "Contacting the others. Calling off the operation."
"Then your colleagues are as good as dead."
Jenny stopped. The confusion on her face shifted into something colder as the implication settled in. "You're saying there are informants inside the command center. And inside the teams already in the field."
"What else?" Nova's tone was direct. "Team Origin put serious resources into this. They're not going to watch from a distance and hope for the best. There's definitely someone compromised at the top — whoever drew up the arrest plan for Lune Town either works for Rocket or handed them the details. Either way, Rocket has had the full picture from the beginning and has been one step ahead the whole time."
He kept going.
"We already know they're capable of silencing a closely monitored prisoner without leaving a trace. Do you think they wouldn't have planted people in the operational command layer? Or among the officers already on the ground here? The plan was built with their input from the start. Their people are woven into every stage of it."
He met her eyes.
"If you report this upward right now, or if you go running through Lune Town warning every officer you come across — the moment even one of them is a informant, the bombs go off. How many of your colleagues survive after that is entirely out of our hands."
Jenny said nothing. Nova let the silence sit for a moment, then added, "If you make it out of this, the first thing you need to do quietly is find out who put this operation together. Whoever drew up the Lune Town arrest plan is the most likely candidate for Team Origin's top operative inside the Alliance."
Jenny turned that over in her mind. Lune Town had been sitting abandoned for decades, with illegal operations running inside it for over ten years. The Alliance's Public Security General Bureau had done nothing — not early, not late — and had only moved after Taylor was caught and the Team Origin base was already destroyed. From Team Origin's point of view, Lune Town had already become a dead weight: no real value, but not worth cutting loose either. And yet someone had pushed hard for this large-scale operation with great urgency.
Whoever that person was, they were almost certainly using Lune Town as bait. If the plan worked, Team Origin's reach across the Norlandia Alliance would grow considerably. Even if their identity inside the General Bureau was burned in the process, the trade — their position for the chance to hollow out dozens of smaller cities — would be well worth it from Team Origin's perspective.
Jenny was too close to it. The scale of the threat — bombs hidden throughout the entire town, two hundred lives on the line — was making it hard for her to think clearly. She knew it. Rather than keep spinning in circles, she looked at Nova directly.
"So what do we do?"
"Do you have a way to reach everyone on duty through the radio?" he asked.
"There's a public channel. It's not supposed to be used except in genuine emergencies — the kind where you bypass the command center entirely and contact all officers at once."
"Good," Nova said. "If your colleagues are smart enough, using that channel correctly could save more than half of them."
Jenny's voice dropped. "Is there really no way to save all of them..."
"Not realistically," Nova said. "We're not superheroes, Jenny. We work with what we have and try to keep as many people alive as possible."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she straightened. "Understood. Keep going."
"The operation is scheduled for midnight. Right now it's 4 PM. By 10 PM, Team Origin will think things are still on track — they won't have gone to full alert yet. At exactly 10 PM, you open the public channel and broadcast the following to every Security Officer in Lune Town..."
He told her what to say.
Jenny listened with a growing frown. By the end of it, she looked genuinely uncertain. "Will that actually work? It sounds..."
"That's the point," Nova said. "Any officer who hears it and isn't completely asleep will know immediately that something is very wrong. And the Team Origin informants will be too busy reacting to what they just heard to move fast enough."
Jenny exhaled. "Fine. I'll trust you — the same way you're trusting me."
"There's one more thing," Nova added. "I'd appreciate it if you could be flexible about something."
"Go on."
"This plan was entirely your idea, Jenny. You came up with it on your own. It has nothing to do with me." He paused. "Also — you haven't seen me today."
Jenny gave a short, dry smile. "So you get to walk away clean while I deal with Team Origin's people inside the General Bureau's command. Very generous of you."
Her eyes fixed on his as she said it — there was something quiet and steady in them, the kind of look that was harder to brush off than anger.
Nova felt a chill run up his spine. He reminded himself, very firmly, that he had a girlfriend.
She is eighteen years old in a twenty-six-year-old body. I cannot win this.
"Jenny," he said, keeping his voice level, "I'm handing you credit for saving over a hundred Security Officers without asking for anything in return. That's not nothing. Don't try to pull me into the fallout."
"I know exactly what you're doing," she said. "You just don't want to get tangled up in the fight between the Security Bureau and Team Origin."
She wasn't wrong. Not even slightly.