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Chasing after a Pokémon while ignoring its emotional state was explicitly forbidden by park policy.
And so Aaron found himself caught between two opposing pressures: satisfying a guest's demands or adhering to the park's rules.
He hesitated.
"Come on!"
"What are you waiting for?"
Beside him, Hannah's urging only grew sharper and more anxious.
Inside the cramped touring car, Aaron sat rigid in the driver's seat, a fine sheen of sweat forming along his forehead.Reflecting on his earlier tardiness, he knew that if he refused the guest now, there was a very real chance she would file a complaint after the tour ended.
And the punishment he might face for that could be several times worse than the penalty for breaking park protocol.
A flicker flashed in Aaron's dark eyes.
Grinding his teeth, he hit the accelerator and drove straight toward Sobble.
The silver-gray touring car, built with its streamlined shell, sped across the damp grass, spraying wet brown earth out to either side beneath its wheels.
Kael stopped walking deeper into the lake.
He turned and stared at the touring car now charging straight toward him, closing the distance with every second.
His gaze turned colder and colder.
"So you really dare."
In an instant, the frustration and restlessness that had already been building in his chest turned into dry tinder and caught fire under his anger.
Under normal circumstances, if a tourist crossed the line like this, Kael might not even have bothered reacting. At worst, he would simply have slipped deeper into the lake and let it end there.
But right now, he was already in a foul mood because of this artificial environment.
And anyone stupid enough to poke at him in a moment like this was not going to walk away easily.
The hardened soul forged through several lifetimes may have made him calmer and more thorough in how he handled things, but that did not mean he no longer felt emotion.
If anything, once that powerful soul truly tipped into anger, the force of it was far more intense than before.
And now, faced with these clueless park visitors, Kael decided to teach them a lesson.
He was going to make them understand exactly how badly they had misjudged the situation.
His slender limbs pressed into the soft, wet ground as his small body leaned slightly forward.
Within the dense muscle fibers beneath his skin, explosive force began to gather in silence.
Reflected in his blue eyes was the silver-gray vehicle rushing toward him.
And within those eyes, a sharp light flared.
Boom.
A deep, drum-like impact burst from the lakeshore.
Crystal droplets flew up in all directions.
Kael's small blue body shot forward with a speed no normal human eye could possibly follow, charging straight at the oncoming touring car.
His broad tail lifted high behind him, aimed at the silver vehicle ahead.
Brilliant white light gathered across it, blinding and radiant, like a concentrated beam from a floodlamp.
Against the reinforced shell of the touring car, Kael had no idea exactly how much punishment it could take.
But instinct told him clearly that brute force alone was not the right answer.
So instead of relying purely on physical strength, he brought elemental power into the attack, the force unique to Pokémon.
Aaron had his foot pinned to the accelerator.
His face, already darkened by constant exposure to the sun, was now flushed with an unnatural red from surging emotion.
Then suddenly, as if he had seen something completely beyond expectation, surprise appeared in his eyes.
The Sobble ahead, which had been moving deeper into the lake, did not panic and run like an ordinary Pokémon when the vehicle got close.
Instead, it had stopped.
And turned to face them.
"What..."
Still caught in confusion, Aaron instinctively lifted his foot off the accelerator when he saw Sobble stop fleeing.
But he failed to hit the brakes in time.
And so the touring car, driven on by its own momentum, kept hurtling toward Sobble.
"Wait."
Aaron's pupils shrank violently.
As someone who had worked in the park for quite a while, he could clearly read what Sobble's posture meant.
That posture was not fear.
It was an attack.
Terror flooded his face.
His right foot jerked up instinctively, trying to slam the brake and bring the car to an emergency stop.
But it was too late.
Boom.
A sharp impact exploded through the air.
Outside the windshield, the blue figure ahead sprang off the mud like a bolt of lightning.
Aaron could not even see the movement clearly. All he caught was a blur of blue, and in the next instant, Sobble had already launched himself up to the upper side of the vehicle.
Then came a wash of blinding white light.
His broad tail, wrapped in that dazzling radiance, came crashing down.
In that instant, the monstrous strength possessed by Pokémon, strength far beyond anything human, erupted in full.
BOOM.
The explosive thunder of metal smashing into metal burst into the open air.
Sparks flew.
A massive dent caved in across the silver body of the specially built car.
The touring vehicle, which had been racing forward under its own momentum, stopped dead as though it had slammed into an invisible wall. Its rear wheels kicked up helplessly into the air before crashing back down.
But it still was not over.
That huge glowing tail, now embedded deep in the car's body, swung violently to the side.
SKREEEEECH!!!!!
As if the vehicle had collided head-on with a train at full speed, the silver touring car was hurled sideways by overwhelming force, flipping across the grass.
Only then did the screaming begin.
Panicked cries and human shrieks finally burst from inside the nearly shattered reinforced windows.
The touring car rolled again and again, carving a long trail across the wet, muddy ground before friction finally dragged it to a stop.
Inside, ragged breathing filled the cabin.
Hannah clung to the overhead safety handle with trembling hands, her eyes unfocused and her face chalk-white.
Unlike Aaron, she did not have enough experience to understand what had happened the moment Sobble changed.
All she had seen was a flash of blue.
Then a terrifying force had struck from the front and sent the entire car flipping into chaos.
The world spun.
And for one awful moment, it felt as though one foot had already stepped into death.
Only then did the car's emergency alarm finally go off, shrieking through the cabin.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
"Hah... hah..."
Aaron's whole body had gone rigid.
Fear had swallowed him so completely that he could not even force out a full sentence.
All he could do was act on instinct.
Numb and shaking, he fumbled open the control panel and slammed his hand onto the emergency distress button.
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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!