Chapter 331: First Encounter
"Living bombs," Ryan repeated, the words sitting wrong in his mouth.
He'd known about the cloned legendary birds through the system's earlier scans — the tragedy of what those Pokémon were, what had been done to them. But there was a difference between knowing something abstractly and hearing that Team Rocket had taken the failed experiments, the ones that hadn't survived the fusion process intact, and repurposed them as weapons. Engineered specifically to detonate. Given no purpose except to absorb damage and convert it into destruction on the way down.
Ryan's fist hit the cage frame hard enough to leave a dent in the already-warped metal.
"Those people are out of their minds."
"Not crazy." The voice came from behind him, and Ryan recognized the cadence of it before he'd fully turned around. "Just motivated. There's a difference."
Lysandre — no. Not Lysandre. The face was different, but the particular flavor of ideological calm in the voice was the same. Ryan turned fully and looked at the man standing at the head of the approaching Team Rocket formation. Beside him, half a step back, stood Jessie — her posture carrying the specific quality of someone who had recently been promoted and was wearing it carefully.
The formation fanned out around them. Thirty operatives at minimum, with more appearing at the edges of Ryan's psychic field from the surrounding streets.
"It's been a while," the man said pleasantly. He was addressing Ryan with the ease of someone who had been thinking about this meeting for a long time and had decided to enjoy it. "I'll answer your question before you ask it. Your team neutralized our sentries, but they check in every ten minutes. When the check-ins stopped, we responded. Simple interval protocol." He tilted his head slightly. "We caught a bigger fish than I expected, though. If we bring in the Guild President, the entire Mercenary Guild falls under Team Rocket's operational umbrella. That's a significant afternoon's work."
Ryan looked at him for a moment. Then he reached for three Poké Balls.
"You really think this group is going to accomplish that?"
Kyuryu, Xerneas, and Florges materialized beside him. All three were still. All three were looking at the surrounding Team Rocket formation with the particular expression of Pokémon that were waiting for a reason to move.
"Let's find out," the man said.
He released them.
The wave that came out of the surrounding streets wasn't a battle formation. It was a flood. Dozens of engineered chimeras — all of them built from legendary bird genetics, none of them whole. Some carried Moltres heads on Articuno bodies with Zapdos legs spliced in at angles that made no anatomical sense. Others had multiple heads and extra wing structures and moved in the lurching, mechanical way of things that had been assembled rather than born. Their eyes were uniformly blank — not the blankness of Pokémon under external control, but something worse. The absence of anything to look out from behind them.
They moved in a straight line toward Kyuryu and the others without any tactical logic. No spacing, no response to positioning. Just forward momentum.
Kyuryu opened its mouth and fired.
The fusion beam — cold lightning and fire combined, the signature of its merged form — cut through the leading wave in a straight line. The chimeras it hit were frozen, incinerated, or simply stopped existing in a functional sense. But what happened in the moment before each one went down was the part Ryan had been watching for: a flash of something in those blank eyes. Not fear. Not pain. Something that looked, briefly and unmistakably, like relief.
Ryan's jaw tightened.
Xerneas and Florges moved without being asked, their attacks clearing sections of the wave with efficient brutality. There was no satisfaction in it. Ryan noted that and set it aside. Sentiment wasn't going to help the Pokémon that had already been turned into this.
"Strong," the man said, watching from the back of the formation with the same pleasant calm. "But I'm curious — how many can you manage? A hundred? A thousand?" He raised his hand slightly. "Try ten thousand."
The sound reached them before the sight did — a low, continuous rushing noise, like a river changing direction. Then the next wave came around the corner of the far street, and it was considerably larger than the first.
Ryan glanced at the cage. Nidoking had the frame almost fully deformed — the bars bent at angles that a person could squeeze through, probably within another thirty seconds.
"Ethan, Kris — the moment that opens, we move. Full retreat, regroup with the strike team outside the perimeter. We don't have the numbers for a sustained engagement right now."
Ethan, watching the wave with wide eyes, nodded sharply.
The second wave hit the line. Kyuryu's domain and Xerneas's life energy field held initially, but the sheer mass of the assault was the point — chimera after chimera detonating on contact with the domain boundaries, each explosion small but cumulative, each one chipping at the structural coherence of the fields the same way water pressure finds cracks in stone. The domains were holding. But they were being worn.
Ryan understood immediately and completely why Raikou and Entei hadn't been able to break out. There was no counter-strategy available against an unlimited supply of living explosives except to not be in their reach, and the wave had covered every exit when it came.
He pulled six more Poké Balls. "Charizard, Greninja, Zygarde, Victini, Diancie, Meloetta — hold the line."
Nine Pokémon stood in formation, covering every approach vector, buying Nidoking the last thirty seconds it needed. The pressure on the front line distributed across the larger formation and stabilized.
Then, from beneath Ryan's feet — vibration.
Ryan had his hand on a Master Ball before the ground cracked. Solgaleo hit the earth with a single tremendous stomp, and the tremor it generated moved outward in a sharp ring, intersecting the subsurface attack and converting it into a shockwave that came back up from below. Four figures burst from the ground around Ryan, thrown upward by the counter-tremor, and landed hard on the surface unable to battle.
Tyranitar, Garchomp, Seviper, Arbok — all four hit the ground at roughly the same time.
Ryan looked at the man and Jessie with an even expression. "Subsurface ambush while I'm managing a front line assault. That's not a bad idea. The execution needed work."
The man's composure cracked slightly — just at the edges. Jessie's expression had gone fully cold.
"Boss — we're out!"
Nidoking had twisted the last section of the cage frame wide enough to walk through and stepped back to give them room. Ethan and Kris climbed through the gap and moved immediately to Ryan's position.
Ryan looked at the wave of chimeras still pressing forward, then at his assembled team, then at the exit vectors his psychic field had already mapped.
"Objective complete. Everyone — full output, thirty seconds, then we're gone."
Diancie moved first. Diamond Storm — not a targeted attack but a full dispersal, thousands of razor-edged crystal fragments expanding outward in a hemisphere that covered every approach simultaneously. The front wave of chimeras hit the storm and stopped. In the gap that created, every other Pokémon on Ryan's side released everything they had simultaneously — a single coordinated burst that cleared the immediate area in a rolling explosion that lit up the surrounding streets.
Ryan recalled his team in rapid sequence, caught Ethan and Kris each by one arm, and released Dragonite. He pulled all three of them onto its back with a pulse of telekinesis, and Dragonite launched skyward before Team Rocket's formation had finished being knocked backward by the blast wave.
The storm it generated on takeoff scattered the nearest chimera wave in all directions. By the time the dust settled enough to see the sky, Dragonite was already a rapidly shrinking point against the clouds, banking hard toward the perimeter.
Behind them, Silver Town was still burning in two places.
(End of Chapter)
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