Space didn't have a temperature. Not really.
Not the way people imagined it—like some endless freezer waiting to snap your bones. Space was absence. No air. No sound. No mercy. A void so clean it didn't even bother pretending to hate you.
But the emptiness around Enzo felt colder than any winter he'd ever known—colder than the frost creeping across the inside of his visor, colder than the warning lights strobing in the corner of his vision, colder than the look his own Pokémon refused to give him.
He drifted among the shrapnel of a Team Rocket shuttle, turning slowly, helplessly, like a discarded screw in a broken machine. The wreckage spun in lazy pieces—panels, wiring, torn insulation—each fragment catching starlight for a heartbeat before sliding into darkness again.
Every rotation brought the same tableau back into view:
Escape pods. Three of them. Small, bullet-shaped coffins with thrusters flaring dull blue as they pushed away from the wreckage and toward the distant curve of Earth.
Inside two of those pods—pressed behind reinforced glass, safe and breathing—were Weavile and Houndoom.
Their silhouettes were sharp even at a distance. He could almost imagine their eyes.
Almost.
They didn't look back.
His suit hissed like an angry serpent as oxygen bled out through a tear near his ribs. He slapped his palm against the gash out of instinct, as if flesh could plug vacuum. A red warning pulsed across the HUD (heads-up display): O2 CRITICAL.
Enzo's fingers were numb. His lips were numb. Even his anger felt like it was freezing.
"Useless…" he tried to spit, but the word came out as a wet rasp. Blood flecked the inside of his visor, turning the next breath into iron. "Tools."
He watched the pods shrink, watched the planet grow, watched the line between survival and death widen with every meter.
And he knew exactly why they left him.
Not because they were stupid.
Not because they were cowardly.
Because he had trained them well.
Evacuation drills. Contingencies. Obedience without question. If the ship failed, take the pods. Preserve the assets. Leave the liability.
He had carved that rule into them until it became instinct.
He had taught them to abandon him.
"I gave you everything," he whispered to the receding specks. "Strength. Vitamins. TMs. Battle routines…"
A laugh tried to claw its way up his throat and died there.
Everything… except loyalty.
Loyalty was for equals. For partners. For people who could afford to believe in something other than survival.
To Enzo, Pokémon were weapons you fed so they'd fire straight.
If a gun jammed, you didn't comfort it. You replaced it.
So why did it hurt—this quiet, absolute indifference behind the glass?
His lungs burned. The last of his oxygen tasted thin, stale, and wrong. His thoughts, starved the same way his body was, began to drift—first into fog, then into memory.
Back.
Back to where the hatred started.
Trial Island.
Fifteen years ago.
In his first life—on Earth—he'd been nobody important. A normal guy with a normal job, a normal commute, and a death so stupid it didn't even deserve a headline.
He remembered rain on asphalt. Headlights smeared into white streaks. A step taken at the wrong time, because he'd been thinking about something meaningless.
Then impact.
Then nothing.
And then he woke up in Kanto with sand in his mouth and hunger in his bones.
An orphan.
A second life.
At first, he'd thought it was a reward. A cosmic apology. A world of Pokémon—adventure, friendship, a bright path of gym badges leading to glory.
A Master.
A childish fantasy that lasted exactly long enough for him to ask one simple question:
"How do I get a Pokémon?"
The answer had been a laugh, a shrug, and a pamphlet he couldn't read because he was shaking too hard.
To own a Pokémon legally, you needed a League License.
The League License cost money.
Real money. Real connections.
The kind of money orphans didn't even learn to count. The kind of connections that started at dinner tables and ended in private training grounds, while kids like him learned how to sleep with one hand over their pockets.
Without it, you were nothing. Not a trainer. Not a citizen with dreams. Just another hungry kid on a street full of hungry kids.
Celadon City glittered like a jewel from a distance. Up close, it was rot under perfume. Women with tired eyes standing under neon signs, selling the last thing anyone would pay for. Children with hollow cheeks sleeping in alleys. And if they didn't die, they ended up in places like his orphanage—rooms full of beds, rules, and the constant smell of boiled cabbage.
No family.
No future.
No hope.
The only hand ever extended to him wasn't a Nurse Joy's.
It belonged to a man in a dark uniform, with a red "R" like a wound on his chest.
"You want to eat, kid?" the recruiter had asked, voice soft as velvet. "You want power?"
Enzo remembered the way his stomach had knotted at the word eat.
He remembered nodding before he even understood what he was agreeing to.
"Then join us," the man said. "Team Rocket doesn't leave its own behind."
The lie was beautiful.
He joined.
They didn't hand him a partner and a smile.
They handed him a rulebook and a knife disguised as opportunity.
Trial Island wasn't a "camp." It was a filter. A machine designed to grind down the weak and spit out the useful.
They called it a recruit assessment program. A rite of passage. A test of "initiative."
The reality was simpler:
They dropped you somewhere you didn't recognize.
They gave you a backpack.
They gave you one Poké Ball—random, sealed, no choice, no guarantees.
And they told you to survive long enough to reach the extraction point.
That was Day 1.
Enzo remembered waking up face-down in dirt, choking on the smell of wet leaves, the air too hot, too alive. His head pounding like he'd been thrown off a moving truck.
He'd rolled over and found the backpack on his shoulders like a brand.
Rations. Water. A foil blanket. Cheap tools.
And one Poké Ball, cold and smooth in his shaking hand.
His heart had nearly stopped from pure hope.
Because a Poké Ball meant a Pokémon.
A weapon.
A chance.
A way to stop being a nobody.
He'd whispered to it like prayer, like promise:
"Please."
Then he'd thrown it.
Light burst through the trees, brief and sharp.
A purple, floating sphere formed in the air, wobbling like a drunk balloon. A goofy, drooling smile. Eyes that didn't look right—too empty, too simple.
Koffing.
Not just any Koffing.
A defective one.
Even back then, before the years burned the softness out of him, Enzo had felt something cold slip down his spine. A wrongness. A sense that he'd been handed the worst possible dice and told to win anyway.
The Koffing floated in place, swaying, its mouth hanging open.
Enzo tried to speak to it the way he'd seen trainers do—firm voice, squared shoulders, pretending confidence he didn't have.
"Listen," he'd said. "We're going to pass this. We're going to—"
The Koffing burbled.
It drifted closer, sniffed the air like it was tasting him.
Then it turned.
And it fled into the forest.
Not running like a beast, not sprinting on legs—just floating away with lazy, idiot certainty, slipping through branches and vanishing into green shadow as if it had never belonged to him at all.
Enzo had chased it.
He remembered his feet sliding on wet roots, his lungs screaming, his throat raw from shouting "Come back!" like obedience was something you could demand from a creature that didn't even understand you.
But the island swallowed the Koffing whole.
And without a Pokémon, the Trial swallowed Enzo.
They didn't expel him.
They did something worse.
They marked him.
Material Grunt.
A human cart. A pair of hands. A back to load and break.
For ten years, he was a slave with a uniform.
Ten years scraping filth from cage floors while rabid Raticate gnawed the bars inches from his fingers. Ten years hauling ammo crates until his shoulders bled through fabric. Ten years watching younger kids—kids who'd been luckier, or had connections, kids with better "starters"—climb past him while he stayed on the floor where they could step on him.
And every day, he saved Rocket Points coin by coin—leveraging what he remembered from the games and the anime for every tiny edge, every loophole, every "safe" pattern in Team Rocket's brutal little system—humiliation by humiliation.
Not for freedom.
For permission.
Permission to buy the right to own a new Pokémon.
Somewhere in those ten years, the soft parts of him died.
Not all at once.
Not dramatically.
Just… quietly.
Like a light going out in a room nobody used.
He made a promise to himself on a night he couldn't sleep because his hands were cramping too hard to unclench.
I will never love these beasts again.
They are not partners.
They are not friends.
They are tools for me to climb.
If they fail, I discard them.
That philosophy carried him upward like a ladder made of bones.
It made him efficient. Ruthless. Reliable.
It turned him into a Squad Leader.
And eventually, it earned him his biggest mission yet—delivered under Giovanni's seal, spoken by an aide who didn't meet his eyes.
A suicide mission dressed as an honor.
After the Mewtwo Project failed—after Mewtwo broke free and reduced a secret lab to ash—Giovanni changed.
The Boss had always been calm. Always controlled.
But after that disaster, the calm turned thin, stretched tight over something hungry. Paranoia grew roots in every order. Obsession wrapped itself around every plan.
If Mewtwo had been a weapon that refused to be held, then Giovanni would never again bet everything on a single chain.
He began ordering missions to gather intelligence on every legendary he could reach.
Every myth. Every rumor. Every tremor in the sky, every strange tide, every report that whispered: power.
Enzo accepted because that was what he did.
Because promotion tasted like oxygen.
Because climbing was the only thing he still knew how to do.
And so he went into the stratosphere, into low orbit, into the thin margin between sky and space, to spy on a legend Team Rocket didn't understand but desperately wanted:
Rayquaza.
He'd told himself it would be worth it. That if he survived, he'd come back with a name that mattered.
Now, he drifted among broken metal, watching the last of his oxygen vanish into nothing.
Killed by the very rule that made him survive.
Betrayed by the "assets" he'd trained to abandon liabilities.
His vision tunneled. The stars smeared into pale scratches.
Then an orange light swelled in the distance.
At first, Enzo thought it was a reflection—sunlight caught on torn paneling, a harmless flare spilling across the void.
Then the light pulsed.
Not like fire.
Like a signal.
His HUD (heads-up display) jittered. The warning icons stuttered, duplicating for a heartbeat before snapping back into place. The static in his earpiece—something he hadn't noticed until it changed—shifted into a thin, high whine that made his teeth ache.
The glow came closer, and the stars behind it didn't vanish.
They bent.
As if space itself couldn't decide how to behave around whatever was approaching.
Enzo's dying mind tried to name it anyway. Tried to make it fit into something safe.
Not Rayquaza.
Not a meteor.
Not a satellite.
Something else.
Something wrong.
The orange brightened until it painted the wreckage in rusted gold. For a moment, Enzo saw his own reflection in a shard of glass—eyes wide, blood floating in beads—like a man watching a god approach.
And then the light unfolded.
A humanoid silhouette resolved out of distortion: sleek, unnaturally still, its form too smooth and too precise, like it had been designed rather than born. A crystalline core glimmered in its chest. Its face—if it had one—held no expression at all.
The eyes, though…
The eyes pinned him without emotion.
Not curiosity.
Not cruelty.
Assessment.
Deoxys.
But the name felt like an insult—like a label slapped onto something that didn't belong in language.
It drifted closer without thrusters, without movement, without explanation.
Loose bolts and flakes of metal began to orbit the alien in slow, obedient arcs, like the universe had remembered a different set of rules.
Enzo tried to raise a hand.
His arm didn't answer.
His suit's readouts blurred. His vital signs flickered between numbers—then between symbols—then into blank spaces. A chill spread behind his eyes, not physical, but invasive, like fingers turning pages inside his skull.
Deoxys lifted a single tentacle.
The gesture was almost gentle.
Almost.
And the world turned into code.
A wave of digital data—cold, absolute, impossibly dense—crashed into Enzo's mind. Not pain. Not exactly.
More like being opened.
More like being read.
Like a file being copied, rewritten, and sealed shut again with a signature that wasn't his.
His last thought was bitter enough to be a prayer:
So this is how it ends.
Then—
"GASP!"
Enzo woke up choking on air, as if his lungs were trying to remember how to work. His body jerked hard enough to dig his elbows into dirt.
Not metal.
Not vacuum.
Dirt.
Heat pressed down on him—real, brutal sunlight filtering through leaves. The air was thick with salt and greenery, with the sharp bite of wild plants bruised under his weight.
He rolled onto his back, blinking fast, pupils shrinking against the glare.
Above him: a canopy of palm fronds and tangled branches. Beyond that, a strip of sky so blue it looked fake.
His hands—small.
Young.
No battle scars. No calluses.
Enzo's heart slammed against his ribs like it wanted out.
He scrambled upright and nearly fell again, dizzy, vision swimming. For a second he expected to see the wreckage of the shuttle, a horizon curved with Earth.
Instead, he saw rough ground, scattered stones, and dense vegetation that hummed with unseen life. Far away, waves crashed—close enough to hear, not close enough to see.
Trial Island.
His fingers clawed at himself. No space suit. No HUD. No torn fabric. Just cheap grey clothing—recruit issue—stained with dirt like he'd been thrown here and forgotten.
Then he noticed the weight on his shoulders.
A backpack.
He yanked it off and fumbled it open with shaking hands.
Inside: sealed ration bars, a small water flask, a folded foil blanket, a cheap knife—standard survival kit. Enough to keep a recruit alive. Not enough to keep them safe.
And tucked into a side pocket, cold and familiar against his fingers—
A Poké Ball.
His breath caught.
Not clipped neatly to a belt like ceremony.
Not handed to him like a gift.
Just… there.
One chance thrown into the wilderness.
"I'm back," he whispered, and his voice cracked on the words. "Day 1…"
The relief lasted half a heartbeat.
Then a headache hit him—brutal, surgical—as if someone were pressing a hot stamp into his skull and forcing something to lock into place.
His vision flickered.
Blue letters appeared in the air in front of him, hovering like a hallucination with perfect typography.
[ INITIATING VIRUS SYSTEM… ]
[ SYNCHRONIZATION: 100% ]