"However, this weather protocol isn't a flawless lock," Guinaifen cautioned, tapping her stylist pen against the map interface. "Entei possesses a cinematic level of pride. It is not entirely impossible for him to choose to endure the downpour rather than retreat, so we must structurally anchor a secondary backup plan."
Although Guinaifen calculated that the volcano king would likely split from the pack before the Cihuai dreadnoughts arrived, entering a dynamic script without an emergency exit was a critical failure in tactical design.
"If the split fails and we're forced into a full-grid engagement, I will commit my primary line to pin Entei and Suicune simultaneously. Qing Lan will route her energy into my flank as a tactical support, and Chang Chang..." Guinaifen turned her gaze to her best friend. "You are our sole ground shield. You must hold Raikou's network completely on your own."
As a maiden of the priest lineages, Qing Lan possessed a vast collection of unique Pokémon, but the absolute majority were Psychic-types. Furthermore, her family's high-level veterans had been partitioned weeks ago for the out-world migrations, leaving her with a younger, mid-tier roster. Stepping into a back-row utility role was her most mathematically efficient placement.
"I can do that," Qing Lan nodded solemnly. After absorbing the historical weight of the mythic trial and realizing the entire continent's data stability hung on their performance, her usual lighthearted innocence had vanished, replaced by a focused, serious intent.
"Uh... I really don't think I have the tactical capacity for this..." Sushang raised a trembling hand, her voice cracking under the sudden, immense weight of the assignment.
Managing a basic doubles rotation already pushed her inputs to their limit. Expecting her to command six separate assets simultaneously to restrain a legendary Electric-type beast in a dynamic field was a recipe for an immediate system-wipe.
"Relax, I've mapped out your exact counter-sequences," Guinaifen reassured her, sliding a technical brief across the local network. "Qing Lan will partition a portion of her field data to buffer your inputs. For now, Ah Lan, transfer the master command of your Espeon directly to my interface."
As the data linked, Guinaifen's gaze lingered on her own active inventory. Her Eevee was sitting at maximum level, yet she still hadn't figured out the precise evolution criteria to unlock the two elusive second-generation forms—Espeon and Umbreon. But with the clock running down, she pushed the thought aside.
"Don't worry, I'll let Xiao Fu know he's under your command," Qing Lan said, inputting the authorization.
"Xiao Fu?" Sushang blinked, caught off guard by the name.
"Oh, that's his personal registration," Qing Lan explained softly. "My grandfather selected the name when the egg first settled in our courtyard."
Guinaifen and Sushang replayed the dialogue trees in their minds, then stared blankly at the Espeon shivering beside Qing Lan's hem. A small, brilliant scarlet gemstone was embedded cleanly between the feline's violet ears.
The visual layout was intensely familiar. The cat's deep, calculating eyes and that precise forehead ornament mirrored the exact physical silhouette of Lady Fu Xuan, the Master Diviner of the Luofu.
Is Boss Julian genuinely unhinged? The thought flashed through both their minds simultaneously. He literally modeled a Psychic-type cat after the head of the Divination Commission.
Because expressing the thought out loud within a public broadcast would be a severe breach of Alliance etiquette, the two girls quickly locked their expressions and banished the observation into their private folders. In their view, this was simply Julian Reed exercising the chaotic creative freedom of an Elation-blessed developer.
However, across the internal network channels of the Luofu, multiple scholars from the Divination Commission were already typing silent messages of condolence for their notoriously overworked, slacking-prone Master Diviner. The symbolic hints embedded within the "Maiden of Divination" (Qing Lan) and her pet cat were too loud to ignore.
Overhauling the Grid
With the factions aligned, the three girls initialized their final team configurations. Having traded blows with Entei during the orchard clash, Guinaifen had completely mapped his baseline parameters. With four of her own optimized anchors and the psychic support of Xiao Fu, neutralizing the volcano king was mathematically secure.
That left her with two remaining slots to construct a containment wall against Suicune.
On the defensive line, she initiated a system trade with Sushang, pulling her friend's high-tier Cloyster into her active roster. Although a pure Ice/Water type carried zero natural resistance to Fire, Cloyster possessed an absolute gargantuan base physical defense parameter of 180. Enhanced by a passive water resistance, it was the only asset capable of absorbing simultaneous physical impacts from two legendary beasts without breaking its data integrity.
For her primary offensive anchor, she locked in her max-tier Tyranitar. To provide operational flexibility, she rounded out the line with her Dragonite and a high-spec Lapras—the latter acting as a secondary defensive pillar while the dragon managed the high-altitude aerial sweeps. For the utility containment, she deployed a Slowking and a Jolteon.
Sushang's configuration underwent an even more radical shift. Aside from her primary Dragonite remaining in the mount slot, her remaining five positions were packed entirely with massive, heavy Ground-types responsible for kinetic absorption, supplemented by a single mid-tier Psychic anchor to receive Qing Lan's data buffers. Guinaifen had hard-coded three automated defensive sequences into Sushang's console—macros designed not to defeat Raikou, but to ground its high-frequency lightning loops through pure elemental immunity.
Guinaifen reviewed the final mission manifest, her eyes tracing the word "UNKNOWN" beneath the faction reward block. The strategy was clean, but a cold, instinctual calculation stalled her hand. The current Rain Dance layout was sufficient to trigger a localized encounter, but was it grand enough to convince a deity like Ho-Oh to return to a ruined city?
If the corporate dreadnoughts of Cihuai Pharmaceuticals breached the airspace mid-operation, the chaotic data interference would ruin the narrative purity of the rite.
"I need to slide an extra insurance policy into the code," Guinaifen muttered, her fingers tapping a private frequency command on her backend terminal before she closed her pack.
The Gathering Storm
Sushang and Qing Lan waited on the perimeter of the Ecruteak terminal for fifteen minutes before Guinaifen finally sprinted out from the automated logistics bay, her breathing slightly ragged.
"Xiao Gui, where did you run off to?" Sushang asked, adjusting her riding gloves. "You were the first one to clear your terminal queue."
"Just securing our backend margins," Guinaifen grinned, unclipping her Dragonite's premium ball. "Let's keep the details for the victory screen. It's time to call down the rain."
To avoid triggering the sharp, instinctual detection grids of the legendary trio, the three girls ordered their Dragonites into a steep, high-altitude climb, using high-powered optical telescopes to keep a visual lock on the valley below while staying completely cloaked within the upper mist layers. From the ground, their forms were reduced to microscopic specks against the gray expanse.
The distance made the manual tracking incredibly tedious; the silver needle of the Volcanic Anchor remained their only consistent coordinate vector.
"I've got a visual signature!" Sushang called out, her sniper-like vision locking onto the topographical folds of a jagged peak below.
Following her telemetry, the layout of the sovereign defense cluster revealed itself. Raikou was perched at the absolute apex of the mountain, his saber-teeth emitting faint, rhythmic pulses of blue energy as he scanned the horizon. Halfway down the rocky slope, the wounded Suicune lay curled within a shaded crevice, while Entei stood near a grove of ancient mountain trees, methodically crushing wild berries beneath his jaw to replenish his internal stamina.
"Now! Deploy the weather matrix!" Guinaifen commanded. "Lapras, Slowking, Azumarill, Quagsire... Rain Dance! Let it pour!"
Six high-level Water and Psychic assets materialized within the upper cloud layer. Utilizing a coordinated Confusion array provided by Qing Lan's psychic types, the heavy aquatic reptiles were held perfectly level in the stratosphere, preventing their immense physical weight from dragging the Dragonites down.
THUMMM—
Six identical elemental frequencies resonated simultaneously. The reaction was instantaneous. The white, wispy mountain mist curdled into a heavy, bruised mass of black storm clouds that blotted out the sun across three entire mountain ranges.
A sudden, freezing downpour tore through the upper canopy, sheets of heavy rain slamming into the rocky slopes. The three sovereigns snapped their heads upward in unison. Had the sky been clear, their mythic senses would have pierced the disguise, but beneath the absolute dark of the artificial storm, the trainers' aerial positions were perfectly camouflaged.
Entei let out a low, irritated hiss as the heavy rain began to drench his fiery mane, his internal temperature bars fluctuating under the continuous moisture damage. He swiped his paw across the dirt, scooped up a final handful of berries, and turned on his heel, charting a swift line toward the deep geothermal caverns to escape the deluge.
"He's breaking away! Ah Lan, deploy the scout!" Guinaifen ordered.
Qing Lan unclipped a dark ball, unleashing a swift Murkrow. The avian silhouette dove through the sheets of rain, its passive tracking signature locking onto the crimson blur as it slipped into the northern ravines.
The Shadow of the Corporation
Wroooaaarrr—
Miles behind the girls' tracking sector, the heavy, rhythmic thrum of massive atmospheric propellers began to vibrate through the storm wall. Three colossi of steel—bearing the stark, silver insignia of the Cihuai Pharmaceutical Corporation—sliced through the lower cloud deck.
"Chairman, we have an atmospheric anomaly ahead," a flight technician reported inside the command deck of the flagship dreadnought. "A localized Rain Dance matrix has just saturated the Ecruteak border grid. The elemental density suggests a high-tier Pokémon origin."
Yao Feng sat within his leather command chair, his eyes fixed on the master radar display where the three legendary beacons were starting to shift positions.
"Did that broken Suicune conjure a storm to mask her retreat?" Yao Feng chuckled, taking a slow sip from his glass. "Fascinating. Let the fleet hover at the perimeter coordinates for now. We wait for the precipitation cells to exhaust their fuel."
He wasn't in a hurry. A standard Rain Dance matrix carried a strict digital expiration limit. Furthermore, entering a high-conductivity storm grid while Raikou was active was a severe operational risk; even with the heavy rubber insulation shielding their hulls, a concentrated, sky-splitting lightning strike could fry their telemetry arrays. Their strategy relied on isolation—neutralizing the water sovereign first to shatter the trio's structural cohesion.
"Chairman, there is an additional variable," the technician added, zooming into a faint, high-altitude signature on the secondary radar screen. "We've logged a minor human data packet hovering inside the upper eye of the storm. The registration coordinates match the tracking frequency of those wild trainers from the orchard."
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