The peace doesn’t last. Perhaps only an hour has passed when Metang stops moving. The change is so abrupt that even Luna pauses. Her paw freezes on the edge of the table. Muse’s eyes snap open. Houndour doesn’t notice; she’s dreaming, claws twitching against the floor.
A pressure builds behind my eyes, then resolves into the flat, doubled voice of Metang: “Two hostiles approaching. Class: human. Vectors aligned to exterior corridor. Arrival in less than two minutes.”
My first instinct is to run. The second is to pull up the map, trace every possible route out, and realize there isn’t one. The tunnel we entered is the only way back; the river is a no-go, and the drop is suicide.
I flex my hand, feel the relay spike at the base of my skull, and tap into Metang’s vision. The air is alive with static—two blobs of heat and electricity moving down the corridor, footsteps measured and slow. They are not in a hurry. They do not expect resistance.
“Metang,” I say, voice low. “Get Luna and Muse ready. No sound. No movement unless I say.”
“Affirmative,” it says, and the field shifts.
Luna perks up, her nose twitching. She knows the drill. She drops from the table, lands soft, pads over to my leg and sits, eyes fixed on the door.
Muse climbs out of the sink, leaf trailing water on the linoleum. He moves with a purpose I haven’t seen in him before—a steady, deliberate motion that puts him at my feet, between me and the door.
I glance at Houndour, still curled in the corner. She will not take a psychic command. She is watching us now, head low, tail rigid, but her eyes are sharp. She knows something is coming.
Metang pulses the warning again: “Psychic confirmation: Team Plasma. No Pokémon visible, but patterns suggest two trainers, one each.”
The footsteps are audible now, a scrape and a stomp, boots on concrete. They stop at the barred door.
A voice, muffled but clear: “Did you hear that?”
A second voice, higher, more nasal: “It’s probably a bunch of Klink. Or Magnemite. You know how they get in these old tunnels.”
First voice: “That sound wasn’t Klink. That was like—”
Second voice: “Relax. If there’s a problem, the sensors would have pinged upstairs. We’re just supposed to check the perimetre.”
There’s a rattle as the handle is tried, then a dull thud as someone knocks on the slab.
“Was this always barred?” says the first voice.
Second voice: “Let’s just go and tell the boss it was fine. Nothing to see here. I’m not paid enough to get zapped by feral Magnemite or whatever.”
A long pause. The footsteps move away, then stop.
First voice, quieter: “What if it’s not a Klink?”
Second voice, now annoyed: “Then it’s a Zubat. Or a homeless. Or nothing. You want to fill out paperwork? I don’t.”
Metang’s field is a vise on my skull. I can feel the frustration, the need to move, to act, to crush the problem before it becomes a threat. But I hold it back.
I whisper, “Hold. Wait.”
Metang relays the command to Luna and Muse. Luna’s body is rigid, every muscle tensed. Muse vibrates, but makes no sound.
Houndour gets up. She moves to the centre of the room, head down, hackles up. There is a growl, low and broken, in her chest.
“Metang,” I send, “can you calm her?”
“Negative. Subject is immune to psychic suggestion.”
The footsteps return, heavier this time. A fist pounds on the door. “Hey! If there’s anyone in there, you better come out now! We’re with the League!”
Second voice: “Don’t say League. Say Plasma. Idiot.”
A hiss of air. The sound of a Poké Ball being thumbed open, the telltale whine of a battery charge.
Metang says, “Weapons readied. Probability of breach: high.”
I move to the table, grab the empty can, and set it in my palm. It’s not much, but it’s metal, and it’s heavy. Luna presses against my leg, ready.
Another thud, then a metallic click as they try to lever the door with something. The bar holds, but it won’t hold forever.
I send to Metang: “If they get in, drop them fast. No hesitation.”
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“Understood.”
The footsteps pause. Then, more voices. A third, maybe a fourth. They are stacking up on the other side of the door. Houndour’s growl is a knife on the air now.
I exhale, slow and careful, and look at Luna, then Muse, then at the door. The time for food and rest is over.
Now it’s just a matter of who gets in first.
The world narrows to the four walls, the door, and the line of us crouched behind Metang, a hovering slab of steel. Houndour is on edge, pacing, tail up, hackles bristling like a row of needles. I signal Metang to the front, and it moves with the silence of a guillotine. Luna stands just behind its left side, claws extended, teeth bared. Muse flanks right, pressed flat to the tile, leaf quivering with anticipation.
I try to catch Houndour’s eye, to motion her into cover, but she ignores me. Her eyes are fixed on the door. There is a split second where everything is still, the only sound the hum of Metang’s field and the drip of water from the sink.
Then Houndour barks. It’s a short, sharp sound, but it carries.
The voices outside explode into motion.
“There’s something in there! Get ready!”
“Deploy on three!”
The hiss of Poké Balls is unmistakable, followed by the whine of a charge field. They’re not just trainers—they’re expecting war.
I drop lower, ducking behind Metang, using it as a shield. Metang locks both arms forward, claws ready. Luna crouches, every muscle a bowstring. Muse is already gathering water in his mouth, the surface of his leaf trembling as he builds pressure.
I try again to get Houndour to fall back, but she’s already planted herself dead center in front of the door. Her growl goes from a low rumble to a chainsaw shriek.
“Metang,” I whisper through the link, “First priority: suppress any Pokémon that comes through. Secondary: protect Luna.”
“Acknowledged,” it pulses back.
The door handle rattles. There’s a click, and a thud, and a second later, a blast of light from the gap where the frame meets the wall. Someone’s using a cutting torch. I hear the sizzle of hot metal and the hiss of coolant, then a chorus of cursing as the torch blows back in their faces.
“Just hit it!” someone yells, and the next moment, the door buckles inward.
I brace, heart hammering, every sense tuned to the single instant before violence.
The door doesn’t just break; it detonates. The hinge-side shears clean, and the whole slab of steel slams into Metang with a sound like a car accident in a tunnel. There’s no time to react before the world goes white—a nuclear burst from the mouth of a Magnemite, floating in the corridor just outside. The Flash is surgical, a perfect slice of light that burns every rod and cone in my head.
Even with my face turned, the afterimage punches through my eyelids and etches a negative across the inside of my skull. I feel Luna clamp down on my leg, claws digging in, and I drop instantly, burying her face under my jacket just as the pressure wave hits, flattening us both to the floor. The heat of the blast prickles my skin through the fabric.
Houndour catches the Flash full in the face. She screams, a shrill, animal panic, and whips her head side to side, firing off a scatter of embers that pop against the wall and fizzle harmlessly. The pain in her howl is real, but the attack is wild—she’s not aiming, she’s lashing out at the ghost of the thing that just blinded her.
The Magnemite floats in, trailing arcs of ozone from its shell. Its eye is a blank white spot, the iris phasing in and out of my vision. Behind it, two shadows lunge: the first a man in the grey-and-white of Plasma, the second a grunt with a riot shield stencilled with the sigil of their cult. The shield is up, and he’s not even hiding behind it—he’s using it as a battering ram, shoving the Magnemite forward like a bomb on a leash.
Muse doesn’t hesitate. He launches from the linoleum, mouth already full of water, and lets a Water Gun rip straight at the shield. The stream is a high-pressure jet, tight and clean, and the impact echoes like a punch. The grunt behind the shield staggers, but he holds; the Plasma logo flexes, then snaps back. A shower of water blasts sideways, soaking the Magnemite and the grunt both.
The second grunt is slower, but more deliberate. He ducks behind the shield and pops a Poké Ball, thumb flicking it open in a practiced, one-handed move. He beams it through the doorway, and the room fills instantly with a hiss of purple-black gas and the stench of rotten fruit. Whirlipede. It’s bigger than I expect, a spiked cylinder the size of a sandbag, rolling in place on the tile as it unspools and bares its fangs.
The next ball is a Liepard. It hits the tile with a slither, perfectly silent. Even blind, I know where it is—the shift in the air, the hitch in Luna’s breathing, the click as its claws flex for the blood. It ghosts to the side, hugging the wall and aiming for Metang’s exposed anchor point. Not a wild attack; this is surgical, a predator mapped for the hardware.
I don’t wait for the show. I thumb Muse’s Poké Ball, recall him in a blink of red. Luna knows the drill—she claws up my pant leg and I scoop her one-handed, backpedalling toward the kitchenette. She’s trembling, but not from fear; her jaw is locked and her eyes are black with the adrenal dump coursing through her.
Houndour leaps for the Liepard, but the cat feints, tail lashing just out of reach. It lands a cut on her flank and she yelps, but the yelp isn’t pain—it’s rage, a bared circuit wired straight from heart to mouth.
Metang makes its move. It takes the steel door—now half unhinged—and slams it up the hallway, using a cocktail of mass and magnetism to pin the Liepard against the cinderblock wall. The sound is ugly: a crunch, a shriek, the whine of a motor forced past its redline. Liepard’s claws rake the edge of the steel, black tendrils of energy leaving colourless void where they touch. The cat doesn’t care about the pain, and neither do the grunts. They’re already stacking up behind it, pushing the Whirlipede ahead like riot police with a living battering ram.
I duck into the admin room, slap Luna down in the middle of the table, and let her go. She bounces once, then sprints for the far side, putting the bulk of the fridge between her and the door. I ping Metang through the relay—”what’s the play?”
“Retreating. Drawing priority target onto catwalk. Diverting lower-class combatants your way. Do not worry—Kuro.”
From the next room, I hear Metang shriek down the hallway, dragging the door and Liepard with it. The next thing past the doorway is a purple circle of murder. Whirlipede, two feet thick and rolling at highway speed, hitching on the tiles with a sound like a bone saw. Whirlipede, two feet thick and rolling at highway speed, the chitin screaming against the tiles like a bone saw. It hits the ramp of Metang's shield, goes airborne, and strikes with enough force to shake the foundations The impact is a concussion bomb—half sound, all pain. Metang deflects, not with grace but brute math, absorbing the blow and redirecting it straight through the entryway into the kitchen, where the Whirlipede slams the far wall and leaves a crater the size of my chest.
There’s no air left for breathing. The Whirlipede recovers instantly, segments flexing, spines out. Houndour is on it before I can even blink, her whole body a black fuse burning down. She bites the bug right at the crease behind its “shoulder,” and the contact point goes up in fire and acid. The Whirlipede shrieks, the volume less a scream and more a weaponized frequency. Houndour’s jaw locks, and she rides the thing sideways as it thrashes, slamming her into the linoleum, into the fridge, into the sink. Doesn’t matter. She’s married to it, and every time they bounce off the wall, another blast of flame chews the air.
Metang pings me, direct and cold through the relay: “We have engaged Liepard. Fifty percent success rate. Good luck, Kuro.”
Magnemite hits the threshold with zero warning. No sound, no charge-up, just a flicker in the air as it clears the ruined door and fires off a mini-Sonicboom at point-blank. The world shudders. Every bottle and can in the kitchenette detonates into shrapnel. The windows—tiny, wire-reinforced glass—evaporate, leaving nothing but fanged wire and a glitter of powder in the air. For half a second, gravity forgets which way is down. Luna, Muse, Whirlipede, Houndour, and I are all picked up and thrown in lazy arcs across the admin room.
I slam shoulder-first into the corner of the supply cabinet. The impact knocks the wind out of me and paints a red stripe across my field of vision. I crumple to the floor, the tile kissing my cheek with the kind of cold only found in fridges and morgues. The hum of the Magnemite is the only thing left in my skull, wiring the pain into something sharp and geometric.
Luna is in a knot under the table, paws clamped over her ears, eyes wide and wild. Muse is upside down, a stubby limb mashed into the cracked linoleum, but he’s blinking, still conscious. Houndour is a black smear on the wall, ribs heaving; she’s alive, but only just. Whirlipede, somehow, rolls with the concussion, bounces off the kitchenette’s metal base, and lands coiled, spines out, dripping a line of blue toxin across the floor.
The Grunts are next through. There are two, as promised, both in the grey-white of Plasma, both with the same haircut and the same desperate, over-caffeinated eyes. One’s got a riot baton out, the other has the riot shield angled like a snowplow. The shield grunt tosses it down—the plastic is spiderwebbed and not worth the weight now—and goes for a baton at his belt.
The shield grunt charges forward, trying to clear space with his boot, but Muse surges up from the linoleum, leaf flapping, and just slaps it around the man’s shin. The leaf is shredded, but the grip is unreal—like Velcro dipped in glue. The grunt yelps, tries to yank backward, but Muse holds on, digging in with both feet and twisting his head left. The move wrenches the grunt off-balance, his centre of mass suddenly in a different postal code. He topples sideways, shield arm pinwheeling for stability.
The baton grunt doesn’t miss a beat. He’s on me as I’m still pushing off the floor, driving the riot stick into my shoulder twice, three times, the impacts blossoming bright, hot pain. I ride the first two, let them carry me up to a crouch, then go low, using the table leg as a post to lever myself under his next swing. The baton cracks air where my skull was a half-second ago, and I hook my right hand around his wrist, jamming the arm up and out.
He tries to yank free, but I roll my thumb over the carpal tunnel, dig in, and torque his arm across my chest. The move is ugly and direct; I feel his bicep pop, a dull, rubbery give. He loses the baton, but not the fight. He hammers at my ribs with his free hand, but there’s no leverage. I use the momentum—draw his arm up and over, collapse his shoulder into my armpit, and then drop low into a judo stance that’s mostly muscle memory and spite. I sweep my hip back, hook his thigh, and dump him over me. He lands spine-first on the concrete, the crack of bone echoing off the tile.
