"Ugh... ugh..."
Hunter T's whole body convulsed as foam spilled from his mouth. His consciousness had already become hazy.
Hunter T, whose real name was Peter, was born in Mossdeep City of the Hoenn region. Both of his parents were League trainers. Around thirty years ago, he should have followed the same path, but because of a moment of carelessness, the Pokémon he had just received was killed by a group of rogue trainers during a riot.
The incident left a deep mark on him. After taking revenge for his Pokémon, he ended up living among the underworld. Eventually, he joined the Hunters Guild and worked his way up until he became one of its twenty-six seat hunters.
"I didn't expect to see all of that," Shiro remarked with a sigh.
Most of those memories were useless. They had only appeared automatically while he was searching through Hunter T's assets, which ended up wasting quite a bit of time.
"I'll be more careful next time. I'll try to ignore the unimportant information."
As he spoke, Shiro was about to finish off the half-dead Hunter T when the teleportation device behind him suddenly lit up.
Buzz!
Psychic energy gathered as the teleportation device trembled slightly. The space inside it twisted.
Someone else was coming? And they knew how to use the teleportation device?
Even Shiro couldn't help feeling alarmed.
Normally, only Hunter F stayed at the Jubilife City branch. No other Hunters Guild members knew how to operate the device anymore.
Anyone capable of using it was either the missing Hunter A or a League trainer who had already broken into the black market.
Even if the League had brought in a Pokémon Professor, it would have been difficult to figure out how to operate the device in such a short time without anyone demonstrating it first.
"Lord W," Farlen said gravely, "it definitely isn't Hunter A. Lord A has his own way of coming and going. He would never use the branch's teleportation device—"
Before he could finish speaking, the device gradually fell silent as two figures slowly appeared inside.
Reacting immediately, Shiro had Unown A use its psychic power to conceal everyone before they quickly pressed themselves against the wall and hid.
A few moments later, the two people stepped out.
"So this is the Hunters Guild headquarters?" Bertha muttered as she adjusted the thick scarf covering the lower half of her face.
Unown G simply nodded. The moment it looked up, it immediately spotted Shiro and the others.
The two of them instantly exchanged information through telepathy. After briefly understanding the situation, both quietly let out sighs of relief.
"Those people should be inside. Be careful. There are probably plenty of paths," Bertha reminded in a low voice.
Unown G gave its usual nod before striding forward.
Shiro stayed where he was while Unown G quickened its pace and led Bertha inside first.
Only after both of them had completely disappeared did Shiro slowly reveal himself again. His brows were tightly furrowed.
According to the information Unown G had gathered, these wanted criminals had all been lured here by news deliberately leaked by Goodshow. The League had already prepared plenty of manpower, and some had even entered the Hunters Guild headquarters ahead of time.
That made escaping and destroying the teleportation device much less convenient.
Bertha and Unown G had already gone inside. If the League trainers below were also trapped and killed here, leaving only him and Bertha alive, explaining everything to Goodshow would not be easy.
It looked like he would have to go down and cooperate with the operation.
Having made up his mind, Shiro glanced at Farlen, who was holding his breath beside him, then at the barely alive Hunter T.
After finishing off Hunter T, he casually threw the body aside. He then had Unown A set up several layers of psychic surveillance nearby before grabbing Farlen and rushing toward the conference hall.
* * *
Hunters Guild Underground Arena.
There were twenty-six seats within the Hunters Guild, while nearly eighty wanted criminals had gathered. Yet only thirteen seats remained vacant.
As soon as the nine trainers with Elite-level Pokémon revealed their partners, nine of those thirteen seats were immediately claimed.
The remaining contestants also released Pokémon they believed were suitable, but the first round quickly eliminated trainers whose Pokémon had only just reached the Gym-level.
After that, only a little over thirty trainers remained to compete for the final four seats.
Following another simple comparison of Pokémon strength, more than ten additional trainers were eliminated. The remaining twenty or so then fought brief matches where victory was decided without pushing either side too far.
The battlefield was enormous, and battles between Gym-level trainers rarely held many surprises. As long as type advantages were excluded, it only took a few exchanges before both sides could roughly tell whether they could defeat the other.
About half an hour later, the final four winners claimed the remaining seats and joined the nine Elite-level trainers, gathering near the Hunters Guild representatives.
Seeing every seat taken, many of the trainers who had only recently reached the Gym-level began thinking about leaving.
With all the seats already divided, even if they tried to overturn the situation by force, there would be nothing left for them. It was better to leave this dangerous place while they still could.
The Gym-level trainers who had narrowly lost, however, had no intention of giving up.
One of them was Morton from Kalos. His expression was so dark that it could rival a Ghost-type Pokémon.
Standing alone in a shadowy corner of the arena, he tightly gripped the Poké Ball containing his strongest Rock-type Pokémon, Golem. Jealousy and resentment churned inside him.
To be safe during his match, Morton hadn't used his Golem, whose strength was at the peak of the Gym-level. Instead, he had chosen another Pokémon, an Onix that was only around level 46.
Onix had come so close, yet it had still lost to his opponent's Drapion.
Now that Drapion's trainer, a Unovan named Renzo, stood among the thirteen successful contenders and was about to become a seated hunter, Morton's regret only deepened.
Why didn't he use Golem?
After briefly blaming himself, all of his anger and hatred shifted toward the Hunters Guild and Renzo.
'Damn it all!'
As the infamous Kalos criminal known as Rockbreaker Morton, he hadn't traveled all the way from Kalos just to watch someone else's performance or play the role of a supporting character.
"Why aren't there more seats?!" A furious roar suddenly echoed through the arena.
Morton froze for a moment. The words he had been about to shout caught in his throat as he turned toward the source. The one shouting was a short, heavyset wanted criminal from Kanto named Mason.
After bellowing in anger, Mason threw out a Poké Ball.
A Tauros at the Gym-level appeared on the battlefield, scraping its front hooves against the ground as it lowered its head and snorted heavily, looking ready to charge without caring about the consequences.
"I'm a Gym-level trainer too!" Mason roared again. His gaze swept across the crowd as he shouted, "And every one of you people here is a Gym-level trainer! Since when have we ever been looked down on like this?"
"What organization or place wouldn't give an Gym-level trainer a seat? Especially the damn Hunters Guild!"
"Isn't this place supposed to accept anyone? Didn't they say every Gym-level trainer would get a seat? Then why are there only twenty-six seats? Gym-level trainers should all be seated hunters!"
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