Chapter 330: Rescue
Silver Town was larger than most people realized until they'd actually walked it. Ryan had been here before — the Silver Conference had given him a solid mental map of the layout — but that had been a tournament, with clear signage and open pedestrian flow. This was an occupied town with Team Rocket's access structure layered over everything, and reconstructing the personnel distribution from the inside, on foot, while maintaining a cover identity, was a different kind of problem entirely.
He was working through it methodically when the explosion happened.
It came from a residential block two streets over — a sharp concussive crack followed by a rolling boom, and then a column of smoke rising fast above the rooftline. Ryan didn't know the cause and didn't particularly need to. What mattered was the effect: every Team Rocket operative in his immediate vicinity turned and moved toward it at speed, the trained reflex of an organization responding to a threat to their secured perimeter.
Ryan moved with them for about half a block, then peeled off into a side alley the moment the crowd thinned enough to make it unnoticed. He remembered this alley from the Conference. He moved quickly through it, using the distraction's window.
The warehouse he'd flagged earlier was still guarded when he looped back past it — fewer personnel than before, but the ones who remained had tightened their spacing to compensate. Important location, skeleton crew during a crisis response. He marked it carefully. When the strike team arrived, that building needed to be on the priority list.
He kept moving. The primary objective right now, alongside intelligence gathering, was Ethan and Kris. According to the information Ethan had passed along before the call ended, both of them were alive and unharmed — captured and held as leverage, not harmed outright. Giovanni was smart enough to know that killing Guild branch leaders would turn a regional conflict into something considerably larger and faster.
Ryan worked his way through three sentry rotations, reading the gaps between them with his psychic awareness kept low and diffuse, and found the holding location after about twenty minutes of careful navigation.
The cage was real — heavy gauge metal framing, institutional construction. Ethan was gripping the bars with both hands in the way of someone who had been doing that at intervals for hours and knew it wasn't working. Kris was crouched beside him, examining the joint points at the base of the frame with methodical patience. Neither of them looked injured. Neither of them looked particularly happy about their situation either.
No visible guards. Ryan expanded his awareness and immediately found them — a dozen concealed sentries spread across the surrounding area in a pattern designed to look like nothing was being watched. Exactly the kind of coverage that would trigger the moment anyone approached the cage without authorization.
Ryan studied the positions for a moment, then made his decision.
"Gengar, Darkrai — your turn."
He kept his voice barely above a whisper. Both Pokémon materialized from their Poké Balls with the particular quietness of Pokémon that were naturally inclined toward silence, and Ryan indicated the sentry positions one by one with small gestures.
Gengar flickered, uncertain. Ryan knew the look. Gengar had loyalty and real power, but it wasn't built for this kind of work — the cold, deliberate neutralization of unsuspecting targets. Ryan put a hand briefly on its head. "If you can't do it the other way, Hypnosis is fine. Put them down quietly."
Gengar nodded and dissolved into the nearest shadow.
Darkrai looked at Ryan. The question in its expression was clear enough.
Ryan held its gaze and nodded once.
This was war. The distinction mattered. In a standard Pokémon battle, the boundaries were understood by everyone involved. Out here, in an occupied town, with hostages in a cage and a three-headed legendary bird fusion somewhere in the vicinity, softness was a liability that would cost him Ethan and Kris and probably several more people besides. Mercy shown to the wrong person at the wrong moment was just cruelty with better optics.
Darkrai had been given to Ryan by Domino, on Arceus's instruction, specifically because certain situations called for a Pokémon that could operate in the dark without the psychological weight that Charizard or Xerneas would carry into it. Darkrai's history was its own — deeply unpleasant, marked by a specific kind of pain that had calcified into something hard and useful. It didn't find this work objectionable. Ryan had made his peace with that a long time ago.
Darkrai dissolved into the shadows without a sound.
Ryan waited, monitoring his psychic field. The sentries went down one by one — clean, fast, no communication before they dropped. Gengar's work was visible in the ones that simply slumped over; Darkrai's was visible in the ones that simply weren't there anymore in any meaningful sense. The Poké Balls were dealt with simultaneously, preventing any automatic release.
When it was done, both Pokémon returned to Ryan's side. Darkrai gave a single nod.
Ryan recalled them both.
Then he pulled the cheat menu up, clicked confirm, and let the warm current run through him in reverse. His dimensions resettled into the familiar configuration. He found a gap between two collapsed storage containers, shoved the female Team Rocket uniform into it as far as it would go, and buried the whole thing under loose debris with a quick application of telekinesis.
That particular chapter of his life was now physically sealed under rubble. As far as Ryan was concerned, it had never happened, it was not going to be mentioned, and anyone who thought otherwise was welcome to try to prove it.
He straightened his jacket, confirmed that he looked like himself again, and ran.
Ethan looked up at the sound of footsteps and went very still for one second.
"Boss—"
"Quiet." Ryan crouched at the cage, assessing the lock and frame construction in one fast visual sweep. "I've got you. Stand back from the bars."
He released Nidoking.
Nidoking was one of the physically strongest Pokémon Ryan had access to at this tier, and it understood what was being asked the moment it saw the cage. It gripped the central bar section with both hands and pulled. The metal held — whatever alloy Team Rocket's research division had used, it wasn't standard construction — but it didn't hold cleanly. The frame began to distort at the joint points, the welds developing stress fractures under continuous force.
"Give it a moment," Ryan said.
Ethan watched Nidoking work, then looked at Ryan. "You came alone?"
"For the extraction phase, yes. The strike team is staging outside the perimeter — I needed the interior layout first." Ryan glanced at him. "You had Raikou and Entei. Walk me through how this happened."
Ethan's expression tightened. He looked down briefly, then back up. "The three-bird chimera wasn't the only thing Giovanni had. Team Rocket took the cloned legendary bird program further than we knew — they developed a second generation. These aren't fighters in the conventional sense. They're built to self-destruct on contact. Engineered specifically for it. When they go down, they lock onto the nearest target and detonate." He paused. "Raikou and Entei hit hard enough to take down anything Team Rocket sent at them one-on-one. But you can't fight a wave of living explosives the same way you fight a battle. Every time one went down, it took a chunk of our Pokémon's health with it. We were being worn down from every direction simultaneously, and we never got a clean window to break out." His jaw set. "They destroyed the branch in the same wave. It wasn't a battle — it was an attrition trap, and we walked into it."
Kris said nothing, but the look on her face said she'd been sitting with the same analysis for hours and hadn't found a satisfying counter to it either.
The cage frame gave with a sharp metallic crack. Nidoking stepped back. Ryan pulled the warped section open wide enough for a person to fit through and looked at both of them.
"Out. Now. We have a window and I don't know how long it holds."
(End of Chapter)
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