Neither of them said anything. They just moved.
Togekiss and Honchkrow went in low and fast, skimming the surface of the ruins at an angle that kept them below the sightline of anyone looking outward rather than up. The Team Aqua members saw shadows a half-second before impact, and that was all the warning they got.
"Togekiss, Air Slash."
"Honchkrow, Gust."
The two moves hit simultaneously from different angles, and the Mightyena that came up as a response got about two steps into their counter before realizing they were dealing with Elite-rank opponents running at combat pace and not rookie trainers blundering into trouble. The gap between level twenty-something and Elite-rank closed at speed with no warning, leaving no room for a meaningful fight. The Mightyena went down fast. The Team Aqua members, separated from their Pokéballs and suddenly on the ground with the wind knocked out of them, were a more straightforward problem.
"Milotic, Hypnosis."
That was the end of it.
Sieg looked at the two unconscious figures and felt a familiar mild irritation settle in. Not at the result, which was clean enough. At the method that had produced it. Two Team Aqua operatives on a criminal operation, taken down without lasting consequences, who would wake up and eventually either go back to the organization or get processed through a justice system that would hold them for a while and then return them to circulation. All the dangerous parts were left intact.
This was the part of working alongside League-aligned people that he found genuinely inefficient.
He knew why Cynthia operated this way. She was League through and through, raised inside its values, and those values included a hard ceiling on how far you went with a neutralized opponent. He could respect the consistency even while thinking it was part of why criminal organizations in every region kept growing. The League's leniency was a known quantity that every criminal group factored into their operational risk. You got caught, you did your time, you came back. Nobody was making visible examples. The organizations that understood this had no particular reason to be afraid.
Drake, the Elite Four's dragon specialist, was someone who had a different reputation. Word was that his approach to criminal organizations was considerably less calibrated. That was part of why his name came up in discussions about League enforcement effectiveness.
The League needed more people who operated like Drake and fewer who operated like they were worried about the paperwork.
He didn't say any of this. He started going through the uniforms instead.
The gear was practical, built for cold and wet environments, and when he pulled the jacket on he understood why immediately. Some kind of thermal treatment in the fabric. Team Aqua spent time in deep water and low-temperature conditions and had apparently decided their rank-and-file deserved equipment that reflected that. He filed it as sensible and continued.
"Try this," he said, holding out the second jacket to Cynthia.
She put it on without commentary. Checked the fit. Pulled the skull-patterned cap down to the right angle.
Sieg looked at her critically. "You're too clean."
"I know." She was already reaching for a patch of dust-covered rubble. A moment later, she had done something to her visible skin and hair that made her look considerably more like someone who had been on a working expedition for several days rather than someone who had flown in from the mainland this morning. She was not precious about it, which he noted approvingly.
He adjusted his own cap. Checked the look from the side.
"That'll hold," he said. "Unless someone looks closely."
"We'll make sure they don't."
They had talked through the disguise approach during the planning window and both agreed it was better than going in announced. Charging through the entrance with full combat team deployed would clear the path, but it would also announce exactly what was happening to everyone in the building with enough time to prepare, relocate, or destroy whatever they'd come to find. Quiet infiltration gave them more time and better options.
Which meant the two unconscious people on the ground needed to be useful first.
"Crawdaunt, Water Gun."
Crawdaunt applied this with the minimum force required to be effective, which still produced a fairly emphatic result. The two Team Aqua members came back to consciousness, sputtering and found Sieg standing over them in their own uniform, which visibly did not help their composure.
The color left both of their faces at roughly the same time.
Sieg had seen this expression before. It was the expression of someone rapidly calculating their options and not finding any good ones. Getting caught by the League meant processing, detention, and prosecution. Getting caught by the League while on an unauthorized operation in a restricted area meant more of all of that. And getting back to the organization after getting caught, even if they somehow managed it, meant explaining how their uniforms had ended up on two strangers who had walked into the facility with them.
There was no version of this that was good for them.
One of them, the squad leader by rank insignia, found his voice first.
"We don't want trouble. We'll talk."
"Good," Sieg said. "Who's running the operation inside?"
He separated them before letting either answer, moving them to positions where they couldn't see or hear each other, then worked through the questions in parallel with Cynthia handling the second one. The answers came back matching on every point that mattered, which was the best indicator available that they weren't being managed.
A Commander. Not a grunt-level lead, an actual Commander, the rank above squad leader, with enough personal capability to have crossed into Sub-Elite Four territory recently. Affiliated directly with an executive who used the name "Tide." The mission was a search and retrieval operation, originating orders coming from above the Commander's own pay grade.
When they compared notes, every figure aligned.
"So," Cynthia said. "Sub-Elite Four Commander, unknown number of additional operatives, underground access, Team Aqua executive involvement." She looked toward the ruin entrance. "Still want to go in?"
"You're the one who looked ready to go before I finished thinking about it."
She almost smiled. "The situation's controllable. A Sub-Elite Four Commander is a real fight but not an impossible one, and we're not going in unprepared." She glanced at the prisoners. "We have better information than we had twenty minutes ago."
Sieg had Crawdaunt put them out again, properly secured them, and took one last look at the entrance.
He had Sharpedo in his back pocket. Open water, Swift Swim running, nothing on this island caught Sharpedo at full speed in its element. If the situation went sideways badly enough, that exit existed.
It wasn't going to be needed.
He nodded at the entrance.
They went in.
The cold air hit immediately, not the outdoor chill they'd felt on the beach, but something different. Structured. The kind of cold that came from enclosed spaces that had been sealed off from natural temperature regulation for years, sitting above water that never saw sunlight. The passage descended ahead of them into the dark.
In the Hoenn League's regional office, a junior operator had flagged the alert from Slateport as routine criminal activity, logged it, and set it to move through the standard escalation queue at the standard pace.
Then the system pulled the identity attached to the call: Level Two clearance, League-sponsored track, a name that someone in the office recognized as being connected to the Joy family's investment portfolio.
The alert moved faster.
By the time it reached someone senior enough to cross-reference it with the second alert that had come in through private channels from a family name that made three people in the room go quiet when they heard it, the escalation had already skipped two levels.
An emergency meeting was convened in the Hoenn branch conference room.
The junior operator who had initially marked it as routine found this somewhat alarming in retrospect.
The senior staff found Cynthia's involvement specifically alarming, for reasons that they did not fully articulate to each other but all understood.