Nova's second wave came out fast: Growlithe, Vibrava, and Marshtomp. All three were sharp trackers in their own way, and if any of the three men had a hidden card left to play, these three would run it down before it could be used.
Growlithe caught the scent first. Odor Sleuth flared, and the strong smell of blood pulled it straight toward one spot, where it clawed and Dug until it uncovered the thin man's body.
He had taken Corviknight's Brave Bird directly and had already been fading fast before the ground ever closed over him. Ten minutes buried under the crushing weight of Nidoking's Earthquake had finished what the bird's strike started; he was no longer breathing. Nova didn't bother searching the body for much, just pulled the utility belt with its Poké Balls free and moved on.
The second man they found was the stocky one in the blue bandana, and his Dugtrio was still with him, easily the best Pokémon anyone could ask for underground. He'd wrapped himself around it as the collapse hit, and together they'd carved out a small pocket of air in the crushing sand using Dig.
When he heard movement above, he assumed the winning Trainer had come to loot the dead, so he sent Dugtrio's Dig into its second, more damaging phase and struck blind toward the noise.
It should have worked. Instead, Marshtomp, the one Nova called Seele, was always alert to the faintest tremor underfoot. It felt Dugtrio shift below and threw itself backward on pure instinct half a second before the strike landed, more animal reflex than any trained technique. Dugtrio's ambush found nothing but empty air.
Seele answered at once. Ice Punch caught Dugtrio square across the head.
Dugtrio tried to dive back underground to escape, but Growlithe had closed the distance and sank its teeth in first, a solid Bite pinning it in place. Unable to twist free, Dugtrio took Seele's second Ice Punch, already charged and waiting, square on and went down for good.
With his only remaining Pokémon out cold and the rest of his team scattered somewhere in the wreckage, the man in the bandana had nothing left but the urge to run. He didn't get far. Dugtrio wasn't the only thing that could tunnel through sand, and Vibrava had been boring downward from above the whole time. The instant it laid eyes on him, it remembered, without needing to be told twice, exactly what Nova had drilled into it during training.
"Forget official matches. Out in the wild, once a team fight starts and you get a clean look at the other Trainer, you finish it the first chance you get. No hesitation."
Vibrava didn't hesitate. The moment their eyes met, it answered with Fury Cutter.
Down in the dark of that narrow burrow, the man barely registered a shape before the blades were already on him, one after another, more than a dozen strikes landing before Vibrava finally pulled back. What had been a solidly built man was left in no shape to be called that anymore. Vibrava beat its wings and rose back to the surface, carrying what remained.
Nova nearly lost his lunch on the spot when Vibrava dropped the ruined shape at his feet.
He'd delivered killing blows before, sure, but that had always been Nidoking's doing, and Nidoking, for all its brute strength, was surprisingly controlled about it. A body shaken apart by Earthquake or one frozen solid by Ice Beam still wasn't pretty, but at least it didn't look like this. Vibrava, easily the most vicious fighter on the team, clearly didn't share Nidoking's restraint.
All that blood, and here he was worrying whether it might traumatize some innocent kid nearby.
Then again, he was the minor in question. So, fair enough.
Still, moments like this drove home just how far this world was from the bright, gentle version he remembered from the cartoons back home. The people here bled and died like people anywhere, no different from where he'd come from. Plenty of what these Pokémon could do was more than capable of killing a person outright. Nobody here was shrugging off a Thunderbolt to the chest or grinning through a Flamethrower like some invincible cartoon extra; that kind of durability simply didn't exist in flesh and blood.
Which meant there was no room to get careless about his own safety, not even a little. He'd need to keep building up his defenses, both the obvious kind that anyone could see and the quieter, hidden kind nobody would notice until it was already too late to matter.
Meanwhile, the search through the wreckage continued. The third man turned out to be the lucky one, relatively speaking, since it was Growlithe who found him.
Growlithe was, at the end of the day, a soft, fluffy little dog, nothing like the two-meter dragonfly built for violence that was Vibrava. It had a gentler streak in it. Sure, it could bite hard enough to kill if it had to, but given any choice at all, it preferred to leave a target breathing and let its Trainer make the final call.
This last man, short and heavyset, still had some fight in him when Growlithe dug him out, and he lunged for the Poké Ball on his belt. Growlithe was faster. Fire Fang closed around his wrist before he got anywhere close.
His scream tore across the Tamar Desert.
By the time Growlithe finally dragged him in front of Nova, hauling him like a sack of trash, the man had cried himself past the point of tears, lost entirely in the pain. His wrist was torn clean through by the bite, the surrounding skin blackened and cooked by the fire riding along Growlithe's teeth. The burn had gone deep enough that the hand looked unlikely to be saved, even if he lived.
Seele had already stripped the Poké Balls from his belt and brought them over for Nova to check. All four were empty. Like the man in the bandana, this one had thrown out his whole team at once to prepare for the fight, only to have Nidoking erupt from beneath them and bury the lot in a single Earthquake.
That strike-from-the-center trick was just one of the field tactics Nova had come up with in idle moments, never expecting to actually use it like this.
By rights, it shouldn't have worked this well. Earthquake landing in the middle of a group wasn't usually enough on its own to wipe out an entire team's ability to fight.
What made it land so hard was that these three had gotten sloppy. They'd underestimated Nova completely, confident enough in an easy kill that they'd climbed to the top of an exposed hill with no cover at all, and hadn't even bothered sending up Flying types to check the surrounding area for threats.
Years of wind and erosion had left that hillside soft and unstable underneath. Setting off an Earthquake up there was never going to end any other way than collapse.
In the end, they'd practically chosen the worst possible ground to make their stand on, and that mistake was what turned Nova's tactic into something far deadlier than it should have been.