Since there was a survivor from the ambush, it was time for Nova's favorite part of any fight: the interrogation.
What mattered most when questioning a captive? Was it brutal punishment? Threats and bribery? A silver tongue?
Nova believed it was none of those. What mattered was emotion.
As long as a person kept their composure, it was nearly impossible to pull anything useful out of them. Only once fear or despair took over their thinking could Nova get what he actually wanted.
He snapped his fingers, and Nidoking, who had traveled with him longer than any of his other Pokemon and understood him better than most people did, needed no further instruction. It swung its heavy tail around and curved the tip about half a meter off the ground, forming a makeshift seat.
Nova settled onto Nidoking's tail, his posture relaxed, his tone almost friendly.
"Can you still talk? If you can, let's have a chat."
The short, stocky man was breathing in shallow, pained gasps. At least the burns from the fire had cauterized his wounds; he wasn't going to bleed out from a severed vessel, small comfort as that was.
Nova waited a full ten seconds before the man finally rasped, "If I talk, do I get to live?"
"Hard to say," Nova said. "Let's talk first. How did you treat the Trainers you caught before us?"
The man said nothing.
There was no point lying now. Everyone understood how robbery and murder worked in a place like this: you didn't leave witnesses. The fact that this trio had operated undisturbed in the desert for so long meant that no one they'd caught had ever made it back to League territory to report them.
"What if I told you today was the first time we'd ever let greed get the better of us? Would you believe that?"
Nova gave him a thin, mocking smile. "Sure, why not? We're just talking here. If I didn't believe you, there'd be no point continuing the conversation, would there?"
For a moment, hearing Nova say he believed him gave the man a flicker of hope. Then Nova's next words crushed it.
"But whether this is your first time, or whether you've got other lives on your hands, isn't really my concern. You're dodging the actual question. I'm asking, if our positions were reversed and you'd ambushed me instead, what would you have done to me?"
The man's face twisted with fury. "You never planned to let me go, did you? So why bother with this act? If you're going to kill me, just do it!"
"There you go again, getting impatient," Nova said. "When did I say I was definitely going to kill you? Dying is the easy part."
He tilted his head toward a shape lying a short distance to the man's right, the one wrapped in a blue headscarf, cut down messily by Vibrava.
"See your friend over there? It doesn't look pretty, and he didn't go quietly either. Whoever handled him has a rough temperament and got a little carried away. My apologies on his behalf."
"What are you trying to say!" The man's voice cracked into something close to a wail, a tangle of fear, rage, hesitation, and hatred all at once.
Good. His resolve was nearly gone.
Nova met his eyes and spoke slowly, deliberately. "What I'm saying is that dying is easy. Staying alive is hard. So the question is whether you're willing to fight for it. Whether you can find a way to earn your life back."
Staying alive is hard. Staying alive is hard. The words seemed to loop in the man's mind until he broke. "Everything we took is back at our camp. If I tell you where, will you let me live?"
"I don't know," Nova said. "Why don't you tell me first, and we'll see."
The man's composure shattered entirely. "You were never going to let me go! You just want to squeeze everything out of me before you kill me! Not unless you promise me my life, I'm telling you nothing!"
Nova shook his head, almost regretful. "Wrong answer."
Nidoking, who had been waiting for its cue, finally got the signal it wanted. It raised one arm slightly, and a needle-thin spike shot from a gap in its forearm plating, a Poison Sting that punched clean through the man's calf.
Dark purple blotches spread outward from the wound almost instantly, and with them came a burning, crawling pain, as though a thousand tiny needles were working their way through his flesh.
"You're already dead," Nova said flatly.
The man's whole body seized with agony. He could only claw at his own leg with his one good hand.
"Antidote! Give me the antidote, please, quickly!"
Nova drew a bottle of Potent Antidote from his pack, set it down in plain view, and said, "So what are you offering in exchange for this?"
The man was past holding anything back. "The camp! I'll tell you exactly where the camp is, just give me the antidote!"
"Good," Nova said. "Meowscarada, three sprays should do it. Don't waste more than that. This information isn't worth a full bottle."
Meowscarada took the bottle and sprayed the wound three times without a word, its expression unreadable. The poison's spread slowed to a crawl, though it didn't vanish entirely. In the half minute it had taken to reach this point, the man's calf had already gone mostly purple, and the flesh around the entry wound had begun to die.
Nova recalled the rest of his team, leaving out only Meowscarada along with Little Blue and Azir, the two who could fly.
Once the man had marked the camp's location on a portable map, Nova moved out right away. He and Meowscarada climbed onto Corviknight's back, while the injured man was carried below in its talons.
Azir stayed ahead, scouting the terrain around them. If nothing raised an alarm, Azir would shift from scout to skirmisher, slipping into the enemy camp early to deal with whatever Pokemon had been left behind to guard it.
Forty minutes later, Nova set down near the camp.
By then, the two Mightyena posted as guards had already been dealt with by Vibrava. Caught by a sudden Sand Tomb, neither one had gotten the chance to run. Being Dark-types, they were especially vulnerable to Vibrava's Bug-type attacks, and Vibrava, true to its role as skirmisher, had no interest in fighting up close. Once it had pinned them in place, it picked them apart from a safe distance.
It was proof that even a base Special Attack stat of only fifty could get the job done, given enough patience and enough attempts. After several rounds of an unavoidable Bug Buzz, both Mightyena were knocked out of the fight.
With the camp's defenses cleared, Vibrava circled the area a few more times to be thorough before returning to report to Nova. Its findings came through as Rotom translated on its behalf.
By the time Nova climbed down from Corviknight and stepped toward the camp, he already had a fairly clear picture of what he'd find inside those tents.