Avoidance

Inside Viridian Forest the three adopt a Ranger-style sweep — spread into a loose triangle about a hundred meters apart, phones set to alert everyone if anyone drifts too far — so each can flush pokemon without scaring every catch off or splitting up dangerously. Red privately savors it: the longer the hunt and their six-pokemon wager drag on, the longer he can avoid Pewter and the storm, ideally letting Zapdos blow itself out before they arrive.

Avoidance shapes his tactics too. Rather than shove his head into bushes that might answer with poison or a stinger, he summons his rattata for the first time, bonds with her, and throws rocks to startle out whatever hides. When that proves slow, he turns predator logic against the forest: knowing the local food web — that caterpie are its weakest link, that butterfree cling near the top only by firing disorienting low-grade psychic bursts, and that noctowl and hoothoot prey on them because their minds resist those bursts — he plays a recorded caterpie distress cry to lure hunters by sounding like easy meat, choosing his fast rattata over charmander as the interceptor.

It nearly costs him dearly. A spinarak snares his pokedex with a thread and hauls it up a tree, and because that device — Oak's off-market software, the most precious thing Red owns — cannot be lost, he climbs and falls and swings after it, recovering the dex with a Hamato-style pivot throw. Mid-fight the spinarak projects the pattern on its abdomen as a mental attack; standing behind charmander, Red takes the brunt and is flattened by an obliterating void of sensation that leaves a raw, unrememberable hole in his mind. He and a staggered charmander still manage the capture, but the experience shakes him: spinarak shouldn't be capable of more than minor emotional nudges, so either his mind is extraordinarily vulnerable to such attacks, or — despite testing negative a year ago — he is himself a latent psychic whose own power was turned against him by a Ghost attack. He keeps the incident to himself, unwilling to either boast or seem weak before he's researched it.

The hunt's tally rises in scraps of conversation: Blue, sweeping nearby, drives a caterpie into Red's path and they down it together (a tree-singeing ember from charmander, squirtle dousing the flames), Blue claiming it along with an earlier shroomish, Red counting his hard-won spinarak. Then both phones chime at once: Leaf, whom Red guiltily realizes he forgot to keep in formation, has filed a CoRRNet alert and a terse "Come quick." They sprint to her and find her crouched at the edge of a flower-filled clearing where a dozen beedrill drift from bloom to bloom — and in the middle of the field lies a human body.