Tradeoffs

The six-shiftry ambush is the crucible of Blue's character. Fighting beside Luis's doduo and Sarah's furret and gloom, he burns through his roster at terrible cost: a caterpie sliced in half, a berserk beedrill that ignores commands and batters itself to brain-death against the enemy. Being dark saves the others — when the shiftry's eyes glow and the mental assault drops everyone else, Blue, immune, captures two of the attackers and shakes his allies awake. They win, but Sarah's furret is killed.

What defines the chapter is what Blue does with the dying ambush-leader. Refusing to "lose again" after the night's wasted deaths, he decides to capture the shiftry even though it's too large for a pokeball — by making it fit. He sedates and treats it, then butchers it alive: hacking off its limbs and shearing its heavy mane to cut its mass, trusting that a plant pokemon can regrow nearly any wound with something to absorb and a pokemon center's help. Sarah says she'd rather it die; Blue asks if that's truly better. The gamble works — the shiftry registers alive and his, its first memory of its master likely the sight of him dismembering it — and even now Blue coolly manages how Luis and Sarah will tell the story so it makes him look strong. His creed crystallizes: the Championship is only a means, his real goal still unspoken, and he will do whatever winning requires. A great onix's roar announces Pewter's arrival; help has finally come.

Across the burnt clearing, Red and Leaf keep watch, trading pokemon trivia to stay awake — basculin colors that no one understands, a pokedex discrepancy in Red's beta build. Their own moral note is the mirror of Blue's. A wounded, orphaned pichu — having just killed the spearow that attacked it — limps near, and Leaf risks a shock to lure it close with granola and catch it, saving a life that would otherwise have bled out in the dark. It is, she reflects, the first capture she feels wholly good about: against the beliefs of Ghetsis's followers back home, she holds that taking a pokemon can genuinely be for its own good when done with respect, since tamed lives run longer than wild ones.

Then Leaf gives the pichu to Red. It is partly confession — she admits she lied, that his hoothoot died of her forgetfulness and she couldn't bear to tell him — and partly repair: a life for the life she cost him. Red, who has always wanted an electric type, protests that a rare pichu for a dead hoothoot is no fair trade, but accepts, both for her peace and his own. A Pewter trainer on a rhyhorn finally reaches them, sets and casts Red's arm, and carries him off toward the city, Leaf staying behind to wait for Blue.