Distractions

What pours out of the breached mountain first is pokemon — geodude, zubat, sandshrew, graveler — and then the spores: a parasect colony driving a stampede, fungus visibly blooming on the backs of the fallen. For Blue it wakes a childhood horror of zombie movies, of waking to find everyone he loved stumbling about, capped in white. The site's defenders organize fast — fire and flying types to the front, a whirlwind to sweep the spore cloud off the mountain's edge — and Ryback splits the trio: Red and his charmander to the firing line, Blue and Leaf to hold the perimeter around a building full of stored fossils.

Red's war is attrition without end. He and Ryback and a geologist named Pira hold a line between a weezing and a magmar as paras come by the dozens, mindless under the fungus, marching into Ember and poison and fire. His nidoran tires, his spinarak loses two legs, and then — in the one mistake he can't take back — he sends his freshly caught spearow in as a stopgap, watches its head get engulfed in spores, and fails to recall it before the swarm closes. Later his rattata — the first pokemon he ever caught — is run through by a paras playing dead. Through all of it Red forces the discipline the chapter is named for: when he can't tell whether Rattata survived the withdrawal, he refuses to check his pokedex — it won't change if I know now or five minutes from now; focus — and turns back to the fight. A charizard finally arrives to pour fire down the tunnel and end it; Red sits on a clean boulder afterward and learns Rattata didn't make it.

Blue and Leaf's perimeter becomes its own ordeal — a zubat swarm broken by coordinated Water Gun, Gust, and Supersonic, Leaf's pidgey Crimson torn up and withdrawn bloody — and then a graveler crashes through the building and curls to Self-Destruct. Blue runs and is hurled clear by the blast, alive only because the graveler was freshly evolved and its detonation small. But the timing nags: a click of commands preceded both the graveler's charge and its suicide. They find a paleontologist — the one who glared at them earlier — methodically loading fossil Containers into a bag. When they confront him he sends out an abra to Teleport away; Blue's squirtle Maturin spits water to interrupt it, the abra vanishes regardless, and the man calmly orders a sandslash to Slash — the command that means lethal intent. Leaf summons her wigglytuff behind her own back and orders Sing; the man drops, and so nearly does Blue, saved by the earplugs Leaf jams in.

The strands knot together in the wreckage: the man is a Renegade, the rarest and most feared thing a trainer can become — one who trains pokemon to kill humans. Leaf strips and secures him, folds her wigglytuff into a bathroom to contain the song, and flags the spot with a Renegade marker while Blue fetches ACE trainers, who cage the man in a Mr. Mime's telekinetic barrier. Red, arriving wrung out, can't stop reflexively flagging the others' reasoning — warning that it's easy to remember only the bad about someone you've been primed to distrust — until Blue snaps, whose side are you on?

The chapter closes outside the story, on an excerpt from Giovanni's blog: a meditation on what a justice system is for — safety, reform, or punishment — and a parable from the Time of Conflict. A shogun, deciding leniency had bred thieves, made theft punishable by death. Theft fell; assault and murder soared. A cornered thief who faces execution either way has every reason to kill the witness.