Shell Game

Blue is waiting by the elevator when Red and his kadabra suddenly teleport indoors to meet him. Red drops the bombshell that he has the ability to turn renegade pokemon against their masters using sakki, a closely guarded secret that fundamentally alters Blue's tactical calculus. Red explains they have a strict time limit: the police hunters plan to breach the building in fifteen minutes, which will likely result in the execution of the hostages or cause the renegades to bring the entire Silph Co. tower down. Realizing they must act immediately, Red insists on splitting up. To survive the harrowing infiltration, Red asks Blue for an unprecedented favor: to allow Red to psychically copy his "Battle Calm" so Red can operate under extreme pressure without being crippled by fear. Though deeply uncomfortable surrendering his greatest psychological edge, Blue recognizes the stakes and temporarily drops his defenses, allowing Red to mirror his hyper-focused, emotionally detached combat state.

Armed with a deputized police utility belt, Blue attempts to scale the building but finds the elevators disabled and the stairwells flooded with toxic smog by renegade weezing. Unable to ascend safely, he relies on his own Battle Calm to deduce the renegades' vulnerabilities. Since he cannot reach the hostages directly, he decides to descend to the basement to sabotage the building's backup generators, aiming to disrupt the renegades' operations. However, upon reaching the power room, he is confronted by a Silph scientist who feigns cowardice before suddenly deploying a magneton and hypno, revealing himself as a renegade guard.

Meanwhile, Red teleports back to President Silph's private office, anchoring himself to the room's exact sensory memory to ensure he has a reliable escape route. Coldly assessing the danger, he accesses a PC to swap his beloved core team for stronger, less emotionally significant pokemon like dodrio—a ruthless tactical choice he justifies by leaning into his borrowed Battle Calm. He systematically scans the building's layout using Kadabra's expanded psychic senses, discovering that the renegades have strategically positioned pokemon with acute auditory and vibrational awareness—such as raticate and arbok—to detect any approach from below. Conducting a quick mental premortem, Red realizes a conventional assault would be immediately detected and trigger the hostages' executions. Forced to innovate, Red develops a desperate, terrifyingly powerful technique: "mirroring." By establishing brief psychic connections with terrified, hiding Silph employees scattered across the floors, he captures their sensory states and uses those human anchors as target points for sequential indoor teleports.

Hopping from floor to floor, Red's fragmented consciousness finally locates President Silph in a heavily guarded storage lab on the seventh floor alongside other hostages, watched by a sandslash and crobat. Armed with this intelligence, he teleports back to the secured police room, informing Commissioner Burrell of the renegades' exact location and requesting a brief extension to clear the path for the hunters.

Operating entirely within his borrowed Battle Calm, Red returns to the hostile floors. From behind walls and closed doors, he unleashes sakki on the renegade pokemon guarding the stairwells and corridors, overriding their conditioning and forcing them to violently attack their trainers and each other. Though sickened by the brutal, lethal efficiency of his unseen assassinations—such as forcing a weezing to spew acid instead of smoke—Red aggressively compartmentalizes his horror and guilt, deferring the psychological toll to "future Red" in order to remain functional. He systematically dismantles the renegade perimeter, leaving a trail of casualties, until the remaining forces finally realize an invisible intruder is hunting them.