Precedes

Blue watches from his pidgeot Zephyr as he flies into the Cinnabar Gym complex. It has been a week since they found the mansion, and they are in a frustrating holding pattern while Interpol slowly plans an excavation. In the meantime, Blue and Leaf have been tracking down ditto nests across the island. Blue admires Leaf's grit; despite her deep aversion to lethal force, she pushes through the sickness of burning out ditto nests with her new magmar because she recognizes the necessity of eliminating the threat.

Hoping to speed up his timeline, Blue intercepts Leader Blaine to request an immediate challenge match. Blaine brusquely shoots him down. The Leader demands Blue speak only the facts, deliberately minimizing any "attack surfaces" for emotional persuasion. Blaine tells Blue he must choose between waiting at the bottom of the Cinnabar queue while the island recovers, or going to Viridian to challenge Giovanni. Wanting Giovanni to be his final challenge, Blue accepts the wait, realizing he still has much to learn about handling Leaders who refuse to play social games.

To stay sharp for the high-stakes, nearly lethal battles expected at the seventh badge level, Blue spars against Blaine's Third, Chase. Chase's hyper-offensive ninetales and turtonator throw devastating attacks like Confuse Ray, Energy Ball, and Dragon Pulse, effortlessly dodging Blue's Bubble Beam. Blue manages to swap between his houndoom, arcanine, and rhydon to survive a close Solar Beam fakeout. Their next bout pits Zephyr against a talonflame using Heat Wave, but Blue halts the match when his phone vibrates with an alert.

Elaine and Glen arrive on a swellow and a pidgeot, leading a cohort of trainers from the Saffron gym. Blue has called them in to help the local rangers clear the ditto nests, hoping to lower Cinnabar's threat rating so he can earn his badge faster and lighten his load before challenging Giovanni. In private, Glen expresses his willingness to fight renegades again if necessary. Touched by their loyalty, Blue asks his friends to quietly monitor the island and ask careful questions about the secret lab.

At Indigo's Interpol base, Red is speaking with Mink, a Silph-engineer-turned-technician, about the difficulty of replicating the Master Ball. Mink notes that the hardest part of early pokeball tech was the fact that mass remains even when converted to light.

They are interrupted by a furious Looker. Red had casually mentioned putting a team on "digging into the lab," and Looker assumed he meant metaphorical digging, not literally excavating the buried structure. As Looker chastises Red for the diplomatic disaster this could cause with Blaine, Director General Tsunemori arrives to personally check on Interpol's massive Cinnabar excavation.

Seeking to justify the operation, Red leads them to his cubicle, revealing a massive conspiracy board he built with his mother's help. He tracked missing researchers, shell companies, and anomalous research outputs. Red hypothesizes that the secret lab intentionally leaked their discoveries to normal labs. By doing so, they allowed the wider scientific community to do the heavy lifting of advancing the research, reaping the benefits of those breakthroughs without exposing their illicit operations.

Tsunemori notices Red is in much higher spirits. Red admits that this detective work—piecing together a puzzle—finally gives him a sense of control and makes him feel uniquely valuable. It provides a much-needed counterbalance to his grueling combat training, where he often feels passively molded into a living weapon by Interpol. Satisfied by his results, Tsunemori and Looker agree to let the investigation proceed, though Looker warns Red about the dangers of poor communication in the chain of command.

Later, Red checks his heavily filtered messages and finds a bizarre poem from Rowan, one of his former peers under Sabrina's tutelage. Sent over a week ago, the poem rambles about peace and war, asking which sides Red will be "On the day / you / meet / me". A chill runs down Red's spine as his unpartitioned self senses something is deeply wrong. He immediately calls Jason, who confirms he hasn't seen Rowan in weeks and has been feeling uneasy about him. Recognizing the potential danger of a psychic with partitioned mind anomalies going rogue, they agree to meet with Sabrina immediately.