Night had already settled over Trovitopolis when Reiji and the First Mate finally reached the broad plains outside the city.
Pelipper dropped the First Mate onto the ground with little ceremony, leaving him to scramble upright covered in dust while fixing his clothes and windblown hair. Only after that did Pelipper descend properly, allowing Reiji to step onto solid ground.
"Finally here."
The temperature had fallen sharply after sunset, and the coastal air only made the cold worse. The First Mate, still dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, hugged himself and rubbed his arms for warmth while Reiji watched without the slightest sympathy.
"Come on. Take me to your daughter."
"Okay."
The First Mate rose cautiously and started toward the city. He knew Gengar was somewhere nearby, watching every move he made, and despite wanting nothing less than to lead Reiji straight to his daughter, he didn't dare try anything clever. The man behind him had already proven that he was perfectly capable of killing without hesitation.
"Don't try anything," Reiji warned as he followed. "I don't mind killing one more person."
Before they reached the city, Reiji released Ditto and had it transform into a mask bearing an unfamiliar face. He put the disguise on, then turned his attention back to the First Mate.
"Tell me about your home. Anyone there besides your daughter?"
"I have an uncle. Whenever I'm away on the ship, I ask him to stay over and look after her."
"Just your uncle and your daughter? No other family?"
The answer struck Reiji as a little strange. People in this world often seemed surprisingly distant from their relatives, with even close family members maintaining very little contact.
"He's only a distant uncle," the First Mate explained. "He originally came to borrow money from me, then somehow ended up staying and never left."
The First Mate wanted to turn around and see why Reiji was suddenly asking about his family, but with his life still firmly in the other man's hands, curiosity wasn't worth the risk. He kept walking without another word.
When the lights of Trovitopolis began appearing ahead, Reiji noticed some clothes hanging outside a house along the road. He had Gengar quietly take a hooded sweatshirt, then tossed it to the First Mate, who was still shivering in his T-shirt.
"Put that on and keep the hood up."
The First Mate obeyed immediately.
Reiji had no intention of letting him walk openly through the city. The First Mate had lived here for years and probably knew plenty of people who could recognize him. Reiji wanted to handle everything quietly, confirm that the man hadn't lied about his daughter, and secure whatever leverage he needed before starting his retaliation against Riku's sworn brother.
They entered Trovitopolis through the quieter streets and avoided crowded areas whenever possible. At that hour, the roads they chose were almost deserted, and nothing interrupted them before they reached the Gyarados Apartments.
The First Mate briefly showed his face to the security guard at the entrance, who recognized him and let them through without trouble. They crossed the residential grounds, entered his building, and stepped into the elevator.
As they rose, Reiji looked through the glass at Trovitopolis glowing beneath them. Neon signs filled the streets with color while traffic flowed between the buildings, and the view briefly reminded him of his previous life.
Back then, he'd once dreamed of owning an apartment in a city like this. Housing prices had climbed so quickly that he eventually gave up on the idea and retreated to the countryside instead, where he could fish and live a quiet life without constantly chasing money.
After arriving in the Pokémon world, owning property had stopped feeling important. There were far too many strange and interesting things here to care much about buying an apartment.
The elevator stopped on the twenty-fourth floor, and the First Mate approached his door with obvious unease. His hand trembled slightly as he hesitated before knocking, caught between hoping his daughter wasn't home and desperately wanting her to be the first person he saw.
When the security door finally opened, an elderly white-haired man appeared on the other side with a badly bruised face. One eye was swollen nearly shut, and dried blood still marked the corner of his mouth.
"Uncle! What happened to you?" The First Mate rushed forward. "Who did this?"
Even while checking the old man's injuries, his eyes kept searching the apartment behind him. Normally his daughter would have been the first person running to the door whenever he came home, yet there was no sign of her.
"Kazuma?" Uncle stared at him in disbelief before letting out a weary sigh. "You're finally back."
The look on his face immediately made him uneasy.
"What happened?"
"Yuzuki was taken."
Kazuma froze. His fists clenched as anger wiped away every trace of exhaustion from the flight.
"Who took her?"
"I don't know. They said they were friends of yours and wanted to take Yuzuki with them. I refused, so they beat me."
Uncle gingerly touched his swollen eye, which had become so badly bruised that he could barely see through it.
"Friends?"
Kazuma couldn't think of anyone he knew who would come for Yuzuki immediately after learning that he was supposed to die. The number of people who knew about both the ambush and his daughter was very small, which made Riku's sworn brother and his men the obvious first possibility.
"I need to find her."
Kazuma turned toward the door, but Reiji stopped him before he could leave.
"Do you think they took her?"
Reiji had heard the entire conversation, and this was the first time he'd learned Kazuma's actual name. At least the man's story about having a daughter was true; the question now was who had taken her.
His first suspicion was the Black Ship. If Riku's brother believed Kazuma had died during the ambush, moving Yuzuki before anyone else reached her wasn't impossible.
Reiji pulled out a photograph of Riku and showed it to both men.
"Do either of you know him?"
Kazuma studied the picture, then shook his head. "Who's that? I feel like I've seen his face somewhere, but I don't know him."
"Wasn't him," Uncle said before looking suspiciously at the unfamiliar man standing behind Kazuma. "And who are you? One of Kazuma's friends?"
Kazuma rarely brought anyone home. As far as Uncle remembered, the only visitor who came by with any regularity was Kazuma's boss, so after what had happened earlier, another stranger was hardly reassuring.
"Not him..."
Reiji put the photograph away and reconsidered the situation. Riku himself probably wouldn't have come personally even if his sworn brother's people were responsible, but the answer still made that possibility less convincing.
Whoever had taken Yuzuki might belong to another group entirely.
"Who else knows you have a daughter?" Reiji asked. "Think carefully."
Kazuma forced down his panic and started going through everyone who knew enough about his private life to come here. Once he set aside Riku's sworn brother and his men, only one realistic possibility remained.
His expression changed as someone finally came to mind.
"Could it be her?"
"Who?"
Uncle understood immediately, having lived with Kazuma long enough to follow his train of thought without explanation.
"It might really be her."
Kazuma's uncertainty quickly hardened into conviction. If everyone believed he was dead, Yuzuki held little value for his former employers. She wasn't someone worth recruiting or cultivating, and there was no obvious reason for them to move an eight-year-old girl so quickly.
His ex-wife, on the other hand, had every reason to take her.
Yuzuki was her daughter too.
"I need to find her."
Kazuma moved toward the door again, but Reiji caught his arm before he could rush out.
"Slow down. Pack first." Reiji gave him a pointed look. "If those people discover you're alive, what do you think they'll assume?"
Kazuma immediately understood what he meant.
"As far as they're concerned, surviving means I betrayed them."
He had spent too many years around criminals to expect them to care about fairness or explanations. When he was still useful, they had treated his family well enough, but returning alive after a failed operation without reporting back would change everything.
Kazuma turned toward his Uncle.
"Pack everything important. We're leaving together."
He rushed into the apartment and went straight for the Pokémon training resources he'd hidden away over the years. Most of them were meant for Yuzuki's future, savings he had built so she could afford to become a Trainer if she still wanted that life when she grew older.
Once those were secured, he gathered whatever else mattered: some of Yuzuki's favorite toys, several sets of clothes, daily necessities, and whatever valuables could fit inside their bags. By the time he came back out, Uncle had finished packing as well.
Reiji was already waiting in the hallway, and the three of them left immediately. They entered the elevator together, the doors slid shut, and the car began carrying them toward the ground floor.
Almost immediately after their elevator began descending, another chime echoed through the quiet twenty-fourth-floor hallway as the second elevator arrived.
A tall young man stepped out wearing a black leather jacket half-zipped over a flashy printed T-shirt, ripped jeans, and mud-spattered boots. Had Reiji still been standing there, he would have recognized him at once.
It was Riku, the same man from the photograph Reiji had shown Kazuma only minutes earlier.
"Bro, it's the twenty-fourth floor, right?"
Riku held a phone against his ear while checking the apartment numbers along the hallway. Once he found Kazuma's door, he knocked hard several times and waited, but no one answered.
After trying for a while longer, he frowned and spoke into the phone again.
"Bro, I've been knocking forever. Nobody's answering. Maybe they're not home?"
"Impossible," a low, rough voice replied from the other end. "His daughter lives there, and there's an old man too. Before Kazuma left, he specifically told me that if anything happened to him, I should look after his daughter."
Riku stared at the locked door.
"So what, you want me to break in?"
"Up to you. Those resources belong to his daughter. If you want them, figure it out yourself."
The call ended before Riku could say anything else.
He clicked his tongue and lowered the phone. He had only come because his brother told him that one of his men, Kazuma, was probably dead and might have left a considerable stockpile of Pokémon training resources behind. For Riku, the inheritance of an Elite Four-tier Trainer looked like free money waiting to be taken.
He glanced through the hallway window, then checked both ends of the corridor. The building was silent, and there wasn't another person in sight.
After a moment of hesitation, Riku pulled a thin piece of metal from his pocket and inserted it into the lock. He fiddled with it for several frustrating minutes, sweat gathering on his forehead as he muttered under his breath.
"Why won't this damn thing open...?"
A soft click finally came from the lock, and Riku pushed the door open.
The sight inside stopped him immediately. The living room was already a mess, with cushions scattered across the floor, the coffee table knocked out of place, drawers hanging open, and belongings spread everywhere.
His first thought was that someone had robbed the apartment before he arrived, which meant the resources his brother mentioned might already be gone.
Riku hurried into the main bedroom, correctly guessing that it belonged to Kazuma, only to find the same disorder waiting for him. Clothes covered the bed and floor, the sheets had been pulled loose, and several pieces of furniture had clearly been searched in a hurry.
He began tearing through everything that remained, yanking open drawers and dumping their contents onto the floor before crouching to check beneath the bed and anywhere else valuables might have been hidden.
After searching the room from top to bottom, he found nothing worth taking. By then he was breathing hard, his face red with frustration.
"Fuck this. Came all the way here for nothing."
Riku spat onto the floor and left without even bothering to close the apartment door behind him.
Yuzuki barely crossed his mind.
The supposedly incurable illness that had once driven Kazuma into desperation had never existed in the first place. The people behind the Black Ship had enough influence in Trovitopolis to cooperate with doctors at local hospitals and fabricate a terminal diagnosis for a perfectly healthy child.
The entire scheme had been designed to control Kazuma.
Once every hospital had supposedly failed him, his boss could step forward with a miraculous solution and demand loyalty in return. Kazuma had believed they saved his daughter's life, never realizing they were the ones who had manufactured the crisis from the beginning.
To people like them, a Trainer with something precious to lose was much easier to control.
Now that they believed Kazuma was dead, neither Yuzuki nor anything else he left behind held much value beyond whatever could be stolen. They had no reason to care what happened to an eight-year-old girl once her father could no longer be useful to them.
Not long after Riku left, a thief crept onto the same floor and immediately noticed the apartment door standing wide open. One glance inside was enough to make his eyes light up.
To him, it looked like an invitation.
He slipped inside and discovered that although the most valuable portable resources were already gone, plenty of ordinary household goods remained. The television, refrigerator, other appliances, solid-wood furniture, and expensive bottles from the liquor cabinet were all worth taking.
The thief treated the apartment like a free shopping spree and stripped it piece by piece, carrying off anything he thought he could sell.
By the time Riku eventually returned, almost everything of value had disappeared. Only worn clothes and scattered junk remained inside the cold, empty apartment, leaving little evidence that Kazuma and Yuzuki had ever built a life there.
[End of chapter]
[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]
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