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The staff at Azure Crystal Marine Park were as efficient as ever, especially in the wake of such a damaging incident. Almost every available employee in the entire park had been mobilized.
Emergency crowd evacuation, calming the contestants, communicating and negotiating with the television station.
Under the coordination of each department, all kinds of work proceeded in a hurried but orderly fashion.
As for the culprit behind the entire incident, Sobble, also known as Kael, the appropriate security department naturally went to deal with him.
This time, the team was not led only by Captain Grant, the armed squad leader from before.
For the sake of one tiny Sobble, almost the entire security department of the marine park had come out in full force.
The scale of it was so massive that even if someone said they were heading into the wild to subdue a top-tier Totem Pokémon, it would not have sounded exaggerated.
The result, however, was rather anticlimactic.
Kael did not even give them a chance to act. After making a simple farewell to Basculin, who had already regained its senses, and signaling that they might meet again if fate allowed, he obediently swam out of the lake on his own and surrendered without resistance.
It stood in sharp contrast to the fierce display he had shown earlier when attacking the contestant.
He gave up so quickly that the more than one hundred fully armed professional Trainers could only look at one another in confusion. They wanted to do something, but because of their orders from above, they had no choice but to awkwardly carry Kael back the way they came.
The entire scene was absurdly theatrical.
...
Inside the general office of Azure Crystal Marine Park.
Peter, the supervisor of the General Affairs Office, looked much more relaxed than his other colleagues in the park.
No urgent phone calls were pressing him.
No documents he needed to be rushed.
He simply sat on the office sofa with a conflicted expression, staring at the black Poké Ball on the desk in front of him.
His body remained completely still.
He had fallen deep into thought.
As far as Peter himself was concerned, he did not think his job was easy at all.
If one wanted to talk about easy jobs, the real lucky ones were those damned bastards in the security department.
They had actually tossed this burning-hot problem straight into his hands.
"Damn it."
The more he thought about it, the angrier he became.
Peter, who had always considered himself a gentleman, actually cursed aloud in the empty office.
He suddenly stood up.
With both hands on his hips, Peter fixed his gaze firmly on the temporary Poké Ball in front of him, his eyes filled with unusual complexity.
That was right.
Inside the temporary Poké Ball in front of him was the root cause of the huge uproar that had just shaken the park and even the entire internet.
Sobble.
At that moment, Peter was extremely conflicted.
His position was supervisor of the General Affairs Office. It sounded rather impressive, but inside the park, it could only be considered a minor senior role.
He was still quite far from the true director and general manager.
He was stuck in an awkward middle position, neither high nor low.
As for how to deal with this Sobble, he had to balance far too many factors and consider far too many consequences.
First, from the perspective of the marine park itself, according to internal regulations, troublesome Pokémon that caused serious incidents were usually released into uninhabited wilderness and left to survive on their own.
Peter himself had originally thought the same.
But the phone call from the director just now had suddenly filled him with hesitation.
As an aside, according to the laws and regulations of this Pokémon world, profit-driven organizations like Azure Crystal Marine Park, whose core attraction was Pokémon, had strict responsibilities.
If a Pokémon inside the park consciously attacked and deliberately killed a human, then that Pokémon had to pay with its life.
However, because Mason was a player, the park staff's understanding of this issue had been blurred by the system.
The nature of the incident had fundamentally changed as well.
Instead of "causing a human death," it had become "causing a human injury."
Because of that, the harshest method of dealing with Kael would be releasing him into the wild.
For a Pokémon born and raised in the artificial environment of a park, that might be a disaster serious enough to cause death. After all, such Pokémon were not necessarily able to adapt to the harsh conditions of the wilderness.
But for Kael, it was exactly what he wanted.
Back to the matter at hand.
The director's phone call had left Peter caught between two choices.
Release Sobble into the wild, or keep it in the park.
The contents of the call were not difficult to understand on the surface.
The director had merely emphasized that the higher-ups expected Sobble to be dealt with seriously. He also stated that his words were only a reference and not a forced order. The final decision would still be left to Peter.
At the end of the call, however, the director had very subtly mentioned Sobble's origin.
Then he hung up.
Peter had been struggling through society for more than ten years. Naturally, he understood these hidden layers very well.
With only a little thought, he immediately grasped the meaning behind those words.
The Joy family.
He had known from the moment this Sobble entered the park that the power of the Joy family stood behind it.
Now, although the Joy family had not clearly stated their position, he still had no choice but to consider that factor as one of the key points influencing his final decision on how to handle Sobble.
"Sigh."
Peter sighed, his expression pained.
"What am I supposed to do with this?"
...
Azure Bay City.
Inside a magnificent building that occupied a vast area and carried an imposing presence.
A strong, bare-chested man was lazily reclining on a sofa chair, a straw from a soda bottle held between his lips.
Perhaps because he trained regularly, the man's muscles were exceptionally solid, looking like layers of hard stone stacked together, giving him an extremely striking appearance.
On his chest was a tattoo of a Feraligatr's head.
The tattoo artist's skill was clearly extraordinary. As the man's chest rose and fell with his breathing, the fierce head of the Feraligatr seemed to move slowly along with it.
Sharp pale fangs, a huge mouth filled with blood-red color, and a pair of cold orange-red pupils.
The moment someone saw it, they could not help trembling all over, as though they had encountered some kind of natural predator.
Yet in sharp contrast to all of that, this powerful man, with a body comparable to a top fitness expert and a fierce, terrifying tattoo, had an extremely feminine face.
A soft, slender face.
Long, proud eyes with a sharp elegance.
Clear eyes like a pool of lake water.
Thin, rosy lips.
If not for his short buzz cut and the masculine aura he revealed without meaning to, judging by appearance alone, he would look entirely like a bright-eyed, beautiful young woman.
At that moment, a sleek, high-tech laptop sat in front of him.
Playing on the screen was the scene of Kael fighting Magnemite inside the marine park.
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
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For early access to advanced chapters on P-atreon:
P-atreon/iamxeno
(Just remove the - hyphen to access normally)
Thank you so much for your support and for reading!