Chapter 209. Which Brain-Dead Villainous Team
Pallet Town, rain pouring down.
Pallet Town, snow swirling for miles.
Pallet Town, the blazing sun overhead.
Natsume stood in the backyard, staring blankly at the weather that had suddenly gone haywire.
Scorching sun, heavy rain, hail.
The three kinds of weather kept cycling.
It had been a full three days.
In three days, the carapace he had prepared for Loreton had re-hardened.
An entire ton of crystal clusters had gone to waste.
If you converted that to value, it was worth dozens of Wishing Pieces to trigger Max Raid Battles at Pokémon Dens, plus hundreds of minor line items.
Natsume clenched his fist.
He hated having his plans interrupted more than anything.
And right now the one interrupting him was the heavens themselves.
"Natsume, I'm scared."
Honora came over carrying a candle and, as she passed, latched onto Natsume's arm.
Outside, thunder howled, and the sky alternated between overcast and clear, like a scene from the end of the world.
"How's the situation?"
Natsume lowered his gaze to Honora.
She took out her phone, which was showing a news broadcast.
"According to the latest information, the cause of this extreme weather seems to originate from the Orange Islands, and the League has joined with Professor Ivy to conduct an on-site investigation, so please do not panic."
"In addition, for areas suffering blackouts and water outages due to the extreme weather, the League also—"
Many parts of Kanto and Johto were affected by the extreme weather and had lost power, and Pallet Town was no exception.
"Natsume, it looks like something happened over in the Orange Islands."
Honora pressed pause, and the broadcast froze.
"And there are also reports that many Pokémon from Kanto and Johto are heading toward the Orange Islands."
Mewtwo appeared without a sound.
"I have a general idea now."
Kanto and Johto were the disaster areas here, and the Orange Islands were the center of the storm.
Something had happened to the three Legendary birds tied to Divinity, and it likely involved Lugia as well.
A thought suddenly flashed through Natsume's mind.
"Which brain-dead villainous team is it this time?"
Couldn't you people go catch some Divine legendaries that won't wreck the world?
If the world gets destroyed, what good is your ambition?
Is it just to make life hard for a sunny, cheerful researcher?
His pent-up frustration finally found a vent, and Natsume made a call and gave Giovanni an earful.
Giovanni, utterly baffled: "???"
What did this have to do with him?
"Don't lump me together with that sort of rabble."
Giovanni's voice came coolly.
"So it really isn't you?"
"It isn't…" Giovanni rubbed his brow, pained.
Whether intentionally or not, he added, "Someone inside Team Rocket has appeared who's capable of shaking me, so there's no way I'd turn against the League."
"What?"
Natsume wanted to ask more, but the other side hung up first.
Someone inside Team Rocket capable of undermining Giovanni?
If that were true, it would explain why Giovanni had been so well-behaved, even leaning toward the League.
But that could not possibly be true.
Natsume frowned and did not think too deeply about it.
He merely got to his feet and silently started to pack.
"Mewtwo, are you going?"
"What?"
"The Orange Islands."
"I can."
Brimming with momentum, Natsume took along all of his Pokémon.
Hitching a ride on Mewtwo's Teleport, he arrived at the research site under construction.
Work here had already been halted by the extreme weather.
On the site, countless vehicles sat in place, being pounded by the extreme conditions.
Aside from that massive mining dump truck, almost none of the vehicles had escaped damage from the hail.
Even the half-finished research facility Natsume had been building had been turned into a huge block of ice by the hail and rain packed together and frozen solid.
Seeing this, Natsume grew even angrier.
"Why did we come here?"
Mewtwo looked at Natsume in confusion, as if to say, weren't they going to the Orange Islands?
"When villains are at the end of their rope, they love to stand there and talk reason."
Natsume tossed out an inexplicable line.
Then he reached out and laid a hand on the fully loaded mining truck.
In the next second, the entire dump truck vanished.
Orange Islands, Lightning Island.
"Pikachu!"
A shout rang out, mingling with the roar of the thunderstorm, resounding across the whole island.
Ash was bounding across the island, whose ground was blackened everywhere by lightning strikes.
He did not care about anything else and just charged straight ahead.
Before Ash, there was an extremely frenzied Pokémon covered in long, needle-like feathers.
Zapdos.
With every beat of its wings, Zapdos's plumage linked up with the crisscrossing lightning in the sky, as though it were charging itself.
However, after linking with the lightning, in less than half a second Zapdos would flare up and blast apart the surging thunder that rushed into it.
Because it had noticed that even if it drew lightning down onto itself, the Pikachu on its back had no reaction whatsoever.
In fact, that Pikachu seemed to be enjoying it.
"Pika—"
Pikachu let out a cry of pain.
Although Zapdos's lightning did nothing to center-parted, the spillover kept hitting Pikachu, and after many times even he was starting to struggle.
Even so, Pikachu still refused to let go of the grip he had on center-parted's tail.
"Pika!"
Pikachu snapped sternly, signaling for center-parted to get off Zapdos at once.
"Pika pika—" Finish plucking its feathers, then take a nap and it will be fine—
Center-parted refused to let go no matter what.
This Zapdos looked every bit like a Legendary tied to Divinity.
Its entrance had been grand—so grand the sky went black.
And the islanders around here even had a custom of worshiping it.
Most authoritative of all, a strange "collector" claiming to have already captured the Divine Moltres was chasing this Zapdos.
More crucially, Natsume was not here.
After weighing all sides, center-parted came to a conclusion—"Pika pika!"
With that thought, center-parted hugged even tighter.
"Hey, hey, hey, center-parted, let go!"
Down below came Ash's yell.
"Articuno was captured just two days ago, and everyone else was taken too.
So it is only us left, which means we should be cooperating with Zapdos!"
As Ash spoke, Zapdos answered him with a bolt.
"Darn it!"
Caught off guard, Ash took a zap and froze for a moment, then immediately took off running again.
"Gyaa—"
Up in the sky, Zapdos abruptly halted.
In front of it, a behemoth broke through the black clouds and charged straight toward it.
It was a flying craft, silver-gray and disk-shaped, its surface covered in metal plates, the rim ringed by a blue energy band, and the underside studded with many openings, black and yawning, sending a chill up the spine.
"Gyaa!"
Seeing it, Zapdos turned tail at once.
It was the second target marked for capture.
But because of center-parted's meddling, it had not been taken, and Articuno had fallen into the clutches first instead.
"Heh."
Inside the airship, a man in sumptuous clothes and gold-rimmed glasses gave a light chuckle.
"This time, without that Pikachu's interference—"
Suddenly his pupils constricted as he spotted the Pikachu on Zapdos's back.
"This works too.
Capture them together and add them to my collection."
Fixing his gaze on center-parted's back, Lawrence III pressed a button with a look of absolute certainty.
"Click!"
There came a mechanical clatter from within the flying craft, and several black rods thrust out of the black openings on its underside in an instant.
The rods moved fast, and in a blink they boxed Zapdos in, forming a perfect cube.
"You jerk, where are you taking Zapdos?"
Ash clung to Charizard's neck and rushed the craft at top speed.
In the next second, several black rods hemmed them in, and at the instant of contact, Charizard stiffened, then went limp all over.
Charizard was taken into the flying craft, Ash and all.
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