"Another big one — Lucario, net ready! Don't let it slip!"
The Abyssal Fishing Rod was nearly bent double. Whatever was on the other end had weight and fury to spare, and David was bracing with both hands just to keep the rod from being torn away entirely.
He held his ground, keeping steady pressure on the line, while Lucario snatched up the net from the floor of Lapras's shell. Zorua and Kirlia moved in immediately — Zorua darting to one side as Kirlia extended her arms and launched Confusion, the psychic current wrapping around the line to ease the strain.
Between the four of them, they hauled it in.
A deep-green fish surfaced, its body streaked with vivid red stripes, just over a metre from nose to tail — still thrashing hard enough to send water spraying across Lapras's back.
"That explains the fight. A Basculin."
David stared at it with a mix of respect and mild indignation. He was in decent physical shape — better than most people his age — but that Basculin had come close to pulling the rod clean out of his hands. If Lucario and Kirlia hadn't stepped in when they did, he suspected it might have managed it. An average trainer, he thought, would probably have gone into the water along with their equipment.
Basculin were like that. The name wasn't just for show.
"Didn't expect to run into one of these out here," he said, watching it thrash. "Red-striped too — high fat content, apparently. Considered good eating."
He had read the official data on Basculin at some point. Blue-striped Basculin had lighter, more delicate meat; the red-striped variant was richer, something the data described as appealing to younger palates. Both had apparently made their way onto dinner tables with some regularity.
David looked at the struggling Pokémon for a moment longer.
Still. The League's laws were explicit on the matter — eating Pokémon was prohibited. And beyond the legal angle, David had never quite been able to shake his discomfort with the idea. Most Pokémon had intelligence that sat comfortably alongside humans. He could rationalise renewable things — Slowpoke tails that grew back, Bounsweet nectar, Tropius fruit — but actually eating a Pokémon as a whole was a line he had never felt like crossing.
He knew there were people who did it anyway, the same way people had always found ways around wildlife protections before the world changed. That wasn't his business. But it wasn't his choice either.
He let his Aura settle outward, just enough for Basculin to feel it, and crouched down to meet the Pokémon's furious, darting eyes.
"All right — stop. Listen to me." His voice was calm and even. "You can keep thrashing if you want, but you're not going anywhere. Competition ends in a couple of hours and I'll let you go then. But if you don't settle down, I start thinking about what to do with you — and I've heard the market for red-striped Basculin is decent."
"You understand me, don't you?"
The Basculin went still. Not immediately — it tested him for another few seconds, muscles taut, gills working — and then, slowly, it stopped.
David exhaled quietly. Good. Basculin continuing to thrash wouldn't have let it escape, but it would have eaten up time and attention he couldn't spare.
He glanced up at the sky screens. The live rankings had just updated.
His name had climbed again — but only into the top ten, sitting just inside the threshold. He studied the gap between the top positions and where he sat. Tight. The difference between tenth place and fourth or fifth was probably just one or two well-timed catches.
The points awarded for the Basculin, though — fifty. He stroked his chin.
It made sense, technically. In the current Pokédex, Basculin was exactly what it appeared to be: a mid-tier Water-type with no notable evolution and no special designation. The organiser drones were scoring based on that data. They had no way of knowing about Basculegion — the Hisuian evolution that transformed Basculin into a Water/Ghost-type powerhouse, its base stats sitting comfortably in the same bracket as starter final forms. On the ancient continent of Hisui, Basculegion had been a genuine apex presence in the water.
But that information didn't exist in any public database here. As far as the competition system was concerned, a Basculin was a Basculin.
The only Hisuian-form Pokémon currently registered in any Pokédex David knew of was Zorua — his own, and even then the records only indicated a regional variant, not the specific origin.
Fifty points it was.
David set the Basculin aside in the live-well the organiser boat had provided and directed Lapras toward a new position. He had already worked through the nearby patches thoroughly. The returns were starting to thin.
An hour and a half had passed. An hour and a half remained.
He looked at the screen again. Tenth place. The top spot seemed to belong to the trainer who had arrived on a Wailmer — David hadn't expected that, but the man clearly knew what he was doing.
Maybe winning this thing actually triggers a system quest. The thought had surfaced before, and it surfaced again now with more conviction. Minor achievements rarely paid out significant rewards, but a win was a win, and he had always subscribed to the principle that anything free was worth pursuing. Even a small bonus was better than leaving it on the table.
His mind was made up. He was going deeper.
The near-shore zone had been fished over thoroughly at this point, by him and by the hundred-odd other competitors working the same area. Further out — closer to open water — the catches would be denser and larger. The risk went up with the distance; wild Pokémon in open water didn't always take kindly to intrusions, and even a non-damaging encounter would cost time that people near the top of the rankings couldn't afford to lose.
That was probably why most of the leading competitors were staying put where they were. A controlled environment, predictable returns, no surprises.
David had no strong attachment to any particular ranking below first. If he couldn't win, second or twentieth didn't make much practical difference to him. So he had nothing to lose by trying for something the leaders wouldn't risk.
"Lapras — let's head further out."
Lapras answered and began to move, her pace easy and confident as the near-shore crowd fell behind them.
Back within the competition zone, tucked into a corner of the designated area where the spacing between competitors was widest, a small cluster of people sat doing nothing that resembled fishing.
"You still haven't pinpointed the location? Are you telling me none of you can manage a simple search? What exactly are you lot useful for?"
A man in black — jacket, hat pulled low, standing on the back of a Gyarados — kept his voice compressed, but the anger in it was clear to anyone nearby. Not that anyone nearby was paying him much attention. The surrounding competitors were too focused on their own lines.
"Boss, we can't help it!" The man across from him, thin-framed and riding a Sharpedo, raised his hands defensively. He had a bit of spray on his face that might or might not have come from his boss's direction. "The information we got just said somewhere in this sea area. No specific coordinates, no landmarks, not even a rough chart. What are we supposed to do?"
He turned the object in his hands over as he spoke — a pendant, clearly old, its surface worn smooth in places and rough where the carved details had partially eroded. Several figures were cut into it, bird-shaped, though the detail was too degraded to identify the species with confidence. The people around him held similar pieces.
"And this so-called token hasn't reacted at all. We've covered nearly the whole zone."
"Right, right!" The heavier man beside the Sharpedo rider jumped in, his tone carrying the specific energy of someone looking for an exit. "Honestly, boss, maybe we cut our losses, head back, regroup—"
"Head back?" The man in black turned to look at him. The temperature of the look did not encourage further suggestions. "You think this is somewhere you can wander in and out of whenever it suits you? This area is closed to the public year-round. The only reason we're standing here right now is because of the Festival. If we leave without finding it, when exactly do you propose we come back?"
The heavier man had nothing to say to that.
"Stop talking and start looking. All of you. Different directions. Go."
They went.
The man in black stood alone on his Gyarados for a moment after they'd dispersed, jaw tight.
"Useless, every one of them. And the people who assigned us this job — what are they thinking, sending us in without so much as a proper map..."
He muttered a few more things under his breath that weren't worth repeating, then set off in the only direction that hadn't been covered yet.
It happened to be the same direction David had just gone.