Once everything was in order, Sieg made his way with the general flow of participants toward Chansey's public battle arena. By the time he arrived, a substantial crowd had already gathered, not only the competing trainers but a healthy number of curious onlookers who had come purely for the spectacle. Umbreon moved at his side, unhurried and self-contained, drawing a few glances of its own.
Sieg settled into a quiet corner and began observing the field without any particular urgency. Most trainers who operated within the League's legitimate circuits made no real effort to suppress their Pokémon's energy output. There was little reason to. The result was that reading the approximate level of almost any Pokémon in the room was straightforward work for anyone who knew what to look for, laid out plainly for anyone with the experience to read it. Sieg catalogued the field methodically. Pokémon at level thirty or above were a distinct minority, accounting for less than one in ten. The overwhelming majority sat somewhere in the mid-to-low teens, and even the stronger entries tended to cluster right at the thirty to thirty-two range, barely past the threshold.
When the last of the participants had filtered in and the crowd had filled out to its capacity, a referee stepped up onto the elevated platform at the front of the arena. He wasted no time on ceremony, offered a clean summary of the rules that had already been posted across every screen on the ship, and declared the tournament open.
Names were called in sequence. Each trainer, upon hearing their own, proceeded to their assigned field. The matchups had been generated at random, and no one present had any reason to doubt that the Joy family's name stood behind that guarantee.
Sieg glanced at the bracket display and noted, with mild surprise, that over two hundred people had registered to compete. Roughly one in five of everyone aboard the Chansey. Not a small number.
His assignment was Field Twenty-Six. When he arrived, his opponent was already there and ready, poised and prepared right up until the moment he registered who he was actually facing. The confidence drained out of the young man's expression almost immediately, replaced by something considerably less comfortable.
He was not alone in that reaction. Word of what had happened between Sieg and Kimhee Takumi the previous day had circulated efficiently through the passenger list. Those who had not witnessed it firsthand had heard enough secondhand accounts to fill in the picture. The result was that Sieg had quietly acquired a reputation as one of the most dangerous draws in the entire bracket, and the evidence was visible every time he walked past an occupied field. Trainers who spotted him tensed, watched him pass with barely concealed wariness, and then visibly relaxed the moment he moved on to the next field. Sieg noted all of it and said nothing. In his estimation, it was simply the noise weak people made when the world declined to arrange itself around them.
"Come on out, Empoleon!"
His opponent was a young man of roughly comparable age, dressed in the kind of clean, expensive clothing that tended to signal a comfortable background. The Pokémon he sent out confirmed the reading. From the burst of light emerged an Empoleon, one of the Sinnoh region's three starter evolutions, standing at its full evolved height with its steel-plated chest forward and its chin raised at an angle that communicated, without any ambiguity, that it considered everyone present beneath its attention.
Empoleon were known for exactly this. They did not travel in groups. They did not defer. They operated on the settled conviction that they were simply better than everything around them, and they wore that conviction openly at all times.
"Who should I send?" Sieg considered the question for a moment, working through the roster.
Crawdaunt, Sharpedo, and Honchkrow were all disqualified by the Elite-rank restriction. Sandile had solid fundamentals but was still in its base form and hadn't yet cleared level thirty, putting it at too significant a base stat disadvantage for a matchup of this kind. And Zorua had only just cleared its juvenile stage. It had never been through a real battle, and throwing it into a tournament setting against a fully evolved Pokémon was not something Sieg was willing to do.
That left Umbreon. Which, on reflection, was not a difficult conclusion. Level thirty-seven, sitting comfortably just below the Elite-rank threshold, with base stats that would hold up against anything in this field. The choice was obvious.
"Umbreon, you're up."
Umbreon stepped forward from Sieg's side with a few light, fluid movements that carried it to the center of the field without any apparent effort. It arrived, settled, and looked at Empoleon.
The look alone was enough.
Umbreon's gaze swept across the field with a cold, unhurried indifference, and the sheer weight of presence that came with it rolled across the arena like a drop in temperature. Empoleon, for all its elaborate composure, caught that look and visibly flinched.
It recovered quickly. Its pride would not allow otherwise. It pulled its chest back out, raised its chin higher, and stood even more rigidly upright than before, radiating arrogance through what was now, very obviously, a conscious effort. The combination of manufactured dignity and barely concealed unease produced something that was, objectively, deeply strange to look at.
Cold as a glacier that has never once thawed, one of the watching spectators thought quietly.
The referee's signal came down, and both trainers called their moves simultaneously.
"Empoleon, Water Pulse."
"Umbreon, Shadow Ball."
Both had opened with ranged attacks, neither committing to contact range on the first exchange. It was a cautious, sensible read from both sides.
The difference was execution speed. Empoleon had only just begun drawing water energy through its flipper when Umbreon's Shadow Ball was already airborne. Ghost-type moves had a reputation for exactly this: fast to form, difficult to track, and nearly silent until they arrived.
The Shadow Ball crossed the field and reached Empoleon just as its Water Pulse finally released. The two attacks met in the air between them and detonated on impact.
The explosion threw a thick curtain of smoke across the entire field.
Inside it, Empoleon lost its bearings almost instantly. It had its senses, but smoke was smoke, and without a clear visual reference, it was working blind. Umbreon, by contrast, was built for exactly this kind of environment. As a predominantly nocturnal Pokémon, operating in darkness and low visibility was not a disadvantage. It was home ground.
Sieg did not let the opportunity pass.
"Umbreon, Pursuit."
Within the smoke, the golden ring markings along Umbreon's body began to emit a faint, steady glow. Then a dark shape accelerated through the haze, fast and low, and the sound that followed was sharp and rhythmic, impact after impact landing without pause.
When the smoke finally cleared, Empoleon was on one knee, its flipper braced against the ground to keep itself upright. It was battered from head to toe, its earlier poise completely gone, its expression stripped of everything except the stubborn refusal to go down, the last remnant of a pride too deep to simply switch off.
Umbreon stood across from it, wearing the same expression it had walked in with. Untouched. Unmoved. Cold as a glacier that had never once thawed.
"Umbreon, Dark Pulse."
The command was calm. Unhurried. Final.
Before it could be carried out, the opposing trainer broke. He had been watching his Empoleon absorb punishment with increasingly obvious distress, and the sight of it struggling on one knee while another hit was already being called was more than he was willing to put it through. He turned toward the referee and conceded, clearly and without hesitation.
Sieg recalled the command without a word. The match was over.
The victory had required very little. With a level advantage, a conditioning advantage, and a base stat advantage all working simultaneously in the same direction, it would have been more surprising if it had gone any other way. The fact that Empoleon had lasted through Pursuit at all had been, if Sieg was being honest with himself, a minor surprise. Level twenty was nothing.
With Umbreon showing no meaningful fatigue and no damage whatsoever, there was no reason to go to the medical suite. Sieg turned away from Field Twenty-Six and began moving through the arena at a steady pace, scanning the other active matches with a practised eye. If there was useful intelligence to be gathered on potential later-round opponents, this was the time to gather it.
Most of what he saw was unremarkable.
Then one match stopped him.
A girl, standing across from her opponent with an ease that suggested she had never considered the outcome in doubt, directed a single quiet command at the Pokémon in front of her. The Glaceon responded before the words had fully left her mouth, and the opposing trainer's Pokémon went down in under thirty seconds, possibly under twenty.
Sieg watched from the edge of the field, reading what he could. The Glaceon's conditioning was exceptional. Not merely good for the setting, not merely impressive relative to the general standard of what he had seen today, but genuinely exceptional by any reasonable measure. Better than the Glaceon belonging to Luna, which was itself a benchmark worth noting, given the resources the Solance family invested in their Pokémon.
Whoever this girl was, she was worth keeping track of.