Sieg had already reached for a Pokéball when Cynthia spoke.
"Would you be willing to let me have the Kingler? I'll compensate you fairly."
He paused. His original plan had been to split the sale value down the middle once they got back to shore, which, for a standard Elite-rank Kingler, would have been reasonable enough. To be fair, though, this one wasn't standard. A reversed claw configuration was a genuine developmental anomaly, the kind of thing that had actual research value rather than just market value. He ran the numbers quickly.
"One TM," he said. "Endure. After we're done here."
An Endure TM ran five hundred thousand Pokédollars at the floor price and usually went higher. A normal Elite-rank Kingler sat at roughly the same bracket, depending on individual quality. The mutant specimen was worth more than either, but they had taken it together, and Sieg had no interest in using that as leverage.
Cynthia looked at him for a moment, then: "Thank you, Sieg."
There was something slightly different in how she said it compared to her usual register, a small warmth that hadn't been there at the start of the morning. Maybe the fair price. Maybe just the accumulated weight of a few hours fighting alongside someone. He didn't think about it long.
"The Kingler being out here bothers me," he said, looking ahead at the island's outline. "Either something changed on the island itself, something we don't have information about, or something moved into the area and pushed Kingler out of its habitat."
Cynthia's expression settled back into the serious mode she'd been running since they spotted the thing. "Neither of those is good news."
The first option was the worst one, honestly. Unknown changes meant no framework for guessing what they were walking into. The unknown had a way of being more dangerous than even a powerful known threat, because at least with a known threat, you could plan. The second option, something strong enough to displace an Elite-rank Kingler from established territory, at least had a shape to it.
"If it's a Pokémon that drove Kingler out," Sieg said, "we're probably looking at Sub-Elite Four minimum."
"Garchomp isn't ideal for underwater terrain."
"No." He thought about his own team's water capacity. Crawdaunt and Sharpedo both operated best in open water rather than confined spaces. Flooded corridors were a different problem. "We work with what we have."
Cynthia nodded. She wasn't backing out, and neither was he. Pressure and progress tended to go together, and they both understood that well enough not to say it out loud.
Sharpedo and Milotic brought them in the rest of the way without incident, and the island came into full view as they crossed the final stretch of open water.
It was small. Not tiny, but small enough that Honchkrow at full speed could probably lap it in under two hours. The southern edge had a strip of actual forest, dense and green. Everything else was the skeleton of an industrial site gone back to nature: rusted structural steel, collapsed sections of outbuilding, surfaces so completely reclaimed by vines and coastal scrub that you had to look for the geometry underneath to tell it had ever been anything. Low-level wild Pokémon moved through the ruins in ones and twos, visible from the air, unbothered by the approach.
They landed on the beach at the island's edge, Garchomp and Honchkrow touching down in nearly the same moment, sending a wave of sand and grit across the flat open ground. Cynthia landed the dismount cleanly. Sieg stepped off onto the beach and immediately felt it.
"It's cold," he said. The air had a quality to it that didn't track with the open ocean crossing they'd just made. Not cold like altitude or cloud cover. Something lower.
Cynthia had already pulled a light jacket from her bag. She gave him a look that asked the obvious question without wasting words on it.
He was already reaching into the dimensional ring for his expedition jacket when the ground moved.
Not dramatically. Not an earthquake. A deep, structural tremor that came up through the soles of his boots and ran for about three seconds before stopping. The sand grains in the flat patch ahead of them shivered with it.
He'd felt it before. Not this specific sensation, but the category.
"Underground," he said.
Cynthia looked at Garchomp. The Pokémon had gone still in the way it only did when something in its ground-sensing registered as significant. Garchomp knew Earthquake. It lived in the space between powerful ground-type energy and the ability to read it.
"Something below us," Cynthia said. "Deep."
The underground platform. The briefing had described Sea Mauville's core as a subsurface installation, connected to the island by internal passages. Whatever that tremor was, it came from down there.
Neither of them said the obvious thing, which was that natural geological activity in this area was effectively zero, and the only thing that produced ground-type tremors of that character in a sealed underground facility was a Pokémon using one.
They moved toward the ruins without discussing it further. The low-level wild Pokémon that had been visible from the air scattered as they walked, which was normal, except that almost every one of them was visibly injured. Scratches, bruising, the kind of accumulated damage you saw on Pokémon in the middle of active territory disputes. They weren't fighting each other, though. Every one of them was moving away from the center of the island.
Sieg was processing this when he saw the movement in the ruins ahead.
He dropped immediately, half-crouching behind a section of collapsed wall, one hand back toward Cynthia in the universal signal for stop and get down.
She was already behind cover.
He looked again through the gap in the rubble.
Blue and white. A jacket cut in the specific style he recognized, the skull-pattern cap, the coordinated boots. Three of them were visible, probably more out of sightline, moving through the ruins with the practiced efficiency of people who had been here long enough to know the layout.
Team Aqua.
"You know them?" Cynthia asked quietly.
"Hoenn's second major criminal organization," Sieg said, keeping his voice low. "Serious operation. They hit a tunnel near the coast a while back, made enough of an impact that people in the region still talk about it. Water-types, marine focus, willing to escalate."
Cynthia was quiet for a moment. "Like Galactic in Sinnoh. Or the Hunters."
"Close enough."
He pulled out his Pokédex and put a call through to the Slateport police without taking his eyes off the ruins. Then he sent a quick message to his Rocket contact. Cynthia was doing the same beside him, her own Pokédex open, connecting with whoever her family's reach extended to in this region.
Sieg looked at her when she lowered it.
"We go in, or we wait?" he asked. Her call, she had the stronger Pokémon, and they both knew it.
Cynthia didn't answer with words. She just looked at him steadily, and the answer in her expression was clear enough. She'd been raised not to back down from this kind of thing, and that upbringing had apparently stuck.
He nodded once.
If it went badly, Sharpedo in open water with Swift Swim running was as clean an escape option as he was likely to find. He had that in his back pocket, and he wasn't worried about using it if it came to that. But it wasn't going to come to that.
He released Crawdaunt.
It materialized at his side without a sound, read the situation in about half a second, and lowered into a ready stance.
"Quietly," Sieg said.
Crawdaunt's claws moved together in the smallest, most controlled version of the gesture it usually made before a fight. Ready.
They moved toward the ruins.