The Commander had a philosophy about Pokémon. It was the philosophy of a man who had bought his first one on the black market rather than raised it from the beginning, who had spent his career treating each one as a resource acquisition and a stepping stone to the next.
You pushed them as far as they would go. When they couldn't go further, you replaced them. Sentiment was for people who weren't serious about the climb.
The Crawdaunt was already on the list. The moment this operation was over, regardless of the outcome, it was going to a buyer. The funds would go into the starter-class Egg he had purchased and been developing separately, the real foundation of whatever came next. The Crawdaunt had served its purpose. Sentiment didn't enter into it.
He was thinking about this when the Crawdaunt ignored his command.
He had told it Crabhammer. The Honchkrow was diving, Brave Bird building, the blue flames already spreading across the dark wings as the descent was committed. The correct response to an incoming Brave Bird was a solid counter. The Crawdaunt understood this.
What it did instead was endure.
A green barrier, faint and precise, settled over it just as the Brave Bird connected, and the force that should have put the Crawdaunt down left it standing at the thinnest possible margin instead.
The Commander stared.
The Crawdaunt did not look at him. It was breathing hard, holding itself up, the barrier already fading, but it had made a decision without his input, and the decision had been to survive rather than to follow the tactical plan he had given it. A Pokémon that prioritized itself over its trainer's commands.
This was, the Commander decided, one more reason to sell it.
What he had missed, because he had never spent enough time paying attention to how Pokémon actually worked, was the other half of the exchange. Honchkrow had not just hit the Crawdaunt with a Brave Bird that was running off its own buffs.
It had hit it with Swords Dance, Swift Swim, and the Helping Hand amplification from Mantine all at once, because every one of those boosts had been on Crawdaunt and Sharpedo's bodies, and Honchkrow had taken them off with Snatch before the dive began.
Sieg watched from his position and felt the familiar satisfaction of watching a plan execute cleanly. The Snatch tactic was the most complex thing Honchkrow did, and Honchkrow did it well. The blue feathers still drifting down through the air were the visual evidence of how much force had been moving through that hit.
The Crawdaunt's Endure decision had saved it. The fact that it had made the decision independently was, from Sieg's perspective, a point in the Crawdaunt's favor and a point against the Commander's understanding of what he actually had.
"Honchkrow. Mantine. Haze."
The fog came from two directions at once, dark and diffuse, filling the lower sections of the drilling platform in under ten seconds and reducing visibility to a flat grey that ate detail at any range past a few meters. Not Smokescreen, which was a directional irritant. Haze, which settled flat statistics across the entire field, resetting everything that had been stacked. The Commander's Swords Dance, gone. Every boost from the altar that had been converted into active parameters was wiped.
And in the fog, Sieg detached from his position and moved.
He released Zorua in the moment before the grey closed fully, in a low voice, with specific instructions.
Zorua had been watching for months. Every training session, every meal, every quiet evening in camp where Honchkrow stood guard, and Umbreon sat at someone's side, and Sieg moved through his routines, Zorua had been watching it all, cataloguing it, running the observations through whatever process its Illusion ability used to translate data into appearance. The condition for good mimicry wasn't talent. It was attention, sustained over time, building depth that surface-level imitation couldn't produce.
Zorua looked at the shape of the person beside it for one second.
Then Zorua was Sieg.
Not approximately. The posture, the specific way the jacket sat on the shoulders, the angle of the head. The Illusion ability was working with material it had spent a significant amount of time preparing, and the result was not something a distracted observer under fog conditions was going to question.
The real Sieg moved through the Haze toward the altar.
Cynthia noticed. She noticed because the figure standing where Sieg had been was holding itself slightly wrong in a specific way, not wrong enough to flag it if you weren't looking for it, but she had been paying attention to Sieg's physical tells since the voyage, and this version had the posture memorized without the weight that lived underneath it. She processed this in about two seconds, understood what it meant, and said nothing.
"Garchomp, Dragon Claw. Milotic, Whirlpool."
She raised her voice on both commands, giving the Commander something loud and directional to track, and stopped thinking about what Sieg was doing because that was his problem now.
The Dragon Claw that hit the Commander's Sharpedo was the first clean shot Garchomp had landed on it in several minutes, and Cynthia felt the difference immediately. The structure around them had been absorbing three Sub-Elite Four Pokémon's worth of combat output without showing any distress, not a crack in the glass, not a groan from the steel, nothing. This wasn't a building that could be threatened by what was happening inside it. It had been designed to operate in crushing deep-water pressure with drilling machinery running continuously. Pokémon at this tier were not its structural limit.
She recalibrated.
"Garchomp. Dragon Pulse."
The purple energy column hit the Commander's Sharpedo straight, and Cynthia didn't bother tempering it. She had been holding Garchomp back for the entire fight based on an assumption that the environment required conservation. The assumption was wrong. The building was fine. She let Garchomp work.
Dragon Pulse. Dragon Claw. And when the angle presented itself: Dragon Dive, the full commitment descent with the ghostly outline manifesting around Garchomp as the energy surged, the one that hit like a verdict rather than an attack.
The Commander was watching his Sharpedo, watching the altar, watching the Haze, watching three things at once and managing none of them well.
The figure that looked like Sieg was standing in roughly the right place, doing roughly nothing, which was probably not suspicious to someone who was not paying close attention.
Somewhere behind the fog, the real Sieg reached the altar.