The Commander was on his back, pinned, the fight fully out of him.
Below, it had gone faster than either of them had expected. The moment the altar's third shard left its socket, the restoration field cut out, and whatever had been keeping the Commander's Sharpedo in the fight stopped keeping it there. Garchomp pressed. Thirty seconds, maybe less, and the Sharpedo was down. The Commander's Crawdaunt, already running without coherent direction from a trainer who had climbed an altar to fight a seventeen-year-old with a knife, lasted slightly longer than that. The forced power was real power in the sense that a muscle cramp was real force, present, involuntary, and impossible to sustain once the underlying structure gave out.
The low-level Water-types the Commander released as a last attempt didn't even make it to the main floor. They looked at Krokorok, made a collective assessment, and broke in every direction.
Sieg looked down at the Commander, then at the three shards in his hand, then at the altar.
None of this was going to be easy to explain to the wrong people.
Milotic's Hypnosis put the Commander under cleanly, and they spent a few minutes doing the practical work of securing him, Pokéballs removed and set aside, wrists bound, the two Sub-Elite Four Pokéball units recalled and locked so they couldn't be released remotely. Sieg looked at the Pokéballs for a moment with the specific expression of someone who had just confirmed that something was genuinely valuable and had also confirmed that taking it wasn't an option he was going to exercise.
Even if he could keep them past the League's arrival, which he couldn't, a Crawdaunt that had defied commands under pressure and a Sharpedo bonded to a man who'd treated it as a financial instrument weren't team additions. They were liabilities waiting to go off. He'd seen the Commander's Crawdaunt make its own call in the middle of a fight. That quality went both ways.
He left the Pokéballs where they were.
The altar was another matter.
Both of them looked at it for a moment without speaking. The three indigo shards sat in Sieg's hand, still faintly warm, the light in them gone now, but the weight of what they had done still present in a way that was hard to articulate. A forced Sub-Elite Four breakthrough. One Pokémon pushed past its natural ceiling by external energy channeled through carved stone. Whatever the shards actually were, they were not incidental.
Before either of them finished the thought, footsteps came up the corridor.
Both of them snapped to attention. The combat instinct didn't ask for permission.
Then the figure cleared the passage entrance, and the tension came down.
Winona, Fortree City's Gym Leader, stepped into the drilling chamber with her Swellow a pace behind her, its blue and red plumage catching the remaining light. She took in the scene: two teenagers, one bound and unconscious adult, what appeared to be a recently concluded battle that had left significant evidence of itself across the floor, and a moderately ominous altar, and tilted her head slightly.
"You're Cynthia and Sieg." A statement, not a question. "The vice chairman sent me. Emergency rescue." She glanced around the chamber. "Though it looks like the emergency resolved itself."
She ran a hand along her Swellow's wing with the absent ease of long habit, and smiled.
Sieg confirmed their identities, gave her a compressed summary of the engagement, and watched her nod along with the professional attention of someone cataloguing information for a report she would have to file. By the time he finished, her expression had settled somewhere between impressed and genuinely amused.
"The island's sealed," she said. "Flight units have every access point covered. The remaining Team Aqua operatives on the surface are being processed now."
Cynthia was already accepting that with the quiet nod of someone for whom League coordination was familiar ground. Sieg was watching Winona's face for the reaction to specific parts of the summary, gauging what she had and hadn't flagged.
The altar, he noticed, she hadn't pressed on.
He had been about to bring up the shards when Cynthia's hand found his arm.
Not a grab. A touch, light and brief, and when he looked at her, she gave him the smallest head movement in the direction of not now.
He closed his mouth and let it pass.
Winona was still talking, which helped. She didn't seem to have noticed the exchange. They found a set of steps at the edge of the chamber and sat, the three of them, while the distant sounds of the League's arrival filtered down from above, voices, Pokémon, the organized noise of a full operation moving into position.
Sieg leaned back against the wall and felt the full weight of the last several hours find him at once. The arm that had taken the brass knuckle hit was still running at a low, persistent ache despite the jacket having absorbed most of it. Not broken, probably. Deeply unhappy.
Cynthia noticed. He saw her look at the specific spot, then look away.
"You handled all of that," Winona said, her eyes moving between the two of them with a brightness that suggested she was revising something upward, "because you happened to be here on a commissioned job. Not a League operation."
"The timing was what it was," Sieg said.
"The League's evaluation of both of you," she said, "is probably going to get a second look."
Sieg waved that off. Cynthia looked like she had no particular interest in the League's evaluation of her in either direction.
Then Cynthia said, with genuine seriousness, "The credit for this engagement belongs to Sieg. He destroyed the altar. He's the reason the Sharpedo went down when it did."
Sieg looked at her. "You were the one holding three Sub-Elite Four opponents in a structural box while I climbed a set of stairs and argued with one unarmed person."
"You were armed."
"He had brass knuckles."
Cynthia pressed her point without humor: "Garchomp couldn't have beaten that Sharpedo while the altar was running. It was mathematically impossible. The moment the altar went down, it was over. That was your contribution. I was buying time."
"You were preventing the situation from collapsing completely while I figured out the actual solution, which is not the same as buying time."
Winona had been watching this exchange with an expression that had moved steadily from attentive to openly entertained.
"Right," she said pleasantly. "I'll note that both trainers performed effectively and move on."
The main force arrived in stages over the next half hour, investigators, officers, the full League response apparatus that had been scrambling since the emergency alert first pinged. Among them were faces Sieg recognized from the Joy family's attached personnel, and the Jenny-family investigator who had debriefed him at the Pokémon Center three days ago.
She ran through the sequence again, more formally, with a recorder.
"The full picture, as near as we can piece it together," she said at the end, "is that Team Aqua approached Briney several months ago about building a specialized submarine. He declined. Rather than accept that, they pivoted to recovering his shipyard blueprints, the majority of which are sitting somewhere in Sea Mauville's filing systems. That was the actual objective of tonight's operation." She paused. "You two were caught in the middle of something you walked into without knowing what it was."
"That's one way to describe it," Sieg said.
"Briney knew the documents were here," Cynthia said. It wasn't a question.
The investigator nodded. "We believe he suspected Team Aqua's interest and moved to recover the files before they could. Which is why the posting went up when it did."
Sieg thought about the posting, the conversation in the museum office, and the care with which Briney had vetted him. The old sailor had been running a quiet race against a criminal organization's retrieval operation and had been discreet enough about it that Sieg had only understood the stakes now, on the other side of it.
Points for the man.
"The Pokémon you encountered tonight will be entering League custody for review," the investigator continued. "Standard procedure. But the Commander's personal effects, including anything in storage devices on his person, are considered operational spoils under active engagement protocols. Those stay with you."
Sieg looked at the dimensional ring on the Commander's finger with the calm attention of someone doing math.
A Sub-Elite Four trainer running a personal operation, funded well enough to buy shards on the black market and keep a starter-class Egg in development on the side.
He wondered, idly, what the number worked out to.