The chamber had gone quiet. The cleanup crew moved in efficient silence through the lower platform, logging evidence and bagging material, and Sieg and Cynthia sat on the altar steps and divided what was left.
The Commander had not been wealthy. For a Sub-Elite Four trainer who had spent what must have been years accumulating field experience in an organization like Team Aqua, the cash figure was surprisingly thin, not enough to meaningfully split two ways. The vast majority of his available resources had apparently gone directly into the forced breakthrough. Force a Pokémon past its ceiling through external energy infusion at scale, and the cost of those shards alone explained where the money had been.
The held items were different.
The Scope Lens that had been on the Commander's Crawdaunt went to Sieg without much discussion, he had been running Crawdaunt-centric tactics for long enough that the critical hit amplification had obvious applications. The Mystic Water from the Sharpedo went to Cynthia, who had been carrying Milotic without a held item for this entire expedition. Both were clean trades.
Then there was the egg.
Sieg had been looking at it since he first opened the incubator. Sky blue shell, dark patterning in black and white across the surface in irregular streaks. He had run the identification in his head three times on the way down from the altar and arrived at the same answer each time.
"Kalos starter," he said. "Water-type. The pattern matches Froakie."
Cynthia studied it for a moment with the focused attention she brought to Pokémon she hadn't personally catalogued yet. "You're a Breeder. How confident?"
"Reasonably."
He wanted it. He was aware he wanted it in a way that was not entirely strategic, Greninja was a Pokémon he had followed closely in his previous life, one of the few that had moved him past casual interest into something that felt more like admiration, and its final form's Water/Dark combination put it directly in the lane his team was built around. He started to frame an offer, something that would cost him a significant share of the other spoils.
Cynthia stopped him.
"You did more of the work in there," she said, in the tone she used when she had finished thinking about something and was stating the conclusion. "The shards pulled them back. That was the deciding action. The egg is yours. I'm not taking a cut on top of what I'm already taking."
Sieg opened his mouth.
"I mean it," she said.
He didn't really know what to do with that, so he accepted it.
Then they both looked at the altar.
The three indigo shards sat together at the edge of the platform where Sieg had set them down. They were quiet now, the light in them gone, but the weight of what they represented was not something that went away just because the function stopped. He had started to say something about them twice and stopped both times, working through the phrasing.
"Do you know the Hoenn creation myth?" he said.
Cynthia looked at him. The question had come from somewhere she hadn't expected.
"Groudon raised the land," he said. "Kyogre filled the ocean. They fought over the energy between them, territory, and dominion, until Rayquaza came down and ended it. That part's well-documented across the region. What's less discussed is the artifacts, the relics that are supposedly connected to each of them." He picked up one of the shards. The blue it had once held was gone, but the weight and density of it were still particular in a way that materials generally weren't. "These match the Blue Orb's descriptions in the historical accounts. Fragments of it, or something related to it."
Cynthia was fully engaged now, the expression she wore when something genuinely interested her rather than just engaged her professionally. "You think these are connected to Kyogre."
"The altar was restoring a Sharpedo continuously and pushed a Crawdaunt past its natural ceiling. Whatever energy these things carry isn't minor. And Team Aqua's organizational interest has always centered on the ocean, Kyogre specifically. They didn't build an altar in Sea Mauville for decoration."
She was quiet for a moment.
Sieg was watching her, and also watching himself watch her. He had a clear view of what he was doing here, which was not a purely generous act of information-sharing. When the Commander went into League custody, it was a matter of time before investigators worked backward through the operation to the shards. His own position, Team Rocket affiliation hidden, Level Two clearance, Joy family connections, but nothing that would definitively withstand a senior League official deciding to push, was not a position that could hold a Kyogre-adjacent artifact under pressure.
Cynthia's position was different. Whatever family backing she carried from Sinnoh, the League's regional headquarters had gone visibly careful around even the mention of her name. If the shards were distributed, and one of the holders was someone the League would rather not antagonize, the situation became considerably more manageable for both parties.
He was using her as a buffer. He was aware of this.
He was also aware that he was betting she was exactly the kind of person who would insist on sharing a find like this rather than letting him shoulder it alone, and that this bet was not separate from the calculation but part of it.
"My Milotic is my only Water-type," Cynthia said. "One shard is enough for what I need to understand about these. You take the other two."
There it was.
Sieg accepted with a straightforward nod that did not express any of the internal satisfaction accompanying it. He had read her correctly. She had done exactly what he had expected her to do, for exactly the reasons he had expected her to do it, and the risk he had been carrying alone an hour ago was now distributed across two people with very different threat profiles from the League's perspective.
"The documents," she said, turning back to the platform. "We should finish what we came here for."
The Sea Mauville filing systems were in worse condition than the briefing had suggested, but worse than expected and completely inaccessible were different things. With the League's support team providing technical access, they worked through the archive in sections, and by the time the main crew was ready to seal the site, they had what they had come for.
The blueprint designation on the recovered technical drawings read: Submarine Explorer 1.
Both of them stood looking at it for a moment.
"Team Aqua wanted this," Cynthia said.
"They needed Briney to build it," Sieg said. "He refused. So they came to take the designs instead." He folded the documents carefully into the retrieval case. "And we just handed the League everything they need to know about what Team Aqua actually wanted this for."
Cynthia said nothing. She didn't need to.
In a cave that no published map acknowledged, Archie held the incomplete orb above his head and let the blue light it still gave off fall across the faces of the three people standing behind him.
The report had been delivered. The Commander had failed. The documents were in League hands. Three shards were gone.
"Useless," he said, the word carrying no particular heat. It was a factual assessment rather than an outburst.
He had already given the order before the report finished. Someone in his organization who had been captured would talk under interrogation, because people did. The solution to that was to ensure the interrogation never happened. He had a Sub-Elite Four operative with a specific skill set. The timeline was narrow but workable.
Archie was not sentimental about these things. You didn't build what he had built by being sentimental.
He looked at the orb. It was large, even broken; the full object it had been part of was something he had spent years reconstructing from records and ruins and the fragments that field teams brought back. Each piece changed the nature of what was possible. Without Submarine Explorer 1, reaching the Seafloor Cavern was a dream with no mechanism. Without the complete orb, reaching the cavern was pointless anyway.
He lowered his hands and spoke to the room.
"This world has been broken for a long time," he said. "Humans taking what isn't theirs, poisoning what they touch, calling it progress. Pokémon have suffered for it. The ocean suffered for it. Everything that lives in it suffers for it." His voice was steady, the cadence of someone who had said these words enough times to have made them a foundation rather than a position. "Water was here before everything else. It will be here after. All we're doing is returning things to the state they should have been in."
The three executives behind him listened without expression. Tide, massive and still as a rock formation. Spring, arms folded, dark eyes level. Drop, watching from the side, saying nothing, the sharp intelligence in his face processing rather than reacting.
They believed him. Not the performative belief of people who followed whoever was loudest, the settled, committed belief of people who had examined the logic and found it sound, and had decided that what he was asking them to give was worth giving.
Archie raised the orb again, and the blue light caught the cave walls, and the shadow of what he intended stretched long behind all four of them.