Chili and Yao came to say goodbye in the morning, which Sieg had expected. Chili had suspended a Gym challenge mid-match when the recall order came in, and two days in Slateport had been a longer delay than he had planned for. The Gym needed him back.
Yao had not finished deciding how she felt about this.
She stood in the Pokémon Center lobby in the careful outfit she had assembled for the market visit, the Torchic plushie under one arm, and delivered her farewell with the particular gravity of someone who had concluded that the situation was genuinely unfair and intended to make this known.
"I'm going now," she told Sieg. "You have to think about me."
"I will," he said.
She thought about something and added, "And stay away from that Joy woman."
Several people nearby registered this statement and looked around to see who had said it. Sieg acknowledged the instruction with the specific diplomatic neutrality of someone who was not going to honor it but was not going to argue about it either.
Yao studied him for a moment to assess whether this was genuine compliance or tactical agreement, appeared to accept it at face value, and then hugged him around the waist with the commitment of someone burning a memory into storage.
Chili caught his eye over the top of her head. Something in the look communicated an apology and an explanation simultaneously: She's like this. Sieg returned the look with something that communicated he understood.
"Safe travels," Chili said.
"Same. Thank you."
Yao pulled back, rearranged her expression into something that was attempting dignified composure and mostly succeeding, and marched toward the exit with her father following. At the door, she turned around one more time.
"Bye-bye!!"
Then they were gone.
The badge pulsed an hour later, in a side street away from foot traffic.
Sieg turned it over in his hand. The emblem Archer had given him didn't send messages on its own; the activation was one-way and deliberate, initiated from the other end. Whatever had prompted it, the decision to reach out directly had been made.
The message was three words.
Return to base.
He stood with it for a moment.
The most obvious explanation was visibility. The Sea Mauville coverage had run in Hoenn's regional press, Cynthia's interview had attached his name to hers in terms the League would be tracking, and the Joy family's media amplification had pushed the story further than it might naturally have gone. Archer monitored that kind of thing. A Team Rocket operative becoming a regional news subject was the kind of development that required an assessment, and an assessment required a conversation.
Whether it was going to be a good conversation was not something he could determine from here.
Whatever this was, it was already in motion, and standing in a side street thinking about it wasn't going to change the shape of it. He sent a short message to Chloé, something warm enough to be genuine and brief enough not to invite extended discussion, and started moving.
Mauville City. That was where the route led.
Route 110 ran cleanly between Slateport and Mauville, League-maintained and well-marked, with guardrails where the terrain required it and regular checkpoint intervals manned by officers who had been deployed as part of the Sea Mauville response. Most travelers took it without thinking.
Sieg turned east at the first junction and took the wilderness path instead.
The official road had been swept clean of wild Pokémon during the operation. Good for travelers, useless for training. The cleared brush on the highway's margins meant there was nothing to work with for a good stretch in either direction, and he was not going to cover terrain that could be productive by choosing the unproductive option out of convenience.
He released Zorua and Krokorok when the city was far enough behind him that the ambient noise had faded to wind.
"Honchkrow," he said, "high perimeter. Stay up."
Honchkrow ascended and disappeared into the sky.
Zorua looked around at the wilderness with the expression it wore when it was not entirely sure what was being asked of it. Krokorok settled into a loose guard posture immediately, reading the environment with the unhurried attention of something that had been navigating the outdoors since before Sieg caught it.
Zorua was the focus today. Eleven levels from hatching, climbing steadily through the base range, where development moved quickly, and each encounter added something. Sieg had been watching its growth numbers and knew it was ahead of schedule by almost any measure; aptitude wasn't the issue. The issue was that the aptitude had been developing inside a comfortable structure, fed and sheltered, and only exposed to challenge at a pace that Sieg had been carefully calibrating.
That calibration was ending.
The first encounter found them within five minutes. A cluster of level eight and nine wild Pokémon working the undergrowth, low level, no real threat to anything on Sieg's team, exactly the right entry point.
"Zorua. Dark Pulse."
Zorua looked at the wild Pokémon. The wild Pokémon looked at Zorua. There was a moment of mutual assessment.
Then one of them lunged.
Zorua yelped, took a hit on the shoulder from a body check it hadn't moved out of the way of, and stumbled back several steps. The hit was not serious. Zorua had the aptitude numbers to absorb a level-eight body check and keep functioning.
It looked at Sieg with very large eyes.
Sieg kept his expression flat.
The previous version of this situation, any time over the past several weeks when Zorua had been mildly inconvenienced and produced the appropriate expression, had ended with Sieg adjusting something. Making the discomfort smaller. Offering something to compensate. Zorua had learned this pattern correctly and efficiently.
"Dark Pulse," Sieg said again.
Zorua's expression shifted from hoping for rescue to something more confused. The pattern wasn't running. The instruction was repeated. In the two seconds it spent processing this, the same wild Pokémon came back for a second pass and hit it harder than the first time.
Zorua sat down on the ground.
Krokorok had already moved to intercept, clearing the attacker with two strikes that communicated clearly that the exchange was over. The wild Pokémon took the hint.
What followed was a series of encounters that went roughly the same way. Sieg gave instructions. Zorua hesitated. Krokorok cleaned up what the hesitation caused. Zorua sat at the end of each one, looking more disheveled than the last, processing something it hadn't encountered before.
The hits weren't hurting Zorua in any serious physical sense. They were hurting it in the sense that it had never been hurt before, and didn't have a framework for it. The discomfort was real, and real discomfort was new.
Krokorok, watching this from a few meters away with the expression of someone who had grown up knowing exactly what real discomfort felt like and couldn't quite understand the confusion, kept covering for its younger teammate with a consistency that Sieg noted and didn't comment on. It was the natural behavior of a Pokémon that had been raised in actual conflict, for whom wounds were just the texture of becoming stronger, and who was apparently extending that framework as a form of protection even while being puzzled by the need for it.
Sieg watched Zorua's face after the third encounter.
There was no performance in it now. No fake tears, no tactical deployment of pathos. Just a small, recently-hatched Pokémon sitting in the dirt looking at the scratches on its foreleg and understanding, for the first time, the difference between knowing something and having to live inside it.
He crouched down to its level.
"The more you sweat in training," he said, "the less you bleed in battle."
Zorua looked at him.
He had said those exact words to it before, in a context that felt abstract. He had meant them when he said them, but Zorua had been dealing with a hypothetical at the time. What it was dealing with now was not hypothetical.
He stood back up.
"Again," he said. "Dark Pulse. When the next one comes."
Zorua got up off the ground.