The chaos in the command center lasted only a dozen seconds. The officers in charge of the operation stared at one another, stunned by Jenny's sudden outburst and her frantic commands over the public channel.
At that critical moment, a tall man wearing glasses and a neat suit rose from his seat. He spoke in a calm, steady voice that cut through the noise.
"All communication units, listen carefully. Follow the emergency protocol at once and contact each action team separately. Report that the Forest City action team has gone rogue. Do not let them interfere with the operation. The action plan continues as scheduled. The action plan continues!"
An older senior officer from the Public Security Bureau standing nearby shot him a sharp look. He did not appreciate being bypassed.
"Pris!" the old man said firmly. "What evidence do you have to call the Forest City unit's actions a rebellion? You had better be ready to answer for this."
"I will answer for it!" Pris replied, turning to face him. "Jenny deliberately sabotaged the arrest operation and used the emergency public channel without authorization. If that does not count as going rogue, then what does?"
The other senior officers in the room looked grim, but none of them could find a strong enough reason to argue against Pris's point.
The communications officer responsible for relaying information to the front line turned to him and asked, "Chief Pris, should I still carry out the notification you just ordered for the front-line action teams?"
"Carry it out immediately," Pris said.
On the surface, it seemed like a pointless exchange. Since the higher-ups had not changed any orders during their brief discussion, the previous command was naturally still in effect. Everyone in the room assumed the young communications officer was simply nervous, likely because she had never dealt with a situation like this before, and had asked out of habit.
What none of them knew was that this small exchange was, in fact, a pre-arranged signal between the two.
The words "carry it out immediately" were not instructions about the front-line teams at all. They were a covert order for her to contact Team Origin's Executive, Robbin, who was overseeing the so-called "Security Officer Elimination Plan."
While keeping her eyes on her screen and looking every bit the part of a diligent officer, she quietly slipped her hand into her pocket. Hidden there was a signal transmitter disguised as a car key. Without hesitation, she pressed and held the activation button for three seconds.
Meanwhile, just as the command center had been thrown into disorder, the Officers stationed throughout Lune Town, keeping watch over several criminal sites, found themselves in a similar state of confusion.
Jenny's sudden words over the public channel had been so unexpected, so strange, that most Officers refused to believe her at first. A message like that seemed impossible to take seriously.
However, a number of Officers who had worked alongside Jenny for years knew better. She was not the kind of person to make a joke over an emergency channel. If she had done this, then something had gone very wrong in those ruins, and she had acted out of desperation because there was simply no time to go through proper channels.
These Officers responded without hesitation. They pulled back from their surveillance posts and moved quickly toward the ruins of the market.
Another group of Officers read the situation differently. Whether Jenny had uncovered a serious problem or whether she was the problem herself, the right call was to find her first. If she had gone rogue, her team could be handled on the spot. If she had genuinely discovered something dangerous, then grouping up gave them a far better chance of getting out in one piece.
There was a third group, unfortunately, who were slower to process what was happening. Some stood frozen, their minds blank, unable to decide. Others immediately tried to reach the command center.
When the command center's reply came back, telling them to hold their positions and continue with the original plan, even these Officers began to sense that something was deeply wrong.
If the command center had already labeled Jenny and the Forest City unit as having gone rogue, then the secret plan to move against Lune Town had most likely been leaked. The major criminal organizations in the area had surely been preparing for this moment. In that case, pushing forward with the operation as planned was the same as walking into a trap.
There was no time to overthink it. One by one, they began to abandon their posts, focused only on getting clear of the area.
But time was already running out.
The signal from the transmitter traveled through a series of camouflaged relay towers that Team Origin had quietly installed across the Norlandia Alliance. It reached its destination at a temporary camp set up roughly three kilometers northwest of Lune Town.
The camp was larger than it appeared. More than a dozen heavy canvas tents were spread across the site, with several off-road vehicles parked around the edges. The people there were dressed and equipped to look like enthusiasts on a desert trail run. In truth, every one of them was a core operative belonging to an Executive of Team Origin, one of the organization's key figures operating in the region.
And at the center of this group was the person the organization knew as Robbin.
She looked no older than sixteen or seventeen. Her skin was an unhealthy pale, almost jarring under the desert sun, though at night it gave the camp a faintly eerie quality. Her light-brown hair was tied into two uneven pigtails. Behind oversized glasses, her eyes were ringed with deep dark circles. She was thin to the point of looking unwell, and lying flat in her tent, she could have passed for someone in desperate need of a meal. Or medical attention. Or both.
Then the alarm in her pocket went off.
Robbin sat up instantly, as though someone had thrown a switch. The vibration ran through her entire slight frame.
"Oh no! Emergency!"
Her sharp cry immediately brought the camp to attention. Operatives gathered quickly, waiting for her orders.
"Change of plans," she said briskly. "Get the fireworks ready."
At her command, the group moved into action. Trainers reached for their Poke Balls and released their Pokemon one after another.
Exeggutor, Drowzee, Haunter, Hoothoot, Stantler, and more emerged from their Poke Balls. Without exception, every one of them was capable of using Hypnosis.
Their Trainers produced devices resembling helmets and fitted them onto the Pokemon's heads. The Pokemon were clearly uneasy. Some pulled back, others flinched, and none of them accepted the helmets willingly.
Whether it was fear built up over time from the way these Team Origin members treated their Pokemon, or simply a grim kind of resignation, they eventually submitted.
At the center of each helmet was a small injector designed to deliver a powerful and illegal substance directly into the Pokemon's cerebral cortex. A signal amplifier built into the helmet would then boost and broadcast the Pokemon's Hypnosis, projecting it outward across several kilometers, all the way to Lune Town.
Deep inside the town, the Pokemon that had been placed there earlier, hidden like dormant traps in every corner, began to stir. Following the instructions Robbin had given them before they were put to sleep, they activated Self-Destruct.
Robbin climbed onto the roof of the nearest off-road vehicle and let out a satisfied laugh.
"Just as planned! This is almost an art form..." She trailed off, squinting into the distance. "Wait. What on earth is that?"