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Lune Town
The roar of the explosion tore through Lune Town.
At first glance, it could have been mistaken for a grand fireworks display. But there was nothing celebratory about it. The blinding white flash, the rising wall of flames, and the shockwave that shook the very ground beneath their feet were all taking lives. Fragile, ordinary lives that had no business being caught in the middle of something like this.
An explosion of this size, spreading across the entire town, meant that even the Security Officer teams who had evacuated early could not fully escape its reach. For the last group still trying to get out, the chances of survival had dropped sharply.
The Security Officers, at least, had received some warning. They were also trained professionals who had dealt with dangerous criminals on the front lines before. When faced with a threat this extreme, they knew how to fight for their own survival.
But for the criminals who had made Lune Town their home for years, and for the reckless guests who had crossed over a hundred kilometers of desert just to chase the thrill of this so-called "Inferno on earth," there was no warning, and no escape. Their lives ended at the very peak of their revelry, frozen in the last moment they were alive.
It was almost as though the only purpose their chaotic lives had ever served was to act as bait, giving a criminal organization like Team Origin the cover it needed to strike at its real targets.
Could they be called innocent victims? Or had it been their own choices that led them here?
Regardless, failure has a way of following a person through everything they do. If those people somehow learned in the afterlife that they had not even succeeded as bait, one could only wonder what they might have thought.
Because of the interference from Nova and Officer Jenny, Team Origin's explosive plan could not be called a complete success. If anything, it had fallen well short of what they intended.
The goal had been to wipe out ninety percent of the Security Officers in a single strike. That goal was nowhere close to being met. And without that, their follow-up sweep of the town would not go smoothly at all.
Every Security Officer who had survived the blast began pushing toward Jenny's position as fast as they could move.
Anyone who had made it this far, no matter how rattled they were, could piece together what had happened.
"Something's wrong at headquarters! There are enemies inside!"
"This so-called 'Lune Town Criminal Elimination Plan' was a trap the whole time!"
"They weren't trying to clean up Lune Town. They were trying to wipe us out!"
They charged through the ruined streets, cutting down anything that got in their way with the help of their partner Pokemon. Those who still had working communicators were not holding back their words.
The communication officers back at base had never dealt with anything like this. Overwhelmed and unsure what to do, they began routing the calls directly to the four senior leaders, letting them handle it. The front-line officers' frustration was coming through loud and clear, and now it was landing exactly where it needed to.
But the four leaders were just as stunned.
Once they managed to piece together what was actually happening on the ground, it felt as though their own heads might explode along with Lune Town.
The blame started flying almost immediately.
"Deputy Director Stefan, you signed off on this plan. How did it come to this? You need to take responsibility!"
"That is not fair. I only approved the plan after Director Pris brought it forward in the first place. If anyone should be under suspicion here, it is the one who originally suggested clearing out Lune Town."
"Do not drag me into this. I am just the head of a small confidential office. I do not have the authority to push through something of this scale on my own."
"Enough! There are still officers trapped in Lune Town. Is this really the time to be arguing over who is to blame?"
That last point got through. The four leaders agreed, reluctantly, to set the argument aside for now. Rescuing their people had to come first. If they failed at that too, no amount of blame-shifting would be enough to account for the damage done.
The problem was that the officers on the ground were not particularly interested in taking orders from them anymore.
"You nearly got all of us killed, and now you want to tell us what to do?"
Officers who were keeping their tempers in check simply said the situation was too fluid and that they would handle things as best they could. Those who were not keeping their tempers told their superiors exactly how they felt, then tossed their communicators into the nearest patch of fire.
With that, the Security Officers in Lune Town were effectively on their own, fighting without any central command.
Under normal circumstances, that would have been ideal for Team Origin. They had the town surrounded. All they needed to do was systematically close in and pick off the scattered officers one group at a time. The explosion had not gone as planned, but a coordinated sweep could still turn things around.
Instead, something strange was happening on Team Origin's side as well.
Some of their squads, positioned around the edges of town, had decided on their own that the time was right. They moved into the town and started taking up positions according to plan, cutting off escape routes for any Security Officers still in the area.
Others, waiting for orders from their operation commander Robbin that never came, stayed exactly where they were.
The result was a disorganized, piecemeal effort that posed almost no real threat to the battle-hardened Security Officers trying to reach Jenny. The interception had no coordination, no weight behind it.
So when most of the surviving officers finally reached Jenny's position and were met by the Forest City Squad, Jenny was genuinely surprised by what she saw. Far more of her colleagues had made it through than she and Nova had counted on.
Two hundred and forty-one Security Officers had entered Lune Town for this operation. Of those, at least one hundred and eighty had made it to her location. Probably more.
The rest had not all been lost. Some were simply too far away to reach her position yet. The scattered sounds of gunfire coming from other parts of town made that clear enough.
Nova and Jenny had expected that Jenny's warning would give most officers enough time to avoid the worst of the initial blast. The real damage, in their assessment, would come afterward. Once the explosion cut the officers into small, isolated groups and the command center went dark, those groups would be picked apart one by one by Team Origin's forces.
But Team Origin's command was clearly not working the way it was supposed to. Even as the bulk of the surviving Security Officers gathered around Jenny, not a single serious interception had been launched against them.
Jenny felt unsettled by it. It reminded her of a student who had always scraped by with barely passing marks suddenly finding that they could answer every question on an exam. The natural reaction was not confidence. It was suspicion that something had gone wrong somewhere.
She found Nova quickly and pulled him aside to talk it over.
Nova was standing near the collapsed ruins of what had once been a general store, doing his best to look like just another officer taking a moment to catch his breath. Since everyone on this mission had been in plain clothes from the start, and with officers from more than a dozen cities now mixed together in one spot, no one looked twice at him.
He listened to Jenny's concern and had no good answer for her. Team Origin was a powerful and organized criminal group. Their coordination should not have fallen apart like this. None of it made sense.
Then, cutting through the noise of the chaos around them, came a voice from above.
"Help! Someone help me! Aaaah!"
Nova looked up and felt his stomach drop.
His own Corviknight was circling overhead, and clutched in its talons was a slim young girl, dangling high above the ruined town.
"Oh, come on," Nova muttered under his breath. He looked up at his Pokemon with an expression somewhere between disbelief and exhaustion. "Little Blue, seriously. Of all the times to do something like this. I am begging you, please."
Corviknight let out a sharp cry, its steel wings catching the light as it hovered.
"Beg me? Get in line."