Pokemon: Criminal Life

Chapter 225: 225-The Sky's Own Warrior

Another hour gone, and the sun was nearly down.

The mountain forest was bigger than it looked on the map, they always were, and two hours of systematic searching had confirmed that the third marked location was going to require considerably more time than he had left before dark. The terrain was rough enough that a proper sweep would take the better part of a full day, and there was no path through it that shortened the geometry in any meaningful way.

He had been muttering about the intelligence trader's methodology for the last twenty minutes. Not loudly. Quietly, in the internal register he reserved for things that deserved criticism but not time.

The honest accounting was that the map had never promised precision. What it had sold was possibility, areas where Absol had been sighted, not areas where Absol currently lived. He had bought the lead knowing what it was, and that was the end of the grievance. The first two locations had come back empty, which put him at zero for three, and the third was now sitting in the next-day column where it probably should have gone from the start.

He tapped Honchkrow's back. Time to find a campsite outside the mountain terrain.

He was pulling the map away when something shifted in his chest.

It was not a sound. Not a visible movement in the canopy below. Just a change in the quality of his attention, something below the threshold of conscious processing that had nevertheless been processed. He had felt it once before, standing outside a power plant, about to walk into a situation involving a person named Kikusfield, and he had learned from that encounter to treat the feeling as information rather than noise.

He folded the map and tapped Honchkrow again. Harder. Move.

Honchkrow read the urgency without needing it explained and accelerated, banking toward the maple forest at the mountain's edge. The wind shifted as the treeline changed character around them, the dark shapes of broad-leafed canopy replacing the sparse mountain growth.

The crack of displaced air came from directly behind.

Not turbulence. Not a bird startled from a branch. The specific percussive sound of something moving very fast through open air and not caring whether it announced itself.

Sieg turned.

The Braviary was already inside a hundred meters and closing.

He took in the details in the time available. White crest feathers, three of them, reddish-brown at the root. Navy chest and legs. Reddish-brown wings and tail, banded at the tip in yellow and blue. The talons, and this was the part that held his attention longest, were not held loosely in the way of a bird in neutral flight. They were extended, curled, the long curved claws catching the last of the fading light with the specific geometry of something that had a target in mind.

The energy radiating off it was dense enough to read from this distance.

Elite-rank peak.

The arithmetic was quick. Rufflet evolved into Braviary at fifty-four. A wild specimen that had actually completed that evolution was at minimum fifty-five; by simple biological logic, you did not evolve and then regress. Fifty-five placed it at the top of Elite rank, one tier below Sub-Elite Four, and whatever this particular Braviary had been doing in that mountain forest for however long it had been there had presumably not made it weaker.

"Honchkrow. Faster."

Honchkrow was already pushing its ceiling, but the gap between them was not closing quickly enough. Braviary's wingspan gave it a cruising speed advantage in open air, and the mountain forest's edge was still ahead.

Most wild Pokémon resolved encounters the same way: they read the energy signature of the opposing team, calculated whether the confrontation was favorable, and adjusted course if it wasn't. It was the same survival logic that every wild Pokémon developed because the alternative was a short life. Strong enough team, and most encounters resolved themselves before they started.

Braviary was a specific exception to that logic, and the reason it consistently ranked near the top of polls about wild Pokémon trainers least wanted to encounter had nothing to do with its power tier. There were stronger Pokémon in the wild. The problem was behavioral: Braviary did not disengage. It was constitutionally incapable of the calculation that led most wild Pokémon to leave well enough alone. The stronger the opposing trainer, the more the Braviary read it as something worth fighting, and it absorbed damage without apparent adjustment to its threat assessment. Injuries did not make it reconsider. They made it more committed.

This particular specimen had chosen Sieg and Honchkrow as a target and was now demonstrating exactly why field guides spent three pages on that specific trait.

The maple canopy passed below them. Honchkrow threaded the first line of taller trees and dropped altitude, using the canopy as partial cover. It bought seconds, not minutes. Braviary's aerial maneuverability at this level was not going to be blocked by trees; it could simply go around.

Sieg felt the shift in Honchkrow's flight pattern as it tracked the pursuer, felt the almost imperceptible tension in the body beneath him as it waited for his next command, and understood that running was not going to resolve this.

He needed to think faster than Braviary was flying.