◉◉◉◉◉
As the wooden door swung open, harsh sunlight poured into the dim tavern.
The sudden brightness made the patrons who had been quietly enjoying their drinks turn toward the entrance.
Standing there was a team of Trainers, five or six in number.
They looked travel-worn and tired, but their matching Trainer uniforms and the hard-to-miss pride on their faces made one thing obvious to anyone with even a little life experience.
These were not people to trifle with.
Because Mercury Town stood so close to Molten Season Forest, the locals were long used to seeing Trainers come and go in search of adventure and experience. They had their own way of dealing with it.
Do not interfere.
Do not get involved.
So after glancing at the door at first, most of the people in the tavern simply looked away and went back to what they had been doing, as though nothing had happened.
At the head of the group, clearly the leader, stood a broad-shouldered man with sharp, handsome features and short orange hair that made him stand out at a glance.
Even through the tavern's dim lighting, one could vaguely see that his face bore a slight resemblance to Wendy's.
That was right.
The man standing at the tavern entrance was Wendy's older brother, the founder and guild master of the gaming guild Sacred Sanctuary.
Jacob.
"Big brother."
A bright, cheerful female voice called out from a corner of the tavern, drawing Jacob's attention.
Turning his head, he saw a pretty girl with lively twin ponytails waving happily in his direction.
A faint smile broke across his otherwise stern face, and Jacob led several of the guild's elite members toward Wendy's table.
As someone whose goal was to turn Sacred Sanctuary into one of the strongest guilds in Pokémon World, Jacob should have been racing against time in this critical opening stage of the game, pushing his Trainer level higher and using the guild's strength to widen the gap between himself and ordinary players as much as possible.
But for the sake of a certain precious target, after weighing the options, he had decisively chosen to lead part of the guild's core members through a long and complicated chain of system quests just to unlock teleportation rights and cross more than half of the Flowerbrocade Continent to reach this place.
And that precious target was, of course, Kael, reborn as Sobble.
After Gerald confirmed Kael's existence, Jacob had immediately halted every guild task currently underway or in preparation and made capturing the Sobble of Mercury Town the guild's top priority.
He had no choice.
In the early stages of the game, a Pokémon with deep-purple rarity and dark-gold individual potential was simply too tempting for players to ignore.
For Jacob, confirmation that Sobble truly existed should have been wonderful news.
But because of another piece of information he had learned on the way here, his heart had instead sunk straight to the bottom.
At the same time, Gerald, sitting beside Wendy, noticed that the guild master approaching them did not look pleased.
Thinking Jacob was unhappy over the failed capture mission, Gerald rose from his seat with obvious guilt on his face and began to speak.
"Guildmaster, I..."
But before he could finish, Jacob raised a hand, signaling him to stop, and Gerald swallowed the words that had already reached his throat.
"It's fine. You did well."
Jacob sat down slowly, leaning back against the tavern sofa behind him.
The cool feel of the leather, the softness of the filling beneath it, and a small glass of smooth red wine were enough to make some of the exhaustion drain from his body.
There was no blame in him.
Gerald was one of the guild's long-standing core members, and Jacob had always thought highly of him.
The failed attempt to catch Sobble had never surprised him anyway. A Pokémon this rare, something that was practically a cheat code in the early game, was never going to be handed over easily by the system.
Confirming that the information was real had already been enough.
The reason he felt so conflicted and so low had nothing to do with that.
There was no time wasted on small talk. After a brief greeting, Jacob got straight to the news he had picked up through in-game channels.
"You may not know this yet, but two days ago, the volcano in the center of Molten Season Forest had the biggest eruption in recorded history. More than half of the core region has already been swallowed by lava and ash."
They were all normal adults with sound minds, people who had received higher education under the Federation's supervision.
Jacob did not even need to finish the rest.
Gerald's thoughts were already racing.
A natural disaster like a volcanic eruption would have devastating consequences.
Without even considering anything else, just looking at Molten Season Forest alone, turning huge sections of it into dead land would inevitably break the ecological chain of the entire environment.
Even if this was just a game, based on everything Gerald had experienced so far, every tiny detail crafted with such precision that it felt like another real world, he had every reason to believe the domino effect caused by the eruption might truly happen here.
The collapse of the environment.
The destruction of Pokémon habitats.
A steep decline in the number of wild Pokémon.
High-potential individuals are becoming even rarer.
For the players in Mercury Town, all of whom were trying to grow as Trainers, that kind of outcome was completely unacceptable.
From one perspective, the eruption meant they were now naturally behind players who had started in other beginner towns.
Fall behind once, and every step after that becomes harder.
If you started the game at a disadvantage, catching up later without extraordinary effort would be incredibly difficult.
That was the large-scale impact the eruption would have on the players.
But when narrowed down to the personal level, for people like Gerald and Jacob, the disaster had done even more.
It had completely wrecked their plans.
After all, the place where they had originally found Sobble had been right near the core region of Molten Season Forest.
Before, they could still have relied on system tools to track him through the jungle.
Now, all they would likely find was a field of ash and charcoal.
And even that was the best-case scenario.
Because as much as Gerald hated to admit it, he could not deny the truth.
With how weak that Sobble had been, newly born and barely started in life, there was almost no chance it could have survived a catastrophe of that magnitude.
◉◉◉◉◉
~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
◉◉◉◉◉
For early access to advanced chapters on P-atreon:
P-atreon/iamxeno
(Just remove the - hyphen to access normally)
Thank you so much for your support and for reading!