"You're completely right," Sushang muttered, nodding grimly. She finally grasped that this particular Entei was a completely different entity from the one they had breezed through in the core sandbox. Going into a geothermal crater against a cinematic powerhouse without a tailored strategy was a recipe for a swift squad wipe.
The three girls immediately bolted back into the Goldenrod medical hub, crowding around the PC terminals to overhaul their rosters.
"If the system didn't limit us to six slots, I swear I'd pack a moving wall of nothing but Blastoise and Tyranitar," Sushang grumbled, her brow furrowed as she agonized over her active party. "The patch notes promised a true-to-life simulation, but this storage restriction feels completely arbitrary when the wild bosses get to ignore the rules."
"It's an ecosystem balance protocol, so quit dragging your feet," Guinaifen chided, her fingers flying across her own interface as she pulled a defensive Golem and a heavy Donphan into her active line. "Lock in your counters quickly, Chang Chang! If we take any longer, Entei will outrun the tracking radius of that artifact."
After a flurry of chaotic inventory management, Guinaifen and Sushang finally cleared their queues and stepped into the lobby to wait for their guide.
"Hehe, look at that," Sushang giggled, pointing a gloved finger toward the terminal banks. "It looks like Qing Lan's decision paralysis is even worse than mine."
The young maiden of Ecruteak was currently staring at the transfer matrix, her hands hovering over the digital keys with intense anxiety. Guinaifen smiled and shook her head. Given Julian Reed's massive intelligence overhaul for the core story assets, she wasn't surprised that the key narrative figures carried distinct, deeply human flaws. Besides, since the primary quest-giver wasn't rushing, the system wouldn't punish them for taking a breather.
"I am so incredibly sorry to keep you both waiting!" Qing Lan gasped a minute later, sprinting toward them while clutching her traditional robes.
"Check the Volcanic Anchor immediately," Guinaifen urged, her posture shifting back to alert. "We need a current vector before we cross the city gates."
"Don't worry, the alignment should be perfectly stable—"
Qing Lan unclasped the silver medallion from her collar to demonstrate its function, but the words died in her throat. The heavy geometric needle was no longer vibrating with that low, amber resonance. It hung completely loose within its housing, utterly dead.
"Wait..." Sushang blinked, leaning in. "If the pointer stops moving entirely... does that mean the tracking signal failed?"
"Yes," Qing Lan whispered, her face draining of color as she stared at the inert silver. "The frequency has flatlined."
"Ahhh! We've lost the lock!" Sushang panicked, her competitive drive instantly overriding her calm. "Move, move! We can't let him slip into a deep valley grid!"
In a flash of pure panic, Qing Lan scrambled through the sliding glass doors of the center, already reaching for her belt to summon her Pidgeot for an uncoordinated aerial sweep.
"Belay the Pidgeot!" Guinaifen shouted, her voice cutting through the lobby noise as she unclipped a premium Heavy Ball. "We're upgrading the transport. Mount up on our Dragonites!"
"You... you actually possess a bonded Dragonite vanguard?" Qing Lan's eyes widened in sheer disbelief. Across the Johto mainland, the Dratini lineage was considered a mythic rarity among ordinary residents, a creature reserved for league champions and legendary elite scouts. To see two of them manifested by a pair of out-world travelers was staggering.
"Save the awe for the sky," Guinaifen laughed, catching the girl by her sleeve and hoisting her onto the massive, amber-scaled dragon as it materialized in the plaza.
The moment her boots cleared the saddle, Qing Lan couldn't help herself. She began tracing the dense, smooth scales of the dragon's neck, her eyes sparkling with pure academic curiosity.
"Focus, Ah Lan! Which quadrant did the needle point toward before the signal died?" Guinaifen pleaded, settling into the forward reins. She suddenly felt an immense wave of sympathy for whoever had to supervise Sushang during her military drills. Managing two enthusiastic, easily distracted companions was an exhausting trial.
"Oh! Right! If my memory serves... the trajectory was locked dead onto the northern alpine ridge," Qing Lan recollected, pointing a finger toward the rugged, misty peaks rising in the northeast.
"Are you absolutely certain?" Guinaifen asked, narrowing her eyes. "If we burn our acceleration cells in the wrong direction, we'll overshoot his trail by fifty miles."
Qing Lan hesitated, her gaze shifting between the mountains and the silver medallion. She took a deep breath, replayed the final movements of the needle in her mind, and offered a firm, resolute nod. "Yes. He is targeting the high fissures."
"Hold onto my waist and stay low! Dragonite, maximum velocity! Launch!"
"We're right behind you! Let's glide!" Sushang roared, her own dragon kicking off the paved plaza with a concussive flap of its wings that left the local trainers shielding their eyes.
Before Qing Lan could formulate a response, the horizon fractured. The sheer, instantaneous acceleration of the dragon created a massive wave of g-force that slammed her back against the saddle, the world blurring into a slipstream of emerald forest and white cloud. The terrifying pressure of the wind threatened to rip her fingers from Guinaifen's belt.
Guinaifen reached back, locking her haptic gloves over the girl's wrists to anchor her position. She wanted to shout an apology, but the deafening roar of the atmospheric slipstream completely drowned out her voice. Once the dragon leveled out at cruising altitude, Guinaifen leaned forward, using the creature's massive, rounded head as a natural windbreak.
The acceleration process was a brutal, jarring experience for an ordinary human. Sushang, possessing the advanced physical conditioning of a Xianzhou native, sat perfectly upright in her saddle, completely unbothered by the atmospheric drag. But for Guinaifen, the transition always left her stomach twisting.
She glanced back at Qing Lan, expecting to see the girl green with motion sickness. Instead, the Ecruteak maiden was leaning out over the wing-joint, staring down at the sprawling topography of Johto with absolute wonder, her hair whipping wildly in the wind. The speed didn't phase her in the slightest.
Did Boss Julian calibrate the baseline haptic physics of these mounts specifically for the biology of Cloud Knights? Guinaifen groaned inwardly. He really needs to introduce a comfort dampener for normal humans.
"Ah Lan! Check the medallion now!" Guinaifen bellowed over her shoulder. "Is the thermal signature registering?"
"Yes! Yes, it's screaming!" Qing Lan shouted back, pulling the silver chain from her robes. The needle had snapped back to life, vibrating so violently against the geometric casing that it emitted a faint, high-pitched metallic hum. "He's directly ahead! Veer three degrees east!"
Guinaifen shifted her weight, her dragon banking hard into a sweeping turn that aligned perfectly with the pulsing signal.
"Xiao Gui!" Sushang's voice crackled through the local party frequency as her mount surged up alongside them. "Look at the geographical coordinates on the mini-map. This vector... Entei isn't just running blindly. He's running a direct line toward Ecruteak City!"
"Ecruteak?" Guinaifen frowned, her mind spinning through the narrative implications. "That's bizarre. Is the AI routing him back to his birthplace for a scripted historical sequence?"
She looked back at their guide. "Qing Lan, has he ever returned to the city ruins before this?"
"Never," Qing Lan answered confidently, her expression turning deeply serious. "For three generations, my family maintained the automated purification arrays around the Burned Tower. If any of the three sovereigns had crossed the regional threshold, our environmental sensors would have flagged the elemental spike instantly. They've avoided the valley for centuries."
"No use guessing from the clouds," Sushang barked, her eyes locked on the horizon. "We drop in, we block the exit, and we read the script on the ground. Simple math!"
"For once, the general-in-training makes perfect sense," Guinaifen grinned.
As the twin dragons tore through the mountain mist, the silver needle in Qing Lan's hand began to glow with a faint, incandescent orange light. "We're within his visual perimeter! Watch the canopy below!"
The three girls leaned over their saddles, their eyes scanning the dense, ancient pines rushing beneath them. The thick foliage created a chaotic lattice of shadows, making it nearly impossible to spot a target from this altitude.
"There! I've got a lock!" Sushang shouted.
Despite her reckless nature, her years of specialized martial arts training under the Zhuming masters had given her an extraordinary level of visual acuity. She had caught a fleeting, split-second flash of crimson fur tearing through a clearing in the valley floor.
"Where? I only see pine shadows," Qing Lan said, squinting into the green.
"Trust the vanguard! Follow my descent!" Sushang yelled. With a sharp tug on the reins, her Dragonite folded its wings and dove into a steep, roaring vertical plunge toward the forest floor.
Guinaifen didn't hesitate. "Stay tight, Ah Lan! We're dropping!"
The twin dragons tore through the upper canopy, scattering branches and leaves in a spectacular explosion of debris as they reached the lower clearing. Before Entei could leap across the riverbed to break away, the two dragons opened their maws, unleashing twin, blinding pillars of Hyper Beam that detonated directly in front of his path, shattering the ancient boulders and kicking up a massive wall of dust.
CRACK-BOOM!
"Now! Form the perimeter!" Guinaifen screamed, her arm snapping forward as she unclipped her belt.
Four premium balls spiraled through the dust cloud, bursting into brilliant flashes of white light. A heavily armored Golem, a massive Donphan, a towering Tyranitar, and an absolute wall of a Blastoise materialized in a perfect, overlapping defensive ring, their heavy bodies thudding into the earth to seal every possible exit. The sovereign of flame was completely boxed in.
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