Vermilion City was a sprawling grid of concrete, maritime commerce, and chaotic noise, but to the Hound of the Conclave, it was nothing more than a topographical map of psychic frequencies.
He walked with the terrifying, unhurried gait of a predator that knew it operated entirely outside the laws of the world. His immaculate, tailored grey suit stood out sharply against the salt-stained overalls and heavy canvas coats of the dockworkers, but no one looked at him directly. The black cloth wrapped tightly over his missing eyes should have drawn stares, murmurs, or at least the casual, suspicious curiosity of the Kanto locals. Instead, pedestrians subconsciously stepped off the sidewalk to let him pass. Dockworkers halted their heavy lifting, their eyes sliding off his form like water off oiled glass.
It was a low-level psychic repulsion field. The Hound was broadcasting a continuous, subliminal command into the neural pathways of every civilian within a fifty-foot radius: Ignore me. Look away. I do not exist. It was an exhausting, complex technique for a standard League-sanctioned telepath, but the Hounds were not standard. They were hollowed-out vessels. The Conclave's architects had surgically excised their humanity, their morality, and their literal eyes, replacing the organic weakness of sight with a vast, cold reservoir of dark psychic energy. They were the scalpels of the thirteen hundred and thirty-three elite families that secretly governed the planet. They did not feel. They did not question. They only executed the will of the Seven Heads.
The Hound moved away from the chaotic harbor, heading east toward the city limits. The concrete beneath his expensive leather shoes gradually gave way to cracked asphalt, and then to the untamed, overgrown dirt paths that led toward the dense forests of Route 11.
He was hunting a ghost.
Three days ago, when Kyogre had broken its subjugation chains and torn a hole in the sky, a shockwave of anomalous, silver empathy had rippled through the region. The Kanto League, bureaucratic and slow, was currently wasting its resources analyzing barometric pressure, ocean temperatures, and seismic shifts, completely blind to the truth. They believed it was a weather event.
The Hound knew better. He was following the psychic echo of the anomaly. The pulse had originated near the city center, but the Conclave's scanners had lost the exact origin point due to the sheer electromagnetic interference of Rayquaza's descent.
But aura was like water. It flowed. It pooled in the low places, clinging to organic life. And a microscopic fragment of that mythic, silver frequency had drifted on the psychic wind, settling into the dense, ancient woods bordering the city limits.
The Hound stopped at the edge of the tree line. The trees here were massive, their roots gnarled and thick, casting deep, overlapping shadows that choked out the morning sun.
He tilted his head back, taking a slow, deliberate breath through his nose. He could taste it.
It was faint, buried under the chaotic psychic noise of thousands of wild Pidgey, Rattata, and Oddish living in the forest, but it was undeniably there. A single, crystalline drop of pure silver resonance clinging to the root system of an ancient oak. It tasted like absolute peace. It tasted like the undoing of the Conclave's dark sciences. It disgusted him.
The Hound took a step forward, his polished shoe crunching on a dead, brittle leaf.
Suddenly, the ambient air pressure dropped to near zero.
It wasn't the subtle, chilling drop of a Ghost-type Pokémon manifesting from the shadows, nor was it the localized vacuum of an Alakazam preparing a kinetic strike. This was a brutal, physical weight, plunging from the sky with the raw kinetic force of a falling meteor.
The Hound did not look up. His psychic radar screamed in absolute, blinding warning.
He threw himself backward, his body moving with unnatural, liquid speed, enhanced by immediate telekinetic propulsion.
A split second later, the ground where he had just been standing exploded.
A crater fifteen feet wide and four feet deep was instantly carved into the dirt, sending shockwaves through the bedrock that violently rattled the teeth in the Hound's skull. A massive cloud of dust, pulverized earth, and splintered wood billowed into the air, obscuring the tree line and blocking out the sun.
From the center of the choking dust cloud, a massive, terrifying silhouette rose.
It was a Salamence. But this was not a wild, untamed dragon from the mountains, nor was it a standard, disciplined League combatant. Its deep blue scales were polished to a mirror shine, its crimson wings flared to their absolute maximum wingspan, casting a massive, suffocating shadow over the Hound. The beast's golden eyes burned with ferocious, unrestrained arrogance. It let out a roar that physically pushed the lingering dust away, a sound that demanded the immediate, unconditional submission of every living thing in the area.
And sitting atop the apex predator's broad neck, looking down with a bored, heavily condescending smirk, was a woman who clearly believed she owned the world.
Seika Muldrev, the reigning Champion of the Hoenn region.
She was twenty-four years old, dressed in a sleek, high-end combat suit of deep sapphire and gold that looked more suited for a fashion runway than a battlefield. Her long, silver-blonde hair whipped wildly in the gale-force wind generated by her dragon's wings. She was the absolute pinnacle of the modern Pokémon League—flashy, universally adored, aggressively marketed, famously arrogant, and devastatingly, uncompromisingly powerful.
And right now, she was incredibly annoyed.
"I have to admit," Seika called out, her voice carrying effortlessly over the low, rumbling growl of her Salamence. She didn't sound angry; she sounded severely inconvenienced. "When I tracked the meteorological anomalies from my region all the way to this dusty, outdated Kanto port, I expected to find an underground syndicate. Maybe a rogue legendary cult attempting a resurrection ritual. Instead, I find a blind man in a tailored suit creeping around in the dirt."
The Hound remained perfectly still, the dust settling around his polished shoes. His featureless face gave nothing away, but his mind rapidly assessed the threat.
Seika Muldrev. A massive variable the Conclave had not accounted for in this sector. She was supposed to be in Ever Grande City, dealing with the political and infrastructural fallout of the oceanic disturbances Kyogre had caused.
"Hoenn Champion," the Hound said, his voice entirely devoid of inflection. It sounded like two heavy stones grinding together in the dark. "You are outside your jurisdiction. The Kanto League, under the jurisdiction of Professor Oak, has not requested your assistance. Your presence here is a violation of the inter-regional treaty."
Seika threw her head back and laughed. It was a bright, sharp sound that held absolutely zero humor.
"Jurisdiction?" She patted the thick, armored scales of her Salamence's neck. "Darling, when your region's ocean throws a temper tantrum and a three-hundred-foot tsunami threatens to wipe out Pacifidlog Town and drown half of Lilycove City, you don't wait for a Kanto academic to file the proper paperwork. The Kanto League is a retirement home disguised as a government. I came here to find out what riled up the Leviathan."
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the dragon's neck. Her smirk vanished entirely, replaced by the cold, predatory stare of a woman who had crushed hundreds of elite challengers to claim her throne.
"And my dragon caught your scent from three miles up. You reek of dark energy, suit. It's making my Salamence nauseous. So, I'm only going to ask this once before I let him use you as a chew toy: What did you do to my ocean?"
The Conclave operated entirely in the shadows. To a Hound, public Champions like Seika were nothing more than loud, colorful distractions. They were gladiators meant to keep the civilian masses entertained and complacent while the real masters moved the pieces on the global board. They were strong, yes, but they were ignorant. They fought with rules, referees, stadium crowds, and broadcast rights.
The Hound did not fight with rules.
"You are an irrelevance," the Hound stated coldly.
He didn't reach for a Pokéball. He didn't issue a vocal command. He simply flicked his left wrist.
The air directly behind Seika warped with a sickening, purple hue.
From the shadows cast by the ancient oak trees, a nightmare materialized instantly. It was a Dusknoir, but it was horrifyingly mutilated. Its usually grey, ghostly flesh was stitched together with glowing, jagged purple psychic threads. Its single, glowing red eye was wide and bloodshot, radiating an aura of pure, engineered agony. This was a Conclave shadow-construct, a wild Pokémon that had been captured, broken on a psychic rack, and tortured into absolute, suicidal obedience.
It appeared directly behind the Salamence's head, completely bypassing the dragon's physical defenses and the Champion's line of sight. It opened its massive, shadowed maw and unleashed a Point-Blank Shadow Ball laced with psychic corruption, aiming directly for Seika's spine.
It was a kill shot. An assassination strike meant to shatter her vertebrae and end the fight before she could even issue a command.
But Seika Muldrev had not become the Champion of a region built on primal energy purely on marketing and corporate backing. Behind the arrogance, behind the flashy smile and the press conferences, lay the honed, lethal instincts of an apex predator.
She didn't even turn around.
"Milotic. Wash it."
A beam of blinding, iridescent pink light erupted from a specialized Premier Ball clipped to her lower back. It materialized faster than the human eye could track, defying the standard compression-release physics of commercial Pokéballs.
A Milotic, impossibly massive and shimmering with a terrifying, ethereal beauty, coiled itself between Seika and the Dusknoir in a fraction of a millisecond. It didn't attempt to block the attack with a shield. It simply absorbed it. The corrupted Shadow Ball struck the Milotic's iridescent scales and immediately dissolved into harmless, hissing purple steam.
Before the tortured Dusknoir could retreat into the safety of the dimensional shadows, the Milotic whipped its colossal, fan-like tail forward.
Iron Tail.
The physical impact was deafening. The air compressed so rapidly it shattered the sound barrier, creating a localized sonic boom. The glowing, metallic tail struck the Conclave Dusknoir with the raw kinetic force of a runaway freight train. It launched the ghost-type backward with such extreme violence that its body snapped three ancient oak trees in half before embedding itself deep into a solid granite boulder sixty feet away.
The forest fell deathly silent, save for the sound of the splintered, ruined trees crashing heavily to the forest floor.
Seika slowly turned her head, looking over her shoulder at the crushed, motionless Dusknoir stuck in the rock. She scoffed, delicately brushing a speck of dust off her sapphire combat suit.
"An ambush? Really? From behind?" Seika looked back down at the Hound, her bright green eyes flashing with genuine, profound insult. "I am the Champion of the Hoenn region. I've fought primal titans. I survived the Meteor Falls training regimes. Did you honestly think a cheap parlor trick in the dark was going to put me in the dirt?"
The Hound did not react to the loss of his asset. His featureless face remained a smooth, impassive mask. He felt no anger, no frustration. He had just gathered a vital piece of combat data: Seika's reaction time was sub-millisecond, and her Pokémon fought with a synchronized, brutal autonomy that required zero verbal setup.
She was arrogant, but the arrogance was entirely justified by her lethal competence.
"You are loud," the Hound noted, his dark psychic pressure beginning to bleed out into the clearing, pressing against gravity. The grass around his expensive shoes died instantly, turning brown and curling into ash. "You draw attention. You break the quiet of the board."
"I am the storm, sweetheart," Seika shot back, a feral, adrenaline-fueled grin spreading across her face. She raised her right hand, tapping a thick, ornate golden bracelet on her wrist. The Key Stone embedded in the center began to pulse with a blinding, rainbow light that fought back the Hound's dark aura. "And I'm about to break a lot more than the quiet. Salamence. Erase him."
The bond between the Champion and her dragon ignited. The mega-evolution energy cascaded over the Salamence, twisting its DNA, expanding its wings into a massive, aerodynamic crescent of pure, blood-red blade. Mega Salamence roared, a sound that shook the very foundation of Vermilion City miles away, shattering the few remaining intact windows in the harbor district.
The dragon opened its jaws, gathering a terrifying sphere of hyper-compressed, volatile orange energy. A Hyper Beam, but not a standard one. This was fueled by mega-evolved, Champion-tier power—an attack capable of leveling a mountain peak.
The Hound knew instantly he could not tank it. His psychic shields, designed for infiltration, memory wiping, and assassination, would shatter like brittle glass under the raw, unadulterated output of a region's strongest trainer.
He raised both hands, plunging his psychic energy not into a defensive barrier, but directly into the earth beneath his feet.
Teleport. But the Conclave version of Teleport was not the gentle, digitized folding of space used by League trainers and Alakazams. It was a violent, tearing rip through the dimensional fabric, a brute-force exit that exacted a massive physical toll on the user.
Mega Salamence fired.
The Hyper Beam tore through the clearing like a miniature sun. The beam of pure destruction vaporized the ground where the Hound had been standing an instant prior. It did not stop there. It continued its path of absolute annihilation into the forest, carving a massive, smoking trench through Route 11. It instantly incinerated hundreds of ancient trees, boiled the moisture in the air into scalding steam, and left a perfectly straight trail of glowing, molten glass in its wake.
The explosion was blinding. A mushroom cloud of dust, smoke, and localized fire plumed high into the morning sky, visible from every corner of the Kanto region.
Seika shielded her eyes against the glaring light, her cape snapping violently in the intense backdraft. As the heavy smoke slowly began to clear, she stared at the half-mile trench of pure destruction her dragon had just casually created.
"Tch. Missed," Seika clicked her tongue, her smirk fading into a deep, highly irritated scowl.
She tapped her bracelet again, severing the energy feed. Mega Salamence reverted to its base form, snorting thick black smoke from its nostrils, visibly annoyed that its prey had slipped away. Milotic coiled defensively around them, its long antennae twitching rapidly as it scanned the area for any spatial distortions.
Seika dropped lightly from the dragon's back, her boots hitting the scorched, superheated earth. She walked to the edge of the glassed trench, her eyes narrowing.
There was no body. There was no blood. There was no trace of dark energy. The blind man in the suit had simply vanished into the ether.
But as the battle-high of the brief, explosive clash faded, the Champion of Hoenn felt something she hadn't felt since she was a ten-year-old rookie facing her very first Gym challenge.
A cold, creeping sense of profound unease.
She closed her eyes and reached out with her own, highly trained combat senses. She wasn't a psychic, but she was deeply attuned to the flow of battle and the residual energy of her environment.
The air in the clearing felt fundamentally wrong. The man hadn't just teleported away. The residual energy he had left behind felt like a disease. It was cold, clinical, and completely devoid of the natural life-force that powered Pokémon and humans alike. It felt like a machine. It felt like absolute, tyrannical control.
"What the hell was that?" Seika whispered to herself, the trademark arrogance entirely stripped from her voice for the first time in her reign.
She looked back at the crushed, mangled body of the Dusknoir still embedded in the rock. She walked over to it, her boots crunching on the ruined earth. She crouched down, carefully examining the purple, glowing threads stitched into its ghostly flesh.
She reached out to touch one of the threads.
The moment her leather glove made contact, a violent, static shock ripped up her arm. She recoiled with a sharp hiss of pain, clutching her wrist. It wasn't electricity. It was a concentrated burst of psychic agony—the echoed torture of the Pokémon, trapped in a loop of suffering designed to force its obedience.
Seika stood up slowly, her green eyes wide with genuine horror.
She had come here thinking she was dealing with a high-end poacher. A cultist. Perhaps a remnant faction of Team Aqua trying to stir up trouble in foreign waters.
But this? This surgical, terrifying manipulation of life and energy? This blind man who walked through Vermilion City like a ghost, completely unbothered by a Champion, and threw away a mutated ghost-type like a disposable piece of trash?
"Milotic," Seika said, her voice tight, completely devoid of its usual theatrical flair. "Keep your guard up. Salamence, aerial perimeter scan. Five-mile radius. Do not engage if you spot him. Report back immediately."
Her dragons responded instantly to the dramatic shift in their master's tone. The cocky, celebrity Champion was gone. The seasoned warrior, the protector of Hoenn, had taken the wheel.
Seika looked past the destruction she had caused, staring into the dense, untouched expanse of Route 11. She had come to Kanto looking for the reason her ocean had rioted. She had found a blind assassin hunting for a specific frequency in these woods.
Whatever he was looking for, whatever he had smelled in the air before she attacked him... it had to be infinitely more important than the presence of a public Champion.
"Kanto is a powder keg," Seika muttered to herself. She pulled out her League-encrypted, high-clearance comms device. She bypassed the standard Kanto League channels, ignoring Professor Oak's jurisdiction entirely, and dialed a direct line to her own Elite Four in Ever Grande City.
"Drake," Seika said the moment the line connected, her voice hard as steel. "Mobilize the Hoenn defense fleet. Lock down the borders. We aren't dealing with an environmental disaster. We are dealing with a shadow faction, and they are playing with the gods."
Three miles away, deep within the subterranean, labyrinthine drainage systems beneath Vermilion City, the shadows warped and tore open.
The Hound materialized out of the spatial rip, stumbling violently forward. He caught himself against the damp, algae-covered concrete wall, his breath coming in short, ragged, painful gasps.
His immaculate grey suit was ruined. The left sleeve was entirely burned away, revealing pale, scarred skin that was currently smoking from the intense radiant heat of the Mega Salamence's near-miss. Blood dripped slowly from his nose, slipping beneath the black cloth covering his eyes, staining his collar.
The violent spatial tear he had used to escape had severely taxed his internal psychic reserves. The Hoenn Champion was a blunt instrument, yes, but a blunt instrument swung with the force of a nuclear warhead was still lethal.
He leaned heavily against the wall, forcing his heartbeat to slow, letting the cold, damp air of the sewer cool his first-degree burns.
He had failed his immediate operational objective. The loud, arrogant Champion had compromised the sector. By tomorrow morning, Kanto League investigators, Elite Four members, and perhaps even the Pokémon Assembly President Goodshow himself would be swarming the Vermilion borders, looking into the massive trench Seika Muldrev had carved into the forest.
The investigation would be intense. But the Hound did not care about Seika Muldrev. He did not care about the Kanto League's impending bureaucracy. They were just noise on the board.
He pressed his uninjured hand against the cold concrete. He focused entirely on the data he had successfully secured before the dragon had interrupted him.
He brought his scorched hand up to his face. He inhaled sharply.
The scent was locked permanently into his neural pathways. That single, crystalline drop of pure silver resonance. The empathy wave that possessed the power to soothe the apocalyptic rage of Kyogre.
He had the exact psychic signature. He knew the frequency.
"It's here," the Hound whispered to the darkness, his bloodless lips curving into a cold, terrifying smile that did not reach his covered eyes. "The anomaly is grounded in Kanto."
He reached into his intact pocket and pulled out a small, featureless black device. He pressed his thumb against it, initiating a heavily encrypted, one-way burst transmission that punched straight through the earth and into the psychic construct thousands of miles away.
Target sector confirmed. Kanto. Route 11 border. The anomaly is mortal. The Hoenn Champion has engaged. Sector compromised. Awaiting further directives.
The Hound crushed the device in his fist, the circuitry sparking before dying. He let the broken plastic fall into the stagnant sewer water.
Seika Muldrev thought she had won the encounter. She thought she had chased a rat back into the shadows where it belonged. She had absolutely no idea that she had just forced the Conclave to drastically upgrade their threat assessment.
They wouldn't send a lone Hound next time.
When the Conclave returned to Kanto, they would bring the full, terrifying weight of the shadow government with them. They would weaponize the earth, tear the region apart, and burn the forests to ash just to find the source of that silver frequency.
The Hoenn Champion had just accelerated the timeline. The symphony of the fallen had officially begun.