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Friar Sand's Lava Plume made the ground shake, forcing both Salem and Salieri to regain their balance. Magma flowed all over the battlefield, bursting forth in geysers and falling down in a scorching rain. The Battle Girl clenched her fists at her sides, struggling to speak. This was unreal.

"Detect!"

Salem's eyes glowed a translucent neon blue, and her movements went into overdrive. The Eevee dashed, darting side to side away from the falling and rising lava. A temporary blessing of Aura Detection allowed her to predict the motion of the random laval flows as she made her way unscatched to Friar Sand.

But the temporary blessing was just that. Temporary. Suddenly, Salem's eyes went back to being their normal brown midleap. She had to dodge the attack on her own accord. The Eevee gulped, but focused on the target in front of her. If she could make it over to Friar Sand she could get in another Dig attack and-

"NO!"

A geyser of lava erupted directly underneath Salem, blasting her tiny body straight into the air. Salieri could hear her cries grow fainter with distance, and her image became smaller and smaller the higher up she flew. The Battle Girl consciously tried to keep her mouth from hanging open in shock and awe.

And then she fell, her tongue lolling out of her side, her body one shade darker with burns and her eyes shaped like squiggly spirals. It was over and she hadn't even hit the ground.

Salieri returned Salem to her pokeball while the Eevee was still in midair. The Battle Girl held the pokeball up to her face for a second, looking lost in thought. Her expression was hard to read, but her narrowed features showed some regret.

Her amber eyes darted up to survey what Friar Sand's attack had done. It's presence was loud. The bubbling and splashing of lava was the only sound to fill her ears.

His fighting spirit was like a stick of dynamite. Once it went off, nothing around it could be louder.

"Alright," Salieri shouted over to Chari. "You've got me."

((It's mostly people waking up, training, some battling and some antagonist exposition.

Speaking of antagonists, what's N up to lately? We haven't seen him around for a while, huh? Not since he met up with the mysterious E in Nacrene City...

Oh? He seems to be right here. Let's check out what's going on...))

In the darkness of Narrow Street, not many people questioned the illegal activities that went on during all hours of the day. Perhaps because shady areas naturally attract shady people, and this was to be expected. Or perhaps it was because people who ended up questioning them ended up missing.

Lorenzo the Hiker leaned against the brick wall of the café, holding a bag of pokeballs in one hand and lighting the cigarette in his mouth with the other. His eyes darted back and forth routinely, in order to scout for potential customers or law enforcement. It was a slow morning for the pokemon dealing business.

Walking towards him down the street was a young man with a baseball cap, plain white and beige trainer’s clothes, and long green hair tied up in a ponytail style mullet. Too offbeat to be a cop. It must have been someone looking to buy.

But the customers you sold to couldn’t just be anyone. If they were a scrub, they could screw up the subtlety of the operation. And then Lorenzo would be the one in trouble. No, selecting a customer was a process. They had to qualify.

The young man leaned up against the wall a few feet away from Lorenzo, saying nothing as he put his hands in his pockets. Clearly he wanted to talk, but wasn’t going to be the first one to do it. So Lorenzo took a drag off his cig and spoke up first.

“Looking for something, kid?”

N looked up at the Hiker’s eyes, his own being half covered by the shadow of his hat. “I’m looking for pokemon. Strong ones. That won’t disobey orders.” He paused, and for a second the Hiker saw what he imagined to be a look of guilt. Or disgust. “Do you know where I could get those?”

Lorenzo grinned. The customer qualified.

“You’re in luck, kid. I just got these in this weekend.”

He reached into the bag and pulled out a few pokeballs. In the translucent red tops were the isolated figures of Tauros. They all looked unhappy. “This herd comes from Kanto. Poached from the Sevii Islands, not stolen, so there’s no record. Completely untraceable. Interested?”

N simply stared at the pokemon in the pokeballs, not moving to examine them closer. He opened his mouth slightly, appearing almost as if he was about to whisper. But nothing came out. The Hiker cocked his head to the side.

“No? Are you looking for a specific mon? Come on kid, I need something to go off of here.”
“Do you know what people like you make me feel like, Lorenzo Davis?”

He knows my name?

Before he could reply with a threat, Lorenzo noticed a shadow rise up from behind them to darken the alley. He quickly spun around, expecting a pokemon or undercover cop to apprehend him. But what he saw was anything but.

A brick wall, which he knew wasn’t there a minute before, was now erected on the end of the alley. It stretched to the top of the buildings, sealing off what was previously an entrance to turn the alley into a dead end.

Another shadow crept behind him. Lorenzo turned around to face N once more, and saw that beyond them was another giant brick wall stretching high enough to block the sun. They were now enclosed in the alley completely by walls that shouldn’t exist.

“W-what is this? Is this some sort of joke?” Lorenzo took a step backwards and reached into the bag to grab a pokeball.

Three rips sounded off, slashing through the burlap sack with an unseeable force. The contents spilled all over the ground and Lorenzo jumped back, startled. N didn’t budge, continuing to give Lorenzo his icy, piercing glare.

“I asked you a question, Lorenzo. Do you know what people like you make people like me feel like?”

Lorenzo gulped. A cop he could handle. Not…whatever this was. Sweat rolled down his forehead as his breathing grew heavier. He could hear the sound of the windows on the side of the buildings next to them begin to crack.

“People like you make me feel like I’m drowning.”

On cue, the windows cracked entirely, and water began to torrent out of them. Lorenzo jumped back when he saw the alleyway start to flood. The newly formed brick walls prevented the water from escaping. It had nowhere to go, and so the water level started to rise rapidly.

It didn’t make sense. None of it. Where did these things come from? It couldn’t have been real. Lorenzo could almost feel parts of his brain frying, trying to figure out the logic behind what he was seeing and feeling.

“There are just so many of you, Lorenzo. People that make fresh air feel stuffy because no matter where I go, I can’t escape you. The scum of the earth suffocates us all. The ultimate pollution is humans beings that do the things you do, Lorenzo.”

N stepped forward, beginning to march to the frozen Hiker. The water levels were reaching their waists and steadily rising.

“What do you want me to do? Say I’ll stop?” stammered Lorenzo. “Okay, okay, I’ll do whatever you want! Just don’t kill me!”

The corner of N’s mouth curled into a tight, tiny smile, and he chuckled. The laugh echoed through the sealed alley, sounding like a mix of his laugh and the high pitched laughter of some feral girl. It only made the Hiker’s eyes bug more.

“Kill you? I’m no murderer, Lorenzo.”

The water was about to go over their heads. Thinking fast, Lorenzo took a huge breath just before going under. They were now entirely submerged, standing only a foot apart. N was unmoving.

“But by the time I’m done with you-“

Lorenzo didn’t have time to wonder how N could talk underwater, because he was too busy trying not to open his mouth to scream. The young man’s clothes were disintegrating, followed by his skin and flesh. It started with his arm and then spread across his body, going across his whole being. And he was smiling, even as he became a skeleton.

The skeletal remains of N’s head opened it’s mouth. “By the time I’m done with you, you’ll wish I was.”

The skeleton of N reached out to grab Lorenzo’s arm. It was too much for the Hiker to bear.

He reflexively tried to scream, and when he opened his mouth was greeted with water rushing into his lungs. It didn’t take long for him to slip into a nightmarish unconsciousness.

****

N leaned over Lorenzo’s unmoving body in front of the café, turning the Hiker over. “You really did a number on him. What did you make him see?”

[The stuff of nightmares.]

“They must have been very realistic illusions. Even their surreal nature didn’t make him doubt their existence enough for his brain to regain sensory control. All according to formula. We now have a successful equation for a psychological knock out.”

N stood up, hoisting the Hiker’s body over his shoulder. He threw the body into the dumpster next to him and closed the lid. “Trash belongs in the trash. When he wakes up, he’ll think twice about his life.”

He turned to face the pokemon next to him. The Zoroark was just as tall as he was, and her eyes glowed a dark purple. “Zero, your training has improved your ability exponentially. Just wait until the Sages see how far we’ve come.”

The Zoroark grinned, her pointed teeth glinting in the small cracks of sunlight available to Narrow Street.

[The Sages? Wait until the world sees how far we've come.]

Chari hurried over to Salieri's side, rooting around in her bag. Her step was halting, a hop-skip over remaining puddles of magma
"I suppose that's so, dear, but that's not the point....let's get those burns treated...no idea how good the center here is, after all."
She handed over a small vial full of pink liquid, a nozzle at one end.

She patted the girl on the shoulder, her face seamed with lines of rue.
"You could have won, you know, if you'd kept the initiative. Switching away from physical strikes was a strong maneuver."

Friar Sand, meanwhile, was tramping over toward the two women, young and old, with a blithe disregard for the condition of the terrain. His eyes had returned to their pale rheum, all traces of crimson fury extinguished.

"Back!" Henrietta commanded and Darumi twisted to take the sand attack to the back, so it would in no way get into his eyes.

Darumi descended as Kai got up, resetting the battlefield completely. Except now they were on opposite sides, Kai closer to Henrietta and Darumi closer to Luka.

Distance once more created, Darumi waited for Kai to take the initiative this time.

"Angry Dance!" Henrietta called immediately, coinciding with Luka's orders. This gave Darumi a head start on charging forward. Right through the concentrated ember, the psuedo-flame thrower. It'd hit, but with the type resistance it wouldn't do a whole lot for Kai.

Not compared to Darumi who would have the distance closed pretty much by the time he was torching Darumi.

Taking, then, minimal damage and Kai needing to breathe sometime to end the move, Darumi struck. Cloaked by flames from Kai's sight, he'd require Luka's knowledge to know when to move.

Still, even Luka would have to guess the position of Darumi in the flames, as the fire type let loose the first rage attack, his attack powered by this. To put it simply, between a rage boost and Hustle, Kai now paled in comparison to Darumi's physical strength.

The attack flew out, aimed at Kai's gut to, if it hit, force him to bend into the punch, to double him over.

Kai was going to dodge but then he saw something out of the corner of his eyes. A small yellowy beige crocodile appeared from under the sand. Kai pointed at the creature and trumpeted.

Luka saw the events unfold and started to run towards Kai and Darumi as Kai was punched in the gut by Darumi. He doubled over and fainted. The sand had whittled him down too much and he just couldn't take it anymore.

Luka recalled Kai and shouted for Squirt. Then he turned to Henrietta and said, "Congrats Henrietta but I've got a little something I need to do." Then he ran off in the direction of the the Sandile that was running away.

Kijin grinned as he walked up the two trainers,"I have to say it again that was a amazing fight from both of you." He says with a large grin on his face before looking at Salieri he put his hand out greeting the battle girl,"The last time we meet it was a bit different so I wanted to reintroduce myself the name is Kijin Riderage." He says with a smile across the his face.

((If reality checks were pharmaceuticals, Salieri would have a light prescription.))

The last time we met?

Now that her burns were taken care of, Salieri recalled Salem once more, opting to do the rest of the healing at the Pokemon Center. She handed the vial back to Chari and shook Kijin’s hand. “Salieri Del Forrest. Heiress to the Saffron City Dojo.”

It felt as though she had been saying that introduction her whole life. At this point, the lie came to her as naturally as breathing did. If it wasn’t for the truth constantly nagging the back of her head, Salieri might even believe it herself.

She sized up Kijin, trying to remember their previous encounter. “And how did the last time we met go again?”