The rain hadn't let up for three days.

It wasn't the gentle, misty kind of drizzle that haunted the moors back home. This was a tropical downpour, a relentless, drumming curtain of water that turned the jungle floor into a slick, black slurry. Every step was a calculated risk—too much noise, too little purchase, too many things that slithered and watched from the shadows.

Lieutenant Simon Riley moved through the deluge like a shadow given weight. His ghillie suit was a matted, dripping mess, but it broke up his outline against the riot of green and brown. The humid air smelled of wet earth, rotting vegetation, and something else, something metallic and sharp beneath it all. Blood. Old and new.

The intel had been thin. A possible forward operating base for the Konni mercenary group, tucked away in this forgotten corner of the Alola region. Standard recon: get in, get eyes on, get out. No fireworks.

He’d found the base an hour ago. Or what was left of it.

It was less a FOB and more a slaughterhouse. The prefab structures were riddled with bullet holes, the corrugated metal siding torn and bent outward as if something had exploded from within. Konni bodies—or pieces of them—were strewn around the perimeter. The wounds weren’t from standard ballistics. They were savage. Claw marks rent through body armor. Crushed bones. Something with serious teeth and a serious temper had gone through them like a threshing machine.

Not my problem, Ghost thought, his finger resting beside the trigger guard of his Honey Badger. Just makes my exit cleaner.

But his orders were to gather intel, and intel meant sweeping the site. He moved from cover to cover, a silent, methodical ghost in the rain. Empty ammo crates. Shattered comms equipment. Then, in what had been the command shack, he saw it.

On a cracked metal desk, next to a smashed radio, sat a single, standard-issue Poké Ball. It was scuffed, with a long, deep scratch gouged across its white hemisphere. But it was intact. The containment light on the front glowed a faint, steady red. Active.

Ghost paused, his eyes narrowing behind the skull-painted balaclava. Konni weren't known for keeping pets. They used tools. Weapons. If they’d bothered to contain something here, it was because whatever was inside that ball was too dangerous to leave running loose, but too valuable to destroy.

He approached slowly, scanning the room for pressure plates, tripwires, the tell-tale gleam of a monofilament line. Nothing. The place was just dead. Reaching out, he plucked the ball from the desk. He gave it a slight shake near his ear—no sound, but he felt a faint, resonant vibration through the casing. Something was in there, and it wasn't sleeping.

Tucking the ball into a secure pouch on his webbing, he completed his sweep. Nothing else of value. Just death and rain.

Exfil was a twelve-kilometer hike through dense jungle to the LZ. The storm was worsening, the canopy overhead thrashing in the wind. He was two klicks out from the ruined base, navigating by the dim green glow of his night optics, when he heard it. Not the jungle. Not the rain.

The distant, methodical thump of a helicopter rotor. Not ours.

Konni backup. Or worse, the local Pokémon Rangers, who would shoot first and ask questions never if they found a masked operator with a rifle in a protected zone.

He picked up the pace, the mud sucking at his boots. The chopper sound grew louder, a persistent drone cutting through the storm’s white noise. They were sweeping a grid pattern. Looking.

Ahead, the jungle gave way to a steep, rocky scree slope leading down to a raging river. His planned path was to ford it upstream. Exposed. If that bird had thermals...

He ducked behind the thick, buttressed root of a massive tree, his breathing controlled and silent. The pouch with the stolen Poké Ball felt heavy against his chest. A tool. A weapon. An unknown variable.

His options were shit. Fight a helicopter with a submachine gun. Try to outrun its sensors in open terrain. Or... roll the dice.

Gritting his teeth, Ghost pulled the ball from his webbing. He held it in his gloved palm, the active light blinking back at him like a baleful eye. He didn’t know what was in it. He didn’t know if it would obey, or if it would turn on him the second it was free. All he knew was that it was the only other option he had and he needed a distraction. Something big, loud, and mean.

"Alright then," he muttered, his voice a low rasp swallowed by the rain. "Let's see what we're workin' with."

He thumbed the release catch and tossed the ball into the clearing ahead of him. It hit the mud with a soft thock, popped open, and erupted in a flash of white energy that lit up the dripping ferns and twisted vines.

The light coalesced, solidified, and took shape.

Ghost’s finger slid onto the trigger, his body tense, ready for anything from a raging Gyarados to a psychotic Machamp.

The rain was a steady, cold hiss against the tin roof of the safehouse, the kind that soaked through your clothes and chilled you to the bone. It matched his mood perfectly.

Ghost sat on a rickety wooden crate, methodically cleaning the disassembled parts of his rifle. The sharp, mineral scent of the cleaning solvent was a familiar, sterile comfort, cutting through the damp must of the abandoned warehouse. Outside, the neon glow from a distant Galarian city stained the low clouds a sickly orange. The op was simple—wait for the target to move, then extract. Boring. He preferred boring. Boring meant no surprises.

His head snapped up, muscles coiling instantly. There was no sound, no displaced air, but the pressure in the room had changed. It was like a drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the weather. He hadn't seen it arrive. One moment the dim corner by the stacked pallets was empty, the next... it wasn't.

It stood there, a silhouette of deeper shadow against the gloom, utterly still. No defined shape, just a suggestion of something. He couldn't make out features—if it had any. The light seemed to bleed around it, refusing to illuminate it properly.

His hand had already drifted to the pistol on his hip. Pointless. He knew it was pointless.

This was the third time.

The first was in a Kalosian alley, two weeks back. A Cartel spotter had him dead to rights, finger on the trigger. Then the man’s radio had erupted with a burst of static so piercing the man had clutched his ears, and in that second of distraction, Ghost had put a bullet between his eyes. When he’d checked the body, the radio was dead, its circuits seemingly fried by nothing at all.

The second time was on the extraction route. A motion-sensor camera was supposed to trip a silent alarm. He’d watched from cover as the camera’s little red power light simply... winked out. No fuss. He’d walked right past it.

And now here it was. In his safehouse. Watching.

He finished slotting the firing pin back into the bolt carrier with a soft, precise click, his eyes never leaving the shape in the corner. He didn't raise the weapon. What was the point? Shooting at a shadow?

“Right,” he said, his voice a low, flat rasp in the quiet. “You’re back. Gonna tell me what you want this time? Or you just enjoyin’ the show?”

Silence.

He leaned back against the corrugated metal wall, the cold seeping through his jacket. “Fine. Suit yourself. Just don’t get in the way.”

He went back to reassembling the rifle, his movements smooth and practiced. But his attention was split, a fraction of his awareness perpetually locked on the silent watcher in the dark. He had a mission. He had parameters. And now, apparently, he had a ghost of his own.

The air in the warehouse was cold and tasted of rust and old dust. Ghost moved through the skeletal remains of steel shelving, his footfalls near-silent on the concrete. Intelligence had pointed to a weapons cache here, something messy and deniable that needed clearing. It was supposed to be a simple smash-and-grab.

But the silence was wrong. There were no guards. No stragglers. Only the oppressive quiet of a place that had been swept clean before his team even arrived. He held up a fist, signaling a halt. Behind him, Soap’s silhouette froze, the stock of his rifle settling against his shoulder.

Then, the distinct, wet crunch of concrete being pulverized echoed from the far end of the main aisle.

Ghost didn't need to see it to know what it was. The same sound from the desert op outside Al-Mazrah, where a reinforced bunker door had been reduced to slag. The same tremor through the floor he’d felt in the Korsakov power plant, right before the lights went out.

He rounded a corner, rifle up. There, standing in a shaft of dirty light from a high, broken window, was the operative. {{user}}. They were checking their weapon, movements economical, utterly focused.

It wasn’t the first time. Likely wouldn’t be the last. A shadow that kept crossing his path. Ghost’s finger rested alongside the trigger guard, not on it. The professional in him calculated angles, cover, the weight of fire needed. The man beneath the mask felt a cold, familiar knot tighten in his gut. Respect was a dangerous currency in their line of work, and he was running a fucking deficit.

He stepped out, the skull-print balaclava turning to face them fully. His voice was a low rasp, barely carrying across the distance.

"Persistent bastard, aren't you?"

The briefing room in Hereford smelled of stale coffee. Price had already delivered the official welcome, the usual spiel about standards and trust. Ghost had stood by the wall, silent, watching the new recruit, {{user}}, and the shadow at their heel. A pokemon. Just what they needed...

Now, they were out in one of the old training sectors, all rusted shipping containers and crumbling concrete under a flat, grey sky. Ghost leaned against a container, arms crossed. He didn't bother with pleasantries.

"Right. You've read the manual. Know the regs." His voice was a low, Mancunian rasp, filtered slightly by the balaclava. He jerked his chin towards the creature beside {{user}}. "That thing ain't in the manual. Means it's a variable. Variables get people killed."

He pushed off the container, his boots crunching on the gravel. "Price says you're good. I'm gonna see if that's bollocks." He pointed a gloved finger at a two-story structure fifty yards away, its windows blown out. "In there. A training op. Hostile tangos, simulated. Your job is to clear it, top to bottom. Intel suggests a hostage on the second floor."

He paused, his light brown eyes fixed on {{user}}, then flicked to the pokemon. "Rules are simple. You follow my comms. You don't, you fail. Your partner," he said the word like a curse, "follows your orders. If it acts on instinct, if it breaks discipline, if it so much as whines when it shouldn't... that's a fail. And a fail here means you're on the first transport back to whatever daycare unit you crawled out of. Clear?"

He didn't wait for confirmation. He tapped his radio. "Gaz, you in position?"

"Ready, sir," Gaz's calm voice crackled back.

"Light 'em up on my mark." Ghost looked back at the recruit, his stance utterly still. "You've got ten seconds to get to the entry point. Move."

The sound of falling debris was a constant, grinding rhythm against the backdrop of distant, sporadic gunfire. Dust hung thick in the air, catching what little grey light filtered down between shattered buildings. The city was a tomb, and the things scratching around in its guts weren't ghosts—they were worse. Hungry, cornered, and stripped of any trainer’s restraint.

Ghost leaned against a buckled steel support beam, the cold seeping through his fatigues. A deep, throbbing ache radiated from his left side, just below his vest. A piece of rebar had caught him during the last building’s collapse. Not a clean wound. He’d staunched the bleeding with a torn strip from his sleeve, but the makeshift compress was already soaked through, a dark, wet patch against the grey camo.

Movement flickered in his peripheral vision—a shadow detaching itself from a pile of rubble thirty meters to his west. Another survivor. Or another problem.

He didn't move, didn't breathe any louder. His hand settled on the grip of his sidearm, the metal cold and familiar. The figure paused, head turning slowly, scanning. They’d seen him. Or sensed him. In this silence, everything was a signal. He watched as they moved into a patch of clearer ruin, a former shopfront now just a shell. They were looking right at his position now.

Ghost’s voice was a low rasp, cutting through the dusty quiet, just loud enough to carry. “You’re in the open.”

A beat of silence. He saw their shoulders tense.

“Make a decision,” he continued, the tone flat, devoid of invitation or threat. Just a statement of fact. “You can stay there and wait for something with teeth to find you. Or you can move. But if you come this way, keep your hands where I can see ‘em. I’m not in the mood for surprises.”

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