Chapter 3: Relicanth and Wailord

What followed was a grueling seventy-two hours that stripped the three of them down to raw nerves.

The Hoenn seas weren’t a playground. They were a hyper-aggressive ecosystem that resented intruders, and the trio had spent two days drifting across open water broken up by jagged reefs, the rusted iron hulls of sunken freighters, and trench drop-offs where the pressure would crush a man’s ribs in seconds. Salt crusted their clothes. Their skin burned through repeated sunscreen. They slept in shifts, four hours at a time. The rented trawler was rocking under them like a cradle that wanted them dead.

The Sharpedo came on the second night.

Ace was leaning over the rail to consult his Pokédex when a fin sliced past the hull. Then another. Then a third, faster than seemed fair.

“Uh, guys—”

Phillip looked over and his eyes widened. “Sharpedo.”

The water exploded. Three of them launched themselves clear of the surface, jaws wide, and Phillip’s hand was already moving.

“G-Man, Twister!”

The Poké Ball cracked open in a flash of light and the sea serpent surfaced with a roar that staggered the boat, large cyclones washing over the predators in a wave that drove them back into the dark.

On the far side of the deck, Phoebe had Crush out already.

“Hydro Pump!” she ordered.

Twin torrents hammered the Sharpedo and broke their charge, but not before one of them slammed the hull hard enough to lurch the entire vessel sideways. Ace pitched against the railing and the railing gave for a sickening half-second before Phillip’s hand closed on the back of his shirt and yanked him backward onto the deck.

“You trying to be lunch?”

“I had it.”

“You absolutely did not.”

By the time the last fin disappeared into the deep, the night was an hour older than it should have been, and all three of them were soaked through.

Hours later, in the gray hour before dawn, a bloom of Tentacool drifted into the search zone. Hundreds of translucent bodies pulsated beneath the surface like a living minefield. The first Poison Sting cracked against the hull. The second nearly took Ace’s eye out.

“Move!” Phoebe shouted.

The fight that followed was twenty minutes of chaos. Crush and Gyarados worked side by side, swatting and battering, while Ace’s Raichu, Shocker, stood on the rail and pulsed careful, low-yield bursts of electricity into the water. Ace had to make sure that Shocker was careful because any miscalculation would cook everything in range, themselves included. By the time the bloom dispersed, Shocker was on the rail with his arms crossed and his ears flattened, looking personally insulted.

Ace dropped a hand on his head. “Yeah. I know.”

Shocker chittered something sour.

“Yeah, wild ocean Pokémon are a pain in the ass,” Ace agreed.

The squall hit the third night without warning. One moment the stars were out and the next, the horizon was black. Wind screamed across the deck. Waves the height of houses came at them from three directions at once, and rain came down so heavily Ace could barely see Phillip ten feet away.

“Into the waves!” Phillip yelled from the wheel.

“I AM!” Ace roared back.

“Then more into the waves!”

Phoebe braced against a rail and called Crush back to the surface. “Hold us steady!”

The Blastoise positioned itself broadside and began firing controlled bursts of water against the incoming swells, cushioning the worst of the impacts. Gyarados swam alongside the hull through the dark, breaking the largest waves apart before they reached the boat. For nearly two hours they fought the sea itself.

When dawn finally came, all three of them looked like they’d aged a decade. Phillip’s hair had become a separate organism. Ace looked like he wanted to personally apologize to whoever had invented oceans before strangling them. Phoebe simply stared at the horizon with the thousand-yard stare of someone reviewing every life decision that had brought her here.

They kept going. They were too far in to quit.

Relicanth was the first break.

The living fossil had perfected its camouflage over millions of years, and it earned that résumé honestly. They’d been diving along a coral shelf at the edge of a trench when Phoebe held up a fist.

Ace and Phillip stopped.

“What?” Phillip asked through his communicator.

“There.”

“Where?”

“The rock.”

Phillip squinted. “That’s a rock, Phoebe.”

“That rock.”

The rock moved. Just a flicker with the subtle expansion of a gill plate. But Phoebe had been still long enough to see it, and the moment her eyes locked onto it, the Relicanth knew the jig was up.

She didn’t hesitate. “Crush, dive!” she yelled pointing down at the Relicanth.

The Blastoise dropped into the dark like a stone with its jets firing. The fight that followed wasn’t fast. Relicanth’s hide had the density of geological rock. Crush’s first impact bounced off without leaving much of a mark. It took a coordinated brutal assault with water cannons and physical hammering at point-blank range to slowly weaken the ancient fish enough that Phoebe could risk the throw.

The Ultra Ball struck. Pulled the Relicanth in. Rocked once. Twice. A third time.

Click

Phoebe surfaced clutching the ball, with water streaming down her face, and allowed herself a single tight fist-pump.

“One down.”

Ace grinned. “One to go.”

She looked at him flatly. “Don’t sound excited.”

Wailord was a different scale of warfare.

They found it the next day, after a fisherman in Lilycove told them about something enormous moving through the deep waters north of Mossdeep. Entire schools of Pokémon had changed migration paths to avoid it.

That was enough to investigate.

The sea trembled before they saw it. Sonar didn’t ping, it blacked out. The water beneath the trawler darkened in a way that had nothing to do with cloud cover, and Ace, leaning carefully over the rail this time, watched the shadow stretch beneath them like a moving continent.

“That’s not a Pokémon,” he said quietly. “That’s a country.”

The Wailord surfaced in slow motion. Water cascaded off its colossal body in waterfalls that drained for entire seconds. Its sheer mass dwarfed the trawler so completely that even G-Man, when Phillip released him into the water, looked like a small snake compared to it.