Chương 6: The Cost of Hunger

Field eligibility did not mean freedom. It meant Rine could accept the missions Team Rocket considered too menial to assign a Grunt. The lowest-paying work remained inside the base: cleaning training rings, sorting damaged equipment, carrying sealed packages between departments, and crawling through maintenance shafts where an adult would not fit. Rine accepted all of it. For four days, he slept in three-hour fragments. He cleaned blood from Ring Six for twenty credits and refused to think about whose it might be.

He spent six hours separating cracked Poké Ball shells from reusable components for thirty-five. He carried a locked medical cooler to Sub-Level Three for forty credits and ignored the small shapes preserved behind its frosted glass. Houndour accompanied him whenever regulations allowed. Outside the training cell, she wore the required muzzle and remained on a reinforced lead. The first attempt lasted eight minutes. A passing Raticate stared too long, and Houndour filled the corridor with sparks.

The second attempt lasted fifteen. By the fourth day, she could walk from the cell to the interior exercise yard without attacking anyone. She kept her flank against the wall and watched every doorway. Rine learned not to tighten the leash when she became frightened; pressure convinced her she was trapped. Instead, he stopped and let her examine whatever had alarmed her. Some guards laughed. Cassian did not. Rine encountered him in the exercise yard beside Ekans.

The snake had acquired a black scar across its snout and a new restraint collar around its neck. Cassian stood with one boot planted on the trailing control cable.

"You're teaching it to walk," Cassian said.

"She already knew."

"And yet you're ranked twelfth." Only fifteen recruits remained. Twelfth was not an achievement. Cassian's watch displayed his chosen field alias beside his rank: VIPER. He had already completed three collection missions and one sanctioned challenge. Ekans was Level 9. Houndour pressed against Rine's leg. Her golden current brightened. Ekans tasted the air with its tongue.

"Pretty thing," Cassian said.

"When it burns out, I might buy the body. The mutation lab pays well for intact organs." Rine's hand tightened around the leash. The cold pressure he had felt before returned, this time from Houndour. Dark energy rolled from her without heat or light. It muted the psychic awareness at the edge of Rine's senses and settled around his anger like armor. Cassian's confidence flickered. Only for a second.

"Ring Three," he said.

"Unless you intend to hide all month." Rine walked past him. Houndour followed after one backward glance. Their work earned enough for a remote veterinary consultation. Rine transmitted Houndour's scans under the pretense that she was a standard dual-type with an electrical move abnormality. The Rocket veterinarian was impatient until the readings appeared.

"Where did you get this?"

"Assigned asset."

"This isn't inheritance. The third elemental signature is integrated into every major pathway." The woman enlarged an image of Houndour's chest. Three overlapping fields pulsed around her heart, lungs, and nervous system.

"Fire energy accumulates in the upper thoracic sac. Electric energy is being generated along the spine. Dark energy separates them, but the partition is immature."

"Can it be treated?"

"Managed. Treatment implies something is wrong according to the design."

"She wasn't designed." The veterinarian gave him the flat look of someone who had worked for Team Rocket long enough to consider that distinction sentimental.

"Increase dietary magnesium and potassium. Protein, not filler. No forced Electric techniques. No Fire training immediately after a discharge. If the Dark partition collapses, the other energies could interact inside her organs."

"What happens then?"

"At her size? Cardiac arrest, internal burns, possibly detonation." Rine looked toward Houndour, asleep on the grounding mat.

"Can she evolve?"

"If she reaches the ordinary threshold for Houndoom, perhaps. But her energy pattern is already diverging. Standard evolution may reject the third type." The veterinarian paused.

"There are records of multi-affinity mutations stabilizing through high-purity elemental stones. Those records also contain a great many autopsies." A document appeared on Rine's watch. PROVISIONAL MUTATION ASSESSMENT Suggested designation: Triune Houndour Long-term prognosis: Unknown This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Evolution forecast: Nonstandard Compatible catalysts: Fire Stone — rejected; Dusk Stone — inconclusive; Thunder Stone — conditional compatibility Minimum recommended maturity: Level 36 Required catalyst purity: Perfect grade Estimated commercial price: 180, 000–400, 000 credits Rine almost laughed. A perfect-grade Thunder Stone cost more than some houses in the Rust District. Team Rocket would not spend it on a trainee's Pokémon.

If Gideon learned the mutation could produce a unique evolution, he might reclaim Houndour immediately. Rine encrypted the report behind the key Identify had created for his personal observations. The veterinarian's final recommendation required better food. Better food required field income. Rine accepted two missions. The first involved surveying security cameras in Saffron's underground commercial district. The second ordered him to collect overdue protection payments from a noodle shop in the Rust District.

The camera work was harmless. The collection was not. Before leaving, Rine visited the orphanage through an observation terminal available to successful recruits. The feed showed a classroom. Mira sat in the third row with her hand raised, the rescued Weedle concealed somewhere beyond the camera's view. She looked healthy. Elara moved between desks. Rine watched for thirty seconds. Then a warning appeared. Unauthorized emotional fixation reduces operational readiness. Observation access logged. He closed the feed.

Houndour waited beside the service exit wearing her muzzle. Rine had modified it with copper braid connected to a grounding strap along her harness. The arrangement would not contain a full discharge, but it redirected minor leakage away from her jaw.

"Outside," he said. Her ears lifted. The steel door opened. Morning poured into the tunnel. Houndour stopped so abruptly that the lead tightened between them. She had never seen the sky. Rine understood this when she lowered herself to the pavement, staring upward as though the blue might fall. Wind touched her coat. Her nose moved constantly, overwhelmed by rainwater, exhaust, cooking oil, human bodies, distant Pokémon, and a thousand smells no concrete cell could hold. A Pidgey swept over the alley.

Houndour flinched, then followed it with her entire body. For several minutes, Rine forgot the mission. He crouched beside her without touching. The first time he had seen a real Pokémon, he had been an infant looking through an orphanage window at a Murkrow. He remembered wonder so intense that his borrowed little body could not contain it. Years of hunger and discipline had buried that feeling beneath practicality. Watching Houndour discover the sky uncovered it. She took one uncertain step into the sunlight.

Then another. Her black coat warmed. Golden sparks moved along her ribs, not from pain but excitement. Rine smiled before he could stop himself. Houndour looked at him, mouth open in a pant. With the muzzle and sharp teeth, the expression should have appeared threatening. It did not. For the length of one quiet alley, neither of them belonged to Team Rocket. They did not reach the street immediately. At the tunnel mouth, Houndour's first wonder gave way to sensory overload.

A delivery truck backfired two blocks away. She spun, struck the end of the lead, and attempted to retreat into the facility. Rine followed rather than dragging her forward. They spent twenty minutes at the threshold. Each time she looked outside without flattening her ears, he marked the calm behavior with the same quiet "good" used during feeding. They advanced to the alley, retreated when a sanitation Trubbish rattled a bin, and advanced again.

Rine remembered early-route games in which a newly obtained Pokémon could be sent into battle within minutes. Real partnership contained far more waiting. The delay cost him nothing but time. Team Rocket's schedule insisted time was expensive. Rine was beginning to suspect that anything worth preserving would look inefficient to the organization. Before departing, he tested Houndour's recall in the open air. She resisted for an instant, distracted by wind and sky, then allowed the ball to take her.

He released her immediately and rewarded the choice. A public recall failure could expose them, but leaving her confined throughout the mission would teach her that cooperation only returned her to imprisonment. They practiced twice more. On the third release, Houndour emerged looking for him rather than an escape. The movement produced a warmth in Rine's chest he refused to examine too closely. His watch displayed a map of permitted zones.

Trainees could travel only through assigned corridors, and location monitoring remained active. Attempting to enter the League Quarter, a Pokémon Center, a police facility, or a licensed Recovery Guild office would trigger an alarm. Team Rocket had built invisible walls through the entire city. Rine checked the mission list again. Camera reconnaissance paid safely but required Identify. The collection order paid less and exposed him to civilians.

Biohazard cleaning offered more than both combined, but the listed poison level could permanently damage Houndour's recovering organs. He rejected it. That decision lowered his efficiency score. Rine almost laughed. Team Rocket measured good judgment only when it profited Team Rocket. As they walked, he noticed signs of other powers operating beneath Saffron's polished surface. A red feather painted on a lamppost marked territory claimed by a street gang.

Three parallel scratches on a service door indicated an Iron Talon informant point. A municipal camera had been rotated away from an alley containing a Rocket drop box, suggesting either sabotage or police cooperation. Identify supplied fragments, never explanations. Rine collected them anyway. At the first intersection, Houndour stopped beside a storm drain. A thin electrical hum traveled beneath the street from Saffron's underground grid. She lowered her head, listening through her paws.

"You feel it." Gold light moved along her ribs. The city itself could become a grounding network—or a weapon. Rine imagined teaching her to discharge into rails, pipes, or conductive surfaces instead of through her own organs. The idea carried risks he did not yet understand. He saved it under a private training file: PROJECT: CONTROLLED GROUND PATH No experimentation until veterinary clearance. Priority: safety before output. Writing the final line felt almost defiant. Houndour tugged toward the sunlight.

Rine followed. They passed beneath the orphanage before reaching the outer tunnel. Somewhere above, children changed classes. Rine heard chairs moving through old ventilation shafts and caught the distant toll of the meal bell. Houndour stopped beneath the sound.

"That's where I lived." Her nose lifted.

"Mira is up there." He could not explain who Mira was or why a person Houndour had never met influenced every choice he made. He wondered whether Pokémon packs required explanations. Perhaps protecting someone was sufficient. A maintenance camera rotated toward him. Rine resumed walking. The tunnel contained no door to the orphanage. Team Rocket had designed the levels so recruits could hear the life above them without reaching it. Hope and leverage occupied the same few meters of concrete.

At the final checkpoint, a guard inspected Houndour's muzzle and scanned her ball registration.

"Triple signature," he said, reading the monitor.

"Research know?"

"Assignment file lists electrical instability."

"That wasn't my question." Rine let uncertainty enter his expression.

"I assumed registration notified them." The guard had no desire to create paperwork. He waved them through. Rine added another rule to his growing understanding of Team Rocket: ignorance, presented correctly, could be more protective than denial. Beyond the checkpoint, Saffron opened around them in layers of sound. Vendors called from the avenue. A Machamp crew lifted steel outside a construction site. Somewhere above, the Magnet Train passed with a hum Rine felt through his shoes.

Houndour tried to follow every noise at once. Rine loosened the lead and allowed her to choose the first direction for five steps. She chose sunlight. He followed without correcting her pace. Their mission clock lost forty-three seconds, an insignificant delay that the watch nevertheless recorded as reduced route efficiency. Rine dismissed the warning. Some inefficiencies were worth preserving.