Chapter 175: Stealthy as all jazz
The moment the city came into view from my spot on Gaia's head I recalled my team and headed for the coast to our right. Taking out my goggles I sealed my bag and with a deep breath dove into the surf and began to swim under the water. When I needed to come up for air I did so by breathing out slowly under the water without stopping so the bubbles were hidden by the waves. Then I would lift my head out of the water only long enough to suck in a lungful of air before diving down again.-
There weren't many pokemon of aggressive temperament this close to the city so besides some funny looks by the ones here in the ocean I wasn't obstructed at all. As for sharks or anything like that I wasn't worried as I had my aura sense active the whole time so there was no chance of one sneaking up on me. Thirty minutes later I began my approach to the team aqua headquarters that was a repurposed cave much like team magmas. The difference was that this time the base wasn't built literally around the ancient pokemon they wanted to awaken.-
Unsurprisingly Archie was one of the three kingpins of the illegal goods market in Hoenn which sorta sucked since I really wanted to kill him but the quest specified capture so that was off the table. Two of the three aqua admins were also handlers so they were also off the kill list but the last admin was fair game and would no doubt serve as a good warning to the other three. My plan was quite simple really , walk into the base, kill everything I could and capture the rest before torturing the ones I captured for information on the rest of the goods business.-
I still had eight more nearly unknown handlers and two truly unknown kingpins to nab as well after all. I say nearly for the handlers because the poacher did know one of the handlers personally from working with them before. It was disgustingly enough an old woman living in Mossdeep city that had a dark type ability to prevent the psychics in the city from detecting her true motives and by extension allowing the goods to move through the city. The worse part was she played the part of sweet old lady in front of everyone not from the criminal side but was actually a vicious old fox.-
Team aqua's base had it's own internal dock for quick access to the water but I used this against them to swim right inside and pull myself up behind the only guard that was dozing off on a crate. Silently I reached into my bag and took out a knife before reaching forward and clamping my left hand over his mouth as I sank the blade through the vertebrae of his neck for a quick and nearly bloodless kill.-
I carefully checked the surroundings of the docks and not finding any more people I released Hades, Rune and Yani. "We are in the Aqua base. Everyone in here besides the four people not in this exact outfit can be killed but remember stealth is absolutely necessary understood?" I spoke seriously while pointing to the fresh corpse and I got affirmations from each of them before they started moving away to hunt the rest of the team in the base. I waited an hour before releasing Vulcan and following the trios path. Unlike the magma base that had this whole naturalist vibe to it the aqua base had tiled flooring and technology all over the place in a sort of modern style.-
It didn't take long for me to come across the first grunt killed by the three I sent ahead which was a woman with a terrified expression permanently on her face as her head was facing the wrong way on her body. "Ten bucks says that's Hades doing." I said to Vulcan who snorted as if to say that was a foolish bet to take. It wasn't wrong as Yani didn't kill and Rune preferred less brutal means of killing such as stopping the heart or straight up zapping you to death.-
To prove my point the next few grunts we came across, all dead of course, were either strung up without any external wounds or slightly crispy but clearly dead before they could understand that fact. I wasn't just wasting the oppurtunity that this base presented though as I regularly stopped to loot store rooms , ingredient containers in labs and even a three fossils that could be revived though none I would be interested in. They were a normal Dome fossil, an ancient wingul fossil and an ancient azurill fossil.-
The two ancient variant fossils were nice and all but besides better stats and different body shapes than the modern versions there was nothing special about the pokemon that could be revived from the fossils. That wasn't to say the fossils weren't worth a pretty penny because they very much were but I personally had no interest in the things. I got a LOT of equipment from throughout the base that was high tech and not exactly open to the public which was great in case I ever made a base of my own that I could secretly equip without anyone knowing.-
I left the computers and servers though as that was all the leagues to break into and find all the goodies of. I didn't have the skill needed to hack into the stuff myself and was more interested in the practical equipment instead even if technically the info on the servers was worth way more. My greatest find though was the ever coveted {Master ball} an experimental and highly unstable type of pokeball that was supposedly able to capture any nonbound pokemon. Thanks to the system i finally understood WHY this thing was so rare despite it's extreme value, the difficulty to manufacture.-
Unlike what one might believe because of the games the ball didn't have a one hundred percent catch rate like that. Instead it had a triple redundancy imprisonment matrix built into it that made it next to impossible for whatever was caught with it to escape before the artificial bond was created. After the bond was created however there was a very small chance that the pokemon would try to escape because breaking a bond even artificial came with serious consequences. In a manner of speaking the master ball blackmails the captured pokemon into compliance.-
Thankfully in order to craft one of the things you need an extremely rare type of apricorn and master level skills in ballcrafting, alchemy, aura and runes or some stupid good luck. In this particular balls case it was made by three masters of everything except aura and only after failing two hundred times wasting a massive amount of money. I kept the thing only as a reference to those fields but I never intended to use the thing as it ruined the foundation of what a good trainer should have with their team, consent.
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