The entry badge didn't look like much.
Just a matte-black chip with a generic logo and the word "AUTHORIZED – SHIFT 3" burned into its surface in faded white font. The barcode on the back was smeared—intentionally so—but it still scanned.
"You're sure this will work?" Orion asked, voice low.
Elias pulled the hood of his jacket farther down. "It'll get us past the first gate. After that, don't say a word. Let me do the talking."
They waited near the edge of the substation platform, where a secondary tram pulled in twice a day, no questions asked. Most of its passengers weren't trainers. They were workers. Or something close to that.
They blended into the crowd—Orion in a dull brown field coat borrowed from the hostel laundry, Elias in his usual miner's garb. No insignias. No Poké Balls visible. Elias kept Luxio's capsule hidden in his boot. Orion had no Pokémon left to conceal.
Not anymore.
The tram arrived.
Doors hissed open.
They stepped aboard and descended.
Sublevel 9-B didn't exist on any public map.
The tunnel that led to it was marked UTILITY ACCESS ONLY, blocked by a gate that only opened with a badge swipe and facial scan. Elias stepped up, kept his head low, and presented the fake badge.
The light blinked red. Then green.
The gate unlocked.
They were in.
The hallway smelled of bleach and rust. Faint coolant lines ran along the walls, humming. Cameras blinked in the corners. Farther in, they passed a table where two men sat, one sorting through crates of Poké Balls, the other scribbling numbers on a pad. Neither looked up.
They turned down a side hall marked "Q-ZONE."
And that's when Orion began to hear the sounds.
Cages.
Chains.
Snarling.
Sublevel 9-B wasn't like the other black market spaces Elias had shown him.
It was cleaner, colder. Sterile in a way that made Orion's stomach turn. The lights were bright, but there were no windows. No laughter. Just narrow walkways and cages—dozens of them, stacked and spaced like lab equipment.
Each one held a Pokémon.
Some asleep. Some curled in corners, staring at nothing. Some pacing restlessly, tails flicking, ears twitching. None of them made eye contact with the humans passing by.
Orion's breath caught.
He'd never seen Pokémon look like this.
"You okay?" Elias whispered.
"No."
But he kept walking.
They passed a handler checking logs on a tablet. She glanced at Elias, nodded at his badge, and said nothing. Farther in, another man in a surgical apron pulled a capsule from a locked cabinet and tagged it with a red ribbon.
Then they reached containment row.
This was different.
Each cage here had reinforced plating. Some had muzzle clamps hanging nearby. Others were stacked with sedation tubes. The creatures inside were wilder, larger, more dangerous—or simply more broken.
And in the third cell from the left—
Orion stopped breathing.
Tyrunt.
He stood at the back of the cage, half-shadowed. Muzzle off, but his legs were chained. His tail lashed once, then again. His eyes flicked toward them—but didn't recognize.
Orion stepped forward.
"Tyrunt."
The dinosaur didn't move.
"Hey. It's me. I'm here. I'm getting you out—"
A low growl rumbled from Tyrunt's chest.
He didn't speak. Didn't bark or cry.
Just growled.
Orion froze.
Elias touched his shoulder. "He doesn't know it's safe."
"They drugged him?"
"Maybe. Or maybe he just thinks everyone who walks down this hallway is the enemy."
Orion reached for the cage.
The moment his fingers touched the bars, Tyrunt snarled—loud—and charged forward, slamming his body against the metal hard enough to rattle the frame.
Orion jumped back.
His heart was pounding.
"Tyrunt, stop! It's me!"
But Tyrunt kept snarling, pacing now, eyes wide and wild. He'd never seen him like this. Not even during the first days after the capture. This wasn't fear.
It was trauma.
"I can't just leave him here," Orion whispered.
"You're not," Elias said. "We're coming back. Tonight. With a plan."
"I don't want a plan—"
"You want results," Elias cut in. "And you're not getting him out through the front door. Not unless you want to end up in a cage next to him."
Orion clenched his jaw.
Tyrunt slammed the cage again.
Elias pulled him back.
"Tonight," he repeated. "Trust me."
Orion didn't reply.
But he didn't fight him either.
That night, in a dim room above a dead food cart, Elias laid the map across the table.
"You see this line here?" he said, tapping a thin route scrawled in red ink. "It runs under the primary fuel pipe and through an old water main. One end connects to the Sub-9 cooling bypass. The other end? Abandoned freight tunnel."
"No cameras?"
"None that still work. Too much corrosion. If we time it right, we get in through the coolant bypass, cut power to the rear zone, and break open that cell while security's rerouting logs."
Orion stared at the map.
"If something goes wrong…"
"We run."
"And leave him?"
Elias paused.
"No," he said. "We don't."
Orion's throat tightened.
He looked down at the map again, hands curling slowly.
"You said to bring a second capsule," he said. "Why?"
"Because Tyrunt might not come quietly," Elias replied. "And if we're spotted, you'll have one shot."
Orion reached into his bag and pulled out the capsule he'd bought with the last of his money.
Standard-issue.
Nothing fancy.
But it would do.