CHAPTER 150

It hadn't even been particularly close. Torterra shared or even surpassed Tangrowth's bulk, so fire type attacks from Charmeleon hadn't done much but annoy it, and it easily retaliated with devastating Earthquakes that took her out of the fight before she could make use of Blaze. Torterra was too heavy for Gothorita to even hope to restrain it, and again, no clawed attacks from Vigoroth dealt much damage. Plus, the normal type had listened to Pauline somewhat, but it never wanted to hang back and wait for the correct opportunity to strike. Crobat, for its part, was just as quick as Cecilia's Talonflame and could easily run circles around anything that Pauline could throw at it.

The battle had been a massacre. A testament to the difference between a trainer with three and five badges. Maybe if Charmeleon, Gothorita, or Rufflet had evolved, then she would have stood a better chance, but there was no way for Pauline to beat an experienced trainer with tougher Pokemon than she had, or at least not with her violent approach to battling. Pauline calmly recalled her Pokemon, and we all held our breaths. She watched her opponent walk off with a smug smile and then stepped away herself.

But then, she stopped.

"Ah, shit," Denzel sighed.

"Hey, Mr. supervisor? I have a question," she said.

"Hm? What is it?"

"Can you explain to me what the fuck that just was? That wasn't the girl I was supposed to fight. I wasn't even warned about the change. Did you expect me to just walk away and take it? That'd mean that you're straight-up fucking stupid."

"Take it up to the higher-ups," he lazily said.

"No, I want to take it up with you, moron."

"I don't know why it happened, I don't make the decisions, I'm just a referee."

"Got it, so you don't care if the tournament the company you work for organized is shit. You clearly favored this guy! Why else would you put him against me at the last second? And no mentions of a schedule or a bracket change? Really?"

The audience was beginning to murmur in her favor, and the supervisor seemed to be genuinely taken aback, which surprised me. Pauline was right. What did he think would happen? Reporters had forgone interviewing Harry Rodriguez and were instead filming this entire confrontation.

"Look, all I know is that there were two resignations from your opponent and his, so you both moved up the bracket and fought each other instead. That's normal proceedings and if you read the fine print when you signed up, you would have known. I'm sorry if you feel like you've been wronged."

"So are you saying it doesn't matter then? I paid for this shit experience. That is bullshit," Pauline said. She exhaled to keep going, but then stared in our direction. Her shoulders relaxed, and she sighed. "Whatever."

After Pauline told every reporter in the vicinity to fuck off, we joined her. She wasn't as pissed off as I expected her to be— well, correction: she was pissed that she'd been wronged, but she wasn't angry that she had lost. She was taking the defeat in stride in hopes of improving.

"I mean, I knew I'd lose when I saw the Torterra come out. That thing is a monster," she sighed. "I'm not stupid. I just wanted to do as best I could. I could have done better if I could have prepared… ah man, this fucking blows. There's so much I have to work on."

"You were right to be angry," Justin said. "There's no doubt that this was a suspicious development. What were the odds that both of your opponents resign on the same day? Without any warning?"

"But he was right when he said that the normal procedure would just be to move both of you up the bracket," Maeve grimaced. "So I'm not sure…"

"What? Are you saying I would have lost to him anyway in the second round? So what? There's still injustice that was done, and it fucking pisses me off. I'll be taking it up with the higher-ups," she hissed, mockingly imitating the referee.

"Did it show on the website at all?" Maeve asked.

"I checked this morning and it didn't," she snapped.

I glanced at Denzel, silently asking him to keep her in line. She was right to be angry. Something about this just didn't bode well, but I felt like we should stay discreet for now until we gathered more information. Something was still bothering me— something other than that egregious display of favoritism and corruption.

It seemed that Harry knew a whole lot about Pauline's team when that shouldn't have been possible if he'd been caught by surprise at the last minute, but most of all…

His battle hadn't been supposed to be on the Rock Field, and yet he'd shown up just in time. He knew.

"Look, we'll do it together," he told her.

"I don't need a babysitter."

"Okay… but that's not what I said— you know what, let's just get your team healed for now."

The mood grew gloomy as we walked toward the Center. None of us had expected someone to lose this early, especially when we'd seen that we wouldn't battle against anyone better than we were in the first round. But if there was a scheme afoot, why would these people risk it? BattleZone— their company— was renowned for organizing and running smooth tournaments, and they'd make an ample amount of money during the whole thing even if the Hunters were getting a share of the revenue for letting them use their land. With the advertisements, the revenue from the tickets, the publicity… so why?

Harry Rodriguez… I thought as I turned on my phone. I scrambled to look up anything I could find about him. He was a second year from Hearthome, and his two other Pokemon were a Pelipper and a Luxray. He was sponsored by a single gaming company, although it didn't seem like a close relationship. He'd gotten four badges during his first year, but was now well on his way to making it to the Conference. He'd beaten all of the gyms in the east, but where had he gotten his fifth?

It took a bit of sleuthing to figure out that he'd beaten Roark a week before the tournament started. How the hell had he gotten back here so quickly for the tournament? He didn't appear to have a teleporter on his team, and even the biggest Pelipper weren't large enough to carry humans. It couldn't have been a secret fifth Pokemon either, since his battle against Roark had been a four-on-four. At the fifth badge, gym leaders weren't going to hold back in terms of numbers for the fight, and they'd force you to utilize your entire team. Maybe Harry had caught something right after his gym battle… but no. Catching a psychic in the wild capable of Teleporting that far was as likely as winning the Arceus damned lottery, and I didn't think that anyone would trust them enough to teleport anyway. The same thought process applied to a flying type.

So how?

Connections. Just like Craig had carried us back to Eterna, Harry had someone to either teleport or fly him around. Innocent enough in a vacuum, but with the added context, I was growing suspicious. We entered the Center, and Pauline gave her Pokemon to Nurse Joy.

"Hey, Justin and I are going to head back to help Pauline lodge her complaint," Denzel said.

"You'll just censor me."

"Yes, that is the goal," Justin said.

"So keep us updated on anything," he continued. "You guys get some rest for your battles tomorrow," Denzel finished, staring and me and Mira.

"Sure thing," she nonchalantly answered.

The group dispersed after that. It seemed that despite some of us being suspicious of this whole affair, most were willing to give the organizers the benefit of the doubt until something like this happened again. Maeve had grown less confrontational since getting crushed by Louis at the Floaroma tournament. Mira didn't exactly care about the tournament anyway, and even if Denzel and Justin were suspicious, they probably wanted to focus on keeping Pauline from exploding at some poor guy who didn't know anything that was happening.

Louis, Cecilia and I were not most. They knew all too well what money could turn a person into, and I wasn't willing to let this go quite easily. Not when a friend had been wronged.

Especially when Harry Rodriguez would be someone I needed to battle sooner rather than later, looking at the brackets. Hell, what happened to Pauline could even happen to me. Instead of training for tomorrow's battle against Yasim like I had expected to do, we all sat in my room. Combee buzzed over Louis' head, the three faces yawning in unison. Cecilia closed my blinds and released Slowking to tell us if anyone was near, and I had Princess out, and she sat in my lap like usual. It wasn't that I wanted to keep my other friends in the dark. That would have been a foolish decision. Everyone needed to be on the same page, or something terrible was bound to happen if our suspicions were correct. Tomorrow, I would tell them all about what we would discover tonight, and I would also send a message to the group chat before going to sleep for good measure.

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The atmosphere was still… awkward. It wasn't that long ago that Louis had left the group because of me. A heavy silence hung in the air, and we all waited to see who would start to speak first. We must have stood there for at least two minutes until Louis let out a slight chuckle.

A single laugh.

Then we joined him, giggling like idiots at the stupidity of the situation. We had a potential scandal on our hands, and we were worried about how awkward things were? It was just so silly.

"Sorry about that," Louis said, wiping away a tear of laughter. "I… wow, I haven't laughed like that in a long time."

"Let's make sure you keep those coming then," Cece smiled.

My heart felt whole again. Like something that I believed irreparably broken had just been healed. Tears of laughter turned into tears of joy, but I hid them well enough and wiped them away with my shirt. Togetic noticed and glanced at me, but I just kissed her forehead and brought her into a tight hug.

"Let's get to the matter at hand then," I said. "Harry Rodriguez."

"There must be something there, right?" Louis asked. "Can we check how many resignations there have been since the start of the tournament?"

"I don't know… Denzel would be useful for this," I muttered. "Let me check the website."

I grabbed my phone again.

"I saw you looking things up earlier," Cecilia said.

"Uhuh," I nodded. "I mostly discovered that he must have an acquaintance or a friend that flew or teleported him back to Solaceon because he was last seen in Oreburgh before this. I tried figuring it out on his megathread, but there was nothing there. Just baseless speculation."

I explained his badge order and how it was strange that he had gotten to Roark so quickly. You could theoretically scale down the mountain on route 207, but nothing Rodriguez currently had was capable of that, which meant that he was teleported or flown to Oreburgh in the first place. We put a tab on that for now.

"How many days did it take him to get back here?" She asked.

"Uh, I don't know, I can't really corroborate anything. He fought Roark and won a bit more than a week ago, and he showed up here five days later in time for the tournament, but that could mean anything."

"He could have either flown directly or waited a few days to Teleport," Louis said.

"So picture this," I said. "I'm Rodriguez—"

Cecilia and Louis both chuckled.

"—and I just beat Roark handily with my Torterra and Pelipper or whatever. Instead of continuing on toward Canalave or just getting a ride to Eterna via my teleporter or flier, I come back here. Why?"

"The rewards. Hyper beam," Cece immediately said.

"Obviously that's part of it, but there must be something else. To backtrack during the Circuit when you don't have to, you must be pretty sure that you're going to win, no? Doesn't that seem suspicious?"

"I don't know… if he has a teleporter or friend to fly him, it wouldn't cost him anything to try. If he loses, he can just Teleport or fly back. Plus, his skills would put him in a good position to win. I think you're looking too deep into it," she frowned.

"That's… fair."

"But then again, doesn't he only have four Pokemon? If he's going to make it to the Conference, he's going to need to catch his last two and train them up quickly. The easiest way to do that is by traveling," Louis said.

"But we could be telling Pauline and Justin the same thing. It's not enough. We're missing something," Cece muttered.

"Ah!" I exclaimed. I had found what I was looking for. "There's been twelve resignations— including the ones we already know of— but the other ten were all before the tournament began. It doesn't tell us the reasons though."

"We lack information," Cecilia said.

"And I'm sure that they could claim that other trainers benefited from those resignations in some way or another," I groaned. "The difference with Harry is that the timing is… too convenient, and that he knew where his battle would take place. Like he'd been warned beforehand.

"Could we track down the two people that resigned from Pauline and Henry's matches? That could give us some insight," Louis asked.

"I've got their names here, but finding them in this town would be…"

"Impossible," he sighed. "It's also possible that they've left already."

"There is something else we can try to do," Cecilia said. "Find Luca Antonovich."

"Who?" Louis asked.

Personally, I knew that Cece just liked to pause for dramatic effect.

"Grace already knows about this, but there's a man with two Cutiefly going around and selling information. Slowking caught one of them spying on me yesterday. He uses their small size to spy on people," she explained. "If anyone knows anything about those two, it would be him. We'll have to pay, though."

"Where is he now?" I asked.

"Now? Not tomorrow?" Louis' eyes widened.

"No time like the present. It's only seven."

"Well, I don't exactly know but I heard he liked to skulk around near the Hunters' home…"

—

With Combee and Togetic in tow, finding Luca had been easy. Well, it was more like he had let himself be found. Princess had told me that he'd waved at her when she'd been scanning the area in the sky. Luca Antonovich smiled widely as he greeted us with a curt nod. The two Cutiefly flying around his head were barely visible to the naked eye, but they had a pale, yellow glow that made them easy to see in the night. I assumed that was just for flair and that they could turn that off.

"I figured people were looking for me when I saw those two in the sky," he said, pointing at Togetic and Combee.

"And you let yourself be found?" Louis asked.

"Hey, how do you think I get paid?" He shrugged. "I didn't think Grace Pastel and Cecilia Obel would come to ask of my services. You two seemed too goodie-two-shoes for that. So who's it gonna be? Yasim Benzema? Finley Johansson?"

"We're not here for info about our opponents," I said. "We're here for two things. First, the two people that were supposed to fight Pauline King and Harry Rodriguez resigned on the same day. Would you happen to know anything about that?"

Luca licked his upper teeth. "That's gonna cost you."

"Money isn't an issue. I will pay," Louis said.

"Louis—"

"Don't worry, Cecilia. It's the least I can do."

"Pay up then. 50 G's."

Louis grabbed his trainer ID and transferred the money onto Luca's account. To him, fifty thousand was nothing, but Luca was practically salivating. We had probably overpaid.

"Alrighty then. See, one of the poor sods who resigned came to me at first looking for info about their opponents. Sally McCree thought she had a chance against Pauline King, so she was willing to pay a lot. I had my Cutiefly snoop around and found out about that Vigoroth of hers and a few new moves," he said. A small, barely audible chime rang out in my ears. The Cutiefly were nowhere near me, but it felt like they were buzzing around right next to my ears.

I wondered if such small Pokemon were capable of battling.

"She was hyped as hell for her battle, so imagine my surprise when I heard she resigned. I usually try to keep my nose out of things where it doesn't belong, but I got curious. I sought her out before she left, but she wasn't willing to tell me anything. I offered to pay. Me! Can you imagine that? There's nothing I crave more than information, but the bitch just snubbed me. She said she'd changed her mind and that she needed to hurry up to collect the gym badges instead of wasting time here. I tried to push her, but she screamed that it was none of my business. So I go 'okay, whatever,' but this thing is eating at me and I seek the other person instead."

"The one who was supposed to fight Harry Rodriguez," I breathed out.

"Yeah. Another kid with five badges this time. Imagine my surprise when he told me the exact same thing, eh? Funny how that works. You know, when people have the exact same story, that means something's going on. Something a lot bigger than I personally can handle, so I resigned to just chill out and make cash even though my curiosity's eating at me."

I sighed and clenched at my forehead. From the way he'd told his story, it sounded like they'd been pressured to leave. Since Harry's opponent had been supposed to be a five-badger, I reckoned he had a decent chance to win, even without knowing anything about his team. You didn't get to five badges without being an excellent trainer.

And now, Harry had fought Pauline and gotten an easy victory instead of a possible nailbiter.

It felt like this tournament was being rigged.

"Okay…" Cecilia exhaled. "Okay. This is big."

"I'd stay out of it if I were you," Luca shrugged. "I like you guys. You paid me a fuck ton."

I ignored his ironic comment and sent all of this information into the group chat. The others needed to know about this, but we needed to act like we didn't, at least for now. Even though I didn't think it was the likeliest scenario, there was a possibility that they'd been threatened to leave. They could have been paid off too, or simply pressured. It was hard to say no when the full weight of a massive company was breathing down your neck. There was no way to know until we gathered more information.

"We also wanted to ask about Harry Rodriguez," Louis said.

"The big guy himself, eh?" Luca laughed. "Shoot."

"Does he have any relations with the organizers here?"

"With BattleZone? Not that I know of, but if they were rigging this, don't you think they'd have hidden it better than this?" He shrugged. "Feels amateurish to me. Too sloppy. I wish I had more for you, but that's all I got."

"That's fine," Louis sighed. "Thank you anyway."

"And hey, if you ever need more information, I'll be here," he grinned. "Here, take my number. Keep me in the loop."

—

I stared up at the stars as we traveled through the lonely road to get back to the Center. Just like in Floaroma, you could see them easily in Solaceon. The reactions to the news in the group chat had been mostly uproar, but we all knew that we needed to proceed with caution. Even Pauline had calmed down somewhat.

"Something's been bothering me," I frowned. "If they were rigging it for Harry, why not make Pauline fight her opponent anyway? Why make Sally Mccree resign?"

"Do you think she knew something that they didn't want her to leak?" Cece asked.

"Maybe. But then again, it could be… what if it was to muddy the waters?" I gasped.

"What do you mean by that?"

"If you're the organizers, you could want to make a bunch of people randomly resign to make it look like you're not helping a particular person," I said. "There are always some people that leave a tournament early, so it wouldn't be that strange."

"But Harry was clearly the one that benefited here, no? He crushed Pauline instead of fighting an equal," Louis said.

I nodded. "Yes. So if my theory's right, more and more people will start quitting at random, and there'll be no way to tell if those resignations are legit or not. It'll make the whole thing impossible to prove. It would be suspicious, but suspicion isn't enough to convict someone."

"So we have this trainer with no relations to the organizers… no holes in his story, but he's still getting pulled upward for some reason," Cecilia reflected. "What can he offer them? What does him winning do for them?"

"For BattleZone? Nothing," I said. "Or at least nothing that I can think of. There's something missing."

I chewed on my thumb nail and stopped moving.

Harry Rodriguez. No relations to BattleZone, but still getting help from the organizers. Why? He had five badges, so he was already a top contender. Someone wanted him to win, but we'd already established that there would be no benefits for the organizers to do so. They were already making money, and risking their reputation on such a scheme was suicidal for a company of that size. This wasn't like Clarence and Harvey. The potential rewards did not justify their actions. The more trainers were forced to resign, the more the chances of a leak grew. They'd never be allowed to run any tournaments again, and they'd ruin the relationship they were fostering with all of these advertisers, trainers, the Hunter family—

The Hunter family.

I stopped biting on my nail and my realized my eyes had gotten dry. I had stopped blinking. The Hunter family didn't run or organize the tournament, but they practically ran everything that happened in Solaceon due to the immense amount of influence they wielded. The tournament was happening on their land, and they'd given up a Hyper Beam TM as a reward. They had skin in the game.

It didn't come close to explaining anything. The entire picture was still blurry, and I still had no idea why they would want Harry Rodriguez to win. If he'd been a part of their family, I would understand…

But it was something to look into.

"We need to look into the Hunters."