Kazuki tossed his head as the tanks made their way into the city, peering out through the battlement, flanked by a Squirtle and a Charmeleon, then glancing down at the rocky surface as his army stopped firing and his enemy's force did the same.

“I see we've been welcomed.”

“Spill it. What are you here for?!” he shouted at the tank column in unison with his former rival. The tanks moved past him, their treads ignoring the countless holes in the road, the master ball logo of Silph shining as the mass of gray rolled slowly past rudely, or perhaps merely stoically, its pilot automated. Did tanks have human pilots?

“Ceasefire?” his opponent asked, and the blue-haired boy glared at him with a glare of hatred typically restricted to those who had killed one's longtime pokemon, then nodded. Suddenly, the ground shook and a small fissure made its way to the tanks, but one large cannon slowly swerved and blasted the assailant (and the rival's trenches and a few people and pokemon which were a bit too close) into dust.

“Rhyperior!” Kazuki yelled, his cape billowing in the wind as he slowly rose eight feet into the air, the sidewalk and pavement shattering as the heavily armored beast emerged through the ground.

The tanks swerved to fire, but the plated pokemon grabbed the first missile and hurled it back at them. As its bright red explosion shook the vehicles, the behemoth fell to all fours, its horn spinning, and charged. The trenches were soon emptied as flashes of red light enveloped each side. A few smaller pokemon ran out to fight alongside the so-called “big guns” – two Blastoise and a Steelix on Kazuki's side, a Primeape, a Hypno, a Golem, a Pinsir, and a Flareon on his enemy's – not that such distinctions mattered. Most of the smaller, low-level pokemon remained in their pokeballs, their trainers judging that sending them out would do nothing more than throw their lives away. The tanks panicked, each turning in a different direction and positioning their cannons low to the ground as Rhyperior's spiralling horn pierced through the metallic lavender armor, impaling a human dressed in combat fatigues on his horn.

As the soldier's blood poured onto the Rhyperior's thick drill, two more cannons fired, the enormous rocky beast reared back in pain, and Kazuki went flying onto the rooftop, holding out his pokeball as it fired a wide red laser to engulf his proud pokemon.

The other pokemon charged, the sole exception a Hypno whose focused psionic waves appeared to keep one tank's treads in place, although its cannon was not slowed by even a nanosecond. The smaller pokemon – mostly Squirtle and Goldeen, but a few Charmander and Bellsprout – launched their attacks, a few run over as the mechanized vehicles rumbled towards the sidewalks. The Golem's roll struck the tank with an enormous force insufficient to crack steel and it bounced harmlessly into the air, the beam from its pokeball skillfully fired by its trainer to engulf it as it fell, hitting it seconds before the approaching missile could. The Pinsir emulated the Rhyperior, its white and spiky horns cleanly slicing the roof off one of the cannons, but when it landed another tank rammed it, knocking it out, then slowly ran it over while firing a large missile into in the horde of trainers, killing about fifteen of them in the blast. The primeape did the same, but to even less success – although its fists glowed with energy, passion and ki, although it was surrounded by fighting spirit, the white monkey-like limbed ball's punch only made it sprain its fist on the tank's thick armor. As it clenched its fist in pain, the vehicle retaliated with a fatal gunshot. The smaller pokemon, too, fought fiercely, some firing from afar, some charging suicidally. Their attacks were harmlessly deflected and they served only to slow the vehicles' movement.

But the sounds of cannon-fire and “Rhyperiorrrrrrrr!” were not ignored. As the tanks took aim at the crowd of fighters, a new army of pokemon which tripled it in size replaced the old, its numbers swelling by the second. Kazuki glanced around from his rooftop lookout at the various faces he saw in the army – men and women who he had quarreled with, allied with, a few whom he utterly hated, all who typically led forces of their own.

Had they been conquered? Moreover, had they been conquered, not killed themselves, and thrown their strength behind a common leader? It was difficult even to comprehend, and yet they were all together with their armies behind them, not fighting one another.

“I don't know who ordered these tanks, but we aren't going to go down without a fight!” one of them yelled from the crowd – he identified the voice as belonging to a man named Mobihiro – and the troops positioned themselves, Sandslash, Geodude, and Diglett in unison shaking the road while a group of Wartortle made an amphibious vehicle seem like a necessity for this battle, soaking the roads with all the water of a typhoon.

Strategy? But... who's leading them? Kazuki wondered.

“Oi, Kazuki!” one of the soldiers yelled – soldiers? Looking into the crowd, there were soldiers, but he found that one in every ten faces or so he recognized; had the leaders sent their lesser followers back as a show of strategy or good faith? “Come down here and join us!”

“I was fighting 'em from the start, Makoto! Nice of you to show up!”

“Is that playfulness I hear?” Mobihiro asked, smirking as Kazuki smiled and a familiar crobat flew suddenly for his rooftop. He stepped back nervously, cautiously, then watched as it stopped, grinning at the sight of a young man named Tetsu being mobbed by his rival generals until a blue-clad warlord called Shin stood up, pokeball in hand, and shot a beam of light for the crobat – the pokemon, sincere in its mission, quickly dodged and charged for him, and he reached for his belt, throwing at it an empty pokeball as he climbed down the stairs from the roof.

The pokeball had no sooner enveloped the crobat then it released it again, but Kazuki was running, the pokeball left abandoned on the roof as he heard the sounds of cannon fire and pokemon screams.

“Traitor!” Mobihiro yelled at Tetsu, his lunatone projecting a weak, one-way shield in front of them as he delivered a headbutt to the would-be-assassin. “This isn't the time to settle old scores!”

“Yeah!” a woman called Nuriko added, glaring at him with fierce, arbok-like eyes. “I mean, sure, I could use control of Kasumi Square and a captive audience for my restaurant... but you don't see me taking advantage of this situation to kill you! Strength through unity – it's what we need right now, so shut up and fight the tanks!”

Kazuki glanced out again at the fight, suddenly shaken by a familiar yet out-of-place face in the crowd, or rather three of them; he'd know her Gyarados and Onix anywhere. As they snaked into combat, the cannons fired through the Lunatone's Reflect and the warlords scattered,a few of the less prepared ones caught in the blast. “Charizard, time to blow up some tanks!” Shin called out, and a missile burnt up in fire as the black beast slashed its claws through another.

As soon as those words were spoken, the bishounen curled up into a ball, squatting sadly in the corner of the lobby of the building which he had so recently used as footing for a dramatic landing of survival. It was a hotel, apparently, judging from the desk in front and the maroon carpet below him. Had he been in a calmer state he would've noted about how it served tourists, how it must've fallen on hard times lately, taken note of the receptionist's worried face and the desk's worn condition, but had he been in a calmer state he would've accepted his ally's support and tried to do something to help out in the battle – instead, he was in the fetal position, the image of a charizard-filled sky still focused in the lens of his mind.

Outside, Hotaru had shrunk back at first, but then shook her head: Charmander was among the three traditional starters, the great Blue had counted it as his strongest companion, there had to be plenty of strong trainers suffering who had made that choice, plenty of Charizard who fought against the war. Besides, this one was black and it sparkled when it came out of its pokeball – the ones who had clouded the sky were orange. Swallowing her fears, she ordered her pokemon to fight on.

Surprisingly, it was Mobihiro's Venusaur who did the most damage. Its vines were wrapped around the cannons of two tanks, its feet dug into the ground as it engaged them in a fierce tug of war. The Pidgeot force which had proved so valuable in Lavender was beginning to reconstitute itself, as were more than a few ghosts, Fearow, and Noctowl, commanding the skies and providing... a small bit of wind resistance for the force. Fantasies of speeding around the enemy's shots were dashed by the regrrettable fact that none of them actually bothered to fire upwards, presumably viewing the pack of pokemon on the ground as far more fearsome enemies.

“Sky attack!” a voice yelled from atop one of the Pidgeot, and a few of them flew over the sidewalk and glowed light blue, fast releasing blasts of Pidgeot-shaped energy into the side of a tank as a Snorlax tore into another with a Giga Impact. The ground shook as a Ditto shifted deep within the Dugtrio-built tunnels, its size massively expanding as it slowly took on cetacean features and a blue-and-white color scheme. The tanks fell as the ground crumbled, the hatch of one tank swung open to reveal a clean-cut man in a business suit at the controls, and a cry of “We surrender!” pierced the noise of the battle, accompanied by a hastily-improvised white flag.

I'm on the road to become the greatest trainer

The path from the Indigo Plateau to Viridian City was never an easy one to travel, and now that the resistance had holed themselves out in Victory Road, Masuo found it harder to get through than ever. No sooner was a battle won than another challenge was made, ambushes awaited around almost every corner, and in the midst of every fight there was always the risk of an angry trainer attacking from the shadows.

And I won't quit 'til I'm number one.

This had been his mantra through the pokemon league, one he had held to through every tournament from here at Indigo to the Sinnoh battle tower. And in time, he had triumphed: his charizard were stronger than any pokemon anyone else was able to handle – but as a year of easy victories in challenges from trainers vastly beneath him went by, as the other elites adhered to his vision, but failed utterly to provide him with worthwhile combat, he had grown bored.

But he wouldn't quit. There was more than one way to define “number one” – and to be number one in the world, as far as he could see, meant to conquer it. To this end he had already built a vast empire, conquering what he could hold and pillaging what he couldn't – Pewter, Cinnabar, Mt. Silver, Blackthorn, the Lake of Rage, Cherrygrove, and endless small towns surrounding Viridian and Fuchsia, although the cities themselves held out. (As did Seafoam – it was said that Articuno had surrounded it in a dome of impenetrable ice and the pokemon there lived their lives in peace, ignoring the outside world.)

The new pokemon battles he had enjoyed, commanding armies instead of one or two fighters, learning and mastering strategy on a whole new level, sometimes(like now) even being challenged... they were fun, in a way which the old ones had long since ceased to be. Besides, even if it got a bit hard, he had come too far by now to simply give up.

We keep on trying

For Osamu, the struggle had never been an easy one. It had taken him fifteen years to make it from Pallet Town to Victory Road, his charizard and raticate giving him valuable assistance for the whole of their lives. He didn't think of himself as the pokemon world's Rock Lee, making up for lack of talent with an insane work ethic or anything like that, but he always got the feeling he was working a little harder than his peers.

And then we try some more

But setback after setback, gym loss after gym loss, he wouldn't give up. He had battled his way through Victory Road, finally making it on the third try and impressing others with his determination – it had been like that at most gyms, as well. Even with his starters perishing in the initial battle for Indigo, he had finally come into his own as a leader, fighting Masuo's ambition in battle after battle of this long campaign.

To stay together and find a place worth fighting for!

The pokemon he had grown close to, the friends he had made in the resistance... Osamu was thankful for all of them. They battled on, even with only a cave to protect; a cave of tradition and shared memories, a cave whose peace he had slowly come to want to protect more than any city.

And maybe somewhere out there – Viridian, Fuchsia, or some distant land in Sinnoh and Hoenn – there really was a place worth fighting for.

I'm on the road to Viridian City.

Masuo steeled himself, looking out as Osamu came into sight, than calmly walked forwards, hands in his pockets, each trying to clutch as many pokeballs as he could. He would walk the road to Viridian City even if it meant turning its dirt and stone red with blood – and when he was done with that, he would subdue the Boss and add the city to his collection.

“Gotta catch 'em all,” he mused sardonically.

The man continued walking, but Osamu was silent, his old enemy's face steeled as his visage came into view. “Persistent, aren't we?”

“Your reign ends here,” he answered coldly, firmly, with a confidence wholly unsuited to one who had fought him in five engagements and been trounced each time.

“Oh, really?” Masuo asked, his eyes mad with power as he released four Charizard at once, then reached into his pant and coat pockets, pulling out four more with each throw until his arsenal of thirty had made their appearance. “Burn him to a crisp!”

“Baka,”Osamu answered, opening a timer ball as he was engulfed in flames.

At this sight, Masuo began to laugh, his eyes on the brink of madness as he watched his enemy's incineration – “You call me a fool? You call me a fool as you burn away to your death?! You're the moron!” But he paid little intention to the color of the flames, a shade more yellow than orange. When the fire cleared away, an enormous moltres hovered in its place, the equal in size of two of Masuo's large pokemon.

“Even the legendaries oppose you,” Osamu said, the moltres flapping its wings as the charizard were pushed back, but only about a foot. “They see you for the danger you are to this world, they hate you for all the pokemon you killed. Articuno and Zapdos have already joined the fight, and as soon as Mew can get in touch with Mewtwo, they will do the same.”

“How far the legends have fallen. Proud Moltres, the never-tamed in the land of the strongest, the bane of countless trainers, sometimes an ally, but never captured... now submits itself to a five-time loser like you?” Masuo taunted.

“Be careful. You're making Moltres mad.”

“Attack.”

A couple of the charizard fled back to their pokeballs in fear as the rest charged, their wings gaining a gray, rocky edge. Moltres focused its eyes, projecting a red shield, then flapped its enormous wings, shooting forth a strong whirlwind accompanied by blazing flames.

As the first charizard reached it, the Moltres changed this tactic, ducking under the stone edge to pierce its stomach with a deadly drill peck. The next slammed into it, but the firebird of legends stood tough, opening its beak and sending a large fire spin from its mouth to trap eight more of its foes.

But the western dragons continued, unabated. A barrier of red light continued to protected Osamu as he shouted his next order – “Heat Wave” – and the room's temparature warmed to hellish proportions, Masuo visibly sweating in the excess heat, but his charizard 's tail flames only grow bigger . A couple of them slammed the Moltres as one more clawed at its wing, the rest positioning themselves to join in the next assault.

“Air Slash!” Osamu yelled, and through the mass of orange scales, Moltres saw its target, flapping its wings to send Masuo a bladed rip in the air as the box of light suddenly burst into a thick wall of flames. Three Charizard swiftly maneuvered between him and the attack, loyally sacrificing themselves for their trainer. The first two were cut cleanly in half, their upper halves flying bloodied onto the ground, but the third was only cut most of the way through; its girth stopped the tear.

While the slash flew, ten Charizard slammed into the Moltres, then one more chomped its beak. The fierce heat was endured by the fire-type horde, and the wounded pokemon could do little to protect itself as the false dragons tore chunks of flesh from its wings.

Mercifully, another Stone Edge cut through the golden bird's thin neck, and the legend of Moltres at last came to its end.

In a small, sterile, hollowed-out cave near Cerulean, Ayane was awakened from her warm bed by a sudden pain in her right arm. Her voice took a disturbing, uncharacteristic and dispassionate tone as she rose to her feet and spoke to the silent room: “Moltres has been slain.” These words said, the girl slowly, purposefully changed into a sleeveless shirt and walked out of her new home.

Throughout the rest of Kanto, Saffron City was typically viewed as a nasty emblem of the evils of capitalism, and there was no figure within the city's walls who faced more of Kanto's ire than Silph Hanako, the current head which bore her family's name. While it could be fairly said that most people had long ago ceased to care about politics in general, very few of them harbored all that much love for “counter-revolutionaries”, and every now and then activists descended on the city, trying to crush the bourgeoise only to be turned back by its thick walls and well-trained army.

This did not, however, mean that Silph Corporation's products were ignored – far from it. While advances were certainly made elsewhere (the Pewter Museum, laboratories on Cinnabar, etc.) Silph's research and development team was second to none, and most people found themselves preferring the company's advanced pokeballs, strategy guides and other products to their principles.

Hanako had listened to a brave reporter or two come in to ask her if she had a conscience or a shred of sympathy for the less fortunate, and while the outside press was banned from the rest of Saffron, that didn't stop her from reading what they said. When they called her counter-revolutionary, she could not deny it, but her belief remained that the revolution was wrong. Marx and Nosaka, Yamamato and Shigenobu – they were all idealistic, honest people, but after reading their works she didn't find herself in agreement with all that many of their ideas – and those few which they did agree on (women's rights, mostly) were on the non-economic matters deemed to be lesser parts of their theories.

“Communism is wrong,” she had said, if privately in her bedroom at night; if she said it aloud, even her business partners would come to hate her. Certainly, there had been a few abuses in the old days, but all the revolution had done was to drag the rest of Japan down to the level of the poorest factory worker. The revolution had allowed people laziness, and lazy they were – how many of them in the outside world even worked twenty hours a week? If not for the Joy and Jenny clans, society would probably have collapsed. The communist regime had destroyed innovation, forsaking the competitions which let the world advance for meaningless pokemon battles, and whenever someone started to earn something through hard work, the party simply hammered them down. Their social policies (apart from female emancipation and public schooling, both solid and necessary reforms which she would've made as well) were if anything even worse, removing from people their family names, renaming Japan the “pokemon world” and carving it into ecological regions, destroying every family history with the abolition of surnames and countless other "reforms" And it wasn't because they had bad people behind the revolution it or anything – if that had been the case, it would've been horror on a scale never seen in human history – but simply because, when you got down to it, this was what “equality” truly meant.

In Saffron City, under Hanako's rule, people were not equal, and she was happy to have it that way. Business, capitalism, and free enterprise flourished, and there was certainly a hierarchy of class. The best, like Hanako, were on top, the ones in the middle were working as managers or doctors or running their own small businesses. The worst, the ones who never amounted to anything, worked for forty hours a week in the factories, manufacturing advanced pokeballs and video game systems in the old days, but now the games had been replaced for the most with airplanes, tanks, and guns. But, as Hanako took care to point out, it wasn't an aristocracy. If a factory worker turned out to be better than that, they studied at night, took extra hours, saved their money, invested well, and clawed their way to the top; if a company owner was incompetent, their business went bankrupt and they joined the lower class. Sure, she had a great mansion filled with luxuries, and there were a few homeless people or families trapped in too-small apartments, but it wasn't her job to help them if they failed in life – they had time, they could work harder.

Yes, she had inherited a majority interest in Silph Co. from her father, and he had inherited it from his. And under each of their tenures as head of the company its assets grew and it expanded its customer base – and why shouldn't a skillful CEO be able to pass down their wealth to their children? Besides, as her own business showed, children of good people tended to do better than the children of the bad – she couldn't take some baby out of the hospital and expect that it would grow up with her hardworking spirit and business aptitude!

Sure, there were no elections in Saffron, as the marxist press was so adamant about pointing out, but Silph provided the necessary security services as a charity for the people! What more of a “state” did they need – they couldn't exactly have freedom when the dregs at the bottom voted to take the stuff of the people on top?! And sure, the city was walled and the gates were patrolled by armed guards, but the outside world was full of revolutionaries intent on imposing their system on Saffron City! What, was she just supposed to let them in? (Allegations that people who attempted to leave the city are routinely shot she dismissed as communist lies.) And yes, rioters had occasionally been supressed, and there were a couple of deaths: if they wanted to live, they could stop spreading chaos.

It was indeed true, Hanako stated, that she had strengthened her grip on Saffron City in recent months, and that she was building up an army among the strongest in Kanto. But times of crisis called for strict leadership and her policy had led Saffron City well. Was she supposed to run it like Vermilion, where the state and its army had withered away and they were powerless to co-ordinate an effective defense of their harbor? Saffron was the biggest city in Kanto, and it deserved the biggest army – for what else would keep the Charizard at bay? And yeah, she had invaded Cerulean, but it wasn't like she was a conqueror or anything – she just wanted to bring the city order and free the masses living in terror in the midst of that bloody anarchy. It wasn't her fault they decided to go with “slaughter” the moment they saw her tanks.

Besides, who else would lead? Yes, typically it was gym leaders who took power, but the “Saffron City Gym” was an outfit she had thrown together herself, recruiting a few Magneton trainers from the Vermilion gym and shipping in a couple from Johto and Sinnoh, paying for a couple Scizor, Skarmory and Metagross, offering them space to train for a year or so, then having them challenge Natsume as she had so long ago challenged the Fighting Dojo. Psychic has the advantage over fighting, and steel resists psychic along with just about anything else: the results were obvious before the battle even began. And when even the gym leader was her puppet, obviously it would fall to the wealthiest, most successful person in the city to take decisive action.

Sure, some said she was heavy-handed – but at the same time, Saffron was still a sparkling metropolis, far better than even Celadon as a place to live. If it was so bad, why did the refugees flock there? (Not that she let them in or anything.) The lockdown was nothing less than necessary, really: spies couldn't be let into the city in wartime, refugees would flood it with population, and the right-thinking residents of Saffron understood the directive on remaining in the city as a necessary wartime measure.

Really, she thought as she commenced preperations for her next attempt to bring order to Cerulean, she wasn't a bad person.

“They'll be back,” Shin noted, the spiky-haired warlord looking out at the ruined tanks, his Scyther holding its arm blade to one of the tank pilots. “If what he says is true, anyway.”

“It has to be,” Mobihiro answered. “It makes sense, and no one's gonna lie with their life on the line like that.”

“Which begs the obvious question...” another general began, his face shrouded in deep red hair.

“Where is Kazuki?” Nuriko asked.

“No, the other obvious question – how are we going to defend our city?” the general finished, his voice showing exasperation with his frequent rival's playful tone.

“I have one more,” another community leader said, this one from atop his Pidgeot. “What exactly are we defending?”

“Ourselves,” Tetsu said plainly. “And our power.”

“Well, duh. But... is that really all?” another man asked. “When you took up arms for the first time after the massacre at the gym, were you only thinking of yourselves?”

“Why did you join in, then?” an elderly woman asked, her pokeball in hand.

“My neighborhood was being squeezed between Mobihiro's goons and Tetsu's. I had to do something to stop it... something to protect my friends, neighbors, and family,” he answered, his gaze broken and forlorn.

“This won't be easy,” Mobihiro analyzed. “When you look at who was fighting... it was really just us, our best friends, and our highest-ranking subordinates. Although we united and captured some solid artillery intact, we've taken so many casualties that I can't even be sure if this battle leaves us in a stronger position than before. Furthermore, we're stuck balancing a very delicate power dynamic with soldiers who could turn on us any moment, and while we knew how to fight with the pokemon who were killed, there's no one here trained in piloting a tank. When the people cry out for order and join on the side of the invaders, we're done for.”

“So what do you recommend?”

“We need to appoint ourselves a commander. A real leader, someone who can keep all these rivalries under wraps and make sure the only fighting in the city is against the guns of Saffron.”

“So all this noble analysis was just another attempt at a power grab?” the old woman said, smirking.

“It's a good idea,” Tetsu admitted. “The problem is finding the right leader – for obvious reasons, it can't be any of us.”

“Yeah,” Nuriko agreed. “And it can't be one of our subordinates, either. It'll have to be someone strong enough to stand toe-to-toe with one of us, someone who can get everyone else on his or her side”

“That's easy enough,” the red-haired general said. “Pending new elections, I shall reluctantly serve as interim commander-in-chief"

“New elections? Are you insane?” another of them asked. “We're not out here fighting just so that we can give up power!”

“You're forgetting that a promise can easily be broken without consequence, so long as your side has all the guns,” he said, smiling. “Now, who do we choose...”

Trembling and nervous, her face contorted into a somewhat megalomaniac grin, Hotaru lifted her hand.

The flyers had been passed out. The generals had dramatically exhorted the people to cease their pointless fighting and prepare to turn their arms against the invader And for a single, benevolent Friday, peace suddenly fell upon Cerulean City and its former empire.

When the announced time came, Hotaru walked out onto the front steps of the gym, the flag Mizuki had designed tightly wrapped like a towel around her lithe and beautiful form. “People of Cerulean,” she began, then waited five minutes as the crowd erupted in an applause which she wondered about – was it for her looks, for the statement her outfit made, or only for the memories?

Cerulean still had a city hall, but it had fallen into disrepair, ignored even by the warlord in whose territory it fell. For a couple weeks, duly elected councilors continued to meet there, but they were corrupt and unimpressive men whose edicts were met by the populace by a collective shrug as the people divided themselves up into warring camps – in time, the councilors had split in two after a particularly heated argument, each side claiming victory and debating rules of procedure, and their leaders eventually became little more than two more rival warlords, their powers each restricted to a couple small neighborhoods.

It was the gym which had become the seat of power, and Cerulean was a city where most still felt that Mizuki had the right idea - before she went insane, sold them all out at Vermilion and killed herself, anyway. With the twin assassinations of Mizuo and Mizuko, the former assistant trainers (who had become high-ranking officials in the Cerulean Army) had split into warring camps, the Mizuoists clamoring for a one-on-one battle to determine who properly led the gym and finding excuses not to let their power be threatened by a fair challenge, the Mizukoites each claiming to be the most skillful general in the city, then slowly testing it against the various “traitors” on the battlefield.

The factions of Mizuko, Mizuki, and Kawada were no more; their leaders had become warlords, and warlords who thought nothing of aligning with someone from an enemy faction against a rival from their own. The smaller parties had occasionally coalesced among leaders who ran their territories in an effort to prove their ideals right – these city blocks tended to be slightly better-run than the rest, but they were by no means immune to either warfare or corruption.

“This city has been attacked,” she said, and the crowd hushed their excitement, the warlords whispering to one another as they did. “Fifteen tanks from Silph Corporation rolled through the gates of the city, intent on conquest. They were fought off by a large group of community leaders.”

When she said “community leaders”, she pointed to the generals, the crowd understanding the euphemism, a few of them disappointed, but most understanding [you said “understanding” twice in one sentence]: the peace was dependent on the warlords, so she at least had to call them what they preferred. “We are facing a new enemy, a powerful one, an enemy who won't rest until they can enslave us to their ‘market’ for profit the same way they did their hometown of Saffron City! I know that many of you are weary – I am too – but we can not afford to lose this war! And we have no chance when we are warring amongst ourselves, or even when we are all fighting hard but with no organization, no leadership, no co-ordination of attacks.

“For this reason, I hereby take interim control of the city. New elections will be held as soon as the situation allows.”

As the generals looked nervously at one another, the crowd, and their pokemon and human followers, the people of Cerulean City (and Lavender Town and countless small villages) erupted into a thunderous applause.

“What do I do?”

Haiiro sat up in the bed, looking around his new secret base – no, with no other base, this was his new home. Ayane had been distant from him ever since the recent incident – sad, but it was understandable – and when he stopped by her place to try and see what was going on, she was nowhere to be found.

Had she gone somewhere? Panicking, he had asked that same question to a few of his friends, only to be given answers which only intensified said panic; the rest had not glimpsed her, either. Of course, she could be okay, searching for solitude a bit further from there – it wasn't like girls just vanished into thin air.

And then there were politics to think about. Hotaru, the classmate he had so long admired, had thrown in her lot with the warlords and somehow became commander in chief of Cerulean City's armed forces. And he... just wasn't sure how to react.

Had Hotaru betrayed them, betrayed everything they stood for, prolonged the chaos for the warlords she had so long eschewed in the hopes of taking their power? No – she wouldn't do that, hadn't done that. She was planning something – probably to double-cross the warlords and actually hold the elections in the end after leading them through another war.

Hikaru was their protector, carving out secret bases for everyone he could when their houses were endangered by war. Hotaru was their leader, was everyone's leader – and with her strong pokemon on her side, she was making a difference and would be even if she wasn't leading. Ayane... well, she hadn't exactly recovered from it or anything, but at least she certainly had an impact! Eiji had died heroically, Kazuki was living an influential life, if not a positive one, and he...

He hadn't hurt anyone. Haiiro could be proud of that much. The influence he had, however little, was one to inch the world towards being a better place. But it was very little, consisting solely of emotional assistance for Ayane, and he couldn't even be sure if her influence on the world right now was a positive one.

The world was in chaos. Things had fallen apart. It was times like these when he was supposed to meet his destiny, yet he had spent it being irrelevant – not even training, as his squirtle and geodude so clearly showed: his pokemon weren't nearly strong enough to make any difference with because he had spent the last couple months slacking.

“I can't accept this,” he said. He was going to do something, going to make his destiny – this he silently swore. But as he thought further, he couldn't think of how he was going to change the world.

So instead, he would go into the mountains, level up a bit, and bide his time until the tide of war shifted; so long as he was alive, the opportunity would present itself in time.

As the Saffron army approached, apart from the fear, panic, and curiosity as to the opponent's weaponry, one thought ran through the heads of Cerulean's fighters: “This is not like Vermilion.”

It wasn't that they were on the defensive, with entrenchments and stationary weaponry in place and their own homes risking ruin - or at least, the ones which hadn't been torn up in two months of low-level warfare. It was more in the composure of the opposing army where the comparison lent itself to being made.

While Vermilion City had an assorted crew of pokemon (a few more of certain species, a few less of others), so like Cerulean's that the battle at time became confusing as to whose side people were on, there was no such danger here. The planes, the tanks, the heavily-armored humans holding machine guns – there were very few actual pokemon in the Army of Silph Corporation. What few they had were a few Metagross and Bronzong and other exotic steel types, the only Kanto natives in the group being Magneton and Porygon, and they didn't seem to have even a tenth of Cerulean's force in terms of pokemon used, although the fifty or so tanks and six fighter planes more than made up for this.

Also, unlike the Vermilion battle, this side identified itself on appearance. The soldiers’ uniforms, the painted color of the weaponry and even the few wrong-colored pokemon were all painted the metallic teal shade of a Metagross.

As the enemy tanks slowly raised their cannons, Hotaru shouted for her forces to charge, and a rampaging horde of pokemon poured out onto the street, many of them obliterated (along with a few trainers) in the first gigantic blast.

The pidgeot and noctowl flew up to challenge the warplanes, but it was of little use in the air battle. Certainly, they had speed, but even six of them using take down at once proved ineffective in damaging the body of the plane: it was the tanks, anti-aircraft guns, and Solarbeaming Venusaur on the ground who combined to finally hit one and take it down.

“Close Combat, you idiots!” she yelled, only to have the trainers disappointedly inform her that she was thinking of Staraptor, and a flustered Hotaru soon changed the order to “Brave Bird for the cockpit!"

On the ground, the Rapidash were demonstrating their effectiveness yet again, their type advantage tearing through the few enemy pokemon the opponents had and setting alight quite a few tanks as well. Yet at the same time, they were losing numbers in every shot; even Rapidash had trouble against missiles. As the power of modern weaponry rained down upon the pokemon army, Hotaru quickly improvised a reflect shield using every pokemon which knew that technique. This held out for a minute or so, and as it began to crack an immigrant boy from a distant Hoenn clan sent a wall of Shedinja to harmlessly absorb the attacks, while Blastoise, Gyarados, and Kingdra tried to shoot the projectiles down with water attacks of their own. Apart from the section of the line guarded by the Shedinja, the barrage continued its deadly effects with little hindrance; another desperate strategy, this one of moving rock-types to the front, was what little hindrance it had. Hotaru had been adamant and firm in her order that it was better to return to one's pokeball than to die in combat, and after about twenty seconds, the red light erupting towards her Onix demonstrated her commitment to that plan.

The dugtrio trap which had served both Cerulean and Vermilion so well quickly proved ineffective – the tanks refused to roll over the existing ones, and when they tried to create new ones they found the deep-ground soil too wet to work with and were beaten away by an angry Kabutops.

As the air battle grew increasingly hopeless for Cerulean and the planes began to strafe the ground forces, a group of Raichu (with an Ampharos, a few Pikachu, and a couple Electabuzz mixed in) sent a vast cloud of orange and yellow electricity into the sky, and while the planes could allegedly move fast enough to dodge, the pilots' reflexes were only so quick; each fighter soon exploded into a fireball, raining junk and destruction down on the city.

While the two sides battled, Hotaru's attention was suddenly jerked from the scene by a large crowd running from the east end of the city. “A flanking attack!” she yelled, and the Rapidash and Pidgeot left the main battle, rushing over to see a city in rubble before being quickly obliterated in a bright flash of light.

Panicked, Hotaru wracked her mind for a strategy as her line began to break, trainers fleeing to defend their homes only to see their pokemon killed for lack of cover fire, if they were so lucky as to live on. Among those rushing to fill the gaps, she noticed a Porygon-Z (a red-and-blue one, thankfully), a Scizor or ten which moved with ninja-like quickness, and a Jynx who sung a haunting melody with a very familiar voice.

It was the Jynx which inspired her. “Win the mental battle! Send all your ghosts and psychics to the east – leave the rest to hold 'em off here!”

It was at this point that a young woman about eighteen or nineteen surrounded herself in dull, purple light and walked out into the battlefield.

“Natsume?!” A call went out from within one of the tanks; the steel gym leader coiled back in inexplicable horror.

“Return Saffron to me and I will leave you unharmed.”

As the tanks stopped, a couple surrounded in blue light, a middle-aged woman known from newspaper photos as “Hanako, head of Silph Corporation” stepped out from the biggest and strongest-looking artillery piece, took out a machine gun, and fired a string of bullets through her sphere.

The bullets' speed plummeted as they penetrared the sphere; by the time they struck Natsume, the projectiles moved so slowly as to be harmless. The fighting resumed, bullets, hydro pumps, hyper beams and a sudden roar of time (from Yuji's Smeargle) and the former Saffron leader erupted with a mirror coat, driving a terrified Hanako back into her tank.

But they had seen which tank to strike. The gunfire was unrelenting and mowed down countless would-be-attackers, but one enranged dragonite managed to topple the vehicle in a burst of outrage, punching through the tank's metal hull to crush the driver's neck.

Their leader fallen, the troops of Silph Corporation withdrew in haste, the exhausted men, women, children and pokemon of Cerulean too grateful for the battle's end to harry their retreat.