C090 - The volcanic eruption

AN: Holy macaroni! My Alpha Chad MC didn't immediately spit in Giovanni's eye and called him a cuck, he's such a pussy! He didn't even insult his mother once in the three sentences they spoke back and forth, clearly he's acting like a subservient dog with no spine! He said "Well... no?" instead of "Fuck off bitch, I do what I want!" - what a loser!

Wow, some of you guys brushed away every aspect of my MC's character shown so far. Not once has my MC sought a fight with anyone if you discount him playfully insulting Clair's outfit and yet here you are telling him (me) that he should square up and nut up against one of the most powerful villains he is aware off in this world? What's wrong with him using deflecting answers to de-escalate the situation that hasn't yet come anywhere close to them actually fighting against one another? Why the everloving frick would he respond something like 'We're here to stop you, villain!' or 'Nobody allowed you to ask any questions, scum. Leave these innocent pokemon and turn yourself in to the authorities!' or better yet 'Go Pickachu, use Thunderbolt on Giovanni and kill him before he releases his pokemon!'

You guys are nuts, and whoever agreed with that sentiment in last chapter's comment should clearly read other novels with generic Thundercock Alpha MC instead of this. There's plenty of novels and fanfics where the MC has the same ever repeating bland 'heroic' personality, so you have a lot to choose from. This is a sliceoflife novel, and when given the choice of becoming pokemon champion like in every 12 year old's wet dream, he instead chose to live on a farm in bumfuck nowhere. I don't get how someone could think a person like that would tell someone like Giovanni to fuck off after 89 chapters...

And Lord Arceus bless my nuts and be my witness. If anyone has anything negative to say about how strong Giovanni's pokemon are in relation to Pete's after this chapter, I'll stop releasing chapters for a week.

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To Pete, it felt like the tension in the air was so thick you could cut it with a butter knife. The waters of Team Rocket ran deep, so he refrained from openly involving the league when he found their camp earlier. Who knew how many of their higher ups were still in Giovanni's pocket after all? There was no need to paint yet another target on his back.

He did send his findings to Elm on an encrypted channel he had learned how to access over the long time he spent in this world, but since he thought he could handle Suicune's mission 'easily', he didn't give the professor a heads up. It would likely mean that it would take quite a while for him to read it. Truly, he had miscalculated.

"In any case, I think you might want to pack up and leave here at a moment's notice," Pete eventually said after gathering enough courage. He hoped it didn't come out as too stand-offish.

"You make it sound like a threat," Giovanni suggested with the same menacing yet polite smile. "Was that a threat?"

"No, my husband merely pointed out the obvious. Your grunts have stirred an ancient fire pokemon, and this place is about to be drowned in lava," Jasmine said while stepping next to Pete.

Courtney did the same and looked at Giovanni with narrowed eyes as she told him, "You might think you and your pokemon are fire-proof, but do you truly want to test out if that suit survives a hit from a grumpy Heatran as old as this continent?"

Giovanni's eyes widened for a brief moment before he regained his calm, "I see. That does indeed change things... now I'm really interested in this 'someone'."

"Yeah, I won't share my sources to someone who justifies abducting children and above all else mass murder as means to an end for his own 'righteous' goals," Pete said, secretly tensing up to guard against retaliation. Right now, Giovanni didn't have any pokemon out, so Pete thought he still had something of a high ground against the ex gym leader.

Yet, it never came. Giovanni simply laughed and replied, "Haha! Discussing morality with you sounds intriguing, but I won't indulge you. Just know that history is written by the victors and that weakness is a sin in this world."

Feeling a little confrontantional despite sharing her aversion to conflict, Jasmine heatedly countered with, "Being weak is not a sin! Staying weak is!"

"Oh? A truly insightful resp...onse," Giovanni answered before being interrupted at the last moment by a giant quake shaking the entire valley.

Turning around, Pete saw a giant plume of lava shooting skyward for a short moment before turning into a constant stream of ash and smoke while the molten rock started raining down in the distance. The air instantly turned even hotter than it already was, and the more and more 'sparks' of lava sputtered out together with the stream of toxic air.

For a fleeting moment, the sweat of all three farm dwellers turned cold. Suicune wanted them to do something against THAT?

Pete, seeing no immediate danger to them thanks to the distance between them and the eruption, turned around to see Giovanni ignoring the rest of their potential argument as he walked toward the cliff with his Magmortar following behind him closely where an Alakazam was waiting for him.

Quite a few Magmar were hot on their heels, but the Arcanine tribe and a few other fire pokemon looked at the eruption in worry, no longer trusting in their ability to resist it. It was much bigger than they had anticipated after all.

The bigger Growlithe and the evolved Arcanine were big enough to flee from the imminent disaster, but they only recently hatched quite a few newborn and they didn't seem to have enough time to rescue all of them.

Pete addressed them with a loud shout as he started wearing a respiratory mask he had prepared for him and the girls, "HEY! Bring your small and slow to me! The three of us will put them in a pokeball so that we can rescue all of you! I swear upon my bond to my pokemon that I will free all of them the moment the danger is over!"

Over his bond, he asked Reuniclus and Mega Milotic to be as convincing as possible, to vouch for his character, and many fire pokemon started cautiously walking toward them. Pete opened one of his bags for the three of them that he had filled with almost five hundred used regular pokeballs he had on hand to tinker with. Though most of those were newer second-hand purchases for just this occasion.

As they started catching small Houndour and Growlithe en masse, Pete ordered the ground pokemon to create a moat further back to make the lava flow away from them as it started to slowly fill the valley. It would buy them more time, especially if they could use their combined effort to connect to moat to that gigantic cave they found near the Team Rocket Camp. If the grunts were still present inside and not yet cooked thanks to Heatran's awakening, it would simply be their bad luck, Pete judged.

Fearing that water would only make the air burn more with the resulting scalding hot water vapor, Pete instead asked their water pokemon and everyone else capable of it, lead by Mega Milotic, to use ice type moves in the general direction of the lava. He tossed them a bag filled with Leppa Berries to make sure they had enough energy until they were done and asked the psychic pokemon that didn't know any ice moves to distribute them as they saw fit.

When they were done, all three trainers were exhausted from the sheer heat alone so they balled almost all of their own pokemon once they were done counting if they were complete and asked Pete's shiny Reuniclus to use Teleport to bring them out of the basin.

Once there, the three quickly started drinking cool water and looked around. Pete had asked Reuniclus to port them near the edge to see the consequences of the eruption, but the eruption was still happening. Pete feared that something happened to Suicune, but he simply couldn't yet care if it did.

Many more pokemon that weren't of the fire type lived near the forest, and many were too stubborn to leave despite the warnings they were given.

Hot volcanic ash rained on the forest and started small fires here and there that thankfully didn't start a giant wildfire yet. Still, many smaller pokemon were starting to get burned and hurt. This was not what he had imagined when Suicune asked for help and said it would deal with its fiery 'brethren'.

Spreading out as much as they could, Pete's fairy pokemon started using Misty Terrain to offset the burning as best they could in the area they influenced and Pete sent out his pokemon to search for anyone that needed help. Flygon and his other non-Jumpluff pokemon capable of flight started scouring the area while his water pokemon finally started using water moves to drench the plants, shielding them from the fire as best they could.

Up there in the forest, the heat was much more bearable, so the resulting water vapor wasn't scalding. The air still felt heavy despite the masks, so Pete handed over his specially prepared weapons to both girls: his special 'medical' Rinka Berries to ease their irritated airways and Moomoo milk infused with cooked Occa Berries. With a little honey to sweeten it, the drink tasted like cold chocolate milk, yet not as heavy. Combined with the fact that Occa Berries were the berries that made it so fire type energy didn't hurt as much, Pete hoped they would lessen the impact the heat had on them.

His and the girl's pokemon had already eaten Occa Berries in preparation, so they were doing rather okay, even Courtney's Mamoswine, who actively used its powers to cool down the air around the team now that it was released once more.

With all his pokemon spread thin, Pete and the girls were rather vulnerable. So, ever the opportunist, Giovanni chose this exact moment to teleport close to them with his Alakazam, if it even was his.

"You have something that belongs to me. I wish to trade you for it," Giovanni offered with his scary smile as he released a Nidoking and a Beedrill from his pokeballs. No, scratch that. A Nidoking and a Mega Beedrill. "Your lives for that bag of pokeballs."

"I'm afraid that won't be possible. I promised their tribe we'd release them once the danger was over," Pete refused with clenched fists after a few silent moments where he called on his two most powerful pokemon over their bond. As much as he didn't want to fight the man, he wouldn't give almost three hundred impressionable young pokemon over to a villain as unscrupulous as him without a fight.

"I spent quite some time with those pokemon you rescued, and I'm sure they would be delighted to be in my service. So I'm afraid I'll have to insist."

Ever vigilant, Pete discussed a few very basic silent hand signals with the girls, and he used those to warn them of the impending confrontation since he wouldn't back down if he could help it.

Pete's Gardevoir lifted the three trainers slightly into the skies to guard them from sneak attacks via the ground and prepared a Light Screen and Reflect over all three humans as Reuniclus and both mega evolved pokemon of the group appeared between them and Giovanni with a Teleport.

Mega Beedrill had the ability Adaptability, which drastically increased the power of STAB moves. So Pete looked on in horror as Mega Beedrill went from hovering on the spot to right in front of Mega Milotic in an instant using the move Poison Jab twice with both arms in quick succession.

The first move was a clean hit, while Milotic managed to dodge out of the way of the second jab. As she tried to retaliate, Beedrill was already speeding backward with the move U-turn and used it twice once more to arrive in front of Mega Torterra as it used X-Scissor on the grass/ground pokemon.

By far, Mega Beedrill was the fastest pokemon Pete had seen live in battle. His bad premonition was only increased as Nidoking prepared the move Fissure, but thankfully nobody was instantly maimed by it thanks to the timely intervention of both a sprinting Golurk who came out of the forest at his maximum speed and Reuniclus, the ever-watchful master strategist.

Reuniclus had simultaneously started using setup moves together with a wide application of Gravity, recognising that with the psychic typing advantage over both poison pokemon, she would be paramount to turn the odds in their favor. The shiny psychic pokemon had just prepared a bunch of Future Sight near Nidoking when Mega Beedrill once more used his overwhelming speed to arrive in front of her using X-Scissor once more.

Barely bringing a Protect up in time, Reuniclus quickly gathered her wits and used a prepared Ally Switch with Golurk in a practiced fashion to trade places with the giant golem.

Golurk had a Fire Punch ready in both hands and swung them toward the Beedrill who was mid-swing of another X-Scissor, yet Beedrill managed to dodge both attacks enough for them to be barely glancing blows that didn't even stop it from completing its not very effective attack.

It didn't matter, though, that Golurk was resistant to bug type attacks because Adaptability increased the powerful move enough that the Beedrill managed to land a signifact blow to Pete's most defensive pokemon.

Meanwhile, a mad Reuniclus used the short moment to instead combine an attack toward Nidoking and unleashed an Ice Beam toward it together with Mega Milotic. Having had enough time to set up, Flygon used that moment to swoop down and 'finish off' the Nidoking with a Steel Wing, but it turned out Nidoking came out of those attacks with barely a sheet of ice covering it and it seemingly used the abundant ice energy near it to greet Flygon with a devastating Ice Punch.

With a sickening crunch, the four times effective move landed squarely on Flygon's head as her steel clad wings barely left a knick, a small papercut, really, on the hide of Nidoking that already stopped bleeding only a few precious drops later.

"With just two pokemon," Pete mumbled in daze as he watched his and the girl's powerful pokemon getting manhandled by just two enemies. At that moment, he saw Giovanni getting two more balls ready.

"Oh shit."