Chapter 1
The blizzard’s intensity increased greatly, and would leave most shaking in cold and with a bad bout of hypothermia, but for Kiyoshi this was nothing. Years of training on this desolate mountain had made him immune to such cold and the thin atmosphere, and even that was nothing compared to the icy wastelands that were his heart. He had left everything behind him that day when he burned what was once his home.
Or so they said. To Kiyoshi, it was no home. It was but a temporary shelter for him to reside in until he finally outgrew it, to display the cunning he had learnt from the ninja academy. How ironic that they were destroyed by the very same powers that made them strong!
He had learnt much from them, but what gratitude would he have to a bunch of murderers? He himself knew that if he ever got captured on a job, he would not expect mercy or empathy for them either. That was the way he lived. Now in a way, he directed his inner hatred for the cause of good.
Working as a mercenary for the World Security Organization. On the surface, the WSO was a peacekeeping organization behind the “diplomatic” solutions to threats posed by other organizations that abused the power of Pokemon for their own ends, such as the Aqua/Magma threat of years ago.
But underneath the facade of pacifism and peaceful diplomacy, the WSO had an unknown number of mercenaries under its employ. Their paychecks funded by the so-called defense budget. Kiyoshi smirked, envisioning the expressions of certain taxpayers if they knew where their money was going.
Typically the WSO never sent them on “death jobs”. Most assignments involved merely breaking in, and in the boss’s words, “claiming what is supposed to be ours anyway”. And of course there were also the almost daily recon missions. Kiyoshi himself had many experiences with the common two jobs, and had never actually been assigned to a “death job”.
At any rate, even if one day he did get assigned to one, unlike most of the other mercenaries, he had no nagging conscience to hold him back. He had been trained in the ninja academy to feel nothing. Lack of emotion was the key, along with numbness to pain and hardship, to the door of success. The same was also important in the training of one’s Pokemon.
Naturally in recent years such a view would be considered as unorthodox, with top trainers swearing by it. Then again, most of these trainers were in reality weak, and only made it to the top by pure luck, as well as the fact that everyone else practiced the “kindness” method. However, one century earlier, such focused training was the norm, and anyone practicing the “kindness” method would be ridiculed.
Kiyoshi had no idea how it had changed. Trainers practicing the kindness method typically were completely ignorant of the finer aspects of battling. If one spoke of effort values, or natures, and sometimes embarrassingly, even type match-ups, practitioners of the kindness method would simply shrug in confusion. They had absolutely no knowledge of where true power originated.
The mechanical side to the art of battling had been completely lost in a hundred years. Or almost at least. Still practitioners of the mechanical method survived, and it was from then whom Kiyoshi learned these lost arts.
He looked to his Pokemon, a Weavile, Combusken and a Glaceon. They had done well enough, if not far better than most Pokemon their level, he had spent all these years on increasing their effort values to the limit, and finally he was done. They were ready for anything the outside world could throw at them.
“We’re trekking down, it’s time.”
