Protected Ground

Chapter 70

Protected Ground

Snowpoint City looked offensively normal by the time they reached it, and Gray noticed that before almost anything else.

The roads had been cleared since morning, leaving ridges of plowed snow packed along the curbs and a wet shine across the pavement where grit and salt had begun working through the ice. Storefront lights glowed warm against the afternoon gray. People moved in and out of cafés carrying paper cups, bundled trainers stood near the Pokémon Center discussing routes farther north, and somewhere across the street a delivery van had managed to block half a lane while somebody argued with the driver about where it was supposed to unload.

Nobody here knew that less than two hours ago Bastiodon had thrown several tons of capture machinery at an internationally wanted Pokémon hunter.

Gray found the normality irritating, but only for a moment. Absol limped beside him, and that mattered more.

He kept looking down every few steps despite already knowing the gait had not worsened. Absol was putting weight on the injured side, though reluctantly, and the scorched fur along his flank looked uglier now that the snow had melted out of it and left the damage fully visible. Bastiodon followed on Gray’s other side with the slow, deliberate stride he used whenever he was trying to pretend he was less sore than he actually was. Scrapes crossed the forward armor plates, and one section near his left shoulder had taken on a darker discoloration where repeated impacts had transferred force underneath.

Lyra walked between Gray and the curb, quiet for most of the trip from the Ranger vehicle. She had been quiet too long for it to mean nothing, but Gray had enough sense not to ask yet. Whatever she was thinking could wait until both Pokémon had been examined.

The Pokémon Center doors opened automatically as they approached, releasing a wave of warm air that smelled faintly of disinfectant, coffee, wet coats, and the particular sterile sweetness Gray associated with treatment rooms. A nurse at the front desk looked up, took in Bastiodon, Absol, the dried peat across Gray’s clothes, and Lyra’s expression, then stopped halfway through whatever routine intake question she had been about to ask.

“We need imaging,” Gray said.

Her attention moved to Absol first. “What happened?”

“Energy impact to the left flank. High-force, probably nonthermal as the primary effect, though there’s superficial scorching. He was thrown several meters.”

The nurse blinked once, then shifted her gaze toward Bastiodon.

Gray continued before she could ask. “Repeated blunt-force impacts, one direct energy pulse across the frontal armor, possible strain through the left forelimb and shoulder from lifting heavy equipment.”

“How heavy?”

Gray hesitated.

Lyra answered for him. “Several tons.”

The nurse looked back at Gray.

He frowned. “That part was voluntary.”

“Gray.”

“What?”

Lyra gave him a look that suggested this was not the distinction he believed it was.

The nurse apparently decided there were several questions she did not need answered yet. She called for two additional staff members, began intake immediately, and separated the injuries by priority.

Absol went first.

Gray followed until a second nurse stopped him just outside the imaging room and explained that he could wait in the adjoining area. He disliked that answer on principle, but Absol had already walked through the door and had not bothered looking back. Gray took that as permission to be annoyed from a distance.

Bastiodon was taken toward a larger treatment bay designed for heavier Pokémon. He resisted only once, planting his feet when the staff tried to guide him away from Gray.

Gray stepped closer and placed one hand against the edge of his armor. “I’m staying here.”

Bastiodon watched him without moving.

“I’m not leaving.”

That was enough. Bastiodon relaxed fractionally and allowed the staff to lead him inside.

Gray sat down because there was suddenly nothing useful left for him to do.

He hated that too.

Lyra lowered herself into the chair beside him, stretched both legs out, and let her head rest briefly against the wall. Her coat was still damp around the hem, and a thin scratch crossed one glove where broken branches had caught it during the fight. Neither of them spoke for a while.

The waiting area had three vending machines, two television screens turned low, and a plant that had either been artificial from the beginning or had achieved a level of resilience Gray considered suspicious. Somewhere behind the closed treatment-room doors, equipment hummed steadily.

Gray stared at the floor.

Lyra eventually broke the silence. “You could have killed her.”

He looked at her.

There was no accusation in her face, and somehow that made the question worse.

“Yes.”

She turned her head slightly toward him. “Did you mean to?”

Gray looked back toward the treatment doors. He could still picture the machine turning over, the support beam breaking loose, J disappearing behind snow and metal.

“I meant to stop her.”

Lyra waited.

Gray already knew that was not enough. He rubbed one hand over his face and exhaled slowly.

“No. I did not mean to kill her.”

Lyra nodded once, but Gray continued before she could decide that counted as a complete answer.

“But I did not know exactly where the machine was going to land.”

She studied him for a moment.

Gray expected a lecture. He would have accepted one, mostly because he did not yet know what opinion he was supposed to have about the fact himself.

Instead, Lyra said, “Okay.”

He frowned. “Okay?”

“That’s what happened.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not pretending it didn’t.”

“No.”

“Then I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

Gray leaned farther back into the chair. “Most people usually have more opinions.”

“I have several.” She glanced toward the treatment doors. “I’m prioritizing.”

That sounded more like her.

Gray let his head rest against the wall.

For the first time since the attack, his hands had begun shaking slightly.

It was not dramatic. Just enough that he noticed the movement in his fingers when he rested them on his knees. He folded them together and held them still.

Lyra noticed.

She said nothing.

The nurse returned nearly twenty minutes later.

Gray stood too quickly.

“Absol first,” she said. “No fractures. No internal bleeding. Significant soft-tissue bruising along the left flank and a superficial burn across the outer coat and skin. There’s inflammation around two ribs, but no crack. He needs rest and monitoring for worsening pain or breathing changes.”

Gray felt his shoulders loosen before he consciously told them to.

“How long?”

“Light activity for several days. No battling until he’s cleared.”

“That’s fine.”

The nurse gave him the kind of look medical professionals used when someone said something obvious with excessive seriousness.

She continued. “Bastiodon has no fracture either. The armor did its job, but there’s bruising beneath the anterior plates and a mild strain through the left shoulder. I’m more concerned about overuse than structural injury.”

Gray nodded, absorbing each phrase separately.

“Both recoverable?”

“Yes.”

That answer mattered enough that he had to look away for a second.

The nurse seemed to understand why and gave him the moment before adding, “You can see them in a few minutes.”

Lyra smiled faintly beside him.

Gray sat down again.

Neither of them mentioned the fact that his hands had stopped shaking.

Absol hated the cooling wrap.

He endured it because Gray had asked him to, but his expression suggested the indignity would be remembered for years. The wrap covered most of the scorched section along his flank, secured snugly enough to stay in place without restricting his breathing, and Absol had spent the first several minutes glaring at it as though sustained resentment might eventually make it fall off.

Bastiodon was considerably more cooperative. He lay heavily across the padded flooring of the larger recovery room while a thermal compress rested against the strained shoulder. Gray sat on the floor beside him with one hand against the edge of the nearest armor plate, close enough that Bastiodon could feel the contact without Gray putting pressure anywhere sore.

Lyra had gone to get coffee.

Gray suspected she had also used the opportunity to contact the Rangers without making him participate immediately. That was considerate enough that he intended not to mention it.

Absol lay several feet away with his head resting across his paws. Gray watched him for a moment, then said, “You were supposed to dodge.”

Absol opened one eye.

“I know what happened.”

The eye remained open.

Gray sighed. “Thank you.”

That apparently satisfied him. Absol closed the eye again and returned to pretending Gray did not exist.

Gray rubbed his thumb slowly along one of the newer scratches crossing Bastiodon’s armor. The damage was cosmetic. He knew that, and the Center staff had already confirmed there was nothing structurally wrong beneath it.

It still bothered him.

Bastiodon’s armor had collected marks for more than two decades. Tournament battles had left some. Fieldwork had left others. Wild encounters, accidents, bad footing, falling rock, machinery, and a frankly impressive number of stupid decisions had all added their own pieces over the years. Gray could still remember exactly where some of the older scars had come from and had forgotten the origins of others entirely.

These would stay too.

The scorched line from the capture pulse. The new gouges where Salamence had struck. The scrape left by several tons of machinery grinding across armor while Bastiodon lifted it.

Gray knew they would become ordinary eventually.

They were not ordinary yet.

Bastiodon shifted his head until the side of his face pressed lightly against Gray’s shoulder.

Gray stayed where he was.

Lyra returned ten minutes later carrying two coffees and a paper bag. She took one look at him sitting on the floor and held the bag out.

“You need food.”

“I ate earlier.”

“When?”

Gray opened his mouth, then stopped.

Lyra waited.

He thought about it.

She handed him the bag.

Gray accepted it without arguing, which apparently worried her more than resistance would have. Her expression changed slightly as she lowered herself onto the floor opposite him.

“You okay?”

“No idea.”

“Useful.”

“I’m tired.”

“That I believe.”

Gray opened the bag and found a sandwich wrapped inside. He took one bite mostly to prove that the process had begun, then leaned back against the wall beside Bastiodon.

Lyra wrapped both hands around her coffee. “Holt called.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Gray stopped chewing and looked at her.

“The wreck is secured,” she said. “Rangers have the entire site locked down. League investigators are on the way from Veilstone and Jubilife.”

Gray swallowed. “Any sign she doubled back?”

“No.”

“Aircraft?”

“Nothing matching Salamence’s flight path after it disappeared into the cloud cover. They’re assuming she left the area.”

Gray’s expression tightened.

“Assuming.”

“Yes.”

He hated that word when other people used it.

Lyra took a sip of coffee and gave him a moment to be annoyed by uncertainty before continuing. “Candice is coming here.”

“Why?”

“To talk about what happens next.”

Gray looked toward Bastiodon.

For a few seconds he said nothing. He watched the slow rise and fall of Bastiodon’s body beneath the thermal compress, then glanced toward Absol lying quietly with the cooling wrap still secured around his flank.

The answer was already forming.

Candice arrived before dark with Holt and two Ranger officers Gray had met only briefly during the earlier closure meetings.

They used a conference room attached to the Pokémon Center because neither Gray nor Lyra was willing to leave Bastiodon and Absol for long. Once the treatment staff cleared both Pokémon for gentle movement, Gray brought them along. Bastiodon settled near the wall with the same careful stiffness he had carried since leaving the recovery room, while Absol chose a place beneath the table where nobody could accidentally brush the cooling wrap around his flank.

Candice looked tired when she came in.

Not battle tired.

Administrative tired.

Gray understood that kind too.

Holt did not waste time. He set a tablet in the middle of the table and brought up photographs from the basin.

The wreck looked worse now than it had during the fight.

One entire side of the capture platform had collapsed inward when Bastiodon overturned it. Several panels had torn free completely, leaving wiring and structural supports exposed beneath the armored shell. The support assembly that had struck J lay several meters away from the main chassis, half buried in snow, while Rangers had marked smaller fragments scattered across a much wider section of the basin.

Candice looked at Gray.

He ignored her.

Holt enlarged one of the photographs. “We pulled what we could before the League techs arrive. Serial plates are gone. Internal identifiers were stripped. Anything software-based either wiped itself when the system failed or was damaged badly enough that we haven’t recovered it yet.”

Gray nodded. “Expected.”

“The restraint system wasn’t improvised.”

“I know.”

Holt looked at him. “No. I mean specifically. The cable tension, emitter strength, recoil stabilization, all of it. This thing was built for high-power captures.”

Candice folded her arms. “Bloodmoon.”

“Probably,” Holt said. “Or something in the same class.”

Gray stared at the photograph.

That distinction mattered.

The machine might have been purpose-built after J learned about Bloodmoon and gathered enough information to estimate what would be required to restrain him. Or it might have been equipment she already used for Pokémon powerful enough to require industrial capture systems.

Neither possibility was comforting.

One of the Ranger officers shifted in his chair. “The bigger issue is access. She got a heavy platform into the basin without tripping a road checkpoint.”

“Because she didn’t use the road,” Holt said. He changed the image to a map and highlighted a route farther east. “We found track damage here. She came through forest service land, crossed an old maintenance corridor, then cut south.”

Candice looked at Gray. “Which means the closure worked for teenagers.”

“But not someone deliberately trying to defeat it,” Gray said.

“That’s what I was going to say.”

Gray leaned forward, attention settling on the route rather than the wreck. “What are you proposing?”

The officer hesitated.

Gray immediately disliked that.

“We need a stronger presence.”

“How strong?”

“Permanent patrol coverage. Rotating teams. Probably aerial observation.”

Gray nodded once, then said, “Outside the territory.”

The officer looked at him. “Professor—”

“Outside the territory.”

Candice watched him carefully but did not interrupt.

Gray continued before the officer could object. “You put routine patrol teams inside his defended range and we recreate the exact problem we spent a week solving. Bloodmoon’s response to human pressure has been consistent. He pushes people out. If we turn the basin into an armed patrol zone, eventually somebody will misread that behavior and escalate.”

The Ranger officer tapped one finger against the table. “Hunter J already escalated.”

“Yes.”

“So if she comes back?”

“We intercept her before she reaches him.”

“That requires knowing she’s coming.”

“That is what patrols are for.”

Holt shifted the map onto the larger wall display.

The current closure appeared first, followed by the surrounding access roads, older forestry corridors, snowmobile routes, drainage cuts, and several stretches of forest with no formal path at all. Seen together, the problem became obvious. The existing closure had been designed to discourage ordinary trespass, not stop someone with planning, machinery, and no concern for legal access.

Gray studied the map for several seconds.

Candice leaned closer to the display. “You’re thinking perimeter.”

“Yes.”

Holt nodded slowly. “Rotating route?”

“Not fixed.”

That caught his attention.

Gray stood and moved toward the screen. “If you patrol the same loop at the same times every day, someone competent learns it. J is competent. Any poacher worth worrying about will observe first.”

One of the officers said, “So random patrols.”

“Structured unpredictability.”

Candice snorted quietly.

Gray looked at her.

“Nothing.”

He returned his attention to the map. “Different entry points. Different times. Some vehicle coverage, some on foot, some aerial, but keep aircraft high enough that we are not repeatedly disturbing the basin. Cameras should face outward along likely approach corridors. We already have enough interior observation to monitor Bloodmoon without increasing it.”

Holt began marking locations as Gray spoke.

The western forestry track.

Northern access road.

The old maintenance corridor J had apparently used.

Two ridges with clear views over likely approaches without crossing into the wet ground itself.

Gray pointed to another line near the eastern edge. “This one too.”

Holt frowned at the route. “That’s terrible in winter.”

“Exactly.”

Candice looked at Gray. “You think someone will use it because we won’t.”

“Yes.”

The Ranger officer leaned back and studied the growing web of patrol routes. “We can’t cover every gap.”

“No.”

Gray looked at the map.

“We make the gaps expensive.”

That changed the discussion.

They stopped talking about sealing the area completely and started talking about making entry difficult enough, uncertain enough, and visible enough that anyone trying would have to accept a much greater risk of being noticed before reaching the basin.

Cameras could cover the places vehicles were capable of passing. Motion sensors could watch narrower forest approaches farther in. Ranger patrols could rotate often enough that nobody outside the service could safely predict which sections would be empty. League rapid-response contacts could be assigned if suspicious aircraft, capture equipment, or unregistered teams appeared. Local road crews could be instructed to report unusual heavy transport moving toward the southern forest. Patrol schedules would remain internal.

The plan began to look less like a wall and more like a net.

Gray preferred that.

Then somebody suggested fencing.

He turned toward the officer who had spoken. “No.”

“It would control foot access.”

“It would also alter Pokémon movement, interfere with seasonal routes, collect snow, create choke points, and potentially give Bloodmoon something new to destroy.”

The officer opened his mouth to answer, but Gray shook his head before the argument could start.

“No fence.”

Candice nodded. “I agree.”

That settled it faster than Gray expected.

Another suggestion came several minutes later.

“What about moving the Teddiursa temporarily?”

Gray looked up. “No.”

“They’re one of the reasons he stays in that section.”

“Yes.”

“Which makes them vulnerable.”

“And removing them could change his behavior in ways we do not understand.”

The Ranger officer considered that for a moment, then looked back toward the map. “What about relocating Bloodmoon?”

Gray stared at him.

The man raised both hands slightly. “I’m asking.”

“Protected where?”

“We have reserves.”

Gray held his gaze. “Protected from whom?”

Silence followed.

Gray did not push the point.

He did not need to.

Hunter J had arrived with specialized restraint equipment and a Salamence. Moving Bloodmoon somewhere humans considered more manageable would not remove the underlying problem. It would simply put him somewhere new and hope the next person looking for him did not find him.

Candice looked toward the map again.

“He stays.”

Gray nodded.

“He stays.”

The formal designation took longer than the argument had.

By the next morning, the League had lawyers involved, which Gray hated immediately.

The first draft arrived just after breakfast.

He opened it on the conference-room display, skimmed the opening paragraph, then stopped at the title.

SNOWPOINT SOUTHERN SPECIAL CONTAINMENT ZONE

Gray stared at it.

Lyra leaned over his shoulder far enough to read the heading. “No.”

She smiled. “I knew you were going to say that.”

Gray opened the document and began editing before anyone from the League could become emotionally attached to the phrasing. Containment implied that the problem existed inside the boundary and that the purpose of the designation was to keep whatever lived there from getting out.

That was not what this was.

Bloodmoon was not the problem. The Teddiursa were not the problem. The wetland was not the problem.

Hunter J had been the problem. Trespass had been the problem. Human refusal to leave something alone had repeatedly been the problem.

Gray deleted the title and replaced it.

SNOWPOINT SOUTHERN PROTECTED HABITAT

Candice arrived twenty minutes later carrying two folders and looking as though she had already argued with three people before breakfast. She dropped the folders onto the table, glanced at the display, and immediately noticed the change.

“Containment sounded safer.”

Gray looked at her. “For us.”

“And protected?”

“For him too.”

Candice read the revised heading again, then gave a small nod that was not quite approval and not quite resignation. “League will complain.”

“They can spell.”

“That has never stopped them.”

Gray kept editing.

The protection language became more specific as the morning wore on. No routine Ranger entry into the central wetland without emergency justification. No public release of precise Bloodmoon sighting coordinates. No trainer access. No unsupervised research permits. No commercial filming. No low-altitude aerial passes except during an active emergency.

He rewrote the surveillance section so cameras and sensors would focus primarily on external access routes, with the existing interior camera network left in place rather than expanded. Any unidentified heavy equipment entering the surrounding forest would trigger immediate Ranger response. Patrol routes would rotate on a schedule unavailable to the public. Snowpoint Rangers would hold primary authority, with the League providing rapid-response support if organized poaching or equivalent threats appeared.

By midday, the document had stopped looking like a temporary emergency order and had started looking like something meant to last.

Gray read the language twice.

Then a third time.

Holt leaned over the table beside him, one hand braced against the back of a chair. “You know someone’s going to call this excessive.”

Gray continued reading. “Someone flew a Salamence into a restricted wildlife area with a capture platform.”

Holt considered that. “Fair.”

Candice had been reviewing the enforcement section separately. She pointed at one paragraph with the end of a pen. “This penalty language needs to be stronger.”

Gray looked at her.

She shrugged. “What? I’m the Gym Leader. I’m allowed to enjoy rules occasionally.”

Lyra sat across from them with her laptop open. “Occasionally?”

Candice pointed at her without looking away from the document. “Careful.”

Gray smiled despite himself and returned to the text.

The moment passed, but that was happening more often now. Small pieces of ordinary conversation were beginning to slide back into place between discussions of injuries, poachers, patrol schedules, and century-old Pokémon.

Gray did not mind.

They stayed in Snowpoint for three more days.

Absol improved quickly. By the second morning, the limp was almost gone unless he had been lying still for too long, and even then it usually disappeared after a few careful steps. He continued treating the cooling wrap as an unforgivable insult, enduring it only because Gray insisted and making his displeasure obvious every time it had to be adjusted.

Bastiodon’s shoulder remained stiff for longer. The Center staff were satisfied with the recovery, but they warned Gray not to mistake improvement for full readiness. Travel was fine. Light movement was fine. Anything strenuous was not.

Gray promised.

Lyra made him repeat it.

He refused.

She told the nurse anyway.

Gray slept eleven hours the second night.

He woke at nearly ten in the morning, looked at the clock, and stared at it long enough that Lyra finally spoke from the other bed.

“Something happen?”

“I lost the morning.”

“You slept.”

“Yes.”

“That is generally what happens.”

“I had work.”

“You still have work.”

Gray looked over at her. “That is not helpful.”

“It was not supposed to be.”

They ate breakfast late.

Then, somehow, lunch at a reasonable time.

Gray found this suspicious.

Candice took them to dinner that evening at a small place several blocks from the Pokémon Center where the windows had fogged from the heat and every table seemed to have at least one steaming bowl on it. The menu was mostly soup, noodles, and things involving potatoes, which Gray decided was exactly what Snowpoint food should probably be.

Nobody discussed Bloodmoon for the first twenty minutes.

Gray noticed almost immediately.

He did not ruin it.

Candice complained about the restaurant changing one of the broth recipes. Lyra argued that she could not possibly tell because she had added enough spice to erase the original flavor. Gray stayed mostly out of it and concentrated on eating something warm that had not come from a Ranger ration packet or a vending machine.

Holt joined them halfway through dinner and spent most of the next fifteen minutes complaining about camera batteries in subzero weather.

Candice told him his equipment budget was already absurd.

Holt replied that this was apparently because cameras were expected to work outdoors.

Lyra laughed.

Gray ate.

The restaurant stayed warm around them while snow moved past the windows outside in soft white sheets. For a little while, Snowpoint was just Snowpoint again instead of a territory map, an incident report, a historical puzzle, or the place where Hunter J had nearly stolen a Pokémon out of the forest.

That helped more than Gray expected.

The permanent patrol route went active on the fourth morning, and Gray insisted on seeing it before they left Snowpoint.

Candice told him she had expected that.

They drove south before sunrise, the city lights thinning behind them until the road became little more than a dark ribbon bordered by snowbanks and trees. The new Ranger post had been established near the northern access road, and from the outside it was unimpressive enough that Gray approved of it immediately. A heated shelter sat just off the road with communications equipment inside, along with medical supplies, emergency capture countermeasures, and a wall map showing the rotating perimeter routes.

No one had built a fence.

Gray checked.

Candice noticed him looking toward the tree line. “Still no fence.”

“Good.”

“You were actually going to inspect the forest for one?”

“Yes.”

“That feels excessive.”

“No.”

Holt met them outside before Candice could continue the argument and handed Gray a tablet with the new patrol layout already open. The map looked different from the temporary closure maps they had been using all week. There was no single clean loop around the habitat. Instead, several overlapping routes circled it at different distances, designed to shift depending on weather, staffing, and recent alerts. Camera icons marked likely access corridors, while two more distant observation points sat on ridges high enough to monitor movement without requiring anyone to cross into the defended area.

Gray zoomed in and checked the central wetland first.

The interior remained largely untouched.

Good.

They left the Ranger post on foot and made their way toward one of the new observation points. It was not the old blind and not even particularly close to it. This one sat farther north, entirely outside the area Bloodmoon had repeatedly defended.

The morning was colder than the previous few days, and the snow had hardened overnight into a brittle crust that broke noisily beneath their boots. Bastiodon came with Gray but moved carefully, still favoring the shoulder just enough that Gray noticed every time. Absol followed without a limp now, though Gray kept glancing back at him anyway.

Lyra noticed.

She said nothing.

The observation ridge overlooked part of the old basin. From there, the forest below appeared quiet enough that Gray could almost believe nothing had happened there.

He raised his binoculars.

At first he saw only trees, snow, and the darker stretches where wet ground broke through the white. Then movement passed between two spruce trunks.

Dark.

Large.

Bloodmoon.

Gray adjusted the focus.

The Ursaluna moved along one of the wetter sections of the basin at an easy pace. The restraint cables were gone. The roughened fur where the capture system had crossed his shoulders was still visible, but there was no obvious stiffness in his gait.

Three smaller shapes followed behind him.

The Teddiursa.

The notched-ear cub wandered ahead briefly, stopped at a patch of snow long enough to investigate something beneath it, then doubled back toward the others. Bloodmoon kept walking at the same steady pace.

Gray watched for several minutes.

Bloodmoon never looked toward the ridge.

That pleased Gray more than acknowledgment would have.

Candice stood beside him with her own binoculars. “How does he look?”

“Fine.”

“Actually fine?”

Gray glanced at her.

She smiled.

He returned to the binoculars. “Moving normally. No obvious residual impairment.”

“Good.”

Behind them, Holt checked the patrol tablet. One Ranger team had just crossed the western route. Another would cover the southern forestry corridor later in the morning.

Neither would enter the basin.

Gray lowered the binoculars and looked over the protected habitat spread beneath them.

Outwardly, it had changed very little from the day he first arrived in Snowpoint. There were no walls marking the limits. No signs stood inside the wetland. No barrier separated Bloodmoon from the rest of the forest, and nothing visible from this distance suggested that humans had spent the better part of three days arguing over legal language, patrol schedules, access rules, and emergency response because of the Pokémon moving below them.

That was probably for the best.

The Rangers would circle the territory without entering it. Cameras would watch the roads, trails, old maintenance corridors, and the sections of forest large equipment could reasonably cross. Unknown vehicles would be noticed. Suspicious aircraft would trigger alerts. Anyone trying to reach the wetland for the wrong reasons would have to work much harder than Hunter J had.

It was not perfect protection. Gray did not think such a thing existed.

What mattered was that the plan respected the one thing Bloodmoon had made clear from the beginning: there was a boundary, and crossing it carried consequences.

Gray lifted the binoculars again.

Bloodmoon had reached the old marsh route.

The Teddiursa followed behind him.

For the first time since Gray had come to Snowpoint, he realized there was nothing he needed from the Ursaluna.

No sample he still had to collect. No observation he had to obtain before leaving. No behavior that needed one more explanation so he could convince himself the work was finished.

They knew enough.

Bloodmoon was an Ursaluna unlike any living individual Gray had encountered. He might have walked these Hisuian wetlands nearly two centuries ago. He might have crossed enormous distances, become the source of stories in Kitakami, and eventually returned to the same ground after humans had changed almost everything around it.

Some of that would remain hypothesis.

Gray was comfortable with that.

Science did not require every question to end neatly. Sometimes the responsible conclusion was simply that the evidence had taken them as far as it could, and anything beyond that would be a story waiting for proof.

He lowered the binoculars.

Lyra looked at him. “Ready?”

Gray glanced once more toward the basin.

Bloodmoon had disappeared behind the trees.

“Yes.”

They turned back toward the Ranger post.

Behind them, the wetland remained quiet. The new patrol routes would circle it without crossing through. Cameras would watch outward instead of inward. Rangers would rotate around the perimeter, close enough to respond if someone tried to enter and far enough away that Bloodmoon should rarely have reason to notice them at all.

For the first time since Gray arrived in Snowpoint, the plan was not to study him, move him, test him, or understand one more thing before leaving.

It was simply to leave him there and make sure everyone else did too.