I had to admit, the three escaped convicts possessed excellent discipline. They didn't panic or immediately rush me. They held their ground, their eyes locked onto my armored form as they waited for an opening.

  "Are you guys just waiting for backup?" I asked, breaking the tense silence.

  Before they could answer, the ambient energy in the jungle shifted dramatically. I frowned, looking up just as a localized Ultra Wormhole tore open horizontally in the air directly above the men.

  Three distinct spheres fell from the spatial rift, dropping perfectly into the convicts' outstretched hands. The wormhole instantly snapped shut behind them. The Pokéballs were bizarre—forged from an obsidian metal and ced with pulsating, corrupted blue circuitry. Without a word, the three men pressed the release mechanisms.

  I wasn't surprised that they were using Pokémon to level the pying field, but the creatures that materialized on the jungle floor were deeply unnatural.

  A Mismagius, a Mightyena, and an Absol took fighting stances. Their biology was completely warped. Instead of their standard regional colorings, all three possessed sickly, ashen gray skin and matted bck fur. But what stood out the most were their eyes. They cked pupils entirely, burning with a violent, glowing red luminescence.

  "You have absolutely no idea what we are capable of!" Shadow hissed.

  A dense, corrosive mist began to flood directly out of his pores, rolling across the dirt toward my boots.

  Cryo, are you actively scanning this guy? Can you make any biological sense of how a human is generating an offensive aura? I asked internally.

  I decided to take a massive risk. With a single thought, I deactivated my Primordial skin. The blinding light fshed, stripping away my white armor and Lugia wings, returning me to my standard human clothes. I wanted to see exactly how my baseline human durability stacked up against augmented psychics.

  I barely had time to register the humidity returning to my skin before a massive chunk of bedrock came flying out of the bck mist. I smoothly sidestepped the projectile, but Shadow had anticipated the dodge.

  In the next instant, a second boulder smmed squarely into my chest.

  I found myself knocked backward onto the dirt. Taking a three-foot sb of solid rock to the sternum certainly hadn't felt good, but my underlying biology was vastly different now. I didn't suffer any broken ribs or internal bleeding. I pnted my hands and pushed myself up without a problem.

  However, as I brushed the dirt from my shirt, I realized something else was actively assaulting me. It seemed that whatever Viotor's specific ability was, it was already infiltrating my system.

  I didn't feel any physical pain, but a creeping sense of cognitive dissonance washed over me. Something was fundamentally off. The air around me suddenly felt incredibly thick, as if the atmospheric pressure had tripled. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. My skin tingled with a phantom static. A crushing mental weight began pressing down on my frontal lobe, actively trying to scramble my sensory perception and rewrite my immediate memories.

  I gritted my teeth, refusing to let the psychic intrusion take root. I shook my head violently, forcing my System to actively purge the mental fog.

  "Did you really think it would be that easy, pretty boy?" Shadow's voice taunted from within the mist.

  Another massive boulder tore through the air, aimed directly at my head.

  I didn't bother to dodge. I just closed my eyes and braced my stance. The boulder collided heavily with my shoulder, shattering into a dozen harmless fragments of gravel. I wasn't going to lose to a street-level psychic. He simply didn't possess the kinetic output to actually damage my core.

  "I guess you didn't have a very good teacher growing up," I sighed, cracking my eyes open to look at the trio. "But I will happily give you a failing grade on your first lesson."

  The three men looked genuinely shocked. Their corrupted Pokémon immediately lowered their stances, growling as they prepared to attack.

  "You think you are so incredibly tough?" Shadow hissed, his scarred face contorting with rage. "Fine!"

  I clicked my tongue, shaking my head in disappointment. "I really don't think you idiots realize the absolute gravity of the situation you are in. I am actively holding back as much of my power as I possibly can right now. Honestly, I don't even think it is medically safe for the big guy over there to take a baseline punch from me. I dropped my armor because I just wanted to see what people like you were actually capable of."

  "What the hell is that supposed to mean? You think we are weak?!" Brawn growled.

  He thrust his hands toward the earth. Using his raw telekinesis, he ripped massive chunks of stone and compacted dirt from the ground. The debris swirled through the air, forcefully grafting onto his arms to create massive, jagged stone gauntlets that stretched from his knuckles all the way to his broad shoulders.

  If I was being completely honest, I actually really liked the utility of his ability. He could use telekinesis to attack from a distance, but he was smart enough to use it defensively to augment his physical brawling. It was a very cool concept, assuming I ignored all the reality-bending powers my own System provided.

  "Fine. But do not say I didn't warn you," I ughed, raising my fists into a loose boxing guard.

  I didn't have a massive amount of technical fighting experience before acquiring the System, so it would actually be nice to get some practical martial arts practice in against augmented humans. Cryo, do you mind pcing a hard restriction on my physical output? I really don't want to accidentally kill them with a counter-punch.

  [Acknowledged. I can temporarily reduce your current kinetic and energy strength to a maximum of thirty percent,] Cryo responded instantly. [However, it will make your movements feel significantly heavier. This limitation should comfortably prevent you from inflicting lethal trauma.]

  Thank you, Cryo. That will do perfectly. I need to see exactly how I handle combat when restricted, I replied.

  A sudden, suffocating weight settled deep into my bones as the System forcefully throttled my power down to thirty percent.

  "You really are completely full of yourself," Shadow hissed, misinterpreting my pause as hesitation. "If you think we are just going to sit by and let you dictate this duel, you have another thing coming! Mismagius, strike!"

  The corrupted ghost Pokémon shrieked. It generated a swirling, condensed sphere of votile dark energy and hurled the Shadow Ball directly at my chest.

  I didn't bother dodging. I raised a single finger, lining it up casually with the incoming projectile.

  "Psybeam," I commanded.

  What I fully expected to happen was a standard, manageable beam of purple psychic energy to fire from my fingertip. The attack did fire, but my calcutions regarding the thirty-percent limiter were drastically off.

  A blinding, three-foot-wide column of concentrated purple energy erupted from my hand. The sheer recoil pushed my boots back an inch. The devastating ray instantly annihited the incoming Shadow Ball, burning right through the dark energy. The beam didn't stop there. It smmed directly into the Mismagius, bsting the ghost Pokémon backward through several ancient, massive tree trunks before it finally detonated.

  The Mismagius colpsed into the ruined foliage, instantly knocked unconscious.

  "Oops," I sighed, lowering my smoking finger. "I totally forgot to manually turn down my raw energy output alongside my physical strength. Silly me."

  I put a hand to my forehead, shaking my head apologetically. I looked over at Brawn. The giant man was staring at the devastated tree line, looking significantly less sure about his stone gauntlets.

  "Hey, don't worry about it," I offered cheerfully. "I successfully turned my physical strength down to about thirty percent of normal, so if I hit you, you will probably not die."

  "Sheesh!" Viotor shrieked, his crazed eyes bulging out of his skull as he stared at the sheer destruction. "Just what the hell are you?! Here I thought that we were the only true monsters operating in this world, but whoo wee! You are just a freak operating on an entirely different level! Are you even biologically human anymore, you fucking monster?!"

  Viotor threw his scarred head back, cackling hysterically at the absurdity of the situation.

  I shrugged. "Who knows at this point, but—"

  I cut my own sentence off. The hairs on my arms stood up as I felt that distinct, chilling sensation of spatial warping. A second ter, a massive, stabilized Ultra Wormhole tore open directly behind the convicts and their remaining Pokémon.

  "So, you are another one of the rogue Cryo users?" a clinical, highly educated voice asked from inside the portal.

  A tall man stepped out of the rift. He was dressed in a pristine, white scientist's b coat. Integrated directly into the forearms of his coat were sleek, holographic data screens. He had sharp features hidden behind rectangur gsses, and his blonde hair featured a very distinct, gravity-defying blue streak running through the center.

  "A scientist?" I asked, narrowing my eyes at the newcomer. "How exactly do you know the name of my System?"

  "I have been systematically tracking down and attempting to secure a live Cryo user for quite some time," the scientist expined smoothly, adjusting his gsses. "Or, as your little Ultra Recon Squad refers to you all: Endbringers. I was able to isote their specific energy signatures and tracked down a few of the weaker variants, but they all utilized temporal jumps to escape my containment grids. You, on the other hand... your output is something else entirely. You are far stronger than my initial models anticipated. I have even reviewed the corrupted footage of your fight with the entity known as Garon in Paldea."

  He offered me a polite, thoroughly chilling smile.

  Do you have any idea who this guy is, Cryo? I asked internally, my muscles tensing.

  [Analysis complete. The subject matches the biological profile of Colress,] Cryo reported. [However, this specific individual is from an unmapped, alternate timeline. I have zero records of him being this tall. The Colress native to your current dimension was assassinated, and the case was never solved. In his native timeline, he is a brilliant but entirely amoral scientist who utilizes advanced technology to push biological limits. He eventually became a high-ranking member of the criminal syndicate Team Psma, before being defeated by a trainer named Red. His ultimate, driving goal is to artificially engineer the absolute strongest beings in the multiverse—both human and Pokémon—and use them for his own research.]

  "You are the one who opened the wormhole directly into the Interpol prison?" I asked, keeping my voice dangerously level.

  Colress ughed softly, tapping a command into his forearm screen. "Ah, so you already know about the breach. Yes, that was my doing. But judging by the crater you just made, I think it is entirely too early for my new recruits to face you in live combat."

  "Hey! We are absolutely not going to run away!" Shadow hissed indignantly, gring at the scientist. "Stop treating us like disposable cowards!"

  Colress didn't even look up from his screen. He simply hit an execution key.

  Instantly, the ground beneath Shadow, Viotor, Brawn, and their corrupted Pokémon vanished. Localized spatial trapdoors opened beneath their boots. They plummeted into the darkness with a chorus of startled yells before the rifts snapped shut, swallowing them—and the unconscious Mismagius—completely.

  "My apologies for the interruption," Colress said politely. "They are not quite ready to provide me with the combat data I require, so they will be taking a little rest in my holding facility. Do not worry, though. I brought something much better for you to py with today. I desperately want to see exactly what you can do."

  Colress tapped a final sequence into his tablet.

  The air behind him violently fractured. A colossal, glowing blue Ultra Wormhole tore open, and I instantly felt a suffocating, predatory presence bleeding through the rift.

  "I was originally pnning on letting my new human friends try to kill you," Colress chuckled, stepping casually to the side. "But this is going to be so much more exciting for my research."

  A giant dragon slowly pulled itself out of the portal.

  Cryo's database immediately identified it as a Hydreigon. However, this specific beast defied every known biological metric. It was easily three times its normal, recorded size. Its scales were entirely pitch bck, and all three of its terrifying heads featured the exact same glowing, corrupted red eyes as the Pokémon the convicts had used.

  "Now this is a truly fun anomaly," Colress mused, pulling up a fresh data recorder on his arm. "If you do not mind, I would very much like to test your absolute strength. Honestly, human-on-Pokémon combat has never truly interested me before. But you and the other System users have finally sparked my curiosity. I would love to see exactly what an augmented human is capable of surviving. Of course, it would be even better if I could eventually extract and hold all of that raw power for myself."

  Colress tapped his screen one st time.

  The three-headed dragon unleashed a synchronized roar. Deep inside all three of its maws, devastating purple energy rapidly condensed.

  In the next instant, a massive, overpping barrage of destructive beams was sent hurtling directly toward my chest. I barely had a fraction of a second to react.