Chapter 15: Betrayal

November 25

As soon as Ash woke up the next morning, he knew something was terribly wrong. But what was it? It seemed warmer than normal, which was nice, and the wild Pokémon flew and scattered about as usual. But something still seemed…off.

He looked to his right to see Dawn, still sleeping on her branch. Lance was doing the same above him. Ash knew that Brock was supposed to be keeping watch below him, but when he looked down he saw nothing but a white slip of paper weighed down by a rock.

Immediately suspecting the worst, he reached down for the slip, barely able to grasp it. When he finally had it, he brought it to his eyes and read it:

Guys – I can't just stay here and wonder if my family is dead or not.

So I left, and I'm going to leave Sinnoh, whether you guys likes it or not.

I'm sorry, but I can't just wait around hoping. I needed to take action.

Once I get word on whether they're OK, I'll try to get back to you guys.

- Brock

P.S. – I went ahead and took Lance's Altaria for extra protection. Tell

him that I'm sorry and that I'll try to return him someday.

Ash read through the note twice, fully digesting what the words said. "Brock's gone," he thought. "He actually left. He stole Lance's Pokémon. And now he's gone…that bastard actually did it!"

"Guys, wake up!" Ash hissed. Lance stirred himself awake, but Dawn didn't move at all.

"Whuz goin' on?" Lance asked groggily. "What 'appened?"

"Brock ditched us!" Ash exclaimed as he nudged Dawn awake. Lance reached for the note, which he skimmed over quickly.

"Son of a bitch!" he shouted, crumpling up the note and flinging it as far from him as possible. Before Dawn could ask what was going on, Ash leapt from the tree with his backpack in hand and began running.

"I'm gonna try and find him, maybe he hasn't gone far!" Ash exclaimed. "Both of you stay here, I'll be back soon!"

"Ash, wait!" he heard Lance shout, but he didn't respond; he was already sprinting with no destination. Pikachu was visibly squirming around in the backpack, struggling to get his head into open air. Ash honestly had no idea where Brock could've gone, he was only thinking of combing out the immediate area.

Ash didn't stop running until he was a good quarter mile from the others. He finally stopped when he realized that running blindly in one direction wouldn't get him anywhere. He slowed down to a steady jog, which quickly turned into a walk, then a complete stop.

He sat down in exhaustion and frustration. Brock was gone, and whether they'd ever find him or not was doubtful, at best. He stroked the back of Pikachu's ear a little too hard, causing him to whimper in pain. Ash quickly retracted his hand as he mumbled an apology.

Pikachu stroked Ash's arm with nose in understanding, causing Ash to grin briefly. "C'mon," he said, "let's get back to the others."

"Pika-Chaaa?"

Ash took that to mean that he was asking about Brock. "He just went to grab some stuff," he lied, "but he'll be back soon."

Pikachu, seeing through Ash's lie, zapped him with a small jolt of electricity and a reprimanding look as Ash flinched. "Okay, you win," Ash grunted. "Brock left us. We're not sure where he went, or if he'll be back."

The pokémon suddenly seemed saddened by the news. "But we're gonna try and find him," Ash reassured, "and who knows, maybe he hasn't gone far. Let's get going."

But before he could get up, he heard the whirr of a chopper flying above him. He and Pikachu froze in place, fearing that the chopper had their sights on them. Eventually, however, it flew past them and into the distance.

Ash sighed in relief, thankful that a swarm of Rocket grunts weren't about to shoot him down. But before he could walk another ten steps, he did hear a lone gunshot, coming from the direction that Ash was facing. Which is where he was headed.

And where Dawn and Lance were.

After making sure that the shot wasn't fired at him, he immediately sprinted in that direction, fearing that it would've been fired at one of the others. "Pikachu, get in the bag and stay there!" he grunted between breaths. Surprisingly, Pikachu did as he was told and retreated into the bag as Ash kept up his sprint.

The sprint back to their spot, however, seemed much longer than it had when Ash left it earlier. Covering the quarter-mile seemed to take a quarter of an hour, but in reality Ash had no idea how long it took. All he was concerned about was making sure that the others weren't hurt.

"What if they were hurt?" Ash thought as he stumbled over a stray branch. "What if they both did get shot? Wait, they couldn't have, there was only one shot. So who fired it?"

He tripped over his own two feet, his train of thought having distracted him. He got up and began his sprint again, but before he got for he noticed from the corner of his eye a blue blur. He turned to see half of Lance's body, his back to him as he was slumped upright against a tree.

"Lance, what the hell happened?" Ash shouted. But Lance didn't respond, or even move for that matter. Ash walked up to him, shouting, "Lance, answer me!"

What he saw when he turned to face Lance nearly made him collapse. A bullet hole the size of a quarter was neatly plastered in the center of Lance's forehead, a fresh stream of blood trickling down his face. His eyes, normally a bright and radiant crimson, were vague and expressionless, aimed at the ground.

"Lance?" Ash asked in a quavering voice. But Ash knew that Lance was dead. "LANCE!" He began to sob in anger when he realized that Dawn was nowhere to be seen. "Oh shit," he thought, "where the hell is she? Oh God, please don't let her be dead, please don't let her be dead!"

"Dawn!" he shouted. "Dawn, where are you?"

Almost as if in response, Ash heard a clatter of footsteps to his right. He immediately turned to see a bastion of gray and black, heading straight toward him.

His agony turning to pure adrenaline, Ash immediately ran in the other direction, but not before scooping up Lance's backpack, which lay next to his body. He could hear bullets being fired just as he disappeared behind a bush.

Quickly glancing behind him, he could tell that there were far too many grunts to count; at least three dozen, probably more. Fearing that the bullets could land in his backpack, he quickly slipped his bag off of his shoulders and clutched it in his chest as he kept sprinting madly. He'd kill himself if Pikachu got shot, or worse…

As he slipped Lance's backpack over his shoulders, he could hear the sound of multiple helicopters flying above him. He glanced up to see not only a half-dozen choppers that had Grunts grappling down from then, but also a group of Salamence, all of whom were charging up a Hyper Beam aimed right for him.

He dived to his left to dodge a Hyper Beam, then kept running, quickly changing direction to avoid another one. He ran past a tree just as a bullet landed in it, right where his head had passed it. Ash drew his gun from his hip and began firing blindly behind his shoulder, knowing that it wouldn't help as he ran right into a black smoke cloud that appeared around him.

The smoke's effect on him was instantaneous. His eyes began to sting and water, his lungs burning as he ran from the smoke cloud. Through his watering eyes he thought he saw Dawn running in the distance, but he wasn't sure. Whoever it was, they were running in the opposite direction, so Ash couldn't find out who it was.

He saw a cluster of Rocket Grunts to his right, causing him to immediately run the other way. The barrage of gunfire continued behind him, and Ash was sure that the only reason he managed to avoid being hit by gunfire was because he was a fast moving target.

He heard the growl of a Houndoom to his side as a Hyper Beam landed a mere meter behind him. The pure adrenaline pumping through his veins was what allowed him to outrun the pokémon…initially. The pokémon soon caught up to him and knocked him down, and Ash soon felt the quadruped beast on top of him.

Ash looked up to see his teeth bared, ready to shred him to bits. He managed to bring up his leg from under the Houndoom and kick him to the side. It yelped in pain, but Ash didn't have time to feel bad. Lance was right; when you were being shot at, you don't worry about morals. You worry about saving your own goddam life.

He continued running, sliding into a different direction as another black smoke cloud seemed to magically appear in front of him. He turned only to see another Salamence being manned by a Grunt, his Hyper Beam nearly fully charged. Ash managed to duck before the beam could take off his head. He leaped over a large branch as the chaos of the attack continued around him.

"Pikachu, you okay?" he shouted.

"CHAAA!" Pikachu cried.

Something hard hit Ash in the head, knocking him down. He glanced over his shoulder to see an Electrode as his feet, primed to explode with an evil grin on its face. Ash pushed himself off of his feet and bounded wildly away from it. When the Electrode exploded, Ash was just far away from it to be blown into the air, but not seriously injured.

It didn't take long after landing before he took his first bullet. He felt the bullet graze the bottom of his chin, causing him to howl in pain as he cupped it whilst running in all sorts of directions. Luckily, he noticed a huge wall of the black smoke, towering at least fifty feet in both directions, off to his left. Taking a deep breath, he dashed into the wall of smoke, emerging from the other side to find that the other side was completely empty of any hostiles.

He quickly hid behind a large tree, trying to mop the blood from his chin. The cacophony of gunshots still pierced Ash's ears, and he could tell that they were still firing through the wall of smoke, hoping for a confirmed kill.

"This is insane!" Ash thought, "Why do they need so many of them to kill just a few people?" He felt trapped behind his tree; if he went out and ran, he'd indubitably be shot dead in a matter of seconds. But if he stayed where he was, the slew of Grunts would eventually find him hiding and kill him then. The branches on the tree were too high up for him to climb, so that wasn't an option.

But then he saw the wide river to his right, the same one that he saw in the Aura more than a week ago. It was all there; the same elegant, winding river, the same steep overpass that stood between him and it. He understood then what the Aura had told him: "Come to me, or die."

Knowing what he had to do, he bolted from his spot and toward the river, using Lance's backpack as a makeshift shield against the gunfire. The shield kept him from any life-threatening injuries, but he painfully took another bullet to the upper leg before throwing himself down the overpass.

He tumbled and turned down the overpass, the gunfire still aimed toward him. He would've been hit, too, provided he wasn't going down the hill at a breakneck pace. The river drew ever nearer, he noticed mid-tumble. The light from a charging Hyper Beam came from the top of the overpass. He shifted himself to the side as best as he could to avoid the Hyper Beam, which missed him by mere inches. The force of the beam being so close to him blew him down the remainder of the overpass and straight into the river.

It was Lance's shouting that woke Dawn up the next morning. She slowly propped herself up on her elbow to see Ash jumping from the tree.

"I'm gonna try and find him, maybe he hasn't gone far!" she heard Ash shout. "Both of you stay here, I'll be back soon!"

"Ash, wait!" shouted Lance. She didn't hear Ash reply, so he must have run off.

"Lance, what happened?" she asked.

"Brock went off on his own," Lance snapped, "specifically after I told him not to!"

Dawn was alarmed by this. "Well, where would he have gone?"

"How the hell should I know?" he retorted. His rudeness seemed to get worse and worse each day, she noticed.

"Should we follow Ash?"

Lance sighed. "There's no telling where he's gone," he said. "We may as well just wait here for him. I'll make some breakfast real quickly." He climbed down from the tree, Dawn following soon after.

Lance had wordlessly gathered some wood for a fire, leaving Dawn with nothing to do. She attended to her backpack to pretend to sort out some supplies, her back to Lance. She glanced at him distastefully. "What the hell has he done in the past week?" she thought, "besides almost get us killed and tell us what to do? And pretend like he's our friend, too. Seriously, how the hell does he live with himself?"

Then, a thought dawned on her. What if Lance was the reason that Brock is gone? "He could've easily disposed of him in the middle of the night. He did have the first watch shift, after all."

She turned to see that Lance was stuffing ammo into the clip of his gun. "Oh shit, I think he actually did it! And with Ash gone for the moment, what's to stop him from killing me off?!" Her breathing grew rapid, her heart pounding in anxiety. "He never did like me, he was gonna kill all of us eventually, why wouldn't he do it now, when he has the chance!"

Almost without thinking, she ran toward Lance, who had stood up just as Dawn pushed him into a tree, knocking the gun out of his hands. Seeing her chance, she quickly picked up the gun, aimed it at Lance's forehead, and pulled the trigger, all before Lance could react.

Blood painted the majority of his head as he slumped to the ground, his back still against the tree. A slow stream of crimson blood began to flow straight down the middle of Lance's face. She expected him to get up, to keep fighting. But one shot was all it took, she thought. One shot was all it took for her to kill Lance.

At first, Dawn felt…what was the word she was looking for? Relieved, she decided. She was relieved that she wouldn't have to worry about the bastard anymore. But her relief soon turned to panic.

"I can't believe it," she thought, "I actually killed him. Oh shit, I actually killed him!" She flung the gun behind her, wanting it as far away from her as possible. "Oh my God, was I really that stupid to actually kill him? Oh shit, oh shitshitshitshit…what the hell is Ash gonna think? He had to have heard the gunshot, what'll happen when he comes back and…"

Dawn noticed a thick bush not too far from it. Primarily out of fear, she buried herself in its camouflaging leaves, completely hidden from the outside world. She silently cried in her hands, ashamed that she had driven herself to actually kill someone, let alone Lance. Why couldn't she trust him? Was there really any reason to suspect him of anything after all?

Before she could answer her own question, she heard Ash's voice, calling out for Lance. "Oh shit," she thought, "when he sees that he's dead…"

"LANCE!" he shouted. Dawn didn't have to look in his direction to know that he was sobbing in agony. It wasn't long before he was calling out for Dawn. "Dawn!" he shouted. "Dawn, where are you?"

Dawn felt Ash's pain, his agony, and wanted so desperately to call out to him, to let him know that she was okay, that she was sorry. She had barely opened her mouth to speak before Ash was off, running into the forest with both his and Lance's bag.

The sight of the Rocket Grunts running after him made nearly made Dawn scream. She had to cover her mouth to stifle the scream, which was only inaudible due to the gunfire that had just erupted. She was forced to wait in the bush until the grunts, as numerous as they were, finally disappeared from sight.

She crawled out of her hiding spot, and was about to run away from where the grunts had gone before a cloud of black smoke suddenly surrounded her. The smoke, which smelled of putrid acid, forced Dawn to lie down, since she feared that more gunmen would be closer to her yet.

This was confirmed when she heard more footsteps clamoring near her. She could only pray that no one would notice her hiding in the smoke cloud, which seemed to wear away at her senses with each and every passing second; her eyesight deteriorated, partly due to the smoke itself and partly due to the tears that stung her pupils. Her muscles became tense, her lungs burning with increasing intensity.

The sound of the hostiles around her didn't go away at all. In fact, it seemed to Dawn that more and more Grunts were passing by her, safety only guaranteed by the cover of the smoke, which Dawn felt would kill her any minute now. Knowing full well that what she was about to do was probably suicide, she forced herself to bolt from the smoke cloud and into the nearest safe cover that she could find.

When she stepped from the smoke cloud and into open air, she saw that all of the Grunts were now a fair distance from her; they were running toward the direction that Ash had gone off to. Dawn saw her chance and ran the opposite way, away from the chaos and gunfire.

But getting away, let alone running, proved to be a fortuitous task; her eyesight, which had initially been restored after leaving the smoke, now became blurrier by the second. Her ears were ringing uncontrollably, and her muscles ached, a stabbing pain shooting through her legs with each step she took. Even breathing was next to impossible, her lungs burned that badly.

She was forced to sit down beside a tree to collect herself, or at least try to. All she could see now were shapes and figures, nothing definite. She was gasping for air; the only sound she heard was the loud ringing in her ears. Dawn felt like she would die any minute. "Is this what I get for killing Lance?" she thought, "A slow and painful death?"

She curled herself up into a ball, waiting for death to envelop her whole. At that moment, the ringing that dominated her hearing was joined by a new wave of gunfire. Dawn retreated further into her ball, fearing death but expecting it at the same time.

The gunfire came from both her left and her right. But what was everyone firing at? "If they were firing at me," she thought, "they would've hit me by now! So who the hell are they shooting at?"

She looked to her right to see a towering figure standing over her as it fired off an automatic. Dawn was left to assume that, since there was only one person near her, that it was firing at a group of Grunts. The figure was shouting something to her, but she couldn't make out what it was or who the voice belonged to.

Dawn had no idea what to do. Did she stay where she was and hope that the figure would somehow get them out of this? Or did she try to run away and hope that she didn't get shot?

Knowing that the figure was most likely heavily outnumbered, she got on her aching feet and half ran, half stumbled away, her hands shrouded over her head. She hadn't moved ten feet before she felt a shooting pain in her spine. She was knocked down to the ground, but strangely enough, she wasn't dead.

Reaching behind her back, she pulled out what felt like a long rod that protruded from her lower back, just opposite her navel. She didn't have to see it to instantly know what it was. Already she could feel the effects of the Sleeping Syringe take hold of her already ravaged physical state. She tried to get up and keep going, but the effects of the drug combined with the short stint she just made left her completely drained physically. She barely had the strength to even breathe. Any moment now, the figure, whoever it was, would fall dead, swarmed by the number of Grunts that it was facing off against. And then they would get to her, lying there weak and helpless. She was done.

Dawn felt herself slowly drifting off, her blurred vision slowly turning to nothing. "Goodbye Brock," she thought, "goodbye Mom, goodbye Ash, goodbye Pikachu."

"Goodbye Lance."

She felt as if she were flying just as she slipped under.