"Warm" Reception

I balled up my team with this announcement and took to the deck to watch our approach. The rocking of the boat didn't bother me at all as I calmly walked across the deck to stand at the front of the ship. Naturally I had already taken down the expanded space I set up in my room as there was no more reason for me to keep it up. The ship followed a set of buoys that showed the way to the city we were going to, Vermillion city. -

We finally docked in the cities harbor an hour later and I simply warped space to step off the deck and onto the solid ground below while the crew worked to start unloading the cargo. My sudden appearance threw off several people who wondered how I had managed to avoid detection so easily despite my eye-catching appearance. I paid most of them no mind but used the systems appraisal to sniff out the Team rocket members amongst them. I normally wouldn't have done this but from what I understood Team rocket was well integrated into every city in Kanto and in quite a bit of Johto as well.-

I used this to assume that checking like this would turn up my first lead on the criminal organization. I was right too as a few of those I checked were indeed members of Team rocket whether as informants or grunts but none could be considered important at all. I didn't let it show that I had made these peoples identities though and walked away until I found an alley that I slipped into and sank into a shadow in. Using my shadow warping ability I moved into one of my targets shadows and waited for them to lead me to someone higher up on the food chain.-

"Yes sir he just got off the ship. No sir he entered an alley and vanished. I understand and will report in for debrief sir." my unsuspecting "host" said over a communication device that looked like a walkie talky. Unknowingly the guy took me straight into a secret entrance disguised as a trashcan behind the cities Gym. 'So Either Surge is ridiculously incompetent or he's in on Team rocket. Best make sure I have enough evidence before I make a move on him.' I thought as we went into the rocket base under the gym.-

Unlike most of the other criminals I had taken down Surge was a Gym leader and that meant he was a high ranking official in the league usually safe from scrutiny. It also meant that unlike all the other criminals who had no real impact politically taking down Surge would cause shockwaves in the leagues political landscape and so I needed airtight evidence before I moved. This base at most only painted Surge as incompetent at his job as a gym leader since he failed to realize that a criminal base was there all this time. -

I needed pictures, records, signatures, something concrete incriminating the man in order to escape the reprisal of the league once I kill him. Yes kill, not capture. Someone like a Gym leader had to not only be quite high on the criminal organizations totem pole but was skilled and powerful enough to prove extremely dangerous once exposed for what they truly were. If he was captured I had little faith the league would be able to prevent him "accidentally" escaping containment. No for someone like this it was better to kill them and prevent such an outcome from even being possible.-

The trick was making sure I didn't get in trouble for doing it beyond the frustration the league would have at me not telling them first. Anyways while I was in this grunts shadow I observed the base under the gym carefully. The more I saw however the deeper my frown got as everything was more serious than I had assumed. From my observation I saw that just this base alone seemed to have a compartmentalization system in how they operated. There were the paper pushers taking care of forging documents, the active teams that were constantly training their pokemon and themselves for their ill intentioned acts.-

There was the information division that this grunt belonged to that was clearly meant to gather intel in secret and finally the resource division that kept strict upkeep on their supplies. I only gathered this from snippets of conversation as the grunt passed people from these divisions. The way these people entirely ignored anyone not from their division made the compartmentalization here obvious as could be. This was a problem for me as if each division was truly separate from the others it meant dismantling the organization will be a pain in the ass.-

I'll have to get the information from each division one by one to completely root out this branch if i want to be thorough. Otherwise I could simply slaughter everyone here and be done with it. To my surprise Surge made my job much easier as he had this grunt report to him personally. The man likely had this habit of getting information from his subordinates from his time in the great war he had been part of. It likely gave him a sense of being in control unlike what he likely felt on that battlefield.-

It was a flaw, a crack in his defenses that I could exploit. I was real sneaky about how I raised the smallest part of my communications device out of the grunts shadow to take video evidence of this conversation. "I need details. Tell me everything you saw, down to the smallest thing. The boss is putting this matter as a highest priority because that man has the potential to ruin everything we've built." Surge said seriously. "The ship came to dock as expected but I didn't see the target disembark at all. One moment there was nothing and the next the target showed up seemingly out of thin air completely dry so he clearly didn't come from the harbor."-

"From there the target walked at a leisurely pace while carefully observing the surrounding with a calm expression. He then made an abrupt turn into an alleyway only to never leave it but had vanished entirely. That was the last we saw of the target." the grunt said seriously and Surge's eyebrows furrowed as his face showed serious thought. "What did he feel like to you?" Surge eventually asked curiously. "I got the sense that I wasn't looking at a person but a dragon type. The target felt almost predatory in the calm confidence he walked with." the grunt admitted honestly.