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The brutal thug had just given the crowd in the Floating Market a vivid lesson through his own death. Clearly, the market's unseen managers had already made their move.
In an instant, many of those who had been itching for trouble fell silent. They went back to chatting and laughing with the stall owners, plastering on fake smiles.
At that moment, Sato was standing before a stall full of counterfeit goods, casually sifting through them as if he hadn't noticed what had happened. But in truth, he had observed the entire event with his psychic powers.
He extended his psychic sense in the direction where the "tentacle" had withdrawn. Probing into the sea, he finally discovered a man in Team Aqua uniform.
The Team Aqua member was hiding inside a massive bubble beneath the water, flanked by a giant Tentacruel and an Azumarill.
As for the thug who had stirred up trouble earlier, he had already been drowned alive by Tentacruel in the depths below.
'So that's why I didn't find anyone on the abandoned ship… they were hiding outside all along.'
Delighted by the discovery, Sato stopped pretending to shop and walked away from the stall, ignoring the owner's baffled, reluctant gaze.
He wasn't in a rush, though. Something unusual had caught his attention.
With his psychic sense, he had clearly seen that the Team Aqua member outside held a laptop. The screen was showing live footage of what was happening aboard the abandoned ship.
And those two sudden bolts of lightning earlier—he still hadn't identified their source.
That meant the man he'd found was not alone. There were likely other Team Aqua members outside, equipped with highly covert surveillance technology. With it, they could monitor everything happening on the ship and respond instantly.
'But how exactly are they watching the trades? I've scanned this place multiple times with my psychic power and haven't found a single hidden camera.'
Sato continued to wander the market, stopping at new stalls while secretly probing the area again and again with his psychic power. But the results only made him uneasy.
Unless he uncovered the source of Team Aqua's surveillance, his infiltration plan would be nearly impossible. If he acted blindly, he risked being discovered the moment he made a move — losing everything instead of gaining.
Half an hour later, the strain of prolonged psychic probing left his head heavy and dizzy. And still, he had found no clue about the source of their monitoring.
So he withdrew, leaving the Floating Market and returning to Haike's speedboat to rest.
It was only after stepping onto the deck that he finally spotted the secret.
Bats — Zubat — flitted through the night sky, their dark bodies nearly indistinguishable from the shadows. Around the necks of several, he noticed tiny infrared cameras.
So that was it. Team Aqua's surveillance method was Zubat. Trained by the organization, they constantly scouted with echolocation and relayed live footage through the cameras.
If anything happened on the ship, the Zubat would swarm to the scene, providing outside Team Aqua members with precise intel in real time.
Sato realized his oversight. He had focused so much on the earlier fight that he had ignored these unremarkable Pokémon blending into the night.
Now that he knew, it was time to remove Team Aqua's eyes. For an ordinary person, quietly dealing with flying scouts that excelled at detection would be near impossible.
But for Sato, handling Zubat in the night sky was child's play.
"Come out, Crobat. Take care of those Zubat up there. Don't kill them — just disrupt them for now."
After a short rest aboard the speedboat, Sato released his Crobat and gave the command.
As the final evolution of Zubat, Crobat's ultrasonic abilities far surpassed theirs. With Crobat's help, Sato could now boldly execute his plan to kidnap the Team Aqua member.
Crobat spread its wings and soared into the night sky. From its mouth burst a special ultrasonic wave.
Almost immediately, the Zubat began reeling drunkenly in the air, losing coordination and crashing into one another. A rare midair collision followed, wings tangling chaotically.
[Looks like Crobat succeeded. Swampert, Pikachu, Duskull — go capture that Team Aqua member in the sea. Move fast, don't give him even the slightest chance to resist.]
With Team Aqua's scouts neutralized, Sato moved to the next step. He released Swampert, Pikachu, and Duskull, sending them into the sea to snatch their target.
The Team Aqua member had no idea disaster was upon him. Accustomed to uneventful days, he was lazily pulling snacks from his space backpack, letting Azumarill monitor the laptop screen for him.
Careless and unguarded, he was caught off-guard when Swampert, Pikachu, and Duskull closed in. Pikachu unleashed a Charge-boosted Thunderbolt, instantly knocking out Tentacruel and Azumarill in one strike.
The man himself froze as Duskull's ghostly power bound him, paralyzed by a primal terror.
Sato had been raising Duskull carefully using methods from the Grimoire of Dark Spirits, honing its innate ability — the Binding Eye.
(Note: Duskull's Binding Eye is a natural talent. It possesses an eye that can awaken the deepest fear in a creature's heart. Any who meet its gaze must pass a willpower check — those who fail are struck with fear and unable to move.)
At first, Duskull trained this power on small animals. Over time, it grew strong enough to reliably paralyze weaker Pokémon. More recently, humans had become its practice subjects — petty criminals that Sato captured and used as training fodder.
By the time the Team Aqua member snapped out of his fear state, Swampert had already dragged him before Sato.
But before he could utter a word, Sato's psychic hypnosis locked him down completely.
Under its influence, the captive began to spill everything he knew.