Seiko watched the iron.
The metal, glowing red-hot beneath the blacksmith's soot and sweat, was a symbol of everything wrong. Heinar, the village smith, was striking the metal with more fury than technique, a burly man whose traditions were as thick as his forearms. He pulled the blade from the forge, plunged it into the water barrel with a furious hiss, and lifted it for inspection.
A satisfied grin split his ash-stained beard.
'It's cracked,' Seiko thought, not moving a muscle from the shadow of the storehouse. 'You can't see it with the naked eye, but that blade will shatter on the first solid impact. He's treating the iron like it's bronze. Too much carbon, cooled too quickly. It's brittle. It isn't even decent wrought iron, let alone the steel he thinks he's making.'
Seiko, with seventeen years of life in this body and the memory of twenty-eight in another, clenched his jaw. He had been born the third son of Lord Valerius, leader of Aethelgard, the last bastion of the self-proclaimed Celestica Clan. They were a proud people, a people who boasted of surviving the Hisui cataclysm centuries ago, a people who still lived in wood and mud houses in an age that should have known steel.
His knowledge—memories of skyscrapers, databases, thermodynamics, and the history of civilizations—was his treasure and his curse. To his family, it was his eccentricity. His uselessness.
"Staring at the fire again, boy?"
Heinar's voice was a rumble. The smith had spotted him.
"I'm admiring your work, Master Heinar," Seiko lied, his voice calm and measured. It was the tone he had perfected to survive, the one that betrayed none of the frustrating cognitive dissonance he felt every day.
"Admirin' doesn't forge swords," Heinar grunted, turning back to his anvil. "Go count grain or read your scrolls. You're a Lord's son, but you don't have the steel of one."
Seiko nodded, taking no offense. It was the truth, at least as Heinar understood it. He didn't have "steel." He had the knowledge of Bessemer steel, of the blast furnace, of alloy metallurgy that could change the world. But here, that knowledge was worthless.
He walked away from the heat of the forge, his worn boots splashing in the spring mud that defined Aethelgard. His village was built in a river valley—good for primitive farming, terrible for defense. Its walls were simple log palisades, already rotting at the base.
'An attack from a rogue Haxorus or a pair of Krookodile and this is all over,' he thought, his engineer's mind ruthlessly cataloging the structural failures. 'No stone foundations, no treated lumber, no choke points. They live in the same land as Hisui's Team Galaxy, but they learned nothing.'
His family was the root of the problem. They venerated "tradition."
His older brother, Borin, was the embodiment of that tradition. Strong, brutally simple, and the obvious heir. Borin could throw an axe and split a Bouffalant's skull at forty paces. Borin led the hunts and was their father's favorite.
His sister, Elara, was cunning. She understood the village politics, the alliances between families, who traded what. She was their father's invisible hand.
And then there was Seiko. The third. The one who asked strange questions. The one who spent hours drawing bizarre diagrams on deer hides he ruined. The one who spoke of "hygiene" and "crop rotation" and "alloys." The burden.
His steps led him to the Great Hall, the largest and most structurally flawed building in the village. The smoke-beamed roof was a fire trap waiting to happen.
Dinner would be soon. And dinner, lately, was a trial.
Hours later, the hall was filled with the smell of roasted Stantler meat and sour ale. Lord Valerius presided over the main table, his weathered face and gray-streaked beard braided with the severity of an Iron Age king. Borin was at his right, telling a hunting story with grand gestures, much to the amusement of the other warriors.
Seiko ate in silence, watching. His opportunity, or rather his inevitable mistake, came when Valerius banged the table for silence.
"The winter was hard," his father began, his voice filling the hall. "But spring brings new dangers. Scouts in the west report more Scolipede herds. They are moving closer. The southern palisade was damaged last week. Borin."
Borin stood, puffing out his chest. "We will reinforce the wall. Double the guards. And we'll send out a hunting party. Those Scolipede will learn to fear the steel of Aethelgard."
A roar of approval went up.
Seiko couldn't help it. The word slipped out before he could stop it.
"Useless."
It was a whisper, but in the momentary lull after the cheers, it sounded like a thunderclap.
Borin turned slowly. "What did you say, little brother?"
The hall fell silent. Elara, from her seat, shot Seiko a warning look. 'Shut up, you idiot.'
Seiko felt the weight of every eye on him. Fear iced his stomach. It was the pariah's fear, the heretic's. But the fear was overwhelmed by frustration. By logic.
He stood, his hands shaking slightly. "I said it's useless. Reinforcing rotten wood is useless. Putting more men on a wall that can't take a charge is sending men to die."
"And what do you suggest, scholar?" Borin sneered, his hand instinctively going to the hilt of his knife.
"Engineering," Seiko said. Blank stares answered him. "Structure. The current wall is straight. It's stupid. If a Pokémon hits it, all the force is concentrated on one point. It fails. But if we build the wall with angles, with... bastions... the force is deflected. We can create kill zones where archers can fire from two directions."
He was talking too fast, his modern mind forgetting his audience. "And we aren't even using our resources. There is clay by the river. We can make bricks. Kilns. We can dig stone foundations. We can divert the stream to create a moat. We could build something to last a thousand years instead of this garden fence!"
The silence that followed was heavy and deadly.
Lord Valerius had not moved a muscle. His gray eyes, cold as the iron Heinar tried to forge, were fixed on his youngest son.
"You," Valerius said, his voice dangerously low, "speak of things you do not understand. You speak of magic. Bricks. Moats. Do you think we are kings from a fairy tale? We are survivors. We are the children of Celestica. We honor our ancestors and the tradition that kept us alive."
"Tradition is killing you!" Seiko burst out, his control finally shattering. "You live in one of the richest regions in the world, Unova, and you starve in winter! You have iron in the hills and you fight with soft-tipped spears! You are stagnant!"
"Enough!" Valerius's roar made the pewter cups rattle.
He rose to his full height, a figure of absolute authority. "You have shamed your brother. You have insulted your ancestors. Your mind is unwell, boy. It has been filled with air and useless dreams."
Seiko realized his mistake. He had gone too far. He had revealed the gap between them, made it unbridgeable.
'Good job,' he thought with bitter panic. 'You've proven yourself the brilliant engineer. You've also gotten yourself exiled.'
Valerius sat down, his anger replaced by cold, pragmatic calculation. "You obviously have no place here. Your brother leads the hunts. Your sister manages trade. You... you do nothing. A Lord cannot afford a son who does nothing."
Seiko waited for the sentence. The mines? Banishment?
"The scouts at the Eastern Plains outpost have not reported in two weeks," Valerius said, as if dictating a routine order. "They are dangerously low on supplies. Tomorrow, at dawn, you will take a cart with flour, salted meat, and hides and deliver it to them."
Seiko felt the blood drain from his face.
The Eastern Plains.
It was a death sentence. It was the wildest, most untamed part of the region, a vast sea of grass where herds of Tauros and Bouffalant ran like thunder, where predators hunted unchallenged. The "outpost" was a joke; a lonely shed manned by two men who had committed some crime and been sent there to die slowly.
A week's journey. Alone. For a "scholar" who had never been trained to fight.
"Yes, father," Seiko said, his voice now void of all emotion.
"Prove you are more than words and air, Seiko," Valerius said, and with that, he turned his back on him, ending the conversation and, in effect, his son's life in Aethelgard.
Seiko walked out of the hall. No one watched him go.
Six days later, Seiko thought the smell of his own fear would be the last thing he ever smelled.
The cart had broken three days ago, a wheel shattered in a rut his engineer's mind had seen coming but his physical strength had been unable to avoid. He had abandoned most of the supplies, carrying only what he could fit on his back: a skinning knife (brittle iron), a bedroll, and enough food for three more days.
He was gaunt, filthy, and terrified.
The Eastern Plains were not like the controlled forests around Aethelgard. This was the real Pokémon world. A world that did not forgive.
He had spent the second night hiding in a rock crevice, trembling as a herd of Zebstrika thundered past, their bodies crackling with static electricity that made Seiko's hair stand on end. On the fourth day, he had narrowly avoided a swarm of Durant stripping a tree to its bones with terrifying efficiency.
'Analyze, adapt, overcome,' he reminded himself, his modern mind clinging to pragmatism. 'You are not a warrior. You are a thinker. Think.'
He had boiled his water. He had walked only at dawn and dusk, avoiding the hunting hours of larger predators. But he was exhausted. His knowledge of civilization's history meant nothing when an Excadrill could burst from the earth beneath his feet.
And it was then, on the seventh day, that he finally reached the location of the outpost.
Or rather, what was left of it.
It was a pile of charred timber and gnawed bones. The scouts had been dead for weeks. His father, Lord Valerius, had known. This wasn't a resupply mission. It was a clean exile. A sacrifice.
Seiko dropped to his knees in the tall grass, the heavy pack falling from his shoulders. The realization hit him with physical force. He was alone. Completely, utterly alone. Cast off by his family, sent to die in a world that neither understood nor wanted him.
'It's not fair,' he thought, the childish emotion welling up for the first time in years. 'I gave them the truth. I offered them... progress.'
He laughed, a dry, broken sound. Progress. He had offered physics to magic-believers.
'And now I die. How ironic.'
He was so tired. He could just lie down here. Let the grass cover him.
That's when he heard the sound. It wasn't a roar or a growl. It was a click. Metallic. Faint.
Seiko got to his feet slowly, gripping his useless knife. He moved toward the sound, pushing aside the scorched grass near the ruins.
There, in a small depression, was a Pokémon.
His meta-mind identified it instantly. Pawniard. The Soldier Pokémon. Dark/Steel type.
But his engineer's mind saw something else. It was broken.
The Pawniard was no bigger than his thigh. Its blades, normally razor-sharp, were notched and dull. One of the blades on its torso was visibly cracked, an ugly fracture that ran toward its red core. It was leaning against a rock, trembling, but its bright red eyes stared at him with pure, impotent hatred. It was covered in dirt and dried blood.
'Outcast,' Seiko thought. 'Probably from a larger group. A Bisharp leads the pack. The weak or damaged are abandoned.'
The Pawniard tried to stand, letting out a faint shriek, and raised one bladed arm, ready to fight to the death.
Seiko stopped. He saw the same death sentence in this creature that his father had given him.
'You're a burden too, huh?' Seiko thought. 'Broken. Useless. Cast off.'
Slowly, Seiko sheathed his knife. He sat on the ground, about ten feet away, and began to unpack his bag. The Pawniard watched his every move, ready to strike.
Seiko pulled out his last piece of dried meat. His rations for the next two days. He broke it in half. He set one half on the ground between them.
The Pawniard hissed.
"It's okay," Seiko whispered. "I'm not going to hurt you."
He pulled out his waterskin and his small tool kit, which consisted of a roll of copper wire he had stolen, a small metal file (which he'd secretly made himself), and a lump of pine resin.
The Pawniard tilted its head, its hatred momentarily replaced by confusion.
"You're broken," Seiko said, more to himself than the Pokémon. "But I... I know how to fix things."
He moved slowly, so slowly. "I'm going to look at that crack. Okay?"
The Pawniard tensed, but hunger and its injuries were making it weak. Seiko moved closer. He saw the crack up close. It was bad. The torso blade wasn't just a weapon; it was part of its body.
'An engineering problem,' Seiko murmured. 'A stress fracture in a composite material. Can't weld it. But I can stabilize it.'
For the next hour, Seiko worked. He spoke in a low, soothing monotone, describing the second law of thermodynamics while he cleaned the wound. He explained the principles of tensile load while he carefully used the copper wire to "stitch" the crack, using small holes that already existed in the Pawniard's armor. Finally, he applied the heated pine resin to seal the join and protect it from moisture.
It wasn't perfect. But it was better.
The Pawniard had trembled the entire time, but it had not attacked. It had felt, perhaps for the first time, a touch that was not violent, but constructive.
When Seiko finished, he sat back, exhausted. The sun was beginning to set over the plains.
The Pawniard stood up, carefully. It moved. The stabilized blade held firm. It turned to Seiko. Its red eyes no longer burned with hatred. They burned with a different intensity.
It walked forward slowly and snatched the half-piece of dried meat Seiko had offered. It retreated to a safe distance and ate.
Seiko ate his own half. Silence settled between them.
He wasn't a trainer and his Pokémon. Not yet.
They were two broken things, abandoned at the end of the world.
Seiko stood and looked at the charred ruins of the outpost. His family wanted him dead. This world was brutal. But for the first time since he could remember, Seiko didn't feel despair. He felt purpose.
He was not going to die here.
'My father says I'm just words and air,' Seiko thought, as the Pawniard moved closer and stood beside him, a small, steel silhouette against the purple sky.
He bent down and picked up a warped piece of metal from the ruins. It was brittle iron. Useless.
"Well," Seiko said to the air, and to his new, broken companion. "We're going to need a forge. A real one. And then, a wall. And after that... we'll build everything else."