"What... what in the world is that thing?!"
Miles turned his head toward the sight before him. He shivered, and nearly bit his own tongue.
Near the coast, a group of monsters had appeared out of nowhere and were tearing everything apart without mercy.
If that had been all, it might have been bearable. A terrorist attack had just taken place, after all, and a few aftershocks would not have been completely unexpected.
But when David and the others turned their eyes toward these destructive "monsters," even David, who had just fought off a horde of modified Pokémon, and Presley, who had spent years working for the Security Bureau, felt their stomachs turn.
Next to these new horrors, the vicious modified Pokémon David had just faced now looked almost tame.
"These cultists deserve to die!"
Presley said through clenched teeth.
If modified Pokémon were simply Pokémon changed through technology while still keeping their original shape, then the things standing before them now could only be called true monsters.
One had a Charizard's body fitted with two pairs of Pidgeot's wings, a massive horn like Heracross's where its head should be, and a living Seviper in place of its tail.
Another was an enormous sea creature with nine heads, its body loosely shaped like a Gyarados, but each of its nine heads was completely different from the others, and its dark green hide dripped venom steadily enough to make anyone's blood run cold.
A third had the body of a Kangaskhan, but with four thick, blue-black arms. Its usually tough hide was reinforced with Aggron's heavy plating, and the pouch on its belly no longer carried a baby Kangaskhan — instead, it held a massive sac of flame that spewed fire wildly in every direction.
Yet none of these were the most frightening.
Out on the water, an enormous shape was beginning to crawl ashore — at least twenty meters tall, a sludge-like giant rising up out of the ocean.
Its muddy body was covered in hundreds, maybe thousands, of Pokémon parts fused together: tails, wings, heads, arms. A single glance at it was enough to make one's sanity waver.
Even the other monsters kept their distance from it. Anything close by was either swallowed whole or drained of its life force, and the sea itself turned black wherever it passed. This thing, which had gone far beyond anything that could still be called a Pokémon, rampaged without restraint. In just a short time, half of the water park, along with the coastal reefs nearby, had been reduced to ruin.
The area, already devastated by the assassination attempt and the explosions, was now little more than a wasteland.
And that enormous sludge monster had barely even started coming ashore.
Looking at these creatures, David suddenly felt a strange sense of déjà vu.
Unlike the earlier Pokémon, which had simply been modified versions of their original selves, the monsters in front of him now had been altered at the genetic level, completely and thoroughly.
This wasn't how things were usually done in the Blue Star Pokémon world. It reminded him more of something out of the actual Pokémon world.
An image from a Pokémon manga surfaced in David's mind.
It was a creature even more absurd than everything currently in front of him combined — a result of Team Rocket's genetic experiments, a chimera Pokémon created by splicing together the three Legendary Birds.
The monsters here might lack the same level of technical precision, but the general approach behind them wasn't so different from Team Rocket's methods, just without nearly the same level of research skill behind it.
Honestly, the level of technology in the Pokémon world was staggering. Beyond the Legendary Bird chimera, there was also Red's Eevee, which could evolve and revert to its base form at will — another creation of Team Rocket. And that wasn't even mentioning the only known artificial Pokémon, Mewtwo, born from Mew's own genetic material.
And it wasn't just Team Rocket, either. Team Galactic had once pursued its own ruthless project: reviving the strongest hunter from three hundred million years ago, the mechanical Pokémon Genesect.
Compared to all of that, what was happening here was really nothing more than a minor incident.
From what David could tell, these monsters were likely failed, unstable creations, made using techniques that were still far from perfected.
Even from a distance, David's Aura sense could pick up a familiar scent coming off them.
The only reason they were still alive at all was that they kept devouring outside life force using some kind of special energy inside their bodies.
Even so, without intervention, they probably wouldn't last more than a few hours, a day at most.
Still, simply waiting them out clearly wasn't an option. If these things were left to keep rampaging, all of Magic City would be reduced to rubble — and that was something no one could accept.
Presley clearly thought the same. He reached for several Poké Balls at his belt.
"Salamence, all of you, go stop that ugly thing from making it to shore!"
He threw the Poké Balls, and in flashes of white light, a Charizard, a Gyarados, an Aerodactyl, and a Haxorus appeared one after another. With Salamence in the lead, they moved to intercept the sludge monster before it could reach land.
"Everyone — get the civilians evacuated now, and hold off the other fusion monsters! Move!"
"Understood!"
At Presley's order, the official Trainers on the scene sprang into action at once.