The Pokemon is as wide as a fridge taller too, with a Teddiursa clamped to her back like a living knapsack. I know Ursaring are supposed to hibernate in winter, but nobody told this one, or the stunted little cub roaring even louder from her shoulders. She blows through the cave mouth in a blur of claws and murder, sending two of the grunts flying so hard into the rock that their helmets split open like eggs. The Sneasel is faster than thought—tries to pivot and launch a second Night Slash—but Ursaring just backhands it into the wall so hard the whole cave shakes. Koffing, caught mid-wheeze, gets a full-body swipe that turns it into a purple bowling ball, bouncing against the stone until it ricochets out into the snow with a wet, splatting noise.

  I never see the handler move. He’s just gone, and the Sneasel with him—both vanished up the ravine wall like they traded places with the air itself. The rest of the grunts aren’t so lucky. Two scramble back, faces coated in horror and smog as Ursaring barrels forward, jaws wide enough to crush limbs. The Teddiursa on her back shrieks, voice higher and meaner than any baby should have, and hucks a fistful of wet snow right at my face. I flinch, but the snow never hits—Beldum’s Ball burns cold in my pocket, and then the world explodes.

  Ursaring rips the mouth of the cave wider, clawing at the ice and stone with the white-eyed focus of something that doesn’t care if it brings the whole mountain down. It sweeps the cave from wall to wall like it’s looking for a snack, and I remember in a flash every story I ever heard about wild Pokémon that drag people into the woods and keep them just alive enough for the spring thaw.

  The Teddiursa sees me. Her eyes are dark and bottomless, the kind of empty you see in a reflection where there should be nothing at all. She bares her teeth—baby teeth, but still, teeth—and points at me with one stubby claw. It’s almost funny, except for the blood on her nose and the way her mom starts to lurch in my direction. I try not to move. I try not to do anything. It’s like when you’re at the dentist and the drill gets closer and closer and you know if you twitch you’ll lose a tongue.

  The first grunt manages to get his Poké Ball open, but what comes out is a Pidgeotto—totally useless down here, wings flapping wild in the close air. Ursaring grabs it by the tail feathers and hammers it into the ground until it stops moving. The grunt tries to run, but gets clipped by a glancing blow that sends him spinning headfirst into the ice. The second grunt does better: his Ball spits out a Golbat, which hisses and throws itself at Ursaring’s head. She ignores it, lets the Golbat latch on to her face, and then just punches it so hard the wings stay behind while the body flies off into the dark.

  There’s no mercy. There’s not even a pause. They’re dead, or gone, or wishing they were. I try to curl deeper into the cave, but my legs won’t answer—they’re part of the rock now, glued and useless. The Ursaring comes closer, the Teddiursa still pointing and shrieking, and I know they’re going to eat me. There’s nothing in the world but the bear, the cub, and the bone-deep certainty that I’m about to get torn in half.

  That’s when the backup Koffing are deployed. Maybe it’s reflex, or maybe the handler’s still up there calling shots from cover, but three more Koffing barrel into the cave right behind the Ursaring. They don’t even try to attack—they just start hissing, every vent pouring out poison gas until the air goes purple and thick enough to cut. The Teddiursa coughs, buries her face in Ursaring’s fur, and the big bear bellows again, this time in rage. She turns, claws flashing, and knocks two Koffing together so hard they fuse into a single, spasming lump. The third one, smarter or luckier than the rest, floats straight up to the cave ceiling and wedges itself between two slabs of frozen stone.

  I see what's coming a split second before it happens: Koffing's eyes go wide, then a white-hot glow builds inside its shell. Self-destruct. I try to scream, but the air’s already gone thick with poison and fear, and my lungs won’t work.

  The detonation is less a bang than a shove—like the whole cave is a fist and I’m being crammed down the world’s tightest glove. The pressure hits first, flattening me against the wall. Then the heat, raw and skin-shaving, followed by a sound so loud it turns my bones to tuning forks. The last image I get before everything turns to static is the Ursaring curling around its Teddiursa, one huge arm braced against the blast.

  Then the back half of the cave evaporates.

  I’m thrown into a void of ice, rock, and loose snow, tumbling ass-over-head down a chute that used to be a ravine and is now a cocktail of mudslide, avalanche, and outright artillery strike. I claw for a handhold—anything—but there’s nothing but cold and momentum. Every time I try to scream, more snow jams into my mouth and ears and eyes, packing every inch of me in a cocoon of white and blue.

  I hit the ground, bounce, and keep sliding. For one mad instant, I’m upside down and see the whole world inverted: the cave mouth collapsed, the ravine above filling with smoke and debris, and in the middle of it, the Teddiursa riding her mother’s back like a banner. Ursaring isn’t running—she’s steering, guiding the slide, her body a battering ram that clears the path and keeps the cub safe above everything else. The snow turns red and brown where she passes, but the Teddiursa barely flinches.

  I try to brace, but the next bounce knocks the breath out of me and I stop caring. All I can do is curl around the Ball in my jacket and pray I don’t shatter on the rocks below.

  The avalanche sweeps us all the way down the mountain, a demolition derby of dead wood, uprooted trees, and whatever else got in the way. I’m not sure how long I’m tumbling, but when I finally stop, it’s in a heap of snow so dense I can’t tell up from down. For a second, I think I might be dead—buried alive, nothing left but cold and pressure and the slow, creeping dark.

  I’m not dead, though. Not yet. There’s no pain, just this weird sense of compression—like being rolled tight in the world’s coldest fruit roll-up. My hands have gone numb, and my knees are jammed up against something rough and unyielding. Air’s a rumour, a promise of maybe if I can just find a way to turn my head. I can’t even move my mouth to spit out the sleet choking me, so I breathe through my nose in slow, panicked drips.

  I remember Beldum, the Ball still wedged in my jacket. With fingers that barely answer, I dig it out, thumb numb on the wet, freezing metal. The release button is stiff as a coin in hard gum. I press it. Beldum doesn’t so much appear as shudder into existence, half-glitched from the cold and the wild spin. It floats, just barely, then slumps against the snowpack, its eye a slit of sullen orange.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The link between us is a bad radio, static and desperate, but the message is simple: Can you dig?

  Beldum twitches like a tuning fork, then angles its claw down and starts to vibrate. The metal hull hums, heat building until the snow around us melts to slush. Water trickles along my cheek and down my neck, and for a moment I think Beldum’s going to boil us out. Instead, it works with surgical precision, carving a tunnel just wide enough to wedge our bodies upward, centimetre by centimetre.

  Above, the pressure shifts. I hear a sound—at first I think it’s the wind, then realize it’s the high-pitched warble of Teddiursa. Buried alive too, or maybe calling for its mother, or both. I push harder, clawing at the melting slurry, and finally manage to break through. My head bursts into open air, which tastes like blood and burnt ozone. Beldum hovers above me now, eye wide and wild, and together we scramble up the side of a shallow pit, the world slowly righting itself beneath our feet.

  There’s no sign of the grunts or their Pokémon. Just a field of shredded trees, mud and ice, and a silence so heavy my eardrums throb against it. The cave is gone, replaced by a gouge in the slope that runs all the way down to a mangled tangle of timber and rock. The only movement is the Teddiursa, half-buried in a mound of brown fur and snow at the bottom of the slide.

  I slide down after it, boots catching on roots and stones until I hit the base, knees buckling. The Ursaring is there, or what’s left: one arm outstretched, claws splayed skyward, her head twisted at a wrong angle. The fur is matted with blood and mud, the mouth open in a way that says she died mid-roar. Teddiursa is pawing at her chest, trying to free her from the snow, making small, wet noises that could be crying or just the failure of her lungs to work in all this cold. I want to turn away, but I can’t.

  Beldum floats beside me, watching the bear and her cub with the same analytical distance it uses for everything else. I wonder if it’s running numbers on our odds of survival now that the guards are gone, or just waiting for me to give an order. The Teddiursa looks up, eyes dark and wet, then goes back to digging at her mother’s fur.

  I kneel in the snow. My hands are shaking so bad I can’t even wipe the crust from my face. “You did it,” I tell Beldum, almost laughing. “We’re alive.”

  Beldum tilts its head, then turns to face the slope above, where the last puff of Koffing gas is evaporating into the sun. For a second, I swear I feel something—a flicker of pride? Or maybe just the residual hum of adrenaline in my own skull.

  I look at the Teddiursa, then at the limp mass of Ursaring. “We can’t just leave her,” I whisper, unsure who I mean. Me, or the cub, or Beldum. I shuffle forward, careful, and start to dig too. The snow is heavy but loose, and with Beldum’s help, we clear enough away that the Teddiursa can crawl under her mother’s arm, curling up against the cooling fur.

  I don’t know how long I kneel there. In my head, the world’s still spinning, every nerve shot with the memory of the cave, the chase, the blast. The sun inches higher, and so does the wind, picking up threads of fur and ash and carrying them off into the woods.

  At some point, the Teddiursa falls asleep. Or maybe just gives up. I check the Ursaring for a pulse, but of course there’s nothing. She took three explosions and the mountain with her—no way anything survives that, except by accident or stubbornness.

  Beldum hovers close, eye soft. Not red anymore, but a paler shade, exhaustion set in long ago. I reach out, let my hand rest on its scarred hull. I expect it to pull away, but instead it vibrates—just a little—like it’s purring.

  We sit a while longer, until the silence starts to feel safe again, or at least normal. Above us, the ridge is a ruin, but it’s empty. No more search teams. No more Sneasel with razors for fingers. Just snow, trees, and the slow, measured breathing of a cub who will wake up to a world she never asked for.

  I stay with them as long as my body will let me. The wind stings my cheeks raw, but even as the cold starts drilling down to the bone again, I don’t want to leave the Teddiursa. Eventually, Beldum nudges me—an insistent, businesslike prod in the ribs that means: priorities. I nod, every muscle resisting, and slog through the snow to where the Ursaring’s charge finally stopped us at the bottom of the slope.

  The backpack is a soaked, half-frozen lump at my hip, but inside the main pocket is the canister of field spray I pinched from the truck. Label’s half-ripped, but the orange stripe and band-aid logo say “Super Potion” in four languages. I shake it once, then kneel by Beldum and scan for damage. The hull is scored deep under the eye, with the cobalt blue feathered back in strips; one joint on the claw hangs out of true, twitching like it’s stuck between gears. The psychic relay between us wavers, fuzzed out by static and pain.

  I press the nozzle to the biggest crack and trigger the spray. The stuff hits with a hiss and a vivid sting of menthol, bubbling in all the places where Beldum is bleeding whatever passes for blood. It trembles, but not from fear—more like the way a tuning fork shakes sound into the air. I work the can up and down, misting the metal until the dented plates start to unbend, warping back toward their old geometry. As I watch, the edges of the scars knit shut, the paint smoothing over as if some invisible hand remembers exactly how Beldum’s hull should look. The wound under the eye lingers, but the ache in my head dims, replaced by a weird, humming relief. Beldum looks at me. The glance is quick, mathematical, but not unkind.

  I take a swig from the water bottle, spit out the taste of aluminium, then check the Teddiursa. She’s still curled under her mother’s arm, barely moving, but the rise and fall of her little chest is steady now. I want to help her, but I have no idea how to fix her broken heart after it’s been blown in half by a Koffing. I leave her the blanket anyway, covering as much of her as I can, and drag myself a few paces away—just far enough to collapse without scaring her. Beldum hovers between us, uncertain, then settles close to the cub, eye flicking from my face to hers and back again like it’s calculating a differential equation between griefs.

  It doesn’t take long before the exhaustion overwhelms me. The last day hits like a deadfall trap: the sprint, the avalanche, the clawing through solid snow. I’m asleep before my head even fully hits the drift, and for a while I dream nothing at all—just black, and the soft, endless hum of Beldum’s EM field running in the background of my skull.