In the dark distance of the night, the pounding of the Voltorbs burst on the horizon. The clouds flickered with a light almost unearthly in its paleness. The rain from the Castform sweeps soaked through their clothes, their packs, their rations. Every half hour there would come a beating of wide wings, and a squadron of Fearows would pass overhead. Zack would throw himself down in the mud along with all the others, pressing his face to the ground and waiting for the sharp pain of the concussion. If it came, he knew, taking cover would be unlikely to do them any good. But nobody wanted to just sit there and wait to die.

They were crouched in a depression surrounded by patches of trees. They were four miles from the city; not close enough to see it, only the flashes from the bombs. Zack's uniform smelled of stale sweat from the gruelling march of the day, the struggle through the poisonous jungle as the humidity pressed in around them like a vice. With one hand he clutched a pistol, tightly so it would not slip. His other hand drifted down, almost of its own accord, to touch gently the Pokeball on his belt.

There were no tents, and no lights. Sergeant Summers had ordered them not to make camp. As far as he was concerned, they were still preparing for combat, and should be ready to march on a moment's notice. That was what he had said an hour ago, before he went back to the far side of the hill to continue arguing with Corporal Hamon. If Zack turned around now he would see their silhouettes, Summers gesticulating angrily, the Corporal sitting on a log with her arms folded across her chest.

"I'm not taking my people beyond this point." she had said. "They'll die." And that was all. The rest had been the Sergeant – shouting, threatening her, threatening the enlisted men and women who stood by her. At eleven o'clock he had balled his Pokemon and set off for the city.

"Anyone who does not march with me is guilty of dereliction of duty." He had said. "You will all be tried by the Provisional Military Court when we get back to Blackthorn. Do you understand me, soldiers?"

They were supposed to shout "Yes, sir!" but nobody did. He had walked a hundred metres through the scrub, turned back to find only a single private behind him. After a moment the boy had turned and crept back into cover, and Sergeant Summers had been alone. Fifteen minutes later he had been back shouting at the Corporal again.

If they had been real soldiers, Zack knew, they would have done as he told them. They would have marched to Ecruteak and been blown to pieces by Voltorbs or cut to shreds by the razor leaves, because that was what soldiers were for. But they weren't soldiers, only students and shop assistants and readers of political tracts, only children. They were children and Coporal Hamon was their mother.

Anna was crouched on the bank beside him. Her hair was just peeking out from beneath the green cap of her uniform, and Zack remembered how long it had been when they were at university together. It wasn't only her hair that had changed when she came back from Saffron City. When he had been in love with her in the summer two years before the war, she had laughed at everything, even things that weren't funny. It had gotten so that her constant good humour was almost irritating to the people around her, but now he missed it terribly. Saffron City had changed her, Saffron City and everything that had come after.

He wanted more than anything to break the silence of that nightmare night. All around him, everyone in the platoon was quiet and grim, their eyes turned toward the distant battlefield.

"What do you think?" he said at last. "Should we be going in?"

She looked at him as if he were whispering in church.

"There's nobody else except for us." He went on, only to fill the gap. "There's nothing we can do for them."

Anna nodded. "Tepe said something like this in one of his lectures that I saw." She said. "A true revolutionary does not fear death, but he fears being useless to his cause. If there is truly nothing we can do, then we should wait, and hope to be of use in the future."

Zack looked out at the hammering horizon once again.

"We might do something." He said. "Something more than nothing at all. We'd take a few of them with us."

"No." said a voice from behind him. "You wouldn't."

Corporal Hamon's broad shoulders loomed over him, would loom over him even if he stood up. With her cap pulled down over her face and her hair shaved to a stubble she looked almost like a man, yet there was a matriarchal aspect to the hardness in her voice.

"A platoon of green kids like yourselves, most with no prior combat experience even as trainers, going up against artillery, armour and high-level veteran Pokemon… if we were lucky, we'd take out one or two of them. Unlucky, not even that. You might die or you might surrender. From what we've heard about the POW camps in Goldenrod, you might be better to choose the former option."

"Where's Sergeant Summers?" Anna asked.

Hamon waved her hand dismissively. "He didn't say." She replied. "Where's the third one of your troop? Andrew, was it?"

"Andrei." Said Zack. "He's somewhere further down the line. He said he wants to be alone."

"Family in Ecruteak?" The Corporal asked. "Didn't know, but I guessed."

They looked down the line of soldiers, crouching or lying on their bellies. There was a dark, damp shape that might have been Andrei or might have been someone else.

Zack looked back at the city.

"He took us to meet them once." Anna said quietly. "It was autumn, and we went to see the Bell Tower."

"Lots of people got out over the past few weeks." The Corporal offered, but Anna shook her head. Zack tried to feel angry, but at that moment another flock of bird Pokemon appeared in the distance and he had to throw himself onto the ground again.

When dawn came there was a thick cloud of smoke rising from the city. Charlie caught a lucky break in the Magnetite bursts and was able to pick up a radio broadcast from Goldenrod. As they clustered around the set, the news came through that at five o'clock this morning, the Kanto Parliament had held an emergency session, and voted to declare war on the Protectorate Government.