Chapter 63.1- Oak

I checked for the seventeenth time to ensure my seatbelt was properly fastened, and then I began searching my pockets and bandolier, making sure I had everything I could possibly need. Sitting opposite me, Cynthia just smiled before returning to exchanging whispers with Lance. I could hear what they were saying. The jet wasn’t so large that anyone could speak without speaking to the entire team. But they went to the effort of whispering, so I did my best to ignore their words.

Steven and Wallace sat a bit further away, but I couldn't discern their words at all. My best guess was that one of their Pokémon was maintaining a cone of silence around them. If I were less nervous, perhaps I could have spared the energy to wonder what had them debating amongst themselves so fervently, but I really could not spare it. I turned to Oak, who was sitting in a corner of the jet nursing a glass of liquid courage. I had never known the aged professor to be a drinker, but as we flew over, he had taken glass after glass from the bottle of whisky by his side. Alakazam assured me he wouldn't be drunk by the time we landed, so I just accepted his words and turned my focus inward.

This was going to be a fight like nothing I had ever faced before. We had a plan, but I already knew it wouldn't work. Something would go wrong somewhere. I could feel it in my bones. It could never be that easy. It would never actually be that easy. Our plan would fail. At some point, we would be left to figure out what to do on our own. I just had to trust my family and the people beside me to see it through. Five Champion-level trainers. The squad in this jet would be strong enough to take on whole regions, and I just had to hope it would be enough for this particular Pokémon.

I scratched at the collar around my neck. Honestly, it looked more like a shock collar than anything else, but I had examined the schematics. It wouldn't be doing anything more than it already advertised. It was going to lock out external influences from our heads, and that even included our own psychics. No exceptions could be made. That excluded Ino from the team of two I would be relying on when the violence broke out. We were each to use two Pokémon for the duration of the battle, so I had to pay attention to the symmetry of the entire squad. Steven would be using Metagross. We wouldn't need Ino to run psychic interference with a pseudo-legendary supercomputer on the loose. Broly was another option, but his weakness at range could prove to be a problem. Kenpachi was a definite, and Igneel was most likely going to be the other. I would have considered Tsunade for the potential of healing the rest of the team, but I was loath to expose her to such dangers for such a selfless reason.

Besides, I was going to be able to release my Pokémon as I needed them. The two I chose for now were the first team. I would substitute them out as the needs of the battle changed.

"We're getting close," I heard the pilot speak from the cockpit, and my nerves suddenly disappeared. The battle was here. There was nothing I could do beyond what I had already done. Either I would be ready or not. Either I had the tools to take on this challenge, or I would die here. There was no middle ground, and that realization calmed me down. I had died before. It was nothing. Just pure void, and that was only if I didn't end up being reincarnated somewhere else. I just hoped it was somewhere I could actually have fun.

Maybe a casual harem anime would be best. Not DxD, though. Anything but that shit.

The plane lurched as it landed, and I stared straight ahead until I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up at Cynthia and smiled back at her. "I'm calm," I told her, trying to stand up, but her grip on my shoulder tightened, and it felt like she was trying to crush it between her fingers.

"No, you aren't. I'm not. Only a madman could be calm in this situation, and of the many things you are, Donnell Oak, you are not mad," she said, and I nodded at her words before allowing her to help me up. She returned to her place beside Lance, and I turned away as I saw them kiss before leaving the jet. I was the last to disembark, with Oak by my side, silent as the grave. The rods I held in my hand felt heavy as we came face to face with the subject of our inquiry. He stood facing us, with the arena that was to hold the Tournament of Power being built behind him.

"So, you came," he spoke out, and fixed his blue orbs that barely passed for eyes on all of us. "When I first watched Giovanni hatch this plan, I was unsure about whether or not he'd find enough people willing to join him in his foolishness. I guess I need not have feared. You brought me everything I needed, and even more." At the last part of his sentence, he fixed me with his gaze. When I took a step back, it was unconscious, but I still took another conscious step backwards as he floated towards me.

"The last bit of Mew DNA out there, and you brought it right to me. How are you doing, brother?" he asked, and I searched the area behind me for another Mewtwo until I realized he was staring right at me. What the fuck?

"Oh. You don't know? You'll get your explanation before we begin," he said, turning to Oak at that. I followed his gaze out of curiosity.

Oak remained stubbornly silent, but Mewtwo scowled, and his eyes flashed, causing the Poké Balls on Oak's belt to levitate out of the belt. He clutched them in his psychic grip, and I heard an audible creaking from the balls as Mewtwo spoke again. "Speak. Tell the whole truth and nothing less," he said, and the threat in his voice was clear. The balls creaked even louder to emphasize the point.

Oak looked like he had swallowed a lemon as he turned to me and began speaking. "Seventeen years ago, we—Giovanni, Blaine, and I—looked at the world and saw the writing on the wall. Pokémon were getting stronger, so strong that even as the Champion, I came across a few wild Pokémon that could give me a fight. Your Snorlax is a lesser example of such, able to fight off an elite Pokémon even in its wild state. We saw what the world could become in a decade, two, even four, and it didn't look good. So, we decided to do something about it. Our decision to attempt to push human evolution farther than ethically necessary was born out of a mixture of hubris and genuine concern for our future. Our first products were malformed, terrible things. They were ghastly, not fit for any purpose. When we fixed the bodies in the next iteration, the minds were frayed, barely intact." As he spoke, I could see the shock building on the faces of the others. Cynthia looked horrified as Oak spoke of children as products.

"Eventually, Blaine had the idea, the brainwave. What would happen if, instead of starting from a fetus and editing the genetics as we wished, we made a true Pokémon-human hybrid? It was a sound idea, but every time we attempted to combine Pokémon DNA with human DNA, it failed. We lost dozens as we ran through our specimens at great speed—"

"How did no one catch you?" Cynthia interrupted, aghast. Lance, by her side, looked green. Steven and Wallace stared at Oak with a mix of disgust and amazement.

"I was the Champion. It was easy to write off the disappearances as wild Pokémon attacks. Sometimes we had to engineer actual attacks to get the specimens we needed."

"You're a monster," Lance spoke for the first time.

"I know. But the world needed a monster. In fifty years, can you truly say humans will remain at the top of the food chain?"

"Back to the story," Mewtwo commanded, and Oak nodded.

"Even those attempts did not work, and then Giovanni came to us. He had found something, DNA from a Pokémon he could not place. DNA that contained the genetic information for every single Pokémon we could find. We theorized it belonged to the legendary Pokémon, Mew. With the knowledge that the legendary Pokémon themselves exist, we committed ourselves even more fervently and passionately to the cause. Our goal? To make a human that could stand up to the legendaries themselves. We cloned the DNA as best we could and tried to create our first hybrids. They all failed. Every single one of them failed. None survived the second trimester. And then one day, Giovanni came to us with a subject in a tank. He had done it. He had created a specimen that survived until infanthood and beyond." He took a deep breath and turned to me.

"It was not until we found out what he had done that we realized the risk he had taken. He cloned the original piece of Mewtwo DNA and used that original on you. Every string of it was used on you to make the perfect human, and it failed. When you first grew up, you were a disappointment. Every test, you failed. Beyond slightly above-average intelligence, there was nothing special about you. I even adopted you personally to expose you to the world and see if any latent abilities could be triggered. Nothing worked. Nothing worked until you became a trainer." He stepped closer to me, and I instinctively stepped backward. His eyes gave nothing away as he continued.

"I thought the experiment was a failure until I first noticed that your trainer card had been updated with a unique Pokémon, a Milotic. How could you have found one? Then I started looking with a focused eye and noticed how quickly you evolved your Pidgey. From there, at every instant, I was there, either in person or with Alakazam. I watched every gym challenge as you awakened psychic abilities, as you developed even more and more, as your Pokémon grew at phenomenal speeds. I came to a sudden realization. We hadn't created the perfect human. We had created the perfect trainer. Just look at you. Not even two years as a trainer, and already one of the ten strongest in the world. In another year, you will surpass us all. I thought you were my greatest failure, but now you stand before me as my greatest success." Every word he spoke hit me like a sledgehammer. The only thing that kept me stable was the knowledge that I was not Donnell Oak. I wasn't the one who had been deceived his whole life and viewed as an experiment by a man he had seen as a father.

"Where do I come from?" I asked, some part of me searching for the closure that only knowledge could provide.

"Giovanni never said, but DNA tests have since revealed the truth. Your 'mother' was a clone herself. Giovanni had cloned his DNA with multiple specimens from the Blackthorn family. I suspect that he was attempting to take advantage of the family's natural evolution to become something more than human. And from her came you," he said, and I closed my eyes at that revelation.

"Good. Isn't the truth lovely?" Mewtwo asked, seeming very pleased with himself as he sent the balls back to Oak. Oak caught each of them as they arrived, and I took a deep breath as I tried to come to terms with everything. The fact that the body I inhabited was that of a clone bothered me little. What did bother me was the realization that I was exactly what Mewtwo needed to complete himself, and they had brought me right to him.