"The baseline for his risk model is a fabrication."
Doom didn't offer a preamble. A holographic comparison flared into the space between them before Orion had fully sat down.
"Luthor measured the festival's incident rates against a baseline of a completely empty park. He calculated the risk of a crowd based on a void. Any event involving even a handful of people will look artificially dangerous when compared to nothing at all. It is a rigged comparison dressed up as neutral math."
Orion's shoulders dropped an inch, weeks of pressure sliding loose all at once. Across the room, Valeria stared at the glowing data, eyes narrowed on the numbers.
The Monarch handled it effortlessly, handing over the technical undoing of a global corporate giant the way someone corrects a typo in a ledger. He never waited for a thank you. He treated ammunition they'd spent days chasing like a scrap of paper already thrown away.
Valeria kept her eyes on the projection. "That's the problem with it. The math is sound. The premise is dishonest from the ground up."
Doom didn't pause to celebrate the win. He waved a hand and the data dissolved, replaced by a massive architectural projection that flooded the throne room.
The scale of it stole the air from the room. A sprawling complex of glass and hewn stone rose across the display, no mere park pavilion but a full cultural embassy and sanctuary: a permanent installation built to anchor Latverian influence right on the border of LexCorp's territory. Blueprints for construction crews scrolled through the projection's edges. The timing was deliberate. During the exact same week as Luthor's televised debate, Doom had scheduled the monument's grand unveiling.
Valeria studied the holographic skyline. She didn't relax into gratitude; something in her posture pulled tight instead.
"This is a monument."
"It is a statement of presence."
She'd come here for a surgical tool to dissect a report. What she'd gotten instead was a sledgehammer built to shatter the diplomatic status quo.
"Why are you really doing this?" Orion skipped the polite mask, his eyes on the Monarch's silver eye-slits.
Doom offered no nobler reason. He didn't dress it up with talk of the architecture, or what it might do for the local ecosystem.
"It is about beating Luthor in a theater where he cannot retaliate. I am building a reality where his voice drowns under the weight of Latverian permanence. I am creating a spectacle so loud no rebuttal is possible."
He had no intention of ever calling Lex Luthor. A diplomatic envoy didn't interest him, none of it did. He would simply exist louder than his rival: a silent, unassailable victory that required no direct engagement. The building itself was becoming a fortress of facts Luthor couldn't argue against, because its existence alone would prove the argument wrong.
The holograms kept flickering through Orion's vision. Real ammunition, forged from a motive that had nothing to do with the Pokémon or the trainers' safety. A weapon of pure ego. That was all it was.
His own thoughts from the shop back in Manhattan surfaced. Winning by out-arguing Luthor was never the fight he wanted. A debate was never what he wanted. He wanted a world where the argument didn't matter at all.
"I won't do the debate." The words were quiet, but they carried through the hall.
Valeria turned on him, frustration written plain across her face.
"Orion, we can use this! We can take this data and crush his credibility on a global stage. This is the perfect edge."
"It isn't an edge if we use it to play his game."
"It is a strategic advantage!"
She wanted to strike with the precision her logic demanded. Orion stood there, calm, his hands at his sides.
Doom let out a short, dry sound that might have been a chuckle. "How shameless."
Orion didn't defend himself. He didn't explain the refusal or try to justify it. He just stood his ground, silent.
The Monarch tilted his head, caught off guard by the lack of a rebuttal. He'd expected a fight, or at least a frantic defense of his own generosity.
"Perhaps you are more difficult to manage than the data suggests."
The tension in the room shifted, from aggressive to something quieter and more watchful.
Then the air in the hall went cold, and every sound in it died at once. Celebi fluttered near the ceiling, wings pulsing with a frantic, uneven glow. The light in the high windows flickered. Shadows stretched long and warped across the polished floor. No draft caused it, no mechanical failure. Something moved through the palace instead, a subtle psychic tremor that ran through its foundation like a struck bell still ringing.
Doom's gaze snapped upward. His hands stayed steady on the throne, his expression composed, but a muscle ticked at his jaw as he fought down something closer to raw curiosity. He wanted to ask about the ripple's source. He kept the question behind his mask.
Orion and Valeria stayed fixed on the festival's logistics, unaware of the tremor passing through the walls around them.
Orion sat at a small desk in the guest quarters that night, his tablet's glow the only light in the room. He drafted the public decline of the debate, fingers moving in a practiced, efficient rhythm. The words to turn away Luthor's challenge without looking afraid took shape slowly, one careful line at a time.
A hand appeared over his shoulder. Doom had reached down and marked the text with a single, sharp red correction in the middle of a sentence.
Orion didn't argue. He adjusted the line, added the correction, hit send. The message went out into the digital void: a quiet rejection that would leave Luthor's response as the only thing left to wait for.
Doom set something else down on the desk before he straightened, a bound stack of paper thick enough to need both hands. Construction specs, printed and bound rather than projected. The kind of document meant for a slower read than any hologram allowed.
"Study it before Latveria breaks ground." His cloak swept behind him as he turned for the door. "You will want to know precisely what you are standing beside."
He didn't wait for a reply.
***
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Advance chapters in P@T0n Najicablitz.