Chapter 143: Countermeasures

Bill’s house feels like a grave, then turns into a lab breakthrough

Red arrives at Bill’s place carrying all the emotional residue of Rowan, the Dreamer, and the sense that this house is now “the grave of someone he knew. Someone he killed.” Bill’s usual Clefairy hologram still jump-scares him at the door, but once he gets downstairs the mood shifts from dread to fascination when Bill bluntly says the secret to surviving Rowan’s psychic assault wasn’t some mental technique — it was hardware.

The anti-psychic helmet is real, gross, and kind of brilliant

Bill shows Red a bulky helmet lined with living cloned Umbreon muscle suspended in nutrient mesh — “an incredibly complex petri dish shaped like a helmet” that turns out to be his answer to psychic shielding. When Red puts it on, his psychic sense stops feeling like an expanding sphere and becomes a narrow forward beam through the visor, and merging with Pikachu only works when Pikachu is in view. Bill is delighted that Red’s brain immediately jumps to experiments, thresholds, and whether psychic interference is binary or measurable by degree.

Eva fills in gaps, and Bill unveils a second countermeasure

While Bill steps out, Red messages Eva and learns she was offline during Rowan’s attack because Bill was backing her up and later reformatted her, leaving her with a lost week while Red lost a month. Then Bill comes back with a half-shell anti-psychic ball: a proof-of-concept Poké Ball that blocks telekinesis and psychic interaction, only lasts about four minutes, and can’t be refueled once used. Red instantly suspects this is not really about everyday Kadabra catches, especially after Bill says Silph put up a bounty for the tech a few months earlier.

Blue trains for Victory Road while Red races in with bad news

The scene cuts to Blue climbing near-vertical rock faces west of Viridian with a newly bought Machamp, pushing himself through the practical danger Victory Road is meant to test: survival, command, endurance, and judgment. He’s restless to become champion and start changing Kanto, but that impatience gets interrupted when Red messages him with obvious urgency and then arrives on Charizard in a landing so wild Blue calls him a showoff. Red’s new Bill-built gloves, glasses, and speaker setup make the reunion feel both impressive and quietly painful.

On a windy plateau, Red tells them the Dreamer saved him — and has been altering researchers’ minds

Once Leaf arrives with thermoses and caffeine, Red plays a pre-recorded confession: he remembers meeting the Dreamer multiple times through merger, trusting them, learning they were Sabrina’s student, and hearing directly that they’ve been psychically pushing reckless unknown researchers to quit. He also says the Dreamer helped heal him enough to wake up, which he openly admits may bias his judgment. The bombshell lands hard: the Dreamer is both rescuer and violator, and Red wants to stop them without treating them like a monster.

The first crack: can Red even trust his own mind?

Blue responds with the most brutal but necessary question in the chapter: how can Red know the Dreamer didn’t manipulate him, too? Leaf reveals she’s been running a full paranoia protocol on herself — recordings, private belief logs, metadata checks, reminders from people in other regions — which gives the moment a frantic human texture instead of abstract philosophy. Red can’t really answer beyond saying he’s thought about it constantly and still believes the urgent priority is stopping the Dreamer’s campaign.

Zoe Palmer’s article makes public disclosure impossible

Before they can even solve the Dreamer problem, Leaf and Blue show Red Zoe Palmer’s article, which basically argues his repeated presence at Kanto’s biggest disasters makes him either impossibly unlucky or suspiciously well-informed. The piece name-checks Cinnabar, Pallet Labs, Lavender Tower, Mt. Moon, the Rocket Casino, and Silph, and asks what else Red may know in advance. That instantly kills Red’s idea of going public: Blue wants a press conference if anything, Leaf says maybe a recorded meeting, but both agree he absolutely should not reveal his tie to the Dreamer.

Then the real fight: negotiation, the Master Ball, and what a champion owes the region

The chapter’s core argument erupts when Red says he suspects Silph’s anti-psychic work is meant to make the Master Ball usable against the Dreamer, and admits he was planning to warn them. Blue flatly refuses: if the Dreamer can alter minds, they’re a threat on the scale of Rocket or worse, and a future champion can’t justify giving up a tool that might protect Kanto. Red frames that as betrayal of someone who saved his life; Leaf goes even further, saying using a Master Ball on the Dreamer would be morally worse than killing them.

Leaf keeps the trio from breaking, and they leave with a 2-week deadline

Just when the argument starts sounding like Vermilion all over again, Leaf steps in and reminds them of the promise they made after earlier fractures: stronger together, even when they disagree. She proposes the only compromise available — talk to Sabrina together, then trusted people like Oak and Red’s mom, regroup, and decide jointly what to offer the Dreamer and what happens if they refuse. Red agrees not to tell the Dreamer about the Master Ball for two weeks, Blue says he’ll try to become champion in that window, and the chapter ends with all three understanding that history may judge them harshly no matter what they choose.