I immediately made use of my new funds, booking a room in the pokemon center for the night for myself and my pokemon. I planned to return to camping in the wilderness around Pewter City the following nights — my near-poverty was too recent for me to be too frivolous with my new funds — but between the late hour and my exhaustion from the long day of hiking, I had no desire to spend the next hour stumbling around in the dark, looking for and then setting up a campsite.

The next morning, our first stop of the day was Sal’s emporium where I spent exactly half of my newly acquired funds to purchase two weeks and two days’ worth of nephrite jade for Sableye. He stared with obvious desire as Sal weighed out the specified amount, his eyes practically glued to the bag as we left the shop and found a secluded training area close to route three. Thankfully, he managed to hold himself back until I prepared his breakfast and thoroughly mixed in the recommended portion of gemstones, but dug in with almost desperate hunger when I’d pushed the bowl his way.

I was a bit perplexed by his gluttony since it wasn’t like the gemstones were too different from what he was used to, at least since I’d rescued him from Team Rocket. It was more than the small handful of diamonds I’d previously been sprinkling on top of his meals or the bits of nephrite jade he’d gotten the day prior, but not so much more that I thought deserved such voraciousness. Perhaps it was the fact that he’d earned these gemstones in a much more direct way than any of his previous meals?

I watched him eat for a few seconds more before shrugging and preparing food for my other two pokemon. Regardless of the reason, I was glad he was enjoying himself.

Thirty minutes later all of us were fed, cleaned up, and ready to start training.

“One week!” I said as I held up a hand with a single finger raised, my three pokemon watching me curiously. “That’s how long we will train before challenging the gym.” I held up my other hand, this one with five fingers raised, and lifted two more fingers on the first. “Thirty-five percent. This is the number of trainers who defeat a gym in the first year of their journey. If you only include those trainers who defeat a gym on their first try, the number goes down to fifteen percent.” I paused, lowering my hands. “I intend for us to be among that number.”

“Di! Kyu!” Hobbes cried in agreement.

“Bzzzt!” Porygon echoed him.

Sableye remained silent, but his eyes were glued to my face, so I gave an approving nod.

“It won’t be easy. Gym Leader Brock will be a challenge many times more difficult than any trainer we’ve faced before, and to even have a shot we’re going to need to step up our training. But with effort, focus, and a little luck, I believe we will be victorious.”

My pokemon let out another series of battle-cries, this time even Sableye joining in.

I gave another approving nod. It was time to train.

----------------------------------------

This training was very different from what we’d been doing in the field outside of Fuschia City.

That training had been important. Essential, even, given the state of my pokemon at the time. It had been a building up of their foundation, a targeting of specific weak points, and of ensuring they were truly as desirous of battling as they had indicated. I was sure we’d return to similar training in the future, both when we added new members to our team and when there were specific areas we needed to target for improvement.

But that wasn’t what we needed now. Right now, more than anything else, we needed power. Which meant one thing: battling.

Lots and lots of battling.

I pushed them as hard as they could go, over and over. Against each other, against trainers wandering down route three, even against the occasional wild pokemon that wasn’t scared off by the sounds of combat. And when they could go no further, I took them to the pokecenter for healing before starting all over again.

It was a type of training that would’ve been disastrous for a human. The human body can’t handle being treated so recklessly, can’t push itself to its limits so consistently without taking time for rest and growth. Even for pokemon, we couldn’t train like this forever. After too long, it would start to do more harm than good. We weren’t playing one of the pokemon games where we could just endlessly challenge the same opponents over and over again for ‘levels.’

But for a week? With two of my pokemon still being so new to battling?

It produced amazing results.

Porygon’s previous hesitation was all but gone. His moves came out in half the time and with twice the power, and he no longer flinched back from incoming attacks, trusting that if I didn’t tell him to dodge, he would be able to withstand whatever came his way. His floating speed was close to fifty percent faster than it was at the start of the week, measured in repeated suicide sprints that we did together to ‘keep warm’ between battles.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Sableye’s previous ferocity was redoubled as he grew accustomed to the heat of battle. He didn’t hate his opponents — I made sure to have several talks with him to make sure we were on the same page in that regard. In battles for sport against gym leaders or other trainers on their journies, they were our opponents, not our enemies. But that truth wasn’t evident in the way he fought, and more than a few opposing pokemon and trainers were left shaking after some of his battles.

Sableye also got better at listening to my instructions, though he wasn’t perfect. In the heat of the moment he would often still trust his instincts over my words, though the rare mistakes didn’t bother me too much. The goal wasn’t for him to ignore his instincts, as they were a powerful tool in most situations. The goal was for my instructions to become his instincts, for him to instinctively trust that whatever I told him to do was the correct choice. We weren’t there yet, and wouldn’t be for quite a while, but the battles were a step in the right direction.

And as for Hobbes…to be honest, he didn’t gain much from our week of nonstop battling. Our years of training had long earned him any similar easily-acquired gains — further improvements from him would have to come the hard way: through slow, dedicated effort towards improvement.

That wasn’t to say he didn’t participate in as many battles as his two teammates. He actually ended up battling more than Porygon and Sableye, since he often emerged unscathed from his battles and didn’t have to take as many breaks for healing or rest.

But even Hobbes lost some of his matches, most often when he transformed into a pokemon or type he was less familiar with. His transformations were improving, but as long as it wasn’t an unfavorable matchup, he was still much more capable in his base form.

Sableye and Porygon ended the first day with about a fifty percent win rate, with Porygon’s being slightly lower than Sableyes. By the end, they were both sitting closer to eighty percent — a marked improvement.

While gratifying, those numbers didn’t necessarily mean much in comparison to someone like Gym Leader Brock. Battles against wild pokemon skewed the numbers, and even the results from trainer battles could be deceiving. Most of our opponents were other trainers my age, those who’d had their pokemon for just as long as I’d had Porygon and Sableye, many of which were traveling to Cerulean in hopes of an easier matchup against Misty after failing to get their first badge from Brock.

Yet not all. Some of our battles were against those who’d emerged victorious from the Pewter City gym. Others were against older trainers, those humoring the young trainers camping around the city or even some on a second or third journey, aiming for a conference championship. Victories against those trainers, when they happened, were the most satisfying, and were what had me most confident we were ready to challenge the gym.

Before that, though, we had one more battle to fight.

In order to make it fair to those trainers fresh on their journey, the battles for the first gym badge were two versus two. Each subsequent badge added one additional pokemon until it capped at six versus six in the fifth gym, with the assumption that any trainer who was able to make it that far was more than capable of capturing and training a full team.

What this meant for me, though, was that only two of my pokemon would be participating in the upcoming battle. Hobbes unquestionably would be one — his power was obvious enough that neither Porygon nor Sableye questioned his automatic inclusion in the roster. But the second spot…

My pokemon would battle for it.

I stood at the halfway point in our makeshift arena, a small glade surrounded by trees a quarter-mile from route three, with a pokeball held loosely in each hand. To keep things fair, I wouldn’t be coaching either side — this battle would be determined by whatever my pokemon could bring to the table on their own.

“Sableye, ready?” I asked, and the pokeball in my left hand gave a slight shake of acknowledgment. “Porygon, ready?” I asked again, and the seldom-used ball in my right hand shook. I lowered both hands and prepared to release. “Then…begin!”

My throws weren’t perfect. Sableye’s especially was a bit off from the center of his side of the ‘arena’, since I didn’t have much practice throwing left-handed. But to my surprise, when the red light escaped from the opened ball, it didn’t seem to matter. The light that represented my ghost pokemon flashed across the field to where Porygon was in the process of materializing like normal, only to form into Sableye mere inches from Porygon’s revealed form.

Porygon gave a bzzt of surprise upon seeing his opponent already so close. But he didn’t have time for anything else before Sableye struck.

I nodded. I’d suspected Sableye had more moves than he’d shown, and now it was finally revealed: fake out. A somewhat unique move, fake out could only be used on the first turn after a pokemon was switched in, but it was guaranteed to make the opposing pokemon flinch, essentially acting as a free source of chip damage. That was how it functioned in the games, at least. In this world, it appeared to be the result of Sableye manipulating where he would come out of his pokeball to catch his opponent by surprise. Functionally the same, but with some ways it potentially could be further exploited. And Sableye was already demonstrating one of those ways.

For all that Porygon had learned to be more aggressive, he preferred to fight at range, using a combination of magnet rise and either thundershock or psybeam to blast his landlocked opponents into submission. Sableye knew this, and he wasn’t giving his opponent a chance to gain range.

Scratch after scratch after scratch, Sableye was unrelenting in his ferocity. Most of his other moves were ghost-typed, making them useless against Porygon, but he didn’t let that slow him down. His eyes were glowing as well, indicating a leer or two mixed in to lower Porygon’s defenses, but mostly it was just scratches — over and over and over.

Porygon didn’t take it lying down. Lightning arced out of him and into Sableye. His colors shifted towards purple as he used psybeam. But Sableye was neither confused nor paralyzed, and he refused to let Porygon gain the space he desired.

It wasn’t elegant or particularly clever. It was about as close to a barroom brawl as a pokemon battle could be, simply trading blows with no thought to defense. But, at least for Sableye, it was effective.

Porygon had been growing by leaps and bounds, but he still couldn’t match Sableye in aggression or power. With more nuanced strategies taken out of the mix, the battle was a foregone conclusion — and two minutes later, it reached its inevitable end as Porygon collapsed to the ground with a final pained beeep.

“Porygon is unable to battle!” I called as I withdrew my digital boy, giving his ball a small pat. “Sableye is the winner!”

“SAYYY!” Saybleye gave a screech of exultation upon hearing the verdict. He wasn’t in much better condition than Porygon after the fight, with smoke drifting up from his skin where he’d been hit by particularly bad thundershocks. But he was victorious.

It was time to challenge the gym.