CHAPTER 114

“So Chase has finally shown himself,” Cecilia said.

“Yup. Gotta hand it to him, he did have me worried for a bit,” Denzel smiled thinly.

The three of us were eating breakfast in my room while Pauline and Emilia were hanging out in the city together. Justin, meanwhile, had left a few minutes earlier to finally go order his Audino from a reputable Pokemon breeding company that supplied most of the region with its medical Pokemon, which meant that they worked closely with the League to supply Nurse Joys with their partners.

“He won’t even tell us what he was doing in there so long, too,” I sighed. “I bet he was doing some really crazy training.”

“Sounds like him,” Denzel nodded. “So he’ll be here in five days. Does that mean we battle in six?”

“If his Pokemon are in shape to do so, I would assume yes,” Cecilia agreed. “We can decide on the teams when he gets there.”

“Come on, we know you’re fighting each other,” Denzel grinned as he stared at us. “The question is, who are Chase and I joining?”

“Oh, man, I’m so excited,” I squealed, tapping my feet against the ground. “I’ve never had a double battle before! There’s going to be so much to keep track of, oh this is just the best!”

Strategizing against a single powerful opponent was hard enough, but two? Both multiple Pokemon, and with different approaches to battling? And then there was how my teammate would synergize with me, and how we could work together! I was already quivering with excitement, and we were still a few days away.

“We have very different definitions of fun,” my friend chuckled.

Cecilia laughed as well. “Don’t stop her. She’s cute when she’s like this.”

“Then there’s the battle against Fantina to plan, too,” I cheered. “I think I’ll start doing that today, actually.”

“Okay, so you won’t be doing anything today. Got it,” Denzel deadpanned.

“No, I’ve got to go train my team and talk with my grumpy turtle,” I said. “This is just going to be some light scanning. I need to figure out Fantina’s general strategy and stuff.”

“Don’t forget that we have to meet Vincent later,” Cecilia said.

“Right. Emi’s new friend.”

“She doesn’t want to call him a friend,” she clarified. “She says that he’s more of a business partner.”

“Sounds like a girl in denial to me,” I said before finishing my plate. “By the way, the food in Snowpoint was definitely better. Don’t look at me like that, Cece! I will die on this hill.”

“Whatever you say…”

After they finished eating, Denzel and Cece went their separate ways, both opting to train. I released my entire team, aside from Turtonator, of course. I’d speak with him again later. I would have really liked it if he could just be less aggressive so that he could actually spend time outside of his Pokeball, but alas, that looked impossible right now. Tangrowth was a lot bigger than before, so he could barely move around in the room, but I had found another application for his new form.

“Angel. Can I sit?”

The grass type’s entire body wriggled, which would have been a creepy sight if I hadn’t been so used to it. These days, I just found it adorable. His vines extended at his feet, stacking up and up until they were thick enough to be a mattress. I sat down on them and leaned against angel, who shook excitedly. His vines were surprisingly more comfortable than they looked, and I enjoyed how much he liked me sitting on them. Larvitar hopped on them as well, and the floor shook slightly.

“Nu-huh,” I warned. “No jumping inside, young lady.”

“Tar…”

“As long as you understand,” I smiled, petting her. “Come,” I continued, patting on the vines.

Larvitar waddled through the bed of vines and settled in between my legs. Togetic let out a lazy chirp and laid down on Tangrowth’s head, and Electabuzz leaned against his body, almost sinking into it.

“Stop brooding in your corner and being so edgy,” I told Frillish, who was keeping his distance. I beckoned him. “C’mere.”

He huffed and floated away, practically hugging the door.

“I already forgave you for what happened yesterday, bud. Come sit with the kids.”

He shot us a glance, and Electabuzz called out to him with a smug smile. Togetic laughed at the joke that must have been said. Frillish shot him an angry glance, and he suddenly stopped smiling and sunk deeper into Tangrowth’s vines.

“Angel, drag him over, will you?” I smiled. He happily obliged me, extending a vine toward Frillish and wrapping it around one of his tentacles before dragging him over. He let his complaints be known, but he didn’t actually leave. I wrapped an arm around his body and pulled him in closer. “I’m gonna look up Fantina today. She might have a Frillish, you know? Wouldn’t it be interesting to fight one?”

He rolled his eyes.

“Only I like that sort of thing, huh?” I said. “Either way, stick around, you goof, or I’ll get sad. I’m burned, remember? You’re supposed to pamper me.”

Togetic and Larvitar loudly agreed, and Frillish resigned to his fate. I grabbed my Poketch, turned it on, and opened the Hearthome city gym website. Larvitar clamored at me to see the screen, which I lowered, but then Togetic complained that she couldn’t see.

“Why don’t you just come down here, princess?” I asked, looking up at her. Her head was hanging off Tangrowth’s massive body.

“Prrrri!”

“You like angel’s head? Well, I can’t accommodate both of you, and holding the phone up makes my arms tired, so you should probably come down here anyway.”

With a disappointed ‘prrrrri,’ Togetic floated down into angel’s vine-bed, and after applying the three-badge filter, I started looking at Fantina’s battles.

The battle for the fourth gym badge is where what Denzel had occasionally called the ‘mid-game’ began. That weird length of time in the Circuit where your Pokemon all started to evolve, and your growth started to get faster and faster until it started slowing down around the sixth or seven badge. The gyms, however, didn’t actually get a huge jump in difficulty like in between the first and second badge, so some trainers found this stretch of the Circuit relatively easy.

Relatively was important. It was still difficult. The curve just wasn’t as steep. At least until the eighth gym battle forced you into a six versus six and kicked your ass. Either way, evolutions were expected around this time, like Tangrowth’s own. Larvitar was still too young to evolve into a Pupitar. However, this was probably around where Electabuzz would have evolved if we hadn’t been in a life-or-death fight against those Sneasel, and Togetic needed a Shiny Stone, which I was hopefully going to start saving for whenever the Poketch Company and the other businesses contacted me back.

Would Frillish evolve soon? I stared at him, and he avoided my eyes.

The most knowledge I had about Fantina before perusing her gym’s website was that she was a ridiculously good trainer when using her personal team— on par with the Elite Four— and that she used illusions to battle. Now, I hadn’t known what those illusions actually implied.

But before going in-depth with the illusions, I noticed something else. The higher level she battled at, the fewer Pokemon she used. She had around forty Pokemon at the first badge level that I could see, but at mine? She only had twenty— including a Frillish— and after giving it some thought, I believed that I managed to figure out why.

All Pokemon were dangerous, but ghost types were especially so, along with fairies and dragons. That knowledge had been ingrained into my mind since I was a child. The ghost-fairy-dragon triad were the most difficult Pokemon to train and raise, although Togetic hadn’t given me any trouble, aside from her usual glee when committing acts of violence. Last night, Cece had already told me about how she struggled to find Denzel when he was off doing his own thing, and we had theorized that there was some… wrongness at play. Not reality warping— he wasn’t strong enough to do that, but maybe Sylveon had affected what we saw because he had wanted Denzel to be alone for a while.

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And he liked us. What would have happened if he hadn’t?

The point about the three types was this. The general rule of thumb was: dragon types were prideful to a fault. Fairy types had a wrongness about them that shook me to my core the longer I thought about it. Ghost types were hateful— so hateful in fact, that some of them sustained themselves purely off of that hatred, like Banette. All three types shared a common love for violence that was nearly impossible to contain.

And for ghosts, that hate meant that they did not like holding back in battles. Pokemon battles were a sport. Pokemon instinctively held back during them in order not to kill, which was something wild Pokemon or criminals’ Pokemon just didn’t do. Ghosts were wild. You could own one, but it would never truly be under your control. There was a reason so few trainers had true ghosts as Pokemon besides their rarity. Fairy types grew attached to their trainers exceptionally quickly, and even dragons eventually relented. Ghosts rarely put their own trainers' wants and orders over their own urges.

Ghosts were also immortal as if they weren’t threatening enough. They could be killed, but they’d always rematerialize a few days or weeks later. The fact that there were a significant number of very powerful, old ghost types roaming the world was a terrifying prospect— Mismagius in Eterna Forest had probably been one, with how incredibly powerful that illusion we had been put under had been. Either way, the more powerful a ghost got, the harder it was to control, so what if even Fantina couldn’t handle dozens of them at my level and beyond?

It made sense too. If she had too many, then she wouldn’t be able to keep them controlled. Without a connection to their trainer, they’d probably go rogue during battles, and a challenger’s Pokemon dying would be the biggest scandal a gym leader could face. It hadn’t even happened in my lifetime. I wasn’t sure if they were capable of passing through Kadabra’s barriers to get to the spectators, but I didn’t want to find out. The good about all of this was that since she didn’t use as many Pokemon as Gardenia or Candice, the strategizing would probably take less time.

Or at least that’s what I thought, until I saw how versatile ghosts could be— and I meant actual ghosts. Attacks would hurt them, so long as they weren’t normal type, but they’d just pass through their bodies, which meant that knocking one away was impossible unless they solidified their bodies themselves to use physical attacks, or like… Dusknoir had done to protect Mars.

I took a breath.

I wasn’t seeing a lot of that in the videos, though, and for a good reason. It would just make them more vulnerable. I couldn’t exactly place a style on Fantina’s battling, however. She seemed bored in every single one, especially when juxtaposed with Candice and Gardenia. Studying her Pokemons’ moves would be relatively easy, but studying the illusions? That was going to be difficult.

Larvitar screamed excitedly as a Seadra spat out a huge Scald toward a flame dancing in the middle of the arena while its trainer kept yelling at it to listen, but it wasn’t. It kept attacking what was clearly a bait while a Lampent lazily appeared behind it and hit it with a Shadow Ball, causing it to faint. I thought all of the illusions would be caught on camera, but most of them actually were not, and they were invisible to a trainer’s eyes.

That meant that my Pokemon and I wouldn’t even be seeing the same thing— a death sentence in a Pokemon battle. It wasn’t even a move, or at least it didn’t look like it. I had expected a variant of Confuse Ray, Hypnosis, or Substitute, but it was just something ghosts could do. But that wasn’t it.

There was also the fact that ghosts could appear and reappear anywhere at will. They could be on the opposite side of the battlefield and then reappear behind your Pokemon seconds later with a Shadow Ball ready to go. Yes, seconds. Ghosts moved quickly when they weren’t in their solid state.

“Well, I like a challenge,” I smiled.

There was your share of Pokemon that weren’t true ghosts that Fantina also used, and they were easier to handle. She probably used them to give her challengers a little break in between the actual threats she had. The Pokemon I identified as the biggest problems were Haunter, Banette, Misdreavus, Shedinja, Dhelmise, and that Lampent, but there were others that weren’t true ghosts that looked like hell to fight, too, like Gourgeist or Drakloak.

But the biggest problem was Palossand.

That last one was actually the biggest threat I could possibly face in a potential battle. The tactics it employed were ruthless. Fantina’s Frillish was disappointingly ordinary. It was a Pokemon she used against the less powerful three-badge holders, and it showed. Their Water Sport was nowhere as versatile as ours, so most of that extra mobility was gone, which was crippling for a Pokemon as slow as Frillish. Its ghost type moves were impressive and on par with ours, but the water side of things was lacking, and it didn’t know Recover or Acid Armor for survivability. Buddy would easily wipe the floor with it in a battle.

“Doesn’t look like she going to use it against me, unless she sends it out first to test us,” I muttered. Frillish let out a satisfied huff. “Happy? I bet it’s weird fighting one of your own. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to fight a human.”

Actually, I wouldn’t want to fight anything, but that was beside the point.

“We’re going to have to fight a four against five, too,” I continued, and all of my Pokemon responded with their respective cries.

Now that Turtonator had been added to the picture and Larvitar was capable of battling, I was going to have to fight at a numerical disadvantage, although it wouldn’t actually be a six-on-six, since those tended to only happen at the seventh gym badge barring exceptional circumstances. Obviously though, I had no plan on using Larvitar for this gym, and even if Turtonator didn’t actually attack me, he wasn’t going to listen to anything I said.

Seeing if he’d let himself lose to spite me, or try to win to salvage his pride would be an interesting experiment, however, but I wasn’t mean enough to try that, especially when I needed to gain his trust and respect. If Electabuzz, Togetic, Tangrowth, and Frillish fainted, I’d give up the battle.

“Well, I think your moves are all good enough to win at the moment,” I told my team. “So we should work on perfecting what we’ve got.”

I hadn’t constructed a plan yet, but I already knew a combination of Togetic’s Wish, along with switching to Tangrowth and Electabuzz— which were my heavy hitters— would be crucial to winning. Frillish’s Recover meant that he’d be fine as an independent crutch in the battle.

So Togetic would put everything she had into using Wish. Tangrowth would perfect Knock Off, and Electabuzz would work on his endurance. With all of Fantina’s tricks, I knew the battle was going to last a long time. I would have liked for princess to learn Air Slash, but I already knew Wish was going to take too much time to work on two moves at the same time.

Plus, Wish would be crucial in the battle against my friends as well.

“Okay,” I said as I stretched. “Everyone satisfied with what we learned so far?”

It had been a few hours, and I was done learning about Fantina for now. I’d come back later and start taking notes, but I hadn’t even signed up yet, so I had time. I laughed when I noticed that angel was asleep. Everyone else had been so focused on my Poketch, but he had just dozed off. I carefully recalled him so that he’d stay asleep in his Pokeball, along with the rest of my team.

“Okay,” I smiled. It was time to speak to Turtonator once again.

——

I was back on route 208, and I released Turtonator. He stared at me angrily and let out a threatening growl.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re a big, scary dragon,” I said dismissively, closing my eyes to show that I wasn’t scared— even though I was. I opened an eye when I heard that he wasn’t growling anymore, and I understood after a few seconds. “What? Surprised my team isn’t here this time?”

He didn’t respond. In fact, he almost looked disappointed, like he wanted a confrontation. Now that he wasn’t getting it, Turtonator turned and left, lying down a few feet away.

“I brought some food for you,” I said, grabbing a pack of kibble from my backpack. “Want some?”

I approached him, but he turned toward me, and flames started to gather in his snout. I froze and fell to the ground, and he let out a satisfied snort.

“Asshole,” I groaned. I realized that I had instinctively dropped the food and grabbed Frillish’s Pokeball instead, probably because I thought I was about to be lit on fire. Even though I knew Turtonator wouldn’t kill me, seeing him gather a Flamethrower and aim it at me had been so terrifying that I had forgotten about it.

Turtonator swiped the food, angled his head upward, and ripped the package open over his mouth, eating all of the kibble in one go.

Two hundred and forty Pokedollars down the drain. And he didn’t even look the slightest bit happy. I sighed.

“Wanna know something?”

He immediately shook his head and walked off. When I tried to follow him, he raised the temperature to unbearable levels and forced me to back off. He was daring me to either recall him or screw off.

“Okay then,” I shrugged. “I’ll tell you when you feel like it.”

I sat a ways away from him. It was uncomfortable but bearable, and I had plenty of water. I couldn’t really tell if there was progress being made or not, but it was nice sometimes, staying on my own in silence. I could tell why Justin wanted his alone time so often. I’d rather be with my friends, but once in a while, I wouldn’t be against this. Plus, even though I was on the edge of the route, no wild Pokemon would be crazy enough to attack a Turtonator.

I jumped when I saw the fire type get up. He was… angry. Furious, like he had been in Mount Coronet. I grabbed his Pokeball, ready to recall him before an attack came, but I soon realized that he wasn’t looking at me.

He was looking behind me. I heard someone fall over and turned. A trainer that had just been walking through the route scrambled backward, but before Turtonator could do anything, I put him back in his Pokeball.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized, helping the teenager up. He gave me a shaky nod and left— well, it was more accurate to say he ran away. I thought that this part of the route was isolated enough to avoid others, but I had apparently been wrong.

In my hubris standing up to Turtonator, I had almost forgotten what he was. I needed to be more alert every time I had him out, or an accident was bound to happen. I clipped his ball back on my belt and ran a hand through my hair.

Dragons were a prideful bunch, and they held grudges. Turtonator still hated trainers for what they had done to him in Mount Coronet. I doubted that kid had actually been one of the people that battled him. There were no signs of burns, and he looked rather new. If I had to guess, I would have said that he had come from Hearthome to train and not from Mount Coronet.

And yet, it did not matter to him. They were all the same.

When I got closer to the city, my phone went off with a flurry of notifications. I opened it and checked the group chat.

Emilia was calling us over to meet her new coordinator friend.