CHAPTER 79

“Of course, it’s you. I thought I heard the sound of fighting,” Chase said, looking at Pastel splayed out on the ground. She stared at him one last time before going limp, and he sighed. “Just my luck. The one I find can’t help.”

Her Pokemon were all over the place too. Her Togetic was crying and desperately shaking Pastel’s shoulder to wake her up while Elekid clamored in her ear, hoping to do the same. Plus, it was spinning its arm around, generating constant electricity for some reason. Chase wasn’t worried about those two, though.

The girl’s Tangela whipped the ground in a threatening manner while Frillish just stared right into his soul. Chase wasn’t the type to get easily scared, but the fact that the water type’s face was torn open wasn’t helping. And then there was also a Larvitar standing to the side, hissing and roaring at him. That was a new one. Houndour started to growl, but Chase clicked his tongue.

“Chill out,” he said to his Pokemon and Pastel’s. “We aren’t fighting. Your trainer was sick when we were up there, and she looks unscathed from the fall, so I’m going to assume her sickness got worse?”

Frillish nodded, but kept glaring.

“Alright then,” Chase said, before frowning. Houndour was still growling, making him suspicious. “Is there something there? Your face got pretty torn up. The thing that attacked you did this? Did you take it down?”

“Fri…”

“Yeah, I don’t know what the fuck that means. Nod or shake your head,” Chase said. The Pokemon’s glare somehow worsened, but he shook his head. “Got it. The cave is fucking with Riolu’s aura, so he can’t sense living beings, but Houndour seems to know where it is, for some reason. I thought it fucked with your sense of smell?”

The dark type just kept growling.

“Ah, whatever, just go get it,” Chase sighed. “Ri, help him out.”

With a burst of speed, Houndour jumped forward, making Grace’s team flinch. The fire type spat out a stream of flames toward a darkened wall. The cave lit up, but a circular spot in the wall stayed dark until a Sableye crawled out of the shadow, screaming in agony from the burns. Riolu summoned one of his bones, rushed toward the ghost type, and slammed it in the head repeatedly until it stopped moving and knocked it away.

“Ah, it was a Sableye. Good. Looks like you can still use your affinity with the dark.” Chase said before looking at Grace. He started approaching her, causing Tangela to strike the ground next to him so hard that it tore it open. “Tell your pal to stop acting like a moron unless he wants his trainer to die.”

Frillish touched Tangela with one of his tentacles, his intense stare softening for a split second. The grass type wriggled around and wrapped one of his vines around the water type before blinking twice.

“So… yeah?” The trainer said tentatively. Frillish nodded. “Finally. Houndour, stay next to her. She’s a little wet, so dry her up and keep guard.”

Chase took a step, and when he saw that there was no reaction, he finally made his way to Grace and crouched next to her. Togetic stared at him with Lilipup eyes as if she was begging him to save her, while Elekid just stared intently, observing his every move. He rolled her body and laid her on her side to unstrap her backpack. His arm hurt while doing all of this, but he just pushed through the pain like it was nothing in order not to appear weak.

“Alright… towel… that’s useful. Food, battery… Tepig plushie? Why even— you know what, whatever. Ah, there you go,” the trainer exclaimed. “Sleeping bag.”

Chase unfurled the sleeping bag and laid Grace on top of it so that she wouldn’t have to lay on the cold, hard, ground. Then, he grabbed a towel and wiped the sweat off her face, and then got a fresh one that he doused with fresh water to place on her forehead.

Been a while since I did this, Chase thought.

“Good thing about it being so damn cold in here is that it’ll help with the fever, I think,” he said. “But you don’t seem to have any medicine in here. She needs to drink a lot of water, but she can’t exactly do that when she’s unconscious,” Chase sighed. “Her breathing seems fine… doesn’t seem like pneumonia or anything fatal with her lungs. I guess the only thing I can do is stick around and swap her towel once in a while. I’m no doctor.”

But I did help out whenever my dad got sick from working in the mines too much, he thought again.

“Could never bother learning any of that, even though they give classes for first time trainers. Never thought I’d need it,” he lied.

Silence filled the air for a few seconds before he stared at Frillish. “You seem to be the leader. I’m releasing my Zangoose so that we have more manpower in case some wild Pokemon shows up.”

He hadn’t been asking. Chase didn’t ask people, but he still felt the need to warn the water type. Zangoose’s hair stood up, and she immediately got up on two feet, thinking there was a fight.

“Chill out. They’re our allies,” Chase said. “After I recalled you, I fell down a huge chasm, and now we’re stuck in the depths of Arceus damned Mount Coronet.”

Zangoose relaxed, but kept a weary stare at Frillish, who did the same to her. His eyes settled on Larvitar. A small part of him wanted to catch it, but Pastel might have had her eyes on it, since it was traveling with her. Chase was no thief. Trainer etiquette had always been first come first serve.

Plus, raising a baby Pokemon sounded like a pain in the ass.

“You fell down here too, huh? Grace catch you yet?” Chase asked, looking at Larvitar. The rock type had now stepped closer and was standing behind Tangela and Elekid, still letting out threatening cries. “Couldn’t you tell your parent to not fucking open up a giant hole in the earth?”

Larvitar’s air of fearlessness disappeared, and the Pokemon started to cry. Togetic immediately got on the ground and hugged the rock type. Elekid awkwardly did the same, and Tangela rubbed a vine on its head. Riolu jumped and hit Chase’s head— not hard enough to injure but hard enough to hurt, and he sucked in air through his teeth before realizing how insensitive he had just been. That Tyranitar… that Tyranitar was its parent, and it probably hadn’t made it.

Larvitar had just lost its parent. Now wasn’t the time to air grievances.

“Fuck. Sorry.”

The apology came out of his mouth before he even realized it, surprising even himself. Still, Pastel’s Pokemon ignored him and kept comforting the Larvitar.

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Chase brought his cap down to his eyes. “Guess there ain’t anything else left to be said.”

——

I woke up in the middle of a battle.

My forehead felt wet, and I brought a hand to it, grabbing the towel off of me. Had my Pokemon… oh. It took me a few seconds to even remember that Chase had found me just when I was passing out.

A fiery explosion rocked me to my core and made my head pound.

“Fucking ram that bone down its eye, Ri! Houndour, Incinerate! Zangoose, keep it off the Larvitar!”

What was happening? I tried moving, but every muscle in my body ached. My heart sank when I saw Tangela fly above me and into a wall, and Frillish sent a Water Pulse toward whatever they were fighting. I tried moving my head, but it hurt too much.

And the noise hurt more. If I could have clenched at my head right now, I would have. There was a booming roar reminiscent of the Rhydon.

“Get its other eye!”

A series of stars flew above me and toward the wild Pokemon, and I saw pink mist gather out of the corner of my eye— Elekid’s Swift and Togetic’s Fairy Wind. There was another yell, and the ground shook.

“Serves you right, motherfucker!” Chase spat. “Holy fucking shit, that was close.”

“What’s going on?” I asked weakly. “Ah—”

My Pokemon let out a collective gasp and grouped up around me to celebrate my return to consciousness.

“Okay, you guys are hurting me,” I said with a small laugh. “Is everyone alright?”

“Good to see you’re up,” I heard Chase say. “This cave is hell. The Pokemon here are fucking awful. It started with just Gravelers and Ryhorns, and now we just had to fight off a fucking Nidoqueen. Riolu blinded the motherfucker.”

“A Nidoqueen?” I said weakly. “Must be a Moon Stone somewhere down here.”

I saw that Tangela had a large portion of his vines missing, giving him a lot less mass than usual, but they’d regrow within a few hours. The rest of the team seemed unscathed, apart from Frillish’s claw mark on his face. Chase’s Pokemon, on the other hand, had looked better. Zangoose’s blood was mixing with the red patches on its fur, and its claws were almost completely gone. The skull-like bone structure on top of Houndour’s face was caved in and cracked, and Riolu seemed to have taken a bath in poison.

“Tried to see if you had any potions, but apparently, you gave all of ‘em to Pauline before we fell, and I don’t have any,” Chase said. “Saw you had an Antidote though, so I’ll use it on Riolu. He got hit by a Sludge Wave.”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” I said. “Thanks for helping out. I don’t think my team would have stood up to a Nidoqueen alone.”

“It wouldn’t have,” Chase said as he searched the inside of my bag. “Oh, here, some water.”

Now that he said it, my throat felt incredibly dry. “I… I can’t move. Or barely. It’s like I just had the most intense workout of my life, and now I’m all stiff.”

Chase sighed. “Hold on.” He grabbed an Antidote and sprayed Riolu’s entire body down with it. The fighting type nodded to thank him and then hurriedly pushed him toward me. “I got it! Arceus.”

Chase opened the bottle and placed it in my mouth, carefully tilting it to not overwhelm me. I downed the entire contents down in one go, and sighed in relief.

“One more, please?”

“Don’t say please, it’s your fucking water,” Chase snapped out of nowhere, surprising me. “You have enough water and food in here for days anyway— weeks if we find your pal Williams on our way out and we ration it.”

Suddenly, my eyes bulged. “That’s right! Did you find any of them?!” I asked, feeling hope. Now that I saw that Chase had made it, the odds were that Cece and Denzel had too.

“I just implied that I didn’t,” he sighed as he made me drink another bottle. I drank half of it and motioned for him to stop.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I just got excited—” I winced. “Fucking headache.”

“You feeling better or worse?” The boy asked.

“Well, the headache is the same,” I said after the pain subsided slightly. “But like I said, I can’t move, so I’m guessing it’s worse.”

“Sounds like we’re going to have to stay here for a few days until you get better,” Chase sighed. “Plus, this position is good and defensible. We’re against a wall, we can’t get sneaked up on.”

“But the others—”

“I’m not leaving to look for them, and you sure as hell aren’t either,” Chase said. “Now that I know Pokemon like Nidoqueen are out and about, I’m not going to throw my life away looking for a needle in a haystack. We met by pure luck, and we should use that to our advantage. Combine our forces and get out somehow. If we meet them on the way, fantastic. If we don’t, well, too bad. They’re… good trainers, so they’ll figure it out.”

“They’re my friends,” I said. “What if they’re both alone out there, facing Pokemon like Nidoqueen? I need to make sure they’re safe.”

The trainer clicked his tongue. “You won’t change my mind, but feel free to dip when you’re back to normal.”

“Then I guess I’ll do that then!” I spat.

“Be my guest.”

I glared at him and huffed.

“Larvitar,” I said before hearing her approach. “This might not be the best moment for me to tell you this since I don’t have the strength to even grab an empty Pokeball, but I think you should come with me.”

“Tar…”

“Frillish, please translate,” I said.

“Frillish. Lish.” The water type said, waving his tentacles and bobbing his head.

“You’re not sure, huh?” I sighed. “You want to try finding your parent? Well… Feel free to think about it. I won’t force you either way. Just know that we can become your family if you want to.”

I didn’t have the strength to tell her that her parent was dead.

“What the fuck?” Chase asked in disbelief. “You understood that?”

“Obviously I did, he’s been my Pokemon for months,” I rolled my eyes. “Say…” I started hesitantly. “When we were running up there, you froze up. Why?”

“What’s your deal? Want me to just ask you personal questions out of the blue too?”

“I mean, I just know that you’re not the type to freeze up when scared. You know that expression, fight, flight or freeze? You seem like a fighter to me, so I was wondering if I got it wrong.”

“Why does it matter to you what I am? Not like we’re sticking together anyway, so you don’t need to know about how I operate.”

“Would it kill you to be just slightly less of an asshole?” I hissed.

“Would it kill you to leave me the fuck alone?”

“Whatever, man,” I said. I wanted to say much more. To tell him to enjoy being a loner for the rest of his life. To fight him. But he was the one nursing me back to health. It wouldn’t be fair to him after having helped me and my team stay alive. “It’d be better if we didn’t talk, I think.”

“Uhuh.”

Chase Karlson was like the worst aspects of Pauline and Louis combined. He snapped at the most minor infractions and clapped back tenfold, but he also had an enormous ego to boot. At least with the other two, I had gained their respect. We had found common ground and become good friends, but him? I doubted that I’d ever get along with Chase, even though I did consider him a rival of some sort. Less than Denzel and Cecilia were to me, but I had to acknowledge his skill as a trainer. He had gotten two badges and survived Mount Coronet.

I just wished I didn’t have to spend all of this time with him. If it had been Denzel and Cece instead of him here… no. I shook my head. These thoughts would only serve to deepen the metaphorical rift between us, and I had to do everything in my power to keep it closed. If we didn’t have any teamwork, there was no way we’d survive down here, especially without any potions.

And things worse than that Nidoqueen were coming. I was sure of it.