The next days passed in a blur as we settled into a rhythm.

Wound-Seeker didn’t even bother having us do the log run in the mornings anymore. He’d spar with us first thing in the morning, kick our asses, then let us strategize and lick our wounds for most of the day, then spar with us again in the evening.

While our fights with the sandlash continued to be brutal defeats, they became shorter as he seemed to take the measure of what we could do, and found little reason to let matches drag out. If we couldn’t get a good hit on him in the first few moments (and we couldn’t,) he’d knock us away and declare the match over.

Our losses were simultaneously frustrating and enlightening. We didn’t know how to win, but it was becoming more obvious what tactics lost faster.

We certainly couldn’t just play defense. The second we did that, Wound-Seeker would go on the offense, absolutely destroying us with attacks so strong and unerringly accurate we couldn’t hope to get through them unscathed.

Reckless offense on our part didn’t fare much better.

So the answer clearly laid in a single meticulous and swift attack. It occured to me that a viper’s strike could be described in much the same way.

He hadn’t been wrong about Focus Energy. It took a bit of thinking and experimentation, but Focus Energy was almost painfully easy once I understood what it was. It wasn’t anything flashy – just taking a moment to examine my opponent and myself, looking for a way to land an especially effective hit. There was a semi-emotional aspect as well; I had to really want that hit.

Tree-Climber and I spent most of our time between our morning and evening beat-downs theocrafting, with the occasional spar. I found in her an intensely intelligent mind, eager to deconstruct problems as puzzles.

It was during one of our spars that I stumbled my way into a new move.

I’d intended to simply kick at her in a moment of desperation as she had me on the backfoot, and my leg muscles had twitched again, delivering two strikes in rapid succession. A Double Kick.

“That was a Double Kick!” she exclaimed, both of us stunned out of our practice fight.

“It… was?” I said, uncertainly. I knew that up until that point, each time I’d managed to perform a move, it had at least been the product of some degree of conscious thought.

With Focus Energy, I had indeed been focusing, trying to find a way past Wound-Seeker’s defense. With Scratch, I’d been actively scratching, even if I believed using the move proper wasn’t possible until I did it.

But Double Kick had had no thought behind it whatsoever. The initial kick had been almost instinctual, the angles of our bodies such that the only weapon I had which I could strike out with in that moment was my legs. And then it had happened again, and I had felt the Fighting energy, and known what had happened.

Fighting energy was a complete comfort in your own body, the knowledge that you were the master of your own domain, even if that domain only extended as far as your own skin.

I hadn’t even realized how uncomfortable I’d been until I felt the energy flow through me, and then everything felt impossibly right. Even after the move had passed, the feeling remained, and I took to our spars with a new vigor.

“It’s so strange,” I commented between dodging her increasingly swift Scratches, “I hadn’t intended to Double Kick. I hadn’t intended to kick at all. It just happened.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“That’s how it is sometimes,” she said between the next few Scratches, “the elders teach that we learn moves when our bodies are ready to learn them, whether we intend to or not. Wound-Seeker is apart from the others, in that he believes we can and should learn moves sooner.”

The idea was simultaneously comforting and concerning. Comforting, in that the nidoran learnset wouldn’t be beyond me regardless of my own difficulties as long as I kept getting stronger, but concerning in a way I could only compare to my understanding of body disphoria. The concept of ‘power incontenence’ came to mind.

It was probably a good thing that I hadn’t made the realization before I’d had the benefit of the Fighting type energy to help me feel at home in my own body.

It also occured to me around then that despite remembering that Peck was supposedly a Flying type move, I had no idea what Flying energy felt like. I had to consider the possibility that it wasn’t truly Flying type, or that I was missing something subtle about it.

In any case, with the benefit of understanding Fighting energy myself, and Tree-Climber’s secondhand description of Ground energy, I felt tantalizingly close to making a breakthrough on Poison energy.

Between the two of us, Tree-Climber and I had been hatching a plan to get past Wound-Seeker’s defenses, though we had agreed not to use it until we were more certain it would succeed. Importantly, it did not rely upon us having cracked the secret of Poison Sting, as much as we were certainly still trying to puzzle it out.

The plan did allow for the usage of Poison Sting if we did figure it out, however.

Not that I expected that to happen in the next few minutes. As evening approached, the sandshrew and I had come to a decision: we would attempt the plan and see how it fared. It might mean losing the element of suprise, but it had reached a point where we needed to impliment and see how it failed to be able to improve it further. And even if it became unusuable, we would surely learn something in the process.

We were distracted by the arrival of a few of the youngest sandshrews peeking their heads curious over the ridge behind which Tree-Climber and I trained.

As they looked at us curiously, we looked back at them.

“Is Wound-Seeker here?” one of them finally asked.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that; we had gotten trounced by just that morning, and not seeing him again until evening wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary for us. Tree-Climber’s gaze sharped though.

“When did you last see him?” she said with a tone of seriousness I didn’t think I’d heard before.

None of the younger sandshrews could pin down exactly when he’d dissapeared, but it seemed to have been sometime around midday, around two hours previous.

Without needing to discuss it, Tree-Climber and I led the sandshrews back to the area where they normally trained, and where the other half of their number were only half-heartedly continuing their exercises.

The younger sandshrews were peppering the both of us with questions, about our own ‘special training’, about where Wound-Seeker had gone, and more. Most of which we couldn’t or didn’t really want to answer.

Finally Tree-Climber got fed up and rose her voice.

“Okay, all of you get back to the training you were doing before. If you want to slack off, you have to come fight one of us.”

She had a wicked grin, and I couldn’t help but share her humor at the situation. After the beat-downs by the sandslash it’d be a welcome break.

The first of the sandshrews to decide to take her up on her offer challenged me, and it was hardly worth describing. After Tree-Climber’s careful, nimble movements, and her disciplined attacks and command over the sand, fighting a sandshrew that had only just becoming proficient in Scratch and was starting to experiment with Sand-Attack was a joke.

That said, I might have been small and in a young body by pokemon standards, but I wasn’t going to let one of them get hurt due to my negligence. I spent most of the match simply dodging, until there was a good moment to go on the offensive. I made sure to slow just enough for the sandshrew to brace themself, then landed a Double-Kick that sent them tumbling but without doing any real harm.

What few decided to challenge one of us picked Tree-Climber to my dissapointment.

I tried to keep an eye on the other sandshrews when Tree-Climber was having said matches, but between that and the distraction of said match, my attention was pretty well kept spoken for. So much so that when Soft-Claws approached, I didn’t notice until she was practically upon us.

“All of you. Training is over for the day. Go rest,” she said with a clipped tone.

“You two,” she said, picking out Tree-Climber and myself, “come with me.”

At our questioning glances, she lowered her voice.

“Wound-Seeker is under claw,” she muttered, “and you are to follow me. Quickly.”