Larry had to recuperate, he hadn’t been hurt this badly before. They had laid back down in the little outcropping Larry had woken up in since Larry wasn’t in any condition to be walking. So now, Larry was on healing duty.

Sure his mom had put him through the wringer before in their spars, but she was also his mom, she wasn’t going to kill or seriously harm her son. She had been going easy on him during their training.

The Mismagius had hurt him so badly he didn’t feel comfortable standing and far less walking. Pokemon adrenaline must’ve been made of different stuff to allow Larry to even fight back with how messed up he’d been.

“Argh!” Larry groaned at his mom's sudden movement, she silently apologized as she adjusted herself while cradling him in her lap like a kitten. After groaning some more in pain, he began stewing in his thoughts again.

That Mismagius, and to a lesser case the Quagsire mother he’d met, had made it clear. If his mom weren’t around, he’d be dead right now and he had been stupidly lucky to survive this long and even make his way down to the second level. If he ever found his way back up here, he’d hope to find that Dwebble that had given him the rundown on survival of the fittest again and pay him back somehow.

Dwebble had given him the rundown on the Pokemon 101s he needed, Larry barely knew how to fit into human society so he was lucky to get himself a tutor for Pokemon society. While surprising, finding out about the violent lifestyle of wild Pokemon wasn’t as crazy of a revelation as Larry would have thought. This wasn’t the Hunky Dory world of children's anime or video games, the power of friendship wasn’t going to save him.

‘My dumbass was walking around and talking to Geodude like they were ACTUAL dudes when I first woke up. They eat and punch rocks all day, what the hell was I thinking? Those Geodude could’ve killed me the entire time I was near them!’ Larry massaged the bridge of his nose at his own naivety. Wild Pokemon ate each other, killed other wild Pokemon, and consumed their flesh to sustain themselves. Not all of them did, but almost all of them could eat Pokemon and even Geodude killed if they felt like it.

Larry snuggled deeper into his mother as the two of them were laid down in the outcropping and sighed, ‘Pokemon life sure isn’t as easy as I thought it would be, eating berries and being woodland buddies with your other Pokemon friends like I’m in a PG-Movie wasn’t going to happen.’

He picked up a few pebbles and snacked on them while stewing in his thoughts, he scratched at one of the itchy scabs on his leg without thinking before swatting his arm away, as he remembered he needed to let the scabs heal.

His legs had been bloodied, cut, and irrigated with Ghost-TE when he first woke up, that Shadow Ball had done a lot of damage even though it hadn’t even hit him. The move had somehow ‘burned’ the skin on his feet off using the Ghost-TE, Larry wasn’t a smart guy, but this seemed awfully similar to something like radiation poisoning.

That beam-like Psychic move had also grazed Larry on his torso, giving him a giant gash that cut down to his legs. The beam instead had bored through his first layer of skin, even though it had barely even less than a second to touch his body. It would’ve stabbed through him like a drill if he hadn’t smashed a Rock Slide over the Mismagiuses head.

His mother had seemed calm enough, a little proud actually, assuring him that damage like that would heal if given enough time, but to Larry they looked like the kind of injuries that would have killed him if he was a human. Sure enough though, after he’d woken up, the gruesome injuries from before had already begun to heal. It did leave Larry with a large percentage of his skin being scabbed over, he had to remind himself to not scratch them absentmindedly.

‘With my mom following now, I really shouldn’t have any problems on the second or first level of Mt. Silver,’ Larry thought to himself wryly, “I wonder how amazed Phanpy will be once he sees my mom.”

With himself now on healing duty he let himself relax further into his mom's body and winced once again at the pain in his legs and lower body before closing his eyes.

…

The next few times Larry woke up were largely spent recuperating and doing nothing. Luckily for him, his wounds were actually healing, slowly but surely. If he wasn’t a Larvitar he would’ve been dead, because foraging for food or hunting other Pokemon would’ve been impossible. He was lucky he was able to simply eat rocks for a quick snack.

His mother followed his lead, biting stray chunks of soil out of the wall behind them when she got hungry, their hideout was slowly but surely growing in size. Most of his time awake was spent trying to make small talk with his mother and not doing so very well. His mother still sucked at talking and she seemed content to let a deafening silence between them stew. He drifted off to sleep again before long.

…

Rrrrrr…

He woke up to a rumbling further up in the cavern. The noise was off in the distance and it definitely wasn’t some kind of Rock Slide, as those usually stop, eventually.

“Something came through here,” His mom spoke up matter-of-factly after realizing Larry was awake.

“What? What do you mean?” Larry asked dumbly, still quite drowsy.

“A Rhydon walked past here,” She nodded up at the walkway and swept her head down it, “Tried to fight.”

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“But it got cold feet.” His mother smiled with a vicious grin.

“Oh, that's good. Did you have to intimidate him?” He asked, trying to keep the conversation going.

His mother shook her head, “No.”

“Hm? Why?” Larry asked awkwardly.

“He seemed anxious, and was already walking quickly.” His mother recounted, “Gave me a mean look, but kept walking.”

“Oh, that's good…” The conversation died painfully quickly and Larry had hoped to find a way to keep talking, but it seemed for naught as a wild Pokemon walked around the cavern corner with an anxious look on its face.

His mother immediately locked on the Pokemon, keeping it under a vigilant eye as it shimmied past the two of them anxiously. It kept an eye on them in return, glancing at them every second it was allowed to as it quickly made its way downwards to the second level.

When the creature finally rounded the corner at the bottom and went out of view, his mother huffed, “Coward.”

“That was a Chingling, Mom,” Larry rebuked with a critical look at his mom.

She huffed again, far more weakly, “Still…”

RRRrrrrrrr…

…

“Something is weird, but what is it…” Larry spoke up after the eighth group of Pokemon shimmied its way past them carefully, giving them the widest birth possible. It hadn’t even been that long, it seemed a group walked past them every other minute.

RRRRRRRRR…

More Pokemon had walked past them, far more than normal. In his entire time out of the third layer, Larry had never seen more than a few Pokemon use the walkway before. He was pretty much the only one who’d used it before.

“It is weird…” His mom agreed as she finally returned from giving the last passerby the stinkeye. All the Pokemon looked anxious, but they had already been quite anxious as they rounded the corner.

‘Normally you’d think that they’d panic at seeing a Tyranitar just lounging next to the walkway, but they're already scared the second they come here.’ Larry thought.

Before the answer could come to him though, another noise became clear in the distance.

“ZU-!” A single cry, seemingly not even having any meaning to translate in his mind cried out in the distance.

“GOL-!” “-BAT!” Another cry followed by wingbeats sounded in the distance, slowly getting louder.

“-BAT! -BAT! -BAT!” The cries continued, crying over one another as they continued to become louder and louder.

Finally, they rounded the corner, and a giant writhing and floating mass of Zubat and Golbat shot around the corner. Their cries resonated around the cavern, hundreds of different cries yelling over each other in a high-pitched voice made Larry immediately reach up to cover his ears.

‘Oh no…’ Larry's heart sank.

His mother snatched him up into her small arms without a word and turned over into their outcropping protectively shielding him and pushing him into her chest while leaving her back open for the gigantic swarm of Zubat and Golbat.

The swarm of Zubat careened into and along the walls like a flood of liquid, their outcropping became just a bit darker for a second as the gigantic mass of Pokemon careened by them and further down the cavern.

“ZU-ZU!”

“BAT-GOL-BAT”

The incessant cries of the Bat-Pokemon faded into the distance in less than a minute and his mother heaved around again, turning herself back to the walkway and finally releasing Larry back down to sit on the ground.

“Damn pests,” She spat as she scratched at her back, “Hate them.”

Larry looked at the aftermath of the Zubat passage with wide eyes, ‘Woah…’

The walls of the cavern were marked by long cuts in them leading downwards all around their circumference, a veil of dust had been kicked up the Pokemon racing their way downwards and it seemed that they simply left their comrades behind if they couldn’t keep up.

A few backmarkers who had been forced into the walls or floor were recovering and still flapping along through the tunnel, trying to catch up to the gigantic mass that had just passed them. They seemed incoherent as they simply yelled out nothing in particular but their name in an ear-splittingly high-pitched squeak. Larry had heard from real bats before as they passed the two of them by, ‘Right, Echolocation,’ Larry remembered.

“That was crazy…” Larry muttered more to himself than anybody else.

“You ok?” His mother asked.

“Yeah, yeah. You protected me well Mom,” He answered back as the last Zubat finally rounded the corner further down the walkway, “I wonder what made all those Zubat and Golbat so crazy.”

He looked back at his mother, she had turned back to their outcropping and Larry could see that her back, while smudged by the Pokemon, didn’t seem any worse for wear, “Did that hurt?”

“Those Zubat hurting me?” She scoffed, “Never.”

With the Zubat gone though, another noise soon overtook the walkway

RRRRRRRRR…

And this time Larry realized what that noise he’d been listening to all this time was. His short stint with Dwebble came back to the forefront of his mind and the loud rumbling which had plagued their short break. It was also probably the answer to why the Zubat and Golbat just rushed past them.

“Mom? You hear that rumbling, right?” Larry asked, finally concerned.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR…

“Hm? Yeah, what about it?”

“We might want to move. This happened once before and-” Before Larry could explain the cavern around them started to shake, loose dirt and dust from the cavern ceiling rained down on the two of them and he jumped into his mother's arms voluntarily before she had time to grab him.

“Graveler are coming!” He yelled and his mom finally realized what was about to happen. She scanned the corner at the upper end of the walkway like a hawk as she slowly stood up with Larry in her arms.

RRRRRRRRRUUUUUUMMMBBBLLEE!!!

Larry held on for dear life as the Geodude, Graveler, and a single Golem rounded the corner above them, barreling down straight at them at high speed. His mother took a final few steps into the middle of the walkway and stood there defiantly, staring down at the veritable mass of boulders heading straight for her.

Type-Energy coiled around his mom before he could even register what was happening and a thick and heavy Sandstorm suddenly overtook the entirety of the walkway. His mother took a single step forward and a wall made of heavy stone jumped out of the ground in front of them immediately.

Larry still nestled in his mother's arms looked out at the wall and the approaching mass of boulders like a damsel in distress, the wall rose to chest height before a giant roar by his mother rocked the entire cavern,

“COME AT ME! IF YOU DARE!”