Day 30 of the journey to Kanto. Cloudy.
Reiji got up early, made breakfast for the Pokémon, then had Pineco use Rapid Spin against a rock to grind down the bark shell around its body.
They had already started polishing the shell yesterday. He had caught Pineco yesterday too, and there was no way Pineco was going to pull off Self-Destruct with Poliwhirl standing right there.
After getting beaten down by Poliwhirl several times, the stubborn little thing finally gave in. It let Reiji arrange everything. Pineco's job was simple now: do as told, get fed, get housed, and battle when needed.
From yesterday until this morning, Pineco had been grinding its shell almost nonstop. Its original diameter of eighty centimeters had already shrunk to sixty, and its overall height had dropped a lot too. It was now under a meter tall.
It was not just smaller. It was lighter too. It had originally weighed over thirty kilograms, more than four times the average weight for a Pineco.
Now it was down to a little over twenty kilos. Most of what had been shaved away was weak outer bark, and he still had not added any Apricorn bark yet.
That was because he had realized something. If Pineco kept grinding itself down like this, the shell would become terrifyingly hard. All the weak material got worn away, leaving only the toughest layers behind to form the outer shell.
But even if Pineco's shell became absurdly tough, once it evolved into a Steel-type shell, it would still be steel, and steel hated fire. That made him wonder if he could add something into the shell so that, even after turning into steel, it would resist burning better.
If he could take Forretress from a four-times weakness to Fire down to a two-times weakness, that would already be huge. He was not greedy enough to hope for neutral damage. If he could at least cut it to a single weakness, then rain could bring it down to neutral.
So the question became obvious. What material could he add before evolution that would let Pineco keep all the strengths of the Steel type while also gaining resistance to fire?
Once he started thinking along those lines, he realized the idea had real potential. If this kind of breeding method worked, he might even be able to turn Pineco into different Bug-type combinations after evolution.
Bug and Rock. Bug and Ice. Bug and Ground...
Bug and Steel had one weakness.
Bug and Rock had three.
Bug and Ground had four.
Bug and Ice also had four, including two brutal double weaknesses.
No matter how he looked at it, Bug and Steel still seemed like the best option.
In terms of resistances, Steel resisted ten types. Rock only resisted four. Ground resisted two. Ice resisted just one.
There was no reason to change Pineco's type entirely. If he could just patch up its weakness to Fire, that would be enough.
And he could only add one kind of material, not a messy mix of several. If he added too much random stuff, Pineco would turn into some weird half-breed mess and might even lose its Steel typing entirely after evolving.
As for fire-resistant material, he actually had something that might work.
Hanhan had nearly eaten all of it, though.
Against Fire-type attacks, only four types resisted them: Fire, Water, Rock, and Dragon.
That meant his material had to come from one of those four. Of them, the only ones he could get easily were the first three.
Out of those three, he leaned most toward Water-type material. Fire-type material was the first option he crossed off.
The whole point of this breeding method was to improve fire resistance. Using Fire-type material to fight fire with fire sounded ridiculous.
For all he knew, using Fire-type material against Fire-type attacks might backfire and make those attacks even stronger instead.
The material he planned to use was Damp Rock, and the matching Fire-type weather item was Heat Rock.
Heat Rock extended sunlight, which boosted Fire-type moves. That made it the worst possible choice.
He also ruled out Smooth Rock for a simple reason: Rock had too many weaknesses. Five, to be exact.
If he added Smooth Rock and accidentally pushed Forretress toward the Rock type, then Rock's five weaknesses—Ground, Fighting, Water, Grass, and Steel—might all end up becoming Forretress's weaknesses too.
So Smooth Rock was out.
Water only had two weaknesses: Grass and Electric.
Forretress already resisted Grass fourfold, so picking up more trouble there would not matter much as long as he could bring the four-times Fire weakness down.
Electric, on the other hand, would be a problem.
He had to control how much Damp Rock he added. If he overdid it and gave Pineco an Electric weakness, then it could forget about being part of a rain team.
One Thunder in the rain and Pineco would drop dead on the spot. That would make rain completely unplayable for it.
He already had a way to judge the limit. Pineco could learn Rain Dance. As long as Rain Dance showed up on the panel and Pineco could learn itself the move, that would mean he had reached the upper limit.
If he pushed past that point, Pineco would stop being a steel shell and start turning into something closer to a shell made of water.
Once the idea clicked, he wrote all of it down at once, then told Pineco to stop grinding and jump into the river to cool off.
You know how blacksmithing works, right? Well, that was the idea that hit him. After grinding itself down, Pineco got extremely hot, so he had thrown it into the river just to test it. He wanted to see whether Pineco could be quenched like heated metal.
To his surprise, it actually worked.
Quenching was a kind of heat treatment. The main purpose was to change a metal's microstructure, which changed its physical properties—especially hardness, strength, wear resistance, and toughness.
The moment he realized that, he started thinking maybe he really could treat Pineco like iron, refine it like steel, and push its shell hardness even higher.
Forretress already had a base Defense of 140. A Forretress raised through this quenching-and-steelmaking method might reach over 200 Defense, maybe even 300.
That would be absurd.
And if the physical defense could be pushed that high, then the special defense ought to rise too. If both defenses could break 200, he would be satisfied.
Forretress was not like Shuckle. Shuckle dumped almost all of its base stats into its two defenses, which reached 230, while its Attack was only 10.
Forretress was different. Even if he pushed both defenses way up, it still had a base Attack of 90, which was leagues ahead of Shuckle's miserable 10.
There was just one problem.
He had no idea how to control the process. He did not know how much heat was needed, or how steel was actually forged from iron.
When it came to smithing, he was a complete amateur. At most, he had watched a few documentaries in his previous life and some blade-forging competitions.
If he wanted to make this idea real, he needed a blacksmith—an old craftsman who actually knew how to refine steel.
So he did the obvious thing. He recalled the Pokémon that were training, climbed onto Pelipper, and flew back to Fuchsia City to ask around for a blacksmith shop that still did real steelwork.
As for the promise he had made to the logging yard, that could wait until later. Darkrai had already gone to the Safari Zone and caught a Pinsir for him. A Pinsir with potential in the thirties was not even worth a second glance to Reiji.
After several hours of searching around the outskirts of Fuchsia City, he finally found a blacksmith shop. The old master there came from a family of craftsmen that had been passing down the trade for five generations.
But after hearing what Reiji wanted, the old man looked at him like he was insane—a young trainer with too much time on his hands, babbling nonsense.
Pineco was a Pokémon. Its shell was bark. How was anyone supposed to refine bark into steel? Steel came from iron, not tree bark.
And just like that, Reiji got thrown out of the shop as some lunatic trainer with wild ideas.
He had no choice but to look for other blacksmiths, but every single one reacted the same way. They all thought he was dreaming.
It was frustrating.
In the end, he went to the logging yard to finish the deal he had made with the foreman yesterday. The man had already been waiting for him, and the moment he saw Reiji, he hurried over with a bright smile.
"You're finally here, little brother. I packed up more than ten sacks of the bark you wanted. Not sure if it'll be enough."
The foreman rubbed his hands together. Seeing that Reiji was not in the best mood, he did not bring up the Pinsir directly. Instead, he mentioned the bark, clearly hinting at the trade.
"Here's the Pinsir you wanted."
Reiji really was in a bad mood. Getting rejected over and over by the blacksmiths had made him doubt himself. He was starting to wonder whether his method for raising Pineco was even possible, or whether the whole thing really was just a fantasy.
If only one person had rejected him, he would not have thought much of it. But three experienced craftsmen in a row had shot him down. That was hard to ignore.
Still, no matter how he turned it over in his head, he knew he had to try.
Since nobody else was willing to help—not even for money—he would do it himself. He would test things slowly, build up experience, and prove each part of the idea step by step.
"Thank you so much, little brother. Come with me. I've already packed up all the bark you wanted and stacked it in storage."
The moment the foreman saw the Poké Ball holding Pinsir, his face lit up. He shoved it straight into his pocket, clearly terrified of losing it.
He had run around who knew how many times for this Pinsir. Now he finally had one. At last, he could make his son happy.
"I'll get it myself. You go do your work," Reiji said, waving him off as he followed the directions toward the storage room.
The foreman saw that Reiji was distracted and wisely chose not to bother him. After saying a few words to his coworkers, he drove straight home. He wanted to give the Pokémon to his son as soon as possible.
When Reiji entered the warehouse and looked around, he saw more than ten sacks of black bark piled inside. It should be enough for Pineco's transformation.
He let Gengar out and had it swallow all the bark, then left the logging yard and returned to the riverside where they had camped yesterday.
He released the Pokémon again. First, he ate lunch with everyone. After that, the ones who needed training went back to training, the ones who needed rest rested, and he got to work on Pineco's transformation.
Pineco's job was simple for now: keep polishing its body and use the quenching process to strip impurities out of the shell, leaving only the purest and strongest parts behind.
To make the quenching-and-steelmaking method work better, he had also gone to the Pokémon Center and contacted Mikan Gym to have Staryu sent over.
He needed Staryu's move Gravity. Under Gravity, Pineco's body ought to become even more compact.
He had already broken his plan for Pineco down into three broad steps.
Step one was purification—refining everything Pineco had built up so far and leaving behind only the purest, hardest bark from the innermost layers.
Step two was to add Float Stone powder into the middle layer to reduce Pineco's weight. That step was crucial. If he ended up creating some thousand-pound fat lump, forget spinning—moving at all would be a struggle.
Step three was to add fire-resistant material to the outer layer, namely Damp Rock powder, to improve Forretress's resistance to fire. At the very least, it had to bring down that four-times Fire weakness.
Right now, he was working on step one: using the quenching-and-steelmaking approach to purify Pineco's shell.
To be fair, he had already noticed something before this. He had found that after ten straight minutes of Rapid Spin, Pineco reached the ideal state for quenching.
So he kept having Pineco grind itself down—first from a diameter of sixty to fifty, then from fifty to forty. Once it reached forty centimeters across, he felt it was about right.
After all, the average Pineco was only around forty centimeters wide. Anything above that was already unusual, let alone a Pineco that had gone through this quenching process.
Its original diameter had been eighty centimeters. Now it was down to forty—literally cut in half.
Its height had also dropped from over a meter to just seventy centimeters. It had shrunk across the board.
That completed the first stage: stripping away the junk and keeping only the essence.
Clang, clang, clang.
"Now that really does ring," Reiji murmured.
He tapped every side of Pineco's body, and each one gave off the same clear metallic sound. It really did resemble metal striking metal.
So he decided to call that innermost layer pure steel.
Steel was only a metaphor, of course. Bark was still bark. There was no way it had literally turned into steel. He had just kept grinding until only the hardest material remained, and somehow it had ended up with a metallic texture.
Even he did not fully understand it.
Next came the second layer.
This time, he planned to add Float Stone powder together with Apricorn bark, grind them in, and fuse the Float Stone powder into Pineco's body so its weight would go down.
Before that, though, he had to test whether powdered Float Stone still worked on Pokémon. If crushing it into powder destroyed the effect, then all the extra blending would be pointless.
He took out a set of grinding tools, called Scyther over from training, tossed the Float Stone in his hand, and said, "I'm going to throw this up in the air. I want you to cut it into four pieces. Can you do that?"
"Scy!"
Scyther nodded with complete confidence. A Float Stone was not going to stop its blades.
"Good."
Reiji stepped back and tossed the stone toward it.
Slash, slash, slash—
Scyther locked onto the stone and struck in rapid succession, carving it into four pieces in an instant. As it drew back its scythes, a flash of blade-light slipped across their crescent edges.
"Nice. Go back to training."
He waved Scyther off, then picked up the four pieces of Float Stone and went over to Pineco. After that, he lifted Pineco onto the scale.
Even after all the shrinking, Pineco still weighed eighteen kilos.
Not bad at all.
The heavier it stayed, the higher its defense would be. That meant the first step of grinding and quenching had worked. It had stripped out the impurities while preserving the toughest material. He would need to keep repeating that process.
After checking the weight, he placed one-quarter of the broken Float Stone onto Pineco. In theory, it should have had one-quarter of the full effect.
Half of Pineco's eighteen-kilo weight was nine kilos. One quarter of that should have reduced the weight by 2.25 kilos.
But the scale only dropped by one kilo.
So once the Float Stone was broken, its effect had been cut in half again.
That meant a complete Float Stone reduced weight by half, but a damaged one only retained half of that effect—in other words, only half as effective as a whole one.
What a waste.
And that was before accounting for the loss during grinding. He had no idea how many Float Stones it would take to reach the result he wanted.
For now, he could only take it one step at a time. If he ran short on materials, he would just go buy more from the department store. Money was not the issue.
After that, he dropped the Float Stone fragment into a mortar, ground it into powder, and sprinkled the powder over Pineco's body.
The effect got cut in half again.
This time, it only reduced the weight by another half-kilo.
[End of chapter]
[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]
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