A full Float Stone cut Pineco's weight in half. Once broken into 2 pieces, its effect dropped to 4.5 kilos. Once ground into powder, it only shaved off 2 kilos.
If he wanted powdered Float Stone to match the effect of one intact Float Stone, he would need four stones ground down to powder just to equal one complete stone.
So the finer the item got, the weaker its effect became. Powdered Float Stone was nowhere near as good as the original item. Reiji could only shake his head.
Still, at least it worked.
The real advantage was that a Pineco trained this way was not benefiting from a held item anymore. The effect became part of the Pokémon itself.
That meant once Pineco evolved, Forretress would step onto the field with the equivalent of a built-in Float Stone. If it then held an actual Float Stone on top of that, the effects could stack.
Pineco could be trained like this, but what about Scyther?
Scyther could not go through quenching, but its red armor might still be able to absorb Damp Rock powder. If that worked, then raising its fire resistance should also be possible.
He put Scyther's evolution aside for now. First he needed to finish Pineco properly and build up some experience. Scyther's evolution could wait until after the Indigo Plateau Conference.
He ground an entire Float Stone into powder and sprinkled it across Pineco's body. Then he had Pineco secrete mucus to stick the powder in place, after which he pressed the cut Apricorn bark onto the slime-covered shell.
He covered Pineco on all sides, then sent it back into grinding and quenching. Even the toughest bark still had impurities in it.
After several rounds of polishing, the Apricorn bark had turned smooth and rounded. The impurities were gone, leaving only the hardest material behind. Reiji tapped Pineco's shell a few times, checking the sound.
Once it gave off that crisp metallic clang again, he called Scyther back over to slice up more Float Stone. This time he increased the amount and used two full stones.
He had already done the math. Once the effect kept dropping off, four Float Stones were needed just to equal the old effect of one complete stone.
Now another round of quenching had shaved that down by half again.
Which meant he would need eight Float Stones just to match the effect he had started with earlier.
As he worked the Float Stone into powder, another thought suddenly hit him.
Would Float Stone work on Hanhan too?
He called Hanhan over. For a Pokémon like Hanhan, there was no need for any fancy treatment. It could just eat the stone directly.
But once Hanhan stood in front of him, Reiji hesitated.
Float Stone reduced a Pokémon's weight, which made movement easier.
But that reduction was relative. If Hanhan got lighter, then when an enemy hit it, they would also be hitting a lighter Hanhan.
Sometimes size really was strength. Boxing divisions existed for a reason, and they were divided by weight.
A hundred-kilo punch and a fifty-kilo punch were not the same thing.
If Hanhan became lighter, its power might drop too. Without body weight behind it, the force would naturally change. Otherwise, Hanhan would not have been able to make Electivire reel with a single punch while wearing rock armor. With that armor on, Hanhan weighed well over two hundred kilos.
So the question was whether reducing Hanhan's weight was worth it.
He needed to weigh the trade-off between better speed and agility on one side, and raw mass and power on the other. Its defense would not drop either way, but the weight difference would change everything.
After thinking in silence for a while, he suddenly realized something.
Why choose?
First, when Hanhan was not wearing rock armor, a lighter body would mean better speed and mobility.
Second, once it put the rock armor on, it could simply use the armor to increase its own weight again and hit just as hard as before.
The rock armor gave Hanhan the freedom to switch between a light, agile body and a heavy, high-mass body whenever it wanted.
And after reducing its natural weight, Hanhan could even make the rock armor thicker, which would raise both the armor's defense and its total mass.
Right. That was it.
He had been trapping himself between two extremes and forgot he could have both.
If that was the case, then Hanhan's natural body weight should be as low as possible. That was completely different from Pineco's direction.
Pineco leaned more toward support, and even its offense depended on smashing into enemies. If it got too light, it would hit like a wad of cotton. How much would the opponent even feel?
That comparison was a little extreme, of course. No matter how much he reduced Forretress's weight, it would still weigh over a hundred kilos at minimum. Float Stone was not magic, and Pineco was not supposed to become weightless.
"Eat this."
After jotting down the idea for Hanhan's Float Stone training in his notebook, Reiji tossed the stone over.
If lighter was better, then Hanhan would need more Float Stones as food until they stopped having any effect. That would be the point where it had reached its limit.
"Rhy... crunch, crunch..."
Hanhan chewed up the Float Stone with a miserable expression. The taste was awful. If Reiji had not been standing there watching, it probably would have spit it right back out.
"Swallow it," Reiji said.
That was a 500,000-Pokédollar stone, more expensive than Ground or Rock Gems. There was no way he was letting Hanhan waste it.
Hanhan looked deeply wronged, then trudged to the river and washed the Float Stone powder down with a few gulps of water.
Once Hanhan had swallowed it, Reiji let it go. No need to bring out the scale yet. Better to wait until it had eaten a few stones first.
Then he went back to grinding Float Stone powder and spreading it evenly over Pineco's shell.
The process stayed the same as before. First Pineco secreted mucus to trap the powder in place so less of it would be lost during polishing.
Then came the bark layer, followed by Rapid Spin, followed by quenching, until the shell rang out with that crisp metallic sound again.
Then he repeated the whole process from the top and ground more Float Stone powder.
By the time all eight Float Stones had been used on Pineco, along with four large sacks of bark, Pineco had grown noticeably bigger. Its body had actually bulked back up again.
Its weight had dropped from eighteen kilos to fourteen, only four kilos less than before. That was probably because he kept adding new bark later on, so the total did not simply halve.
It still felt a little short to him.
The first layer was pure steel.
The second layer was Float Stone.
The third layer would be Damp Rock.
Which meant the outermost layer still had to be added, and that would definitely raise the weight again.
He had to keep Pineco's final weight within a certain range. At the very least, it could not exceed twice the weight of a normal Pineco.
Too heavy, and it would lose too much agility. Too light, and it would lose too much impact. Fourteen or fifteen kilos would have been ideal, but only if there were no third layer of Damp Rock.
The problem was that he had not even added the third layer yet, and Pineco was already at fourteen kilos.
That outer layer mattered. It was supposed to be the fire-resistant layer, which was why he had planned to put the Damp Rock powder on the outside in the first place.
So yes, his calculations were slightly off.
But not by enough to ruin anything.
He could mix both Float Stone powder and Damp Rock powder into the outer structure separately, stacking them layer by layer until Rain Dance appeared on Pineco's panel.
So he started grinding both powders and applying them in separate layers over Pineco's body, building the final fire-resistant outer shell. Then he ran Pineco through the same process again, except this time Damp Rock powder was part of it too.
When Pineco finished another cycle of grinding and quenching, Reiji had it come out of the river and sit in the inflatable pool.
He needed to check whether the earlier Float Stone powder had been distributed evenly.
The side with less Float Stone would sit deeper in the water. The side with more Float Stone would float higher.
He had only noticed the balance problem after watching Pineco bob up and down in the river. Good thing he caught it early.
If he had only discovered it after evolution, Pineco might not have been able to spin properly at all. Even if it could, it would wobble badly.
Like a top, it had to be balanced. Balance was everything when it came to rotation.
After marking the waterline and taking notes, he marked Pineco's shell and went right back to grinding more powder, then sent Pineco into more grinding and quenching.
All the Damp Rock he used was Advanced-tier quality. Luckily, he had plenty of it left. Most of what Hanhan had eaten before had been Heat Rock and Smooth Rock instead.
So the cycle continued.
Grind the items.
Paste on the bark.
Let Pineco grind and quench.
They kept going until nightfall, and at last Rain Dance appeared on Pineco's panel.
The moment Reiji saw that, he knew Pineco had reached its limit.
Any more Damp Rock would start doing more harm than good and weaken the shell's defense instead. Right now, the balance was perfect.
The shell was still primarily Steel-type. That mattered more than anything else, because Steel brought far too many resistances to lose. Compared to that, the four-times Fire weakness was only the flaw he was trying to patch. Keeping the Steel typing came first.
Pineco now weighed sixteen kilos, two more than he had aimed for, but still within an acceptable range.
Its width had reached ninety centimeters, ten more than the eighty-centimeter body it had before he caught it.
Its height was now one meter twenty. Before, it had been one meter five. So it had gained another fifteen centimeters there too.
The outer layer alone had consumed seven large sacks of bark. In total, eleven sacks of Apricorn bark were gone, leaving only four behind.
He had also burned through twenty Float Stones, and Pineco still came out two kilos heavier than planned. He had done everything he could. Besides, he was completely out of Float Stones now, and he still needed to buy more for Hanhan to eat.
As for Damp Rock, he had used three pieces, nearly all of it on the outer layer. There was actually more Damp Rock than Float Stone in that final shell, but luckily he still had some left. That much, at least, was good news.
Naturally, bark had been the biggest expense of all. Even after grinding and quenching all of it down, only the hardest essence remained, and Pineco still ended up this big. Reiji was more than satisfied.
Compared to before, old Pineco had just been bulky.
Now it looked solid.
Hard.
Like a lump of forged iron.
The next step was evolution.
But before that, Reiji made a trip into town and stopped by a Pokémon food shop. There, he bought three blocks of steel-type Pokémon food.
Honestly, he had no idea what kind of Pokémon actually ate stuff like that. It was heavy and hard enough that probably only Steel-types could chew through it.
The clerk explained that, despite the name, it was just a kind of specialty food for Steel-type Pokémon, not actual steel. To a Steel-type, it was nothing special—only a bit tougher than gold. A human could still leave a faint mark by biting it, though barely.
After leaving the shop, Reiji actually took one out and bit it himself.
He nearly cracked a tooth.
There really was a faint little bite mark on it, though. It looked about as noticeable as pressing a fingernail lightly into your arm.
In other words, practically nothing.
At that point, he gave up arguing with reality, packed the steel feed away, and bought ten more Float Stones. Another five million gone.
The steel feed had cost fifty thousand each. To him, it felt pretty similar to Weezing's toxin crystals. For Poison-types and Steel-types, both were basically just food.
After buying everything he needed, he returned to the riverside and had Pineco spit out the Everstone it had been holding in its mouth.
Then he fed Pineco three blocks of food made for Steel-type Pokémon, three Bug Gems, and a Float Stone.
That was enough.
Now it could evolve.
"Pineco, eat all this. The Float Stone needs to be crushed up and mixed into the shell after evolution. Once you're ready, evolve."
"Pine..."
Pineco almost sighed in relief while it ate.
At last, it was over.
The last two days had been pure suffering for it.
More than once, it had ground itself against the rocks until smoke started coming off its body before Reiji finally let it jump into the river and cool down.
Pineco was a Bug-type. It hated high heat by nature. Yet it had still pushed itself until its body smoked.
These two days had been brutal.
If Poliwhirl's fists had not been so persuasive, there was no way Pineco would have worked this hard.
In that sense, Pineco was a lot like Weezing.
Weezing had been cut apart over a hundred times. At one point it had nearly rolled its eyes back from all the slashing, and sometimes it passed out completely, only to get splashed awake and cut again.
Thankfully, all of that was over now.
Weezing had finished in one day.
Pineco had taken a day and a half.
"Pine!"
The moment Pineco finished eating what Reiji had prepared, it triggered the light of evolution almost immediately. It wanted this done as badly as he did. No more endless spinning, no more burning body, no more dizzy mind.
When the white light faded, Reiji stared at the giant Forretress in front of him and knew he had done it.
He could not hold back the smile spreading across his face.
"Forretress, congratulations on evolving. Welcome to the team. Everyone, get over here. We've got a new partner."
"Poli!"
Poliwhirl had been swimming in the river, but the second it heard there was a new teammate, it rushed ashore.
"Scy!"
Scyther came over too, giving up its training without hesitation.
Then came Pelipper, Kingler, Hanhan, Gyarados, Shelmet, Zapdos, Toxicroak, Golbat, Marshtomp, Weezing, Gengar, Ditto, Spinarak, and the rest.
Not everyone looked interested, though.
Riolu and Tauros, for example, could not have cared less.
Darkrai did not show up either. It was not close to Pineco. If this had been one of the Pokémon it actually knew well, it might have come out to congratulate them. For Pineco, it stayed hidden.
Once Pineco had evolved successfully, Reiji finally allowed himself to sit down, breathe, drink some water, and rest properly.
He had been working nonstop since yesterday afternoon. Not a single real break. The sky had already gone dark, and he had not even started making dinner yet.
After resting for a short while, he hung up a camping lamp by the river and cooked the evening meal. Only then did the Pokémon gather around to eat.
While they ate, he pulled out a measuring tape and started checking Forretress's body.
Its height was one meter ninety, which was not too far off from his original expectations. He had to stretch his arm fully upright just to measure it.
Its width was one meter seventy, and that was not even counting the four protruding points on its body.
Forretress had no visible limbs. Its body was wrapped in two pink shells with uneven grooves across the surface.
Its true body sat inside the steel outer shell, protected beneath it by a second red shell. A narrow slit ran across the middle of that red shell, and through that slit, its eye could be seen.
That eye was all anyone ever saw of Forretress.
To this day, no human or Pokémon had ever seen what it really looked like inside.
The four pipe-like protrusions extended out from the corners of the red shell.
As for what they actually did, nobody knew.
[End of chapter]
[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]
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