If you counted the four protrusions on Forretress's body, its full width came out to 2.2 meters. The one Reiji had raised deserved to be called a monster without question.
An average Forretress stood 1.2 meters tall and measured 1.5 meters across.
His Forretress was 1.9 meters tall and 2.2 meters wide.
That was not just one or two sizes bigger. It was bigger by several whole tiers, at least six or seven sizes larger than normal.
Its size was not the only thing that stood out. The shell on this one was not the usual pink. It was jet black, and when he knocked on it, it rang like metal. It honestly sounded like tungsten steel.
[Forretress (shiny)]
[Type: Bug + Steel]
[Gender: Male]
[Potential: 72%]
[Level: 44.12%]
[Ability: Sturdy/32.12%][Hidden Ability: Overcoat/23.22%]
[Bug-type Moves: (Bug Bite/37.82%)(Pin Missile/17.11%)]
[Steel-type Moves: (Iron Defense/42.41%)(Gyro Ball/14.12%)(Autotomize/34.64%)(Heavy Slam/4.52%)(Iron Head/13.44%)]
[Normal-type Moves: (Tackle/11.14%)(Protect/28.22%)(Self-Destruct/13.41%)(Take Down/7.55%)(Rapid Spin/21.74%)(Explosion/21.38%)(Double-Edge/4.94%)(Endure/35.32%)(Body Slam/26.62%)(Sleep Talk/31.12%)]
[Other: (Rest/39.44%)(Rollout/7.54%)(Spikes/5.35%)(Toxic Spikes/6.72%)(Counter/4.44%)(Rain Dance/1.12%)(Magnet Rise/5.38%)]
Well then.
He had accidentally made another shiny Pokémon. That was the first surprise, and it was probably connected to the black Apricorn bark.
The second surprise was its potential. It had jumped straight into the seventies, and for Reiji, that was already more than enough.
Its level had also broken into Advanced tier, even higher than Gyarados's current level. Gyarados was only level 39 right now, just one step away from Advanced tier. By the time the Indigo Plateau Conference started, it would definitely be there, which made it a perfect lead Pokémon.
Anything below Advanced tier would be dead weight in the later rounds of the Indigo Plateau Conference. Sending it out would just be going through the motions.
There was not much to say about Forretress's moves. They were mostly the same as before, though all that constant Rapid Spin grinding over the last few days had pushed its move proficiency up quite a bit.
It had picked up new moves too.
One of them was the Steel-type move Heavy Slam, which attacked by crashing its heavy body into the opponent. The heavier the user was compared to the target, the stronger the move became.
After reading that, Reiji decided the move suited his current Forretress pretty well. At least it was far from unusable.
This Forretress weighed roughly 280 kilos. The three blocks of food for Steel-type Pokémon and the Float Stone it ate during evolution had made some difference.
Without that Float Stone, its weight might have shot all the way up to 300 kilos. Just a little short of that, really. Heavy Slam would have hit even harder then, but the extra mass would also have dragged its speed down too much.
A weight in the two-hundred range felt just right.
At this weight, it did not need to hold a Float Stone. Sure, it could still get lighter, but there was no real need. If it got too light, Heavy Slam would pretty much do nothing.
Forretress also had the Steel-type move Autotomize. That move raised Speed by two stages and cut its weight by 100 kilos.
After using that, Forretress would drop to 180 kilos and still be able to use Heavy Slam. If it skipped Autotomize, it stayed above 200 kilos, and Heavy Slam would hit even harder.
Looking at it that way, if his Forretress had evolved without Float Stone, it would have weighed about four times as much as an ordinary Forretress. The base weight should have been somewhere above 500 kilos, considering a normal Forretress averaged 125 kilos.
His Forretress had its weight halved by Float Stone before evolution, then ended up at 280 kilos after evolving. After Autotomize shaved off another 100 kilos, it still sat at 180, about fifty kilos heavier than a normal Forretress. Not bad at all.
Of course, defense did not scale as cleanly as body weight. Still, if the weight gap was that massive, the defense might be too. Even if it only came out to triple a normal Forretress instead of quadruple, that would already put its base Defense around 420. Four times would be absurd. Even Reiji did not dare assume that much, so he stuck with triple as his estimate.
And on top of that, it had fire resistance now.
The only thing he still did not know was how much. Did it now only take triple damage from Fire, or was it down to the standard double weakness? He would need to test it against an ordinary Forretress owned by another Trainer.
It had also picked up Iron Head, plus the Electric-type move Magnet Rise.
So Forretress could fly after all.
Once he finished checking the panel, the Pokémon were just about done with dinner. He packed up the tent and gear, recalled everyone, climbed onto Pelipper, and headed for the Pokémon Center in Fuchsia City.
He wanted to test the upper limit of Forretress's physical and special defenses, which meant he needed an ordinary Forretress for comparison.
At the Pokémon Center, he put up a request for a Trainer with a Forretress to act as a sparring partner. The reward was 100,000 Pokédollars.
Someone accepted almost immediately. Pineco could be found in the Safari Zone, so Forretress was not exactly rare.
"Hi, did you post this request?"
A boy of about eleven or twelve came over holding the job slip. The task listing included Reiji's location, so it had been easy enough to find him waiting at the Pokémon Center.
"That's right. Let me see your Forretress first."
Reiji laid out the condition plainly. Once the boy sent it out, he took out a measuring tape and checked it.
The height and width all matched what a normal Forretress should look like.
Then he checked its proficiency panel and found the level too low, so he turned the boy down.
If he was going to test properly, he needed a matching sample. The comparison Forretress had to be Advanced tier too. He had forgotten to include that in the request, but it did not matter. He could wait.
Half an hour later, he finally got the Forretress he wanted: a normal-sized one at level 41, also belonging to a boy.
He led the boy outside the Pokémon Center to an open patch of ground. They did not go to the battle field, since other Trainers were fighting there and there were too many eyes around.
Once they reached an empty spot, Reiji sent out his own Forretress. He planned to test its defensive limits, starting with Fire-type attacks.
"Whoa, that's a Forretress too? Yours is huge. And the shell's black!"
The boy stared at Reiji's Forretress and could not stop exclaiming. He kept looking it over, his face full of open envy.
That reaction made sense. The boy already owned a Forretress, which meant he clearly liked the species. Put the two side by side, and one looked like an adult while the other looked like a child. Of course he preferred the giant black one.
A man-made shiny Forretress like this was basically a dream specimen among kids who liked the species. Who would not want a shiny Pokémon?
"Let's not waste time. Do you have a Fire-type Pokémon too?" Reiji asked.
He did not own one himself, so if he wanted to test fire resistance and both defenses, he had to borrow someone else's.
"Come on out, Magmar."
The boy threw the ball and waited for instructions, wondering how exactly this "sparring" was supposed to work.
"Good. That's everything."
Reiji looked at the Magmar and then checked its Poké Ball. Its strength landed right in Advanced tier. He glanced up at the boy and asked, "These are all yours?"
"Yeah," the boy replied, a little confused.
He had only recently reached Advanced tier himself and badly needed money for training items. That was why he had accepted the 100,000-Pokédollar sparring request in the first place.
Still, the task only lasted two hours, so it had seemed worth taking.
"Nothing," Reiji said.
He just had not expected the kid to already have two Advanced-tier Pokémon.
He immediately sent out Poliwhirl and took out a stopwatch. Then he gave the boy his instructions.
"Have your Forretress retract into its shell. Then have your Magmar keep using Ember on it until the Forretress can't take it anymore."
"What kind of sparring is that?" the boy blurted out.
He had thought sparring meant trading moves or something. He had not expected to set his own Forretress on fire. Did this guy not know that Forretress was four times weak to Fire?
"I'll add another hundred thousand. That makes two hundred thousand total," Reiji said flatly. "Do exactly what I say, and don't interrupt me while the job is running."
The impatience in his eyes was obvious.
This was paid work. He was buying the boy's time. There was no room for all this extra chatter.
The boy swallowed. "O-Okay."
That look in Reiji's eyes had unsettled him enough that he stopped arguing. It was just burning his own Forretress for a while, and he would get 200,000 for it. No reason to turn that down.
"Magmar, use Ember on Forretress."
At the boy's command, Magmar spat out a small burst of flame and started burning the Forretress curled up in its shell.
With the four-times weakness in play, the ordinary Forretress did not even last half a minute. It got so overheated that it started rolling around, and Poliwhirl had to jump in with Water Gun to bail it out.
"That bad?" Reiji muttered.
He had not expected it to collapse that quickly. Four-times-effective damage really was vicious.
"Now have your Magmar use the same Ember on my Forretress."
He recorded the ordinary Forretress's endurance time, then moved on to his own.
"Okay. Magmar, burn it."
The boy had figured out by now what this was about. No wonder the request specifically asked for a Forretress. Reiji wanted to test the limits of his own shiny Forretress.
"Mag..."
Magmar flicked its tongue out, clearly thinking this was easy money, then spat Ember at Reiji's black Forretress.
Reiji kept his thumb on the stopwatch and watched the seconds climb. Every so often, he looked up to check Forretress's condition. Since it showed no reaction at all, he never called for a stop.
Half a minute passed.
One minute.
Two.
Three...
Eventually Magmar got tired and stopped using Ember on its own. The stopwatch stopped at six minutes and twenty seconds.
Forretress still showed no reaction.
"Damn, don't tell me it got roasted unconscious," Reiji muttered.
He stepped forward and knocked on Forretress's shell. Only then did the shell part slightly, revealing two large black eyes.
So it was not out cold after all.
He put a hand on its head. Warm, but nothing more. Then he slowly ran his hand lower until he reached the underside where Ember had been hitting. That part was hot enough to sting his palm.
Forretress, however, seemed completely unaffected.
He wrote down two words in his notebook: Damp Rock and size.
Those were the most likely reasons it could sit through several minutes of continuous burning without reacting.
The shell mixed with Damp Rock powder had blocked most of the heat, and its huge body took far longer to heat up in the first place. Getting through the shell and actually harming the Forretress inside would take even longer.
Overall, that meant its weakness to Fire had dropped below the normal double weakness. That alone was a major success. His idea of using Damp Rock to reduce Fire-type damage had clearly worked.
Before raising Forretress, his best-case goal had been cutting the weakness down to double damage. Instead, it had gone below that.
Damp Rock had done incredible work. His Forretress did not even need rain support anymore to stop fearing Fire.
Ember was a special move, which also meant Flamethrower would probably be something it could tank several times too. How many times exactly still needed testing.
Next came physical defense.
That meant Fire Punch.
"Have your Magmar use Fire Punch on your own Forretress."
"Got it."
The boy nodded at Magmar and said, "Do what he says."
"Mag..."
Magmar looked thoroughly miserable, but a Trainer's order was still absolute. It raised its fist, wreathed it in flame, and slammed it into its own teammate.
The poor Forretress had already tucked itself into its shell. First it got burned. Now it was getting punched with fire. Its own teammate really did not hold back.
Bang, bang, bang—
After only three Fire Punches, the ordinary Forretress started smoking. When its shell opened, its eyes were already rolled back white.
"That's enough. Hit mine now."
Reiji sighed and wrote down the limit for a normal Forretress against Fire Punch. Three hits and it was out. Honestly pathetic.
Then again, if four-times-effective damage were easy to shrug off, Reggie's Gabite would never have been launched so far and frozen solid in that block of ice.
Whether it was Ember or Fire Punch, Magmar was getting STAB on both. The only thing Reiji did not know yet was whether the Magmar was holding an item.
"Is your Magmar carrying an item?"
"Charcoal," the boy answered at once.
He recalled the ordinary Forretress too. Reiji had gotten the data he wanted, and the poor thing had no further use here.
"Right," Reiji said, shaking his head.
STAB, item boost, and four-times effectiveness. No wonder the kid's Forretress died in three hits.
Really, it had already been done after two. The earlier burn damage just meant the third punch finished it off for good. Reggie's Gabite had also suffered four-times-effective damage, but Poliwhirl had been at plus six Attack and used Waterfall burst on top of that, so the two cases could not be compared directly.
Still, the lesson was obvious enough.
That was the true weight of a four-times weakness.
Unless you were some plot-favored mascot, never be stupid enough to try to tank an x4 weakness. Even an x2 weakness needed to be treated carefully.
He did not even need to look nearby for examples. Pryce had failed badly before, and Lance's shiny Gyarados had been smashed apart by Thunder Punch despite being famous in its own right. That was what type advantage meant.
"Three... five... eight... ten..."
Reiji kept counting Magmar's punches under his breath.
Even after twenty punches, Forretress was still tucked inside its shell without the slightest reaction. No smoke. No rolling eyes. Nothing.
Crack.
"Mag..."
Magmar threw one last punch, and something snapped.
Reiji looked up.
Other than being slightly more scorched on the surface, which barely even showed against a shell that was already black, Forretress had not changed at all.
That cracking sound had not come from Forretress.
It had come from—
"Mag..."
Magmar's arm drooped uselessly. It looked broken.
"No way. That can happen?"
Reiji hurried over and knocked on Forretress's shell. Forretress opened its shell just enough to show its eyes again, staring at him in confusion as if asking why the punches had stopped.
Reiji coughed.
This was awkward as hell.
Forretress's shell was simply too tough, and its resistance to Fire was too strong. Magmar ended up breaking its own arm on it.
He quickly broke down the reasons.
First, Damp Rock had given Forretress real resistance to Fire, which made it much better at absorbing Fire Punch.
Second, size. A normal Forretress weighed a bit over a hundred kilos. His weighed over two hundred. Hitting cotton and hitting steel did not feel the same. Anyone could understand that.
Third, hardness. His Forretress was simply harder. He had ground and quenched it again and again under Gravity, then layered bark onto it over and over. That had raised its hardness, strength, wear resistance, and toughness.
Fourth, the shell was technically divided into three broad layers, but in reality it contained twenty or thirty separate ones. Every round of bark he pasted on had become another shell layer. He only clearly remembered the first layer, then the eleven sacks of bark after that. The exact number of layers was a blur.
In the end, he still had not found Forretress's true limit.
That left him a little unsatisfied.
He pulled out the money and tossed it to the boy.
"Here's your payment. Two hundred thousand."
He gave the boy the task voucher and the cash. If the kid wanted cash or points processed officially, he could handle that at the Pokémon Center himself. Reiji recalled Forretress, called Poliwhirl over, and turned to leave.
He heard the boy shouting after him, but he could not be bothered answering.
The kid was obviously asking how he had raised Forretress.
As if he would tell him.
Of course not.
The methods he had stumbled into by accident could probably be used to build entire minor clans if they got out. He could open a school and charge apprentices just for access to them.
But he had no intention of doing that.
Every training method revealed a weakness too. People could study that and dig things out of it. He was not about to hand that over.
Poliwhirl was a different case. Even if someone figured out what he'd done, it wasn't something most people could copy. Plenty of Water-types could use Waterfall, but there was a world of difference between knowing the move and mastering it. If that Rhydon on Fairchild Island hadn't shown Poliwhirl how to burst with it, Reiji would probably still be stuck.
Even with that help, Poliwhirl was still training Waterfall. It would probably take years to truly master the move.
And how many people could really keep polishing a single move for years on end?
It was still a shame he hadn't managed to find Forretress's true limit. For now, all he knew was that both its physical and special bulk were absurd, and Fire-type attacks were no longer a serious threat.
So the 200,000 hadn't been wasted.
At the very least, he now had a benchmark for what an ordinary Forretress could handle.
If he wanted to find his own Forretress's real ceiling, he would probably have to do it at the Indigo Plateau Conference, in actual high-intensity battles.
His guess was that Forretress would be worn down or collapse from exhaustion long before it was knocked out cleanly.
Same as ever, the real problem was whether the opponent could break its defense at all.
With Forretress added in, he now had seven true mainstays ready for the tournament.
Outside that core group, he still had several reserve options—Shelmet, Slowpoke, Butterfree, Staryu, Tauros, Farfetch'd, and a few others.
Those could handle the early three-on-three rounds, though he would still need one or two core team members in reserve as insurance. Otherwise, one bad matchup could still trip him up. He could decide the exact lineup later.
Then there was Shelmet.
Before the tournament started, he still had to decide whether to evolve it.
Shelmet without evolution had limited value, but Accelgor was a Unova Pokémon that, as far as the world knew, hadn't been discovered yet.
Trade Evolution had existed for ages. Ever since Pokémon transfer machines became common, some Trainers had been swapping Pokémon back and forth constantly. Sooner or later, if enough people kept doing it, someone was bound to stumble onto a new evolution.
Honestly, Reiji suspected the League pushed those machines so hard for exactly that reason. Keep rolling the dice, and maybe someone would eventually turn up a new discovery.
The problem was that he had never been to Unova, yet he just happened to have both Shelmet and Karrablast in his hands. If he dug too openly into it, people would realize he was aiming straight at Accelgor, and once that happened, they would start asking the wrong questions.
How was a Trainer who had never even set foot in Unova supposed to know so precisely that those two Pokémon evolved through trade?
He had no interest in putting himself under that kind of spotlight.
That said, he could always pass the discovery along anonymously to a well-known Pokémon Professor.
Even that choice needed care. A cautious professor was a bad pick. Better to choose a greedy one—someone willing to claim the credit and carry the risk that came with it.
As for the fame that would come from publishing a paper on Shelmet's evolution?
A real schemer didn't need fame.
What he needed was strength.
Once he stood at the top as Champion, no one would dare ignore what he had to say.
Why was Giovanni the boss?
Why did he have scientists, researchers, and even Elite Four-level Trainers working for him?
In the end, it all came down to power. Giovanni was strong enough to force everyone else into line.
That was what mattered.
Strength.
Still turning Shelmet's situation over in his mind, Reiji returned to the Pokémon Center and rented a room for the night. He would leave tomorrow. It was already late, and sleep mattered more than anything else right now.
He had spent long enough in Fuchsia City.
And if he had to name the biggest gain he'd made there, it was this absurdly durable Forretress.
It was time to move on to the next Gym.
[End of chapter]
[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]
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