Ash opened his eyes back in the real world. Gary was still going, still mid-anecdote about his month away. He'd been on this section right before Ash had ducked into the Chat Group.
Now, after what had felt like a long conversation in the group, Gary was on the same section. Like only a dozen seconds had passed out here. Maybe fewer.
Ash wasn't surprised. He'd worked it out a while ago. Time in the Chat Group ran slower than time outside, and the gap had been widening. Early on, it had been close to one-to-one, maybe two seconds in there for every second out here. Now the ratio was pushing a hundred to one.
He didn't know if it would keep stretching, but even capped where it was, it was massively in his favor. If anything urgent ever blew up in his face, he could duck into the group and brainstorm with the heavyweights. Problems he couldn't solve alone could get cracked open by the others while the outside world barely ticked forward. Another layer of cheat on top of the cheat he already had.
Gary, mid-sentence, noticed Ash was looking at him strangely. He stopped, glanced down at his own clothes, then back up. "Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my face?"
Ash had the expression of someone fighting back laughter and losing.
Gary didn't get it. He hadn't said anything funny.
"Nothing. Just remembered something funny. Keep going." Ash shrugged it off, like it had nothing to do with Gary.
In his head, he was still chewing on the parallel-world Gary holding the Champion seat for exactly one hour before getting kicked off it. Anyone who could hear that and keep a straight face was made of stone.
No wonder Gary wanted that part buried. Being the youngest Champion in history was a great line on paper, until you had to say the next line: and the fastest to lose the title. Same person, both records. Impossible to talk about with dignity.
Jokes aside though, in Champion Ash's world, both Ash and Gary were freaks of nature.
Special constitutions, inherited memories from top-tier Trainers, sure, but hitting Champion in two years was still absurd. A Champion in this era wasn't just someone with six Champion-level Pokémon. From the current roster of known Champions, the standard was six Champion-level Pokémon plus at least one in the Champion Advanced tier on hand. This generation of Champions was the strongest cohort the League had ever fielded. Word was, every Champion except Unova's Alder had at least one Pokémon at the Champion Peak level.
So becoming a Champion wasn't a six-Pokémon checkbox. It was six Champion-level Pokémon, plus a Champion Advanced anchor. Pulling that together in two years was monstrous, full stop.
Even at his own current pace, Ash could probably cultivate six Champion-level Pokémon in a year, and that was only if Blastoise, Venusaur, and Lucario all kept up. If they didn't, he was looking at three at best. With a super-cheat in his back pocket, one year. Which meant the two of them on Champion Ash's side were operating on another level entirely.
Thinking it through, the first Champion title both of them would have claimed was the Kanto League. And if the setup in Champion Ash's world matched his own, with the entire Kanto Elite Four sitting at Champion level themselves, then the prestige of that title jumped another notch.
Fastest dethroned or not, parallel-Gary was still no joke.
Gary, meanwhile, had been turning Ash's earlier reaction over in his head and not liking what he found. Something was off. He just couldn't pin it.
"What was so funny?"
"Uh, cough, just thinking about the Silver Conference coming up. Getting excited." Ash scrambled and pulled the first plausible thing off the shelf.
"Right, the Silver Conference!" Professor Oak cut in. "This year's is going to be a spectacle."
"I know. The slots are tied into the Masters Eight qualifiers now, so it wouldn't be weird to see Elite Four members or even Champions show up at the conference." Ash answered without thinking.
Gary had told him about the Silver Conference reforms. Otherwise he wouldn't have heard about a change that big at all. Gary's source had been Professor Oak, and Ash had naturally assumed Professor Oak didn't know that he already knew.
Except Professor Oak shook his head. "Old news. That's already out of date. I've got the latest."
Ash caught the smug look on the professor's face and bit. "What news? Another reform?"
"Something like that. This one's about eligibility. You remember the earlier announcement, that Badges from any region could qualify a Trainer for the Silver Conference? The League decided that making people collect Badges from other regions and then drag themselves to Johto was too much of a hassle."
"Johto has plenty of Gyms, but not enough to handle the wave of challengers coming in. So the League is inviting a batch of Gym Leaders from other regions to take up posts here for the duration. Johto's Gym Leader count has more than tripled."
Professor Oak held up three fingers with the air of a man delivering inside intel.
That was fresh. Importing Gym Leaders from other regions was going to scramble Johto's ecosystem. For one thing, an enormous wave of Trainers would now pour into Johto on top of the ones already coming for the Silver Conference itself.
Johto had been the center of attention as the host region anyway. Now, with the Gym Leader influx, it was effectively the gravitational center of the entire League.
Galar used to be an afterthought of a region. Then Gigantamax surfaced and Leon rose to Champion, and overnight Galar shot to the front of the pack. Everything followed: ordinary Trainer numbers, tourism, top-end combat power. For a while, Galar was the undisputed number one region.
But the tide was turning. Kalos, with its huge new finds of mega stones and key stones, was charging forward. Johto, with the Silver Conference and the imported Gym Leaders, was right alongside it. Both were closing on Galar at a flat sprint.
Galar's lead had quietly begun to slip.
That said, a fair number of the Gym Leaders coming to Johto were Galar natives themselves. The reason wasn't subtle: Galar wasn't going to miss a chance to plant its flag in front of every Trainer who showed up.
The Silver Conference venue itself had been expanded close to tenfold, and there was real concern it still wouldn't be enough.
Taking up a Gym post in Johto was the single best place to advertise their own region. Knowing full well it would only pump up Johto's numbers in the process, they still had to come. If they came, Johto got the lion's share and they got the leftovers. If they stayed home, they didn't even get the leftovers.
So they came. For now, Johto had all the momentum. Galar would have to wait until after the Silver Conference to make its own move.
The Silver Conference decided the slots for the Masters Eight tournament. And Galar was hosting the Masters Eight itself.
That said, the Masters Eight might pull a massive audience, but only eight Trainers competed in it. Lots of spectators, very few participants. In sheer liveliness, it wouldn't necessarily beat the Silver Conference.
In short, Johto's move to invite outside Gym Leaders was a masterstroke. Good for Johto, good for every region that sent representatives, which was exactly why everyone was racing to send people in.
"With this many Trainers stacking up in Johto, you'll get to challenge styles from every region, and the pressure should sharpen you faster. I put together a list of the strongest visiting Gym Leaders, broken down by region. Want it?" Professor Oak finished, and produced a roster.
The instant the words left his mouth, the roster left his hand. Ash and Gary were already shoulder to shoulder, leafing through it.
Professor Oak stared at his own empty palm, then at the two of them, and let out a resigned laugh. "Their hand speed is something else."
The roster was thorough. Not exhaustive, mind, only the visiting Gym Leaders who actually mattered, but each entry came with a full profile and a photograph. The thickness wasn't from quantity. It was from depth.
Sunyshore City, Sinnoh. Electric-type Gym Leader Volkner. Elite Four level. His ace, Electivire, sits just shy of Champion level. The strongest Gym Leader Sinnoh has.
Blackthorn City, Johto. Dragon-type Gym Leader Clair. One of Johto's heavy hitters. Cousin to the current Johto Champion and Kanto Elite Four member, Lance the Dragon Master. Not to be underestimated.
Petalburg City, Hoenn. Normal-type Gym Leader Norman. The Hoenn League reportedly offered him an Elite Four seat once. He turned it down to stay close to his family. Sitting as an Elite Four member would have eaten too much of his time. He's brought his whole family to Johto for this stint, including a daughter who's just hit travel age.
Hammerlocke City, Galar. Dragon-type Gym Leader Raihan. Publicly bills himself as Champion Leon's rival. Strength: Champion level.
Profile after profile. The intelligence network it must have taken to gather data this clean was hard to picture.
It covered the heaviest hitters coming to Johto. Volkner, Sinnoh's pseudo-Champion. Clair, related to Lance and at minimum Elite Four. Norman, Elite Four caliber by ability but unwilling to take the seat. And the headliner, Raihan, an honest-to-god Champion-level Gym Leader.
In the entire world, the count of Gym Leaders at Champion strength could be done on one hand. There was Raihan, and there was Giovanni, who Ash had personally beaten to a pulp not long ago.
As a rule, anyone who climbed to Elite Four level didn't stay parked at a Gym. People wanted to move up. The view was different at the top. A Gym Leader sitting at Elite Four strength was already a rarity.
And yet Kanto had four of them.
Yes, there were specific reasons for that, but the number was the number. Every other region combined could field maybe four Gym Leaders at Elite Four or higher. Kanto alone had four.
The roster didn't bother listing Kanto's Gym Leaders. Ash had already cleared the region's Badges once. He knew who was tough and who wasn't.
This roster was for him specifically. Professor Oak had compiled it knowing perfectly well that Ash, given the option, would seek out the strongest Gym Leaders on the list.
"Professor, why's there no information on this one? Pryce?" Ash had reached the last page and stopped. The page was a single photograph of a man called Pryce. Nothing else.
Every other Trainer in the roster was top-tier. This Pryce looked sixty or seventy in the photo, with no profile attached. Strong? Weak? No way to tell from the page.
At the name Pryce, something complicated moved across Professor Oak's face. He took a moment before answering.
"Pryce was a formidable Trainer in his day. His strength isn't below mine. For certain reasons, he no longer accepts Gym challenges. I put him on the list so you'd know he exists, and that he is, very much, someone to take seriously."
Not below Professor Oak's strength?
That put Pryce at Champion level.