"What the hell? He just cleared the first five floors? I checked the time — the whole thing took maybe fifteen minutes. That's three minutes a floor, average."
"And out of those three minutes, half of it was Old Fish walking up the stairs. After that, you've got the referee reading the rules and calling the results."
"That Shellder of his is genuinely terrifying."
"I'm serious; I spent two and a half years training without a single day off, and I barely scraped through the fifth floor. Standing next to Old Fish makes me feel like I've wasted my life."
"Don't be so hard on yourselves. I'm older than all of you and I've only cleared the fourth floor. If anyone has wasted their life, it's me."
The Trainer Tower on the Sevii Islands wasn't exactly a famous landmark. Even so, it was no joke in terms of difficulty, and blazing through it the way Caster just had was genuinely rare.
What made it even more striking was that he had used only a single Shellder the whole way through.
Down in the first-floor lobby, Tower Director Albert wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and shot a discreet glance at Elite Four Member Lorelei.
If Lorelei hadn't flat-out denied it, he might have suspected that Shellder was one of her own Pokemon, lent to Caster just to tear the place apart.
What really floored Albert was something Lorelei had mentioned offhand: Caster was a new trainer.
"Him? A new trainer?"
Albert's jaw dropped. If the person in front of him hadn't been Elite Four Member Lorelei, he would have said something far less polite.
While the crowd was still processing what they had just watched, Caster followed a receptionist up to the sixth floor.
"Welcome to the sixth floor. My name is Garrett, and I'm one of this tower's floor guardians."
The lights came up, and a young man in a red cape with bright green hair stepped forward, expression serious.
As a floor guardian, Garrett had access to footage from the earlier fights. He knew Caster was dangerous. Anyone who had steamrolled straight to the sixth floor deserved real respect, and Garrett wasn't about to take him lightly.
Fortunately, Garrett was a seasoned trainer with plenty of competitive experience under his belt. By the time the battle was set to begin, he already had a plan for handling the Shellder, and his nerves had steadied.
"Both trainers, take your positions!"
At the referee's signal, each side sent out their lead Pokemon.
Caster's was, once again, his Shellder. Garrett's was a massively-built Snorlax — navy-dark, half-lidded, and deceptively sleepy-looking. Anyone who knew their Pokemon understood that was a dangerous illusion.
"Shellder, Ice Shard!"
"Snorlax, Defense Curl!"
The moment the battle started, both trainers called out their commands almost at the same time.
Thick shards of ice launched forward, dragging waves of bitter cold with them.
On the other side, Snorlax curled inward, rounding itself into one enormous, living boulder.
It let the Ice Shard hit dead-on. The attack burst against its hide with a heavy crack, and cold air rolled outward in thick clouds. Within seconds, a heavy layer of frost had crystallized across Snorlax's body.
But to everyone's surprise, the frost and the chill barely seemed to bother it. Snorlax rocked in place, and the ice shattered and fell away. At the same moment, a white glow pulsed across its body.
Snorlax's Defense had gone up.
"Garrett's Snorlax has very high resistance to cold," Albert said from the lobby below, a rare smile crossing his face.
As the tower director, Albert naturally had no interest in watching his floor guardians get steamrolled. That kind of thing was bad for the tower's reputation.
He knew that Garrett's Snorlax had the ability Thick Fat, which cut damage from Fire- and Ice-type moves significantly. On top of that, Snorlax had a monstrous HP pool, so a single Ice Shard was never going to leave a dent. And now that its Defense had been boosted, even its lower physical bulk was no longer a real weakness.
The way Albert saw it, it was time for Snorlax to hit back.
He was about to say as much when Lorelei spoke, calm and unhurried: "The Snorlax is already poisoned."
Lorelei had barely finished speaking before a dark violet flush crept into Snorlax's face, and its dopey expression twisted into a grimace of pain.
"Poisoned?" Albert's eyes went wide. "Since when?"
Shellder had only ever used Ice Shard, from the opening move to now. How was Snorlax poisoned?
"That Shellder's control over Poison-type energy is extraordinary. It puts most actual Poison-type Pokemon to shame, and it isn't close."
Lorelei watched Albert's stunned face and smiled, then explained: "While it was forming the Ice Shard, it laced the attack with toxin. So when the Ice Shard hit and burst apart, what it released wasn't just cold air. It was also a cloud of poison."
Lorelei could fully appreciate Albert's shock, because she had felt exactly the same way the first time she found out. She considered herself well-versed in Shellder and what it was capable of, and even she had been quietly floored when she learned what Caster's Shellder could do.
He had taken a Shellder, of all things, and turned it into this.
"Snor..."
On the battlefield, Snorlax's face twisted in pain.
The toxin was at Mastered level, and the poison hit hard. Even a tank like Snorlax was struggling to hold on, its HP draining away in steady chunks.
"Snorlax, use Rest! Now!"
On Garrett's command, Snorlax closed its eyes and began snoring with thunderous volume.
Garrett had barely started to exhale when he noticed that even in sleep, Snorlax's face was still creased with pain. The poison seemed to be chewing through it without pause.
"What kind of toxin is that?" Garrett stared. "Rest couldn't even clear it?"
Rest was the gold standard of recovery moves: full HP restored, every status condition wiped clean. That was the whole point of it.
But just now...
"A Mastered toxin wasn't going to disappear that easily." Caster crossed his arms, a cold smile on his face.
A Mastered technique represented a qualitative leap beyond anything below it. A poison at that level wasn't something an ordinary Pokemon could just sleep off.
"Snor..."
Snorlax's sleep didn't last long. When it woke, its HP hadn't recovered at all. Instead, it had bottomed out entirely.
One Icicle Spear from Shellder was all it took. Snorlax's knees buckled. It swayed once, twice, then came down like a falling wall.
"Snorlax is unable to battle. The winner is Shellder!"
The referee called it quickly, then announced, "The floor guardian will now send out a replacement Pokemon."
"Let's go, Persian!"
Garrett took a breath and released his second Pokemon, a large cat that radiated pure predatory energy, claws sharp, gaze cutting.
The battle picked back up.
Caster went to the same well: "Ice Shard!"
But Persian was far faster than Shellder. It seemed to blink out of existence and reappear directly behind Shellder in an instant, its massive paw slamming hard down onto Shellder's tongue.
A Normal-type move: Fake Out.
Fake Out carried priority even higher than Extreme Speed, so it connected well before Ice Shard could fire.
"Ugh..."
The tongue was a sensitive, vital part of its body. The direct hit left Shellder visibly reeling, its shell snapping shut.
But almost immediately, a piercing cold began spreading from the point of contact across Persian's paw. The chill wasn't just seeping in. It was actively freezing Persian's paw to the shell, fusing them together.
Shellder's surface temperature was so extreme that the moment Persian's paw made contact, it was like pressing a wet tongue to a metal pole in the dead of winter. They stuck fast.
"Meoww!"
Persian panicked.
Its entire fighting style relied on speed and agility. Caught like this, every advantage it had was gone in an instant.
"That Shellder is something else," Garrett muttered, unable to hide his disbelief.
Still, Garrett was an experienced battler. Surprised as he was, he quickly spotted an opening.
With both Pokemon locked together at point-blank range, there was nowhere for Persian's next move to miss.
At this distance, Protect, Double Team, and every trick in the evasion playbook became completely useless.
Garrett raised his voice: "Persian! While you can! Thunderbolt!"