Kamish tears through the dark smog and collides with Marcus's Gastly, who is knocked away by the impact.
"Oh Shit! Smits try to regain your balance. And use Smog again," Marcus's voice comes out from the dome speakers.
Gastly, who was flung towards the ground tries to get back up to fill the dome with even more black fog.
"Let him get back up. Kamish, fly up and then use Dragon Tail on descent." Kamish hears Lazarus's voice and goes as high as the dome will allow him to go.
Gastly prepares to spew the dark fog all around it to hide from Kamish, but the dragon is much faster.
Kamish descends from the above and slams his tail on top of Gastly, and before Gastly can recover from it Kamish uses another Dragon Tail which knocks Gastly out.
Kamish flies in circles inside the dome to celebrate his victory.
It's been three days since Kamish learned Dragon Tail, and since then he's been unstoppable so far. This was his fourteenth victory out of fourteen matches fought inside the dome.
—
Marcus makes his way over to Lazarus with Gastly's pokéball in hand.
"Man, your Dreepy is really strong. But I wouldn't expect any less from a dragon." Marcus says, "But I am unwilling to lose again."
"Hey, you're welcome to challenge us again anytime. Pretty sure there nothing else Kamish would rather be doing." Lazarus says and then turns to Kamish flying overhead, "What do you think Kamish?"
Kamish looks at Lazarus and nods, sure he'll beat the Gastly again. It won't be fun to beat the same pokémon again but he'll do it.
"Awesome. I'm gonna go train with my Gastly. I'll catch you later." Marcus says before leaving the arena.
—
Lazarus sits inside his room, with Aurora in his lap and Kamish beside him. In front of them is a holographic recording of the matches these two pokémon fought in the last three days.
They see Kamish dodging bullets fashioned out of water from a blue monkey. The Panpour tried his best to hit Kamish but the dragon proved to be too fast, Kamish didn't even feel the need to finish the match properly, he took his time and just let Panpour get tired and then knocked it out in a single Dragon Dash.
Lazarus pauses the hologram and turns to ask his Dreepy, "Do you know what you did wrong here?"
Dreepy looks at him in confusion. What does he mean? Didn't he win the match?
"I had told you to finish the match as soon as you could. But you took four minutes to end the match when you could have done it in one. Why did you give your opponent three extra minutes to make his play. What if it had some move you couldn't dodge or stop. What would you have done then?
I know these matches are fun to you. And honestly what you did is not that big of a deal, but you need to eliminate this habit while we are here. When we get into the wild, a single mistake could cost us everything, especially one like this. You need to finish your enemies as fast as you can."
Kamish looks away guiltily, he understands what his trainer is saying but he was having so much fun running circles around the Panpour.
Lazarus sighs, he knows this habit of his pokémon will be a problem one day, but he also knows such is the nature of dragons. They are reckless, and proud. He will not hold it against his Dreepy, he just hasn't met his match yet.
"Alright, don't worry about it too much. I know you'll learn to control yourself just like you learned to do everything else. I don't want you to feel bad for having fun. You should be having fun, but I also want you to understand your mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes but what differentiates the winners from losers is that they are at least aware of their mistakes."
Kamish thoughtfully nods, and Aurora uses her paw to pat him in the head.
Lazarus smiles and they continue watching the rest of Kamish's previous matches. Aurora yips in celebration everytime Kamish lands an attack on his opponent.
"We are going to watch all of your matches as well, Aurora." Lazarus says to his Vulpix after they finish watching Kamish's latest match against Gastly.
Aurora happily nods.
They start with watching their second match that took place the day after Kamish learned to use Dragon Tail, it was against an Oddish, a small grass pokémon with two small legs and a head full of leaves.
It wasn't much of a fight, the Oddish was young, it didn't have a lot of battle experience, and Aurora had every advantage over the grass pokémon, so the match ended less than twenty seconds after it started when Aurora generated some Ice Missiles by siphoning the moisture from swampy environment they were fighting on.
Aurora just wanted to get away from the swamp as fast as she possible.
Her next match took place the day after, and by then she had successfully learned how to convert energy to ice, so it was a lot easier for her to fight.
She fought seven pokémon in the last three days and won against all of them, but one came close to beating her.
The hologram changes to show an icy field with small snow dunes and a few ice pillars scattered around. Aurora fought against a Torchic here last afternoon.
The orange fire pokémon had the type advantage over Aurora but in the end they won due to one of Lazarus's clever plots, where they kept forcing the Torchic to keep warming up the ice with it's Ember and Flamethrower. And that eventually lead to the creation of a puddle of water beneath them, where Aurora tackled the fire pokémon to.
Suddenly his wristcomm buzzes with a notification. Lazarus checks it out and finds that his father is calling him, so he routes the call to the holoprojector.
Arthur Hawke materializes in front of them.
"Hi, Dad." Lazarus smiles. And Dreepy floats towards the projector and looks up at the hologram curiously, Lazarus had told them about his father but neither of his pokémon have seen him before.
Arthur Hawke sees this through the projector camera and chuckles, "Interesting pokémon you have there. Is the dragon giving you any trouble?"
"Not really, no. I am doing so much better than I had hoped. He is really fun to be around. Both of them are. I really can't wait to show them to you in person."
"That is good to hear. Where is your Vulpix?"
"Oh right, I forgot you haven't seen Aurora yet. Let me show you." Lazarus picks up Aurora from his lap and faces her towards the camera.
Arthur Hawke sees the little fox pup with bright blue eyes and snow white fur that seems to reflect light.
"She is beautiful. Are you are taking good take of them?"
"Oh, you know I am."
Arthur smiles, "Yeah, sure. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I got you your psychic. Steven agreed to send us one of Aeosis's eggs. It will arrive at the company in three days. What do you want to do with it? I'm told it's going to hatch in a week or so."
The news makes Lazarus happy, now there is one less problem for him to worry about. With the addition of a psychic they can finally work on building their teamwork.
"I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that. It couldn't have been cheap, what did he want in return?"
"Nothing really. He said he had three of them so he was more than happy to send one to us."
"Is that so, I'll be sure to thank him properly when I meet him."
"But he did ask me to tell you to take care of the pokémon. He's hoping you can train it to be formidable."
"That was always the plan. And can you send the egg to the arena? I want to be there when it hatches."
"Alright, I'll talk to the arena management and have someone bring the incubator to your room there."
"Thank you for doing this for me. Especially since you don't really approve of what I'm trying to do. "
"I'm just trying to make sure you have everything you need to survive out there in the wild. I still don't want you to become a pokémon trainer but more importantly I don't want you to get hurt."
"I know you are hoping I'm going to fail at this, but I think I'll end up surprising you."
"If you can succeed in winning the tournament in the time you have, then you'll have proven yourself to be more than capable of being a pokémon trainer and I will have no complains. But only if you win. If you lose, then you'll come back and help me out with the business."
"I will honor our deal." Lazarus says with fully certainty. He has absolutely no intention of going back on his word, if he fails, then he'll make peace with it and give up his dream of becoming a pokémon trainer.