Viridian Forest ate the sunlight whole.
One step past the tree line and the bright morning became a green underwater dark, the canopy so thick overhead that the light came down in thin coins on the path. It was cooler in here, and quieter, and it smelled of wet bark and crushed leaves. Somewhere above them a hundred small things clicked and rustled and did not show themselves.
"Okay," Ren said, looking up into the dark branches. "Any special pokemon here?"
"Maybe." Adam stepped over a root. "There can be a Pikachu, a small rabbit-like electric pokemon. Useful."
"You want one?"
"Nah, only if its blue or above."
"Mm, I want a tough pokemon."
Her Pidgey rode her shoulder with its feathers puffed against the chill, glaring at every shadow like it personally suspected each one. Adam's own belt held a single ball, and inside it a monkey who, according to Sage, had spent the last hour of transit "radiating hostility."
He unclipped it and let the Mankey out. It landed in a crouch, looked at the dark trees, the damp path, the woman, the man, and its whole small body said the same thing it always said, which was that it would like to fight one of these things and did not much care which.
[ It has been out of the ball for four seconds and it is already looking at you like you owe it money. ]
Good, Adam thought. I can work with that.
Overhead, for less than a second, one of the coins of light went out. Something crossed it, up in the canopy, and was gone. Not a bird.
Our little friend probably.
[ Affirmative. ]
They made camp early, in a clearing where enough light got through to see by, because the plan for the forest was not to rush it.
Adam had thought about this part more than he would admit. He had a Fighting-type now, an angry one with a good ceiling, and in three days they would be standing in a Rock gym where a Fighting-type was worth its weight in gold. But a strong type was not the same as a strong fighter. The monkey hit hard and hit often, but it was stupid, and stupid got you killed in every world Adam had ever walked.
So he did the thing he actually knew how to do. He taught it.
"No," he said, the first time the Mankey threw itself at the tree trunk he'd marked. "You're all shoulder. You swing from here." He tapped his own hip, then set his feet, and threw a slow Low Kick into the bark so the monkey could watch where the power came from, floor to hip to fist. "From the ground. Everything comes up from the ground."
The Mankey stared at him with open contempt.
Then it set its feet, wrong, and Adam crouched and moved them, ankle and knee. It threw the kick again. It was better. Not good. Better.
They worked the morning like that. Adam did not fight it. The pokemon also knew that it was pointless so they trained. His years of watching people who really knew how to move, and the two years since learning it in his own bones, were his biggest advantage now in training his monkey. He couldn't make the monkey strong. He could make it good.
By midday the Mankey could put a Low Kick through the marked tree without falling over afterward. By afternoon it had learned to catch its balance and come back with a second strike, a chopping thing with the edge of its hand that Adam kept correcting until the angle was right. It bled off the fury into the form, and the form gave the fury somewhere to go, and when it landed a clean hit, it would look up at Adam with an expression that was almost, nearly, grudgingly, pleased.
[ It just did something correctly and immediately looked to you to confirm it. Host. It wants your approval. ]
Lets pretend like I didn't notice.
Across the clearing, Ren was running a different kind of training.
She did not correct her Pidgey's form, because a bird's form was already a million years old and better than anything she could teach it. She corrected its choices. She stood in the open with a fistful of pebbles and threw them, one after another, and made the Pidgey dodge them in the air, bank, climb, cut back, until the little bird could turn inside its own length and come out of the turn already diving. She was building a flier that could not be hit. Adam watched her work between corrections of his own, and knew exactly what she was building, and knew exactly what she meant to do with it in three days, and said nothing, because it was going to be a very good surprise for the man in the Rock gym.
"You're planning something," he called over.
"I'm always planning something." She sent the Pidgey up in a tight climbing spiral. "You're the one bringing a punchy little goblin to a boulder fight. I'm bringing a small, bombastic, problem."
"My goblin is going to walk through that gym."
"Your goblin is the easy mode," Ren said. "Mine's going to be a legend."
They found the bugs on the second day.
Adam had been scanning as they walked, out of the same habit that made him count exits, and most of it was the White wash he'd expected, Caterpie and Weedle and the odd Pidgey, ordinary little lives going about their business. Then a Weedle no longer than his hand inched along a branch at eye level, dumb and slow and armed with the small poison barb on its head, and the scan stopped him cold.
[ SCAN — Weedle (wild) ] Potential: Blue Bug/Poison Affinity: A− Ability: Shield Dust (chip damage doesn't affect it) Speciality: Hunter's Patience (rare — increased attack damage after dodging an incoming attack, or making a surprise attack) Compatible Treasures: Poison Barb, Silver Powder Possible Route: standard → Beedrill; trained right, a genuine assassin
"Blue," Adam said, delighted. "This dopey little thing is a Blue."
"You said the potential was in the boring ones," Ren said, appearing at his shoulder.
"I said don't sneer at White. This isn't White. This is going to grow up mean." He crouched. The Weedle regarded him with all the intelligence of a piece of string. "The bug's a throwaway for now, we can't use it against Rock, it'd get flattened. But three days of forest battles and it evolves twice. By the gym time it's a Beedrill, and a Beedrill I can use later."
He chipped it down with the Mankey holding back to not kill it, and rolled a ball at it. One wobble. Click.
Ren found hers an hour later, and hers was a Caterpie, Blue too, with a Speciality Sage tagged as Windrider Wings (dormant), the Butterfree comes out a flier, not a floater. Ren caught it with the cheerful ruthlessness, and then spent twenty minutes observing it, learning its habits.
"They're temporary," she said, not sounding like she believed it.
"Yeah," Adam agreed, not believing it either.
The forest, as it turned out, was full of the guys. Bug Trainers in shorts came out of the green in twos and threes to challenge anyone on the path, and Adam and Ren obliged them, because it was money and practice. The new bugs needed the training. The battles were quick, lopsided and good for the soul. Somewhere in the middle of them a boy in a bandana and a plastic sword tried to challenge Adam to what he promised would be an epic duel, and the duel came down to his Metapod and Ren's fresh Caterpie both being told to harden up and do nothing, and lasted until Ren got bored and had hers simply headbutt his off the log. The boy took it hard. Adam gave him some of his own winnings back on the way out, which the kid found more insulting than losing.
By the time the trees thinned and the light came back, both bugs had thickened into cocoons and cracked out again bigger, a real Beedrill buzzing a wary orbit around Adam and a Butterfree drifting over Ren's head on wings that caught the returning sun. Two days. Adam had forgotten this part of it, how fast the small ones grew, how a thing could be a worm on Monday and a hunter by Wednesday.
Lets hope I don't get attached to these guys, he told himself, watching the Beedrill fuss into a protective hover when a Spearow flock passed too close.
Pewter City was grey stone and grey dust, a town that had grown up around a mountain. The gym sat at the top of the main street, low and heavy and built out of rough boulders stacked like something a giant had left behind. A sign by the door said BOULDER BADGE in letters worn soft by weather.
Adam stopped outside it and felt the old thing wake up in his chest, warm and stupid and glad, the thing that had been quiet through two years of wars and had come roaring back to life the moment the battle was on the horizon.
I'm about to have a gym battle, he thought, and had to work not to grin like the kid with the plastic sword. An actual gym battle.
[ Your heart rate is elevated, Host. ]
Shut up, Sage.
[ Never. ]
Inside, the gym was one long room floored in rock and sand, lit by high windows that dropped hard bars of light across a battlefield marked out in white stone. A young man waited at the far end, maybe seventeen, with dark skin and a squint and the settled, unbothered stance of someone who had watched a great many overconfident trainers walk through that door.
"Two of you," Forrest said. It wasn't a question. "One at a time. I'm Forrest. This is my gym, and I don't go easy." He looked them both over, and something in the look sharpened, the way Oak's had. "You don't move like beginners."
"No, we really just started," Adam said. "Me first."
Forrest didn't believe it but in the end it didn't matter. "Whatever, we will do two pokemon each"
Forrest sent out a Geodude, and it was exactly what it should be, a floating boulder with arms and a scowl, low, dense and patient. Adam sent the Mankey, and the Mankey took one look at the thing and its whole body lit up with joy.
Before Forrest even gave the order Adam said "Low Kick". "Under it. Like the tree."
The Mankey came in low and fast, feet, hip, and drove a kick up into the Geodude from below. The Geodude cracked and rolled backward across the sand. Forrest's eyes went a little wider.
"Defense Curl," Forrest called, and the Geodude tucked, armor thickening. "Rock Throw."
Stones tore up out of the battlefield and flung themselves at the monkey. This was the part they'd worked on. The Mankey didn't block and didn't panic; it moved, the footwork Adam had beaten into it over two days in the clearing, weight already shifting before the rocks arrived so that it slid off to the sides.
"Now the chop. The angle we practiced."
Karate Chop, the edge of the hand into the seam where the Geodude's curl left a hand's-width of gap, and Adam had spent an afternoon teaching that exact angle into a marked tree. It landed hard. The Geodude's arms went slack and it dropped to the sand, knocked out.
"Huh," Forrest said quietly, and returned it, and there was respect in it now instead of patience. "That wasn't luck. You trained well." He took a new ball off his belt and his voice changed, went up a register into something almost gleeful. "Okay. Let's see how it does against the big one."
Onix filled the room.
It came out of the ball as a landslide with a face, a serpent of boulders forty feet of it, and it reared up until its head brushed the high windows and looked down at the small furious thing on the sand the way a mountain looks at a man. The Mankey's fur stood up. For the first time all week, it hesitated.
Here's the fight, Adam thought. Here's where a good type stops being enough.
"You can't kick that over," Adam said, calm, pitching his voice so only the monkey would hear. "Don't even try a direct assault. You go small. You go inside. It's slow and long. Get in close where the tail can't reach and hit it where it matters."
"Bind," Forrest called, and the Onix's whole length came pouring down to wrap the Mankey in a coil of stone.
It would have crushed a normal monkey flat. It didn't get the chance. The Mankey went in instead of away, ducked under the first loop of the coil and got inside the circle of it, into the dead space near the Onix's body where forty feet of tail was too long to fold back on itself. Adam had put it exactly there on purpose. The coil closed on nothing.
"Good. The joints. Where the boulders meet."
The Onix twisted, trying to shake the small thing loose, and the twisting opened gaps between the great stones of its spine, and the Mankey hit them, Low Kick and chop, Low Kick and chop, working up the length of it like a climber. The Onix screeched, a horrible grinding sound, and the noise alone rattled the monkey's teeth and loosened its guard. Then a swing of the head Adam couldn't teach it to dodge caught the Mankey full-on and flung it the length of the room into the sand.
It got up wrong. Furious. Bleeding fury the way it had that first day on the road, temper boiling over.
Other would get sloppy when angry, except this monkey didn't get sloppy. That was the whole reason he'd wanted it.
[ There it is, Host. Fury Engine. The anger is going into the strike, not the head. ]
The rage came up buffing the little guy. The Mankey's eyes went hard and bright. It stopped throwing itself around and got very, very still. Adam felt the grin break across his face.
"Focus," he said. "Then throw it. The way we practiced with the log. Use its own weight."
The Mankey ran back in. It didn't climb this time. It went low, under the descending head, got both small hands on the Onix near the base of its neck where the leverage lived, set its feet, floor to hip, everything from the ground, and it threw. Forty feet of stone serpent, hauled off balance by a thing a fraction of its size using nothing but angle, timing and a fury that had finally learned to aim. The Onix came down on its own coils with a crash that shook dust out of the ceiling.
It tried to rise. It got halfway.
"Now," Adam said softly.
Karate Chop, the clean one, into the seam behind the jaw. The Onix sank down into the sand and became still.
The gym was very quiet. Motes of dust drifted through the bars of window-light. The Mankey stood on the fallen mountain, chest heaving, and turned to look at Adam, and for once there was nothing grudging in it at all.
"Yeah," Adam said, and his voice wasn't quite steady, and he didn't care. "Yeah. That's it. That's exactly it."
Forrest returned his Onix, disbelief on his face. He crossed the sand and put a small grey stone badge in Adam's hand. Adam felt like a kid again, wining pokemon battles against his friends.
"Okay," Forrest said, turning to Ren, rubbing his hands together, cheerful again. He'd clearly decided the day was going to be interesting. "Same deal. What've you—" He looked at the Pidgey on her shoulder and stopped. "That's a bird."
"It is," Ren agreed.
"You're bringing a Flying-type. Into a Rock gym."
"I am."
"Rock beats Flying. You know that, right?"
"I do."
Forrest looked at her for a moment, and then he grinned, because he was young enough to still love it when someone did something that made no sense. "Alright. Your funeral. Geodude, go."
Adam leaned on the low stone wall at the edge of the field to watch, arms folded, already smiling. He knew what she was going to do. He'd watched her training, pebble by pebble.
"Sand-Attack," Ren said, before the Geodude had even settled. "Keep moving."
The Pidgey came off her shoulder and was airborne in a wingbeat, and its first move wasn't an attack at all, it was a low fast pass that kicked a spray of battlefield sand straight into the Geodude's eyes. The boulder pawed at its face. Its accuracy dropped, and Ren's whole plan was accuracy, and she was going to spend the entire battle taking it away.
"Rock Throw," Forrest called, and the Geodude flung stones at where the bird was.
Where the bird was, not where it would be. The Pidgey was already gone, banking through one of the tight turns Ren had drilled into it, coming out of the turn already climbing, and the rocks passed through empty air. A Geodude was slow. A Geodude with sand in its eyes was slow and half-blind. The Pidgey wove between the throws like Ren was reading the boulder's mind, and maybe she was, and every second pass it dropped another spray of sand into the thing's face until it was swinging at ghosts.
"Quick Attack. The chip. Don't stop."
Normal into Rock did nothing special, no bonus, no drama, just a small fast tap of damage over and over from a bird the Geodude could no longer reliably see or hope to catch. It wasn't a knockout blow. Ren didn't have a knockout blow. What she had was a bird that could not be hit, and she simply attacked until it was finished, chip after chip, pass after pass, the Geodude wearing down and swinging blind, until one last Quick Attack tipped it over into the sand.
Forrest stared. "You beat a Geodude with Tackle."
"Quick Attack," Ren said. "Precision matters."
"Onix," Forrest said, and this time he wasn't grinning. This time he was concentrating.
The mountain filled the room again. Adam watched Ren's face and saw the exact thing he'd expected, which was that she wasn't worried, she was interested. An Onix was faster than a Geodude in the ways that mattered and its Rock Throw hit like a truck, and a single one of those would take her Pidgey out of the sky for good. She had no margin at all. One clean hit and it was over.
That was, he knew, precisely how she liked it.
"Sand-Attack," Ren said. "Twice. Before it does anything."
The Pidgey blurred in and threw grit into the Onix's eyes, twice, back to back, and the great head recoiled and shook. Forrest was ready for it this time.
"Screech, then Rock Throw. Flood the area. She has to be somewhere."
The Onix screamed and hurled a barrage, not aimed, just everywhere, filling the air over the battlefield with flying stone to catch a bird that couldn't dodge what wasn't aimed. It was the right call. Adam saw it was the right call, and saw Ren see it a half-second sooner.
"Down," she snapped. "Under it. Ride the floor."
Instead of climbing away from the barrage, the Pidgey dove into it, down under the arc of the thrown stones, flattened out a hand's width above the sand where the rocks were passing overhead, and ran the floor of the battlefield straight in toward the Onix's body. The one place the barrage wasn't. The rocks rained down behind it.
"Now up the inside. The eyes. Gust, point-blank."
The Pidgey pulled up the length of the Onix's body, close in where the tail was too long to reach, exactly the dead space the Mankey had found, and at the top of the climb it beat its wings full-force into the Onix's already-blinded eyes. Gust was a Flying move. Rock resisted it. It did almost nothing, and it wasn't meant to do damage, it was meant to finish what the sand started, and it did. The Onix couldn't see at all now. It thrashed, blind and half-panicked, swinging its enormous head at a bird that was never where the sound was.
And then Ren closed the trap the same way she had on the Geodude, only tighter and colder now, her whole body leaned forward over the rail. Stay airborne. Stay unhittable. Peck after peck, Quick Attack into the same spot behind the jaw every single pass, while the Onix wore itself out throwing rocks at echoes. It went on long enough that Forrest's confidence curdled into something close to awe, because he could see it now, the thing Adam had seen days ago in a clearing full of pebbles. She had built a bird that could not be caught, and against a thing that could not catch it, a bird only had to be patient.
The Onix threw one last desperate barrage, blind and wild, missed, and had nothing else left. The Pidgey came down on the back of its jaw one final time, and the mountain sighed and went down into the sand.
The gym rang with the silence of it.
Forrest returned his Onix and stood looking at the empty battlefield for a moment. Then he laughed, short and disbelieving, and walked over and put the second badge in Ren's hand.
"I had every advantage," he said. "Type, power, all of it. And you beat me with a Pidgey and never let me land one hit."
"You had every advantage except one," Ren said, and closed her hand around the badge. "You were fighting me."
They ate lunch on the steps of the gym with two Boulder Badges between them and the grey mountain town going about its afternoon. The Mankey sat on Adam's knee eating more than its share and daring anyone to comment. The Beedrill dozed in its ball. The Butterfree sunned its wings on Ren's shoulder, next to a Pidgey that had, in the space of one morning, become something Ren clearly intended to build a legend out of.
"Two badges," Adam said. "Day five."
"Your battle cant compare to mine," Ren said, around a mouthful. "Admit it."
"Mine threw an Onix."
"It's you. I keep telling you. It's a small furious you." She bumped his shoulder. "Mine's more interesting, a bird beating a mountain."
"I agree," Adam admitted, and meant it, and clinked his badge against hers like a coin.
Ren leaned into his shoulder and watched the town go about its day. For a while neither of them said anything, and it was the good kind of quiet.
"Cerulean next," she said. "Water gym."
"Your bird will enjoy that one."
"My legendary bird," Ren said.
"Sure." Adam handed the Mankey the last of his lunch before it could steal it, and the monkey took it without thanks. The three of them sat there in the sun with nowhere they had to be.
AN: If we get to 300 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 500, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123