There were two hundred and fifty-six of them, and the flame went up over the stadium on the first morning while all two hundred and fifty-six stood in the field and watched it catch.
Adam found that he was nervous.
This is a sports competition, he thought, standing in a crowd of teenagers in matching jackets. I have fought in a war. I have watched a world end. My hands are sweating because of a sports competition.
"Your hands are sweating," Ren said.
"Shut up."
"I'm just saying. Big tough explorer." She was grinning at the flame. She'd been grinning since they got off the bus. "I love this. I want to do this every year."
The early rounds were on the outdoor fields, one stage for rock, one for water, one for ice, one for grass, and they were over quickly.
Adam did not enjoy this part as much as he expected. The trainers were sixteen and seventeen and they were good, some of them very good, and they were all a year and a lifetime behind him. He beat them cleanly and thanked them properly and moved up the board.
He did not use the Tyranitar in the first three rounds, because the first time he sent it out on the rock field a boy from Pewter looked at it and quietly recalled his own Pokémon before the match started, and the referee had to have a conversation with both of them about what forfeiting meant.
After that people came to watch. The Tyranitar became a thing you went and looked at between matches, like an exhibit. It slept through most of the attention. Somebody's Growlithe fell in love with it and had to be carried away by its trainer, twice.
Ren went up the other half of the board and did not lose a single Pokémon until the fourth round.
They put the fifth round in the main stadium because the fifth round is three-on-three, and it's what the crowd comes for.
The board went up. Adam read his name, and read the name under it. He stood there in the tunnel for a second with his hand on the rail.
There he is.
"What?" Ren said.
"The kid from Pallet."
"The one you've been going on about for a year?"
"I have not been going on about him."
"Adam. You have absolutely been going on about him."
He was shorter than Adam expected. That was the first thing. A skinny kid in a blue jacket with a hat on backwards and a Pikachu on his shoulder. He came out of the far tunnel at a run instead of a walk, because apparently walking had never once occurred to him.
Two people were shouting for him from the stands. A girl with red hair, and a tall boy who was leaning over the rail with his hands cupped round his mouth.
The kid stopped at the line and looked across the field at Adam.
"You're Adam," he said. "I heard about you. I'm Ash. This is Pikachu."
"Pika," said the Pikachu, in a tone that suggested it had heard this introduction several hundred times.
"Nice to meet you, Ash. I've heard great things about your Pikachu too."
The referee raised the flags. Three on three. No substitutions once a Pokémon was down.
"Kingler, I choose you!"
What came out of the ball was a Kingler with one claw four times the size of the other, and it planted itself on the stone and clacked that claw once, and the sound went round the whole stadium.
That's a serious Pokémon.
Adam sent the Primeape.
He got it wrong, and he knew it about nine seconds in.
The Primeape went straight at it, because that's what it does, and the Kingler let it come. It took two hits on the shell without moving its feet. Then Ash shouted "Crabhammer!" and the big claw came round in a flat arc and caught the Primeape across the ribs and put it eleven metres backwards into the wall of the arena.
The crowd made a noise. Adam heard Ren, somewhere above and behind him, say something that was not encouraging.
The Primeape got up. Of course. It came in again lower and faster and got inside the claw this time, and it hit that shell with everything a year on Mt. Silver had given it, four times, six times, and the Kingler took all of it. The big crab clacked its claw and hit back hard.
That was the end of the Primeape.
"Yes!" Ash was jumping. "Yes, Kingler, that was perfect!"
Adam recalled his Pokémon and stood there for a moment with the ball in his hand.
Nice crab. Well, it was expected. Primeape still needs to control himself a bit more, he's too battle hungry.
He found he was smiling.
"Gengar."
The Gengar came up out of the stone floor rather than out of the ball, and the crowd noise changed, because a Gengar coming up out of a stadium floor shows its eerie nature.
Ash didn't flinch. "Kingler, Bubble Beam, keep it back!"
The water went through the Gengar. It simply went through, because there was nothing solid there to catch it, and the Gengar grinned wider and drifted forward through the spray.
"Shadow Ball," Adam said.
The first one hit the Kingler in the shell and dropped it a foot. The second one turned it over. Ash got it back on its feet twice. After the fourth Shadow Ball it went down properly and stayed there.
"Kingler, return. You were amazing." Ash held the ball a second. Then his jaw set. "Charizard! I choose you!"
The thing that came out of that ball filled a quarter of the sky.
It was orange and enormous, the flame on its tail was the size of a man, and the whole stadium went up in noise. Adam's first thought was that this was the strongest Pokémon he had seen since Steven's Metagross.
His second thought was that it wasn't looking at the Gengar. It was looking at the crowd.
"Charizard! Flamethrower, let's go!"
The Charizard yawned.
"Charizard!"
It stretched out one wing, examined it, and then lay down on the arena floor and put its chin on its claws.
The noise from the stands turned into something else. Adam watched a fourteen-year-old boy shout himself hoarse at an animal that had decided, in front of forty thousand people, that it could not be bothered. Ash's face went through about six things in four seconds and settled on a kind of furious embarrassment that Adam recognised from the inside.
The referee counted it. Then he raised the flag.
"Charizard is unable to battle."
"It's not — " Ash started, and stopped, and closed his mouth. He recalled it without another word.
Adam did not say anything either. There was nothing to say that wouldn't have been worse.
Welp. Is this what they call comic relief? Jokes aside, I would have liked to fight it.
"Pikachu," Ash said. "You're up, buddy."
The Pikachu came off his shoulder and hit the floor running, and Adam revised every estimate he had made about it in about a second and a half.
It was fast. Not fast for a small thing — fast. It crossed the arena in a yellow line and it was already turning when the Gengar's Shadow Ball went through where it had been.
"Thunderbolt!"
The whole field went white.
The Gengar took it standing but it definitely felt it.
"Again! Quick Attack, then Thunderbolt!"
He's chaining them.
"Get under the floor," Adam said.
The Gengar dropped through the stone. The Quick Attack went through empty air. Pikachu skidded, spun, and looked at the ground with its cheeks sparking, waiting.
Ash was faster. "Into the ground! Thunderbolt into the ground!"
What's this kid on about? There's no way that does anything.
The floor lit up from underneath.
The Gengar came out of it sideways, smoking, and got one more Shadow Ball away before it hit the wall and slid down and did not get up.
Okay... that. Wow. Just wow. This Pikachu breaks physics.
Forty thousand people lost their minds.
Adam recalled the Gengar and told it, quietly, that it had done well.
Two down. One left each.
"Lucario."
It came out of the ball and stood on the scorched stone and looked at the Pikachu, and it had absolutely no idea what a stadium was, and it did not appear to care.
"Whoa," Ash said. "What is that?"
"He's new."
"He's really cool. Okay. Pikachu, Thunderbolt!"
Lucario started running. He managed to avoid it and launched an Aura Sphere at the Pikachu. The rodent dodged, made a spin and started preparing another attack.
"Pikachu, again! Keep going!"
The Pikachu was superb. Adam wants that on the record. It hit the Lucario two times and it never once stopped moving, and the last Thunderbolt was big enough to make the lights above the stadium flicker.
But the Lucario kept walking forward through all of it, Adam had taught it how to disperse the electricity through the ground, his steel side helped a lot in this.
After a bit of back and forth Adam shouted, "Smash him." That was the keyword for the next sequence of events. Lucario rushed in, while the Pikachu had just finished another attack and was still mid-air. One palm, into the side, and the blue light came off its hands. Meteor Mash point blank.
The Pikachu went across the arena and rolled twice, then lay there with its cheeks crackling, lying still.
"Pikachu is unable to battle. The winner is Adam."
The kid got to his Pikachu before the referee had finished. He knelt down on the stone, picked it up and checked it over with his hands, quickly, expertly, the way you check something you've checked a hundred times before, and then he sat back on his heels with it in his lap and said, "You were incredible. That was the best you've ever done."
Adam walked over. The Lucario came with him, limping slightly.
"Your Kingler beat my Primeape," Adam said. "A big achievement."
Ash looked up. His eyes were wet and he clearly did not care who saw it. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. And that chain attack, and the Thunderbolt into the floor. Where'd you get that?"
"I made it up. Just now." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. "It seemed like a good idea."
"Well, good job." Adam crouched down. "Can I tell you something about your Charizard?"
Ash's face closed.
"It's not that it doesn't like you," Adam said. "It's that it hasn't decided you're worth listening to yet, and the only thing that fixes that is time and about a hundred days where you don't give up on it. I lost a battle to a much better trainer than me a few months back, for exactly the same reason. Mine ignored me too."
"...What changed?"
"Nothing yet. I'm still working on it." Adam stood. "Come and find me in a few years. I'd like to see how it goes."
"I'll beat you next time," Ash said. Not as a boast. Just as a fact he was informing Adam of, as a courtesy.
"You might."
Ren was waiting in the tunnel with two drinks.
"You almost lost there," she said.
"Pff, not even close."
"Arguable." She handed him a drink. "Seems like a nice kid."
"Everybody likes him. That's his whole thing." Adam drank. "Also one hell of a trainer."
They both came through the quarter-finals.
Which meant the board put them against each other in the semi-final, and the stadium sold out in an hour, because word had got round about the two foreigners with the impossible team.
They spent the night before it eating badly and arguing about whether it counted as a real fight.
"It counts," Ren said.
"It counts, but don't you dare cheat."
"I don't need to cheat. I've watched every single one of your training sessions." She pointed a chip at him. "I know your Gengar's tell. I know what your Metagross does when it's thinking. I know your fox better than you do."
"You don't know the last one."
Ren stopped chewing.
"You wouldn't," she said.
"I might."
"Adam."
"I really want to win."
Her team had finished growing too. He'd watched it happen on the same island, on the other end of the same beach, and it still hit him differently when the six of them came out onto the field together for the walk-on: Pidgeot, Weavile, Milotic, Mawile, Froslass, and behind them, tall and white and quiet, the Gardevoir.
"Six on six," the referee said. "Begin."
Adam led with the Zoroark. It walked out as the Tyranitar, seven feet of it, and forty thousand people gasped. Ren laughed out loud on the other side.
"Nice try," she called. "Pidgeot."
The illusion came apart in irritation. The Pidgeot came down out of the roof of the stadium at a speed that made the air scream, hit the Zoroark before it had finished being annoyed, and did not stop diving until it stayed down.
Ren, one nothing. She blew him a kiss.
Gengar went next, and the Gengar was not something a bird could harass. It went up through the air and met the Pidgeot at the top of its climb with a Shadow Ball, and the second one caught it turning. The bird came down hard. One all.
Froslass came out of Ren's ball like breath on a cold window.
It was the only thing on Ren's team Adam had never seen fight properly, and it was a ghost like his was a ghost, which meant everything the Gengar could do to other Pokémon it could do right back. They fought in the air over the middle of the arena, in and out of visibility, and the crowd could only follow it by the impacts. The Gengar was still carrying yesterday's damage. The Froslass was not.
An Ice Beam caught it in the shoulder and the Gengar dropped out of the air and lay grinning at the ceiling, done.
Ren, two-one.
Adam sent the Metagross, and it took the Froslass apart in ninety seconds. Meteor Mash is a bad thing to be hit with when you are made mostly of ice. Two all.
Then Ren said "Weavile," and Adam's stomach did something unpleasant.
The Weavile had been the most dangerous thing on her belt since Mt. Silver, and it had one property that made it a nightmare for the specific Pokémon standing on the field: a Metagross's psychic moves had no effect on it at all.
I hate that little shit.
Which left the Metagross with its steel moves, and the Weavile was faster than it.
It went in and out four times before the Metagross had turned around. Night Slash across the seam, Night Slash across every part of it, and it was gone before the steel arm came round. Ren wasn't calling anything. She'd stopped calling things for the Weavile a long time ago.
Adam waited. He'd learned to wait.
"Now," he said, on the fifth pass. "Don't turn. Drop."
The Metagross didn't turn. It dropped, all eleven hundred pounds of it, straight down onto the spot the Weavile was about to be, and it very nearly worked. The Weavile got a shoulder crushed against the stone and screamed, but managed to get out by cutting the Metagross until it let it go.
Both of them were hurt after that. Only one of them was fast.
The Metagross went down on the ninth pass.
Ren, three-two. She was winning, and the crowd knew it, and she was having the time of her life.
Lucario.
It was still recovering from the Pikachu. It went in against the Weavile anyway, and this time the matchup was the other way round: everything the Weavile threw either missed or got deflected, and everything the Lucario landed was amplified by the type mismatch.
[ Host, we can confirm that the Lucario had somehow inherited your fighting style and experience. ]
Yep. No way a freshly evolved Pokémon fights that well against that menace.
It ended it in two exchanges. Three all.
Ren sent the Mawile, and the Mawile stayed passive until it was sure it could land. It took a few hits on purpose, just to get the chance to spring its trap. It caught the Lucario's arm in its jaws. Adam heard it happen from across the arena.
The Lucario put its free palm against the Mawile's side and let go an Aura Sphere at a range of about four inches.
They both went over. Only the Lucario got up, and it was hurt badly, and Adam very nearly recalled it right there.
Adam, four-three.
Then Ren sent out the Gardevoir, and the arena went quiet in the way arenas do when everyone realises at once that they are looking at something rare.
On paper, it was over. Adam had a Fighting and Steel type standing in front of a Psychic and Fairy type.
On paper.
The Gardevoir had been growing since Hoenn under a trainer who talked to it every night, and the Lucario had been alive for eight weeks and had already fought two matches that day, and the type chart is a description of how damage works, not a promise about who wins.
She didn't rush it. She let the Lucario come, and they exchanged a few moves, pure hand-to-hand.
Adam could tell, somehow, that the Pokémon had Ren's fighting style.
Then the Gardevoir moved. It was teleporting. She came up behind the Lucario, and a wall of pale light came off her and hit it in the back and took it off its feet and into the arena walls.
"Lucario is unable to battle."
Four all.
Adam recalled it and held the ball a moment longer than he needed to.
You did more than I had any right to ask.
"That's my girl!" Ren shouted, and the Gardevoir inclined its head very slightly, like a professional acknowledging applause it hadn't asked for.
Tyranitar.
The sand came up off it before its feet touched the floor. Within four seconds the whole arena was a dry brown storm and the lights had gone orange. The front rows were on their feet with their hands over their faces.
It should have been finished quickly. Gardevoir had a type advantage and hit like a truck. The first Moonblast rocked seven feet of armour plate backwards a full metre.
The second one didn't.
That was the difference, and Adam saw Ren realise it. Her Gardevoir needed more destructive power to win this, and Ren hadn't trained it in that direction. That was her mistake. She'd made an assassin out of it.
"Now," Adam said. "Straight through. Don't be clever."
The Gardevoir kept blasting it with Moonblasts, hoping to take it down with sheer volume. The Tyranitar did not care one bit. It barrelled through the attacks and used Heavy Slam, a steel move whose power depends on the weight difference between the two Pokémon. Here the difference was massive.
The Gardevoir got hit hard, and you could hear something crunch. Many in the audience gasped. Ren had a worried expression too.
Uhh. Buddy, that was too much. Adam thought.
Adam, five-four.
Ren recalled her ace and looked at the ball for a second. She had a pissed-off look on her face. Adam knew bad things were waiting for him after the tournament.
"Milotic," she said.
The Milotic came out of the ball and unrolled across the arena floor, and it was the most beautiful thing anyone in that stadium had ever seen, and the ugly fish it had been eleven months ago was somewhere underneath it.
Here Ren had the type advantage again, and another important factor. Endurance. Her Milotic could heal itself. So the battle went the way Adam predicted. Every time the Tyranitar hit it, it would heal and chip him down with water moves. Eleven minutes is how long the fight lasted. The Tyranitar ran out of juice. The Milotic looked haggard; in the end it could not heal all of its wounds, and it was barely standing too.
Five all.
The stadium was making a continuous sound now. Ren stood on the far side of the field with her hands on her hips and her Milotic coiled and shining in front of her, hurt, still standing, and she was breathing hard and grinning and she looked more alive than Adam had ever seen her.
"Last one," she called.
"Last one."
"Come on then." She spread her hands. "Let's see it."
Adam didn't throw a ball.
He looked down at the floor in front of him instead, at his own shadow, lying long across the stone under the stadium lights.
And it came up out of it.
Small, dark, and quiet. It stood on the arena floor in front of forty thousand people and did not appear to notice a single one of them. Every camera in the building turned to look at it, and in the commentary box a man stopped mid-sentence and did not start again.
Somewhere in the stands, a girl with red hair grabbed the arm of the boy next to her and asked him what it was, and he didn't know either.
There it is, Adam thought. The whole world just saw you.
He'd decided on the walk in that he didn't care.
The Milotic struck first, a wall of water across the whole width of the arena, and the Marshadow went into the floor and came out under it. A punch followed, cloaked in shadow. The Milotic was thrown sideways. Soon the healing light enveloped it, but it was dimmer than before. It was barely holding on.
The Milotic rushed in as Ren instructed, trying to catch the Marshadow with its tail.
"Behind it," Adam said. "Now. Don't trade."
The Marshadow listened.
Adam felt it again in that moment, the closeness with his Pokémon, the same as with the Lucario. Marshadow even used the combination he would have used in its place: first a Shadow Punch from below, then a Thunder Punch to finish it.
"Milotic is unable to battle. The winner is Adam."
He got about three steps onto the field before Ren hit him.
She jumped on him. He managed to catch her in his arms.
"Congrats, Adam. I see real progress."
"Yeah, it was a great battle." Adam said while smiling.
Ren leaned in and spoke into his ear.
"We will have a talk later about what your brute did to my dear Gardevoir."
Adam knew it. Tyranitar, buddy, this one is on you. I want nothing to do with it.
The final was on the Sunday, against a boy called Ritchie who gave all his Pokémon nicknames and who had beaten a great many people to get there, including, Adam gathered, most of the field Ash would have faced.
He was good. His Charmander was called Zippo and it fought like it had something to prove; his Pikachu was called Sparky and it very nearly did to the Metagross what Ash's had done to the Gengar.
It went four to nothing, and then Ritchie's last Pokémon looked across the field at a thing that had come up out of the winner's shadow and Ritchie, who was a sensible boy, sighed and told it to do its best anyway.
It did its best. It was not enough. Nothing on that field was going to be enough.
They put a wreath on Adam in front of the flame while the stadium stood, and somewhere in the noise a chime went off behind his eyes that nobody else in the world could hear.
[ MISSION ASSESSMENT — PENDING ] [ S-OBJECTIVE: Stand at the top of the ladder. ] [ CLEARED. ]
Sage.
[ Congratulations, Host. ] A pause. [ You did that without a single ability. ]
They found Ash outside the stadium that evening, sitting on a low wall with his friends, eating chips out of a paper bag.
He got up when he saw Adam and stuck his hand out like a much older person, and shook, and then ruined it completely by asking an insane number of questions about the Tyranitar.
"Where did you even get it? Are they all that big? Can I see it? Does it eat rocks? Brock says it eats rocks."
"It eats everything."
"It ate a bit of the stadium," Ren said. "They're sending us a bill."
"That's the best thing I've ever heard," Ash said.
The tall boy, Brock, wanted to know what a Milotic ate. The red-haired girl, Misty, wanted to know about Ren's Gardevoir.
Nobody asked about his shadow partner.
"You can ask," Adam said.
"What is it?"
"I don't really know," Adam said, which was almost true. "It found me. It stayed."
Ash thought about this while eating a chip.
"Mhm," he mumbled.
They walked back through the plateau town in the dark with a wreath in a bag.
"We won a tournament," Ren said.
"You didn't win it. You came third."
"I came third out of two hundred and fifty-six, and I lost to the person who won, which is basically winning." She had her hands in her pockets.
"So what's next?" Ren said.
"Next, well, next is home. I think it's time to leave. I can use my powers now that I've cleared all the objectives. So anything you want to take back, I'll have to steal, so that we can keep it."
"Great!" Ren said enthusiastically, and started picking out clothes and Pokémon items she wanted to take back.
Adam had already stolen his own Mega Stone, which was now marked with his power and could be taken back with him.