....
The move was Bite.
Four faintly glowing fangs punched straight through a Rattata's body.
One.
Two.
Then...
The Rattata that hadn't been hit made the same instinctive choice at once
Rush in and save them.
That was when Julian's voice rang through their minds again.
"Too late. They're gone. Fall back. Protect yourselves first."
The Rattata who heard him didn't hesitate.
They immediately broke off and retreated.
Thankfully, after swallowing the third Rattata, Ekans only gave the rest of the colony a mocking look.
It had no interest in pressing the attack any further.
With a slow ripple of its smooth body, it slithered out of the Rattata territory.
The older Rattata watched it go with tangled emotions.
Look again.
Every time Ekans had its fill, it wore that same expression.
Contempt.
Disgust.
Dismissal.
As if to say
Food is food. Struggle all you want...you're still ending up on the menu.
After the battle, the Rattata colony fell into a slump almost immediately.
All the confidence they had built from those earlier victories came crashing down in a single instant.
And that was the harsh truth of it.
One bad loss was all it took to break them.
Julian didn't try to snap them out of it right away.
His feelings were just as complicated.
The fight had been brutal.
And half of that brutality was on him.
If he had responded the way he had in the earlier battles...ordering the whole colony into action...then at worst, they and Ekans would have walked away battered together.
There might have been injuries.
But there almost certainly wouldn't have been deaths.
The moment the command reached his lips, Julian paused, thinking hard about what would actually help them improve.
...
Over the past several days, it had become obvious that many of the Rattata had lost the edge they started with.
In plain English?
They'd gotten cocky.
Their confidence had snowballed into arrogance.
They no longer treated their old natural enemy like something dangerous.
And if that kept going, Julian was certain this colony wasn't going to last.
So in that split second of hesitation, he changed his call.
Maybe letting them suffer a real loss...
letting reality teach the lesson instead of words...
would work better.
Looking at the result, Julian still didn't think he was wrong.
Only three had died.
Painful as that was, it was still a number the colony could absorb.
Their deaths were tragic.
There was no getting around that.
But if that sacrifice forced the rest of the colony to get their paws back on the ground, then Julian believed it had meaning.
Ekans's sequence had been nearly perfect.
Intimidated to cut their Attack.
Glare to inflict paralysis.
A shrieking sound attack to ruin their defenses.
Then a savage finishing rush with Bite.
For the Ekans they were facing now, it was about as clean a battle plan as you could ask for.
And if the Rattata couldn't land critical hits...or use moves with a real type advantage...then this matchup was always going to tilt in Ekans's favor.
Based on everything Julian had seen during training, he could have started teaching the ten elite trainees new technical moves as early as the second week.
But the reality was this.
Their overconfidence had slowed everything down.
Even by the third week, more than half of them still hadn't fully mastered Hyper Fang.
And the smaller group that had learned it was still stuck at the beginner stage.
They could barely use it reliably in normal practice, let alone with real force in combat.
Under those conditions, teaching them even more moves would have been pointless.
They wouldn't have taken the training seriously.
So the entire pace of their progress had been dragged down.
That was one of the things Julian found most frustrating.
Sometimes, watching them slack off and bask in their little winning streak, he couldn't help wondering if he'd expected too much from them in the first place.
...
Because when it came down to it, Rattata were only really popular with rookie Trainers.
Sure, once they evolved into Raticate, their strength jumped sharply.
Moves like Crunch and Super Fang had real tactical value.
But in the eyes of any Trainer with even a little experience, they still came up short in almost every category.
Compared to the Pokemon that were born practically standing at the finish line in this forest, could these Rattata really live up to Julian's expectations?
Could they actually earn enough power to matter?
He had doubted it before.
More than once.
And now, with the territory wrapped in this cold, defeated silence, that doubt came creeping back again.
"Everyone, go back," Julian told the colony through telepathy. "Think about why we lost so badly today. And think about how you've been acting lately."
As he said it, he let his gaze linger on the ten elite trainees.
He didn't call them out by name.
That was deliberate.
They'd been riding high lately, and if he crushed them publicly with a few sharp words, their confidence might not recover.
But his expression said enough.
Today's performance.
Your attitude lately.
You've disappointed me.
Several Rattata couldn't even meet his eyes.
The second his gaze passed over them, they turned and slipped back into their burrows.
With that, Julian gave them space.
He didn't stay to lecture them further.
Instead, he turned and went back into his own den as well.
If they were willing to reflect, a few words were enough.
If they weren't, then talking more wouldn't change a thing.
The next morning, Julian was up early.
Or rather...
He had never really fallen asleep.
At this point, his fate and the Rattata colony's fate were tied together.
Audino wasn't exactly built for dominant early-game combat.
If he couldn't help raise the Rattata into something stronger, then his own future was going to look pretty grim, too.
He tried practicing a few technical moves on his own.
But with his current body still running on limited nutrition and energy, those techniques refused to take shape.
After repeated failures, Julian could only give up with a sigh.
He didn't have access to any TMs.
His level was low, his offensive power was weak, and he couldn't just throw himself into battle whenever he wanted.
Naturally, that meant his growth was slow.
One problem fed the next, and before long, he was stuck in a vicious cycle.
Even the move he was currently trying to learn...Disarming Voice...had its limits.
Its damage output wasn't impressive to begin with, but in team battles, it could still offer useful support.
The problem?
It was a Fairy-type move.
And in this forest, most of the Pokemon around him seemed to be Poison-types.
Poison beat Fairy.
Which meant even as support, the move wasn't nearly enough.
After spending the whole night turning all of that over in his head, Julian ended up mentally spiraling.
At this point, he was starting to think the Rattata hadn't been entirely wrong when they first treated him like a decorative mascot.
Honestly…
Was there any Pokemon species out there that judged by looks?
Would anyone be interested in adopting a very pretty, mostly useless guy?
Crack!
Thud!
Crack!
Thud!
BOOM!
After sitting there in a daze for who knew how long, the sudden barrage of noise outside snapped him out of his thoughts.
Julian stepped out of the den to look.
It was Patch.
Based on training results so far, Patch was probably the most talented of the ten elite Rattata.
But he had fallen into the same trap as the others.
Lately, he hadn't trained much, and the new move he'd learned...Hyper Fang...had already started getting rusty.
His training target was a small tree in the clearing.
When he used Hyper Fang successfully, there was a sharp crack as his fangs bit into the bark.
When he failed, his whole body slammed into the trunk with a dull thud.
And when he tried combining Quick Attack with Hyper Fang and botched it?
That was the boom Julian had heard.
That, more than anything, was what drew his attention.
Julian sat down at the mouth of the burrow and quietly watched him train.
Whatever Patch had felt yesterday, he had clearly fought his way out of that dark mood by today.
You could see it in the way he threw himself into every attempt without holding back.
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter