Chapter 302

Chapter 302

CHAPTER 302

Click. Click. Click.

The screen was blinding, but not as much since Honey had opened the blinds and let the final licks of sunlight shine through. My fingers touched the backspace arrow key with a light tap, rewinding my battle against Byron for what felt like the thousandth time today. The specific spot I'd been focused on for a while now was the moment when he'd released Kingambit onto the field. My eyelids closed for an instant, feeling horribly dry, and my throat tightened. There was a flash of scarlet, and the steel type appeared within the dark sandstorm, his form too blurred to get a good look with these ancient Gym cameras. It was only when Kingambit cut apart the sandstorm with that golden cutting move, that I got a good look at him. It had been long enough now that I'd stopped being salty at Byron bringing a newly-evolved Pokemon to the fight. New moves or tactics, I'd considered, but that? That had screwed me up in more ways than one.

I paused the video and looked at myself. Utterly frozen, chin high as if someone had been holding a blade to my neck and with trembling legs. Fingers twitching, mouth sown tightly shut and eyes half-closed. The feeling was still fresh in my mind, given that the battle was only hours old. That any move, any command I had Sweetheart execute would result in a loss. That no matter what steps I took, Kingambit would lead me to my doom. It had been a horrid, choking sensation that still had me shudder even now. His moves had seemed so calculated, his slashes so deep, his steps so quick. Kingambit had been larger than life, the concept of triumph itself.

In reality?

He was strong. Indubitably so, with the way he'd gone toe to toe with a Tyranitar. None of what I'd seen had been a lie. He had cut through her armor, had taken Earthquakes and punches and kept fighting afterward, but on the video, he was... not as indomitable as he'd seemed. Maybe it was the way his tiredness and strain were easier to notice with a clear head and the effects of Supreme Overlord not there to hamper me, but as I rewatched the battle over and over, focused on this specific moment, one notion rang louder than any other mistake I'd made during the battle.

I ordered Sweetheart to run when I shouldn't have.

I shifted in my seat and shot down the urge to gnaw on my nails through my bandages. I'd done it once already when Byron had been talking to me and bit through them, and Honey had been worried sick when he saw the state of my still-healing fingers and had forced me to switch my bandages early. Leaning back forward, I let the video play at double speed, letting the entire chase sequence play out. If I'd let Sweetheart stand her ground, if I'd let her fight like Sunshine had with Steelix, then maybe I'd have a badge right now instead of this hollow feeling inside of me.

No, not hollow. Inadequacy. My Pokemon were all strong enough, they were. Hell, Byron had even said that Sunshine fought too hard and our way of using heat to drown out all life ran the risk of getting a Pokemon killed— which meant that we'd have to start focusing on his dragon side or teach him to be better at manipulating heat like Emilia's Braixen was, when this entire thing with Galactic was over.

If we won.

I'd just fucked up again and again. Of course, no battle was perfect, but minor mistakes had added up until I made the last one I couldn't afford. I felt a hand on my shoulder and flinched for a moment, remembering Honey had been in the room watching the footage along with me. He'd been rather quiet, not knowing what to say to cheer me up.

"Thanks," I just said. "Oh, wow."

My voice was drier than usual, like I hadn't drank in hours, and I'd surprised even myself. Well, I hadn't. I'd also cried, screamed into my pillow and punched and cut it, but that was par for the course.

I brushed a strand of hair behind my ear to get a better look at my screen. "I'm okay."

The start of the battle had gone rather well, but it all started slipping when Princess had her wings broken.

It disturbed me, in the moment. Rattled me, despite not realizing it at the time. She'd be in the Center the entire week with Sunshine because of it, too. That feeling had made me not notice that the iron that had penetrated her back had been liquid seeping into her veins, and not solid blades, more of a liquid than solid.

I found myself rewinding the video, hearing a metallic burp behind my laptop from Mimi. I quickly lowered the screen, glad to see they hadn't been eating at the behind of the screen, but chewing through the bag of scrap metal I'd given them instead as an apology for having them sit through all this battling on my wrist earlier. They had not been a fan of all the hurt and violence.

Back to the battle.

The truth was, I hadn't known how to defeat Wormadam in concrete terms. My thoughts had frayed too much, and I'd ended up relying on a leap of faith that ended up working out, in the end, thanks to Buddy's breakthrough of learning to reform through any water and him going... feral, for lack of a better word. Not a huge problem, but it meant I wasn't thinking. Trust in bonds between me and my family was nice, but I couldn't rely solely on hope and a prayer, or it was bound to bite me in the ass eventually. What if there'd been a way to beat Wormadam while still preserving Buddy? Making him last just a little longer?

Not that I was seeing one right now, but that didn't mean it was impossible. I was finding it difficult to focus, when I'd been a few better decisions away from a fucking badge. There were plenty of other mistakes, too. Not expecting Byron to know I was the kind of trainer to prevent a recall when I'd done it to Maylene months earlier, for example. It was a hard-earned lesson, to understand that people would be studying me at the Conference. The honest truth was, I'd never ever battled a trainer who knew as much about me as I knew about them, and it showed. They did prepare you well for the Conference, didn't they? My back strained to stay straight, and I moistened my lips— and eyes when Honey asked me to please blink.

"Should have sent Sweetheart against Empoleon at the end," I muttered. "Then she wouldn't have been able to speed up the mercury poisoning process. Kingambit would have taken her down, but then it would have been an exhausted Kingambit against a tired Princess."

And she was basically the worst kind of Pokemon for him to face, instead of a large, slow-moving target like a Tyranitar. A flier who was... well, not agile with her broken wings, but she could have flown high enough for it not to matter, and we would have won.

Even still.

With everything having gone the way it had.

I shouldn't have asked her to run. That was when I'd lost the fight and given up on the initiative. Let ourselves be baited with our backs to the water. Using Rock Polish had made her easier to knock down too, with the heightened friction against the floor.

I'd fucked up, as plenty of people had liked to point out. Oh, they were almost all gentle about it. Goalducc, for example, had put out a commentated analysis of the battle within the hour after his live commentary and had caught most of what I had. There were a lot of others chiming in, just as there had been when Denzel had lost. The most dedicated of my fans were quick to lay the blame on Claydol, to say that with Honey, I would have easily nabbed the badge from Byron's hands.

Had I not been tired and had a reputation to uphold because of Poketch, I would have remembered their names and DMed them instead of blocking them on sight. Without Claydol there, my entire strategy with Angel fell apart and he would have gotten torn up by Lucario without so many vines to overwhelm him. Fighting steel types capable of cutting in general hadn't been his forte, especially when Vine Terrain was still in its beginning form and the soil hadn't been as good as I expected. They meant well, but reading the 500th comment and beyond backseating about what moves or tactics my team should know or trashing Claydol from people who had no idea what they were talking about and who'd never battled a day of their lives got tiring.

I would have loved to say I hadn't let the online discourse get to me, but people were already comparing...

Comparing me to the people who'd won on their first tries. Barry. Lauren.

Cece.

I hadn't watched her battle yet. Not even talked to her beyond sending a message right after my battle and muting my alerts on all my devices. I didn't want her to be disappointed in me... to think less of me for getting caught in these stupid mistakes and throwing the battle. I was better than this. Poketch, for their part, I couldn't ignore. They were miffed to see me lose so close to announcing me as their new Unovan Representative in tandem with their declaration about expansion to a brand new region, and Melody was working overtime to keep the heat off my back and have them understand that a loss at the first attempt of any 8th badge battle was normal.

That was what I was. Normal.

Gah! This fucking sucked.

But it had opened my eyes, too. Shown me that I was good at tricking myself that everything was going according to plan, that it was fine, when it wasn't. Shown me that violence was a tool that could be used to throw me off-balance and to probe for weaknesses just like I used it against others. Every single time my team had gotten mauled to such an extent before had been when my emotions had been dampened one way or another except with Zoroark, and that...

Well, yeah. I'd frozen up in my tracks, and Claydol had been the one to recall Honey when his hand had been cut off. He might have died, had the ground type not been there. What was the point of using violence as a tool if I couldn't even move when it was done to the people I cared about? It made me a hypocrite.

There was a lesson, there, woven into this battle. A lesson about keeping my mind clear in the face of having my tactics turned against me, and in the face of the pressure some Pokemon could have. My fingers traced the mousepad, but a strange sound interrupted me.

My stomach growled, and Mimi crawled from behind my laptop, pinging me with notions of sustenance over and over again.

I tilted my head toward them. "You hungry? You still have some metal left, and it's clean, too." I squinted at the scraps, holding one between my fingers before dropping it on the desk again. It clattered next to them. "Yep, no rust on any of them."

The steel type mewled, their little arms grabbing at the piece of iron, and waved it my way.

I snorted, leaning against a palm with my other hand tapping their golden head. "You know I don't eat metal, silly."

Electivire raised a finger, saying that technically, I'd never tried.

I forcefully exhaled through my nose. "I'll try when you try." I stretched my back, hands intertwining together and toes wiggling in my shoes. "But you're right, Mimi. I haven't eaten since breakfast, so I guess I should get some food. The others have probably called me a thousand times, too. Just... I need to figure out a little more stuff."

Like what strategy I'd employ the next time to win, and a way to hone myself into a true knife capable of piercing through Byron. Not that he'd been very shield-like during the battle, anyway. He'd used all of his most offensively-minded Pokemon, save for Wormadam, and even her offensive power was rather insane—

A knock on the door, rough and annoyed. Chase, then. There was a rise of irritation at him interrupting my autopsy, but I let it settle while Honey moved to open the door. Mimi hissed, becoming all spikes and needles, but I scooped them up and placed them in my sweater. They grabbed onto my collar, their eye becoming a disapproving 'X' before slipping underneath and hiding away, more out of habit than anything else, given that Chase knew about them.

Chase looked up at Electivire as soon as he opened the door. "Hey, big guy. Came to visit your Mom, or whatever."

The electric type ushered him in with his usual grin, waving at a pair of guys trying to look into the room instead of scaring them away like Buddy would have. Unfortunately, he was in his Pokeball right now, since he was too tired to even lay in a bath.

"Gee, you look like shit," he said. "This room reeks."

Well, I hadn't showered yet after that battle.

I sneered, turning away from him. "Whatever. Come to talk to me about the fight?"

He slipped past me and opened a window. "I was watching."

"Yeah, I figured you'd be there." I spun around, turning to straddle my chair. "Angry I lost?"

"Not exactly. I was more trying to look at how he'd try to put you in the dirt," Chase said, a finger tracing the outline of his cap. "See if I can figure how he'd do me in." His arms crossed, and he leaned against the wall. "It was a good fight. Won't tell you how you screwed up, since it looks like you've figured it out."

He awkwardly gestured at my face, then at my laptop, and I relaxed a smidge. I'd expected him to be more combative about this, but that was probably because of our last interaction.

"He fucked me over," I sighed.

"I'll get out of your hair. Come see us when you're done, we're all hanging out in the lobby."

I quickly nodded. "Yup."

He threw the bottle in the trash and left with his hands shoved in his pockets while I quickly scrambled to check on Cecilia's battle, wanting to watch at least once before I called her. The thumbnail quickly caught my eye as soon as I made it onto Wake's website, given the fact that there was no more water. It was gone. Evaporated, with the five islands acting as mountains instead, the central one even having collapsed midway through the fight.

Her strategy had been this.

Leading with Hydreigon, she had fought back against another Empoleon, forcing Wake to use the first switch of the battle through the sheer brutality the dragon showed. There was power there, but also subtle skill that hadn't been present during her fight with Byron for her seventh badge. The way the turquoise light surrounding him seemed to cause all moves to cower beneath his form, and they became weaker as they struck him. The way one head had made Empoleon freeze for a moment with what must have been Scary Face while the other two combined a Dragon Pulse and Charge Beam. It was something they excelled at, now. Mixing and matching moves to obtain different results.

Azumarill had come out next, and despite the range advantage Hydreigon had on them, the water type had swarmed the field with bubbles of water and glamour that exploded upon contact and were powered up with the storm Empoleon had set up at the start of the battle, forcing Cecilia to expend one of her recalls as well, revealing her Toxicroak.

Vacuum Wave user, my eyes instantly narrowed. The bubbles actually didn't pop when exposed to the move, but it did drag all the air out of Azumarill's lungs and start evaporating the water around them. The fairy type was poisoned before getting back into the sea, and from now on it had just been a matter of waiting them out.

Of course, that didn't mean Cecilia got the takedown for free. Knowing that time hadn't been on their side, Wake had ordered Azumarill to use Belly Drum and the water type completely turned the battle around, using her exploding glamour bubbles as support while she beat up Toxicroak with a relentless fervor that had both of them fall by the end of the fight. Still, the fact that Toxicroak had drawn against a water type in the rain had me in awe at how far she'd come so quickly.

The battle continued in a rather equal manner, with Scizor and Hydreigon battling a Feraligatr and Wailord, the latter of which was the one to take down Hydreigon. Since this was a battle she was fighting tooth and nail for, it wasn't looking like Palafin was going to come out, with how close things were.

That was until she sprung her trap.

Both were out of their three switches, and Cecilia had three Pokemon left while Wake had two, his Empoleon having fallen as well. Since Crasher Wake was one of the weaker Gym Leaders, one could expect him to use two of his personal Pokemon, and as a man for theatrics, and like was the usual for these kind of battles, he'd kept them for last. The first one had been Quagsire, just as dumb looking and unaware as one could expect from their species despite having heard that he was not from rumors online.

See, despite what people thought, Crasher Wake was not someone to only use the rain. Sometimes, he used mist to make visibility near zero, or he summoned clouds at ground level to use electric attacks, for example, but against Cecilia, he had leaned toward rain, stacking up Rain Dance after Rain Dance. It was a veritable storm that had her own Pokemon unable to hear her own commands, by the end, which meant that they could only run on instinct and what they'd planned beforehand while she watched, with every island but the central one having been swallowed by the waves. Powerful tsunamis swarmed the entire arena, seemingly sped up and controlled by Wake's Pokemon, making life hell for anyone but a water type.

Some would call it boring, maybe, to see him do the same thing so frequently, but this was actually an excellent test for Cecilia. She had, after all, always been the worst of us at manipulating the weather and the terrain, even if she had finally started dabbling and was actually decent at it now.

So here had been Crasher Wake's test, or at least the main one I could see. With her back against the wall, two personal Pokemon left powered by multiple Rain Dances and no way to claw her way back to influence the terrain and weather, how was she going to win?

Slowking had been the answer. Not because he was a water type, but because she had pushed Disable to its limits. Ordinarily, the move only prevented a Pokemon from employing the last move they'd used, but not Slowking's. He parsed through Quagsire's mind, pulling at the exact move he'd wanted him to stop using.

Rain Dance.

It was a majestic display of skill, one that had me rewinding that part of the video twenty times to understand what had happened. From then on, it was just a matter of waiting out a storm that was collapsing on its own weight and couldn't be sustained, though Quagsire still ended up taking him down, by the end of it, breaking through Slowking's barriers even though they rivaled Claydol's.

Then came Talonflame, and she burned. All of the water was swept away by a Heat Wave hot enough to turn sand to glass with Quagsire too weak to do anything about it, without rain to constantly regenerate himself and too tired after a drawn-out fight with Slowking. Quagsire did come close to taking her down with attacks wide enough for her speed not to matter, but she was not frail as she'd once been, with many ways she and Cece had come up with to stop her wings from getting hit and her wings broken. She had gotten used to seeing that, had she? Unlike Princess, Talonflame had gotten hers broken so many times it was probably routine.

In the end, it had been Golurk against Poliwrath. The ghost type now was even worse to fight. Discounting the sheer destructive power on display that put all of my Pokemon to shame, there was a time limit to how long you could last in battle with him, and it was all because of his song. Listen long enough, and you'd go unconscious, weakening along the way, too. It tied in beautifully with her disabling of the rain and its powerful sound. Despite Poliwrath having set up another one, Lehmhart's song had been so loud it easily broke through any singular Rain Dance, even from one of Wake's Pokemon. She'd broken the stacking Rain Dance and won because of it.

Even then, Cecilia had won by the skin of her teeth in a fight so grand the central island had been destroyed. Poliwrath had been strong enough to go toe to toe with Lehmhart's powers, no doubt putting that fighting type to good use.

Damn it, she was cool. Composed the entire fight, too, which was what I'd been missing, granted Wake didn't throw a Pokemon with Pressure at her, or something akin to it. I rewinded her video by muscle memory until Honey grunted at me with an engine-like laugh while he played with Mimi in his hand, holding them by the window and throwing them up with weak magnetism.

"Uh, right," I nodded. "Better call." I blew a raspberry, lying down on my bed on my stomach instead of sitting on my chair while kicking my feet in the air. She was on top of my contacts, so I was quick to dial her number, never mind that Honey snickered at me having a heart next to her name.

When I glared, he raised his good hand and said I'd been worrying for no reason anyway.

"Probably. I mean, it still sucks, but— oh, hi Cece!"

There was the sound of the TV in the background— no, not the TV, probably her laptop. Knowing her, she must have been watching Unovan news or something to keep her mind off things. Not like there was much to do now that her team was at the Pokemon Center and Maeve was busy training most days.

"Hi."

Oof, she was frustrated. Not angry, though, so that was a plus. Probably understood that I needed space, but was annoyed I'd ghosted her the entire day and she'd been worried about me, which was understandable.

"Sorry?" I tried. "I'm... better now. Got all of my frustration out, I think." I cleared my throat and turned on my back. "I saw your battle, it was—"

"We were all worried sick. The others kept knocking at your door and you wouldn't answer," she scolded.

"I, um, I only heard one knock."

"There was more than one." Had there been? I must have been too focused early on to notice. "Before Chase got there they were about to call the Nurses to do a wellness check. They would have, if you hadn't answered."

I scoffed. "Come on, I was just studying, no need to make such a huge deal about—"

"That's not how it looked! You can't expect us to know that, especially with all the problems you're dealing with!" she rebuked, a slight quiver in her voice. "You tore apart your own fingers two weeks ago, Grace. We didn't know, and it would have been fine, but you didn't communicate!'

"I was... I'm sorry," I said. "Arceus, yeah it must have looked bad from the outside, I just wanted to— it's like I needed to figure out everything that went wrong and that I couldn't focus on anything else beforehand."

"I know, but you've never stormed off like that after a loss," she sighed. "You always talk at first before locking yourself up in your room. Keep up a brave face for a while, then you the rage, sadness and frustration out alone. I know what it's like to need space, but answering our messages when we tried checking in on you would have been nice."

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry."

"Okay. Thank you for that." There was a noise, like the shifting of skin against a mattress. "I watched your battle."

"Let's not talk about my battle. It's just embarrassing and I hate it," I muttered. "I fucked up too many times to win."

"If you want to, that's fine."

For around an hour, we talked about her fight. Her thought process during every frame, the new moves and techniques she'd come up with, and how they'd trained that crazy Disable, too. Ordinarily, I was sure we would have kept this hidden, but with Galactic coming around, it was like Chase said. It'd be stupid not to know what everyone was capable of in detail just for a tournament I wanted so desperately to be in, but that might not come.

A tournament I might not even be in, depending on the events of next week. What if today was my last chance? What if I fucked myself over? Poketch didn't know, and they expected me to try again in two weeks, but I knew.

Don't think about it. Don't envision it. I had to believe that I'd make it, because that light at the end of the tunnel, that thread of normalcy was the only thing keeping me sane. Hopes of facing the strongest trainers at the Conference, with this entire nightmare behind us all and the world saved. You're okay.

"For Zolst, we've been trying to get a hang of dragon TE, but it's got some... esoteric properties if you're not trying to just create some kind of blast. It's difficult to figure out what it exactly does when people at our level keep their cards close to their chest."

"Nothing online?"

"Not in detail, no," Cece said. "It's been trial and error, so right now our working theory is Might, or at least it's what I think it is. He certainly likes the sound of it. It's got a way of making everything around it cower in fear and subjugating TE that we haven't gotten much experience with yet, otherwise Zolst never would have been able to take so many Ice Beams or Freeze Dries. Wake tried to freeze him from the inside a couple of times."

"You know, I had a similar thought when Sunshine was fighting Steelix. Haven't started anything yet on that front, though. We plan to."

"There are a thousand different research papers on the subject of TE and none can agree on anything, so I'll have to come to my own conclusion anyway."

There was a lapse of silence. "So, are you and Maeve coming here?"

"When my team is healed. Golurk took a beating, so I won't be here until the time's basically come."

"Bummer. We can't even hang out before it all comes to a head."

"We can hang out on the phone more now that our Pokemon are all too banged up to train," she said, smirk clear in her tone. "Plus, I can't be missing out on those meetings you guys are going to have, can't I?"

I smiled. "You bet. Let me head downstairs."

Pausing, a gasp left my lips.

"Wait, I need to shower!"