“Challenger ready?” The referee called.

  “Ready!”

  “Leader Byron, ready?”

  “Ready.”

  The referee dropped his hand.

  “Begin!”

  “Venus!” I called. “Bite!”

  My not-so-little Umbreon lept forwards, her teeth clicking together loudly as she snapped at the enemy Bronzor.

  “Dodge it!” Byron said, but the disk-like Pokémon was too slow.

  A set of shadowy jaws appeared around the other Pokémon, crunching down on its body. The Bronzor let out a wail of pain that shot through my head.

  Literally, in this particular instance. The Bronzor didn’t have a mouth, and instead its cry was psychic, bypassing my ears to go straight into my brain.

  It was a unique experience, and one I didn’t want to experience again. It reminded me too much of the Mime Jr. that I had saved from Kane several months ago.

  Letting Venus go first instead of Kōjin against a Steel-type Trainer was a bit of a risky play, but in my admittedly limited research, I’d seen that Byron often sent out his Bronzor first in fights. While Venus wasn’t strong against Steel-types, her new Dark typing was formidable against the Psychic-typing of the Bronzor.

  Thankfully my move had paid off.

  “Start dancing!” I ordered, and her ear flicked.

  Byron, for his part, had a slight frown on his face.

  “Flash Cannon.”

  I tried not to smile as I realized that I’d just beaten his Bronzor.

  The Bronzor tilted, catching the light from the overhead lamps, and used its reflective surface to concentrate it into a beam of energy that caught Venus on her hindquarters.

  My Umbreon yipped in pain, but powered through the blow.

  While I may not have been as good at battling as Ted or Lucas, I was still more than capable of doing research. Despite being half Steel-type, Bronzor didn’t learn all that many Steel-type moves, and at lower “levels” they mostly focused on the Psychic half, along with a small handful of Ghost- and Dark-type attacks.

  I was pretty sure that Flash Cannon was one of the only moves that Byron could use that was even somewhat effective.

  Right now, it was just a battle of attrition between Venus and the Bronzor, and that wasn’t really a competition at all.

  Venus dodged what few attacks she could, but mostly focused on powering through the Bronzor’s Flash Cannons to land her Bites.

  Her final attack came less than a minute after the battle had begun.

  The muscles in her legs were almost visible through the dark fur as she tensed, then leaped forwards. The Bronzor got off another attack, and Venus was a black blur as she jumped through the beam of light.

  She flew through the air, and a pair of shadowy teeth clamped down around her opponent.

  With a flick of her neck, the Bronzor was sent crashing to the ground, solidly unconscious.

  “Leader Byron’s Pokémon is unable to continue battling!” The referee called. “Leader Byron, please recall your Pokémon and send your next one out!”

  “Hey Ref! I’d like to use one of my substitutions!”

  The referee looked over at me, and nodded.

  Venus disappeared back into her ball, and I released Kōjin.

  He entered the battlefield with a happy howl, his tail wagging so hard it caused his legs to jump from side to side.

  Since I was the challenger for this particular fight, my Pokémon were released first, so Byron could respond in kind.

  He grimaced again, but released his next Pokémon.

  I froze, my hands grabbing the railing in front of me to try and stop them from shaking.

  Rationally, logically, I knew that it wasn’t the same Steelix that I’d fought so long ago, underneath Oreburgh City.

  But for a brief moment, I was back in the tunnels, staring up at a gigantic steel monster that was going to crush me and my Pokémon.

  Then Kōjin growled, his entire chest resonating with the sound, and I was snapped back into the present, catching the tail end of the referee telling us to begin fighting again.

  “K-Kōjin!” I called, my voice unsteady. “Ember!”

  Kōjin was a good boy. He hadn’t been with us, down there in the dark. He didn’t have the same kind of hesitation, of fear that I did.

  All he saw was a big metal snake.

  The training we did over the weekend showed itself as he launched his first attack at the Steelix. Instead of his old, larger flames, his Ember was now like a short jet of concentrated fire.

  The Steelix reared back and roared, the sound shaking the area as a spot on its surface started to glow from the heat.

  Then the last segment of its tail began to spin, and the Pokémon dug it into the ground.

  Sand whipped up into the air and I threw up my hands to protect my eyes, though it never got that far. The storm battered against the psychic walls established before the fight, leaving everything beyond the arena perfectly untouched.

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  But in the moments before the Sandstorm had gone up, I’d managed to get a good look at the Steelix.

  It’s smaller.

  Venus, Zetian, and I had beaten the Steelix underneath Oreburgh. We could beat this one, especially with Kōjin on our team.

  My hands stopped shaking, and I dropped them back onto the railing.

  “Kōjin!” I commanded, having to raise my voice so he could hear it through the Sandstorm. “Flame Wheel!”

  There was a yip of acknowledgement, and a new light blinked into existence through the haze of the storm.

  My Growlithe tore a path through the Sandstorm wreathed in flame, the dirt and gravel flowing in strange eddies as the fire ate the oxygen around it and changed the airflow.

  The Steelix roared in pain again, and I closed my eyes.

  There was nothing else I had to do right now. Kōjin had this handled, and I had to leave it up to him.

  The rest of the battle passed quickly, but even if I’d had my eyes open, I wouldn’t have been able to see any of it through the storm.

  When the wind let up, Kōjin was standing happily over the unconscious form of the Stelix.

  I let out a long, deep breath.

  “Good job Kōjin!”

  “Leader Byron’s Pokémon is unable to continue battling!” The referee called rotely. “Leader Byron, please recall your Pokémon and send your next one out!”

  “Any substitutions?” The referee asked me, and I shook my head.

  “Kōjin! Come on back over here!”

  The little Growlithe yipped, and hurried back over to my side of the arena so Byron could let his next Pokémon out.

  “Not bad.” Byron said as he withdrew his Steelix.

  His hand hesitated over one of the Poké Balls at his waist, then moved to another one.

  “Go.” He said simply, and a new form appeared in a flash of light on the field.

  Byron was a lot like his son in a lot of ways. They both adored mining and used Pokémon whose types were associated with minerals. Also their ace Pokémon were the two Fossil Pokémon of the Sinnoh Region - Rampardos for Roark, and Bastiodon for Byron.

  I’d seen Byron’s Bastiodon in a couple of televised fights, and like most Gym Leader’s aces, it seemed like a proper monster of a Pokémon.

  Thankfully, this wasn’t that Bastiodon.

  Bastiodon weren’t the tallest Pokémon in the world, most of the few surviving examples were only about four feet tall at the most, but this particular one Byron sent out was a little shorter than that. Its shield-like face barely had any scars on it at all, and overall it seemed like it was a little awkward in its own skin as it snorted and pawed at the ground.

  It was definitely younger than Byron’s ace, and based on the small Bastiodon population, was probably even his ace’s kid or grandkid.

  I recognized the signs from my own, admittedly small, experience. This Bastiodon had probably just evolved a little while ago, and it was still getting used to its new body.

  This was one of its first battles after evolving.

  If that was true, it stung a little bit to know that Byron didn’t see me as worthy of using a stronger Pokémon on. At the same time, it also meant that I was more likely to defeat a newly evolved Pokémon, and my team could really use the win right now.

  I took another deep breath and shoved my ego aside. I shouldn’t take any Gym Leader’s Pokémon lightly, Byron was still in the fight.

  “Begin!”

  The Bastiodon snorted, steadied its large, shield-like head, and charged.

  /^\

  In the Pokémon games back on my old world, the stats of each Pokémon had been broken up into six distinct categories. Health, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense, and Speed. There was a complicated set of values that regulated these stats, IVs and EVs, but I had never paid much attention to them and had no real idea how they worked.

  In general, the higher a stat was, the better the Pokémon was at it.

  I’d never been big into the competitive Pokémon scene, but I did know a few things. While there were a few strategies like using Trick Room to make slower Pokémon move first, for the most part there was one stat that everybody made sure to put at least some effort into.

  Speed.

  A Pokémon with a higher Speed stat would move first, and depending on the matchup, just a single extra point in Speed could result in victory or defeat.

  Even though in the actual world of Pokémon these statistics didn’t exist, Trainers here were much the same as those back on Earth, and had cottoned onto the same kind of strategy.

  Speed is life.

  And unfortunately for the Bastiodon, regardless of how much effort Byron had put into training its speed, Kōjin was just that much faster.

  By the time the Bastiodon had gotten its head ready for ramming, and started charging, Kōjin was already moving.

  “Fight like it’s Hardy!” I shouted, and Kōjin barked in response.

  Hardy, Lucas’ Cranidos, had the habit of putting his head down and attacking as fast as possible, but it could only move in straight lines when doing so.

  I didn’t know much about the Bastiodon line, but with such a big, heavy head, I figured that any changes to its momentum would have to take a lot of energy and muscle-power.

  If Kōjin could get around the charging Bastiodon, around that massive shield, he’d be more than able to hit the weaker flanks.

  As Kōjin started to dash to the side, I looked over and saw a small smile on Byron’s face, and knew I had miscalculated.

  Once Kōjin was in position, taking a deep breath to let loose his fire, Byron simply called out “Right.”

  The Bastiodon turned its head to face Kōjin and slammed its chin into the ground.

  A deep furrow was dug into the earth, but physics did its job. Almost all of the Bastiodon’s forward momentum was cancelled out, and its weaker body swung around thanks to inertia to be behind the heavy shield of its head, just as Kōjin let loose his fire.

  The flames whipped past the Bastiodon, and although I could see that a part of its side was looking a little sunburnt, it had managed to avoid most of the blow entirely.

  “Ancient Power.”

  The Bastiodon opened its mouth and roared, the sound chilling me to my very bones. It wasn’t like any other roar from a Pokémon that I’d heard before; this was a clarion call, something that reached out and touched the instincts of my ancestors.

  It spoke to the fears of mammoths stampeding across the steppes, of being hunted by sabertooth tigers in the night, of huddling around the first fire in awe at the power of the gods delivered unto earth.

  Rocks tore themselves free from the ground, flying forwards to smack into Kōjin. At the same time, the Bastiodon was clearly enhanced by the primeval call, and was moving more fluidly than before.

  I needed a new tactic. Byron had clearly trained his Bastiodon for just this exact purpose, he knew that other Trainers’ Pokémon were going to be faster than his, and had planned around it.

  If that was the case…

  I sighed, and decided to give Kōjin what he’d wanted all along.

  I was completely convinced by now that Kōjin’s Ability was Rock Head. He just simply loved headbutting things too much for it to be anything else.

  Flame Wheel was, at its core, a charging move. Now if the Pokémon using it were smart, they would stop just before they actually ran into their opponent, causing the fire to lash out at their enemy.

  Kōjin, the loveable goofball, wasn’t very smart, but he did have a very hard head.

  “Kōjin. Full Throttle.”

  Full Throttle wasn’t a move by any actual standard. It was just a codeword between the two of us that let him know he could go all out.

  For a slightly hyperactive Hisuian Growlithe with Rock Head, that meant using Flame Wheel to charge at the enemy and run into them as many times as possible, as hard as possible. Either they would get knocked out, or Kōjin would.

  This was a stupid plan, but Venus was still mostly healthy and Zetian hadn’t been out at all in this battle, while Roark’s Bastiodon was his last Pokémon.

  I could take a chance or two to let my Pokémon go all out, just this once.

  My little fire-dog yipped happily at the command, his stubby tail wagging like a helicopter’s blades, and charged.