Chương 76: Chapter 61

There was a tension to it. A mounting sense of unease that afflicted all of us. Me, Alyssa, Mr. Gima, our partners, none were spared as hours of vigilance became days, and then days became weeks. Waiting for the metaphorical shoe to drop was excruciating, in a way I'd never grasped before. When I was with Alyssa, my eyes were constantly roaming, constantly seeking, looking for anything wrong or out-of-place. Every shadow was a potential threat, every empty space an ambush spot.

It wasn't so bad the first day, or even the second, or the third. The tenth? Alyssa and I both snapped at each other a couple of times, and Mr. Gima didn't even bother trying to mediate. Our Pokémon weren't spared the uncertainty either. My knights were holding up well, but I could tell the stress was wearing on Mana and Maushold. The former grew increasingly sullen and suspicious, while the latter got jumpier and jumpier.

Mana had a fleet of constructs about her at all times, darting, weaving shapes that caught the light and refracted the sun in a dizzying array that tried to shed light on any uncertain shadow we passed. Maushold, for their part, seemed constantly one shock away from an explosion, shaking ears and jittery paws that could only be calmed by extended periods in the safety of our apartment, and particularly their little warren under my bed.

PIkachu clearly felt some of the pressure, growing more testy by the day, and Mr. Gima's partners, for all they were holding up well, had less patience about them than they'd had several weeks ago. At least we weren't alone in our deteriorating condition. One would think that our group's suspicion, our implicit need to double-check every corner and peer into every shadow, would set us apart from the other people traversing Techne's streets.

But gone were the days when pedestrians of all sorts streamed freely through my home city, unbothered and uncaring. No, right now, we were actually representative of the norm. Closed-off groups of people and Pokémon, huddling close together and shooting surreptitious glances at each passerby and bystander. Families sticking close to one another, partners surrounding them defensively. Roving groups of teens and young adults, Pokémon out and bristling.

Whole classes of students, collected from homes one-by-one and jealously guarded by teachers and volunteers. Service workers and office drones, traveling via summoned shuttles and carpools. And there were more cars on the road now, clogging up lanes that went previously unused and generally making it harder for everyone else to get around.

And even those didn't seem safe; crumpled bumpers, shattered windows, and missing tail-lights characterized the seeming majority of vehicles, damage from Pokémon or vandals or accidents. Cars, as it turned out, were not very resistant to Pokémon moves. Historically, this hadn't been a problem, but as more and more brawls and fights broke out in the city, Techne's vehicles often found themselves becoming collateral damage.

Recalling the BFGs hadn't slowed down the battling in the streets all that much, and conversely, the lower-quality knock offs many people had bought didn't have the same level of barriers as the FrontLine-created devices. Errant projectiles and hurtling bodies became, if not exactly ubiquitous, still something you'd see almost daily.

Turns out, there was an appetite for battling in Ferrum that the standard circuit hadn't been satisfying, and the danger presented by these impromptu competitions wasn't doing enough to stymie their participants. Theoretically, this is where the helmeted security personnel that had seemingly infested the city overnight should have come in. In my mind at least, they should have been stamping down on these poorly-managed street fights.

The thought seemed hypocritical on the surface, but these syn-infused battles were so completely different from the carefully-managed underleague that even suggesting they might be similar sounded like an insult to me. They had the tools, portable AR devices of their own without the barrier devices attached. If they took the action necessary to censure these dangerous battles, maybe their presence would have been useful. Helpful, even.

Instead, you'd see them haunting street corners, PSS-covered heads staring eyelessly at the road, their prowling partners restlessly pacing back and forth in front of them. City-security, sub-contractors, corporate security guards, they all blended together into a faceless soup of militarized suspicion and surveillance. It didn't really make sense to me.

Why pay to deploy all of these groups if they weren't going to work to curtail the main thing threatening the ordinary people on Techne's streets, but Golems know I'd never seen the menacing creeps do anything more than glare impolitely and harass people for ID checks. And people were getting sick of it. Protests were an almost daily occurrence, though the exact grievance and participation varied. One Monday, a small group showed up at city hall, holding signs and shouting for more lenient voting tests.

The next day, a massive crowd convened around RealTech's headquarters, demanding more stringent action be taken to recall rogue BFGs. A few hours later, a group was being dispersed at a Techne City-Security post, complaints and recriminations unheard in favor of threats and violence. It felt like something was going to bubble over at any moment, but what was there to-do but go on living?

We still met in the mornings to find battles, spending the early parts of the day at Pokémon Centers or commercial arenas that felt like oases of sanity in a sea of chaos. After that, we'd huddle close as we traversed hostile streets, meeting Mr. Gima for training, or catching some sort of transit to go to one of Alyssa's matches. I'd been worried that with the way things were going, my parents might want to start limiting my activities, but they'd both grown so busy that I essentially never saw them.

Mom was overnighting at the hospitals half the week, the small-scale riots and constant street-fights resulting in a level of injury the city had never seen before. Dad had all but vanished, working overtime and a half at RealTech along with the rest of his team, purportedly to mitigate the damage their creation was currently doing to Techne, but probably actually to service the PSS devices that had seemingly become ubiquitous overnight.

I took to calling their workplaces in the evening, checking to see if they'd be home that night and reassuring them that I'd spent the day safe and okay. Maybe their decision not to curtail my activities came from a place of ignorance? Or maybe they just trusted my partners and I to take care of ourselves. If it was the latter, their faith wasn't misplaced. Under Mr. Gima's ministrations, we were growing more capable by the day.

-"I've seen that move before," the Unovan man said thoughtfully, watching as Maushold did their strange dance, a buffing move of some sort that my PokéDex hadn't been able to identify. Ten seconds of frantic movement later, the three of them stood proudly in front of a somehow polished-looking patch of dark, iron sand.

"It's on the tip of my tongue," the man said, his face twisted up in thought. I couldn't tell if he was messing with me, or actually struggling to remember. Luckily, just before my already-strained patience gave out, he had an epiphany (or decided he'd had enough fun at my expense).

"Tidy Up! That's what it's called! I didn't realize Pokémon other than Minccino could learn it."

"What does it do?" Alyssa asked, curiosity plain in her tone as her sparkling eyes watched the trio of Normal-types 'clean' another stretch of the beach.

"Well it sharpens their speed and attack for one, though not very efficiently. As for the other effects… probably easier to just show you. Fe, call your partners over, Alister, give them a target to work with." The crimson-armored Bisharp gave a short nod, before holding up a metal-gauntleted hand. His claws slowly clenched into a fist, and where he directed his attention, small collections of iron sand compressed together into glowing clusters of energy.

"Stealth Rock?" I asked, watching the impromptu mines with a weather eye.

"Right," the Dark-specialist nodded.

"Tell your partners to use Tidy Up on those." A single shouted order later, and Maushold got to work. After just a few seconds, I could feel my eyebrows climbing up into my hairline, and saw Alyssa's doing the same out of the corner of my eye. In the space of seconds, my partners descended on the field of glowing stones, sweeping paws and swaying bodies sending the Stealth Rocks flying, defused and inert.

The move crumpled underneath their ministrations, and after what felt like moments, they'd mitigated it entirely, leaving only the oddly clean sand as evidence of their passing.

"They'll do that to Stealth Rock, Spikes, Toxic Spikes, and one other move that I'm not remembering," Mr. Gima remarked approvingly.

"And it'll sweep up any substitutes on the field as well, theirs and their opponents. Not the most flexible move, but definitely one that comes in handy. Some people really, really, like their Stealth Rocks." -"Scrafty, scraft!" I couldn't make out exactly what Scrafty was telling my partners, but I'd grown close enough to the foreign Pokémon to get the gist of what he was saying.

"Scascascarftytyty!" the Fighting-type punctuated his proclamation with a flurry of blows that left me blinking, my eyes trying for a moment to go off in two different directions to watch the various afterimages he was projecting. Apparently, mastering Close Combat was more about the feeling of the move than any sort of re-creatable pattern. Every time he demonstrated the exhausting attack, the look and details of it were different, but it remained indisputably recognizable all the same.

From the impressions I was getting, Close Combat was all about attacking however you could, relentlessly, with no thought or concern given to defense or protection. It was a finishing move, the sort of attack you wanted to use to take your opponent down, because if you didn't, you'd probably regret it. My knights tried to follow-up Scrafty's demonstration with an all-out charge of their own, glowing with determination and power.

And yet, halfway-through their breakneck assault, their energy petered out, and they tumbled over each other in a heap. Unfortunately, unlike when they'd learned Upper Hand, my knights were struggling to grasp how to use this attack. Firstly, because the move was obviously exhausting. Even the elite-level Pokémon demonstrating the attack for them could only use it a few times before needing a break.

My knights were strong, of that I had no doubt, but Close Combat was widely considered one of the most powerful Fighting-type moves for a reason. Secondly was their mindset. Falinks were, as a rule, naturally predisposed to follow orders (brass notwithstanding). They needed to be careful, strategic fighters, who paid close attention to their opponents, to their positioning, and to their leader. All of that flew in the face of the feeling they needed to capture to learn Close Combat.

The powerful move required a level of commitment and disregard for all else that strongly contradicted what my knights specialized in, and what I'd focused on training them so far. It wasn't an insurmountable wall, of that I had no doubt, but they hadn't picked it up in just one day like they had with Upper Hand. No, they'd been working on the move for three days now, slamming their heads repeatedly into the metaphorical wall it represented.

They'd made some progress, they could summon up the energy necessary to start the attack now, but they were still a ways away from completing the move. After a few more demonstrations from Scrafty and a few more failed attempts from my partners, I could tell they were getting frustrated, and weren't making any more forward progress, so I pulled my partners aside, gesturing for them to follow me away from our little group's territory on the beach.

I sat down in the sand, and gestured for them to do the same, the seven of us forming a little circle atop the slushy iron grit. I could see my knights' frustration roiling off them, could feel it bubbling just beneath the surface of their steely determination. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Come to think of it, when was the last time we really struggled with a move like this?" I asked them. The seeming non-sequitor drew them out of their brooding, the formation musing on my statement. I let them think it through for a few moments, and my patience was rewarded when Percy sat up a bit.

"Links, Falinks!" he posited, accompanying his statement with a demonstrative little barrier.

"Right," I nodded at him, "I thought the same. Do you guys remember how long it took us to get Protect down?" My question elicited grumbles and mutters from my knights, as their minds cast back to the literal weeks we'd spent trying to master the move to the level the ranger corps required.

"Do you remember what finally helped us figure it out?" I asked the group, leading them along. This time, it was Tristan who spoke up.

"Fafalinks," he mused, his eyes taking on a faraway look. My mind cast back at the same time, and a little spike of grief churned in my gut as Mark's face surfaced in my memory. -"Icebox, Icy Wind." At Mark's quiet command, another blast of cool air flowed across the gym, washing over my knights and running straight through the flickering shield they were trying to put up.

A few seconds passed as my knights struggled in vain to get up a barrier, only for the proto-shield to collapse with a sound like shattering glass. My knights sagged as frost built up on their carapaces, and Icebox cut off the attack with a clattering snap of his icy jaw. Training Protect could technically be done without help, but supposedly having someone actually throw moves to block made the whole learning process easier.

That made sense to me, but we'd already been at this for a couple of weeks now, and the best my knights could manage was a flickering shield that let moves by more than half the time.

"Why d-d-don't we take five Fe?" Mark asked, his quiet voice startling me out of my reverie. For all the older ranger was a big guy, he had a quiet way about him, one that often saw him fading from my attention even when he was right next to me.

"Yeah, you heard him guys, let's take a little break before we get back into it. Grab some water." My knights grumbled at the instruction, but acquiesced, trooping over to the little fountain installed in one corner of the gym.

"Y-y-y-y-you guys haven't made much progress since last week," the corporal observed, and I had to work to not grind my teeth.

"We'll get it," I said with assuredness that I didn't actually feel.

"Progress is slow, but we're making it."

"Hmm," the rumble of consideration from the huge ranger was even deeper than his usual speaking voice. His eyes went from me to my knights, and I turned to watch them as well, the pair of us observing as they drank their fill from the gym's fountain. After they'd had enough to drink, they started using their shields to wipe the frost from each other's carapaces, cleaning the icy remnants of Icebox's assault with a zeal that spoke to their current level of vexation.

Because as frustrated as I was by my knights' struggles, I had no doubt that they were even more dissatisfied than I was. Over the few months we'd spent getting to know each other, I'd learned that my knights held themselves to high standards. They always wanted to be better, to be stronger, to be smarter, and hitting this stumbling block had really put a damper on the enthusiasm they usually showed for all things training.

"I just don't get it," my frustration finally bubbled over as I complained to Mark.

"I'm training them the exact way Donna and Janine have been saying to, and apparently they've taught tons of Pokémon to use Protect, so why isn't this working?" The older ranger fell silent for a few moments, his forehead creased in thought.

"You know, Icebox always h-h-h-had a hard time with Protect too, at first," he finally said, gesturing over to his reclining partner.

"It's still not his specialty, b-b-b-b-but he's gotten a lot better. Do you know what helped him?" I shook my head, turning my attention from my knights to the lounging Ice-type. I'd never noticed any deficiency in his ability to create a barrier.

"What's that?"

"When we made him use P-p-p-protect to defend something he really cared about," the older ranger explained. I felt my eyes widen in shock.

"You?!" I asked, alarm and confusion coloring my tone.

"What?" Mark blinked.

"No, that'd be w-w-w-w-way too dangerous. We made him use Protect to defend his lunch!" - Mark had gone on to explain a little bit more of Icebox's difficulties. As a Dragon-type, the lazy lizard had been rather prideful, even as a Frigibax. His block had been an unwillingness to defend himself from trivial attacks when he could just tank them out to retaliate. And of course, using stronger moves to encourage him to Protect would put him in danger, as would hitting him when he was on the edge of exhaustion.

So Mark had given the prideful dragon something more vulnerable to protect. Something he'd want to preserve no matter what. Once his sweet lunchtime treats had been imperiled, Icebox had learnt how to use Protect almost overnight. It took my knights a couple of days to grasp the move when they had the proper motivation, but finding that motivation made all the difference. In the end, all I'd needed to do was reframe the issue.

Using Protect wasn't about my knights covering for themselves, it was about them defending each other. It seemed like such a minimal difference in the way they should think about the move, and yet as soon as we talked it out, I saw a marked improvement in how fast they picked up the technique. It seemed obvious in hindsight, but what worked for some Pokémon might not work for others. Everyone was different, and there was no one right way to teach or learn a move.

If the way Scrafty was having them think about Close Combat wasn't working, maybe coming at the move from another angle would be the key to getting over this stumbling block.

"For Protect, you needed to focus on defending each other, not yourselves. Maybe we should try something in a similar vein for Close Combat." My statement got my knights muttering and murmuring.

"Let's think about it a different way," I told them.

"Close Combat is about hitting as hard as you possibly can. For Scrafty, that means going all-out and letting his instincts take over. Maybe that doesn't work for you guys, that just means we need to figure out what does." I could tell my knights were listening. My musings had put them in a similarly introspective mood, so I decided to strike while the iron was hot.

"Hold on a second, guys. Wait right here, and I'll be right back." One hurried trip to my training bag later, and I'd returned with the Hitmonchan-style training pads I used to train with my knights.

"Okay, let's try it like this. Lance, tell Percy to hit this pad with a Rock Smash at– let's say twenty-five power." I held out a hand, and after a few moments of hesitation, the front brass obliged, telling his second to strike the proffered target. For his part, Percy didn't dither for a moment, lashing out almost exactly in time with Lance's order.

"Good," I commended them, "now let's do it again, but this time let's do fifty-percent." Again, my partners obliged, Lance giving the command and Percy thwacking the proffered target. At fifty-percent strength, I had to hold back a wince, and my arm recoiled back before I could force it steady. We hadn't broken out these training pads in a while, and that was mostly because my knights' strength had outstripped mine. Luckily, we weren't training alone out here.

I felt a paw tap my shoulder, and turned to find Scrafty looming over my shoulder, head tilted down towards my seat in the sand. It took a few seconds for me to grasp what he was asking.

"You want to take my place?" I confirmed, to which I received a nod.

"Thanks Scrafty, let me just pass you these." A little bit of shuffling later, and Scrafty was kneeling down in front of Percy instead of me, paws stuck inside the crimson training pads.

"Alright Lance, let's do seventy-five." Lance gave the order, and Percy followed it, walloping the proffered target, to seemingly little effect as Scrafty effortlessly held his hand out and maintained his signature grin.

"And now one-hundred percent!" I said quickly, as soon as the sound of the previous impact stopped echoing around us.

"As hard as he can go!" Just like I'd hoped, my enthusiasm proved infectious, and Lance bellowed an order that had Percy ramming full force into the pad, striking now with his whole body instead of an outstretched shield.

"Again!" I ordered, and the pair obliged.

"And again!" I kept up a blistering tempo, Lance echoing my commands and Percy throwing himself at the pad over and over. At first, nothing much happened, other than the formation's second ramming fruitlessly against Scrafty's padded paw again and again. But I didn't allow him to let up, calling for him to strike over, and over.

Eventually, the pace became too frantic for Percy to keep up alone, but Lance shouted another order, and Kay joined him, interspersing their impacts to keep up a constant, unrelenting assault. After a few more seconds, Tristan joined Lance in shouting commands, and Galad and Bers got in on the action, forcing Scrafty to hold up both pads to defend himself.

Over and over the troops crashed into the stronger Pokémon, and even though I'd stopped giving commands myself, Lance and Tristan continued shouting orders, with increasing force and tempo. And yet, it was never wild, or uncontrolled. Every individual command was met with a charge from a corresponding troop. Each barked order came only when one of my knights was in place to fulfil it. Even as the tempo increased, and the assault came to a fever pitch, the disciplined movements never stopped.

And right as it seemed like the troops had reached the limits of what they could do, I gave one last command, putting just a little bit of syn in my voice, "Lance, Tristan, get in there too! Close Combat!" With a trumpeting battlecry, the two brass joined the fray, taking their place in the formulaic assault, slotting in perfectly to the unrelenting rotation. Scrafty's grin had given way to an expression of steely determination, his teeth grit and his hands flying to block the upcoming assault with the pads.

On and on my knights came, an unending tide of attacks that drove the more experienced Pokémon back, forcing him to stand from his kneeling posture and give ground lest he be bowled over. And with one last bellow of exertion, Percy leapt forwards, rotating his body as he flew so his little legs hit both pads in a devastating drop kick.

A whining hiss, followed by an explosion of fabric and foam marked the end of the attack, as the pads covering Scrafty's paws exploded under the second's assault, scattering detritus all over the beach. My knight stood heaving, the exertion leaving them utterly drained, and Scrafty carefully shook out his limbs, his smiling face twisted up in a wince.

"There," I told them breathlessly. Somehow, I felt as exhausted as they looked, but I had to tell them this, had to make sure they knew.

"Remember that feeling, that tempo, that formation. That's how you use the move. That's your Close Combat." My knights looked up, expressions set, and I knew for sure, they'd never forget it. -"Hydro Pump." Unlike my knights, Mana picked up her newest move in almost no time at all. Juan's journal helped. According to him, the hardest part about using the strongest Water-type move was creating the internal pressure necessary to fire water off at such high velocities.

After I explained that to Mana, she just shut her school's maw closed like a vice, allowing the tension to build up within the azure leviathan's body until her constructed form was swollen almost to bursting. When she loosed, the air cracked from the force of the water displacing it. No one had volunteered as a target for her training. As I watched the attack plow into the ocean and carve a gouge ten feet deep in the water, I decided that it'd probably been for the best.

- It wasn't quite the level of progress we'd made under Drake's tutelage, but other than that, this was the fastest my partners and I had ever progressed. A master's influence was profound, and after a few weeks in the enigmatic Mr. Gima's presence, I was pretty sure he qualified. In between sessions of training and Alyssa's Ferrum battles, we made some light investigations into our foreign teacher.

Unfortunately, the Macross gear didn't have a lot to say about the name 'Gima,' perhaps unsurprisingly since Galar and Unova were so far away from one another. Ferrum's local net was useless as usual, and even a trip to the library turned up little more than a few notable individuals in Ferrum with the same name who seemingly had little relation to the foreign region.

Our current theories posited that he was either a spy, primarily because of his expertise with these 'Zoroark' Pokémon, or that he was an outlaw of some sort, a rogue master (that suspicion stemming mostly from his attitude). Whatever his history, Mr. Gima was a strong trainer. Where a battle without him involved might be sort of competitive between our partners and his Pokémon, when he threw himself into the mix, it was a completely different story.

Any of us his partners could take on any two of ours, providing he was involved, and it wasn't just from the extra oomph he gave his partners by participating. The man understood battling, in a way that reminded me distinctly of Drake. Not in that they approached battles the same way, but in that they shared a cohesive sense of what battling meant to them, and to their partners. He had, as both Donna and my old mentor had put it, an answer.

One that he understood implicity, and that his partners grasped at the same level. And over the weeks we spent training with him and battling his Pokémon, I started to make out what I thought might be the edges of his conception. He was always stacking the odds. Every little advantage, every tiny edge, he grasped and clutched and coveted, moving the chances further and further into his favor. For a man that Alyssa posited might have a gambling problem, Mr.

Gima left remarkably little to chance, once he was taking us seriously. It manifested in the way he'd systematically start each battle, instructing his Pokémon to set up and strengthen themselves. In the way he'd avoid hitting Pikachu with a physical attack whenever possible, or insist on trying to land a status condition before committing to an actual brawl. But just because you knew what he wanted to accomplish didn't make it easy to stop him. No, Mr.

Gima clearly knew his own tendencies, and used his habits as bait. Try to punish his Pokémon for setting up? They'd be ready with a Fake Out or Sucker Punch. Avoid his attacks and prevent the statuses he coveted? Then it was right back to buffing up. No matter what you tried, the Unovan Dark-specialist was always prepared. His Pokémon knew a truly staggering number of different moves, and I was pretty sure it was because he wanted to make sure that no matter what he ran into, he had an answer for it at the ready.

The only time we made any headway against him was when we did something that would catch him off guard, like the time Pikachu first showed off her Brick Break, or when Maushold split up and chained together Echoed Voices. And even then, in just moments he was reevaluating our capabilities and replanning his approach, and the gap would widen once more. Every day, we'd draw just a little bit closer to him, only to see just how much further ahead of us he truly was. It was consistent, tough, exhausting effort.

And it was also completely exhilarating. There was nothing like getting stronger, and with the state of the region, that felt more true now than ever. The only question remaining was: how much longer did we have to grow before everything came crashing down around us? With every passing day, we drew closer to finding out.