Day 38 since returning to the Orange Archipelago. Light rain.
A steady drizzle fell over the mountains again that morning, carrying the damp smell of soil through every crack in the lakeside cabin.
Reiji woke slowly and reached toward the pillow out of habit. His hand found Umbreon curled beside him, warm and soft beneath his fingers, and only then did he grope around for his old keypad phone.
After having used smartphones in his previous life, there was something almost liberating about owning a phone this primitive. There was nothing on it worth lying awake in bed scrolling through.
He unlocked the screen and found a message from Tai.
The last traces of sleep vanished as he read it.
A grin spread across his face.
"Tai, you beautiful bastard. I've been wondering how to solve this for ages, and you went and did it for me."
Shingo.
Of all the people Tai could have stumbled across during Team Rocket's recruitment operation, he had somehow found the exact person Reiji had been trying to pull into Spider. Better yet, after the mess the previous night, Tai now had the perfect excuse to bring Shingo directly to the others.
That changed Reiji's plans considerably.
He set the phone aside, changed into loose clothes and dark blue shorts, then padded downstairs barefoot. A few minutes later he was sitting beneath the eaves in his wooden rocking chair, watching the rain drift across the lake while thinking through what needed to happen next.
Umbreon soon appeared beside him and rubbed its fluffy head against his arm.
Reiji looked down at it and realized what he had forgotten.
"Right, breakfast. Give me a minute."
He headed into the kitchen and started preparing food for both himself and the Pokémon. While everything cooked, he picked up his phone again and sent messages to Naoki, Shun, Itsuki, and Tai.
We've got an activity. Mandarin Island North. Tomorrow night.
After thinking about it, he added another message.
Might as well make it a full Spider gathering.
Naoki could notify the others.
Itsuki was the only awkward one. He was still all the way over on Cinnabar Island in Kanto, and even with a fast Flying-type, reaching the Orange Archipelago without stopping would take roughly a day and a half of hard travel.
Reiji had originally suggested that he simply join remotely but he refused.
Apparently, attendance at an unofficial criminal-organization team-building exercise was important enough to justify flying across half the region.
Reiji shook his head, amused despite himself.
If everything went well, this gathering could add three serious Trainers to Spider at once: Shun, Itsuki, and Shingo. All three had the strength and potential to become major pieces of the organization later.
That alone made the trip worthwhile.
After breakfast, Reiji returned to his rocking chair and watched the rain for a while longer. He had spent most of yesterday doing the same thing, though, and staring at wet grass eventually lost its charm.
Then he spotted Charizard.
An idea occurred to him.
Charizard landed beside the porch, and Reiji promptly began arranging skewers over the flame on its tail.
The Pokémon gave him an offended look right up until Reiji tossed over a generous pile of Pokéblocks. After that, Charizard seemed perfectly content with its new occupation as an extremely overqualified barbecue grill.
Reiji warmed a metal flask of liquor beside the fire as well. Sitting under the roof with hot food, warm alcohol, and rain falling beyond the porch was a pretty good way to spend a morning.
The only thing missing was Cissy.
Unfortunately, with rain covering most of Mikan Island, there was little reason for her to make the trip to the cabin. They settled for talking over the phone instead, which mostly consisted of Cissy complaining about her father.
"He's already planning training for us," she groaned. "You should see the schedule. He's insane."
Reiji laughed.
Her father had barely returned and was already preparing to put both siblings through another round of hellish training. Apparently, Senta waking up had restored the household to normal faster than expected.
"When the rain stops, you're taking me somewhere," Cissy added. "I need a break."
"We'll see."
Reiji would have liked to take her somewhere too, but the tournament had only just ended and the Orange Archipelago was still unsettled. Until he understood what Team Rocket and the League were doing next, wandering around with Cissy beside him felt needlessly risky.
They talked for a while longer before ending the call.
By then, several Pokémon had begun their own training.
Lucario looked much better than it had yesterday. One proper session of deep meditation had finally allowed it to get real sleep, and the dark circles beneath its eyes had faded considerably.
After breakfast, it had returned to the porch and settled into meditation again. Its breathing remained slow and even despite the rain, while the enormous mental power inherited from Medicham gradually became something it could live with rather than something constantly battering against its Aura.
The solution had come to Reiji because of something he remembered from his previous life.
Korrina's Lucario had once lost control after Mega Evolution caused its strength to jump too quickly. Its Aura became unstable because it had suddenly gained power its mind and body were not ready to handle.
Reiji's Lucario was dealing with a different source of power, but the underlying problem felt similar. Medicham had left it with far more mental strength and Aura than it knew how to process, and simply trying to suppress that excess had made everything worse.
Meditation gave it another option.
Instead of fighting the power, Lucario could slowly organize it, get used to it, and eventually make it part of its normal state. If it kept progressing this way, the inheritance that had been ruining its sleep might ultimately become the thing that pushed it into Elite Four tier.
Lucario was not meditating alone.
Poliwrath, Slowking, Ninetales, and Starmie had all joined in. Slowking looked completely at home, while Ninetales sat quietly with its tails gathered around itself. Starmie floated nearby, its central gem pulsing gently as it maintained concentration.
Poliwrath still had one injured arm immobilized, which made meditation a useful way to train without slowing its recovery.
Magnezone hovered off to one side, quietly working on its own control exercises. Both it and Starmie played important roles in maintaining the gravity fields Reiji used for team training, so their control and endurance were just as important as raw offensive power.
Toxicroak remained in its usual corner, steadily refining the poison inside its mutated throat sac.
Butterfree, meanwhile, was making an impressive effort to avoid doing anything productive whatsoever.
It fluttered around the cabin, sampled honey whenever it thought Reiji was not watching, then drifted off again with absolutely no interest in joining the others.
Reiji had long since accepted that convincing Butterfree to train voluntarily was harder than most battles.
Golurk was another matter.
Yesterday, Reiji had spent quite a while wondering why the giant Pokémon seemed to spend so much time standing motionless and staring into space. When he finally investigated, he discovered that Golurk had not been daydreaming at all.
It had been eating.
Or, more accurately, digesting.
Golurk had been born with an enormous reserve of energy sealed inside its body, and even now it had not finished processing everything stored there. What looked like hours of blank staring was actually its body slowly absorbing that reserve.
The discovery had been a relief.
Reiji had poured a ridiculous amount of resources into Golurk and had started wondering whether much of it had gone to waste. Instead, the Pokémon was still working through the energy it already possessed.
That probably explained why it had grown to more than four meters tall.
Reiji was curious to see what would happen once the reserve was finally exhausted. Golurk might shrink closer to its normal size, which he would actually prefer; even at a little over two meters it would still be huge, but four meters made it an unnecessarily easy target in battle.
More importantly, the amount of energy stored inside it was enormous. Considering the resources involved, there was every chance that fully digesting them might carry Golurk all the way into Elite Four tier.
Reiji was looking forward to finding out.
His thoughts drifted toward another Pokémon that had not been around lately.
"I wonder where Zapdos ended up."
The Legendary had vanished on another long flight, taking advantage of its freedom after spending so much of its life asleep. Reiji was not especially worried about its safety; a quasi–Elite Four-tier Zapdos could handle most trouble it stumbled across.
The problem was that Zapdos had all the restraint of a child discovering the outside world for the first time.
Before leaving, it had practically bounced with excitement while Slowking translated.
I slept for so long that I barely saw anything. This time I'm flying everywhere!
Reiji had decided there was no point trying to stop it.
Dragonair presented a completely different problem.
The shy little Dragon-type had finally stopped hiding from everyone, but it had compensated by becoming almost absurdly attached to Reiji. Whenever possible, it wrapped itself around him and slept there.
That included times when Reiji would have preferred privacy.
Bathroom included.
He had gained a Dragonair and somehow lost the ability to go anywhere alone.
After resting properly the previous day, Reiji had enough energy to do something more productive than complain about clingy Pokémon. He settled deeper into the rocking chair, opened a small leather notebook, and began organizing the data he had collected on Elite Four-tier breakthroughs.
So far, he had three useful examples.
The first was Gengar.
Gengar had absorbed energy from a fragment of the Spooky Plate and completed its breakthrough in roughly five days.
The second was Electivire.
It had used Elite Four-tier Electric energy originating from Zapdos and Raikou. Reiji knew it had successfully broken through, but he did not know exactly how long the process itself had taken.
The third was Poliwrath.
Poliwrath had absorbed roughly one-tenth of that ancient Never-Melt Ice, and its breakthrough had taken around three months.
Three examples were nowhere near enough to establish a real rule, but there was already an obvious pattern worth testing: the quality of the energy being absorbed seemed to have a major effect on how quickly a Pokémon could cross the threshold.
Reiji tapped his pen against the notebook and began building a rough classification system.
At the very top were Arceus's eighteen Plates.
Those were widely regarded as some of the highest-grade type-related artifacts in existence, so for the sake of his notes, Reiji labeled Plate-level power Tier One energy.
"Everyone knows Arceus is at the top..." he muttered, then paused. "Actually, never mind. Ash's Pikachu would probably object."
He cleared his throat and returned to the extremely serious science taking place in his notebook.
Below the Plates came the energy of powerful Legendary Pokémon such as Zapdos and Raikou. Neither of the two whose energy Electivire had absorbed had reached Champion tier, so Reiji classified their Elite Four-tier output as Tier Two energy.
Then came conventional high-grade type resources.
Poliwrath's ancient Never-Melt Ice was powerful enough to help force an Elite Four-tier breakthrough and seemed comparable to a Champion-tier Ice resource. Reiji therefore placed that kind of energy into Tier Three.
That gave him three reference points.
Tier One: energy on the level of a Plate fragment. Gengar had taken around five days.
Tier Two: Elite Four-tier energy from a Legendary Pokémon. Electivire's exact breakthrough time was unknown, which annoyed Reiji now that he realized how useful Team Rocket's experimental records would have been.
Tier Three: conventional Champion-tier type energy. With roughly one-tenth of the Never-Melt Ice, Poliwrath had needed around three months.
Once he arranged the information that way, another pattern became obvious.
Tier One did not really need lower subdivisions for his purposes. Unless Plate energy had been deliberately diluted, anything in that category was already operating far beyond the resources Reiji normally had access to.
Tier Two could be divided into Champion-tier and Elite Four-tier Legendary energy.
Tier Three had even more variation: Champion-tier resources, Elite Four-tier resources, and ordinary type energy below Elite Four tier, including things like Gems and other type-enhancing materials.
Reiji wrote the hierarchy down carefully.
Assuming a Pokémon's potential was not the limiting factor, the time required to reach Elite Four tier seemed closely tied to the grade of energy available for the breakthrough. Gengar and Poliwrath made that much clear even with such a tiny sample size.
The frustrating part was what the comparison implied.
Even Poliwrath had required roughly three months while using Tier Three energy at the Champion level.
Reiji could not reliably obtain resources that good.
Most of what he could supply was one step lower: Tier Three, Elite Four-tier material.
That was exactly what Weezing, Scizor, and Forretress were currently using. Weezing had Gengar's Elite Four-tier toxins, while Scizor and Forretress were absorbing Steel-type materials left behind by an Elite Four-tier Steelix.
All three were working with breakthrough resources one grade below what Poliwrath had used.
Reiji stared at the numbers he had written and slowly tapped the end of his pen against the page.
If Poliwrath had needed three months with better material, then how long were these three going to take?
That was the number he needed to work out next.
[End of chapter]
[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]
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