After the battle with Fay, the remaining four challenge matches left Nova feeling considerably less engaged.
The other four trainers wanted good battles — that much was clear — but none of them were battle-hungry the way Fay was. They weren't here to test themselves against impossible odds; they were here for the badge, and they approached it sensibly.
Nova battled each of them in turn using the Gym's Pokémon. He lost more than he won, if he was being honest with himself. But that was how Gym matches worked. Win or lose didn't matter for the defending side — what mattered was that the Gym Leader, or whoever was standing in, saw every challenge through to the end regardless of the matchup.
It wasn't without value for Nova, though. Fighting from a type disadvantage, against trainers who had come specifically prepared for it, put real pressure on his ability to read the field and adapt. That kind of pressure had been his classroom once before.
When Nova had first arrived — carrying knowledge from games and manga but no real experience in actual Pokémon battles — his skills had grown quickly over that year and a half at the Withered Gym. Losing battle after battle from behind had taught him more than winning ever could have. When you spend long enough fighting uphill, level ground starts to feel like a gift.
As expected, anyone willing to make the trip out to an obscure Gym like the Withered Gym for a badge had already collected more than half the Alliance's Gym Badges. Every one of the five challengers was clearly capable of entering the Norlandia Conference — so regardless of how their matches had gone, they all received their badges.
With that, the main business of the Gym's open day was done.
What Nova hadn't expected was that the quieter matches after Fay's battle had come with a small surprise.
His Sprigatito had been perched on his shoulder the entire time, watching every match with wide, attentive eyes. From the high-level duel with Fay early on, to the more uneven exchanges that followed, Sprigatito had watched everything with complete focus — sitting so still at times that the challengers had apparently mistaken it for a decorative patch on Nova's jacket.
When the battles wrapped up, Nova lifted the small Pokémon off his shoulder to check on it.
It had gained two levels.
Just from watching.
Nova stared at it for a moment. Sprigatito's battle sense was genuinely remarkable — absorbing experience from observation alone, leveling up without ever setting foot on the field. At this rate, it might catch up to the Growlithe it had been quietly competing with for Nova's attention sooner than expected.
He made his way to the small lounge at the back of the arena — a room he knew well — and pulled a can of iced cola from the mini-fridge. He cracked it open and took a long drink before glancing at the label.
The production date was from over a year ago. He had bought it himself, during his part-time days at the Gym. It had been sitting in that fridge, untouched, for an entire year.
Nova looked at the can.
So this is where I am now. Drinking year-old cola in an abandoned Gym.
Clearly, in the time since he had left, Mort had paid almost no attention to the place.
Near the arena, two small figures were hauling a portable Pokémon recovery device across the floor, making slow, determined progress.
They stood about a meter tall and had the rough, unfinished look of something shaped from clay and stone — mismatched eyes, bodies assembled from fragments of rock, and a flat stone plate bound across the front of each one, marked at the centre with a spiral whose meaning had been lost to time.
Golett. Ground- and Ghost-type Pokémon, said to be magical constructs made by an ancient civilisation to assist people with everyday tasks. Within the Norlandia Alliance, Golett were sometimes used as working Pokémon, taking on labour that required steady, reliable effort.
The Withered Gym's Gym Leader was, as a rule, unreliable. He disappeared into the desert for stretches of ten days to half a month at a time without much notice. Since Nova had left, the day-to-day upkeep of the Gym had fallen entirely to these two. They loaded the Gym's Pokémon into Poké Balls and placed them in the dispenser rack before each open day, and once the battles were over they brought out the recovery device to treat any Pokémon that had taken damage.
The device was called portable. It was not particularly portable. It required two Golett to move it, and it was completely useless outside. The name made sense only when compared to a full-function Pokémon recovery machine — the kind used at Pokémon Centers, which took up over thirty square metres and would need something like two Nidokings to shift.
A standard Gym, even at Class 3, was supposed to keep at least one full-function machine running. The portable kind was expensive to operate, limited in what it could do, and still technically counted as a recovery device only because the alternative was nothing at all.
Each use consumed a Revive — costly on its own — and the device's only real function was amplifying that Revive to the level of a Max Revive, restoring a Pokémon to full health. At over 1,500 League Coins per use in materials alone, it was not a practical long-term solution.
Only someone like Mort Cotterill — unwilling to run the Gym properly, unwilling to hire a proper Pokémon Nurse, but apparently not short of money — would rely on something like this. Following the logic of at least don't waste what's already been paid for, Nova handed Golett Nidoking's Poké Ball for treatment, then collected the already-treated Poké Balls and carried them out to the release area.
The release area was a wide stretch of wasteland behind the Gym. No trees. No shade. Just flat, dry, ochre-coloured earth as far as it went, with an automated conveyor running along one side that dispensed food appropriate for Ground- and Rock-types on a regular schedule — essentially a very large, very basic automatic feeder.
This was where the Gym's Pokémon lived.
Most Rock- and Ground-types were not particularly demanding about their environment, which was fortunate. If Mort had tried keeping anything else out here, the Pokémon League would have had grounds for a neglect complaint before the week was out.
The one thing the release area had going for it was that it was genuinely open. The boundary was a low row of iron rails — no proper fencing, nothing that would stop a determined Pokémon or, for that matter, an average adult with any athletic ability at all.
Mort's position on this was that a Pokémon that wanted to leave would leave, and that was fine. The Pokémon that had stayed — Golem, Boldore, others like them — were clearly not interested in going anywhere. They waited for the conveyor to deliver ore, ate it, and went back to doing nothing.
Nova looked out at them for a moment.
It was, in its own way, a kind of mutual understanding. The Pokémon that couldn't stand this environment had left long ago. The ones that remained had found something that suited them — food every day, one battle a month, and very little else asked of them.
The Gym was, without question, completely rotten. But the Pokémon in it seemed perfectly content.
Nova wasn't sure whether that was reassuring or just sad.