Taking stock of captured spoils turned out to be a slow, tedious job, made worse by the fact that some of it could only be done by Nova himself. His partners couldn't help him with this part at all.
Daily necessities were the last thing Nova needed right now. Before leaving Layered Peaks Gym, he had packed his space backpack nearly full of food and supplies, worried that a shortage might tie his hands once he was deep in the desert.
The trio had kept themselves well stocked with fresh water and food, though most of what they had was little more than emergency rations, nowhere close to the quality of meals Nova prepared for his own team. That difference alone said a lot about the gap between one Trainer and another.
Back when Nova had barely any money to his name, he'd rather live off instant noodles and cheap bread than skimp on Nidorino's meals. Only by keeping his partner properly fed could he support the punishing training regimen that let it keep growing stronger. As for people who robbed travelers while posing as explorers, they clearly weren't nearly as devoted to their Pokemon. Feeding them something, anything, was already more effort than most of these people bothered with. None of them fed their Pokemon on a careful, fixed schedule the way Nova did, weighing out exact portions without ever cutting corners.
It also showed in how the rest of the trio's team had been assembled. Apart from whichever Pokemon had been with them from the very start, the others had clearly been snatched up in the wild through ambush, and it showed in how little trust existed between them and their Trainers. Getting them to follow orders in battle was about the best these Trainers could manage. None of them could do what Nova did, letting his own team organize themselves into fighting units and coordinate without him even being present.
Don't mistake what Corviknight pulled off, leading a coordinated strike that took down the trio's whole force in one pass, for something simple. It demanded total trust between Trainer and Pokemon, the kind that let them carry out a plan without supervision, and it demanded real skill and instinct from the Pokemon themselves. Otherwise they'd have just executed the plan woodenly, unable to adjust if anything went sideways, freezing up the moment something unexpected happened.
For all their experience pulling off robberies out in the field, the trio had never come up against anything like Nova's style of fighting. They'd even assumed that with Nova himself still three kilometers off, there was no reason to be nervous yet.
The gap in raw strength was already wide, and the gap in tactics and execution was wider still. One side had planned for this moment; the other hadn't planned at all. The instant the three of them stepped out onto the hill in plain view to watch Nova, the outcome was already settled.
The two Mightyena, worn down half to death by repeated hits from Vibrava's Bug Buzz, had been dragged out and left on the sand outside the camp. Unable to fight and with no one tending their injuries, they were about as helpless as prey could get. Fortunately, neither Nova nor most of his team had any taste for dog meat. Azir would have liked to take a bite, but with the surrounding area still needing to be watched and a report still owed to Nova, there was no time to indulge.
Waking from unconsciousness didn't mean the two Mightyena had actually recovered. Without something like a Revive to speed things along, they'd need to lie there for at least half a day on their own before they'd even be able to try standing. Half a day was plenty of time for any passing wild Pokemon to make a meal or two out of them.
Mightyena are sharp animals, and watching Nova haul out crate after crate of supplies that had belonged to their former masters, they understood exactly what had happened. In the wild, this would be no different than watching a new alpha kill off the old one; whether the fallen pack's subordinates got to live depended entirely on the new alpha's mood.
So it caught Nova off guard when the two Mightyena, too weak to even stand properly, started wagging their tails at him with everything they had left. Weren't canine Pokemon supposed to be the loyal type? These two didn't look like it.
In truth, Nova had it backward. Canine Pokemon are loyal, but a Trainer still has to earn that loyalty by treating them well. These two Mightyena had been living fine on their own in the wild before they were ambushed and pressed them into service as guards. Losing that fight would have been one thing, but the way they'd been treated afterward was worse than fending for themselves ever was, which was frankly ridiculous.
Out in a place like the Uninhabited Area, a Trainer who went to the lengths Nova did just to keep his team well fed was practically unheard of. Nova only managed it because of his space backpack; otherwise he'd have been stuck like the last time he'd climbed North Heaven Mountain, with everyone hauling supplies on their backs like a line of ants moving house.
The two Mightyena had been eating the same emergency rations as their human captors, three meager meals a day, never full and never well fed. Given that kind of treatment, the fact that they hadn't turned around and bitten at least once was proof enough that loyalty runs deep in canine Pokemon.
Nova had never been able to stand seeing a dog wag its tail at him, and whatever edge remained of his killing intent dulled considerably. He put Growlithe on watch duty over the two Mightyena. They were awake now, and however docile they seemed, keeping an eye on them still seemed wise.
As for the trio's only surviving member, the stout man, nearly two hours had passed since he'd been poisoned. Three sprays of Antidote had only slowed the poison's spread, not stopped it. He drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes seeming asleep, other times jolting suddenly awake, caught in a state where he could neither die outright nor truly hold on. He lay on the sand, gasping for air now and then.
On the edge of death, he kept mumbling fragments about something called a "Secret Realm" and a word that sounded like "Prosperity." It could have easily been nothing more than a dying man's ramblings, but there was a strange thread of logic running through it.
Nova filed the words away without dwelling on them, his attention still on sorting through the recovered goods piece by piece.
Honestly, the haul wasn't much to speak of. The food, water, and medicine were things he didn't need right now anyway, and his backpack didn't have room for much more of it besides. What remained, once the cash, Pokemon-related materials, and miscellaneous items were tallied up, came to just under two hundred thousand.
Half a year ago, that sum would have thrilled him. These days, with steady savings, a steady income, and a settled position as an official staff member at Layered Peaks Gym, two hundred thousand felt almost unremarkable.
People really did change.
What struck him as most ironic was finding a Moon Stone tucked among the Pokemon items, the very thing he'd once wished for so badly half a year back. He checked it with the scanner built into his Pokemon phone. The stone's inner energy read as middling, decent enough to be usable, though nothing special.
It hardly mattered now. Nidoking had long since pushed past the plateau that used to hold its growth in check, and it was closing in on the peak of its own potential without any help from a stone like this. What had once been a treasure he'd have given anything for was now just another thing to sell off for cash. Life really did have a way of playing these little jokes.