Desert. Nightfall. Moonlight spilling over the dunes.
Two great beasts faced each other, separated only by a thin curtain of sand and dust stirred gently by the night breeze.
It should have been a scene of quiet grandeur. Naturally, someone had to ruin the mood.
Nova sat cross-legged on the hood of the supply vehicle, leaning back against Meowscarada's soft, faintly fragrant fur, using his partner as a backrest while he rambled on at Nidoking without pause.
"I'm warning you, Arno, this is the wild. There's no barrier keeping the moves off you out here like there is in a proper stadium. You cannot let anything land on this side of the field. If you dodge and it hits me instead, guess who's going to be dealing with the consequences?"
Even while scolding Nidoking, Nova kept his personal bodyguard seated right next to him just in case.
Lapras waited off to the side in front of the vehicle, absorbed in the very important task of trying to bite her own ear.
If not for Nova's deep suspicion of how Lapras's mind actually worked, he might have simply had her use Protect over him and called it a day. Whatever Nidoking failed to dodge, Lapras could have blocked outright.
But this was Aqua. Nova could easily picture her throwing up the shield at some random moment for no reason, then, thanks to how much less likely Protect is to succeed right after a first use, failing to raise it on the one occasion it actually mattered.
That would leave him in serious trouble.
So Marshtomp had also been posted in front of the car, since he knew Protect as well.
Finally, Rotom drifted free of the phone entirely, taking its small floating ghost-light form and circling happily around Nova and Meowscarada. It was the last line of defense.
For someone this strong, Nova was remarkably paranoid.
Still, from where Nova sat, a little extra caution never hurt. He had no interest in getting caught in the middle of some wide-area attack during a wild battle and coming out of it covered in bruises. Especially not against a Rock-type. If one of those attacks actually connected with a person instead of a Pokémon, there probably wouldn't be much left to bruise.
Nidoking, for his part, had grown thoroughly sick of Nova's running commentary. His heavy tail swept back and forth with the irritation of a cat whose patience had run out, and the moment the battle opened, he threw himself straight into the attack.
As Nidoking climbed in level, Nova kept building on his offensive range, and with money no longer an issue, he had been buying up Technical Machines freely. Between that and his species' naturally wide movepool, Nidoking now commanded more than thirty five moves, enough to make him a heavy tank with an answer for almost anything.
Against a Ground and Rock-type like Rhydon, Water was the obvious tool for the job.
Nidoking opened with Surf, but Rhydon already remembered from their last meeting that he had reliable Water-type attacks, and had come prepared for exactly this. It threw up Stone Edge as a barrier, catching the wave before it could reach him.
Out here in the desert, Water-type moves lost a good deal of their force to the dry sand before they ever landed, which made it harder for something as overwhelming as Surf to hit at full strength. The way the sand slowed and scattered the water also made it that much easier to stop with a move that could reshape the ground itself.
It showed just how much experience a wild Pokémon could pick up, growing up untamed all the way to level 68. Rhydon's instincts and battle sense were genuinely impressive.
But that was as far as it went.
Nova shook his head. Wild Pokémon fought with a rawer kind of ferocity, sure, but compared to Pokémon raised alongside a Trainer, they carried two disadvantages that no amount of savagery could make up for.
The first was moves.
Both belonged to old, sturdy species with naturally broad movepools, but Nova had spent a fortune keeping Nidoking stocked with Technical Machines, so there was almost nothing his partner couldn't learn.
Rhydon had grown up with no access to anything like that. Whatever it knew now, at level 68, came only from leveling up naturally or from moves passed down within its line, wide for a wild Pokémon, but nowhere near what Technical Machines could offer.
The second disadvantage was tactics.
No matter how sharp a Pokémon's instincts were, or how high its battle intelligence climbed, it still couldn't out think a human mind behind the scenes.
Take this fight, for instance. Rhydon had no idea that the Water-type special attack it had been so carefully guarding against was never the real plan. It was only ever a decoy.
The instant the first attacks collided, Nidoking followed up with the Ice-type move Blizzard, while Rhydon answered with another Stone Edge.
Blizzard hits like a truck, but its accuracy is famously unreliable, and without something to back it up, it rarely does much damage on its own. Even so, Nidoking pushed through four separate Stone Edges just to land that one attack, all for the sake of a longer-term advantage.
The sand that Surf had already soaked was heavy with moisture, soft enough to squelch underfoot. Once Blizzard swept across it, that same ground froze solid, a jagged mix of ice and sand that turned the whole area cold and treacherous underfoot.
Rhydon realized, almost too late, that the only patch of solid footing left was the small space walled in by its own Stone Edge.
Sensing the trap, Rhydon immediately used Hammer Arm to smash a path through its own barrier, aiming to close the distance for Close Combat. But the frozen, slippery ground turned what should have been a powerful charge into an unsteady stumble.
It took real effort just to keep its footing, and that brief hesitation, one or two lost steps, was all the opening Nidoking needed.
Surf came again.
Rhydon had no option but to throw up another Stone Edge to block it, and right on its heels came a blast of Ice Beam, locking the frozen, sandy ground down harder than ever.
From the outside, it might have looked like Rhydon had the upper hand, four Stone Edges landed, ground gained one barrier at a time in a grinding, defensive push toward Nidoking. In truth, Rhydon found the whole exchange deeply frustrating.
It had settled into something close to a routine: advance a step, throw up Stone Edge, brace for the Surf that always seemed to follow.
Except this time, Nidoking didn't use Surf at all. He used Toxic.
A thread of dark purple poison lashed out from the tip of Nidoking's horn. Boxed in by its own wall of stone with almost no room to maneuver, Rhydon had nowhere left to go.
The venom struck it squarely across the head and body. A thin haze rose off its hardened rock hide with a sharp hiss as the poison began eating into the surface, seeping steadily deeper beneath the skin.
Somewhere underneath the burn of it, one thought rose clear in Rhydon's mind: were humans always this underhanded when they fought?