Chapter 27: The Tower Part Three

(A/N: So holiday season is almost over at my ecomm job, should be getting back to normal workloads soon. Those 1-7am shifts were killers for my sleep schedule. I understand that there has been some criticism of the chapter lengths and time in between chapters. I think that's legitimate criticism of me and while work does get in the way, I'd like to improve if possible, and to be honest I do my best work when I feel motivated to write something so I will try to find more motivation to be more consistent. Besides that, looks like there's a covid vaccine from Pfizer and it was approved by the FDA (allegedly?) so hopefully things are looking better for at risk groups.)

Platina

For the briefest moment, Lopunny looked concerned but she almost immediately decided to trust me and I was launched by her powerful hind legs.

While I couldn't see myself from a third person POV, I could imagine that I had made a beautiful arc as I flew because I was flying directly into the soft pads beyond row 21.

I braced my hands and legs for the landing and while the pad was surprisingly rougher than I expected (turns out that the gym padding wasn't meant for a human being flying into it from eight meters away).

Still, I landed safely enough and turned around to survey the aftermath of my gambit.

Unsurprisingly… the trainer on Lopunny's course and the overseer were standing there with their mouths wide open.

Lopunny hopped over to me with ease and we heard the ringing of a bell that probably denoted the fact that we cleared the trial.

The overseer clicked a button near their side and walked over to finish line to congratulate both of us.

"I have never seen someone clear the trial in this manner… that was truly an impressive display of the trust and bonds between trainers." The overseer commented with a genuine look of surprise.

Incidentally… what was I supposed to do in this trial? I asked out of curiosity.

"Normally, you're just supposed to coordinate with Lopunny to defeat the final trainer with the trick being that Lopunny has to jump over to row 21's trainer and beat them. After completing the hardest battle, the tiles would deactivate and if you had found a way to test these tiles then you would be able to confirm that it would be safe to walk all the way to the end." The overseer gave a longwinded explanation that gave the impression that they were used to explaining this kind of thing.

"Anyway… congratulations on completing the trial, you can now descend back down to where your team members are waiting. Honestly, I didn't think you would clear the trial this quickly so don't be surprised if the staff downstairs gives you a weird look."

I didn't consider the fact that the trial wasn't as complicated as I had thought and was still feeling a bit overwhelmed by that revelation. Still, there wasn't much I could do but go down and help prepare against the potential Team Neo attack so I returned Lopunny to her ball and started my descent to the base of the Tower of Mastery.

(Going back to the beginning a few hours ago)

Blue

Blasty and I were escorted up the staircase opposite the one Platina was starting to climb.

I saw that Red was still at the bottom discussing something with the trial staff.

I lost sight of him soon after as he walked off with the staff away from our original area.

His trial must have been somewhere on the ground floor or underground…

As the overseer and I ascended the stairs, I could have sworn I heard the faint sound of water running.

All the way up here though? That's odd…

That suspicion began to grow as the sound grew louder and louder until finally we reached the trial room.

There was an imposing door with the mega evolution symbol on it, so there was no doubt that this was the correct room.

I was wondering how the overseer was going to get this door open when he suddenly tapped a card on a cleverly camouflaged panel next to the door.

It scanned his ID card and let us in… I guess even the Tower of Mastery had some high-tech things integrated in it.

(If only Blue knew what Platina had just gone through).

As the large stone doors slowly swung inward, I saw that the source of the water was a large waterfall with a bunch of blinking targets moving around on it.

To top it off, I noticed that at the top of the waterfall, suspiciously out of range of Blasty's cannon range, there was a mega stone and a mega bracelet on the same pedestal.

The overseer traced my line of sight and smiled warmly at me.

As if to read my mind, she said "As you are probably guessing right now, the mega items are out of range of Blastoise's cannons and will drop down from the pedestal into the pool if you complete the challenge. The challenge for Blastoise will be a coordination challenge, you will need to break these targets while Blastoise is blindfolded, the challenge will come in sets and the time that the targets will stick around will decrease as the sets go on. If it takes too long for you to coordinate on hitting the targets, the target will go away and it will count as a miss against you, too many misses and you will fail that set. Too many fails overall will lead to a failure of the challenge as a whole and you'll have to come back again another time."

There was a lot to process with the rules for this challenge… so I tried to summarize it for my own sanity.

So… what you're saying is that we have to break these targets within a certain amount of time or they'll disappear, if we miss too many in a set then we'll have failed that run?

"Yep!" She replied.

And um… could you tell me how many times I'm allowed to fail overall?

"Nope" She said with a smile.

Oooookayyyy then… I guess we'll just try the trial then.

"Sound's like a plan, there'll be 10 sets of targets, the condition for winning the challenge is to break enough targets in set 10. Besides only using a blindfolded Blastoise for this challenge, there are no restrictions on what strategies you use to beat set 10." The overseer finished her instructions and stepped to the side.

A helper came out from a door in the shadows and handed me a ridiculously large blindfold.

Blasty knew what the challenge was about so he agreed to let me tie it on his head.

After the blindfold was tied correctly (I made sure to keep it tight enough so it wouldn't fall off and disqualify our challenge, and loose enough so it wouldn't cause discomfort for Blasty), I asked Blasty if this was okay. He gave a thumbs up and grunted a short "Blas Blas!"

Taking that affirmation, we both got into position before the waterfall (of which I have no idea why they thought to build something this big in the tower).

I observed the targets and noted that they looked like the type of wooden target you'd see at an archery range.

The overseer asked if I was ready and reassured me that it might be hard to coordinate at first but not to worry as it would be hard for anyone to blindly hit a target from 20 meters away.

I held back a smirk and said in my most polite voice, I'm ready to start! Thanks for asking!

Immediately I ordered Blasty to shoot twenty degrees to the right and about 3 meters up from there.

Blasty let out a hydro pump and barely missed the target.

Tch… I wanted to show off a bit more, but that's fine.

Just a little bit more to the left Blasty!

Blasty immediately reacted and ended up easily blasting the target apart.

Another one showed up immediately afterward and was quite a ways off to the left, but on the same height level as the first.

I thought about it for a second, and then an idea came to mind.

(Anything goes right…?)

I took my phone out and opened the compass app. Then I pointed at the area the old target had broken, and then moved it to the new one.

Looks like it's 30 degrees to the left Blasty!

Blasty blasted this target with frightening accuracy, and I could hear a small gasp of surprise from the overseer behind us.

Well I wouldn't blame her, there was no way she would have known that Blasty and I had long practiced aiming at things in the dark from my days of thiev… economic balancing.

I would be wearing night vision goggles and would act as the eyes for Blasty (who was a Wartortle at the time).

We had a lot of practice for a situation like this so unfortunately for the Tower of Mastery, this was going to be a breeze.

The first two targets were all that set 1 had to offer and the overseer informed us that set 2 was beginning.

The targets in set 2 looked similar to the first sets except they had lights that would blink on them.

As we were trying to calibrate the shot, I noticed that the targets were starting to blink faster.

I could safely assume that these were the targets that would go away if we took too long to take them out.

Luckily in set 2, it didn't look like the timers were too harsh and we were able to break them all without too much stress.

Set 3 was essentially the same idea except the timers were even more harsh than before. I let Blasty know that the challenge was getting more difficult in terms of time constraints and he replied with a confident "Blas Blas BLAS!"

I knew I could trust him to keep his cool even under increasing pressure which is why I wanted to give him all the information that I could so I would properly become his eyes.

This paid off as we cleared set 3 with even more precision than before. It looks like the pressure was making Blasty's competitive side come out and this compounded with the benefit of us getting our old night sniping coordination back up to prime form.

I was starting to wonder if they were just going to keep ramping up the intervals because we had yet to miss a single target yet and if it was just going to be this for 10 sets in a row, this would be a fairly painless way to get a mega stone.

Not that I was complaining of course, I was looking to get the mega stone for a huge powerup to my close partner.

At the same time, I really wanted to show off to Red this time and be the first one back in the waiting room.

With that motivating factor in mind, Blasty and I speed ran through set 4 without much trouble.

Set 4 had the most targets so far and the blinking definitely felt like it had ramped up once again.

I was slightly concerned that at rate this was going to reach a difficulty that would be too ridiculous for us to reasonably keep up with.

I wasn't sure what the nature of Red or Platina's trials were, but these trials had to be made to be clearable or else I'm sure there would be some town hall meeting or something regarding this in Shalour City.

That's when Set 5 began, and I saw the targets start to move.

Oh shit, was all I could think to myself.

(A/N: I've already got some stuff down for the next chapter so look forward to it coming sooner than this one took. Nearly at the time we tend to wind down during this job. I recently started taking care of a friend's cat so once again just another thing to be busy with during these times. She has been great to take care of, there's just the small issue that I'm allergic to cats so I've been coping with antihistamines and an air purifier. She likes to sit on my lap as I'm doing work/playing games/typing this chapter so I wanted to share that. Hope y'all enjoyed the chapter and see you in the next one.)