Chapter 28: The Tower Part Four

(A/N: Back at it again with another chapter. I probably have another week or two before I can take the holidays off, so I'm very much looking forward to that. Not much has happened since the last chapter besides it being Ayame Nakiri's birthday as of the time of writing this chap. My favorite hololive vtuber aside, I wanted to clarify that the FDA had approved the vaccine for emergency use by high risk groups, still good news though.)

Blue

Hitting a moving target while blindfolded eh…

I see what Korrina meant when she told Red that we were getting the highest difficulty challenge possible.

I told Blasty to keep calm and let him know that the targets were moving ones now.

He grunted in a slightly uncomfortable manner but righted himself immediately, probably so he could inspire confidence in me too.

How sweet of him… I went over and gave him a reassuring pat on the back of his shell and said, "Don't worry we'll figure out something for this, for now let's keep doing what we were doing before."

Blasty responded positively to the idea and we resumed our trial challenge.

I tried to pinpoint where to shoot like before and Blasty reacted almost immediately which allowed us to hit the targets, albeit barely at times.

I was a bit slow on the 5th target and Blasty ended up missing that one, which resulted in an annoying beeping sound coming from a red alarm light at the top of the waterfall next to the keystones.

What an obnoxious sound… I felt strongly motivated to not have to hear that sound again as much as possible.

We cleared the fifth trial without much further struggle and I let Blasty know that I had messed up on one of the targets which is why he didn't hear the, now familiar, sound of a wooden target breaking.

I wanted to keep his spirits up since he was the one doing the heavy lifting here. Having to react to relative coordinates on a dime while losing one of your key senses was no small feat.

Luckily, Blasty replied with the same level of confidence that I had come to expect from my old partner.

The sixth trial went much like the fifth trial except that this time I had come up with a strategy that was borne out of necessity due to the speed of the targets starting to rise between trials.

My great strategy was to preemptively give the location that the current target looked like it would arrive at, and then this would account for the lag between Blasty's reaction time.

I informed him of my great plan and he gave me a mysteriously approving grunt.

Hm… that was an oddly halfhearted reply, I wonder why he did that?

After thinking about it for a few moments, I blushed a bit and realized, okay so maybe it wasn't the most complex strategy in the world. But it was effective! And that's what counts, right?

Meh, this wasn't the time for embarrassment, the seventh trial started and I was glad that I had come up with my … average strategy.

The speed had ramped up the point that the old strategy of just shooting at where it was currently was not going to cut it.

Even though there was only one target, the first few shots from Blasty's water cannon were nearly misses due to how fast the targets were moving.

I'd describe the speed of the targets as similar to how fast a Squirtle walks on land.

We cleared trial seven and the good news was that I had gotten Blasty's average delay down to a good rhythm and we were perfectly hitting the targets.

The bad news was that I wasn't sure if our strategy would hold up if the targets started moving too quickly, at least at 100% accuracy (Since I still had no clue what the number of fails were allowed I figured we gotta play this as safe as possible. Although I assume that the margin for error wouldn't be that brutal, I also wanted to show my good side to Red).

When trial eight started, I realized why the saying "Wishing on a Mankey's paw" was a thing as I got my wish of the target not moving faster.

The issue was that the term "target" would better be described as "targets" in trial eight.

I should have seen this coming, Blasty was alternating between different cannons depending on what side the targets would appear on.

So of course, it was natural that a test about the bonds between a trainer and their Blastoise would involve fully pushing the capabilities of Blastoise.

Hmm… so they thought of everything huh? Well no matter, we can still do this, I just need to plan beforehand and set two points for Blasty to shoot at, I know he can do this.

I started doing a lot more waiting before giving the coordinates for shots.

This was because I wanted to carefully plan for the sake of accuracy, and not because I was being bad at using the compass for two different locations at once, I swear.

We were able to clear the 8th challenge after a fair bit of time, there was only one miss because I got my degrees on the compass mixed up and made me look silly (and Blasty by association) as he fired basically at the direction as his first shot.

While we did miss once, it nearly brought a tear to my eye that Blasty trusted me enough to shoot the same spot twice just because I told him too.

I noticed that the first target that we broke had spawned back after we had missed the second target, so it would seem that the pair of targets had to be broken within a certain time of each other to be counted as passing.

Trial nine had more bizarre paths for the targets to take, I was able to get this one done quicker because I started telling Blasty the first coordinate immediately after I calculated it so he could prepare properly, and then gave him the second one when I finished that one. This meant we were more efficiently running through the targets despite their weird pathing, so we were able to complete this trial in less time than the first one.

Man, I really am quite smart, I'm pretty sure I'm getting to the level of ideas that Platina comes up with. Probably.

I can't imagine she's going through anything more convoluted than shooting two moving targets while blindfolded.

The 10th trial began differently than any of the other ones. While the first two targets on the left and right side appeared like normal… the waterfall that was behind them started rumbling as the trial began.

The wall of water opened straight down the middle and a bigger target emerged in the middle.

Normally, one would think that a bigger target (even if it's a third one) would be good news, however this target wasn't like the other ones.

More specifically, it wasn't made of wood. I couldn't tell what weird material this one was made of, but my instincts told me that it wasn't likely to be easier to break than the wooden ones.

The other glaring issue was… Blastoise only had two cannons, and there were three targets.

What a headache…

I told Blasty we were dealing with three targets now and he sadly pointed to his cannons.

"Yes, I know you only have two of them too… I'm trying to think of a way around that right now." I tried to reassure him that I was certainly on the same page.

He replied with another mild "Blas" grunt and I remembered that I was going to have to sit him down later and teach him about making me look good in public.

For starters, I figured we would test out the middle target, I had Blasty shoot at it and… as expected, it didn't break like the other ones.

Looks like a standard hydro pump wasn't enough… maybe it was a question of pressure?

I didn't think we would have to use this but I had Blasty try a Hydro Cannon on it instead.

To my surprise, it seemed to be pushed back but it didn't break from the Hydro Cannon either.

What the heck is this thing made out of to be able to survive an ultimate attack? And more importantly, how am I supposed to break this thing?

So we had racked up two more fails in this trial, if I included the two from the previous nine trials, we were at a total of four fails…

I wasn't sure if we should risk it, but after some thought, I decided that even if we had to restart this trial, we knew the strategies from our first attempt so it wouldn't be too bad to run it back to trial ten.

With that in mind, I had Blasty hit the two regular wooden targets on the left and right side so we could at least focus on the middle one.

Blasty was able to dispose of them without much trouble, but to my horror, they came back after a few seconds.

Wait, are you serious…

We had to break all THREE of them in relative succession?

Holy hell, this was going to be quite the challenge.

I told Blasty that the two targets had respawned and he gave a slightly exasperated look when I also mentioned that we probably had to break all three targets within a certain amount of time or else it wouldn't succeed.

He once again pointed at the fact that he only had two cannons and I sweatdropped at this.

I know I know… but I'm not sure what else we can do. We need something powerful enough to beat that middle target, and you're not growing a third cannon anytime soon.

Blasty and I both sat down for a while and started thinking.

After what seemed like forever, Blasty seemed to have an idea.

He pointed upward to the general direction of the mega stone and keystone and then pointed to his cannons.

I smiled gingerly and replied, I thought of that too, but the overseer let us know that the megastone and keystone were purposely put just out of the range of Blastoise's attacks.

I thought that would be the end of that discussion but Blasty shook his head again and then he started angling his face downward.

I wasn't sure why he was aiming his face towards the ground, was he giving up?

Well there's no way that would be the case, Blasty wouldn't ever give up without a fight…

Then I noticed his cannons were pointing towards the ground and I realized I had been a total idiot for the first time in my life (definitely).

"Heh, they probably didn't know we had "that" trick in our book"

Blasty gave an equally cheeky smile and I started planning for the height I wanted to make coordinates for.

The overseer, who had been silently observing up 'til now looked over curiously at us and wasn't sure if we were giving up or getting desperate.

They asked if we were alright, and I gave a sly grin while saying "Oh just you wait, we're more than fine, this trial is in the bag."

The overseer gave a doubtful look but decided to let us go on with our weird plan.

So the thing is, our plan hinged off one very simple premise, this trial was designed for a normal Blastoise. The thing is, Blasty was no normal Blastoise.

I gave the count down for Blasty to start the trial attempt and he proceeded to do what basically amounted to a handstand of sorts.

Like he had done on the S.S. Anne when we were in the air, and on countless other occasions, he began using his cannons… to fly.

(A/N: I bet a lot of y'all know where this is going so I'm gonna leave it at this point and continue it with the end of Blue's arc and then straight into Red's arc. I think that I want to get right back into the main action while still making the trials an important thing as the mega stones are going to be very powerful additions to the rosters and story going forward. When I get my break I should be back to writing at a regular pace so I hope y'all look forward to when those regularly paced chapters come back (hoping they do). Have a good one and see you in the next one!)