Chapter 30: The Tower Part Six

(A/N: Already two weeks into the new year and MLK day is around the corner. Stay safe out there for those in the states, hoping that we have a stable week leading up to the inauguration. Otherwise, don't have much to comment on besides looking forward to TFT set 4.5 on the 21st and LCS starting up again. Enjoy the chapter!)

Red

The next trio sent out a Crobat, Swoobat, and Noivern.

Hmm there seems to be a theme here with the pokemon choices but I guess they coordinate this stuff ahead of time.

I'm not sure if they thought that the quadruple and double resistances to grass type was supposed to give them an edge or something but I wasn't concerned for a moment.

My faith was rewarded almost instantly as Saur just nonchalantly repeated his previous strategy of raining rocks down upon the enemies and with the force of a titan flinging rocks, the opponents were summarily defeated.

The other three trainers oddly didn't back out immediately.

They started whispering amongst each other and then with a salty look on their faces they vacated the area.

I guess they weren't expecting to be humiliated when the advantage was a 3 vs. 1.

The ease of the challenge made me suspect that they must have toned down the caliber of the opponents to make the 3 vs 1 nature of the fight more reasonable.

Still, I was a little surprised that this was what they considered the "hardest difficulty" that the Tower of Mastery had to offer.

Couldn't complain too much though, the goal was clearly to gain the mega stones and then confront Team Neo.

The next group of hapless challengers had a Mightyena, Sharpedo (never really understood how this pokemon could survive out of water but they must have some special adaptation for land fights), and Crawdaunt.

Seems like the theme for this group was dark type pokemon.

I found it odd that they weren't even working off the premise of pokemon with type advantages against Saur anymore.

The battle began and originally I was going to have Saur just handle them on his own but surprisingly there was some resistance from the opponents.

Compared to before, the dark themed trio was actually fairly competitive with Saur and at times during the bout I had to intervene with some advice like "wait" and "now" for the timing of moves.

The power level and coordination of the opponents seemed a lot tighter than the previous ones.

Still, despite their best efforts, the trio was summarily defeated by Saur's superior power with some assistance from me.

Guess we couldn't just treat theses guys like a joke anymore.

As I was actively thinking that, the overseer alerted me that the challenge difficulty would increase again.

Well… a part of me was surprised that they would increase the difficulty even more… but at the same time this was supposed to be the hardest challenge that the tower had so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.

Four vs. one shouldn't be too bad if the previous challenge was any indication.

Unfortunately for me, the tower seemed to have different plans.

The overseer announced that the next challenge would be ten vs. one … wait ten?

I was taken aback.

The largest format I had ever heard of in my travels was triple battles, I'm fairly sure that even horde battles in Kalos consisted of five pokemon at once…

Well, I guess the Tower of Mastery really wasn't fooling around when they said that this was the hardest version of their challenge that they could offer.

Suddenly, the overseer behind me caught my attention with a boisterous voice.

"Alright the façade is over, I can't take this anymore. You're going down brat!"

Well… that's certainly an odd thing for an overseer to say…

Of course, that was not what I was thinking at this point.

The other ten trainers filed into the arena and they were all wearing the familiar uniforms of Team Neo.

Completely uninvited, the "overseer" began to monologue "the original plan was to wear you down through waves of our members and then defeat you when you were weakened. But after the first few rounds of the trial, it wasn't looking like this was going anywhere and we don't know when the tower's people will figure out that we completely infiltrated their basement trial arena. With that in mind, we had the remaining ten Team Neo Elites come out early so we can squash you now."

I assume that the Team Neo grunt/overseer thought that they had the definitive advantage here because there wasn't really any reason to explain their whole plan to me.

I glanced around at the ten trainers who were forming a semi-circle on the other side of the arena.

So they… had ten tough looking Team Neo Elites and then an overseer trainer with an unknown power level as well flanking me while it was just me and Saur here.

Saur and I briefly made eye contact and it seemed like we were on the same page with our idea on how to deal with this dilemma. Despite the Team Neo Overseer's intentions, this whole trial helped us refresh some of our synergy.

They probably thought they had the advantage in this scenario, but little did they know, since this wasn't a trial anymore, Saur and I could finally communicate with each other.

I looked around the room at the pokemon that Team Neo had just sent out and noted that it was an assortment of strong pokemon like Rhyperior, Aggron, Steelix, Metagross and more.

They were menacingly starting to encroach upon our side of the arena, and because I didn't expect them to follow any rules like "stay on your side of the arena" I decided to make the first move.

I yelled at the top of my lungs "SAUR MAKE A SANDSTORM" so that everyone in the arena could clearly hear it.

The Neo Overseer seemed shocked that I had issued such a command, she looked at me and Saur incredulously and laughingly exclaimed "I didn't think you'd lose your cool so easily brat, you of all people should know that Venusaur can't learn the move sandstorm."

I looked right at her incredulous expression and chuckled, "Venusaur doesn't learn rock slide either but we saw him use it earlier."

That was the last bit of conversation I would share with the Neo Overseer as Saur placed his vines into the ground and released a powerful frenzy plant.

This one wasn't aimed at the opposing pokemon though.

The vines began breaking down the rocks that were broken up from the previous frenzy plant attack.

While these loosened up rocks were originally useful for a makeshift rock slide attack, this time around they were being pounded into dust by countless vines.

When the timing was ripe, I had Saur toss up the countless fine particles of sand he had just made into he air with multiple upswings of vines.

An overwhelming amount of sand was tossed into the air and suddenly visibility between Saur and the other pokemon dropped to nearly 0.

Then with the most advanced battle technique in my repertoire, I quickly took out Saur's pokeball and returned him.

Without giving the Neo Overseer a chance to react, I dashed past her through the doorway and up the staircase that we had originally come from.

If anyone thought that I was going to somehow take them all on down there, they must be out of their mind.

Those pokemon looked straight out of a tough looking pokemon tier list and each of them could have had up to six pokemon.

When I only had Saur, a potential 1vs60 was not something that I was looking forward to. There wasn't really a feasible way I could win that battle without potentially pulling off something that might hurt the trainers as well… which was not something I was willing to do here.

I ran up the stairs as fast as I could and it seems like my gambit had paid off,

I was a third of the way back to the ground floor before I heard the steps of the other trainers coming after me.

The plan was simple, I'd get back to the top floor, and get my pokemon back and inform the others of what was going on.

As I reached the ground floor, I noticed that Blue and Platina had both not finished their trials yet.

Instead, half of the team was there patrolling the area in preparation for a potential Team Neo attack.

Crys was the first to notice me, "Red! You already finished your trial? It hasn't been that long since it started though."

She looked happy to see me but also had a confused look on her face, likely from the timing that I showed up and the sweat dripping down my forehead.

"Crys, get everyone's attention, this is urgent!" I said with a serious expression.

After a brief moment of contemplation, she seemed to understand the urgency of the situation and sent out Natee the Xatu.

It seems like the particular group of Crys, Mei, and Sapphire had agreed to use Natee as one of their emergency signals.

Everyone convened on Natee's location after a few moments and a repeat of Crys' reaction to seeing me ensued.

I quickly explained to them that I had not completed the challenge. In fact, Team Neo had already infiltrated the area and had set a trap for me in the arena downstairs.

Mei acted quickly and messaged White who was currently patrolling outside with the rest of the team.

None of the overseers were available at this point as normally they were supposed to come back down with us to the ground floor when a trial was finished.

This meant that between the four of us, we had to handle at least eleven Team Neo members as well as the ones I had originally defeated (assuming they could heal up somehow down there).

I looked over at the wide entrance to the staircase behind us and noted that the enemies would be here very soon.

The plan was simple, I let the rest of the girls know that we were going to hold them at this choke point so that the bigger pokemon could not surround us easily. With our combined firepower, it was very unlikely that they would be able to beat us in quality of our pokemon. I sent Saur back out and re-equipped the rest of my pokeballs that Crys was holding onto (it would seem she got permission to hold onto them for the sake of the inner defenses in case something happened while I was in the trial).

Sapphire sent out her Chic the Blaziken, Mei sent out her Togekiss, and Crys sent out Mega the Meganium.

It looked like we were going to use some of our most trusted pokemon for the incoming onslaught.

As the sound of the enemy drew near, a message appeared on White's phone.

"We can't come back to help just yet, we have our hands full with an attack outside too!"

With that, the battle for the Tower of Mastery began.

(A/N: Hey y'all, next chap will likely be the finale of this arc so I hope you look forward to it. I'm still coming up with some final details for how I want it to play out. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying the new season of anime, league of legends esports, and vtubers ofc. Lemme know if y'all have any recommendations for anime I should check out this season. I'm currently following AoT, I've read promised neverland and dr. stone, slime, re:zero, Go-toubun, Mushoku Tensei and I've read Kumo Desu ga. That's all from me this time around, I look forward to seeing your reactions to this chapter and the finale coming up!)