As soon as her fist impacted Ben's chest, displacing the energy that Delaney had mustered prior to using the move, transferring it into Ben in an explosive display of brute force, it felt to Ben as though all of the air had been removed from his body at once. Time seemed to slow down, and from the point of impact and slowly outward and down along his body and each of his extremities, Ben could swear that he felt a ripple move across him, the very skin on his body moving in a wave as the sheer power of the strike shook his body. His eyes, wide and incredulous, were staring at a point that only he could see as his feet left the ground, following the core mass of his body backward and toward the treeline behind him.
He flew for several feet, still incapable of drawing a breath, until he impacted the ground and skidded backward a bit, leaving a trail in the dirt with his ass. It couldn't have elapsed more than a second, maybe two at the very longest, but it felt like an eternity before his momentum was stopped and he found himself on his back. His eyes had turned upward to the sky, and he, at last, drew in a deep breath to satisfy his lungs that had been deprived of air for what could have been ages. Surely a strike as powerful as the one he had just received should have been enough to crack his sternum, completely remove it from the rest of his bone structure, or at the very least give him some incredible bruising. There was no way that he should have been capable of any sort of movement after enduring such a shot, much lesshave the power to immediately sit up. And yet, as he lay there, collecting himself physically and mentally, he felt like he could get up that very moment and get back to fighting. There wasn't even much pain associated with it, so much as just a numb soreness that he was experiencing.
After a few seconds, Delaney entered his field of vision, and he shifted his gaze from the cloud at which he had been looking to her puzzled expression. She didn't say anything, nor did he, for a few seconds, and then finally she broke the silence, putting her hands on her hips as she looked down at him. "You didn't even try to block it. I wasn't really expecting that…" Her head turned to the side a little, and she looked overhis facial expression, which was somewhat blank and spacey, like he was thinking about something.
"Yeah, you caught me kinda off guard that time. When you mentioned the map it made me think of something, and I zoned out when you delivered that punch. Err, well, Pound, anyay." He smiled sheepishly and slowly sat up, at which point Delaney backed up a step or two to give him some space. Ben's hands came to his chest at around the impact zone, tenderly touching at it, expecting it to be incredibly sore, but as it happened he didn't feel anything out of the ordinary. In fact, as far as he knew, there was no indication that he had just taken such a huge hit. He looked up to Delaney, confused. "So if you hit me way harder than I've ever been hit before, why am I not feeling it?" His confusion was matched by Delaney, and he went on to try to explain what he meant. "I didn't think it was possible for anyone to throw a punch that hard. It shouldn't be possible, at least. I should be dead. That shit could have stopped my heart. And I don't even feel any bruising, no soreness, nothing. What's going on?"
Delaney scratched behind one of her ears, and then rolled her shoulders and sighed. "Well, again, this is something that I had expected you to already know. Maybe I shouldn't have so much faith in your knowledge of my world after all, because you seem to be coming up short on some pretty basic trivia points," she muttered only half to him, shaking her head. "looks like we're going to have to have another tutoring session before I can really start teaching you, because this is really important for you to know just in case things go south at some point."
Delaney licked her lips once before she began again, trying to discern how she could explain what to her was such a basic concept. "Well, you're right when you say that any ordinary punch that strong probably would have killed you. No normal punch could ever hit that hard, I'd have to guess, or else it would pretty much break the laws of physics. But that wasn't an ordinary punch. It was my Pound attack." She looked to him to see if this resonated with him, but disappointingly he didn't seem to have any sort of brainblast that would prevent her from having to explain any more. With a sigh, she continued. "I could never hit you that hard with a normal punch. But with the power that I can channel when I use Pound, I can strike you a lot more solidly, as you just saw."
The bunny girl gestured with her head for him to follow, and she began walking as she talked to her human companion. "I guess the best way to explain it is like this. Normal attacks, and that's normal with a lowercase n, as in just regular kicks and punches and things, will hit you differently than a special move or ability or power or whatever you want to call it will. Essentially, you body processes and handles the attacks differently. For example, you could punch a gengar in the mouth and really piss him off. But if you tried to Pound him, the attack would have no effect." She looked over to him and saw that what she had just said didn't make sense, grimacing. "Ghost types aren't affected by normal type attacks." She smirked. "You're gonna need flashcards or something of all the different type matchups," she muttered to herself, amused.
"The two go hand in hand," she went on, tilting her chin up as she thought. "Like, you couldn't sit there all day long and get wailed on by some kung-fu guy and then fire off a flamethrower at full power. Similarly, if you get pummeled by Close Combat until your eyes fall out, you're not going to be ready to run a marathon. You can be knocked out by Moves just as you could traditional punches, but under normal circumstances you can't be killed by them. No one knows why, but the religious tend to think that it's Arceus watching over us and preventing us from laying waste to one another."
She frowned, as though just remembering something. And obviously, you're not going to be able to just keep using Water Gun or any other Move indefinitely, either. There's a limited number of how many of Move you can use before you need to rest, just like you could only run so hard so far without getting tired and needing a break. Higher intensity Moves like a Hyper Beam can only be used sparingly, however more basic ones like Pound you can use more liberally." She paused, both in speech and in walking, turning to look at him. "Does all that make sense to you?"
Ben was so entranced by the prospect of learning the way of the world from her that he had become completely laser-focused on the sound of her voice, soaking in every word and committing it all to memory so he would never forget it, hoping that eventually it would all just become second nature to him. When she stopped, he was staring at the ground intently, following in her footsteps closely enough that he bumped into her from behind, blinking a few times as he stepped back and nodded. "Yeah, I think so," he said with a smile. "Shit, I wish I had been taking notes. That was a hell of an explanation, Delaney."
She smiled back, blushing a little. "Thanks."
Ben nodded. "Almost like the author was too lazy to demonstrate all of that and sacrificed almost all of your personality along with any sort of reasonable continuity just to have you spit it all onto the page for him."
Delaney frowned. "What did you just say?"
Ben frowned as well, puzzled. "What do you mean? I said thanks for the explanation."
"No, after that. You were just… you know what, never mind. Let's just get back to training," she said, laughing to herself as she headed back in the direction from which they had come.
"Uh. Alright, weirdo," he returned, falling into stride beside her.