(Nice)
(I know it looks like this is chapter 70, but it's actually Nice)
WOOOOOO HEY WHAT UP PARTY PEOPLE WE DID IT WE WROTE A CHAPTER IN A WEEK AKA MOSTLY LAST NIGHT
I'm trying to mix up the tournament pacing so it's less predictable. So, battle.
"She's doing much better now," the nurse informed me cheerily, handing me Hope's pokeball. "Good call on the urgentcare box. It'll be best to keep her out of battle for a bit."
"Yeah, for sure. Thanks for healing her so quickly," I said.
"Anytime!"
The nurse moved on to the next trainer in line. I wondered how she could be so cheerful on urgentcare duty. Maybe it was intentional, for her sake or ours.
I let Hope out. She chirped brightly, showing no signs of having fallen from the sky ten minutes prior.
"Hey Hope, how're you doing?"
"Tos!"
"Sorry about the battle – I was absent from time at the wrong moment."
"Tos," she said cheerfully. I was blithely forgiven.
"I'm thinking maybe we should work on not having you go so high," I said. "It boosts your evasion, but we've started fighting pokemon with better aim, and if you fall, you fall hard. There's a higher risk in that sense."
"Togekiss," she said, seeming like she didn't mind.
"I mean it, we can't just keep letting you climb to the moon and then come crashing down. That's just irresponsible. Obviously we won't stop you from flying altogether, but if we could limit the height–"
"Togekiss," she said. It sounded affirmative, but I got the sense that there was no way to stop Hope from climbing as high as she wanted.
Thomas and Dawn had both won their battles. I actually could have seen the end of Thomas's (a full six-on-six) if I hadn't immediately gone to check on Hope.
"How was yours?" he asked me.
"It was… It was interesting. I skipped all over it until the very end, and in the middle – well, technically the beginning – Hope crash-landed pretty hard… She's fine now, don't worry," I said, seeing the look on his face.
"Oh, good. What about the end?"
"In the end, I was stable. I was there for the entirety of the final matchup. It was Prom versus a muk, and I got really focused on not letting him get poisoned, and I just stopped skipping around."
Thomas thought about it. "Do you think it was…?"
"An anchor? Kind of. At the end of the battle, I felt like I could push myself to be awake and tethered to time. Prom needed me, and that kind of overrode the problems I was having."
"That's it then, isn't it?" A smile spread across his face. "You've found your anchor."
"I think I've found an anchor, but I don't know how sustainable it is in the long run. I don't think I can be that hyper-focused on my pokemon or on other people all the time."
"So you're still looking, then."
"Still looking."
We watched one of the last fourth-round battles, in which Ashley de Leon narrowly defeated AJ Kaur in overtime. Thomas and I returned to the tteokbokki stand at 5:12 – turns out if you put it in a cup, it is hand-held food – before rushing back to the main arena for top-16 matchups. The concourse was eerily quiet – 32 felt like plenty of trainers, but 16? Basically no one was left. I recognized Sean Obi, Kaitlyn Cabot, Axel Tokuyama, Ashley and her friends. AJ was there, but I think most other eliminated trainers were out getting dinner and enjoying the festival.
"Oh, I'm screwed," Thomas said with a laugh. I found him paired up against Kyle Nguyen at 7:30 pm, one of the last four battles of the day – sorry wait, one of the last two battles of the day, because each timeslot was two battles each now, which meant more people would be watching each. Arceus.
"You and me both," I said, finding my photo next to Etana Bing, whom I'd almost battled in round two before time swapped our matches and some other trainer got demolished by her instead.
Etana and I were the lower-ranked 6 pm battle (the other one was between two 8-badge trainers who were the champion and runner-up of the Solaceon Tournament), so we were relegated to the Diamond Arena. I didn't mind. It meant fewer people watching and less pressure overall.
"This will be a three-on-three triple battle between Etana Bing of Hearthome City and Evelyn Meyers of Twinleaf Town. No substitutions will be made; the battle will continue until all three pokemon on one side have been defeated. Battlers, are you ready?"
"Ready," said the very serious-looking girl across the rocky field from me.
"Ready," I said.
"Battle… begin!"
"All right, you're on," I said, throwing three pokeballs at once. Trust, Prom, and Def appeared opposite a leafeon, an empoleon, and a ditto who quickly morphed into a buizel.
"Excalibur, aquajet!" Etana called out. "Sugu, razor leaf! Noya, watergun!"
"Prom, protect Trust. Def, take control."
Prom shielded the two of them from the empoleon charging in with aquajet. From Noya's transformation into a water type, I guessed Etana was aiming to knock out Trust first. Def diverted the watergun and razor leaf back at the ditto-buizel, who put up a protect of his own.
Time jump – Trust was down, so I pulled him back in. "Def, psychic on the leafeon. Prom–"
Time jump – Trust was back up, but Def was down. "Def, return. Trust, blast them all with flame–"
Time jump – I directed Prom away from an incoming leaf blade. Everyone was back.
"Sugu, helping hand; Ex, aquajet; Noya, swift if you can, else watergun."
Without words – words were too clumsy and took too long – I told them what to do.
Trust charged at Ex, the empoleon, who was coming in with aquajet again. He visibly prepared to jump, causing Ex to swerve up. Trust waited until Ex was already over him, stomach exposed, and jumped into him with a double mach punch. Def, who had been psychicking Noya the ditto-buizel's watergun off to the side, suddenly teleported into the air above Ex, swiping down with a leaf blade. Trust dove out of the way, aided by mach energy, just before Ex crashed hard into the ground. Still conscious, but hit hard.
Prom, meanwhile, shot slightly off-center towards the leafeon. She dodged in the more-convenient direction; he dug two iron tails into the ground to swerve and hit with ice punch.
Time jump – only five pokemon were on the field. One buizel was missing. "Prom, you there still?"
"Yeah, I'm here."
Okay, so the ditto was gone, leaving Def and Trust ganging up on the empoleon and Prom trying to get the leafeon with ice.
"Noya, transform into buizel!"
The leafeon melted and reformed. Never mind, the ditto wasn't gone at all.
Time jump – I counted two leafeons and zero empoleons. Both leafeons were hurling star-shaped energy projectiles at my pokemon, who were huddled together in a protect bubble.
In a sudden flash of clarity, I realized the point of triple battles wasn't to juggle type advantages – I mean, unless the battlers decided it was. Which Etana and I had, up til now. But it could also be about having so many pokemon on the field, they could battle as a unit. In other words, I'd been directing them as three limbs, when they could instead be a body.
"Hey, so here's what I'm thinking…" I illustrated the plan. "How does that sound?"
"Je ne sais pais si je peux use psychic armor that way."
"Sorry, rephrase?"
"Unsure if je peux utiliser l'armure psychique like that."
I… think I got it that time. "Okay, then can you just keep throwing out more copies, or is that too much effort?"
"I think so."
"Great. Prom, keep the protect up behind them. Go for it!"
Time jump – the battlefield was scorched on Etana's side, which I took to mean they'd done it. Noya had transformed back into a buizel and was now chipping away at Trust's stamina with more water special attacks than Prom himself usually used. Sugu was also focusing on Trust, reaching for him with giga drain energy tendrils, instead of on the protect on the other side of the field.
"Coeur, did it work?" I asked, not wanting to distract the pokemon in battle.
"Mostly, yeah."
She showed me – my pokemon approached the leafeons in a protect bubble preceded by a small army of gallades, who reappeared each time they were taken out by leaves. When they were close enough, Prom let the protect down and Trust jumped over to surprise them with flamethrower.
"They got Prom with magical leaf. Def's been protecting him."
Oh, shit. "Def, I'm here, I'll take him," I said, fumbling for Prom's pokeball.
Def's protect went down. He ran at the fake buizel while I recalled the real one. I then discovered that Prom knew whirlpool, because the ditto-buizel used whirlpool, which was too massive for an exhausted Trust to dodge in time.
"Infernape is unable to battle!"
"Return." Just Def now. I focused. "Ready?"
"Ready."
He redirected the leaves and water flying his way – magical leaf may not miss, but if the psychic energy it relies on it is overtaken, then it becomes someone else's magical leaf entirely. The energy lifting the leaves turned from gold to pink as Def stole the attack, redirecting it and the water back at Noya.
"Transform!"
The ditto-buizel shifted, growing taller. Def lunged, catching Noya in an in-between stage that was neither buizel nor gallade, neither water nor psychic-fighting but… normal. A ditto. I don't know if the punch Def threw was close combat or an imitation of Trust's mach punch or an attempt at offensive aura usage, but it was enough of a fighting move to get Noya off his guard and unprepared for the real attack: a left-handed slash with a sword emanating multicolored energies. The multi-slash burst against the ditto, who collapsed into a blob on the ground.
"Ditto is unable to battle."
Sugu flung a pair of shadow balls at Def, who sidestepped both. She threw a razor leaf at him, which he bounced back at her at her as a magical leaf attack. She tried both giga drain and shadow ball at the same time, which Def easily evaded. Frustrated, she charged, tail glowing green.
Def disappeared and Sugu hit the boulder behind him, shattering it with her leaf blade. He reappeared behind her and swiped at her with flying energy – aerial ace, technically. She fell, and I didn't believe the battle's overall brevity for a second, but then I realized one-round triple battles were short by nature, and she'd been hit by Trust in the earlier maneuver, and there was plenty of the battle I hadn't seen.
"Leafeon is unable to battle! The victor is Evelyn Meyers from Twinleaf Town!"
I exhaled. "Well done, Def."
"Merci," he said, sounding positively bubbly. I felt good about it too – we'd never connected quite like that. It was like what had happened for Prom and me last time. We'd found a groove. We were on the same wavelength. We were in sync.
Triple battles, I thought as I shook Etana Bing's hand, are just whatever. You can approach them however you want. They may not depend on any one thing. It's all a nebulous mess of pre-battle training and on-the-fly formations and adapting to the opponent's strategies and connecting and communicating with your own pokemon and the list goes on but ultimately it doesn't matter because certainty distills it into a science, when there is beauty in the indefinite.
"So the anchor worked again," Thomas said later, when I told him about my battle. It was nearly 9 pm, and we were waiting amongst the rest of the freezing festivalgoers for the fireworks to begin. He'd won his round against Kyle Nguyen, and Dawn had won hers against Kaitlyn Cabot. Their victories were maybe more impressively shocking than mine, but mine was personal.
"It did, yeah," I admitted.
"So…?"
"It's still unsustainable," I pointed out. "If anything, this battle showed another reason it wouldn't work out long-term: if I'd focused on any one pokemon the whole time, the other two would've been on their own."
"What if you focused on all three at once?"
"That's… kind of the opposite of focus."
"What if you… uhh, took turns?"
"Thomas, it's okay," I said, laughing. "I'm not worried about it. At least, not in battle."
"You're not?"
I shook my head. "I'm not. I think… I mean, once in a while it is a problem, like when Hope fell or when Prom got left on the field. We're working on solutions for that kind of thing. For the most part, though, I've been learning to roll with it. I just kind of… let it happen, instead of anchoring myself."
"It sounds like such chaos."
"It is. I'm okay with it, though."
Thomas stared at me, confused. The lights around us darkened, and a hush settled over the sea of people. I turned away from him to watch the sky. Light washed over the crowd in bursts, fire appearing in streaks and glittery puffs. Lucas and Dawn were nearby, but I was trying not to think about them (him) too much. This wasn't about them (him). This was a good moment for me, and I wouldn't let them (Lucas, of course) stand in my way.
I awoke in a good mood, which felt increasingly rare these days and therefore more precious. Obviously I was nervous for the quarterfinals – quarterfinals, we'd reached the quarterfinals of the final tournament of the season, what the fuck – but there was a baseline positivity in me that made it okay.
There were only eight trainers in the arena at 9:30 am. Ashley was there. Sean. Axel. Dawn, of course. Thomas and me. Two others I didn't recognize.
Day three of the Chaos Tournament (or Lake Valor Tournament, whichever you want to call it) marks the beginning of the actual tournament bracket, because yes, it has one of those. The matches from here on out would feed into each other. Also, every match was in the main arena. Day three was only seven battles long, but each one was the sole battle of its time slot. No way around a televised match now. Aah.
"Are you cold?" Thomas asked me, noticing that I was shivering.
"No, I'm just nervous," I said, teeth chattering.
He tentatively reached out a hand and rubbed my shoulder. I laughed at the awkwardness of it. "Sorry, I don't know what to do," he admitted.
"It's okay."
There was a triumphant fanfare from the concourse speakers, like we'd already won, and the matchup animations were off and running. This time, the screens gave each of us a short highlight reel of our previous battles before the matchups themselves. Thomas's contained some things I'd seen, some things I hadn't: Esther zapping an entire pool, Marcassin's future sight attack taking down a rapidash after he was already out. Dawn's was all clips I hadn't witnessed: Alan moving faster than an aquajet, her altaria accelerating her roserade's petal dance with gust. Kenna freezing an entire whirlpool.
And then there was Faith, dodging a shiftry through the trees. Hope flying high in the sky, leaving aura spheres in her wake. Coeur rushing forward, brimming with aura energy. Prom falling like an icy meteor onto a frozen muk. Trust jumping up into an empoleon, Def appearing above to leaf-blade him back down. A shot of me grinning ear-to-ear.
After the highlights, our pictures appeared onscreen. They flipped over and shuffled around tauntingly, spinning in directions that didn't matter, finally reaching their end positions at the edges of the screen. The gold lines of the bracket materialized before the pictures flipped back over.
It didn't really surprise me. I know the chances of us battling in this round were one-in-seven, and the chances of us battling in this tournament were pfffffffft I dunno, tiny, but it made sense. It was a long time coming – maybe more so because of all the times I'd insisted he was too strong to fight, maybe since the time in Eterna Forest when he said we'd battle one day, maybe since the day we met in Jubilife. It just made sense. It was inevitable.
Which didn't make me feel more confident about my quarterfinal against Thomas Zamora.
Tteokbokki creds to Matt, who pointed out what should have been the obvious existence of small cups.
Will Big Chance Project make it in time for the 5-year publication anniversary? Unsure but it's getting there lmao.
Merry Christmas/Happy holidays, I'll see you next chapter.