My team had a pretty clear ranking when it came to power and skill in battle, but it was a ranking for power and skill individually rather than both at once.

  No one could argue that Valiant stood at the top of two lists; their overall capability with their weapon meant they could beat anyone else in a fight.

  For sheer power, Rotom was close behind them, but there was still a noticeable gap in raw strength. However, the power of the moves Rotom could gain through possession almost let him match Valiant’s strikes.

  Meanwhile, Liepard didn’t quite have that same level of strength, but he did have his tricks. With the right plan, he could shut down an opponent even above Valiant’s level. Although his various slashing moves weren’t necessarily as strong an attack as one delivered by Valiant’s blades, he was adept at ensuring his moves landed critically, and those critical hits were much like Rotom’s best attacks: they almost let Liepard match Valiant’s strength.

  So Valiant was at the top, and in terms of raw power, Rotom was right behind them. However, when it came to skill in battle, it was Liepard who was firmly in second place.

  I explained all of this to Dianne on that same, first night as we walked through Lacunosa Town after I got back from the Giant Chasm. The sun had long since set, and her work had already seen her return from her day on the Route. Most people here in Lacunosa were asleep at this point, but there were plenty of those who were up and wide awake.

  After all, it was the World Coronation Series. For the trainers competing in it, night was the perfect time to search out battles.

  “Psycho-Cut, Valiant,” I ordered.

  Ahead of us, Valiant swiped with the flat edge of their blade to deflect a glob of embers. A monkey with flaming red hair then tried its best to leap back to avoid the follow-through strike.

  It failed.

  “So for power, it’s Valiant, then Rotom, and then Liepard,” I said to Dianne while carefully watching the ongoing battle. “But for ranking the skill behind their moves, it’s Valiant, then Liepard, and then Rotom after him.”

  “Wow,” Dianne said, paying attention but needing to force back a yawn. “So Liepard’s not in last?”

  “Yup!” I answered cheerfully. “If anything, he’s firmly tied for second place.”

  Ahead of us, Valiant finished the current battle, bringing down their weapon with a single glowing slash. Their opponent, a bright red Simisear, was no longer able to push through the devastating damage it had sustained, and the Pokémon finally collapsed.

  “Good to know he’s doing so well. I was worried he wouldn’t keep up in a team like yours,” Dianne said, pulling her arms back in an effort to stretch and maintain the level of energy needed to get through the night. “And, if he’s comparable to even part of what I’ve seen your Iron Valiant get up to...”

  The Simisear’s trainer looked crestfallen. In the street between us, Valiant flicked their polearm to the side as if to clean it off. Breaking it apart and clicking the two individual blades back into place, Valiant marched to my side to stand at attention, returning to their default position of standing guard.

  Their metal face rarely displayed any form of emotion—at times, it almost felt like they were proud of how serious they were. However, there were subtle tells that they themself weren’t aware of.

  With this battle finished, the glow in the electronic screen that displayed Valiant’s eyes had brightened ever so slightly. I didn’t need to guess what they were feeling after seeing that—the increase in brightness told me they were quite pleased with their performance.

  “Good job,” I said quietly to them. And then, to our opponent, I shouted, “And your Simisear was no joke! Its Overheat was almost as strong as my Rotom’s!”

  “Almost as strong, but not as strong or stronger...” my opponent said.

  He let out a quiet laugh as I tried not to wince.

  The battles I’d had so far... hadn’t really been that fair.

  As far as I could tell, only Normal Rank trainers were active in Lacunosa. With months left in the Series, not everyone was bothering to compete just yet, and not everyone had gathered the requisite points to reach a higher tier. However, it was more that the vast majority of Series-related battles were happening in major cities. The strongest trainers had left; only the trainers with a more casual approach had stayed behind.

  Here and now, almost as if to add insult to injury, the trainer that Valiant had just defeated walked over to pass me prize money after his loss. While it would have been “kind” for me to turn it down, this trainer had been the one to challenge me in the first place, and... I kind of needed the cash after spending every last bit I had left on the berries I’d given to the Tangela earlier today.

  These battles were helping me with more than just the five-or-so Series points I’d earn after a win.

  Especially since, with the thousands of trainers competing, it’d take several hundred points before I could earn the right to test myself in a promotion match.

  “I knew it was the right decision to come along with you tonight,” Dianne said as she watched the other trainer hurry off toward the town’s sole Pokémon Center. “I don’t think I understood just how strong your team was until now.”

  “You’re not tired?” I asked.

  She yawned, but it felt more like a joke.

  “I am a bit, but it’s Farigiraf that had to do all of the running, and this tiredness is worth it. Now I know that you’ll be able to ward off any robbers, and it’s nice to see that you’re so confident about the Giant Chasm for a reason.”

  We started to walk down the empty, nighttime street. The occasional lamp lit up the road, but they were never frequent enough to provide consistent light. Rotom kept to the sky above us, but I had him flying up there without any additional drones. We didn’t need to make that much noise this late at night, and this was more of a casual hunt for battles more than anything else.

  For our purposes, a single camera was enough to give me a view of our surroundings on my tablet. Rotom meant we had an advantage when it came to finding other trainers to battle, and he could also record all of our fights.

  “You mentioned robbers,” I said, looking over to Dianne. “I thought this place was pretty peaceful. Lacunosa gets robbers?”

  “Not really.” Dianne shrugged. “But everyone’s still on edge. It might have happened over a year ago at this point, but you would be paranoid too after what happened at the Pokémon League.”

  I could tell this wasn’t a topic Dianne wanted to discuss, so I just hummed, and Rotom flew one block over to send an image of the opposite street. There, another battle was actively taking place, and a deer with foliage growing from its horns furiously battered a fiery anteater that refused to go down.

  “How was Giant Chasm, by the way?” Dianne asked quietly as we moved on to search for anyone else who might be out here.

  “It was... weird,” I said. “It’s quiet, but the Pokémon there are strong.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  “You actually got into a battle?” she asked.

  “Not really. We had a tough one before we entered, so I returned everyone but Liepard and focused more on stealth. It was just me and him out there, and we only bothered with a preliminary push. I don’t know if we were noticed or not, but I got to see a lot of the Chasm’s different species.”

  “And?” Dianne asked, waving a hand to gesture for me to continue.

  “And... there were a lot more Ice types and far fewer Steel types than I had hoped,” I finished, speaking with a grumble.

  Still, the lack of easily accessible, desired species didn't mean the Chasm itself was any less impressive.

  “It was... foggy,” I continued, bringing my thoughts back to earlier today. “It was hard to see that far into the distance, even with all of the gaps between the trees. But I could see shapes moving beneath the branches, and any open space was claimed by these massive herds.”

  Great numbers of shuffling, brown mounds of fur would wander about and sniff for food. Among all of those tall-backed Piloswine and Swinub, I’d see the squashed mammoths that were Mamoswine somehow present to walk between them.

  Other wild Pokémon would float around far off into the distance, but I’d never see anything more than a flash as they zipped by. I had to pull back before we got too deep in, but I could already tell:

  The further into the Giant Chasm we pushed, the stronger the Pokémon we encountered would be.

  “So,” Dianne said, letting out a slight chuckle. “You going back?”

  She tried to speak with levity, but her voice became a bit quieter when she asked her question.

  “I am,” I told her, speaking with the utmost confidence. “While I know my team and I could be following a bunch of different strategies to get stronger, I really need to expand our team, and the Giant Chasm is our best bet for that.”

  Dianne nodded, but the act wasn’t directed at me—it was more of an absentminded shake of the head that hinted at deep thought rather than explicit agreement. I could tell she still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of me entering the Giant Chasm, but being able to return unharmed had helped.

  And it had helped even more to see the level of strength my team demonstrated in our battles tonight.

  “I’m guessing you have some spare Pokéballs on you,” she said.

  “Ultra Balls,” I replied. “Not many, but enough that I should be able to catch one or two things after getting into a fight. The real issue is, however, that I can’t catch just any Pokémon. I need to catch a Pokémon that I can actually connect with. I can’t imagine taking on Champions with a team member I can’t befriend.”

  Once again, Dianne nodded, but this time, the nod was far more intentional. As silly as it sounded, the power of friendship was essentially a real, measurable force in this world, to the point that there were entire phenomena that revolved directly around it.

  For example, whatever “Mega Evolution” truly was, it was common knowledge that it only worked when a true bond was formed between a trainer and their Pokémon. Otherwise, all that temporary transformation did was cause their Pokémon a lot of pain and forced them to mindlessly lash out.

  “At least you have a plan,” Dianne mused. “And, at least you— Hold on, can I see that?”

  Handing over my tablet, Dianne’s eyes widened in surprise, but then a sneaky grin replaced that expression on her face.

  “I knew he was competing!” she all but hissed. “That’s Daryl—he’s a Pokémon Ranger with me. He’s not supposed to be competing, but... Did you know he pulled my hair in school?”

  “As a child?” I asked.

  “Nope! Back in Ranger School, just a few months ago, he walked up to me after class one day, complimented my curly hair, and then just kind of... grabbed it?”

  “Messed up,” I said.

  “Yup.” Dianne sent me another nod, but I could tell she had already come up with a plan of her own. “Anyway, since that guy’s here, and since Liepard’s been resting in his Pokéball, I wouldn’t mind if you brought him out and...”

  “Beat that guy up?” I offered.

  “In a battle, of course,” Dianne said quickly.

  The fight was easy—Daryl was just another Normal Rank trainer that my team outmatched and beat. By the end of the night, we were able to defeat three more trainers.

  That put my current ranking somewhere in the mid eight-thousands, and we earned a bit more cash, too. With all of that experience, and with everything we had earned from our battles, we took our first few steps toward climbing toward Master Rank.

  Of course, we were only able to gather a total of twenty-five points.

  Six months felt like a long time, but it was also far too short.

  The world inside the Giant Chasm was calmer. The uneven rows of trees, the thick fog, and the occasional patch of snow muffled everything that wasn’t a nearby voice. Sounds that might have alerted something at a distance only gathered attention if they happened up close. That meant that few Pokémon ever saw where Liepard helped me stalk about, but that also meant we were at the same disadvantage when it came to discovering interesting Pokémon in return.

  Out here, Pokémon didn’t necessarily claim a territory and then forbid all other species from entering it. Rather, a Pokémon or a group of Pokémon would lay claim to an area, and then, as long as those who entered it respected their presence and didn’t go after their specific home, there was no issue with walking around.

  Mostly.

  I took advantage of that lenience by not needing to bribe anything but the Tangela on my way in, but I also made sure to take wide and careful paths, too. I didn’t want to stomp about, infuriate the wild Pokémon, and outright attack anything we could see. That kind of behavior would only see otherwise opposing species band together just to push us out.

  So, instead, I focused my efforts on staying quiet while searching for a new team member to catch. Our practice would come from defending ourselves against anything that attacked us instead of us attacking them.

  “Close Combat, Valiant.”

  Valiant’s Fighting-type moves excelled at breaking through things like the hardened ice of any charging Mamoswine.

  “Rotom, Thunderbolt.”

  Species like Drifblim and Golbat were easily shocked and scared away whenever they would swoop down to try to steal our stuff.

  “Slash, Liepard!”

  And sometimes, an exceptionally clever species would try to sneak up on us—usually something like a Ditto or Weavile. Pokémon that tried to use stealth to their advantage would only ever find themselves on the wrong end of Liepard’s claws.

  We spent days trying to explore the crater, and the battles weren’t too frequent, but they were just common enough that my team had to be constantly on edge to avoid the worst when getting into fights. The freezing temperatures sapped their energy, and the stamina they lost in one battle would carry over to the next. However, few fights would last until a knockout. Most wild Pokémon didn’t want to risk that level of injury and tended to flee long before they collapsed.

  “But we’re also in a tough spot. We want to push in deeper every day, but we can’t accidentally trap ourselves here,” I whispered to my team, a day in, as we took a break beneath one large evergreen tree. “Yeah, we can go really far into the Chasm by taking the most direct route and running past everything we see, but what happens when we encounter something we can’t avoid? Then, we might get hurt in that fight, and the commotion might cause all the other Pokémon to come running to investigate. Or, the Pokémon we bypassed might stand in our way when we’re tired and trying to get out.”

  Just like how a wild Pokémon didn’t want its health to get too low, we couldn’t afford to take too much damage, either. That meant the Giant Chasm wasn’t just training for my team; it also pushed me to make the correct strategic decisions. I had to know what fights to take, when to call for us to fall back, and then I also had to decide when to leave for the day.

  It’d be a waste of time and energy if we left too early, but it’d also be dangerous if I had us stay for too long.

  I couldn’t even cheat with technology. Rotom’s drones didn’t work in this magnetic field. Video feeds would come out warped, and even something as simple as a compass would have its needle be lost to a chaotic spin.

  Even as the days passed, we kept coming back regardless of the difficulty—because of it, in all honesty. The environment and the encounters imbued a need to improve that was even greater than I wanted. This place was everything that I had hoped for, and I planned to make a true, final push once we fully adapted to these conditions.

  But, really, I wanted to wait until we had more than just three members of our team.

  Every morning, we’d pass berries to the Tangela in exchange for passage, and then we’d explore the freezing temperatures of the chasm. Usually around noon to mid-afternoon, we’d return, handing over a few more berries, and then we’d rest until we had more Series matches that night.

  Our search let us find plenty of species, and we encountered quite a collection. Pokémon like Swellow, Delibird, and Piloswine were common, but we’d also see others that were almost impossible to find almost anywhere else.

  Pink, chubby Clefairy would still be present whenever we arrived too early in the morning. That fairy-like species would sometimes still be awake after whatever rituals they had performed during the night.

  Lunatone and Solrock would float around as mystical, stone representations of the moon and sun. While their passive wanderings would mostly see them exist almost as harmless background noise, whenever the two Pokémon encountered one another, a fight would break out, and the Psychic-types would not hesitate to turn their attention on any intruders that got too close.

  Once in a while, wild Absol would directly approach our group, and that species was sharp—especially with the bladed horn that grew from their head. Valiant was the source of that attention, and instead of serving as a grim omen, the white-furred species would appear solely intent on challenging a fellow blade-wielder to a fight.

  And then, I’d see the species that I was truly interested in:

  The Steel types.

  They were nowhere near as common as I’d expected, but they were certainly present.

  Occasionally, I’d see a streak of blue, and small groups of Beldum would rush by beneath the trees. That metallic species could already float normally, but whatever electromagnetic field existed in this area let them slide through the air with incredible speed.

  We found a tree toward the edge of the crater that had been struck by lightning. Around it, a group of Electric-types floated about. Magnemite and Magneton flashed and crackled with ambient energy, and the leader of that group, a Magnezone, practically used the tree’s charred branches as if they were a throne.

  In the few cave entrances we poked our heads into, we ignored the swarms of Zubat to search for dust clouds. In almost every one, we would find a digging Drilbur, a mole Pokémon with sharp claws capable of evolving into Excadrill.

  But even with all of those encounters, no captures happened. The Beldum were too rare and would fly by too fast. The Magnemite and Magneton were too weak to bother to catch, and I couldn’t exactly just take away their leading Magnezone so suddenly like that.

  As for the creatures we found in the caves, I did try to challenge them to fights. Unfortunately, they would always dig away out of fear.

  The single time we encountered a wild Excadrill, it took one look at us, scoffed, and then dove deep into the earth.

  I’d never been more offended in my life.

  But I wasn’t one to give up. Spite was a great motivator, and every day, my team and I entered the crater. And, for every failure, the more we pushed.

  We fought, we searched, and we explored. I might not have been able to make much use of my electronics, but I was at least able to get a general sense of a map.

  And then, it happened.

  It finally happened.

  After almost a full week of just exploration and searching for something to catch, we finally found a viable target:

  A Metang.

  Pokémon mentioned in this chapter:

  / / / / / / / / /

  Nick’s Team:

  Iron Valiant

  enormous thank you to everyone reading! Your support keeps this story going.