The morning had started well before seven for Kai and his Pokémon.
He'd been up since just after five, when the city was still mostly dark, and the bells of Sprout Tower were marking the early hour in their low, rolling way. He'd dressed quietly in the half-light, taken his Pokémon out of their balls one by one, and got a good breakfast into all of them. Once they were done eating, his legs carried him to the park without him really thinking about it, his brain still catching up somewhere behind his eyes.
The clearing looked different in the pre-dawn. Softer. The dew on the grass caught what little light there was, and the car park was quiet, void of life. He had it all to himself — which suited him fine, given that he hadn't slept properly anyway. Different training exercises had been popping into his head all night, refusing to let him settle.
Most of them had come from the session he'd run the evening before, after his battle with Marcus.
Zubat had been the easiest to work with, in terms of temperament at least. It had spent most of the time gliding loops around the trees at the park's edge, and Kai had cobbled together a target routine using whatever he could find on the ground — a scrunched piece of paper, a twig, his cap once, which he'd immediately regretted. Zubat would intercept them mid-air with Wing Attack. Not perfect, but the accuracy was improving. What it lacked in precision, it compensated for with the kind of uncanny spatial sense that came from navigating in total darkness. You couldn't really surprise a Zubat. It already knew where you were.
Rattata had taken to its drills the way it always did. Quick to pick things up, focused in a way the others sometimes weren't. Kai had spent time working on its Focus Energy — not just as a pre-battle prep, but as something it could hold during a fight, maintaining concentration while the world around it got loud and chaotic.
He'd had Zubat use Supersonic while Rattata practised, filling the air with that warbling, disorienting noise, and Rattata had gritted its teeth and kept its form. Mostly. There'd been one moment where it had lost the thread entirely and bolted sideways into the hedge, which neither of them had acknowledged. Still, by the end, the small mouse Pokémon had been pairing Focus Energy with Quick Attack in a way that had real bite to it.
Snubbull had been eager to please, as ever — the small bulldog Pokémon throwing itself into the running drills and strength work with the kind of dedication Kai sometimes thought he didn't quite deserve. So far, it had proven to be his most versatile partner: three Fang-type attacks, a Fairy typing that made it a nightmare for half the things he was likely to run into, and the kind of raw attacking power he'd watched bite clean through a thick log without slowing down.
And then there was Mankey...
Kai stood at the edge of the clearing, hands tucked in his jacket pockets, watching his shoes as the memory played back.
It hadn't gone well. That was the thing he kept turning over.
He'd let Mankey out alongside Sandshrew and Snubbull — partly because he wanted some company nearby, partly because, if he was honest, he'd had a feeling he might want it. Up to that point, he'd only released Mankey to feed it, never really sat with it, never tried to do anything that might actually matter.
"Alright, Mankey," Kai had said, keeping his voice light. "How about we hit some training like the others, see what you can do?"
Mankey hadn't said anything. It had just stared at him, dark eyes flat, arms loose at its sides in a way that didn't feel relaxed so much as ready.
He'd tried to run it through some basic conditioning. Simple stuff. Movement patterns. Asking it to shadow-box the air at varying pace while he called out combinations — Karate Chop left, Low Kick, Fury Swipes three-strike — the kind of thing that was less about power and more about getting the two of them in the same rhythm.
For about four minutes, it had worked. Kai had even let himself think, briefly, that he was getting the hang of this whole training a new Pokémon thing.
Mankey had that coiled-spring quality to its movements he'd noticed when he'd caught it, a restless tension that it burned through in short, sharp bursts. It was fast. Frighteningly fast, actually — faster than he'd expected, even knowing the data. When it committed to a strike, the decision and the movement were nearly the same thing. There was no wind-up. No tell. It just went.
The problem was that Mankey was also, at its absolute core, bad-tempered in a way that didn't really bottom out. He'd known that before catching it. He'd known it from the game — Anger Point was right there as the ability, it literally said it on the card — but knowing and experiencing were different animals entirely.
He'd been demonstrating how he wanted the Fury Swipes pattern to look, standing a few feet away and moving his own arms through the sequence in slow motion, talking it through, when something about his tone or his movement or just the ambient pressure of being looked at tripped some wire inside Mankey. There was no warning. No build. One second, it was watching him; the next, it was coming at him with a fury swipe attack.
Kai got his arm up.
Just about.
The Fury Swipes weren't practice swipes. He felt the first strike land across his forearm, sharp lines of heat opening up under his sleeve — and then the second hit came in low and hard against his ribs, and the world simply stopped behaving the way he expected it to. He was airborne. There was no other word for it. A small, pig-faced Pokémon barely up to his waist had hit him with enough force to lift him clean off the grass, and the next thing he knew, he was on his back two metres away with the wind crushed out of him and his own pulse banging in his ears.
He couldn't breathe.
That was the first thing. He couldn't breathe. His diaphragm had folded in on itself, and the only sound he could make was a thin, useless wheeze, and through the haze of it he saw Mankey already coming again, low and fast across the grass, eyes gone somewhere he couldn't reach.
Something cold and clean cut through the panic.
This thing could kill me.
It wasn't a thought so much as a fact arriving, fully formed, in the part of him that had been raised on cartoon battles and pixel sprites. In every game he'd ever played, every episode he'd ever watched, Pokémon attacks were a kind of stylised choreography. Trainers got knocked over. Trainers got dust in their hair. Trainers got back up. Nobody died. He couldn't think of a single time, across all of it, where someone had actually been killed by a Pokémon — and lying flat on his back in damp morning grass with a Fighting-type closing the distance at a sprint, he understood, suddenly and properly, that the absence of those stories didn't mean the absence of those deaths. It just meant nobody had felt like telling them.
It had to happen. It had to happen all the time. After all, there was a reason you were warned not to go into the grass without your own Pokémon.
He was still trying to suck air back into his lungs when something small and round shot past his hip in a blur.
Sandshrew hit Mankey in the ribs with a Rapid Spin, coming to his master's rescue.
The impact knocked Mankey sideways off its line entirely. It tumbled across the grass, shell-tail still spinning, and Sandshrew came out of the rotation already low, claws planted, body angled between Kai and the threat in a way that wasn't a stance Kai had taught it. It was just there, ready to defend him no matter the threat.
Mankey came up snarling.
It went for Sandshrew this time, all teeth and rage, and Kai didn't even have the breath to get a command out before there was a second blur from his other side — pink and white and low to the ground — and Snubbull cannoned into Mankey's flank with the full weight of an Intimidate ability already settling over the clearing like a pressure drop.
Mankey hit the grass hard and skidded, trying to get up.
Snubbull stood over it, lips peeled back, that low growl of hers sitting somewhere between a warning and a promise. Sandshrew planted itself at Snubbull's shoulder, claws still out, breath coming fast through its small nose. Neither of them attacked again. They didn't need to. They were just — there. Two of them. Together. And Mankey, half-up on one elbow with grass in its fur and its chest going like a bellows, suddenly had to do the maths on what came next.
Kai could see the moment it landed.
The rage didn't drain out of it so much as get pinned down by something heavier. Its arms were still trembling. Its eyes were still wrong. But it stopped trying to stand. It looked from Snubbull, to Sandshrew, to Kai still flat on the grass behind them, and the tension in its shoulders shifted into something that wasn't quite calm but wasn't murder either. Something more like calculation.
Kai got his first proper breath back and used it to push himself up onto one elbow.
"It's okay," he said, more to Sandshrew and Snubbull than to Mankey. His voice came out rougher than he'd meant. He swallowed and tried again. "It's okay. Stand down. Easy, you guys."
Snubbull didn't move. Not for a long second. Then she huffed, hot and unimpressed, and took one deliberate step back. Sandshrew waited until she had, then lowered its claws, eyes still locked forward.
Mankey sat up slowly. It didn't look at Kai. It looked at the two Pokémon between him and it.
Kai's arm was on fire. His ribs were worse — a deep, tender ache where the strike had landed, the kind of pain that promised to be much more interesting in the morning. He could feel blood, warm under his sleeve, and the cold buzzing in his fingers that came with adrenaline emptying out faster than the body knew what to do with. He didn't reach for the Poké Ball straight away. He just held the moment where it was, breathing carefully through his nose, letting the clearing go quiet again.
He kept thinking about the throw.
About how easy it had been. How a small Pokémon, smaller than Snubbull, had picked him up and put him down two metres away with what hadn't even looked like a full-power swing. He thought about Silver's Houndour that had slammed him into a tree on the way to Cherrygrove and how lucky he'd been then, too.
He'd known, in the abstract, that catching a Pokémon and earning a Pokémon weren't the same thing. He'd had it explained to him in practice already — Sandshrew, those first few days; the way Totodile still occasionally did exactly what it wanted regardless of what he'd asked for. But there'd been a part of him, a stubborn part shaped by years of red-and-white shorthand, that had still half-believed the click of a ball was a kind of contract. That the Pokémon inside, on some level, signed up.
But Mankey hadn't signed up to any of this.
Mankey was, as far as Mankey was concerned, currently outnumbered two-to-one in someone else's territory, and the only reason it wasn't still swinging was that the maths had stopped working in its favour.
That wasn't a partnership. That was a stand-off.
Kai eased the Poké Ball from his belt, carefully, with the hand that hurt less. He didn't make a show of it. He just held it loose at his side, and when he spoke, he spoke to Mankey directly for the first time since it had attacked him.
"We're done for tonight," he said. "Get some rest. We'll try again tomorrow."
Mankey watched him a beat longer. Then the red light took it back without protest, and the ball clipped quietly back to his belt.
Sandshrew turned and trotted over, butting its head gently against his thigh as he sat up properly. Snubbull came up on his other side, still bristling slightly, and only relaxed when Kai put his hand flat on the top of her head.
"Yeah," he had said quietly. "Thanks. Both of you."
He'd recalled them after that. Given them all the rest they deserved.
The walk back to the Pokémon Centre had been slower than the walk out. He'd tried to tell himself it was a scratch and a bruised ego, and somewhere around the third street, he'd given up the lie. The scratches were still stinging now under his sleeve, peeking out in red lines below his cuff where he'd rolled it up to look at them in the bathroom mirror at half-four in the morning. His ribs had stiffened in the night into a dull, hot bruise the size of a saucer. Every time he turned over in bed, he'd been reminded of it.
And every time, the same thought had come back.
He'd never heard a story about a trainer getting killed. Not in the games. Not in the cartoons. Not in any of the official anything. Trainers fell over and got up again. Trainers cracked jokes about how their Pokémon were a handful. Nobody was ever carried off a route on a stretcher. Nobody was ever buried.
And yet here he was, fifteen years old and lying awake in a Pokémon Centre at four in the morning, working out how close he'd just come. A few centimetres higher and that strike to his ribs would have been a strike to his throat. Sandshrew had hit Mankey in maybe two seconds. Two seconds was a long time for a creature that could throw him through the air like that.
It had to happen. People had to die out here. Trainers, hikers, idiots who got too close to nests, kids who wandered off paths — somewhere, in the parts of this world that the brochures didn't show, there had to be a count. He just hadn't seen it yet.
He didn't know whether the thought made him want to be more careful or less of a coward.
Standing in the cold dawn of the clearing, he rolled the sleeve back down. Carefully. Hiding the marks.
Mankey wasn't going to be tamed by a Poké Ball. That much was clear. Whatever this turned into, it was going to have to be earned the long way round — the same way everything else in this world seemed to be — and he was going to have to be a lot smarter, and a lot more careful, about how he asked for it. Not just for Mankey's sake. For his.
He straightened up, breath steaming faintly in front of him, just as a voice came from across the park.
"Kai!"