Kai turned around.
Marcus was crossing the grass in long strides, jacket open, school bag slung over one shoulder. Behind him, three others, two boys and a girl, around Marcus's age — maybe eleven, twelve — with the same academy blazer and the same air of people who had somewhere to be but had decided to be here first.
"You're early," Marcus said, genuinely surprised when he got close enough to take in Kai's state — slightly damp at the knees, dusty, the faint look of someone who had already been in the wars. "What time did you get out here?"
"Five-ish," Kai said, rubbing the back of his head.
Marcus blinked. Looked at the others and then looked back at Kai. "Right," he said, as if he wasn't quite sure what to do with that.
He remembered himself. "These are the lot I was telling you about, well some of them anyway." He turned to the three of them. "This is Kai. He's the one I was telling you about — the Totodile."
"The one you said destroyed your Aipom?" one of the boys said, grinning. He was shorter than the others, with his hair slightly too long and a Poké Ball already rolling back and forth across his knuckles like a coin trick.
"I said it was a close match," Marcus said, with no real conviction.
The girl looked Kai up and down with a frank, assessing sort of look that he'd have found rude from an adult but was almost refreshing from a kid. "So you're not from the academy?" she said. Not unkindly. Just straight.
"No," Kai said.
"Wild trainer?"
"Self-taught, yeah."
The third of them — another boy, a bit taller, with his academy badge slightly crooked, tilted his head. "Have you graduated yet, then? Or are you still at school?"
Kai paused for just a half-second. He'd had this question before in various forms, and it never got any easier to navigate cleanly. "Not at the academy, no. I'm already on my journey."
That landed. He saw it in the slight shift of their attention — not awe exactly, but recalibration. Trainers who were on a full journey, out in the world properly, occupied a different tier in the academy kids' mental map. The kind of thing you studied toward.
"How many badges?" the tall one asked.
"Working on my first."
"Violet Gym?"
"Yeah."
"Falkner's tricky," the girl said. "We studied his last three recorded matches in class. He plays the field vertically, not horizontally — most trainers forget to account for height positioning."
Kai filed that away. "Good to know. Thanks."
"Right, okay—" Marcus cut in, apparently deciding the introductions had gone on long enough, along with the small talk. He was smiling, though.
"What I was trying to say to them all this morning was that Kai here is seriously good. Like, his Totodile was—"
"Wicked strong," the coin-trick boy said. He was grinning. "That's the word he used. Verbatim. Multiple times."
Marcus looked pained. "The point is," he said, rallying, "I thought it'd be worth seeing what he's got across the board. Not just the Totodile."
The girl's eyes lit up first. Then the tall boy's. The coin-trick one stopped rolling the ball across his knuckles and looked up properly.
"Across the board," the tall boy said. "As in—?"
"How many Pokémon have you got?" the girl asked Kai directly.
"Six. So far anyway." Kai said, a smile coming to his face.
The three of them exchanged a look. The kind that had a whole conversation compressed into about a second and a half.
"Six," the coin-trick boy repeated. "And no badges?"
"No badges," Kai confirmed.
"That's—" He paused, recalibrating. "I mean, no offence, but managing more than two at once without badges is actually hard. Most independent trainers don't bother with more than one or two, maybe three at a push until they're badge one or two in."
"More than two is where experience management gets complicated," the tall boy said, with the slightly rehearsed quality of someone quoting something they'd been taught. "Pokémon bond differently across a team, and without formal evaluation, you can't always tell who's actually ready to battle and who just thinks they are."
"Or who's going to try and bite your arm off," Kai said mildly.
"...Was that a joke?" the girl said.
"Yeah..." Kai said, being able to tell that their humour wasn't on his level.
Marcus looked at his forearm. Then at Kai's jacket sleeve. He had, Kai noticed, the social awareness not to say anything.
"Right," the girl said, decision apparently made. She stepped forward, unclipping a Poké Ball from her belt. "I think we should test this properly. All of us. You use a different Pokémon for each battle — one each — and we get to see what your team actually looks like."
"Three against six," Kai said.
"Three against three. We're not going to be unfair about it." She looked at the others. "Right? One each."
"Absolutely," the coin-trick boy said, and the tall one nodded.
Kai looked at the three of them. Then at Marcus, who gave him a slight shrug that said this was exactly what he'd expected to happen.
He thought about it for all of two seconds.
It was a good test, actually. That was the thing. He hadn't had a chance to run his whole team through their paces against anything that would actually push back properly. Zubat and Mankey especially needed ring time — though he was keeping Mankey in reserve for the right matchup, not wanting to torch a goodwill exercise with a Pokémon that might decide to redefine "friendly" at short notice.
"Yeah," he said. "Alright. Let's do it."
"I'll go first," the coin-trick boy said immediately.
"Fine with me." He was already rolling it again, the Poké Ball spinning across his knuckles. Kai got the sense that he did this a lot.
"Go, Sentret!"
The ball arced out and cracked open, and the Sentret that came out of it hit the ground on its wide, striped tail, balancing perfectly upright, nose twitching and eyes sharp, already scanning the space between them with the alert, jittery energy of its species.
Kai had seen wild Sentret on the routes. They were scout Pokémon by nature — constantly checking sightlines, never fully comfortable, always watching the perimeter.
He considered his options. Mankey would have been the obvious choice — Fighting type versus Normal, same as the Rattata matchup, but that was a conversation he wasn't ready to have in public yet. Snubbull was perfectly capable, but probably overpowered for this.
That left Rattata, with Kai knowing this would be a good test for the Pokémon. Unclipping its Poké Ball from his belt, he threw it onto the field.
"Rattata, let's do this."
The coin-trick boy watched this with mild amusement. "Sentret versus Rattata. This should be quick," he said. Not rudely — just with the confidence of someone who thought they were about to demonstrate something.
He wasn't wrong about quick, Kai reflected. Just wrong about who'd be doing the demonstrating.
"Sentret, use Foresight!"
Sentret's eyes sharpened — that unblinking, hyper-focused look that locked onto a target and stripped out the noise. Kai understood the play immediately. The kid had done his homework: Foresight removed evasion advantages, made Normal-type moves hit Ghost-types, and, more practically, it stopped Kai from playing too cute with positioning. It was a smart opener, actually. Better than he'd expected from someone this age.
But Rattata wasn't a Ghost-type. And the answer to a smart opener was a faster one.
"Rattata, Focus Energy."
Rattata dropped its chin and went very, very still. The kind of stillness that was the opposite of doing nothing — every sense drawing inward, filtering out the grass smell and the distant bells and the watching faces, narrowing the world to the Sentret in front of it. Its small eyes didn't close. They got sharper.
"Sentret, Scratch — rush it, don't let it settle!"
Sentret came off its tail in one fluid motion, moving fast across the grass, claws up. But Rattata moved first.
Using Quick Attack. Not as a response. But as an anticipation.
It read the angle before the movement had finished deciding itself, shot sideways at a low angle and was already inside Sentret's reach when the scratch came down on empty air. The impact of Rattata's counter came from below, and Sentret caught it across the jaw, spinning half a rotation before planting its tail again and catching itself.
"Scratch again—" The trainer yelled.
But Rattata had already gone. Quick Attack has a rhythm to it — any trainer worth their salt knows that — but the rhythm Rattata had found was not the predictable one, not the straight-line dash and return. It was something Kai had been working on in training: broken timing, random exit angles, never the same route twice. The coin-trick boy tried to track it and couldn't, his eyes following where Rattata had been while it arrived from somewhere else entirely.
Sentret tried to compensate. Using a Quick Attack of its own — a late one, too late, and it clipped Rattata's flank without real purchase. Rattata took it and kept its feet.
"Now use Hyper Fang Rattata," Kai yelled out.
Rattata turned. The Focus Energy was still there — he could see it in the locked-in clarity of its expression, the way it wasn't reacting to anything except the target. It closed the gap in three strides, and Sentret barely got a paw up before Rattata's teeth found its scruff.
Sentret hit the grass, rolled, came up on its tail again — and wobbled. Legs trembling slightly, eyes slightly unfocused. It hadn't fainted. But it was looking at Rattata with something that wasn't aggression anymore.
"Sentret," the coin-trick boy said quietly. A pause. He looked at it for a moment. Then made his decision. "Good effort. Return."
He recalled it, and the clearing settled. He looked at Kai with an expression that was still friendly but had gained something — a proper seriousness.
"Okay," he said. "That Focus Energy hold during the rushing. That's not standard."
"No," Kai agreed.
"How'd you teach it that?"
"Supersonic during drills. It had to learn to block out the noise."
He nodded slowly, turning this over. Then stepped back and gave the space to the next person in line.
"Looks like you weren't kidding, Marcus, he's good."
Marcus nodded, arms crossed over his chest, pleased to see Kai living up to his reputation. Now he was eager to find out how he'd fare against his next opponent.