The static lifted off the Mareep's fleece in a thin blue-white shimmer, hairs standing on end like someone had drawn a charge through a comb, and the air between them tasted briefly of lightning — that clean, metallic sharpness right before a summer storm broke. Mareep's eyes had gone wide and glassy with focus, the soft pink of its cheeks lit up from the inside.
It was, Kai had to admit, impressive to say the least.
It was also about to be over for the poor thing.
"Sandshrew, use Magnitude!"
He saw Sandshrew register the command and adjust to it instantly — none of the questioning glance from earlier. Just a small body dropping its weight, ears going flat against its skull, and then the launch.
Sandshrew jumped straight up into the air.
Higher than Kai expected, frankly, but he'd watched it do this enough times now to know what came next. The little sand-coloured body twisted in the air with a kind of compact grace, pulling its limbs in tight as it rotated, building rotational momentum the same way a diver built it before a dive. The morning light caught on its yellow underbelly as it hung, for one impossible second, at the top of its arc.
"Mareep — !"
Kai didn't catch what the girl tried to call out. The Thundershock had already left the fleece by then anyway, a forked yellow line that cracked through the air toward where Sandshrew had been a half-second ago and found only empty space.
Sandshrew was coming back down and hit the ground claws-first, both palms slamming flat into the grass with the full weight of its descent behind them, causing the earth to move.
Not metaphorically. The clearing went sideways under their feet for a heartbeat, the way a bus did when it took a corner badly — that lurching, unsteady shift that made your stomach roll. Kai saw the coin-trick boy stagger and grab Marcus's shoulder for balance. He saw the girl's stance widen instinctively. He felt it himself, through his boots, that low subsonic punch that came up through the soles and into his knees.
The grass between Sandshrew and Mareep didn't stay grass. It rippled. A line of earth lifted maybe six inches, a wave moving across the clearing in a shockwave radius, and where the wave reached Mareep, it lifted the small woolly body clean off its feet and flipped it backwards, a direct hit.
Mareep flew through the air before it came crashing down on its side.
It didn't get back up.
The wool was singed at the edges where the Thundershock had still been crackling when the impact landed — backfired, Kai thought vaguely, like static does when the body holding it blacks out — and one small black hoof gave a single twitch, searching for the ground. Then it went still.
Silence.
The wave of disturbed earth was still settling. Small clods of dirt rolled to a stop. A Pidgey Kai hadn't noticed before flew up out of the trees at the clearing's edge, startled by the tremor.
Sandshrew straightened slowly, brushing soil from its claws, looking at its handywork.
"...What."
That was the coin-trick boy. His Poké Ball had stopped rolling across his knuckles. He was staring at the divot in the grass where the Mareep had been standing as if it had personally offended him.
"That was—" Marcus started, and then stopped, because he didn't seem to have the rest of the sentence ready.
The girl was already moving. She crossed the clearing in quick, no-wasted-motion strides and dropped to one knee beside her Mareep, hands going to its side, the back of her fingers pressed lightly against the woolly chest to feel for breathing. Kai watched her do it with the slightly relieved feeling of someone who'd been worried she might not — that the Magnitude had been too much, that he'd misjudged. He'd had that nagging thought as soon as Sandshrew had cleared the apex of its jump, and he'd realised that this was going to be a high-level magnitude.
But Mareep was breathing. The flank rose and fell, slow but steady. The girl's shoulders dropped about half an inch, and she let out a quiet breath that Kai recognised, because he'd let one out himself plenty of times.
"Mareep, return," she said softly, holding the Poké Ball out. The red light pulled the small body back into the capsule, and the grass where it had lain was empty.
She stood up. Looked at Kai. Looked at Sandshrew, then looked back at Kai.
"That was one move," she said.
"Yeah," Kai said, not needing to say anything else.
"You used one move."
"Yeah..."
"On a Mareep that doesn't move that well in close quarters when it's already charging."
"Yeah," Kai said again, feeling like he kept needing to repeat himself because he didn't know what else he could say without it sounding either too much or too little.
She gave a slow nod. The kind of nod that meant the assessment had been completed, and the result had been logged somewhere internally.
"Right," she said. Then, with more feeling. "Bloody hell."
Marcus laughed — that startled, half-disbelieving laugh that he made when something had genuinely thrown him. "I told you," he said. "I told you he was good, didn't I tell you he was good — "
"You said he had a good Totodile," the coin-trick boy cut in. "You did not mention his Sandshrew jumps four feet in the air and detonates the ground like a bomb."
"To be fair," the tall boy said, "I'm not sure how he could've worked that into normal conversation."
Kai found himself, weirdly, embarrassed. He stooped down and let Sandshrew step into the crook of his arm, lifting it up against his chest. It was heavier than people probably expected — all that body density packed into a small frame, and it settled against his ribs with a small contented huff, the way it always did when a fight had gone well. He felt one of its small claws curl into the front of his jacket.
"Good work, Sandshrew," he said quietly into the side of its head.
Sandshrew pushed its forehead briefly against his collarbone and didn't say anything. It didn't need to.
"Honestly though," the girl said. She'd come closer now, hands tucked into the pockets of her blazer, her usual measured composure recovered but with something sitting underneath it that hadn't been there before. "You should be challenging the Gym."
"He's working on it," Marcus said, in the tone of someone who'd already had this conversation in his own head several times.
"No, but I mean — now," she said. "I thought maybe in a couple of weeks. I thought maybe he needed more match time. I — " She gestured vaguely at the divot in the grass. "That kind of timing. That kind of finishing. Falkner'd give you a proper run for it, but I genuinely don't think it'd be as one-sided as people would expect."
"I appreciate that," Kai said, and meant it. He felt the heat of the compliment in his chest in a way he hadn't quite expected to. Coming from her, it landed differently. She wasn't the type to hand things out that she didn't believe.
The tall boy nodded, slowly. "Yeah. I agree with her."
"Same," the coin-trick boy said. Then, with feeling: "You might actually do the thing. Like, beat him. Like, on the first attempt. Not many people can pull that off."
Kai opened his mouth to say something modest and then thought better of it, and then thought better of that, and ended up just laughing.
He looked down at Sandshrew. Sandshrew looked back up at him, eyes bright and ready for more action.
Yeah, he thought. Maybe we could.
It wasn't smugness. It wasn't even quite confidence. It was something stranger and quieter — the feeling of standing on a path and seeing, for the first time, where it was actually leading.
Kai's goal of becoming a powerful Pokémon trainer was starting to grow more interesting, and now the first gym was truly in sight.