Chapter 30
After battling, the four of them ended up sitting on the low wall that ran along the edge of the park, taking a break before Marcus and the others had to head over to school.
The morning sky had gone fully blue over them. The sun was clear of the rooftops now, catching the slate-grey tiles of Violet City and warming the stone under Kai's hands. Somewhere across the city, the bells of Sprout Tower had started up again — chiming across the city.
Marcus was watching the bells, being able to see the tower standing over the trees from where they were sitting.
"What time is it?" he said eventually, to no one in particular.
The tall boy checked his wristwatch. "Coming up to nine."
"Right." Marcus blew out a breath. "Right, we're going to have to leg it in a bit."
"What's on?" Kai asked.
"Field trip day." Marcus pulled a face. "School thing. They're walking us up to Sprout Tower for the morning. Some sort of — I don't know, lecture? Visit? They've been hyping it up for weeks, but our teacher's been weirdly tight-lipped about it. Like something's going on, but he won't say what."
"It's the challenge," the girl said.
Marcus turned to her. "What?"
"My brother said. He went on the same trip two years ago." She said, taking a sip from her water bottle. "The head monk at the tower — Elder Li, I think his name is — he runs a thing for trainers who go up there. If you make it all the way to the top floor and beat him in a battle, he gives you something. Like a gift, sort of. My brother said it was something good, but he wouldn't tell me what. Just that he uses it all the time and it 'changed how he trains.'"
The other two leaned in slightly.
"He got there?" Marcus asked. "Your brother? He won?"
"He got most of the way up," she said. "Beat a couple of the lower-floor monks. But the head monk wiped his Furret out in two moves. He still talks about it — said he's never been thrown around a battlefield like that in his life."
"Two moves," the coin-trick boy repeated, glancing at Kai with new appreciation. "Look, no offence, but — "
"I know," Kai said. "I know."
But something underneath the conversation had gone very still in his head.
Sprout Tower...
He could see it. Properly, the way he could sometimes, when one of these random pieces of the game lined up with the right slot in his memory. The wooden tower with its swaying central pillar — the great Bellsprout, the elders had called it, hundreds of years old, holding the whole structure together by being alive at its core. Three floors, if he was remembering right. Sage Li. Bellsprout, Hoothoot. A TM at the end of it, the kind of thing that genuinely had changed his playthroughs back when he'd been small and nine and on his bedroom floor with the DS in his hands and the curtains drawn.
Flash...
Or had it been Rock Smash? No, Flash — that was the one. Flash, for getting through the Dark Cave properly. Or he could be wrong.
The Dark Cave. He thought about that, too, briefly. He thought about how dark real dark was, after his trip into the lower part of it on his way to Violet, and how that was a problem he was going to have to solve eventually, one way or another.
Beyond all of that, though — beyond the prize, beyond the lore — there was the bit Kai's brain kept circling back to.
The tower had been full of Pokémon.
Wild Bellsprout. Wild Hoothoot. Rattata, even, on the lower floors. He'd run from half of them and battled the rest as a kid because he hadn't wanted to slow his progress through. But here — in this version of things, where catching a Pokémon meant adding a partner to his life, another Pokémon who'd fight alongside him, every wild encounter in that tower was a possibility.
He looked down at Sandshrew, who was curled up in a ball by his feet, resting.
A Bellsprout would round things out, he thought. Grass type. Something I haven't got. Something that'd open a few doors for me. Kai thought.
The training value alone would be worth the morning. A live battlefield with a proper challenge at the top, in a controlled environment with monks who knew what they were doing and students supervised by teachers. Nobody was going to die in Sprout Tower the way nobody was going to die at the academy, not really — not the way they could die out on a route at three in the afternoon when a Mankey took offence to a glance.
And then, at the top, a man whose own students hadn't been able to put a dent in him. A challenge that, if he was honest, his team had actually grown into the shape of since he'd last been able to picture what that fight looked like.
He realised the others had stopped talking now.
He looked up.
Marcus was watching him with the expression of someone watching a mouse stand very still in the corner of a room before deciding to bolt.
"You've gone quiet all of a sudden," Marcus said.
"Yeah."
"Thinking?"
"Yeah," Kai said with a smile.
Marcus glanced sideways at the girl. She was already smiling, very slightly, in a way that suggested she'd seen this coming three sentences ago.
"Kai," Marcus said carefully, "do you want to come?"
Kai pretended to consider it for about half a second longer than he needed to.
"Would your teacher mind?"
"Oh, no, the trip's open to any registered trainer who wants to attempt the challenge. They actively encourage it — gets the academy a write-up if one of us does well, and they reckon outside trainers raise the bar for the rest. It's how they pitch it, anyway."
"Then yeah," Kai said. "Yeah, I'll come for sure."
"Sick," the coin-trick boy said, already swinging his legs back down off the wall. "Sandshrew's got to do that move at least once on an unsuspecting monk, that's a hard requirement now." He said, laughing.
"It's not," the girl said.
Marcus stood up and brushed grass off his trousers. "We've got to get back to school first — register, get into our walking groups. You can meet us at the foot of the tower at half ten. They'll let you in, as long as you've got your trainer card." Marcus said.
"Half ten," Kai repeated. "Sprout Tower. Got it."
"Sprout Tower." Marcus grinned. "And bring your whole team. Trust me. You're going to want options."
They peeled off then, in a brief flurry of bag-grabbing and "see you laters", and the girl gave him one last appraising look that he was starting to suspect was just her resting expression. Within about a minute, the four of them were jogging across the park heading toward their academy, disappearing out of Kai's eye line.
Kai stayed sitting on the wall for a bit longer, letting his thoughts run a little.
Sandshrew had popped out of his rolled-up ball and jumped up onto the wall, sitting next to Kai, nudging his trainer for some attention.
Kai patted the small Pokémon on the head, a smile on his lips.
Sprout Tower, he thought again. This should be a good final test before I challenge the gym leader.
He could see it on the city's skyline from here — leaning very slightly with the breeze, the way a tall reed did. Not a building. A creature, kind of. Or a building grown around a creature, which was the closest he could get to it.
Above him, the bells started up again.
Low. Rolling. Marking the hour the way they had every hour since he'd arrived in the city, but somehow, now, with his name in them.
"Right," Kai said quietly. "Half ten."
Sandshrew gave a small approving snort against his leg, and the two of them sat there for another minute, listening, before he eased it back into its Poké Ball, stood up, and started heading for the Pokémon Centre to heal his team and get ready for their next challenge.