The crowd swallowed my name and threw it back at me as a dare. The ring crew raked quick lines through the dirt, smoothing the gouges Luxio's claws had left from the first match. Dust hung in the light like breath. Somewhere behind the stands, a vendor shouted about skewers and sweet tea, and the smells—smoke, sugar, hot metal from a smith's stall—mixed into something that felt like heat on the tongue.
I pressed the purse from the delivery job deeper into my pack so it wouldn't swing. It wasn't heavy enough to change my future, but it thunked against my spine with every step like a reminder: keep moving, keep winning, keep earning. Luxio paced a tight arc at my heel, sparks snapping as if the cheers were electricity he could drink. Tyrunt rattled inside his ball, impatient. Grotle's stayed still but warm against my palm. Honedge's tassel lay cool against my wrist where my shadow pooled at my feet; his eye blinked once from the dark, then stilled.
"Back in ten," the ring marshal barked. "Winners to the south gate, losers to the east. Healers at the west tent, that way if you're smart."
I was smart. I cupped Luxio's jaw and checked his gums, the scrape on his shoulder where Staravia's wing had cut him. Not deep. He barely tolerated the pressure of my thumb before twisting away, insulted that I'd misplaced my priorities anywhere but the ring. I grinned despite myself and hooked a finger under his collar to settle him.
The bracket board clacked, tiles sliding as names jumped brackets. My next opponent's card flipped over: Lina. Two badges. Ponyta icon burned into the corner in red chalk.
Heat leapt under my ribs. Tyrunt's ball twitched like it had heard the chalk scraping. Of course he did. Fire on hooves. That was the opponent his pride would choose.
"Second round's one-on-one only," the marshal announced to the line of us waiting in the shade of the south gate. "Single switch allowed. You send two Pokémon to your box judge before the match; no changes after. No double-ups. No 'accidental' interference from the sidelines. We see a second body in the ring, you forfeit. Clear?"
I nodded, then flicked my glance down. My shadow didn't move. Honedge understood rules better than most people.
I put Luxio's and Tyrunt's balls into the tray for the judge. Luxio snarled under his breath at the indignity of being chosen alongside anyone, but he kept his mouth closed when I cupped his jaw again, and that counted for a lot. Tyrunt's ball was warm in my palm like a heart.
The first whistle cut the heat. We filed out, Lina already crossing to her mark with a grin that had teeth. Her Ponyta stamped and blew steam as if the city were a stable and it would burn its way out of every street to feel grass.
"Trainers, present," the ref called, flag raised.
I lifted Tyrunt's ball. The ring vibrated with the crowd's breath.
"Go," we said together, and red light burst against sun.
Ponyta hit the dirt like a thrown spark and turned that momentum into a kick that made the boundary stone tremble. Its mane cracked like pages of a burning book. Tyrunt landed with a roar that rattled my chest, claws digging lines, tail flaring wide on instinct.
"Half arcs!" I snapped, before pride could turn his first step into a mistake.
He blinked and the wild angle of his tail softened. Ponyta surged, hooves clipping dust. Lina's voice cut sharp—"Flame Wheel!"—and heat rolled off the ring as the horse tucked and spun into a circle of fire that ate distance.
"Inside it," I barked.
Tyrunt stepped—not back, not away, but sideways, meeting the edge of the wheel with a cut from his tail, not a swing. Fire spilled around him in a sheet, heat ghosting the dirt. For one bright second the ring was only color. He didn't push into it; he disrupted it, like I'd drilled into him until we both hated my voice. The circle stuttered. Ponyta stumbled and had to catch itself with two rapid hoof beats.
"Bite!" I shouted, already moving my mouth to say "no chase" if the angle was wrong.
It wasn't wrong. Tyrunt slid under the sputtering edge of heat and sank his jaws behind the shoulder where muscle bunched to drive the next stride. Ponyta screamed and kicked. Tyrunt rode the kick, the way we'd practiced in the yard, not matching it with force but matching the rhythm and letting it lift him just enough to avoid being smashed. He dropped, paws hitting dirt, tail already poised for the half arc that would carry him back out of range.
"Ember!" Lina snapped, and the world spit red.
"Shed!" I broke the word across my teeth.
Tyrunt snapped his mouth open in a roar so it wasn't a plug for the flames to funnel into. Heat washed over his tongue and scales like a dirty wave; he shook it off with a full-body shiver rather than bracing against it. The crowd hissed as if they'd felt it. He didn't. Born to ice, built on stone, he had learned to let heat be weather that passed around him instead of through.
"Keep your feet. Arcs," I said, softer now, as Ponyta cantered light, tossing its head with fury at a bite that still ached under the sheen of flame.
Lina narrowed her eyes. She'd thought she could draw us into a sprinting match and win by heart and fire. Pride angled her chin; she wasn't used to a dinosaur answering rhythm with rhythm.
"Stamp," she snapped, and Ponyta charged, hooves pistoning hard enough to lift dust like thrown flour.
"Inside step, now," I said, and Tyrunt moved in a line as clean as Grotle's patience taught him, tail flicking low so it was a blade rather than a club. Hooves slammed where his toes had been. He spun, jaws open—but I saw it before he did; an honest horse can feint, too. Ponyta's weight had been on the wrong leg for a proper strike and I snatched the word out of my mouth before it made a mistake out of him. "No!"
He froze mid-lunge, neck the only thing moving, eyes wide with the effort not to take the bait. Ponyta's hindquarters bunched to wheel hard and punish the pause—but in the split-second between intention and pound, Tyrunt's restraint became geometry. There, I thought, there is the lesson grown into bone. His tail cut a clean crescent. Ponyta's hoof struck dirt with the wrong angle, slid. For a heartbeat, gravity forgot itself. Horse and flame skidded as one; Tyrunt's Bite took the opportunity like a gift from a god older than Veilstone's stones.
He didn't make it a jaw-lock. He made it a drag. Lina shouted something—I didn't hear it. He didn't either. He hauled once, hard, and let go before a backlash kick could break his teeth. The bite wasn't the point. The point was the fall.
Ponyta hit dirt and slid into the boundary chalk hard enough to smear it. The crowd roared at the shape of turning color and the sight of a proud creature learning what friction felt like across skin. Heat licked my face and Tyrunt's scales steamed where embers had stuck. He planted his feet.
"Again?" Tyrunt's eyes asked with bright, dangerous joy.
"No," I said. "Make her stand."
He didn't understand the words, but he understood the timber of them and the way my hand cut the air low and still. Ponyta staggered up, sides stringing in and out like bellows. Lina's jaw was a knife.
"Flame Wheel," she said again, but there was different anger in it. Not joy. Not pride. Frustration. The kind that makes even the best riders dig in their heels.
The wheel started hotter. Tyrunt watched it, tail poised, mouth open to make any forced ember wash and go. He stepped inside at the last moment and knocked the ring off-balance with a touch that was almost delicate. The crowd made a new sound when they recognized the craft of it. That was what I wanted burning in his chest: not just strength. Control.
"Finish," I said.
He did not chase. He did not hit head-on. He took the misstep he had carved into the circle and turned it into a fall that looked accidental. His jaws closed at the base of the neck where skin is thick but feeling runs close. He shook once, hard, and stepped back before either of us made it cruel.
Ponyta's legs folded cleanly beneath it like a tent coming down. The ref's flag cut the air and the scream of the crowd came hot and honest.
"Winner: Orion and Tyrunt!"
Tyrunt lifted his head from the dirt and roared, chest heaving, tail trembling with the strain of control kept and used. The half-arc had become a weapon instead of a tripping hazard. He looked at me not for approval but for the next order, and something inside me that had been tight since Hearthome loosened.
"Good," I said, voice breaking around a word that felt too small. "Good."
Lina recalled her Ponyta. Her chin stayed high. "He doesn't jump at shadows," she said, not at me but to the air, like a note to herself. "You taught him that." She didn't wait for a response, just turned on her heel and vanished into the press.
The healer tent was a blur of cool cloth and a smell like fresh leaves. They dabbed Tyrunt's gums with a bitter syrup he hated and smeared something greasy over the reddest patches where embers had nipped, then sent me away with a string of berries and the admonition not to feed him all of them at once. Luxio prowled the perimeter, convinced every flap of canvas was a challenge. Grotle's leaf brushed my shoulder when I leaned on his shell for a second longer than necessary. Honedge's tassel never left my wrist. His silence was its own language: on we go.
The board clacked again. Quarterfinals.
Best-of-three.
The ring marshal handed me the tray. "Name three."
I didn't think long. "Grotle. Honedge. Luxio." I fingered Tyrunt's ball, hot with pride, and clipped it back to my belt. He'd made his point. Now the other points needed sharpening.
My name rose from the announcer's throat the way a bell rings from stone, clean and loud. Across from me walked a girl with hair buzzed short and a stance that said the ring wasn't a place she visited; it was where she lived. A black belt tied around her waist wasn't a Gym uniform, just honest cloth holding clothes together.
"Rena," she said when the ref made us nod at each other. Two badges on her vest. Her eyes flicked to my sleeve bells and didn't blink. "I'm not here to look pretty for the crowd."
"Me neither," I said, which was a lie because I hoped my team looked beautiful to anyone with eyes, but I understood the kind of truth she meant.
She sent first without ceremony. "Croagunk."
The frog landed with a smirk, sacs inflating under its cheeks like it was already bored. Poison gleamed at the edges of its fists.
I touched the hilt that wasn't there—only the space my hand knew around Honedge's tassel—and breathed once to smooth my voice. "Your time."
Steel slid out of shadow the way a note slides out of a throat. No flash, no roar. Just presence. His eye found the frog and didn't move. The crowd hushed like something in them recognized a blade the way hands recognize a flame.
"Poison Jab," Rena snapped.
The frog darted, fist humming violet.
"Flat guard," I said, and Honedge rotated on an axis that wasn't human, angling his body so that the steel received the poison the way a pond receives a stone—surface disturbed, depth unmarked. Poison splattered, hissed, slid like rain across a temple roof.
The crowd made that weird, hungry sound they only make when they think they are seeing a trick but it's only physics done without apology.
"Feint Attack," Rena said, and what she meant was not a show feint. Dark. Real. The punch that doesn't need the crowd's permission to hurt.
"See the shadow first," I whispered, and Honedge's eye twitched a pinprick to the left. The frog disappeared; no, it moved in a path our eyes didn't like watching. The angle it came from was where fear lived.
"Pivot," I said, and the blade did not block. He wasn't there. The fist streaked through the ghost-edge of where steel had been. By the time Croagunk's knuckles hit the dirt, Honedge had already put the weight of his intent behind the place a spine would be if a frog punched with a spine. The flat of his blade touched; the frog's breath left in a noise like a tire giving up.
"Shadow Sneak," I finished, and it wasn't an attack so much as a decision. No leap. No flash. Honedge slid along his own absence and hit the frog's temple lightly, precisely, with a force that didn't need volume to announce itself. Croagunk folded.
Flag. The roar rolled through me and out the other side. Rena's mouth tightened not with anger but with a craftsman's respect for a different craft.
"One-one?" she asked the ref, who nodded. Best-of-three, first blood to me.
She tossed her second ball with her head dipping not to me but to the ring. "Meditite."
The little fighter landed in a cross-legged stance and did not uncross. It opened its eyes and looked at Honedge like a monk looks at an altar: not impressed, not dismissive, only aware. The ring changed temperature in the space between its slow inhale and exhale.
I did not tell Honedge to stay in. Meditation cuts ghosts with thoughts as surely as fists cut flesh. I could have gambled. I didn't.
"Return," I said, and he slid into my shadow without a sound.
"Grotle," I told myself more than the ring, and he rolled onto the dirt like a small hill choosing a different valley. The crowd's cheer changed timbre. It was easy to love the blade. But there is a kind of love that only grows around patience, and a ring teaches a city that love too.
"Meditate," Rena said, and the little fighter did, light pooling under its skin in a way I had seen in priests and in wildfires.
"Vines out, then still," I said. Grotle put his roots where his feet were and his vines where his breath went and then let the ring be the ring. Meditite charged, fists a rhythm that wanted you to dance with it. Grotle did not. He absorbed the first hit along the edge of his shell and let the second hit the ground where he had been. It was not pretty. It was not clever. It was the answer you give when a question is asked too fast: No.
"Confusion!" Rena snapped, and the air around Grotle's head shimmered like heat above a forge. My stomach clenched—Psychic is unkind to those who live in their bodies.
"Bite," I said gently, and Grotle did something that would have made me laugh if I'd had air: he bit the dirt. His jaw sank into the ring itself not to eat it but to anchor to something the mind could not lift. The shimmer flattened. He shook soil loose and looked almost embarrassed. The crowd lost its breath and then remembered to cheer.
"Again," I told him, and this time when Meditite struck, Grotle's answer was not bite or block but lean. He leaned the way a tree leans into a wind that doesn't end. The force had to go somewhere; the ring took it. Vines snapped like seatbelts against Meditite's shins—tap, not cruel. The fighter stumbled. Grotle didn't hurry. He didn't have to. He lowered his head and let mass do the slow math that wins wars.
Flag. We were through.
Rena stepped to the chalk and bowed at the line. "You did not mistake patience for weakness," she said without inflection, which is what praise sounds like in a place that respects the ring more than the people in it.
"Semifinalists return at sundown," the marshal called. "Healers on the west. Don't be dumb."
I wasn't dumb. I let the healer smear paste across the scrape on Luxio's shoulder and rub cold oil into Tyrunt's tail muscle while Grotle chewed through a pair of bitter leaves like a cow that refused to admit it liked anything. Honedge didn't need hands; I polished him myself with the oiled cloth I kept wrapped under my sleeve. He didn't purr—steel doesn't—but the tassel's gentle pressure against my wrist was approval measured in grams.
The plaza thinned as the sun slid down the blocks of Veilstone's walls. Long shadows stretched like roads painted on stone. In the high windows of the Gym tower, I thought—for a heartbeat only—that I glimpsed pale hair curve and a black coat tilt, someone watching from a ledge where wind made most people blink. It might have been nothing. It might have been the city itself wearing a human outline the way it wore banners. I didn't look twice. The ring wasn't done with me.
Sundown burned the sky to copper. The crowd came back with food and coins clinking, voices rougher. Semifinal time. Best-of-three, again. My name threaded with another's in the announcer's throat. Dake. Three badges. He walked out with an Onix etched on his jacket and a smirk that belonged to boys who believed rock was a synonym for forever.
"Pick three," the marshal said again, though the board had already taken my names. I stayed with them: Grotle, Honedge, Luxio. Tyrunt's ball was warm and proud on my belt; he knew the choice wasn't lack of faith. Lava doesn't have to prove it's hot every hour.
"Onix," Dake said, and when the rock snake rose out of light into more stone, the ring looked suddenly too small.
"Grotle," I said, and the crowd laughed like it knew the script. Grass writes its own lines in this matchup.
"Rock Tomb!" Dake barked, fast, trying to steal momentum the math should have denied him.
"Roots," I said, and Grotle obliged by becoming more Grotle than a moment before. Stones slammed into where he was, and where he was was broader and lower than Dake had wanted him to be. The first time you see a plant choose the ground, you remember how foolish you've been pretending you own it.
"Razor leaf," I added, not as a shout but as a direction to tide. Grotle flicked and the air turned into paper that cuts. Onix's hide doesn't bleed the way flesh does; it chips. Chips rained. Dake's jaw tightened.
"Bind!" he snapped. Stone coils closed.
"Shell," I said, and Grotle's answer wasn't escape. It was geometry again. He tucked and let the coil hold him so he didn't have to hold himself. Onix squeezed. Grotle used the pressure to anchor a bite on stone—not to chew, to count—and when he exhaled, he did it as if air could be a tool. The coil loosened the half-inch you need to move a mountain. The next leaf line found the joint where two boulders met. The flag rose. The script had been old; we had honored it without boredom. Sometimes the answer is as simple as letting a truth be true.
Dake's mouth made a line. "Riolu," he said, and the little jackal hit the dirt like a question with legs.
I didn't send Honedge to make the obvious point about Fighting. I sent Luxio because Fire had not humbled him today and I wanted him to meet something that refused to be impressed by thunder.
"Quick Attack!" Dake shouted.
"Eyes," I told Luxio, and he looked. The blur came not from speed but choice, and choice leaves footprints called intention. Luxio stepped where the blur wasn't, not where it was, and set his paw gently on the path where it would be. Riolu tripped over a paw that felt like lightning that hadn't chosen to hurt yet.
"Spark," I said, and this time it was not a leap but a current running downhill. Riolu took it with a grunt and grinned with too many teeth for a boy-shaped dog.
"Counter!" Dake barked, and he meant the Psychic trick, not a simple punch answer. My stomach tightened. That force comes back multiplied.
"Out," I snapped, and Luxio moved not like a predator but like a man stepping off a train a breath before it leaves. The return pulse sizzled the hairs at his tail tip rather than his heart. He laughed in a way only things that hunt lightning can laugh.
"Bite," I finished, and his fangs found Riolu's forearm at the angle that says drop it or I take it. The jackal did. The flag fell. The crowd noise was a wave, and for a heartbeat I was a boy in it, not a captain on it.
Semifinal over. Finals tomorrow.
The plaza bled its sound into the streets as people peeled away toward food and beds. My team and I stood in the shadow line where the ring's light didn't quite reach. Tyrunt's ball was warm against my palm; when I clipped it back to my belt, I felt him settle like a sleeper turning to a cooler part of the bed. Grotle exhaled with a slow creak that sounded like wood in winter. Luxio prowled his small territory—a half circle that happened to be the curve where my body threw shadow. Honedge's tassel pressed once, the weight of a promise measured in thread and steel.
I should have slept. I didn't. We walked the edge of the ring while crews smoothed it for morning. The chalk boundary was a line I was learning not just to respect but to use, a thing you can push an opponent toward one inch at a time if you learn to let your breath be a rope. Veilstone's night smelled like rain that wasn't there and metal that had forgotten the fire that forged it. Somewhere up in the Gym tower, a laugh cut the stone quiet and then was gone. It might have been mine a year from now. It might have been a stranger's that I would never meet.
I sat on the lowest step and took one more long look at the bracket board: my name stitched to a stranger's and the word Final scrawled above like a dare. Prize money chalked in a line that would make the purse in my pack into something that could buy more than herbs and paste and a night under a dry roof. Not tutors, not yet. But enough to tighten the belt on the future.
Luxio bumped my knee with his head, then pretended he hadn't asked for my hand until I set it on his mane. The sparks that kissed my palm were honest and small. Grotle set his chin on the step and closed his eyes without sleeping. Tyrunt stirred and stilled. Honedge's eye opened in my shadow and went dark, not because the light had changed, but because he had decided the night had done enough looking.
Tomorrow, the ring again. After that, Maylene. After that, a road with names we hadn't earned the right to say yet. Somewhere far beyond those, a story about a Dragonite that had made my hands shake and my Pokémon's eyes shine. I didn't say it out loud. I didn't have to. Luxio's pulse thudded against my palm, and in the rhythm of it I heard the words they didn't need language for: one day.
The bells on my sleeve chimed once in the breeze and went still.