They said goodbye to Shikamaru's group at Cherrygrove's northern gate, where Route 30 split from the coastal road that continued west toward Azalea Town.
The parting was easier than it would have been at the beginning of their journey. Eight months ago, Sasuke would have nodded, said something economical, and moved on. Now he clasped Choji's hand and held it for a moment longer than strictly necessary, because somewhere between the cook-off and the conversation about emotional chemistry, the large man had become someone whose absence would be felt.
"When we're both in Goldenrod," Choji said, "we cook together. No competition. Just cooking."
"Deal."
Shikamaru raised a hand in farewell that could have been a wave or could have been a dismissal of the entire concept of farewells as unnecessarily emotional. "Don't lose to Asuma before I get to watch. I want to see a Supernova get humbled in person."
"I'll try to schedule my humiliation around your travel itinerary."
"Appreciated."
Ino, standing slightly apart from the others, caught Kasumi's eye across the distance between the two groups. She didn't wave. She pointed at Kasumi, then at herself, then made a gesture that clearly meant next time, you and me, on stage. Kasumi returned it with a thumbs-up that carried the weight of a promise.
Then Shikamaru's group turned west, and Sasuke's group turned north, and the road diverged the way roads do, without drama, without finality, just two paths bending away from each other through different forests toward different challenges.
Route 30 swallowed the Mobile Home within minutes.
The forest closed in not gradually but suddenly, as if the trees had been waiting for them to commit to the road before revealing its true character. Johto cedar dominated, enormous specimens with trunks the width of the RV itself, their bark deep red-brown and fissured with age, their canopy so dense and interlocking that the midday sun reached the road only in coins of light scattered across the packed earth like fallen currency.
The effect was cathedral. That was the word that kept surfacing in Sasuke's mind as he drove, his hands steady on the wheel, his eyes tracking the narrow path ahead. The trees were pillars. The canopy was a vault. The light was stained glass. And the silence, or not silence, exactly, but the particular hush that falls in places where the outside world is held at bay by something older and more patient, was the silence of a space built for contemplation rather than transit.
"These trees are old," Kiyomi said from the back seat. She wasn't looking at her tablet for once. She was looking out the window with an expression that Sasuke had learned to recognize. the face Kiyomi made when something exceeded her ability to analyze it and forced her to simply experience it instead. "Some of these cedars are five hundred years old. Maybe older. They were standing when the Path of Letters was an active pilgrimage route."
"Tight turn ahead," Miyuki said from the passenger seat, her attention on the road rather than the trees. She'd taken over navigation duty because the GPS had lost signal a kilometer back and the paper map Elm had given them didn't account for the degree to which the forest had encroached on the road since the map was drawn. "Left, sharp. There's a rock formation on the right side, you'll need to hug the left bank."
Sasuke eased the Mobile Home through the turn with the precise, patient maneuvering that eight months of driving an oversized vehicle through spaces designed for foot traffic had taught him. The right mirror clipped a branch; cedar needles scattered across the windshield. Kasumi, who had been dozing against the window, startled awake.
"Are we being eaten by a forest?"
"The road narrows," Sasuke said.
"The road was already narrow."
"It narrows further."
"Wonderful."
She was right to be concerned. Route 30 had been designed, if "designed" was even the correct word for a path that predated formal engineering, for travelers on foot, trainers with Pokémon companions, monks walking the pilgrimage route with nothing wider than a handcart. The road accommodated the Mobile Home the way a garden path accommodates a truck. grudgingly, with frequent reminders that it hadn't been asked and didn't approve.
But the forest was not hostile. It was merely old, and old things have their own pace.
Wild Pokémon appeared with a frequency and boldness that surpassed anything they'd encountered in Kanto's managed routes. A Spinarak web stretched between two cedars at windshield height, massive, intricate, the silk catching the fragmentary light like a net of diamonds. Sasuke stopped the RV and Kiyomi climbed out to relocate the web's anchor points to higher branches, working with a patience that suggested she considered the Spinarak's architectural effort more important than their travel schedule. The spider Pokémon watched from its new position with the expressionless competence of a creature that had already begun planning the replacement web.
"You could have just driven through it," Kasumi said when Kiyomi returned.
"I could have. But someone spent all night building that. It deserves better than becoming a windshield decoration."
Teddiursa watched them from branches, three of the small bear Pokémon, their dark eyes curious and unafraid, their crescent-moon forehead marks catching what little light penetrated the canopy. One held a pawful of honey and licked it with meditative concentration, apparently finding the sight of a large blue vehicle more interesting than alarming. When Victini pressed its face against the window and chirped a greeting, the Teddiursa tilted its head, offered the honey toward the glass, and then ate it itself when no one took the offer.
Noctowl were active despite the afternoon sun, two of them perched on a dead branch overhanging the road, their enormous eyes tracking the RV's passage with the unblinking intensity of creatures that could see in spectrums humans couldn't name. In Kanto, owl Pokémon slept during the day. In Johto, the deeper forest provided enough darkness that the distinction between day and night blurred, and the Noctowl had apparently decided that both were acceptable hunting hours.