"Enter," he said, and stepped aside.
The girls remained on the ground floor by mutual agreement. Sasuke climbed alone, with Victini on his shoulder and the morning light filtering through wooden lattice above.
The first floor smelled of old wood and green growth.
Monk Ichiro knelt in the center of a circular training space, his Bellsprout standing beside him, thin, swaying, its leaf-like hands folded across its chest in an approximation of its trainer's meditative posture. The room was sparse. wooden floor, paper walls, a single window that admitted a shaft of light in which dust motes turned like tiny planets.
"Welcome," Ichiro said. He was young, perhaps twenty-five, earnest, with the trimmed intensity of someone early in a lifelong practice. "Your challenge is simple. Defeat my Bellsprout." A pause. "Without using a super-effective move."
Sasuke looked at Victini. The small Pokémon was a Fire- and Psychic-type. Fire was super-effective against Grass. Psychic was neutral. Taking fire out of the equation removed Victini's most obvious advantage, the hammer that type matchups practically begged him to use.
Restraint. The first lesson.
"Victini," Sasuke said. "Confusion."
The Psychic-type energy rippled outward from Victini's crest, a controlled wave, precise, directed at the Bellsprout with surgical intent. But Ichiro's Bellsprout didn't take the hit. It bent. Its entire body twisted aside with a fluidity that seemed to ignore the rules governing solid matter, the thin stem of its body curving like a reed in a river, the Confusion wave passing through the space it had just vacated.
Fast. Faster than any Bellsprout Sasuke had expected.
Victini adjusted without being told, tracking the Bellsprout's movement and firing a second Confusion at its projected position. The Bellsprout bent again, the other direction this time, its leaves brushing the floor, its body a green arc of impossible flexibility.
The pattern established itself. Victini struck, the Bellsprout bent, and the attacks hit air. Victini's speed was superior, but the Bellsprout wasn't trying to match speed with speed. It was matching speed with absence, being somewhere else by the time the attack arrived, not through quickness but through anticipation.
Sasuke read it. The Bellsprout was watching Victini's body language the way a dancer watches a partner, reading intention before action, moving in response to the decision rather than the execution.
"Victini. Feint left, strike right."
The small Pokémon understood immediately. It shifted left, drawing the Bellsprout's anticipatory lean, and then redirected mid-motion, Confusion lancing right, catching the Bellsprout in the middle of its dodge. The hit connected cleanly. The Bellsprout tumbled once, recovered, and swayed upright with the dignified resilience of a creature that treated being knocked down as a temporary change in altitude.
Victini pressed the advantage, two more Confusions, each one targeted at the gap between the Bellsprout's anticipation and its recovery, the narrow window where flexibility hadn't yet decided which direction to flex. Three hits. Four. The Bellsprout wavered, drooped, and settled to the floor in the Grass-type equivalent of a conceded match.
Ichiro recalled his partner gently. "Good," he said. "You understand restraint. Many trainers with your power wouldn't bother finding the precise approach. They'd burn through the restriction and call it strategy."
The second floor belonged to Monk Nozomi, a woman in her thirties whose quiet confidence filled the room the way perfume fills a small space, invisibly, completely, without apparent effort. Her Weepinbell hung from a ceiling beam beside her, the bell-shaped Pokémon rotating slowly, its wide mouth set in an expression that might have been patient or might have been hungry.
"Your challenge," Nozomi said. "Battle in complete silence. No verbal commands. No sounds of any kind from the trainer."
She looked at Sasuke. "If you speak, you fail. If you whisper, you fail. If you clear your throat, you fail. Your Pokémon must fight using only the bond between you."
Silence.
Sasuke looked at Victini. Victini looked at Sasuke. And in the space between their eyes, in the language that twelve years of partnership had built from shared meals and shared battles and shared afternoons in the Crown Tundra's silence and shared evenings on observation decks watching stars, in that language, a conversation happened that neither of them could have translated into words, because it had never been made of words.
Ready?
Victini's crest flickered. Not a nod. Something deeper.
Nozomi released her Weepinbell.
The battle was strange and beautiful.
Victini fought without audible cues, responding instead to Sasuke's micro-expressions, the slight tightening of his jaw that meant dodge left, the flick of his eyes that indicated above, the barely perceptible shift in his breathing that signaled now. Twelve years of knowing each other had created a vocabulary that existed below the threshold of conscious thought, in the territory where instinct and intimacy became indistinguishable.
The Weepinbell attacked with Razor Leaf, a storm of sharp-edged foliage that filled the room with green projectiles. Victini wove through them without a single verbal instruction, its movements synchronized to Sasuke's attention the way a brush follows a painter's hand. When Sasuke's focus shifted left, Victini moved left. When his breathing quickened, Victini accelerated. When he exhaled slowly, Victini settled into defensive positioning.
Confusion connected twice. A Zen Headbutt followed, precisely timed to the instant when the Weepinbell overextended on a Vine Whip. The bell-shaped Pokémon wobbled, steadied, and launched a final Acid attack that Victini dodged with a spiral that turned evasion into something that resembled, if you were watching from the right angle, a dance.
The Weepinbell fainted. Victini landed on Sasuke's shoulder without needing to be called.
Nozomi smiled. It was a small expression, private, the kind of smile that acknowledged something worthy without diminishing it through excess praise.
"Your bond speaks louder than words," she said.
The third floor tested patience.
Monk Daiki was broad-shouldered and thick-necked, a physical anomaly among the slender monks of the Tower, and his Victreebel matched his energy. large for its species, aggressive, its vine-lash tongue dripping a faintly acidic saliva that hissed where it touched the wooden floor.
"Three minutes," Daiki said. "Your Pokémon must dodge every attack. It cannot strike back. Not once. If it attacks, you fail. If it's hit, you fail. Three minutes of pure evasion."