The doubt lasted only a moment. Nova pushed it aside. Whatever he felt standing across from a Pokémon like that Whiscash, he could not let it bleed into the battle. His partner needed him steady.
He reached for Nidoking's Poké Ball.
Then something changed. The familiar weight on his shoulder, the small, warm pressure he had grown so used to that he barely noticed it anymore, was gone.
Nova spun around. "Sprigatito!"
Sprigatito had already leapt from his shoulder and landed in the middle of the battlefield. It stood there, small and green against the wide open field, tail flicking with a kind of quiet resolve.
"Sprigatito, this is not a game! Get back here, right now!"
Sprigatito turned its head and looked at him. Its eyes were steady. Not playful, not restless. It had made up its mind about something, and Nova could see it.
The referee moved to call the start of the match, but Gilbert raised one hand. The referee stopped immediately.
Strictly speaking, once both Pokémon had entered the field, the match could begin. But no one in that arena was going to argue with an Elite Four member about procedure, least of all a referee whose salary came from the Gym itself. When Gilbert said to wait, they waited.
Gilbert looked across the field at Nova, his expression somewhere between puzzled and amused.
"Well now, kid. What exactly are you trying to pull? Are you looking down on me?" He tilted his head toward Sprigatito. "A Pokémon at that level, still in its first stage... you kept it on an Everstone, didn't you? Planning to keep it as a pet?" He gave a low, dry laugh. "A kitten is still a kitten, whatever level it is. You want to put that little thing up against my partner? You've got some nerve. Aren't you worried it'll get hurt?"
Nova stepped down from the trainer's platform and jogged onto the field. "I apologize, Elite Four Armstrong. This wasn't planned. Please give me thirty seconds."
Gilbert gave a quiet snort. He didn't approve, but he didn't stop him either.
Nova crouched down beside Sprigatito. "Come on. This isn't the time for this." He reached out to scoop Sprigatito up the way he always did, settling it back onto his shoulder.
Sprigatito pulled away.
Nova tried again, more firmly this time. The fur along Sprigatito's back suddenly bristled and hardened into sharp, stiff thorns. Nova's hand caught several of them before he could pull back. Small beads of blood rose along his palm.
Sprigatito froze. Its eyes went wide, full of something close to panic. It hadn't meant to do that. It leaned forward and pressed its small tongue to the cuts, again and again, as though it could undo the damage it had caused. Nova was the one who was hurt, but the guilt on Sprigatito's face was plain.
Even so, it did not leave the field.
When Nova met its eyes again, he saw it clearly. Sprigatito had something to say that words alone would not carry, so it said what it could with the look it gave him.
It had thought about this. It had been thinking about it for a long time. It loved Nova, and it knew that love meant it had to grow stronger. If it kept staying back, kept sitting on his shoulder while the battles happened around it, the gap between them would only widen. It didn't want to drift away from him. So it would fight. Not because it was told to. Because it had chosen to.
No matter who the opponent was.
Nova looked at Sprigatito for a long moment. Then he took a slow breath, stood up, and walked back to the trainer's platform.
"It's your battle, Sprigatito. I'm with you."
"Sprigatito!"
The small Pokémon let out a sharp cry and opened its mouth. Out rolled the Everstone, clicking across the arena floor.
The effect was immediate. Sprigatito's body began to glow, a bright, warm light that spread across the entire arena. Level forty-two, well past the threshold for its first evolution, the only thing that had been holding it back was the stone it had just released. Now, there was nothing stopping it.
From across the field, Gilbert watched with an expression that had softened into something like genuine interest. Life at his level left little room for surprise. Most battles followed patterns he had seen hundreds of times. But a Pokémon choosing to evolve in the middle of a match, on its own terms, with that kind of quiet conviction behind it... he hadn't seen that in years.
The glow faded.
Where Sprigatito had stood, there was now a Floragato. It rose to its full height, bipedal now, light green fur covering most of its body, with darker green markings along its face and a short, fluffy tail. Its posture was different too, balanced and ready, its newly freed forepaws loose at its sides.
The referee called the start of the match.
"Floragato, use Grassy Terrain!"
It was a careful opening, but the right one. Whiscash was a Water and Ground type, with a four-times weakness to Grass. Even so, the level difference between the two Pokémon was severe, and Nova was not about to let Floragato take a full-powered Earthquake without some protection in place. Grassy Terrain would cut the power of Ground-type moves like Earthquake and Bulldoze, giving Floragato room to fight back. It would also restore a small portion of Floragato's health each turn.
There was one more factor Nova was counting on. Floragato had a passive ability that let it draw on the healing energy of terrain beneath it. In Grassy Terrain, that ability would provide an additional layer of recovery on top of what the terrain itself offered. Combined, those two sources of healing meant that as long as Whiscash could not knock Floragato out in a single hit, Nova's side could sustain the fight.
The desert floor of the Layered Peaks Gym battlefield had been working against Floragato. Now it would not.
Green energy poured out from Floragato in a spreading wave, rushing across the cracked sand until the entire field had transformed into a carpet of fresh grass. The air itself changed, carrying the light, clean scent of a meadow.
Whiscash felt it. Even with its Oblivious nature, the surge of Grass-type energy filling the arena was something its instincts could not ignore. It didn't bother with a measured response.
It simply used Earthquake.
The ground buckled. The force tore the field apart in an instant, splitting the lawn into jagged fragments with cracks wide enough to swallow half a Floragato whole. The grassy surface Floragato had just laid down was shredded and scattered.
But it was not gone. Earthquake could not erase a terrain effect entirely. The grass-energy field still held, broken and battered as the ground beneath it was. The advantages Floragato had set up with its opening move were still in play.
The first exchange had been made.