Scyther’s potential had barely changed. It was only up by a fraction, so Reiji didn’t bother paying it much attention.

They had spent a lot of the past month on ships, so Scyther had only gained a little over three levels. The further they went, the harder leveling up became.

As for its Abilities, the one Reiji cared about was Swarm. Its proficiency had risen quite a bit. They sparred almost every day, all for the sake of developing the sensing side of that Ability.

Steadfast didn’t matter much. Once Scyther evolved, that Ability would be overwritten anyway, so there was no point obsessing over it. Besides, Scyther’s fighting spirit was as strong as ever. He had no worries there.

Its older moves had not changed much. The four new ones were Razor Wind, Close Combat, Baton Pass, and Cross Poison.

Those were the moves it had picked up during their days at the Gym, and their proficiency looked good. It had been training them this whole time.

On top of those four, Scyther had also learned Air Cutter from Pelipper. On paper, that was a special attack, so a physically focused Scyther did not really need it. But because it had an elevated critical-hit rate, Reiji had it learn the move anyway.

As for the rest, the moves he focused on most had all climbed to solid proficiency.

X-Scissor and Fury Cutter on the Bug side.

Acrobatics and Tailwind on the Flying side.

Focus Energy, Swords Dance, Double Team, Protect, Quick Attack, and the rest on the Normal side.

Agility and Steel Wing had also reached very respectable levels.

Against that Venusaur, Scyther should not be at any real disadvantage. Venusaur was weak to Flying, while it did not have many good options to pressure Scyther in return.

The moment Reiji decided Scyther would handle the second round, he shouted, “Scyther, Focus Energy first. Then accelerate in and use Double Team!”

Scyther’s body was wrapped in a strange glow as energy gathered around it. It was focusing its spirit and sharpening its edge.

“Venusaur, Synthesis.” Tania did not attack at all. Instead, she used Scyther’s setup window to have Venusaur restore the HP it had lost earlier.

Light blossomed over Venusaur’s body, and its flower flared brightly as it healed itself.

By the time Venusaur finished using Synthesis, Scyther was already on it. It circled Venusaur at high speed and filled the field with afterimages, leaving Venusaur unable to tell the real one from the fakes.

“Venusaur, sweep with Vine Whip!”

Thick vines lashed out from Venusaur, ready to sweep across the circle of afterimages and flush the real Scyther out.

Reiji had no intention of giving her that chance. Venusaur was already slower than Scyther to begin with, and Gyarados had knocked two stages off its Speed earlier. There was no way it was escaping now.

“Scyther, Acrobatics!”

Before Venusaur’s Vine Whip could complete the sweep, all eight Scyther images moved at once, diving in from every angle. One slash flashed past—

Venusaur cried out in pain for the first time all battle.

That Acrobatics had clearly hurt.

Acrobatics started at 55 power, but with no item, it jumped to 110. A critical hit doubled the damage again, and that still was not even counting Flying’s super effective damage against Venusaur.

Reiji let out a quiet breath. That should do it.

Focus Energy only raised the critical-hit rate to stage two, which still meant a fifty-percent chance. It was only stage three that guaranteed criticals.

He had not expected it to crit right there. That was a very welcome stroke of luck.

“Scyther, press it. Air Cutter!”

“Venusaur, Protect!” Tania bit down hard. She could tell that one Acrobatics had done serious damage. At this point, she could only try to buy another turn and gamble on another Solar Beam.

Scyther hovered above the field and snapped its wings, firing crescent-shaped Air Cutters down at Venusaur in a relentless barrage.

From above, it bombarded the ground below until the whole area was buried in smoke and dust. When the haze finally began to settle, Venusaur was already out cold.

Air Cutter was another move with an elevated critical-hit rate. If even one of those wind blades landed, the damage would spike. Venusaur had already been hanging on by a thread. Even if Protect blocked the first few blades, it could not save it from the rest.

Type advantage really did make life easier.

Reverse matchups were a nightmare. One slightly unlucky turn, and everything could collapse. Gyarados had just demonstrated that perfectly.

“Come back, Venusaur. You did well.”

After recalling Venusaur and quietly praising it, Tania lowered her gaze toward the shadow at her feet.

“Gengar.”

A dark line stretched out from Tania’s shadow, slid across the battlefield, and swelled into a round purple body with a wicked grin.

“Gengar, huh?” Reiji had just finished checking Scyther’s panel, and one thing stood out: Scyther had a Dark-type move that could threaten Gengar. He saw no reason to switch.

“Scyther, Agility!”

Reiji still held first move advantage, as always. That was one of the perks of being the challenger in a Gym battle.

Scyther took off at once, accelerating around Gengar until it blurred. With that, it had now boosted its Speed for the second time.

“Gengar, Mean Look!”

“Oh, come on. More dirty tricks.” The moment Reiji heard it, he cursed under his breath. He understood immediately what Tania was trying to do and shouted, “Scyther, Night Slash!”

“Gengar, Protect. Then Perish Song.”

“Damn it. So that’s how you want to play.” Reiji had truly misjudged her. Under that pretty face was a mind just as filthy as his old PvP habits.

These were the kind of cheap tactics he had been abusing back in his previous life. He never thought he would be on the receiving end of them one day.

“Scyther, no holding back. Break through by force!”

Scyther had already been caught by Mean Look. Two black beams had shot from Gengar’s eyes and struck it cleanly, leaving behind a choking sense of restraint. It felt wrong immediately.

Then Gengar started muttering some eerie little tune, and a black wave of energy rippled out from it. Red-black power wrapped around Scyther like a mark.

Before it had any time to think, Reiji was already shouting for it to break Gengar’s Protect head-on.

Scyther obeyed.

Its blades smashed again and again into the green barrier around Gengar, but Protect did not budge in the slightest. There was no sign of cracking it.

Fortunately, Protect only lasted so long. After a few breaths, the barrier disappeared on its own.

“Gengar, disappear!”

All Gengar had to do now was stall for three turns. Once the countdown ended, Scyther would drop out even if no more fighting happened.

“Is that Phantom Force? Or just invisibility?” Reiji muttered while staring across the battlefield.

Gengar’s body was fading, growing thinner and thinner until it vanished entirely.

If it was Phantom Force, then that meant Gengar was slipping into another dimension to stall. There were two ways to answer that.

One was to send in a Pokémon that also knew Phantom Force and drag it back out of the other space.

The other was to wait. Phantom Force only lasted a turn of disappearance. Gengar would have to reappear on the next one.

But there was another possibility too: plain invisibility.

That could be broken, but only with the right tools—Odor Sleuth, Foresight, or Miracle Eye. Any of those could expose a hidden Ghost-type.

Unfortunately, Scyther knew none of them.

Still, there was one more method.

Reiji remembered it from the anime—Leon had once used it in the Masters Tournament, when he broke through Ash’s Gengar’s invisibility by washing it out with a Water move, essentially a modified Counter Shield.

The principle was simple enough.

First, you needed a move that could be sustained.

Then you spun your Pokémon in place so the attack stopped being focused in one direction and instead spread over a wide area, turning an offensive move into a combined offense-defense field.

That was the essence of Counter Shield.

The reverse version worked on the same principle. At the end of the day, it all came down to whether the Pokémon using it was strong enough to hold the pattern together.

Unfortunately, Scyther did not seem to have an obvious move for that…

Then Reiji’s eyes lit up.

No, it did have one.

He had just seen it on the panel.

“Scyther, use Swords Dance and whip up the fallen leaves!”

Scyther did not understand what he was doing, but in a moment like this, all it could do was trust its trainer.

It crossed its arms and spun at high speed, driving the surrounding air into a twisting funnel around itself.

Leaves from the ground were swept up into the air.

More and more of them.

Until the whole battlefield was filled with spinning leaves.

And then Gengar appeared.

The leaves and dust had brushed over its hidden body and exposed it.

“Scyther, it’s above you!”

Gengar hovered in the air, still looking faintly baffled. It had not even figured out how it had been found yet.

“Gengar, Phantom Force!” Tania reacted immediately. Since its invisibility had been broken, the only choice left was to slip into another dimension and stall the remaining time out.

Scyther was not going to let that happen.

Agility had already accelerated it. Tailwind’s boost was still behind it as well. Its wings blurred faster than ever before.

In that instant, it crossed the distance and slashed at Gengar just as half its body was disappearing.

Gengar’s body dropped back out of the dimensional gap. It cried out in pain. That Night Slash critical had hurt like hell.

“Gengar, Phantom Force!” Tania’s voice had sharpened with real urgency now. The countdown was close, and if Gengar failed to hide, Scyther might still force something desperate at the last second.

Gengar rolled once on the floor in pain, then shoved open a dimensional gap from the ground and scrambled in, ignoring the ache just to obey.

“Scyther, don’t let it get away!” Reiji was just as tense.

Perish Song’s time was almost up.

Any Pokémon that heard Perish Song would faint after three turns. The move never missed unless the target was already off the field in a charging state.

Its effect ended only when the timer expired, and once it did, all Pokémon that had heard it fainted.

There were only two reliable ways around it. Either switch the affected Pokémon out before the countdown ended, or have Soundproof and block the move in the first place.

But thanks to Mean Look, switching was impossible.

And Tania showed no sign of worry at all.

That meant she either had some way to shield Gengar from its own Perish Song, or Gengar had never truly been affected by it in the first place.

By the time Reiji finished running through those possibilities, Scyther had already dived again, trying to cut Gengar down before it could vanish completely.

Then its consciousness snapped.

Perish Song’s timer had ended.

Scyther crashed hard into the ground.

Reiji recalled it immediately and tossed the Poké Ball to one of the maids. She would take it inside and have it treated.

Scyther itself had not taken much battle damage. It was that last high-speed crash into the ground that had done the worst of it. Better to let the Gym treat that properly.

Scyther’s defeat felt horribly frustrating.

It had not been beaten straight up. It had been dragged to death by dirty tactics.

Mean Look had locked it in place, so Reiji could not even switch it out and remove Perish Song the normal way.

By all logic, Gengar should have been caught by Perish Song too. It had been the one to sing it, after all. And yet there it was, perfectly fine, drifting back out of the other dimension.

So that settled it.

Tania had some method of shielding Gengar from its own Perish Song when it used the move. That was the kind of inherited family knowledge Reiji simply did not have.

This was the real gap between him, a lone trainer with no backing, and the kind of trainers raised inside old families with generations of accumulated tricks behind them.

He had one Pokémon left.

Tania still had two.

This was already the hardest Gym battle he had fought yet.

He was not even using his full strength, but that girl was genuinely strong. She was easily good enough to act as a stand-in Gym Leader.

Now his choices narrowed fast.

Pelipper, Poliwhirl, Kingler, Rhydon…

Actually, it barely felt like a choice at all.

Pelipper, Poliwhirl, and Kingler all had the same problem. None of them could expose a hidden Gengar reliably, and none of them had the right moves to threaten it cleanly. At best, they could copy Scyther’s crude method of revealing it.

But if Gengar hid in another dimension again, those three would have no answer at all. Sending them out would just be sending them to die.

That left only Hanhan.

Hanhan still had no way to chase something hiding in another dimension, but at least it had Crunch and Shadow Claw. It would not be completely helpless the way the other three were.

So that was it.

His only real option now was Hanhan.

[End of chapter]

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