Day 28 of the journey to Kanto. Cloudy.

The weather was good today. The air was cool, the sun was mild, and it was perfect for a day out.

After packing his things in the private room, feeding his Pokémon, and recalling them, Reiji ate breakfast at the Pokémon Center, left with Poliwhirl, and headed out of Fuchsia City toward the outskirts.

He had already sent Diglett’s Poké Ball back to Mikan Gym. There was no point carrying those combination Pokémon around with him. He would not study them properly until after the Indigo League, so for now they could stay stored at the Gym.

The Safari Zone was outside Fuchsia City and had its own entrance, complete with an admission fee. By the time he got there, plenty of people were already lined up.

He joined the queue, paid, and entered the Safari Zone. Admission cost 10,000 Pokédollars, and that only got him five Safari Balls. If he wanted more, he had to buy them separately.

So much for the anime version where nobody ever mentioned the ticket price.

Standing there, he could not help wondering whether the rumor about Dratini had been spread by the organizers on purpose, just to lure Trainers in and collect entrance fees.

After all, every extra Safari Ball cost another 10,000 Pokédollars. Only Safari Balls could be used to catch Pokémon in the Safari Zone, battling them first was forbidden, and each ball was single-use. Once thrown, it was gone, so anyone who wanted more had to keep paying.

Heh. No wonder the place kept pushing the Dratini rumor. Even if it was true, it was probably just bait from the management.

He had never put much faith in finding a Dratini here in the first place. Now he expected it even less. The whole place was nothing like he had imagined.

If there was no Dratini, then fine, there was no Dratini. But now that he was here, he was not about to leave empty-handed. Five Safari Balls for 10,000 meant each one cost 2,000, which was already outrageous. The extra ones were even worse. No way was he paying for more, not even after just making a hundred million.

Once registration was done and he officially entered the Safari Zone, he found the place quite scenic, with plenty of wild Pokémon roaming around.

But because he already distrusted the whole setup, he could not help wondering whether these “wild” Pokémon were even truly wild. For all he knew, the organizers had bought a pile of low-potential rejects from breeding ranches and dumped them into this artificial reserve to pad out the roster.

After all, almost everything in the zone was common.

The Normal-types included Raticate and Tauros. There was a huge Tauros herd thanks to the grassland, along with common Pokémon like Sentret.

The Flying-types were mostly ordinary birds like Pidgey, Spearow, and Farfetch’d.

The Water-types were common too: Poliwag, Shellder, Krabby, and all sorts of useless fish Pokémon.

Who would have thought his own little tadpole used to be one of the ones nobody cared about?

The Bug-types were even more common. Caterpie, Weedle, Wurmple—bugs were everywhere.

Then there were Geodude, Oddish, Bellsprout, Poochyena, Diglett, Sandshrew…

Looks like I really was overthinking it, Reiji thought. The Pokémon in the Safari Zone had probably just been rounded up from somewhere else. Saying they were bought would have been giving the organizers too much credit. For Pokémon this common, they could have grabbed them off any random hillside. Why pay for them?

With this many Pokémon around, he still had not seen a single rare one. There was not even a Scyther in sight. The most popular Pokémon here was Pinsir, and even that left him speechless.

“Whatever.” Reiji looked down at the five Safari Balls in his hand. Now that he was here, he could not exactly go home empty-handed. That was not his style.

The place was packed with tourists and families, all happily throwing balls around and trying to catch the gentler Pokémon for their kids.

At this point, Dratini was obviously hopeless. Betting on one showing up here would be even dumber than expecting the management to stop being stingy and offer something halfway decent.

If he wanted to take a Pokémon out legally, he had to register it with a Safari Ball. So the smarter move was to use regular Poké Balls first, check for high-potential catches, then use a Safari Ball only on the one he actually wanted. That way he would not waste all five.

He wandered around the Safari Zone for a while, but there was still nothing he truly wanted, and he had no idea where to start.

In the end, he set his sights on the grazing Tauros.

There were plenty of them here, which meant he should at least be able to pick out one decent bull.

Seeing that herd immediately reminded him of Ash’s thirty Tauros. He briefly wondered whether Ash had been here yet.

Then he stopped caring and started catching.

There was hardly anyone around that section of the grassland, so nobody was competing with him. He swept up the whole herd with ordinary Poké Balls, checked them one by one, and released the low-potential ones as he went.

In the end, he found a Tauros with 48 potential.

Not high, not terrible. A Tauros that could not evolve was never reaching Elite Four tier in this life, but quasi–Elite Four tier was still possible.

The only reason he was willing to take a Tauros like that was because he had paid to get in. Ten thousand for admission meant bringing one decent bull home at least counted as getting his money’s worth.

Reiji never did business at a loss.

He released the Tauros he had picked, had Darkrai pin it in place with the pressure of a quasi–Elite Four legendary, and the poor thing locked up on the spot, all four legs stiff with fear. Then Reiji caught it properly with a Safari Ball.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

“Run! Run! Stay away from that side! The Pokémon over there explode!”

“Damn it, we never should’ve brought in Pineco. We only wanted more variety in the zone, and now we’ve got a Pokémon that blows up on contact…”

“Excuse me,” Reiji said, stopping one of the staff members who was busy driving tourists away from the forest that kept erupting in blasts. “What Pokémon is over there?”

“That area’s full of Pineco,” the staff member said. “They look like berries hanging from trees, but the moment they hit the ground, they explode. We’ve already had plenty of accidents. Management’s talking about clearing them out.”

“Pineco…” Reiji paused to think.

He remembered that Pineco evolved into Forretress, a Bug- and Steel-type like Scizor. Four times weak to Fire, yes, but with a pile of resistances. Not bad at all. On paper, it would fit a rain team nicely.

“Hey, kid, don’t go over there!” the staffer shouted after him. “It’s dangerous!”

“I’m a Trainer,” Reiji said with a wave and kept going.

That patch of woods had just gone through an explosion, which made it the perfect time to screen Pineco. He had already paid the entrance fee, after all. No way was he leaving empty-handed.

If he could not fleece the Dratini rumor, then he could at least take something else.

Once he entered the forest, he realized the place could practically be called a Pineco grove. Every tree had Pineco hanging from it. Whether they had all bred there later or had originally been introduced by the Safari Zone, there were far too many to count.

They were not easy to catch either. Make the slightest noise and disturb them while they were feeding, and they would drop from the tree and explode the moment they hit the ground.

Pineco looked a lot like berries. Their bodies were a dark gray-green, covered in hard overlapping scales that flared upward. Between the topmost layers sat a pair of red eyes, and a little stem stuck out from the top like a thorn.

They hung motionless from branches and waited for prey to wander close, feeding mostly on Bug-types and hardly moving at all.

Flying Pokémon often pecked them by mistake, but their tough shells kept them safe. Pineco also spat out a sticky fluid that hardened the moment it hit the air.

They used that adhesive to glue bark onto themselves and thicken their shells even more. The older they got, the heavier and larger they became, and aged Pineco could grow to ridiculous sizes.

Their shells layered up almost like tree rings. The thicker and larger the shell, the older the Pineco.

That meant he did not need to check every single one individually.

The larger the shell, the older the Pineco. The older it was, the stronger it ought to be. And the stronger it was, the better its potential should be.

After all, if something hung on a tree for decades, maybe even a century, its potential had to crawl upward eventually.

So he started moving carefully through the grove. At each large tree, if he spotted a Pineco big enough to interest him, he would quietly pull out a measuring tape and check its diameter.

So far, most of the Pineco he had seen were about thirty centimeters across. Ones that reached forty were rare. Their height was mostly around sixty centimeters as well.

If thirty centimeters across and sixty tall was the average, then he needed something at least fifty centimeters in diameter and closer to seventy or eighty tall before it was worth catching.

He circled the outer grove first and inspected every large tree he passed. Even so, he still did not find a Pineco that satisfied him, so he had no choice but to keep moving deeper into the forest.

Maybe the bigger ones were farther in.

Once he reached the deeper part of the grove, he kept measuring.

Sure enough, the Pineco inside were larger. The deeper he went, the bigger they got.

Back near the edge, finding a Pineco wider than fifty centimeters had been almost impossible. But deeper in, he ran into a few pushing sixty or seventy centimeters.

Then, farther in still, he found it.

A gigantic Pineco was hanging from a tree asleep, and that tree held no other Pineco at all.

He called it gigantic because even at a glance it was more than twice the size of the ones outside.

He edged closer, pulled out the measuring tape, and carefully lined it up against the Pineco’s body.

Eighty centimeters across.

More than a meter tall.

It was an absolute monster.

The moment he saw those numbers, his heart kicked hard in his chest.

He had to catch this one.

Crack.

In his excitement, he forgot to watch his footing and stepped on a dry branch.

The second that twig snapped, his whole heart leapt into his throat.

He looked up and saw the Pineco’s crimson eyes snap open.

The red eyes buried deep beneath the protective shell locked onto Reiji, the unwelcome intruder. White light started bursting from its body, and he did not need any special insight to know it was furious.

Because it was so big and heavy, it was hanging low enough that its body sat right around chest height. That was why he had even been able to measure it in the first place.

If that Pineco blew itself up here, he was finished.

Dead on the spot.

End of his isekai career.

Fortunately, he had prepared for exactly this.

His thumb pressed the Poké Ball switch, and Poliwhirl came out.

“Poli! Poli!” The moment Poliwhirl appeared and saw that enormous Pineco glowing, it immediately jumped in front of Reiji, trying to shield him from the blast.

The problem was that Poliwhirl only came up to Reiji’s waist, so it could not really block much.

But the glow stopped anyway.

The moment Poliwhirl appeared, the Pineco’s self-destruction failed, because Poliwhirl had Damp. Explosion was off the table.

“Pine? Pine?” Pineco looked confused. Its self-destruct had been cut off, and it clearly could not understand why the move that had never failed it before suddenly did nothing.

Thunk.

Before it could figure it out, a Poké Ball struck it head-on and pulled it in with a flash of red light.

The ball shook once.

Then burst open.

Pineco came right back out, its enormous red eyes glaring at Reiji even more furiously than before.

Since it could not explode, it chose the next best thing.

Its body flared with blinding light.

It was going to evolve.

“Well, damn,” Reiji muttered. “That’s some serious buildup if it can evolve on command.”

He could not let Pineco evolve yet. There were still a few things he needed to verify, and some of them were tied to Scyther’s evolution as well.

“Poliwhirl, knock it out. Stop the evolution.”

He pointed at Pineco, and Poliwhirl rushed in at once. Evolution could be interrupted, and Reiji needed it interrupted now.

Plenty of Ash’s Pokémon had resisted or halted evolution in the anime. This was not some impossible thing.

“Poli!” Poliwhirl charged straight in and smashed Pineco with an Ice Punch, knocking it unconscious into the crater below.

Reiji immediately rushed forward, hung an Everstone on it, and then caught the dazed Pineco with a Poké Ball after its failed evolution.

There were a few theories he wanted to test, and this Pineco was the perfect specimen.

First, if Pineco could keep layering bark onto its shell, then could it just keep growing larger and larger without any real limit?

Second, if a giant Pineco evolved, would that oversized body carry over into Forretress? Could the evolved form keep that massive scale?

Third, size meant thicker armor, thicker armor meant more weight, and more weight meant less speed.

An average Pineco weighed only seven kilograms, but an average Forretress weighed one hundred twenty-five.

That was nearly eighteen times heavier after evolution.

And this Pineco was already far larger than normal. If it evolved, it would be even heavier still.

So then the real question was this:

Would a Float Stone work on a Pineco like this?

Who would not want a giant Forretress with the same monstrous defense, reduced weight, and no loss of speed—maybe even a speed increase once the burden came off?

An ordinary Pineco evolved into a Forretress about 1.2 meters tall.

This one was already over a meter tall before evolving.

A normal Pineco averaged sixty centimeters in height. This one dwarfed that. So if it reached two meters after evolution, that would not be strange at all.

It would become a truly colossal Forretress.

He had struck gold again.

He came here hoping for Dratini and found nothing.

Instead, he had stumbled into a monster Pineco.

Sometimes luck really did feel like stepping in dog shit on the way out the door.

[End of chapter]

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