The log bridge had been nothing more than an appetizer.
Next came the rock-climbing section.
The cliff face was slick with moss, and the handholds that looked solid were, almost universally, just waiting to crumble the moment any real weight was applied.
"Oh boy..."
"...This climb is actually pretty rough?"
Ash had no choice but to engage every single one of his senses, probing each handhold with his fingertips and testing each foothold with his toes before committing his weight.
Even with a safety net — even knowing Volcarona and Ariados were right there watching — he still felt a hollow, uneasy sensation crawling up his spine.
That particular feeling: nothing solid beneath your feet, nothing solid in your gut. A certain coldness in a very specific region of the anatomy.
Most people have at least some degree of acrophobia, it turned out. The difference between real climbing and indoor simulation was, as advertised, enormous.
Thankfully, the equipment-free climbing techniques he'd drilled into muscle memory during his week of intensive training came through for him. He worked his way up the cliff face carefully, and on a few occasions when a foothold crumbled away beneath him without warning, he simply hung there by sheer arm strength and core power, found a new anchor point, and kept going.
Still — for anyone with solid physical conditioning, this section wasn't genuinely hard. With the right technique and a body that could back it up, the difficulty ceiling wasn't actually that high.
The only real downside was that Aura, unlike chakra, couldn't simply stick him to a wall.
"Next up should be the mist forest, if I'm remembering right..."
He stepped into a bamboo grove wrapped in a soft, drifting white haze. Visibility dropped sharply. Direction became ambiguous. Every tree looked identical to the last.
This section wasn't dangerous — but it was absolutely obnoxious.
Ash navigated it the hard way: memorizing his paper map beforehand, then relying on the faint angle of filtered light and the subtle shift in the sound of the wind to keep himself pointed in the right direction.
Even his Psychic power and Aura couldn't hand him a clean answer here. This was one vast, featureless dead zone — all fog, no signal. His Aura sense simply didn't have the range to cover it.
It was a different situation entirely from Gringey City. Back then, there had been an enormous, violent energy surge in the distance to lock onto. Here, there was nothing. Aura was like sound — it needed a source to bounce back from. You could use it actively like a radar if you pushed, but that was the brute-force method, and it was slow.
When Ash finally emerged from the bamboo fog, he was met by an entirely different world.
The area ahead had clearly been extensively — and deliberately — modified by human hands. The trees had been pruned and arranged into a series of artificial obstacles. The ground was paved with stone slabs of varying shades of color. The rock walls were riddled with evenly-spaced holes. And drifting faintly through the air was something else: a smell, faint and sweet and faintly metallic at the same time.
The Dense Mechanism Zone. He'd arrived.
Ash stopped walking. His gaze swept slowly across what lay ahead.
Even standing at the entrance, he could feel it — a wall of pressure rolling toward him, a prickling in his instincts that screamed danger. This was nothing like the earlier sections that had tested his basic fitness or sense of direction. Here, every single step could be hiding something lethal.
Poison darts. Pitfall traps. Throwing needles...
These were not things you could just muscle through on physical conditioning alone. If a poison needle caught him wrong, or he fell into a spike-lined pit, he'd survive — Volcarona's Psychic power and the emergency antidotes would see to that — but the experience would be anything but pleasant.
Especially if some unlucky angle sent a needle into his eye or another vulnerable spot. The consequences of that didn't bear thinking about.
...He wouldn't die.
...But it would definitely, absolutely not feel good.
"Warm-up's over," Ash murmured to himself, his eyes hardening with resolve.
The earlier sections had been an opportunity to sharpen his own natural ability — a chance to train without relying on everything he had. But when the difficulty ramped up like this, there was no room for that kind of noble restraint. Getting eliminated because he was too proud to go all-out would be nothing short of ridiculous.
If he wanted to exercise his body for its own sake, he could do that any time he liked. But pulling that stunt during an actual assessment? That was just brain damage.
So the objective from here on out was simple: get through without taking a single hit.
Without Aura and Psychic, he could afford to be a little sloppy. With them? He was going for a perfect, untouched run.
Ash glanced up at the sky, gauging the time.
"I need to reach the Gym before lunch. Can't keep Brock and Misty waiting forever."
Facing this field of mechanisms — clearly operating on a level far beyond any normal training scenario — he made his decision. No more holding back.
Time to get serious.
Ash drew in a long, slow breath, then released it with equal deliberateness.
——Agility!
"HA — Gate of the Chicken Pupils!"
(Gate Technique Activate!)
"Grandma Li's Knocking at the Door — OPEN!"
(The [Nth] Gate — Gate of Shock — OPEN!)
(The Nth: ...lol.)
His muscle fibers, guided by Psychic energy, achieved their optimal state of coordination and relaxation — every unnecessary tension and load shed in an instant. His body felt lighter by several degrees. Every joint hummed with explosive potential. His reaction speed climbed to an entirely new tier.
Simultaneously, the power of Aura spread out from him like a silent tide, quietly expanding to cover everything within dozens of meters in every direction — no need for deliberate focus. It fed him a vivid, three-dimensional mental image of his entire surroundings.
The flow of air. The microscopic vibrations in the stone slabs underfoot. The tension state of the mechanisms coiled inside the wall openings. Even the rope snares hidden beneath layers of fallen leaves... nothing could hide from him.
Aura not only amplified his perception — it acted as an invisible boost to his entire body, like a surge of power running through every system at once. He was operating in a state that could only be described as: everything is absolutely firing right now.
Supercharged Ash was ready to make an entrance.
"Alright then... time to sprint!"
The corner of Ash's mouth curved into a supremely confident smile. Every last trace of his earlier caution evaporated. His body snapped into motion like an arrow loosed from a bowstring, and he launched himself into the mechanism zone — movement as smooth as if he'd rehearsed this particular obstacle course a thousand times.
It was officially Ash's Speedrun Mode. Let's go!
First up: the poison needle launcher array —
The instant his foot landed on a stone slab painted a subtly wrong shade of color, the dense clusters of holes in the walls on either side of him erupted with the soft, rapid clicking of mechanisms releasing.
Fwoosh fwoosh fwoosh——!
A barrage of poison needles screamed outward like a localized rainstorm, saturating everything in front of him.
But through Ash's Aura perception, the pattern was immediately legible. The needles didn't fire in a continuous wall — they came in staggered batches with rhythmic gaps between them, weaving a lethal-looking grid that nonetheless left slivers of safe passage.
More importantly —
"Wait — these needles don't have tips?"
Not that it made them safe, of course. A blunt wire could still punch through skin and flesh. But still.
He filed the observation away and kept moving, throwing himself headlong into the needle storm without slowing down.
His body wove through the barrage — lunging forward, sliding sideways, at one point bending almost horizontal in a near-complete back bridge to slip beneath a crossing volley. He threaded the needle every time, always finding the gap in the pattern at the very last possible instant.
Not a single hesitation. Every trajectory had been mapped in his mind before he reached it.
Behind him, Volcarona and Ariados visibly accelerated, locking onto Ash with a renewed urgency.
This challenger's speed and reaction time were nothing like what they'd seen from him before. It was as if they were watching a completely different person.
— Was he cheating?
But neither of them could detect even a trace of Ash releasing any Pokémon from their Poké Balls.
Could a Pokémon still inside its ball provide assistance? Technically, a weak one couldn't manage it. A powerful one doing so... didn't really count as cheating.
In the end, the standard for cheating was simple: did it exceed Volcarona and Ariados's ability to detect it? What they couldn't catch wasn't a violation. What they couldn't catch wasn't cheating.
Past the needle zone came the collapsing slab pitfalls — a field of pressure-sensitive stones that dropped away underfoot, interspersed with stone spikes that rose and fell in alternating cycles.
"I keep getting the feeling that the people who just try to bulldoze through this section don't have a great time," Ash observed, feeling the subtle looseness telegraphed through the slab beneath his foot.
His Aura had already mapped the hollow structure below. When he stepped down, he put almost no weight on it — and virtually in the same instant the slab gave way, he had already pushed off from it, hands pressing the edge as his body flipped lightly over the gap. He didn't even glance at the stone spikes waiting at the bottom of the pit.
As long as my speed is high enough, those spikes have no prayer of catching me.
Speedrun. Accelerate!
From the observation point beside the trap field, Janine couldn't hold it in:
"Auntie — his movements... they've completely changed! It's like he's a different person!"
Aya watched Ash's silhouette with a grave expression, her fingers unconsciously tracing the handle of the kunai at her side. "It's not that he's a different person. He was holding back before. Deliberately."
"Look at his footwork. The way he reads timing. That quality to his movements — as though he can see through everything before it happens..."
Aya was fairly certain she understood what she was seeing. After all, the Pokémon they carried hadn't detected anything irregular on Ash's person.
Compared to Psychic ability, which tended to produce noticeable brainwave signatures — Aura was simply too subtle to sense without knowing what to look for.
Janine's eyes lit up with undisguised excitement. "That level of perception, reaction speed, and body control... he's a born ninja if I've ever seen one! If Father saw this, he'd want to take him on as a disciple on the spot!"
Aya gave a small shake of her head. "It's not that simple. The path he walks and our way of the ninja — they're not from the same root." She paused. "But the talent itself... yes. It's genuinely exceptional."
While the two of them exchanged those words, Ash had already moved on to the next section.
This one was — Suspended True-and-False Platforms.
The path ahead crossed a deep ravine, spanned by a series of floating stepping platforms. Most of them were false — incapable of bearing any real weight — and only a small number were solid.
To Ash's Aura perception, the difference was immediately obvious: the real platforms displayed minute structural flex and weight-bearing feedback that the false ones simply didn't have.
He barely hesitated. The tips of his feet touched down on the real platforms in quick, feather-light succession — skimming across the ravine like a dragonfly kissing the surface of still water.
With Aura feeding him the answer directly, this section offered no difficulty whatsoever.
Next: Fallen Leaf Snares and Canopy Paralysis Darts.
The forest path was blanketed in dead leaves.
But through Ash's "Aura Mind's Eye," the rope snares buried beneath those leaves shone out as clearly as fireflies on a moonless night. He drifted around every single trigger point without effort.
At the same time, an almost inaudible clicking drifted down from somewhere in the canopy overhead. Poison-coated paralysis darts shot downward at speed.
Ash didn't even look up. Guided purely by the Aura-fed imprint of the air disturbance and the darts' trajectories, his body moved with an almost preternatural foreknowledge — small swaying shifts and lateral steps, entirely unhurried — and the darts ticked off his clothes one by one, burying themselves in the dirt on either side.
— These darts had no cutting edge either, it turned out.
Not that it made them pleasant. Unsharpened or not, taking a volley of those to the body would leave a person looking like a painter's palette of bruises.
All one could say was: the Fuchsia Gym's gauntlet was unreasonable in many ways, but it had genuinely never been designed with the intent of killing anyone. Add the presence of Volcarona and Ariados as failsafes, and it was no wonder the staff at the entrance had cited a mortality rate compressed below one in a hundred thousand.
Barring truly catastrophic luck, nobody was dying here.
The next section: Hallucinogenic Pollen Garden.
A wide area full of vividly-colored flowers, breathing out clouds of sweet, cloying fragrance.
...This one was even less of a challenge for Ash than the ones before it.
At his current level of physical conditioning, low-dose ordinary toxins simply had no effect on him. And he was confident the Fuchsia Gym hadn't laced this section with anything genuinely lethal.
He held his breath, kept his mind sharp with Psychic energy, and blew through the flower field without breaking pace.
After all those high-difficulty sections, the next one was something of a reprieve — a pure test of physical endurance.
Ice Pool Dive and Underwater Rock Climbing.
A frigid pool of near-freezing water blocked the path entirely. The only route forward was underwater, through a submerged passage that required climbing a slick rock wall in complete darkness.
Ash drew a deep breath and plunged in.
Underwater, Aura became his eyes — mapping the passage, marking the handholds on the submerged rock face with perfect clarity. He moved like a fish, finding the route quickly and navigating it with precision. His lung capacity and physical endurance carried him through the dive and the climb both. He broke the surface, swiped the water off his face with one hand, and kept moving.
But the most remarkable part wasn't that Ash had cleared it quickly. The most remarkable part was that he'd cleared it faster than Volcarona and Ariados.
These two Bug-types were, to put it plainly, not built for underwater environments.
——Volcarona: Hey! Challenger!
——Ariados: Wait for us!!
The two of them hauled themselves out of the water in a considerable hurry and scrambled after Ash's retreating figure.
If they lost their assigned challenger, they were going to hear about it when they got back. And "hear about it" was an understatement — it was going to be embarrassing. Career-damagingly embarrassing.
What kind of examination proctors got left behind by their examinee?
The funny kind, apparently. Today was that day.
Aya and Janine, who didn't need to dive, had no trouble keeping pace and caught up to Ash easily.
"Even an underwater environment doesn't slow him down..." Janine's voice had taken on a note of genuine awe. "What even is his perception? Is it Psychic ability?"
Aya was quiet for a moment before she answered slowly. "Most likely, yes. He did pass the Saffron Gym after all."
"Being able to clear the Saffron Gym at the five-Badge level — having some degree of Psychic ability on top of that is entirely plausible."
The Saffron Gym's difficulty was, after all, in a class of its own by any standard in the entire Kanto region.
The next section Ash encountered: Rotating Log Array and Tilted Platform.
A series of enormous logs, set spinning by water currents or mechanical drives, constantly grinding and colliding against each other — every surface slick and treacherous.
Ash crossed them as though the ground were flat.
With Aura feeding him the rhythm of each rotation before it happened, every step landed with precision on the exact point of each log's balance or natural momentum transfer. His body rose and fell naturally with the turning timber, and with a few graceful hops, he was through.
Immediately after came an inclined track running at close to sixty degrees.
Ash let out a sharp, quiet shout, and the leg muscles boosted by Psychic-Agility detonated with force. His feet drove into the incline like nails hammered into wood, each footfall kicking up a small puff of dust as he sprinted straight up.
Sparks and lightning, all the way to the top — as if nothing in his path had ever constituted an obstacle.
On and on, with joy. Forward!
Ash had, in short, taken the [Ninja Obstacle Challenge] and turned it into a round of [Wipeout: Easy Mode].
Absurd. But entirely his problem to deal with.
He could feel the finish line approaching.
Now came: Devil's Staircase and Swinging Rope Traverse.
The steps were all wrong — varying heights, depths, and angles, engineered to be as deliberately awkward as possible.
Under Ash's feet, they became nothing more than a stage for his leg power and quick judgment to perform on. He bounded through them like a mountain goat — quick and sure, every landing solid.
In short: cleared.
At the cliff edge, the only way across was a set of ropes swinging wildly in the wind. Ash timed the moment a rope swung toward the far platform, leaped, seized the handle at the rope's end, and let the pendulum arc carry him. His body traced a clean, fluid arc through the air and he landed firmly on the platform opposite.
One unbroken motion. Not a single wasted movement.
Ash reached out toward the spot where he could sense someone watching him — he wasn't sure who it was, but the urge was irresistible.
"Honestly? Basically zero difficulty."
He gave a thumbs-up in the direction of the observation point, then carried on to the next section without a backward glance.
Janine: ...
——Slackened Ladder / Pipe Crawl / Rope Course / Twisting Frame Slider.
A ladder that looked perfectly ordinary — except several of its rungs had been deliberately compromised.
Ash already knew this through Aura. He climbed fast, and as he neared the compromised section, he fired both arms downward in a single explosive push — his body pivoted cleanly over the section like a kite on the wind, and he was through before the trap had time to register.
After that came a narrow pipe that demanded flexibility and spatial awareness, a hanging curtain maze that required precise threading, and a twisted frame structure that called for core strength to push through.
All of them were things that offered Ash precisely zero challenge.
He threaded Aura perception with body control — curling, twisting, exploding into brief bursts of force where needed — navigating each obstacle by whatever method was most efficient in the moment.
The final obstacle was a great wall that was slowly, steadily bending inward — designed to press the challenger off the path and out of the zone.
— Truthfully, this last section wasn't that hard on its own.
— But consider that a normal person would have run through every section before this, and by the time they reached this final wall, their reserves would be running on empty.
— The difficulty was calibrated for a person already exhausted. For anyone at that point, it was entirely reasonable.
— The most psychologically terrifying element of this section was probably just the sight of a massive wall slowly toppling toward you.
— The sensation it produced — a kind of primal dread, like being pressed flat by something enormous — was something like lying beneath a giant.
Ash pressed himself against the wall and let his Aura lock onto its bending rhythm and amplitude with perfect precision. His footwork shifted in sync with it, keeping his body in constant optimal contact with the surface, balanced and immovable — no matter how the wall bent and tilted, it simply could not throw him off.
When the curve reached its maximum and the light from the exit blazed ahead —
Ash drove off the wall surface with everything he had.
His body shot forward like a round from a cannon.
A forward roll to absorb the landing.
Then — dropping into a half-crouch, left hand brushing the ground, right hand extended behind him — he came to rest in a perfect, stable landing at the very end of the mechanism zone.
Challenge cleared.
He looked back at the gauntlet behind him — its layered threats and hidden dangers stretching away into the shadows — and let out a long, slow breath as he straightened up.
A faint sheen of sweat on his skin. Breathing still steady. Eyes clear and bright.
Not a scratch on him.
Difficulty: low.
Safe.
"...Still a long way to go before this would actually push me."
In a gesture borrowed from a certain prodigy prince of the tennis court, Ash reached up and tugged the brim of his cap.
Come to think of it, Ryoma Echizen was only a little older than Ash was right now. If they played tennis — who would win?
At that moment, Volcarona and Ariados drifted slowly down to land beside him.
The emotions radiating from these two Pokémon were unmistakable.
Volcarona: ....Outrageous.
Ariados: He's not human.
"Hey — what's with the looks?" Ash could feel that something was off with these two, but they were refusing any form of mental communication.
Not that he could actually tell what they were thinking when they shut him out like this. His psychic link worked beautifully with his own Pokémon, adequately with ordinary ones — but with these two, who were actively blocking him...
It wasn't exactly the same feeling as being blocked by Marshadow. This felt more like a deliberate self-shielding. If he had to put it in terms people could understand: it was like a mental lockdown technique — the mind simply set to "do not disturb."
"Forget it..." Looking at these two silent Pokémon, Ash accepted that he wasn't going to get anything useful out of them.
It actually fit perfectly with every stereotype of a ninja he'd ever held — silent, closed off, not a single syllable beyond what the mission required. The Fuchsia Gym was itself a ninja dojo, so it only made sense that even their Pokémon had been trained to match.
Pokémon ninjas, apparently.
"Anyway... that was a fair bit faster than I expected."
Ash patted the dust from his clothes and let himself smile.
"Looks like I'll make it back for lunch after all."
He didn't linger. He set his sights on the silhouette of the Gym building visible at the mountain's peak, and kept walking.
Now that the challenge zone was fully behind him, he could finally let himself relax a little. The Fuchsia Gym was an official Gym — it wasn't about to spring some last-minute surprise on him once the course was done. The approach to the exam zone and the exit from it were both clear of any tests. That was standard operating procedure.
— They genuinely had not been trying to kill anyone.
Volcarona: "..."
Ariados: "..."
The two Pokémon watched Ash's retreating figure until he disappeared into the treeline, then turned and made their way back toward the forest.
Waiting there were Aya and Janine.
Ash had, of course, been aware that someone was following him the whole time — but he'd assumed they were staff members, and had thought nothing of it. In a challenge this genuinely dangerous, having staff trailing the challenger was entirely normal.
"What's your read on him?" Aya reached out and rested a hand on Volcarona, who hovered beside her.
Volcarona: He is a formidable human.
"Ariados — what do you think?" Janine asked in turn.
Ariados: He is something out of the ordinary.
"Get yourselves back and rest," Aya said simply.
Janine gave a nod, then added with a grin that was hard to suppress: "I really want to see it with my own eyes someday — where exactly his limits actually are!"
Both ninjas understood clearly: the ability Ash had put on display far exceeded anything within the normal range of Gym challengers.
His completion time had already shattered the course record.
And it had done so by a margin that left the previous record-holder looking like a distant speck in the rearview — despite the fact that Ash had taken his time in the earlier sections.
____
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