"Your Dreepy is pretty cool," Oliver says while shaking hands with Lazarus. "But the next time we fight, my Pansear and I will win."
Oliver's orange monkey stands behind him, dejected, and looks at Kamish, who is floating above Lazarus with pride in his eyes.
"You are welcome to try anytime. My Dreepy and I will be here for the next week or so." Lazarus replies with a smile.
Oliver comforts his Pansear, then they all leave as the arena prepares for the next match.
Lazarus looks at Kamish, "You were amazing out there. I never had any doubt."
Kamish does the dragon equivalent of a giggle.
"We'll go and do some training today after we watch a couple more matches," Lazarus says as he walks back to their seat with Kamish flying behind them.
The moment they reach their seat, Aurora yips at Kamish, beckoning him over with her paw.
Kamish excitedly drifts to Aurora and gets a head pat as she praises him for a job well done.
"You'll get your chance, too, Aurora. Tomorrow we will all see you fight." Lazarus says before taking his seat.
Aurora looks at him with determined eyes and nods.
Mike looks at this and says, "You have built a good rapport with your pokémon, that's good. Not every pokémon is willing to fight for its trainer."
Lazarus shrugs, "I treasure all my pokémon, I would never ask them to do something they didn't want to do. And besides, it's not my first time raising a Pokémon. I learned the important lessons the hard way, like everyone."
Mike nods, "This was your first official pokémon battle, right? What did you think?"
Lazarus smiles, "I guess it was alright. It's not like I did anything. Kamish was more than enough."
Mike nods, "True, a dragon's evolutionary instincts are more than enough for a simple fight like this."
Lazarus slowly nods, "Sometimes I wonder how much I, as a trainer, can even contribute to this gestalt. After all, there are plenty of powerful wild pokémon who don't need humans to command them."
Mike chuckles at this, "Every trainer goes through this phase once in their life. It's a rite of passage at this point, but you can't think like that. The insight a trainer has is essential to, as you called it, the gestalt between a human and pokémon. Let me tell you a story.
When I was newly working for the Black Sector, a group of Tauroses migrated out of the Obsidian Fields and were marching towards Sandgem City. My team and I were sent to stop them. It was supposed to be a simple mission. Our team had eighteen pokémon among the three of us.
We could easily take on a few Tauruses. All we had to do was bring out our psychics, put the Tauroses to sleep, capture, and later release them back into the wild. But things didn't go as planned. When we got there, we were ambushed by a group of renegade trainers. The Tauroses were just bait they had set up. They managed to overpower our psychics and were going to kill us.
We managed to survive only because of our team leader, who gave his life to protect ours. We later found out that the trainers who attacked us were part of an eco terrorism group protesting against a city expansion plan the league was going to execute."
Lazarus, Kamish, and Aurora listen attentively to what Mike has to say.
Mike sighs, "What I am saying is… we thought that the strength of our pokémon would be more than enough for the mission, so we didn't even think of alternatives, and we paid heavily for that. Always remember that your worth as a trainer will be tested when you are entrusted to protect something and find yourself lacking.
That is when you have to prove you are worthy of the league's and your pokémon's trust. You will have to go through an evolution of your own and come out the other side as a stronger, more capable leader. Your pokémon can't do that. You, as a trainer, are the only one who can.
The job of a pokémon trainer is not to make pokémon more powerful. The league doesn't want that. We don't need more calamities. We need better leaders. Our job is not to make our pokémon unbeatable. Our job is to make them useful. And power is only useful when it is used to protect something."
While Lazarus digests what Mike just told him, the stage for the next battle is being set.
"You will have to think really hard about what being a pokémon trainer means to you if you want to be the Warden," Mike says, looking at the hologram. "But I don't want you to rush anything. Things like this take time."
The hologram shows a landscape filled with rocks and boulders. Then two pokémon are released inside the dome.
On one side of the arena is a pokémon that looks like a floating ball of dark gas, on the other side is a purple feline with a black nose on its cream-colored muzzle.
"A Dark against a Ghost. Interesting." Lazarus mutters.
Kamish sees another Ghost type for the first time and looks at it with interest.
"Who do you think is going to win?" Mike asks. "Any predictions?"
Lazarus thinks for a moment before replying, "Honestly, I can see this going either way. Gastly is a Ghost pokémon, which makes it vulnerable to Dark types. Purrloin has an advantage there. But Gastly is also a Poison type, and if it uses its poison to take down Purrloin before it can use its umbrakinesis, Gastly might be able to win."
"Have Kamish pay attention to this fight. He is also weak against Dark types. I'm sure he will learn something from it," Mike says to him as the match starts.
They watch the Holographic projection, which shows Purrloin dashing through the rocky terrain with its nimble body in a bid to catch Gastly before it has a chance to widen the distance between them.
Purrloin climbs on top of a boulder, looks at the Gastly floating above, and manifests a claw made of pure darkness.
But before Purrloin has a chance to do anything, Gastly emits a dark smog that quickly spreads throughout the entire dome.
The thick black smog is meant to hamper Purrloin's visibility.
The gas isn't poisonous since poisonous gases are more costly in terms of energy, and Gastly, being only a first stage pokémon, doesn't have the energy required to synthesize highly poisonous gases.
Gastly wisely uses the time the gas afforded it to synthesize a common toxin and mold it into sharp spikes.
Purrloin tries looking through the smog but fails, so it abandons this approach and instead tries to locate Gastly by sensing its life force.
Dark pokémon are sensitive to life and can sense living beings, like Psychic pokémon sense everything around them.
Purrloin flares its senses and tries to locate anything living inside the smoke-filled dome.
The moment Purrloin feels a life signature, Gastly fires the toxic spikes at Purrloin.
Purrloin cries out as spikes of solid poison pierce its flesh, drawing blood.
While Gastly gathers energy to make more spikes, Purrloin manages to figure out Gastly's approximate location by the trajectory of the attack.
The wounded Purrloin manifests another Shadowy claw and leaps towards Gastly.
Gastly fires more spikes at Purrloin, which Purrloin's claw rips through.
Gastly emits more smog, but to Purrloin, this doesn't matter since it already knows where to attack.
Gastly lets out a ghostly shrill as a dark, shadowy claw rips through its ectoplasmic body, hurting its soul.
Purrloin slams back on the ground, hurt and poisoned.
And the algorithm overseeing the match deems Gastly unable to fight anymore, and the match ends in Purrloin's favor.
Lazarus and Mike watch as both the pokémon are recalled into their pokéballs and taken to the main building to get healed and rested.
Mike turns to Lazarus and asks, "What do you think?"
Lazarus replies, "If the match had gone on for another two or three minutes, Purrloin would have fainted because of poison running through its veins, but luckily for it, the poison Gastly's used is probably the weakest class of toxin. If I were Gastly's trainer, I would have done exactly what Gastly and its trainer did. The smog Gastly used at the start was the right choice.
It was thick enough that Purrloin wouldn't be able to see through it, but it should have been deployed a bit faster. Purrloin probably sensed Gastly's lifeforce to locate it. They had a pretty good strategy, and I am sure if Gastly could secrete a poisonous gas or if it were able to synthesize a more potent poison, they would have won the moment Purrloin was impaled with those toxic spikes."
Lazarus and Mike watch a couple more matches before Lazarus decides it's time to check out the training facility this place has to offer and work on making his pokémon more powerful.