The Gyms of the Norlandia Alliance are each given a rating and an operating license by the Alliance. However, the Alliance itself does not get involved in how each Gym is run on a daily basis.
The day-to-day operations of a Gym have always been left entirely to the current Gym Leader. Because of this, the feel and style of any given Gym tends to closely match the personality of whoever leads it.
This also means that each Gym has its own way of deciding who gets to challenge it.
Some Gyms ask Trainers to take on bounty missions posted within the city, requiring real contributions to the local community before earning the right to battle the Gym Leader.
Others hold large open tryouts, where only the Trainers who win can walk away with a chance at a badge.
Some Gyms work more like apprenticeships. A Trainer must intern at the Gym, train both their body and mind, and earn the approval of a senior member before they are given the right to challenge.
And then there are the unusual cases, like Mort Cotterill. His Gym has no screening process at all. The Gym simply opens its doors once a month, accepts challengers on a first-come basis, and once the date passes, no more challengers are taken until next month.
Compared to Mort, his junior, Gilbert Armstrong of the Armed Mountains region, is clearly far more dependable. The Layered Peaks Gym under his care runs smoothly and in good order.
When Nova stepped into the reception hall of the Layered Peaks Gym and looked over the challenge guidelines posted on the board, he found himself quietly amused.
The reason was simple: the Layered Peaks Gym offered two completely different paths for Trainers who wanted to earn a badge.
The first path was to enter a desert off-road race hosted by the Gym. A Trainer needed to finish in the top eight to earn the right to challenge the Gym Leader.
That path was reasonable enough. The second one, however, was something else entirely.
The second path was a so-called VIP channel. A Trainer could skip the race altogether and challenge directly for the badge, but there was one condition: they had to face Gym Leader Gilbert in a one-on-one personal battle.
Nova stared at the board for a moment. Fight a Ground-type Elite Four Member? Just like that?
Of course, losing did not automatically mean no badge. It would be far too unreasonable to expect a new Trainer, fresh off the start of their journey, to defeat an Elite Four Member outright.
Instead, Gilbert would watch the battle carefully and decide whether to award a badge based on how the challenger performed during the match.
Still, the likely outcome for most who took the VIP channel was being swept in a six-on-one battle and walking home with a lot to think about.
Nova had a suspicion. Since Gilbert came from the same school as Mort, maybe he had inherited some of that same difficult personality. The overly harsh challenge rule felt like it was designed on purpose to lure in confident young Trainers, then crush their spirits in battle just so the old Gym Leader could enjoy the look on their faces afterward.
If Nova walked in without thinking and took the VIP challenge, he might be falling right into that trap.
He had no intention of doing that. Nova walked straight to the registration counter and signed up for the desert off-road race.
The race was held twice a month, on the 15th and the 30th. It was currently August 27th, which meant the end-of-month race was just three days away.
The young woman at the registration desk gave him a warm smile and gently suggested whether he might want to register for the 15th of next month instead, since that would give him more time to prepare.
She had a point worth considering. Even though the race ran twice a month, only the top eight finishers earned the right to challenge the Gym. That meant at most sixteen badges could be handed out each month, and that was only if every qualifier won their match. Trainers who failed to qualify, or who qualified but lost to Gilbert, had to come back and race again. Over time, the pool of repeat challengers grew larger and the competition for the Ceng Luan Badge became harder and harder. Some Trainers spent half a season just preparing before they felt ready to enter.
The young woman at the desk had seen many Trainers like Nova before. He looked no older than fifteen or sixteen, had only recently set out on the path of a Professional Trainer, and did not seem to have attended a Specialized Vocational School before arriving at the Gym. In her experience, Trainers like him usually did not do well in the race. A few had even come away with serious injuries.
She spoke up because Nova struck her as a genuinely handsome young man, and she quietly hoped her advice would be enough to make him reconsider entering a competition that carried real risks.
Nova, however, did not catch what she was hinting at.
And honestly, even if he had, it would not have changed his answer.
It was a desert off-road race. He had been through Lune Town three times already. How much harder could a race track really be?
Well, as it turned out, quite a bit harder.
Three days later, Nova stood at the starting point of the course along the desert's edge. As a Gym staff member finished reading out the rules, Nova quietly revised his earlier opinion.
The rules themselves were simple enough. The race had one goal: reach the finish line first. The first eight Trainers to cross it would qualify for the Gym challenge. Everyone else would need to try again at the next race.
Each participant was allowed to use up to three Pokemon.
The race had to take place within the marked course boundaries. Flying-type Pokemon were not permitted to fly higher than twenty meters above the ground. Moves that caused long-range displacement, such as Teleport, were banned. Beyond those restrictions, there were no other rules.
That last part was the part that mattered.
Since there were no other rules, attacking another contestant during the race was completely allowed. Setting traps, cutting off opponents, even a little creative interference, none of it counted as a foul. If a Trainer had the time and the Pokemon for it, nobody would stop them from digging a pit in the path of a rival.
This was not a clean racing event. It was closer to a battle royale spread across a wide stretch of open terrain.
The one unspoken rule was that actually knocking someone out of the competition entirely was frowned upon. Though, Nova had heard from someone in the crowd that there had been real incidents on this course before.
Several of the first-time participants nearby went quiet after the rules were read out. Their expressions said everything. A few looked nervous, and understandably so.
But if Nova was being fair to Gilbert, calling this "malicious" was a bit of a stretch. The setup seemed more like a reflection of what Gilbert actually valued in a Trainer: the ability to handle a real, unpredictable battle in the wild, where there were no referees and things rarely went according to plan.
Nova was not especially worried. He had some experience with exactly that kind of situation. Even the most aggressive Trainer in this race would have a hard time measuring up to Taylor, a high-ranking member of Team Origin. That was a different level of threat entirely.
The race course ran through a rocky Gobi valley. Sand River City sat near the edge of the Tamar Desert, and the terrain around it reflected that. Wind and sand had worked away at the stone over countless years, shaping the rock into jagged pillars and crumbling walls that rose and fell in every direction, forming what felt like a natural maze without any visible end.
It reminded Nova of the Danxia landforms he used to see in nature documentaries in his past life. The kind of place that looked beautiful from a distance and completely disorienting from the inside.
He was not really worried about other Trainers giving him trouble. What he was genuinely worried about was his own sense of direction.
Getting lost in there was a very real possibility.