They came down off Mt. Silver into green country. Low hills and rivers, fields of cut hay under a warm sky, the first colour either of them had seen in three weeks.
The wild Pokémon in the long grass took one look at the things walking beside Adam and Ren and did the sensible thing, which was leave.
They were in no hurry. After three weeks of rock and cold, the warm road was enough.
The first trainer found them on the road to a town whose name Adam didn't catch. A kid, maybe fourteen, with a good Quilava and the swagger of someone who'd won his local competitions. He planted himself in the road, pointed, and said something about a wager.
Adam sent the Beedrill; it had been agitated since the mountain, with nothing worth fighting.
It was over before the kid finished his second command.
The Beedrill didn't gloat. It never did. It came back and hung in the air by Adam's shoulder with the flat patience of a thing that had learned what a real fight was and did not consider this to have been one.
"Two hundred," Adam said. The kid paid, and stared, bewildered.
"We are going to make so much money," Ren said.
They did. That was how the next two weeks went. Johto was full of trainers who thought they were good, and every one of them was a paycheck. Adam and Ren cut across the region in no hurry at all, taking the fights that came to them, and their team, which had come down off the mountain a tier stronger than before, did not lose a single one.
It was, Adam thought, one of the most relaxing things he had done in two years.
The Larvitar was a problem.
Not a behaviour problem. It was, if anything, the best-behaved one on the team, in the sense that it did exactly one thing and did it without complaint. It ate.
It ate constantly. It ate rocks, which was expected. It also ate a fence post, a significant portion of a stone wall belonging to a very confused farmer, and, on one memorable afternoon, a boulder that Adam was fairly sure had been someone's property boundary for a hundred years.
"It's bigger," Ren said, at the end of the first week.
"It's not bigger."
"Adam. It was the size of a small dog. Now it looks like it can eat a small dog."
He looked at it. The Larvitar was chewing, with the flat contentment of a thing that was exactly where it wanted to be, which was next to a lot of food.
[ It is growing faster than the species should, Host. ] A pause. [ I would feed it whatever it wants. You do not want to find out what it does if it gets hungry and there is nothing on the menu but the town. ]
"Sage says feed it."
"Sage is right. I like Sage." Ren crouched down to the Larvitar's level, which was getting less low every day. "Eat up, little apocalypse. Get big."
The Larvitar ignored her and ate a rock. But it did it a little closer to the Primeape than before, which from a Larvitar was a love letter. The two of them had come off the mountain something like friends, in the way of things that have tried very hard to kill each other.
The Haunter, meanwhile, had learned it could reach through the tent wall at night to rearrange the camp, had been forbidden from doing so, and did it anyway. Adam let it. A team needed a menace, and the Marshadow refused to apply for the job.
Goldenrod was the biggest town in Johto, a bright modern sprawl of a city with a radio tower and department stores and, tacked onto the side of the sports complex, a rolling open tournament that anyone could enter for a small fee and a large ego.
Ren entered on principle. Adam entered because Ren entered.
It was not a fair fight and everyone involved found this out quickly.
Ren's bracket learned about the Weavile. It came out of its ball for the first match, looked at the opposing trainer's Ariados, and did not wait to be told anything. Ren had stopped giving it detailed instructions somewhere on the mountain; you didn't aim a knife, you pointed it. She pointed. The Weavile took the Ariados apart in a flurry of black claws so fast the referee had to ask her to confirm it was over. Then it walked back to Ren, stood at her side, and watched the next opponent with the specific attention of something deciding where the soft parts were.
"That's not a Pokémon," said the trainer she beat in the semi-final, a bit shaken. "That's a war crime with a face."
"Thank you," Ren said warmly.
She won her bracket. Adam won his without his team taking a hit — the Marowak ended most matches in a single swing of the club, and the one boy who lasted longer only managed it because the Primeape was enjoying itself. That drew a small crowd, then a slightly nervous offical for the pokemon league approached with a few other men. He wanted to know how Adam trained his pokemon and where they learned to fight like that.
"A mountain," Adam said.
"Which mountain?"
"Mt. Silver."
The man went away. Adam collected the prize money, which was more than the last month of road battles put together, and treated the whole team to the best food Goldenrod had, and watched the Larvitar eat a decorative rock feature outside the restaurant while the staff pretended very hard not to notice.
"We could just do this," Ren said that night, on a hotel balcony that cost more than either of them cared about, with the city lights spread out under them and a Weavile sitting on the railing like a gargoyle. "Pokemon competitors. Get rich. Retire on a beach somewhere warm."
"You'd be bored in a week."
"I'd be bored in three days," she admitted. "But it's a nice thought." She leaned on the rail beside her Weavile, which tolerated it. "It's strange. Years of everything being life and death, and then this. It changes your perspective somewhat."
"Same," Adam said, and meant it.
He was already counting, out of habit, the days until something went wrong. Ren watched him do it.
"Don't," she said. "We earned this. Just relax."
So he tried. The city hummed under them, and he got most of the way through the evening before he started thinking about the boat.
They ran out of Johto eventually, the way you run out of any place, and came to the sea at Olivine, a working port town of ferries, salt, and gulls. The water went on forever. Somewhere far over it was the next region on the list.
Adam laid the map out on the harbour wall. Ren fed the team behind him, which now took a while, because there were more of them and one of them ate the infrastructure.
"South-west," he said, and dragged his finger down the map and then across. Past a scatter of small islands sitting alone in the blue, then a hard turn west into a big green sprawl of coast and volcanoes. Warm, wet, a long way from anywhere they'd been. "The boat runs south through the Orange Islands first, then bears west. Few days on the water."
"What's down there?"
"Your team." He didn't look up. "Most of the things I promised you are down there. A little psychic that grows into something that'll scare a god. A fish so ugly nobody bothers to catch it, that turns into the most beautiful thing in the water. A little creepy pokemon." He tapped the map. "And a piece of a meteor for me, if I can find it."
Ren went still in the way she did when she wanted something and didn't want to say so.
"How many of those are mine?"
"Three of the four."
She sat down next to him on the wall. Her Weavile arranged itself at her feet. Her Pidgeotto rode the harbour updraft in slow circles, hunting gulls it had no intention of catching, just to keep its edge. Her Butterfree drifted past, going nowhere, happy.
"Finally I will be able to get a full team."
"Yeah."
"Now I've got a monster on a leash and a few more waiting across the sea." She looked out at the water. "This is the best place I've ever been. All of them are. It keeps being true."
Adam folded the map.
"The Boat leaves in the morning," he said.
The Larvitar, behind them, ate a mooring bollard. Somewhere a harbourmaster began to shout. Adam paid for the bollard, and the boat, and a great deal of extra food, and in the morning they sailed south, into warm water, toward Hoenn.
AN: If we get to 300 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 500, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123