Groups of wild Pokémon had a limit to how large they could be. Pokémon with a guaranteed source of food tended to stay in larger groups, and flocks of flying Pokémon tended to get even larger thanks to sourcing meals over vast distances and picking out targets from the sky.

  Gligar weren’t a species that traveled in large groups, and though they could glide, they couldn’t exactly get too high into the air. They were as limited as any grounded group of Pokémon, but right now, it was like that limit on group size had disappeared.

  They were a tide, a flood of creatures from many different groups joining together for a mass assault. Berry trees were invaluable out here, and the mere chance to claim one from the Mankey tribe was worth putting aside their differences for this singular plan.

  It would have worked in any other situation, but these Gligar had unfortunate timing. Though a mass, midnight ambush would have worked even just one day ago, Sam’s group was right here, and they had no plans to let the Gligar win.

  Unlike usual, Misdreavus was the first Pokémon to act, as Haunter intentionally waited for her to begin. She had been practicing new ways to use old moves, and she showed off her practice with a Psybeam that tore up the ground.

  Rather than just leaving a groove, the Psychic Type energy sent dirt and debris into the air. In a cloud that wasn’t quite a Smoke Screen but didn’t need to be actively maintained, her attack churned up the earth to create quite the obscuration that Haunter and everyone else could take advantage of.

  He dived right into it, with most of the Gastly following behind. The lower half of the Gligar swarm disappeared into the dust cloud, and muffled yelps began to echo out, quickly fading into nothing more than whispers thanks to the blankets of Night Shade the Gastly popped up and maintained.

  Claws left the cloud to grab the necks of isolated Gligar and yank them back in. Several Gastly lingered off to the side to flash their eyes at incoming attackers, and sleeping Gligar fell right out of the sky toward the other, eager Ghost Types waiting below.

  At Sam’s side, Typhlosion took a step forward and brought up her head to conjure her best attack. Deep purple flames burned from her neck, their unnatural energy casting shadows instead of light.

  Her Infernal Parade winked into existence multiple wisps at a time. She formed a wall that she sent right toward the incoming swarm, and Gligar desperately moved out of the way in an attempt to avoid the unfamiliar move.

  But the Infernal Parade did not light up the area, and the combination of the dust cloud below and Gastly at the sides meant it had become the darkest of nights. In an attempt to dodge, blind Gligar slammed into other blind Gligar. Their charge fell apart in seconds, which created openings for even more attacks.

  Every Gligar that dodged was another Gligar that got hurt somehow. Either by being bumped into, grabbed by a Ghost Type, or just hit by Typhlosion’s attack, the assault force quickly became the ones under assault.

  Trevenant took advantage of that to slip forward, becoming a surprisingly stealthy tree that sent up roots to lash around. Gligar were either pinned or inflicted with the Grass Type thanks to Forest’s Curse. Those ones became easy targets for Typhlosion to get quick knock-outs.

  Trevenant’s Shadow Claw also let him finish off any stragglers, and the Gastly did their work in support. The overall combination had come together in only a few short moments, and already, the swarm was falling apart.

  Out here, an attack force of this size was practically unheard of, but even more unheard of was this many Ghost Types working together. They were off-route, where every day was a fight in its own way. Even in the rare scenarios in which a trainer showed up, they never brought a team of this size.

  “This attack was doomed before it even had a chance,” Sam said quietly, keeping his voice low to not wake up any slumbering Mankey in the camp.

  At his side, Typhlosion snickered, but even though his chest swelled in pride as he watched how easily his Pokémon dismantled the swarm, he still found himself growing nervous.

  Everyone might have been demonstrating the strength they’d been chasing all this time, but something about this mass battle was missing. It wasn’t Primeape, as he had moved up to stand next to Sam and serve as a last line of defense just in case, and it wasn’t the Mankey, since they were all still asleep behind them.

  The more Sam watched, the more he realized what he was feeling. The swarm almost felt too undirected. Honestly, it was almost as if it was uncontrolled.

  Primeape grunted to express his suspicions, and Sam had to agree with his comment; this was too easy.

  “Wait. I get it,” Sam said, looking at how easily the Gligar were falling into a panic. “This was supposed to overwhelm us with numbers, but they’re falling apart too quickly. No one was leading the charge. Even out here, isn’t every group out here supposed to have a leader?”

  That Gligar from yesterday, the one that had challenged Primeape’s brother only to lose, was nowhere to be found. This might have been a swarm, but it was like each Pokémon was fighting individually rather than as a group under a single Pokémon’s command.

  Even when Trevenant had taken over Route 43, his groups of Pokémon had leaders. Sam had a clear memory of that Honchkrow leading its group of Murkrow. Not every Pokémon had a trainer, but many still tended to follow something that gave them commands.

  This was wrong. While the sheer amount of numbers had been a surprise, the assault was far too simple. Sam quickly looked around, trying to see if the lead Gligar was hiding anywhere or attempting to sneak around from the back.

  But he couldn’t find it. It wasn’t that the Pokémon was sneaky, it simply wasn’t there.

  Alarm bells went off in Sam’s head, even as the swarm of Pokémon slowly started to flee. He got his first clue that something was going wrong when he looked down and saw a pebble rattle against the ground. It bounced as if subjected to distant, heavy thumps.

  And those thumps grew by the second.

  Sam began to feel vibrations under his feet, and he finally realized exactly what he’d missed.

  “Drop the dust cloud! Push it down!” he shouted.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  Misdreavus had been firing off weak Power Gems, using this opportunity to practice that move. But with Sam’s command, she quickly switched to using Psychic, and the dust slammed to the earth like a blanket hitting the floor.

  The noise picked up; right away, behind them, many of the Mankey woke up in alarm. Shouts rang out when they saw the fight going on ahead of them, but Sam didn’t care. Now wasn’t the time to be quiet anymore.

  His eyes locked onto the lead Gligar almost right away. It was desperately gliding forward in the back of the swarm. The dust cloud had hidden its presence, but it hadn’t been hiding. It was as if it hadn’t shown up until right now.

  It rushed out from around a curve in the ravine, face locked into panicked desperation. It was intent on moving as fast as possible, and those same thumps grew louder behind it.

  Something growled, but the noise was nothing that could come from a mouth. Followed by a constant rumble, it was pretty clear that Gligar was being chased. Panic started to erupt in the Mankey tribe as they put the clues together before it was revealed. They pushed aside any weariness just to flee, scrambling toward the back boulders while fueled by nothing but adrenaline.

  Sam finally saw it—the real core of the Gligar’s plan. Heft—fat, plain and simple—appeared around the corner, jiggling with every step.

  Unfortunately, he had been right in the worst way possible; the Gligar’s mass assault hadn’t been the entire plan. Their leader had been doing something else. They knew they wouldn’t win against Primeape’s brother, so this had all been just a distraction to lure something else in.

  A Snorlax.

  Almost like a Primeape, Sam could have sworn he felt a vein throb on his head.

  “That idiot! Doesn’t it know that a Snorlax is just going to eat the entire tree?!”

  Wild Snorlax stood above every other wild species out here, not just due to how much it ate, but due to its thick layers of fat that let it shrug off practically any attack. That weight made them strong, not just defensively, but also because they needed the muscle to lug all that mass around.

  So impossibly heavy, as the Snorlax turned the corner, each of its footsteps shook the earth, and the Mankey cried out in pure panic. On the Snorlax’s stomach, Sam could see a nasty, discolored welt that showed off just how the Gligar had attacked it to get it to wake up.

  But waking up a Snorlax was not a simple matter, and Sam would in no way call this Pokémon fully awake. Its eyes were closed, and it was half asleep. There was a purpose to its footsteps, but it wasn’t being guided by anything conscious.

  If Sam had to guess, the reason the Snorlax was chasing the Gligar was two-fold; it was lashing out in its sleep, and it was following what movement it could see out of hopes it’d eventually be led to food.

  “Hypnosis won’t work. Snorlax is still practically asleep. I could have Haunter use Dream Eater or Nightmare, but those would just enrage it even more. The worst case is if messing with its dreams wakes it up. Then it’d see that the berry tree is right there and would go up to it for an easy meal.”

  Sam muttered his thoughts, speaking as quickly as possible to share anything he could think of with his Pokémon around him. Snorlax had a reputation for a reason. This one might not have been a trainer’s Pokémon, but the sheer level of strength it possessed meant it was a major threat.

  “Can’t have Typhlosion help,” he continued, speaking anything that came to mind. “Thick Fat means Fire Type moves are nothing against it, and the same is probably true for a burn. Worse, it’s a Normal Type and immune to Ghost Type moves. And then the same reason Hypnosis is ineffective makes Confuse Ray ineffective, too.”

  If Sam had taught his Pokémon Destiny Bond by now, Haunter could have purposefully fainted to buy the team an opening for an attack. Trevenant could have then used his roots to lash Snorlax to the ground, which would have worked because breaking free was too much work for a lazy Pokémon like it.

  But Haunter didn’t know Destiny Bond. None of Sam’s Pokémon did.

  And Sam had even told Misdreavus to work on Power Gem before Pain Split. If she had known that move, Pain Split would have been perfect here.

  They had nothing. Well, they did have a few options, but those were based around wearing the Snorlax down. Despite its bulk, Sam knew his team could eventually win, but that was only if they spent a while taking it out. Meanwhile, as they fought, the Snorlax would still have free reign to continue its half-asleep movements. Eventually, it’d find the berry tree, and then that would be it.

  There was also the issue that if they focused on it too much, the Gligar would come back. Then, it didn’t matter if the berry tree was protected. The Mankey would be forced away, anyway.

  This is bad. They’ve pinned us. Fighting a wild Snorlax is just as dangerous as fighting a wild Dragonite, and only fools fight wild Dragonite.

  The difference between the two Pokémon was that Snorlax rarely gave chase if its opponents fled, but if a Pokémon was deliberately trying to guide it somewhere...

  Sam growled at how the lead Gligar grinned when it saw its goal was now in sight.

  “Primeape,” Sam said, though he wasn’t happy with this plan. “You’re our only solution. You’re a Fighting Type, so you’re our best answer to big targets like these.”

  Primeape had already stepped forward. He knew his role. When it came to the opponents the rest of the team struggled to defeat, his job was to take them out. For as immune to Normal Type moves as the team was, they didn’t exactly have a viable way to defeat Normal Types. That was where Primeape came in, as his strong, super effective Fighting Type moves could defeat those kinds of foes.

  He knew how to fight a bigger target. He’d fought Ursaring countless times in the past. While Ursaring wasn’t as big as a Snorlax, he was more skilled than one, so Primeape looked unbothered as he marched ahead.

  No matter how strong the Snorlax was, it was still a Normal Type, and it was an untrained one, at that. It was powerful, but Primeape had something even more powerful prepared for it.

  A strategy.

  And that strategy involved landing just a single, solid punch.

  As Primeape walked forward, he had to ask himself a question: was he afraid? He would never admit that he was, but he couldn’t ignore the way his body shook as he approached such an enormous threat.

  It wasn’t that the Snorlax was intimidating. It wasn’t that the Pokémon was some impossible-to-defeat foe. It was that Primeape was familiar with the species. He had grown up in this valley, and Snorlax had always felt more like a force of nature than any individual Pokémon.

  One of his earliest memories was of him fleeing alongside the rest of the tribe. While traveling, they had turned a cliff corner only to come face-to-face with a wandering Snorlax. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but it had seen the chestnuts carried by a few members of the tribe and lunged.

  The way it drooled in hunger had been terrifying. It cared nothing for the Mankey before it, only for the food they held. The only reason the tribe managed to escape was because the older members called for everyone to drop what they carried and run. The Snorlax had shaken the earth when it sat to eat, and that was the first time Primeape remembered ever truly being scared.

  So his reaction was more instinctual than it was logical. Coming back here had stirred up far too many memories. If they had been facing the Snorlax in an official battle, he wouldn’t have been nervous. But out here, it was a threat, and he was the one to take care of threats. Yet even though the Snorlax was tough, so was he.

  Primeape had beaten his brother.

  Primeape had been strong.

  He had finally managed to prove his strength.

  Because of course he had, hadn’t he?

  Gligar fought in the air above him as he picked up speed. All around him, Gastly pushed the wild Pokémon back to open up a path for his charge. A Psychic from Misdreavus grabbed a Gligar and yanked it to the side. Nearby, Trevenant slashed with a Shadow Claw to prevent a pair of aggressive Gligar from reaching where he ran.

  Primeape’s nerves hardened. These Pokémon were his team. His friends. His family. As big as the Snorlax was, he’d be bigger. This was his role. His job. His target to defeat.

  The space between him and the approaching Snorlax shrunk. It only walked, but it was so big it felt as though every step brought it forward a mile. In front of it, that one lead Gligar looked at Primeape with a smug, punchable face, but Primeape just grabbed its lashing tail and swung it away. It didn’t deserve anything more than that right now.

  And then, he was at the Snorlax. It towered over him with its jiggling, impossibly heavy bulk. It barely responded to him with anything other than a half-conscious growl. He was likely nothing more than a blur to the half-asleep creature, but he was a blur that was in the Snorlax’s way.

  It lifted its arms, but Primeape was faster. Raising his fists like the boxers Redi once told Ursaring about, he dived forward to slip beneath the Snorlax’s guard and jabbed to unleash the strongest move he could.

  Brick Break. The attack was like Rock Smash, but it broke through most forms of defense. Sam had mentioned that some Psychic Types liked to set up translucent screens, and Brick Break was powerful enough to shatter them to pieces. It might not have been a Rock Smash, which could destroy a Pokémon’s defense and make them vulnerable to further attacks, but Primeape didn’t want to take that chance. Rock Smash wasn’t as strong as Brick Break, and he needed a strong attack.

  So, his fist hit the Snorlax’s stomach, and the Pokémon stopped where it had been walking forward. This first super effective move should have been enough to seal the fight.

  But there was no impact.

  Though he had landed his punch, his fist had harmlessly sunk into the Snorlax’s gut.

  So incredibly fat, the Snorlax only had to breathe in to send Primeape bouncing back. He stumbled on his feet and looked up. An arm was already swinging his way.

  It wasn’t a move. It was just a swipe. The Snorlax was too unconscious to do anything more than a simple bash. No matter how much Primeape tried to resist, the difference in strength and size was too much, and he flew.

  Soaring over the battlefield, the next thing Primeape knew was the pain of an impact into a rock wall. Everything blurred, and his consciousness slipped.

  In the distance, the Snorlax continued forward.

  Sam’s Team:

  Badges Earned: 7 (Mineral, Fog, Plain, Hive, Zephyr, Rising, Glacier)

  Approximate Team Strength: 7 Stars

  (Fire / Ghost Type, Female, Timid Nature +Spe/-Atk)

  Abilities: Blaze

  Held Item: Charcoal

  Moves: Tackle, Leer, Smokescreen, Ember, Flame Wheel, Curse, Will-O-Wisp, Incinerate, Detect, Quick Attack, Swift, Flame Charge, Flamethrower, Double Team, Infernal Parade, Confuse Ray, Hex, Shadow Ball, Night Shade, Shadow Claw

  (Fighting Type, Male, Impish Nature +Def/-SpA)

  Abilities: Anger Point, Vital Spirit

  Moves: Scratch, Leer, Low Kick, Karate Chop, Fury Swipes, Assurance, Ice Punch, Fire Punch, Cross Chop, Curse, Brick Break, Rock Smash, Rock Slide, Bulk Up, Rage, Rage Fist

  Haunter (Ghost / Poison Type, Male, Naive Nature +Spe/-SpD)

  Abilities: Levitate

  Moves: Hypnosis, Lick, Confuse Ray, Spite, Mean Look, Hex, Shadow Punch, Night Shade, Acid Spray, Ominous Wind, Shadow Ball, Dream Eater, Nightmare

  (Ghost Type, Female, Hasty Nature +Spe/-Def)

  Pokéball: Friend Ball

  Abilities: Levitate

  Moves: Growl, Psywave, Astonish, Confusion, Confuse Ray, Mean Look, Night Shade, Shadow Sneak, Shadow Ball, Nasty Plot, Psybeam, Will-O-Wisp, Psychic, Hex, Power Gem

  Trevenant (Ghost / Grass Type, Male, Quiet Nature +SpA/-Spe)

  Pokéball: Moon Ball

  Abilities: Harvest, Frisk (Developing)

  Moves: Horn Leech, Tackle, Confuse Ray, Astonish, Growth, Ingrain, Leech Seed, Forest’s Curse, Shadow Claw

  Redi’s Team (at last sighting):

  Badges Earned: 7 (Mineral, Plain, Hive, Zephyr, Rising, Glacier, Fog)

  Approximate Team Strength: 6 Stars

  (Normal Type, Male, Adamant Nature +Atk/-SpA)

  Abilities: Guts, Quick Feet

  Moves: Scratch, Fury Swipes, Fire Punch, Baby-Doll Eyes, Slash, Ice Punch, Focus Energy, Thunder Punch, Hyper Beam, Rock Slide, Swords Dance, Giga Impact, Shadow Claw, Sleep Talk

  Porygon (Normal Type, Genderless, Quirky Nature +-n/a)

  Abilities: n/a

  Moves: Tackle, Sharpen, Conversion, Psybeam, Thunder Shock, Charge Beam, Discharge, Tri-Attack, Charge, Teleport, Recover, Thunder Wave, Magnet Rise, Lock-On, Zap Cannon

  (Dragon Type, Female, Rash Nature +SpA/-SpD)

  Abilities: Shed Skin

  Moves: Wrap, Leer, Thunder Wave, Twister, Slam, Agility, Aqua Tail, Dragon Rush

  Auxiliary Pokémon: x2 (Tibia and Fibula), a decent number of wild (variable)

  At Home (non-battlers): ,

  Pokémon included in this chapter:

  huge thank you to everyone reading! Your support keeps this story going.