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"Gloom!"
The black-haired NPC youth shouted anxiously and ran straight onto the field.
Although his real-time battle command ability as a Trainer was indeed lacking, Kael could at least see that he genuinely cared for his own Pokémon.
"You did great... Thank you, Gloom."
The black-haired youth held the unconscious Gloom in his arms, his eyes slightly red as he spoke in a gentle voice.
Even after losing the battle, there was not the slightest complaint toward his Pokémon partner. His words carried only heartache and pity.
Click!
With a soft sound, illusory red light spread across the grass.
Gloom, who lay weakly collapsed on the ground, was recalled into the young man's Poké Ball.
The space inside a Poké Ball had the effect of suppressing injuries and easing pain for the Pokémon within.
No matter how severe the injury was, as long as the Pokémon was recalled into its Poké Ball, it could at least endure until it reached a Pokémon Center.
Although Gloom's injuries were not fatal, keeping it inside the Poké Ball was still safer.
The black-haired youth carefully placed Gloom's Poké Ball back into the pouch at his waist.
Then he stood up and looked at Kael with a serious expression.
"I lost this time."
"But next time, Gloom and I will definitely win it back."
"I'm going to get the Azure Bay Water-type Gym Badge for sure."
His words were still just as dramatic as before, awkward enough to make anyone listening cringe.
The faint goodwill Kael had felt because of the boy's gentle attitude toward his Pokémon vanished again the moment those dramatic words left his mouth.
Kael rolled his eyes, then turned and walked toward the entrance of the field.
Although Gloom had already been defeated and returned to its Poké Ball, the smell lingering on the field was still terrifying.
He did not want to stay here any longer.
Creak...
Just then, the door in front of Kael opened from the outside.
"Yo."
"It ended that quickly?"
The newcomer was Evan, who had fled the battlefield earlier under the attack of that biological weapon.
Compared with before, he now had a thick mask covering his face, making him look so fully armed that it was almost funny.
After entering the room, Evan nodded at Kael with satisfaction, then walked over to the black-haired boy.
He began saying all kinds of extremely official-sounding lines, such as, "You already performed quite well today. Unfortunately, your luck was a little lacking," and, "Try again next time. Maybe you'll have a chance to win the Badge."
The speech was so painfully generic that Kael could guess the second half of every sentence as soon as Evan started the first.
"Even an idiot would know he's just brushing him off."
Kael could not help silently complaining.
Even so, the innocent black-haired Trainer did not understand the hidden meaning at all.
Instead, he nodded seriously with a thoughtful expression, as if he deeply agreed.
It was as though he truly believed his luck had just been a little bad, and that if he challenged the Gym again next time, he would definitely pass.
"Sigh."
Kael silently sighed.
"What a weirdo."
Soon, under Evan's "warm" encouragement, the black-haired youth regained his confidence and strode out of the Gym with his head held high.
Evan watched him leave, then turned back and smiled at Kael.
"You did well."
"Keep this state from now on. Keep it up."
Kael's face showed no pride.
Against an opponent like Gloom, whose strength was so far beneath his own, he could not get excited at all. Even winning the battle gave him no sense of achievement.
His clear blue eyes stared at the shirtless Evan in front of him, cold as water and expressionless, as if asking where his next opponent was.
"Haha."
"No rush."
Having guessed Kael's thoughts, Evan laughed, then spoke.
"You should have two more battles this morning."
"Take a good rest and recover your energy for the next fight."
"When the time comes, I won't come over. I'll let a professional referee from the Gym handle it."
No matter how lazy Evan's personality was, he was still the Gym Leader of the only Gym in a major city. He had a great many things to deal with every day.
Spending an entire morning accompanying Kael through challenges was clearly unrealistic.
He had only come this time as a precaution, to confirm whether Kael's battle condition had any issues.
After all, it was normal to feel some discomfort after suddenly changing to a new living environment.
Now that he had seen Kael's overwhelmingly dominant performance, he felt relieved and prepared to return to his busy work.
After greeting him once more, Evan shoved both hands into his pockets and wandered out of the field in his usual careless, lazy manner.
At the same time, a middle-aged man with a square face entered the field.
From the Gym uniform he wore, the silver whistle hanging around his neck, and the two small flags in his hands, Kael guessed that this man should be the battle referee replacing Evan.
The square-faced man's attitude stood in stark contrast with Evan's laziness.
His face was serious, and he did not say a single unnecessary word.
The moment he entered the battlefield, he silently began setting up his work area, as if he had not seen Kael at all.
Kael was quite happy to see this.
He did not like communicating with humans.
It was too troublesome.
When he spoke, the other side could not understand him. Psychics who could communicate with minds were extremely rare, and he no longer possessed the aura power that could connect to a mental space.
Whether Kael could communicate smoothly with ordinary humans depended entirely on whether they could guess what he meant.
The mental effort spent going back and forth like that was even greater than fighting a battle.
Faced with this serious and quiet Gym referee, Kael simply sat down on the spot, closed his eyes, and began resting carefully while waiting for the next battle.
...
Time passed quickly.
It felt as though only a blink had gone by, and the entire morning was already over.
Kael's work for the first half of the day had also ended.
The two challengers he faced were, respectively, a cute elementary school student with a Pidgey, and a tall girl who used a Plusle as her battle Pokémon.
The result was naturally the same as the first battle.
Kael won overwhelmingly.
As for Badges, of course, not a single one had been given out.
It was not that Kael did not want to hold back.
The Trainers who had come to challenge the Gym were simply too weak.
At first, he had thought the black-haired youth from the morning was merely a special case among rookie Trainers.
Only now did he truly understand that in this game world, the average skill level of beginner Trainers was probably around this level.
He even started wondering whether, if the challengers he met afterward were all this fragile, he should lower his standards a little.
At the very least, he should give out a few Badges each day. He could not just block everyone here forever and cause trouble for both himself and the Gym in the future.
Aside from that, there was one other thing that left Kael slightly disappointed.
Including the black-haired NPC youth from the beginning, he had handled a total of three challenges that morning.
The number of players among them was an extremely eye-catching zero.
They were all NPCs.
This made Kael feel very confused.
Based on his recent experiences, he could infer that the number of players in this game was definitely not small.
For the Azure Bay Water-type Gym, the only Gym in an entire major city, to have no players coming to challenge it was honestly a little unexpected.
"That shouldn't be right."
Even if the game had only just launched and players were generally not very strong, quite a few of them should at least be able to reach the level of challenging a Gym.
Besides, with the fearless personality of players, even if they only had a level 5 Caterpie beside them, they should still charge into the Gym without hesitation.
Kael found it strange.
What he did not know was that the situation he was experiencing right now had actually been caused by himself.
After Kael caused chaos at the Bibarel Cup Fishing Tournament, Azure Bay City had almost become the place with the highest player density on the entire Floravale Continent.
However, the place where the players gathered was not the Water-type Gym where he currently was.
It was the place where he had appeared on the live broadcast.
Azure Crystal Marine Park.
The players were all busy searching the park for traces of Sobble. Naturally, they had no interest in traveling all the way to the other end of the city to fight a meaningless Pokémon battle at the Water-type Gym.
Because of that, they naturally had no way of knowing that the dream Pokémon they were desperately searching for was not far away at all, but hidden in plain sight inside the Gym.
Of course, this peace was only temporary.
Once the players tried every possible method and still failed to catch sight of Kael, they would begin researching every part of the city.
At that point, the information that Kael was serving as a defending Pokémon in the Gym would naturally be exposed before the vast number of players.
During the lunch break.
Lying on the soft bed inside the training room, specially made for small Pokémon like Sobble, Kael casually opened his system panel and looked it over.
...
[Species: Sobble]
[Level: 15, 86/100]
[Ability: Sniper]
[Moves: Pound, Growl, Origin Pulse, Aqua Ring, Water Gun, Bind, Water Pulse, Snore]
[Evaluation: A strange lifeform born from data turbulence and void fractures. The special aura from another world has drawn the attention of the incarnation of the north wind.]
[Held Items: Dynamax Band, Deoxys Speed Forme's Cosmic DNA]
...
Although the three Trainers from the morning were not very strong, together they had still provided Kael with nearly forty experience points.
Added to the result of his intense training over the past two days, his current level had reached 15, 86/100.
He was only fourteen experience points away from the level 16 required for evolution. A single average-quality battle would be enough to fill it.
Of course, as he had thought before, Kael would definitely linger at the level 16 threshold for a while to maximize his gains.
He was not in a hurry.
Compared with his level, what Kael truly cared about now was the new move that had appeared in his move list.
Snore.
Just as the name suggested, it was a move that created loud snoring noises while asleep to attack the enemy with sound.
This was the new move Kael had automatically learned when he reached level 15.
Useless.
That was Kael's first impression when he saw the move.
To be honest, Snore's power was not actually weak.
Even among the moves Kael could currently use, it ranked third, only below the unusable Origin Pulse and his trump card, Water Pulse.
However, it had an extremely restrictive condition for use.
If the user wanted to truly unleash Snore's power and damage the enemy, they had to be asleep.
Otherwise, what came out would only be ordinary, annoying noise.
That harsh requirement meant the move could only properly display its value on a small number of Pokémon.
For example, Slaking or Komala.
As for Kael's current Sobble body, this was probably a move he would never have a chance to use in his entire life.
Let him sacrifice his mobility and agility, both far superior to other Pokémon of the same level, by entering a sleep state during battle just to use Snore?
What kind of joke was that?
Doing something so foolish as picking up a coin while throwing away a treasure chest was not something Kael would ever do.
Because of that, even though he had learned a new move, its harsh conditions meant Kael could only throw it into storage and forget about it.
He had no interest in it at all.
He did not even have the slightest thought of trying to train the move.
It would be a pure waste of time.
In his view, if a Pokémon in a future battle could force him into the sleep condition, then that opponent's strength would probably be far higher than his own.
At that point, a Normal-type move with a game power of 50 probably would not be of any use anyway.
At that moment, Kael even felt a little grateful that this was a virtual game close to the real world, and not a true mainline Pokémon game made by Nintendead.
Otherwise, with the unique four-move limit of the mainline Pokémon games, he would pitifully have to waste one of those slots on Snore.
How would he even keep playing like that?
"Sigh."
With a look of disgust, Kael casually minimized the system panel and moved it back to the corner of his vision.
He turned his head and looked at the clock on the wall.
13:51.
"It's almost two in the afternoon."
"Time for this working Pokémon to clock in."
Kael stood up, stretched lazily, and walked toward the battlefield.
...
Five minutes later.
Kael looked at the slender figure in front of him, the one with twin ponytails, and a strange smile appeared on his face.
"Well, well... What a small world."
At the same time, on the other side of the field, Wendy stared at the small water-blue Sobble standing on the battlefield as if she had seen a ghost.
Her eyes went wide and round, almost as if they were about to fall out.
"So… Sobble?"
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
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For early access to advanced chapters on P-atreon:
P-atreon/iamxeno
(Just remove the - hyphen to access normally)
Thank you so much for your support and for reading!