Regarding Venusaur's invincibility against Fire moves, that was about as much explanation as Ash could give. The truth went deeper into Xerneas, the god of life, and even with how favorably he was already disposed toward May and Max, he wasn't about to casually reveal a Legendary's involvement.
May and Max exchanged a look, and the same skepticism showed in both pairs of eyes. Ash's explanation made internal sense, but the picture still strained belief.
Forcibly making Grass moves resistant to Fire by leaning on life force? What kind of off-the-wall idea was that? It wasn't that it was impossible to pull off. It was the sheer amount of life force you'd have to spend to keep doing it.
The life force of a Grass-type Pokémon did grow as its level rose, but that life force stayed inside its own body. Why would it pour it into moves? Wasn't that a pure waste? Did Venusaur have a mineral deposit somewhere inside that made spending life force this freely worth it?
Ash's expression didn't read as anything but sincere, though. And if he hadn't wanted to share, he wouldn't have needed to invent a flimsy cover. He could simply have said it was a secret. They'd known each other for less than a day. There was no reason for him to lay out his cards. So even if the explanation was hard to swallow, it was probably the truth.
"Ash, your Pokémon are really something else." May spent a while turning the words over and finally landed on something that wasn't another variation of "incredible." She didn't know what other phrase could fit.
Ash just scratched his head and laughed off the comment. His Pokémon's strange performances hadn't been an accident born overnight. Without genuine skill, even Aura fusion couldn't carry him past a full major tier in a fight.
After the two of them had talked it over and traded a few details, about an hour later, May's Blaziken was fully healed. The recovery took that long not only because Blaziken was a High Level Pokémon, but because the Pokémon Center was overwhelmed.
The half-hour wait at the arena earlier was a clue. With that many Trainers battling in New Bark Town, all of them were going to swing by the Center for healing afterward. The recovery wing didn't have the same density of bodies as the registration line, but the workload was on a whole different level.
One side was just paperwork. The other was actual treatment and healing, which was orders of magnitude harder. Even with a different crowd, the recovery side was buried in work. That was why Blaziken took so long to come out.
Once Blaziken was back to full, everyone got up and set out for Violet City.
On the road, Ash asked May her age, curious. She looked close to his, but he couldn't tell exactly. May said she was sixteen. Ash worked it out. She was a little over sixteen. That meant her journey was roughly half a year older than his own. In just over a year and change, she'd already raised a High Level Pokémon.
A girl like May, who actively went looking for battles, was rare. The number of girls who genuinely loved battling was relatively small, which was why there were so few powerful female Trainers in the world.
Of course, though the numbers were small, the quality didn't suffer for it. Among the world's six publicly recognized Champions today, two were female. Word was that Alder, the Champion of another region, had also already identified his eventual successor, and that person was apparently a girl as well.
With May's current talent, becoming a Champion in the future wasn't merely possible. It was nearly a sure thing. Then again, who could say for certain what the future held?
Time slipped past. A week later, Ash's group of five successfully arrived in Violet City.
By the time they did, May and Max felt like they'd lived several lifetimes. The things that happened over those seven days nearly exceeded what they'd understood about Trainer life up to this point.
First, Ash carried more training tools than they'd known existed. May used commercially available training items often enough, but the variety and quality of what Ash pulled out of his pack were on a completely different plane.
Each item he brought out worked better than what the open market sold.
And then there was Ash's cooking. The food he made stunned them. Without exaggerating, his food was the best they'd ever tasted. The kind of meal that read as a feast sent down from heaven.
They'd already considered their mom's cooking excellent. Who could have imagined that a fifteen-year-old boy would outdo a housewife who'd been cooking for half her life? Talent was a real thing. Even if Ash had started training in cooking from the day he was born, that was still only sixteen years, and it wasn't even close to their mom's lifetime of practice.
The fact that he was producing food at this level only proved one thing. His cooking talent was off the chart. Just like the rest of his talent.
When May learned that Ash had spent only half a year on the road, training Pokémon while constantly running between battles, and had still polished his cooking up to this level along the way, her mouth fell open and stayed that way. It was beyond absurd. She didn't say a word. She just kept eating.
Aside from the cooking and the training, there were two or three other things that came up over those days.
They were on the road for seven days, and Team Rocket showed up three times. Three times in seven. Every single time the trio appeared, Ash sent them flying with Pikachu straight off. The few times they actually managed to catch Pikachu with one of their underpowered electric contraptions, Ash brought out Charizard or Gardevoir and put an end to it instantly.
Even after getting launched into orbit every appearance, they still came knocking three times in a week. It defied comprehension. Sometimes Ash genuinely wondered what those three were made of.
Anyone else getting flung from that height and then crashing back down would have been laid out in serious pain. A normal person falling like a meteor would have been incapacitated for months. The Team Rocket trio? Calling their bodies iron was an insult to iron. A block of iron wouldn't hold up the way they did.
Ash and the others were fine with it. They'd been through this routine before. For May and Max, though, it was the first time they'd ever seen anything that bizarre. What kind of people existed like that in the world?
The strangest part wasn't even the indestructibility. It was the way the trio could pin down Ash's location every single time. If the others hadn't carefully confirmed that no one in the group was carrying any tracking devices, they'd have assumed Team Rocket had something planted on them somewhere.
Team Rocket's three attempts ended in three failures, but Ash did get pulled into trouble one more time because of them.
It happened while the group was passing through a forest. The Team Rocket trio had been causing chaos there, scaring off a group of Pinsir that had been resting and feeding on tree sap. After being driven out, those Pinsir then went and picked a fight with the local Heracross colony over territory.
The Heracross colony was roughly equal in strength to the Pinsir, but Heracross were the more peaceful of the two. So when the Pinsir came looking for a fight over tree sap, the Heracross ultimately chose to back off and yield the ground.
Even after the rest of the Heracross had cleared out, though, one stayed behind, still drinking from the sap. That Heracross got jumped by the Pinsir group. It took the beating and refused to leave. Ash and the others happened to be cutting through the area at the time and used Venusaur to rescue it, driving the Pinsir off.
Once the picture was clear, Ash worked out the cause and effect, then went and drove Team Rocket out of the forest too.
The Pinsir successfully returned to their original spot. The Heracross colony, who lived locally, naturally returned to their home territory.
The lone Heracross who'd stayed behind, though, ended up tagging along with Ash. The reason was simple. Venusaur's nectar was too good to give up. The bug had been a glutton from start to finish. The reason it hadn't left its colony's territory in the first place was the food, and even when it was getting beaten on, it refused to abandon the sap. Now, having tasted Venusaur's nectar, it wanted to follow Ash.
Ash happily agreed. This Heracross was a little clumsy, but its raw ability wasn't bad. Defense at B. Special attack, speed, and stamina at A. Attack at S. Don't be fooled by how many S-rank Pokémon Ash already had on the roster. In reality, having an S-rank stat on a single Pokémon was already a rarity, roughly one in ten thousand within a species. Possessing a Pokémon with two S-rank stats was rarer still, on the order of one in a hundred thousand.
So a single S-rank attack on a Heracross was simply that Heracross's natural talent, and within its colony, this one had been the strongest. Catching this Heracross was a real piece of luck for Ash.
Outside of Pokémon catches and the recurring Team Rocket nonsense, the rest of the time was spent on Pokémon training. May had been picking up knowledge since she was a kid too, and even though she was older than Ash and had been on the road longer, her experience didn't even register next to his. It pushed her to sigh. Talent really was something you couldn't reason your way around.
A week later, the group finally arrived in Violet City. Violet City was a prosperous place, anchored by a commercial center, the kind of feature you found in any decent-sized city.
The city also had its iconic landmark, the Sprout Tower. Inside it sat the gathered memories of Violet City. Trainers could return to the Sprout Tower whenever they felt lost or confused, and a journey that lets you find yourself through architecture this remarkable was, in the end, the most important reason Violet City carried the standing it did. The whole point of travel was rediscovering who you really were.
"Finally, I'm back!" Max stood on a small rise, threw his head up to the sky, and let out a long, ringing shout. On one hand, he genuinely missed his parents. On the other hand, he couldn't wait to see his father and Ash square off.
Only after spending time at Ash's side did Max truly understand how extraordinary a Trainer he was, and that was exactly why a win against Ash would be so valuable to his father. In Max's heart, his dad was still the strongest Trainer alive.
Ash was strong, but he was still a long way behind Dad. Max couldn't wait to see that proven, which was why he'd been more eager than anyone all the way here.
"Violet City is pretty big. The original Violet City Gym is on the left side of the city, but our gym is set up on the right side, over near the Sprout Tower. There's also the Violet City Trainer Academy on that side too, and Dad sometimes teaches there as an instructor," May explained gently to Ash, hands clasped behind her back.
"So right now, Mr. Norman is"
"He's at the academy lecturing today. Given the time, it should be his lecture slot. Let's just head straight there."
May took the lead, and Ash and the others followed.
Half an hour later, they arrived in front of the academy. It wasn't a large building, but the design was meticulous, and even from the entrance you could hear enthusiastic shouting inside. The students were clearly fired up.
When they stepped inside, they saw a middle-aged man with a distinctive Mohawk-styled cut at the front of the room, energetically lecturing on Pokémon-related knowledge. The students below him were mostly around ten years old. They looked young, but they were responding to the man's questions with sharp, eager voices, completely caught up in the lesson.
The arrival of Ash's group also caught the man's attention. He glanced over, then his gaze settled on May and Max.
"May, Max, you're back! And this is"
"This is Ash, a well-known name in the Kanto region. He came to challenge you, Dad." May stepped forward and introduced Ash and the reason for his visit.
Norman's eyes sharpened instantly.
"You're Ash? The legendary Kanto Supernova, the Trainer everyone says might one day surpass Leon. I've heard plenty about you. I didn't think I'd meet you this soon."