Chapter 475: Who Is the Gym Leader?

Real combat doubles and game doubles have vastly different points.

Specifically, it comes down to one using Protect, which can be applied to two Pokémon—

"Lunatone use Calm Mind!"

"Solrock use Protect! Defensive formation!"

Under the shouts of Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan, the Solrock, resembling some ancient human-faced statue, spun and flew in front of Lunatone, unfurling a deep-blue honeycomb disc shield.

The Lunatone hiding behind closed its eyes, its mind still as water yet its spirit boiling, as orange-red high-energy light streams drove up its Special Attack and Special Defense states.

To be honest.

This tactic looks a bit cheap.

If one can't find openings to use moves like Taunt, Imprison, or Disable, it's easy for Solrock and Lunatone to steadily boost their states by alternating Protect and Calm Mind, creating a situation where they sweep the team.

Of course, that doesn't mean there are no other countermeasures.

All Baimu met the smiling gazes of the two across from him and silently drew out a Key Stone.

"Porygon2, Trick Room. Mawile… Mega Evolve!"

In an instant.

Accompanying his low shout, the astonished expressions with dilated pupils on Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan's faces, Mawile's body was enveloped in brilliant light, spirit chains flying out from both ends to rapidly connect, triggering a tremendous transformation in its body.

Meanwhile, Porygon2 beside it, whose stat values had risen due to its Download Ability, silently drove its energy, sending a flash of blue light into the ground.

Immediately, the light rapidly spread to the field's edges and shot up to form a strange, glowing-blue space, instantly illuminating the field that had been somewhat dim under the starry ceiling.

"Trick Room…"

Younger brother Miss Xiao Feng looked around, feeling something was off.

Solrock and Lunatone's advantage lies in using their speed and the special terrain equipment to confuse opponents—both are indispensable.

Just which region's Pokémon is that?

Older sister Xiaonan stared intently at the fully Mega Evolved Mawile, nudging her brother beside her with her arm. "Look at that! That's even worse!"

It wasn't her first time seeing Mega Evolution, but one with such a violent aura like this Mawile…

Could it be that they brought it out for battle before fully mastering it?

Xiaonan looked at All Baimu in the distance; his extremely calm expression made her dismiss that unrealistic thought.

Haha.

How could that be?

Yet in fact, she had hit the nail on the head.

In just a few short days, there was indeed no way to let Mawile fully master Mega Evolution. In terms of controlling its newly added power, this Young Lady was far worse off than Aggron, resulting in rather slow progress.

But at the very least, she had already succeeded in maintaining rationality, enough to handle the current Gym battle. Moreover, the tension of real combat helped progress in mastering the power.

On the other hand.

Although judging from base stats, Solrock and Lunatone's speed wasn't much faster than Mawile's and Porygon2's, setting up Trick Room was a bit redundant.

However, based on All Baimu's understanding, due to the special terrain, Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan had further trained Solrock and Lunatone's speed, hoping to rely on their speed and familiarity with the field to fend off opponents.

Therefore, setting up Trick Room was definitely worth it.

Sure enough.

"Fly up high!"

When Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan raised the floating height of their two Pokémon, hoping to copy the trick and repeat the Protect and Calm Mind combo, the fully Mega Evolved Mawile struck.

"Iron Head!"

"Gyaaah!"

The Mega Mawile, with its two massive jaws, lowered its body and charged forward at full speed, its legs swinging at a frequency nearly like afterimages, creating a rhythmic thump-thump-thump sound across the field.

How could it be this fast!?

Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan felt that in the span of a breath, the Mega Mawile, silver light emanating from the top of its head, had already reached beneath the Lunatone shielding Solrock.

"Block—"

Xiaonan shouted, but the Mega Mawile had already transformed into a brilliant, dazzling silver bullet, striking head-on at the honeycomb light shield the opponent had just raised!

At this moment.

A revolving, earth-yellow planet hurtled over, seemingly poised to slam into the Mega Mawile.

Who would have thought that before the latter's body surface of resplendent silver light, the earth-yellow planet couldn't even hinder it for a single second, collapsing and disintegrating like a bubble.

Boom! Crash!

A muffled sound like vibrating glass shook Lunatone's mind. It watched helplessly as, under the Mega Mawile's headbutt, the light shield before it was covered in dense cracks from violent shaking, and in the next instant shattered with a bang.

For a moment, panic was impossible to suppress.

The hard planet, and the ever-effective Protect shield, had both been brutally broken!

As a trainer, Xiaonan felt it deeply—after all, the material of these planets was aerospace-grade!

Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan exchanged a glance, both eyes filled with terror. They had never imagined that any Pokémon in the world could shatter a planet and still break through a Protect light shield.

What kind of Attack power is that!

Doesn't that make any sense?

"Don't panic! Solrock, use Psychic to hold it in place!" Miss Xiao Feng was the first to recover, shouting upward. Solrock had already grasped its trainer's intent, leaping in front of the instinctively retreating Lunatone.

It just seemed to have forgotten about Porygon2's existence.

"Signal Beam!"

"Pory!"

A verdant beam fired from Porygon2's tail, instantly piercing the air and slamming into Solrock, whose eyes had turned blue.

"Swoosh—!

It let out a barely-suppressed wail of pain, nearly plummeting out of the sky.

Only this thing proved a bit tougher than All Baimu had imagined — a mere Signal Beam couldn't finish it off, but it did successfully cover the free-falling Snorlax that had just finished its attack.

So close.

All Baimu's brow furrowed slightly. Snorlax could have inflicted damage on Lunatone even while shattering the Light Screen guarding it, but unfortunately jumping really does weaken the power, and that planet from earlier wasn't as harmless on the surface as it seemed for Snorlax either…

In the end.

It had a lot to do with Snorlax not having fully mastered its power either.

Bear in mind that when it went berserk, even Lugia's wind couldn't restrain it — now that it isn't berserk, its strength is actually a notch weaker?

All Baimu didn't dwell on it for long, nor did he want to give Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan another chance to seize the rhythm of the battle.

"Snorlax, Electromagnetism!"

The saying goes that force rises from the 'ground.' Once Snorlax used Electromagnetism to rise into the air, it gained a point of leverage in the sky, no longer afraid of building momentum only to fizzle out like before.

Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan reacted quickly too. The two of them, as if by unspoken agreement, both identified Snorlax as the key to this battle and launched their strongest countermeasures against it.

"Solrock, use Flamethrower!"

"Lunatone, use Psychic!"

The moment the words fell, Solrock spun and blasted out a stream of searing flames, and under Lunatone's Psychic, that stream formed a fierce curtain of fire that circled around Snorlax in an enormous range, forming a massive fireball that kept shrinking.

While scorching it with the flames, it was also firmly trapped within.

The two of them were long past those half-baked partners who used to bicker during Gym battles — they'd polished their move coordination to perfection, looking at a glance just like the move combos in a Pokémon Contest.

But All Baimu knew perfectly well that the power of this thing was nothing like those Contest moves.

A Flame Spin with doubled-and-then-some power — touch it and you're done for.

"Signal Beam, target Lunatone!

Whoosh!

The emerald beam fired again. Lunatone, which was using Psychic, happened to be the linchpin of this combo — interrupt it and the whole thing falls apart easily!

Little did anyone expect that a deep-blue planet just happened to block the Signal Beam's path.

Boom!

The planet shattered more than halfway, yet still withstood the Signal Beam — it was a bit tougher than expected, stubbornly refusing to let the beam punch through.

From this, it wasn't hard to see just how heavy the resistance Snorlax had faced from its earlier attack was.

All Baimu saw the smiles on Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan's faces and understood that they had known the planet would arrive at this moment.

Although Trick Room's existence prevented Solrock and Lunatone from using terrain advantages to drag things out, their familiarity with the field was enough to give them a chance to use the planet to block one or two moves.

In that case.

"Flame Wheel! Porygon2, Texture! Psychic!"

Amid the shouts, Snorlax — trapped inside the super-powered fireball — blasted flames from the jaws on the back of its head, and with its high-speed spinning they became a searing spiral of fire, while another flash of blue light covered the outermost curtain of flame, resisting Lunatone's Psychic that was trying to stop the fire from spinning.

The two began to wrestle on the psychic plane.

"Hang in there, Lunatone!"

"Solrock, keep using Flamethrower!"

Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan's commands made the spherical flame cage hanging in midair even more terrifying.

Porygon2's eyes were already like incandescent bulbs, but its level dragged it down — even though it had shifted its type to Psychic, it couldn't use its mental power to completely stop the flame curtain from spinning.

But even just slowing the rotation was enough to give Snorlax, poised to strike inside, its chance.

"Now!"

Boom!

A deafening explosion was heard as the powerful spiral torque drilled through the spherical flame cage, bursting it open like fireworks, and Snorlax — spiraling upward — didn't lose any momentum, and under Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan's anxious gaze, slammed straight into Solrock!

Boom!

The flames swelled into an orange-red rolling cloud!

Lunatone was blasted away by the shockwave, Solrock right behind it, but at the very instant of separation, a massive pair of jaws shot out and precisely clamped down on it.

When the flames dispersed, Snorlax stood proudly as Lin Li, diving downward, wrapped in silver light like a shining meteor.

"Solrock!"

Miss Xiao Feng shouted in a panic, "Cosmic Power!"

Xiaonan shouted along with her: "Lunatone, use Psychic to block it!"

If Trick Room didn't exist, she would definitely have chosen to send Lunatone below Snorlax first to use Protect to block, but unfortunately under Trick Room, Snorlax's speed wouldn't allow Lunatone to do something that complicated.

Psychic was the only option.

But Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan seemed to have been so overwhelmed by Snorlax's overpowering presence that they forgot about a certain Pokémon they didn't know—

Porygon2.

This guy had, at some unknown point, hidden itself atop the planet above Lunatone's head, its rounded body transformed into the shape of a square cannon, with icy-blue light furiously gathering within.

By the time Xiaonan and Lunatone noticed, it was already too late.

"Ice Beam!"

All Baimu's shout clearly reached their ears, and the streaking bolt — in the blink of an eye — struck Lunatone, freezing it into a spherical ice sculpture at a speed visible to the naked eye.

When did it appear there!?

And how did it know the planet would rotate to that position!?

Xiaonan was full of question marks — how would she know that Porygon2 had just taken advantage of their attention being fixed on Snorlax to quietly test out Substitute?

And the patterns and speeds of those planets rotating above had long since been effortlessly analyzed by it within ten seconds.

Don't underestimate a Pokémon designed for the purpose of modifying outer-space planets!

Porygon2 looked down smugly at the falling Lunatone, its lively eyes brimming with pride.

At the same moment.

A silver-bullet-like Mega Lickilicky, carrying the barely-resisting Solrock, slammed into the ground—

Boom—!

The earth instantly crumbled into a spiderweb pattern, sending countless shards of rubble and gravel flying outward with a deafening explosion, the terrifying whooshing sounds revealing their extreme speed.

Miss Xiao Feng let a piece of gravel fly past his cheek, his face full of melancholy.

With such tremendous destructive force, Solrock couldn't possibly still be "standing" — he knew its limits best of all.

The gap in strength was simply too great.

Miss Xiao Feng and his sister had been gym leaders for so long, from green and immature to mature and confident; the challengers they'd seen, conservatively, probably numbered over a thousand, and All Baimu was the first person who made him feel like battling was walking a tightrope.

—The moment you fail to watch one side, you'll be completely suppressed by overwhelming strength.

Just who is the gym leader here?

That amusing question flashed through Miss Xiao Feng's mind, and even more amusing was that Xiaonan beside him was thinking something similar — especially after the frozen Lunatone landed not far from Mega Lickilicky.

The field was thick with dust and smoke; the situation was unclear.

"Break free, quick!"

Xiaonan shouted.

But this drew Mega Lickilicky's attention from the deep crater; it shifted its gaze from the Solrock beneath it to the Lunatone nearby, which was frantically shaking the ice ball, trying to escape.

"Take it down — Power-Up Punch." All Baimu's voice suddenly rang out.

The command arrived, and Mega Lickilicky's body vanished in an instant, followed by a tremendous Peng! from the impact.

It appeared where Lunatone had originally been, while Lunatone was embedded in the spectator stands' wall outside the field, its body surrounded by shattered ice fragments and rubble.

The sight was extremely visually shocking, making one's hair stand on end.

Miss Xiao Feng and Xiaonan: "……"

Lei Yin: "Cough, cough… Solrock and Lunatone are unable to battle; Lickilicky and… and Porygon2 are the winners! The gym leader side has two Pokémon remaining!"

Logically, during the interval between each Pokémon fainting and the substitution in a gym battle, the gym leader would normally comment on the just-concluded fight — either praising the challenger's strength or pointing out their shortcomings.

But right now.

The two of them truly didn't know how to critique this match where the gym leader looked more like the challenger; perhaps it would take a more experienced and seasoned gym leader who'd seen far more challengers to properly evaluate it…

The siblings had actually only been gym leaders for less than five years.