Once everyone had returned to the villa and taken their new seats, Reiji looked around the table and read out Spider's revised ranking.
"Number Zero is me. Naoki is One, Tai is Two, A.J. is Three, Shun is Four, Miki is Five, Itsuki is Six, Gulzar is Seven, Sou is Eight, Daishi is Nine, Keith is Ten, and Shingo is Eleven."
Twelve people in total.
These were Spider's original core members, and Reiji intended to keep it that way.
"From now on, anyone you personally recruit will be considered an associate under the member who brought them in. They won't automatically become part of Spider's core."
Several people glanced around the table, already realizing what that meant.
"The entry requirement changes today," Reiji continued. "Anyone who wants a core seat after this needs at least one Elite Four-tier Pokémon. That's the minimum."
A murmur went around the room. By that standard, most of them had slipped into Spider's core before the door became much harder to open.
The ranking matches had also given Reiji a much clearer picture of everyone's current strength.
Miki stood out immediately. Her Skarmory was already among the stronger quasi–Elite Four Pokémon at the gathering, its metallic plumage carrying the marks of years of training and battle. Reiji could tell it was not far from another breakthrough.
Her loss to Shun had been heavily influenced by matchup. With a team made almost entirely of Flying-types, running into Electivire was about as unpleasant as it could get.
Shun's victory had not been luck, though. His Fighting-types were well trained, physically powerful, and surprisingly flexible. Fighting Pokémon had access to enough coverage moves that he rarely entered a matchup without some way to threaten the opponent, and Shun was good at exploiting that flexibility.
Naoki followed Reiji back toward the long table.
"Boss, is there anything else planned tonight?"
"Sit according to the new rankings first."
Everyone changed places again. The arrangement around the table now looked very different from when the gathering had begun.
For the seven members below A.J., moving higher from here would depend largely on who reached Elite Four tier first. Once someone had one Elite Four-tier Pokémon, an ordinary ranking battle would become heavily skewed; if they eventually accumulated two or three, the hierarchy would become even easier to judge.
When everyone settled down, Reiji opened his bag and removed a thick stack of copied pages.
It was the manuscript he had written back at the lakeside cabin:
Hypothesis on Pokémon Advancement to Elite Four Tier and Energy Grades.
He handed the stack to Naoki.
"Pass these around."
Naoki accepted the papers and began distributing them along the table while Reiji waited for everyone to receive a copy.
"This is my current model for how Pokémon break through to Elite Four tier," Reiji said. "The exact route varies by species, individual potential, and the resources available, but the basic framework should apply to almost any Pokémon. The biggest difference is how long the process takes."
For a moment, nobody reacted.
Then the meaning caught up with them.
"You figured out how to reach Elite Four tier?"
The table erupted into overlapping voices.
Information at this level was rarely made public. Families, Gyms, research groups, and major organizations guarded serious training knowledge closely, and anything related to producing Elite Four-tier Pokémon was worth far more than an ordinary training manual.
Yet Reiji had just handed each of them a copy.
Near the door, Gai reacted more violently than anyone.
He was still bound tightly in webbing, but the instant he heard what the papers contained, his eyes locked onto them. He strained against the restraints, desperately trying to see over the nearest shoulder.
The reward that had tempted him into betraying Spider had been the promise of a pseudo-Legendary.
Now, only hours after selling everyone out, he was watching the people he had betrayed receive something that could potentially help them build entire teams of Elite Four-tier Pokémon.
The realization was almost crueler than whatever punishment Reiji had planned for him.
Naoki barely noticed Gai. He was already buried in the manuscript.
"Boss... these energy grades really affect breakthrough speed this much?"
His own Golem immediately came to mind.
Even ignoring the years before it reached quasi–Elite Four tier, Golem had spent roughly seven or eight years stuck below Elite Four tier before finally crossing the threshold.
Naoki read further and finally began to understand why.
"So it wasn't just one bottleneck."
His finger traced several lines on the page.
"First, its potential had to catch up. Then the energy it was absorbing was too low-grade."
For years, Golem had eaten enormous quantities of ore, but most of it was exactly that—ordinary ore. It contained little concentrated Rock-type energy compared with the resources Reiji had classified in the manuscript.
Even the bottom end of Reiji's Tier Three category consisted of proper type-energy resources below Elite Four grade, covering the ordinary elemental types. Golem had spent most of its life receiving something worse than even that.
According to Reiji's estimates, a Pokémon in similar circumstances could easily need around a decade to force its way through.
Naoki's Golem had been somewhat faster, probably because things improved after Naoki became leader of the Rock Gang and could afford better food and training materials.
Potential made the entire calculation even less predictable. A Pokémon without the potential to reach Elite Four tier could spend years accumulating strength without ever breaking through until that underlying limit improved.
Across the table, Tai was reading with a very different expression.
He had spent time training at Team Rocket headquarters and had even witnessed several of its Pokémon experiments. Some Team Rocket researchers had proposed theories vaguely similar to Reiji's, but those ideas had been fragmented.
This manuscript was far more systematic.
Reiji had separated energy into grades, considered the influence of Legendary Pokémon and even forces associated with Pokémon such as Arceus, and recorded which species could safely absorb large amounts of energy quickly versus those that needed years to digest the same investment.
He had also tried to separate two problems that most Trainers treated as one: improving a Pokémon's potential, and providing enough high-grade energy for its strength to catch up with that potential.
Tai kept turning pages.
The more he read, the harder it became to dismiss any of it as speculation.
His own Pokémon provided evidence.
Gengar's breakthrough through concentrated poison resources followed the same broad logic described in the manuscript. Muk had progressed even faster, in part because its simpler typing allowed its training and resource intake to stay focused.
Tai slowly leaned back in his chair.
Team Rocket had researchers, laboratories, money, and years of accumulated data.
Reiji had somehow produced something alarmingly close to a usable framework by himself.
A.J. was less interested in hiding his excitement.
"So that's how it works..."
He flipped rapidly through the manuscript, then went back several pages to read them again.
This was exactly the sort of thing he had hoped Spider could eventually give him.
A way forward.
If Reiji's estimates were even roughly accurate, then with a steady supply of Elite Four-grade resources, A.J. could potentially raise several more members of his team to Elite Four tier within three to five years.
Six Elite Four-tier Pokémon.
An actual full team.
For someone who had spent years as a Pokémon hunter scraping together whatever resources he could find, the possibility was almost ridiculous.
Then he reached the section on potential, and his excitement cooled.
Resources alone were not enough.
A Pokémon first needed the potential to reach the desired level. If that ceiling was too low, pouring more energy into it did not guarantee a breakthrough. The Trainer would first need some way to improve the Pokémon itself, and that was a much harder problem.
Reiji's manuscript listed several possibilities, but one category stood out immediately:
Relics or energy left behind by Legendary Pokémon.
A.J. stared at the words.
Elite Four-grade resources were expensive.
Legendary relics were something else entirely. A normal Trainer could spend a lifetime without even seeing one.
Still, Reiji had previously told him that several of his Pokémon already had a realistic chance of reaching Elite Four tier. That eased the concern somewhat.
His Sandslash was proof that long-term development mattered too. It had been with him since it was only five or six years old, and after roughly a decade of training together, it had finally crossed the threshold.
At the opposite end of the table, Shingo kept reading while occasionally looking up at Reiji.
The manuscript felt strangely familiar.
His father's old breeding and training notes had contained several similar conclusions, particularly the idea that once a Pokémon approached its current limit, continuing to improve required increasingly better resources rather than simply more training.
His father's Scizor had eventually reached a point where ordinary methods no longer produced meaningful progress. He had always believed that pushing it toward Champion tier would require a much higher grade of energy.
Reiji's model suggested he had been right.
The problem had been cost.
According to the estimates in front of Shingo, even a Scizor with Champion-tier potential could require close to a decade of continuous investment if it relied primarily on Champion-grade resources to force that breakthrough.
Using lower-grade Elite Four or quasi-Champion resources would stretch the process even further.
Twenty years would not be absurd.
Thirty might not be either.
And that assumed the Pokémon had enough potential from the beginning.
Shingo finally understood why his father had stopped pouring resources into the attempt. It was not necessarily because reaching Champion tier was impossible.
The family simply could not afford to keep feeding that kind of project indefinitely.
Around him, Shun, Miki, Itsuki, Gulzar, Sou, Daishi, and Keith had gradually gone quiet as well.
None of them needed to understand every calculation to grasp what Reiji had placed in their hands.
For Shun, it offered a realistic path toward becoming strong enough to compete among the Elite Four.
For Miki, it meant revenge might someday become something more than a desperate wish.
For Itsuki, strength meant a chance to pull himself and his family out of Team Rocket's grip.
Sou could become something beyond another generation of fishermen struggling to get by. Daishi could finally become strong enough to stand beside Naoki rather than remain someone his brother had to protect. Keith's dream of becoming a serious Flying-type Trainer no longer looked impossibly distant.
Even Gulzar, who had already rebuilt his life once, now had a concrete route toward strength he had never expected to possess.
Shun lowered the manuscript slightly.
"This is... really good."
The simple comment drew several quiet nods around the table.
Reiji understood what they were seeing.
The manuscript did not guarantee anything. Much of it was still theory, and some of his estimates would inevitably be wrong for individual Pokémon. It did not solve the problem of money, rare materials, potential, or time.
What it gave them was a direction.
For people who had spent most of their lives reacting to whatever happened to them, that alone mattered.
Reiji let them read for a while longer before finally setting down his drink.
"When you're finished, hand the copies back."
Several people looked up.
"I'll leave one copy with Naoki. Anyone in Spider can borrow it whenever they want. Read it a hundred times, memorize the whole thing if you feel like it."
His tone hardened slightly.
"But no copying it. No photographs. No making your own version and taking it home."
Nobody argued.
"This cannot leave Spider. The more copies exist, the easier it becomes for one to disappear, and I'm not interested in seeing this sold to the highest bidder six months from now."
One by one, the manuscripts began returning to the center of the table.
They had entered the villa that evening with new masks and new rankings.
Now Spider had something much more valuable than either.
A shared path to becoming stronger.
[End of chapter]
[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]
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