In a single night, Gastly had mastered Substitute. Luke wasn't sure what to do with that information.
Substitute wasn't exactly hard, sure — but even simple moves usually took a Pokémon three days minimum to pick up. One night? Luke rubbed his temples.
Okay. Calm down. Maybe it had only managed a flawed version — technically formed, not necessarily battle-ready. Except the system's move list clearly listed Substitute as mastered, no asterisks.
"It actually learned it," Luke said, half to himself.
Gastly, still visibly drained from the effort, couldn't quite hide the smug little smile tugging at its mouth.
Luke reached over and patted its head. "You worked hard."
Since Gastly had burned through a lot of stamina training, Luke put together a fresh batch of Pokéblock using Leppa Berries.
[Leppa Berry Cube: Restores a Pokémon's fatigue after using moves; extends effective training duration.]
In games, Leppa Berries restored a move's PP — its usage count. Reality didn't quite work that way; instead, every Pokémon had a natural daily ceiling on how many times it could throw out a given move before hitting a wall. High-cost moves like Stone Edge or Earthquake were brutal to train without a steady supply of Leppa Berries backing them up. Turning them into Pokéblock only sharpened that effect further.
"Open up."
Gastly swallowed the sweet-and-sour cube whole, practically glowing with satisfaction.
Gastly: (*≧▽≦)
"Alright," Luke said, "eat up and get some rest—"
Before he even finished the sentence, Gastly was already back at it. Another cloud split off from its Haze, and two grinning Gastlys hovered in the air, cackling in unison.
It had apparently decided Substitute was fun.
"You're actually enjoying this?"
"Kojie kojie!"
Gastly had quietly set its own bar. Master had said the group stage wouldn't be a challenge — so it was going to train that much harder and make the finals a reality.
Gastly: (ω)
Over the next two days, Gastly experimented with coordinating itself and its double — sometimes zipping around the room like a leaking balloon, sometimes standing perfectly still like a fencepost. Eventually the chaos got to Luke enough that he stepped in.
"You're doing this wrong," he said, actually serious for once. "If the original and the Substitute use the same move, there's no point. Two Confuse Rays at once just confuses the target once. But if the original uses Will-O-Wisp while the Substitute throws Confuse Ray, that's two status conditions landing simultaneously."
He kept going, warming to the idea. "Once you've got Double Team down, you could be stacking four — no, five statuses at once."
Sleep. Paralysis. Burn. Poison. Confusion.
The thought alone got Luke a little too excited (edited out). He almost felt bad for whoever ended up on the other side of that.
If I ever fold Substitute-Protect-Toxic into this too, Gastly's going to hit numbers that shouldn't be possible pre-evolution.
"Kojie kojie!" Gastly's eyes went wide, like an entire new world had just opened up. It grabbed a pencil in its mouth, spread paper across the floor, and started scribbling furiously.
Luke watched it, a little uneasy.
"...I was just thinking out loud."
"You're not actually working out Substitute-Protect-Toxic right now, are you?"
As it stood, Gastly had only assembled a broken version of the combo — swapping in Will-O-Wisp for Toxic worked fine, but the crucial piece, Protect, was still missing entirely. A genuine, official Protect TM ran at least $14,000 on the market — proof enough of how thoroughly pay-to-win the whole Trainer profession was. With barely $1,400 to his name, Luke wasn't exactly in a position to shop.
Even in the system store, Protect cost 10,000 BP. Cheaper than the real world, sure, but still well outside Luke's current budget.
"The path of the Trainer," Luke sighed, "is long and thankless."
"I'll just stay a gaming streamer, thanks."
The Teacher Luke Teaches Battling series was doing well for itself — episodes 03 and 04 had both cleared two million views and were closing in on three. Episodes 01 and 02, meanwhile, had been quietly deleted; rough editing and not nearly enough "dirty tricks" to satisfy Luke's growing perfectionism.
In a single month, his subscriber count had blown past 700,000 and was still climbing fast. Every view earned him a tiny sliver of BP — roughly 100 BP per 100,000 views. Slower than battling, sure, but a lot safer than getting into actual fights.
[Remaining BP: 2380]
He briefly considered a ten-pull, then thought better of it — Gastly was training so hard, it felt wrong to gamble the BP away.
"I'll just save up to 10,000 and grab Protect outright."
Time moved fast, and Saturday morning arrived. The first round of the Group A group stage kicked off, and as expected, Gastly — the tournament's unofficial mascot at this point — drew every eye in the arena the second it appeared. What drew even more attention was the fact that, once again, its Trainer was nowhere in sight.
"Still no sign of Trainer Luke!" the commentator called out, clearly delighted. "His opponent today is Trainer Marcus, another freshman out of Southbank University's Fighting Department!"
Gastly floated in place, tongue out, pulling faces at the Vigoroth across from it, doing everything short of throwing hands to provoke a reaction. It worked — the notoriously short-tempered Vigoroth was already snarling, arms flailing.
Marcus hadn't signed up to fight a Pokémon with no Trainer giving commands. Murmurs rippled through the crowd as his expression soured.
"Is this Luke guy just disrespecting the competition at this point?"
"Or he's just that confident in his Gastly."
"Whoa — that speed!"
The match opened fast: a mass of Haze drifted toward Vigoroth like something out of a nightmare, coalescing mid-air into a grinning Gastly, three coils of pitch-black Will-O-Wisp spinning around it as it closed in.
Marcus, rattled, called out, "Vigoroth, Pursuit!"
"Kao—!!"
Vigoroth crossed its arms through the incoming flames and lunged, claws slashing out in a sharp arc.
"Pursuit is a Dark-type move — that's a real threat to a Ghost-type like Gastly!" the commentator warned.
Except the claws swept clean through empty mist. A cloud had already split away from Gastly's body a split second before impact, and Vigoroth's eyes went wide with confusion as two identical Gastlys hovered in the air, cackling.
"It used the window of Substitute forming to dodge the hit entirely?"
"Whoever's Pokémon this is — I need answers."
A shimmering light bloomed off the Substitute, forcing Vigoroth's eyes shut. In that same instant, Gastly blinked out and reappeared behind it, three surging bursts of Will-O-Wisp slamming home with a triple boom.
[Earned admiration from onlookers: BP+1, BP+1, BP+1...]
[Gastly, dodge — quick! BP+10]
[Victory achieved — rating: Meh (BP+50)]
Back at home, hunched over his editing software, Luke rubbed his temples again.
I'm literally sitting at home right now. And somehow, trouble kept finding him anyway. He'd already advanced through the group stage — and apparently, he'd just won again without lifting a finger.