This Rhydon had fought quite well in battle. If Nova had caught it two months ago, he probably would have been thrilled for days.
But things were different for Nova now.
His team already had more than enough raw talent. Even a Pokémon with Elite Four level potential would still fall behind his other partners in growth, unless it also had a strong Ability backing it up.
He had run into this same problem back when he was choosing his Mudkip. At the time, Nova had looked through many adorable, promising Mudkip before finally picking it to travel with him.
His other partners had been raised the right way from the very beginning, with Nova's guidance and the help of his breeding system. This Rhydon, on the other hand, had grown up wild and free in the Tamar Desert, with no one training it properly at all.
It was a bit like a video game character whose player never read the guide and just threw skill points around at random. The Rhydon was already Level 68, and even if Nova used his breeding system to fix its foundation now, the time and cost would be far more than what he'd get back in return.
In short, a Pokémon that could grow this strong in the wild was better suited to a Trainer who wasn't especially skilled at raising Pokémon. For someone like Nova, whose real strength was his own training ability, catching powerful wild Pokémon like this wasn't actually the best use of his time.
That was because a Pokémon raised from an egg or a young age would always end up with a higher ceiling than one simply caught strong in the wild.
Weighing all this, Nova made up his mind. He would hand this Rhydon over to the Layered Peaks Gym later on, to help strengthen his family's Gym. It would count as his own contribution as the future Ninth Generation Gym Leader.
If he could trade it to his uncle-master for a Pokémon Egg with excellent genes, a Pseudo-Legendary, or some cute little one with great potential, all the better. Nova wouldn't say no to any of that.
After capturing nearly the whole Rhyhorn herd, Nova swallowed his disgust at the mangled bodies nearby and searched the Blue Headscarf bandit thoroughly, digging out every Poké Ball the man carried.
He tried each Poké Ball on the two Mightyena until he found the right ones, then recalled both Pokémon inside.
With that finished, Nova wasted no more time. He climbed back into the driver's seat of the off-road supply truck and set off toward the location marked on his map.
Fighting off drowsiness, he drove for ten straight hours. Without Rotom's precise navigation, he would have gotten hopelessly lost in the desert in his current exhausted state.
This was exactly where Rotom outshined an ordinary GPS system.
Rotom was a Plasma Pokémon, and the way it connected to outside networks worked nothing like normal electronics.
Put simply, while most devices in this world still depended on signal towers, Rotom, as a living plasma being, was already using something closer to quantum communication.
That was also why a Rotom Phone was so much more capable than an ordinary Pokédex. With Rotom inside it, the device felt almost alive.
It didn't just boost the phone's functions. Even in a signal dead zone in the middle of nowhere, Rotom could use its own quantum entanglement to link up with the Norlandia Alliance's network, thousands of kilometers away.
Thanks to Rotom, even with Nova half asleep at the wheel in the middle of an endless desert, he never had to worry about losing his way completely.
Even so, driving while this exhausted was genuinely dangerous. Nova only did it because he badly needed to save time, and it wasn't something anyone should copy, unless they too had a Rotom Phone and were crossing a desert wilderness.
Nova pushed on through the night, and his Vibrava got no rest either.
As the only scout on his team right now, it had to fly ahead of the truck, scouting out each stretch of desert before Nova drove through it. If danger lay ahead, it had to fly back and forth to warn him so he could change course.
Racing through the desert all night like this, Nova finally reached the marked location just before sunrise.
But the map was only a rough sketch. Even though Nova had arrived at the coordinates for the spatial rift mentioned in the old explorer's notes, actually finding the small, hidden oasis the man had described was no simple task.
Searching a vast sea of sand for an oasis that might be no bigger than the flower bed outside the Layered Peaks Gym office was slow, careful work.
Nova knew better than to rush it. Since his Vibrava had been flying back and forth all night without a break, he decided to make camp and rest for a while first.
He let all his partners out of their Poké Balls, along with the whole Rhyhorn herd, and started fixing them breakfast.
"Fixing" mostly meant pouring pre-made food into their bowls. The Rhyhorn, the Rhydon, and the two newly recruited Mightyena all ate the standard Pokémon feed Nova kept stored in his Space Bag.
Before setting out this time, Nova had guessed he might end up catching a whole herd of Pokémon out in the desert. So before leaving, he had packed nearly twenty tons of premium standard Pokémon feed into his Space Bag, just in case.
That came to a full eight hundred bags, taking up sixty percent of the Space Bag's capacity.
Standard feed earned its name because its flavor could satisfy about ninety percent of Pokémon. It might not taste like a rare treat to any of them, but it was reliable enough that almost nothing would refuse to eat it.
Because of that, regular standard feed was cheap, while the premium version cost noticeably more, since it was better in both nutrition and taste. If Nova hadn't had the Layered Peaks Gym backing him, he never would have splurged on so much of it.
Pokémon that had lived in the wild their whole lives, never having tasted anything made with human technology, could eat this stuff and think it was a feast.
So in the eyes of this whole crowd of Rhyhorn, Nova looked like some kind of endlessly generous food wizard. Eating like it might be their very last meal, and following the Rhydon's lead, they all dug in without holding back.
Thirty two Rhyhorn plus one Rhydon made for one hungry crowd. That single breakfast alone burned through forty bags of Nova's feed. At this rate, it would be a small miracle if his supplies lasted even a week.
That meant Nova needed to find the spatial rift fast and send this hungry crowd back to the Gym, or he'd end up eating himself broke feeding them!
Rhyhorn: "Don't go around badmouthing us! We only ate your food, we didn't touch your water. If the water runs out, that's not on us!"