After reading through the training materials Professor Oak had sent over, Asher learned that since Fighting-type Pokémon didn't have much talent for Element Affinity, there was no need to buy energy cubes, which saved a huge chunk of money.
They only needed to add Protein to Tyrogue's meals to improve its physical strength.
Protein was sold at the Pokémon League's Poké Mart chain for the standard price of 9,800 a bottle. A truly beautiful number...
It was diluted into food, so one bottle could last a while, but after getting fleeced by the Pokémon Center's medical bills again, Asher only had a little over three thousand Poké Dollars to his name. There was no way he could afford it.
Left with no choice, he had to settle for a second-rate high-protein meal plan for now.
After watching Asher's behavior for two full days, Diamond had finally come to a clear understanding of this trainer who had suddenly appeared in front of him.
It could tell that Asher was a good person!
And that alone was important enough.
Standing once again at the edge of Petalburg Woods, Asher said to Diamond, "Come on, Diamond. Let me really get to know you first. Can you show me the techniques you know?"
Because it had lived around humans for so long, Diamond couldn't read or write human language, but it was pretty skilled at listening. It could understand most normal speech well enough.
Once it understood what Asher wanted, Diamond let out a battle cry and started showing off.
"Balu!"
A straight punch, a lunging punch, a jab, a hook, an uppercut...
A forward step, a pullback, a side step, a slide step, a series of quick shuffles...
After finishing a beautifully polished boxing routine that blended punches and footwork together, Asher fell into thought.
It wasn't that Diamond had no techniques. It was more that... its whole fighting style was just very unusual.
Normal trainers developed a Pokémon's move potential based on documented, established moves.
With that kind of deliberate development and guidance, a Pokémon could quickly learn its natural moves.
But Diamond's former owner had been an unlicensed trainer. He hadn't had the resources to teach it step by step the way normal trainers did.
The things he taught Tyrogue were all the fighting techniques he'd learned and refined over the course of his own life.
So you could say every punch and kick Diamond threw was a technique... or you could say every inch of its body was just one giant basic attack with no formal moves at all.
Since their Bond still wasn't strong enough for them to communicate their intentions directly, Asher could only use the most primitive method possible for now: shouting commands like something straight out of a Saturday morning kids' cartoon.
"Diamond, attack with your left!"
"Diamond, dodge to the right!"
"Diamond, block that hit!"
After an entire afternoon of training, Asher and Diamond were both drenched in sweat, but everything still felt clumsy and awkward. They just couldn't find that feeling of things finally clicking into place.
Without specific move names or move structures, Asher couldn't give Diamond clear, concise instructions. He kept having to resort to vague descriptions of physical actions.
On the way home, Asher kept thinking hard about how to come up with an effective training method.
That was when Kagari suddenly asked, "Asher, are you a boxer?"
Asher jolted and answered on instinct, "Uh... no, I'm not! I'm just a Pokémon trainer... Why, Kagari? Do you want to learn boxing?"
Kagari shook her head, confused.
"Huh? I just saw Diamond throwing punches all afternoon, so I thought you were the one teaching it boxing."
Asher smiled. "Oh, no. Diamond actually—"
Then, in a flash, something clicked in his mind, and Asher suddenly realized where the problem was.
He had raised and trained Flare little by little from the ground up, so he understood every one of Flare's abilities and techniques inside and out. That was why he could fight alongside it so naturally.
But Diamond's skills had been built by its former owner, who had fought underground boxing matches. In his previous life, Asher had just been a dead-inside programmer. He barely even watched combat sports, let alone knew how to box.
Because he had no background in fighting at all, he didn't understand Diamond's whole technical system. Naturally, that meant there was an invisible wall between them.
In that instant, everything suddenly became clear.
He rubbed Kagari's head and laughed. "Kagari, you're a genius! Right, how can I not be a boxer?"
If Diamond's former owner had been a boxer, then couldn't he just learn to fight too and become a boxer himself?
Asher's hand on her head made Kagari's body tremble, and a secretive smile appeared on her face...
Once he'd made up his mind, he acted immediately. Asher had some experience in rough street fights, but systematic combat training? This was his first time.
Since he was starting from absolute zero, it was an extremely hard road.
In this world, combat techniques weren't exactly underdeveloped. It was more that they had very little to do with humans.
Anything related to Pokémon held overwhelming importance in this world, so basically nobody cared about human combat sports.
Fighting technique existed more as a byproduct of developing Pokémon abilities.
For trainers, the self-defense value of learning martial arts really wasn't that high. If you had time to learn how to fight, it made more sense to raise a Pokémon that could protect you properly.
So Asher could barely find any footage related to human fighting at all. All he could do was study a few matches between Fighting-type Pokémon and try to feel his way forward.
But those highlight reels were basically just two huge muscleheads hurling flashy finishing moves at each other. You couldn't really learn any actual fighting technique from them.
Seeing Asher stare at the glowing screen in deep thought, Kagari showed up again.
"Asher, are you scrolling PokéTok?"
Asher twitched at the corner of his mouth. PokéTok was the kind of thing that took a bunch of Pokémon battle clips, mashed them together with heavy, pulsing music, and somehow wasted your entire afternoon.
He figured Kagari had seen a bunch of massive bruisers hurling big moves around on the screen and assumed he was hooked on that junk too.
So he hurried to explain, "Uh... I'm trying to learn technique from the fighting footage!"
Hearing that, Kagari touched her lips thoughtfully and said, "Huh? Then why are you watching those videos? Diamond already knows how to box, so why don't you just have it teach you?"
"Uh..."
Asher suddenly realized he'd been an idiot. He'd been looking for his glasses while they were already on his face.
Just because Diamond was his Pokémon, and because trainers were usually the ones teaching their Pokémon techniques, Asher had gotten trapped by his own assumptions. It had never even occurred to him that he could learn skills from his own Pokémon instead.
But a child's innocent way of thinking could break free from those mental walls and smash rigid old ideas to pieces with ease.
Asher rubbed Kagari's head again. "Kagari, you're seriously smart. You really saved me here!"
With Asher's hand on her head again, Kagari gave another hard little shiver, and that secretive smile returned to her face...
Early the next morning, Asher bowed toward Diamond and shouted, "All right, Diamond. I'm in your hands from here on out! Please teach me how to box!"
"Balu?!"
Diamond was stunned. It had never imagined that its trainer would want to learn boxing from it.
But when it saw the passionate look in Asher's eyes, Diamond understood how sincere he was.
"Balu!"
And so, a boxing life starting from zero began...
On a bright, sunny morning, the young red-capped boxer started another day of training.
Asher jogged through Petalburg Woods, his sweat falling across every corner of the forest's outer edge.
A ten-kilometer morning run every day was just the appetizer before the real training started.
After the run, Asher kept going with jump rope, shadowboxing, shuttle runs...
All of it was basic training meant to awaken and strengthen his body.
Boxing was a discipline that required tremendous stamina to support it.
Without a powerful body, no matter how talented you were, you'd never truly understand its essence for yourself.
That level of intense training was hard for an ordinary person to even imagine.
But Asher was a transmigrator. With the app helping him, his mental strength was much stronger than that of an ordinary person.
And this body of his was pretty tough too.
Humans in the Pokémon world didn't have the kind of ridiculous strength Pokémon did, where they could split stone slabs or punch down a speeding train, but compared to people on Earth, their physical ability was clearly on another level.
So he gritted his teeth and forced himself through all of that brutal foundational training.
Once the morning conditioning was over, Asher ate lunch, rested for a while, then put on a thick set of protective gear and began live sparring with Diamond.
Since Diamond was a Pokémon, it was hard for it to fully explain the finer points of technique through speech or gestures.
So Asher made a bold decision and chose sparring, the most direct possible method, to improve his boxing and communicate with Diamond.
If words couldn't convey it, then action would.
As an experienced boxer, Diamond had total control over its strength. Starting with the very basics of punching and footwork, it carefully fed Asher one lesson at a time.
"Balu!"
Waving the glove on its fist, Diamond signaled for Asher to attack with everything he had.
Hiss—
Asher took a deep breath, then swung without hesitation, throwing a full-force punch with all the strength in his arm!
Naturally, Diamond simply leaned back and dodged it with ease.
One miss led to another, and Asher kept launching attack after attack.
Diamond, meanwhile, swayed in place like one of those wobbling toys that never quite fell over, casually letting Asher pound nothing but air.
In truth, it wasn't moving especially fast. It wasn't even close to using its full speed to dodge. It was just demonstrating the most basic movement techniques for Asher.
After spending more than an hour punching nothing but air, Asher finally took a break, exhausted, and felt firsthand how weak he was.
So this was the difference between wild haymakers and a real boxer?!
When Asher watched boxing matches before, he hadn't thought those fighters looked all that incredible. But now that he'd experienced it himself, he finally understood how important movement and technique were in a fight.
Still, since he'd spent the whole time outsmarting empty air, Asher still hadn't experienced the real, solid feeling of punches landing.
So he said casually, "Diamond, you don't have to keep dodging the whole time. Throw in some attacks and counters once in a while. Let me see how a real boxer attacks."
Estimating the thickness of the protective gear on Asher's body, Diamond felt a challenge unlike any it had ever faced before...
After checking Asher multiple times with its eyes to make sure he wasn't joking, it gave a solemn nod.
"Balu..."
A new round of sparring began. Asher, as always, came in with pure meathead boxing and whipped a huge hook straight at Diamond.
Diamond started its quick little shuffling steps, slipped past the punch with ease, and then...
Boom—
With veteran precision, a vicious straight shot speared into Asher's chest like a steel lance!
A burst of explosive force tore through the protective padding and detonated in Asher's body, sending him free of gravity and straight into the air!
Hell, that hit harder than Tyson!
Courtesy of Diamond sending him into orbit with one punch, Asher, flat on the ground, finally experienced the difference in physical ability between humans and Pokémon.
Even a bottom-tier Pokémon like Diamond, holding back with every ounce of control it had and sparring through protective gear, had nearly made him cough up blood with one punch.
"Gah!!"
The moment it saw Asher go down, Flare leapt out at once, fury written all over its face as it blasted fire at Diamond.
It had felt a powerful force punch straight through Asher's body!
Damn it! How could it possibly tolerate something like that?!
"Ba-ba-balu..."
Diamond, on the other hand, looked completely innocent, insisting it had already restrained its strength as much as physically possible...
Lying there and gasping for breath, chest aching, Asher actually smiled.
He had just experienced something incomparable.
"So that's it... This is the kind of terrifying battle you've all been fighting this whole time... You've really had it rough..."
Seeing Asher sent flying like that, Kagari said worriedly, "Asher, this kind of training is way too dangerous. You could get hurt really easily!"
But Asher brushed the concern aside and lectured her instead.
"No! Why should there be some rule that says Pokémon are allowed to get hurt, but trainers aren't? If you never get hurt, how can you understand what a Pokémon feels? If you never get hurt, how can you truly connect with them?"
?!
Kagari didn't fully understand, but her heart was deeply shaken.
So this was what a real trainer was like... someone who experienced the same things as their Pokémon...
Mm... Asher... y-you're amazing, mm, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh—
[Rotom! Your words seem to have deepened Kagari's understanding of Bond...]
Asher climbed to his feet, fighting spirit blazing in his eyes.
That was right. He had to set a good example for the younger generation!
He waved at Diamond with a smile.
"Come on! Don't worry about me. I can take more than this. Let me really experience your boxing!"
"Gah!"
Flare, tears pouring from its eyes, threw itself around Asher's leg, begging him not to do that again, because its poor heart couldn't take it!
Asher raised his right hand and unleashed a devastating head pat, soothing Flare right on the spot.
"Don't worry about me. This kind of minor injury is nothing. You've taken wounds far worse than this. Just sit over there and watch, okay?"
And so Flare sat under the green trees with its eyes wide open, watching something horrifying unfold.
"Ugh!" "Nngh..." "Ah!" "Gah—" "Hmph!!"
Heavy impacts kept ringing out across the outer edges of Petalburg Woods. By the time the sun was setting, Asher was covered in bruises and injuries, yet the expression on his face was one of total satisfaction, like he'd found buried treasure.
He had felt something telepathy could never perfectly convey: the pain born from battle.
That pain made Asher respect Pokémon more. It made him understand Pokémon more deeply. It meant that from now on, in future battles, he would naturally find himself thinking their thoughts and feeling what they felt...
And Flare?
It was as if it had unlocked an entirely new way to experience Asher.
That sensation of pain and pleasure existing together drove it completely wild!
With the strange feedback constantly pouring off Asher, its eyes had long since rolled back. Unable to withstand such an overwhelming impact, it passed out on the spot from being in too much blissful agony...
After the sparring was over, Diamond skillfully wrapped Asher up in bandages.
As the saying went, if you got beaten up often enough, you eventually became your own doctor. As a seasoned professional at taking hits, Diamond was highly skilled at treating bruises and impact injuries.
A few sprays of healing medicine later, the day's training finally came to an end.
And just then, a voice full of resentment rang out—
"Hey, Asher, what've you been doing these past two days? Why haven't I seen you at the usual spot?!"