"Abusing and oppressing Pokémon? My mas... uh, Gym Leader Huang did that? I had no idea he was that kind of person!"
"There must be some misunderstanding, right? I know Gym Leader Huang pretty well..."
After everything he had been through, Ye Lan smelled danger in an instant and turned to glare at the culprit beside him, Venusaur.
"Saur!"
Recalling all the sweat and tears of its recent days, Venusaur nodded vigorously and laid out the whole story.
It turned out that while Huang Yuntian had left Venusaur in the Giant Venusaur Forest for special training, Giant Venusaur had chosen the most primitive teaching method to improve its strength as efficiently as possible:
"Beatdown"!
Five Venusaur squad leaders with Gym Leader level strength took turns ganging up on it. Once it was beaten flat, it could rest, then the fighting resumed as soon as it got back up!
They started with single battles. After Venusaur made a breakthrough, the five squad leaders switched to a mixed Five-Strike Combo. They ambushed it during meals when it was most relaxed, suddenly interrupted it with moves halfway through a bathroom break, and knocked it flat with their attacks just as it breathed a sigh of relief while sneaking away, thinking they had failed to catch up.
Under such harsh conditions, Venusaur's battle techniques and proficiency with its moves improved dramatically, and its strength grew without it even noticing. But the psychological scars simply would not fade.
All of this was because, before leaving, Huang Yuntian had repeatedly urged the Venusaur Ancestor to "train it within an inch of its life, as long as it doesn't die," leading to Venusaur's current tragedy.
"That really does sound awful. But then again, I feel like the root cause wasn't actually my senior brother. The Venusaur Ancestor