"Battling."
"What did it mean to me?"
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In a limestone canyon overgrown with weeds, a chestnut-haired young man sprinted forward, Alakazam floating beside him like a fox-faced old man.
"Don't run!"
"Stop right there!"
Shouts rang out behind him without pause.
Now and then, a sharp wind whistled past his ears and struck the rocks nearby, shattering them.
Bang!
Fragments hit his back like bullets.
Shan Ren kept running, Alakazam levitating along beside him with its psychic powers.
His luck had been terrible.
The moment he landed, he spotted five trainers nearby.
He didn't know three of them, though they clearly knew one another. The other two he'd met before in Silicon Beryllium City...
Would it be three against three, with the trainers joining forces?
No!
The two he knew had shouted in unison, "He's the strongest! Take him out first!" All five had promptly focused their attacks on him!
If Shan Ren hadn't sharpened his reflexes recently and sent out Alakazam at once to block most of the attacks with Protect,
his League challenge would probably have ended as soon as it began.
Five against one? He had no confidence he could be the last one standing.
Still.
The rules allowed trainers to flee.
Just as they forbade trainers from forming teams but allowed them to focus their attacks on one person.
As the man who had drawn up the plan, Shan Ren had generously left a way out for trainers with bad luck.
He hadn't expected to benefit from it so soon.
He sped through the canyon between towering cliffs, then plunged into the dense forest with Alakazam without looking back.
At once.
Frustrated cries from Pokémon and trainers rose behind him.
None of them seemed to have expected him to run so fast.