January 30, Friday.
Four days had passed since Sunshine Gym first unveiled a fully developed tactical system.
Over the past week, Sunshine Gym had welcomed plenty of confident challengers, just as it always did.
But with the Gym Challenge suddenly becoming much harder, this week's clear rate was noticeably lower than in the previous two weeks.
Qingyu did a brief review of the situation.
Perhaps the root of the problem was that he expected too much of these little cuties?
Introducing full strategies seemed a little premature for them.
Although their progress had far exceeded his expectations, they still needed substantial time and practical battle experience to truly realize their potential.
Even Mela, who was likewise adept at using sun teams and ranked fairly high among the students, had failed this week, let alone the other, average students.
Besides, even if they learned how sun teams and certain Pokémon worked during their Gym battles, replicating those strategies was difficult for them.
After all, developing as a Trainer in real life took enormous amounts of time. Raising Pokémon alone was a massive, time-consuming undertaking.
So expecting them to face a new strategy every week and find a counter to it was perhaps a little unrealistic.
Never mind the students-even after running Sunshine Gym for so long, Qingyu was still some way off assembling a complete team of main battlers...
As such, the drop in this week's Gym clear rate was perfectly understandable.
As a Gym Leader of the "Eight Gyms," responsible for assessing every novice Trainer's abilities on the League's behalf, Qingyu could neither go so easy that too many passed nor avoid leaving openings that gave truly outstanding newcomers room to shine.
In short, he had to adjust his strength dynamically to provide just the right assessment of a Trainer's