"Good heavens! A single punch shattered the entire battlefield. With Nidoking hiding beneath the ground, wouldn't it be caught in the shockwave and lose its ability to battle?"
"I could feel the entire stadium shaking from my seat just a moment ago."
"Do you think it's possible that Nidoking completely evaded Conkeldurr's attack?"
Trip's Conkeldurr stood utterly motionless on the cracked surface, frozen in its final striking posture. Trip knew, with heavy certainty, that his partner had already lost consciousness.
Right on cue, a mound of loose soil burst upward, and Nidoking emerged from the subterranean layer, its eyes bright and its energy levels remarkably unblemished.
"Unbelievable! This Nidoking didn't absorb a single shred of damage!"
"Could this be directly tied to the directive Champion Feng Che issued at the absolute last millisecond?"
"He ordered Nidoking to deploy Earthquake."
The spectator galleries hummed with animated analysis. Sensing the unspoken confusion clouding Trip's features, Feng Che offered a calm, technical clarification.
"The rationale behind directing Nidoking to execute Earthquake from beneath the bedrock was to intentionally generate a counter-shockwave. By matching Conkeldurr's downward kinetic impact with an equal and opposite subterranean force, the two energy blocks cleanly neutralized each other. That is why my Nidoking remains entirely unscathed."
"Conkeldurr is rendered unable to battle! The ultimate victor of this exhibition match is Champion Feng Che!" the referee officially broadcasted.
"Your tactical execution and power metrics are undeniably immense, Champion Feng Che," Trip acknowledged grimly. "I will continue to rigorously drill my active roster. I pray my line can comfortably secure a secondary engagement against your hand in the future."
With his final brief concluded, Trip recalled Conkeldurr into its capsule and swept out of the colosseum.
Feng Che let out a slow, silent sigh of relief. Truth be told, had he been piloting his own elite vanguard lines rather than these unfamiliar reserve assets siphoned from the Viridian Gym vaults, the execution loops would have demanded far less cognitive strain. This grinding showcase had anchored his attention for over two hours.
Following the conclusion of the event, Feng Che transitioned into the League's central executive suite to audit the operational briefs compiled by the Elite Four.
"At present, our primary administrative agenda requires us to officially appoint a successor to fill the vacant Elite Four seat," Caitlin noted casually, adjusting her glasses as she let out a faint, lazy yawn.
"What precise protocols governed this selection matrix under the previous administration?" Feng Che asked. Having never personally managed a regional League hierarchy, he chose to humbly siphon Caitlin's experience.
"Our standard constitutional options restrict us to three definitive paths: maintain the vacancy indefinitely, wait for the International High Command to allocate an outside asset, or directly elevate a verified Gym Leader from the regional circuit," Caitlin mapped out the operational boundaries.
"If you desire my personal recommendation, my calculus strongly favors promoting a Gym Leader directly from our own ranks."
"Agreed. Advancing a Gym Leader functions as a highly efficient administrative multi-hit," Feng Che mused. "It directly rewards internal merit while seamlessly decentralizing the independent leverage of the Gym Leader Alliance."
"Furthermore, if we defer to the High Command to funnel an outside master into our inner circle, that asset will inevitably seek to micromanage our sovereign operations and restrict our shadow expansion."
"Clay strikes me as an exceptionally stable candidate with solid baseline performance metrics. I shall schedule a private audience to check his willingness at a later date," Feng Che decided, before his gaze locked onto a massive, towering mountain of neglected paperwork piled high across the master desk, his head instantly throbbing with acute cognitive fatigue.
Caitlin, Grimsley, and Shauntal concurrently averted their eyes, explicitly refusing to meet the new Champion's desperate gaze.
"These are the legacy document backlogs left entirely unaddressed by Alder's administration. We highly suggest Champion Feng Che optimize his schedule to clear these files with maximum velocity," Caitlin announced with concise brevity. "Our respective departments are currently swamped under severe operational overhead; if your office requires zero alternative inputs, we shall smoothly take our leave."
The exact millisecond her sentence finalized, she focused her psychic authority to execute an instantaneous Teleport, dissolving completely from the boardroom.
"Ahem... Champion Feng Che, a high-priority logistical variable just flagged my attention. I must vacate the premises immediately," Grimsley muttered, his silhouette breaking into hundreds of illusory dark smoke tendrils that vanished into thin air.
By the hour Feng Che turned his crown toward Shauntal, the Ghost-type specialist had already smoothly slid onto her Drifblim, riding the wind to escape through the high windows within a single blink.
"Alder truly possessed near-zero baseline compatibility to govern a regional League. To have accumulated an executive backlog of this catastrophic scale... clearing these files will tax my processing cycles for an eternity," Feng Che grumbled internally, a slight headache flaring across his temples.
Steeling his focus, he siphoned his supreme psychic parameters to rapidly leaf through the mountain of paperwork, his brain scanning the technical telemetry at a manic velocity.
Amidst the endless streams of generic administrative noise, a highly specialized conceptual blueprint caught his intellectual focus.
Constructing a Regional Pokémon Academy?
This concept carries remarkably high strategic utility.
Feng Che casually spun his pen, his mind rapidly mapping how to seamlessly link this educational framework with the infrastructure of his personal Pokémon Daycare networks.
He had long held the operational view that permitting a ten-year-old child to unmoor themselves from a structured home environment to initiate a continent-spanning journey was a severely unoptimized social law. At that baseline age, a child's psychological fortitude and risk-assessment matrices are dangerously unformed, rendering long-term wilderness exploration exceptionally high-hazard.
If the legal threshold governing tournament eligibility and independent travel could be forcefully deferred to fifteen, the social return would scale significantly. By establishing a centralized Pokémon Academy network, children could systematically absorb foundational tactical lore, typing mathematics, and survival variables within a structured, low-risk environment.
Executing a grand-scale blueprint like a Pokémon Academy demands an immense allocation of specialized land sectors alongside a massive fleet of baseline Pokémon partners.
Securing the Pokémon vectors presents an unchallenging task; my personal Daycare facilities can smoothly funnel thousands of well-bred, highly stable common assets to stock the campuses.
However... the current economic indicators of the Unova region are completely abyssal. The League's financial ledgers are heavily drowned under a monumental mountain of debt—the absolute fallout of Alder's archaic management models.
Feng Che ran a thorough forensic audit across Unova's active financial balance sheets, and the data verified a catastrophic, deep fiscal deficit. At present, the League treasury lacked the liquid capital required to safely process the baseline salary allocations for its own internal staff.
The variables looked incredibly thorny.
A highly premium, resource-dense continent has been systematically mismanaged to the point where its economic performance indicators have regressed by over a decade.
Alder comfortably anchored his public persona as a legendary war hero for the Unova populace—yet his processing loops contained near-zero data regarding macroeconomic strategy.
If I desire to aggressively vitalize Unova's fiscal indicators, my shadow empire must forcefully integrate and streamline the continent's macro-resources.
We must inaugurate large-scale deep-ocean maritime trade networks, exponentially scaling our export volume of premium material resources to international markets.
Feng Che executed an exhaustive review of the geological data maps mapping Unova's subterranean assets. The continent housed an astronomical wealth of high-grade mineral veins and raw ores, yet an absolute majority of these deep reserves sat securely nested beneath the ancestral territories governed by the Dragon Clan.
If my corporations initiate large-scale mining operations without securing the absolute compliance and formal authorization of the Dragon Clan, the localized seismic disruption will inevitably trigger a massive, uncontrollable regional dragon population mutation loop, Feng Che calculated silently.
A stroke of absolute, magnificent luck that my shadow networks successfully forced the Dragon Clan into total unification under my sovereign hand prior to this phase. Had my human shell ascended this Acting Champion throne without that baseline leverage, this seat would have felt like a bed of literal iron nails. Feng Che let out a soft murmur of relief.
Re-engineering a continent's entire economic architecture is a macro-scale campaign that cannot be finalized within a brief timeline.
Across this immediate phase, our primary tactical objective requires us to systematically condition and secure the region's civil stability indicators. Saturated under Team Plasma's prolonged aggressive campaigns, Unova's baseline public security has sustained severe structural degradation.
An immense fleet of common Pokémon lines have been violently abandoned or displaced by unconditioned humans. Having unmoored themselves from the civilian sectors to nest across the deep wild, these feral populations harbor an intense, deep-seated psychological malice toward human contact, launching hyper-aggressive territorial presses upon sight.
My office must engineer a definitive containment solution to systematically capture and rehabilitate these feral wild populations, while leveraging our tracking databases to trace their original registered Trainers.
Feng Che's core philosophies were heavily anchored on maximizing the authentic, mutual bond dividing humans and Pokémon.
My calculus mandates that my Pokémon Daycare franchises must be aggressively expanded to blanket the entirety of the Unova region, seamlessly rooting a facility across every single town and high-density metropolis on the continent map.
Only through a capillary network of that scale can our operations efficiently absorb, shelter, and condition these abandoned assets, systematically dissolving the deep psychological friction dividing them from human contact.
Feng Che finalized his analysis, resolving to utilize the Daycare infrastructure as his primary wedge to reshape the continent.
Yet, coordinating a macro-scale deployment of this caliber means I must systematically migrate my primary Daycare pipelines entirely out of the Kanto region...
Feng Che's brow furrowed slightly as a minor tactical constraint flagged his focus. Operating his premier resource pipelines directly under Team Rocket's pervasive surveillance grid within Kanto placed an unsustainable, dangerous limitation on his shadow empire's long-term expansion metrics.