The live audience was caught up in the excitement of the moment, which made it easy to overlook the fact that Aresdra had only completed half of her performance.
The viewers watching the broadcast at home were more clear-headed about it. Nova had the livestream open on one screen while refreshing forum posts about the K.D.A. Girl Group Auditions on another.
There was no shortage of critics voicing their dissatisfaction with Aresdra's perfect scores.
"I'm not saying her performance wasn't impressive, but she didn't finish it. Giving a perfect score for an incomplete performance — doesn't that seem a bit generous?"
"The most important quality of any performance is that it reaches its conclusion. By that measure, Aresdra didn't deliver."
Naturally, twice as many people were pushing back.
"A routine of that quality could hold its own at the World Tournament. You got to see half of it at an Audition and you're still complaining?"
"The gap here isn't even close. It's like comparing an amateur league to the Master Tournament. Winning twenty amateur titles doesn't come close to standing on a Master stage for a single second."
The arguments gradually faded as Aresdra finished her interview and the next contestants took the stage.
It had to be said that Aresdra's performance had raised the ceiling of the entire Audition to a height it was never really meant to reach. The girls who followed her were not bad by any measure. They were young performers who had only recently begun working with Pokémon in artistic performance, and doing well enough to show off their own charm alongside their Pokémon's was exactly what the Audition called for.
But even though every one of them performed with real heart and ability, the audience — both in the arena and at home — could not quite shake the lingering shadow of what they had already seen.
"I've only been away from Aresdra's performance for thirty seconds and I already need to rewatch it."
"The person above me is unwell. Though honestly, same."
"Can we talk about Psyduck? Aresdra's routine was brilliant, but Psyduck just showing up and doing nothing was somehow equally entertaining."
"For me, the best part was the look on Aresdra's face after she fell. Nothing beats a flustered expression on a girl that composed."
It was genuinely a little rough on the other contestants. They were all doing their very best, but neither the judges at the front nor the audience further back could keep their full attention on the stage. Their eyes kept drifting back to the replay monitors.
Watching all of this, Nova finally let himself relax.
Given everything that had happened, as long as Aresdra did not stumble in the Contest Battle round, first place in Group A was already hers. There was no real competition left.
The only question was whether Psyduck would cause any more chaos.
But a Contest Battle was a different matter from a stage performance. Psyduck had been able to derail a performance simply by wandering in at the wrong moment, but that kind of thing would not work in a battle. The Audition's Contest Battle was formatted as a Double Battle, which meant even if Psyduck somehow ended up on the field again and continued its usual brand of bewildered interference, Aresdra's other Pokémon were more than capable of carrying the weight.
Whether it was Torchic or Riolu, both were absolute powerhouses that Nova had personally chosen and helped train for Aresdra. Even in a one-against-three scenario — Psyduck included — Nova had complete confidence the final win would be Aresdra's.
Still, even as he thought this, a certain image flickered through his mind. A sharp-tempered girl with an instinctive gift for battling and a lifelong dedication to Grass-type Pokémon.
Surely she wouldn't give up on becoming a Grass-type specialist — a goal her family had passed down for generations — just to join a girl group Audition.
Don't do anything reckless, Thelma.
But as Nova well knew, the thing you dread most has a way of turning up exactly when you least want it to.
When the host announced the final contestant of the evening, Nova's heart dropped.
Thelma walked out onto the stage in a black outfit. With her height and long legs, she did not look like someone who had come for an Audition. She looked like someone who had come to start a fight.
As it turned out, she had.
There was nothing in the way of singing or dancing. With a casual flick of her wrist, eight Poke Balls flew open at once. Every Pokémon she currently had trained stepped onto the stage together.
Led by Sceptile and Meganium, all eight of her Grass-type Pokémon had been dressed by Thelma for the occasion. Each one wore a black suit and a pair of oversized sunglasses, arranged in two neat rows of four — like a boss walking in with the full crew behind her.
Thelma's heels clicked against the stage as she walked to the center. Behind her, Sceptile and Meganium moved as one. Both channeled their energy into Frenzy Plant — the most powerful Grass-type move in existence.
The stage transformed in seconds. Massive roots and twisting trunks burst upward from the floor, branches spiraling into each other, vines curling through the air. Leaves and petals scattered across the arena as the sound of rustling Growth filled every corner of the venue. The intertwining trees rose higher and higher, winding together into a single towering column that shot upward more than ten meters before the very top split open like the petals of a flower.
In the hollow at its center sat a throne, carved entirely from wood.
Thelma settled onto it sideways — composed, unhurried, looking down at the audience below with an expression that made it very clear she had no particular interest in impressing them.
Her voice came through the stage speakers, clear and cool.
"You expected me to perform for you? That's not how this works. You are here to impress me."
The arena erupted.
Nova put his face in his hands. He could feel the goosebumps running down both arms.
He did not even want to think about what it would look like if the K.D.A. Girl Group actually came together and Aresdra and Thelma ended up as teammates. The thought was exhausting. He considered closing the stream entirely.
As a stage performance, Thelma's entrance was undeniably striking. But there was not much in the way of artistry to it. It was a raw display of power and presence — impressive, but not what the judges were looking for in this round.
Her scores reflected that. When the numbers came in, Thelma landed in the lower half of Group A's overall standings.
The Contest Battle segment, on the other hand, was a completely different picture.
In the Contest Battle, Thelma was simply overpowering everyone in her path. Her Pokémon knocked out opponents in a single hit, round after round, without any need for type advantage or strategy. They just went out and won. There was nothing more complicated than that.
Meanwhile, Aresdra had taken her lesson from the stage performance very much to heart. Before the Contest Battle began, she quietly left Psyduck's Poke Ball behind in the contestants' lounge.
"No matter how much trouble you cause," she murmured to herself as she set it down, "you can't ruin anything if you're not out there. Right?"
With Torchic and Riolu performing brilliantly, Aresdra swept through every opponent she faced and advanced through the bracket until only one battle remained — the final match of the Audition.