I really will be disappointed if he's actually cheating… Will's giving a hell of a fight so far
It's about a 99% chance that's where the story's going.
There's kind of a shape to this, when a story like this introduces a character in an antagonistic position. The story will feature a series of moments along the way that you can read to figure out how you're intended to feel about a particular character.
For example, when the upcoming fight was with Lance, you were presented with a series of scenes with Lance. He was sent back to his clan in Johto, where they specifically chided him about his actions and talked down to him about picking a fight with Brock; this is a scene intended to make it clear that this was specifically a fuck-up on Lance's part, and evoked a little sympathy for him. He then proceeded to have several moments throughout his fight where he engaged in the same kind of excitement in battle as Brock did, engaged in the same
manner of fighting as Brock did, and lost graciously.
All up, this is intended to evoke a situation in which the reader feels great about Brock overcoming Lance, but leaves Lance in a situation where the reader likes him in the losing position and wants to see him better himself after that.
The opposite is true with Will. He's been presented in a purely antagonistic manner so far, with actions practically designed to remove any desire to sympathize with him; it's strongly implied that he was the one targeting Forrest when he got arrested, he's the one who mind-whammied Brock's lawyer, he's tied with Team Rocket, etc, etc.
Now, in the fight, actions are being set up specifically to make you feel antagonized towards Will again. The story is continuing to hammer home the point that everyone dislikes his actions, and the story goes out of its way to condemn his tactics with Trick Room, etc, despite noting that they're valid tactics within the rules as they stand. Sympathetic characters are given the spotlight to talk down on Will's actions; the entire cut-away section to Gary is there to give the perspective from other characters that it's not just Brock who dislikes Will's tactics.
It's extremely likely that the fight's going to end either with Will being found to be cheating so that Brock wins the match and gets to rub it into Will's face while Will is publicly humiliated, or else that the match is going to be cancelled due to some kind of a technicality and no victor will actually be announced.
There's a
bit of a chance that this segment will end with an attempt to make Will sympathetic by playing into his plight as a Psychic-type trainer who's being used by the people around him, but I don't rate that chance very highly.
To be somewhat frank, Hard Enough isn't exactly a story that's particularly interested in having Brock ever actually legitimately
lose a fight without coming out ahead regardless (outside of Gym battles where the point isn't for him to win), so I wouldn't walk into this expecting Will to legitimately pull out a win or come out of this with an overly sympathetic depiction.
It's kind of a shame, because I agree- Will's by far the most interesting opponent to be faced in the entire fic, and it's
fun to see a trainer whose underlying strategy isn't just 'have really powerful Pokemon use funny combinations of moves'. He's fighting dirty and using tactics that Brock can't easily counter, and in a story that was interested in having its protagonist actually be challenged, he'd be the perfect kind of opponent to throw up against Brock. There's a lot of lessons Brock could take away from the fight that could make for interesting stuff being brought up in future.
It's also just interesting to see a legitimately skilled trainer with a complex strategy and set of moves that doesn't immediately move to become one of Brock's friends. It would be good to see that there's an entire ecosystem of powerful trainers outside of the protagonist's viewpoint that will totally just see him as an obstacle to overcome because they don't care about him from their point of view.
But by far the most likely result is that Will's just going to be caught out for cheating and it's going to be explained that Brock definitely
would have won on his own merits if it weren't for Will's underhanded tactics.
