In the depths of the Lumiose City royal palace, the faint green light faded from Lucien's palm. Zygarde's cell had withdrawn.
He let out a slow breath.
'Good. A line of communication with the third great Pokémon of Kalos had been established.'
He stood and looked out the window. Night had settled fully over the city. Perhaps because of the recent assault, Lumiose was completely silent. Soldiers moved along the outer walls with torches, their small lights tracing slow arcs through the dark. Every civilian window was shut tight, no sound escaping from within.
Looking at it, Lucien felt an unexpected pang of something close to homesickness. Lucien City at night was nothing like this. The streets there were bright, the taverns and restaurants open at all hours, Pokémon moving through the city alongside people as naturally as breathing. Everything there felt alive, even in the small hours.
He shook his head and turned away from the window. No point in that line of thinking. He washed his face, lay down, and let sleep take him.
He didn't know how long he slept before the roar woke him.
It was deafening and close, and it brought him to his feet before he was fully conscious. He crossed to the window in two steps.
"BOOM!"
A violent impact had struck the northern city wall. Dust billowed up in a thick cloud, and a section of the already-weakened stonework had cracked open entirely, leaving a jagged gap in the fortifications. An alarm split the night air immediately after, its sound cutting across the entire city.
"Enemy attack!"
"The Galar army! They're at the gates!"
"Why now, of all times!"
The voices of soldiers carried up from below, ragged with fear. Along the walls, the hoarse cries of guards competed with the rising roar of flames spreading along the horizon.
Armored Galar soldiers surged forward in a tide, and behind them came enormous Pokémon, their heavy stone-like bodies sending tremors through the ground with every step.
Light, fire, and rubble churned together in the night sky as the full Galar vanguard pressed its assault under cover of darkness.
In the corridor outside, the palace guards arrived at a run, dropping to one knee, their faces drained of color.
"Your Majesty! The North Gate has been breached! Galar's main force is pushing through!"
AZ went rigid. The fragile calm that had settled in his eyes during his conversation with Lucien burned away in an instant, replaced by a cold and towering fury. His fists clenched until his knuckles went white.
"Galar." His voice was barely controlled. "At this moment, of all moments, they choose this."
Outside, the sounds of fighting closed in steadily. Civilian cries, Pokémon growls, the crash of structures giving way. Lumiose City's defenses had already been stretched thin before tonight. Against a planned, coordinated assault of this scale, the walls would not hold.
A minister looked upward through the high window, his face blank with dread. The clear moonlight had been blotted out entirely. The sky was black with wings.
"Your Majesty, the Corviknight air corps. They're attacking from above as well."
A knight dropped to his knee, his voice cracking. "Your Majesty, please withdraw! We will hold them as long as we can!"
AZ let out a short, bitter sound that wasn't quite a laugh. The wildness had returned to his eyes.
"Withdraw." He turned the word over as though it belonged to a language he no longer spoke. "My city is here. My people are here. My Floette is here. Where exactly would I withdraw to?"
Throughout Lumiose City, civilians had pressed themselves into corners, into cellars, into the spaces beneath stairwells, clutching each other in silence while the sounds of the assault rolled over them like a flood.
A small girl in a rough cloth dress looked up at her mother, her eyes wide and lost.
"Mother, what do we do?"
The woman's eyes were clouded. She had no answer. The enemy had reached the capital itself. There was nothing left to do. She pulled her daughter tightly against her chest.
"Don't be afraid. His Majesty AZ will drive them back."
On the street nearby, a Kalos man froze as a Galar soldier stepped in front of him, weapon raised and already stained dark. The man's legs gave out beneath him. He collapsed to his knees, begging.
The soldier grinned and swung without hesitation.
"Forward! Take the Kalos capital tonight!"
The promise of rank and reward had turned these men into something else entirely. They poured through the breached gates like water through broken stone.
"The West Gate is lost!"
The cry came from somewhere in the dark, followed by the sound of something heavy collapsing. The West Gate of Lumiose City had fallen.
Kalos soldiers stood where they were and stared at nothing, the last of their resistance leaving them.
Then the cold arrived.
It came without warning, a sudden drop in temperature that swept across the palace square and outward. A vast ice-blue shape descended from above, wings spreading wide, radiating a chill that turned breath to vapor and quenched the nearest flames in an instant.
The noise of battle faltered across the entire city, swallowed by the Dragon-type pressure radiating outward in every direction.
Kyurem had entered the battlefield.
Every face in Lumiose City turned upward.
Kyurem beat its wings and climbed, the Ice Dragon tearing through the smoke-filled night sky, moving toward the breaches in the walls. Wherever it passed, the air crystallized. Flames died. Debris froze mid-fall, hanging suspended in clear ice before shattering on the ground below.
The Galar general stared up at it from outside the walls, went pale, and then forced a laugh.
"It's just a monster! All units, attack! Bring it down!"
Thousands of Pokémon unleashed simultaneously. Flames, lightning, boulders, beams of energy converged on Kyurem from every direction.
Kyurem exhaled.
The attacks froze in the air. Every flame, every bolt, every projectile crystallized and held for a single suspended moment, and then fell as a cascade of ice shards onto the charging force below. The vanguard of the assault stopped moving. Soldiers and Pokémon alike stood fixed in place, encased in ice, a frozen tableau spread across the ground outside the gates.
The battlefield went silent for one full second.
Then the Galar lines broke.
"What is that thing!"
"A Legendary beast! We can't fight a Legendary monster!"
Soldiers turned and ran. The organized assault dissolved into individual men fleeing in every direction, their formations meaningless.
High above the city, something else was changing in the sky.
On one side of the horizon, a spreading radiance of seven colors bloomed slowly outward, soft and alive with the particular quality of something ancient waking from sleep.
On the other side, a deep crimson shadow condensed against the dark, dense and still and carrying the particular cold of absolute finality.
Two presences. Vast and opposing. Moving from opposite ends of Kalos toward the same point.
Xerneas and Yveltal arrived almost together.
They did not enter the city. They held at a distance, two enormous shapes at the edge of the firelight, watching. The war between humans below. The breached walls, the fleeing soldiers, the frozen vanguard on the ground. And above it all, Kyurem, hovering over Lumiose City in the dark, alone against an army, its ice-blue eyes moving across the land below with complete and unhurried calm.
They watched, and they did not intervene.
Kyurem did not acknowledge them. It simply continued what it was doing.
The Corviknight air corps, which had been holding formation overhead, received their orders and dove. Hundreds of armored bodies dropped in a single mass toward Kyurem, filling the sky from above like a collapsing ceiling.
Deep beneath the palace, in the secret chamber where the Ultimate Weapon stood, AZ had not moved.
He stood before the machine in silence. The sounds of the battle above filtered down through the stone, each impact, each cry, each collapsing wall reaching him as though from a great distance. The weapon's metallic frame caught the dim light and held it, cold and patient, its lines glowing faintly crimson in the dark.
AZ's eyes had gone somewhere far away.
It was over. All of it. Tonight, his city, his people, everything he had tried to hold together would be taken by Galar. He had not been able to defend the walls. He had not been able to protect his people. He had not been able to save Floette.
He had believed Lucien. He had, for a brief and fragile moment, allowed himself to believe that there was another way.
But Galar's forces were inside the gates now, and the fires were spreading toward the palace, and the sounds outside did not lie.
"It's too late," AZ whispered. His voice was hoarse and barely audible, and the tears that ran down his face left pale tracks through the dust on his skin.
Slowly, his hand rose. His fingertips were trembling.
He reached for the Ultimate Weapon's activation core.
One touch, and the Galar army would be reduced to nothing. Kalos would be safe. The price? There was no price worth considering.
An army that had done this to his city and his people had forfeited any claim to mercy. A man who had already lost everything had no right to hesitate.
The despair had burned away completely, replaced by something colder and more absolute. AZ's face twisted, and a dark aura radiated from him in waves. He would stand and fall with Lumiose City.
His hand came down hard on the activation core.
The ground shook. Deep beneath the palace, the weapon's awakening sent a tremor through the earth that traveled up through the walls and into every stone of the castle above. Brilliant white lines ignited across the machine's frame at terrifying speed, and the chamber was swallowed by a searing, blinding light. An all-consuming force erupted from the core.
Like something dropped from above onto the earth, a white hemispherical wave of light rose from the ground and expanded outward in every direction, turning the night sky as bright as noon.
"What is that!"
Inside the city, soldiers and civilians alike looked up with expressions of pure terror.
Lucien saw it from above and felt his stomach drop.
The Ultimate Weapon. AZ had activated it.
Wherever the white sphere advanced, something invisible reached into the living things nearest to it and pulled. Life force, drawn out of civilians, soldiers, Pokémon, without discrimination, without mercy, rushing inward toward the weapon. It did not distinguish between Kalos and Galar. It did not distinguish between friend and enemy.
It simply consumed.
Lucien's expression hardened. His gaze swept across the civilians and Pokémon below, frozen in helpless terror as the light crept toward them. He gritted his teeth.
"Kyurem, Glaciate! Slow that sphere down!"
The ancient cold that erupted from Kyurem's body was immense, a rushing tide of ice that engulfed the white sphere almost instantly. But the Ultimate Weapon's power was not simply a force that could be overpowered. It was a platform, an indiscriminate absorption engine, and the moment Kyurem's energy touched the white light, it began drawing that in as well.
"It's absorbing Kyurem's energy directly."
Lucien's jaw tightened. The one thing worth noting was that the freezing effect had slowed the sphere's expansion considerably. But slowing it was not stopping it. To truly halt it, the weapon would need to be fed enough energy to reach saturation. There was no other way to shut it down.
"Everyone, get out of the city now! Move away from the walls!"
He reached into his coat and released the remaining Poké Balls in quick succession. Dragonite, Volcarona, and Serperior materialized in the air around him, their faces immediately registering the wrongness of the white light below.
"Dragonite, Help! Get the civilians and Pokémon out of the city!"
Dragonite glanced at him once, worry plain across its face, then dove without hesitation.
"I'm staying to stop it," Lucien said, quietly enough that only his Pokémon heard.
In the streets below, the people of Lumiose City looked up at Kyurem and Lucien above them, tears running freely down their faces. They had just watched people disappear. Civilians, soldiers, Pokémon, there one moment and simply gone the next, drawn into the light without a sound.
"Please hurry!"
The Kalos garrison had finally broken through its paralysis and was pushing civilians toward the outer gates, organizing what retreat it could. The evacuation was desperate and disorganized, but it was moving.
High above the chaos, the Galar general watched the white sphere with wide eyes, and then smiled.
The Corviknight corps had just been routed. His army had suffered a blow unlike anything it had faced before. But this white light, whatever it was, that was opportunity. Let it exhaust itself against the Pokémon. Let it do the work for them.
"All ground forces, begin your withdrawal! Air units, listen to me carefully! While that creature is occupied, hit it with everything you have, then pull back immediately!"
Lucien, still riding Kyurem, watched this unfold and felt a cold fury settle over him.
From this day forward, the Galar royal family had made themselves his problem.
Outside the walls, at a distance far enough to observe without being caught in the sphere's reach, Xerneas and Yveltal had stopped moving.
The moment the white light had appeared, both of them had gone very still. Because they understood, in the way that beings of their nature understand things, exactly what would happen if that wave of energy was allowed to continue expanding unchecked. Buildings dissolved.
Earth cracked dry and barren. Life simply ended, grass and stone and living creature alike, stripped to nothing as the light passed through. Soldier and civilian. Pokémon and person. The Galar army. Every living thing within reach.
All of it, consumed without distinction.
The two Legendary Pokémon looked at each other.
And then they looked again at the figure riding the ice-blue dragon above the stricken city, throwing himself between the weapon's light and the people below it.
Not an invader. Not a conqueror. Something else entirely.
They moved at the same moment.
Two streaks of light, one the deep blue of living things and one the deep red of their ending, shot over the walls and came to rest beside Kyurem. Their bodies blazed with power as they turned the full force of their presence against the white sphere, pouring energy into it from either side.
Lucien stared at them.
"Xerneas. Yveltal."
He recovered quickly. They had felt what was happening and come on their own. They understood what was at stake.
"Kyurem, protect them!"
Kyurem climbed instantly, cold erupting from its body in a wave that swept the Corviknight corps from the sky. The armored birds and their riders froze mid-dive, becoming ice sculptures that fell and shattered on the ground below. Lucien drove Kyurem straight toward the Galar forces massed outside the walls, and in one sweep, the army's advance was encased in frost.
He turned back.
The white sphere had stopped expanding. Xerneas and Yveltal had given it enough.
At the same moment, deep within the palace chamber, in the light of the Ultimate Weapon, something moved.
The still figure of Floette slowly opened her eyes.
AZ did not see it. His bloodshot eyes were fixed on the machine, on the energy readings climbing toward their peak. A terrible smile crossed his face.
"Galar. This is for everything you have done."
He activated the weapon's release.
The energy that had been gathered and compressed within the Ultimate Weapon's core erupted in a single column of white light that punched through the earth, through the palace walls, through the sky above, turning the darkness of the night into blazing noon in a single second. The beam climbed past the clouds and kept going.
In the streets of Lumiose City, everyone who had not yet evacuated looked up.
Outside the walls, the soldiers who had fled looked up.
Lucien looked up.
The beam reached its apex, and then changed direction. It bent, impossibly fast, and accelerated away on a trajectory no eye could follow.
Lucien already knew where it was going.
Galar. Across the ocean, thousands of miles away. The Ultimate Weapon of the Super-Ancient Civilization, the most destructive force this era had ever seen, was crossing the world to strike the Galar Region with everything it had gathered.
...
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