Stepping out of the final transit corridor, Feng Che felt as though he had walked directly into a vast, uncharted segment of the cosmos.
Suspended across the core of the ancient monument, millions of independent Minior were revolving around a central axis in a highly precise, mathematically calculated orbit, formatting a magnificent, undulating ocean of cosmic dust.
Countless threads of iridescent starlight cascaded from the celestial sea, illuminating the space.
Feng Che had officially breached the absolute central platform of the ruins—the authentic, historical heart of the Altar of the Sunne.
As his boots locked onto the center stone, his visor registered an anomaly. Floating in absolute stasis dead-center of the altar was a gargantuan, primal Unown—specifically, the ancient Primal Unown U.
The cosmic glyph was continuously siphoned and bathed in the falling starlight, its deep-slate edges pulsing with a brilliant, star-blue energetic signature.
"Young Challenger, does your station authorize the initialization of the Trial Matrix?"
"Should your vanguard successfully demonstrate the required combat parameters to clear my assessment, my core will permanently unseal the definitive spatial gateway leading straight back into the primary Pokémon world."
The Primal Unown U spoke, its telepathic voice booming through the chamber with immense, historic majesty.
"Concurrently, your ledger will be bankrolled with a pristine Pokémon Egg, supplemented by a legendary evolutionary resource completely saturated with solar brilliance."
Before Feng Che could voice an administrative response, the spatial boundaries wrapping the Unown violently warped and expanded.
Within fractions of a second, the glyph's mass re-stitched its atomic data, materializing a pristine Solgaleo directly before his position.
The emissary of the sun boasted a massive, leonine physical frame sheathed entirely in smooth, ivory-white armor plates. It possessed a sharply defined, ash-gray snout framing a pair of deep, pale-blue eyes.
The upper half of its cranial visor was composed of a deep, midnight-blue matrix inside of which an endlessly shifting map of cosmic constellations danced across the surface.
Four heavy, golden sun-spikes crested its crown like a traditional sovereign crown, paired with two secondary sets of blades decorating its lower jaw lines to cleanly partition its massive, sun-shaped mane into independent, thick clusters of fleece.
A deep, burning orange ring banded its heavy ankles, complemented across its paws by embedded, diamond-cut obsidian gemstones.
When entering its ultimate Radiant Sun phase, a shallow, sky-blue third eye would fracture open across its forehead, while the internal constellations stretched into longitudinal beams of pure light. Except for its primary snout and irises, every single non-white segment of its hide would flash into an incandescent, brilliant golden-yellow output.
"A Low-Tier Champion Solgaleo, commanding a dual Psychic/Steel attribute profile."
"Evaluating the elemental advantages... your station represents the absolute peak counter for this layout. Come forth, Incineroar!"
Feng Che smoothly unclipped a luxury capsule, deploying his starter.
The exact millisecond its heavy paws hit the altar plates, Incineroar automatically unsealed its internal furnace, triggering an immediate Primal Reversion. The dark tiger transformed into a prehistoric juggernaut, its entire muscled frame laced with veins of flowing, white-hot magma.
"Furthermore... we are unsealing this constraint tonight."
Feng Che reached into his traveling cloak, extracting a pristine, shimmering Z-Crystal calibrated specifically to his starter's frequency.
"The moment a structural opening materializes across its guard, I shall instruct your core to authorize an unrestricted Z-Move deployment. Let us verify the absolute limits of this Alolan catalyst," Feng Che commanded firmly, his voice cutting through the hum of the star-sea.
The Clash of Fire and Steel
Solgaleo unhinged its massive jaws, unleashing a deafening, earth-shaking lion roar that sent shockwaves vibrating through the limestone pillars before rocketing down a direct linear trajectory toward Incineroar.
Sustained beneath the continuous life-energy of the Viridian Force, Feng Che's Incineroar had already pushed its baseline attributes to the absolute brink of the Champion threshold. The exact millisecond its Primal Reversion locked in, its active combat torque crossed comfortably into the Champion Tier.
"Incineroar, intercept their vector—Precipice Blades!"
Two colossal, jagged greatswords composed of compressed Earth-core magma violently tore out of the stone floorboards. Facing the oncoming trajectory of Solgaleo's steel claws, Incineroar calmly crossed the burning stone blades before its chest to format a solid parry shield.
BANG—!!
A monumental, high-torque metallic detonation ripped through the chamber as Solgaleo's iron talons collided head-on with the magma swords.
Thousands of white-hot friction sparks sprayed across the grid, the sheer concussive blast wave of the impact violently shattering and scattering the lower clusters of Minior cores floating across the airspace.
Exploiting the sudden spatial displacement, Solgaleo took a deep structural breath, unchaining a colossal gravitational suction matrix from its throat.
An inescapable vacuum locked onto the surrounding Minior. Unable to parry the kinetic pull, hundreds of independent cores were forcefully siphoned out of their orbits, flying straight toward the sun lion's open jaws.
As the pastel cores were devoured, their internal cosmic brilliance was systematically drained, converting the raw starlight into a massive energy multiplier inside Solgaleo's engine. The drained husks faded into gray soot, dissolving into the wind.
An immense shroud of brilliant, golden-yellow solar fire erupted across Solgaleo's flanks.
It accelerated down the center line, its heavy paws hammering the flagstones with enough kinetic force to cause the entire altar architecture to tremble as it unleashed a devastating, maximum-potency Flare Blitz.
However, attempting to utilize a pure Fire-type art against a Primal-Reverted Incineroar was a catastrophic tactical miscalculation.
Incineroar merely smirked, unhinging its jaws to execute a massive, inverse suction pull. The entire torrential wave of solar fire wrapping Solgaleo was cleanly siphoned out of the airspace, devoured whole by the dark tiger's internal thermal furnace to supercharge its own battery.
Before the sun lion could adjust its pathing, Incineroar lunged forward, its heavy paws locking like iron vices around Solgaleo's tail. With a brutal, full-body twist of its torso, it swung the massive white beast through the air like a ragdoll, throwing it head-first into the reinforced limestone canyon walls.
CRASH!
A colossal crater fractured open across the bedrock, dozens of jagged, deep fissures radiating outward through the stone panels under the pure kinetic impact.
Solgaleo dragged its frame out of the smoking debris cloud, its ivory armor plates heavily scuffed and caked in stone gravel. It shook its mane, its optical sensors burning with an absolute, unmitigated torrent of feral rage.
The constellations across its visor strobed violently. With a sharp jerk of its head, it projected a massive, silver-gray energy beam—Flash Cannon—straight from its maw.
The high-velocity steel railgun beam tore across the distance, boring a clean, molten puncture straight through the center axis of Incineroar's chest.
Just as Solgaleo's jaws began to curve into a triumphant, predatory smirk, the dark tiger merely cast a deeply mocking, arrogant look back at the sun lion.
Deep layers of incandescent magma began violently churning and crawling across the internal tissue walls of the wound. Within a single fraction of a second, the structural bisection cleanly closed and vanished without leaving a single trace of cell damage—the absolute manifestation of its primordial regeneration loops.
The total failure of its offensive arts pushed Solgaleo's behavioral script into an absolute, veins-bursting fury.
Its heavy talons aggressively scraped the stone floor, its entire biological chassis erupting into a blinding, star-like luminescence that meticulously mirrored a falling meteor.
It transformed into a roaring, world-ending cosmic lion avatar, plunging down a terminal trajectory—Sunsteel Strike!
"Hmph... Finalize the parameters, Incineroar! Deploy the Z-Matrix!"
Feng Che clamped his fingers tightly over the raw Z-Crystal. Lacking a traditional Z-Ring harness to ground the frequency, he manually unchained a massive, high-purity stream of his Viridian Force to act as a substitute conductor, forcing a direct injection query into the catalyst.
BOOM!
The Z-Crystal erupted into a spectacular, terrifying shroud of chaotic black-and-crimson plasma arcs.
"Crush their alignment, Incineroar! Carry the undivided resolve of my house to permanently shatter the sun!"
Feng Che roared his execution command across the chamber. A monumental bolt of jagged, black-red lightning cascaded down from the ceiling vaults, grounding straight into Incineroar's shoulders to completely unlock its maximum-potency output.
An apocalyptic, towering wall of dark, malicious fire erupted from the tiger's chest belt.
"Malicious Moonsault!"
As the definitive battle cry cleared Feng Che's lips, Incineroar's heavy claws ignited with crackling bands of black-red electricity.
It vaulted high into the stratospheric airspace of the cavern, before plunging down like a descending dark god, driving a catastrophic, full-torque straight punch directly down onto Solgaleo's charging skull.
CRACK—BOOM!!
A deafening, absolute structural detonation ripped through the nexus.
The Low-Tier Champion Solgaleo phantasm shattered instantaneously into millions of asymmetric, glittering crystalline fragments under the sheer weight of the impact.
As the star-shards rained down across the altar, a pristine, heavy Pokémon Egg materialized quietly onto the center pedestal, parallel to a glowing, jagged stone that radiated a dense, intense solar heat signature. Feng Che stepped forward, smoothly securing both assets into his collection.
Having sustained total structural defeat, the Primal Unown U accepted its destiny, converting its remaining mass into a fluid streak of violet light that branded itself cleanly across the back of Feng Che's left hand, expanding his ancient glyph registry.
Concurrently, a massive, smooth spatial corridor began unhinging its boundaries behind the altar plates—the permanent, stable transit gateway leading straight back to the baseline material plane had officially opened.
"The authentic embryonic cell core of a newborn Cosmog... paired with a pristine, maximum-tier Sun Flute Catalyst," Feng Che analyzed, a look of immense satisfaction lighting his eyes as he audited the solar stone's data stream.
The ambient starlight remaining in the chamber was being continuously siphoned into the facets of the light-stone, the gem emitting a sharp, incandescent white aura that brightened the vault like high noon.
This specific solar catalyst was the irreplaceable evolutionary key required to comfortably trigger a Cosmog's eventual final metamorphosis into Solgaleo. With this pristine sun-stone locked inside his private inventory, Feng Che could safely bypass the necessity of ever returning to this specific regional altar to authorize the final evolution query when his Cosmog reached maturity.
"Haha... if the Altar of the Sunne houses an inventory of this caliber, then the parallel structure must hold the exact equivalent."
"It is time to systematically harvest the assets of the Altar of the Moone."
Leveraging a precise, short-range Teleport matrix via Mewtwo, Feng Che instantly dissolved his coordinates, rematerializing his frame along the rugged, wind-swept outer perimeter of the Altar of the Moone. He smoothly unclipped his luxury ball to deploy his Sovereign of Fortune, Togekiss, before stepping firmly into the dark stone corridors of the second temple to finalize his campaign.