Taylor had considered the risk. He had simply decided it was a gamble worth taking — a chance to erase his past entirely and walk away clean.
Nova felt a brief flash of disappointment. The plan to earn Taylor's trust and take him down with a well-timed surprise attack was no longer on the table. But finding Taylor and getting inside the base had always been the hard part. Everything from here was a direct fight instead of a quiet one — the goal had not changed.
And now that Taylor had moved first, Nova had no reason to hold back on what he actually wanted.
The Gold Talent egg.
Nova reached back and placed a hand on Onix's side, keeping his voice low and steady through the chaos.
"Onix — remember our deal. Help me through this, and you go free. That's still the agreement."
The lord Onix had been thrashing and striking blindly in pain and confusion. At Nova's voice and touch, something in it settled. It pulled back from pure reaction and held still long enough to listen.
Nova called out the next round of orders in quick succession.
"Nidoking — give it everything. No Earthquake — I need you to hold that room for five minutes. You're on your own back there."
"Corvisquire — stay close. Watch for the opening and follow me."
"Onix — Dig. Forty metres, left and to the rear."
Nidoking heard the order and immediately shifted modes. It abandoned Obstagoon entirely, stopped defending, and opened up with full offensive power toward the back of the room.
A Thunderbolt swept across the space, scattering both Golbat and Arbok and giving Onix the window it needed. The lord Onix drove its head into the floor and began tunnelling.
Nova and Corvisquire dropped into the tunnel right behind it.
Taylor stood in the control room trying to work out what had just happened.
The kid's ace Pokémon — clearly the strongest Pokémon on his team — had just been left behind to cover a retreat. That was a move you only saw from experienced operatives who had been in genuinely dangerous situations before. Someone willing to leave their best partner behind to buy time knew exactly what they were doing.
For a brief moment, Taylor almost felt respect.
But something was wrong.
Nidoking did not look like a Pokémon that was used to being left behind. It was facing three opponents on its own, and it was not rattled. It was furious — loud, aggressive, and completely without fear. This was not a Pokémon performing a reluctant sacrifice. This was a Pokémon that had been trusted with something important and knew it.
Taylor looked at the direction Onix had been tunnelling.
It was heading straight for the laboratory.
"Arbok — take down that Nidoking. Now."
Arbok moved on the command, but it could not gain the upper hand. Ten levels of advantage meant nothing against the type matchup. Nidoking was a Ground and Poison type — Poison-type moves hit it for less than a quarter of their normal damage. Arbok's Acid barely scratched Nidoking's horn-plated hide. Poison Fang was even less effective. Nidoking's type resistance turned the most dangerous weapons in Arbok's moveset into minor inconveniences.
Taylor had no clean options left. He left Obstagoon to keep Nidoking occupied and went after Nova himself, Arbok and Golbat alongside him.
He did not get far.
Nidoking found a gap in the traffic and sent a Psybeam straight across Taylor's path. To move forward, Taylor would have to leave Arbok behind to deal with Nidoking. Arbok was not going anywhere quickly.
Taylor was not overly worried. He still had Frosmoth in the laboratory — the same Frosmoth that had been keeping the Flygon Queen sedated with Sleep Powder. It was level 51, and it had been through serious battles before. Stopping one Trainer and a Corvisquire would not be beyond it.
What Taylor had not accounted for was that stopping Frosmoth was never Nova's objective.
Onix burst upward through the laboratory floor directly beneath the electromagnetic restraint device holding the Flygon Queen in place. The device's base shattered on impact. Onix's momentum carried it straight into the sedated Flygon's underside — blunt, unintentional, but effective.
A streak of blue light shot out of the tunnel behind Onix. Corvisquire used Defog the moment it cleared the opening, and the layers of Sleep Powder that had been hanging in the laboratory air were swept clean in seconds.
Frosmoth reacted immediately. It lunged at Corvisquire, going for its neck with Bug Bite. Corvisquire's Steel Feather trait absorbed the initial impact — the metallic feathers deflected just enough of the damage to give Corvisquire a window. It countered with Peck, sharp and direct, and the two of them locked into a close-range exchange in the air above the laboratory floor.
While they were occupied, Nova moved.
He kept low and held his breath, cutting across the room toward the display case behind the shattered restraint device where the eggs were stored. He found the egg — the one the scanner had flagged with a gold nameplate — and pushed it carefully into his flight pack.
The pack had room for one. He looked at the Purple Talent eggs around it for a half-second and kept moving.
Behind him, a sound came from the floor.
Under Onix's continued strikes, the Flygon woke up.
She had been imprisoned here for long enough that the moment consciousness returned, so did everything that went with it. The Sleep Powder was gone. The restraints were gone. And there were intruders in her nest.
Earth Power tore through the laboratory without direction or restraint, hitting everything in the room.
Nova threw himself sideways and scrambled into the opening of Onix's tunnel a fraction of a second ahead of the shockwave.
Onix was not so lucky. The Earth Power connected squarely, tearing away close to half its remaining health. It did not wait to assess the damage. It turned in the tunnel and started digging for the surface as fast as it could move, survival instinct overriding everything else.
Nova recalled Corvisquire mid-fight, cutting it away from Frosmoth, and sent it back through the tunnel ahead of him with one instruction — find Nidoking and tell it to run.
Frosmoth tried to follow Corvisquire into the tunnel.
It did not get the chance.
The Flygon Queen had been watching it.
Frosmoth was the Pokémon that had scattered Sleep Powder through her nest, night after night, keeping her sedated and helpless while that human conducted his experiments. She remembered. She had a very clear memory of exactly what Frosmoth had been doing this entire time.
Boomburst.
The sound wave compressed and detonated across the laboratory. The walls cracked. Equipment flew. Frosmoth took the full force of it head-on — its delicate exoskeleton fractured under the impact, layer by layer, and it dropped from the air without another sound.
The dust was still settling when Taylor reached the laboratory doorway at a run.
He stopped.
The Flygon Queen turned her head toward the door and found him.
For a moment, nothing moved.