As Aqua's song filled the arena, bubbles began appearing across the field, rising up from nowhere, drifting without any clear direction or weight.
Marowak raised its bone club to knock them away and found that it could not make contact. The bubbles did not pop or scatter. They simply continued floating, as if they existed slightly apart from everything else in the arena, untouchable by anything physical.
Sparkling Aria was Primarina's signature move. Outside of that species, Lapras was the only Pokémon known to inherit it naturally, and even among Lapras, individuals that actually carried the move were rare enough that most Trainers in the Norlandia Alliance had never seen it on a battlefield.
Aston was one of them.
He stared at the bubbles and felt a cold certainty settle in. A move he had never seen meant a move he had no framework for. He did not know whether it would hit physically or land as a special attack, and without knowing that, any attempt to set up a proper defense was guesswork. In a battle already slipping away from him, guesswork was not something he could afford.
He made the only practical choice available.
"Marowak, Bonemerang! Now!"
Nova glanced at Aqua and called out, "Aqua, that's enough singing. Finish it."
Aqua gave him a mildly offended look but seemed to accept that being hit in the middle of a performance would be worse. She completed the final note of the melody and stopped.
The bubbles throughout the arena burst all at once. The sound was soft, almost gentle, a series of light pops, and then Water-type energy crashed down from every direction, swamping the field. Marowak had been winding up to throw its bone when the wave hit. It was completely buried.
When the move ended, Marowak was still standing, but only just. Its eyes were unfocused and its legs were unsteady. Sparkling Aria had hit a Water-weak opponent for double damage, and Marowak's HP was down to almost nothing.
Aston pressed forward anyway. He had worked out what the move was now. Sparkling Aria was a sound-based attack. And there was exactly one way to shut that down.
"Marowak, Throat Chop!"
Throat Chop would leave Aqua in enough pain to prevent her from using any sound-based move for two full turns. If it landed, Sparkling Aria was off the table. That mattered.
Nova looked at Aqua and then at the oncoming Marowak and felt no particular urgency about the danger. Aqua was tough. She had always been tough, with the kind of bulk that made most hits feel like minor inconveniences. A Dark-type move with no same-type bonus behind it was not going to do serious damage.
But there was no reason to let it land at all.
"Lapras, Protect."
A wide green barrier spread out in front of Aqua. Marowak's bone club struck it with a sharp, ringing crack and stopped completely. Marowak stumbled back, the blow absorbed without effect.
Aston saw his opening before Marowak had even fully recovered. "Close range! Use Throat Chop again!"
"Brine."
Aqua did not sing first this time. She simply spat a concentrated blast of salt water directly at Marowak.
Brine was not a high-power move under normal conditions. But against a target below half HP, the move's power doubled. Marowak was well below half HP, it was a Ground-type taking a Water-type hit, and the blast landed at point-blank range before Marowak could raise its club a second time.
That was the end of it.
Marowak went down without landing the second Throat Chop.
Aston recalled it quietly.
Looking back at the match, Lapras had barely moved from where she started. Four moves: Charm to disrupt Marowak's opening attack, Sparkling Aria to break through its HP, Protect to absorb the counterattack, and Brine to finish it. None of it had been complicated. None of it had been close.
Compared to the back-and-forth grind of the first match, this felt like a completely different kind of battle.
To be fair, the gap was not purely about skill. Aston's Pidgeot was his strongest Pokémon, trained and trusted over a long time. Marowak was newer, picked up after he joined Layered Peaks Gym to round out what was expected of a Ground-type Gym Leader. The difference in experience between the two showed, and Lapras had simply given Marowak no room to do anything with what it had.
Aston stood quietly for a moment. As much as he had trained with Ground-types over the past months, he could feel in moments like this one that Flying-types were where he actually belonged. He knew how to think with them. He knew how to recover with them.
He reached for his final Poké Ball.
"Archeops, go!"
Nova's expression shifted the moment he saw what came out of the ball.
Archeops. An Ancient Pokémon. Teal markings on its head and back, massive wings layered with yellow and blue feathers, sharp claws on all four limbs, and a long red tail that ended in a fan of blue feathers shaped like a five-pointed star. It landed on the arena and stood there with an easy, unhurried confidence, as if it had seen far older battlefields than this.
In canon lore, Archeops existed mostly in fossil records. Living specimens came either from gene restoration technology or from rare, isolated populations in places still untouched enough to be called Ancient Secret Realms. Either way, they were not something most Trainers ever encountered.
In two lifetimes, Nova had never seen one in person.
He stared for a moment longer than he should have, the same way he imagined someone from his previous world might stare at a living dinosaur walking through the door.
Across the field, Aston finally allowed himself a small, quiet confidence. The last match had been decided before it started because he had no information about Sparkling Aria. Now the situation was reversed. Nova was looking at Archeops with wide eyes, and that meant Nova had no idea what was coming.
This time, the information gap was on Nova's side.